The life signs detector showed their glowing dots almost on top of each other, and then he saw the movement, pale hair catching the light as the Wraith stepped around the corner. Ronon fired twice, the first shot making the Wraith stagger backwards, the second dropping him.
John caught Teyla’s eye. “Teyla?”
She took a deep breath and frowned for a moment as if looking at something he couldn’t see. “I do not know if he was able to communicate our presence to anyone,” she said. “There is too much alarm and confusion.”
“Let’s hope he wasn’t,” John said. He scowled down at the life signs detector. There were too many moving forms, and no way to tell if any of them was Rodney. “Let’s go.”
The corridor branched off into two others, one slanting upwards, the other down. John picked the upward one, moving quickly and checking every opening. There were too many deserted rooms, too many branching corridors. They could wander around a fleshy maze for an hour, all their time slipping away —
Teyla caught his arm, and he looked down at her. “This will take too long,” she said. “We must find out where he is being kept.”
“You have an idea?”
She squared her shoulders as if bracing herself for something. “They will know we are here soon enough already,” she said. “Let me try to get the knowledge from one of them. I think I can do it.”
He gritted his teeth. He hated asking her to risk touching one of their minds that way, but it was true that they weren’t getting anywhere. “What do you need?”
“I will need to be close,” she said. “We will need a prisoner.”
They took the next turning, following a single bright spot making its way down the corridor past several more serpentine bends. John gestured for Ronon to cover their rear, stepping out in front. They needed a prisoner in good enough shape for Teyla to do her thing, not stunned into unconsciousness or with large smoking holes in him.
He came around the corner behind the Wraith, its head bent over some kind of device in its hands, and put one shot through its shoulder. It screamed, the noise inhumanly loud in the cramped corridor, but Ronon was already moving, throwing the Wraith hard against the wall and then wrestling its arms behind it. That wouldn’t hold it for long, and if it broke free, it would be easy for it to spin, to jam its feeding hand against Ronon’s chest —
Teyla stepped out from behind John, her face as calm as if she were sitting cross-legged in meditation back in Atlantis, beautiful in shadow. The Wraith’s eyes locked onto hers, and both of them tensed. Ronon jammed his pistol hard against the Wraith’s side, and John trained his P90 right between its eyes, but he held still, heart hammering in his chest, waiting.
Fear. Confusion and fear. She felt it like ice within her, cold as the barrel of Ronon’s energy pistol against his side.
Once, under Todd’s tutelage, masquerading as his Queen Steelflower, she had learned to speak this way, to modulate the tones of her mind to what passed for conversation, to speak as a Wraith would speak rather than shout. This was different. This was as different as speech was from interrogation.
And yet she felt his fear lessen by some small amount. The touch of her mind did not send him burning in agony to his knees. It was imperative and order, the vise-like strength of the mind of a Queen.
*You will tell me where the scientist McKay is kept* she demanded, and he felt almost a moment of relief, as an unsure soldier would be steadied by John’s voice snapping an order, decision taken away, uncertainty resolved in the reliance on someone who ought to give the orders, who by right could command.
He did not resist, but the images were jumbled, corridors and doors, Wraith and more Wraith. People that he knew, others aboard the hive ship, with no clear picture of Rodney. Not useful, not coherent.
*Tell me what room.* He could not deny her. She was a Queen, and her mind was on his. No mere cleverman could conceal his thoughts from such, even if he might wish to. *I am a Queen* Teyla said, mind to mind, as though her hands ringed his wrists like iron. *Show me the chamber where the prisoner McKay is.*
Power and the thrill of power, the bright yielding of his mind to hers, as though he bent like a supplicant, head down before her beauty and her strength. The corridor, the room, not so far from here. Two turnings, and then the door.
*You will kill me.* He stated it as fact. Of course they would. When he had rendered her what she wanted, he would die, surely as a sacrifice beneath a sovereign’s hand.
*Yes* she said.
She pulled the energy pistol from Ronon’s hand, thumbing the settings, her fingers small around the large grip, the barrel against the cleverman’s ribs, and squeezed the trigger. The Wraith sprawled first to his knees, then collapsed to the floor in an ungainly heap, a pool of shadow in the darkened hall. She held the pistol out to Ronon.
He took it, glanced down at the stun setting, and frowned. “What did you do that for?”
“Because I wanted to.” In Teyla’s voice she heard the echo of a Queen’s tones, and Ronon’s frown deepened.
“Later,” John said, forestalling any further discussion. “Did you find out where Rodney is?”
“Yes. It is this way. Todd was right that it is a laboratory.” Teyla gestured to the left. “It is not far. Come.”
John let her lead, following after with the life signs detector, while Ronon took six. It took only a moment, which was probably a good thing. She knew that time always seemed to run unevenly in a mission, minutes seeming hours, elongating with strain and adrenaline, but even so they must have been aboard the hive ship for some minutes. Sooner or later it would awaken. Sooner or later they would activate their defensive systems, and then the Hammond might be seriously outclassed.
“It is here,” she whispered, gesturing to a closed door.
John squinted at the life signs detector in the dim light. “Two,” he said. “Rodney and somebody else. And there are a bunch one corridor over who are going to be here any second. Ok, let’s do this thing. Ronon, cover us.”
Quicksilver was in his laboratory when the alarms sounded. Doors slid shut all over the ship, panels of bone and cartilage connecting with the quiet hiss of ventilation systems sealing. The laboratory lights flickered and then came back to life as it went to internal emergency power.
“What has happened?” Quicksilver said.
Dust shook his head, but he looked disturbed. He cocked his head for a moment, listening to the great network, to the other minds aboard. “An unidentified ship has just come out of hyperspace,” he said. “And we are powered down while the ship restores himself. We have no external power. The Bright Venture sleeps.”
“That’s not good, is it?” Quicksilver asked, cold running through his veins. Fear. That’s what it was.
“It might be rival hive,” Dust said. “Or it might be…”
Quicksilver turned to the viewscreens, trying to get sensor readings. There they were, green and red on the screen, the dipping, weaving shape of a ship the size of a cruiser, approaching with evasive jinks and bobbles though the Bright Venture did not return fire.
The alarm tone changed. Pilots to the Dart bay. Though how they should get the bay doors opened with the ship dormant…
In the hall there was a burst of sound, the bright pure buzzes of stunners, and the heavy rattle of something else, something that seemed oddly familiar to Quicksilver. Terrifying. And yet he felt his heart lift inexplicably.
“We must get down,” Dust said, and pulled him to the floor behind one of the long tables. “Their weapons will pierce the door!” He drew a small stunner from a compartment in the wall behind them.