Angelus

by Stargate

  Eventually, there was no-one left to listen.

  It was probably close to midnight when Zelenka became fully aware of his solitude. The ZPM lab was not a particularly large room, but complicated in form, and it was possible to sit in one part of it and be wholly out of sight of someone quite close by. For a few moments, as he leaned back and looked around, he wondered if anyone was still there, around one of the corners or behind a pillar, but he quickly realized he was totally alone.

  He glanced at his watch, and smiled to himself. The movie was over anyway. Apart from the city’s night staff — marines on guard, sensor operators on one of their constant shifts, anyone unlucky enough to have gotten cleaning duty — he was probably one of the last awake. There were few night-owls on the expedition. Work started early on Atlantis, and late nights were discouraged.

  Zelenka shrugged, and went back to his work. If he was honest with himself, he rather enjoyed being alone here. The stillness helped him concentrate.

  And the work required his concentration, there could be no doubt of that. Atlantis was big. Compared to cities on Earth, maybe, it wasn’t exceptional — just over four kilometers from the tip of any pier to that of its opposite twin. Taken as a single structure, though, it was enormous, and ferociously complex. If every building in Manhattan, every streetlight, every hydrant and taxicab and TV and electrical socket, every single part of that entire conurbation was part of one single system, and controlled by one electronic authority, then it might rival Atlantis as a work of technological wonder. Such complexity was what made studying the place so endlessly fascinating, but also frustrating in the extreme. The power distribution grid alone had something close to six million output nodes.

  Trying to find the source of the drain had seemed, at first, to be like looking for a single leaky pipe in a city-sized plumbing system, and when Colonel Carter had given Zelenka the task of tracking that leak down he had despaired. From the first few huge and unexplainable power drops, the problem had shrunk to its present, nearly-undetectable levels, which made hunting it seem even more hopeless. Zelenka had decided that his only hope of finding the drain was from the ZPM lab itself: it was directly connected to the main power chamber, and had uninterrupted access to the battery of Ancient devices monitoring the city’s three Zero Point Modules. Each of those tiny power sources, despite being no bigger than a man’s thigh, could power Atlantis for decades — or, if their energies were released all at once, reduce a planet to fast-moving rubble. Little wonder, then, that so much of the city’s resident computing power was devoted to watching over them.

  Zelenka had been siphoning off a fraction of that electronic attention to try and track down the drain for most of the day. One of his first ideas had been to poll a scattering of output nodes to see which were hit by the power drains earlier than others, and from this locate the source of the problem. The polling system uploaded its data to a core file: Zelenka, while running other tests at the same time, had watched the file grow in size for half a day, populating a series of graphs and maps and diagrams with its contents.

  He had given up on that when he decided that the graphs were going to stay as flat as they started, and the maps as undifferentiated. There was no measurable lag between nodes at opposite ends of the city: the pulse was, quite literally, happening everywhere at once.

  The exercise had not been a complete waste of time, though. While the data from the nodes showed no timing differences, they did show something else. Something that had filled the rest of Zelenka’s day, and left him here alone in the lab.

  There was a pattern to the drops in power that went beyond a regular forty-one second cycle, an underlying structure of breathtaking fractal complexity. It was subtle — as the pulses themselves had been almost too small to detect, so this structure was smaller still by a factor of a hundred. Only when the sensitivity of the node-sensors had been set as high as the grid would allow could it be properly seen. Zelenka had spent hours trying to filter the pattern out, writing algorithms to flatten any hint of electrical noise. System use, feedback from the sensors, even the microscopic flexion of the city’s structure due to wave motion had to be eliminated.

  The pattern remained. Now that he had found it, Zelenka couldn’t make it go away.

  Visually, it told him nothing. There was something of an eerie beauty to it, he couldn’t deny that, and he found himself watching its slow, rippling fluctuations for several minutes. But there was a signal component to the structure that promised to be of far more use. Zelenka had spent the last half an hour, just before noticing he was alone, setting up a series of frequency analyzers and pattern-recognitions systems to try and make sense of what he had found.

  The lab was very quiet. There was a faint humming from the city’s air system, and the whirring of computer fans from the tech team’s terminals and laptops, but apart from that there was nothing.

  Perhaps that silence was what gave him the idea of translating the signal component to an audio output and listening to it.

  The process was simple, a conversion of data that he accomplished almost reflexively. Then, with one more quick glance about to make sure no-one was around to hear this folly, he turned up his terminal’s speakers and triggered the signal.

  Breathy, sibilant sounds began to whisper out into the lab.

  “Hovno,” swore Zelenka. He had expected to hear static, or some meaningless pulsation, but the audio signal was something else entirely. It ebbed and flowed like waves on a distant shore, rising slowly in pitch and volume, then falling away in a series of melancholy echoes, only to hover at the edge of hearing for several long seconds before starting its inexorable climb again.

  Zelenka leaned close to the terminal speakers, listening hard. There was another level to the sound, hidden by that lonely rushing, something more complex, more structured. The underlying pattern of the signal, he guessed, but even as that rational thought entered his mind it was swept aside. What lay beneath the sound, beneath the waves, was no mere pattern.

  There were voices in there.

  Suddenly, the lab was very cold. Zelenka found himself edging away from the terminal, straining to hear what the voices were saying but dreading making out the actual words. It wasn’t easy; there were many voices, whispers, hissing over and through each other like the mindless sibilance of snakes. Dozens, hundreds of voices… He strained to hear, his skin crawling, trying not to remember the cold echoes of an attic in Prague as the whispers grew louder, edging towards comprehension.

  It was too much. He moaned in horror, reached out to switch the speakers off and almost screamed as he saw the figure reflected in the terminal’s screen. There was someone behind him!

  He whirled. Sam Carter was in the lab doorway, a puzzled frown knitting her brow. “My God, Radek. What in the world?”

  For a moment, Zelenka just sat there, heart bouncing, breath frozen in his throat. Then his lungs decided to release him, and he let out a shuddering breath. “Colonel.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” he croaked. He turned down the volume. “Yes, I’m fine. You’re up late…”

  She drew closer, looking concerned. “I’ve been up arguing with Fallon about the tech team for Angelus. I was just going to get some sleep when the biosensors flagged somebody still in here, so I came down to check it out… What are you still doing up?”

  “Working.” He rolled his seat back on its castors. “Trying to track down the power drains. I guess I must have gotten caught up.”

  “Yeah, but what in?” Carter pulled up a nearby seat and sat next to him, peering at the screen. “What was that awful noise?”

  He took a deep breath. “As far as I can tell it’s what’s underlying the forty-one second cycle of the drain pulses. There’s a very faint pattern there that I’ve been trying to identify, and it’s going through frequency analysis right now. I just thought I’d see what it sounded like.” He shivered. “I wish I hadn’t, now.”

  “I’ve
got to admit, it did sound pretty freaky.” Carter gave him a smile. “Let’s hear it again.”

  “Do we have to?”

  She nodded. Reluctantly, Zelenka raised the volume again.

  He watched Carter’s face as she listened, her forehead creased in concentration, light from the monitor playing patterns on her skin. “That’s so odd,” she breathed, finally. “It almost sounds like…”

  “Voices?”

  She gave him a startled look. “You hear that too? I thought it was just me.”

  “Whispering. And I think I may have…” He shook his head. “No.”

  “What?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Doctor, it may seem unimportant, but this situation is mysterious enough without us keeping secrets from one another. What were you going to say?”

  He straightened his glasses. “Okay. But Colonel, if I tell you something strange, will you promise not to have Doctor Keller evaluate me?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “How strange are we talking here?”

  “When I was young… Younger, back in Prague. There was a fellow student of mine in the university. Bedřich, although we called him- No, never mind.” He chuckled abruptly, then stopped, aware of how hollow his voice sounded. “One winter, Bedřich stopped turning up to his lectures. I became worried, so I visited him.”

  Carter was gazing at him quite intently. “Go on.”

  Zelenka shrugged. “His father had a large house, much larger than mine, in the Malá Strana. It had an attic… Bedřich was up there, he was spending all his time there, his father said. His wife, Bedřich’s mother, had died, you see, and Bedřich had a tape recorder.”

  “A what?”

  “One of those, what are they called? The old kind, with the big reels. He was disconnecting the microphone, letting the tapes record all the way through, and then listening to the tapes. Over and over again, listening to the blank tapes he’d recorded. Trying to hear…”

  “Hear what?”

  “His mother.”

  “Oh my God,” she said quietly. “EVP.”

  Zelenka sighed. “Yes, I read up on it later, after Bedřich went to hospital. Trying to record the voices of the dead on tape… I even listened to one of his tapes. He said it had his mother’s voice on it, but I didn’t hear her. I heard…” He paused, and looked away.

  “Radek… What did you hear?”

  Zelenka nodded at the terminal. “That.”

  Carter looked at him for a few seconds, then reached out and turned the volume down again. “Okay, now that we’ve completely freaked ourselves out, what do you say we pick this up again in the morning? When the lights are —”

  Half the computers in the lab went dark.

  Zelenka jumped up from his chair. It went skittering back on its casters. “Kurva,” he gasped.

  Carter was on her feet too, looking wildly about as the dark computers began to boot themselves up again. “What’s happened? How did that happen?”

  He shook his head. His heart was yammering behind his ribs, the pulse beating in his ears… “Oh, the pulse!”

  “The what?”

  “What I’ve spent all day working on!” He took the audio signal completely offline and brought up the timing track of the power drains. A quick look at his watch confirmed what had happened. “It’s the power drain. It shut down all the computers that were running heavy loads. Their power supplies dropped out, so they rebooted.”

  “That must mean the drain’s a lot bigger than it was,” Carter replied, staring at the screen. “Yeah, there it is. Damn, Radek, that’s a big jump.”

  “Almost ten percent below baseline.”

  “Not good. Let’s see if the next one is as bad…” She straightened up, her eyes still on the screen.

  Zelenka counted down on his watch. “Okay, we’ll hit it again in three, two one…”

  Nothing happened. This pulse was just as imperceptible as the others.

  They stayed where they were for another few minutes, waiting for a bigger spike, but none appeared. It seemed, for the moment, that the drain on the city’s power had returned to its previous levels.

  “That,” Carter told him, “is the damndest thing. But if it’s stabilized for now, I think it might be a good time to get some sleep.”

  Zelenka thought about lying in the dark, trying not to hear whispering behind the rushing of blood in his ears. “Yeah, maybe I’ll stay up a little longer.”

  “This will keep for a while, don’t you think?”

  “I hope so. But right now, I need some fresh air.”

  There was an open area on the way to Angelus’ lab; a long gallery, railed on four sides, surrounding a space in the pier amour. It was a kind of narrow cloister. McKay had mentioned it, while boasting to Zelenka about his rapport with the genius Ancient, but he had been characteristically dismissive. Zelenka, on the other hand, liked it a lot.

  He could hear the sea from here, but it was a distant, comforting sound, not at all like the signal component and its tragic rushings. There must have been a fairly stiff breeze blowing across the city tonight — he was largely sheltered from it in the cloister, but if he listened closely, he could hear it whistle past some of the upper towers, and raise waves to slap against the pier’s armored flanks. It made him think of the Vltava, and rain on streets, and suddenly Zelenka wanted very much to go home.

  He glanced up out of the opening, towards the core of the city. Hundreds, thousands of lights were on there, studding the towers, outlining their jumbled, angular forms in dots of bright gold. The highest lights were misty, almost lost to the darkness, but the center part of Atlantis was awash with them.

  It was a strange sight, alien. After years as part of the expedition, still oddly unfamiliar. It gave him no comfort to see it. There was a coldness to the city, an antiseptic, inhuman feeling that he had never experienced anywhere else. It was as though the structure of the place was completely apart from the people that lived there, unaffected by them. Sure, they could hang pictures or play movies or set up beds and bookcases, but the walls remained unchanged, the floors and ceilings stayed exactly as they would be if no-one was there at all. Zelenka gazed up at the city of Atlantis and knew that if it wished, if it gained the will, it could wipe all traces of them away in an instant.

  Humans clung to its surfaces like germs to a toilet bowl. One flush, and they’d be gone as if they’d never arrived.

  He turned away, an act that felt more like defiance than avoidance. As he did so, something moved at the far corner of the cloister.

  Zelenka froze, one hand on the cold rail, peering out across the open space to try and see who or what was there. The cloister was lit, although not brightly; panels along its walls cast a sea-green glow that was gentle on the eye, but not very revealing. There was certainly more shadow here than light, and if something had retreated into the darkness it looked very much like it was going to stay there.

  A minute passed, and then another. Zelenka stayed where he was, waiting for the movement he had seen to repeat itself, but he waited in vain. Eventually he decided that he had seen nothing after all. One of the disadvantages to wearing spectacles was the occasional reflection cast across their surface, especially when looking up at an alien city full of lights.

  He walked on, feeling rather foolish, wondering if perhaps he should invest in contact lenses. On the one hand, he might see less in the way of ghosts if he did so. Then again, wearing contacts would necessitate starting each day by touching his own eyeballs. The thought made him shudder, and by the time he reached the end of the cloister he had dismissed it entirely.

  There was an opening at the end of the gallery, leading into a short corridor. Zelenka looked down it, saw the guard station that had been set up there and thought about turning back. After all, what was he here for anyway? He had already determined that Angelus’ lab could not be proved the source of the power drains. Was he really going to walk in and accuse the Ancient of sucking the city’
s power like some kind of voltage vampire? It was ridiculous. Sometimes, Zelenka thought darkly, McKay was right to berate him. He could be a damned fool on occasion.

  Then he noticed that the guard station was empty.

  He walked up to it, puzzled. There should have been two marines posted there at all times. If either had to take a break for any reason the other would stay, and the post was supposed to be manned continuously, despite Fallon’s objections. If the two marines there had both left at the same time, and Sheppard found out about it, there would be hell to pay.

  The guard station was a prefabricated, collapsible structure from the city’s stores. Unfolded and bolted into place it formed an armored box a couple of meters square, with plexiglass panels on each side. There should be no way that the post could appear empty when it was occupied, unless whoever was inside was on the floor.

  He pushed the door slightly open, and peeked in. There was a small folding table there, set against the far wall of the box, and a couple of unoccupied seats, but that was all. No marines on the floor. There was a mug of coffee on the table, and next to that, an automatic pistol.