by Stargate
The hybrid shifted, moaned a long, mournful bellow. There were other sounds too, distant thumps and bangs. People were still shooting at the thing, Sheppard realized. If they were still around when the hybrid awoke, it would kill them all.
“Do you know what hurts more than anything?” Angelus asked him. “I can still remember Eraavis. My children. The cities… Oh, Sheppard, if you could have seen the cities! Soaring under mountains…” The awful head dipped. “The fact that all those memories are utterly false is something I cannot bear to fully comprehend.”
“We saw a planet,” Sheppard breathed. “Burning…”
“The Asurans attacked that world. To test planetary bombardment techniques. There was no human life there.”
“Target practice?” It was too much. Sheppard was reeling, his aching head full and pounding. How could he believe this, in such a place? It was a reversal of everything he had known.
But then, if Angelus was telling the truth, wasn’t he in the same situation? And if he was lying, why was Sheppard even alive?
“Okay, just in case we’re not both crazy right now, what do I do? To kill the hybrid.”
Angelus lifted his unmade head. “I have control over a few of the hybrid’s most basic functions for the moment. I was able to build myself this vessel and regain what little individuality I ever had… I can introduce an infectious element into its system. Before it regains control. A vaccine.”
“Vaccine?” Sheppard shook his head. “Something this big? I don’t —”
“Sheppard, the hybrid is comatose. It is defenseless. It is a made thing; not an evolved creature, but a construct. It has no immune system other than its own conscious defenses. If we infect it now, it will be poisoned before it can recover.”
“What do you need?”
“Something external. Something alien to the hybrid. You.”
“Me?”
“Not all of you. Some blood… A little of the Ancient gene. I am a part of the hybrid, and so I can use its weapons against it. In the same way it grows flesh, I can grow a poison. Give me your arm.”
Angelus reached out. The metal bones of his hand were suddenly alive with silvery worms, their tips needles.
Sheppard had seen those glistening tendrils before, when he had pulled the Replicator’s hand free of McKay’s ankle in the weapons facility. Carter had seen them tear a man inside-out, make a replica of him. He jerked back in horror. “Not a chance!”
“Sheppard, we have no more chances!” The arm turned slightly, the hand outstretched. “I do not know what happened to Elizabeth. The hybrid was made soon after she arrived on Asuras… Her fate is unknown to me. But if she knew of this… Her memories, used as a weapon against her friends… Would she want you to hesitate?”
Sheppard stared up at the remnant for a long moment. The hybrid could still be lying. Maybe it needed a jolt of blood to kick-start its recovery. Maybe everything Angelus had told him was more lies.
But if it was true, then Angelus was right. Elizabeth should not be used this way.
He stepped forwards. “Do it.”
The hand clasped his. The metal of it was warm, and the needle-tips of the worms frighteningly sharp. “This will cause you pain,” Angelus told him gently. “I am sorry.”
The worms slithered into the flesh of Sheppard’s forearm.
He cried out, tried to yank his hand away on reflex, but Angelus was holding him too tight. The remnant’s arm, for all its frail appearance, was machine-strong. Sheppard could no more have pulled himself free of that gleaming hand than he could from locked handcuff. All he could do was sink to his knees, staring at the pulsing worms sliding deeper and deeper under his skin.
His flesh was alive with them. He could feel them draining him, gnawing at him, drawing his blood away into their metal throats. Angelus had lied, he thought wildly. He was a vampire, sucking down one last draught of hot blood…
The worms snapped back, out of him and away. He fell.
“Sheppard?”
He rolled onto his back, staring up at the pulsing ceiling. He penlight was spinning on the floor, strobing crazy shadows.
“John? It is done. You have to leave now.”
Sheppard struggled up, onto his knees. “I don’t think I can.”
“You can.” The Ancient’s voice was weaker, thinner. It sounded as though it were coming from far away. “I’ll help.”
The hybrid had already started to die when Sheppard made it out. Angelus had taken control of some more of its structure, opening a way for him in the same way as it had cocooned him for the fall from the tower. The false Ancient’s control failed in the last few meters, leaving him to struggle out though a liquefying mass of flesh and metal before he finally reached a gap in the armor plating and freedom.
He emerged, according to what he was told later, in front of several terrified marines, covered in bloody slime and making incoherent bubbling noises. It was only by luck, and the fact that he had collapsed unconscious almost immediately, that he hadn’t been shot dead on sight. If he had continued towards the marines, they would have thought him some kind of birthing from the stricken hybrid, and ended him.
It took the hybrid a long time to die, and even longer to fully disintegrate. While Sheppard lay insensate in the infirmary, Carter had the nauseating mass pushed close to the edge of the pier, so that its oozings could drain off into the ocean. It was pollution of the worst kind, but there was nothing else to be done. Hopefully the ecosystem of M35-117 was pristine enough to recover from such a slight.
As it was, the slick of dissolved hybrid was visible for days, and the reek of it drove the inhabitants of Atlantis to stay inside with the windows closed for longer than that.
Gradually, Sheppard recovered. Angelus had taken more than two liters of blood from him, which was a worrying amount, and he had suffered multiple injuries from the crash and the fall. Under Keller’s care, though, he became himself again, and within a short time was finding the enforced bed-rest distasteful. It was then, Keller told him, that she had known he was going to be all right.
Later, his friends and colleagues came to deliver news to him and to wish him well. McKay arrived and told him that the hangar space was damaged beyond repair, and would have to be welded shut. Not only that, but the city’s antibody system had shut down completely after it had been boosted by McKay’s signal, and could no longer be reactivated. That might have been because there was no longer a threat, or because it had been overloaded and destroyed. No-one knew.
Teyla brought him a portable DVD player and a selection of movies to watch, and told him that contact had been re-established with the Apollo. Ronon Dex challenged him a to stick-fight as soon as he was fit enough, and let him know that the Atlantis security protocols were being revised completely in view of what had occurred. There would be a lot of work for them both when Sheppard’s stay in hospital was done.
Eventually, when she had a free moment, Carter arrived.
They spoke of many things, some pleasant, many somber. The casualty figures had to be discussed — twenty-eight dead, thirty-six injured, not counting casualties that had occurred on the Apollo. Apparently, McKay’s fears for the ship had been justified. Ellis had suffered a hybrid outbreak of his own.
There were also some personnel for whom the experience had been too much. Nineteen members of the Pegasus expedition were ending their tours early. Alexa Cassidy was going home on medical leave. There were high hopes for her recovery, but she would not be returning to Atlantis.
Finally, Carter brought up the subject of Angelus. “So, he was telling us the truth after all.”
“What he thought was the truth, sure.” Sheppard closed his eyes for a moment, but all he could see was the pain in the Ancient’s tattered face, so he opened them again. “Poor bastard. He lost them twice.”
“Hm?”
“The Eraavi. He lost them when the Replicators killed them all, then again when he discovered they were never real in the fir
st place.” He sighed. “Sam? How the hell do we tell people he wasn’t the bad guy?”
She shook her head. “We don’t, not the IOA. It’s too risky. If we tell them the truth about him, they might be more inclined to believe the next fake Ancient that turns up on our doorstep.” She smiled. “Besides, I know for a fact that most of them just wouldn’t get it.”
“Yeah, well. It’s pretty hard to get. I keep thinking, all the different things he told us… He believed them all, and none of them were true.” Another memory jolted him. “Hey, that’s it. The weapon he was going to build… What was he actually doing down there?”
Carter shrugged. “Most of it was lost when the lockdown happened. McKay saved some of it — a big chunk of the science looks like stuff the Replicators already knew, and there was a lot of random gibberish.”
Sheppard laid back, staring up at the ceiling. “Rodney’s gonna hate that.”
“Yeah, he does.” She stood up. “Anyway, Keller says you’re ready to be discharged tomorrow. I’ll leave you to your final night of peace.”
“Why’d you say that?”
“Because one of the buildings that got cooked was right outside your quarters. You’re going to be hearing the repairs crews there for weeks.” She went to the door, and waved as she stepped out. “Goodnight!”
“Thanks a bunch.” He settled back.
Slowly, the stillness surrounded him, settled on him like a membrane.
Even now, out in Atlantis, panels were being replaced, walls repaired, wiring checked and fixed. The city would, over a period of weeks, return to how it had been before. The gaping holes in the west and southwest piers would be covered. The events of the past few days would pass into history, just like the people that had been lost to them.
Which was worse, he wondered: killing twenty-eight people, or killing an entire planetary population that had never existed? To him, the former, without question. To Angelus?
He didn’t know. And he found that he could not speak for the man, even though he too had never been. A false man mourning false children. The death of a lie breaking the heart of a man who was only a lie himself.
It was beyond him, a paradox without answer. Maybe, one day, he might be able to ask the opinion of the only person he felt might know its solution.
Until he found her, though, he would have to let the matter rest.
Epilogue
Fire from Heaven Redux
Apollo was different. There was a strangeness to the vessel now.
Ellis had felt it as soon as the ship had fled the jovian. At first he had put it down to the effects of damage, or the hammering meted out to both Apollo and its crew. Then, for a time, he had simply been too busy to dwell on it: as soon as the battlecruiser left the shadow of the gas-giant it had been detected by the Wraith fleet, and Ellis’ attentions had been fixed very firmly on not getting Apollo blasted to atoms before it reached the safety of hyperspace.
It had been a tense time. Several Wraith vessels had altered vector and given chase, and without shields or weapons Apollo had been in no position to do anything but run. The pursuit had stretched halfway across the system, each vessel under constant acceleration, and there had been a time when Ellis had become convinced that they weren’t going to make it. The hyperdrive had taken far longer than expected to reboot and run through its auto-calibration routines, almost allowing the Wraith vessels into weapons range before Sharpe was finally able to make the jump.
Had the main drives taken a similar time to reheat, or had the third Wraith cruiser from the storm been waiting in orbit as Ellis had feared, Apollo might never had escaped. Even when the hyperdrive had returned to normal function, using it had been something of a leap of faith. There was no time to check whether the system had accurately recalibrated. If there had been any significant error in its startup routine, all the crew’s efforts to rid the ship of its intruder and the pursuing Wraith would have come to nothing.
Any fears Ellis might have had on that matter were unfounded, thankfully, and the ship had leapt away without further incident. And once it was gone, the Wraith had not attempted to keep up their pursuit. Either they hadn’t recognized the significance of the battered spaceship that had entered their staging area, or else they simply had other fish to fry. In either case, once Apollo had jumped, it was safe.
After the trauma, then, the recovery. A quiet system in which to nestle the ship close to an uninhabited moon, and time to make the best repairs possible and to re-establish contact with Atlantis.
Later still, perhaps, a chance to mourn the dead.
For now, Ellis was content to supervise the repairs. He was in the bomb bay, watching the launch racks being disengaged and lowered onto the bay doors; they were useless now, tangles of broken gantry and dangling cable. The creature — what Colonel Carter had referred to as the hybrid — had partially ripped them apart as it had attacked McKay’s stealth sensors. Its path through them on its way out of the ship and into the jovian had finished the job.
Past the racks, steel plates were being welded over the hole in the ceiling. The fluttering blue-white glare of welding torches lit the bay, reminding Ellis uncomfortably of the lightning storm. Above that, another crew was working in the corridor, but nothing was being welded there. Corridor nine was largely off-limits, and only temporary coverings had been set down. One of the first instructions Ellis had given upon breaking out of hyperspace had been to order a crew of engineers, plus a squad of marines, into the corridor to pull away every panel from the floor, walls and ceiling.
Unsurprisingly, fragments of the hybrid still remained. Most were dead, including all of the vein-like tubules that had infiltrated the ship’s control cabling and power lines. Those were easy to remove; since the demise of their host they had already begun to rot and peel.
A few of the pieces had tried to crawl away from the light, and one had even been discovered in the process of trying to infiltrate a wiring conduit again. Engineers had used arc welders on the tenacious mass of tissue until it had shriveled, and then dumped it unceremoniously out of the airlock along with all the other pieces.
Ellis couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that they might still not have caught all the hybrid’s last scraps, but that wouldn’t be determined until the ship could be dry-docked. Hence his reluctance to order anything more than temporary coverings to be placed in the site of Kyle Deacons death. They would be lifted and the systems under them checked at regular intervals until he was sure.
If he could ever be sure.
That, he had decided, was part of the ship’s strangeness. Like a man who has recovered from a tumor no longer trusts his own body, Ellis was finding it difficult to trust Apollo. In a way that was unfair — the ship had not turned against him of its own volition. But now he could not watch a screen glitch on start-up, or hear a stutter in the air system, or see the merest hint of a flicker in the internal lighting without wondering if part of the hybrid was once again in the process of infecting Apollo and eating it away from the inside.
He hoped it was a feeling he would be able to shake, in time. For now, he was getting used to the vessel all over again.
After a while he left the bay and returned to the bridge. It was time for Apollo to jump into hyperspace again.
Both Meyers and Sharpe were back at their consoles; Ellis had ordered them away to rest while the ship orbited the silent little moon. Whether either of them had slept at all was anyone’s guess — there was probably a sizeable proportion of the crew who would prefer to rest with the lights on for a while. However, now that they were back at their stations Ellis knew the ship was in the safest of hands.
The lack of Kyle Deacon was something else he would need to get used to, though.
“Status report,” he barked, settling himself into the command throne. “What are we missing?”
“Nothing essential.” Meyers was tapping rapidly at her board, running test routines almost continuously. “Weapons are up, shields at ei
ghty percent strength. Long-range sensors are showing some calibration errors, but short-range and passive are fine. I think we’re about as good as we’re going to get.”
“Sharpe?”
“Course laid in, sir. As long as we keep the jumps short for now, I think we’ll be okay. Hyperdrive could do with a little fine-tuning, but nothing that can’t wait.”
“Very well. Let’s do this.”
Sharpe worked her console, and within a few moments there was a throaty grumble from somewhere deep in the ship’s interior. Ellis found himself listening to it, feeling it through his boots, through the throne arms. He could sense himself waiting for it to fail.
The gray bulk of the moon slid away and out of sight as the ship accelerated smoothly out of orbit. “Jump in ten seconds,” Sharpe announced. “All systems nominal, capacitors charged. Hyperdrive at max power in three, two, one.”
Blue light whirled out from the darkness, reached out and dragged Apollo into its maw. A second later all Ellis could see outside was the spiraling tunnel of hyperspace.
He had seen far less pleasant sights. He stood up again. “Sharpe, call me when we get close.”
“Yes sir. Five minutes out?”
“That’ll be fine.”
He stood at the end of the corridor, watching the engineers checking under the floor panels and then tacking them down again with beads of silicone sealant. They were using powerful spotlamps to hunt for anomalies; wide-lensed halogens fed by thick power cables. Ellis found himself studying the lights for flickers, and shook the thought away. “Damned fool,” he muttered.
“Sir?”
He turned. Copper was there behind him, the bandage around his head replaced by an adhesive patch. He looked wan, but Ellis was coming to realize that he always did.
There was a haunted air to him, though, that hadn’t been there before. And little wonder, thought Ellis. Seeing what the hybrid had done down in the bomb bay would be enough to haunt anyone. “What brings you up here, airman?”