STARGATE ATLANTIS: Angelus

by Peter J Evans

  She could feel the floor moving as she ran, could hear shuddering impacts against the walls. There wasn’t just one source of it, but many. It felt like the very stuff of Atlantis was springing to violent life around her.

  The two technicians had moved to the other side of the gallery, along with one marine. The three of them were actually ahead of Carter on their way out: she saw them flinging their welding masks aside as they ran, the marine shouting at them, telling them to move faster…

  The floor ahead of them burst like trodden fruit, splitting upwards in shards. From within came something whipping, a blur of movement, a great nest of mindless, thrashing serpents, looping and coiling and lashing too fast for her to see. Norris skidded right into the heart of it, and was gone in an instant. Behind him, Bennings and the other marine went scrambling back the way they had come.

  Carter hadn’t realized she had stopped to watch until MacReady dragged her out of the way. She felt herself being shoved bodily into the corridor, the Major taking up position in front of her, dropping to one knee and firing his P90 back into the gallery. She saw the flailing things struck, sparks and fragments whipping away over the rail.

  She snapped her own sidearm up, flicked off the safety and emptied the gun into the mass.

  Bennings and the last marine were running up the other side of the gallery. Carter could feel the drumming of their feet as they ran.

  And then she remembered that the deck was far too solid for her too feel that. Something else was making the floor shake.

  From the corners of her vision, metal appeared.

  “Blast doors! Everybody get back!”

  The end of the corridor was shrinking, cut into an octagon by the sliding doors. Bennings was almost there, she could see his terrified face as he saw the octagon contract into a diamond ahead of him. If he dived for it, Carter thought wildly, he might make it. He might almost make it.

  He wasn’t going to make it.

  A gout of matter splashed from the wall beside him, ripping the metal as it vomited out into the air. Carter saw it shine wetly in the morning sunlight for a split second; it was a limb of raw flesh and pulsing metal, of silver and gristle, and it had Bennings off his feet before he could scream. It lashed at him, coiled around him, wrenched him off the deck and into mid-air.

  He reached out to her, in those final seconds before the blast doors met, hands clawed, face imploring. Had there been breath in his lungs he would have shrieked, Carter had no doubt of that, but the limb was around him too tight. All he could do was flail and squirm, twist in its awful grip as it dragged him away.

  And then he was gone, sealed away behind the smooth, silver wall of the blast doors. All Carter could see now was her own reflection, white with horror.

  It was some time before Macready could pull her free of its gaze.

  Up in the control room, several minutes later, Carter and Zelenka stood at the sensor terminal and watched Palmer’s city map swoop towards the lockdown zone again. It stopped swooping a lot earlier this time.

  “It’s grown,” he told them quietly. “Almost exactly doubled in size. And that unknown functionality we detected has increased as well.”

  “What about the…” Carter searched for suitable words, ones stripped of emotion. “What’s in there?”

  “It seems quiet now. Nothing on visual.”

  “A runner from my lab says that the vibrations have dropped back to their previous levels,” said Zelenka. “So really, all we did was get its attention.”

  “Maybe.” Carter undid the straps on the tactical vest and shrugged out of it, glad to be free of its weight, its constriction. “On the other hand, maybe it was about to do that anyway. Expand its territory, I mean.”

  Zelenka frowned. “That’s a scary thought. If the lockdown area has doubled in size in about… How long has it been? Five hours? If it’s a geometric progression, that would mean…”

  “Oh God,” Carter muttered. “Thirty hours. It would enclose the city core in thirty hours.”

  There was no way that could be allowed to happen. The core contained everything that allowed Atlantis to function — the control room, the ZPMs, even the infirmary and most of the living quarters.

  And the Stargate.

  “We’d lose control of the city,” she whispered. “Everything. This… Tumor, would take Atlantis right out from under us.”

  “What can we do?”

  Carter thought for a moment, then tilted her head towards the internal balcony overlooking the Stargate. “Out here.”

  He followed her, plainly puzzled. “Colonel?”

  “Sorry. I didn’t want to say this in there, not yet.” She walked up to the rail and leaned on it, looking down to the smooth, raised floor of the gate room. “Radek, how much explosive force would we need to blow off the west pier?”

  There was a moment of pure silence. Then: “I’m sorry?”

  “Look, I know that sounds extreme. It’s a worse-case scenario, but right now I’m having trouble thinking of anything else. I wasn’t kidding when I called that thing a tumor — this city has a malignant cancer, eating away at us from inside the lockdown zone. It’s infiltrated our vital systems to feed itself, it can defend itself against us, and it’s growing. We don’t have much time left.”

  “So, to continue the medical analogy, you’re talking about amputation.”

  “I guess I am.”

  He puffed out a long breath. “Well… Back when we thought the Wraith were going to take the city, I modeled the effect of the self-destruct system on Atlantis. That broke the whole city into pieces, though…” He rubbed his chin, deep in thought. “Seriously, I don’t think you could remove a pier with anything less that ten kilotons.”

  “Seriously?” Ten kilotons would only be a little less explosive force than that of the Hiroshima bomb. Letting something the size of Little Boy off inside the city wasn’t something she wanted to do. “That would wipe us out.”

  “Almost certainly. The piers are tough, you see… Atlantis is constructed of fantastically strong alloys. It has to be, to hold together in flight. If they were made from conventional materials, all the piers would still be on Lantea. They’d never have survived the takeoff stress.”

  “Damn,” she said. “Could we shrink the shield? Activate it, but draw it in until it covers the city core and leaves the piers exposed?”

  “It’s possible. The last time that happened was when we left Lantea, an automatic response to the power drain. I suppose we could try to contract it intentionally this time.” He put his hands into his jacket pockets, looking uncomfortable to even having the conversation. “But Colonel, what are you going to use as a bomb?”

  “Drones,” she said. “A massed drone launch, take them straight up and then right down onto the pier. If we hit it hard enough, we could sever the entire structure.”

  “You know, I’d never thought about using drones against ourselves before.” His eyes were a little wide, but she could tell he was mulling it over. “Perhaps you wouldn’t even need to remove the whole pier. If you launched enough drones, aimed them right at the lockdown zone… With the shield to protect the city core, we could cut structural loss down to no more than six, seven percent of the city.”

  “That’s great!” smiled Carter. Then the smile fell away. “Oh my God, what am I saying? That’s not great at all… I’ve been in Atlantis three weeks and already I’m going to blow six percent of it apart…”

  There was a movement behind her. She looked back and saw Palmer there. “Colonel? Something’s happening. We’ve got an incoming wormhole.”

  “What? Have you got an IDC?”

  “It’s a jumper.”

  As he spoke, the gate activated.

  There was a hissing, a liquid metallic growl that filled the gate room. A ring of glittering quantum foam appeared at the inside edge of the gate, whirled inwards to form a membrane that erupted out into the gate-room, a billowing horizontal splash. The splash paused, then
recoiled, dragged by its own field stresses into a vertical mirror, a rippling plane of tension a billionth of a millimeter thick and untold light-years long. The event horizon.

  The gate was open. A few seconds later the angled nose of a puddle jumper split the mirror.

  The jumper decelerated smoothly, coming to a halt in the middle of the gate room. Behind it, the event horizon lost cohesion and spun away to nothing, the gate suddenly a dark, empty ring once more. Carter caught a glimpse of John Sheppard through the jumper’s viewport just before the ceiling irised open and the craft fled upwards and out of sight.

  “Radek,” Carter said bleakly. “What am I going to tell them?”

  “Everything,” he said. “And as quickly as you can. Like you said, we don’t have much time left.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Phage

  Rodney McKay felt thoroughly sick.

  His nausea wasn’t the result of the unending smell of Chunky Monkey’s algae-laden rain, although the quick shower he had taken had done little to get the reek of the stuff out of his clothes and skin. Surprisingly, it also had little to do with the thought of what was lurking out on the west pier, in the center of what people were calling the lockdown zone. The thought of that was terrifying, certainly, and McKay wouldn’t argue that there was a queasy sense of violation in the thought of something so cancerous, so vigorously alive insinuating itself into the city’s structure. But no, what really had his stomach roiling was the two days he had spent in the center of that enclosed, diseased area, working on what he had thought of as the cutting edge of high energy physics.

  Setting up to translate the nanite code he had downloaded from Laetor helped him forget that, for periods of several minutes at a time. But every now and then, while he worked, some train of thought would lead his mind back to that time, and a wash of nausea would sweep over him and leave him in a cold sweat.

  It was only a matter of time, of course, before Zelenka saw it happen. “Rodney?”

  “What?”

  “Is everything all right? You don’t look so good.”

  He waved Zelenka away. “I’m fine. Just keep… Doing whatever it is you’re doing.”

  “What I’m doing is monitoring the unknown functionality around the lockdown zone,” Zelenka snapped. “For your information, while you were out doing whatever it was you were doing I’ve located a series of antiphase pulses that —”

  “Yeah, yeah.” McKay swallowed hard a couple of times. The server he was setting up for the nanite code was almost complete; the stack of high-capacity drives installed, the decompression and translation routines ready. His main concern now was with the output — normally he would have downloaded all the translated information to the Atlantis main servers for storage, then sorted through it by relevance later. But things were a lot more difficult now. Not only couldn’t he use a networked server for the raw nanite code, but he couldn’t even have the output go anywhere online either. There was the constant suspicion, now, that Angelus had hacked into the network and was watching the city’s data traffic. McKay couldn’t discuss important information over the communication system, and he couldn’t send important data, either. It was immensely restricting, having to work in whispers and mime.

  He sat back, running his hands through his hair and clasping them at the back of his neck, trying to get some of the kinks out. Being cooped up in the puddle jumper for so long hadn’t done his spine any good at all.

  Zelenka was still looking at him. “Dammit, what?”

  “Are you ill? Maybe you should get Keller to check you out.”

  “I’m not ill, okay? It’s just been a rough couple of days…” He glared at Zelenka. “What the hell are you looking at me like that for?”

  Zelenka shrugged, and returned his attention to the program he was working on, an algorithm for restructuring the shield in case Carter went ahead with her plan to launch drones into the lockdown zone. “I don’t know.”

  “Yes you do! You think I’m one of those things, like you and Teyla saw.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You didn’t have to!”

  “Would I be sitting here if I thought you were?” Zelenka didn’t take his eyes off the screen, just kept typing out his command strings. “I just asked if you were okay. You look a little…” He flicked a glance over at McKay. “Peaky.”

  Yeah, well. You’d look peaky too if you’d —” He broke off and jerked upright, almost knocking his seat over. “Jesus, what was I doing down there?”

  “Rodney —”

  “No! Okay?” He pointed a feverish finger at Zelenka. “No! You didn’t spend any time down there… I was working with Angelus for two days, and we were doing stuff! I’m sure of it… The algorithms he was generating were just, I dunno, magnificent! Okay, I know it was only preliminary modeling, but in terms of compression rations, the encoding…” He trailed off, his eyes widening. “Oh my god.”

  “What now?”

  “Carter was saying he can project false images… In the briefing, those medical scans she showed us. What… What if he was doing the same thing to me?”

  Zelenka gave up on what he was doing and spun his seat around to face McKay. “What are you babbling about?”

  “What if all my experiences down there were fake?”

  “That’s ridiculous… Rodney, I studied the surveillance footage myself — it’s just image manipulation of an extremely advanced kind. Pixels, that’s all. There’s no way that he could create a false memory.”

  “Are you sure?” McKay felt short of breath. The lab, with its gloomy lighting and flickering terminals, was closing in on him like a vice. “Those marines you saw. What if they didn’t know they weren’t real?”

  “Rodney, you’re being ridiculous.” Zelenka frowned. “I think you’re also hyperventilating. You need to sit down.”

  “Ridiculous, huh?”

  “Yes. There’s no telling what happened to the marines — you said in the briefing that you encountered Replicators who had been altered, infected by this chimera, this hybrid. Not copied as evil clones. What happened to those marines was probably the same thing.”

  McKay blinked at him. “You think so?”

  “If you’re worried, get Keller to check you out.” He went back to his workstation. “If there’s a diagonal scratch on your x-ray film, then you’ll know.”

  “Did she check Cassidy? She was in the with Angelus for a while.”

  “Not as long as you. And yes, Keller checked her out. She’s fine.” Zelenka’s expression darkened for a moment. “Physically.”

  “Okay…” McKay took a couple of deep breaths. “Okay, you may be right. And yeah, I could go down to the infirmary, might put my mind at rest…”

  “Unless there’s a printer malfunction,” said Zelenka, his voice devoid of emotion. “Something that puts a scratch on the film somewhere.”

  McKay narrowed his eyes. “You’re an evil little man, did you know that?”

  Zelenka didn’t reply. McKay stood where he was for a moment, then retrieved his chair and sat back down. “Maybe you’re the fake instead. Angelus built you specially just to make me nervous.”

  “In which case,” said Zelenka, giving him a nasty sideways look, “it’s working really well, isn’t it?”

  There came a time, when McKay started to download the nanite code from his laptop, that he no longer had anything to do. He realized that it probably wouldn’t be for long, but until the translated information started to build up in his output store, all he’d be doing down in the lab would be staring at swathes of raw code coursing down a monitor screen and trying not to get into a fight with Zelenka.

  Oddly, the thought of some time to himself was no respite. He didn’t want to be alone with his thoughts, and neither did he want to waste the slack period on useless make-work, not while the hybrid was no doubt busy with its own loathsome projects at the heart of the lockdown zone. So instead of going to the mess hall, or having a bath to try
and rid himself of some of the Chunky Monkey smell, he went to find Sam Carter.

  She was in the control room, which was no great surprise. Since returning to the Atlantis McKay had learned just how different life there had become for everyone: the city had been taken to a state of alert and had remained that way. There was no downtime any more. All marines were active and either on guard duty or inducted into Teyla Emmagan’s army of message runners, while the science staff were all working on problems that related, directly or indirectly, to the thing on the west pier. Even the support personnel were involved in emergency procedures.

  And Carter was coordinating them all. The pressure on her must have been immense.

  McKay almost felt guilty about intruding on her, but as soon as she saw him she gave him a tired smile and beckoned him over, and he decided he might well have been providing a welcome break for her.

  They went out onto the internal balcony, overlooking the Stargate. Across the open space McKay could see that Sheppard and some of his marines were in the conference room, talking animatedly. The multiple doors were still open. “I guess he’s not discussing anything private,” Carter ventured.

  “Either that, or it’s because of the smell,” said McKay sniffing his own sleeve and grimacing. “This stuff doesn’t come off.”

  “What was it again?”

  “Rotted algae. I tell you, I’ve been to some weird places since taking this assignment. But that planet has got to be one of the most, I dunno, yucky that I’ve ever seen.”

  “Yucky,” repeated Carter, smirking.

  “You know what I mean. We’ve been to all kinds of planets. Most of them are pretty nice, considering. I mean, the Ancients didn’t put many Stargates on worlds that weren’t habitable. And there are some that are dangerous, or really harsh, or whatever… Chunky Monkey wasn’t any of those things. It just rained all the time and it smelled bad.”

  “Let’s hope it was worth a few showers,” Carter replied. “How’s it going with the nanite code?”