by Stargate
It didn’t. The next lightning bolt struck Apollo directly in the center of the upper hull.
The ship bucked. Ellis saw the lightning flash down, painfully bright, splashing out into a million coursing forks over the hull. For a few seconds Apollo was alive with sparks, the air in the bridge greasy with static, and then just as suddenly it was over.
One of the Wraith cruisers vanished from the tactical screen.
Ellis switched to a rear camera view, just in time to see the stricken vessel tumbling away, trailing fire and debris. The camera view dissolved in static for a moment as another lightning blast hit Apollo and coruscated over the hull, but when it came back one of the two remaining Wraith ships was climbing, fast, up into the ammonia layer and away.
The last ship accelerated, got close, and fired all its weapons at once.
In an instant the space around it was riddled with electricity. The plasma pouring from the Wraith ship was acting as a conduit for the lightning, focusing it straight into the heart of the vessel. Ellis saw it swell, split, break apart in a great cloud of fire that dropped back and down, gone in a final few seconds.
“Sharpe, take us up. Fast. We’ve been lucky so far, let’s not overplay our hand.”
The storm began to drop. Meyers let out a long sigh. “Sorry sir. Forgot my physics.”
“Sometimes there are advantages to being inside a metal hull.” Ellis went back to the command throne and slumped into it. “Do we have main drive yet?”
“In the next few seconds,” Sharpe reported.
“As soon as we clear the atmosphere, full thrust away from the Wraith fleet. At this range we should be able to outrun them until we can get the hyperdrive back, unless that last cruiser tries anything funny.”
If the Wraith had even made it out of the jovian, he thought tiredly. Its hull, comprised of the strange, biomechanical armor the Wraith used for all their vessels, would not have acted like Apollo’s trinium hull in the midst of the storm. The battecruiser, clad in metal, had acted like a Faraday cage, in just the way airliners in the skies of Earth were struck by lightning every day — the electricity had simply conducted around the ship. Certainly there had been some damage; scoring and blown systems due to static, plus the awful effects of the storm’s titan winds.
The Wraith ship, partially alive, could never have survived such a strike.
In front of Ellis, the clouds whipped away, thinned to nothing, and opened up into a black sky full of glittering stars. And he felt Apollo leap forwards, eager to be away.
Me too, he thought. So let’s go. Anywhere but here.
Chapter Eighteen
Resistance
Carter was on her way to the ZPM lab when Sheppard caught up with her. She had been walking fast, lost in her own racing thoughts, and had not heard him calling her. He had to put a hand on her shoulder before she noticed he was there.
The contact made her jump slightly. “Damn it, John. Don’t do that.”
“Sorry.” He was wearing a tactical vest over his uniform, and had a P90 cradled against his chest. All the city’s military personnel were on full combat alert, and most were armed and armored in the same way. “I was yelling from halfway back there.”
“Is something wrong?”
“No more than usual. Where are you headed?”
“ZPM lab. Zelenka’s got some new data to show me. I think McKay’s down there too — he’s been in and out of there since Norris trashed his lab.”
“Yeah, he wasn’t happy about that. Said I’d ‘dawdled’.” He nodded down the corridor. “Shall we?”
“Sure.” She set off again, and he fell into step alongside her. “So, what’s the news?”
“Right now, nothing good. No-one’s seen Clarke. He’s officially AWOL.”
Clarke was the marine who had been working as a message runner from the control room. He had vanished at the same time the hybrid had launched its offensive. “So either something’s grabbed him, or…”
“He guarded Angelus for a while. Same as Kaplan and DeSalle.”
“Chances are he’s hybrid too, then. Who was he partnered with on that, Bowden?”
“Also missing.”
“Well, if he turns up and he still acts human, throw him in the brig. Tell him it’s for his own protection.”
The corridor branched; Carter headed for the nearest transporter. As she did the lights dipped noticeably, and Sheppard looked warily up at the ceiling. “Has that been getting worse?”
“Yeah. Whatever the hybrid’s up to, its definitely drawing more power.”
“Still hungry, eh?”
“Always, according to McKay.”
There was silence for a few meters. Then Sheppard said: “Sam… How are you doing?”
“I’m fine,” she smiled, slightly surprised to have been asked.
“Okay,” he replied. “I’ll try again. How are you doing? Really.”
She didn’t answer immediately. The question wasn’t an easy one to answer; ever since the hybrid had gone on the attack she’d barely had time to think. Organizing the city against the creature had been difficult enough when it was skulking in the lockdown zone. Now that it was active, the job was doubly hard.
So far, apart from the awful thing in the hangar, there had been no other violent attacks. But it was obvious the creature was testing her defenses. It was as if the thing was probing her; acting in a certain way to see what she would do, then changing tactics. Prodding her, testing her responses. Keeping her on edge.
After the hangar incident, and the destruction of McKay’s lab by the Norris replica, things had gone quiet for a short time. Then a report had come in from the medical lab, the one in which Angelus’ blood samples had mysteriously vanished — an element of the hybrid had been discovered there by some of the nursing staff. The lab had been sealed, but the thing inside had been crashing about, obviously trying to attract attention. It had been driven off without injury, thankfully, but the whole incident had resulted in considerable disruption to the running of the infirmary.
The missing blood, Carter guessed, had been nothing of the kind. Tiny fragments of the hybrid, they had crawled out of the sample tubes and gone on to assimilate part of the locker.
Since then there had been more sightings of replicas, isolated attacks, and several attempts to hack into vital systems. For some reason the hybrid hadn’t been able to disrupt the water supply, the transporter system or the ventilation network, despite having tried to do so on several occasions. It seemed, thankfully, that there were still parts of the city it hadn’t figured out yet.
Still, it was keeping Carter on her toes. At the moment she considered the situation a stalemate, but she had the uneasy feeling that it couldn’t last. She was being too reactive. Sooner or later, in the next day, the next hour or minute, the hybrid would make a new move and tip the balance.
That was how Carter was. Fearful, frantic, worried, overstretched. Angry and sickened. Violated and exhausted. Almost at the limits of her endurance, and completely unable to stop, to falter, to give in. To do so would be to hand Atlantis over to the hybrid, and there was simply no way she could do that. It was beyond her.
What to tell Sheppard, then?
“Really, I’m okay,” she said.
“Tired?”
“No, I’m so hopped up on coffee I can barely see straight.” She glanced sideways at him as they reached the transporter. “What about you?”
“Me? I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck. Why’d you ask?”
The transporter doors slid apart. Once the two of them were inside and the doors had closed again, Carter selected the nearest transport point to the ZPM lab, six levels down from the gate room. There was a brief flash, a fizzing sensation and a moment’s disorientation, and then the doors opened onto a different scene.
Carter stepped out. “By the way, did you get a look at Lorne’s flypast scans?”
Sheppard made a face. “Sure did. Apart from the ones with the scratc
h in one corner they were pretty… What’s the word I’m looking for?”
“Informative?” Carter suggested, heading into the ZPM lab.
There were few words to properly describe what the jumper’s flypast had revealed. Barring the first few images, which showed nothing awry and were quite obviously fake, the scans had shown an area of the city that was almost completely taken over the by the hybrid. Not only had the creature grown vast amounts of new flesh while it hid in the lockdown zone, it had also started to assimilate the structure of Atlantis itself. Parts of the pier had changed, become ridged and rippled and twisted into disturbing new formations, as if the chimera had learned the trick of manipulating the very stuff of the city.
The pictures that stuck in Carter’s mind, though, were the ones showing, however briefly, that while Lorne looked down on the hybrid from the air, something very like a vast, unblinking eye had been staring back up at him.
She looked quickly around the ZPM lab as she went in, but McKay was not in sight. Zelenka sat at a workstation, his back to her, and a couple of other technicians were busy at other parts of the lab.
He glanced around as she entered. “Ah, Colonel. Sorry, Colonels, plural. Any more developments?”
“Nothing that wouldn’t give you nightmares.” She moved next to him and sat down. Sheppard stayed behind them both, arms folded. Guarding as well as watching. “Where’s Rodney?”
“I’m not sure. He said there was something he needed to work on, but he wouldn’t tell me where. Maybe something to do with his new pets, I don’t know.”
Carter hid a grimace. Some of the pieces of hybrid McKay had salvaged after the hangar encounter had remained alive, and he was keeping them in an isolated lab under constant guard. She had reports of certain tests he had performed on them — she hesitated to use the word experiments — and while she could summon no sympathy for the hybrid or its works, the idea of McKay vivisecting squirming chunks of protean biomatter made her stomach roil.
She pushed the thought aside; there were more pressing matters at hand. “So what do you have for us?”
“Okay.” He tapped at his keyboard, bringing a map of the city up on the workstation monitor. “Firstly I’ve been able to verify the output of the biometric sensor. I thought the hybrid had hacked it, but I’ve run some sequence tests and I’m pretty sure it’s one of the systems it can’t get into yet.”
Carter felt the word ‘yet’ settle in her gut like a ball of cold stone. “What does that show us?”
“This.” Zelenka hit a key, and the map was overlaid with a series of crimson shapes. “I took some readings from one of McKay’s new friends and re-tuned the sensor. You can see the lockdown zone here — obviously, most of the activity is confined to that area. But we’ve also got incursions in the tower.” At the press of another control, the map turned, revealing itself to be a 3D model of the city. The virtual viewpoint zoomed in on the control tower, and as it drew close two red splotches appeared most of the way up. “This lower one hasn’t moved, but this one here has spread itself thin between the hangar ceiling and the gate room.”
“Damn,” Carter breathed. “I hadn’t realized it was still there… What do you think it’s doing?”
“Could be trying to hack into the control room systems. Maybe even the gate.”
“Why the gate?” asked Sheppard. “It’s not trying to go anywhere, is it?”
Zelenka shrugged. “The gate has direct power connections to the ZPMs. Maybe it’s trying to get a better source of energy.”
Carter leaned closer to the monitor. “It’s only a few levels away. Why not try to go for the ZPMs directly?”
“I’m not sure.” He sat back. “There are a number of systems it hasn’t gotten into yet, and I don’t know why. I have a theory… McKay shot it down in flames, of course, and he might be right. But there do seem to be some essential elements of the city’s function that I would have expected the hybrid to take over first. Now that its out in the open, why not shut down the transporters? Poison the air or the water?”
“It wants us alive, maybe?” Sheppard stepped closer, peering at the map. “Maybe we taste better fresh.”
“What’s your theory?” Carter asked. “Forget McKay — what do you think?”
“I think it’s possible there’s a connection between the unaffected systems and the unknown functionality we’ve been seeing. There’s a signal component to the activity that seems to be in antiphase to the hybrid’s pattern…” He sighed. “I’m sorry, I don’t have much more than that.”
Carter gave him a smile. “Don’t worry. It’s certainly worth looking into. In the meantime, this biometric data is a godsend. If we can use it to track the hybrid elements…” She squinted at the map. “Can it show us the replicas?”
“It’s not quite tuned that finely yet, but I’m working on it. Oh, and there’s one more thing. The seismic detectors are showing even heavier vibration in the lockdown zone. It’s still hammering away in there.”
“That’s so odd.” Carter looked over her shoulder at Sheppard. “Building something?”
“Doesn’t seem like the constructive type. If I had to lay money down, I’d say it was probably ripping the pier apart and eating it piece by piece.”
“That makes a depressing kind of sense, actually.” Carter straightened up. “Although I still don’t get why it’s obsessed with increasing its mass when what it’s short of is power.”
“Fat guys don’t stop eating. It’s kind of a vicious circle, I guess.”
“Actually, it’s a little more than that.” McKay walked into the room, a laptop under his arm. “Hey everyone. Did I miss anything?”
Carter pointed at the workstation. “Zelenka’s found out how to track the hybrid.”
“Really?” McKay gave the screen a cursory glance. “Yeah. That’s, ah, really interesting.” He put the laptop down and flipped it open. “Anyways,” he went on, bringing the machine off hibernation. “The hybrid’s mass. The bigger it gets, the more of its own power it can generate. It’s working towards a point where it’ll be self-sustaining.”
Zelenka looked up at him, blinking. “How did you find that out?”
“Oh, you know. A little applied science, a little raw genius.” He brought up a graphic on the laptop screen. “Here you go. I’ve been analyzing those sections we saved, you know, from the hangar? And the mass to power ratio has got a definite curve. Extrapolating, I can tell within a fairly thin margin when it will have reached a big enough mass to not be hungry any more.”
“That’s great,” said Carter. “Maybe, if we just find the thing enough to eat, it’ll get full.”
“Okay, two problems with that,” McKay told her. “Firstly, there’s no guarantee that it will stop — just that it will be self-sustaining and no longer tied down to draining power from the grid. And secondly, I don’t think we’ll be able to find it enough to eat.”
“Why, how much will it need?”
“About half the city.”
Carter sagged. “Damn. I thought we actually had a piece of good news.”
“Yeah, sorry about that.” McKay rubbed the back of his neck. “Ouch. That thing you fired in the hangar… I tell you, ever since that, my neck’s been killing me.”
“You were pretty close to it,” said Zelenka, not unkindly. “Maybe you sprained some muscles when you landed.”
“I was in the air?”
“Oh yes. I watched you.”
“Wow. I thought that was just an out of body experience.” He looked around at Carter. “And what was with all that water, anyway?”
“Confined-space version,” she told him, rather impatiently. “There’s a saltwater countermass to dampen the backblast. Rodney —”
“‘Dampen’ being the operative word.”
“Hey,” said Sheppard. “At least you weren’t on fire.”
“Okay guys, come on.” Carter folded her arms. “Focus. Rodney, are we any further on the APE?”
; His gaze dipped. “Not so much. Without the data we got from Laetor I’m kind of groping in the dark. I’ve not been able to tune a pulse that has any effect on the hybrid. Not the pieces of it I’ve got in the lab, anyway.”
“Radek?”
“There’s no immediate way to deform the shield, not with the hybrid’s pattern interfering with the power grid. Sorry.”
Carter suppressed the urge to swear. “John?”
“I’ve got nothing.”
“Great.” She raised her hands to her face, cupped them over her eyes to block out the world for a moment. The respite was welcome, but momentary. “So we’ve got a giant tumor in the west pier that’s not going to stop before it’s eaten half the city, a bunch of zombie clones of Atlantis personnel that we have no way to track, carnivorous biomass in the crawlspaces under the gate room and who-knows-where else, and Rodney’s got a bad neck. Anything else?”
There was a long silence. Finally, Sheppard said: “I think that covers it.”
For a moment, just a heartbeat, Carter almost lost control. A wave of anger and despair hovered over her, like the crest of some dark breaker about to surrender to its own mass and slam down on her, sluicing her away.
It didn’t last long. Carter had never been a woman to give in to such feelings, even when all hope was gone. But the temptation to rage and howl and quite possibly pick up the laptop and shatter it over Rodney McKay’s head was a very real one.
Embrace despair, someone had once told her. Turn it into anger. Use anger as energy.
“Okay,” she said, her voice very calm. She pulled a seat out from under the workstation bench and sat down. “If what we’ve been working on so far has gotten us flat nothing, what else can we work on?” She glanced up at McKay. “How do you cure a smart disease?”
“Maybe you should be talking to Keller.”
“Could be…” She frowned, thinking hard. “The tumor’s metastasized. It’s spread to other areas of the city, set up new infections there… It’s acting just like a cancer, but a cancer that knows all about us. How does it know so much?”