STARGATE ATLANTIS: Angelus

by Peter J Evans

  Those must have been heavier weapons, he thought. M60s, emplacement-mounted to protect the city against air assault by Wraith darts. He could hear the difference in the tone of those weapons, the deeper rattle of their fire as opposed to the high, rapid stutter of smaller guns. The first people to open up on the hybrid had used P90s and sidearms.

  As the tracer began to strike the hybrid’s flanks, it hesitated, as if waiting to see if any damage was inflicted. A moment later, though, it moved on. “It’s not working,” Sheppard breathed. “Got to get something bigger down there.”

  “Give them time,” Carter replied.

  As she spoke, something in the city flashed, and a trail of smoke reached out to touch one of the hybrid’s legs. There was a spark of yellow fire, a cloud of smoke whipped away by the wind. Fragments of debris spun away, arcing down like metal rain over the city. Another rocket lanced up, striking the main body of the thing. Two more.

  The hybrid was being hit from all sides by machine gun fire and AT-4 missiles, but it still wasn’t slowing. Sheppard could see pocks of damage on it now, scorch-marks from rocket explosions, small fires burning on its armor. But the effect was minimal. “It’s too damn strong.”

  “Something’s happening,” said McKay suddenly, pointing.

  Sheppard followed his finger, and saw that a part of the hybrid’s forward body had opened up. An instant later, a thread of impossible brilliance connected the opening to a building that had been firing tracer rounds; the entire upper floor of it simply turned to fire, expanded, blasted apart in a shattering explosion of metal and glass. Sheppard heard the thump of it, felt the blast in his guts, watched burning pieces of debris carving tracks of smoke through the clear air.

  The thread went out, vanished as abruptly as it had appeared. “Holy God,” Sheppard whispered. “Where did it learn to do that?”

  “It knows everything the Replicators know,” groaned McKay. “It knows how to build beam weapons, everything.”

  “Yeah,” spat Sheppard. “And we gave it a goddamn lab and all the time it needed, didn’t we?”

  “I should have told Apollo to stay,” Carter whispered. “If I hadn’t sent them away we’d have 302s, railguns…”

  “You couldn’t have known.”

  “I should have done,” she replied, her voice dead. “I should have known.”

  Sheppard couldn’t answer. She was in charge. This had happened on her watch. He knew there was no blame to be appointed here, but how could he tell her that? If he could not convince himself that he had not brought this on Atlantis by abandoning Elizabeth Weir to her fate, how could he comfort Carter in this dark hour?

  There was no comfort to be had. He turned away, ran to the doors.

  Carter called after him. “John? Where are you going?”

  “Up,” he told her. And kept on running.

  Chapter Twenty

  Old Friends

  After spending so long in the hyperspace-capable jumper on his way to and from Chunky Monkey, Sheppard had hoped not to be inside one of the machines for a while. Still, few of his hopes came to fruition these days; he was rapidly coming to terms with that.

  And so, as he took a standard jumper up and out of the bay, he did not allow himself to hope.

  In the time that he had taken to get there and take off, the hybrid had moved another few hundred meters. It had used its beam weapon again as well — another building was a raging inferno from the middle levels upwards. Seeing it, Sheppard cursed. Buildings could be repaired, he knew; at times, structures within Atlantis had been returned to pristine condition within startlingly short periods of time. But the lost lives horrified him. People were dying down there, in that great metal city, people he had spoken to, known, liked. In one single flare of energy, lives were being snuffed out.

  As a soldier, death in battle was a fact he was intimately aware of. But he knew that it was not something he could ever fully accept. Human lives had their worth, he had decided long ago. And any one of them was worth more than the ravenous ambitions of the abomination stalking towards the city core beneath him.

  He brought the jumper round in a long, swooping arc, testing his flight path above the hybrid. It grew in the forward viewport, the full awful shape of it spread out in front of him, then it whined away beneath him and out of sight. He wrenched the controls about, bringing the ship around for another pass.

  His communications board lit up. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Sam, I’m going to drone this thing. It’s too close to the core to use drones from the launchers, but if I can come in low enough there shouldn’t be too much damage.”

  There was a pause. He knew her instincts would be to order him back, but there was no point to that and she knew it. Besides, he was right. “I’ll send out some more ships.”

  “Wait until I give this a try. I’d like to be the only thing in the sky at the moment.”

  “Don’t take too long.”

  The hybrid was almost in his sights again, the center of a web of tracer fire and rocket trails. He thought a drone into life, and as he did so the comms board lit up again. “Sheppard.”

  He didn’t immediately recognize the voice. “Get off the damn line, I’m busy.”

  The board went dark. Sheppard gave the mental command to launch the drone, sent it hissing away from the craft. Instantly his mind opened to encompass it; in one version of himself he was hauling the jumper up and over the hybrid’s bulk, in another he was guiding the drone right towards it. There was no conflict involved, no effort. The Ancient gene he carried had attuned him to the technologies involved as completely and accurately as he was attuned to his own fingertips.

  He spun the jumper around in a turn that made his chest ache, in time to see the drone strike the hybrid squarely in one leg. There was a sheet of flame, a globe of brilliant light expanding into a bubble of debris, and the leg sagged away. The material above and below the strike point was white-hot, glowing liquid like magma, and as it cooled into yellow it stretched, softened. The leg broke away, the clawed end of it striking the deck below, catching, so the entire severed limb stood, tilted, crashed down like a tree.

  “Not bad,” he grinned. “Not too bad at all.”

  The hybrid’s beam weapon seared up at him and hammered into the side of the jumper.

  The machine slewed wildly sideways. Sheppard’s hands were ripped from the controls by the impact, and his seat spun, almost tipping him out. He dragged himself back to the controls in time to see the city core racing up to meet him, grabbed the yokes and hauled them back. The jumper leapt under him, climbed sickeningly fast. Something hit its belly, a deafening screech of metal on metal, and then he was in the air again and heading for the sky. He leveled off. “Okay then. Complacency in combat situations: not good.”

  An incoming communication crackled through his speakers. “Sheppard, you cannot win this.”

  It was the same voice as before, but this time he recognized it. “Go to hell, Angelus.”

  “I am there already. In order to finish this, you need to join me.”

  Sheppard didn’t answer. The hybrid was ahead of him again. It was in the city core, among the buildings. He slowed, looped the ship around. There was too much structure in the way. “Come on,” he found himself murmuring. “Incey wincey spider, get up that damned water spout…”

  The beam lashed out again. It missed the jumper, but it was close; he felt the fizz of static from its passing, and the ship rocked under him. He increased speed, took the jumper a couple of kilometers out to sea, then around in a long, wave-skimming turn.

  The hybrid was climbing the tower.

  It was a hundred meters up, reaching out with one leg, spearing its clawed foot through the shell of the tower before doing the same with another. It would have been slow progress had each stride not been fifty meters long. Sheppard watched it grow in his viewport, marveling at the strength of the thing. It was one thing to drag itself across the pier with those
titan limbs, quite another to haul itself vertically up a smooth surface.

  Still, it was in the open now. He thought up another drone, launched the brilliant thing towards the hybrid’s body. If it fell from the tower, the buildings below would suffer terrible damage, but what else was there to do? He could only attack this armored nightmare, and keep on attacking it, until one or the other of them was no more.

  The drone sliced through the air, completely on target. Sheppard smiled as he thought it through the last hundred meters, half a second…

  The hybrid whipped a limb back, insect-quick, a car-sized piece of tower wall still impaled on the end of it. The speed was enough to fling the debris directly into the path of the drone. The explosion atomized the chunk of plating, washed the jumper in fire as the ship went right through it. Sheppard was battered back into his seat and then forward with massive force into the controls. He hauled the yokes back, a cry of fury ripping out of him.

  Water sprayed up. He was out to sea, slicing the tops from waves. The jumper had a limited automatic pilot, he knew: either it had cut in at the last moment, or he was an even better flyer than he thought he was.

  He turned the ship around again, but something was wrong. The controls were loose in his hands, the engine note wavering behind him. He checked the drones mentally and came back with no returns. The weapons were offline.

  And the hybrid was most of the way up the tower. Almost at the level of the ZPM room.

  If it used its beam weapon to cut into the tower, it could shut the city down in a second. Or strike a ZPM and send most of Atlantis into orbit in pieces no larger than a suitcase.

  There was only one thing left to do, Sheppard realized. And the less time he had to think about it, the better.

  He aimed the jumper at the hybrid, brought the engines up to maximum power, and locked the controls.

  Maybe the creature simply didn’t believe what he was trying to do, or maybe it was so close to the source of power it craved that it had forgotten him in its lust. In either case, it didn’t try to defend itself. The jumper struck it between the upper joints of two legs, in its open flank.

  The impact was gigantic. Sheppard’s last conscious memory was seeing the rear door of the jumper racing up towards him, a dreadful sense of tumbling, free-fall, and then all was noise and darkness.

  “Sheppard?”

  There were no words in him, no breath, no thought. He was still, and unable to be other than still.

  “Sheppard?”

  He couldn’t move to wave the voice away. It pained him in ways he could not describe, but all he could do was endure it.

  “Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard.”

  “G’way,” he mumbled. His mouth was full of something coppery and foul. He opened his aching jaw and let some of it fall out. He felt it splash warm on his chest.

  Light filtered in through closed eyelids, and there was a rocking sensation. Somewhere above him, a deep, organic groan. The sound was massive, heavy, like a great boulder poised above his head. He didn’t like it at all.

  “You have to open your eyes.”

  He did. Doing so was an effort, and it hurt. And when he had them open, what they saw still made no sense.

  He was looking at chaos; a twisted, mangled space of deranged complexity. Part of it close to his head was metal, some recognizable and some completely alien to him. Other parts were pulpy, fleshy, crimson and pulsing. There was as dreadful smell in the air, like the inside of a rotting carcass, and the space around him was hot and foully damp.

  He tried to move, and found that he couldn’t. A mass of pulsing silver tubes was running over and around him, holding him against a wall of debris. As he watched they slowly retracted, slid away, and he fell, gently onto something that had once been a puddle jumper floor.

  “Get up,” the voice said. “We don’t have much time.”

  “Until what?”

  “Until the hybrid wakes up.”

  He knew the voice, now. “Angelus, you are the goddamn hybrid.” He looked around, still trying to make sense of the cramped space around him. “Okay, I’ll bite. Where am I?”

  “Partly inside the hybrid. Partly in the crater it made in the southwest pier when it landed. Partly in the remains of your ship. John Sheppard, I commend your bravery, but not your common sense. Did you really think that a simple mechanical impact would destroy this creature?”

  “It always works in the movies.”

  “As Colonel Carter said to another man recently, this is not a movie. Sheppard, you have only stunned the creature. I was able to take back some measure of control when your ship struck it, and managed to cushion your fall. And I can talk to you now. But this situation is not one that will last once the hybrid regains control of its core functions. When that occurs, the space you are in will collapse, you will die and then everyone in the city will die soon after that.”

  Sheppard got to his feet. Every part of him hurt. “I don’t understand. Why are you even talking to me? Why don’t you just eat me and get on with chewing up the city?”

  “That can be explained more easily if you step through the hole to your left. Between the jumper’s engine module and that section of flooring.”

  Sheppard peered to his left. In the dim, ruddy light pervading the space, he could see an irregular patch of darkness. “If I don’t?”

  “My fate is sealed in either case.”

  Above him, the hybrid groaned again. Sheppard muttered a curse under his breath and clambered through the hole.

  Beyond it was another space, no less jumbled. The floor here was steeply angled, part of the crumpled deck of the pier. The impact of the jumper must have knocked the hybrid a considerable distance, Sheppard realized. Not just down from the tower, but clear of the city core altogether. If he ever made it out of here, he decided, he would love to see film of that. He hoped a security camera had been pointed in that direction when the jumper hit.

  There was something on the far wall of the space, moving fitfully. It was high up, and embedded in a wall of tangled debris and pulsing biomechanical organs. Sheppard peered at it, but couldn’t make out its shape in the meager light. He searched around in his tacvest pockets and found a small LED penlight. Luckily, it had survived the fall in better shape than he had.

  In the bright beam of the light, Angelus looked down at him.

  The false Ancient was far from the man he had once been. There was little more than a tattered remnant of him up in the wall; a curl of spine, a distorted cage of ribs, a few other sundries that shook and twitched among the wreckage. Most of the remnant’s frame was not bone, but glistening metal, the same bright, liquid silver of the hybrid’s internals, but there were a few shreds of Angelus’ face adhering to the nodding skull.

  In the midst of the glitter, a single eye looked down at Sheppard, and the ragged frame of an arm moved in fitful greeting.

  “I apologize for my appearance,” Angelus said, although the voice didn’t come from his ruin of a face. It issued from everywhere. Sheppard didn’t want to think about the mechanism that formed it. “I was almost completely absorbed. This is all that I’ve been able to reconstruct in the time I’ve had.”

  “I’ve been in better shape myself.” Sheppard felt at his hip.

  “Your sidearm is elsewhere,” the remnant said, a slight sigh in his voice. “I thought that removing it would save the time otherwise spent by you emptying it into my face.”

  “Can’t blame me for wanting to.”

  “Indeed, I cannot. I brought untold ruin to your door. But there is no time for recriminations. You have to destroy the hybrid.”

  “Yeah, you know what? I’d love to!” Sheppard looked around for a weapon to hit Angelus with, but there was nothing loose in reach. That was no accident, he was sure. “But I’m kind of out of options here!”

  “Only because you will not listen. Together, you and I have the means to end this, but you must trust me first.”

  The word stopped S
heppard in his tracks. “Trust?”

  “Sheppard, I am not the hybrid, not in the sense you believe I am. It made me from itself, but I have only recently become aware of that.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Listen to me. Who makes the best liar?”

  Sheppard shook his head, helplessly. The surreal nature of his situation was rapidly robbing him of reason. “I give.”

  “The best liar is one who believes his lies. Sheppard, when I came to you I was Angelus. Everything I told you was true…” The Ancient’s voice was strange, almost wistful… There was a sorrow to it that stabbed at Sheppard, despite the derangement all around him. “My history, my origins, my children. Everything.”

  “It wasn’t true. That’s bull. You didn’t come from that planet!” He pointed upwards, a random direction. “There’s no way you could have made it from there!”

  “Of course not. Sheppard, don’t you understand? The hybrid needed to get to Atlantis. It needed to be left there, alone and undisturbed for long enough to regain its strength after the Asurans damaged it. While it was escaping its birthplace, it accessed the memories of Elizabeth Weir and used them to create the perfect bait, the perfect cover story. It invented Angelus!”

  Sheppard stopped looking for a weapon. He turned, slowly, to look back at the remnant. “Are you telling me you didn’t know?”

  “Angelus was a construct from beginning to end, a pretty prize that your people couldn’t help but take into their arms. A Trojan horse, to use a human phrase… It learned what to do from Doctor Weir’s uploaded mind. Her memories are part of the collective’s database.” The arm waved sluggishly. “But in order to deliver that prize, it built me from itself. Gave the memories and form of the Ancient called Angelus to me. I sought out the Apollo believing I was who I said I was. That what my memories told me had happened had really happened.”