“You and me both,” said McKay, shrugging out of his pack. “But maybe we don’t have to now. Sheppard? Do me a favor?”
“What?”
“Find me a Replicator. One that’s really good and stuck under something.”
“Huh?”
In answer, McKay just looked around at him, mouth set and eyebrows high, stabbing a finger towards the rubble pile.
Sheppard shook his head in despair, and turned away. When Rodney McKay got an idea, it tended to fill his mind to the exclusion of all else. Including manners, social skills… “Here’s one. He’s about halfway under. Is that okay?”
McKay scurried over, his hands full of equipment and the laptop jammed under one arm, and surveyed the Asuran Sheppard had chosen. It was a male — although that distinction was entirely cosmetic — and had the same doughy look to its skin as the others. Its left leg, left arm and the lower part of its torso were covered with broken chunks of stone, and a thick metal brace was lying across it, crushing the right shoulder. “Perfect.”
He knelt down, setting the laptop on the floor with one hand and flipping it open. Sheppard watched as he spread out the rest of the gear he had carried over. “What are you doing?”
“I am going,” said McKay, beginning to tap command strings into the laptop, “to power this guy up.”
There was a click and thin whine as Dex’s blaster came to life a hand’s width from the back of McKay’s head. “I don’t think you are.”
“Would you get that thing out of my ear?” McKay glared up at him, eyes narrowed between the halogens. “He’s not going anywhere — what’s he going to do, drag himself out from under a couple of tons of rubble? Look, he’s trapped and dead. All I’m going to do is reactivate some of his nanite code, specifically the parts relating to memory and recording. Under the right instructions from me those nanites will start downloading into the laptop, and once I’ve decoded that data I’ll know everything he knows.”
Sheppard blinked. “Is that even possible?”
“I hope so. To tell you the truth, since we’ve never encountered a Replicator in this state before I really can’t be sure exactly what’s going to happen, but as long as I can get into this guy’s memory files I don’t really care.” He looked up at the pair of them. “Don’t worry, he’s not going to wake up or anything.”
“Fine,” Dex snarled. “But if he starts acting up, I’m blasting him.”
“Be my guest.” McKay had connected a portable power pack to a small switch box, from which he drew a length of multicolored ribbon cable. The end of the cable plugged into a probe array, a spidery mass of wires each tipped with a crocodile clip or an insulated needle. Sheppard had seen him use similar gear when trying to bring Ancient technology back to life.
The Replicators were, basically, Ancient technology. By that token, he thought, perhaps McKay’s strange plan actually had some merit.
“Okay, here we go…” McKay took two of the sharper steel probes, touched them to the Replicator’s scalp and then, with a sudden twisting push, forced them both deep into its head.
Sheppard grimaced, hearing the probes crunching through layers of alien matter as they slid inwards. If the Replicator had been human, those needles would have been driven clear through the skull and several centimeters into brain tissue. The Asuran, as a coherent mass of microscopic nanites, should have been the same hazy metallic stuff all the way through, with no complex structures under its skin at all. But if that was the case, why did the probes sound as if they were being forced into frozen hamburger?
McKay took another pair of probes and rammed them in alongside the first, then returned his attention to the laptop. “Okay… No response to the probes.”
“It didn’t work?”
“I haven’t switched him on yet.” He pressed a key on the power pack, and Sheppard saw a row of LEDs on its front face start to glow. “I’ll give him a hundred microvolts. That shouldn’t be enough to fry anything vital.”
He touched a control. There was a soft bleep from the pack, and then silence.
“Okay, okay, that’s…” McKay sighed impatiently. “Disappointing. Charging to two hundred microvolts.”
Sheppard raised an eyebrow. “Should I be shouting ‘Clear!’ at this point?”
“No, you should be making sure Ronon’s still aiming at Bishop here and not at me.” He stabbed at the control again.
This time, there was a reaction. But not the one anyone had been expecting.
The Asuran jolted into life: Sheppard saw its whole body jerk, twist sickeningly under the rubble. Its face worked for a moment, eyes flicking wildly around, the head lifting and then snapping back down to impact the floor. Its free leg kicked and scuffled.
And then its mouth opened, very wide, and it began to scream.
Chapter Fourteen
Dead Metal
The scream was continuous, nothing at all to do with breath. It was metallic and filtered and atonal and utterly horrifying. Sheppard resisted the temptation to cover his ears. “Jesus, Rodney!”
“I have no idea why it’s doing that!” McKay was tapping frantically at his laptop, face screwed up in discomfort. Even Dex, Sheppard noticed, had stepped back from the Replicator and its awful shriek.
“Can you stop it?”
“Frankly, I doubt it.”
“Try,” Dex growled. “Or I’ll stop it.”
McKay scowled. “Look, just plug your ears or something, okay? I’m starting to get data on this thing.”
The Asuran twisted suddenly, in a weird mechanical parody of pain. Sheppard knew it was incapable of true sensation: he was looking at a device, a robot made of self-replicating nanomachines, an artificial intelligence that walked on two legs only in honor of its lost creators. But seeing the stricken thing at his feet, writhing under its tomb of rubble and howling an endless note of pure electronic misery, it was difficult not to see the Replicator as being in terrible distress.
“Rodney, how long is this going to take?”
“I don’t know…” McKay peered at the laptop screen, still wincing at the noise, his voice raised to make himself heard over it. “There’s a lot of code coming through here. Even with the upgraded storage I’ve got all kinds of compression routines going just to avoid a complete overload.” He shrugged. “What can I tell you? It’s ready when it’s ready.”
The scream stopped.
It was sudden, totally without warning. Sheppard glanced down at the Replicator, expecting to see it inert, but it was still moving, scrabbling weakly at the rubble. Its head was twisting left and right, but not in the random spasms it had exhibited earlier. It looked, for all the world, like the Asuran was conscious and trying to free itself.
Sheppard wasn’t the only one surprised to see it behave in such a lifelike way. McKay was stabbing frantically at his laptop keys. “It shouldn’t be doing that. There is no way it should be doing that.”
“Kill me,” gasped the Replicator.
Sheppard stared. “Say what?”
“Kill me.” The voice was rough, still metallic and synthesised, but it sounded far more human than that awful screaming had done. “I am… Compromised…”
Dex made an angry rumbling noise in the back of his throat. “You said you were just going to get its code.”
“Code,” repeated the Asuran. “You are downloading me. Stop.”
Sheppard had his P90 aimed at the Replicator’s forehead, the beam from his taclight illuminating its agonized face. “No can do, feller.”
“Destroy me. I am compromised. The collective…” The Asuran shifted violently under the rubble, straining against the weight. Sheppard saw Dex step back, bring his blaster up to fire. “Hurts…”
“What did you say?” gaped McKay. “It hurts?”
“You are bleeding me of everything that makes me what I am,” the Replicator snarled. “My motor functions are destroyed. My core programming is compromised. I am cut off from the collective. Human, it hurts more than you can comprehend!”