Teyla made her way through the dense jungle under cloak until she came to the edge of a small pool, but unlike the hundreds of others she'd maneuvered around in her surface search, this one was special. Her armor's telemetry was detecting residual trace elements in the water and the bank of the pool where the tiny waves had floated the material and stranded it on the shore. To her heads up display the pool was slightly aglow, with a brighter ring around the edge.
Looking up, around, and down, Teyla made sure she was alone, then stepped into the pool. The displaced water was obvious around her invisible form, but she waited until her head was beneath the surface before she disengaged her cloaking device.
However, the color of her armor shifted to a murky green, similar in color to the haze in the water. The visible camouflage made her almost undetectable just a meter below the surface as she slid down the steep bank. A few steps in and the bottom dropped out completely.
She let herself fall through the dark water, but her heads up display showed her a bright diagram of the shaft's walls, the surface above, and the expanding tunnel below as she quickly sank. Her armor was quite heavy, and she used that to her advantage.
Fifty meters below the surface the tunnel/funnel ended and a large underwater cavern appeared. She continued to sink through it for a hundred more meters until her limited sensors tagged a large structure coming up beneath her. Her feet touched the surface of the Wraith facility and reestablished her equilibrium as she dropped down into a crouch. She glanced to the right and left, getting her bearings via the computer image of the darkness.
Content that she hadn't been noticed, Teyla slowly walked through the thick waters over the surface of the biological structure looking for an entry hatch. If she had to make one herself she could, but that would then flood the facility. The Wraith were coming and going by ship, so there had to be a way in.
It took two hours of searching before Teyla discovered an indented alcove in the 'roof' by accident. Her sensors said it was flat, but when she stepped onto a particular section of the facility her foot passed through a force field and she nearly fell in. The newly minted Alterra caught her balance, teetering on her other foot and slashing at the water with cupped hands to move her backward.
She slowly tipped toward safety and steadied herself. She manually adjusted her sensors through a virtual pull down menu and reconfigured them sufficiently enough to discern the field from the hull.
She had to give the Wraith credit for their ingenuity. Beneath the field was air, with the water suspended above. Several darts and a lowly lit hangar bay revealed itself when Teyla poked her head through the field, but here wasn't the place to drop down.
Teyla pulled herself back up into the water and swam across to the other side and settled on the edge. She lay down on her side and slid her feet down through the energy barrier.
With a sudden movement, Teyla was sucked through by gravity as her buoyancy was lost. She landed in a crouch between the wall and a parked dart. She stayed there, motionless, for several seconds while she surveyed the area. Neither her armor's sensors nor her eyes and ears could detect anything. The bay was empty.
Teyla stood up and sleuthed around the perimeter of the large bay, glancing upward at the powerful force field holding up so much water. Yes, the Wraith were clever, but they still had to die…all of them. And the sooner the better.
The headpiece of her armor retracted, opening her biological senses to the environment. The room smelled of must and the odd, familiar scent of Wraith biotech. Teyla walked over to the only door and pressed her ear against it. With her Wraith genetics gone, she could no longer sense their presence and didn't fully trust her armor's lifeform detector. Twice it had failed her in previous missions due to some unforeseen anomaly with Wraith biotech…and she'd decided to take a step backward and not use it unless absolutely necessary.
She felt more at ease relying on her skills than technology anyway, which had only been heightened by her transformation. Her hearing had become exceptionally acute, and while the Wraith weren't the noisiest of species they were heavy breathers.
Detecting nothing, she opened the door, standing out of view as she did so. She listened again…all clear.
Moving through the interior of the Wraith facility section by section Teyla reached out with her limited telepathic ability, searching for Human minds. After nearly half an hour of searching empty corridors she caught a wisp of sensation.
Figuring she'd pushed her luck enough, she redonned her hood and activated her cloaking device in concert with her lifeform scanner. To her chagrin, no Wraith lifesigns were showing. That worried her even as the crude map displayed several dozen Humans arrayed in neat rows…probably in cocoons.
Teyla deactivated both technologies and proceeded by ear. The Wraith weren't big on internal security, but there should have been at least a few walking around. And while prudence would have suggested staying cloaked, the field interfered with her vision slightly and dampened sounds by more than 30%. That wasn't good enough for Teyla, so she decided once again on the 'old school' methods that had served her well over her many years on Athos and then her stint on Colonel Sheppard's team in Atlantis.
The Alterra patiently made her way to the Humans without encountering any resistance…but where she had expected cocoons she found only one, along with liquid filled pods.
Teyla glanced around again, making sure she was alone, then pulled back a mass of tentacles revealing a translucent skin. Visible within was a small humanoid form which could have been Wraith as easily as it could have been Human, but Teyla was sensing a trace of a Human mind…in fact, it was the same trace as all of them.
Her eyes widened and she looked back at the man in the cocoon. He was unconscious, but his mind was more 'visible' to her than the others. Still, she wanted to be sure so she retracted the 'glove' on her right hand and pressed her fingertips to the man's forehead.
His mind and essence poured into her senses, giving Teyla an ethereal 'fingerprint' which she then compared to the others. She couldn't touch them, nor did they seem fully developed, but the faint presences she felt were eerily similar.
Teyla pressed her head against the pliable pod, getting in as close physical proximity as possible to boost her telepathy. She checked and rechecked the 'fingerprint' a dozen times, but in the end she still wasn't sure if it was the same, but she knew it definitely wasn't Wraith.
That said, her logic filled in the rest. Wraith captured Humans to feed on. These Humans weren't fully developed and in pods rather than cocoons. Children weren't culled and captives weren't bred. She knew this from her own experience and the files the Lanteans left behind, though how they knew for sure was beyond her.
Her gut instinct told her she was right, which implied either a shift in strategy or a complete lack of understanding of the Wraith. Either way, they were cloning Humans, possibly as a runaround to the Hoffan plague or as a means to supplement their food supply.
Had they always been able to do this, was it a new technology, was it power hungry and therefore not previously used? Many questions ran through Teyla's mind, questions she couldn't answer. But whatever the answers, this wasn't good.
Teyla decided to move on. Her mission was to rescue any captured Humans, but she had no idea how many there were. If this was the only man, her task would be relatively easy, but if he wasn't, pulling him out now might jeopardize any others in the facility. She needed to do some additional recon before she acted…and record data.
To that end she engaged the data recorders in her armor and scanned the pods before moving on. Using a mix of her own senses and her armor's systems she located another set of cloning chambers…and a single woman in a cocoon. It was an identical chamber with 38 pods. Teyla marked the location in her armor's navigation system and moved on.
She found three more cloning chambers before she crossed her first Wraith. Actually it was three of them, two warriors and one male. The male led the way while the warriors pulled a struggling Human screaming behind them.
Teyla steadied her nerves and clamped down on her urge to kill them immediately and free the Human. Instead she shadowed them. They led her to an as yet unused cloning chamber where they sedated and secured the Human in the cocoon.
Where the man had come from was of primary importance, so she backtracked to where she'd discovered them then attempted to divine their route prior to their encounter. It took a little work, and a lot of dead ends, but she eventually came to a level filled with holding cells…a third of which held conscious Human captives.
Teyla crouched down out of sight. This was it. This was what she had come for…but there were so many of them, and she only had 84 tags. They'd have to double up.
First things first.
Off in the distance she saw a pair of Wraith guards and heard at least four more in various directions. She relented and used her lifeform detector to get more accurate numbers and discovered twelve in total, assuming none were being shielded by irregularities in the walls.
Slipping beneath her cloaking device, Teyla snuck up behind and followed one of the Wraith moving through the halls until it was alone and out of earshot. She reached her wrist up to the back of its neck and shot it three times, the third of which hit its head as it fell to the ground. Not sure if she'd been heard, she ran off under cloak and tracked down the next nearest Wraith and disposed of it.
Teyla went on a Ronon-esk tear, killing ten of the Wraith before an alarm finally sounded.
"You're on the clock," she reminded herself as the final two Wraith came toward her position, unaware of her cloaking device. She caught them both in the neck with punch/shots directly into their throats. She decloaked and fired several more green bolts into their skulls to make sure they were truly down.
Knowing that there were probably more on the way, Teyla hurried to the first cell and pried open the spindle doors with her armored hands and several strategically placed energy blasts.
"Help us, please!" a woman shouted amidst an array of barely audible chatter coming from this cell and the others when they saw her wall-blue armor and exposed head.
Teyla knew better than to argue with panicky people, so she didn't bother to respond. Instead, she slipped a small adhesive disk out of her pocket beneath her armor and stuck it to the woman's forehead. A small blue light started to blink in the center of the tag as the woman reflexively reached up to touch it.
Before she could she disappeared in a flash of white light and Teyla grabbed two teenage girls, ordered them to hold onto each other, and tagged one on the arm. A moment later they both flashed away…and loud footsteps boomed from the left.
Teyla stepped out and fired several blasts down the hallway, killing two Wraith as she ducked under a stun blast. Several more quick shots killed the third Wraith and she returned to tagging the people in the cell she'd opened.
One of which she had to run down as he fled aimlessly away from the holding cells. She grabbed him angrily and smashed the tag into his exposed sternum, then left him and retreated to the next nearest cell. He vanished behind her.
She repeated the process for two more cells, killing isolated Wraith in the interim, before the heavy waves of reinforcements began. She didn't know where they were coming from, but they were coming in the dozens…which meant she had to stop tagging captives and fight.
Moving with the speed and agility that only an Alterran could achieve, Teyla ducked in and out of cover, sprinted up and down hallways, crawled above doorways, across ceilings, and over biological equipment as she evaded, separated, and thinned their numbers until she could fight them head on. She did this for nearly twenty minutes until the Wraith had either quit trying, or had run out of reinforcements to send.
Stepping over dead bodies left and right, she policed the corpses, firing additional shots to make sure they wouldn't spring back to life and take her off guard. Teyla proceeded to the other cells where she freed and tagged the remaining survivors, some 63 people total, then she went back and carefully extricated the captives in the cocoons.
Finally she got back to the first man she had found. He was the last Human to rescue, and she only had two tags left…but that would be enough.
He awoke with a gasp and Teyla caught him before he could hit the floor.
"Easy…I'm going to get you out of here," she said reassuringly.
"My…wife," he said stoically as he shook uncontrollably.
"I got the others out already," Teyla told him. "You're the last person left."
"Thank…the Ancestors," the man said, nearly fainting.
"You're welcome," Teyla said as he wavered in and out of consciousness. She placed a tag on his forehead and held him in a tight embrace, glancing at the cloning pods. They weren't fully formed yet…if she pulled them out now it would kill them.
She didn't like it, but there was nothing she could do for them.
With a flash of bright light the dim confines of the Wraith base disappeared, quickly replaced by the dull interior of the Daedalus's ring room.
Two of the crew took the man from Teyla and dragged him off to the med bay. She retracted her armor into her innocuous forearm jewelry, revealing neat, trim blue garments that clung to her body in a flattering, yet formal design where the armor had been. She flicked a bit of Wraith blood out of her hair and headed for the bridge.
"Quite a haul," Ford said from the command chair.
"Yes it was," she said, sitting down on the edge of the holographic ring that had replaced the archaic vertical navigational board behind the control stations.
"We all done here?" he asked.
Teyla nodded.
"Good, because we've been recalled," Ford said as his lieutenant began to break orbit under the anonymity of their cloaking device and the shadow of four Wraith cruisers.
"For what purpose?" Teyla asked. Stevenson had given her a crew and ship along with permission to rescue as many captives as she wanted. Over the last two months she'd accumulated a total of 104, plus those saved today. Such missions were time critical and she knew that any delay would probably prove to be lethal for someone, somewhere.
"A little recon," Ford said as they passed under the last of the orbiting cruisers. "Apparently the Wraith hit one of Stevenson's replicator worlds. It's less than half an hour away and he asked us to check it out."
"Very well," Teyla said. "Bring us out of hyperspace in high orbit, just to be on the safe side."
Ford turned to his lieutenant. "Hear that, Chuck?"
"Got it," the only other crewman on the bridge said.
"I'll be back in fifteen," Teyla said, walking off.
"If you're going to get some food, bring me back a red bar."
"If you must know, I'm going to wash my hair, but now that you mention it I'm a little hungry too. Do you want anything?"
"I'm good," Chuck said as the ship entered hyperspace. "Nice work down there, by the way."
Teyla smiled faintly. "It's still not enough."
"You can't do everything yourself, Teyla," Ford consoled her.
"No…but I'm working on it," she said in a mixture of sarcasm and defiance as she left.
Chuck laughed after she was gone and Ford turned to him, shaking his head in awe. "Just be glad she's on our side."