That something had the face of Kyle Deacon.
Chapter Eleven
Lock and Load
She awoke, suffocating. The sheet was tangled around her, pinning her to the narrow bed, and the darkness pressed down around her like wet sand. There was a noise close to her head, a shrill buzzing that scratched at her ears, but she couldn’t identify it nor reach out to silence it. The depth of her sleep, and the suddenness of her waking, had nailed her down.
She fought the pressure, the crushing fatigue, convulsing sluggishly on the bed until, finally, some measure of control returned to her deadened body. She got an arm free, flailed until she found her headset, and shut off its insistent whirring.
Carter sat up in bed, not remotely awake, and pressed the headset into her ear. “Wha?”
“Colonel? Is that you?”
“Teyla? What… What’s going on?” She swung her feet free of the sheet and stood up, swaying a little. According to the clock next to her bed she had been out for no more than a few minutes. Just long enough to fall really, soundly asleep, which made waking all the harder.
There were noises coming through the headset; scuffling, panting, as though Teyla was running. Another voice, too far out of pickup range to identify. Something that sounded like sobbing.
“Colonel, something has happened. We were attacked, the lights have failed —”
“Attacked? Lights?” Carter rubbed her eyes, trying to shake the edges of fatigue away. “Where are you?”
“We are near to the Ancient’s lab. Colonel, we were attacked by two of the marines guarding him. I do not think they are human.”
“We? Who —?” Carter stopped in mid-sentence, aware that she was doing nothing but asking random questions. “Okay, let’s start again. Are you injured?”
“I am not. Radek is fine too, but Alexa Cassidy is in extreme shock.”
A thin tone broke through the Athosian’s words; another call coming through on the headset. “Teyla, hold on a moment, I just need to switch channels.” She keyed the new call in. “Carter.”
“Colonel, this is Palmer in the control room. We’ve got a serious situation here. Looks like an entire section of the west pier has gone into some kind of lockdown.”
“I’ll be right up.” Carter switched channels again. “Teyla, get yourselves up to the infirmary, as quickly as you can. I’ll meet you there in a few minutes.”
She dressed quickly, in the dark, something she had done so many times that she could let her body deal with the task while her mind went elsewhere. The west pier was, of course, where McKay had chosen to set up Angelus’ lab. That was no real surprise to her — in fact, it had a kind of sickening inevitability. Despite all her efforts to keep the situation with Angelus under control, all her hopes of dealing with the Ancient’s plans peacefully, through diplomacy and reason and common sense, the whole thing had slid out from under her. Now she was getting wild calls in the middle of the night and Fallon was going to have her skinned alive.
Carter was out of her quarters no more than three minutes after she had first woken, and within five was striding into the control room. “What have we got?”
Palmer was waiting for her, standing next to the sensor terminal. The screen showed a vector image of the city, a broad, angular snowflake drawn in threads of pastel blue. A red circle pulsed ominously on one of the piers. “It’s here,” he told her. “We picked it up just a few minutes ago.”
“Can you zoom in on that?”
He did so. The picture of the city spread abruptly, making Carter feel like she was swooping uncontrollably down into its complexities. In a few moments the pier filled the screen, and the red circle now centered around a rectangle of the same color.
Carter looked at it warily. “Okay, what am I seeing here?”
“Basically, nothing. It’s a hole in the city — not a physical hole, but we’re no longer getting any returns from it at all. No external lights, no communications in or out, and no sensor readings of any kind. There’s a whole bunch of functionality at its edges we can’t identify, as well.”
“Functionality?”
“Systems we weren’t previously aware of activated at the same time the section went dark.”
“Right,” said she quietly. The Pegasus expedition had been occupying the city for years, now, and they were still finding new pieces of kit to trip over. Even in a structure as large and as complex as Atlantis, she couldn’t help but wonder how the previous administration had been spending its time if there was still ‘functionality’ here that no-one could identify. “Give me a minute.”
There were times, Carter thought ruefully, as she opened the doors to the balcony, that being in command was no fun at all. In principle, it was what every soldier strove for; promotion after promotion, the recognition of one’s superiors, the inexorable climb up the ladder of command.
But damn, things were a hell of a lot easier when she had someone to tell her what to do.
She walked out onto the balcony, letting the doors slide closed behind her. The air was cold, almost freezing, the sky above her clear and bright with stars. The planet’s two visible moons were up, neither full, but each casting a silvery light across the ocean. She could smell brine, and, if she listened hard past the soughing of the wind, could hear the far-off, rhythmic rushing of the sea.
There was a cold beauty to it, although at that precise moment Carter would rather have been in bed.
She looked down, out across the city. Little of its actual structure could be seen, given the altitude and the darkness, just silver-blue edges caught in moonlight and a constellation of golden lights. The sight was strange, surreal, made even more so by the missing part of it.
On the west pier, far to her left, was a very regular rectangle of pure darkness.
Palmer’s diagram had been informative enough, but the true enormity of the situation didn’t hit her until she saw that black space for herself. It was shocking as a missing limb.
She looked out at it for a long minute, until the bite of the night wind began to hurt her, then she spun on her heel and marched back inside. “All right, as of now the city is on full alert status.”
Palmer was at the communications terminal. Carter saw him punching buttons, and a few seconds later the lights in around her rose to their daylight levels. The same would be happening everywhere else, too; inside living quarters, corridors, public areas, labs… Within minutes, the city would be awake.
Whether or not the same could be said if the locked section, she couldn’t say. Effectively, that was now no longer part of the city. It was a sovereign state, answerable to no-one. What, if anything, was occurring in there was a mystery to which she would have to devote all her efforts.
Right now, nothing else mattered. Not Fallon, not the IOA, nothing. The dark space was her only concern.
“Palmer? I’ll need city-wide comms. And how long do you think the rest of the control staff will take to get here?”
“Fifteen minutes?”
“Call them individually, tell them they’ve got five.” She walked a couple of steps away from him, taking a deep breath, readying herself. Then she switched her headset on. “Pegasus expedition, this is Colonel Carter. As you are probably aware by now, the city of Atlantis is on full alert. All active personnel are required to go to their duty stations, all others please make yourselves ready and await further instructions.”