SGA fic: Queens in the Mire
Title: Queens in the Mire
Spoilers: None.
Characters: Teyla, John, Rodney, Ronon
Notes: a gift for ileliberte's birthday, beta'd by ileliberte, because yes, I am that lame. Started long ago on the chocolate and peanut butter principle, in this case the Teyla and Wraith Queens principle.
Summary:
“We are--” Teyla forces as much sincerity into her words as possible. The metal edge of the chute bites into her thigh; her feet hang free in space. “--alone. We came alone!”
“You are lying,” the queen says, her brow furrowed, as much astonished as irritated. The long claw of her thumb presses against the underbelly of Teyla’s jaw.
The P90 spirals down the chute behind her, banging and clanking the whole way. Hulking silhouettes of drones surround them, lit by the rows of dimly glowing lights that run along their bayoneted stunners. The open grate warps under the queen’s hand, the metal keening at the edge of human hearing.
The queen smiles, baring jagged, nightmare teeth in inky black gums. The breath from her vestigial mouth smells oddly pleasant. Her irritation hits Teyla like an axe between the eyes.
Another drone approaches, dragging a body squelching across the scum-covered floor. Teyla’s eyes close in relief to hear the heavy, undrained sound of it. An open-faced box is placed into the queen’s hand, glowing softly from within--circuits of Ancient crystal, smeared with the blood of their descendant. The queen lifts the box until the light touches her pallid face. A small storm begins to churn inside Teyla’s skull.
“You have the ability to raise this battleship from the muck.”
“No. That is--”
“You will bring us the rest of the interfaces.”
The queen opens her hand and shoves. Teyla follows her P90, banging and clanking down the chute.
The only thing that really matters--as she wraps her arms around her head to meet the first curve in the chute, thump thump THUMP--is the thought Teyla has plucked whole from the queen’s mind that to her, John is an item of barter; he will live until Teyla returns.
**
The chute expels her into a muddy underground stream. She tumbles out, bruised and vividly aware of every item tucked away in her pockets, having smashed against each of them again and again on her way down. The queen took nothing from her except for John; she wants Teyla to have the tools to continue her work.
Teyla grabs the dim edge of the chute’s opening, coughing. She sees a small light blinking somewhere far away in the dark, and something in her chest unwinds to see it; she thought it would be harder to find.
Her flashlight shows the ceiling curving over her, unusually regular and furry with encrusted salts and hanging strings of mold feeding on the seepage of the Mapayan jungle above them. A shoulder-high stain hints at the passage’s high water mark. Pale clusters of globular mushrooms sprout here and there in the mass of green and brown. Underneath the fuzzy infestations, she sees a repetition of careful geometric patterns, the occasional gleam of steel in the path of her flashlight beam.
She is in the belly of an Ancient warship.
The ship has begun a feeble resurrection, its sleepy eye blinking at her in the dark. Scraping away the gunk of millennia, Teyla finds a recognizable data port, light flashing: ready for use.
Her plan is this: she carries John’s Ancient scanner, casually handed over while he’d worked Rodney’s pieced-together interface into place near the corridor ceiling. The scanner, once pried open, can be connected easily to the corroded data port with several of the translucent cables Rodney uses to bridge Ancient circuits. She snaps them into place, trembling and cold in the underground chill.
Slowly, the dark screen begins to shine blue under her hands. It has connected to an ATA gene through the complex neurological weave of the battleship’s awakening A.I. The screen begins to flicker between functions as this other ATA gene-holder notices the blip in his system.
Teyla crouches in the mud and waits for Rodney to find her.
**
“There’s the obvious solution, of course, though it will--add another of course here--be unbelievably dangerous. The disadvantages being outweighed by its simplicity and presumed effectiveness.” Rodney pauses. “So it only appears to be imbecilic, while in fact being--well.”
Here, his expression contorts, the corners of his mouth making a bid for higher altitudes, but the area around his eyes eludes his control, remaining weakly uncertain. Yanking desperately at scum-coated gear, he adds, “A fitting tribute to our rescuee, you might say.”
A metallic fountain of old pipes heavy with fungal growth spring out from the center of the little room where Rodney sits, his body wrapped head to toe in protective plastic. On top, a transparent rain slicker, hood pulled up; at bottom, rain pants fashioned out of black bags and duct-tape. Latex gloves from the first aid kit cover his hands. He flinches squeamishly each time water drips from the ceiling or the pipes.
The drips never reach Teyla because Ronon is using his share of the room’s limited space to loom over her with as much bulk as possible. Currently, he’s irritating her by trying to wipe the mud from the scrapes on her face. Both men are filthy, but from the way Ronon fusses and Rodney stares, she must resemble some kind of pygmy swamp monster--an amorphous mud cake trailing tentacles of fungus fronds.
At least Rodney is speaking clearly. It’s the first coherent thing he’s said since, “What do you mean Wraith?” and “Wait, where’s Sheppard?”
“We’ve been pumping the water out,” Ronon says, free hand curled loosely around a hanging pipe. He has to raise his voice over the sound of the pump machinery. “We can pump it back in.”
Rodney cocks a finger at him, palm up. “As he said.”
“We have one more advantage,” Teyla says. “The queen believes John and I were working alone.”
“Doesn’t even the odds much,” Ronon says.
“It’s irrelevant anyway. We just have to lure the queen below the water line, and--presto! Abra-cadaver!” Rodney looked at her apologetically. “You’re, uh, necessarily bait.”
Teyla shakes her head. “She has John. With that leverage, she does not believe she needs to supervise me. We could perhaps convince her my behavior was irregular, but if, in that time, she discovers that John can use the technology on this ship...”
“She doesn’t already know?” Rodney says, distracted by the tablet he’s spliced into the ship’s crippled electrical system. “It’s not exactly--oh.” He looks up, white with comprehension. “She doesn’t know because he’s been bashed unconscious, a fact for which we’re grateful--”
Teyla flushes. “It was only a stunner blast, Rodney!”
He looks down, face set into deep unhappy lines. Ronon takes another swipe at her dirty face, and she knocks his hand aside, showing teeth. He stuffs the cloth back into a pocket, giving her a long unhappy look.
“Got a better plan?” he asks.
“Yes,” Teyla says. “I do.”
**
In another age, the room had been an observation deck. An inside-out amphitheater, the edges sloping towards windows buried in millennia of dirt. Unpleasantly-shaped chemical sacks brought from their ship light the room with a diffuse green glow.
At the crest of the steps, the queen stands, a pale subterranean ruler, her hair a river of inhuman scarlet down her back.
Her vassal drones stand around her, breathing deeply of her scent, caught in the net of her thoughts. They have no need to speak with the gifts of a mental wizard so close at hand. The two males who attend her are more restless, strolling up and down the broken, mud-logged steps. Encounters with the crystalline mineral growths that thrived in the dank interior have left streaks of white on their dark leather.
One of the males crouches over a still figure discarded carelessly beneath an encrusted console, not so pale as the others, human. The Wraith takes the human’s watch from around its wrist and plays with it awkwardly, claws not dainty enough to handle the small buttons.
The ship is silent but for their footsteps and the occasional beep from the human’s stolen watch. Into this silence comes the sudden sound of running steps squelching through the accumulated mire. The male leaps to his feet, discarding the curious gadget. The queen turns her head slowly, unthreatened.
A human rounds the corner, darker than the space-dwelling Wraith and--unusually for a creature who had reached adulthood in natural gravity--taller. The figure plants both feet solidly, slipping only a little, and raises a pistol that gleams red. Her vassals are already leaping towards him, and he fires--a red scar across the air directly at her head.
The queen ducks the charge easily, teeth bared in irritation.
The human shows his teeth back at her. The drones reach him, but he turns and flees, keeping ahead of them easily. Half of her drones follow him. The queen follows them in her thoughts.
The earthy stench of the underground is unpleasant to the drones, though they like the dark. As he flees, the human trails a spicy fatty smell of feast, and the drones hurry after him, heavy-footed. They find around the corner something they had not expected.
Another scent has risen around them, calming and oversweet; at the end of a dark hall, rising with the tilt of the Ancient wreck, they see the other queen.
She stands as tall as theirs, skin and dress the frigid white of starlight, hair the inky black of space. With a lifted hand dangling spider-webbing strands of cloth, she halts them. A drone stands at her side, bent, clutching a standard data array that looks out of place disconnected from its ship.
“--it’s just that historically, this has not gone well,” the drone says, claws jittering.
“Hush, Rodney,” the queen says.
She drops her hand. The drones bow in willing devotion. From the observation deck, the scarlet queen screams in fury.
**
“That was the most unnerving sound I’ve ever heard,” Rodney says.
Teyla shifts on the overturned container they found to boost her up to a proper regal height. The Wraith-lights scattered about turn the mud that covers them both a sickly, toxic green. A strand of the fungus draped across her shoulders rolls down to the crook of her elbow, and she picks at it distastefully. They hardly resemble a gown.
And yet, even with so simple a template, the minds of the drones are easy to twist, barely a flick of a the wrist. Three years ago, she would never have imagined it.
“Don’t fall off the bucket.” Rodney’s eyes steal again to the kneeling drones with their fearsome faceplates, white showing all around his eyes. “They’d probably notice that.”
“Where is Ronon?”
Rodney checks the life signs detector. “Almost circled around. Oh, here comes--”
“The Queen.” She says it with him. Her shoulder lifts, her spine straightens, dried mud flaking as the mental thread that ties her to the drones shudders as in a strong wind.
They come around the corner in formation, the two males flanking their otherworldly regent. The queen's face contorts. Her sharp teeth glint blue in the Wraith light. Teyla thinks: these are the archetypes of my people's fear. Odder still: for an enemy older than historical memory, Teyla has only been fighting Wraith face to face for a few short years. For the universe's most successful human predators, they are oddly intangible.
The bucket, which had boosted her illusion, now seems moronic, amateur--it impedes her movement, cripples her stance. She steps down; kicks it away, ignoring the rock in her stomach.
For so long, the world of three dimensions had been all she knew. Now her mind has opened up; in a fourth dimension--a mindscape of only two inhabitants--Teyla sees the queen's approach as wilder, larger, and sharp-edged. A final thought: only since she met John Sheppard has Teyla fought the Wraith mind to mind, and in that time, she has yet to defy a queen directly and win.
Rodney has drawn a box in the mud a few dozen yards in front of the queen's approach. The line is subtle, soon to sink back into the mire, but Teyla remembers its location. With each step the Queen takes towards it, Teyla's muscles coil tighter and her hope rises.
The Wraith come fully into the light, and she sees why the second male lags half a step behind. The claws of the his feeding arm are fisted in the battered front of John's tactical vest, dragging him along behind. Teyla's stomach turns over. Rodney lets out a shout of protest. Ronon's attempts to circle behind seem hopeless now. The Wraith jerks the colonel up, slams his body against the wall, where John's head lolls bonelessly to the side, still unconscious. The Wraith's hand is clenched, not spread and hungry, but the threat is implicit.
Rodney's carefully drawn box waits only 5 yards ahead--much much too far. The illusion that Teyla has drawn over herself, as brittle as onion skin, is suddenly irrelevant. The game is no longer one of intellectual strategy and clever double-blinds. Luckily, Teyla has always had an affinity for the physical.
She throws out her hands, and like the tides, the drones rise, massive hulks encased in steely armor. They turn to face their former queen.
"Oh, please," the queen says, over-enunciating past her long fangs, when the first drone leaps at her. It will not attack her directly; Teyla can barely wrestle the creature in the right direction. As a bluff, it will have to do.
As the reluctant drone moves forward, Teyla snatches the long stunner off the second drone. She fires, blue light splashing across the queen's chest. She can hear Rodney's little triumphant shout. She herself hesitates, poised on bent knees, distrustful of such success. Pegasus has drilled it into her since she was a girl: no one escapes the Wraith. To come out of such a confrontation whole and without grief, is too much of miracle for Teyla to hope for, even for John Sheppard.
The queen only laughs as the stunner hits her; her hand is on the chest of the drone that Teyla sent to distract her. Teyla sees her miscalculation. The drone screams, a low warbling sound, as its queen takes its life in her hand, revitalized, flushed almost to a human pinkness. The stunner dissipates like water.
The queen grabs the drones empty sheath with both hands. Muscles bunch under her strange gown, and she flings the body of the drone at Teyla's head, still bulky with all its armor. Teyla gives a twist of her mental wrist and her second drone moves in, smashing the body of its comrade out of the air.
Teyla and the queen watch each other, breathes coming rapidly, sharp-eyed predators. There is no more pretense of negotiation.
No matter how she tugs and twists the threads that hold it, Teyla's drone shudders and rebels at the order to attack its former queen, even for the sake of its new monarch.
"Kill him," the queen says, and behind her, the Wraith's hand starts to close around John's throat.
"No!" Teyla shouts. The drone, so reluctant a moment ago, finds this target more appealing. It bows its head and charges, mind full of Teyla's desperation. For a second, the male holding Sheppard snarls and almost seems ready to drop his burden, but no--the second male is there, raising his hand, the gash across the palm gaping dangerously. This time Teyla is better prepared. She hefts the stunner. Power sizzles along its length, raising the hair along her arms, and the male Wraith shudders, dropping.
"Teyla!" Rodney shouts. Shots fire. He has retreated to a depression in the wall, tablet forgotten at his feet, awaiting his command to activate the box he's drawn in the mud. He clutches his 9 mm, staring straight ahead. The queen is striding forward, small dark wounds from Rodney's pistol closing up across her chest and shoulders. In her hands, she holds one of the long stunners, reversed so that it's bladed end is front-most. She strides towards Teyla, almost appearing to smile.
Behind her, the drone engages with John's captor. The battle plays in the edges of Teyla's mind, a distraction but a vital one. The queen is in front of her, raising the bayonet for a killing blow, and Teyla's head is stupidly full of John's too pale face, bruised neck, slumped in the mud. Barely, Teyla has time to jerk her own stunner sideways and deflect the queen's jab. The blow jars Teyla down to her bones. The queen is human-shaped, but newly fed, she is far more than human-powered.
Rodney tracks them with his sidearm, hands shaking. He knows he is not good enough to take the shot; even worse, that Teyla has stupidly handed the queen a meal, and the shot will do no good. She is close enough, she might even feed on Teyla to regain her strength. Teyla throws herself into the battle, into all her remembered lessons and mastery of stick-fencing. She has always been strong for her size, strong for her species. Still, Teyla gives ground.
A shout--the male has been successful. Teyla's drone falls, a stunner blade through the throat. The death is painful, but her attention is suddenly free--the world seems in sharper focus, the wraith lights a brighter blue. More than that, behind the queen, the male is jerking John limply to his feet, and Teyla's world narrows suddenly, sharply overexposed. The queen backhands her across the face. Teyla falls to her knees, blood trailing down her cheek from the queen's blunt claws.
The queen crows in triumph. A moment of clarity: Teyla looks up and sees the lines cutting through the mud. They had gotten turned around. Teyla is on her knees in Rodney's box.
The male Wraith draws back his hand; he is tried of these human methods of murder. He will feed. Teyla shouts, a wordless scream of will. For a moment, the air clears; the queen's malice falls back. With a final effort, Teyla reaches out, snips through the connection between the male and his queen like a simple pair of scissors.
Above her, the queen is bringing the stunner down for the final blow. She starts in surprise when the male tackles her, limbs moving sluggishly, confused. Teyla scrambles to all fours, feet finding no purchase in the mud, and flings herself past the lines of Rodney's box, towards Sheppard, once again a boneless lump against the wall.
The queen is freeing herself from the male easily, but it is already too late. Rodney, no slow fool, has already activated the trap door hidden under so many years of neglect and decay. There is a screech of metal, and then the queen and the male simply drop away in a rain of dirt. They hit the pool below with a splash and the door closes up after them. Mud has fallen away, and Teyla can clearly see the soothing lights running around and back on the door's Ancient interface.
Footsteps, Ronon has returned. He looks at Teyla, blood on her face, collapsed in an awkward bundle next to John's form, and perhaps sees something in her face, because he only steps past her, putting a blast of his energy pistol into the head of each of the Wraith bodies that did not fall through the trap door.
"I got the rest of them," he says, matter of fact.
Teyla cannot bring herself to move. Her heart beats too fast, her face has finally begun to sting, and she thinks that the queen may have broken bones in her hand. Against her bare arm, John Sheppard's body is slimy, wet, and--breathing. Rodney splashes desperately towards her, skidding to a stop above her at Ronon's side.
"He--is he--did we--"
"He's okay," Ronon says gruffly. He looks at Teyla but doesn't turn towards her, like some kind of odd offer of privacy. "He'd better be. Just a stunner."
Teyla looks up at both of them, and suddenly her paralysis lifts. She breaks into a smile, turning to John. She's bent down, holding his face up above the muck, his cheek cradled in the crook of her arm and her team crowded around her, when John's eyes finally--finally, oh, Ancestors, thank you--flutter with wakefulness.
John looks at her and past her, where Ronon's aloofness has caved and he cannot help but bend down to peer over shoulder. Rodney wrings his hands.
“Hey, Teyla,” John says groggily, “what’s the fuss?” and as his nose wrinkles, splitting the mud dried to his face: “You kind of stink.”
"Oh my god, you enormous freak," Rodney says.
Teyla, for her part, bends down helplessly, body curving around John's as he raises a hand to her shoulder in confusion. Joyfully, she presses her cheek to his dirty forehead--not quite her people's traditional greeting--and revels in the heat of his skin.
He kind of stinks a little bit too. She laughs in delight.
Spoilers: None.
Characters: Teyla, John, Rodney, Ronon
Notes: a gift for ileliberte's birthday, beta'd by ileliberte, because yes, I am that lame. Started long ago on the chocolate and peanut butter principle, in this case the Teyla and Wraith Queens principle.
Summary:
“We are--” Teyla forces as much sincerity into her words as possible. The metal edge of the chute bites into her thigh; her feet hang free in space. “--alone. We came alone!”
“You are lying,” the queen says, her brow furrowed, as much astonished as irritated. The long claw of her thumb presses against the underbelly of Teyla’s jaw.
The P90 spirals down the chute behind her, banging and clanking the whole way. Hulking silhouettes of drones surround them, lit by the rows of dimly glowing lights that run along their bayoneted stunners. The open grate warps under the queen’s hand, the metal keening at the edge of human hearing.
The queen smiles, baring jagged, nightmare teeth in inky black gums. The breath from her vestigial mouth smells oddly pleasant. Her irritation hits Teyla like an axe between the eyes.
Another drone approaches, dragging a body squelching across the scum-covered floor. Teyla’s eyes close in relief to hear the heavy, undrained sound of it. An open-faced box is placed into the queen’s hand, glowing softly from within--circuits of Ancient crystal, smeared with the blood of their descendant. The queen lifts the box until the light touches her pallid face. A small storm begins to churn inside Teyla’s skull.
“You have the ability to raise this battleship from the muck.”
“No. That is--”
“You will bring us the rest of the interfaces.”
The queen opens her hand and shoves. Teyla follows her P90, banging and clanking down the chute.
The only thing that really matters--as she wraps her arms around her head to meet the first curve in the chute, thump thump THUMP--is the thought Teyla has plucked whole from the queen’s mind that to her, John is an item of barter; he will live until Teyla returns.
**
The chute expels her into a muddy underground stream. She tumbles out, bruised and vividly aware of every item tucked away in her pockets, having smashed against each of them again and again on her way down. The queen took nothing from her except for John; she wants Teyla to have the tools to continue her work.
Teyla grabs the dim edge of the chute’s opening, coughing. She sees a small light blinking somewhere far away in the dark, and something in her chest unwinds to see it; she thought it would be harder to find.
Her flashlight shows the ceiling curving over her, unusually regular and furry with encrusted salts and hanging strings of mold feeding on the seepage of the Mapayan jungle above them. A shoulder-high stain hints at the passage’s high water mark. Pale clusters of globular mushrooms sprout here and there in the mass of green and brown. Underneath the fuzzy infestations, she sees a repetition of careful geometric patterns, the occasional gleam of steel in the path of her flashlight beam.
She is in the belly of an Ancient warship.
The ship has begun a feeble resurrection, its sleepy eye blinking at her in the dark. Scraping away the gunk of millennia, Teyla finds a recognizable data port, light flashing: ready for use.
Her plan is this: she carries John’s Ancient scanner, casually handed over while he’d worked Rodney’s pieced-together interface into place near the corridor ceiling. The scanner, once pried open, can be connected easily to the corroded data port with several of the translucent cables Rodney uses to bridge Ancient circuits. She snaps them into place, trembling and cold in the underground chill.
Slowly, the dark screen begins to shine blue under her hands. It has connected to an ATA gene through the complex neurological weave of the battleship’s awakening A.I. The screen begins to flicker between functions as this other ATA gene-holder notices the blip in his system.
Teyla crouches in the mud and waits for Rodney to find her.
**
“There’s the obvious solution, of course, though it will--add another of course here--be unbelievably dangerous. The disadvantages being outweighed by its simplicity and presumed effectiveness.” Rodney pauses. “So it only appears to be imbecilic, while in fact being--well.”
Here, his expression contorts, the corners of his mouth making a bid for higher altitudes, but the area around his eyes eludes his control, remaining weakly uncertain. Yanking desperately at scum-coated gear, he adds, “A fitting tribute to our rescuee, you might say.”
A metallic fountain of old pipes heavy with fungal growth spring out from the center of the little room where Rodney sits, his body wrapped head to toe in protective plastic. On top, a transparent rain slicker, hood pulled up; at bottom, rain pants fashioned out of black bags and duct-tape. Latex gloves from the first aid kit cover his hands. He flinches squeamishly each time water drips from the ceiling or the pipes.
The drips never reach Teyla because Ronon is using his share of the room’s limited space to loom over her with as much bulk as possible. Currently, he’s irritating her by trying to wipe the mud from the scrapes on her face. Both men are filthy, but from the way Ronon fusses and Rodney stares, she must resemble some kind of pygmy swamp monster--an amorphous mud cake trailing tentacles of fungus fronds.
At least Rodney is speaking clearly. It’s the first coherent thing he’s said since, “What do you mean Wraith?” and “Wait, where’s Sheppard?”
“We’ve been pumping the water out,” Ronon says, free hand curled loosely around a hanging pipe. He has to raise his voice over the sound of the pump machinery. “We can pump it back in.”
Rodney cocks a finger at him, palm up. “As he said.”
“We have one more advantage,” Teyla says. “The queen believes John and I were working alone.”
“Doesn’t even the odds much,” Ronon says.
“It’s irrelevant anyway. We just have to lure the queen below the water line, and--presto! Abra-cadaver!” Rodney looked at her apologetically. “You’re, uh, necessarily bait.”
Teyla shakes her head. “She has John. With that leverage, she does not believe she needs to supervise me. We could perhaps convince her my behavior was irregular, but if, in that time, she discovers that John can use the technology on this ship...”
“She doesn’t already know?” Rodney says, distracted by the tablet he’s spliced into the ship’s crippled electrical system. “It’s not exactly--oh.” He looks up, white with comprehension. “She doesn’t know because he’s been bashed unconscious, a fact for which we’re grateful--”
Teyla flushes. “It was only a stunner blast, Rodney!”
He looks down, face set into deep unhappy lines. Ronon takes another swipe at her dirty face, and she knocks his hand aside, showing teeth. He stuffs the cloth back into a pocket, giving her a long unhappy look.
“Got a better plan?” he asks.
“Yes,” Teyla says. “I do.”
**
In another age, the room had been an observation deck. An inside-out amphitheater, the edges sloping towards windows buried in millennia of dirt. Unpleasantly-shaped chemical sacks brought from their ship light the room with a diffuse green glow.
At the crest of the steps, the queen stands, a pale subterranean ruler, her hair a river of inhuman scarlet down her back.
Her vassal drones stand around her, breathing deeply of her scent, caught in the net of her thoughts. They have no need to speak with the gifts of a mental wizard so close at hand. The two males who attend her are more restless, strolling up and down the broken, mud-logged steps. Encounters with the crystalline mineral growths that thrived in the dank interior have left streaks of white on their dark leather.
One of the males crouches over a still figure discarded carelessly beneath an encrusted console, not so pale as the others, human. The Wraith takes the human’s watch from around its wrist and plays with it awkwardly, claws not dainty enough to handle the small buttons.
The ship is silent but for their footsteps and the occasional beep from the human’s stolen watch. Into this silence comes the sudden sound of running steps squelching through the accumulated mire. The male leaps to his feet, discarding the curious gadget. The queen turns her head slowly, unthreatened.
A human rounds the corner, darker than the space-dwelling Wraith and--unusually for a creature who had reached adulthood in natural gravity--taller. The figure plants both feet solidly, slipping only a little, and raises a pistol that gleams red. Her vassals are already leaping towards him, and he fires--a red scar across the air directly at her head.
The queen ducks the charge easily, teeth bared in irritation.
The human shows his teeth back at her. The drones reach him, but he turns and flees, keeping ahead of them easily. Half of her drones follow him. The queen follows them in her thoughts.
The earthy stench of the underground is unpleasant to the drones, though they like the dark. As he flees, the human trails a spicy fatty smell of feast, and the drones hurry after him, heavy-footed. They find around the corner something they had not expected.
Another scent has risen around them, calming and oversweet; at the end of a dark hall, rising with the tilt of the Ancient wreck, they see the other queen.
She stands as tall as theirs, skin and dress the frigid white of starlight, hair the inky black of space. With a lifted hand dangling spider-webbing strands of cloth, she halts them. A drone stands at her side, bent, clutching a standard data array that looks out of place disconnected from its ship.
“--it’s just that historically, this has not gone well,” the drone says, claws jittering.
“Hush, Rodney,” the queen says.
She drops her hand. The drones bow in willing devotion. From the observation deck, the scarlet queen screams in fury.
**
“That was the most unnerving sound I’ve ever heard,” Rodney says.
Teyla shifts on the overturned container they found to boost her up to a proper regal height. The Wraith-lights scattered about turn the mud that covers them both a sickly, toxic green. A strand of the fungus draped across her shoulders rolls down to the crook of her elbow, and she picks at it distastefully. They hardly resemble a gown.
And yet, even with so simple a template, the minds of the drones are easy to twist, barely a flick of a the wrist. Three years ago, she would never have imagined it.
“Don’t fall off the bucket.” Rodney’s eyes steal again to the kneeling drones with their fearsome faceplates, white showing all around his eyes. “They’d probably notice that.”
“Where is Ronon?”
Rodney checks the life signs detector. “Almost circled around. Oh, here comes--”
“The Queen.” She says it with him. Her shoulder lifts, her spine straightens, dried mud flaking as the mental thread that ties her to the drones shudders as in a strong wind.
They come around the corner in formation, the two males flanking their otherworldly regent. The queen's face contorts. Her sharp teeth glint blue in the Wraith light. Teyla thinks: these are the archetypes of my people's fear. Odder still: for an enemy older than historical memory, Teyla has only been fighting Wraith face to face for a few short years. For the universe's most successful human predators, they are oddly intangible.
The bucket, which had boosted her illusion, now seems moronic, amateur--it impedes her movement, cripples her stance. She steps down; kicks it away, ignoring the rock in her stomach.
For so long, the world of three dimensions had been all she knew. Now her mind has opened up; in a fourth dimension--a mindscape of only two inhabitants--Teyla sees the queen's approach as wilder, larger, and sharp-edged. A final thought: only since she met John Sheppard has Teyla fought the Wraith mind to mind, and in that time, she has yet to defy a queen directly and win.
Rodney has drawn a box in the mud a few dozen yards in front of the queen's approach. The line is subtle, soon to sink back into the mire, but Teyla remembers its location. With each step the Queen takes towards it, Teyla's muscles coil tighter and her hope rises.
The Wraith come fully into the light, and she sees why the second male lags half a step behind. The claws of the his feeding arm are fisted in the battered front of John's tactical vest, dragging him along behind. Teyla's stomach turns over. Rodney lets out a shout of protest. Ronon's attempts to circle behind seem hopeless now. The Wraith jerks the colonel up, slams his body against the wall, where John's head lolls bonelessly to the side, still unconscious. The Wraith's hand is clenched, not spread and hungry, but the threat is implicit.
Rodney's carefully drawn box waits only 5 yards ahead--much much too far. The illusion that Teyla has drawn over herself, as brittle as onion skin, is suddenly irrelevant. The game is no longer one of intellectual strategy and clever double-blinds. Luckily, Teyla has always had an affinity for the physical.
She throws out her hands, and like the tides, the drones rise, massive hulks encased in steely armor. They turn to face their former queen.
"Oh, please," the queen says, over-enunciating past her long fangs, when the first drone leaps at her. It will not attack her directly; Teyla can barely wrestle the creature in the right direction. As a bluff, it will have to do.
As the reluctant drone moves forward, Teyla snatches the long stunner off the second drone. She fires, blue light splashing across the queen's chest. She can hear Rodney's little triumphant shout. She herself hesitates, poised on bent knees, distrustful of such success. Pegasus has drilled it into her since she was a girl: no one escapes the Wraith. To come out of such a confrontation whole and without grief, is too much of miracle for Teyla to hope for, even for John Sheppard.
The queen only laughs as the stunner hits her; her hand is on the chest of the drone that Teyla sent to distract her. Teyla sees her miscalculation. The drone screams, a low warbling sound, as its queen takes its life in her hand, revitalized, flushed almost to a human pinkness. The stunner dissipates like water.
The queen grabs the drones empty sheath with both hands. Muscles bunch under her strange gown, and she flings the body of the drone at Teyla's head, still bulky with all its armor. Teyla gives a twist of her mental wrist and her second drone moves in, smashing the body of its comrade out of the air.
Teyla and the queen watch each other, breathes coming rapidly, sharp-eyed predators. There is no more pretense of negotiation.
No matter how she tugs and twists the threads that hold it, Teyla's drone shudders and rebels at the order to attack its former queen, even for the sake of its new monarch.
"Kill him," the queen says, and behind her, the Wraith's hand starts to close around John's throat.
"No!" Teyla shouts. The drone, so reluctant a moment ago, finds this target more appealing. It bows its head and charges, mind full of Teyla's desperation. For a second, the male holding Sheppard snarls and almost seems ready to drop his burden, but no--the second male is there, raising his hand, the gash across the palm gaping dangerously. This time Teyla is better prepared. She hefts the stunner. Power sizzles along its length, raising the hair along her arms, and the male Wraith shudders, dropping.
"Teyla!" Rodney shouts. Shots fire. He has retreated to a depression in the wall, tablet forgotten at his feet, awaiting his command to activate the box he's drawn in the mud. He clutches his 9 mm, staring straight ahead. The queen is striding forward, small dark wounds from Rodney's pistol closing up across her chest and shoulders. In her hands, she holds one of the long stunners, reversed so that it's bladed end is front-most. She strides towards Teyla, almost appearing to smile.
Behind her, the drone engages with John's captor. The battle plays in the edges of Teyla's mind, a distraction but a vital one. The queen is in front of her, raising the bayonet for a killing blow, and Teyla's head is stupidly full of John's too pale face, bruised neck, slumped in the mud. Barely, Teyla has time to jerk her own stunner sideways and deflect the queen's jab. The blow jars Teyla down to her bones. The queen is human-shaped, but newly fed, she is far more than human-powered.
Rodney tracks them with his sidearm, hands shaking. He knows he is not good enough to take the shot; even worse, that Teyla has stupidly handed the queen a meal, and the shot will do no good. She is close enough, she might even feed on Teyla to regain her strength. Teyla throws herself into the battle, into all her remembered lessons and mastery of stick-fencing. She has always been strong for her size, strong for her species. Still, Teyla gives ground.
A shout--the male has been successful. Teyla's drone falls, a stunner blade through the throat. The death is painful, but her attention is suddenly free--the world seems in sharper focus, the wraith lights a brighter blue. More than that, behind the queen, the male is jerking John limply to his feet, and Teyla's world narrows suddenly, sharply overexposed. The queen backhands her across the face. Teyla falls to her knees, blood trailing down her cheek from the queen's blunt claws.
The queen crows in triumph. A moment of clarity: Teyla looks up and sees the lines cutting through the mud. They had gotten turned around. Teyla is on her knees in Rodney's box.
The male Wraith draws back his hand; he is tried of these human methods of murder. He will feed. Teyla shouts, a wordless scream of will. For a moment, the air clears; the queen's malice falls back. With a final effort, Teyla reaches out, snips through the connection between the male and his queen like a simple pair of scissors.
Above her, the queen is bringing the stunner down for the final blow. She starts in surprise when the male tackles her, limbs moving sluggishly, confused. Teyla scrambles to all fours, feet finding no purchase in the mud, and flings herself past the lines of Rodney's box, towards Sheppard, once again a boneless lump against the wall.
The queen is freeing herself from the male easily, but it is already too late. Rodney, no slow fool, has already activated the trap door hidden under so many years of neglect and decay. There is a screech of metal, and then the queen and the male simply drop away in a rain of dirt. They hit the pool below with a splash and the door closes up after them. Mud has fallen away, and Teyla can clearly see the soothing lights running around and back on the door's Ancient interface.
Footsteps, Ronon has returned. He looks at Teyla, blood on her face, collapsed in an awkward bundle next to John's form, and perhaps sees something in her face, because he only steps past her, putting a blast of his energy pistol into the head of each of the Wraith bodies that did not fall through the trap door.
"I got the rest of them," he says, matter of fact.
Teyla cannot bring herself to move. Her heart beats too fast, her face has finally begun to sting, and she thinks that the queen may have broken bones in her hand. Against her bare arm, John Sheppard's body is slimy, wet, and--breathing. Rodney splashes desperately towards her, skidding to a stop above her at Ronon's side.
"He--is he--did we--"
"He's okay," Ronon says gruffly. He looks at Teyla but doesn't turn towards her, like some kind of odd offer of privacy. "He'd better be. Just a stunner."
Teyla looks up at both of them, and suddenly her paralysis lifts. She breaks into a smile, turning to John. She's bent down, holding his face up above the muck, his cheek cradled in the crook of her arm and her team crowded around her, when John's eyes finally--finally, oh, Ancestors, thank you--flutter with wakefulness.
John looks at her and past her, where Ronon's aloofness has caved and he cannot help but bend down to peer over shoulder. Rodney wrings his hands.
“Hey, Teyla,” John says groggily, “what’s the fuss?” and as his nose wrinkles, splitting the mud dried to his face: “You kind of stink.”
"Oh my god, you enormous freak," Rodney says.
Teyla, for her part, bends down helplessly, body curving around John's as he raises a hand to her shoulder in confusion. Joyfully, she presses her cheek to his dirty forehead--not quite her people's traditional greeting--and revels in the heat of his skin.
He kind of stinks a little bit too. She laughs in delight.