“No more than half an hour.” Less if he could manage it, Radek thought, but he wasn’t going to promise more than he was sure he could deliver.
“Ok.”
Radek scrambled back up the ramp, Peebles still patiently on guard in the hatch, and began opening access panels, checking his tablet as he went. There were no visible signs of damage, and he looked over his shoulder to where Kaminsky waited in the pilot’s seat. “Can you run another diagnostic for me without affecting your ability to take off?”
“Hang on.” Kaminsky frowned at his controls, and then his expression eased. “Yeah. What systems?”
“Engine power conduits. Also flight surfaces and fields.”
“Hang on,” Kaminsky said again, and lights flickered in the open panel.
Radek glanced at his tablet, watching the numbers scroll past, and allowed himself a sigh of relief. Everything looked to be within normal limits, no changes in power flow or field strength, and he moved forward to look over Kaminsky’s shoulder.
“Everything looks nominal, Doc,” Kaminsky said, and Radek nodded.
“Yes, to me, too.”
“Any more info on why they were shooting at us?”
Radek shrugged again. “Parabantha keeps hinting the Genii were involved, but I don’t see how.”
“Weird,” Kaminsky said.
“I thought by now they’d be ok with being our allies,” Peebles said, without taking her eyes off the group outside. “After we beat Queen Death, I mean.”
“They don’t like taking second place,” Kaminsky said.
“It’s not like we’re trying to take over here,” Peebles said.
“We have Atlantis,” Radek said. He still remembered being evacuated from the city as a massive storm rolled in, and the Genii seizing that moment to attempt to take over the city for themselves. Ladon Radim had been part of that group, and Radek had always wondered just what lessons he’d taken from their narrow failure. He shook himself, and started down the ramp.
“Excuse me, Professor?”
It was a woman’s voice, and Radek turned to see Parabantha’s female assistant standing by the ladder.
“Are you done with this?”
“Yes,” Radek said, and automatically moved to help her fold up the awkward length. Their hands touched, and before he could pull away, he felt her push a piece of paper into his palm. “What?”
“We did this,” she whispered. “This. To the Genii.”
Radek kept his voice down, very aware that his back was to the other Teosians and that his body blocked their view of the woman as well. “Did what?”
“This.” She pressed the paper harder into his hand, and he folded his fingers over it. “To the Pride.”
“But —“
She gave him a blinding smile, hoisted the ladder out of his hands, and walked away. Radek stuffed his hands in his pockets, hoping the move looked natural, and let the paper slide out of his fingers. He followed her at a distance, fixing Lorne with what he hoped was a significant stare.
“Major. I can report no damage from the attack.”
“Oh, that’s excellent news,” Parabantha exclaimed. “I’m very pleased to hear that.”
“Me, too,” Lorne said. “Thanks, Doc. Gatekeeper, we’re going to have to leave now. Our current mission is time-sensitive.”
“Can’t you stay just a little longer? I’m sure we will have word about your attackers any minute now.”
“Sorry, sir,” Lorne said, firmly. “But if you’d dial Atlantis direct with that info, we’d appreciate it.”
“Of course. Of course.”
Maybe it was just the weirdness of the message, the folded paper in his pocket, Radek thought, but there was something odd about Parabantha’s tone — a kind of satisfaction, as though somehow he’d gotten something he wanted. There was nothing he could say, however, and he turned back to the jumper with Lorne. “I checked the hull and the conduit beneath it, and everything’s in order.”
“Good.” Lorne didn’t look back, but his head moved as though he wanted to. “I’ll be glad to get out of here.”
“You, too?” Radek couldn’t stop himself.
“Yeah. Something — none of this adds up.” Lorne nodded to Peebles as they climbed the ramp. “All right, Sergeant, close her up. We’re getting out of here.”
Radek waited until the ramp was sealed, then reached into his pocket. “This should not delay us, but — one of the young women handed me this, very secretively.” He unfolded the paper as he spoke, frowning as the writing was revealed. “She said they did this, whatever this is, whatever this notation is, to the Pride.”
“That’s unexpected,” Lorne said. He took the paper when Radek held it out to him, but shook his head. “I recognize that it’s Ancient writing, Doc, but I can’t read it.”
“It’s Ancient scientific notation,” Radek said, “and it’s a chemical formula of some kind, but that’s as far as I can get. Dr. Beckett would be able to tell more, or Dr. Wu.”
“Can’t the jumper translate it?” Kaminsky asked.
“Yes, but I’m still a physicist, not a chemist,” Radek answered. “It will take a chemist to tell us what this does.”
“I’m not comfortable sending that through the Stargate here,” Lorne said. “Let’s see if we can find the Pride’s track, and then send this back to Atlantis.”
“Yes.” Radek reached for his tablet, calling up the Ancient program. “The sooner we do that, the better.”
~#~
The morning dawned chill and cloudy, with wisps of fog hanging low over the grass. Orsolya dragged herself to the main hatch, heavy-eyed, and stood for a moment wondering if it would be better to get a cup of tea first, or just to go to bed. She had spent the night trying to coax the secondary scanners to give her some kind of reading in the infrared — those sensors used a different channel — but she had only been able to make out a few small areas of warmer temperature, not enough to get a decent reading. Some of the gun crew was gathering at the edge of the perimeter fence, and she frowned. Surely they weren’t going looking for whatever had been there last night…
”They might have hit it,” Agosten said, and she realized she had spoken aloud. “Anyway, if there is something out there, we need to know about it. Did you pick up anything?”
“Maybe.” Orsolya bit back a yawn. She definitely needed tea for this conversation. “I was going to report to the captain, you should hear, too.”
To her relief, someone had already fetched Bartolan an enormous pot of tea, and each of them filled a cup and took a seat in the opening of Bartolan’s tent.
“I came to report on the sensors,” Orsolya said, and took another gulp of the tea. It wasn’t as hot as she would have liked, but it was black and bitter and she could feel it reviving her as she drank. “The main system is still off-line — it uses the same crystals as the communication system — but I was able to get the infrared scanner to give a weak reading. The range is terrible, less than a mile, and the resolution is poor, but I think we caught traces of something moving in the approximate area where our gunners saw eyes.”
“What sort of something?” Agosten asked.
“Probably something living,” Orsolya said. “Though the body temperature was lower than one would expect.”
“A reptile? Something cold-blooded?” Agosten drained his cup, and filled it again.
“Go and take a look,” Orsolya answered. “It’s possible, or it’s possible that the object was smaller than we thought.”
“How large would you say?” Bartolan asked.
“Our first indication was that it’s big.” Orsolya held her hand at her ribs just below the line of her breast. “The size of a small cow. But much colder than a cow, so either it’s a reptile, as First Officer suggests, or something else is obscuring its heat signature.”
“Any guesses?” Bartolan asked.
Orsolya shrugged. “Armor could do it. Feathers could do it. A shell. I just can’t tel
l. Not with the sensors out. And before you say anything, First Officer, we’ve been working on that all night.”
Agosten lifted a hand. “I know. And believe me, we appreciate all your work.”
That was not what she had expected to hear, and she took refuge in her cup of tea, muttering graceless thanks over the rim.
“With your permission, Captain, I’d like to take a team out to see if we can find any traces of whatever that was,” Agosten said.
“Yes, do that,” Bartolan said. “And pass the word that the watering parties should be escorted by a member of the gun crew.”
“Yes, Captain,” Agosten said, and turned away.
“With your permission, Captain,” Orsolya began. She could almost feel her bunk, the cool sheets and the welcoming dark.
Bartolan ignored her. “Engineer. Have you given any more thought to who might have damaged these components?”
“Sir, it may not have been sabotage.”
“But it may well have been, and we can’t ignore that,” Bartolan said.
“I know.” Orsolya took a breath. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see part of the gun crew forming up, rifles on their shoulders, Agosten saying something as a technician opened a section of the fence to let them out. “Sir, I haven’t slept since last night’s excitement. If you want me to say something sensible about this, I’ll have to sleep on it first.”
For a moment, she thought she’d gone too far, but then Bartolan’s lips curved up into a slow smile. “Understood, Engineer. Get some sleep. But we will discuss this later.”
“Yes, sir,” she agreed, setting her cup down, and turned back toward the ship.
How she got to her cabin remained hazy, but she woke sprawled on her bunk, the cabin door not quite closed and distant shouts filtering through the corridors from the hatch. She glanced at the wall display — five hours, better than nothing — and hauled herself to her feet, wishing there were time for a shower. She made her way to the top of the ramp in time to see the exploring party pass through the fence, Agosten striding ahead of his men.
“Oh, there you are, Engineer.” That was one of the gun crew, a fair boy who looked too young to shave. “The Captain wants to see you right away.”
So much for a shower, Orsolya thought, but she was curious, too, and reached the captain’s tent just as Innyes came bustling across from the medical tent. At least everyone else was recovering, and Innyes was looking less harried. She fell in next to the chief pilot Joska, who still looked pale and unsteady. Still, it was an improvement on the last time she’d seen him, when he’d been semi-conscious in a cot in the hospital tent, and she nodded a greeting.
“Feeling better?”
“Yes, thanks. I think I’m mostly back to normal.”
Before she could say anything more, Bartolan lifted a hand, and they all turned to face him. “Gentlemen! First Officer, your report, please.”
“Sir.” Agosten stepped forward. “Gentlemen. The short answer is, there was something out there last night, and the gun crew did an excellent job to spot it and drive it off. Unfortunately, whatever it was, it wasn’t wounded, and we found only tracks and traces of its passage. This is a photo of one of the pug-marks —” He held out a square of quick-print, and it passed quickly around the circle. “And from its size, I’d say that the animal is quite large. I think the System Engineer’s guess of the size of a small cow is about right.”
Orsolya accepted the picture from Joska, grimacing as she made sense of what she was seeing. She could see why Agosten had called it a pug-mark: like the tigrids back on the homeworld, the print had a broad central oval and four smaller ovals at what was presumably the front. It also had a smaller oval to the rear. Someone had had the sense to lay down a measuring stick, and it was easy to see that that whole thing was bigger than her hand. A sizable creature indeed, she thought, and passed the picture on.
“We found where the creature was when we fired at it,” Agosten went on, “and we were able to track it for nearly three kilometers before we lost it. It was heading for the edge of the basin, and we think it went back there. There were some indications it may have come from there as well. With a bit of luck, we’ve alarmed it sufficiently that it won’t be back.”
There was a murmur of appreciative laughter at that, but Orsolya noted that the gun crew’s captain Hajnal didn’t join in. Instead he cleared his throat, and said, “If I may, First Officer?”
“I was coming to that,” Agosten said, “but, yes, go ahead.”
“Thank you, sir.” Hajnal cleared his throat again. “Along with the tracks, we found a decreasing trail of droplets of a thick, viscous liquid. At first, we thought it might be blood, that maybe we hit it after all, but the way the size and frequency of the droplets changed made me think it’s some other sort of secretion. A warn-off musk, maybe, though it didn’t have any particular scent that we could perceive. Anyway, we brought a sample.”
“I’ll take that,” Innyes said, and Hajnal handed over a small bottle about a quarter filled with a dark brown liquid.
“The question is,” Bartolan said, “do we need to take any action about this?”
“Do we know it’s a carnivore?” Joska asked. “We haven’t exactly seen anything for carnivores to live on.”
“There’s not much for an herbivore except the grass,” Agosten said. “And we didn’t see any signs of grazing. We looked for dung, but didn’t find any. Unless that fluid is what it eliminates.”
“I’ll consider that,” Innyes said.
“Maybe everyone should move back onto the ship,” Joska said. “Just to be on the safe side.”
Osolya felt everyone look at her. “The systems will now support that, yes. But we’ve got a lot of rewiring and bypass work before the Pride will be ready to lift.”
“Can you do it with people on board?” Bartolan asked.
“Yes, of course.” She shrugged. “But it will go faster without.”
Before anyone else could speak, there was a whistle from the guard tower. Everyone turned to look, and one of the gunners dropped down from the platform and came running toward the tent.
“Captain! We’ve seen another one!”
“One of the creatures?” Bartolan’s voice was sharp.
“Yes, sir. On the edge of the basin. It dropped out of sight, but we saw it clearly.”
“Describe it.”
“Big, big as a cow, with short fur — It’s about the same color as the grass, maybe that’s why we didn’t see them before. Heavy shoulders, heavy front legs. And it’s got claws bigger than my fingers!”
That was probably imagination, Orsolya thought. She doubted they could have made out that detail through the distance glasses. But still, that sounded more like a carnivore than a grazing animal.
Bartolan tapped his lips with his forefinger. “Keep watching, sing out at once if you see it again, or if you see another one. If they’re just passing through, that’s fine, but get everyone prepared to move back onto the ship. If they’re going to hang around, I want everyone at least sleeping inside the hull.”
That was a good compromise, and Orsolya nodded along with the others. She would also do everything she could to hurry the repairs along. Even if Innyes was worried about them still being contagious, they could at least sit safely in orbit while they figured out what to do.
~#~
The jumper emerged from the orbital gate above P3M-991, and Lorne guided it to a stable orbit a kilometer from the Stargate. The planet hung in the front window, rust-red streaked with long swathes of pale cloud that looked as textured as an oil painting. Hints of gray-green ocean peeked through along the left-most limb, but it was mostly hidden by an enormous whorl of cloud as big as any hurricane Lorne had ever seen. He could hear Zelenka typing data into his tablet, and then a pleased murmur in Czech before the scientist leaned forward.
“Ok. We can see the Pride’s track here as well. I’m putting the extrapolated course onto your screen.”
“I’m working on it,” Zelenka answered. “But while the program runs — shouldn’t we talk to Atlantis?”
“Yeah.” Lorne started to reach for the controls, but the jumper had already anticipated him, dialing the gate and bringing up the radio a moment later. “Atlantis, this is Jumper Three.”
“Jumper Three, Atlantis.” The city spoke with Airman Salawi’s familiar voice. “Go ahead, please.”
“Atlantis, Jumper Three,” Lorne said. “Can you patch me through to Colonel Carter? And probably Doctor Beckett? We’ve found something they need to look at.”
“Jumper Three, Atlantis. Copy that. Can you remain at your current location for contact?”
“We’ll be here, Atlantis,” Lorne said.
“Thank you, Jumper Three. We’ll be back to you as soon as possible.”
The transmission cut out, and Kaminsky said, “I wonder where the colonel is.”
“Probably on the Hammond,” Zelenka said. “There was still much work to be done there.” He shook his head. “If we had the Hammond, they could follow this track directly, while we have to jump from gate to gate and hope we choose correctly.” He stopped, shaking his head. “But. That is what we have. And we cannot wait.”
“How long have they been missing, sir?” Peebles asked.
Lorne frowned, calculating. “Three — no, about four days, now.”
“Oh.” Peebles sank back into her seat, looking thoughtful.
Lorne couldn’t blame her. Four days was a long time, if the ship had wrecked, and even if it hadn’t, even if it was just a system outage, four days was plenty of time for the fault to spread, for the systems to degrade further. Hopefully they’d had the sense to land: everything was worse in vacuum.
“Do we know why they diverted?” Kaminsky asked.
Lorne looked at Zelenka. “Doc?”
“Not really.” Zelenka had set aside his tablet, was rummaging in his battered carryall, but he looked up at that. “Remember, we did not hear their original transmission, just the log entry that referred to it. So something went wrong with their communications system, and then something else happened to keep them from returning to the Genii homeworld.”
Stargate Atlantis #24 Page 17