Teyla had a gun pointed at DeSalle’s face.
Carter hit the Play control, and the picture shivered into motion. Cassidy was backing away, hands to her mouth. Zelenka was looking at Teyla with a shocked expression on his face. Teyla was shouting, enraged, the gun centered on DeSalle’s forehead.
She watched as Kaplan turned to the wall, began working at a control panel there. The picture shuddered, and then diagonal slabs of metal appeared at the corners of the corridor. The blast doors, sliding smoothly towards each other, the space between them a rapidly-shrinking diamond.
Teyla must have seen the doors rising between her and the marines. She stepped back and fired. Carter saw the flash from the muzzle, pixilated fuzzy white on the screen.
DeSalle ducked away from the shot, turned, his face a mask of shock, and then dropped to the floor. He lay there while the blast doors rose up. And then, once they had closed, he rose and turned back down towards the corridor. He shouted something.
The footage froze in mid-shout, DeSalle’s mouth open, hovering between two final frames. Juddering endlessly.
There had been no attack on Teyla Emmagan. DeSalle had evaded the bullet she had fired, unprovoked, at him. The doors had been activated by the two marines for their own safety.
Teyla’s story, backed up by Radek Zelenka, was a lie.
Carter leaned back in her seat, rubbing her eyes. There was no sense she could make of this. Unless Teyla and Zelenka were suffering from some kind of shared hallucination, the only other possible explanation was that they had deliberately concocted the story.
No wonder Angelus had locked himself away.
An insistent buzzing from her headset broke into her thoughts. If she was honest with herself, she rather welcomed the distraction. “Carter.”
“Colonel? This is Andrew Fallon.”
She leaned across her desk to peer along the gangway. There was a man at the communications terminal, but it wasn’t Fallon. “Where are you?”
“I’m with Major MacReady, down by the gallery blast doors. Angelus has agreed to let me in.”
“Good grief…” Carter found herself quite stunned. “You spoke to him?”
“While you were away. I’m afraid it looks like your people have been stringing you along, Colonel. Angelus says that DeSalle’s alive and well, despite Teyla trying to shoot him when the blast doors started to close. She was threatening Angelus, and they closed the doors to keep her from carrying out those threats.”
“Mr Fallon, can you ask him to open the doors and return that section to our control?” Carter was looking at the picture on her terminal, but not really seeing it. The two frames still shuddered one to the other, everything on screen shaking back and forth, over and over. Only the corner scratch stayed stable. “I can guarantee his safety.”
“I’ve already asked that, Colonel. Angelus no longer trusts you, I’m afraid. He knows you’ve been working to obstruct his project.”
“Fallon? Tell him…” Carter fell silent, frowning. Something about the picture in front of her was familiar. It nagged at her, itched like a bug in her ear… “Wait. Hold on. Don’t do anything.”
She slid her seat back to get to her desk drawer, opened it and pulled her mystery folder free. Her hands were trembling slightly — fatigue, she told herself — and she fumbled with the folder, scattering its contents across the desktop.
“Colonel? The doors are opening.”
“Wait!” The top few sheets were reports. She slid them aside, the paper elusive under her dry fingertips. Under them, photographs. Scans from Keller’s examination of Angelus.
A side — on x-ray of the Ancient’s skull. Down in the bottom right, a diagonal scratch of interference.
An oblique false-color CAT scan of the skull and spine. In the corner, the same scratch.
Her eyes darted up to the screen. The line of bright, random pixels along the bottom right corner was identical. “Fallon? Don’t go in there! For God’s sake, don’t go in! He can fake images!”
There was no answer. Only a soft, rhythmic rushing that sounded, if she listened very hard, like the rise and fall of distant voices.
Chapter Twelve
By the Sea
The puddle jumper had been out of Atlantis for just over a day and a half when McKay told Sheppard and Ronon Dex that they could not complete the mission. “There isn’t enough power,” he said.
Sheppard, who was at the controls, looked back over his shoulder at him. “You’re kidding me.”
“Nope. I wish I was. Using the cloak both times we went into orbit put a drain on the reactor that I wasn’t expecting. And even if it hadn’t, I still don’t know if we’d have had enough.”
Sheppard took his hands off the joysticks and turned fully around in his seat. “So let me get this straight. We’re halfway through the mission, twenty light years from Atlantis —”
“Twenty seven.”
“Twenty seven light years away from Atlantis, and you’re saying we’re running out of gas.”
McKay, who was standing at the hatch, nodded. “That’s about it, yeah.”
“Have we got enough to get back?” Dex asked. His voice was flat, but Sheppard detected a very slight warning note there. McKay either didn’t hear it or simply chose to ignore it. Instead he drew himself up to his full indignant height. “Of course we have,” he snapped.
“Then what’s the problem?”
“I’m not saying there’s a problem. I mean, it’s not like I’ve stranded us out here or anything. We just don’t have enough power to visit the other two origin sites and then get home.”
Sheppard let out a long breath, and returned his attention to the jumper’s controls. In front of him, through the forward viewport, a misty globe rotated slowly against a backdrop of stars: M2L-374, the second of McKay’s designated origin points that they had visited, and the second to have turned up nothing.
Of the dozens of planets Angelus could conceivably have launched from, only four were capable of supporting human — or indeed Ancient — life. The first, and closest to Atlantis, had turned out to be seething with living things; its jungles rife with beasts, its plains lush, its oceans blue and bright with fish. Had the mission been to seek out and study new forms of flora and fauna, that world might have kept an army of scientists busy for decades — even its skies were full, so much so that Sheppard had found himself flinging the jumper around just to avoid the creatures that flew or floated there. But there was no way Angelus could have started his voyage from this planet. It was a primitive world, free from intellect. Nothing with a mind walked on those plains or fished those oceans. Life there was new, and violent in its youth. It was not Eraavis.
Neither was this second planet, but for very different reasons. Beneath that covering of cloud lurked a world that should, given its composition and distance from its sun, have been Earthlike. But something had gone very wrong in the planet’s distant past. Pollution, possibly, or an excess of volcanism. Some growing taint in the air. In any case, it’s atmosphere had turned from a source of life to a suffocating blanket, a chemical wall that no heat could escape. M4T-638 had a surface environment so hot, so corrosive and pressurized and thick that it had almost wrecked the jumper. Sheppard had been forced to engage the vessel’s emergency thrust and power it out of that hellish atmosphere, long before McKay had finished his scans. Had he waited any longer, the vile stuff would have eaten through the hull.
Which left two more worlds. And, McKay was telling him, not enough power to visit them.
“So what you’re saying,” growled Dex, “is that this has been a complete waste of time.”