“Ronon!” Teyla called, and he heard the thunder of her P90, spraying the doorway behind him with bullets. He fired once, twice, and readied himself to spring.
“We’re leaving now,” Carter said. “Ronon, make the call.”
With Sheppard down, they didn’t have a pilot, but it didn’t matter. They’d never make it out of this room. He wanted to stay, to keep fighting to get to Rodney, even if all he could do was die with his teammate. It was the right thing for a soldier to do.
It wasn’t the right thing for the team leader to do. Teyla was still firing, pausing only to jam another clip home. Sheppard lay unmoving, one hand outflung as if in sleep. He couldn’t throw away the lives of his team. He had to keep them safe.
“Pull us out,” he said, his voice rough in his own ears. “Carter, do it now!”
He felt the pull of the transport beam, his stomach twisting as the world changed around him. They were on the bridge of the Hammond, Sheppard sprawling across the deck, Teyla dropping to her knees next to him. His face was pale and streaked with blood.
“Get a medical team up here,” Carter said. “Franklin, punch it!”
There was a slight jolt, and the view outside the forward window changed, stars elongating into the azure of the hyperspace field as the Hammond passed through the window, leaving the battle behind.
“He was hit by a stunner many times,” Teyla said urgently, her hands on Sheppard’s neck, checking the pulse at his throat. “I think he is not breathing as he should.”
“They’re on their way,” Carter said. “What happened?”
Ronon didn’t think either of them wanted to say it. It was Teyla who finally answered.
“He is Wraith,” she said flatly. “Rodney is a Wraith.”
The blue shifted stars of hyperspace slid past the George Hammond, while within the thin envelope of the hyperspace field a spacesuited repair crew swarmed over her surface, conducting a visual inspection of the damaged shield array.
Master Sergeant Luciano, the Hammond’s chief structural engineer, frowned at his captain through the video link to the station beside her command chair. “It’s not good, ma’am. The shield emitter is basically blown away. There’s nothing left but the twisted backing plate attached to the brackets. We’ve got replacement internal electronic components for repair purposes aboard, but we’re going to need a full machine shop to rebuild the titanium alloy casing.”
“And until then we’ve got no rear shields,” Sam said, her fingers drumming on the chair arms. “I read you loud and clear, Sergeant. Bring your crew in. We’ll see what we can rig up in Atlantis. They’ve probably got what we’ll need for the casing.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
It wouldn’t be that simple, of course. Rebuilding a major external system was not going to take a few hours. It might — might — take a few days at best. More likely a week or more. Still, it was something well within their capabilities to do. The Hammond carried titanium alloy hull plates for repairing breaches. The problem would be machining the spare hull plates into the proper structure for all the fiddly little parts that made up Asgard shielding. It was a week’s work for skilled people with Atlantis’ facilities to use.
“Major Franklin, you have the bridge.” Sam stood up, making her way to the infirmary.
Her people were in pretty good shape. A medical corpsman was treating three or four people for mild electrical burns from the shield control panels shorting, and Sam stopped to say an encouraging word to each of them. If the worst to show for her ship’s first battle was a damaged shield array and some second degree burns that wouldn’t keep people off their feet a full day, you had to call that a win.
Only it wasn’t, of course. They didn’t have McKay back, and they hadn’t destroyed Queen Death’s hive ship, though Sam thought they’d fairly well crippled it. She thought they’d taken out the hyperdrive and all of the forward weapons systems and done some major structural damage. That wouldn’t be easy to fix either. It would be months before that ship was flyable again. But Death was queen of a big alliance. She’d probably shift her flag to another ship.
And then there was Sheppard. Sam looked around the screen in the infirmary, where Sheppard was hooked up to monitors and drips. Teyla sat on the metal stool at the beside, her feet up on the rung and her arms crossed over her stomach. Ronon leaned against the wall behind her, his head back against the bulkhead and his eyes closed.
The doctor came over as Sam approached. “How’s he doing?” Sam asked quietly.
The doctor glanced back at him. “Not too bad for someone stunned that many times. He’s still out cold. I’ve got him on a drip to replace electrolytes, and a heart monitor because we detected arrhythmia as a result of the amount of electrical current his body absorbed. It’s pretty much the equivalent of being struck by lightning.”
“Lovely,” Sam said. She looked over at Ronon and Teyla. She’d spent a lot of hours waiting like that.
“He’ll be ok,” the doctor said. “I think it’s unlikely he’ll suffer any permanent effects. But even a stun beam can be dangerous if you do it over and over. The Wraith don’t usually fire more than necessary to incapacitate a human being.”
“It was Rodney,” Teyla said harshly, and Sam came over to stand on the other side of the bed. “Rodney did not know us. He resisted. John…” She shook her head, her eyes falling to Sheppard’s face. “I do not think he ever realized what had happened. That Rodney was…not himself.”
“It’s some kind of medical thing,” Ronon said. “Like Michael. I don’t know. I don’t know what it was. But he was a Wraith.”
“A retrovirus?”
“I don’t know,” Ronon said again, shaking his head, anger plain in his voice. Not anger at her, Sam thought. Anger at himself, that he had not somehow parsed the impossible.
“We couldn’t have known,” Sam said. “Todd may not have known.”
“Or he was playing some game of his own,” Teyla said, and there was a bitter edge in her voice. “I do not think he serves Queen Death. I do not think he truly serves anyone’s interests besides his own.”
Sam nodded. “We’ll be back in Atlantis in nine hours and a bit. Sheppard may be up and awake by then, and we can all sit down and debrief. But until then you might want to get a meal and some rest.”
“I think we would prefer to stay here,” Teyla said. Unsurprisingly. Sam had sat that watch herself way too many times.
“I’ll have somebody bring you up something,” she said, and turned to go.
Night had come, and the towers of Atlantis glittered through the falling snow. The debriefing was over, and Teyla left the conference room, Woolsey and Carson still talking behind her. Yet everything that could be said had been said and said a thousand times while she and Ronon and Sam and Mr. Woolsey and Radek and Carson and Jennifer had deconstructed everything over and over. There was nothing more to be said. There was no more information to share. There were only empty, gaping questions.
Through the glass doors of the control room balcony Teyla thought she saw a familiar figure outside despite the cold and darkness. She hugged her jacket about her as the doors opened before her, but the wind hit her like a punch in the chest as she stepped out of the shelter.
“John? I thought you were in the infirmary.”
He didn’t turn around, just stood at the rail, his shoulders hunched against the cold. “Keller let me out. I’m not sure she wanted to see me any more than I wanted to see her.”