Angelus

by Stargate

  “Rodney? He doesn’t look so hot.”

  “Yeah, well I think he’s pretty much empty.” McKay came over and crouched down next to his laptop, scanning the screen. “And this is full. Okay, I think we’re done with the torture.”

  Thinking about the desiccated corpses in their cells, Sheppard found it difficult to be sympathetic to the machine. For all its howling, it was only a mechanism, after all. What it called pain could only be a signal telling the Replicator it was being damaged. He had seen Asurans exhibit a vague kind of emotion once or twice, but in general they were no more individual than ants in a nest.

  He reached down and switched off the power unit. “Goodnight, sweet prince.”

  The row of LEDS on the power unit went out, one by one. As the last one faded, Laetor’s eyes became still.

  Its expression remained frozen, a mask of hatred. Weirdly, for all the ruin that had been inflicted on it, this Asuran had been the most lifelike — the most human — he had seen. Perhaps its distress had lessened its mechanical nature, he wondered. Brought it closer to being alive.

  The idea that pain was the closest Replicators could get to life was an unsettling one. Sheppard shook it away. “Anyone want to say anything?”

  “How about ‘Goodbye’?” replied Ronon, finally letting his blaster down.

  “Sounds about right. Rodney, how long do you think it’ll take to read that data?”

  “Could be a while.” McKay had folded the laptop closed and was stuffing it into his backpack. “I’ll have to decompress it first, then get it onto a secure server so I can run decryption routines on it… Believe me, you do not want this stuff running around an unsupervised system.”

  “I’m sure Sam will be happy to set you up when we get back.”

  “We’re leaving? Already?”

  Dex snorted. “If you’re starting to like it here, we can leave you.”

  “Yeah,” grinned Sheppard. “If you get lonely, you can just power up a new friend for a while.”

  McKay had his mouth open to reply when he was interrupted by a faint electronic chirrup from the darkness. An alert from his PDA, Sheppard guessed. “Aha!”

  “What?”

  “I set up a routine to try and hack some of the APE’s nanite code.” McKay stood his backpack against Laetor’s head and checked the PDA screen. “Yes! I just got a return!”

  Sheppard eyed him warningly. “Rodney, didn’t we just agree not to play with the ball?”

  “Don’t worry, I’m not going to set it off.”

  “Yeah?” said Dex flatly. “Like you weren’t going to wake up the Asuran?”

  McKay chuckled and aimed the PDA at the emitter. “You want to see something really cool?” He pressed a control. There was a moment’s silence, and then the emitter lit up.

  Sheppard brought the P90 up reflexively. Thin lines of blue light had appeared on the APE’s surface, outlining a complex series of panels. As he watched, the panels suddenly snapped free of the main body of the ball. They hinged outwards, unfolded, rotated around each other.

  The APE extended three angular legs and stood up.

  Sheppard looked slowly around at McKay, and at the smile of quite unbelievable smugness that he had on his face. “You are so proud of yourself right now, aren’t you?”

  McKay shrugged. “Who wouldn’t be?”

  Dex walked closer to the APE. “Can you make it walk?”

  “Yeah, I think so. It’s part of the same subroutine. I figured that they’d need to be able to deploy it somehow, but it would have been too big to carry down those corridors, even if the Asurans were strong enough to haul it about.”

  “And you knew it had legs?”

  “Actually no. I thought it was going to float. What do you think, it should fit in the jumper?”

  Sheppard blinked. “You’re thinking of taking it back with us?”

  “Why not? Any anti-Replicator weapon has got to be a good thing, right?”

  “Not when it’s charged up with about a million volts and is sitting inside a spaceship!” Sheppard gestured wildly around him. “Have you forgotten we’re in the dark here? What if you get your subroutines mixed up and it goes off inside the jumper? Or in Atlantis?”

  “Did you hear something?” asked Dex suddenly.

  “No!” Sheppard growled. “To both questions. Rodney, shut it down — carefully — and leave it here.”

  “Hey, McKay.” That was Dex again. “Your pack fell over.”

  “So what?”

  “You had it resting against the Replicator.”

  McKay frowned, puzzled, and walked over to where his backpack lay on the floor. Sure enough, it had toppled over. “That’s odd.”

  Sheppard joined him. “Maybe he twitched.”

  “He can’t ‘twitch’. I checked the output before I closed the laptop down, there was nothing in there. No power, no code. The guy’s a paperweight.”

  Laetor’s right hand snapped out, insect-quick, and grabbed McKay’s ankle.

  McKay gave a shout of shock and pain. He tried to drag his leg away but the grip was too strong. He overbalanced, howling, and crashed to the ground.

  The Replicator was trying to twist its way out from under the rubble again.

  Sheppard grabbed McKay under the arms and tried to pull him away. Even with McKay helping him, his free foot planted against the side of the Asuran’s chest, he couldn’t get away. “Ronon!”

  Dex leapt forwards, stamped his boot down solidly on Laetor’s wrist. He brought his blaster up.

  “I meant use a goddamn knife or something!”

  “Cover your eyes,” Dex said, and pulled the trigger.

  The blaster went off with an electric snarl and a blinding orange flash. Sheppard, who hadn’t had a chance to look away, saw the energy bolt strike Laetor in the shoulder, blowing free a fist-sized chunk of matter. The Replicator made an incoherent sound, a buzzing metal scream, but the hand around McKay’s ankle stayed firmly clamped on.

  McKay screamed. “It’s biting me!”

  “What do you mean, it’s biting you?” Sheppard was trying to kick the hand away. “Ronon, do it again! Blow it’s damn arm off!”

  “Way ahead of you.” Dex took aim again, let off another two shots. The chamber lit up fire-yellow with each of them, and white-hot gobs of molten matter spattered into the air. Sheppard felt some of the stuff hit his skin, and winced as it burned him.

  Laetor’s arm came off at the elbow, the ragged end of it glowing, sizzling like frying meat. McKay tumbled, still yelling. Sheppard leaned down to him, held him still and wrenched the Asuran’s disembodied hand free from his ankle.

  The hand came away bloody. In the wild light from McKay’s halogens he saw fat threads of something shining dart back onto the palm, like startled sea-creatures whipping back into their dens. “What the hell?”

  “Just get rid of that thing!” McKay cried. He struggled up and clamped his own hands over where Laetor had gripped him. “Ow! First Angelus’ ship and now this!”

  “Are you okay?” Sheppard threw the arm across the chamber, half expecting it raise itself on its fingers and scuttle back towards him. It didn’t.

  “Of course I’m not okay!” McKay offered a hand, and Sheppard hauled him up by it. “What the hell’s happening here?”

  “Looks like Laetor was just taking a nap.”

  “No way. There was no active nanite code in there.” McKay was on one leg, gingerly testing his weight on his injured ankle. “And his goddamn hand was biting me! I could feel something trying to get through my skin…”

  “It’s still alive,” said Dex. He was pointing his blaster at Laetor. “Something’s happening to it.”

  Sheppard looked more closely. “No way…”

  Laetor, or the entity that had once called itself that, was convulsing under the slabs and the metal brace that crushed its right shoulder. The burned stump of its arm flailed, slapping the floor, and its head turned left and right, eyes wild, as if trying t
o find a way to get free.

  There was something mindless about the way it moved, something queasily animalistic. There seemed to be none of the Replicator’s previous intellect there at all. “Rodney, look at that.”

  “Yeah, I can see it.” McKay was supporting himself fully on his injured leg now. “It shouldn’t be doing that.”

  “You downloaded it’s whole brain,” said Dex, leaning down to look closely at Laetor. “Maybe this is what’s left.”

  “Look at the arm,” breathed Sheppard.

  The Asuran’s arm, horribly truncated by Dex’s blaster shots, was still flapping. But the ragged end of it was sprouting a nest of glistening worms, part crimson, part silver, writhing and extending and swarming over each other as they slicked out of the stump.

  Sheppard aimed his taclight at the wound in Laetor’s shoulder. That was erupting too, sewing itself together with gouts of what looked like gristle and liquid metal. “This is not good.”

  “John?” That was McKay, his voice dull with fear.

  Sheppard looked up, and followed McKay’s terrified stare. Across the chamber, one of the other Replicators was hauling itself upright.

  “Oh crap,” he muttered.

  A second later, the air was hot with weapons fire. Sheppard opened up on the Asuran with his P90, hammering a ragged hole into its chest. Dex leveled his blaster and put a bolt into the thing’s face, swinging it around, then blew its head into ragged shreds. It fell.

  Sheppard could hear scuffling sounds from all around the chamber. Where there had been only a still silence, now the place was coming to horrible, shuddering life. Everywhere the beam of his taclight touched seemed to be moving, the Replicator corpses dragging themselves up, heavy and uncoordinated.

  “I think I’ve seen this movie,” he grated. “Rodney, get your stuff. We’re outta here.”

  “How many?” Dex said quietly, swinging his blaster left and right.

  “About fifteen.”

  “We can take them.”

  “Don’t be too sure.” Sheppard focused his taclight on a Replicator on the other side of the chamber; the one Dex had blasted a few seconds earlier. It was dragging itself erect again, the stump of its neck a medusa of whipping tendrils. He aimed low, the P90 clattering as it sent a stream of lead into the Asuran’s left ankle, and the awful, headless thing tumbled as the foot came free. But a moment later it was trying to get up again.

  There was no sound from the Asurans other than the scrape of their limbs on the floor: they rose in eerie, inhuman silence.

  McKay had retrieved his backpack and his own weapon, and was looking wildly about. “Where’s my gun?”

  “Where did you leave it?”

  “By the APE…” He started towards it, but stopped mid-stride. He must have realized there were simply too many Replicators between him and the weapon. “Sheppard?”

  “Leave it!” Sheppard heard a scrape to his left, snapped around and put a burst of fire into the face of a Replicator just a few meters away. The shots knocked the Asuran back, ripped half its head off, but it righted itself almost immediately, its wounds sprouting as he watched. “Just get to the door!”

  He saw McKay go past him, still holding the pack. “I’m out!”

  “Get back to the exit!” He fired again, stepped back, pulled the trigger and found the gun empty. “Ronon, you too,” he yelled, slapping in a fresh magazine and snapping the charging handle back.

  Dex’s blaster was going off almost continuously. Each shot sent a Replicator sprawling, but they were recovering faster with each passing second. Sheppard could see the way they moved was smoother, more natural, as if they were regaining functions they had lost as they lay like corpses on the floor. Whatever these things had become, they were waking up.

  It was time to be gone. He shot out the throat of one Replicator, turned to blast away the face of another, then began to back away. “Ronon!”

  “I’ll follow you!”

  “Follow the damned order!” The P90 clattered empty again. “Ronon, behind you!”

  A Replicator was within a meter of the Satedan, reaching out to him, its fingers elongating into oozing spines. Sheppard saw Dex spin around, raise his blaster and fire it point-blank into the Asuran’s face, but he was too close to it. The Replicator staggered back, its head an exploded mess from the jawline upwards, but the backblast had flipped Dex over too. He fell away, covering his eyes, snarling.

  Sheppard raced over to him, gabbed him by one arm. “You okay?”

  “I will be when I can see!”

  “Now will you listen when I tell you to do stuff?” Sheppard righted the man, then sent him with a shove towards the door. “Go on, I’m right behind you!”

  Dex hit the wall, found the doorway with his hands, and ducked into it. Sheppard turned, fired a long, street-sweeping burst into the advancing Replicators, then followed him.

  The two of them ran through the short corridor and out into the first chamber. McKay was there waiting for them, near the exit. Sheppard could hear the sounds of water coming from the ceiling there, and almost smiled. He could even see natural light issuing from the other end. “Everyone okay? Ronon?”

  The Satedan was blinking. “Yeah, I’m okay. Give me a minute.”

  “I don’t think we’ve got a minute.” Scuffling, slapping sounds were coming from behind him. When he looked around, the taclight beam fell on a corridor that was a seething mass of Replicators.

  “I’ve got an idea,” said McKay suddenly. “Where’s my PDA?”

  “In your damn bag.” Sheppard shoved him towards the exit corridor. “How’s this for an idea? Just run!”

  “No time, they’ll catch us trying to get through that hole. Just wait…”

  “Rodney!”

  McKay was tapping at the PDA screen. “I can control the APE from here.”

  “Can you set it off?”

  “No,” McKay shook his head, not taking his eyes off the screen. “But I can do this.”

  The scuffling grew louder, turned into a cacophony of impacts, crunches, sickening scraping and crushing noises, and a moment later something dark and bulky erupted from the corridor. The Replicators in front of it were bowled aside; Sheppard saw one crushed down and impaled by the APE’s spindly leg, another torn in half in a gout of crimson and silver.

  Next to him, McKay made a flourish on the PDA screen, and in response the APE spun, pirouetting wildly. Another pair of Asurans were knocked flying, limbs ripped free.

  McKay gave a nervous laugh. “I’ve missed having a pet.”

  Sheppard slapped him on the shoulder. “Right now, I’m probably almost as proud of you as you are. Ronon, get your blind ass down to the exit! I need you to drag us out fast!”

  “I’m not blind,” the Satedan grumbled, splashing off down the corridor. Sheppard stepped aside to let McKay in after him, then followed the pair of them, letting the APE spin its wild, uncontrolled dances at the corridor mouth. Some of the Replicators were already scampering past it, but it had bought them a precious few seconds.

  The corridor was just as he had remembered it; dank, crumbling, ankle deep in stinking water. After the nightmares he had just witnessed, though, it felt absurdly welcoming. He followed the light from McKay’s PDA all the way out, turned and dropped to one knee to fire bursts back along the corridor as Dex hauled McKay out into the open, then as soon as he saw daylight flood past him he stopped firing and began to scramble out of the hole.

  Rain, heavy and slippery-warm, sluiced down over him as he emerged. The murky, grayish light felt searing, making his eyes blink and water. It had been cool in the Replicator base, the heat of the air leached away by the weight of rock above it, but out in the open it felt muggy and hot.

  Still, compared to the alternative, it was practically paradise.

  Sheppard heard splashing behind him, the scrape of flesh on stone. He unclipped a grenade from his belt. “Better stand back, I’m gonna blow this —”

  A Replic
ator erupted from the hole.

  In an instant, it had him, one hand around his throat, the other clamped iron-hard over the grenade in his right hand. The Replicator had given up all pretence at humanity: whether it was one of the creatures he had seen decapitated by weapons fire he could not tell, but what bobbed on the end of its neck was not a head. It was a seething cluster, a mass of eyes and mouths and the waving needles of sensory antennae. Part metal, part meat, all hunger.

  The Replicator was appallingly strong. Sheppard couldn’t even shout.

  Dimly, through the pain in his throat and the reddening in his vision, he could see Dex next to him, trying to yank the thing away, hacking at it with one of his many knives, but the Satedan was wasting his efforts. He was opening superficial wounds at best.

  And then, without warning, something washed over him.

  At first he thought it was death, but then the ground came up and hit him in the back. There was an awful feeling in the air, a million crawling itches scuttling under his skin, a hissing, crackling sound in his ears. A dry, wavering heat drawing steam from the rain.

  A stink of ozone. McKay had set off the APE.

  Sheppard struggled to his feet. The Replicator was hanging halfway out of the hole, inert, lifeless. Horribly, it was starting to disassemble as he watched: the machine parts of it shrinking away like severed tendons, the fleshy elements breaking down, liquefying into a thick, ruddy soup that oozed down onto the broken stone, carrying a myriad of silvery fragments and threads.

  The pain in Sheppard’s throat was lessening, almost to the point where he thought it might be possible to start breathing again. He gave it a try, sucking in a mouthful of the reeking air, but it caught in his chest. He coughed, spat, straightened himself up and tried again. This time it worked, more or less. “Oh, man…”

  “Are you okay?” That was McKay, the PDA still in his hand. Sheppard nodded.

  “Finally hacked that part too, eh?”

  “Well, I didn’t want to let all that voltage go to waste.” McKay blinked sorrowfully at the PDA. “Well, that’s the end of that.”

  “You break it?” asked Dex. McKay tossed it to him.

  “EMP cooked it. It was beefed up with Ancient technology, and that’s what the APE was tuned to, I guess. I’m just hoping the laptop survived. It was powered down, so it shouldn’t have blown the storage…” He raised his arm and pulled his sleeve back. “Hey, my watch is okay!”