“Great.” Sheppard walked in, slowly, and drew closer to the structure. It was a table, like a long bench but deep, faceted and paneled in smooth white and gleaming steel. Hinged arms were attached to it at one end, dozens of them, folded back on themselves like the limbs of a waiting mantis. Sheppard could see a continuous rail around the table, the arms mounted on it so they could reach any part of its surface with the knives and claws and razored spindles that tipped them.
The arms twitched, clicking one against another, as if eager to be at work.
Sheppard leaned over the glassy surface of the table, just far enough to see what lay in the cavity beneath it. After a moment, he grimaced and looked away.
McKay was staring at him. “What? What’s under there?”
He gestured back at the glittering metal arms. “What do you think?”
“Oh.” A queasy realization crossed McKay’s face. “Oh. Okay.”
Dex raised an eyebrow. “Dead?”
“Very.” For longer than the prisoners in their glass coffins, Sheppard guessed, although it was hard to be sure. The arms had done their work well, and enthusiastically. What lay in the cavity was still shaped like a man, but only just.
“Rodney? Anything else you need to see in here?”
McKay shook his head emphatically. “Believe me, I’ve seen more than enough.”
“So okay, at least we know why they were keeping people in cells,” Dex whispered a few minutes later, as they prepared to go back into the exit corridor. They had paused at the edge of the water to let McKay investigate some random technological anomaly he had spotted.
“We do?”
“Yeah, to do experiments on them.”
“Oh, right.” Sheppard nodded. “Yeah, we know what they were doing. But why were they doing that? The Asurans have got access to pretty much all the Ancients knew, haven’t they? What would they need to know about humans that they couldn’t just get from a book?”
“And here’s another one.” Dex made a sweeping gesture. “What’s Angelus got to do with all this?”
“You got me there. Hell, maybe this has got nothing to do with the guy. He’s not a Replicator — Ellis would have spotted that the moment he set foot on Apollo. Besides, the Replicators were trying to kill him.”
Dex shrugged. “Maybe he saw this, and that’s why they were after him. To keep him quiet?”
For a moment, that seemed almost plausible, but Sheppard found himself having to dismiss it too. Mainly due to the outrageous arrogance of the Asurans. If they had decided to go picking people apart to see how they worked, they wouldn’t have let a witness bother them. Replicators did whatever was best for Replicators. Why would they fear exposure?
He shrugged. “It’s got me beat. Maybe Rodney can get some answers out of all the readings he’s taken. I don’t think there’s much more to see here.”
“Or that we want to.” Dex looked away. “I don’t know, John. I’ve seen a lot of bad things. They don’t usually bother me. Death’s just something you get used to. But this?”
“Yeah, I know what you mean.” He slapped the Satedan’s shoulder and moved past him, towards the spot where McKay had been working. “Hey Rodney! Come on, we’re outta here.”
There was no answer. Come to that, there was no McKay, either.
Sheppard aimed the taclight at the spot. There was another corridor exit there, equidistant between the waterlogged entrance and the way to the dissection rooms. McKay had noticed something unusual there, and the last time Sheppard had seen him he had been crouching at the entrance to the corridor, taking more readings with his custom PDA.
There was no sign of him now.
“McKay?” Sheppard’s voice echoed eerily as he called out. But once the echoes had gone, there was only silence.
And then a strangled cry, followed by the stuttering hammer of a P90.
Sheppard hurled himself into the corridor, Dex on his heels, the barrel of his own gun nosing for a target. The corridor was short, just an angled opening into another open space.
Beyond it, McKay was standing rigid, his gun raised with the butt jammed into his shoulder. There was a square of dim light spinning down on the floor: the PDA.
“Rodney?”
“Replicators,” he hissed.
“What? Where?”
“Over there. On the ground.”
There was no other sound in the chamber, no movement Sheppard could detect. He moved ahead of McKay, lowering his weapon slightly, scanning the taclight beam left and right.
What he saw made no sense. “What the hell?”
McKay had been right. There were indeed Replicators in the chamber — Sheppard counted a dozen, maybe more. Their uniforms were unmistakable.
But the Asurans were on the floor. They lay sprawled like dead men.
Sheppard glanced quickly across at McKay, seeing the man’s knuckles still white around the P90’s grip. “Were they moving?”
McKay’s eyes met his for an instant. “Not as such.”
“So you fired because…”
“It’s dark, okay?” McKay lowered the gun. “I just saw a face, and…” He gestured angrily at a perforated Asuran.
“And you panicked,” said Dex.
“I did not panic!” McKay snapped. “My reaction-time got the better of me, that’s all.”
“It’s okay,” Sheppard told him, “I don’t think he’s going to lodge a complaint.” He moved further into the room, keeping his finger lightly on the trigger, using the taclight beam to illuminate the crumpled Replicators one by one.
The Asurans weren’t the only thing littering the ground. There was debris, too; random chunks of stone and metal were scattered across the chamber floor, increasing the further right he looked. Sheppard could see that the ceiling there was open, a gaping maw fanged with twisted shards of metal and dangling braces. What must have been several tons of debris littered the chamber below it, forming a treacherous slope, and several replicators lay pinned beneath its margins. Others were scattered around a complicated ball of machinery on the far side of the chamber, almost as though they had been fighting for possession of it before they had fallen.
Sheppard knelt gingerly next to one of the fallen Asurans, and poked it with his gun barrel. It didn’t move, just lay there, open eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling.
“What’s wrong with them?” he asked, his voice a whisper.
“They look dead,” McKay replied.
“That’s impossible. Dead replicators are just piles of dust.”
He saw the beams of McKay’s halogens swing around at him. “Well, they’re not exactly up and dancing, are they? Lucky for us… And what the hell’s wrong with their faces?”
“I don’t know…” Sheppard prodded the Replicator again. It was hard to tell in the taclight beam, but the Asuran’s face looked strange; pallid and sunken, almost pasty. Around one temple and the corners of the mouth were something that looked like lesions.
The Replicator looked diseased.
Dex had wandered past him, and was surveying the drum of machinery by the far wall. “Are you sure they’re Replicators? Not dead people dressed up?
“No, I’m picking up traces of nanite code.” McKay crossed the chamber to join him. He had retrieved the PDA. “Back in the main chamber? I noticed something odd about the walls near this corridor, it was like the surface of the metal had started to break down. There’s more of it in here, too. And these guys just lying around like corpses…” He crouched down next to the ball. “Well hello, what have we got here?”
“I give. What have we got?”
“Our power source.” McKay was leaning around the ball, twisting himself to see it from all sides. “But it’s not connected to anything. Weird.”
Sheppard got up, and moved back to the corridor. Sure enough, the wall there was corroded, blistered, patches of it stretched like melted plastic. “Weapons fire?”
“I doubt it. That stuff’s a trinium-reinforced polymer compound. You’d need, oh, shipboard weaponry to melt that. Maybe a drone…”
“You know something?” Sheppard stalked back into the center of the room. “I am getting pretty damn tired of wandering around this chamber of horrors and not having a clue what’s happened here.”