by Stargate
The Asurans weren’t the only thing littering the ground. There was debris, too; random chunks of stone and metal were scattered across the chamber floor, increasing the further right he looked. Sheppard could see that the ceiling there was open, a gaping maw fanged with twisted shards of metal and dangling braces. What must have been several tons of debris littered the chamber below it, forming a treacherous slope, and several replicators lay pinned beneath its margins. Others were scattered around a complicated ball of machinery on the far side of the chamber, almost as though they had been fighting for possession of it before they had fallen.
Sheppard knelt gingerly next to one of the fallen Asurans, and poked it with his gun barrel. It didn’t move, just lay there, open eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling.
“What’s wrong with them?” he asked, his voice a whisper.
“They look dead,” McKay replied.
“That’s impossible. Dead replicators are just piles of dust.”
He saw the beams of McKay’s halogens swing around at him. “Well, they’re not exactly up and dancing, are they? Lucky for us… And what the hell’s wrong with their faces?”
“I don’t know…” Sheppard prodded the Replicator again. It was hard to tell in the taclight beam, but the Asuran’s face looked strange; pallid and sunken, almost pasty. Around one temple and the corners of the mouth were something that looked like lesions.
The Replicator looked diseased.
Dex had wandered past him, and was surveying the drum of machinery by the far wall. “Are you sure they’re Replicators? Not dead people dressed up?
“No, I’m picking up traces of nanite code.” McKay crossed the chamber to join him. He had retrieved the PDA. “Back in the main chamber? I noticed something odd about the walls near this corridor, it was like the surface of the metal had started to break down. There’s more of it in here, too. And these guys just lying around like corpses…” He crouched down next to the ball. “Well hello, what have we got here?”
“I give. What have we got?”
“Our power source.” McKay was leaning around the ball, twisting himself to see it from all sides. “But it’s not connected to anything. Weird.”
Sheppard got up, and moved back to the corridor. Sure enough, the wall there was corroded, blistered, patches of it stretched like melted plastic. “Weapons fire?”
“I doubt it. That stuff’s a trinium-reinforced polymer compound. You’d need, oh, shipboard weaponry to melt that. Maybe a drone…”
“You know something?” Sheppard stalked back into the center of the room. “I am getting pretty damn tired of wandering around this chamber of horrors and not having a clue what’s happened here.”
“You and me both,” said McKay, shrugging out of his pack. “But maybe we don’t have to now. Sheppard? Do me a favor?”
“What?”
“Find me a Replicator. One that’s really good and stuck under something.”
“Huh?”
In answer, McKay just looked around at him, mouth set and eyebrows high, stabbing a finger towards the rubble pile.
Sheppard shook his head in despair, and turned away. When Rodney McKay got an idea, it tended to fill his mind to the exclusion of all else. Including manners, social skills… “Here’s one. He’s about halfway under. Is that okay?”
McKay scurried over, his hands full of equipment and the laptop jammed under one arm, and surveyed the Asuran Sheppard had chosen. It was a male — although that distinction was entirely cosmetic — and had the same doughy look to its skin as the others. Its left leg, left arm and the lower part of its torso were covered with broken chunks of stone, and a thick metal brace was lying across it, crushing the right shoulder. “Perfect.”
He knelt down, setting the laptop on the floor with one hand and flipping it open. Sheppard watched as he spread out the rest of the gear he had carried over. “What are you doing?”
“I am going,” said McKay, beginning to tap command strings into the laptop, “to power this guy up.”
There was a click and thin whine as Dex’s blaster came to life a hand’s width from the back of McKay’s head. “I don’t think you are.”
“Would you get that thing out of my ear?” McKay glared up at him, eyes narrowed between the halogens. “He’s not going anywhere — what’s he going to do, drag himself out from under a couple of tons of rubble? Look, he’s trapped and dead. All I’m going to do is reactivate some of his nanite code, specifically the parts relating to memory and recording. Under the right instructions from me those nanites will start downloading into the laptop, and once I’ve decoded that data I’ll know everything he knows.”
Sheppard blinked. “Is that even possible?”
“I hope so. To tell you the truth, since we’ve never encountered a Replicator in this state before I really can’t be sure exactly what’s going to happen, but as long as I can get into this guy’s memory files I don’t really care.” He looked up at the pair of them. “Don’t worry, he’s not going to wake up or anything.”
“Fine,” Dex snarled. “But if he starts acting up, I’m blasting him.”
“Be my guest.” McKay had connected a portable power pack to a small switch box, from which he drew a length of multicolored ribbon cable. The end of the cable plugged into a probe array, a spidery mass of wires each tipped with a crocodile clip or an insulated needle. Sheppard had seen him use similar gear when trying to bring Ancient technology back to life.
The Replicators were, basically, Ancient technology. By that token, he thought, perhaps McKay’s strange plan actually had some merit.
“Okay, here we go…” McKay took two of the sharper steel probes, touched them to the Replicator’s scalp and then, with a sudden twisting push, forced them both deep into its head.
Sheppard grimaced, hearing the probes crunching through layers of alien matter as they slid inwards. If the Replicator had been human, those needles would have been driven clear through the skull and several centimeters into brain tissue. The Asuran, as a coherent mass of microscopic nanites, should have been the same hazy metallic stuff all the way through, with no complex structures under its skin at all. But if that was the case, why did the probes sound as if they were being forced into frozen hamburger?
McKay took another pair of probes and rammed them in alongside the first, then returned his attention to the laptop. “Okay… No response to the probes.”
“It didn’t work?”
“I haven’t switched him on yet.” He pressed a key on the power pack, and Sheppard saw a row of LEDs on its front face start to glow. “I’ll give him a hundred microvolts. That shouldn’t be enough to fry anything vital.”
He touched a control. There was a soft bleep from the pack, and then silence.
“Okay, okay, that’s…” McKay sighed impatiently. “Disappointing. Charging to two hundred microvolts.”
Sheppard raised an eyebrow. “Should I be shouting ‘Clear!’ at this point?”
“No, you should be making sure Ronon’s still aiming at Bishop here and not at me.” He stabbed at the control again.
This time, there was a reaction. But not the one anyone had been expecting.
The Asuran jolted into life: Sheppard saw its whole body jerk, twist sickeningly under the rubble. Its face worked for a moment, eyes flicking wildly around, the head lifting and then snapping back down to impact the floor. Its free leg kicked and scuffled.
And then its mouth opened, very wide, and it began to scream.
Chapter Fourteen
Dead Metal
The scream was continuous, nothing at all to do with breath. It was metallic and filtered and atonal and utterly horrifying. Sheppard resisted the temptation to cover his ears. “Jesus, Rodney!”
“I have no idea why it’s doing that!” McKay was tapping frantically at his laptop, face screwed up in discomfort. Even Dex, Sheppard noticed, had stepped back from the Replicator and its awful shriek.
“Can you stop it?”
>
“Frankly, I doubt it.”
“Try,” Dex growled. “Or I’ll stop it.”
McKay scowled. “Look, just plug your ears or something, okay? I’m starting to get data on this thing.”
The Asuran twisted suddenly, in a weird mechanical parody of pain. Sheppard knew it was incapable of true sensation: he was looking at a device, a robot made of self-replicating nanomachines, an artificial intelligence that walked on two legs only in honor of its lost creators. But seeing the stricken thing at his feet, writhing under its tomb of rubble and howling an endless note of pure electronic misery, it was difficult not to see the Replicator as being in terrible distress.
“Rodney, how long is this going to take?”
“I don’t know…” McKay peered at the laptop screen, still wincing at the noise, his voice raised to make himself heard over it. “There’s a lot of code coming through here. Even with the upgraded storage I’ve got all kinds of compression routines going just to avoid a complete overload.” He shrugged. “What can I tell you? It’s ready when it’s ready.”
The scream stopped.
It was sudden, totally without warning. Sheppard glanced down at the Replicator, expecting to see it inert, but it was still moving, scrabbling weakly at the rubble. Its head was twisting left and right, but not in the random spasms it had exhibited earlier. It looked, for all the world, like the Asuran was conscious and trying to free itself.
Sheppard wasn’t the only one surprised to see it behave in such a lifelike way. McKay was stabbing frantically at his laptop keys. “It shouldn’t be doing that. There is no way it should be doing that.”
“Kill me,” gasped the Replicator.
Sheppard stared. “Say what?”
“Kill me.” The voice was rough, still metallic and synthesised, but it sounded far more human than that awful screaming had done. “I am… Compromised…”
Dex made an angry rumbling noise in the back of his throat. “You said you were just going to get its code.”
“Code,” repeated the Asuran. “You are downloading me. Stop.”
Sheppard had his P90 aimed at the Replicator’s forehead, the beam from his taclight illuminating its agonized face. “No can do, feller.”
“Destroy me. I am compromised. The collective…” The Asuran shifted violently under the rubble, straining against the weight. Sheppard saw Dex step back, bring his blaster up to fire. “Hurts…”
“What did you say?” gaped McKay. “It hurts?”
“You are bleeding me of everything that makes me what I am,” the Replicator snarled. “My motor functions are destroyed. My core programming is compromised. I am cut off from the collective. Human, it hurts more than you can comprehend!”
If the Asuran was telling the truth about being cut off from the collective, Sheppard thought, that was the first piece of good news he’d heard all day. If he had thought there was a chance the thing was going to revive in the way it had, he would have vetoed McKay’s plan to reactivate it immediately. An active Replicator would have instant access to the Asuran collective, would know what they knew, see what they saw. If this one hadn’t been cut off from its network, Sheppard would be looking into the eyes of every Replicator in the galaxy right now.
“What’s wrong with you?” he snapped.
“You’ll learn nothing from me.” It twisted again, trying to tear itself free, and actually made sounds of pain as it contorted. “If there is a scrap of mercy in you, human, destroy me now.”
“Well, let’s just say for the moment that there isn’t.”
“Curse you!”
Sheppard lifted his foot and rested it on one of the slabs holding the Replicator down. He severely doubted that his weight would add anything significant to that of the rubble, but it was an effective gesture nonetheless.
“We can make it hurt more,” he said quietly.
“Or,” McKay cut in, angrily, “we could make it hurt less.”
Sheppard glared at him, then returned his attention to the Asuran. “Your call.”
It said nothing, just kept struggling. Sheppard leaned closer to it. “Listen buddy, we’ve got spikes in your head. Right now we’re turning your brain into MP3s, and when we’re done we’ll put on our iPods and listen to it all the way home. I’m giving you a chance to make things easier on yourself — the more you tell me right now, the less we’ll have to rip out of your skull, okay?”
The machine ceased scrabbling, and fixed him with a look of unremitting hatred. “Your species is a stain on the universe,” it muttered.
“Is that a yes?”
The Asuran’s mouth opened, and it made a strangled metallic cry of pain and anger. “Yes, human. Ask your questions while you turn my mind into qubits.”
“Quantum bits,” said McKay, wearily answering Sheppard’s question before he asked it. “Go on, just interrogate the poor bastard, will you?”
“You and I are going to have a serious talk on the way home, Rodney,” Sheppard told him, then returned his attention to the Asuran. “What’s your name?”
“The entity I used to be was called Laetor. That will suffice.”
“Used to be?”
“I told you, human. I am compromised. I am no longer what I was, who I was. I have no name.”
“Compromised by what?” asked Dex.
“The chimera,” Laetor spat. “The hybrid.”
Sheppard sighed. “Wanna be a little more specific?”
“A weapon, human. That is all you need to know. We came here to destroy it… It was too dangerous to be allowed to continue.”
That sounded familiar. The Replicators had a policy of obliterating weapons they thought too dangerous, it seemed, along with everything around them. Although the level of destruction here paled into comparison with what they had wrought on Eraavis. “But it got to you before you could destroy it, right?”
“We sacrificed ourselves to destroy the hybrid.” The Replicator, jerked its head to the side, its face contorting, then appeared to relax again. “We brought an autonomous pulse emitter. It destroyed the chimera and shut us down. Until you wrenched me back in to this parody of existence!”
Something about that struck a chord with Sheppard. He shone the taclight over towards the ball of machinery he had noticed on the way in, the one that even now was surrounded by dead and contorted Asurans. “Autonomous… That thing over there?”
“Your perception does you credit,” Laetor sneered.
“Ronon, have you got this for a minute?”
Dex grinned wolfishly. “Oh yeah.”
Sheppard stepped over the Replicator and tapped McKay on the shoulder. “Come on.”
“Hey, what? I’m downloading here!”
“It’s going to do that anyway.” He pointed at the ball. “I want to have a look at this thing, but without you I’m not going to know what the hell I’m looking at. So take a break, okay?”
With McKay somewhat reluctantly in tow, he picked his way across the corpse-scattered chamber and over to the emitter. Approaching it, he could see that his initial impression had been right: the Replicators had been fighting for possession of this thing up until the moment it killed them.
But fighting who? All the bodies in the room were Asurans. There was no sign of anything he might have thought of as a chimera.
He shifted a couple of the inert Replicators aside, and crouched down next to the emitter. It was large, maybe a meter and a half wide, and formed from blackish, faceted metal. Dozens of pipes and vanes studded its surface, and although it looked at first glance like a random mess he could see on closer inspection that it had a weird, twisted symmetry.
He’d been right. He didn’t have a clue what he was looking at.
“What do you think?” he said to McKay, his voice low. He checked back on Dex as he said it, but the Satedan still had Laetor firmly in his sights. “Any of this make sense to you?”
“Not much.” McKay was aiming his PDA at the emitter, peering at it intently.
“This is Replicator tech, same as the rest of the base. What did he call it, an autonomous pulse emitter?”
Sheppard smiled. “So we can call it an APE, huh?”
“Yeah, that’s… That’s really clever,” muttered McKay dismissively. “EMP generator. Probably tuned with these arrays here, capacitors here. Charge it up from its own power core, set it off and say goodbye to your cellphone.”
“Powerful enough to take out Replicators?”
“Enough to take out the whole base. Why d’you think there’s no power?”
“Is it charged?”
“I think so.” McKay took another reading with the PDA. Sheppard saw his eyes widen slightly. “Okay, that’s a yes. It’s on standby now, but there’s a couple of million volts in this thing.”
“Whoah.” Sheppard edged away. “Rodney, let’s not play with the ball right now, huh?”
“Oh, I think it’s safe.” McKay stood up. “But this still doesn’t explain anything. Replicators shooting up a Replicator base? Human dissections? A weapon called a hybrid that makes Replicators sick but that gets taken down with an EMP?”
“A hybrid…” Sheppard thought about what they had found in some of the other chambers, and felt slightly queasy. “Oh man. I think —”
“Yeah, me too.” By the distasteful look on his face, McKay had obviously come to the same conclusion he had. “Let’s not go there at the moment, huh?”
“Suits me. Let’s get finished up with Laetor.”
McKay nodded. “Go ahead. I’m just going to set something running on this…” He began tapping at his PDA again. Sheppard got up and left him to it, rejoining Dex on the other side of the chamber.
The Satedan was standing just as he had left him, with the wide barrel of his blaster aimed directly at the Replicator’s head. As Sheppard walked up to him he said: “It’s been looking at me.”
“Laetor, stop trying to stare Ronon down. Trust me, statues blink first.”
The Asuran made no reply. It had stopped moving, and now lay completely inert on the littered floor. Only its eyes moved, flicking over to Sheppard as he approached and following him.