Lorne had risen, too. “Ember. This is the stuff?”
The Wraith dipped his head. “Yes. We should begin at once, if it is as bad as you say —”
“Hold on.” Lorne raised a hand. “Side effects? Hazards?”
“As far as we can tell, none. It does not harm human skin, nor does the aerosolized version affect breathing.” Ember bared teeth in what might have been an attempt at humor. “It is slippery underfoot. We would all be well advised to step carefully.”
“Doc?” Lorne turned to Radek, who shrugged.
“That’s good enough for me.”
“Ok,” Lorne said. “Start with the computers?”
Radek nodded. “Yes. Though what a liquid will do to them when the cases are already degraded —” He broke off, knowing it was a futile protest, and beckoned for Ember to follow him.
They had placed the worst-affected items in one of the side offices, and turned off the local ventilators, though so far it didn’t seem to have done any good. Radek unlocked the door, and heard Ember hiss as he surveyed the miscellaneous array of equipment scattered across the table and stacked on the cabinets that ran along the sides of the room. There was everything from shapeless lumps that had been Air Force-issue ballpoint pens and travel mugs for coffee to laptops whose keyboards had nearly disappeared and tablets whose cases were deeply pitted and scored.
“The computers, you said?” Ember asked, after a moment. “Though I think that if I spray them directly I will do as much harm as good.”
“We have removed the batteries on the laptops,” Radek said, “and we can dry them out later if they survive. The tablets — we will have to take the chance.”
“Very well.” Ember lifted the nozzle and pumped twice. A fine spray drifted over the keyboards, settling like a fog. Radek waited, half expecting to see some sign that the disinfectant was working, but there was nothing. He turned the laptops so that Ember could spray the rest of the cases, then held the tablets for him as well.
“Should we bother with the rest? It’s all destroyed.”
Ember shook the container, cocking his head to one side as he judged how much liquid was left. “At some point we must, otherwise the bacteria will simply spread again. But right now I think it is more important to treat your most vulnerable objects.”
“Right.” Radek led him in a circuit of the gate room, spraying down the cases of those laptops that seemed least affected, then the Marines’ weapons and a few more pieces of equipment before Ember shook his head.
“There is no more. At least —” He shook the jar again. “If there are sponges, there is perhaps enough to wipe down a few more things?”
“Our sponges are all plastic,” Radek said, but Sindye nodded.
“There are some cloths we can use.”
Ember handed her the container, and she hurried off, grabbing one of the technicians as she went. Radek took a breath, and looked at Ember. “You really think this will work?”
“Yes.” Ember leaned against the nearest pillar, his white hair hanging lank. “At least, it will slow the spread for now. It worked in the lab, and it will work here. And that will buy us time.”
There was something not quite right about him, Radek thought. Did he know something about the bacteriophage that he wasn’t sharing? No, he looked almost as though he was exhausted, but the Wraith did not tire the way humans did. They did get sick, though, they’d learned that much from Todd — Guide — and he cleared his throat. “Ember. Are you —?”
Ember turned, straightening, the momentary strangeness falling away. “Yes? Am I what?”
“I thought —” Radek shrugged. “Nothing, never mind.”
“Dr. Zelenka!” That was Sindye, waving at them from the doorway of the room where they had sequestered the worst-damaged machine. “I think we are seeing results.”
“That would be an excellent sign,” Ember began, and Radek nodded.
“Yes.”
Sindye had set aside a plastic cup and a length of plastic tubing from one of the assay machines, laying each one out on sheets of paper so that she could mark the bacteria’s progress. The ink had run where Ember had sprayed them, but even so the meaning was clear. “You see how the effect was spreading faster and faster,” she said, pointing to marks that came further apart each time. “I’ve been checking this every fifteen minutes since I started keeping the record, and this is the first time that there hasn’t been any increase in the affected areas. I think this is working.”
Ember nodded. “Yes. That’s what I hoped to see.”
“Tell me some good news,” Lorne said, from the doorway, and Radek turned to face him.
“This time I can, yes. Ember’s compound has stopped the spread of the bacteria.”
Lorne gave a slow smile. “Dr. Beckett just let us know that the next batch is on its way. He got it done faster than he expected. Maybe we’re finally getting a handle on this thing.”
“Don’t speak too soon,” Radek said, but he felt a surge of optimism in spite of himself.
Ember was shaking his head. “This is a respite, not a victory. What we must do now is find something that will destroy the bacteria, and treat all of Atlantis at once, so that none of it can possibly survive.”
“That’s not possible,” Sindye began, and stopped herself. “All right, assuming we can find something that is toxic to this bug that won’t kill all of us as well — how can you possibly treat something the size of this city?”
Ember gave a wry smile. “I don’t know. But if we can find something to kill the ‘little replicator’, we can find a way to deliver it.”
“Surely,” Radek said, and hoped it was true.
“Well,” Joseph said. “It’s not as bad as I thought.”
Ronon eyed the still-open pedestal of the DHD, and refrained from saying that it looked bad enough to him. “Yeah?”
“Everything works — well, nothing’s damaged,” she amended. “All the crystals are intact, no cracks, no burnt-out wiring.”
“So what’s wrong with it?”
Joseph made a face. “It won’t dial anywhere except Atlantis.”
Ronon felt his eyebrows rise. Aulich swore under her breath, and Parrish said, “Why not? Do we know?”
“Not for sure.” Joseph hauled herself to her feet and touched the first symbol of Sateda’s gate address. Instead, an entirely different symbol lit. She pressed the second symbol, and again the wrong symbol lit. “You see the problem. I’ve tried a dozen different addresses, but the only one that shows up is Atlantis.”
“Why?” Parrish asked again, and Joseph shrugged.
“I think it’s — well, the equivalent of a software glitch. The energy bolt somehow screwed up the programming, and locked the DHD onto the last address dialed.”
“Can you fix it?” Ronon asked.
Joseph shook her head. “No, sir. We don’t entirely understand how the programming works in the first place, and even if I wanted to take the risk, I don’t have the tools that would let me access it.”
“So you’re saying we’re stuck.”
“Yessir.” Joseph paused. “Well, at least for now. And I think we can actually dial Atlantis successfully, though I don’t want to try unless we have to, just in case completing the dialing process blows up any subtle damage I haven’t found. But if it’s just the software, there’s a good chance that the updates will fix the problem.”
“Updates,” Ronon said.
“You know. The Stargate system regularly updates the gate programming. We don’t know the exact intervals, but it’s fairly frequent. The next update should restore the original programming and let us dial out normally again.”
Ronon considered that. The Stargates were such a normal part of life — and a technology so far beyond anything Sateda or anyone was capable of building — that everyone tended to take their functioning entirely for granted. But it made sense that there would be some way to correct errors and keep the entire system aligned and functionin
g. “But you don’t know how long it will take.”
“No, sir. We’ve never been able to work out the interval here. Could be anything from a couple of hours to a whole day. The longest recorded interval was thirty hours.”
So their choices were to stay here or to declare an emergency and insist that Atlantis let them through the quarantine. Ronon didn’t like either option very much, but on balance, he thought they were reasonably safe here. At least as long as the botanists didn’t do any more exploring. They had food; they could improvise shelter, and the conifers looked as though they’d burn nicely, if they had to stay through the planet’s long night. The trick would be to find enough water, and at least there was a stream bed within walking distance, and that didn’t involve going any closer to the plants. And there was a good chance that Atlantis would solve its own problems before the update came through anyway. “OK,” he said. “I say we stay here for now.”
Aulich nodded. “I agree, sir.”
“That does give us a chance to look around a little more,” Parrish began, and Ronon shook his head.
“No. I think we’ve done enough science for right now.”
Parrish looked as though he wanted to protest, then winced as he moved his arm injudiciously. “Maybe so.”
“How long till nightfall, captain?” Ronon shaded his eyes to look toward the setting sun. It didn’t seem to have moved much, but the shadows were longer than they had been before.
Aulich consulted her watch. “About seven hours now.”
Water, shelter, fire. Ronon said, “Dr. Parrish, can we cut and burn any of those conifers without setting off the pods?”
Parrish blinked. “I think — probably so? Dr. Hunt and I can find out.”
“If you would,” Ronon said. “And see if we can cut some bigger branches. Those clouds are getting thicker.”
Both the botanists nodded.
“Sergeant, you and the captain scout around, see if you can find anything we can use to build shelter,” Ronon went on. “Samara, come with me. We’re going to see if we can dig a well.”
The dry stream at the bottom of the hill was broad, the sandy soil carved and channeled by a recent flow of water. Ronon chose his spot carefully, a wide flat spot at the lowest part of the channel where there was room to scoop out a good-sized hole. The sand was soft enough to scoop bare-handed, and it was the work of minutes to dig a shallow pit as deep as his hand. The sand there was cool and damp; he dug deeper, and was rewarded with a slow upwelling of water. He tasted it cautiously, and was relieved to find it sweet, not brackish or tasting of mud. He dug a little deeper, and water rose in the new depression, perhaps as deep as the first joint of his little finger, and clear to the eye. He gave a grunt of satisfaction and Samara moved to help, wielding a folded piece of plastic as a shovel.
When they’d finished, they had a hole about as deep as Ronon’s forearm, already half full of water. Samara stretched a piece of camouflage fabric over it to keep out insects and more dirt, and Ronon sat back on his heels, pleased with their success.
“It’s going to take a while to fill,” Samara said, “but it’s coming along.”
Ronon nodded. It wouldn’t be a lot — there wouldn’t be any extra for washing, for one thing — but by nightfall they ought to have enough to drink and to heat the MREs. “Got something to carry it in?”
Samara grinned, and flourished what looked like another piece of fabric. “Folding bucket.”
“Nice.”
“And I’ve got a full tube of water purification tablets.”
“Good.” Ronon remembered an unpleasant three days on Appar, back when he was a Runner, when the water had been tainted without him realizing it. He’d barely managed to get up enough strength to make it back to the Stargate and dial a more hospitable world. The Lanteans were lucky their drugs and filters meant that almost never happened to them. He pushed himself to his feet, scanning the ground on this side of the hill. There were more of the conifers, a low tangle on the far side of the stream, and still more of the succulents in a rising bank beyond them, their pods rising over the broad leaves. A couple of the smaller insects bumbled past them, following the line of the stream and staying well clear of the succulents. “Let’s see what they’ve got back at the gate.”
To his pleased surprise, Parrish and Hunt had gathered an enormous pile of branches and bark from the conifers, and stacked it on cleared ground beyond the DHD. They’d managed to collect a few longer, nearly straight branches, and were planning, Hunt said, to cut a few more once they’d had a breather. She flourished a survival saw, jagged wire with handles, and Ronon nodded again.
“Does that stuff burn safely?” He’d been on planets where trees that looked like that were full of a smelly resin that went up in an explosive whoosh once he put a spark to it.
“It burns fast and hot,” Parrish said, and nodded to a smear of ash on the ground. “Or the bark does. If we strip that off, the wood beneath should burn more slowly.”
“That’ll work.”
“What I’d really like to know is how these plants are generating all that power,” Parrish said. “I’m sure some of those pods have fired twice, and I don’t see how they can do that on a purely chemical reaction.”
“Let’s concentrate on getting more wood,” Hunt said, and Parrish sighed, but followed her.
Ronon looked to the horizon again. The sun was definitely lower now, its light reddened and the shadows darker. If they had to stay through the planet’s night — well, the question was how cold it was going to get, and what kind of shelter they could pull together. “Captain! How long does it stay dark?”
Aulich turned away from her equipment, her almost-invisible eyebrows drawn together in a frown. “About nineteen hours — nineteen hours ten minutes.”
That was a long time to huddle in the dark by a fire. Ronon said, “How cold does it get?”
“I don’t know for sure,” Aulich said. “This is planetary summer, but we’re some considerable distance from the equator. My calculations say it’s likely to drop to ten degrees Celsius — that’s 50 Fahrenheit.”
The two scales were still strange to Ronon, but he’d learned a few benchmark temperatures, and that one was pretty chilly. “Not so nice.”
“No.” Aulich looked at her screens again, still frowning. “That may not be the worst of it, either. You know I’m a meteorologist?”
Ronon nodded. “Yeah.”
“When we first came through the gate, we sent up a weather balloon — and, you know, I just realized how lucky we were that it went straight up and didn’t cast any shadows on those damn plants.”
“Go on.”
“I’m still getting readings from the instruments, and I’m picking up some data that — I think there are storms coming. Maybe bad ones.”
“How bad?”
“Electrical storms,” Aulich said. “Lots of lightning, probably heavy rain in places, maybe wind. I think what’s driving them is the mismatch between the temperatures in the daytime and at night — I think the storms are a way of equalizing the pressures that result. But if we’re out here in the open, right under the Stargate…”
Her voice trailed off unhappily, and Ronon nodded. “Not good.”
“Not good at all,” she agreed.
“How long?”
“How long till they get here, or how long will they last?”
“Both.” Ronon turned to look at the western sky. Was it his imagination, or was there a darker shadow on the horizon?
“I’d say we’ll start to see the effects in about seven hours,” Aulich said. “As for how long… It’s not a deep front, and it’s moving fast. A couple of hours, maybe? But that’s a long time to wait.”
Especially without shelter. Ronon surveyed the area again, wishing he’d missed something, but there were no convenient caves, nothing at all to break the force of a storm. Maybe among the conifers, except that the bark was, by Parrish’s reckoning, thoroughly flammable. Better t
o get off the planet, if they possibly could. “Sergeant?”
Joseph looked up from where she was sitting by the pile of wood, methodically chipping the jagged bark away from the harder core. “Sir?”
“Anything new from Atlantis?”
She pushed herself to her feet, wiping her hands on her pants. “No, sir. They checked in an hour ago, and the quarantine is still in effect. I reported our problem, but they said to stay put if it was safe.”
Safe. That was the real question. Ronon said, “Any idea if they’re making progress?”
“They said they were locking it down, sir.” Joseph’s tone was flat, matter-of-fact, but a briefly cynical expression flickered across her face. Aulich grimaced, and Ronon nodded. He’d heard that kind of reassurance before, and was willing to bet that the Lanteans had no real idea what was going on.
“No time frame either?”
“No, sir.”
“And I’m guessing the gate hasn’t reset, either,” Aulich said.
“No, ma’am,” Joseph said. “I’ll keep checking.”
Ronon looked back at the horizon, where a thin line of cloud just touched the sun’s lower limb. Probably those were the storms, or their first forerunners, but even a small thunderstorm could prove deadly if they were trapped in the open. And there was no time to build the kind of shelter that would keep them safe, even if they had the materials. If he pushed, he was sure Atlantis would let them through, but then they’d be trapped inside whatever quarantine line had been established, and in the long run that wasn’t any better than where they were now. If he’d evacuated everyone to Sateda when the plants first started shooting —
He killed that thought. He hadn’t done it, and there was no point thinking about might-have-beens. It was still some hours before the storms reached them, and there was always a chance that either Atlantis would fix their problem or the Stargate would reset. And it was also possible that they might miss the worst of the storms, in which case they needed shelter against the rain and cold, some way to protect the fire… “All right,” he said. “Keep me updated, sergeant. And call me the next time Atlantis dials in. I want to talk to Major Lorne. Captain, can you keep tracking the weather?”
Stargate Atlantis: Third Path: Book 8 in the Legacy series Page 16
