He reached down and switched off the power unit. “Goodnight, sweet prince.”
The row of LEDS on the power unit went out, one by one. As the last one faded, Laetor’s eyes became still.
Its expression remained frozen, a mask of hatred. Weirdly, for all the ruin that had been inflicted on it, this Asuran had been the most lifelike — the most human — he had seen. Perhaps its distress had lessened its mechanical nature, he wondered. Brought it closer to being alive.
The idea that pain was the closest Replicators could get to life was an unsettling one. Sheppard shook it away. “Anyone want to say anything?”
“How about ‘Goodbye’?” replied Ronon, finally letting his blaster down.
“Sounds about right. Rodney, how long do you think it’ll take to read that data?”
“Could be a while.” McKay had folded the laptop closed and was stuffing it into his backpack. “I’ll have to decompress it first, then get it onto a secure server so I can run decryption routines on it… Believe me, you do not want this stuff running around an unsupervised system.”
“I’m sure Sam will be happy to set you up when we get back.”
“We’re leaving? Already?”
Dex snorted. “If you’re starting to like it here, we can leave you.”
“Yeah,” grinned Sheppard. “If you get lonely, you can just power up a new friend for a while.”
McKay had his mouth open to reply when he was interrupted by a faint electronic chirrup from the darkness. An alert from his PDA, Sheppard guessed. “Aha!”
“What?”
“I set up a routine to try and hack some of the APE’s nanite code.” McKay stood his backpack against Laetor’s head and checked the PDA screen. “Yes! I just got a return!”
Sheppard eyed him warningly. “Rodney, didn’t we just agree not to play with the ball?”
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to set it off.”
“Yeah?” said Dex flatly. “Like you weren’t going to wake up the Asuran?”
McKay chuckled and aimed the PDA at the emitter. “You want to see something really cool?” He pressed a control. There was a moment’s silence, and then the emitter lit up.
Sheppard brought the P90 up reflexively. Thin lines of blue light had appeared on the APE’s surface, outlining a complex series of panels. As he watched, the panels suddenly snapped free of the main body of the ball. They hinged outwards, unfolded, rotated around each other.
The APE extended three angular legs and stood up.
Sheppard looked slowly around at McKay, and at the smile of quite unbelievable smugness that he had on his face. “You are so proud of yourself right now, aren’t you?”
McKay shrugged. “Who wouldn’t be?”
Dex walked closer to the APE. “Can you make it walk?”
“Yeah, I think so. It’s part of the same subroutine. I figured that they’d need to be able to deploy it somehow, but it would have been too big to carry down those corridors, even if the Asurans were strong enough to haul it about.”
“And you knew it had legs?”
“Actually no. I thought it was going to float. What do you think, it should fit in the jumper?”
Sheppard blinked. “You’re thinking of taking it back with us?”
“Why not? Any anti-Replicator weapon has got to be a good thing, right?”
“Not when it’s charged up with about a million volts and is sitting inside a spaceship!” Sheppard gestured wildly around him. “Have you forgotten we’re in the dark here? What if you get your subroutines mixed up and it goes off inside the jumper? Or in Atlantis?”
“Did you hear something?” asked Dex suddenly.
“No!” Sheppard growled. “To both questions. Rodney, shut it down — carefully — and leave it here.”
“Hey, McKay.” That was Dex again. “Your pack fell over.”
“So what?”
“You had it resting against the Replicator.”
McKay frowned, puzzled, and walked over to where his backpack lay on the floor. Sure enough, it had toppled over. “That’s odd.”
Sheppard joined him. “Maybe he twitched.”
“He can’t ‘twitch’. I checked the output before I closed the laptop down, there was nothing in there. No power, no code. The guy’s a paperweight.”
Laetor’s right hand snapped out, insect-quick, and grabbed McKay’s ankle.
McKay gave a shout of shock and pain. He tried to drag his leg away but the grip was too strong. He overbalanced, howling, and crashed to the ground.
The Replicator was trying to twist its way out from under the rubble again.
Sheppard grabbed McKay under the arms and tried to pull him away. Even with McKay helping him, his free foot planted against the side of the Asuran’s chest, he couldn’t get away. “Ronon!”
Dex leapt forwards, stamped his boot down solidly on Laetor’s wrist. He brought his blaster up.
“I meant use a goddamn knife or something!”
“Cover your eyes,” Dex said, and pulled the trigger.
The blaster went off with an electric snarl and a blinding orange flash. Sheppard, who hadn’t had a chance to look away, saw the energy bolt strike Laetor in the shoulder, blowing free a fist-sized chunk of matter. The Replicator made an incoherent sound, a buzzing metal scream, but the hand around McKay’s ankle stayed firmly clamped on.
McKay screamed. “It’s biting me!”
“What do you mean, it’s biting you?” Sheppard was trying to kick the hand away. “Ronon, do it again! Blow it’s damn arm off!”
“Way ahead of you.” Dex took aim again, let off another two shots. The chamber lit up fire-yellow with each of them, and white-hot gobs of molten matter spattered into the air. Sheppard felt some of the stuff hit his skin, and winced as it burned him.
Laetor’s arm came off at the elbow, the ragged end of it glowing, sizzling like frying meat. McKay tumbled, still yelling. Sheppard leaned down to him, held him still and wrenched the Asuran’s disembodied hand free from his ankle.
The hand came away bloody. In the wild light from McKay’s halogens he saw fat threads of something shining dart back onto the palm, like startled sea-creatures whipping back into their dens. “What the hell?”
“Just get rid of that thing!” McKay cried. He struggled up and clamped his own hands over where Laetor had gripped him. “Ow! First Angelus’ ship and now this!”
“Are you okay?” Sheppard threw the arm across the chamber, half expecting it raise itself on its fingers and scuttle back towards him. It didn’t.
“Of course I’m not okay!” McKay offered a hand, and Sheppard hauled him up by it. “What the hell’s happening here?”
“Looks like Laetor was just taking a nap.”
“No way. There was no active nanite code in there.” McKay was on one leg, gingerly testing his weight on his injured ankle. “And his goddamn hand was biting me! I could feel something trying to get through my skin…”
“It’s still alive,” said Dex. He was pointing his blaster at Laetor. “Something’s happening to it.”
Sheppard looked more closely. “No way…”
Laetor, or the entity that had once called itself that, was convulsing under the slabs and the metal brace that crushed its right shoulder. The burned stump of its arm flailed, slapping the floor, and its head turned left and right, eyes wild, as if trying to find a way to get free.
There was something mindless about the way it moved, something queasily animalistic. There seemed to be none of the Replicator’s previous intellect there at all. “Rodney, look at that.”
“Yeah, I can see it.” McKay was supporting himself fully on his injured leg now. “It shouldn’t be doing that.”
“You downloaded it’s whole brain,” said Dex, leaning down to look closely at Laetor. “Maybe this is what’s left.”
“Look at the arm,” breathed Sheppard.
The Asuran’s arm, horribly truncated by Dex’s blaster shots, was still flapping. But the ragged end of it was sprouting a nest of glistening worms, part crimson, part silver, writhing and extending and swarming over each other as they slicked out of the stump.
Sheppard aimed his taclight at the wound in Laetor’s shoulder. That was erupting too, sewing itself together with gouts of what looked like gristle and liquid metal. “This is not good.”