At first he thought it was death, but then the ground came up and hit him in the back. There was an awful feeling in the air, a million crawling itches scuttling under his skin, a hissing, crackling sound in his ears. A dry, wavering heat drawing steam from the rain.
A stink of ozone. McKay had set off the APE.
Sheppard struggled to his feet. The Replicator was hanging halfway out of the hole, inert, lifeless. Horribly, it was starting to disassemble as he watched: the machine parts of it shrinking away like severed tendons, the fleshy elements breaking down, liquefying into a thick, ruddy soup that oozed down onto the broken stone, carrying a myriad of silvery fragments and threads.
The pain in Sheppard’s throat was lessening, almost to the point where he thought it might be possible to start breathing again. He gave it a try, sucking in a mouthful of the reeking air, but it caught in his chest. He coughed, spat, straightened himself up and tried again. This time it worked, more or less. “Oh, man…”
“Are you okay?” That was McKay, the PDA still in his hand. Sheppard nodded.
“Finally hacked that part too, eh?”
“Well, I didn’t want to let all that voltage go to waste.” McKay blinked sorrowfully at the PDA. “Well, that’s the end of that.”
“You break it?” asked Dex. McKay tossed it to him.
“EMP cooked it. It was beefed up with Ancient technology, and that’s what the APE was tuned to, I guess. I’m just hoping the laptop survived. It was powered down, so it shouldn’t have blown the storage…” He raised his arm and pulled his sleeve back. “Hey, my watch is okay!”
“Wonderful.” Sheppard saw that he still had the grenade in his right hand. He clipped it carefully back onto his belt. If the Replicator had been a second later in grabbing him, he would have had the pin out of the thing. It would have gone off when he fell.
Come to that, a stray spark from the electromagnetic pulse could have cooked off either grenade, or the ammo in his vest… He suddenly thought just how close he had come to obliteration. “Guys, can we get out of here now?”
“With pleasure,” McKay said emphatically. “This place makes me want to take a shower. I more ways than one.”
The walk back to the jumper gave Sheppard time to think about what he had seen. But his thoughts were circular, chasing each other around in his tired head and ultimately making no sense at all.
He had almost worked out the sequence of events at the Replicator facility, although there were still a few puzzling gaps. The biggest of which was the idea of two groups of Asurans working at cross-purposes to each other, even to the point of one group shooting its way into the other’s facility and setting off a suicide weapon there. If there had been more light in the base, would he have seen scatterings of metal dust on the floor of that corpse-strewn chamber? It was impossible to say. The APE had rendered the compromised Replicators inert the first time it was used. The second time, at least given what he had seen of the one that had grabbed him, it had broken their structure down entirely.
A structure that was, quite obviously, part Replicator, part living tissue.
A chimera. A hybrid.
Too many pieces to the puzzle, he thought wearily. Too many gaps in the picture. He couldn’t put it all together just yet. Especially where Angelus was concerned. How the Ancient fitted into all this was a mystery beyond his capacity to solve.
Maybe when he was back on Atlantis things would become clearer. Right now, all he wanted to do was get back into the jumper and go home.
They had almost reached the landing site. Sheppard was first in line as they rounded the rocks, with McKay in the middle and Dex last. So it was Sheppard who first saw the puddle jumper.
He stopped in his tracks. “Aw crap,” he muttered.
McKay heard him, increased his pace on the slippery ground, and scrambled up alongside him. “What? What’s wrong.”
Sheppard gestured at the jumper. “I think we’ve got a problem,” he said.
“It looks okay to me.”
“Yeah,” said Dex, stopping a few meters away. “But when we left, the cloak was on.”
McKay stared at it for a second, then looked back over his shoulder. “What, you don’t think…?”
“Tuned to Ancient technology,” Sheppard replied. “Congratulations, Rodney. You just cooked our ride home.”
Chapter Fifteen
In the Zone
Outside the city, dawn was breaking.
Cold, clear sunlight was skating across the ocean, broken into misty shafts by the spires that dotted the piers and rose, clustering like admiring acolytes, around the control tower to form the city core. Carter had seen the sun come up from the balcony, as she had waited for the senior staff to congregate in the conference room. Those few minutes leaning on the angled rail, watching night turn into golden day, had been the first rest she had allowed herself since Teyla’s call had roused her in the night.
Now, with the conference room’s multiple doors closed, and the only light coming from the half-globe that hugged its ceiling, Carter missed the sun. Surrounded by identical rust-colored panels and the expectant faces of the Atlantis senior staff, she felt entombed here. Trapped.
She was very tired, and she wanted to be away.
Still, those feelings were a weakness, and there was no place for them now. She pushed the fatigue and the fear aside, shut them away within herself. Later, when all this was done, she would deal with them at her own pace — for now, ruthless efficiency was the order of the day.
“Okay,” she began. “Thanks for getting down here so quickly. I’ll keep this as short as I can; we’ve all got other things to be doing. So, first things first — I think it’s safe to assume that Mr Fallon isn’t coming back.”
“There has been no answer at all from him?” asked Teyla. Carter shook her head.
“Nothing. He went in to meet with Angelus, oh…” She checked her watch. “About four hours ago, and there’s been no word at all since then. I’ve had people trying to get in touch with him and with Angelus periodically since that time, and they’ve had no response.”
“Won’t that just be due to comms being out in the lockdown area?” That was Major Lorne, who was standing in for John Sheppard, representing the city’s military contingent. MacReady was still at the lockdown. “Maybe he’s just trapped, unable to respond.”
Zelenka, who sat across the table from Teyla, shook his head. “That’s just the point — the communications aren’t out, not in any conventional sense. Fallon proved that when he got in touch with Angelus. Try connecting to anyone who’s still in there, and listen. You’ll get a return, just no answer.”
“Actually, don’t,” Carter cut in, grimacing. “Trust me, it’s one of the creepiest damn sounds you’ll ever hear.”
“Creepy how?” Jennifer Keller was right opposite Carter, looking slightly more nervous than usual, if that was possible. “What is it, static?”
“Not exactly,” muttered Zelenka. He obviously remembered the eerie sounds he had amplified for Carter in the ZPM lab. “Put simply, something has infiltrated the comms net. We don’t know what — a computer virus, maybe, some kind of nanite infection — but that’s the noise it makes. It’s part of the same pattern of interference that’s been draining power out of the grid every forty-one seconds.”
“And the false images on the surveillance cameras and the medical scanners,” Carter went on. “The pattern interferes with some of our compression codecs, sets most of the picture just slightly out of phase, so you get that diagonal —”
“Jesus!” hissed Keller, and tugged the headset out of her ear. She had gone quite pale. “Sorry.”
“I said don’t,” Carter told her, smiling grimly. “Look, what this means is that we can’t trust the comms network any more. From now on, any communications that could possibly be of tactical advantage to Angelus can’t go via the city net.”