by Stargate
Deacon ran through a swift set of calculations on his panel. “About two hours. We’ll need to swing around the second moon to grab enough extra velocity, but that will set us up for dropping the sensors at the right speed, too. We’ll only need to make a couple of course corrections before we set them free.”
Ellis nodded slowly. “Outstanding… Helm, let’s do this.”
“Into the hands of Rodney McKay,” he heard Deacon mutter, “I commend my spirit.” And with that, the thrusters began to fire.
Just as predicted, the journey took over two hours. With Deacon monitoring the ship’s course, Meyers keeping a watchful eye out for potential threats and the rest of the bridge crew making sure Apollo and the program kept in synchronization, Ellis allowed himself the luxury of taking some of that time away from the bridge.
Touring the ship was a habit of his, but one he seldom got to indulge in. Apollo was a big vessel, over one hundred and fifty meters from prow sensors to drive bells, and even to walk from one end to the other could take more than an hour. Had the distance been in a straight line, Ellis could have jogged it in a couple of minutes, but the interior of the ship was almost unimaginably complex. Split into dozens of rooms and compartments, connected by hundreds of meters of corridors, gangways, service ducts and bulkheads, Apollo’s innards formed such a maze that new recruits to the ship were given photocopied maps as soon as they set foot aboard.
To be seen actually using one was to invite ridicule, but they were a fact of life, nonetheless. Ellis still had his, somewhere, as a souvenir. Nowadays, of course, he could have found his way around the ship blindfold.
Given the situation, Ellis decided to restrict his wanderings to the rearmost section of Apollo — that way, he could be back on the bridge in the shortest time should anything warrant his attention. He stopped off at the wardroom to grab a mug of coffee, setting the dispenser there to produce a brew both darker and sweeter than should technically have been possible, then took off down one of the aft gangways. One that would lead him, via a series of other compartments, to the 302 bays.
He was halfway there when he realized there was something wrong with the ship.
At first, he couldn’t even be sure what made him think so. The deck seemed steady under his feet, the constant background noise of the air-circulation and heating systems was uninterrupted, and there were no warnings or alerts. In fact, for a few minutes, Ellis remained convinced that his intuition was deceiving him. If there really was something not right with Apollo, surely he would have been informed by now?
It wasn’t until he was making his way through one of the aft service areas that he discovered what had tipped him off. It wasn’t something that could be easily seen in the open gangways or the more brightly lit sections, and even in the relative dimness of the service compartment it was hard to be sure. Ellis stood quite still, coffee mug in hand, for a long minute before he was certain.
The lights were flickering.
The flicker was amazingly subtle; not constant or obvious, but a momentary variation in brightness occurring once every forty seconds or so. Almost impossible to see. If Ellis hadn’t known the ship as well as he did, if he hadn’t made himself learn every quirk of its design and every idiosyncrasy of its operation, he would never have noticed it.
But yes, there it was again. A fluttering dip in brightness, then a slight surge, then normality again. Not random, but regular. He reached up with his free hand and keyed his headset. “Meyers?”
“Sir?”
“How’s everything up there?”
There was a slight pause, probably while she checked her readouts. “All quiet, sir.”
“Good… Look, Meyers, get one of the techs to run a power diagnostic.”
“Will do, Colonel. Is there a problem?”
He took a gulp of the coffee, but it didn’t taste all that good any more. “Looks like an intermittent fault in the lighting system. Might be nothing, but if there’s a pulse in the power grid I want to know about it.”
“I’ll get somebody on it right away, Sir. Will you be long coming back?”
“No,” said Ellis. “I won’t be long at all.”
True to her word, Meyers had the results of a full diagnostic check on the grid ready for Ellis when he returned to the bridge.
There were no faults. The grid was totally clean.
Someone less sure of himself might have put the flickering lights down to imagination, or set the problem on the back burner until a less critical time, but Ellis didn’t do that kind of thing. He was acutely aware of just how dangerous an environment space could be, and even the thousands of tons of weapons, armor, systems and personnel that made up a ship like Apollo could be brought low in a moment if even the slightest fault wasn’t checked out immediately. Ellis studied the diagnostic for a while, then decided to ignore it and do things the old fashioned way. He called up a team of engineers and told them to deal with it.
The next hour passed quickly. Apollo swung around the second moon on the course Deacon had plotted, smoothly transferring a fraction of the planetoid’s momentum to the battlecruiser. It was, in accordance with the physical laws of the universe, an equal swap: the moon slowed down while Apollo sped up. Of course, the moon was millions of times more massive than the ship, so while Apollo almost doubled its velocity, the impact on the moon was all but undetectable. Perhaps the day it finally surrendered to the gravity of its parent world had been brought forward by an hour or so, but Ellis knew he would be dust a billion years before that mattered to anyone at all.
McKay’s program warned them in good time before the sensors were due to be launched. Back when the system was being designed there had been talk of an automatic activation, but Ellis had vetoed that without a moment’s hesitation. He didn’t mind McKay’s computer program letting him know what should be done and when, but there was no way he was going to let it take over his ship. Ellis believed, very firmly, in the human element.
Which is why it was Major Emma Meyers who fired the first sensor array out into space. Ellis watched it go from the command throne, on a tablet computer slaved to cameras in the bomb bay. He saw the rack descend into position, slow on its hydraulic rams, and the clustered sensors dart free as McKay’s program sounded its alarms.
Moments later, they were gone from sight, too small to make out with their matte surfaces absorbing the meager starlight. The tiny thruster burns that would spread them out into an array thousands of kilometers across would take many hours to complete, but Apollo couldn’t stay around that long. Ellis had a report to make, and for that he needed a Stargate.
“Phase one is complete,” he told Sam Carter, just over an hour later. “You should start getting test returns from the array within a day or so.”
“That’s good to know, Colonel. I’ll make sure we’re listening for that.”
Apollo was in a new system, one several light years from M4T. Ellis had chosen it quite carefully; it was reasonably far from any predicted Replicator or Wraith activity, hopefully distant enough to avoid any confrontations. But it was also part of the Stargate matrix.
Although the battlecruiser was fitted with a subspace communications system, Ellis had decided at the beginning of the mission that he would not be using it. Subspace communications could be detected more easily than burst transmissions through a Stargate, and M4T was too close to the enemy battle lines for him to chance that. Retreating to a safe distance and using a local Stargate was the safer option by far — he’d not open subspace communications unless absolutely necessary.
Ellis had hoped that negotiations with the local populace for use of their gate would be swift. Despite what some of the Pegasus expedition seemed to think, neither he nor anyone else had a right to simply beam down to the surface of an alien world and activate a Stargate. However, as it turned out, there were no negotiations to make. The landing party reported no signs of life when they arrived, and were able to dial back to Atlantis unmolested. Still, Ellis rem
ained nervous, and found himself trying to keep the conversation as brief as possible. The sooner Apollo was away from here, the better.
The problem with the lights had unsettled him, far more than it should have done.
“So far we’ve detected no enemy activity, and apart from a slight technical problem we’re good to go here, Colonel. I’d like to be underway as quickly as possible.”
There was a pause. “What problem?” she asked.
“It’s nothing to worry about. Minor pulse in the power grid, but I’ve got a team on it.”
“Would it stop you making a slight detour?”
Ellis rolled his eyes, and tried not to sigh audibly into the pickup. He should have known. “What kind of detour?”
“We’ve traced our new guest’s point of origin,” she said, and he could hear the wariness in her voice. “There are some elements of his story which we’re having a hard time getting to grips with.”
“And?”
“And we need visual confirmation. Colonel, it shouldn’t take much time — I’ll upload the jump solution directly to your helm terminal, but trust me, it’s not too far from where you are right now. I just need you to drop out of hyperspace in low orbit and make a cursory scan of the planet.”
Ellis glanced over at Meyers, but she just gave him a kind of facial shrug. “Can’t you send someone through the gate?” he asked Carter.
“Not any more. Colonel, I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important. But believe me, this is vital. We need to know what happened down there.”
“The more I hear about this, the less I like it.” He sat back. “Very well, upload that solution. I’ll have Deacon check it out, but if there’s no problem we’ll jump there as soon as I get my landing party back.”
“Thank you.” She sounded genuinely relieved. What was going on back there? “Lower your firewalls and I’ll send the data through.”
The audio feed shut off. Ellis heard a series of faint sounds from Deacon’s board as the hyperspace flightplan was uploaded, then a chime that meant the firewalls were back up. There was almost no chance that anyone would be able to tamper with the radio signal from Atlantis, but almost no chance was not the same as none at all. The Replicators, machines themselves, were masters of electronic warfare, and there was no telling just what the Wraith’s biomechanical data systems were capable of. A piggybacked computer virus could be as deadly a weapon as a railgun or a nuke if it was allowed through Apollo’s defenses.
The thought didn’t give Ellis much comfort. Not a lot did, in these troubled times. “Well?”
Deacon tapped a few keys on his board, then frowned and pushed his spectacles a little higher on his nose. “M19-371,” he replied. “Colonel Carter was right, it’s not too far out of our way. But it is on the other side of Replicator space.”
Ellis stared at him. “We’d need to go through the Replicator battlelines?”
“No, not as such. This jump solution’s been worked out pretty thoroughly.” Deacon nodded. “I think we’ll be okay.”
Ellis could feel his teeth clamping together. “’Slight detour’ my ass,” he muttered. “Okay, plot it out on the tac map. If — and I mean if — I like the look of it, we’ll go on Carter’s goddamn goose chase. In the meantime, call the landing party. I want them off that rock and shipboard right now.”
Much to Ellis’ chagrin, the jump solution was sound. He could find no real objection to the diversion, or at least none he could safely vocalize. He wasn’t sure if the crew would think less of him if he did express his disquiet, but now was not the time to find out. Instead, he gave the order for Apollo to re-enter hyperspace, and tried to put his nameless fears to the back of his mind.
The engineering team he had sent to work on the power grid came back during the flight, reporting that they could find nothing at all amiss with the generators, the power distribution grid, or any of the associated batteries or capacitor banks. Ellis could do nothing but accept their findings — he trusted his engineers implicitly, and if they said there was nothing wrong with those systems then the fault, if there was one, lay elsewhere. Somewhat against his instincts, Ellis was forced to put the problem aside, and told the engineers to stand down, with the proviso that they monitored the grid at regular intervals.
Meyers spent some time reconfiguring the ship’s sensors for ground analysis, while Deacon ran simulations of the course home. Carter would need to know Apollo’s findings as soon as possible, but although M19 had originally been part of the Stargate matrix she seemed certain this was no longer true. Ellis, despite his feelings about the woman, saw no reason to doubt her on that, and had Deacon plot a jump solution that would allow them to call back to Atlantis without raising the wrath of either of the two great serpents.
He could only guess what the map of those two twisting battle lines looked like now, and how many systems had drowned under those bright splashes of monstrous blood.
It was a disturbing notion, and one that threatened to bring back the disquiet that had troubled him earlier. He shook it away. “Deacon, what’s our ETA?”
“We’re four minutes out, sir.”
“Right. Meyers, fire up the sensors as soon as we break out. Tactical sweep first, then orbit-to-ground as soon as we know we’re not going to get jumped on. Helm, have we got an outward-bound yet?”
“It’s queued up and ready to run, sir.”
“Good work.” He sat back in the command throne, reached down to grip the seat arms. The solidity of the metal there, the cool, hard edges under his palms, seemed to steady him. Steel was something he could rely on; smooth tempered steel and trinium armor and the cold iron ingots in the magazines of the railguns. That was something he could put his faith in, right there. It was all the strength he needed, and his fears retreated in the face of it.
“One minute and counting,” said Deacon.
“Weapons hot,” said Ellis calmly. “Shields to max.”
“Forty seconds- What the hell?”
Something on Deacon’s board was buzzing, a low, insistent drone. “Helm, what am I hearing?”
“Glitch in hyperspace navigation,” Deacon said quickly. He was already tapping out command chain, fingers flying over the keys. “I’m compensating… There!”
The drone stopped abruptly. Ellis glared at Deacon. “A glitch?”
“Minor, sir. A percent off on the timing… Breakout in three, two, one.”
The hyperspace tunnel grew an end, a disc of black nothingness that raced towards Apollo, flared, and vanished into darkness. Ellis felt the deck shudder slightly under his feet as the ship re-entered normal space. “Check our position. Run a stellar overlay, make sure we are where we’re supposed to be.”
“Sir?” Meyers had turned towards him. “Tactical sweep shows us clear. Shall I go to ground-sensing?”
“Wait until we know there’s some ground to sense. Deacon, don’t make me come over there…”
“It’s fine, Colonel,” Deacon shoved his glasses back so hard the frame squeaked. “We’re right on the money. Just a fractional rotational anomaly, that’s all. I’m correcting that now.”
“Are we in orbit around M19-371?”
“Should be coming into view now, sir.”
Sure enough, the starfield outside the viewport was turning. Apollo had come out of hyperspace in the right place, but tilted about twenty degrees off the ecliptic with a sizable yaw. To get the ship back on course Deacon was swinging the ship to starboard and executing a long-axis roll at the same time — the visual effect, with no sense of movement to back it up, was mildly disorientating. “Meyers, factor the rotation in and begin ground-scanning.”
“I just have…” She sounded hesitant, which wasn’t like Meyers at all. Ellis saw her lean towards Deacon. “Kyle, are you sure we’re in the right place?”
“Sure, why?”
She shook her head. “This can’t be right. Colonel, didn’t Atlantis say this world was inhabited?”
“They said it was
where Angelus came from.”
“It can’t be,” she breathed. “It can’t be.”
Ellis opened his mouth to ask her what she was babbling about, but then the planet rolled into view, and he forgot what he was going to say. The strength he took from steel faded, lost in the sight.
He stood up. “My God,” he whispered. “It’s on fire.”
There might have been a time when the planet could have supported life. According to the readouts on Meyers’ tactical display its gravity was near Earth normal, its rotational period at roughly thirty hours, its orbit in the sweet spot between the boiling and freezing points of liquid water. There could have been life on M19-371, once. It might have been a garden world, a paradise.
There was no way to tell. The planet was a charred ball, blackened and blasted, cracked through with threads of livid red. There were no land-masses he could see, no polar caps, no green, no blue. Just black and gray and the flickering, liquid orange of distant magma.
“No breathable atmosphere,” Meyers said dully. “Traces of oxygen in the upper layers, but not much. Nitrogen, carbon dioxide, methane, some exotics. Mostly particulate carbon.”
“Radiation?”
“Off the scale.”
“Analyze it.” Ellis stared down at the planet, watching black clouds the size of continents roil sluggishly beneath him. Where the clouds were parted he saw spots of dull light, overlapping rings, hundreds of them. Craters, no longer burning but glowing hot, vomiting up more smoke into the dead, poisoned air.
“Sir?” That was Meyers again. “I’ve got the radiation signature.”
“Spit it out.”
She took a deep breath. “Asuran weapons fire, Colonel. It was the Replicators.”
“Tell me one thing, Colonel Carter,” Ellis asked a short time later. “Were you expecting that?”
He heard her sigh. “No. Angelus told us the planet had been attacked, everyone killed, but that level of destruction is just...” She trailed off.
“What would make them do that?”
