If the Asuran was telling the truth about being cut off from the collective, Sheppard thought, that was the first piece of good news he’d heard all day. If he had thought there was a chance the thing was going to revive in the way it had, he would have vetoed McKay’s plan to reactivate it immediately. An active Replicator would have instant access to the Asuran collective, would know what they knew, see what they saw. If this one hadn’t been cut off from its network, Sheppard would be looking into the eyes of every Replicator in the galaxy right now.
“What’s wrong with you?” he snapped.
“You’ll learn nothing from me.” It twisted again, trying to tear itself free, and actually made sounds of pain as it contorted. “If there is a scrap of mercy in you, human, destroy me now.”
“Well, let’s just say for the moment that there isn’t.”
“Curse you!”
Sheppard lifted his foot and rested it on one of the slabs holding the Replicator down. He severely doubted that his weight would add anything significant to that of the rubble, but it was an effective gesture nonetheless.
“We can make it hurt more,” he said quietly.
“Or,” McKay cut in, angrily, “we could make it hurt less.”
Sheppard glared at him, then returned his attention to the Asuran. “Your call.”
It said nothing, just kept struggling. Sheppard leaned closer to it. “Listen buddy, we’ve got spikes in your head. Right now we’re turning your brain into MP3s, and when we’re done we’ll put on our iPods and listen to it all the way home. I’m giving you a chance to make things easier on yourself — the more you tell me right now, the less we’ll have to rip out of your skull, okay?”
The machine ceased scrabbling, and fixed him with a look of unremitting hatred. “Your species is a stain on the universe,” it muttered.
“Is that a yes?”
The Asuran’s mouth opened, and it made a strangled metallic cry of pain and anger. “Yes, human. Ask your questions while you turn my mind into qubits.”
“Quantum bits,” said McKay, wearily answering Sheppard’s question before he asked it. “Go on, just interrogate the poor bastard, will you?”
“You and I are going to have a serious talk on the way home, Rodney,” Sheppard told him, then returned his attention to the Asuran. “What’s your name?”
“The entity I used to be was called Laetor. That will suffice.”
“Used to be?”
“I told you, human. I am compromised. I am no longer what I was, who I was. I have no name.”
“Compromised by what?” asked Dex.
“The chimera,” Laetor spat. “The hybrid.”
Sheppard sighed. “Wanna be a little more specific?”
“A weapon, human. That is all you need to know. We came here to destroy it… It was too dangerous to be allowed to continue.”
That sounded familiar. The Replicators had a policy of obliterating weapons they thought too dangerous, it seemed, along with everything around them. Although the level of destruction here paled into comparison with what they had wrought on Eraavis. “But it got to you before you could destroy it, right?”
“We sacrificed ourselves to destroy the hybrid.” The Replicator, jerked its head to the side, its face contorting, then appeared to relax again. “We brought an autonomous pulse emitter. It destroyed the chimera and shut us down. Until you wrenched me back in to this parody of existence!”
Something about that struck a chord with Sheppard. He shone the taclight over towards the ball of machinery he had noticed on the way in, the one that even now was surrounded by dead and contorted Asurans. “Autonomous… That thing over there?”
“Your perception does you credit,” Laetor sneered.
“Ronon, have you got this for a minute?”
Dex grinned wolfishly. “Oh yeah.”
Sheppard stepped over the Replicator and tapped McKay on the shoulder. “Come on.”
“Hey, what? I’m downloading here!”
“It’s going to do that anyway.” He pointed at the ball. “I want to have a look at this thing, but without you I’m not going to know what the hell I’m looking at. So take a break, okay?”
With McKay somewhat reluctantly in tow, he picked his way across the corpse-scattered chamber and over to the emitter. Approaching it, he could see that his initial impression had been right: the Replicators had been fighting for possession of this thing up until the moment it killed them.
But fighting who? All the bodies in the room were Asurans. There was no sign of anything he might have thought of as a chimera.
He shifted a couple of the inert Replicators aside, and crouched down next to the emitter. It was large, maybe a meter and a half wide, and formed from blackish, faceted metal. Dozens of pipes and vanes studded its surface, and although it looked at first glance like a random mess he could see on closer inspection that it had a weird, twisted symmetry.
He’d been right. He didn’t have a clue what he was looking at.
“What do you think?” he said to McKay, his voice low. He checked back on Dex as he said it, but the Satedan still had Laetor firmly in his sights. “Any of this make sense to you?”
“Not much.” McKay was aiming his PDA at the emitter, peering at it intently. “This is Replicator tech, same as the rest of the base. What did he call it, an autonomous pulse emitter?”
Sheppard smiled. “So we can call it an APE, huh?”
“Yeah, that’s… That’s really clever,” muttered McKay dismissively. “EMP generator. Probably tuned with these arrays here, capacitors here. Charge it up from its own power core, set it off and say goodbye to your cellphone.”
“Powerful enough to take out Replicators?”
“Enough to take out the whole base. Why d’you think there’s no power?”
“Is it charged?”
“I think so.” McKay took another reading with the PDA. Sheppard saw his eyes widen slightly. “Okay, that’s a yes. It’s on standby now, but there’s a couple of million volts in this thing.”
“Whoah.” Sheppard edged away. “Rodney, let’s not play with the ball right now, huh?”
“Oh, I think it’s safe.” McKay stood up. “But this still doesn’t explain anything. Replicators shooting up a Replicator base? Human dissections? A weapon called a hybrid that makes Replicators sick but that gets taken down with an EMP?”
“A hybrid…” Sheppard thought about what they had found in some of the other chambers, and felt slightly queasy. “Oh man. I think —”
“Yeah, me too.” By the distasteful look on his face, McKay had obviously come to the same conclusion he had. “Let’s not go there at the moment, huh?”
“Suits me. Let’s get finished up with Laetor.”
McKay nodded. “Go ahead. I’m just going to set something running on this…” He began tapping at his PDA again. Sheppard got up and left him to it, rejoining Dex on the other side of the chamber.
The Satedan was standing just as he had left him, with the wide barrel of his blaster aimed directly at the Replicator’s head. As Sheppard walked up to him he said: “It’s been looking at me.”
“Laetor, stop trying to stare Ronon down. Trust me, statues blink first.”
The Asuran made no reply. It had stopped moving, and now lay completely inert on the littered floor. Only its eyes moved, flicking over to Sheppard as he approached and following him.
“Rodney? He doesn’t look so hot.”
“Yeah, well I think he’s pretty much empty.” McKay came over and crouched down next to his laptop, scanning the screen. “And this is full. Okay, I think we’re done with the torture.”
Thinking about the desiccated corpses in their cells, Sheppard found it difficult to be sympathetic to the machine. For all its howling, it was only a mechanism, after all. What it called pain could only be a signal telling the Replicator it was being damaged. He had seen Asurans exhibit a vague kind of emotion once or twice, but in general they were no more individual than ants in a nest.