FIC: "Ichor" 2/3 (SGA) John Sheppard/wraith

[lobelia321]

Ichor, contd





Part 2

"Kneel in obeisance."

The wraith had tucked the empty syringe back into the folds of its black coat. A thin thread of spittle trailed from one of its sharp upper teeth.

"I'm not kneeling," said John.

"It is the custom."

"No, it isn't. Not for me it isn't."

"You will fall. It is practical if you are not in a standing position to begin with."

Dots of light danced between the fronds. John dropped his gaze to the wraith's feeding hand, large against the wraith's belt, impossibly large.

"Okay. But then you've got to kneel, too."

The wraith sank to its haunches without demur. Its tiger eyes roamed over John's chest in a hungry circle.

John stayed standing. "I know how this works," he said to the wraith below him.

He didn't, of course. He didn't know a thing. He was floundering on a veneer of reason.

"First," he said, "I'll take off my shirt." He took off the binoculars. He pulled his T-shirt over his head. It scraped against burnt skin. His torso was strange and pale. He took a long time, folding his shirt, settling it on the sand, hanging the binoculars over a tree branch. His skin vibrated in the naked air.

"And remember. No full-on feeding. Go in small doses."

The wraith stared up at him out of inscrutable slitted pupils.

"And the enzyme," John added. "Don't forget the enzyme." I need that enzyme.

"You shall not die," said the wraith. "You shall guide my hand. Then I shall place my hand on you. I shall release the helpmeet, the tonic of resilience. Then I shall feed."

"Okay," said John. "Helpmeet." The ocean rumbled in crazy loops.

"Kneel, human."

"My name's John, actually. John Sheppard. Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard."

The wraith's feeding hand lay in its lap, held fast by the wraith's other fist. The nails shone green-black, their cruel points curved over the pads of the fingers. The central talon was sheathed in black. Hard cartilage coated the back of the middle finger all the way down to the knuckle. On the back of the hand, there were thick rivers of arteries.

Impossible.

"What's your name? Not that you'll tell me. You guys never tell anyone your names. Still, though, be nice to know who's actually sucking the life out of me."

The wraith hissed; drops of rotted saliva sizzled into the sand.

"Okay, okay." John dropped to a tall kneeling pose, knees pressed into the sand, thighs at right angles to calves. "I'll think of a name for you later."

"Eight breaths," said the wraith, now just above John's eye-level. "I shall feed for eight breaths."

"What's that, about half a minute? Thirty seconds? Great. Whatever. I can keep count. Thirty down to one."

"Now guide my hand." The wraith held out its right hand.

John touched the wraith's wrist. The wraith's pulse was wild and strong, the skin slithery and surprisingly hot. John lifted the wrist. Slow, he told himself, slow. This was no worse than being at the dentist. Root canal treatment. Drilling without the anaesthetic. No, with the anaesthetic: he was going to have the enzyme.

He placed the wraith's palm against his own bare chest.

John's rib cage instinctively rebelled. It knew what was going to happen. The very hairs on his chest recoiled.

The wraith flicked a finger to move John's dog tags out of the way.

The wraith's pulse thrummed against John's solar plexus. The wraith hand's feeding mouth pressed against his skin.

"Now," said the wraith, "I shall inject the helpmeet." Its voice sounded starved, pent-up.

A drop of moisture formed in the dip below John's breastbone, leaking from the wraith hand's slavering maw.

Then the mouth opened.

Hot. It was hot. Searing. A rotating heat against his heartbeat, in the centre of his torso. The palm of the wraith had its own life; it was an inner cavity rimmed with squirming lips. The hand spread across John's chest, across John's whole body, it covered the entire sky. It palpated John's chest in peristaltic spasms; it gripped his skin; and then his flesh ripped open.

He didn't scream.

He could stand this.

He could withstand this.

This was pain. Only pain.

This was nothing.

Nothing, his brain gibbered, nothing nothing nothing.

The world burst into light; he must have had his eyes shut; his sensations swayed without anchorage.

Thirty, his brain gasped at him. Twenty-nine. He tried to hold onto the counting, onto the numbers, just as his hand was trying to hold on, gripping the wraith's wrist. Twenty-seven, twenty-six. The wraith's wrist throbbed thickly. Globules of viscous stuff surged under its skin, surged into John. He focused on that as well, on the enzyme pumping out of the wraith's system into his. He tried to latch some form of rational thought onto that, onto the mechanics of that, the capillary logic of it.

Twenty. Nineteen.

The numbers pulled him through a sea of pain. Numerical buoys.

Fifteen. Twenty-two.

His reason was scrambled but a strange power surged in his blood. I can do this. Seventeen. I can do anything.

Sludge pressed against the back of his left eyeball. He could hurl boulders, leap the volcano in a single bound.

Six.

Blood streaming down his flanks. The claws in deep; deep to the hilt.

Four. Five.

Two.

He couldn't stand this after all.

Nothing could stand this.

His scream was ripped from his guts. An endless scream, straight from his soul.

The scream slashed his throat as it tore through. It rent the air. It rent him in two.

In three, in four. There wasn't enough breath for so much scream.

His mind vortexed down into a chaos of pain.

A thousand pores exploded into sweat on his body. A million cells convulsed. But it wasn't the agony of the flesh that unpicked the seams of his being. It was the white roar of utter existential terror, the incomprehensible horror of life running in reverse.

In the middle of panic, a number floated.

He clung onto that.

One. One. One.

A sliver appeared at the edge of insanity.

Like the rim of a world just before sunrise. Jumper wheeling at an angle to the asymptote.

All of a sudden, it was over.

Blackness swamped his edges. But he didn't faint.

He didn't faint.

His knees had worn grooves into the sand; they chafed raw against his trousers. He was upright, though; he hadn't collapsed, just slumped forward, leaning into the wraith, his mouth open against the wraith's throat.

The wraith's head was tipped back. A long hiss vibrated through its adam's apple.

John moved back heavily. Gravity pulled at his body. Underneath it all, there coursed a golden ferocity: the enzyme.

The wraith shook its mane and wrenched its hand from John's grip.

John sank into the sand. His knees buckled into broken joints. An eclipse clouded his left-ward vision.

A hot salve chilled his flesh. He blinked with his good right eye. The wraith was hunched over him. Its tongue swiped across John's skin, into the cleft down his sternum, into the corona of wounds around that central gash. One, two, three, four, five, six of them. One wound for each wraith claw and one for the feeding mouth.

Then they were all closed up.

The island heaved underneath him.

The wraith stood up in a creaking of leather. It licked its palm. Its tongue was sinuous and pink, longer and thinner than human tongues.

Relief and torpor dimmed John's vision. He fell into unconsciousness, with the sound of the sea in his ears.

**

John's right eye focused on the syringe that had materialised before his face in the sand. He watched his hand arc across to grasp it, watched his fingers pull the plunger as he slid his thumb along the seam -- it slid out easily. He closed his eyes as the first drop squeezed out. He lay on his back and let the water drip into his open mouth.

It was tepid like tea.

All that hydrogen. All that oxygen. Gorgeous, gorgeous solvent.

It filled him out. Even the hairs inside his nostrils began to moisten.

"Is there more?" He turned around.

The wraith was hunkered down in the shade, two trees away.

"No. That is all."

It had been barely a one-shot glass. Already, the need for more pulled at John's throat.

"Can't you make more?"

"I cannot make more than this amount at one time. There will be more later. This is your share."

John touched his bare chest. The gashes had puckered into raw red scars, five points in an arc above a vertical mark in the centre. The central scar was surrounded by fine lines, like the stretch marks around an anus.

"So," said John. His mind was dazed; his thoughts wobbled. "Is that it then? You give me a thimbleful, and I let you rip the life out of me in return?"

"You offered yourself voluntarily."

"Oh, shut up." Something churned in John's guts. He remembered the signal mirror, gone forever; it would have shown him how many years he had lost. He ran his hands over his face, over his stubbled chin, his burnt flaking nose. "Anyway, it's only until rescue gets here."

"Rescue will not arrive for some time."

"Well, maybe your rescue isn't arriving for some time. Which is a good thing because I'm not too keen on your rescue. But my rescue is on its way."

"You need not fear the hive. We do not kill our fealty devotees."

"That's what you say. And I'm not your damn slave. Try and understand that, okay?" John struggled to sit up.

"Your rescue is not on its way."

"Yeah, yeah, so you keep saying. But how would you know that? You're not in telepathic connection with my team by any chance, are you?"

"I know this," said the wraith and bared its teeth in a ghastly grimace, "because I set a decoy destination."

"A what?"

"You cannot fathom this."

"Try me." The tree bark scraped against John's bare back. "I'm a pilot."

The wraith looked at him with its unreadable eyes. "I set the hyperspace co-ordinates for a certain planet. This planetary destination left the space trace but it was not the intended destination. I changed the co-ordinates at the last nano-breath. This was a trick to divert the rival hive."

Sun glinted through the fronds.

"Let me get this straight," said John. "You set the co-ordinates for this hellforsaken planet?"

"I did not. The decoy destination sends pursuers into the whorls of perihelic fire at the universe's edge. I set the real co-ordinates for an outpost thriving with human fodder and hive activity."

"You're either lying or your navigation sucks, wraith. Because I'm not seeing any thriving outposts anywhere around here. If there are thriving outposts there, they're miles away, across this blasted ocean. If it weren't for your stupid little space tricks, we wouldn't be in this damn mess and we wouldn't be totally and utterly fucked."

"We are in this damn mess," and the gravel in the wraith's voice darkened, "because of you, human. You boarded the dart without permission. You confused the excess weight ratio. You jolted my body just as the co-ordinates were being set. The input slipped and the dart jumped to an unforeseen destination."

"I did not take us here!"

"Yes," said the wraith. "You did." It gathered up its syringe, brushed the sand off its coat and betook itself to another part of the copse. "As you would say," it added over its shoulder, "this is fuck."

John stared at the wraith's back. Then, despite himself, he laughed, a short sharp release of breath. "Yeah, you're right there. This is totally fuck."

He put his T-shirt back on and got to his feet. The air wavered in ginger mirages.

"Well," he said. "I'd better go find myself something to eat. And oh." He turned back briefly after stepping into the glare of the beach. "I've thought of a name for you. You can be called Ken."

**

Food on the island was small, and you had to eat a lot of it to take the edge off hunger. But there wasn't a lot of it so the edge was never taken off. Hunger turned into pain, and then into normality, a constant visceral cramp, a dizziness behind John's right eye.

He harvested the bitter little ember nuts with care, one branch at a time. He ate from each tree in rotation. And then he foraged.

He hadn't taken notice of anything before, except as cover or as obstacle, but now he combed the terrain step by step. He crouched on the sand and ran his hands along the surface. He was alert to every hint of shade in the black mica sand, every hump interrupting the foaming surf. He found some flora down in the ebb-tide, floating in the shallows of the western shore: a tough rubbery weed, kelp-like, smooth-skinned with round beans attached at intervals to supple stalks. The beans popped when squeezed by fingernails. Inside each, curled a fibrous pulp.

The pulp made John gag but he forced it down. Its texture was somewhere between fairy floss and lint, its taste vomitous. It stuck to his gullet. There was nothing to wash it down with.

He called the plant 'seaweed', and the beans 'seabeans'.

He tried drying the rest of the plant on the sands to render the stalks edible but they shrivelled to dark hard strings.

By the eastern promontory -- John renamed it 'Sunrise Promontory' --, a kind of limpet clung to the underwater rock. John prised it off with his knife. Each shiny black shell held a button-sized gobbet of flesh. John swallowed the globs raw at first, mere jelly-baby rations but meat, glorious meat. The taste was intense and fishy. Later, he learned to cook them over the fumaroles of the Devil's Run, in their shells until the insides boiled.

He called the limpets 'ladybugs'.

He roamed the shores and the volcano's edge, looking for the remains of his gear. A trail of troubled sand led him to a set of gaping holes. He peered into the roiling miasma at the bottom of the crater. He found nothing. Nothing was left, not even a shred of aluminium foil.

He soon learned that it was foolish to move away from the copse's shade during the day. The skin peeled off his arms in transparent strips; his lips cracked and frayed. He swore that he would never again wear anything so inane as a flimsy and short-sleeved T-shirt on off-world missions. Once, he fainted near the Devil's Run and came to, disoriented, his cheeks bloated, his pulse erratic and fevered. After that, he stopped going out during sunlight hours.

Dusk brought swarms of little insects that covered John in bites. He called them 'sandfleas'. When he caught one, it turned out to have eleven legs, not six.

He ceased to hear the surf.

He discovered that the sulphur-encrusted soil from the volcano's edge could be turned to mud by dousing it with sea water, and that this kept the sandfleas at bay. So every few dawns he climbed the volcano to fetch soil, then made it into mud and, in time for sunset, smeared his exposed skin with it -- his arms, his neck and cheeks, his ankles.

He was a constant hunter and gatherer, always keeping a look-out, underwater, overwater. One day, he plunged naked into the surf and struck out for the horizon. He swam in bold long strokes. Beams of sunlight slanted through the waves.

After a while, the island diminished to a hump in the distance, benign and impartial. A thin vertical column rose from the volcano. The view was strangely compressed, made of monocular vision.

Something slimy brushed John's leg. It was a big amorphous creature, gibbous, tentacled. On earth, John would have called it a jellyfish. It was the first creature larger than a coin that John had encountered on this planet. He made it ashore, clutching the mass of blubber to his chest. It didn't sting.

The taste of the medusa's flesh made him retch. But at the centre of its gelatinous mass, there was a kernel of knotted-up organs. This had an unexpected sweet taste, brackenish and rich.

John called the jellyfish 'jellyfish' and the edible centre 'oyster heart'.

He scoured the sky for a sign. He probed the horizon with his binoculars. There was never anything, not from off-world, not from in-world.

His wrist watch counted out the hours. There was a fourteen-and-a-half hour day, and a fourteen-and-a-half hour night: equatorial conditions. Dawn and dusk were short windows of bearability, and a lot had to be compressed into barely forty-five minutes each: the harvesting of seabeans; the gathering and roasting of ladybugs; the hunting of jellyfish; the collecting and preparation of anti-sandflea mud; the digging of a well near the copse, with his hands, until it occurred to John that he was probably sitting on a bed of subterranean lava, that he was unlikely to hit any water table, and that the only source of fresh water on this island would be rain from above.

The sky, though, remained forever blue and bereft of cloud.

John had no idea how the trees survived.

The nights were warm and dreamless. He tried not to think of his team, even though it was hard during the black hours of wheeling stars. But there was no point to it; there was no point in picturing Rodney at his simulations or Teyla, urging him on with a quiet voice, or Ronon, ready to kick wraith ass. They would be doing their thing and he, John, had to do his. And his thing was survival.

When the sun rose, refracting off a million waves, he ran down to the sea and washed the mud off. He needed his clothes to protect himself when out and about but during the hottest hours, slouched in the shade, he draped them over a tree to air and sat, with limp air cascading down his naked skin and sweat evaporating from his armpits and navel.

Ken the wraith never stirred from its side of the copse. It avoided exposure to the sun. It never bathed. It never took off its long leather coat nor its thick leather boots -- if they were leather. They looked like leather, and they creaked like stirrups against saddles but who knew what these things were really made of, some artificial fibre, some sentient material even? John started to wonder about that, why the wraith wouldn't take them off, if they provided some sort of life-support system, à la Darth Vader. He couldn't remember the science team on Atlantis ever mentioning anything of the sort.

As far as John could tell, the wraith didn't sleep, either, but sat with its lidless eyes open to the night air. He never managed to catch it making the water but every morning, a syringe of luke-warm water was stuck in the sand next to John's head, with the top fifth skimmed off by Ken for itself.

When the sun was at its height, the shade turned into a splash of purple directly under the trees. Nothing moved, only the ponderous waves.

Ringlets of heat rose from the ground.

When the evening breeze came in from the south-east, John sawed off a stretch of rope, bent the broken safety pin into a hook, worked it through the frayed end of the rope and waded into the sea.

He started on Sunrise Promontory. He spent hours dangling his bait -- a de-shelled ladybug -- from its outermost rock. He tried various locations, and the next evening he tried again, thinking that the fish might follow some unknown diurnal migration pattern. He swam along the island's coast, knife between his teeth, but all he saw were glinting motes and waving seaweeds.

He knotted the rope into a net of sorts and set traps around the rocks, and further out. He wished he had a lamp to use as a lure but his watch face had stopped lighting up, and his flash light was at the bottom of a cesspit, and no fish ever, ever bit.

"Do not expend your energy," said Ken the wraith, and John turned around, startled, half-immersed in surf.

"You must conserve your health." The wraith had actually ventured forth from its habitual place by the trees to stand near the edge of the tide in the dusk. "If you are too weak, you will not survive the feeding."

John drew in a breath. "Know what, Ken? You're not the only one worried about feeding. And you have all the food you need right here." He pointed a wry hand at his own chest. "But guess what? I don't. I've got to find food."

"What do you seek in the ocean?"

"I'm fishing, Ken. I'm trying to fish."

"There are no fish in this ocean."

"And how would you know that?"

"There is no vertebrate fauna on this planet."

John turned back to the water. "Yeah, right."

"No higher life forms have yet evolved. There are only invertebrates."

John's arm, holding the net, sank. "What are you talking about? Have you been to this planet before?"

"No. But I am cognizant of this fact."

"Hang on. You told me that, in the dart, I jostled you and accidentally changed the co-ordinates so that we landed somewhere unknown!"

"Not unknown. Unexpected. I did not set the co-ordinates for this planet but I did recognise the planet once I was here."

"You just said you'd never been here."

"I recognise it from the position of the stars."

Waves sloshed against the back of John's knees. The wraith stood on the sand, black against black. "The stars?" said John. "You can recognise a planet from the position of the stars? And then you know what kind of life forms it has?"

"Of course. We are aware of all the planets that have a potential to sustain breeding and feeding grounds. This planet will be ready in perhaps ten or thirteen cycles."

"Right." John passed a hand through his beard stubble. "And the stargate? Where is that?"

"There is no stargate here."

"No stargate?"

"The ancients did not care about planets such as these," said the wraith, and John thought he could detect a note of scorn in its voice. "Nor did they know about all the planets in our care."

"So you mean that this planet is possibly not in the ancients' database?" Which would be bad. Very bad.

"I do not know what the ancients did or did not keep in their databases. You should not expend your energy in useless fishing activities. The hunger grows, and soon it shall be time to feed."

With that, it stalked back into the shade.

John stood in the waist-high water.

Droplets tumbled among the spindrift waves.

**

John draped his T-shirt on a branch. He slipped the chain of his dog tags over his neck and hung it over the same branch. The scars on his chest were pink and young.

"Okay," he said. "Ken." He took some time over arranging his knees in the sand. "This time," he said, "why don't you make me see things? Distract me. Do your mind game thing."

"I cannot do that," said Ken the wraith, "while feeding at the same time."

John closed his eyes. "Okay," he said. "Do your worst. Thirty seconds, right? And give me some warning. Pump the enzyme into me first, before you start."

The enzyme pulsed into his veins, and he made himself count along. By the time he got to ten, he was sky high. By the time, he got to twenty, suns spun through his blood.

The enzyme was opening him up. It was preparing him for the feast. John had become attuned to the process but his brain was clear and fuzzy at the same time, thoughts at once wading through gel and whizzing through space.

First, there was the handprint, branded onto his breast and opening up a wound.

Then, as the wraith began to enter him, the lips of his wound softened in welcome.

Finally, the wraith's feeding tube, lithe and probing, emerged from the inside of its palm. Insinuating its blunt hot end past the labia of John's wound, enzyme juice oozing down John's chest, snaking in deep, into his existential core, eating him out. And then the overwhelming vacuum suction, the heady rush, the fall into the abyss.

Utter abandon.

The screams tore out of him in long burning scrolls.

Afterwards, the bliss of survival.

The sheer shocked joy at having come through.

He slumped against the wraith, then collapsed into the sand.

He didn't fall asleep. Just lay in tripped-out stupor while Ken the wraith licked his lesions shut and then departed to fetch water.

**

John's digestion was shot to hell. He got diarrhoea, and then he got constipation. Bowel movements were rare and painful. He crouched in the shallows on the western shore, one hand in the wet sand, straining and panting. More than once he bled into the water and afterwards worried about infection. Then it occurred to him that perhaps there were no infections on this world for him. If what Ken the wraith had said was true, then there were no mammals here, no complex animal forms at all, and therefore no bacteria to dwell inside complex animal forms.

It was an odd thought, the realisation that microbes, far from primitive, had actually evolved to adapt to highly sophisticated organisms. The tiniest bacillus was as advanced as the humanoid it contrived to kill.

He made himself not check the empty sky. He forced himself not to talk into his non-existent radio. He compelled his mind to stay in the here and now.

For fitness, John ran round the island at a steady trot. He managed to do three rounds every night, keeping the ocean always to his right. He could feel each of his ribs, like the spars on a ship's rump, and by rights he should be so weak as to make running impossible. But it was the enzyme. The enzyme was maintaining his strength.

John turned one of the trees into a calendar. Every morning, first thing, he carved a notch into its bark. He grouped the marks in lots of seven, to approximate earth's week.

Every fifteenth notches, he marked with an X. X for feeding day.

Every two weeks.

And how many years was John losing each time?

Well, he told himself, it's only until rescue gets here.

And when it did? What then? Would it be a hive ship? Or his own team, and how to warn them of the wraith?

How could he prevent the wraith from killing him in one fell feed and ambushing his crew? And he, without radio or comm?

These, he decided, were matters to be figured out as and when they arose.

**

"Why don't you make more water?" John said, after having gulped down his daily ration. "Is it really necessary to keep me on the brink of dying of thirst? You're always telling me to save my strength."

"I, also, am on the brink of extreme thirst," said the wraith, its voice like silt in the dark.

"So why can't you make more of the stuff? And what do you need to make the water, anyway? A special technology activating gene? Because hey, I've got that." John touched the syringe all over, stroked its phallic body, jiggled its pump. Nothing lit up. Nothing hummed into life.

"No, you do not need a gene. You need the elixir of life."

"The what?"

"The elixir of life."

"What elixir of life?"

"You have something like it but your substance will not do."

"My substance?"

"The closest human equivalent is the semen that is produced in the scrotal sac of the male. You must have this, for are you not a male?"

John dropped the syringe. "What?"

"The device is of no use to you without the elixir of life."

John's tongue was heavy in his water-wet mouth. "Are you telling me I'm drinking wraith spunk?"

"The alchemy of the vial transmutes our elixir into water. It is an emergency device."

John let his head fall back against the bark of the calendar tree. "So that's why there's never enough water? Because we're dependent on how much of a load you shoot?" He started to laugh in short, high bursts. "And the reason we've got to wait in between rations is because of your re-charge time? And at night when I'm not looking, you sit there and you jerk off? I didn't even know you had..."

But then what did he know? When had John ever paid any serious attention to the ramblings of the science team? They had dissected wraith; they had dismembered their anatomy. John couldn't even begin to imagine a naked body underneath all that leather gear.

**

Every fifteen notches, John took his threadbare T-shirt off, hung his dog tags over a branch, and knelt in the sand.

It never got easier.

It got easier every time.

His mind accepted the logic of the feedings.

His body revolted with a primeval biological reflex. But his instincts were being conditioned. Already, his skin chafed less at first contact with the wraith's sharp claws.

And his emotions? They, in curdled fractals, huddled in upon themselves and retreated into a null, flat-lined blank.

There was no point in having any emotions about this particular arrangement. It was what had to be, and that was simply it.

But then there was also something else, something deeper, something more vital. There was something that was being sucked out of him that was more than merely the years of his flesh. His life, yes. But what was his life beyond the mere years?

This something wanted to cleave to John; it wanted to cherish him and nourish him. It did not want to be hoovered out of him, piece by screaming piece.

There was an existential anguish to the process, but there was also a strange kind of twisted euphoria.

Because nothing was as intense. Everything else faded into washed-out sepia thereafter. The routine of the island, all his memories, earth, Atlantis. Parachuting, bomb runs, careening through wormholes, dodging space satellites, diving, soaring, puddle jumping. Yes, even that, even the jumper's startled flight.

Nothing came close to the high of the feedings.

The ultimate.

Even the screams were a fearless release.

Even the fear. Going right into it, into its heart of horror. Coming out on the other side.

Like descending into hell and coming back. Every single time.

He knew he was having the life sucked out of him. But it didn't feel like that. It felt like cheating death.

It was terrifying.

Exhilarating.

It felt immortal.

Surveying his world from the lip of the volcano's crater, the evening breeze ruffling his hair and his beard, the horizon flat all around, he was lord of all.

**

A few grey hairs appeared. They might have appeared, anyway.

The skin of John's arms was leathery brown, and he assumed his face must be, too. His beard was bushy; snarls of it straggled down his throat. His hair was a mane; thick locks curled down his temples and over his ears, and strands of it got caught in his mouth when swimming. He ran his hands over his face and could feel his cheeks sticking out like blades. His lips were bloated with blisters.

The wraith, too, changed in appearance. Its skin faded to a greyish green. Its face was haggard. Its sleek hair had grown matted; its roots showed white; the pink sheen must have been dye. The wraith bound it up into a ponytail, using a length of John's nylon rope. The slime on the wraith's teeth had dried into a lichenous crust.

John squinted into the small rock pool that appeared on Sunset Promontory just after every ebb-tide. It was his only mirror, unquiet and dark.

It was the left eye that totally changed the effect of his face.

It had flooded completely. It was a black almond, no iris visible, no whites. A bubonic beetle of an eye.

He looked out to sea, with insects crawling through his vision. He closed his left eye with his hand: the insects still crawled.

John pulled off his shoes and all his clothes, and slid into the sea.

He swam until the copse was a clump in the distance. He played dead man and floated face upwards. The sun stabbed at his pupils but only one of them squinted. The other, like an open lens, allowed in all the light, every last lumen, and swallowed it all up.

He put his hands over his face.

"What have I become?" he said into his palms.

**

THE WAY OF THE WELL AND THE SHINING DANCE OF TZ'AB AND THE RINGS OF KURATKA THE BLACK PINS OF THE NETHERWORLD O MY BRETHREN MOTHERS ON FIRE OFF THE SHOULDER OF ORION C-BEAMS GLITTERING IN THE DARK NEAR THE TANNHAEUSER GATE ALL THOSE MOMENTS LOST IN TIME O WHAT IS LEFT WHAT REMAINS IF ONLY HUSK UPON A ROCK IF THE SHINING PATHS ARE LOST IF ALL COMMUNION IS LOST IF ALL IS LOST IF ALL IS

**

During the hot eye of the night, John woke up.

A voice had woken him. He lay confused for a moment until he realised it had been his own voice, talking to somebody in his sleep.

He turned his face towards the sound of the ocean. The sky was white with stars, and the sea was white with the sky.

There was nobody there, nobody to talk to.

Carved out of the night was a black shape: the silhouette of Ken.

The wraith sat some way away, its head bent back and exposed to the cosmos.

John got up on one elbow. His arm shifted sand. "Ken?" he said.

Waves lapped the shore.

"What's happening?"

Without turning, the wraith spoke. "There is Kungkarungkara. And there Kuratka. Tayamni-pa above, and the cluster of Sevencross: Denebola, Tauna, the Large Thought, the Small Thought, the Mouthstar, Krittika and Kozaru. And beyond them, the Gate, and the Nebula of the Queen. I wintered there once, and there, Sjostirnith, is the asterism where I hatched."

A wind startled the fronds.

"So you've given all of these stars names?" John said. He hadn't paid much attention to the stars himself. He only scanned the sky for moving objects.

"Alloth, Alnair, Dubne," continued the wraith. "Ophlucci, Pyxis, Choque Chinchay. The Claw. The Sailing Queen. Ship's Berth, with its five jewels: Hokihoshi, the Single Jump, Makali'i, Tz'ab, Azelfafage."

They were like names from a dream.

"Did you make all of these up?" said John.

"Certainly not. All the hives know them."

"You know all of these stars?"

"Of course. The stars, the planets, and all the paths between."

"The paths between?"

"The paths of our ships. The routes of travel." It lifted one hand in an open gesture. "The planets are but way stations. They are not where we live."

John gazed at the wraith. He gazed at the stars.

"How?" he said. "The constellations change depending on where you stand. They're different from every single planet, from every single perspective. And you've never been to this planet before. Have you?"

"Naturally I know all the stars," the wraith said, in its hollow bucket of a voice.

"How? How can you know all their names?"

"The names are only their husks, and the way they look from each planet is immaterial. The planets are but pins of matter. We are not planet-bound. We are not bound to any perspective."

"Aha," said John who didn't think aha at all but whose skin breathed the sand's reflected warmth and who felt languid in the cradle of the night. "So what's that one called?" He pointed. "That one with the lots of small ones to one side?"

The wraith moved in order to follow John's index finger. "That is The Claw."

"The Claw. And that one? Just above the horizon?"

"Kuratka."

Every star. Every single dot and every shadow of white had a name. The sky was not alien, not to Ken the wraith. The sky was a map.

"And what was that other one you said? The place where you... hatched?"

"Sjostirnith." The wraith formed a circle with thumb and fourth finger, a lens for John's eye. Inside it burned a single white spot.

"So," John said, trickling sand through his fingers, "what does that actually mean? To hatch?"

"You do not know?" The wraith seemed surprised. "This occurs after the final instar when the imago emerges fully-formed from the cocoon."

"Ken? I've got no idea what you're saying."

"This is your language I am speaking, is it not?"

"Yes, but it's kind of technical. It's kind of... biological."

"You are not familiar with the reproductive cycle of our kind?"

"No," said John. "Strangely, I am not familiar with the reproductive cycle of wraith."

"The drone ejaculates spermatozoa into the queen's brood pouch. There they remain until the queen fertilises them with her ovipositor and lays them in the Chamber of Larving. The larvae--"

"Okay, I get it. I get it. No need to go into the details of your weird alien mating rituals."

"I am not an alien," said the wraith. "You are the alien."

"No, I'm not. In case you hadn't noticed, I'm human."

"I had indeed noticed that you were human. I could not feed on you otherwise. But you are not from this galaxy. You are one of the Lantean usurpers. You are not one of our native humans."

"Hey, I'm not an alien."

"On this planet," said the wraith, "we are both aliens."

**

So John started having conversations with the wraith.

The wraith did not seem averse.

"You said the other night that you know the paths in between the planets," said John. "What did you mean by that?"

"The highways and byways of our journeyings," said the wraith. Its voice was heavy and dream-like in the heat. "The magnetic fields by which we navigate."

"Hang on. You navigate by magnetic fields?"

"Of course. The hive senses the tracks, and the ships translate the sensings through their ganglia to the outer carapace to propel us along the vectors."

"Like migrating birds? You just kind of feel your way through space? Like some kind of space nomad?"

"We can never get lost."

"Well," said John. "You can still get shipwrecked, though."

"It is not good to be on a planet too long." The wraith's voice was taut. John opened his eyes; at once, the heat assaulted them. "Planets are for beasts. They are pins of base matter."

"You should maybe get out more. You know, go for a little exercise. Have a swim. Get out of those hot clothes of yours. You must be rank under there."

"We are not meant to be exposed to the crude elements. We are creatures of space. This is not a regulated environment. The temperature here is extreme."

"Yeah, so I've noticed." But sardonic understatement was lost on the wraith. "So, away from your high-tech bio-ship you just give up and sit there and stew in your own juices, is that it, Ken?"

"We endure," said the wraith. "To survive in intolerable conditions, it is imperative to conserve energy."

"Okay. You just go on conserving, and I'll do all the work. Like finding the food and digging for mud and starving on insect-size rations."

"I know that the nutrition on this island is barely enough to keep you alive. Too much excess energy is wasted by you in collecting this meagre fodder."

"Spare me the false concern for my energy levels, Ken."

"It is not false. For millennia, our hives have husbanded our resources well. We tend to our herds with great care. We do not harvest our crop all at once but allow for regeneration during the cycles of hibernation. We have removed all obstacles to human health and fertility." The wraith's voice changed. "You do not perhaps know this because you are alien to our galaxy."

John looked up sharply. Had he detected a note of irony in the wraith's speech? But no, Ken continued implacably.

"We have obliterated most species of poisonous flora. We have annihilated all large predators, leaving only those that may be used in the nourishment of humans. We protect our herds."

John knew this was nonsense. It had to be nonsense. But at the same time, he couldn't remember encountering any large man-eating animals on any of the planets he'd visited. The only beasts the humans of the Pegasus Galaxy feared were the wraith.

"Humans are unable to survive without the guardianship of the hives. Observe your own example. Your body is riddled with damage."

"Come on, Ken."

The wraith pointed a tired claw. "A scar line circles your neck. There is another scar above your hip, and a large one across your left shoulder, and another one on your right shin. You have also a mark above your left eyebrow where no hair grows. Only recently, you inflicted a cut on yourself, along the back of your hand."

"Oh, and let's not forget the huge gaping holes in my chest." But it was disconcerting. John hadn't realised that the wraith had observed his body so closely.

"The feeding ring is sutured by the healing sap," the wraith said, and to John's heated ears it suddenly sounded vile and glib.

"Is this the sort of horseshit you tell yourselves? Let me tell you something. Guardianship? Everyone in this galaxy lives in constant terror of you! You zoom in without warning, you kill and cull--"

"We cannot come with warning," the wraith interrupted, "or the humans would produce debilitating hormones of anticipation. Only a sudden culling will preserve the purity of the lives to be fed on."

"The what?"

"It is true that some of our kind delight in the taste of wild fear. They like to hunt their quarry..."

"The Runners," John muttered.

"...and to sample the savour of adrenaline. But this is a specialised foible. Such lives are not sustaining in the long term."

Conversations with the wraith tended to do this. They started out as easy chats and ended in anger and revulsion.

John wanted to yell but forced his words to be measured and slow. "You make me sick." He articulated each syllable. "Protecting the herd? Where I come from, we have managed without your so-called protection just fine. We happen to be very good at surviving on our own. We're fantastic at survival!" He grew more heated. "You're the ones that hide away in your artificial space environments and as soon as you get out on an actual piece of land, you can't cope! You're dependent on one single food source, like fucking panda bears, that's what you are, nothing but a glorified panda bear insect, and when there's no human around, you die! I don't call that a great survival skill!"

"You also are dependent on one single source of hydrating fluids. You are dependent on water."

"Fuck you!" John shouted in helpless fury. "Plus you stink!"

"The smell of you, on the other hand," retorted the wraith, "is always exquisite to me."

John would have got up and stormed off but there was nowhere to storm to. The island brooded in ominous silence.


**

"This," said the wraith who had moved over into John's side of the copse, "is your reproductive organ?"

"Yeah," said John. He was naked. He didn't particularly like the wraith looking at his genitals but then again, he also didn't particularly mind, and at the moment, he was distracted, trying to pull bark fibre out of the top of a tree trunk, to use in the making of a jellyfish net.

The wraith hunkered down in front of John and peered at his crotch.

"Do you mind?" said John. "I mean, I know we've gone way past false modesty but there is actually such a thing as privacy." But then it occurred to him that the wraith probably had no such sense at all. What could privacy possibly mean to a hive mind?

Without warning, the wraith shot out its prehensile tongue and stroked it along John's bare cock.

"Hey!" John yelped and jumped back.

The tongue slipped off.

"What the fuck," said John.

"You use this to mate?" said the wraith as if nothing untoward had occurred.

"Yes, I use it to mate," said John. "So keep your fucking tongue off it, okay?" He looked around for his boxers. They were salt-stiff, hanging from a branch of the calendar tree.

"Human reproduction is inefficient and strange," said the wraith.

"Well, guess what? Wraith reproduction is very strange to me."

"I can oblige by enlightening you."

"You already have," said John. And then, in greater alarm, "No, really, cut that out. Keep your clothes on. Holy shit."

The wraith had moved aside the tails of its leather coat and opened a flap at the front of its trousers to reveal its crotch area.

It didn't have a penis. It had two of them. The twin penes were pink and nude, like new-born tubeworms, hanging loose on either side of a hairless mound. They were scored with the same incisions that marked the wraith's spiracles.

Oh, John definitely should have listened more closely at science debriefings.

"Put that away now, Ken." He grabbed his own boxers and slipped them on with speed.

The wraith smoothly closed its gaping flap. "Is it a hardship for you not having a female here whom to inject with your spermatozoa? Does it sap your energy?"

"Jesus, Ken. What is this, twenty questions?"

"Does not the act of procreational coitus provide a necessary stimulus for humans? That is what keeps you reproducing, is it not? It is a very interesting fact for the hives, and very necessary. It is what enables your continued breeding."

"Can we not talk about this?" said John and eased out the crinkles in his fly. "Much as I'm enjoying this little chat about the birds and the bees--"

"There has been speculation that the reproductive drive has weakened among your race. Our memories show that humans produced a far greater number of young in the past but that in recent times, fertility has decreased. Far fewer offspring have been hatched during the last two and three awakenings."

"Maybe that's because you're killing them all. Maybe people aren't so happy about having lots of babies when those babies are likely to be murdered by a bunch of life-sucking space nomads."

"Oh no. We avoid feeding on immature humans. Our breeding programmes are very intricate. It is humans who of their own volition are not breeding so well. Some of our kind argue that we have proved ourselves to be inadequate humanherds and that we need new methods. Is this a problem among your species in your own home galaxy?"

"I--," said John.

"It is, of course, unlikely that humans who do not enjoy hive protection would be able to achieve adequate reproduction rates," the wraith answered his own question. "It is the failing of a species that mates for purposes other than reproduction."

"Excuse me?"

"Unfortunately, humans need other incentives to mate besides reproduction. You are too carnal to strive purely for the survival of your species. You are dependent on the sensations of physical gratification. Were it not for carnal gratification, humans would never mate."

John tried to process this. "Come on. Don't tell me the wraith never have sex without making babies?"

"Of course we do not," said the wraith. "Sexual reproduction involves a corporeal act. We limit our corporeal acts to the essential minimum. This," and now its voice took on a positively haughty tone, "is how we differ from you humans. We are of a higher order. We do not live for our bodies alone."

"You know what? I'm suddenly realising something here. You've got a hell of a lot more in common with the ancients than I thought. All that ancient stuff about the spiritual plane and ascension and overcoming the physical body. You totally buy into all that crap yourselves, don't you?"

"We are the hive," said the wraith, as if that explained everything.

**

Then it was dark again, and then light again. Subterranean rumblings disturbed John's sleep, or was it the ocean's booming? The fumaroles sputtered. John carved a notch into the calendar tree, and another one, and another one, and then it was the fifteenth notch, the wraith came to feed, John screamed, he reeled in exhilaration, and the next day he carved another notch.

He missed different things at different times. Sometimes it was his watch but then he forgot the march of minutes in the tidal fluidity of insular time. Sometimes it was the water canister but then he knotted the rope together in a basket-like shape and padded it with fibre torn from the bark, and that was good enough to carry the things he needed to carry -- ladybugs, mud, lengths of seaweed. Sometimes it was his razor, or a pair of scissors, but he knew that shaving gear hadn't even been part of his mission kit, and he copied the wraith and tied his hair up in a ponytail. He let his beard grow wild, just combed it with his fingers from time to time. He bit his toenails. His fingernails stayed blunt from scraping away at rocks to dislodge ladybugs.

He missed his long-sleeved jacket, and he really missed one tiny thing: a sewing needle. The sleeves of his T-shirt were coming apart at the seams, and he couldn't afford that. Already, the skin on his forearms was black with blisters. In the end, he pierced holes into the fabric with the tip of his knife, and threaded the sleeves together with bits of seaweed. They had to be re-threaded every few days.

The volcano coughed fiery air. Sweat suppurated from the roots of John's hair and collected in pools in his philtrum.

He missed people. He still missed people, despite telling himself it was pointless to. He even missed the disagreements and the misunderstandings. Because misunderstanding arose from a current of understanding, a constant, taken-for-granted undertow.

He missed being told, shut up, you're wrong, and snapping, I know what I'm doing, and being corrected, no, you don't, you haven't got a clue, look how you stuffed up, look how you allowed your gear to be destroyed and yourself to be wrecked. Look at the mess you got yourself into because you couldn't be bothered to hail anyone on your radio before you went off on some half-ass independent hero mission of your own.

But, he wanted to argue, but I did it to get intel! It was important!

He missed having arguments.

At night, he stared at the sky with his raw eye. The Claw. The Gate. The Small Thought.

The wraith was not in the copse. John found it standing near Sunrise Promontory, its face turned towards the stars.

"Hey, Ken," he said.

"Yes," the wraith's voice said, a growling among the growling of the breakers.

"Looking at the stars? Kuratka, The Gate, The Sailing Queen? See? I'm good with names."

A smell of bleach mingled with the smell of salt and surf. Wraith smell.

"What's your name? When it's not Ken?"

No reply.

"I didn't think you'd tell me," said John. He walked past the wraith and clambered onto the promontory. "What is it with you wraith and names? Don't tell me you haven't got names."

"It is you who do not have names," said the wraith.

"No names? Pardon me for setting you right about that one." John settled himself on a rock. "We do have names. My name, for example, in case you'd forgotten, is Sheppard."

"Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard."

"Yeah. That's right."

"That is not a name," said the wraith. "That is a label."

"Excuse me, that is not a label. Okay, the Lieutenant Colonel part is maybe a kind of label but the John Sheppard part definitely isn't."

The vibrator voice of the wraith took on a high-pitched timbre for one moment, as of somebody sighing. Then it spoke very slowly, as if enunciating obvious truths. "These words, 'John Sheppard', are a label. Someone else labelled you with these words."

"Yes," said John, mimicking the slow enunciation. "That is correct. Someone else named me with these words."

"This label is not unique to you."

"Okay, Ken. A fair point. It's true that 'John' isn't the most unusual name on earth. Which doesn't mean that I'm not unique, though. It doesn't make me the clones of all the other Johns in the universe. Not like you."

"How are you unique?" said the wraith.

"All food looks the same to you, is that it? Well, I've got to say it's you wraith that all look alike. You're the ones that are clones. Nameless wasps in those hives of yours."

"We do not all look alike. Each set of spiracles is unique."

"Each what?"

The wraith's leather coat creaked. John tried to see where it was pointing by the light of the stars.

"The breathing apertures on our cheeks," said the wraith.

"Oh right. Those. I thought these face markings were just some sort of tattoo?"

"We apply scarring to the spiracles but this is only to accentuate their natural uniqueness."

"A bit like fingerprints?"

"The spiracles are unique, unlike your name labels."

"My fingerprints are unique, too. And my, I don't know, my irises. My DNA."

The scars on my body. The stutter in my pulse. All the plans and all the memories.

The dreams I killed. The dreams I lived.

The scar around my neck where the iratus bug strangled me. The scar in my eyebrow where the beast of the ancients attacked me. The scar on my hand where I grazed my skin while gathering ladybugs. The scar on my hip, the scar on my shoulder, the scar on my shin. Battle scars. The scars of a military life.

The scar on my tonsils. The scar on my intestine. The scar that is my navel.

"What is DNA?" said the wraith.

"What?" John shook his head. "DNA? That's deoxyribonucleic acid."

"What is deoxyribonucleic acid?" Was this a genuine question?

"It's a genetic code. I'm sure you know that. Chromosomes. Double helix. You need a scientist to explain it all in detail but it's a blueprint for who I am. It's what makes me unique."

"This code makes you unique but you do not know the code?"

"Well, that would take years. It's very complex. Hang on, don't tell me you know your own genetic code off by heart?"

The fronds rasped their spines against each other. Something tiny clambered across John's bare toes.

"My name is like that," said the wraith.

"So you do have a name. I knew it!"

"It is unique and complex, like your deoxyribonucleic acid. It would take years."

"Come on, Ken. What's your name?"

"It must be found out. Humans have no access. It cannot be told in speech."

"You mean you can't tell me your name because you can only mindspeak it? Telepathy? You all crawl into each other's heads and figure out what's in there and that's what makes up your names?"

"Speech is an inadequate instrument," said the wraith. "Speech is nothing."

"Well, I don't know about that--"

"Speech," boomed the wraith, "is useful only for communicating with lower life forms. Humans are arrested at a base level of communication."

"Hey," said John. "I communicate just fine."

The stars burned like icicles.

"The hunger is very bad," the wraith said abruptly.

John froze. "It's not," he said. "It isn't feeding time. Yet."

"The little I take from you each time does not sate the hunger." Something was wrong with the wraith's voice.

"Well." John opted for a lighter tone. "Welcome to the clan. I'm hungry, too. I'm hungry all the damn time."

"But the hunger is not the worst thing," said the wraith. "The worst thing is the silence."

The surf moaned.

"We talk," John said lightly.

"Not talk! Not speech!"

The wraith's boots crunched in the sand. With angular bounds, it mounted the promontory, right up to John.

"In here," it said. "In here." It pressed its palms to its own forehead. "There is silence. There is nothing." Its voice caught on a tripwire of despair. It moved its hands, and now both of them pressed into John's skull, into the bone of his temples. Their moist mouths caught his hair. "Here," said the wraith, "here, where you always have nothing. Where you have only a void."

It pressed harder. Little spots exploded in front of John's right eye but he didn't move.

The hands slipped off. The wraith turned, leaped down onto the beach and disappeared up the coast, in the direction of the wreck site.

John sat in silence. The volcano shuddered and spewed forth a tongue of red flame.

From the south, there came a roar. A pained roar of anguish.

It was the wraith, screaming at the empty space.

**

ENDURABLE OR NO WHO IS TO SAY WHO IS TO ANSWER WHERE THERE ARE NO ANSWERS O WHERE I CALL AND NEVER AN ANSWER NEVER A STIRRING IN THE FOLDS OF THE WORLD O MY BRETHREN MY HUSK DOETH CRAWL UPON THE CRUST OF THIS ORB UPON THE PEEL OF THIS GRAIN THAT PULLETH ME TO IT EVERMORE WITH SUCH FORCE WITH SUCH GRAVITATIONAL PULL OF AEONS O MUCH MORE OF THIS HOW TO ENDURE HOW TO PREVAIL O WHERE AND WHEREFORE ARE YE ALL YE LOST ONES MY SIBLINGS


**

John was harvesting seabeans when he looked up and saw a cloud of black smoke spume forth from the top of the mountain. At the same time, a quake shook the sand underneath his bare feet.

"What the," he said.

And then the volcano erupted.

**

"Ken!" John yelled. "Ken!" He ran, instinctively cowering, along the shore towards the southern beach. An ominous rumbling shook the air.

By the time he rounded the promontory, a cloud of smoke filled almost the whole sky. The wraith stood transfixed among the trees.

"Come on!" yelled John, running so that the sand sprayed up behind him. "Don't just stand there! We've got to get off this island!"

Ripples ran across the beach. The trees creaked. A mist of ash began to snow down, tinting the black sand grey and splotching the sunset.

"Shit." John was in the copse. He gasped for air. Sparks shot into the darkening sky. The sea snarled. Rents split open in the side of the mountain. Hair-line clefts crackled all the way down from the top, one to the south of the copse, one to the north. By the time, the clefts had reached the mountain's foot, they had widened to smoking crevasses. Great billows of steam hissed upwards.

With a chthonic groan, a mass of black and orange lava heaved itself up over the lip of the crater.

"Holy shit. It's coming down." John grabbed his knife and started hacking at the trees. "What are you doing?" yelled the wraith. "Making a fucking raft, is what I'm doing!" "We cannot make a raft." "The hell we can't. Why aren't you helping? No, you're right, there's no time. Jesus Christ." Magma streamed down the slope, in thick slurries, like burning porridge. The air stank of exhaust fumes and sulphur. An uncanny wind made the spiky foliage howl.

"Okay," said John, his mind cavorting wildly. "We'll just have to head for the sea without a raft." He pulled his trousers from their branch and felt for the small pellet in its calf pocket.

He forced his mind to focus on a tiny circumference of action. He stepped into his trousers, sheathed his knife and hitched it onto his belt, tied his shoes around his neck by the one length of lace that was left in them, pulled fistfuls of ember nuts from the trees and stuffed them into his button-down pockets. What else, what else? Wasn't he forgetting something? Something vital?

The air sizzled. The wraith's face glowed orange.

"Come on!" John yelled. He started running towards the surf.

The wraith wasn't following.

"Ken! Get a move on!"

"I cannot!" croaked the wraith, barely audible above the roar of the volcano.

"What?"

"I cannot enter the ocean."

"Shit, Ken. This is not the time. You can't swim, is that it? Is that it?" John ran back up the beach and grabbed the wraith's sleeve. But Ken lashed out, and John flew backwards onto the sand.

"Damn you!"

The first bulge of lava hit the waves just to the south of the promontory. Flames engulfed the rocks. The sea spat and threw up fountains of foam.

"Well, okay then, you son of a stupid bitch! Stay here and burn. Are you thinking you'll survive?" John stood between shore and surf, his chest heaving. He tried to calm down. He tried to focus. "Okay, you're going to survive this, are you? You're going to be able to self-heal?"

"No," said the wraith. "I do not expect to survive. I have not fed recently..." I know. Not for fourteen days, thought John. "...and there may not be time to regenerate. These conditions are very ferocious."

"Yes, for Christ's sake! They are ferocious!" yelled John. "What the fuck are you waiting for?" He ran back up the beach and pulled at the wraith's arm.

"No!" hissed the wraith, close to John's face. "I cannot enter the ocean. The salt water will be worse than my death!"

"Don't be ridiculous." But already John was remembering the dart wreck, melting into nothing on the rising tide. And he was remembering the iratus bug, curling in on itself when rubbed with salt. "Shit," John said.

He looked at the heaving seas. He looked at the burning land. Ashes frosted the wraith's hair.

"But you'll die if you stay here."

"I must ask something of you, Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard."

"Oh no. Don't start that. This is not going to happen."

"If you survive this catastrophe..."

"What part of you can't be exposed to salt? All of you? Your whole skin?"

"...do gather up my bodily remains in a sheltered spot, so that if rescue should ever arrive..."

WITHOUT YE MY BRETHREN ALL CHAOS WOE ALL CHAOS AND EMPTINESS WOE ALL NOTHING WOE ALL INFINITE EXPANSE NO WALLS

"Shut up!" John shook the wraith. The air was burning; it was starting to burn up his lungs. "What fucking part of you can't be exposed to salt?"

"...the remains may be returned home to the hive..." The wraith touched its cheeks with fluttering claws.

"The what? The spiracles? Only the spiracles? Take off your belt. Take off your belt!"

But in the event, John had to take it off himself. The wraith stood immobile and continued chanting instructions, letting its arms be lifted limply. The wraith's belt was heavy, laden with buckles. "Here," John muttered, and without ceremony he bent the wraith's head down and wrapped the belt tightly around its skull, taking care to cover up the breathing holes, winding it across the bridge of the wraith's nose, tightening the tongue in the central buckle. "Now come on."

The wraith did not move. It seemed stricken with horror.

NO ROOF NO HONEYCOMBS NO CHAMBERS OF THE SPIRIT ONLY THIS TOO HIGH ROOF OF COSMOS UNPROTECTED O WOE ONLY THIS TERRIBLE PIN SO FAR FROM THE MOTHER ONE LONG SCREAM

"Ken!" John roared in exasperation. "Would you rather burn to death, or would you rather take a chance in the sea? A chance, Ken!"

"IF WE DO DIE WE DIE AMONG OUR BRETHREN," intoned the wraith, in a keening mantra, its rock-strewn voice flushed with an unearthly tremor. "IF WE DO PERISH WE DISSOLVE AMONG OUR BRETHREN BUT WOE TO DIE IN EXILE WOE TO DIE BEREFT."

"Stop it! You stupid great big fucking crazy alien. You're frightened of dissolving in the sea, is that it? You'd rather burn up so that, what, I don't know what? I don't know what, Ken! Fuck!" O WOE MINE HUSK WILL ROT UPON THIS ROCK WILL DIMINISH IN THIS SALINITY The wraith seemed to have lost the will and the power to flex its muscles. WHO WILL ENFOLD MINE SPIRIT WITHIN THE SPIRIT OF THE HIVE So now John was pushing and tugging it towards the breakers. "Maybe you're prepared to die," he panted, "in that damn stupid ancient ascending let's-all-give-up-the-ghost fuck of a way, but guess what, I'm not. I'm not."

The first splash of water round the wraith's boots in the shallows seemed to startle it into reality. "No, no," it said. "This is not good. I am too heavy. MINE HUSK ENTRAPPED IN THE MIASMA OF THIS MATTER."

"You're not heavy. It's salt water, for Christ's sake. It's going to buoy us both up. Climb up! Climb up onto my shoulders. Keep your head out of the water."

"You will drown. TO DIE BEREFT LET ME AT LEAST FEED ON THINE LIFE ONE LAST TIME."

"I won't drown. I've got this." And scrambling in the wrinkled depths of the left calf pocket of his trousers, securely buttoned in, John drew forth the airbead. It was covered in lint but it was still good for another twenty-eight hours at least.

The lava was now rolling into the surf to the north of the copse. The ocean churned. Crevices erupted along the shore, and then the volcano burped; something was flung into the sooty air, and crumbs of pumice pattered down upon the surface of the waves.

They were shoulder-deep in the water. Just before John prepared to submerge--, airbead clamped between his back molars, the wraith's legs gripped around his neck in a panicked vise -- he remembered the something vital.

"Damn it, the water!" he gasped. "The syringe! Have you got the syringe?"

"Yes."

"Where? Where have you got it? Have you got it somewhere safe?"

"Yes. I have placed it somewhere safe. It cannot fall out into the salt water."

"It can't fall out? You sure?"

"I have inserted it in my cloaca."

"Jesus," said John. Then, with red flames dancing at the back of his left eye and pumice bouncing off the crests of the waves, he burst out laughing. "You stuffed the syringe up your ass! That was good thinking! Oh, that was brilliant!"

And with that, he sank beneath the gurgling waves.

***

Part 3.

Comments

heads-up ...

[viva-gloria.livejournal.com]

link in part 2 points to part 2 again, not part 3

Re: heads-up ...

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Oh. Thank you!!!!!! *goes to fix*