A/N: Thanks once again to all those of you taking the time to comment. I know I always reply with my thanks directly, but this is the only place I can say it to those who don't have accounts, so I like to add it here. Feedback makes this whole process even more worthwhile, although I confess I love to write anyway! :)

Chapter 36

An agonising pulse of pain throbbing through both his right forearm and his torso brought Sheppard back to consciousness. His hands were numb, he couldn't feel his fingers when he tried to flex them, and his wrists hurt so badly he wondered if someone had cut off both his hands. He forced his leaden lids to open, spotting the crane hook dangling above his head, and his cuffs attached to it, suspending him above the ground. The metal was digging into his swollen wrists, slicing his skin, and his hands had turned purple, suggesting he'd been hanging there for a while.

He was cold and...wet? He looked down at his body, finding he'd been completely stripped to the waist and water was running down his chest in numerous rivulets. A blast of freezing cold water slammed into his back, and set him spinning, his eyes falling briefly on a figure in the room along with him. Was that Rabbrine? A second turn gave him a long enough look to realise he was right.

The physician blasted him with another jet of water, then climbed on a set of steps and began scrubbing him down with something that smelled antiseptic and foamed up on contact with the water on his body. When he cried out at the rough contact, he got little sympathy from his diminutive torturer.

'Stop your whining, man. It's just a few cuts. Look at me – I have a black eye thanks to you...and I'm considerably poorer than I planned to be today. You have to go and escape just when Gullaen and his men came looking for you. He thought I'd set him up for arrest. I was lucky to escape with just this.'

'Oh, poor you,' Sheppard grunted, glaring down at him. The man scrubbed over the gouged wounds on his stomach with his coarse cleaning cloth, making him throw his head back with a hiss through his clenched teeth while he fought back a torrent of abuse.

'Why you thought you could come back here I'll never know...faeces for brains, if you ask me.'

'I didn't ask,' Sheppard pointed out, his moment of rebellion instantly ended by a particularly thorough scrub across the buckle welts on his back.

'I told them you were trouble, but did they listen...no.'

'What...the hell...are you...doing?' Sheppard eventually managed to squeeze out between pain-riding gasps and teeth grinding.

'Preparing you for surgery,' Rabbrine barked. 'I don't think I've ever seen a man so filthy in my life.'

'Surgery? What surgery? I don't need surgery!' Sheppard assured him as he span around and Rabbrine scrubbed at his damaged back again. He clamped his eyes and jaws shut and rode out the pain, ignoring the pressure of the unwanted and sometimes intimate scrubbing on his battered body.

'Well, you might not consider it necessary, but considering the role Magister Tranaedan has in mind for you, I can assure you it's most vital.'

That didn't sound good. 'What role?'

Rabbrine blinked at him, pushing his spectacles up his nose, as they refocused on his face. 'A permanent pilot. You're to be assimilated into that new ship of his.'

Images of Faraenal assaulted him, thoughts of how the man's suffering was now about to become his own. He panicked, kicking out with his bound feet and sending the physician spilling from his steps and thudding onto the floor beneath his feet.

The doctor wailed, a sound that brought other people running. Tranaedan and Vandaer appeared, the former guiding in a table from one of the medical rooms, the latter pushing in the machine Sheppard had deactivated for the sensory on a hovering platform.

'No!' Sheppard breathed, the sight of those things making him struggle more furiously in the hope that gravity would somehow help him work his way free.

'Quit your complaining, Rabbrine. You only fell a short way. Is he ready?' Tranaedan demanded, taking no nonsense from the man still sprawled on the floor.

Rabbrine stumbled to his feet, straightening his glasses. 'Not really...he's still covered in filth and already in poor health. He needs a good bath and two weeks of recovery –'

'Not possible. I need this done now. Do whatever you have to do to bolster him and make sure he survives.'

'With a patient in this condition there can be no guarantees –'

Tranaedan grabbed the front of Rabbrine's shirt. 'Just do as I ask.'

Rabbrine straightened out the steps and remounted them to continue the preparations while Sheppard watched in morbid fascination as Vandaer wheeled the machine on board the jumper.

'Do you have everything else clean and ready for the procedure?' Rabbrine asked as he resumed his heavy handed bathing.

'Yes. The machine has been completely cleaned down and serviced in preparation for a new sensory it appears I am to be denied. All you have to do is make it so I can attach that man to it.' He picked up a container sitting on top of the bed and opened it, rattling the connectors it contained. 'They're all here; you just need to get them into him.'

Sheppard freaked out again, tugging hard on his cuffs, driving the metal deeper into his skin in his desperation to be free. Blood ran the length of his arms, mingling with the stinging antiseptic wash and turning the foam and water pink as it dripped from his body onto the floor.

'Surely you're not worried, John Sheppard? You're a pilot...you love to fly. Now you will do nothing but,' Tranaedan sneered glaring up at him, not an ounce of sympathy in his manner.

'Where's the girl?' Sheppard asked, suddenly remembering his little friend and worried that if Tranaedan was prepared to do this to him, he might have hurt Ishraela, too.

'I think you have other things to concern yourself with right now,' Tranaedan told him. 'The child should be the least of your worries.'

'I need someone to help me get the rest of these stinking clothes off him,' Rabbrine grunted as he worked, and Tranaedan ordered Vandaer to help restrain Sheppard while the doctor did that. The slave wrapped an arm around Sheppard's calves while the doctor cut his belt and ankle restraints and relieved him of the rest of his clothing. His trousers were now plastered to him with a mixture of blood, grime and water, so were reluctant to part company with his damp skin. Though normally being stripped naked would have been reason enough to panic, now it paled into insignificance in comparison to the thought of what was to come. He barely even noticed the rest of the intrusive cleaning process as his lower half was washed clean of the blood and dirt he'd acquired during his supposed escape.

'I believe he's clean enough to proceed,' Rabbrine announced, and now Sheppard suddenly missed the gruff treatment.

'I dunno! I don't feel all that clean, yet,' he suggested, hoping to stall him. 'Like you said, the odds are already against me. Why take the chance you missed a spot?'

A blast of cold water hit him again, taking his breath away as it practically scoured the top layer off his skin. The pain was incredible, and though it wasn't in his nature to give up, knowing what lay ahead, Sheppard prayed to anyone that might be listening to let the infection in his injuries take him, right here, right now.

'Stay strong, John. The end is in sight.'

The sensory's voice echoed somewhere in the distant recesses of his mind. He dropped his head against his quivering arms. 'This is not ending well...this is not ending well...' he whispered over and over to himself, repeating the sensory's promise to him.

'What's he saying?' Tranaedan asked from below him.

'Who knows? I told you he has an infection. The man's probably raving. Anyway, we need him down now, so I'll give him a mild sedative to make him more amenable while I operate.'

Mild? Sheppard didn't want a mild sedative, he wanted the real deal. He wanted Rabbrine to knock him out, and when he woke up as a lobotomised autopilot he hopefully wouldn't understand what pain really was any more...although, having seen Faraenal's reaction to being roused, he seemed to be frighteningly aware of his agonising condition. He watched Rabbrine rummaging through his medical bag, panic rising as the frightening realisation that he had absolutely no way out of this hit him.

'You know, the sensory told me you wouldn't take my wife from me, but you did,' he heard Tranaedan call up to him.

With nothing to lose, Sheppard's belligerence rose to the surface, and he fired back. 'And how do you figure that?'

'If you hadn't come back here and fought with her, I would never have known the truth...'

'And you could have gone on living a lie,' Sheppard spat at him. 'I didn't stop you doing that. You could have turned a blind eye to what you'd seen and carried on fighting with each other if that made you happy.'

'But I couldn't ignore what she was!' he bellowed, tears in his eyes. 'That was one thing I could never forgive her for.'

'Because she was a different colour? Because she could do things you couldn't? It's attitudes like yours that forced her to disguise herself in the first place. You brought this on yourself.'

Tranaedan swung a punch up into his stomach, making him wheeze out all the breath remaining in his lungs. Apparently, the magister didn't take criticism well. No surprises there.

Rabbrine had finished what he was doing, and now climbed the steps with a loaded syringe, ready to inject him and make him more malleable.

Sheppard suddenly felt his brain become spongy, a frighteningly familiar sensation. He hoped he was wrong and he was about to pass out instead, but no, he could feel it, the prodding and poking around in his head. So who was in there? Was it the sensory or did he have a new lodger?

His mouth opened, and without consciously forming any words they began spilling out. 'If his blood is on your hands, you will surely die.' What he said awoke a vague sense of déjà vu within him, as if he'd spoken them before. But it wasn't him...it was the sensory, interceding to try to save him.

Rabbrine drew his hand back, looking puzzled, and beneath Sheppard the colour drained from Tranaedan's face. Those words clearly resonated with him; he'd also heard them before.

'You...you're dead,' he breathed, gazing up at Sheppard with eyes filled with fear.

Sheppard wasn't sure whether he was talking to the sensory now, or threatening him. The fear and confusion suggested the former, but he couldn't be sure. So would the sensory's threat be enough to stay his hand?

His hopes of Tranaedan's repentance were dashed when he watched the magister's expression shift from that mixture of fearful confusion to something that looked to him like complete desolation. Something had left the man, and now a deep, dark, choking emptiness was engulfing him in front of his eyes.

'Should I continue?' Rabbrine asked. Apparently, even the seemingly sadistic physician could sense the import of their exchange and wondered what to do.

Sheppard held the magister's gaze, hoping to see some kind of pity or even shame surface there, but there was nothing. The magister was a broken man, the death of his wife too much for him to cope with. Nothing mattered to him anymore, certainly not the torture of a virtual stranger.

'Yes,' he replied, his voice flat and completely devoid of any level of emotion.

He walked away, and Sheppard squirmed and thrashed as Rabbrine jabbed the syringe into his arm and set the sedative free in his system. Moments later, his brain felt like it was swimming in some kind of opaque, gelatinous fluid, everything becoming blurred and muffled as his motor controls failed and he could struggle no more.

In some distracted way, he became aware of arms holding his legs, another arm wrapping around his upper body as his cuffs released and his body fell, supported only by the others holding him and lowering him to ground level. His head lolled, making the room lurch in sickening waves each time it shifted. He could see the bed Tranaedan had steered in coming closer in his fractured and distorted sense of perception , and then he was on it, Rabbrine and Vandaer rolling him onto his front and stretched his arms out in front of him, magnetising them to the metal bed stead. Then in complete contrast, the gentle touch of a sheet being tossed over him lulled away a little of the pain his movement there had ignited.

He heard Tranaedan dismiss the other slave, as he stepped forward and grasped Sheppard's upper arms from his position at the head of the bed. 'Begin when you're ready, Curan Rabbrine,' his voice announced, the words somehow echoing around in Sheppard's head, mockingly emphasising his impending fate.

'Don't...do this...' he gasped, trying to lift his head, but failing dismally to come anywhere near coordinated movement.

In response, the magister's grip on him tightened, and he felt the sheet folded back to his waist, a cold, damp sensation on his skin telling him he was being swabbed ready for an incision.

'Begin,' Tranaedan ordered again, and as the physician followed that instruction Sheppard's screams filled the hangar he had thought held his means for escape.

oooOOOooo

The jumpers sped out across the Haraendon landscape, scanning for the registered tracking device on board the cargo vessel Sheppard had escaped on. Rodney watched the scanner readings, trying to stay calm as mile after mile revealed nothing of any use to them. He desperately wanted to see that transmitter reading they were looking for show up in their area so he could feel he'd played some part in rescuing his friend. So far, he felt like he'd simply abandoned Sheppard the last time they'd seen one another at the Tranaedan house, and his current situation was therefore at least partly down to him.

Teyla stood beside him, and though she maintained her exterior calm, he could see her breathing was far heavier and more erratic than normal. She wanted to see something just as much as he did, no matter how much she tried to hide it.

Suddenly, the signal they'd been so anxious to find showed up on the edge of their scans. 'There...look,' Rodney yelled, 'there it is!'

'I see it,' Harding acknowledged, steering the jumper in the direction the scans showed them. 'Dr Weir, we've locked on to the transmission in our sector. I recommend all teams converge on our position.'

'Will do, Lieutenant,' she responded.

They continued to head toward the dot on their scans, the small light moving away from them at first, and then seeming to double back toward them after a few moments.

'He is heading our way,' Teyla said. 'Is it possible he has seen us on his own craft's scanners?'

'Well, he might have picked us up, but he'd have no way of knowing it was us,' Rodney pointed out. 'And if he has picked us up, why isn't he keeping out of our way in case we're out here to take him back to Traginta Duo?'

'He's not even heading toward the 'gate,' Harding chimed in. 'Maybe Sheppard's not flying the ship at all.'

'Well, even if he isn't, the pilot should be heading for the 'gate,' Rodney called back to him. 'This doesn't make any sense. Do you have a visual yet? '

'Not yet.'

'But it should be directly in front of us.' Rodney watched the dot on the scanner approaching, now only a couple of hundred metres ahead of them. The landscape through the windshield was virtually flat between them and the approaching blip. They should have been able to see something by now.

'It is heading straight for us. Is it possible the vessel is cloaked?' Teyla suggested.

Harding activated their comms system. 'Dr Weir, could you ask the first minister if their ships possess cloaking capabilities?'

There was a slight pause before she responded. 'Apparently not. Is there a problem, Lieutenant?'

Harding took evasive manoeuvres as the craft supposedly passed right over their course, still invisible to their eyes.

'What the hell...?' Rodney breathed, straightening up as Harding took them round to follow the signal. 'Oh, wait a minute...wait a minute.'

He darted forward, practically throwing the marine sitting beside Harding from his seat. He adjusted the settings of the jumper's scanning field, adding another reading they hadn't accounted for. The new scan, a three-dimensional one, showed him just what he'd feared.

'It's underground!' he squeaked.

He looked back at Teyla, seeing the horror register on her face as she digested what he'd just told her. This was why her telepathic friends couldn't find him anymore. The ship had been eaten by one of those huge underground monsters.

Harding looked across at McKay, his expression fixed although his deep swallow betrayed his true feelings. He slowed the jumper, knowing that following the transmitter was useless now.

Rodney reached out to activate a channel to the other jumpers. 'Elizabeth –'

A chorus of screams from the afflicted in the rear of the jumper cut him off before he could complete his report. He spun his seat round to see Teyla already back amongst them, trying to calm them enough to speak to them.

'What's wrong with them?'

'I do not know...I cannot get any sense from them.'

'Your friend!' a young man shrieked, seemingly in terrible pain. 'He is suffering...'

Rodney almost puked right there on the spot. 'Suffering? Is he...is he alive inside that thing?'

While the others wailed in the background, the young man continued to master his own torment to speak to them. 'No...he is not out here...I see him clearly now. He is back in Traginta Duo...with the magister...Magister Tranaedan...He is in terrible pain, and so, so afraid.'

A moment of panic passed between him and Teyla before Rodney turned and activated the radio again. 'Elizabeth. The afflicted have picked Sheppard up...he's back in Traginta Duo...at the Tranaedan house. He's in trouble. We have to be quick!'

Harding had already set their new course back to the city as Rodney had conveyed his message, pushing the jumper as hard as he could.

Elizabeth's voice broke through in the cockpit. 'We read you, Rodney. First Minister Thalaezin is going to communicate with the facilitators to ensure all three gates are open when we get there. If they're not, whichever of our teams gets there first is authorised to use whatever means you can safely employ to expedite our entry. Let's get him back, people.'

Rodney felt a hand slip onto his shoulder, and he looked up to find Teyla gazing down on him, her lips curved into a smile, but her eyes bathed in the tears of her true anguish. 'We will get to him, Rodney. He will come home with us.'

Behind her, the afflicted had fallen into some kind of exhausted stupor, their connection to Sheppard ended for their own welfare. That couldn't be a good sign, and Rodney had seen what Tranaedan was capable of the last time he'd seen Sheppard. He cursed himself again for not coming up with a way of getting him out of the man's clutches then. Now, if Sheppard didn't survive, he didn't know if he'd ever be able to forgive himself.

oooOOOooo

Just when he thought the pain couldn't get any worse, it did. The first incision had been made, and though the sedatives had taken the edge off just slightly, the pain was still there, perhaps heightened by the fact he remained fully aware of the procedure and what it was for. Sheppard pressed his forehead into the sweat soaked sheet beneath him and screwed his eyes shut as the physician prodded and poked within that opening, the sense of an unnatural pressure left inside him when the man straightened up again making him retch.

Rabbrine jabbed him with something he could only assume was meant to control that reaction, and the nausea quickly subsided to just a background annoyance compared to the other horrors being inflicted on him. The uneasy pressure in his back changed then to something else, something more sinister, something that was apparently creeping through his body – he could feel whatever was in there worming its way through tissue, setting off raw pains as it brushed past exposed nerve endings. He clutched the sheet, screwing it up in his balled fists and he ground out another cry.

'Arrrrghh! What...the hell...is that?' He tried to pull away from the sensation, not convinced he'd come anywhere near successfully doing that since his responses were still so sluggish.

'Keep still! Squirming isn't going to make any difference,' Rabbrine chastised from his position at the bedside. 'The connector is bedding in so that it can take control of your kidney function once you're connected to the machine.'

'Hurry, Rabbrine,' Tranaedan ordered. 'I've asked the other staff to stay in their rooms because we're having a routine government inspection, but the women are already suspicious of what's going on down here. I want him in place and hidden before they come down here again.'

Rabbrine shifted to the other side of the bed, and more cold liquid was slopped over Sheppard's left kidney region. Moments later, the familiar pressure then pop of the physician's blade slicing through his skin awoke another area of intense, yet detached, pain in his back. He screamed and cursed into the thin mattress beneath him, then managed to tip his head so he could look at the magister ahead of him.

'Knock me out...please!'

'I'm sorry, John Sheppard, but that's not possible. We need you awake for the final stage of the procedure when we connect your brain to the machine. The adjustments required to ensure it's fitted correctly have to be done while the patient is at least partially alert to ensure the machine's control is complete. I need you to live and breathe flying this machine. It will be the only thing you ever think of again. If we knock you out now and wait for you to wake it will slow the procedure down to the point you may not survive long enough for the connection to be made. And I'm not going to lose the only pilot I have who can fly that ship.'

The weird, excruciating prodding and pulling sensation made him scream all over again, and new beads of sweat burst out on his face and arms, running off him in streams that saturated the bedding. It felt like Rabbrine had both hands in there poking around with his insides, and then he cut in some more to make room for the next connector, the pain building to a crescendo again. 'I'm sorry...your wife's dead! Just...stop this...please!' he begged again, hating the way those words sounded, but so desperate for respite from the pain he was prepared to say just about anything.

'It's not only about my wife, it's about you coming in here and turning my world upside down, it's about your self-important friends imposing themselves on me and making me feel I'm an inferior being in my own home, and it's about that ship...that wonderful, beautiful ship. I want to fly in it more than I've ever wanted to fly any ship. You must understand that feeling, John. You're a pilot. You must understand the thrill.'

Of course he knew what Tranaedan meant, but not when he was being dissected like a frog in a high school biology lab. The hideous creeping sensation started up again, sending cold shafts and raw pain shuddering through him. His whole body began to violently quake, his temperature dropping and his lungs seizing when he tried to breathe. 'How...many...more?' he panted, needing to know this would be over soon.

'The machine will control all your major body functions, so there's a long way to go yet, boy,' he heard Rabbrine say, matter-of-fact.

The smell of burning flesh pervaded the air, then, and Sheppard realised it was his when he began to feel like his lower back was on fire. The doctor was cauterising his wounds, sealing in those intrusive metal connectors so they could become a permanent addition to his anatomy.

'We need to turn him so I can continue,' Rabbrine told Tranaedan in his usual brusque manner.

His cuffs almost instantly released and his arms dropped, dangling over the sides of the bed. They felt as if they were weighted with lead – he couldn't even lift them an inch to try to help himself. They rolled him, pain exploding like fireworks as his torso twisted in transition to his new position. His mind raced through all the possible options for what they would do next – stomach, liver, oh, God, not his heart. The trembling took hold more fiercely than ever, his vision blurring when his eyes could no longer stay focused on any one thing.

'What's wrong with him?' he vaguely heard the magister ask, though he couldn't keep him in sight as the man leaned over him.

'He's going into shock,' Rabbrine snapped, and suddenly there was a new urgency to the doctor's movements. 'I warned you he wasn't fit for surgery. Now I need to stabilise him or he'll die before I even finished preparing him for connection.'

'Hold on, John. Help is near,' he heard the sensory's voice whisper in his ear, little more than a random sigh in amongst the rushing sound filling his head as his heart pumped his blood frantically around his failing body. He sounded so far away now...so very far away. And Sheppard didn't want to hold on any more. This was unbearable. He needed the bliss of unconsciousness, no matter whether that meant the next time he woke would be to serve the magister. His eyes rolled almost uncontrollably, unable to fix on one point, a fact that made him feel as if he were tumbling around the room, thrown about in the whirlwind he thought he could hear all around him...the whirlwind that denoted his body's desperate struggle to survive. Give up, John, he ordered himself. Let it go.

He felt his arms being secured again, then a sharp prick as a needle punctured the vein inside his elbow and pumped in some other vile concoction meant to preserve him.

A muffled voice called out for the doctor to get on with it, and he thought he heard Rabbrine put up a short argument, but he was obviously persuaded to press on.

A pain struck low down on his abdomen, Tranaedan pressing down on his shoulders to stop him reacting, though his legs reflexively drew up. Someone, probably Rabbrine, though it was hard to keep track now, pressed them down and something was wrapped around his ankles, no doubt to secure them to the bed. Rabbrine returned to his butchery, but somehow, Sheppard felt detached from it now, the pain still registering, but in some bizarre way feeling as if it were happening somewhere else too far away to fully reach him.

Then something happened...noise...vibrations...plaster shaking loose from the ceiling and raining down on them all as the two men around him cried out in apparent terror. Sheppard suddenly had a reason to stay conscious, the sound of voices, voices he recognised, getting louder and closer as the physician yelled to Tranaedan that the surgery was over.

And then the room was full of people all screaming instructions, the noise mingling with that whirlwind in his head to become an almost overwhelming cacophony, his mind fazing out for a moment until a hand on his forehead, stroking back his hair, brought welcome warmth to his cold, clammy skin.

He opened his eyes to find Teyla looking down on him, Elizabeth soon beside her and yelling for someone to release his cuffs. Tranaedan must have capitulated at the sight of several angry armed marines, because his arms dropped away from the bed frame almost instantly. Elizabeth caught his hand and held it tight, telling him to stay with them, a message echoed by Teyla, over and over.

Elsewhere he could hear Ronon raging and McKay whimpering. He even thought he saw the scientist hovering in the background, eyes wide and his face white as snow.

He relaxed, knowing that if he was to die now, at least it was amongst friends who would ensure his body made it home and he wouldn't fester in this house as the other pilots had. Then, as he often did, he disobeyed an order, letting go of his tenuous grip on reality and slipping into the peaceful and painless surrealism of unconsciousness, its welcoming embrace pulling him under as his ears rang with his friends' cries, begging him to stay.