by Stargate
“Look, Colonel…” He turned away from the doors, leaned back against them with his arms folded. “My first responsibility is to Angelus and his project. If your people went down there, and caused him to lock himself in for whatever reason, then trust me, there will be trouble. On the other hand, if they’re telling the truth about what they saw, then I consider that a direct threat to Angelus too. You’ve already said that the Replicators have tried to kill him — what if they’ve infiltrated Atlantis?”
Carter frowned. “There’s no way they could do that.”
“How much are you willing to bet? Colonel, right now, priority number one is that we find out what’s happening behind those doors. Let me talk to Angelus.”
“He’s not answering. We’ve tried.”
“You’ve tried. I haven’t. It’s possible he sees you as an enemy now.”
Carter mulled this over for a moment. If Zelenka couldn’t convince the blast doors to open from the outside, maybe Fallon could talk Angelus into reversing whatever protocol he had invoked to lock the section down. And then, she thought, she would take great satisfaction in throwing the Ancient right back where he had come from.
Wherever that was.
“I guess it couldn’t hurt,” she told him. “I’ll give you full access to the comms system. I hope you have better luck than us.”
“So do I. In the meantime, please keep Teyla and Zelenka away from Angelus. I don’t want him thinking anyone else is going to get shot in the head.”
Once she had set Fallon up at the communications terminal, Carter went to her office. Teyla joined her a few minutes later.
Carter sat the Athosian down and, over the next few minutes, outlined what it was she needed Teyla to do. She had wondered at first whether the woman was the right person for the job, whether she should simply have drafted in a technician instead. But Teyla had been in the corridor when the blast doors had slammed shut. She knew what to look for. And she knew John Sheppard well.
Besides, having Teyla in the office allowed her to keep an eye on Fallon. And Fallon, seeing Teyla there, would hopefully be less troubled by thoughts of her trying to inconvenience Angelus.
The fact that she would be doing exactly that, right under his nose, was neither here nor there.
Once Teyla had started work, Carter set off to find Zelenka. As expected, he was in the ZPM lab. Stepping from the transporter there gave her an odd, uneasy sensation — the memory of those sinister noises Zelenka had conjured from his computer were still fresh in her mind, and remembering them made her shudder.
It was an eerie feeling, going back.
Zelenka had four terminals open at once; three were displaying complex rotating graphics, the fourth streams of raw numerical data. He looked up as Carter came in. “Colonel,” he said. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“Have you had any luck?”
“Depends how you define luck.” He leaned back, and tapped the screen of one terminal. “I have managed to access a partial database of emergency protocols. I can’t tell how partial, and right now I’m only certain what about twenty percent of the ones I have found do — if Rodney was here, I’m sure he’d be able to identify them far more readily than I.”
“And he’d enjoy rubbing it in your face, too.” Carter gestured at the screen. “Come on, Radek. McKay’s not here — it’s you I’m relying on right now. What are we seeing?”
“Well…” He pointed at a graphic. “These are the protocols, in 3-D form. Basically, they present as virtual crystals.”
“That makes sense.”
“Identifying the purposes of the crystals gives us clues as to what the protocols do. This one right here, this is to do with the transporters — I think it would re-route all transporter traffic to a central location. This one here, though, is purely decorative. Flashing all the city lights in sequence.”
“Pretty,” said Carter. “Have you found any that reference the blast doors?”
“No, I haven’t. I have found some that reference local power nodes, though.”
“That’s great! How many?”
He looked glum. “About six hundred.”
“Damn,” Carter muttered.
“Oh, and one other thing. Just in case you weren’t feeling quite futile enough.” He nodded at the screens. “So far I have no evidence that any of the city protocols have been activated, apart from the alert status.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Carter breathed.
The lockdown, as she understood it, would require many processes to occur at once. Activating those processes one at a time would be no great feat — anyone with enough knowledge of the city’s systems could cause a door to close and lock, to interrupt communications along a limited path, to extinguish an exterior light, and so-on. But in order to set off an entire series of those processes, like raising all the city’s internal lights when the alert status was sounded, would require a large set of programmed instructions keyed to a single command. A protocol.
If no protocol had been activated, how had Angelus been able to close and lock all the blast doors at once? To shut down all communications in the section? It was impossible.
“It must be one you’ve not found yet,” she told Zelenka. “There’s no way he could do that without a protocol.”
“I’ll keep looking,” he said. “There’s something else. Around the edges of the lockdown zone, there’s some kind of activity.”
“What do you mean? Where?”
“Everywhere. Well, not exactly… What I mean is, all the systems around the lockdown are showing this activity. Power, sensors… It’s something I’ve not seen before, like a set of new functions being applied.”
That rang a chime in Carter’s memory. “Hey, you know Palmer? In the control room… He said there was unidentified functionality around that area. Could it be those armored doors you saw?”
Zelenka weighed this up for a moment. “It could be. On the other hand, it does seem to have some similarities to the signal pattern I detected earlier. Or it could be nothing at all.”
“I guess…” Carter shivered slightly. A coldness had moved across her, a terrible sense of things moving into place. For a moment, it felt to her as if everything that was happening now had been somehow set in motion long ago, that tonight was the end result of some vast and dreadful process. That rectangle of darkness out on the west pier was merely the final domino toppling over: hidden hands had tipped the first one at some distant point in the past, knowing exactly when and where the ultimate impact would occur.
Behind her, something moved, and a shadow fell across the lab.
Carter turned around, and saw Teyla Emmagan in the doorway. She was about to welcome her in, glad of the extra company, but then she saw the distraught look on the woman’s face. “Teyla? What’s wrong?”
Teyla remained very still. “Colonel, I did as you asked.”
“Jesus, Teyla, you look terrible. Get in here and sit down.” Carter drew a seat out for the Athosian, who walked slowly in and dropped onto it. “What happened?”
“The cameras… Most of them are malfunctioning. There was very little footage. I saw…” She fell silent.
“What?” whispered Zelenka. “What do you mean?”
“I had Sheppard install a surveillance suite before Angelus moved into the lab,” Carter told him. “He gave me the access codes. I was hoping Teyla could download what they’d been recording, but —”
“Maybe he found the cameras,” Teyla said bleakly. She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a USB thumbdrive. “All I saw is here.”
Carter took the drive from her, found an unused terminal and plugged it in. Together, the three of them watched what Sheppard’s cameras had recorded earlier that night.
Later, Carter found herself back in her office with only the vaguest recollection of how she had gotten there.
After she had seen the surveillance footage, there seemed to be almost no words that could be exchanged between her and Teyla. Zelenka ha
d been shocked into silence too, apart from a few half-hearted denials. But in the main, the film on the thumbdrive had robbed them all of voice.
Since returning to the office, Carter had seen the film three more times, perhaps hoping for some hint of insight with each successive viewing. But each time was the same.
The footage was not good quality: the picture was grainy, monochrome. An annoying diagonal scratch of interference hovered around one corner, and dark specks danced distractingly across the screen every few moments. There was no sound. However, the scene, and the players in it, was unmistakable.
Rewinding the footage back to its start, Carter once again found herself looking into the corridor that led to Angelus’s lab on the west pier.
The camera had been set high, near the ceiling, probably in an air vent or close to a light panel for concealment. It was aimed back towards the gallery, with the end of the corridor a skewed rectangle of black at one side of the picture.
In the center was a small knot of people. Closer to the camera lens, with their backs to it, were two men in marine uniform; Kaplan and DeSalle. Facing them were Zelenka and Teyla, with Alexa Cassidy off to one side.
Teyla had a gun pointed at DeSalle’s face.
Carter hit the Play control, and the picture shivered into motion. Cassidy was backing away, hands to her mouth. Zelenka was looking at Teyla with a shocked expression on his face. Teyla was shouting, enraged, the gun centered on DeSalle’s forehead.
She watched as Kaplan turned to the wall, began working at a control panel there. The picture shuddered, and then diagonal slabs of metal appeared at the corners of the corridor. The blast doors, sliding smoothly towards each other, the space between them a rapidly-shrinking diamond.
Teyla must have seen the doors rising between her and the marines. She stepped back and fired. Carter saw the flash from the muzzle, pixilated fuzzy white on the screen.
DeSalle ducked away from the shot, turned, his face a mask of shock, and then dropped to the floor. He lay there while the blast doors rose up. And then, once they had closed, he rose and turned back down towards the corridor. He shouted something.
The footage froze in mid-shout, DeSalle’s mouth open, hovering between two final frames. Juddering endlessly.
There had been no attack on Teyla Emmagan. DeSalle had evaded the bullet she had fired, unprovoked, at him. The doors had been activated by the two marines for their own safety.
Teyla’s story, backed up by Radek Zelenka, was a lie.
Carter leaned back in her seat, rubbing her eyes. There was no sense she could make of this. Unless Teyla and Zelenka were suffering from some kind of shared hallucination, the only other possible explanation was that they had deliberately concocted the story.
No wonder Angelus had locked himself away.
An insistent buzzing from her headset broke into her thoughts. If she was honest with herself, she rather welcomed the distraction. “Carter.”
“Colonel? This is Andrew Fallon.”
She leaned across her desk to peer along the gangway. There was a man at the communications terminal, but it wasn’t Fallon. “Where are you?”
“I’m with Major MacReady, down by the gallery blast doors. Angelus has agreed to let me in.”
“Good grief…” Carter found herself quite stunned. “You spoke to him?”
“While you were away. I’m afraid it looks like your people have been stringing you along, Colonel. Angelus says that DeSalle’s alive and well, despite Teyla trying to shoot him when the blast doors started to close. She was threatening Angelus, and they closed the doors to keep her from carrying out those threats.”
“Mr Fallon, can you ask him to open the doors and return that section to our control?” Carter was looking at the picture on her terminal, but not really seeing it. The two frames still shuddered one to the other, everything on screen shaking back and forth, over and over. Only the corner scratch stayed stable. “I can guarantee his safety.”
“I’ve already asked that, Colonel. Angelus no longer trusts you, I’m afraid. He knows you’ve been working to obstruct his project.”
“Fallon? Tell him…” Carter fell silent, frowning. Something about the picture in front of her was familiar. It nagged at her, itched like a bug in her ear… “Wait. Hold on. Don’t do anything.”
She slid her seat back to get to her desk drawer, opened it and pulled her mystery folder free. Her hands were trembling slightly — fatigue, she told herself — and she fumbled with the folder, scattering its contents across the desktop.
“Colonel? The doors are opening.”
“Wait!” The top few sheets were reports. She slid them aside, the paper elusive under her dry fingertips. Under them, photographs. Scans from Keller’s examination of Angelus.
A side–on x-ray of the Ancient’s skull. Down in the bottom right, a diagonal scratch of interference.
An oblique false-color CAT scan of the skull and spine. In the corner, the same scratch.
Her eyes darted up to the screen. The line of bright, random pixels along the bottom right corner was identical. “Fallon? Don’t go in there! For God’s sake, don’t go in! He can fake images!”
There was no answer. Only a soft, rhythmic rushing that sounded, if she listened very hard, like the rise and fall of distant voices.
Chapter Twelve
By the Sea
The puddle jumper had been out of Atlantis for just over a day and a half when McKay told Sheppard and Ronon Dex that they could not complete the mission. “There isn’t enough power,” he said.
Sheppard, who was at the controls, looked back over his shoulder at him. “You’re kidding me.”
“Nope. I wish I was. Using the cloak both times we went into orbit put a drain on the reactor that I wasn’t expecting. And even if it hadn’t, I still don’t know if we’d have had enough.”
Sheppard took his hands off the joysticks and turned fully around in his seat. “So let me get this straight. We’re halfway through the mission, twenty light years from Atlantis —”
“Twenty seven.”
“Twenty seven light years away from Atlantis, and you’re saying we’re running out of gas.”
McKay, who was standing at the hatch, nodded. “That’s about it, yeah.”
“Have we got enough to get back?” Dex asked. His voice was flat, but Sheppard detected a very slight warning note there. McKay either didn’t hear it or simply chose to ignore it. Instead he drew himself up to his full indignant height. “Of course we have,” he snapped.
“Then what’s the problem?”
“I’m not saying there’s a problem. I mean, it’s not like I’ve stranded us out here or anything. We just don’t have enough power to visit the other two origin sites and then get home.”
Sheppard let out a long breath, and returned his attention to the jumper’s controls. In front of him, through the forward viewport, a misty globe rotated slowly against a backdrop of stars: M2L-374, the second of McKay’s designated origin points that they had visited, and the second to have turned up nothing.
Of the dozens of planets Angelus could conceivably have launched from, only four were capable of supporting human — or indeed Ancient — life. The first, and closest to Atlantis, had turned out to be seething with living things; its jungles rife with beasts, its plains lush, its oceans blue and bright with fish. Had the mission been to seek out and study new forms of flora and fauna, that world might have kept an army of scientists busy for decades — even its skies were full, so much so that Sheppard had found himself flinging the jumper around just to avoid the creatures that flew or floated there. But there was no way Angelus could have started his voyage from this planet. It was a primitive world, free from intellect. Nothing with a mind walked on those plains or fished those oceans. Life there was new, and violent in its youth. It was not Eraavis.
Neither was this second planet, but for very different reasons. Beneath that covering of cloud lurked a world that should, given its co
mposition and distance from its sun, have been Earthlike. But something had gone very wrong in the planet’s distant past. Pollution, possibly, or an excess of volcanism. Some growing taint in the air. In any case, it’s atmosphere had turned from a source of life to a suffocating blanket, a chemical wall that no heat could escape. M4T-638 had a surface environment so hot, so corrosive and pressurized and thick that it had almost wrecked the jumper. Sheppard had been forced to engage the vessel’s emergency thrust and power it out of that hellish atmosphere, long before McKay had finished his scans. Had he waited any longer, the vile stuff would have eaten through the hull.
Which left two more worlds. And, McKay was telling him, not enough power to visit them.
“So what you’re saying,” growled Dex, “is that this has been a complete waste of time.”
“That’s a matter of opinion.”
“In this case, it’s the only opinion that matters.” The Satedan folded his arms. “You should have let me ask Angelus where he came from. Would have been a lot quicker than this.”
“I don’t think torturing the guy was really an option.”
“Who said anything about torture?”
“You didn’t need to.”
“Okay, you two! Knock it off!” Sheppard put his head in his hands, briefly, then straightened and shook himself. Either Dex or McKay, alone, might have been tolerable companions for the duration of the mission, but together they were making his head hurt.
“Rodney,” he said firmly. “Straight answer time, okay?”
“Er, sure.”
“Do we have to turn around and go home right now?” Please say yes, he thought silently. Please, please say yes.
“No,” McKay replied.
Dammit. “What else can we do?”
“There’s two more planets on the initial list. We can check out either one of them before we need to head back and recharge.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“Well, as sure as I am of anything. I mean, this hyperdrive is hardly standard equipment. I’m not entirely sure why is doesn’t blow up every time we try to use it, let alone how much power it eats. But so far, it’s been consistent. As long as it stays that way, then yeah, I’m sure.”