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"Stone will not protect your people," Teyla objected. "Not from the Wraith."
"It might keep them out of the crossfire," Sheppard offered from behind her. Teyla ignored him, but the dragonman nodded.
"Today it is the dragons that must protect them," F'lar said, and with one hand indicated the rows and vics of brightly-colored fliers arrayed behind him. Two hundred. Two hundred, where three thousand had once flown, but still ready to ... to what? They couldn't outfly darts. They didn't have weapons that could pierce Wraith armor. They had fire and claws.
"The Wraith will go straight for the Hold," she started to say, and halted at the sound of the gate opening behind and beneath her. She wheeled. "They're coming," she hissed.
"We didn't need you to tell us this time," Ronon said, as her team found cover and took aim.
"You sure we shouldn't be in the jumper?" McKay asked, for the third time.
"Positive," Sheppard replied.
Teyla checked behind her for F'lar, but he had vaulted astride his waiting bronze and now held his fist aloft in a signal to his wingmen. One after another, seven vics of dragons took to the sky.
"They've gotta have something," McKay mused, mostly to himself. "If they fought back and lost, the Wraith would have wiped them out a long time ago. Right?" No one answered him. "Who left us that note, anyway?" he demanded, a little louder. "How did they know the Wraith were coming here, now? How did they find Atlantis?"
The slosh of the gate and the whine of darts interrupted him. Teyla braced herself, following the second of a dozen darts with the sight line of her P-90.
"They speak as we do," she thought she heard F'lar say, and startled, she glanced away from the dart to look for the dragonman. But no, he was at three or four hundred feet altitude and moving. There was no way she could have heard him...
"But I do not understand them." No, the voice was deeper.
"They come this way!" Another voice, and just as a dart veered, bringing its weapons to bear, a dragon vanished from its path. Another dragon dove to strike, wrenching the dart from its flight path and sending it into a near-fatal tailspin.
"They cloak?" McKay exclaimed.
"They teleport!" Sheppard answered.
They speak as we do. They speak as we do, but I do not understand them. Images of the interior of a Hive ship, and dart controls, and a Queen flashed through her mind.
"They hear the Wraith," Teyla murmured. "All of them. We have underestimated them."