Angelus

by Stargate

  McKay listened hard. Sure enough, from somewhere else in the tower, an alarm had begun to hoot mournfully. A moment later they were joined by chimes from one of the workstations, more musical but identical in pitch and rhythm.

  One of the techs, Palmer, sprinted to the workstation screen, scanning its readouts. “Colonel?” he called. “Alert in the hangar — someone activated an alarm, and I’m also picking up weapons fire.”

  “The ship,” groaned McKay. “Angelus’ ship… What, is he trying to fly out of here or something?”

  Carter was already running past him. He followed her, with Zelenka on his heels. “Sam?”

  “Not now!”

  “Was that call you got about Angelus’ ship?”

  She was clattering down the stairs to the next level, drawing her sidearm. “No. That was MacReady — he’s lost another two marines. Looks like one set of blast doors opened up and they got attacked before they could even call in.” She skated to a halt outside the doors to the hangar, waved her hand over the control. “The hybrid’s gone on the offensive. Something tipped it off.”

  The doors opened onto utter chaos.

  When McKay had last been here, the hangar had seemed cavernous, dark and quiet around the golden ship. Now it was an assault on the senses; the stuttering glare of muzzle-flashes, the deafening hammer of machine guns, the reek of blood and cordite. McKay yelled in shock at it, clapped his hands over his ears to shut out the din, squeezed his eyes shut to block out the sight. It was insane, hellish.

  He felt someone grab him, pull him down into cover. It was Carter, he saw as he opened his eyes again, her pistol leveled, her head turned slightly away from the gunfire. He hadn’t even known that there had been guards stationed around the golden ship — from what he could see now, peeking over a tumbled crate, there had probably been about a dozen of them, armed with everything from conventional firearms to anti-Replicator guns. What formation they had taken around the starhopper he could only guess, because those still on their feet were now clustered at the long sides of the hangar, taking cover behind the piled equipment and stores that the ship had displaced.

  They were firing almost continually at the starhopper, or what the hopper had now become. The noise was insane, an earsplitting racket of stuttering machine guns, the whining snarls of ARGs, the hooting of the alarm.

  There were screams, too. Some of the screaming came from injured men. Most issued from the towering, writhing tangle in the center of the hangar.

  The golden ship was gone. McKay could see elements of it in the mass — a fin here, the glossy globe of a viewport there — but even those last fragments were unraveling before his eyes. It was as if the entire vessel had turned to fluid, risen up into a great column of liquid metal veined with pulsing flesh, connecting floor and ceiling and lashing out in every direction with a thousand whipping, squirming tendrils.

  The noise it made, that cacophony of whistling shrieks and metallic, bass bellows, was simply astonishing.

  Carter was firing her pistol into the thing: McKay saw her empty the magazine, the slide locking back, the empty mag falling to the floor and another in its place before it struck. She opened fire again, squeezing off shot after shot, placing each one. She was testing the hybrid, McKay saw, not just firing randomly but planting each bullet in a different location, seeing if any of them had an effect.

  Zelenka was just behind him. He shouted something, but McKay couldn’t hear him over the noise. He looked back. “What?”

  “Up!” Zelenka pointed frantically. “It’s trying to go up!”

  McKay turned, and saw that Zelenka was right: there was now less of the mass on the floor than there was spreading out over the ceiling. It was hauling itself upwards like an inverted tree, sending out thousands of pulsing metal roots that locked into the panels above and dragged it, hissing and howling, off the ground.

  A marine ran forwards, dropped to one knee a few meters in front of the doorway. He had a weapon over one shoulder, some kind of rocket-launcher. He shouted a warning over his shoulder; behind him, marines covered their heads.

  He never fired it. McKay saw the man correct his aim slightly, angling the launcher upwards, and then a limb of metal snapped down towards him. It coiled around him with insane speed, enveloping his chest and head before he could loose a cry, let alone a missile. The launcher tumbled from his grasp as he was whipped up into the air.

  McKay saw the launcher fall, strobe-lit by weapons fire. Reflexively he went to grab it, desperate to stop the impact setting the missile off. But he was too far away; it skidded out of his grasp.

  It hit the floor end-first, bounced, toppled. Swung back towards the doorway.

  Carter snatched it up, dropped to one knee and fired it in a single action.

  There was an almighty sound, so loud and so vast that it was almost beyond noise. McKay felt it like a punch over his entire body. It had him off his feet. The light, a blast of searing flame in the center of the hangar, lit up everything.

  There was an instant of almost pure peace. For a fraction of a second McKay saw nothing but light, felt nothing but heat, heard nothing past the wall of silence in his ears. He was alone, gliding backwards. Nothing could touch him.

  The floor came up and smashed into him rump-first, so hard his teeth snapped together. The air was full of smoke and water, and everything was on fire.

  The hybrid had stopped screaming.

  McKay, his vision blurring and clouded with spots, could just about make out what had happened to the chimera. Carter’s missile had struck it a third of the way down, blasting it entirely in two. There was a foaming, burning mess of it on the floor, leaping and convulsing in eerie silence, while the part on the ceiling was a gigantic inverted crater, ringed with ragged tendrils, shrinking in on itself as it retreated.

  There were bits of it everywhere. Most of them, McKay saw to his horror, were still moving.

  He scrambled to his feet. Oddly, he was soaked through; when the launcher had gone off a back-blast of hot brine had covered him from head to foot. There were small secondary fires on whatever tarpaulin hadn’t been saturated, and a couple of marines were batting out minor flames on their uniforms.

  The smoke was clearing, slowly. McKay saw Zelenka getting up, his hair plastered to his head and his glasses knocked askew. Carter was curled up on the floor with her arms over her head.

  McKay went over to her and helped her up. “Nice shot,” he said, his own voice dim in his ears.

  “Did I get it?” She was blinking fiercely, trying to focus.

  “Oh yeah.”

  The hybrid was mostly gone, now. The part that had been on the ceiling was sucking itself up into whatever crawlspace existed between the hangar and the level above. The lower section, that which wasn’t scattered in chunks around the floor, was making a similar escape. The last of its tendrils, ridged like silvery worms, vanished out of sight as he watched.

  There was something broken in its actions, though. It was running, not attacking. The explosion, while far from fatal, had done enough to drive the thing into full retreat.

  It had left some objects behind, McKay noticed. Getting closer, he could see that at least one of the objects had been a marine, although it was hard to tell. But there was machinery too: something that looked like a stretched car engine married to a series of coils, twisted and scorched by the explosion. Other parts that were even less identifiable.

  Zelenka was close by. “This looks like Replicator technology,” he said, pointing at the largest section. “A hyperdrive?”

  “Maybe.” He rolled it over with his foot. “It was pretending to be a spaceship, but it still needed an engine. Must have stolen it from the Replicator landing party.”

  He went back to Carter. She was tending to a wounded marine, tying a tourniquet around the ragged mess that had been his right leg. “Medics are coming,” she told him. “Just hold on.”

  “Sam?”

  “Rodney.” She glanced up fro
m her work. “Are you okay?”

  “What, apart from drowning?” He waved around at the mess. “Look, we need to collect some of these fragments. I can test them and use the data to get the pulse frequencies for the APE.”

  “Sure. I’ll get a couple of guys on it.”

  “Yeah…” He gazed around, at the chaos, the fires, the scattered chunks of hybrid and human. “I just thought of something else.”

  “Let me guess. Something bad.”

  “Could be. Remember how I told you the ship had lost weight? And that I didn’t know what that meant?” He spread his hands, encompassing the mess all around him. “Now I do. There’s still about fifty kilos of hybrid on the Apollo.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Open Season

  There was a sound on the bridge of the Apollo that Ellis had never heard before. It was a thin, high rushing, a continuous crackle that, although it wasn’t loud, seemed to pervade the entire space. In itself, the sound wasn’t unduly disturbing. But Ellis knew what it was, and he didn’t like it at all.

  The sound was that of millions of ammonia crystals hitting Apollo at high speed. Sharpe had taken the battlecruiser high, as high as she dared, a long parabolic arc that took it almost entirely out of the water layer and into the frozen skies above.

  It wasn’t a course that could be maintained for long. The friction of the ammonia crystals would slow Apollo even more than the water layer had — the ship was a creature of pure vacuum, built for the airless reaches between worlds. It was too big to be comfortable in an atmosphere; too blunt, too heavy. In the spaces between power drains Sharpe had poured as much energy into the drives as she dared, sending the ship up into what might be its last climb.

  When Apollo reached the highest part of the arc, began to slide back down the other side and deeper into the water layer, there was a very good chance that the power drains would be too severe to allow the engines to restart. If that was the case, Apollo would begin one last maneuver: an unstoppable dive into the heat and gravity and crushing pressure of the jovian’s heart.

  For the moment, though, the ship rose. Ellis hoped it would give him enough time.

  “Meyers,” he said. “Give me a countdown. Twenty minutes mark.”

  “Mark,” she acknowledged, setting the clock running on her PDA. “Do you want me to count you down at all?”

  “Best not. I might need to sneak around.” He got up, walked between the two consoles and right up to the viewport. He could see almost nothing; Apollo was on the dark side of the jovian, so even this high there was no filtering sunlight. All he could see was powdery crystals washing against the viewport in random waves, a supercooled blizzard hammering at his ship. Robbing him of speed, of altitude. The planet wanted Apollo, wanted to drag the vessel down into its terrible interior.

  Ellis allowed himself a grim smile. The planet wasn’t the only thing that wanted to eat his ship at the moment. But with luck and a following wind, he would deny both the jovian and the awful thing shrieking and squirming in corridor nine.

  “Not today, you sons of bitches,” he muttered under his breath. “Not today.”

  There were marines on guard near the corridor, around the corner and out of sight of the creature. They hugged P90s to their chests like totems, although the weapons had proved to be largely ineffective. After the initial encounter with the creature there had been an abortive attack on it, after which Ellis had basically banned anyone from trying to shoot the thing. Missed shots and ricochets were not something he wanted to happen inside a spaceship — even if there was little chance of a shot puncturing the armored hull, there were just too many vital systems around to risk another firefight. Besides, the shots that did hit the creature had little effect on it.

  It was also quite capable of defending itself. Its tentacles could lash out several meters, faster than a man could move, and with brutal, impaling force. And if it took a dislike to anything further away, it had weapons taken from the two marines it had killed. Somehow, those guns had become part of the creature, partially absorbed into it in much the same way as it had infiltrated the ship. Whatever it was, wherever it came from, it seemed to have an instinctive affinity for machinery.

  In addition to the two marines killed in the first attack, there was another in the ship’s sickbay with serious gunshot wounds. Ellis wasn’t about to risk anyone else if he could help it.

  As he greeted the marines on guard he heard footfalls coming up behind him, and turned to see Major Spencer and Copper, the bridge tech. He waved them down, and then tentatively peeked around the corner.

  The creature was still there, filling the space, as raw and unearthly as he remembered. The skeletal likeness of Deacon still jerked and shuddered at its heart, as if driven by poorly-maintained engines. Ellis wondered if there was anything left of his helmsman in the creature at all, or if his shape was just some vestige, an unthinking, unfeeling image of the man.

  Ellis guessed he’d probably never know, but he hoped it was the latter.

  The Deacon-face turned towards him, glittering and ravaged, and its jaw unhinged to vent a whistling scream. Ellis ducked back, hearing a shot and a whine of ricochet as he did so. Had he remained still, the creature would have put a hole though his forehead.

  Its aim was remarkable. Luckily, though, its reflexes were not much better than human.

  “Any change?” Copper asked him. Ellis shook his head.

  “Just as ugly and pissed-off as before. What have you got for me?”

  “Managed to print these off in forty-second chunks,” Spencer said, producing several battered-looking sheets of paper. “Schematics of this area, the bomb bay and the bridge sections above.”

  He spread them out on the deck. Ellis leaned close, studying the various levels of systemry the plans displayed. Dozens of trajectories and reflection angles had been drawn onto the paper, along with copious notes in Copper’s neat handwriting. “This looks thorough.”

  “I’d have preferred another few run-throughs,” said Copper, “but there really isn’t time. I guess we’re out of options.”

  “Pretty much. What about McKay’s sensors?”

  The tech nodded. “They’ll be up to the job. I’ve been double-checking the specs, and my team’s almost got them wired up. We’re ready to go.”

  “That’s good to hear. I’d hate to have to come up with a backup plan this late in the day.”

  Spencer frowned. “There was a back-up plan.”

  “What was it?”

  “C-4. Wouldn’t have been pretty.”

  “Something tells me this one’s not going to be a bundle of laughs.” Ellis checked his watch. A hair less than fourteen minutes. “Right, let’s get down there. Getting the timing right on this one is going to be a bitch, and we’re not going to get any second chances.”

  The lack of power meant that Copper hadn’t been able to reliably lower the launch racks. The team he had assembled were clambering around near the roof of the bomb bay, several meters up and lit only by flashlights and portable spot lamps. Ellis gazed up at them, wondering how long it would take them to get down again. He couldn’t afford to have anyone still in the bomb bay when he put the plan into operation.

  Copper looked worried. “Sir, I’m not sure we’re going to be able to get them all wired in time.”

  “Then just make sure we’ve got enough. How’s the circuitry going to hold up?”

  “In this heat?” The bomb bay was actually cold, almost uncomfortably so, but compared to the deep space it was an oven. “I wouldn’t trust it to last more than an hour.”

  “Lucky for us we’ve only got a few more minutes, then,” said Spencer. Copper ran a hand nervously back through his hair.

  “Yeah. Lucky us.”

  “Copper, I don’t think there’s much more you can do here. Get back up to the reactor — if this works, I’ll need you on the restart.”

  The tech nodded, took one more long look at the spiderweb of cable tangled above hi
s head, and then went for the hatch.

  Ellis had to admit, the job being done on the stealth sensors was one of the most haphazard-looking kludges he had ever had the displeasure to witness. McKay, had he been around, would have thrown a royal fit, there could be no doubt of that.

  Every one of his sensors had been activated early, their generators brought online while they were still tethered to the launch racks. Those that had been successfully modified had been levered open, force-fed a new set of instructions, then connected by lengths of scavenged fiber-optic cable to a central controller. The controller was powered by batteries, as was the remote to operate it, and of course the sensors had their own internal naquadah generators. Hopefully, the entirely network was independent of the power drains, and the obscene creature that was causing them.

  None of the sensors would ever be fit for their original purpose again. Over the past couple of hours, every one of them had been systematically wrecked. Still, thought Ellis, if the plan worked, the sensors would be giving themselves for a noble cause.

  Hell, if he made it out of the jovian alive, he’d even buy McKay a drink.

  Spencer was starting to order some of the techs down. It was a slower process than Ellis would have liked; he was intensely aware of time ticking away. As one man started to clamber down from the rack there was a hefty clanging sound in his wake, and Ellis actually winced. “Careful up there, damn it!”

  The tech looked down at him, over one shoulder. “Sir, that wasn’t me…”

  “Then what the hell was it?”

  “Not sure…” He moved another meter along the rack, heading for the lowest point so he could jump down.

  Above him, the noise came again. A solid metallic impact.

  “Aw crap,” muttered Ellis.

  A section of the bay roof crashed out of its moorings, spinning down to the deck; Ellis saw Spencer duck aside to avoid being bisected. A moment later something darted from the hole left by the panel, an oozing congeries of eyes and mouths on the end of a sinuous limb. The limb swung about, its movements convulsive, lashing like an injured snake while the eyes blinked and the mouths opened and closed, tongues tasting the air. They looked sickeningly human.