Wherever that was.
“I guess it couldn’t hurt,” she told him. “I’ll give you full access to the comms system. I hope you have better luck than us.”
“So do I. In the meantime, please keep Teyla and Zelenka away from Angelus. I don’t want him thinking anyone else is going to get shot in the head.”
Once she had set Fallon up at the communications terminal, Carter went to her office. Teyla joined her a few minutes later.
Carter sat the Athosian down and, over the next few minutes, outlined what it was she needed Teyla to do. She had wondered at first whether the woman was the right person for the job, whether she should simply have drafted in a technician instead. But Teyla had been in the corridor when the blast doors had slammed shut. She knew what to look for. And she knew John Sheppard well.
Besides, having Teyla in the office allowed her to keep an eye on Fallon. And Fallon, seeing Teyla there, would hopefully be less troubled by thoughts of her trying to inconvenience Angelus.
The fact that she would be doing exactly that, right under his nose, was neither here nor there.
Once Teyla had started work, Carter set off to find Zelenka. As expected, he was in the ZPM lab. Stepping from the transporter there gave her an odd, uneasy sensation — the memory of those sinister noises Zelenka had conjured from his computer were still fresh in her mind, and remembering them made her shudder.
It was an eerie feeling, going back.
Zelenka had four terminals open at once; three were displaying complex rotating graphics, the fourth streams of raw numerical data. He looked up as Carter came in. “Colonel,” he said. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“Have you had any luck?”
“Depends how you define luck.” He leaned back, and tapped the screen of one terminal. “I have managed to access a partial database of emergency protocols. I can’t tell how partial, and right now I’m only certain what about twenty percent of the ones I have found do — if Rodney was here, I’m sure he’d be able to identify them far more readily than I.”
“And he’d enjoy rubbing it in your face, too.” Carter gestured at the screen. “Come on, Radek. McKay’s not here — it’s you I’m relying on right now. What are we seeing?”
“Well…” He pointed at a graphic. “These are the protocols, in 3-D form. Basically, they present as virtual crystals.”
“That makes sense.”
“Identifying the purposes of the crystals gives us clues as to what the protocols do. This one right here, this is to do with the transporters — I think it would re-route all transporter traffic to a central location. This one here, though, is purely decorative. Flashing all the city lights in sequence.”
“Pretty,” said Carter. “Have you found any that reference the blast doors?”
“No, I haven’t. I have found some that reference local power nodes, though.”
“That’s great! How many?”
He looked glum. “About six hundred.”
“Damn,” Carter muttered.
“Oh, and one other thing. Just in case you weren’t feeling quite futile enough.” He nodded at the screens. “So far I have no evidence that any of the city protocols have been activated, apart from the alert status.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Carter breathed.
The lockdown, as she understood it, would require many processes to occur at once. Activating those processes one at a time would be no great feat — anyone with enough knowledge of the city’s systems could cause a door to close and lock, to interrupt communications along a limited path, to extinguish an exterior light, and so-on. But in order to set off an entire series of those processes, like raising all the city’s internal lights when the alert status was sounded, would require a large set of programmed instructions keyed to a single command. A protocol.
If no protocol had been activated, how had Angelus been able to close and lock all the blast doors at once? To shut down all communications in the section? It was impossible.
“It must be one you’ve not found yet,” she told Zelenka. “There’s no way he could do that without a protocol.”
“I’ll keep looking,” he said. “There’s something else. Around the edges of the lockdown zone, there’s some kind of activity.”
“What do you mean? Where?”
“Everywhere. Well, not exactly… What I mean is, all the systems around the lockdown are showing this activity. Power, sensors… It’s something I’ve not seen before, like a set of new functions being applied.”
That rang a chime in Carter’s memory. “Hey, you know Palmer? In the control room… He said there was unidentified functionality around that area. Could it be those armored doors you saw?”
Zelenka weighed this up for a moment. “It could be. On the other hand, it does seem to have some similarities to the signal pattern I detected earlier. Or it could be nothing at all.”
“I guess…” Carter shivered slightly. A coldness had moved across her, a terrible sense of things moving into place. For a moment, it felt to her as if everything that was happening now had been somehow set in motion long ago, that tonight was the end result of some vast and dreadful process. That rectangle of darkness out on the west pier was merely the final domino toppling over: hidden hands had tipped the first one at some distant point in the past, knowing exactly when and where the ultimate impact would occur.
Behind her, something moved, and a shadow fell across the lab.
Carter turned around, and saw Teyla Emmagan in the doorway. She was about to welcome her in, glad of the extra company, but then she saw the distraught look on the woman’s face. “Teyla? What’s wrong?”
Teyla remained very still. “Colonel, I did as you asked.”
“Jesus, Teyla, you look terrible. Get in here and sit down.” Carter drew a seat out for the Athosian, who walked slowly in and dropped onto it. “What happened?”
“The cameras… Most of them are malfunctioning. There was very little footage. I saw…” She fell silent.
“What?” whispered Zelenka. “What do you mean?”
“I had Sheppard install a surveillance suite before Angelus moved into the lab,” Carter told him. “He gave me the access codes. I was hoping Teyla could download what they’d been recording, but —”
“Maybe he found the cameras,” Teyla said bleakly. She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a USB thumbdrive. “All I saw is here.”
Carter took the drive from her, found an unused terminal and plugged it in. Together, the three of them watched what Sheppard’s cameras had recorded earlier that night.
Later, Carter found herself back in her office with only the vaguest recollection of how she had gotten there.
After she had seen the surveillance footage, there seemed to be almost no words that could be exchanged between her and Teyla. Zelenka had been shocked into silence too, apart from a few half-hearted denials. But in the main, the film on the thumbdrive had robbed them all of voice.
Since returning to the office, Carter had seen the film three more times, perhaps hoping for some hint of insight with each successive viewing. But each time was the same.
The footage was not good quality: the picture was grainy, monochrome. An annoying diagonal scratch of interference hovered around one corner, and dark specks danced distractingly across the screen every few moments. There was no sound. However, the scene, and the players in it, was unmistakable.
Rewinding the footage back to its start, Carter once again found herself looking into the corridor that led to Angelus’s lab on the west pier.
The camera had been set high, near the ceiling, probably in an air vent or close to a light panel for concealment. It was aimed back towards the gallery, with the end of the corridor a skewed rectangle of black at one side of the picture.
In the center was a small knot of people. Closer to the camera lens, with their backs to it, were two men in marine uniform; Kaplan and DeSalle. Facing them were Zelenka and Teyla, with Alexa Cassidy off to one side.