by Stargate
“Please, Ma’am,” he said flatly, “let us handle this,”
The other marine reached out to take Cassidy by the arm, grabbing her as she shrank back. “Doctor, I think you should go back.”
“No,” she moaned. She looked despairingly at Teyla. “Please,” she whispered. “Help me.”
“Lieutenant, let her go.” Teyla took a step closer, getting between the two marines. The one holding Cassidy had the name ‘Kaplan’ sewn above his breast pocket. “There is no need for this.”
“Mr Fallon gave us express orders,” Kaplan replied. “Doctor Cassidy has been assigned.”
“I quit,” said Cassidy quietly.
Teyla reached out to her. “Alexa, come with me. We will sort this out with Colonel Carter.”
“Something’s wrong,” breathed Zelenka. “Teyla…”
“Radek, call the Colonel.”
“I’m trying to, that’s what I meant. There’s no signal.”
“What?” Teyla reached up to her own headset. “Colonel Carter?”
He only answer was static, and a distant, sinister rushing, like breathing. Or chanting. The sound of it was awful, filled with malign intent, and she shut the signal off to avoid hearing more of it.
As she did so, Cassidy dragged herself free from Kaplan’s grip.
Teyla stepped aside to let the woman pass her, and then looked up to see that Kaplan had draw his sidearm. He must have done so terrifically fast; Teyla hadn’t even seen him move. In a split second the pistol had gone from securely holstered to being aimed, one-handed, at Zelenka.
In response, Teyla stepped back and brought her own gun up. “Lieutenant, you may stand down.”
“Give her back,” he said.
“I said stand down!”
There was a blur of movement: DeSalle, brutally quick, had reached out to grab the gun from Teyla. He was faster than she’d ever seen a man move — his entire arm was up and his hand clamped hard over the top of the gun in the exact same time it took Teyla’s trigger finger to twitch.
The gun went off into DeSalle’s face.
Bullets, despite what happened in the movies Sheppard insisted on showing her, do not fling people backwards. Occasionally people fling themselves backwards as the bullet strikes them, but that is only a reaction to the impact, not the impact itself. Teyla had seen enough men shot to know what bullets do.
Bullets kill. And dead men do not hurl themselves about. Dead men fall down.
Lieutenant DeSalle, despite the fact that the bullet had crashed clear through his skull, was not falling down. He was very much upright. His head was tilted back slightly, but as Teyla watched he straightened, and turned his ruined face towards her.
Light shone through the hole where his left eye should have been.
He let go of the gun. Teyla backed up, still aiming, utterly aghast. There was a part of her mind that was waiting for him to fall, waiting for his body to realize that half his brain was gone. Fall, she thought wildly. Fall fall fall…
He stepped back, calmly, his face still turned to her. He did so in perfect unison with Kaplan. Both men, moving as one, backed slowly and deliberately away from her.
They stopped partway up the corridor, and at the moment they stopped walking the floor shook faintly under Teyla’s feet. There was a soft grinding noise, a metallic scraping, as diagonal slabs of metal emerged from the walls just ahead of the two marines. The metal slid inwards, drew close, slammed massively and irrevocably together.
And then all the lights went out.
Chapter Ten
What Lies Beneath
When Apollo’s navigation system failed, the ship could technically have broken out anywhere. The relationship between hyperspace and realspace is not a direct one: a journey of ten light-years might take an hour in one direction and two in another, and a timing error of thousandths of a second can account for spatial displacements in the millions of kilometers. Hence the enormous complexity of the navigational computers, and the awful consequences should they fail.
The ship’s systems did, to their credit, make every attempt to ensure the survival of the crew. Even in the midst of a cascade failure they managed to send Apollo from one universe to another largely intact, rather than as a cloud of free and extremely fast-moving molecules. Not only that, but in a supreme effort of mechanical will they had held the breakout back just long enough to get the ship within range of a gravity well. This was the result of a deeply imbedded emergency protocol, one programmed to allow a vessel stricken with hyperdrive failure at least a fighting chance of survival. A ship lost in deep space, between the stars, is little more than a complex metal coffin.
That, though, was the limit of what Apollo’s systems could do. And it was hardly their fault that the system they had dropped the ship into was about the least survivable they could have found.
For one thing, the system was full of Wraith. By some minor miracle Apollo had broken out on the far side of a planet to the massing fleet, and at roughly the same time as a Wraith cruiser had jumped in to join its fellows. So far, it seemed that none of the alien ships had detected Apollo’s headlong emergence into their staging post, which was hugely lucky for Ellis and his crew. The battlecruiser was crippled. It could no more fight the Wraith than it could escape them.
The other flaw in the ship’s choice of destination was the solar system itself. The emergency protocols might have found Apollo a gravity well to drop into, but there were no habitable worlds rolling around that well. The star shining at the heart of the system was small and hot, far younger than Earth’s sun and racing towards a much earlier grave. It had planets, but none that could support life in the conventional sense; these were gas giants, jovians, titan worlds without land or water. If any terrestrial planets had formed around that hot little dwarf, the gas giants had long since swept them to dust.
Of the four jovians, the third from its sun would have been the most recognizable to terrestrial astronomers. In many ways it was much like Jupiter — like that world, it was sheathed in a thin curtain of crystallized ammonia, banded by storm systems and dotted with vast convection cells. It also shared a composition with that giant world, in that it was almost ninety percent hydrogen under the ammonia, with the remaining tenth a soup of helium, sulphur, phosphorous and complex hydrocarbons. And much like Jupiter the planet had a thin interphase layer of water clouds, at the point where the crystalline tropopause met the hydrogen-rich stratosphere.
This was Apollo’s hiding place, and had been for the past forty hours. Hovering like a bug between the hydrogen sea and the sheltering ammonia sky.
There was almost no light in the water layer. While the ammonia clouds were a mere skin in relation to the planet’s bulk, they were still fifty kilometers thick, and heavily reflective. Every few hours a convection cell would spin close enough to stir the cloud layer near the ship and send dull shafts of ruddy light spearing in through the gloom, but for the most part Apollo drifted in darkness. Even its running lights had been shut down to conserve power.
Had the lights still been active, Ellis knew they would have dimmed disconcertingly whenever the drain pulse hit.
The pulse was impossible to ignore now. When he had first noticed it, the dimming of the lights had been an almost imperceptible flicker. But it had been growing more serious ever since the breakout, slowly but inexorably, the power dipping lower with every pulse. It was as though the ship had a heartbeat, although a failing one.
Apollo was dying. And it came a little closer to death every forty-one seconds.
On the bridge, the pulse was impossible to miss. The lights were dim anyway — the ship was still on emergency power, and the darkness only made the regular drop in voltage all the more obvious. Most of the bridge crew had taken to using laptops and PDAs, rather than Apollo’s instruments. At least that way they could keep working for longer than forty-one seconds at a time.
Sharpe had two laptops taped to her control board, and was using them to
constantly monitor the ship’s position. It was a complex job; juggling the navigation computer’s wildly inaccurate timings, trying to manually recalibrate them between each pulse, resetting the readings on the two laptops against each other and the board continuously. Ellis wondered how she’d managed to keep it up for so long.
Still, it was time for another status report. “Sharpe?”
“A moment, sir.” Her fingers rattled over the keys, hands dodging between laptop and control board and back. Ellis saw her pause, look up slightly, and as she did the lights dipped. The hum of the aircon stuttered, then picked up again as the lights brightened. She knew when it was going to happen on reflex now.
They all did. It was like a water-torture, a continuous drip that wore into the senses, hour after hour…
Ellis forced the thought away. “What have you got?”
“We’ve dropped another two hundred meters, drifted six hundred bearing zero niner four. There’s a current close by, sir. We’re going to need a correction burn within the next twenty minutes.”
“Okay, set it up.” The burn, a series of thruster bursts intended to keep the ship safely in the water layer and away from any convection cells or storm currents, would have to be carefully timed. When Apollo had first entered the jovian a burn had been allowed to carry on through one of the power drains, and the results had almost been disastrous. A thruster had jammed on during the pulse, and almost sent the ship spiraling into the hydrogen layer. “Meyers? Any visitors?”
“Nothing on passive, sir.” Meyers was using a PDA to keep her data calibrated, but even with that help she had only the most limited access to the ship’s sensor suite. Much of it had been damaged or completely misaligned by the breakout, and those segments that still functioned could barely be trusted. It was all Meyers and Sharpe could do to keep the ship in place, let alone track what was going on above the ammonia clouds.
Ellis nodded, then closed his eyes briefly as the power dipped. When it was over he got up. “Anyone got any good news?”
“Maybe, Colonel.” That was Copper, the tech who had opened his scalp on a panel when the ship had broken out. He’d been patched up by a medic a few hours ago, but the bandage taped to his head had spots of crimson soaking through, and he was pale in the dim light. Ellis hoped he’d be able to deliver his good news before he collapsed.
He crossed the bridge to join Copper and the rest of the tech team, behind the tactical map. “Okay, what have we got?”
“Compression, sir.” Copper had a laptop open on one of the systems boards, and he swung it around to show Ellis what was on the screen. “These are the recorded data files from all the onboard systems — security, sensor logs, pretty much everything.”
Ellis bent to look more closely at the screen. “All this stops at the breakout?”
“Yes sir. We got jolted so hard that we lost most of the recording systems, but auto-recalibration should have set them back up before there’d been any loss.” He reached up to touch the bandage lightly, and winced. “Of course, we know that —”
The lights dimmed. Ellis sighed, waiting until the pulse was over. That, of course, was the reason Apollo was still crippled after all this time. All the systems needed for tracking down the ship’s multiple faults had not only been hammered out of true by the violence of its return to realspace, but any attempt to recalibrate them had been rendered futile by the constant pulses. Every forty-one seconds, many of Apollo’s systems returned to their factory default settings.
So far, all attempts to track the source of the pulse down had failed for that precise reason. Gross physical searches could only achieve so much. The ship’s technicians needed accurate data.
As the lights came back up, Ellis straightened. “But you think there’s something you can do about this?”
“I think so. Mischa’s been working on a compression routine that will break the recorded data into small chunks, and I’ve been programming a worm to get the routine into the data core between pulses.”
“Hold on, a worm? Like a computer virus?”
Copper tilted his head. “Not exactly. They’re synonymous with malware now, sure, but the first worm was developed to find idle processors on a network and give them jobs to do. It was a legitimate software tool.”
Ellis frowned. He didn’t really like the idea of rogue autonomous programs being given free reign in Apollo’s data core, but this was the first piece of hopeful news he’d heard in a long time. “So can this work?”
“I think so. I’ve got a copy of the worm on this laptop, off-network, and I’ve assigned it Mischa’s compression routine as a payload. We’re about to try it on a non-essential file, something that we won’t miss if it hits a pulse and goes AWOL. We just need you to give the word.”
“It’s given. Let me know as soon as you have any results.”
Copper saluted briskly, and Ellis saw his pallor deepen suddenly as the sudden movement jarred his injured head. He reached out to steady the man as he swayed. “Maybe we’ll go easy on the protocol for a while, yeah?”
“That sounds like a good idea, sir.”
Ellis left the technician to his programs, and headed back towards the command throne. As he passed the tactical map he saw Meyers look up and beckon him over, and continued past the map to join her.
Meyers half-turned in her seat. “Colonel, I think we’ve got a problem.”
Her voice was low, little more than a whisper. Ellis leaned closer to her and responded in kind. “Another one?”
“Sorry. I know it’s the last thing you wanted to hear, but…” She lowered her voice still further. “I can’t be sure right now, not a hundred percent. But some of the sensor readings I’ve been able to get have shown something coming towards us. I’m picking up energy spikes like you’d not believe…”
“Wraith?”
She shook her head. “Sir, I think it’s a storm front.”
“How bad can that be?”
“Bad. The way the convection cells are starting to bunch up, the level of the spikes… We’re probably talking about a wavefront of twisters about as wide as Mars, traveling at several hundred kilometers an hour and causing lightning strikes a thousand times bigger than anything we get at home. If we get hit by that, it’ll shred us.”
“Dammit. Sharpe, are you hearing this?”
“Yes sir. And before you ask, no, we can’t get out of the way in time, not in the shape we’re in now. The pulse is getting worse — at this rate it’ll be impossible to make correction burns within eight hours, and with the main drives offline…”
“So unless we can fix the pulse before the storm hits, we’re done for.”
Sharpe nodded. “Our only alternative would be to go up and over it. We might just about be able to manage that, but we’d break cover. If any Wraith were looking in this direction…”
“Let’s keep that as Plan B for now.” He stepped back. Neither Meyers or Sharpe needed to be told to keep the information to themselves; they were quite aware of when such things should be spoken of in hushed tones and when they should be broadcast. Right now, there were only a few people that needed to know, and a lot more who would find the prospect of a ticking clock dangerously distracting.
Ellis found himself gazing out of the viewport. There was almost nothing to see, only the merest hint of glow from above, and the rest just gluey darkness. Even the stars were hidden from him, up above the ammonia. But out there, somewhere in the murk, was a raging storm front as big as a planet. When it arrived, it would bring light — sunlight as it scoured the cloud layers above and below, and an army of lightning strikes. There would be no missing it. When the storm was ready for them, it would announce itself.
All the better, then, not to be around when it did.
Copper’s compression worm was not an instant success. Ellis watched it fail nine times before it successfully retrieved a file. Even on the tenth time, it was able to snatch just a piece of data before the pulse killed it.
&nb
sp; But it was a start. Information had been downloaded from the data core. It might only have been a fragment of a backup of a mission log, but it represented a breakthrough. If Ellis could have given Copper and his team a few hours downtime as a reward, he would gladly have done so.
He couldn’t. There simply was no time. He could feel the storm coming.
Instead, he set Copper’s people to work. Over the next hour, thousands of worms infiltrated the data core, splitting files wherever they could find them, compressing the split chunks, and hauling the encoded fragments into protected areas. A dozen laptops logged into these areas between pulses, uploading and recombining the data. There was no orderly plan for the worms, no priorities or targeted areas. At the rate Copper’s people were working, it was all they could do to keep replicating the worms and sending them, wave after wave, into the ship’s memory.
There were casualties. If a pulse arrived before a worm had completed its task, the worm and anything it was interacting with at the time was lost. But with a success rate of over ninety percent, and more technicians working to recreate the lost data as the missing files became apparent, Ellis realized that he was almost starting to hope.
The first data he asked to see was footage from Apollo’s internal security cameras. Major Kyle Deacon was still missing, and no trace could be found of the man. Although he loathed to admit it, Ellis knew there was a very good chance Deacon’s disappearance was not unconnected with the ship’s plight.
The footage was uploaded into a laptop. Once this was done, Ellis thanked Copper and his team for their efforts so far, told them to keep at it until they dropped, and then took the laptop away with him. This wasn’t something he wanted to view in public, at least not yet.
He didn’t want to see it alone, either.
Ellis was in his cabin, connecting the laptop to the ship’s power grid when Meyers keyed open the hatch. She raised an eyebrow. “Is that wise?”
