by Stargate
“Really? You’re actually going ahead with that?”
“I hope I don’t have to. We’d have to saturate the pier with them, and I don’t even want to think about how much damage that could do.”
“It would be one hell of a risk, Sam. You do realize that the explosive power of a drone has never been accurately measured? From what I’ve been able to model in the past it’s got more to do with the power source in its control than in the drone itself — when we used naquada generators to power them they didn’t pack anything like as much punch as they do with a ZPM in the chair.” He shook his head. “Get it wrong and you could blow the city in half.”
“So give me alternatives. Tell me about the APE.”
“Oh, that. Well… Talk about a two edged sword…” He gave a wry chuckle. “Put it this way, if it hadn’t worked so well I’d be able to build you one right now. All the readings I took on it were in my PDA, and the pulse cooked it.”
“Yeah, Sheppard said it affected the jumper, too.”
“Only the cloak. Everything else was powered down…” He paused. “Okay, not only the cloak. It kind of screwed up the lifters too. And the sensors.” He looked away and cleared his throat. “And the hyperdrive.”
“So everything, really.”
“Well, yeah, pretty much. But the stuff that was powered down just needed rebooting. I managed to get it all working okay with a little tinkering.”
Carter raised an eyebrow. “I guess your definition of ‘okay’ is different from John’s.”
“Ah, picky. So using the hyperdrive was like riding a jackhammer all the way home… I can fix it.”
“I wondered why you used a gate to get back.”
“Yeah, we just found the nearest one and dialed back. It was probably a short cut, anyways.” He made a dismissive gesture. “Look, the important thing is that the Replicators brought the APE with them specifically to kill the hybrid. Laetor and the other infected Replicators were shut down by the pulse when it went off, so he couldn’t know it hadn’t worked. The hybrid got away.”
“And pretended to be Angelus?”
“Maybe. If that’s what happened, I still can’t figure out why… We’ve still only got half the picture right now. But Sam, if the plans to the APE were in Laetor’s head — and if he was part of the Asuran collective at any time I can’t see why they wouldn’t be — then I bet you any money I could beef it up.”
She leaned a little closer to him. “Could it work?” she asked quietly. “Honest answer, Rodney. If what we’ve got here is the same as what you found in the Replicator facility, could the APE kill it?”
“Honest answer?”
“Please.”
“I don’t know.”
She sagged. “Okay. Guess there’s no way you could.”
For a moment, he could see, the pressure had almost gotten to her there. And McKay realized, in that instant, why the thought of his time with Angelus was making him sick. It wasn’t that he could have been killed by the hybrid at any time, if Angelus was indeed the Replicator’s feared chimera. It wasn’t that the physics he had been so engrossed in, so seduced by, had been stolen from him again.
It was because he had let everyone down.
He had been closer than anyone to the Ancient, and hadn’t noticed anything amiss. If he’d seen something earlier, he could have warned them. People might not have died.
But he had been so in love with the science that he hadn’t even spotted the fact he was working with a monster.
“Sam? Let me go through what I’ve gotten from Laetor. If the APE is in there, I can build it for you, I swear to God.”
I won’t let you down again, he thought. Although he could never bring himself to say it out loud.
The contents of Laetor’s head, in terms of nanite code, were immense. The laptop’s storage, even with the massive increase it had gained by McKay’s installation of an Ancient data crystal, was filled with a solid mass of supercompressed data. Each fragment of code had to be extracted from that mass, run through a decompression routine to expand it back to its original size, recombined with all the nearby fragments in order to form viable blocks of data and then finally sent through a series of translation protocols to turn the data from pure nanite code to something readable by human beings. It was a mammoth task, and if McKay hadn’t set all his routines up to be extremely selective in what they extracted and expanded, one that could easily have taken years.
There was, however, just one area of information that the programs were interested in. They still vomited out terabytes of data, but at least it was a manageable amount. Before too long McKay was able to start filtering it by relevance to the hybrid.
The rest of the information, that which didn’t have any direct relevance to Laetor’s experiences on Chunky Monkey, would have to stay in storage for now. McKay hoped that, once this present crisis was over, he would be able to return to it and add it to the Atlantis database. One could never know too much about an enemy, and certainly not one as dangerous and implacable as the Asurans.
He was alone in the lab when he first found something helpful. Zelenka had finished his run of simulations, and had gone to find Carter and give her the results. From the look on his face when he left, they hadn’t been entirely what he was hoping.
What McKay had started seeing wasn’t exactly what he had been looking for, either. In the data blocks he was first able to read there was little or no mention of the APE, and nothing at all in the way of specifications for it.
What he did find, however, were some very interesting facts about the hybrid itself.
Interesting enough to have him running out of the lab, so fast that he collided with a junior technician on the way in. The tech had a mug of coffee in her hand, no doubt trying to stay alert after a long night’s work. The coffee wasn’t as hot as it might have been — presumably the tech had carried it all the way down from the mess hall — but it still made McKay yelp as it soaked through his shirt.
“Ow! Son of a —” He stepped back, batting at himself. “Ooh, hot… What the hell are you doing?”
“I’m sorry, doctor,” the woman stammered. “I was just —”
“What? Just what? You know I’m scalded, don’t you?” She was looking at him in utter horror, and seeing that, he relented slightly. There could be no-one in the city who wasn’t on an edge of tension at the moment, even though the exact details of what had been occurring hadn’t been completely disclosed. “Screw it, just forget it, okay? Look where you’re going from now on, yeah?”
She nodded.
McKay started away, then paused. “Were you looking for me?”
“No doctor. I was just going in to use my workstation.”
“Really?” McKay blinked. “You’ve worked in here?”
“Yes.”
“While I’ve been here?”
“Yes.” Maybe she saw that he was looking bewildered, because she said: “It’s all right, doctor. I don’t think we’ve ever spoken.”
“Oh, okay then…” He gestured vaguely upwards. “I’ve got to, uh… Upstairs. Control room.”
She gave him a shy smile. “Do you want me to lock up when I’m done?”
“No, no. I’ll be right back.” The woman was quite attractive. Had he really not noticed her before? “Sorry, what did you say your name was?”
“Solomon. Gina Solomon.”
“Well, pleased to, er…” He waved her into the lab. “Carry on.”
With that, he carried on, more slowly now, and rather lost in thought. He stayed that way until he got up to the control room.
There was a marine stationed at the entrance, standing at ease to one side of the door. He nodded to McKay as he came in. McKay returned the greeting on reflex, then paused. “What, we need guards on this place now?”
“I’m sorry? Oh, no doctor. I’m a message runner.”
“Oh, I see! I thought things had gotten worse.” He glanced past the man, into the control room, but he
couldn’t see anyone there but the usual technicians. “Ah, is Colonel Carter around?”
“Out on the balcony.”
“Thanks.” McKay left him there, crossed the control room and opened the balcony doors.
Carter was there, near the rail, looking up into the sky with a pair of binoculars. Zelenka was there too, standing nearer to the wall, and Sheppard was right up against the rail, looking upwards with a hand cupped over his eyes.
“Hey,” McKay said warily. “What are you looking at?”
“Major Lorne,” Sheppard replied.
“Up there?”
“He’s in a jumper,” said Carter. “Doing a flypast of the lockdown zone.”
“Oh, I see…” McKay looked up, but couldn’t see anything. “Observation, or target acquisition?”
“Bit of both.” Sheppard pointed. “There he is!”
McKay joined him at the rail, and followed the line of his finger. As he did so a metal splinter raced up from his far right, catching the sun as it skimmed low over the west pier. “He’s moving fast.”
“He started off slower,” said Zelenka, sounding unhappy. “Something reached up and tried to grab him.”
“Holy…” McKay turned his attention to the pier itself, shielding his eyes from the high sun. For a few moments he saw nothing, but then, between two structures, something moved convulsively. “Okay, that’s nasty.”
“Third pass,” Carter muttered. “He should be coming in now. Hi Rodney.”
The jumper sizzled past again. “Okay,” said Sheppard, with an edge to his voice. “Fourth pass.”
“He’s probably, you know, just being thorough.” McKay turned away from the view. “Look, guys? I’ve managed to translate some of Laetor’s head. You might want to hear this.”
Zelenka looked puzzled. “Laetor?”
“The zombie Replicator we interrogated on Chunky Monkey. Didn’t I tell you his name?”
“You don’t tell me anything.”
“Yeah, well.” McKay waved him away. “The important thing is, I think I know what we’re dealing with here. The hybrid.”
Carter lowered her binoculars and turned to him. “Go on.”
“It’s a weapon,” he said proudly.
There was a few moments when no-one spoke. Then Sheppard said: “We know.”
“You do?”
“Er, that’s what Laetor called it, remember?”
“What? Oh, that!” McKay shook his head. “No, I mean now I really know.”
“I would have thought it was pretty obvious!”
“Would you just listen to me for a minute?” McKay waved a hand out towards the lockdown zone. “That is not what it’s supposed to be doing!”
“If we told it that,” ventured Zelenka, “would it stop?”
McKay gave him the sour eye, but didn’t answer him. “It’s a pet project of Oberoth’s. I’m guessing part of an instant arms race we kicked off when we screwed with the Asuran base code.”
Sheppard raised a hand. “Hold on, Oberoth directly?”
“Oh yeah, his name’s all over the code. Figuratively. Anyways, the original plan for the hybrid wasn’t that mess over there. What it’s supposed to do is make more Replicators.”
“That doesn’t make any sense at all,” said Zelenka.
McKay made an exasperated noise. “Of course it does! It makes perfect sense… Listen, the Ancients lost the war with the Wraith because they were outnumbered, yeah? So the Replicators design something they could, I dunno, get into a hive ship, or drop onto a populated world, whatever. It disguises itself, uses all kinds of ninja tricks to avoid getting caught, and quietly starts grabbing people and turning them into new hybrids. Two become four, four become eight… Wouldn’t be too long before the whole planet’s full of Replicators.”
“Replicators can’t reproduce like that,” said Zelenka.
“That’s why it needed to be a hybrid. Living tissue can be infectious — this thing isn’t part Replicator, part human. It’s part replicator, part disease.”
“My God,” breathed Carter. “That’s just…”
“I think the word you’re looking for,” Zelenka muttered, “is ‘disgusting’.”
“You defeat your enemy and increase your own forces at the same time.” Sheppard gave a low whistle. “Holy cow.”
“Yeah. Except it doesn’t work.”
“Seems to be doing okay to me.”
“What?” McKay nodded out to sea. “That? We know all about that! Sure, it’s got the upper hand at the moment, with all the ninja tricks it knows, but as a stealth weapon it’s blown its cover big time.”
“And you know why, don’t you,” smiled Carter. “C’mon, Rodney. You so want to tell us…”
“Ah, you know me so well,” he grinned. “As a matter of fact, I do. It’s hungry.”
He looked at the three of them, and was met by three blanks stares. “Oh, for goodness… The Replicators must have made an error in the design. Hugely underestimated how much power it would take to keep the nanites and living tissue functioning together. The hybrid works, but it’s energy-poor. It’s starving, in a way we can’t even comprehend. It’s mad with hunger — that’s what drove it beyond its programming.”
“And the Replicators found out what it was capable of,” Carter said, very quietly. “Once it went mad. They knew they couldn’t control it. They had to destroy it.”
“Hold on…” Sheppard had a hand at his headset, no doubt taking a call. McKay hoped it wasn’t anything important — even though the hybrid was insane with hunger, it was still startlingly intelligent. And not only that, it was imaginative, a complex function that that had probably evolved from the stealth techniques programmed into it by its creators.
This wasn’t just artificial intelligence, he thought. It was artificial cunning.
And that made the hybrid, in its present, imperfect form, even more dangerous. In order to satisfy its insatiable appetites the chimera could be capable of almost anything, the full range of action from stealth to huge and overt violence. It would hide in the shadows and strike like an assassin in the night, and in the next instant would unleash unimaginable fury and brutality right out in the open. It was unpredictable and ruthlessly efficient and completely terrifying.
No wonder the Replicators had sacrificed an entire starship to destroy it. The hybrid would consume anything, Asuran and Wraith and human alike. It had to.
“Lorne’s down safely,” Sheppard reported a moment later. “I’d better get in there and see what he’s got.”
“I’ll come with you,” said Carter. She walked across to the doors and waved them open. “Rodney, that was good work.”
“I thought so.”
“At least we know what we’re dealing with now…” Closer to him now, she sniffed. “Is that coffee on you?”
“Yeah, a tech threw it at me. I think it was a sign of affection.”
“Keep thinking that,” Zelenka told him, then turned to Carter. “Colonel, should I give up on the shield deformation? With what Rodney has discovered, surely the pulse emitter has got to be our best option.”
She shook her head as she went through into the control room. “No, keep on that. The more options we have the happier I’ll be.”
“We might still need to do both,” said Sheppard, looking grim. “The APE didn’t work for the Replicators, not all the way. It escaped.”
“At least part of it did.” McKay followed Carter through the doors. “But yeah, we might have to zap it more than once. Or…” He trailed off. Gina Solomon, the technician who had spilled her coffee on him, was standing at the entrance door. She waved to him nervously, as if to try and attract his attention without drawing any to herself.
McKay gave Zelenka a nudge. “’Keep thinking that’, huh?” he murmured, then strode over to her, smiling. “Doctor Solomon, what brings you up here?”
“I was trying to find you.” She glanced nervously around, and paled slightly as she saw Carter and Sh
eppard there. When she next spoke, her voice was very low. “Something’s happened.”
His smile dipped. “What kind of something?”
“Well, I was in the lab, where I met you? I set up what I needed to and left the program running, and then when I was coming out, another tech came in. He didn’t say anything, and I didn’t really look at him…”
Carter had obviously overheard, despite Solomon’s hushed voice. She walked quickly over to join them. “Is there a problem?”
“I’m not sure, Colonel.” Solomon was looking deeply uncomfortable. “I… I’d forgotten my mug, so I went back to get it. But the lab door was locked from inside.”
McKay’s stomach lurched. “Locked? Somebody locked themselves into my lab?”
She nodded miserably. “I think it might have been Doctor Norris.”
“Norris? But isn’t he… Oh no.” McKay put a hand over his face. “Oh no nononono!”
“Colonel Sheppard,” said Carter. “Get a squad down to Doctor McKay’s lab. Get that door open. Blow it off its rails if you have to.”
“On it.” He raced away. McKay almost went after him, then thought how futile it would be. “Damn it, Solomon,” he hissed. “Didn’t it occur to you that Doctor Norris might not exactly be himself right now?”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I didn’t —”
“Oh, this is perfect!” McKay snarled. “Everything we got from Laetor will be trashed by now…”
“Doctor, calm down,” Carter snapped. “It’s obvious we’ve got a change in situation here. Where’s Clarke?”
“Who?”
“The runner, he was just here.”
McKay glanced around. The marine he had seen on the way in was gone. “Maybe he had to use the bathroom or something.”
“I sure hope that’s it…” Carter suddenly dipped her head, putting a hand to her headset.
“That’s not a good sign,” McKay moaned, watching as she nodded and muttered her end of a terse conversation. “That’s not supposed to happen.”
Zelenka looked around, suddenly. “Do you hear sirens?”