The marines were looking back at Teyla. Their eerie synchronous motion was nowhere to be seen now; they moved just as anyone would. Teyla saw one of them — a Lieutenant DeSalle, by his nametag — look past her as Zelenka walked reluctantly up the corridor.
“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.