The moment Trebal and I rounded the corner of the corridor into the deep-sea suit compartment, everything fell into place.
"Damn it!" I shouted bitterly, seeing four withered bodies. But my vigilance remained. As did the understanding that there was no one and nothing left to search for here. "She killed them!"
Trebal, despite both of us being protected by personal shields, moved cautiously, watching for danger around every corner.
"Enough with the 'Splinter Cell' act," I waved my hand, pointing at the wet footprints on the deck leading out of the compartment. "She drained those guys and left. The detector can't see her," I pointed at the Ancient scanner monitor, running in life-sign search mode. Aside from the two of us, there was no one else here. But worse still, we hadn't detected the Queen's movement as we approached.
The blasted thing was moving very, very fast. And from here, deeper into the station, there were at least five long corridors. And the blocking fields were activated on the side far from us. The wretched creature could have slipped into any of them and vanished.
The Dorandan woman looked at the tracks I'd pointed out and relaxed a little, acknowledging I was right. But she didn't take her eyes off the bodies, leaning over them as if searching for something.
"Teyla," I activated the radio. "Which other sectors have their blocking fields deactivated?"
"Corridors three and five," she said. "You came through three, and in five, Thoran's and Tirin's groups were on duty..."
Eight more people... Just wonderful! Out of the fifteen Athosians we brought to the platform, twelve decided to show some backbone and go hunt the queen, as I understand it! Four are already dead, another eight are in a zone where the fields between them and the queen are down!
Bitch!
And they opened corridor five too!
Corridor five, the main one, damn it! At the spot where they disabled the blocking field, there's a fork leading to other sections. And that's exactly where Tirin's group was stationed!
Bastards, damn them!
And I have every right to be furious!
The plan to neutralize the Queen of Death was simple to the point of absurdity.
First, we arrived at the drilling platform, studied it, started it up, and prepared the battlefield. In the events I knew, she came through the open lower hatch, but she used Teyla to disable the tracking systems. To prevent that, Teyla hadn't established mental contact with the source of her feelings of a Wraith's presence.
She stayed in the zone that suppressed Wraith abilities, guarded by three Athosians and accompanied by a couple of Ancient technicians in the central control room. Only for a few moments, while the queen woke up, did Teyla disable the device and give Death a lure in the form of her own mentality. Immediately after that, the Suppressor was turned back on, and the Queen of Death could no longer reach her — at least not from a distance.
She also couldn't activate any technology aboard her own starship — not only had we blown up the generator, we'd also set up an electromagnetic field on the ship, placing a generator in the middle of the cruiser's upper section. So that it was entirely within the EMP zone.
Which meant no canonical tricks with triggering the self-destruct system upon leaving the cruiser — the Queen of Death couldn't have pulled that off. She simply had no way to turn on anything aboard the downed starship.
But it looked like the problems stemmed from the hit to the ship's generator. So she understood that both a ship and a means of escape were nearby. Here, on the Ancient drilling platform.
She just had to reach us, go through the hospitably open hatch, get outside, and... fall into the trap in that part of the station where the protective fields were already active, and that same ill-fated hatch was sealed tight! She had nowhere to run!
Meanwhile, Trebal and I, equipped with personal Ancient shields, armed with energy weapons, and standing in the zone suppressing the Queen's mental abilities, could easily track her by the single life-sign marker in the cordoned-off section. At the very least, she wouldn't be able to take control of us both at once.
One of us would have shot her! Fast, precise, elegant, and without any casualties on our side!
But everything went sideways.
We tracked the queen's arrival at the station using external sensors. She swam in a few minutes after us, surprising me quite a bit with her speed of movement through water on the ocean floor, especially under such colossal pressure.
But while we were running here — having sent Ihaar to the control room — the force fields were already down. And only the Athosians could have done that!
And if you think about it, these fifteen people are the ones Teyla called her best warriors. Alvar trained them in the first batch of new Athosian soldiers!
Oh, things are not right on New Athos.
But what the hell? Why now of all times?
"Have they made contact?" I asked. Hope was still strong.
"No, Misha, their radios are off... I don't understand what's happening," Teyla's voice carried confusion. "A dozen of my people have stopped obeying me. I don't understand... Maybe the Queen took control of them?"
"At least one of these, for sure," Trebal drew my attention to the bullet wounds on three dead Athosians. "The fourth one's uniform is intact. So he shot the others."
"Possibly," I exhaled irritably, waving toward corridor five. "Let's go. Teyla, can you see them on the scanners?"
"We see them," Ihaar answered instead of her. "Tirin's group is moving in your direction... What's this? One of the signals is overlapping... It's gone..."
Gunfire echoed from the corridor.
"Tirin's group has run into a Wraith!" Ihaar shouted. "They've lost two, three..."
"Lock down the control room!" I ordered. "No one gets in or out, under any circumstances!"
"Mikhail!" Teyla's voice broke in. "I need to go! My people are out there and—"
"They're not your people anymore!" I barked. "At best, they're under the Queen of Death's control!"
Even though I don't believe it, the objective facts will only be clear after we finish this. In my own head, I can spin any theory and curse anyone I want. But the facts speak for themselves.
The fields weren't turned off for no reason.
The Athosians had already opened the panels and pulled out the crystals. They never intended to follow the plan from the start.
As a result, the plan to trap the Queen of Death and then destroy her in the sections cordoned off by force fields went straight to hell! In two corridors, part of the defenses are breached. The queen now has access to dozens of sections and rooms she was never supposed to reach! This is no longer an operation — corner her and fire a couple of shots. This is a damn full-scale cleanup! Especially since, in corridor five, the queen can get to...
More shots rang out.
And almost immediately, the relatively bright lighting in the corridors switched to emergency mode.
"Ihaar?" I called the control room, already guessing what had happened. "What's going on?"
"Exactly what shouldn't have happened if the Athosians hadn't turned off the fields!" the engineer's voice barked from the radio. "The queen knows where the power and control cables are! And she damaged them! We've lost access to the life-sign tracking system, the auxiliary power system we've been running on is damaged, so we have power problems. And either we shut down the internal shields across the entire mobile drilling platform, or in half an hour we'll start suffocating from lack of oxygen! We don't know who's where on the station, we can't raise the fields, we can't call for help... We're about to start suffocating here!"
"We won't," I countered. "The station is big, there's plenty of air. First we kill the queen, then you fix the station, and we wait for help."
"We can't contact Atlantis! I told you — the wiring is damaged!"
"We don't need to contact them," Trebal reminded him. "They have a time window. After that, a support team will arrive here. They've already started the countdown and are undoubtedly deploying. We just need to wait..."
"We don't have time to wait," I cut her off, stepping into a corridor that connected at a right angle to another. Four dried skeletons immediately caught my eye — all that was left of the second Athosian combat group. "Tirin's group is wiped out. Four bodies, all drained dry."
"And not one was shot," Trebal said. "Ihaar, Teyla — the Queen of Death can still take control of our people. She destroyed the first group by mentally taking over one of the squad members."
"And now she's playing with us," I concluded. "Wrecking the station to force us out of the control room to make repairs. Ihaar!"
"I remember. We're not leaving here!"
"Good," I approved, crouching down and shining a light on the floor beneath my feet. "There are water droplets here. I suspect they've almost dried or been wiped away."
"Which means soon there won't be any tracks at all," Trebal realized, obediently moving in behind me. "I'll cover you from behind."
"Deal. If you see her, shoot to kill."
"Understood." And so we moved forward. "Misha..."
"Yes?"
"I want to apologize. I thought you'd decide to capture her for interrogation or feed her to Koschei..."
"Koschei would never feed on his own queen," I cut her off. "But if they were near each other, and Death is clearly stronger than him mentally — since even under the Suppressor, it couldn't block all her abilities — then keeping her alive is extremely stupid."
"Glad we share the same motives in this situation. Let's find her and kill her."
"I'm all for it, with every limb. Then we'll find and finish off the bastards who caused all this," I promised. "Unless, of course, the Queen of Death kills them first."
"Then that would solve so many pressing problems," I lamented, shining a light into another room on our path. Empty. The handheld scanner showed nothing either — just our two dots...
The Queen of Death was far ahead of us.
And that was bad.
* * *
"This... wasn't... supposed... to happen like this," rasped the old man lying on the floor, who just seconds ago had been a young human animal. Pathetic, cowardly, arrogant. It didn't help him — the Queen of Death had easily broken his spine and drained almost all his life. "You... were supposed to die..."
"Many have thought so," Death assured him, running the back of her hand across the man's face. "None have succeeded. What made you unworthy animals think you had a chance? Thousands of Lantians and Ancients tried to kill me. I killed or fed on every one of them."
"I... had a vision..." the old man rasped. "The Ancestors... came to me in a dream... Told me how it would happen... Told me how to win..."
The Queen of Death bared her teeth, revealing fangs as sharp as dozens of daggers.
"Neither your Ancestors, nor anyone else's, can defeat me," she assured him. "You've already understood that, since you told me everything I wanted to know."
"Mercy..." the old man rasped. "Please... You promised I wouldn't suffer... If I told you..."
"That's right," the Queen of Death's eyes glinted ominously against the backdrop of blue shadows as she placed her right hand back on the wound on the man's chest. "I did promise... But I lied!"
Life left him in a second. He didn't even have the strength to scream from the pain or fear.
When the last of the twelve weak minds ceased to exist, granting her their strength and energy, the Queen of Death sensed two powerful minds on the edge of her perception.
They were following her trail, pursuing her, wanting to kill her. She had no doubt about that.
Nor that she had miscalculated about at least one of them. It was a strong mind, clearly beyond anything she had encountered among the members of the lesser races. Probably a descendant of the Lantians.
He would be a problem. He might not succumb to her mental influence. Especially since it was weakened by some device — the Athosians she had drained told her about it before they died.
They also told her, clinging to the last remnants of their existence, that the device was in the control room. Along with three armed Athosians, their leader who could sense Wraiths, and three humans from Atlantis with the Ancient gene.
One engineer and two technicians.
An excellent selection for her.
Four Athosians and five bearers of the Ancient gene.
Of those five, four were members of a lesser race who had been in stasis aboard a Lantian military vessel. And they had been revived by a Wraith who had spent ten thousand years on the second planet of this star system, after his transport ship was shot down.
The picture was starting to come together.
She could easily kill eight of the nine people present on the mobile drilling platform. One engineer would be enough to get her out of here. According to the dead, he was a coward, afraid of her because he had seen her in action.
This was perfect, because she wouldn't need much effort to make him obey!
The Queen of Death's mood improved with every human she drained.
She already knew their plan, so she began to act.
Using a firearm, she damaged the power lines hidden in the wall behind a decorative panel. Now they were deaf and blind, barely able to activate the disabled shields. Even if they could restore the system, they now had serious power problems.
The main system — the geothermal generator — hadn't been tested or connected yet, so all their hope rested on the backup energy that had been here all this time.
Help would arrive for the humans soon, but it wouldn't be easy to get inside — both docking bays were occupied by small ships. So they could only come through the same hatch she had used.
And that wasn't simple to do — it required the right preparations. Or, she could use cunning to free at least one of the docking ports.
So she had time to hunt them down and kill them one by one.
Unfortunately, no one had left the control room when she disrupted the control and power systems. The seven people she sensed through the last energy shield separating them from her were now awash in conflicting emotions — from compassion to anger.
But they didn't come out, either to repair the damage or to hunt her.
Obviously, they had decided that those two would make excellent hunters and would get rid of her.
But she wouldn't have become the Queen of Death, the one who united all the Wraith hives, if she gave up so easily.
The short-sighted animals who thought they could defeat her had only played into her hands.
The Queen knew this platform perfectly. Her two pursuers were searching every nook and cranny, thinking she was hiding somewhere or had found a way into the ventilation shaft (she had planted that idea by tearing off decorative grilles in many sections, like the staff recreation room on the mobile drilling platform) and intended to bypass the still-active force fields.
While they followed her tracks — real and false — finding one corpse after another, wherever Death had caught up with the fleeing animals, the Queen was busy with a more pressing matter.
The recreation rooms aboard the Ancient mobile drilling platform.
From the animals, she already knew that these two — Mikhail and Trebal — carried Lantian firearms. And also their personal shields.
And that was a problem.
The animals had prepared well.
The Lantian pulse weapon could tear her apart with a single hit. The personal shield protected its wearer from any injury or impact — explosions, shots, punches, blades. It prevented anyone from grabbing the wearer or attacking them with any kind of energy or radiation.
But it didn't protect against mental influence. However, that was weakened by the device...
And it also didn't generate oxygen for breathing. Which was good, because that was an excellent opportunity. Right now, her priority was to deal with these two. Then, get rid of the rest.
Except for the engineer, of course. He would help her escape, and also share his secrets about Lantian technology. And if she succeeded, the Queen of Death might even take control of Atlantis.
But first, she had to finish things here, on the mobile drilling platform.
And she had already figured out how to do it. At the same time, she would make sure the support group rushing here couldn't board the mobile drilling rig too easily. By "easily," she meant before the Queen of Death had carried out all her plans.
Gathering from the losers' pockets the crystals they had previously removed from the force-field control panels, the Queen of Death swapped the empty weapon from the last corpse for a charged one, and grinned with satisfaction.
It was time to make her pursuers feel like they had caught her.
* * *
"She's moving through the air ducts!" I shouted as I ran.
"Are you sure?" Trebal asked. "She's tricked us like that ten times already!"
"Either that, or she's moving straight through that wall!" I pointed to the right side of the corridor. "And going in a straight line!"
We had no way to shoot the Queen through the wall — not only was it made of the infamous Concrete-811, but it also contained a huge amount of Lantian technology behind it. Lantian technology specifically — back during the initial study of the platform, Ihaar had categorically stated that he had no idea what we'd do if any of the devices we had turned out to be faulty. There were no spare parts, no specifications, and the mobile drilling platform's systems were as different from the geothermal generator he had dealt with as moccasins were from brogues.
Meaning, they apparently served the same purpose, but there were nuances... Ihaar, and Chaya too, only knew how to fix a certain part of the equipment. And since we planned to use this platform, putting unnecessary holes in it would be incredibly stupid.
"Why is she only showing herself now?" Trebal suddenly asked. "We lost her for almost fifteen minutes! Why did she suddenly decide to run in this direction? She won't be able to use our jumpers! Especially since they're separated from the corridors by shields!"
"No idea," I declared. "We'll catch her and ask! She's getting away!"
"How is she doing that?" Trebal ground out through her teeth. "There's no room to maneuver in there, and the air ducts slope downward — from the center of the platform to the outer sections..."
She fell silent, pointing at the streams of water flowing out of a ventilation grille we had just passed.
We seemed to realize it at the same time.
"There's water in the air duct!" Trebal stated the obvious. "The queen used it to reduce friction!"
"That bitch is sliding through them!" I shouted. "She's made herself a water slide, damn her!"
"Mikhail, Trebal, I don't know what you're doing," a voice crackled from the radio, "but we have a big problem!"
"Where's the leak?" I asked, rounding a corner at a run.
"How did you—?" Ihaar was taken aback. "Someone damaged the main assembly lubrication system. We're losing a very rare substance that provides absolute slip..."
"So it's not water in the ventilation," I told Trebal.
"I already got that," the Ancient woman rasped.
."..and we have no replacement for it!" Ihaar continued. "If we lose another ton, we can forget about this platform ever working again!"
"Can you shut off the substance supply from the control room?" I asked.
"If I could, I would have already done it!" the engineer said, his voice laced with frustration. "We need to go out to the middle zone, get to the technical niche, and patch the pipe. The sooner, the better!"
"Do it!" I ordered. "We're chasing the Queen toward the docking port — that's on the opposite side from you. Get out quickly, patch it up, and get back to the control room, understand?"
"It won't be quick! The damage is in the middle zone! Where there are no internal shields or sensors right now!"
"For crying out loud," I think I bit my cheek in anger. "Do what you have to do! Take the guards just in case!"
"I'll send Teyla to the backup control panel so she can shut off the lubricant supply from there. I can't do it from the control room because of the damaged power and control systems..."
"Do it!" I barked, realizing that a few more turns and we'd be there. "Hurry! We've almost caught her!"
In reality, the Queen of Death was still ahead of us. We had about a minute of running left, and she was already in one of the docking bays. And only a god Ascended knew what she was doing there, practically cornered with no way to escape!
"That bitch bypassed our force fields," Trebal grimaced, pointing at the pale white energy curtain separating us from the docking bay. "Ihaar, can you drop the shield on docking bay two?"
"One moment! I'm not in the control room anymore! The technicians... Just a second, I'm near the damaged main line, I'll restore shield control now... One moment," the engineer muttered into the radio.
Approaching the field, I saw a dark silhouette moving inside the cargo bay of the first jumper. From the characteristic movements, she was clearly breaking into the consoles. And that was bad — with the right skill, you could activate certain systems even without the Ancient gene.
In the events I knew, Koschei managed to switch the camouflage screen to a shield.
"Ihaar!"
"Done!" he replied. "Control room, drop the shield on docking port two!"
With a crackle and a flash of white light, the energy curtain before us faded. Trebal and I activated our shields on the move, raised our weapons, approached the jumper, and aimed at the ship's only exit.
Unlike the docking port on that satellite, this mechanism on the platform was more like a sealed ring. The rear part of the jumper would be inside the platform, while the front half would be outside, in the water. The division was roughly at the bulkhead between the pilot's cabin and the cargo bay.
An interesting mechanism, actually. All the external control systems would be outside the platform, while the weapons and engines would be inside. In their stowed configuration, of course.
"Take your hands off those crystals right now!" I ordered, stepping onto the ramp and taking aim at the Queen of Death. "Or I'll shoot you on the spot."
The Wraith woman stood before me, holding a crystal slightly pulled from its socket. Unfortunately, they all looked the same to me, so I couldn't tell which system she had been accessing.
Trebal mirrored my movements, standing beside me and aiming at Death.
"I'll count to three," I announced.
"Don't threaten one whose name has terrified generations of people in this galaxy," Death snorted. "You won't shoot."
"What makes you think that?" Trebal asked. "I'd be happy to burn your insolent face off!"
"I second that," I said.
"Wraiths are faster than humans," the Queen of Death bared her teeth. "Better in every way. And your weapons, though devastating, are slow. If you fire, I'll dodge," she warned. "And the shots will hit the porthole. It will be destroyed, and you'll be flooded with water. I can survive it, but you can't."
"You're bluffing," Trebal said. "But if you move that engine control crystal even a millimeter, I'll kill you."
"Just try to move even half a step to the side, and I'll put the crystal back, force-start the engines, and this whole bay will get a wall torn open," the Queen warned. "Water will flood the platform, and you'll suffocate. And I'll swim back to my cruiser, just as I planned."
A stalemate, no doubt about it.
Infuriating. That fiend was plainly screwing us. It seemed she had planned from the start to come here, to the most vulnerable spot on the platform, to bargain for her escape. But we couldn't allow that — very soon, the EMP generator's work would be complete. And the technology aboard the Wraith cruiser would come back online.
"I just need to get out of here," the Queen laughed, her voice like a knife scraping glass. "Your insignificant fellow animals have already told me that my cruiser is fine. And your generator doesn't have much time left. Perhaps I'll take it with me to the cruiser and use it as a power source."
"Not happening," I cut her off.
"In vain, human," she turned serious. "I just want to return to my people. Help me leave, and I swear the Wraiths and Atlantis will never be enemies again."
"Even I doubt that," Trebal said. "You can't be trusted! You're a killer!"
"And don't you kill livestock for food?" the Queen of Death laughed. "The Lantians are dead. My revenge is complete. I have no quarrel with you. Especially since you already have experience cooperating with Wraiths."
"They told her everything," the Dorandan woman said, disheartened.
"We trust Koschei a little, but not you," I said. At the same time, I think we all understood that both we and she were just stalling for time, trying to find a way out of this deadlock.
And right at that moment, Ihaar's voice came through.
"Mikhail, we've shut off the lubricant supply. Keep her there, we're on our—"
I looked away for a split second, listening to the engineer's voice.
And that was enough.
Everything happened at once.
The Queen shoved the crystal back into place. Trebal fired.
As if in slow motion, I watched the white-blue energy charge travel far too slowly toward the Queen.
Death twisted in an impossible way — one that would make even the most seasoned gymnasts envious — and lunged forward. A giant, swift leap that neither I nor Trebal could shoot her during ended with the Queen of Death at the exit of the bay.
An instant, and she was out of sight.
Meanwhile, a torrent of water crashed down on us from the enormous gaping hole in the mobile drilling platform's hull.