The Stars My Destination (SGA, ensemble) 10/17
Title: The Stars My Destination (10/17)
Author:
mad_maudlin
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis/Star Trek 2009 (mashup)
Length: 91,750 (total); 4,832 (this part)
Characters: All of them!
PairingS: Canonical levels of Elizabeth/Simon, Teyla/Kanaan
warnings: Graphic violence
Summary: When a terror from out of time threatens the heart of the Federation, the crew of the USS Atlantis must band together in order to stop it. But can they overcome their own demons to stop the greatest threat they'll ever face?
Ten
Jonn made an effort to take a nap in Rodney's room-it was four o'clock in the morning in Colorado Springs, and he'd been awake something like twenty hours, so he needed the sleep. But he had too much nervous energy to lay down for long, and he resorted to fidgeting, snooping around the few contents of the room and trying unsuccessfully to get his communicator to interface with the ship's computer. Probably for the best; he didn't want his name to appear in the system before Rodney had done whatever voodoo he was planning. Rodney had left behind a padd that was already interfaced, but there wasn't much to do even with that-apparently completing the shipboard entertainment system hadn't been a priority in getting this thing launched, and status reports of non-critical systems didn't tell him anything worth knowing. Jonn brushed his teeth, instead, and debating putting on one of Rodney's uniform tunics (risk of standing out vs. the risk of getting mistaken for an engineer?), and did some pushups just to pass the time. Eventually he convinced himself to lay down again, try to at least rest up.
Of course, the moment his eyes closed, he was out like a light.
Jonn didn't dream a lot-he sometimes wondered if it was a Vulcan thing, if he actually dreamed less than a real human would, but he didn't know if anyone had ever actually tried to quantify that sort of thing and had never bothered to look it up. When he did dream, though, it was full-on vivid technicolor, and he tended to remember it pretty well. This dream started out like that: he was in the Kobayashi Maru simulator, and everything was just on the wrong side of realistic, the colors too bright and the sounds too muddy. He was at the helm, not in the command chair, and all the instruments said they were accelerating at half-impulse, directly into the teeth of ten or twenty bristling Klingon birds-of-prey. All stop, someone said-maybe it was him, who knew-but Jonn let the ship coast, instead, struggling to evade the battleships hanging strangely static in his path. All stop, Mr. Sheppard.
Dream-Jonn didn't stop, and with dream-logic he had a strangely split perspective, of his hands on the controls and the ship moving and the total lack of connection between the two. He probably ought to bring this thing to a stop. Did he even have reverse thrusters? Did it matter? Prepare to abandon ship, he heard, and this definitely wasn't his own voice; this was a woman's voice, and when he turned in his seat he saw his mother standing before the captain's chair, staring out the forward screen.
Don't be an idiot, he said, or thought he said. We can take a couple of Klingons. But when he looked out the forward screen, there were no more birds-of-prey. There was only a huge, black shape, formless and vast, visible only in how it blotted out the stars.
It is the only logical response, T'Perr said, implacably calm. There is system near these coordinates with an M-class planet, a spacefaring civilization. They will take in and protect the evacuees.
What's so logical about suicide? Jonn wanted to ask-maybe he did ask, seeing as it was a dream and all.
T'Perr's eyes looked as blank and cold as the thing outside. The good of the many outweighs the good of the few. You know this as well as I. Ramming speed, Mr. Sheppard.
Jonn looked back at the screen, at the black void coming closer and closer, preparing to swallow him whole-
And started awake to the sound of the shipwide speakers squealing to life. "Ah-sorry-" He recognized Zelenka's voice, and the feedback dialed down. "Sorry about that. Atlantis, we are currently thirty minutes out from Vulcan. All stations move to yellow alert."
As the alert sounded in the corridor, Jonn sat up and scrubbed at his eyes. He sort of knew where that dream had come from-in one of his classes, they'd had to watch a documentary on the Athos Incident, full of cheesy dramatizations of the surviving crew's reports. Jonn had toughed it out, focusing on the cheap-looking sets and the crappy make-up on what was obviously an all-human cast, but then they had shown the moment Commander T'Perr decided to ram her unknown attacker so that the crew of the Kelvin would have a chance to escape...that had been when Jonn had to step out of the room. He'd always known how she died, but that didn't mean he wanted to picture it. Especially not some melodramatic bullshit about how she looked her death in the eye without losing her cool-she'd had to have been at the helm, for one thing, to plot the collision course. Nobody knew what she'd done in those last few minutes, either; no record had survived. If a Vulcan cries in space and there's nobody around to see it, does it count?
The shipwide came on again, without the burst of feedback. "Atlantis, this is your captain speaking," said a gruff, unfamiliar voice. "We are about to engage an unknown hostile vessel in orbit around Vulcan. The last report from the Samarkand indicated that this ship has deployed fighters capable of atmospheric flight as well as ship-based energetic projectile weapons capable of penetrating standard shield configurations. It is powerful, it is shielded, and it's the size of a damn mountain. It is our duty to defend the people of Vulcan at any cost, and we will not fail them. I know each and every one of you is prepared to do whatever is necessary to see that this attack on the Federation does not go unanswered. Sumner out."
Jonn went into the bathroom to splash some water on his face. Size of a damn mountain... Why did that sound familiar? Had Emmagen said something...? No, her confidential message, the one he'd kinda-sorta eavesdropped on, it had talked about flying mountains. (Had that really only been ten hours ago?) They weren't that far from the Pegasus quadrant, though, either....but there was something else...
He wiped his face, and thought back to that dream. Now, why would his subconscious have dredged up memories of a mysterious hostile with powerful weapons attacking without apparent provocation? He grabbed Rodney's padd off the desk and scrolled through the ship's database, which was only slightly more complete than the entertainment selection...but there had to be a history catalog, or an encyclopedic reference, or something...
He tried searching T'Perr, T'Perr Sheppard and Athos Incident separately, but kept coming up against glitches-one more thing nobody had put the finishing touches on before the launch. When he tried USS Kelvin, though, he finally got an article. He skimmed down to the end, telling himself this was stupid, this was random, a shot in the dark...
Or maybe not.
Without a second thought, he dropped the padd on the bed and headed for the bridge.
-\-\-\-\-\-\-
There were over a hundred communication channels available over subspace, and each one Teyla checked seemed full of noise. A few were white noise, generated by broken transceivers on damaged ships; most were being used by the Vulcan evacuation fleet, cool voices betraying periodic hints of strain as ships tried to coordinate plans with one another or share hasty passenger manifests. The survivors of Vulcan's system defenses were requesting aid. The planetary government was continuing to loop a distress signal, updating the grim estimates of the dead as the attacking ship launched fighters to raze the surface; there seemed to be nowhere to hide, except perhaps the unforgiving deserts.
There were a half-dozen channels reserved for the rest of the task force. These had remained steadily quiet. Of course, the long-range subspace antenna was not operational, but surely there ought to be something...
A pair of incoming alerts flashed onto her screen, followed by text messages. "Captain Sumner, sir, the Daedalus has reached position and is preparing to drop out of warp," Teyla announced. "The Apollo estimates they are three minutes behind."
"What's holding us up, gentlemen?" Sumner asked, addressing the question at Zelenka and Miller.
"We have not been able to maintain a consistent Warp Ten-Five, sir," Zelenka said crisply. "Commander Castilho suspects there may be a faulty conversion coil that is responsible for the power leak, but we cannot be certain without disabling warp drive-"
"Fine," Sumner said, cutting him off. "Current ETA?"
"Twenty more minutes, sir."
A moment later, the port-side turbolift opened, and someone came barreling out, nearly crashing into the railing between the upper and lower bridge sections. Teyla was not certain which surprised her more: that it was Jonn Sheppard, out of uniform, standing wild-eyed on the bridge, or that he blurted out, "We need to drop out of warp right now."
"Excuse me?" Sumner turned around to face Sheppard, incredulous. Elizabeth, who had been at one of the sensor stations, straightened up with a look of shock that swiftly turned frosty.
"We need to stop this ship and contact Starfleet Command, right now," Sheppard repeated firmly, apparently uncowed by the looks he was receiving, whether angry or simply incredulous.
Sumner climbed to his feet. "And just who the hell are you?"
"This would be Cadet Jonn Sheppard," Elizabeth said, approaching him from behind Teyla's station. "Who was not, as I recall, assigned to this ship."
"That's Lieutenant Sheppard, ma'am," Jonn said hotly, before looking back to Sumner. "Sir, the ship that's attacking Vulcan isn't unknown. It was sighted in the Pegasus quadrant twenty-five hours ago, and it destroyed the USS Kelvin twenty-five years ago."
Teyla had half-forgotten Halling's message in the rush of activity, but it returned to her now...and Jonn, she remembered, had overheard part of it when they had met outside the dormitory. But that had had nothing to do with the Kelvin...it was not even sighted in the same sector...
"What exactly are you basing this claim on, Lieutenant?" Elizabeth asked dryly, hands behind her back, echoing Teyla's own thoughts. Teyla knew this was the most alarm Elizabeth was likely to let herself show-alarm, or irritation, it was difficult to tell.
Sheppard, however, seemed to have decided it was an accusation. "When Lieutenant Eirxxyl Dar Istys of the Kelvin described the ship that attacked them at Athos, he called it a flying mountain, amorphous of shape, radiating more waste energy than a starship consumes at warp," he quoted. "The only identifiable hull structure was a hangar, and it KO'd their shields and warp drive on the first shot. That description sound familiar to you?"
"What's this got to do with Pegasus?" Sumner asked.
Sheppard opened his mouth to begin explaining, but Teyla cut him off, rising to her feet; she was quite capable of speaking on her own behalf. Sheppard seemed not to have noticed her until then, because he did an actual double-take as she said, "The Athosian Council received a report yesterday about a Traveler ship that was destroyed on the edge of the Genii Confederation, near the Burill system. A Genii listening post was able to capture some limited sensor data from the confrontation, but the hostile vessel could not be identified-it fired once and completely destroyed the Traveler ship with no survivors."
"And let me guess, big as a mountain, came out of nowhere?" Sumner asked. Teyla could not yet tell when he was sarcastic; he seemed to put on irritation as part of his uniform.
"Except the Burill system is on the furthest edge of Genii space, over two hundred light years from here," Elizabeth said. "To get from there to Vulcan in the amount to time Sheppard is suggesting, a ship would have to sustain Warp Fourteen for twenty hours."
"Fourteen-point-five, actually," Lieutenant Zelenka volunteered; he cowered slightly when all eyes fell on him. "Of course, a ship with weapons this powerful would not necessarily have the same constraints on power consumption," he added quickly.
"And the ability to disappear for twenty-five years at a time?" Elizabeth asked. She turned back to Sumner. "Captain, not every coincidence in the universe needs to be deeply meaningful."
"It's not a coincidence," Sheppard said mulishly.
"Even if you're right, what are we supposed to do about it?" Elizabeth asked.
Sheppard raised his eyebrows. "Not get ourselves killed, maybe?"
Sumner interrupted whatever Elizabeth was about to say back by turning to Teyla. "Ms. Emmagen, raise the Samarkand and get a status report."
Teyla took her seat again and cycled through channels full of noise. They dedicated frequencies for the task force had been quiet, but she had told herself that they were occupied with the battle, and perhaps purposefully limiting the range of their broadcasts to avoid being overheard by the civilian ships. She sent a standard-form hail, expecting nothing more than a ping in reply.
The Samarkand did not reply at all.
She tried the Farragut. The Yorktown. The Challenger. The Carthage. The Daedalus...
"I cannot raise any members of the task force," she said, as she hailed the Apollo. That, at least, returned a ping of acknowledgment, but very weakly, and there was no follow-up attempt to open a channel. "There may be some kind of interference effect surrounding the hostile ship..."
"Emergency beacons?" Sumner asked.
She shifted to the proprietary channels reserved for Starfleet vessels in distress. Those should have been able to cut through most of the natural forms of interference, because they were, in effect, a single, powerful repeater sending out a steady ping. Even non-Federation vessels would be able to detect and locate such a signal; it was, after all, how the Athosian fleet had first located the survivors of the Kelvin twenty-five years ago. Teyla expected to hear the metronome click of one beacon, maybe a few.
The emergency channel was a continuous wash of noise.
"Sir..." She had to swallow before she could report; her throat had gone abruptly dry. "Sir, I am detecting nearly a thousand individual emergency beacons. The only source for so many signals could only be-"
"Lifeboats," Sumner cut her off. "One hell of a lot of lifeboats." He turned to the front of the bridge. "Mr. Zelenka, course correction. Bring us out of warp directly into Vulcan's orbit, thirty-five thousand kilometers. New ETA?"
"Ah, moment..." Zelenka worked for a moment, then said, "New ETA is fourteen minutes, sir."
Sumner nodded. "Emmagen, keep trying to raise the rest of the task force. Sheppard, fourteen minutes is how long you have to explain what you're doing on my ship."
"I was assigned here," Sheppard said tensely, though Teyla did not believe him for a minute; occupied as she was with her task, she could still hear the tension in his voice, could almost sense it radiating off of him. (Vulcans were capable of sharing thought, were they not? Though not in an Athosian manner
"I think we can clear this up rather quickly," Elizabeth said; Teyla saw out of the corner of her eye that she had approached one of the computer stations, and she brought up a document to stare at it intently.
"Well?" Sheppard prompted, folding his arms across his chest.
Elizabeth straightened up suddenly. "You're out of uniform, Lieutenant," she said crisply. "And very lucky to have Mr. McKay as a roommate."
Teyla glanced at him in time to see a pale green flush rush up from his neck; for once, though, he had at least enough wisdom to keep silent.
She tuned out the chorus of emergency beacons-lifeboats had no subspace communication, only radio, so she could not even acknowledge that they had been heard. Her hails to the Vulcan government went unanswered, though they were continuing to broadcast-perhaps Atlantis was being overlooked, or perhaps they were already operating at their antenna's maximum capacity. She tried, instead, discreetly asking some of the evacuee ships of their status and what they could see of the battle. Unfortunately, most of them were on the opposite side of the planet from the hostile ship, a deliberate decision to shield them; as a consequence, they were also unable to see the any Starfleet actions, and the few in the correct position were so far away that they could not report in detail. We suspect the Samarkand has been destroyed, one pilot said gravely, but Teyla told herself that these was still mere hearsay, not worth reporting to Captain Sumner yet.
"Five minutes to Vulcan, sir," Miller reported.
"Go to red alert," Sumner replied.
As the sirens wailed, Sheppard leaned against the computer station without taking a post-that he could loiter on the bridge like that was the surest proof that he was not meant to be there, but she had no time to speculate on why and how he'd come. Her hail to the Vulcan government was finally answered, and she hastened to open a channel. "USS Atlantis, this is the Vulcan Civil Defense. It is advisable that you do not attempt to engage the hostile ship," a male voice said.
"VCD, this is Atlantis," she replied. "Can you confirm the status of the task force in orbit?"
"Atlantis, this is VCD. There is no task force."
Teyla's heart skipped a beat. "VCD, this is Atlantis. Please say again, I do not understand."
"Atlantis, this is VCD. Your task force has been destroyed-"
"Dropping out of warp in three," Miller said, "two, one-"
The sheet of subspace distortion dissolved from the front view screen. At the same moment, a horrible, cold, clawing sensation flooded into Teyla's mind, feelings so utterly alien-and so distant-that she could scarcely parse them as thoughts. It felt very much as though the inside of her mind was being scraped raw: nauseated, she braced herself against her station with one hand, trying to push out the blinding sensations of hurt and rage and hungry-
"Hey." She felt the cool touch of Sheppard's hand on her wrist. She realized, faintly, that her other hand was pressed against her Ancestor's amulet, holding it through her uniform shirt like a lifeline. "Hey, you all right?"
"Wraith," she blurted. She meant it as a curse, but then realization fell upon her like an icy chill. It was insane, it was impossible, it was the raving of a fundamentalist, but- "Oh, Ancestors, it is the Wraith."
-\-\-\-\-\-
"Jesus Christ."
Jonn didn't know what Emmagen was talking about, but Sumner's quiet explicative caught his attention immediately. He looked up at the forward screen. Vulcan was a rust-colored disc, Mars-like, except for a few startling smears of turquoise sea. From this distance, the whole planet was visible, pole to pole.
So was the debris field surrounding...flying mountain sounded about right, actually. None of the Kelvin crew had ever been able to accurately describe what had hit them; Jonn hadn't been sure what to expect. The vessel had a weirdly organic look, with thick, curved ridges running along its tapered hull. The lurid burn of its engines was about the only thing that made it clear it wasn't a living thing-that, and the tiny flecks of the fighters that swarmed around it, like some kind of hive. It was ten times the size of the Apollo, which hung just below it, venting plasma and atmosphere.
"Get us down there, Mr. Miller," Sumner ordered, but then a ribbon of projectiles burst out of the mountain-ship-thing, and in the next minute the Apollo blew apart. The secondary hull disintegrated in a cloud of uncontained antimatter, releasing a shockwave of gas and fine debris; part of one nacelle went spiraling away end over end, split down its axis like a hot-dog bun. The saucer fractured along the midline, and flames flared in a few pockets of oxygen atmosphere before subsiding. Jonn could make out the tiny points of light where pieces of debris struck the enemy fighters, or even tinier dots that were probably lifeboats consumed in the blast.
"There are millions of life signs aboard that ship," Weir announced, breaking the silence. "I'm picking up transporter signatures from the enemy fighters. It looks like they're beaming people up from the lifeboats and the planet's surface."
"What the hell?" Sumner asked. He looked to Jonn, as if he had any answers. "Why would they do that?"
"Taking hostages?" Jonn proposed.
"They have no need of hostages," Emmagen said quietly, but though she was looking a little gray in the face she seemed to have regained her overall composure after that...whatever-it-was, seizure or panic attack or something. She was still rubbing something under the front of her shirt, though.
Sumner glanced at her. "You know what this thing is, Lieutenant Emmagen?"
Before she could answer, Ford blurted out, "Incoming fire, sir!"
Torpedos like a string of pearls were coming directly at them; Miller rolled the ship away, but obviously not fast enough. The entire ship shook from the impact, and the overhead lights flickered dangerously; Jonn had to cling to the side of the communication station to keep his feet. "Our main shield generator has failed," Zelenka called out. "Deflectors at thirty percent. We have sustained damage to decks five and six and the starboard nacelle." And that had been a glancing blow, holy hell.
"Return fire," Sumner called, as if that had worked for anybody else. "Give it all we've got."
But the vast enemy ship was at the very edge of their phaser range, and a full phaser bombardment scattered harmlessly well away from its hull. Ford rapped his fist against his station. "No good, sir. Their shields aren't even flickering."
Jonn leaned forward, staring at the vast length of the ship below them. "Why aren't the fighters attacking?" he wondered out loud. "There's got to be a thousand of them out there. We'd never be able to pick them all off if they swarmed us."
As if in answer, Emmagen suddenly called out. "Sir...we are being hailed by the enemy ship."
Weir and Sumner shared an inscrutable look, but only for a moment. "Open it up," Sumner said. "If they're talking, they're not shooting at us."
The forward screen flickered and went dark. The face that came up on it was humanoid, but in some ways looked more like a badly-made copy of a humanoid face than something real: its waxy skin was pulled tight over bones that protruded in the wrong places, and when it breathed deeply more air seemed to go into the pits beside its nose than through the nostrils. It had close-cropped hair of pure white, and when its mouth split into a smile, the teeth were far more pointed and widely spaced than Jonn was strictly comfortable with.
"Hello, Atlantis," he said with a horrible false cheer in a voice with distinctly non-human harmonics. "Elizabeth Weir. Jonn Sheppard. Teyla Emmagen. It is so good to see you again."
Jonn, for a split second, thought he'd somehow heard wrong. Then he glanced at Weir and Emmmagen, and their equally gobsmacked expressions said, no, he really hadn't. Sumner looked at them curiously, and Jonn could only shrug. No idea why the malevolent alien is name-dropping me, sir. Maybe ask him?
Instead, Sumner turned back to the screen and stepped to the front of the bridge, imposing himself in the center of the transmission. "This is Captain Marshall Sumner of the USS Atlantis. To whom am I speaking?"
"Ah," the alien said. "A bit early, am I? That's too bad; I hope you can still appreciate my work. You can call me Michael, Captain Sumner."
"Why are you attacking the planet Vulcan?" Sumner asked, sticking to stiff formality. "The Federation had no ill will toward you or your kind."
"Not at the moment, but I happen to harbor some very ill will towards the Federation." Michael's lurid yellow eyes seemed to search the room, as if he was scanning his screen for something. "How does it feel to watch your world burn, Dr. Weir? Is your family quite safe, Commander Sheppard?"
Commander Sheppard? This just kept getting stranger...Jonn looked at Weir, but aside from a slight twitch of one jaw muscle, her expression was completely passive. Emmagen caught Jonn's eye, and he shook his head slightly-he hadn't spoke to his mother's family in years, the threat was nearly meaningless.
But if they somehow had something to do with Michael's reasons for targetting Vulcan in the first place...
"We demand the immediate cessation of hostilities towards the planet Vulcan and all other Federation words and allies," Sumner said with a remarkable air of confidence, given the circumstances. "I order you to recall your fighters and withdraw from this system immediately."
"Now, Captain Sumner," Michael said, and actually rolled his eyes. "Did you really think that was going to work?"
"I take it that's a no, then," Sumner replied dryly.
Michael suddenly tilted his head to one side, a gesture few humanoids made naturally. "Oh, not at all! In fact, I would be delighted to have you as a guest aboard my ship to discuss...cessation of hostilities."
"Bullshit," Jonn murmured under his breath.
But to his surprise, Sumner hesitated, and then asked, "Do I have your guarantee of safe passage to and from your ship, and a cease-fire for the duration of the talks?"
"Captain!" Weir protested, eyes widening.
"You should listen to Dr. Weir, Captain," Michael said silkily. "But yes, if you require it-I promise you ship will be unharmed while you are my guest."
"All right," Sumner said. "Obviously you've got hangers on that thing, so I'll be coming over by shuttlecraft. Give me ten minutes."
"I'm sure it will be a most fascinating discussion," Michael said, and closed the channel.
Weir immediately charged forward. "Captain, no. It's out of the question."
"It might be the best chance we have at distracting that thing," Sumner said. He turned around, pale eyes drilling into Jonn's. "Jonn Sheppard. You're the hotshot behind that shuttle crash in Spring Sim last year."
"That's what the discipline board decided, sir," Jonn said, and it took a lot of willpower not to glance at Weir when as he did so.
Sumner tilted his head back, as if sizing Jonn up. "Had to be a pretty good pilot to pull off a move that stupid. What do you think, Lieutenant?"
"Sir, I think I'm one of the best damn pilots in the fleet," Jonn said firmly.
Sumner huffed, though whether he was impressed by Jonn's display of bravado or skeptical of the claim, Jonn couldn't tell. "Here's your chance to prove it, then." He climbed up to the sensor station and opened up a display of Michael's ship. "He's going to have to lower his shield to let my shuttle through. That gives you a split-second to get inside his guard. I don't know what kind of hull plating he's carrying, but at this range even a shuttle's phasers can do some serious damage."
"Captain, what you're suggesting is suicide for everyone involved," Weir said flatly. "Even if a second shuttle could get inside that shield, there's no way it would survive long enough to make an attack before those fighters swamped it. And if he suspects any treachery on your part, he'll kill you."
"Odds are he's going to kill me anyway, Commander," Sumner said flatly. "This is about getting a shot in any way we can. Unless you three know something I don't?" He glanced and Weir and Jonn, and at Emmagen, who had remained at her station.
She spoke up now, turning in her seat to face them. "He cannot be trusted, sir. I can...I have a sense of these creatures, and they are the closest thing to evil that I have ever encountered."
"You mean telepathically?" Sumner asked. Emmagen nodded reluctantly. "Noted," he said, and turned back to Weir. "I'm officially transferring the Atlantis into your hands, Commander. If there's any chance to kill that thing, I want you to kill it. Failing that, you need to get a message to the fleet at Vorash any way you can."
"Hasn't Starfleet Command already informed them of the situation?" Weir asked.
"The Vorash mission is so classified God himself wouldn't know what they're up to," Sumner said. "They're operating under radio silence, so they won't have a clue what's happening here unless someone goes and tells them. Jack O'Neill is in charge of the task force there, he'll know what he has to do."
Weir stared at Sumner for a minute, then nodded shakily. "I understand, sir. It...thank you."
"Thank you, Commander." He shook her hand, and then turned around. "Ensign Ford!"
"Sir?" Ford turned in his seat.
"You want to live forever, kid?"
Ford jumped to his feet. "No, sir."
"Good. You and Sheppard-with me."
He strode towards the turbolifts, and Jonn had to hurry to catch up with him. He gave one last backwards glance to Weir and Emmagen, standing at the back of the bridge, and then the lift was bearing them away.
Chapter One
Chapter Nine
Chapter Eleven
Author:
mad_maudlin
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis/Star Trek 2009 (mashup)
Length: 91,750 (total); 4,832 (this part)
Characters: All of them!
PairingS: Canonical levels of Elizabeth/Simon, Teyla/Kanaan
warnings: Graphic violence
Summary: When a terror from out of time threatens the heart of the Federation, the crew of the USS Atlantis must band together in order to stop it. But can they overcome their own demons to stop the greatest threat they'll ever face?
Ten
Jonn made an effort to take a nap in Rodney's room-it was four o'clock in the morning in Colorado Springs, and he'd been awake something like twenty hours, so he needed the sleep. But he had too much nervous energy to lay down for long, and he resorted to fidgeting, snooping around the few contents of the room and trying unsuccessfully to get his communicator to interface with the ship's computer. Probably for the best; he didn't want his name to appear in the system before Rodney had done whatever voodoo he was planning. Rodney had left behind a padd that was already interfaced, but there wasn't much to do even with that-apparently completing the shipboard entertainment system hadn't been a priority in getting this thing launched, and status reports of non-critical systems didn't tell him anything worth knowing. Jonn brushed his teeth, instead, and debating putting on one of Rodney's uniform tunics (risk of standing out vs. the risk of getting mistaken for an engineer?), and did some pushups just to pass the time. Eventually he convinced himself to lay down again, try to at least rest up.
Of course, the moment his eyes closed, he was out like a light.
Jonn didn't dream a lot-he sometimes wondered if it was a Vulcan thing, if he actually dreamed less than a real human would, but he didn't know if anyone had ever actually tried to quantify that sort of thing and had never bothered to look it up. When he did dream, though, it was full-on vivid technicolor, and he tended to remember it pretty well. This dream started out like that: he was in the Kobayashi Maru simulator, and everything was just on the wrong side of realistic, the colors too bright and the sounds too muddy. He was at the helm, not in the command chair, and all the instruments said they were accelerating at half-impulse, directly into the teeth of ten or twenty bristling Klingon birds-of-prey. All stop, someone said-maybe it was him, who knew-but Jonn let the ship coast, instead, struggling to evade the battleships hanging strangely static in his path. All stop, Mr. Sheppard.
Dream-Jonn didn't stop, and with dream-logic he had a strangely split perspective, of his hands on the controls and the ship moving and the total lack of connection between the two. He probably ought to bring this thing to a stop. Did he even have reverse thrusters? Did it matter? Prepare to abandon ship, he heard, and this definitely wasn't his own voice; this was a woman's voice, and when he turned in his seat he saw his mother standing before the captain's chair, staring out the forward screen.
Don't be an idiot, he said, or thought he said. We can take a couple of Klingons. But when he looked out the forward screen, there were no more birds-of-prey. There was only a huge, black shape, formless and vast, visible only in how it blotted out the stars.
It is the only logical response, T'Perr said, implacably calm. There is system near these coordinates with an M-class planet, a spacefaring civilization. They will take in and protect the evacuees.
What's so logical about suicide? Jonn wanted to ask-maybe he did ask, seeing as it was a dream and all.
T'Perr's eyes looked as blank and cold as the thing outside. The good of the many outweighs the good of the few. You know this as well as I. Ramming speed, Mr. Sheppard.
Jonn looked back at the screen, at the black void coming closer and closer, preparing to swallow him whole-
And started awake to the sound of the shipwide speakers squealing to life. "Ah-sorry-" He recognized Zelenka's voice, and the feedback dialed down. "Sorry about that. Atlantis, we are currently thirty minutes out from Vulcan. All stations move to yellow alert."
As the alert sounded in the corridor, Jonn sat up and scrubbed at his eyes. He sort of knew where that dream had come from-in one of his classes, they'd had to watch a documentary on the Athos Incident, full of cheesy dramatizations of the surviving crew's reports. Jonn had toughed it out, focusing on the cheap-looking sets and the crappy make-up on what was obviously an all-human cast, but then they had shown the moment Commander T'Perr decided to ram her unknown attacker so that the crew of the Kelvin would have a chance to escape...that had been when Jonn had to step out of the room. He'd always known how she died, but that didn't mean he wanted to picture it. Especially not some melodramatic bullshit about how she looked her death in the eye without losing her cool-she'd had to have been at the helm, for one thing, to plot the collision course. Nobody knew what she'd done in those last few minutes, either; no record had survived. If a Vulcan cries in space and there's nobody around to see it, does it count?
The shipwide came on again, without the burst of feedback. "Atlantis, this is your captain speaking," said a gruff, unfamiliar voice. "We are about to engage an unknown hostile vessel in orbit around Vulcan. The last report from the Samarkand indicated that this ship has deployed fighters capable of atmospheric flight as well as ship-based energetic projectile weapons capable of penetrating standard shield configurations. It is powerful, it is shielded, and it's the size of a damn mountain. It is our duty to defend the people of Vulcan at any cost, and we will not fail them. I know each and every one of you is prepared to do whatever is necessary to see that this attack on the Federation does not go unanswered. Sumner out."
Jonn went into the bathroom to splash some water on his face. Size of a damn mountain... Why did that sound familiar? Had Emmagen said something...? No, her confidential message, the one he'd kinda-sorta eavesdropped on, it had talked about flying mountains. (Had that really only been ten hours ago?) They weren't that far from the Pegasus quadrant, though, either....but there was something else...
He wiped his face, and thought back to that dream. Now, why would his subconscious have dredged up memories of a mysterious hostile with powerful weapons attacking without apparent provocation? He grabbed Rodney's padd off the desk and scrolled through the ship's database, which was only slightly more complete than the entertainment selection...but there had to be a history catalog, or an encyclopedic reference, or something...
He tried searching T'Perr, T'Perr Sheppard and Athos Incident separately, but kept coming up against glitches-one more thing nobody had put the finishing touches on before the launch. When he tried USS Kelvin, though, he finally got an article. He skimmed down to the end, telling himself this was stupid, this was random, a shot in the dark...
Or maybe not.
Without a second thought, he dropped the padd on the bed and headed for the bridge.
-\-\-\-\-\-\-
There were over a hundred communication channels available over subspace, and each one Teyla checked seemed full of noise. A few were white noise, generated by broken transceivers on damaged ships; most were being used by the Vulcan evacuation fleet, cool voices betraying periodic hints of strain as ships tried to coordinate plans with one another or share hasty passenger manifests. The survivors of Vulcan's system defenses were requesting aid. The planetary government was continuing to loop a distress signal, updating the grim estimates of the dead as the attacking ship launched fighters to raze the surface; there seemed to be nowhere to hide, except perhaps the unforgiving deserts.
There were a half-dozen channels reserved for the rest of the task force. These had remained steadily quiet. Of course, the long-range subspace antenna was not operational, but surely there ought to be something...
A pair of incoming alerts flashed onto her screen, followed by text messages. "Captain Sumner, sir, the Daedalus has reached position and is preparing to drop out of warp," Teyla announced. "The Apollo estimates they are three minutes behind."
"What's holding us up, gentlemen?" Sumner asked, addressing the question at Zelenka and Miller.
"We have not been able to maintain a consistent Warp Ten-Five, sir," Zelenka said crisply. "Commander Castilho suspects there may be a faulty conversion coil that is responsible for the power leak, but we cannot be certain without disabling warp drive-"
"Fine," Sumner said, cutting him off. "Current ETA?"
"Twenty more minutes, sir."
A moment later, the port-side turbolift opened, and someone came barreling out, nearly crashing into the railing between the upper and lower bridge sections. Teyla was not certain which surprised her more: that it was Jonn Sheppard, out of uniform, standing wild-eyed on the bridge, or that he blurted out, "We need to drop out of warp right now."
"Excuse me?" Sumner turned around to face Sheppard, incredulous. Elizabeth, who had been at one of the sensor stations, straightened up with a look of shock that swiftly turned frosty.
"We need to stop this ship and contact Starfleet Command, right now," Sheppard repeated firmly, apparently uncowed by the looks he was receiving, whether angry or simply incredulous.
Sumner climbed to his feet. "And just who the hell are you?"
"This would be Cadet Jonn Sheppard," Elizabeth said, approaching him from behind Teyla's station. "Who was not, as I recall, assigned to this ship."
"That's Lieutenant Sheppard, ma'am," Jonn said hotly, before looking back to Sumner. "Sir, the ship that's attacking Vulcan isn't unknown. It was sighted in the Pegasus quadrant twenty-five hours ago, and it destroyed the USS Kelvin twenty-five years ago."
Teyla had half-forgotten Halling's message in the rush of activity, but it returned to her now...and Jonn, she remembered, had overheard part of it when they had met outside the dormitory. But that had had nothing to do with the Kelvin...it was not even sighted in the same sector...
"What exactly are you basing this claim on, Lieutenant?" Elizabeth asked dryly, hands behind her back, echoing Teyla's own thoughts. Teyla knew this was the most alarm Elizabeth was likely to let herself show-alarm, or irritation, it was difficult to tell.
Sheppard, however, seemed to have decided it was an accusation. "When Lieutenant Eirxxyl Dar Istys of the Kelvin described the ship that attacked them at Athos, he called it a flying mountain, amorphous of shape, radiating more waste energy than a starship consumes at warp," he quoted. "The only identifiable hull structure was a hangar, and it KO'd their shields and warp drive on the first shot. That description sound familiar to you?"
"What's this got to do with Pegasus?" Sumner asked.
Sheppard opened his mouth to begin explaining, but Teyla cut him off, rising to her feet; she was quite capable of speaking on her own behalf. Sheppard seemed not to have noticed her until then, because he did an actual double-take as she said, "The Athosian Council received a report yesterday about a Traveler ship that was destroyed on the edge of the Genii Confederation, near the Burill system. A Genii listening post was able to capture some limited sensor data from the confrontation, but the hostile vessel could not be identified-it fired once and completely destroyed the Traveler ship with no survivors."
"And let me guess, big as a mountain, came out of nowhere?" Sumner asked. Teyla could not yet tell when he was sarcastic; he seemed to put on irritation as part of his uniform.
"Except the Burill system is on the furthest edge of Genii space, over two hundred light years from here," Elizabeth said. "To get from there to Vulcan in the amount to time Sheppard is suggesting, a ship would have to sustain Warp Fourteen for twenty hours."
"Fourteen-point-five, actually," Lieutenant Zelenka volunteered; he cowered slightly when all eyes fell on him. "Of course, a ship with weapons this powerful would not necessarily have the same constraints on power consumption," he added quickly.
"And the ability to disappear for twenty-five years at a time?" Elizabeth asked. She turned back to Sumner. "Captain, not every coincidence in the universe needs to be deeply meaningful."
"It's not a coincidence," Sheppard said mulishly.
"Even if you're right, what are we supposed to do about it?" Elizabeth asked.
Sheppard raised his eyebrows. "Not get ourselves killed, maybe?"
Sumner interrupted whatever Elizabeth was about to say back by turning to Teyla. "Ms. Emmagen, raise the Samarkand and get a status report."
Teyla took her seat again and cycled through channels full of noise. They dedicated frequencies for the task force had been quiet, but she had told herself that they were occupied with the battle, and perhaps purposefully limiting the range of their broadcasts to avoid being overheard by the civilian ships. She sent a standard-form hail, expecting nothing more than a ping in reply.
The Samarkand did not reply at all.
She tried the Farragut. The Yorktown. The Challenger. The Carthage. The Daedalus...
"I cannot raise any members of the task force," she said, as she hailed the Apollo. That, at least, returned a ping of acknowledgment, but very weakly, and there was no follow-up attempt to open a channel. "There may be some kind of interference effect surrounding the hostile ship..."
"Emergency beacons?" Sumner asked.
She shifted to the proprietary channels reserved for Starfleet vessels in distress. Those should have been able to cut through most of the natural forms of interference, because they were, in effect, a single, powerful repeater sending out a steady ping. Even non-Federation vessels would be able to detect and locate such a signal; it was, after all, how the Athosian fleet had first located the survivors of the Kelvin twenty-five years ago. Teyla expected to hear the metronome click of one beacon, maybe a few.
The emergency channel was a continuous wash of noise.
"Sir..." She had to swallow before she could report; her throat had gone abruptly dry. "Sir, I am detecting nearly a thousand individual emergency beacons. The only source for so many signals could only be-"
"Lifeboats," Sumner cut her off. "One hell of a lot of lifeboats." He turned to the front of the bridge. "Mr. Zelenka, course correction. Bring us out of warp directly into Vulcan's orbit, thirty-five thousand kilometers. New ETA?"
"Ah, moment..." Zelenka worked for a moment, then said, "New ETA is fourteen minutes, sir."
Sumner nodded. "Emmagen, keep trying to raise the rest of the task force. Sheppard, fourteen minutes is how long you have to explain what you're doing on my ship."
"I was assigned here," Sheppard said tensely, though Teyla did not believe him for a minute; occupied as she was with her task, she could still hear the tension in his voice, could almost sense it radiating off of him. (Vulcans were capable of sharing thought, were they not? Though not in an Athosian manner
"I think we can clear this up rather quickly," Elizabeth said; Teyla saw out of the corner of her eye that she had approached one of the computer stations, and she brought up a document to stare at it intently.
"Well?" Sheppard prompted, folding his arms across his chest.
Elizabeth straightened up suddenly. "You're out of uniform, Lieutenant," she said crisply. "And very lucky to have Mr. McKay as a roommate."
Teyla glanced at him in time to see a pale green flush rush up from his neck; for once, though, he had at least enough wisdom to keep silent.
She tuned out the chorus of emergency beacons-lifeboats had no subspace communication, only radio, so she could not even acknowledge that they had been heard. Her hails to the Vulcan government went unanswered, though they were continuing to broadcast-perhaps Atlantis was being overlooked, or perhaps they were already operating at their antenna's maximum capacity. She tried, instead, discreetly asking some of the evacuee ships of their status and what they could see of the battle. Unfortunately, most of them were on the opposite side of the planet from the hostile ship, a deliberate decision to shield them; as a consequence, they were also unable to see the any Starfleet actions, and the few in the correct position were so far away that they could not report in detail. We suspect the Samarkand has been destroyed, one pilot said gravely, but Teyla told herself that these was still mere hearsay, not worth reporting to Captain Sumner yet.
"Five minutes to Vulcan, sir," Miller reported.
"Go to red alert," Sumner replied.
As the sirens wailed, Sheppard leaned against the computer station without taking a post-that he could loiter on the bridge like that was the surest proof that he was not meant to be there, but she had no time to speculate on why and how he'd come. Her hail to the Vulcan government was finally answered, and she hastened to open a channel. "USS Atlantis, this is the Vulcan Civil Defense. It is advisable that you do not attempt to engage the hostile ship," a male voice said.
"VCD, this is Atlantis," she replied. "Can you confirm the status of the task force in orbit?"
"Atlantis, this is VCD. There is no task force."
Teyla's heart skipped a beat. "VCD, this is Atlantis. Please say again, I do not understand."
"Atlantis, this is VCD. Your task force has been destroyed-"
"Dropping out of warp in three," Miller said, "two, one-"
The sheet of subspace distortion dissolved from the front view screen. At the same moment, a horrible, cold, clawing sensation flooded into Teyla's mind, feelings so utterly alien-and so distant-that she could scarcely parse them as thoughts. It felt very much as though the inside of her mind was being scraped raw: nauseated, she braced herself against her station with one hand, trying to push out the blinding sensations of hurt and rage and hungry-
"Hey." She felt the cool touch of Sheppard's hand on her wrist. She realized, faintly, that her other hand was pressed against her Ancestor's amulet, holding it through her uniform shirt like a lifeline. "Hey, you all right?"
"Wraith," she blurted. She meant it as a curse, but then realization fell upon her like an icy chill. It was insane, it was impossible, it was the raving of a fundamentalist, but- "Oh, Ancestors, it is the Wraith."
-\-\-\-\-\-
"Jesus Christ."
Jonn didn't know what Emmagen was talking about, but Sumner's quiet explicative caught his attention immediately. He looked up at the forward screen. Vulcan was a rust-colored disc, Mars-like, except for a few startling smears of turquoise sea. From this distance, the whole planet was visible, pole to pole.
So was the debris field surrounding...flying mountain sounded about right, actually. None of the Kelvin crew had ever been able to accurately describe what had hit them; Jonn hadn't been sure what to expect. The vessel had a weirdly organic look, with thick, curved ridges running along its tapered hull. The lurid burn of its engines was about the only thing that made it clear it wasn't a living thing-that, and the tiny flecks of the fighters that swarmed around it, like some kind of hive. It was ten times the size of the Apollo, which hung just below it, venting plasma and atmosphere.
"Get us down there, Mr. Miller," Sumner ordered, but then a ribbon of projectiles burst out of the mountain-ship-thing, and in the next minute the Apollo blew apart. The secondary hull disintegrated in a cloud of uncontained antimatter, releasing a shockwave of gas and fine debris; part of one nacelle went spiraling away end over end, split down its axis like a hot-dog bun. The saucer fractured along the midline, and flames flared in a few pockets of oxygen atmosphere before subsiding. Jonn could make out the tiny points of light where pieces of debris struck the enemy fighters, or even tinier dots that were probably lifeboats consumed in the blast.
"There are millions of life signs aboard that ship," Weir announced, breaking the silence. "I'm picking up transporter signatures from the enemy fighters. It looks like they're beaming people up from the lifeboats and the planet's surface."
"What the hell?" Sumner asked. He looked to Jonn, as if he had any answers. "Why would they do that?"
"Taking hostages?" Jonn proposed.
"They have no need of hostages," Emmagen said quietly, but though she was looking a little gray in the face she seemed to have regained her overall composure after that...whatever-it-was, seizure or panic attack or something. She was still rubbing something under the front of her shirt, though.
Sumner glanced at her. "You know what this thing is, Lieutenant Emmagen?"
Before she could answer, Ford blurted out, "Incoming fire, sir!"
Torpedos like a string of pearls were coming directly at them; Miller rolled the ship away, but obviously not fast enough. The entire ship shook from the impact, and the overhead lights flickered dangerously; Jonn had to cling to the side of the communication station to keep his feet. "Our main shield generator has failed," Zelenka called out. "Deflectors at thirty percent. We have sustained damage to decks five and six and the starboard nacelle." And that had been a glancing blow, holy hell.
"Return fire," Sumner called, as if that had worked for anybody else. "Give it all we've got."
But the vast enemy ship was at the very edge of their phaser range, and a full phaser bombardment scattered harmlessly well away from its hull. Ford rapped his fist against his station. "No good, sir. Their shields aren't even flickering."
Jonn leaned forward, staring at the vast length of the ship below them. "Why aren't the fighters attacking?" he wondered out loud. "There's got to be a thousand of them out there. We'd never be able to pick them all off if they swarmed us."
As if in answer, Emmagen suddenly called out. "Sir...we are being hailed by the enemy ship."
Weir and Sumner shared an inscrutable look, but only for a moment. "Open it up," Sumner said. "If they're talking, they're not shooting at us."
The forward screen flickered and went dark. The face that came up on it was humanoid, but in some ways looked more like a badly-made copy of a humanoid face than something real: its waxy skin was pulled tight over bones that protruded in the wrong places, and when it breathed deeply more air seemed to go into the pits beside its nose than through the nostrils. It had close-cropped hair of pure white, and when its mouth split into a smile, the teeth were far more pointed and widely spaced than Jonn was strictly comfortable with.
"Hello, Atlantis," he said with a horrible false cheer in a voice with distinctly non-human harmonics. "Elizabeth Weir. Jonn Sheppard. Teyla Emmagen. It is so good to see you again."
Jonn, for a split second, thought he'd somehow heard wrong. Then he glanced at Weir and Emmmagen, and their equally gobsmacked expressions said, no, he really hadn't. Sumner looked at them curiously, and Jonn could only shrug. No idea why the malevolent alien is name-dropping me, sir. Maybe ask him?
Instead, Sumner turned back to the screen and stepped to the front of the bridge, imposing himself in the center of the transmission. "This is Captain Marshall Sumner of the USS Atlantis. To whom am I speaking?"
"Ah," the alien said. "A bit early, am I? That's too bad; I hope you can still appreciate my work. You can call me Michael, Captain Sumner."
"Why are you attacking the planet Vulcan?" Sumner asked, sticking to stiff formality. "The Federation had no ill will toward you or your kind."
"Not at the moment, but I happen to harbor some very ill will towards the Federation." Michael's lurid yellow eyes seemed to search the room, as if he was scanning his screen for something. "How does it feel to watch your world burn, Dr. Weir? Is your family quite safe, Commander Sheppard?"
Commander Sheppard? This just kept getting stranger...Jonn looked at Weir, but aside from a slight twitch of one jaw muscle, her expression was completely passive. Emmagen caught Jonn's eye, and he shook his head slightly-he hadn't spoke to his mother's family in years, the threat was nearly meaningless.
But if they somehow had something to do with Michael's reasons for targetting Vulcan in the first place...
"We demand the immediate cessation of hostilities towards the planet Vulcan and all other Federation words and allies," Sumner said with a remarkable air of confidence, given the circumstances. "I order you to recall your fighters and withdraw from this system immediately."
"Now, Captain Sumner," Michael said, and actually rolled his eyes. "Did you really think that was going to work?"
"I take it that's a no, then," Sumner replied dryly.
Michael suddenly tilted his head to one side, a gesture few humanoids made naturally. "Oh, not at all! In fact, I would be delighted to have you as a guest aboard my ship to discuss...cessation of hostilities."
"Bullshit," Jonn murmured under his breath.
But to his surprise, Sumner hesitated, and then asked, "Do I have your guarantee of safe passage to and from your ship, and a cease-fire for the duration of the talks?"
"Captain!" Weir protested, eyes widening.
"You should listen to Dr. Weir, Captain," Michael said silkily. "But yes, if you require it-I promise you ship will be unharmed while you are my guest."
"All right," Sumner said. "Obviously you've got hangers on that thing, so I'll be coming over by shuttlecraft. Give me ten minutes."
"I'm sure it will be a most fascinating discussion," Michael said, and closed the channel.
Weir immediately charged forward. "Captain, no. It's out of the question."
"It might be the best chance we have at distracting that thing," Sumner said. He turned around, pale eyes drilling into Jonn's. "Jonn Sheppard. You're the hotshot behind that shuttle crash in Spring Sim last year."
"That's what the discipline board decided, sir," Jonn said, and it took a lot of willpower not to glance at Weir when as he did so.
Sumner tilted his head back, as if sizing Jonn up. "Had to be a pretty good pilot to pull off a move that stupid. What do you think, Lieutenant?"
"Sir, I think I'm one of the best damn pilots in the fleet," Jonn said firmly.
Sumner huffed, though whether he was impressed by Jonn's display of bravado or skeptical of the claim, Jonn couldn't tell. "Here's your chance to prove it, then." He climbed up to the sensor station and opened up a display of Michael's ship. "He's going to have to lower his shield to let my shuttle through. That gives you a split-second to get inside his guard. I don't know what kind of hull plating he's carrying, but at this range even a shuttle's phasers can do some serious damage."
"Captain, what you're suggesting is suicide for everyone involved," Weir said flatly. "Even if a second shuttle could get inside that shield, there's no way it would survive long enough to make an attack before those fighters swamped it. And if he suspects any treachery on your part, he'll kill you."
"Odds are he's going to kill me anyway, Commander," Sumner said flatly. "This is about getting a shot in any way we can. Unless you three know something I don't?" He glanced and Weir and Jonn, and at Emmagen, who had remained at her station.
She spoke up now, turning in her seat to face them. "He cannot be trusted, sir. I can...I have a sense of these creatures, and they are the closest thing to evil that I have ever encountered."
"You mean telepathically?" Sumner asked. Emmagen nodded reluctantly. "Noted," he said, and turned back to Weir. "I'm officially transferring the Atlantis into your hands, Commander. If there's any chance to kill that thing, I want you to kill it. Failing that, you need to get a message to the fleet at Vorash any way you can."
"Hasn't Starfleet Command already informed them of the situation?" Weir asked.
"The Vorash mission is so classified God himself wouldn't know what they're up to," Sumner said. "They're operating under radio silence, so they won't have a clue what's happening here unless someone goes and tells them. Jack O'Neill is in charge of the task force there, he'll know what he has to do."
Weir stared at Sumner for a minute, then nodded shakily. "I understand, sir. It...thank you."
"Thank you, Commander." He shook her hand, and then turned around. "Ensign Ford!"
"Sir?" Ford turned in his seat.
"You want to live forever, kid?"
Ford jumped to his feet. "No, sir."
"Good. You and Sheppard-with me."
He strode towards the turbolifts, and Jonn had to hurry to catch up with him. He gave one last backwards glance to Weir and Emmagen, standing at the back of the bridge, and then the lift was bearing them away.
Chapter One
Chapter Nine
Chapter Eleven