“You’re sure of that?”
“Well, as sure as I am of anything. I mean, this hyperdrive is hardly standard equipment. I’m not entirely sure why is doesn’t blow up every time we try to use it, let alone how much power it eats. But so far, it’s been consistent. As long as it stays that way, then yeah, I’m sure.”
“‘No’ would have been quicker,” Dex told him.
“But it wouldn’t have been as accurate.”
“Guys,” warned Sheppard. “Come on, I don’t want to be out here any more than you do. Probably a lot less. Let’s pick our last planet and get going, yeah?”
“Sounds good,” Dex replied. “What are our choices?”
McKay had a laptop jacked into the jumper’s systems. He hit a control and a stylized star map appeared on the HUD. “Here,” he said, pointing. “M1Q-432. And here, M7Y-119.”
Dex snorted. “You people chose the galaxy’s most confusing way of naming worlds.”
“Hey, come on,” said Sheppard. “There’s a lot of planets. All the good names get used up really fast, and then you have to visit some colony and tell them you’ve called their planet ‘X’ or ‘New New Jersey’.”
“Still beats naming them after… What are those things on cars?”
“License plates,” said McKay. “And trust me, I know what you mean. Back in the Milky Way we at least started them with P for planet and M for moon, but somehow even that got screwed up.”
“Fine,” said Sheppard, pointing at the two planets in turn. “Chunky Monkey and Rocky Road. Which one do we go for?”
McKay leaned close to the HUD, rubbing his chin. “Rocky Road’s closer to the biozone sweet spot. If I was an Ancient, that’s the kind of temperature range I’d want to be living in.”
Dex blinked lazily. “The Monkey’s closer to us.”
“Sorry Rodney.” Sheppard grabbed the controls and concentrated on the jumper’s engines. The boards lit up under his hands. “Chunky Monkey it is.”
“Banana and walnuts?” McKay screwed his face up. “Please.”
He was wearing the same expression all the way into hyperspace.
Conventionally, puddle jumpers were not hyperspace-capable. Their engines were as efficient as any other piece of Ancient technology, but they had never been designed to bridge the gap between universes. If it hadn’t been for one very important feature, the jumpers would have remained nothing more than rather cramped shuttlecraft.
The feature that transformed the puddle jumpers were their cross-section. With the engine pods retracted, the ships were just small enough to fly through a Stargate.
Obviously, that had been enough for the Ancients. They had possessed armadas of starships, after all, each of them fitted with hyperdrives among their many wondrous technologies. There had never been a need for them to upgrade the jumpers to handle superlight velocities. It would have been like fitting a rowing boat with wings.
However, for the members of the Pegasus expedition, a hyperspace-capable puddle jumper was nothing short of a holy grail. It was just a pity there was only one.
And that it didn’t work very well.
The jumper-scale hyperdrive had been designed by Rodney McKay. Unfortunately, he had not been himself while designing it — an encounter with a piece of Ancient technology had caused a massive acceleration of his mental capacity, among other powers. Luckily, he had been able to reverse the process before it killed him, but it left him with several new designs that he could barely understand. He had been so much more intelligent when he had created them.
Out of those designs, the engine presently hurling the jumper through hyperspace was one of the more comprehensible, now that his intellect was back within human ranges. He had even made it work, after a fashion. But despite continually tinkering with the hyperdrive, McKay still had little faith in it. As a result, neither did anyone else.
If Carter had been able to contact Apollo, she would not have entertained the idea of sending anyone out in the jumper. But Ellis had missed his deadline, and Apollo could not be raised on subspace comms.
That, to John Sheppard, was a cause for concern. Ellis wasn’t the kind of man who missed things if it could possibly be avoided. There could be any number of reasons why he might not have reported in, and for why the ship could not return communications hails. But for both of those circumstances to arrive at the same time required reasons that were far more rare.
Sheppard couldn’t think of any good ones.
His first thought had been to take the jumper out and use it to look for Apollo, but Carter had vetoed that immediately. There was no direct evidence that Ellis was in trouble, for a start, and of course no indication of where the battlecruiser might actually be. That, coupled with the more immediate threat of Angelus and his project, was enough for Carter to requisition the jumper for a recon mission.
And so Sheppard found himself piloting a ship no bigger than a compact Winnebago through the silver-blue vortices of hyperspace, in search of a planet named after a flavor of ice-cream, while Dex and McKay did their best to bicker throughout the entire length of the trip.
Sheppard had a bad feeling about Chunky Monkey as soon as he saw it, and when McKay came forward from nursing the hyperdrive, he said so.
“Well,” McKay replied, “I’ll admit it’s not pretty.”
“Not pretty?” Sheppard squinted down at the planet, trying to see something appealing about the surface. “I’ve seen prettier Wraith. What the hell’s wrong with it?”
Once again, he was sure they had not found Eraavis. The planet seemed ill-equipped to support life of any kind, let alone Angelus and his subterranean children. And while it was ugly, the world did not show any obvious signs of heavy orbital bombardment. On the contrary, rather than being attacked, it looked more as if it had been left alone to rot.
What he could see of the land masses were a roiled, greyish brown. There didn’t seem to be any surface vegetation at all, which of course would rule out a breathable atmosphere. Oxygen is a highly reactive gas, and left to its own devices will bind to other chemicals as fast as it is able. In order for a world to sustain breathable air, there needs to be something keeping the oxygen in circulation. On most worlds, that was green plants.
On Chunky Monkey it was vast, slimy mats of sea-borne algae.
“Pretty small diameter,” McKay read, staring at his laptop screen. “Gravity’s a shade higher than Earth normal, though, so it must have a dense core. Atmosphere is… What do you know? You could breath it.”
“I’m not sure I want to.” From altitude, the seas looked sludgy and toxic. Only the country-sized algal colonies gave them any color at all, and that color was a sickly, phlegmy green. “Look, Rodney, this place is a dump. Angelus wouldn’t have come from here, would he?”
“Sheppard’s right,” said Dex. He was leaning forwards in his seat, looking at the world’s surface with a slightly queasy expression. “This is still a waste of time.”
Behind him, McKay started. “Oh my God,” he breathed. “Guys? Maybe this one isn’t a bust after all.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s a power signature. Something down on that slimeball is generating power!”
The energy trace McKay had picked up was faint and intermittent, and when Sheppard flew the cloaked jumper in a high, slow pass over the site of it there seemed to be nothing about the rocky landscape below to suggest its source; just the wrinkled, wattled ground, a ragged curve of coastline and the oily, thick wash of algae-riddled sea.
A lower, slower pass once again failed to reveal anything unusual. It was only when Sheppard hovered the jumper just a hundred meters up could he make out any signs of structure, and then only hints, blurred by rain that sluiced down from the mud-colored clouds and ran in streams off the viewport.
McKay’s scans revealed nothing more concrete. “I’m just not picking up enough to get a fix on,” he complained. “There’s something down there, but I’ve got no idea what.”
Dex peered out of the viewport, studying the ground. “Angelus said his people lived underground. Maybe it’s an entrance.”
“They lived underground to hide from the Wraith. Leaking a power signal like that… It’s like leaving the front door open.”
“Or having the front door blown off,” the Satedan replied grimly. “I can see blast marks.”
Sheppard stood up, trying to get closer to the port, to see past the distorting rain. “I can’t see anything.”
“We’ll have to land.”
McKay blinked, his eyes wide. “Really? I mean, actually land?”
“You got a better idea?”
“We’ve got no idea what’s down there!”
“And we never will if we stay up here.” Dex grinned wolfishly at him. “What are you going to do? Head back for home and when Carter asks if you found Eraavis, tell her ‘maybe’?”
“He’s right,” said Sheppard. “Nothing else for it. Trust me, Rodney, this place gives me as bad a feeling as it does you, but I don’t think we’ve got the choice.” He gripped the controls again, taking the jumper up higher, and then edging it slightly inland. The ground rose there in a series of twisted, bonelike formations, but behind them was a relatively flat area of something very like shale. He aimed for that, letting the jumper turn like a falling leaf as it dropped, finally settling onto the wet ground with its rear hatch facing the site of the power leakage.
There was an ugly sliding sensation as the ship put its weight down. The shale must have been slightly unstable, slick below the jumper’s belly, but after a final, jolting twist it became still.
Sheppard throttled back the drives, eased the power down until only enough to run the cloak filtered from the generator. The interior of the jumper darkened slightly, and the noise of its workings, so constant and pervasive that he had quite forgotten it was here, faded to nothing.
The three men sat, quite still, listening to rain patter on the viewport.
“Anyone bring an umbrella?” said McKay, after a time.
“If it really worries you, there’s rain cloaks in the survival kit,” Sheppard told him. “But I don’t intend to be out in it for that long. We’re about two hundred meters from that trace. We’ll double-time over to it, see what we’re looking at and go from there, okay?”
“Well, if you think there’s no other way...”
“Yeah, sorry.” Sheppard got up, and began pulling a black tactical vest on over his uniform. He’d already checked it a dozen times during the trip, when Dex and McKay were arguing over some impossible point and he’d needed to go to a quiet place in his head. Going over the vest, making sure its multiple pouches contained all the ammo and equipment that they should do, testing the webbing and the reinforced stitching, positioning the custom-reinforced slabs of Kevlar… It had been like a mantra for his hands, a muscle-memory he could retreat into.
It also meant that he could pick up the vest at any time and be sure it was ready.
In the aft compartment McKay was readying his own gear, stuffing the laptop into a backpack already filled with gadgets and spare batteries. And several MRE ration packs, Sheppard noticed, allowing himself a wry grin. He’d lived off the things himself often enough in his life, but he had no love for them. McKay, in fact, was about the only person he knew who would eat MREs by choice.
Dex had no such concerns. If the prospect of hiking in the driving rain bothered him, he didn’t show it. He simply checked that his blaster was fully charged, shook his dreadlocks out of his face and got up from his seat. “I’m ready.”
“You’re always ready.”
Dex seemed to weigh this up. “Pretty much. Anything wrong with that?”
“No, no…” Sheppard finished strapping up the vest and twisted himself this way and that, making sure it was snug but didn’t restrict him. “Just spare a thought for us slower folks, okay?”
He moved to the back, past McKay, to where the weapons were held. He thought about taking one of the M4s, but he wasn’t sure if he’d need to be fighting in a confined space. The P90 was a lot shorter, so he took that, along with a pair of grenades and as many spare clips as he could fit into the vest. “Rodney?”
“I’m good.” Sheppard glanced over to see that McKay already had a P90 held across his chest.
“Remembered the ammo this time?”
McKay glared. “Yes!”
“Just asking.” He threw a grin back over his shoulder at Dex, and then keyed open the rear hatch.
Almost the entire aft wall of the ship hinged downwards, folding outwards to form a ramp. Sheppard heard it’s top edge crunch into the shale. “Guys? Watch your step on that stuff, okay? Even if it wasn’t raining, it sounds unstable.”
“So unstable and slippery, right, got it.” McKay walked nervously down the ramp, stopping just below the rear overhang of the jumper’s hull. “Wow.”
Sheppard joined him, frowning up at the muddy sky. There was no wind at all, and the rain was coming straight down, a merciless, unceasing wash of grimy water spattering and bouncing off the rocks and the broken ground and the far edge of the ramp. He could smell it in the air, a swampy musk, like the wet fur of a dead animal. Ahead of him, the rocks twisted up into eroded lumps and mounds, eaten through by the rain into a maze of glistening holes, and in the distance, past the hiss and spatter of rain, he could hear the sea, sluggish and thick, slapping aimlessly at the bleak, colorless shore.
“God almighty,” he breathed. “What a dump.”
“You sure this isn’t toxic?” Dex was hanging back, slightly. “Seriously, what is that smell?”
“Rotted algae,” McKay replied. He stuck a hand out into the rain, and quickly pulled it back in, shaking it. “Warm,” he muttered, then brought his palm up to his nose to sniff it. His nose wrinkled. “Aw crap.”
“Oh, what the Hell.” Sheppard ducked his head and trotted down the ramp.
A blood-warm fug of rain washed over him, coating him almost instantly. It wasn’t heavy, like a monsoon or the sudden thunderstorms of home, but it was continuous. It felt almost artificial, like a chemical shower. There was a greasiness to it that made him want to wash.
“Come on, will ya?” He beckoned to McKay and Dex, who were still under the overhang. “Let’s get this over with!”
Grudgingly, heads held low, they followed. Dex keyed the hatch shut as he stepped off the ramp, and in a moment, the jumper had vanished.
No, not quite. Sheppard couldn’t help but smile as he looked back towards the ship, a hand cupped over his eyes to protect them from the rain, and saw the upper surface of the cloak outlined in greasy sparkles. The rain was bouncing right off it.
Not even the Ancients, it seemed, could beat the weather.
It took them longer than Sheppard would have liked to reach the power trace. As he had predicted, the going was treacherous — where the ground hadn’t been pulverized into multiple layers of shifting, razor-edged shale, it was granite-hard and slippery with rain and algal grease. The three men had to plant their feet carefully, making sure their boots had grip on each step before moving onto the next. To cross the two hundred meters from the jumper to the trace took them almost ten minutes.
By the time they got there, Sheppard was soaked through. “You know something? I am really not looking forward to being locked up with this smell all the way back to Atlantis.”
“Be glad it’s only half a day,” Dex growled. His dreadlocks were soaked onto his head. “But I swear, if McKay’s got his numbers wrong again and we end up stranded, having to breathe this stink until we’re rescued?”
“Don’t think about it,” Sheppard advised him. “Really, it’s best not to.”
They had reached the foot of a low hill. On any other world it might have been impressive, soaring, but Chunky Monkey’s incessant rain had beaten it low; its hunched peaks were almost invisible through the wet air, the shattered, powdery margins of its slopes shelving messily into the ground until it was almost imp
ossible to see where it began.
Dex had been right about the weapons fire, though. From close up, Sheppard could see where the shale had been scooped away by blast effects in a dozen places along the slope. The weather had disguised much of the damage — in such a naturally broken landscape it was difficult to tell which craters were the result of erosion and which of explosion. Like a hurried murderer, though, the rain hadn’t covered everything. There was evidence enough of some bloody crime, here.
Sheppard stooped to pick up a chunk of shale. It had another piece fused onto it, the two rocks welded into one by the intense heat of some violent energy discharge. He showed it to Dex, who nodded silently, then threw it away.
The rock clattered eerily as it struck ground, the vibration of it sending rivulets of jagged pebbles rustling and skittering down the slope. It must have startled McKay, because he popped up a few meters down-slope, clutching a PDA in one hand and the P90 in the other. “What was that?”
“Nothing,” Sheppard called back to him. “Found anything?”
“Yeah. This way.” He turned away and began trudged along the edge of the slope. Sheppard swore under his breath and began to follow him, picking his way as quickly as he could on the treacherous ground.
A few minutes later, he stopped. McKay was standing near a bulge in the hillside, a ragged swelling that emerged from the slope like a blister. “It’s here,” he said. “Can you see that?”
“See what?”
“That shape!” McKay pointed at the blister.
Sheppard covered his eyes again, blinked rain from his lashes and tried to see what McKay was talking about. For a moment it eluded him, but then he saw an edge — fractured and crumbled, half covered by broken rock and rivulets of streaming water, but unmistakably an edge.
Once he had seen that, the outline emerged from his confusion like the solution to a puzzle. Seconds later, he couldn’t understand why he hadn’t been able to see it.
There was a structure emerging from the side of the hill. A broad shape, flat and faceted, maybe thirty meters across, ten high. It had been clad in the same gray, sodden stone as the rest of the landscape, but here and there parts of the covering had fallen away, revealing a dark smoothness beneath.
STARGATE ATLANTIS: Angelus Page 20
