“John?” That was McKay, his voice dull with fear.
Sheppard looked up, and followed McKay’s terrified stare. Across the chamber, one of the other Replicators was hauling itself upright.
“Oh crap,” he muttered.
A second later, the air was hot with weapons fire. Sheppard opened up on the Asuran with his P90, hammering a ragged hole into its chest. Dex leveled his blaster and put a bolt into the thing’s face, swinging it around, then blew its head into ragged shreds. It fell.
Sheppard could hear scuffling sounds from all around the chamber. Where there had been only a still silence, now the place was coming to horrible, shuddering life. Everywhere the beam of his taclight touched seemed to be moving, the Replicator corpses dragging themselves up, heavy and uncoordinated.
“I think I’ve seen this movie,” he grated. “Rodney, get your stuff. We’re outta here.”
“How many?” Dex said quietly, swinging his blaster left and right.
“About fifteen.”
“We can take them.”
“Don’t be too sure.” Sheppard focused his taclight on a Replicator on the other side of the chamber; the one Dex had blasted a few seconds earlier. It was dragging itself erect again, the stump of its neck a medusa of whipping tendrils. He aimed low, the P90 clattering as it sent a stream of lead into the Asuran’s left ankle, and the awful, headless thing tumbled as the foot came free. But a moment later it was trying to get up again.
There was no sound from the Asurans other than the scrape of their limbs on the floor: they rose in eerie, inhuman silence.
McKay had retrieved his backpack and his own weapon, and was looking wildly about. “Where’s my gun?”
“Where did you leave it?”
“By the APE…” He started towards it, but stopped mid-stride. He must have realized there were simply too many Replicators between him and the weapon. “Sheppard?”
“Leave it!” Sheppard heard a scrape to his left, snapped around and put a burst of fire into the face of a Replicator just a few meters away. The shots knocked the Asuran back, ripped half its head off, but it righted itself almost immediately, its wounds sprouting as he watched. “Just get to the door!”
He saw McKay go past him, still holding the pack. “I’m out!”
“Get back to the exit!” He fired again, stepped back, pulled the trigger and found the gun empty. “Ronon, you too,” he yelled, slapping in a fresh magazine and snapping the charging handle back.
Dex’s blaster was going off almost continuously. Each shot sent a Replicator sprawling, but they were recovering faster with each passing second. Sheppard could see the way they moved was smoother, more natural, as if they were regaining functions they had lost as they lay like corpses on the floor. Whatever these things had become, they were waking up.
It was time to be gone. He shot out the throat of one Replicator, turned to blast away the face of another, then began to back away. “Ronon!”
“I’ll follow you!”
“Follow the damned order!” The P90 clattered empty again. “Ronon, behind you!”
A Replicator was within a meter of the Satedan, reaching out to him, its fingers elongating into oozing spines. Sheppard saw Dex spin around, raise his blaster and fire it point-blank into the Asuran’s face, but he was too close to it. The Replicator staggered back, its head an exploded mess from the jawline upwards, but the backblast had flipped Dex over too. He fell away, covering his eyes, snarling.
Sheppard raced over to him, gabbed him by one arm. “You okay?”
“I will be when I can see!”
“Now will you listen when I tell you to do stuff?” Sheppard righted the man, then sent him with a shove towards the door. “Go on, I’m right behind you!”
Dex hit the wall, found the doorway with his hands, and ducked into it. Sheppard turned, fired a long, street-sweeping burst into the advancing Replicators, then followed him.
The two of them ran through the short corridor and out into the first chamber. McKay was there waiting for them, near the exit. Sheppard could hear the sounds of water coming from the ceiling there, and almost smiled. He could even see natural light issuing from the other end. “Everyone okay? Ronon?”
The Satedan was blinking. “Yeah, I’m okay. Give me a minute.”
“I don’t think we’ve got a minute.” Scuffling, slapping sounds were coming from behind him. When he looked around, the taclight beam fell on a corridor that was a seething mass of Replicators.
“I’ve got an idea,” said McKay suddenly. “Where’s my PDA?”
“In your damn bag.” Sheppard shoved him towards the exit corridor. “How’s this for an idea? Just run!”
“No time, they’ll catch us trying to get through that hole. Just wait…”
“Rodney!”
McKay was tapping at the PDA screen. “I can control the APE from here.”
“Can you set it off?”
“No,” McKay shook his head, not taking his eyes off the screen. “But I can do this.”
The scuffling grew louder, turned into a cacophony of impacts, crunches, sickening scraping and crushing noises, and a moment later something dark and bulky erupted from the corridor. The Replicators in front of it were bowled aside; Sheppard saw one crushed down and impaled by the APE’s spindly leg, another torn in half in a gout of crimson and silver.
Next to him, McKay made a flourish on the PDA screen, and in response the APE spun, pirouetting wildly. Another pair of Asurans were knocked flying, limbs ripped free.
McKay gave a nervous laugh. “I’ve missed having a pet.”
Sheppard slapped him on the shoulder. “Right now, I’m probably almost as proud of you as you are. Ronon, get your blind ass down to the exit! I need you to drag us out fast!”
“I’m not blind,” the Satedan grumbled, splashing off down the corridor. Sheppard stepped aside to let McKay in after him, then followed the pair of them, letting the APE spin its wild, uncontrolled dances at the corridor mouth. Some of the Replicators were already scampering past it, but it had bought them a precious few seconds.
The corridor was just as he had remembered it; dank, crumbling, ankle deep in stinking water. After the nightmares he had just witnessed, though, it felt absurdly welcoming. He followed the light from McKay’s PDA all the way out, turned and dropped to one knee to fire bursts back along the corridor as Dex hauled McKay out into the open, then as soon as he saw daylight flood past him he stopped firing and began to scramble out of the hole.
Rain, heavy and slippery-warm, sluiced down over him as he emerged. The murky, grayish light felt searing, making his eyes blink and water. It had been cool in the Replicator base, the heat of the air leached away by the weight of rock above it, but out in the open it felt muggy and hot.
Still, compared to the alternative, it was practically paradise.
Sheppard heard splashing behind him, the scrape of flesh on stone. He unclipped a grenade from his belt. “Better stand back, I’m gonna blow this —”
A Replicator erupted from the hole.
In an instant, it had him, one hand around his throat, the other clamped iron-hard over the grenade in his right hand. The Replicator had given up all pretence at humanity: whether it was one of the creatures he had seen decapitated by weapons fire he could not tell, but what bobbed on the end of its neck was not a head. It was a seething cluster, a mass of eyes and mouths and the waving needles of sensory antennae. Part metal, part meat, all hunger.
The Replicator was appallingly strong. Sheppard couldn’t even shout.
Dimly, through the pain in his throat and the reddening in his vision, he could see Dex next to him, trying to yank the thing away, hacking at it with one of his many knives, but the Satedan was wasting his efforts. He was opening superficial wounds at best.
And then, without warning, something washed over him.