by Stargate
Sheppard whistled. “Talk about being in for the long haul.”
“Yeah, but he was a little too successful. He advanced the Eraavi too far, and the Wraith got a scent. He was in stasis when they attacked.”
“His children were culled?” whispered Teyla.
“He doesn’t know exactly.” Carter ran a hand back through her hair. “Whatever happened, it must have been bad. Either his computers decided to keep him frozen until they thought it was safe, or they took a hit and malfunctioned. He was in stasis for almost ten thousand years.”
“Holy crap,” breathed Sheppard.
“Is that even possible? “ McKay asked. “I mean, the Ancients we found on the Aurora had been in stasis for that amount of time, but they’d still aged. They couldn’t even survive outside the tubes.”
“I don’t know,” Carter replied. “Maybe he had a more advanced version, or he tinkered with it somehow. He didn’t say.”
“So that’s what he meant by killing his children,” said Sheppard. “Advancing them to the point they became Wraith food.”
“No, that’s the odd part. He says the Eraavi were alive when he got out of the lab. The thing is, that’s as far as we got. Keller pretty much threw me out of the infirmary.”
“Just when you were getting to the good part,” Dex said grimly. “John, what do you think?”
“Sounds crazy enough to be true. Just don’t ask me to believe a word of it.” He turned back to Carter. “We need the rest of the story. Once we’ve got that, maybe we can start checking it out.”
“Agreed.” She stood up. “Rodney, I need you back with the ship. Anything you can tell me about it, even from the outside, could help. If you can figure out a way to get back into it that’d be great too, but start off with the broad strokes. Teyla?”
“Yes, Colonel?”
“Get together with Ronon. See if you can’t get a lead on the Eraavi. Somebody must have heard of them. And John? You’re with me. It’ll take two of us to get past Keller.”
There was a series of self-contained living spaces a couple of levels under the infirmary, not entirely unlike the kind of rooms one might find in a small hotel. Like most of the city’s components, their original function remained a mystery, but Doctor Keller had recently extended the medical team’s territory downwards to included them. Since then, the rooms had proven very effective quarters for those who might need quick access to medical facilities, but yet didn’t warrant a bed in the infirmary. Or, in the case of Angelus, people who required a comfortable and closely-monitored form of house arrest.
There were two marines posted on the door. Sheppard knew them; Kaplan and DeSalle. Perhaps not the pair Sheppard would have chosen, but competent enough.
They snapped to attention as he and Carter arrived, but Sheppard gestured at them to relax. “At ease, guys,” he said, then nodded at the door. “How’s he been?”
“Quiet, sir,” Kaplan told him, pushing his cap back on his head. “Really quiet.”
“Yeah?”
Concern must have shown on his face, because Kaplan immediately tried to reassure him. “It’s okay, sir. He’s wearing biomonitors, so if there was anything wrong Doctor Keller would know about it. But no, so far he’s not caused any trouble.”
“Glad to hear it.” He looked over to Carter. “Shall we?”
In response, she waved her hand over the lock control. The door sighed open, and Sheppard saw Angelus for the first time.
There was a big window in the far wall of the apartment, an asymmetrical panel of something that wasn’t quite glass, with a sprawl of the city’s towers and spines rearing behind it. The Ancient stood silhouetted there, a tall, slender figure, his back to the door. He had one hand raised, the long fingers pressed flat against the window, and if he heard the door open he didn’t respond to it.
Carter went in first. “Angelus?”
“I had forgotten what it was like,” he breathed. “The city. I never thought I would forget this, of all things…” He turned, a lost expression on his face. “How could I have forgotten?”
“You’ve been away,” she replied, sounding wary.
“I have. But still…” He looked back over his shoulder, as if to get one last glimpse of the towers ranged out behind him, then seemed to steady himself. “Forgive me, Colonel. I’m proving a poor guest.”
“Angelus, I’d like you to meet Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard.”
The Ancient bowed slightly. “So many new faces. Welcome, Lieutenant Colonel.”
“Nice to finally meet you,” said Sheppard. He kept his voice neutral, and didn’t move any closer to the Ancient than he had to. It was easier to gain an initial impression of someone, he always found, from a slight distance.
Angelus was very still; that was Sheppard’s first thought. Even when he had turned around he had done so with the minimum of effort — not so much a grace, but a kind of efficiency, as though he was unwilling to waste even the slightest movement. He wore a long robe of what looked like pale gold, and the reflections from this seemed to pull all the color from his skin. That, and his stillness, gave Sheppard the unnerving impression he was speaking not to a man but to a statue, all white gold and ivory.
His dark hair and eyes were the only contrast about him.
“I’m sure you have many questions,” said Angelus. He gestured to a set of padded forms nearby. “Would you like to sit down?”
“Not right now.”
A brief smile crossed the Ancient’s lips. “Of course. Doing so would restrict access to your sidearm.”
“Hey,” started Carter. “He didn’t mean —”
“Please, Colonel. I fully understand, and I bear John Sheppard no malice for his mistrust.” Angelus spread his hands. “No physical test you could subject me to will be exhaustive. My story cannot be verified. I am sure there are many species in this galaxy capable of pretending to be something they are not. In all truth, why should I be trusted?”
Clever, thought Sheppard. “Look, either we find a way of proving you are who you say you are, or we’re just gonna be doing this dance forever.”
“Agreed. So, how can I assist you?”
“Well, let’s start with the rest of your story. What happened when you woke up?”
“Ah,” said Angelus. “That.”
There was a period of silence. The Ancient was simply standing, outlined in light from the window, his gaze seemingly fixed on a point midway to the floor. It wasn’t until Sheppard looked over at Carter, hoping for some signal as how to proceed, that he spoke again.
“You understand,” he said, his voice barely louder than a whisper, “that this is… Difficult. During my time with the Eraavi, I…” He paused, took a breath. “I became very fond of them.”
“Your children,” Sheppard prompted.
“Yes, that is how I began to think of them. More and more as my time with them went on. I must admit, when the experiment began, that is all they were to me… An experiment. A complex system on which to test my theories. But it didn’t take me too many years before they became something far, far more.”
He half-turned back to the window, and stood gazing over his shoulder at the city’s spires. “I think that was, partly, why my guiding hand became known. My intention was to remain completely hidden from the test subjects — to do anything other would have compromised the purity of the experiment. Over the years, however… As I guided them through the earliest algorithms, I found I could not keep such a distance.”
“How did they regard you?” Carter asked him. “Did they resent you?”
He turned his haunted eyes to her. “They called me Father.”
“Okay,” said Sheppard, slowly. “So you realized your experiment wasn’t valid anymore, but you stayed around anyway. Did you think they needed you that badly, or did you just get used to the adoration?”
“I don’t know. Honestly, I do not. I had begun to ask myself the same question… My own motives had become a mystery to me
, and there is no comfort in that. I had decided to resolve that question when I was next roused from stasis, but of course I never got the opportunity. The Wraith robbed me of it.”
“They must have hit the Eraavi pretty hard.”
Angelus smiled grimly. “It is a matter of some pride to me that they survived at all. Suffice to say that when I finally escaped my stasis chamber, things on Eraavis were very different.”
“We’ve seen some post-Wraith cultures,” Carter began. “I know —”
“Colonel, you know nothing!” the Ancient snapped. He spun to face her, his face dark with sudden rage. “You have seen cultures beaten into submission by the Wraith, not steeled against them. You have seen primitives, no better than cattle, not a surge in art and culture and technology… You were not there, Colonel Samantha Carter, and you do not know!”
Sheppard had taken a step back, and his hand, unconsciously, had dropped to the butt of his pistol. “Easy, tiger,” he warned, keeping his voice flat and calm. “You’re right, we weren’t there. We need you to tell us.”
Angelus glared at him, dark eyes flashing beneath his brows. And then, abruptly, he was still again. “I apologize,” he said, bowing to Carter very slightly. “That was unforgivable.
“John Sheppard, I will tell you. Ah, if only I could have shown you… There were cities, you see, cities to rival Atlantis itself.” He closed his eyes, raised his face to some unseen wonder. “The Wraith had blasted the Eraavi back to the invention of the mud brick, but over the millennia they had recovered, and used what I had taught them. Cities, the like of which you have never witnessed, and every tower and garden and library and home built utterly below ground. They had extended existing cave systems, digging deep and far… When I awoke, there was barely a mountain on Eraavis that didn’t hide a city beneath its peak.”
“That’s incredible,” muttered Sheppard.
“Truly. And they were not ignorant of the Wraith’s danger, either. They had developed a sacrificial culture, entire villages on the surface, living as though they knew nothing of the cities under their feet. When the Wraith came, time after time, they found scattered groups of primitives, subsistence farms, iron tools. They never saw the teeming millions, just the devoted few…” His eyes, open again now, gleamed. “This is what I found when I awoke. If my experiments had still been a priority, they would have been validated beyond my imagination.”
“What did you do?” asked Carter, sounding a little stunned.
“At first? I walked the land.”
“Meaning…”
“I spent ten years walking among the Eraavi,” Angelus replied. “Learning their history, their culture… I had arrived with every intention of building a society in my own image, but I now found myself exploring a whole new one.”
“That must have been amazing…” Carter pulled a seat close and sat down carefully. “You must have been very proud.”
“I think I was beyond pride at that point, Colonel.” Perhaps following Carter’s lead, Angelus sat too, perching on the edge of the bed. Sheppard watched him sit down, judged how quickly the Ancient could get to Carter if he went for her, calculating how many shots he could get off if that happened. Enough.
“When was this?” he asked. “Our time.”
“I finished my travels a year ago, John Sheppard. Believe me, I could have spent my whole life travelling there, and would have done had I not learned two things. Firstly, that I had been remembered. The Eraavi still revered their Father.”
“And second?”
“That the Wraith were coming back.” Angelus raised his hands, a strange gesture, and sat looking at them for a moment. “The Eraavi were too numerous, I could see that. If there was another cull, they might not be able to remain hidden. Their expansion and that of the Wraith were on a collision course. Sooner or later, all this wonder would be brought to ruin.”
Something in his voice lodged a shard of ice under Sheppard’s sternum. “What did you do?”
“I did what any loving father would have done,” the man replied. “I gave them the means to destroy the Wraith.”
“We need to get back to IOA,” Sheppard told Carter a few minutes later, as they walked back towards the tower. “Jesus, if they knew about this —”
“If they knew about this they’d throw eight kinds of fit,” Carter said quickly. “Listen, John. Be careful about who you tell for the moment, okay? Believe me, IOA could really go the wrong way on this one. We’re going to need confirmation at the very least.”
“How are we going to get that?”
“Give me time.”
“Sam, if what he told us is true we might not have any time!”
She stopped, and put her hands up placatingly. “Look, we’ve been over this with Ellis, and the situation hasn’t changed. If they knew he was here, they’d be all over us already. If we get this wrong, shoot our mouths off to IOA before we’ve got all the facts, then yeah, we could find ourselves up to our ears in bad guys before we could spit. So we’ve got to be careful.”
Sheppard pointed back towards Angelus’ room. “Like he was careful?”
“He didn’t know about the Replicators. How could he have done? If he did, maybe he wouldn’t have been so quick to do what he did. But one way or the other, John, we need to know.”
He took a deep breath, tried to calm the angry slamming of his heart. “Okay. Okay, maybe you’re right. Question is, what do we do now?”
“We get back with the others, tell them what we know and see if they’ve gotten any results. And we get a message to the Apollo. We’ll need Ellis on this one.”
“Right.” He put his hands to the back of his neck, fingers linked, trying to stretch out a sudden knot of tension there. “I’ll light a fire under ’em.”
“Good.” She gave him a quick, grin. “And try not to panic.”
Despite himself, he chuckled. “Sure. Hey, Sam?”
“Hm?”
“You don’t think it could have worked, do you? What he was trying to do?”
She shrugged. “I have no idea. But that’s one of the reasons I don’t want IOA in on this yet. If they even get a taste of this…”
“They’ll be all over us, I get it.” He stretched his arms out, fingers still woven, and cracked his knuckles. “Okay, let’s see how far across the hangar I need to kick Rodney.”
Chapter Four
The Sixth Circle
Apollo jumped into the M4T system with shields set to maximum, all forward railguns live and eight missiles, including a pair of tactical nukes, hot in their tubes and ready to fire. Even though the Replicator ship he had encountered the previous day had been an easy kill, Ellis was in no mood to take chances.
He was on the edge of his seat, quite literally, as the ship broke out of hyperspace. Despite the inexorable downward slope the tunnel effect seemed to have these days, he had fixed his attention on it for the past several minutes, his eyes narrowed, staring down that silver-blue throat as if he could force himself, by sheer will, to see what lay beyond. Foolish, he knew, but if there was anything waiting for him at the other end, he didn’t want to blink and miss it.
There wasn’t. Apollo lurched out of hyperspace and into still, silent darkness.
“Stay frosty,” Ellis growled, glaring out at the starfield. “We thought it was gonna be quiet last time, too. Meyers?”
“Yessir?”
“Full sweep. Deacon, shut down the main drives. Thrusters only while we try and shed some heat.”
Deacon tapped at his control board, and Ellis heard the faint grumble of the drives attenuate as they were throttled back. Apollo still had plenty of forward momentum, even after leaving most of its velocity in hyperspace, and would continue to coast forwards forever until some other force was applied to it. That suited Ellis just fine for now: the heat from the main drives would light Apollo up like a torch against the freezing background temperatures of space, and while the battlecruiser could never shed enough thermal energy t
o become invisible, every degree lost could be an advantage, however slight.
Trying to stealth any kind of ship without a cloaking field was damn near impossible; Ellis was all too aware of that. But he wasn’t going to advertise his presence in the system any more than he could help. Besides, if trouble did arise, Apollo’s main engines could be brought back online within moments.
“Meyers, how’s that sweep coming along?”
“Still building up a picture, sir, but no significant returns yet. So far, it looks like we’re all alone out here.”
“Just how I like it. Okay, let’s get McKay’s program running.”
Behind him, two technicians began the process of loading Rodney McKay’s guidance program into Apollo’s computers. The stealth sensors, still chilling on their racks down in the bomb bay, needed to be dropped at a very precise location in the system. Their operational range was vast, several Astronomical Units in radius, but the arrays needed to mimic the orbits of existing debris. McKay’s program would, the scientist had claimed, take charge of Apollo’s own sensors, map out a gravitational diagram of the system in precise detail, and work out exactly where to drop the sensors. McKay had boasted of the program being accurate to within ten kilometers, but Ellis wasn’t buying that. Still, on an interplanetary scale, even distances in the thousands of kilometers became vanishingly small.
The sensors would be dropped in the right place, he had no doubt, or would find their way there.
Within a few moments, Deacon’s control board chirruped, and a tactical display flowered open on his centre screen. Similar readouts sprang to life on the weapons panel, too. “Damn,” said Ellis. “That guy’s scary. Okay, people, looks like we have our drop point. How long to get there on thrusters?”