by Stargate
“If we kick him out of the damn city maybe nobody dies!”
Fallon shook his head. “He’s too valuable. He either works here or at home. Your choice.” He picked up his case and coat, turned away from her, and headed for the door. As he reached it, he paused. “This whole mess is your fault, Colonel,” he said quietly, not looking back. “All you exploration junkies, spinning your Stargates just to see what would happen… Here’s your chance to atone. Don’t screw it up.”
“Fallon?”
“Yeah?”
“This isn’t over.”
“Damn right it isn’t. I’ll go and see Angelus now, let him know how things are going to be run around here.”
With that, he was gone. Carter watched him making his way to the stairs, half of her hoping that he’d fall and break his spine.
The other half wondering if he was right.
She sat in the office for some time, listening to the soft chatter of the control room, trying to calm herself and failing. The conversation with Fallon had shaken her.
Three weeks, she thought. She had been in charge of the Pegasus expedition for three lousy weeks, and already she’d had the authority ripped out from under her.
Had she made a mistake? She had known that the Advisory wanted what Angelus was offering, but perhaps she’d underestimated just how badly. And seriously, she wondered, how could they trust her with a decision like that? She had proven herself to be an effective agent in her time at Stargate Command, sure. She’d been promoted, in the field; she’d fought and led men into battle and, on more occasions than she trusted herself to count, she had been instrumental in saving the day.
But she’d been in Elizabeth Weir’s shoes for three weeks. It wasn’t enough.
Her headset crackled softly, a certain sign that it was about to admit a call. Carter sighed, put her elbows on the desktop and her head in her hands, and closed her eyes.
As she did so the speaker blipped in her ear. She touched the control on its side. “Carter.”
“Colonel? It’s Jennifer Keller, down in the infirmary.”
Carter’s eyes snapped open. There was something in Keller’s voice she didn’t like at all. “What’s wrong?”
“There’s been an incident. Rodney McKay’s been injured.”
“Seriously?”
“No,” said Keller quickly, “it’s not serious.”
In the background, almost out of range of the pickup, Carter heard McKay begin to disagree vehemently, and she puffed out a relieved breath. “Sounds like his voice hasn’t been impaired, anyway.”
“Oh no, that’s working just fine. But Colonel, he wants to talk to you. Alone.”
“So put him on.”
“In person. He’s extremely insistent.”
“I’ll be right down.”
Carter hurried to the nearest transporter. She was most of the way there when she heard her name called, and turned to see Radek Zelenka running towards her.
Zelenka was the expedition’s second expert in Ancient technology, just below McKay in the Atlantis scientific hierarchy. He was a slight, bespectacled man, a native of the Czech Republic. Carter hadn’t really spent enough time in his company to know much about him, but he seemed extremely competent. Certainly, his soft voice and slightly withdrawn nature was often a welcome opposite to McKay’s bombast.
He skated to a halt, slightly out of breath. “Colonel Carter? May I speak with you?”
“Is it about Rodney?”
He looked at her blankly. “Should I be speaking to you about Rodney?”
“I guess not. Look, I’m in kind of a hurry…”
Zelenka nodded. “I understand, but this is rather important. May I walk with you?”
“Sure.” She gestured down the corridor. “I’m heading to the transporter, so I can go with you as far as there. What did you want to talk about?”
“Well…” He fell into step alongside her as she set off. “That report on the power fluctuations. Have you had a chance to read it yet?”
The report was one of the documents in Carter’s mystery folder. For the past twenty hours, parts of the city’s power grid had been experiencing unexplained drops in power. There hadn’t been many — four at last count — but they had been noticeable. Carter had asked Zelenka to look into the problem, just in case anything was wrong with the ZPMs. “I have, yes.”
“I think, perhaps, you should throw that report away.”
Carter raised an eyebrow. “Why is that?”
“It’s inaccurate. No, I’m sorry. What I mean to say is, it is no longer the whole picture. Um…” He scratched his head absently, brushed hair out of his face. “The fluctuations are different now.”
“Worse?”
“Not as such. They are not as strong now. The level of the drops in power has now decreased to only one or two percent of what they were.”
“Well, that doesn’t sound so bad.”
He gave her a slight shrug. “True. But they are now occurring once every forty-one seconds.”
Carter stopped dead. “You’re kidding.”
“I am not. Where we were experiencing severe power drains at random, now the grid has settled into a kind of pulse. The drops are almost too small to notice — if I hadn’t already been looking for them I wouldn’t have known they were there.”
“That’s just weird.” Carter got her feet moving again. They were coming up on the transporter now, and if Rodney wanted to speak to her alone she was going to have to dump Zelenka in the next few meters. “Have you tracked down a source for the drain yet?”
“No. It’s system-wide as far as I can tell. And yes, that lab was the first place I looked. So far, I cannot pin it down to there.”
Carter got to the transporter and stopped, turning to Zelenka as the doors slid open. “Okay, thanks for telling me. Radek, can you stay on top of this? Maybe it’s nothing, a side-effect of the extra computing power we’re feeding Angelus, but I’ve got a bad feeling about it anyway.”
“You and me both.” He was standing a little way from the transporter, and she realized, with some relief, that he wasn’t planning to get in with her. “I’ll keep you posted. Say hi to Rodney for me.”
“Sure,” she smiled, and stepped inside. And then, as the doors closed, remembered that she hadn’t told him who she was going to see.
Obviously, she hadn’t needed to. She chuckled softly, touched the nearest activation dot to the infirmary and vanished in a flare of blue-white light.
McKay was alone in the infirmary when Carter arrived. He was on a gurney, sitting back against the raised backrest with his legs stretched out in front of him. As the door opened he started upright, then relaxed slightly as Carter came in. He raised a hand. “Hey.”
“Hey yourself.” McKay’s right trouser-leg had been raggedly cut away just below the knee, and his entire lower leg was wrapped tightly in white bandages. Carter pointed at it. “What happened to you?”
“Got into a fight with Angelus’ ship. Guess who won.”
She pulled up a nearby seat and sat down. “It’s not like you to go picking fights with starships.”
“Trust me, I didn’t start it.” He sat up straighter, and swung himself around, wincing as he eased his damaged leg off the edge of the gurney. “Damn it, that stings. You know, I asked Keller for morphine, and she laughed. Can you believe that? Laughed. Does this look like ‘just a scratch’ to you?”
She could only shrug. “I’m not a doctor. Speaking of which, where is she?”
“Down in one of the labs. Something screwy with the MRI machine, or something.” He stretched, as if he had been lying still for too long. “Sorry to drag you all the way down here, but Keller won’t let me out just yet and I’m not entirely sure if I trust the comms, especially if that observer’s around.”
“Oh yes,” Carter muttered. “He’s around. But what about you, staying here because Keller said so? When did you start following other people’s advice?”
He looked slightly hurt. “It’s been known. Hey, I’ve been injured, okay? And, I might add, in the line of duty. Keller might not have the most wonderful bedside manner, but if she says she wants to run some more checks on me then I figure it’s probably best to, you know, let her do it.”
Carter could understand his aversion to leaving the infirmary. He probably hated being in here, but if there was any chance at all something might still be physically wrong with him he wouldn’t take the risk. McKay was a legendary hypochondriac. “So what’s your beef with the comms? Apart from Fallon.”
“Let’s just say I’ve already been physically assaulted by one inanimate object today.” He took a deep breath, squared his shoulders a little. “Okay, here’s the thing. When I was in the hopper, I managed to get some readings on a PDA before the door closed. And there’s a whole bunch of stuff about that ship which doesn’t add up.”
“Like what?”
“Well… First I was concerned because it didn’t look like an Ancient ship. The detail was all wrong, the shape of the thing... But I checked out the database and spotted a class of ceremonial vessel that wasn’t completely different. And it turns out that the Eraavi blinged it up for him as a mark of respect, same time as they made him the mask.”
“So, what then?”
“That’s the problem. There’s no way that ship came from Eraavis.”
Carter tilted her head slightly, puzzled. “Say again?”
“I got some pretty detailed readings on the quiescent emissions from the drive system. I couldn’t from the outside because there’s some kind of shielding, but once I got in there… Anyways, it’s got a hyperdrive, but a pretty pathetic one. If Angelus wanted to cross Replicator space in that thing, he’d need to do it in microjumps. Seriously, I don’t think he could have done the trip in less than a month.”
A cold knot had appeared in Carter’s gut. “Can you confirm that?”
“My calculations? Yeah, as soon as I’m out of here. As for the readings themselves, I’m guessing I won’t get another chance to get inside. Even if I could…” He screwed up his face, as though tasting something sour. “Thanks, but no thanks.”
“I can understand that,” she lied. There was something he wasn’t telling her, something not right about the entire conversation. “Rodney…”
“You want to know what else?” he interrupted. “It’s lost weight.”
She blinked. “The ship? I don’t —”
“I got mass readings on it when I was on Apollo. And while I was cross-referencing what I got on the PDA, I ran it through the load records on the jumpers that hauled it in. There’s a discrepancy of almost fifty kilos.”
“What does that mean?”
“I have absolutely no idea.”
Carter remained silent for a moment or two, thinking hard. What McKay was telling her felt like more pieces of her mystery folder — strange, unconnected incidents that seemed as though they should fit together somehow. The chemical analysis of Eraavis had shown discrepancies, and if McKay’s assessment of the starhopper’s hyperdrive was correct, then that meant…
“You think Angelus is lying to us.”
“I don’t know,” McKay replied, sounding oddly subdued. “If you’d asked me that before today, I’d probably have said no. In the time I’ve spent with him, I’ve never got the feeling that he’s being anything but honest. Then again, my instincts aren’t always one hundred percent accurate…” He sighed. “Sam, I swear I just don’t know. Maybe it’s the ship that’s lying!”
Despite herself, she smiled. “I’ll have it arrested.”
“Well, you could maybe have Angelus arrested instead.”
“Not a chance. If I tried it Fallon would just claim you were interfering with the ship and have it cordoned off. Or he’d have you reprimanded. Actually, both. Trust me, the Advisory want this weapon so bad they can taste it, and they don’t care what happens to us as long as they get it.”
“No big surprise there,” McKay sighed. “Okay, I guess we’ll just have to leave him to it for now. Until I can, you know, confirm what the Hell’s going on.”
“It’s a risk.”
“Well, he’s contained. I spent a lot of time down there with him, you know? He’s under guard the whole time, there’s the surveillance… Sheppard installed guillotines in the lab’s power feeds when he was setting the cameras up. If Angelus even looks like he’s going to jeopardize the city with some kind of wild experiment, he can be shut down in a second, whatever this Fallon guy says. Hold on, I’m just going to try this…” He eased himself off the edge of the gurney, testing his weight on the bandaged leg. Carter saw him wince, but he didn’t seem to have any trouble standing.
“Okay, that’s not too bad,” he muttered. “Anyway, back to Angelus. Why would he be trying to pull something? So far we’ve given him everything he wants, however reluctantly. Believe me, I’ve been over and over this. It doesn’t make sense.”
“You’re right.” She got up. “We haven’t got all the right bits of the puzzle yet.”
“Hm?”
“Never mind. Look, we have the sensor data from Apollo, we’ve got your PDA readings… Surely we could plug that information into the stellar database.”
“To find out where he actually came from?” McKay nodded tentatively. “Yeah, I guess we could do that. There’s only a finite number of bio-capable worlds, and the hyperspace trajectory data from Apollo could round down the point of origin even further… Yeah, that’s do-able.”
“Great.” She got up. “Come on, we’re leaving.”
His eyes went wide. “What about my tests?”
“I’ll have Keller book you back in later. Can you walk on that leg?”
McKay, as it turned out, was quite capable of walking. His wounds might have been painful, but they were by no means serious. Carter had already decided to call back on Keller and make sure before she put McKay through anything strenuous, but the fact that he kept forgetting to limp when he thought she wasn’t watching clued her in.
They went back to the control room. McKay hauled himself theatrically in front of a terminal and set to work on the PDA data. Carter left him to it and went in to her office, opened a word processor on her computer and quickly typed out a summary of what McKay had told her in the infirmary. Then, without saving the file, she printed it out and deleted the text.
The hardcopy went into her mystery folder. One more piece of the puzzle, awaiting it’s place.
By the time she was finished, McKay was already waving at her from his terminal, occasionally gesturing at his leg as if to let her know he was quite unable to walk the several meters from his chair to the office. Sighing, Carter got up and went across the gangway to join him. “Have you found something?”
“If by ‘something’, you mean our guest’s true point of origin, yes I have,” he told her, triumphantly.
“Wow, that was fast.” She leaned closer to his terminal screen, genuinely impressed. “You got that down to one out of how many planets?”
“Well, okay, lets say points of origin.”
“Rodney…”
“There’s no way to be certain exactly which one it is, okay? There’s too many variables. And this is assuming that he’s telling the truth about how long he spent out there in the first place.”
“Please don’t make this any more tenuous than it already is. I can only imagine what Colonel Ellis is going to say when I send him off on- How many was it?”
“Four,” said McKay, glumly.
“Four new detours.”
He looked up at her. “You’re not going to make me tell him, are you?”
“Not this time. I’ll take the flak on this one. Just upload those points to my terminal.”
She went back into her office, and then used her headset to call Palmer. “Simon, can you set up a subspace hail to Apollo?”
“I’m sorry, Colonel, but didn’t Colonel Ellis forbid patching into Apollo unless it was an emergency? He doesn�
�t regard subspace as being secure.”
“He’s probably right, but I can’t risk waiting until he reports in again. He’s already overdue. Tell him it is an emergency. I’ll take responsibility.”
She cut the connection, and waited. A few seconds later an upload from McKay appeared. Carter opened it, quickly arranged the planetary ident codes into the order she would give them to Ellis, and then heard her headset crackle.
“Carter.”
“Colonel, it’s Palmer. There’s a problem. I can’t raise Apollo.”
She stood up. Through the glass wall of her office she saw Palmer over by the comms board. He saw her looking and spread his hands. “There’s no return at all,” he went on. “The hail’s going out, but it’s not reaching anyone.”
“That’s odd.” And a little frightening, she thought to herself. “Keep trying. They might be in a blind spot, or be having technical difficulties. Let me know as soon as they pick up the hail.”
She sat down, slowly. There was a Plan B, of course — Carter knew she couldn’t always rely on Apollo being at her beck and call, so she had decided some time ago what to do if the battlecruiser wasn’t available. She would wait a short time for Palmer to work his magic on the subspace comms, but if Ellis continued to prove elusive, that secondary plan might have to be put into operation.
And McKay wasn’t going to like it. Not one bit.
Chapter Eight
Insecurity
Radek Zelenka was alone in the ZPM lab when he heard the voices.
He hadn’t intended to stay in the lab so late. Like every member of the expedition he kept long hours, and certainly wasn’t adverse to working through the night when the situation demanded it. But the problem that was occupying him now had hardly seemed urgent. The fluctuation in the Atlantis power grid was puzzling, but in terms of actual voltage close to unnoticeable. The strange, rhythmic dips in electricity amounted to half a percent of the city’s regular output at most. It wasn’t even enough to make the lights flicker.
However, there were elements of the phenomenon that intrigued him, to a point where he had become thoroughly engrossed in cataloguing them. He had started to notice the anomalies at around six in the evening, Atlantis time, and had promised himself a couple of hours work on them before closing down his programs and heading out. Several of the tech staff who worked the later shift were due to head out then anyway, and Zelenka had planned to leave with them and join them for a meal in the mess hall. There had been talk of a movie. But, as the daylight outside had reddened into darkness, and the city lights had grown bright and golden in response, Zelenka had stayed at his terminal. Gradually, the rest of the tech team had left him; the group at first, no doubt following up on their meal and movie plans, and then other, less social members of the science staff. As each had gone Zelenka had muttered his goodnights, promising, without looking up from his screen, to be just a few more minutes. Another couple of cycles, just to confirm his readings, he would say absently, and then he would be done.