She stifled an impulse to groan in frustration. “Very well. I’ll get Teyla and Ronon to start searching. From what you said, they should be reasonably safe.”
“Aye. You do that. I’d better get back.” He rose and raised a hand to ward off her protest. “I can sleep when this is over. Reminds me of my youth. Being a resident and pulling ninety-hour weeks.” Halfway to the door he suddenly turned around. “Where is Rodney?”
“Holed up in his lab with Radek. Why?”
“Make sure he stays there, and make sure nobody else goes in. Rodney’s got the ATA gene as well. If I’d realized the implications sooner, I’d never have let him inside the infirmary, naquadah generator or no.”
Elizabeth watched him leave, trying hard to squelch a sense of rising panic. Other than Carson, Rodney was their best hope of beating this thing. If they lost him… it didn’t bear thinking about.
“How about some good news for a change?” she muttered and rose to head back to the command center.
Rodney McKay was positive that he was developing a fever. He could feel it. There! A bead of sweat, originating somewhere between his shoulder blades, shook loose and slid down his back like an icy little finger. He groaned.
“You look fine to me, Rodney.” Radek Zelenka’s response was mechanical, and he never even bothered to glance up from the computer screen.
“How would you know?” snarled Rodney. “You haven’t looked at me.”
Radek peered over the monitor at Rodney. “You look fine to me.”
“I’m sweating.”
“So am I. I shut down all non-essential environmental systems in this sector two hours ago, so we can divert the energy to the shield. The current temperature in the lab is”— he rattled out a tattoo on the keyboard, then his head popped up again, like a chipmunk peeping from its burrow— “eighty-two point four degrees Fahrenheit and rising.”
Twenty-eight degrees Celsius, for those who liked to use a comprehensible measure of temperatures.
A nice, sultry day at the beach.
Sure. He could dream.
And he still wished he’d had the foresight to keep a thermometer in his desk, along with the aspirin, cold and flu remedy, and antacids. But Zelenka’s explanation was plausible. By Zelenka’s standards.
Then again… Rodney furtively felt his forehead but couldn’t tell any appreciable difference. His palms were just as hot. And sweaty.
He supposed he might as well work until he was overcome by the disease. He had no doubt that he would be infected. After all, he’d been given the ATA gene.
“Nice going, Carson,” he muttered under his breath. “I don’t suppose it occurred to you to take the attendant risks into account.”
“What?” Zelenka piped up.
“Nothing!”
Rodney tried to focus on the latest rampage of the computer virus, and decided that, maybe, quantum computing wasn’t such a cool gadget after all. Especially when your malware operated by the rules of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which meant that, every time you thought you’d finally caught a glimpse of the little bastard, it switched quantum states and turned into something else entirely. When that happened, all you could do was wait until a new trail of destruction showed up elsewhere in the system.
Which, fundamentally, was what Rodney had been doing for the past several hours. That and praying that, wherever the beast cropped up next, it wouldn’t affect anything essential for survival.
“Uh, Rodney?”
“What? I’m trying to think!”
“We just had a power fluctuation in the shields.”
So much for things nonessential… Damn! “Well, what do you expect me to do? Rattle my beads and chant magic spells? Reroute the power, for God’s sake!”
Zelenka gave a despairing little grunt. “I’m starting to run out of places to reroute stuff through. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“Yes. Fine. Magnificent. I shall consider myself warned. Now let me think.”
After precisely two point five seconds of blessed silence— certainly not a stretch of time in which a useful thought could be conceived, but silence nonetheless— static whooshed through the ear-bud of his com set. Hot upon its heels followed the nasal, wannabe-Oxbridge tones of the duty technician in the control center. Bloody colonialists!
“What?” roared Rodney.
Zelenka jumped. “I didn’t say any—”
“Not you!” And, “Yes, you!” he hollered into the stalk mike. Within moments he wished he hadn’t. Which, of course, wouldn’t have made the this latest problem go away either. “Yes! I know you need the shield fully functional. We’re working on it. What do you think we’re doing down here? Playing strip poker?”
Zelenka did that chipmunk thing again, eyebrows raised over the frame of his specs. Lord have mercy! He wasn’t getting any ideas, was he?
“McKay out!” he snarled and flopped back into his chair, closed his eyes, started swiveling.
The motion felt soothing, at least that was what he was telling himself.
Everybody seemed convinced they could just snap their fingers and Rodney McKay would hop and spit out some foolproof plan for salvation while he was at it. Nobody appreciated that science, too, was creative and therefore required a certain touch of the muse. Annoyingly, muses refused to kiss on demand.
Worse than that, he knew that, given the situation, he didn’t have much choice in the matter. He couldn’t afford to wait for inspiration, he needed inspiration now. Zelenka was right; they couldn’t go on rerouting systems indefinitely. Apart from anything else, the virus behaved like a gang of hyenas on the prowl, slowly but surely blocking any and all escape routes.
“What was that all about?” Zelenka interrupted the interior monolog.
Popping one eye open, Rodney found he was staring at a shelving unit and swiveled the chair to the proper position from which to send a baleful glare in his colleague’s direction. “Oh, nothing special. The Wraith decided our little dilemma here wasn’t quite challenging enough. A hive-ship just showed up on the long range sensors. Naturally the good folks in the command center expect me to make it all go away— preferably within the next twenty seconds— while crocheting a whole new ZPM so we won’t lose power to the shield.”
Zelenka burst into a stream of Czech that sounded like it carried an ‘R’ rating. Nice to know one’s coworkers appreciated the gravity of the situation.
Make it all go away.
Yeah. You wish!
Make it all go away…
Make it…
It couldn’t be that easy, could it?
Sniffing at the scent of the idea, Rodney felt it might be worth getting excited over. They’d already determined it was a cohesive stream of photons that acted as the virus. Translated into the vernacular it meant their problem was caused by something as mundane as a beam of light. In a manner of speaking. The salient point was, it had been done before. By a bunch of postgraduate students, at that. Okay, so the conditions had been vastly different, vastly more controlled than what they were facing, but at the end of the day the same principles applied. If their hacker was using Heisenberg against them, they’d just have to do an end run around all that, wouldn’t they?
“Spooky action at a distance,” he murmured.
“Excuse me?” Going by the look on Zelenka’s face, he thought Rodney must have cracked.
Far from it. “You’ve got to hand it to the old codger. When he was wrong, he was really, really wrong,” Rodney said pensively.
“Which old codger?”
“Einstein, of course. Who else?”
“Of course,” parroted Zelenka, suggesting he’d decided on no account to contradict the lunatic. He also was gawking, mouth open. Quite unattractive, actually.
“Can you do something about the draft in here?”
“Sorry.” Zelenka closed his mouth, which constituted a moderate improvement.
“Spooky action at a distance,” repeated Rodney. “T
hat’s how Einstein referred to quantum entanglement. He didn’t believe in quantum mechanics, period, on the grounds that, and I quote, God doesn’t play dice with the universe. Fact is, of course, not only does He play dice, He cheats.”
“Joseph Ford, I believe.”
Rodney scowled. “Rodney McKay.”
“If you say so.”
“Never mind all that. We can’t nail down the virus, because it operates like any self-respecting subatomic particle in that it won’t let itself be interfered with, right?”
“Right.”
“The way around it is to create entangled pairs of particles. In each pair the opposite number of your particle will be and do the exact opposite of the particle you’re interested in.”
“Yes. I know that.”
“Now repeat the process, what do you get?”
“An exact copy of my original particle.”
“Elsewhere! Which would be the whole point!”
“And the original particle would be destroyed in the process.” You could tell that a vague concept of Rodney’s idea was beginning to dawn on Zelenka. His lower jaw sagged again. “You want to teleport the virus out of the mainframe.”
“Precisely!”
“You’re crazy!”
“If that’s what it takes. A few years back a group of students at Berkeley managed to teleport a laser beam. Photons. Same thing. It’s possible. All I need is… well, I need to build a particle beam generator that’s capable of creating GHZ states.”
“Well, if that’s all… piece of cake,” Zelenka said, straight-faced.
“Of course it isn’t!” The excitement finally propelled Rodney from his chair and sent him pacing. “I need… I need Colonel Carter to assist me. She’s designed a particle beam generator, crude of course, but at least we’ll have a foundation to build on. I need to contact the SGC and have her sent here, I don’t care about the power requirements at their end. This is an emergency. This is—”
“A city under quarantine,” completed Zelenka.
Interesting. This had to be how a tire felt when it got punctured. Rodney felt the air seep from his lungs. “Thanks,” he said. “I really wanted that reminder.”
“There is another way.” So now Dr. Positive was trying to throw him a bone. How nice. “And it’s easier. Probably. A Wraith beam operates on a similar principle. So does the Asgard beam technology, for that matter, but sadly we sent our only available specimen of that back to Earth. So we need to modify a Wraith beam according to requirements.”
Much to Rodney’s dismay, the idea actually had some merit. On the upside, it also had an obvious flaw. “And where would we get a Wraith beam from? Those four dozen Darts we happen to have tucked away in the Jumper bay? Or should we just walk up to the nearest Wraith and say pretty please?”
“We’ve got a hive-ship within sensor range. And where there’s hive-ships…”
“You can’t be serious! Who do you think you are? Colonel Sheppard?”
“It’s the quickest way, and time is an issue.” Zelenka shrugged. “If I remember correctly it took Colonel Carter three months to build that particle beam generator. I don’t think we’ve got that long.”
He had a point.
Rodney hated it when that happened.
Chapter 23
The call came in just before twenty-three hundred. Not that it mattered, because her Pentagon office was a windowless closet that encouraged long working hours simply because its occupant was unable to register the passage of day into night.
The call came in on the secure phone. She’d had it installed months ago, on the pretext that, given the increased terrorist threat, it was better to be safe than sorry. It probably had garnered her points for diligence with her superiors. Fact of the matter was, though, that only a very select handful actually had access to this extension.
She picked up the receiver. “Yes.”
“We have a problem,” said the voice at the other end.
Who did he think she was? Houston? “What?”
“The site was compromised.”
“Compromised?”
“Destroyed.”
She felt an icy knot forming somewhere beneath her breastbone. She was safer than the messenger, for sure, but she was nowhere near high enough up in the pecking order to be immune. There would be repercussions.
“How?” she asked hoarsely.
“Current best guess, an explosion of some sort that resulted in an extremely hot fire.”
“What about the find?”
“No trace. The pod’s still recognizable, but it looks empty. We found no organic matter in there. So the assumption is that they managed to open it. As for the contents, we simply don’t know for certain.”
“Destroyed in the fire?”
“Possibly. As far as we can tell there are the remains of three people at the site. Apparently our men took the girl up there. They never made it back.”
“Where is the girl?”
“Beats me. However…”
“However?”
“There were tracks.”
“Tracks?”
“On some derelict trail that leads to a neighboring cove. Tracks in and out. More out than in.”
“Terrific. I suppose that, on the strength of your assessment of the trail as derelict, you never bothered to secure it.”
“It’s a dead end!”
“Obviously not.”
“It is. Well, unless you’ve got a boat.”
“And there are so very few of those around, given that the damn place is an island.” She didn’t bother to filter the acid from her tone. All this smacked of pure and arrogant laziness, and ultimately she would be the one to pay for it. But not before she’d seen this cretin pulverized. “Presumably I shouldn’t ask if you actually ran a check of who was out there at the time.”
“As a matter of fact, we did check. We’re not completely stupid, you know.” His voice went tight with the effort to control his temper.
“Oh, really?”
“Mostly fishing boats. Which isn’t anything to get excited about. The natives have to eat, after all. Notably, though, there were several leisure crafts absent from their moorings last night. Among them the Jenny III, big motor yacht. Wanna guess who she’s registered to?”
“I don’t have time for your crap!”
“Our most generous benefactor. And wouldn’t you know it, nobody’s seen hide nor hair of him at the office since day before yesterday. We checked that, too.”
“How thorough of you. What do you want? A pat on the back for adroitly shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted?”
“I’m just saying. Looks like our friend may have had a change of heart. Apparently he received some visitors the morning before he dropped off the face of the planet.”
“Fine. I’ll look into it. And I’m relying on you to sanitize the site.”
“Not to worry. Nobody’ll know we’ve been there or what it is we found. The locals we’ve hired on already succumbed to a nasty case of botulism. Spoiled fish, looks like.”
Well, that was something, she supposed. Although it was too little, too late. She hung up without another word, leaned back in her chair, fingers steepled under her chin, and began to sketch out a plan of how to proceed. There might yet be a chance to set things to right and pretend none of this had ever happened. The window wouldn’t be large— she’d have to deliver a full report by start of business tomorrow at the latest— but this wouldn’t take much time. And there was nothing like a credible threat to get a person what she wanted.
Definitely in this case. The man was a pushover. A former hippie made good and brimming with juvenile embarrassment about having joined the ranks of the filthy rich his generation had so despised. He’d embrace any cause you threw at him, because the guilt always lurked just underneath the surface. And guilt was exactly what she intended to exploit.
At the very least she’d get a reliable answer. Best case scenario, she’d get
back what had gone missing, and no one upstairs would be any the wiser.
Smiling, she picked up the receiver again, dialed a cell phone number from memory. He answered after the third ring.
“My, my, my, Mr. Webber,” she purred. “You’ve been a naughty boy, haven’t you? Running off with what belongs to me and my friends? Really, really naughty. I suggest you deliver all of it back to me, otherwise my associates will feel compelled to take something that belongs to you.”
The mystery woman hung up without waiting for an answer, which was just as well. Otherwise she might have noticed that, though she’d gotten the right phone, she’d sure as hell ended up with the wrong guy.
Jack O’Neill stared at the cell phone in his hand as if it were toxic, then punched a couple of buttons. The caller’s number came up, and he recognized it, useless as it was. Switchboard. The call could have originated from anywhere within the Pentagon. Come to think of it, it was worse than useless. It confirmed a suspicion he’d been nursing for while now. The Trust had picked up where the NID had left off and infiltrated the US government.
He flipped the phone shut, stared back into the cabin and at Michael, a mix of worry and guilt curdling in his gut. They— he— had had no business involving the guy, and never mind that he’d volunteered. Michael’s readiness to help had been all too convenient, and Jack had allowed himself to be swayed without a thought to the consequences. Consequences that wouldn’t affect General O’Neill who had his ass too far up the ladder to catch any fallout. Oh no. It was just the innocent bystanders who’d get clobbered. In other words, the kind of godawful mess the military liked to call collateral damage.
So much for flattering himself that he’d run a clean operation.
Should have realized something like this would happen, O’Neill. What the hell were you thinking?
He hadn’t been thinking. He’d been worried sick about Cassie. Still was, if truth be told. Time was when he’d have been her first port of call whenever there was trouble on the horizon. Now she was doing her level best to avoid him. Well, not just him. She hadn’t spoken more than two words to anyone. Instead she’d grabbed a blanket and curled up on one of the couches at the rear of the cabin. Jack would have bet a large amount of money on the fact that she was brooding, not sleeping.
STARGATE SG-1: Transitions Page 17