by Karen Miller
“This,” Sheppard croaked, “is getting real old, real fast.”
The gun muzzle was vibrating. He lowered the weapon slightly, took one hand off the grip just long enough to wave the door open, then stepped through backwards as it slid aside.
A shadow loomed to his left. He spun, brought the gun up one-handed and came within a hair’s width of putting a bullet through Rodney McKay’s forehead.
The man yelped, floundering sideways, shielding his head with a computer tablet. “Whatever I did, I’m sorry!”
“Rodney?” Sheppard lowered the gun shakily, making sure his finger was off the trigger. “What the hell are you doing out here?”
McKay peeked out from under the tablet. “Trying not to get shot in the face?”
“Were you in my room?”
“When?”
“Just now.”
The scientist was putting his arms down, a look of wary indignation on his face. “What in God’s name would I be doing in there?”
“I dunno.” Sheppard holstered the gun, feeling spectacularly foolish. “Watching me sleep?”
McKay just stared at him.
“Okay, forget that part.”
“I’ll try. It won’t be easy.” McKay peered through the doorway. “Did you seriously think someone was in there?”
Sheppard waved the door closed. “Just my mind playing tricks,” he muttered. “It’s been getting pretty good at that lately. What are you doing out here, anyway?”
“Looking for you. I need to talk to you about something.”
“Can it wait?”
McKay’s eyebrows went up, as if the concept was entirely alien to him. “Wait? Why?”
“Because I’m tired and I feel lousy.”
“Oh. Then no, it can’t wait.”
Sheppard sagged. “Fine. Just… Not here.”
McKay appeared to ponder for a moment. “We’ll go to the lab. It might be easier if I show you, anyway. I’ve got some stuff running you might want to see.” He frowned. “As long as you promise not to point the gun at me again.”
“I’m not promising anything. It’s been that kind of a day.”
The pressure in Sheppard’s skull had receded somewhat by the time he reached McKay’s lab. In its place, though, was a new concern; his left arm had begun to twinge intermittently, firing blunt jolts from shoulder to wrist whenever he moved his hand.
He had fallen asleep on it, no doubt. “I need a vacation.”
McKay didn’t pick up on the quote. “I won’t argue,” he replied, stopping in front of the lab door. “You look bad.”
“Thanks.”
“Actually, you look worse than bad.” McKay was edging slightly away. “You’re not contagious, are you?”
The door slid open onto near-darkness, studded with constellations of fluttering LEDs; the racks of servers lining one wall must have been engaged in furious activity. Sheppard went in, found the nearest chair and dropped into it. “Keller said I wasn’t sick.”
“And you believed her?” McKay strode past him, tapping keyboards as he went. In his wake, a succession of flatscreen monitors lit up from standby, panels of pale blue light suspended eerily in the gloom.
Sheppard looked around. “Where’s Zelenka?”
“Who knows?” McKay had stopped at a nearby bench, its upper surface a small forest of cables and computer equipment. He tugged a keyboard out from under the mess and rattled off a rapid series of commands. “Asleep, probably. Are you going to have time to finish Sam’s report?”
“You heard about that?”
“Mmm.” A larger monitor had awoken under McKay’s ministrations. There was some kind of graphic on it, a complex 3D structure rotating slowly within a mesh of hair-fine gridlines. “All clear within eight hours, wasn’t that what she said?”
“No, that’s what I said.”
“Oh. I must have remembered it wrong.”
Sheppard stiffened. “What did you say?”
“Look, just try to focus.” McKay finished typing, stabbing at the Enter key with what Sheppard considered to be a wholly unnecessary flourish. “I really need you to think back.”
“Not exactly my strong suit right now.”
“John, this is important. Ronon won’t talk about it, and I can’t even find Teyla. Can you remember anything at all about leaving that city?”
“Well, at least you’re not asking me how I got in.”
“I don’t care how you got in. I need to know if there was anything at all unusual about the gate you used to come back.”
“Damn it, Rodney.” Sheppard glared at him. “I’ve got the IOA breathing down my neck, Sam poking me about it every five minutes, and now you’re on my case too?” He stood up, a little too fast. The motion sent a thorn of pain into his wrist bones. “Don’t you understand? Remembering hurts! I’m doing everything I can not to remember!”
McKay looked grim. “You need to start.”
“Why? Why is this even important?”
“Because,” said McKay, “I’m pretty sure that when you gated back to Atlantis, there was something already in the wormhole with you.”
There was a long silence. Finally Sheppard gathered his wits. “That, uh… That sounds kind of crazy.”
“Zelenka said the same thing. Then he said I sounded kind of crazy. Which may be part of the reason he’s not here. We, ah, kind of had words…” McKay shrugged. “You know what he’s like.”
“What he’s like.”
“Point is, I knew something was screwy with the gate after you three came back, you know… The way you did.” McKay had the good grace to appear slightly apologetic when he said that. “So I checked the timestamps. Your transit time was one point eight seconds longer on the return trip.”
Sheppard frowned, mulling that over. Theoretically, the time it took for an object to travel between Stargates had a fixed correlation to the distance between them. It often didn’t feel that way to the object itself — the difference between subjective and objective time within the confines of a wormhole was still a matter of fierce debate — but to an outside observer, the time out should equal the time back precisely.
Unless something catastrophic happened between journeys. “Could an endpoint have moved?”
“Not unless it made a sixty light-year hyperspace jump without anyone noticing. And given that both of them are planets…” McKay shook his head. “I had a few other ideas. A hypersurface deformation in Minkowski spacetime, some kind of interplanar anomaly affecting energy density, maybe even a Klein flaw…”
John Sheppard was no slouch when it came to higher mathematics, although he usually chose to keep that fact to himself. But McKay was talking about realms of theoretical physics that would have made his skull ache even without the mystery hangover. “Rodney, you mentioned something earlier about focusing. Remember that?”
“What? Oh, sure. Anyhow, I went over the sensor logs, and it turns out the event horizon threw a howling fit for that extra one point eight seconds. Spewed out a whole storm of exotic particles and resonant frequencies just before you came through. I thought it was just noise until I started picking it apart.”
Sheppard gestured at the desk. “Is that what all the spaghetti’s for?”
“Yeah, I had to temporarily beef up the transient storage. This is complex stuff.”
“Not just noise then.”
“Anything but. The particle emissions are pretty solid evidence of a hyperdimensional incursion.” He went back to the desk, tapped out another command string. A new graphic appeared on the monitor, a flat disk, ripples and peaks crisscrossing its surface in a morass of intersecting waves and interference patterns. “I’ve run these simulations, oh, nineteen times? Same result each time. Something with too many dimens
ions became temporarily coterminous with the subspace bridge.”
Sheppard went over to stare at the screen. The animated disc was fascinating, hypnotic, oddly beautiful. It looked like a pond in a hailstorm. “Too many dimensions… Sounds like it’s not from around here.”
“Definitely not local. And I can’t imagine how anything from a parallel plane can intersect with ours by accident.”
“Are you saying it wanted to be here?”
McKay shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe it’s predatory. Maybe it was trying to study our dimension through the wormhole interstices and fell in — press your face against too many windows and I guess one of them’s bound to open. Point is-”
“What’s that?”
“Hm?” McKay glanced up, following Sheppard’s gaze. “I told you, a simulation.”
Sheppard was moving slowly around the desk, his eyes fixed on the large monitor behind. The graphic on it was still turning slowly within its cage of gridlines. “I’ve seen that.”
“Huh? How could you possibly… Hey, have you been in here?”
The graphic had been edge-on to Sheppard when he had first looked at it, but now his simulated viewpoint was angled enough for him to see its true form: a flattened torus, surrounded by a labyrinth of fine threads, a complex disc of channels and chambers.
The number of channels connecting to each chamber varied, but only multiples of three. “I was there. Rodney, that’s a map of the damn city.” He turned back to McKay, aghast. “Where did you get that?”
“Extrapolated backwards from the particle burst.” McKay was looking intently at him, obviously concerned but, at the same time, strangely observant. “John, trust me. That’s not what you think it is.”
“I know what it is, damn it. I was there. We were all there. Ask Teyla, get Ronon in here…” He trailed off. McKay had touched a control on his desk, and the torus was falling away from him.
The gridlines thinned to a haze as the graphic’s scale decreased exponentially. In moments the torus was joined by two neighbors, themselves webbed together by their own network of channels. And just as swiftly, three had become nine, and then dozens, then too many to count, a galaxy of whirling points arcing down and away in an awful, vertiginous swoop.
Until, finally, there were no individual channels and toroids anymore. Just a single, ghostly structure rotating in front of him, lumpy and convoluted, strange and complex and utterly alien.
But for all its strangeness, John Sheppard knew exactly what he was looking at.
Atlantis, as though understanding Sheppard’s need for solitude, chose not to trouble him with company as he left the lab. He walked its corridors alone, and in silence.
The implications of McKay’s theory were unthinkable. He simply could not imagine some predatory entity lurking in the wormhole’s throat like a spider in a tunnel; it flew in the face of everything he knew about gate travel. Even McKay’s assurances that he was massively oversimplifying the concept didn’t make it any more palatable. Whether an alien mind had been inside the subspace bridge or dimensionally coterminous with it made little difference. The idea still made his mind rebel.
It was just possible, he supposed, that he, Teyla and Ronon — or the stream of energy they had been converted into by the Stargate — had collided with a wormhole anomaly on their way back from the city. He certainly felt as though he’d collided with something recently, although a Mack truck fitted his mental image more accurately. Such an event might explain both the extended transit time and the adverse effects he and his companions had suffered on their return.
But to consider the anomaly as having conscious intent was a horror too far, despite what glittered in the darkness of McKay’s lab.
The extrapolation graphic filled every monitor. Sheppard raised his fingertips to the largest screen, brushing the warm glass as if trying to reach past it, to feel the structures rotating beyond.
It was alive, there was no mistaking that. He was no longer looking at geometry, but biology: nine interwoven lobes of labyrinthine tissue, three branching cords twisted one around the other in unsettling, yet graceful symmetry. “Is this what it looks like? What its brain looks like?”
“God no. That’s just a CGI metaphor. It’s what a hyperdimensional brain would look like if it was compressed into four-dimensional spacetime.” McKay’s face was lit by the graphic, shifting planes of blue ghosting his skin. “In reality, it would look like-“
“A city,” Sheppard breathed.
No, if anyone was oversimplifying, he decided, it was McKay. The city and the anomaly could not be the same. The particles emitted from the event horizon prior to Sheppard’s return must have come from the city itself, or been reflected by it, confusing the data.
Sheppard couldn’t recall how long he had been in the alien construct, but it had been a lot longer than one point eight seconds.
He stopped where he was. “Sorry Rodney, this isn’t Fantastic Voyage. No Raquel Welch for you.”
He had spoken aloud. There was no-one to hear him. The part of Atlantis he had wandered into was utterly deserted, shadowed and silent. Not even the wall lamps seemed to be working.
Sheppard glanced around, puzzled. Had he really been so lost in thought?
There was light ahead of him, a pale slab in the gloom; a junction, he guessed, the corridor in which he stood meeting one that was at least partially lit. He started towards it, eager to be out of the darkness, and as he moved he saw a figure step out from around the far corner.
Suddenly, John Sheppard was very glad not to be alone here. Atlantis was a massive structure, and the total number of humans inhabiting it almost vanishingly small. Still, to go for so long without seeing anyone had unsettled him.
“Hey,” he called, raising a hand.
The figure didn’t move, just stood watching him, silhouetted by the light. Sheppard found his pace slowing.
“Who’s there?”
There was no reply, no reaction. Just a faint fluttering around the figure’s outline, as though it were made of smoke.
Sheppard stopped dead in his tracks. “You,” he snarled.
Fury boiled in him, sharper and hotter that the pain in his skull and arm. He surged forwards. Before he knew it the pistol was leaping in his hand, the hard flat snapping of gunfire echoing from the walls as he put three shots through the figure’s torso, one through its hazy head.
It darted away, leaving threads of itself to twist in the air.
He broke into a run. The knowledge that gunfire had no effect on the creature meant nothing to him. He didn’t care how it had tracked him down, found its way to Atlantis to torment him a second time. He didn’t care that it was probably going to kill him. He just wanted to get his hands on it, to rip the gaseous stuff of it apart. One final payment for all the woe it had caused.
Sheppard hurled himself around the corner, half expecting to find the shape’s inky hands reaching for his eyes again, but it was already at the next junction. It was taunting him, playing with him. Staying just out of reach until he was exhausted, before turning back to wreak ruin on him.
He was long past caring. He sent another couple of bullets up the corridor to herald his approach, and kept running.
Again, as he drew close the figure breezed away, to the left this time. Sheppard scrambled to the place it had been, barely keeping his balance as he ducked around the wall, then sprinted towards the next junction.
There wasn’t one. Just black sky, and the stark, merciless light of a million stars.
Sheppard stumbled out into fresh air. The corridor had terminated abruptly, a low archway meeting what looked like an open gallery. He was on one of the piers. His solitary walk from McKay’s lab had taken him much further than he had thought.
He reached the gallery rail and stopped there, panting.
It was very dark, the lapping sea around him black and unseen, but to his left the great towers of Atlantis glowed from within, spearing the air like glittering shards of crystal. There was a breeze, cool and soft, and he could smell the tang of salt and ozone.
The creature had vanished. Presumably it had tired of the game. Sheppard slapped the rail angrily. “Damn it!”
“John?”
He whirled. Teyla Emmagan was emerging from the arch.
Sheppard sagged back against the rail. “Oh man, am I pleased to see you.”
“And I, you.” She smiled. “You look-“
“Bad, I know. People keep telling me.” He glanced quickly left and right, but there was no sign of the creature. “Those things are here. One of them was just ahead of me.”
“I know.” She nodded. “It’s all right, John. You can put the gun away.”
“Where have you been? I haven’t seen you, not since…” He had been about to say since we got back, but before the words could reach his lips he realized they were meaningless. He had no actual memory of returning to Atlantis. Nothing, if he was honest with himself, before waking in the isolation room.
“I am sorry,” Teyla replied. “I needed to be alone, to try and make sense of what has happened.”
“Hope you’ve had better luck than me.” There was a movement at the far end of the gallery. Sheppard turned to see Ronon Dex striding towards him. “The gang’s all here, huh?”
“Good to see you too.” The Satedan joined him at the rail. “Nice night,” he muttered. “Pity, really.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because it’s not going to last.”
As he spoke, the air beside him grew dark.
Sheppard cursed, leapt back. Three of the shadow creatures were forming around him; one slight and slender, the others larger, inky silhouettes coalescing from the sharp night air. He brought the gun up, but before he could fire Teyla’s hand was on his forearm.
