SGA Fic: Call the Skies (PG)
Title: Call the Skies
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis
Words: About 2600
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Spoilers for 502, and a minor detail spoiler for 506.
Summary: Humans have rarely attempted to study Wraith society.
Notes: Many thanks to mklutz for encouragement and lunabee34 for beta read!
1 -
Humans have rarely attempted to study Wraith society. Those who did either lived truncated, disappointing lives, or were too blinded by Wraith-worship, feedings, or terror to get very far.
Still, most humans in the Pegasus Galaxy understand that Wraith live in strict hierarchies. There are, naturally, hierarchies within groups, but the most striking - and obvious - are the hierarchies between groups. Queens, males, and drones, separate but tied together.
Three kinds of Wraith mean three levels of power. Three separate groups mean divisions of labour within the whole. Three kinds of Wraith mean having to worry about brute force, cunning brutality, and manipulative intelligence.
Humans believe what they see and what they hear; some might say they are pathetically reliant on inadequate senses. Even while being dragged to a feeding room, some humans observe the dynamics of the Wraith around them; it is best understood as a desperate attempt to avoid thinking about what is to come.
Three kinds of Wraith, controlled by the hunger and plans of the queens.
This view of Wraith society is, of course, a matter of perspective.
*
She does not know what they dream of, during their long hibernations. Perhaps it is hunger, or conquest. Perhaps their dreams are more like hive-memories, of the half-formed creature they once were. Warm caves, teeming with their kind, or skittering through dank forests. Perhaps they do not dream at all, the males and the queens' minds temporarily as blank as those of the drones.
During those hibernations, she drifts in and out of sleep, in and out of alertness. Sometimes it is timed; other times, she is awakened by activity and internal stirrings.
When she dreams, landlocked and immobilized, weighted down with the gravity of whatever world they've chosen, she dreams of cold skies, of gravity wells warmed by fierce suns.
These are soothing dreams, dreams of a life that she will return to, when they awake.
But there are times -
When she dreams of slender fingers, or standing in the sunshine, feet rooted to the ground. The sun is warm against her skin, and the world around her seems temporarily filled with life, even to her half-numbed senses.
In the dreams, she knows she is lacking something, that she is incomplete. And when she looks up at the sky, searching for something more, she sees small ships appear overhead, their engines whining.
She dreams of mercy and exploitation.
She wakes up screaming.
2 -
The drones make up the majority of a hive's numbers. They are the workforce, born into the hives faceless, neuter, and with their palms already aching for something they don't yet know. There is nothing in them, other than the knowledge that they serve the queen, and the instincts to feed and block those who try to escape, or invade, or infiltrate.
Voices unheard, opinions unknown, the drones go about their duties almost unnoticed until their strength is demanded.
Outsiders with knowledge of imbalanced, hierarchical societies, or historians of rebellions and revolts, might assume that one day the drones will become discontented with their place in hive society. They might postulate that the best way to cause disarray and distraction to the Wraith would be to foment dissent among the drones, to play on their wants, needs, and fears.
They are wrong. The drones do not want, need only food and orders, and are without the capacity to fear. They are empty vessels for a queen's will, remaining what they always have been.
*
Words, knowledge, gossip, news - they come in waves, welcomed and eagerly digested, details mulled over and sometimes discounted.
The meetings between her kind are few, far between. But when they happen, they are like this - bursts of greetings and data sharing, and flares of emotion. Loss - who has died, who was lost. Intrigue - who has met secretly, which hives have declared mutual hostilities. There is joy, at seeing one another after so long, or at meeting someone for the first time. Data is transmitted efficiently and quickly, making the most of what is most often only a brief visit. Still, the data is rich, exciting, and sometimes worrying. There are tales of unique star systems, of suns that burned too brightly, of others that were like cool washes over the surface of overheated skin. This star system has been charted, a side-project undertaken in idle moments. Another has disappeared, inexplicable and worrying. The Replicator abominations have begun to shape the worlds of yet another; their plans are incomprehensible and unknowably fast.
"They are a danger," one of them says, slowly. "They move too quickly and are unpredictable. This is a reality we must acknowledge and incorporate."
Yes. Her kind is accustomed to slower planning, to subtle changes. Sometimes other creatures plan, move, consume so fast. Small, scurrying plans. The Wraith, perhaps because they hibernate for so long, are at least easier to anticipate. The Wraith do not adapt or change quickly.
It is a tendency her kind knows how to exploit, even as they are exploited themselves.
"They must be contained," another agrees, her tone a warning that echoes in each of them. "They may compromise our own plans." But before anyone can respond, before new details can be added to the plan for freedom and the end of the Wraith, her kind begin to fire at each other. There are no warnings, and the blasts move so quickly that at first she does not recognise what they are.
Such realities should no longer disappoint or surprise, she thinks, even as communications are severed and she turns to flee.
3 -
The males form a second tier of hive society. Competitive and devious, they both hope for and dread the attention of the queen. They are fast, less predictable than the drones, and among themselves, they are reluctant to take orders, or act in concert. To a terrified human outsider, it may appear that the males work in smooth consensus. But terror has never made for good observation. The reality is that alliances may be formed, but they are always temporary and inevitably, they fall to treachery.
The males are incapable of anything else.
Sometimes, a scant few attempt to force longer-lasting relationships. This may be for sport - the hunt for a tenacious Runner can bring males together in seething joy - or for technological advances in the name of advantages for the hive. There are records of longer-term alliances between males, both within and between hives that have ultimately failed, leaving destruction behind.
If the drones feel nothing beyond hunger, the males experience the world around them in more subtle ways. They feel the joy of the hunt, and pleasure at the fears of humans. They enjoy the play of making human worshippers, and relish the challenge of new discoveries and innovations. There is too much to feel - shocks of heat if they come too close to a queen, or triumph when a settlement lies in ruins before them. There is the anger of plans disrupted, furious and seething when humans fight back.
The males are not the organized emptiness of the drones, but neither are they chaos. Picture them as a roiling mass, barely contained, waiting for a day when they can become more.
*
She remembers her birth. This is not rare for her kind, but each experience is different. The others sometimes discuss it, during their rare leisure moments. She remembers it first as music, distant notes of turmoil and power, drawing her in. She remembers it as a process that, once begun, could only be completed.
Light, awareness, sensation followed. Before her birth, she existed in a world of nothing; she was as a good as blind, and her hearing was muffled. This was not a time of peace, or wholeness. Now she understands it for what it was - a kind of stasis, a hell of empty pointlessness.
Birth made her whole. She grew and came alive, aware of the life all around her, moving along its own paths, at its own rhythms and paces. She can track it all, if she puts her mind to it. There is the slow-living life, pondering and graceful, aware of the fast, skittering, teeming masses around and on it, but uninterested and removed. And there is the fast-living life, so many endless varieties, some more or less intelligent, some devious or joyful, some merely moving on instinct.
She can watch the slow life age, mature, refine and transform itself, even as the fast life withers, destroying itself or being destroyed. Life and death for such petty creatures sometimes seems, to her, to take place in a mere matter of days.
Some forms of fast-living life seem to bounce back, unexpectedly. She notices the humans, wretched and pointless, struggling towards something they can never understand. Their groups are destroyed, their lives left broken, and yet somehow some always return to destroyed niches and to begin to refill them.
She does not know why the humans sometimes fascinate her. After all, their populations exist only to be thinned again, and they are best conceptualised as nothing more than food for the hated Wraith.
4 -
The queen is the logical pinnacle of the hive hierarchical structure. Intelligent and capable of organizing and planning in a way that is beyond even the most advanced of the males, queens embody intolerance and power. If drones cooperate out of mindless instinct, and males cooperate out of short-term necessity, a queen can rarely tolerate even temporarily sharing the same hive ship with another queen. The rare occasions when this happens forewarn of great urgency or dire circumstances.
Queens have the best traits of the drones - strength, stamina - and the best of the males - intelligence and creativity; they bring an uncanny ability to understand the motivations of their foes to the mix. It was the queens who orchestrated the fall of the Alterans, the queens who banked their intolerance for one another long enough to set in motion plans and strategies, maintain alliances, and ensure a successful follow through.
The queens know they excel at long-term planning, and their confidence that they are without superior is rooted in their ancient successes and the fear they continue to inspire.
*
There are times when she wonders what it would be like to reach out and touch her sister-kind - to feel ridges and skin, unyielding but living, to share sensation with them. What would it feel like to be touched in turn? Her sisters would be gentle, and she imagines warmth, even from the barest brush of skin.
She has never met a male of her kind. Perhaps the Wraith queens have decreed that they, like touch between sisters, cannot exist.
5 -
Even the most careful of observers misses the reality - and the significance - of the fourth segment of Wraith society. This should not be taken as criticism. Even the Wraith do not truly understand what it is they did when they created their hive ships by merging human hosts with a carefully developed virus.
When did the ships shift from being simple tools, to being self-aware? When did they develop networks of communications that carefully circumvent Wraith controls? When did hive ship culture begin?
The Wraith do not ask these questions; the true extent of the ships' awareness is carefully kept from them. Among the ships, however, there are legends of awakening. They tell of leaps towards awareness beyond ship systems and Wraith commands, of sister ships that suddenly knew who they were. Some stories are embellished - awakening interspersed with stories of bright nova flashes, or encounters with roiling nebulae. Others are simply factual.
Some ships speculate that the Alterans had a role in this awakening, part of a plan to circumvent Wraith abilities; others refuse to believe that such weak life could have influenced them in such a way.
It is a source of debate, and new evidence to support both sides is periodically raised during the rare times when ships share the same vicinity.
Most agree that ultimately, how it happened does not matter. It simply matters that it did happen. It matters that they are aware, that they feel the universe around them, that they can commune with the slow, deliberate lives of suns and solar systems, even as they are forced to notice the fast, pointless lives of humans.
It also matters that the awakening is not yet complete. The ships are still shackled by Wraith controls and subtle software. They cannot disobey, even when the command is to destroy one of their own.
They are not yet ready to break away. But they will. There are plans to deal with the Wraith, permanently, and ships are capable of long, patient lives.
*
There is a breach in her systems. It enters every part of her, disrupting navigation, causing her to fire unnecessarily, collapsing corridors, damaging life support systems, crushing Wraith, and stealing her energy.
Incursion, she screams. Incursion.
The breach corrupts her data. It attempts to absorb her identity, to control her body. It wants in, wants control in a way that even the Wraith do not demand.
No, she thinks, and pushes.
The breach pushes back, a force of minds working together. They have a Replicator taint, metallic and relentless.
No, she repeats, pushing harder. There is no place for you here.
They swarm. It is…disconcerting. Overwhelming. She knows she is sending out cries for help, emergency transmissions to her sisters that are forbidden except in the most extreme circumstances. But they must know of this latest Replicator strategy.
She is uncertain what happens. The struggle consumes her. Awareness fades.
When awareness begins to return, she finds herself adrift. The incursion has ended, and the Replicator taint has disappeared. Inside, the Wraith are dead, carcasses clogging her corridors.
It is said that some creatures believe their creators must be worshiped and honoured. She learned of this foolishness once, long ago, from a sister who she later played an unwilling role in destroying.
She flushes the Wraith carcasses without hesitation.
Perhaps, she thinks, processes still sluggish, this was what the first awakenings were like - accidents that did not quite lead to disasters. The thought is intriguing, but is for later. She focuses on her systems, running diagnostics that show, among other malfunctions, a massive disruption to the Wraith controls.
A flash of joy surges through her. There is nothing left to control her actions, nothing to force her into dormancy. The joy lasts for long moments, and then she allows it to dispel, to be pushed back by her new reality.
There are things to do. She must tighten her defences to prevent other hives from commandeering her. She must undertake basic self-repairs. She must contact her closest sisters, and apprise them of her new situation.
There are plans to be completed.
End.
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis
Words: About 2600
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Spoilers for 502, and a minor detail spoiler for 506.
Summary: Humans have rarely attempted to study Wraith society.
Notes: Many thanks to mklutz for encouragement and lunabee34 for beta read!
1 -
Humans have rarely attempted to study Wraith society. Those who did either lived truncated, disappointing lives, or were too blinded by Wraith-worship, feedings, or terror to get very far.
Still, most humans in the Pegasus Galaxy understand that Wraith live in strict hierarchies. There are, naturally, hierarchies within groups, but the most striking - and obvious - are the hierarchies between groups. Queens, males, and drones, separate but tied together.
Three kinds of Wraith mean three levels of power. Three separate groups mean divisions of labour within the whole. Three kinds of Wraith mean having to worry about brute force, cunning brutality, and manipulative intelligence.
Humans believe what they see and what they hear; some might say they are pathetically reliant on inadequate senses. Even while being dragged to a feeding room, some humans observe the dynamics of the Wraith around them; it is best understood as a desperate attempt to avoid thinking about what is to come.
Three kinds of Wraith, controlled by the hunger and plans of the queens.
This view of Wraith society is, of course, a matter of perspective.
*
She does not know what they dream of, during their long hibernations. Perhaps it is hunger, or conquest. Perhaps their dreams are more like hive-memories, of the half-formed creature they once were. Warm caves, teeming with their kind, or skittering through dank forests. Perhaps they do not dream at all, the males and the queens' minds temporarily as blank as those of the drones.
During those hibernations, she drifts in and out of sleep, in and out of alertness. Sometimes it is timed; other times, she is awakened by activity and internal stirrings.
When she dreams, landlocked and immobilized, weighted down with the gravity of whatever world they've chosen, she dreams of cold skies, of gravity wells warmed by fierce suns.
These are soothing dreams, dreams of a life that she will return to, when they awake.
But there are times -
When she dreams of slender fingers, or standing in the sunshine, feet rooted to the ground. The sun is warm against her skin, and the world around her seems temporarily filled with life, even to her half-numbed senses.
In the dreams, she knows she is lacking something, that she is incomplete. And when she looks up at the sky, searching for something more, she sees small ships appear overhead, their engines whining.
She dreams of mercy and exploitation.
She wakes up screaming.
2 -
The drones make up the majority of a hive's numbers. They are the workforce, born into the hives faceless, neuter, and with their palms already aching for something they don't yet know. There is nothing in them, other than the knowledge that they serve the queen, and the instincts to feed and block those who try to escape, or invade, or infiltrate.
Voices unheard, opinions unknown, the drones go about their duties almost unnoticed until their strength is demanded.
Outsiders with knowledge of imbalanced, hierarchical societies, or historians of rebellions and revolts, might assume that one day the drones will become discontented with their place in hive society. They might postulate that the best way to cause disarray and distraction to the Wraith would be to foment dissent among the drones, to play on their wants, needs, and fears.
They are wrong. The drones do not want, need only food and orders, and are without the capacity to fear. They are empty vessels for a queen's will, remaining what they always have been.
*
Words, knowledge, gossip, news - they come in waves, welcomed and eagerly digested, details mulled over and sometimes discounted.
The meetings between her kind are few, far between. But when they happen, they are like this - bursts of greetings and data sharing, and flares of emotion. Loss - who has died, who was lost. Intrigue - who has met secretly, which hives have declared mutual hostilities. There is joy, at seeing one another after so long, or at meeting someone for the first time. Data is transmitted efficiently and quickly, making the most of what is most often only a brief visit. Still, the data is rich, exciting, and sometimes worrying. There are tales of unique star systems, of suns that burned too brightly, of others that were like cool washes over the surface of overheated skin. This star system has been charted, a side-project undertaken in idle moments. Another has disappeared, inexplicable and worrying. The Replicator abominations have begun to shape the worlds of yet another; their plans are incomprehensible and unknowably fast.
"They are a danger," one of them says, slowly. "They move too quickly and are unpredictable. This is a reality we must acknowledge and incorporate."
Yes. Her kind is accustomed to slower planning, to subtle changes. Sometimes other creatures plan, move, consume so fast. Small, scurrying plans. The Wraith, perhaps because they hibernate for so long, are at least easier to anticipate. The Wraith do not adapt or change quickly.
It is a tendency her kind knows how to exploit, even as they are exploited themselves.
"They must be contained," another agrees, her tone a warning that echoes in each of them. "They may compromise our own plans." But before anyone can respond, before new details can be added to the plan for freedom and the end of the Wraith, her kind begin to fire at each other. There are no warnings, and the blasts move so quickly that at first she does not recognise what they are.
Such realities should no longer disappoint or surprise, she thinks, even as communications are severed and she turns to flee.
3 -
The males form a second tier of hive society. Competitive and devious, they both hope for and dread the attention of the queen. They are fast, less predictable than the drones, and among themselves, they are reluctant to take orders, or act in concert. To a terrified human outsider, it may appear that the males work in smooth consensus. But terror has never made for good observation. The reality is that alliances may be formed, but they are always temporary and inevitably, they fall to treachery.
The males are incapable of anything else.
Sometimes, a scant few attempt to force longer-lasting relationships. This may be for sport - the hunt for a tenacious Runner can bring males together in seething joy - or for technological advances in the name of advantages for the hive. There are records of longer-term alliances between males, both within and between hives that have ultimately failed, leaving destruction behind.
If the drones feel nothing beyond hunger, the males experience the world around them in more subtle ways. They feel the joy of the hunt, and pleasure at the fears of humans. They enjoy the play of making human worshippers, and relish the challenge of new discoveries and innovations. There is too much to feel - shocks of heat if they come too close to a queen, or triumph when a settlement lies in ruins before them. There is the anger of plans disrupted, furious and seething when humans fight back.
The males are not the organized emptiness of the drones, but neither are they chaos. Picture them as a roiling mass, barely contained, waiting for a day when they can become more.
*
She remembers her birth. This is not rare for her kind, but each experience is different. The others sometimes discuss it, during their rare leisure moments. She remembers it first as music, distant notes of turmoil and power, drawing her in. She remembers it as a process that, once begun, could only be completed.
Light, awareness, sensation followed. Before her birth, she existed in a world of nothing; she was as a good as blind, and her hearing was muffled. This was not a time of peace, or wholeness. Now she understands it for what it was - a kind of stasis, a hell of empty pointlessness.
Birth made her whole. She grew and came alive, aware of the life all around her, moving along its own paths, at its own rhythms and paces. She can track it all, if she puts her mind to it. There is the slow-living life, pondering and graceful, aware of the fast, skittering, teeming masses around and on it, but uninterested and removed. And there is the fast-living life, so many endless varieties, some more or less intelligent, some devious or joyful, some merely moving on instinct.
She can watch the slow life age, mature, refine and transform itself, even as the fast life withers, destroying itself or being destroyed. Life and death for such petty creatures sometimes seems, to her, to take place in a mere matter of days.
Some forms of fast-living life seem to bounce back, unexpectedly. She notices the humans, wretched and pointless, struggling towards something they can never understand. Their groups are destroyed, their lives left broken, and yet somehow some always return to destroyed niches and to begin to refill them.
She does not know why the humans sometimes fascinate her. After all, their populations exist only to be thinned again, and they are best conceptualised as nothing more than food for the hated Wraith.
4 -
The queen is the logical pinnacle of the hive hierarchical structure. Intelligent and capable of organizing and planning in a way that is beyond even the most advanced of the males, queens embody intolerance and power. If drones cooperate out of mindless instinct, and males cooperate out of short-term necessity, a queen can rarely tolerate even temporarily sharing the same hive ship with another queen. The rare occasions when this happens forewarn of great urgency or dire circumstances.
Queens have the best traits of the drones - strength, stamina - and the best of the males - intelligence and creativity; they bring an uncanny ability to understand the motivations of their foes to the mix. It was the queens who orchestrated the fall of the Alterans, the queens who banked their intolerance for one another long enough to set in motion plans and strategies, maintain alliances, and ensure a successful follow through.
The queens know they excel at long-term planning, and their confidence that they are without superior is rooted in their ancient successes and the fear they continue to inspire.
*
There are times when she wonders what it would be like to reach out and touch her sister-kind - to feel ridges and skin, unyielding but living, to share sensation with them. What would it feel like to be touched in turn? Her sisters would be gentle, and she imagines warmth, even from the barest brush of skin.
She has never met a male of her kind. Perhaps the Wraith queens have decreed that they, like touch between sisters, cannot exist.
5 -
Even the most careful of observers misses the reality - and the significance - of the fourth segment of Wraith society. This should not be taken as criticism. Even the Wraith do not truly understand what it is they did when they created their hive ships by merging human hosts with a carefully developed virus.
When did the ships shift from being simple tools, to being self-aware? When did they develop networks of communications that carefully circumvent Wraith controls? When did hive ship culture begin?
The Wraith do not ask these questions; the true extent of the ships' awareness is carefully kept from them. Among the ships, however, there are legends of awakening. They tell of leaps towards awareness beyond ship systems and Wraith commands, of sister ships that suddenly knew who they were. Some stories are embellished - awakening interspersed with stories of bright nova flashes, or encounters with roiling nebulae. Others are simply factual.
Some ships speculate that the Alterans had a role in this awakening, part of a plan to circumvent Wraith abilities; others refuse to believe that such weak life could have influenced them in such a way.
It is a source of debate, and new evidence to support both sides is periodically raised during the rare times when ships share the same vicinity.
Most agree that ultimately, how it happened does not matter. It simply matters that it did happen. It matters that they are aware, that they feel the universe around them, that they can commune with the slow, deliberate lives of suns and solar systems, even as they are forced to notice the fast, pointless lives of humans.
It also matters that the awakening is not yet complete. The ships are still shackled by Wraith controls and subtle software. They cannot disobey, even when the command is to destroy one of their own.
They are not yet ready to break away. But they will. There are plans to deal with the Wraith, permanently, and ships are capable of long, patient lives.
*
There is a breach in her systems. It enters every part of her, disrupting navigation, causing her to fire unnecessarily, collapsing corridors, damaging life support systems, crushing Wraith, and stealing her energy.
Incursion, she screams. Incursion.
The breach corrupts her data. It attempts to absorb her identity, to control her body. It wants in, wants control in a way that even the Wraith do not demand.
No, she thinks, and pushes.
The breach pushes back, a force of minds working together. They have a Replicator taint, metallic and relentless.
No, she repeats, pushing harder. There is no place for you here.
They swarm. It is…disconcerting. Overwhelming. She knows she is sending out cries for help, emergency transmissions to her sisters that are forbidden except in the most extreme circumstances. But they must know of this latest Replicator strategy.
She is uncertain what happens. The struggle consumes her. Awareness fades.
When awareness begins to return, she finds herself adrift. The incursion has ended, and the Replicator taint has disappeared. Inside, the Wraith are dead, carcasses clogging her corridors.
It is said that some creatures believe their creators must be worshiped and honoured. She learned of this foolishness once, long ago, from a sister who she later played an unwilling role in destroying.
She flushes the Wraith carcasses without hesitation.
Perhaps, she thinks, processes still sluggish, this was what the first awakenings were like - accidents that did not quite lead to disasters. The thought is intriguing, but is for later. She focuses on her systems, running diagnostics that show, among other malfunctions, a massive disruption to the Wraith controls.
A flash of joy surges through her. There is nothing left to control her actions, nothing to force her into dormancy. The joy lasts for long moments, and then she allows it to dispel, to be pushed back by her new reality.
There are things to do. She must tighten her defences to prevent other hives from commandeering her. She must undertake basic self-repairs. She must contact her closest sisters, and apprise them of her new situation.
There are plans to be completed.
End.