"Look, `interference' is my middle name," he said. "I won't stand on the sidelines while Charybdis destroys everything we know, especially if all I've got to look forward to afterwards is eternity consisting of you, me, and-supposing you're right-Charybdis in some sort of primordial vacuum. If the thought of spending eternity in that company doesn't scare you off, watching the universe and everyone in it fall apart should."
I don't care! Everybody I've known is long dead anyway!
"But you did care! How did it feel, watching the Wraith take your family and being powerless to do anything about it, huh?"
The response was a furious jumble of pain and rage and sorrow that petered out into the mental equivalent of a little boy's whimper. Rodney recalled moments when he himself must have sounded-sounded?-exactly like that, and pushed the memories away with a vengeance, hoping against hope that Ikaros hadn't noticed. And maybe he hadn't. The kid was preoccupied with his own grief.
"I'm sorry." Rodney surprised himself again by meaning it.
After what seemed like decades of silence-funny how it bothered him now, seeing that he'd wanted it for so long-Ikaros finally came back.
You're right.
It was all he said, but apparently it was enough.
As though somebody had thrown a switch, that soothing pool of sunlight winked out. Swirling clouds seemed to collide in the sky, their gray thickening to charcoal to black. With a bone-rattling clap of thunder the skies opened again, releasing a deluge that was like nothing Rodney had ever experienced. Cold, hard pellets of rain were hammering down relentlessly, jumping off the floor of the cage, stinging his face and whipping his skin. On the market below, the crowd flew apart, scattering toward the nearest shelter, their screams of terror or dismay scarcely audible over the roar of the rain.
Charybdis is angry.
"Thanks for telling me. I thought it was just mildly irked."
CHAPTER 20
Charybdis -223
adek! Leave!" Selena was shouting it out, but she herself wasn't moving from her terminal.
The holographic image that quivered in front of her work station, at the brink of winking out, showed a schematic of the planet's continental plates. Their drift was now visible with the naked eye, not that Radek Zelenka would have needed a computer to demonstrate that fact to him. He briefly tore his attention away from the figures racing across his own holo-screen, escalating rapidly, and projecting a sequence of events nobody would be able to stop now. Even if the planet's scientific facilities weren't being knocked down like houses of cards. Their own laboratory was no exception.
Ceiling tiles dangled at drunken angles, having ripped loose light fixtures and wiring that snaked halfway to a floor strewn with debris and broken equipment. Windows were shattered, with the exception of one pane that stubbornly hung on in defiance of a crack that split it top to bottom. Across the room a whole section of the wall had caved in about two hours ago. Falling masonry had flattened a slew of instruments, including the monitors for their main seismic sensor array, and half buried a young technician, at the very least cracked a few ribs, at the worst caused severe internal injuries. Two others had volunteered to take her to a hospital that was only four blocks away-in other words, the situation there wouldn't be any different from here, but any speculation on the girl's chances of receiving treatment was moot anyway. Her escorts hadn't returned, so Radek couldn't even tell whether the men and their charge had made it to the hospital in the first place. The safest assumption was that they'd lost three more people in addition to the five who had died from carbon monoxide inhalation the previous night.
"Radek! Move!" The project leader still hadn't moved. Knowing her, she probably didn't intend to. It was her lab, her responsibility, and like the proverbial captain, she was going to go down with the sinking ship.
Not as long as he had anything to do with it. "It's too late, Selena! We have to go! And that means you, too! We-"
"Go where?" she shot back. "No matter what the government tells us, there's nowhere safe, and you know it."
He did. In a last ditch effort to appear to be doing something, the planetary government, or what was left of it, had ordered everyone who'd survived so far-few enough, the global population had been decimated-to evacuate to high ground by morning. Morning was now. They should be leaving, but it didn't make sense. High ground was no safer than anywhere else; this was a disaster that impartially struck everywhere, robbing people of the titillating comfort of watching the devastation in some remote corner of the planet on their news screens and donating to the nearest relief fund by ways of paying admission to the spectacle. The evacuation merely was an attempt to keep the pervasive panic at bay and offer the survivors a scrap of hope and the chance to die with a glimmer of optimism in their eye.
And maybe it was his job to justify that scrap of hope and that glimmer of optimism.
It wasn't just time-honored disaster tradition that had prompted the council to send people into the hills above the city. The ruins of the old Atlantis were situated in those hills, and among the ruins still stood the Stargate-the only potential means of mass evacuation. Of course the council had been briefed regularly, and they knew as well as Radek or Selena what the chances were. They'd been trying to get the gate to work for as long as Radek had been here. Twenty-six years. The lab had been established within days of his dropping out of the event horizon, in the hopes that they could duplicate what he seemed to have achieved. He'd told them, time and time again, that he didn't know how he'd done it. All he could say for certain was that, one moment he'd been on Mykena Quattuor, watching Charybdis going active, and the next he'd landed here. On his own. In a timeline that wasn't his. This much at least was definite, because this was Atlantis-at a time when its inhabitants had either not yet reached or somehow lost their technological advantage. Radek had found himself in the bizarre position of knowing more about Ancient technology than the Ancients. He'd been happy to join the research team at the laboratory, not just for the intellectual challenge but also because getting the Stargate to work was his only way home.
These days he no longer remembered when exactly he'd decided to confine his expectations to explaining the seemingly unsolvable puzzle. Nothing they'd tried, none of the bright ideas he and the team had cooked up over the years, had had any effect. Still they'd never stopped trying. What had continued to spur them on was one simple fact, based on the laws of probability; with every failed attempt their chances of succeeding the next time increased. And that was what drove Selena.
As he looked over at her, he noticed for the first time that most of her unruly mop of hair had escaped the chignon at the back of her neck and flared around her face like a gray, curly halo. Her lab coat was rumpled, and fatigue had blotted shadows under her eyes and carved her crow's feet into deep, angry lines.
"You look terrible," he said, smiling.
"Have you looked at yourself lately?"
He hadn't, but he supposed it didn't take too much imagination to get the picture. At least her coat was only rumpled. His was stained with what had to be at least a gallon of coffee. Though that nicely covered those blotches of grease, leftovers from a meal he couldn't even recall eating.
"This last batch of readings looks interesting. It suggests a temporal not a spatial phenomenon," she offered. "I have to stick with it. Maybe-"
"Show me then." He crossed the room and flung himself into a chair next to her.
It wasn't what she'd expected, and it triggered a frown. "Radek, you can't stay here. You're the only one who stands a reasonable chance of making this work."
Still confident, even after all these years of futility.
"That's exactly why I need to stay," he replied. "Even though, personally, I feel you may be overestimating my capabilities. Show me what you've got."
She brought up the latest figures. They had installed sensors all around the gate to measure abnormalities in the energy flux. Each time they'd dialed the readings had been
nominal, indicating that there was nothing wrong with the gate itself. Then, over the past ten days or so they'd occasionally registered energy spikes while the Stargate was supposedly dormant. In each instance, the spikes lasted for the average duration of an intragalactic gate journey and they had always shown exactly the same characteristics. If nothing else, it had confirmed Radek's longstanding suspicion that it had to be the system that was faulty. It also suggested that, somehow, the gates remained interconnected even when they weren't active. Unfortunately, fascinating though the observation was, it also remained completely useless unless they could figure out what it meant. If they figured it out in time, they might save the lives of everybody who had fled into the hills.
As if the planet or fate or Charybdis were laughing at the mere thought of this possibility, a new tremor slammed into the lab. Selena's chair toppled, spilling her under the desk, and Radek flung himself over her, partly to protect her, partly to seek cover from the rain of mortar, tiles, fittings, and other junk that burst from the torn ceiling. That sole, steadfast window pane gave in at last and sent a shower of shards sailing across the lab. Everywhere in the building alarms went off, only this time there was nobody left to silence them. The klaxons barely contrived to add to the noise that seemed to turn the air solid.
To Radek it sounded as though the planet itself was groaning-and perhaps it was; for reasons unknown Lantea was expanding, rapidly, straining at the seams, its continents just about ready to pop off the surface of the doomed planet. All scientific analysis of the problem basically read like the diagnosis of a monumental case of gas.
The notion of a planet suffering from indigestion made him chuckle, though neither their current predicament nor the pre dicted end result were funny in the slightest. Lantea would simply fly apart, and sooner rather than later.
Finally, the shaking stopped but instead of the leaden postshock silence-so profound that you could hear the dust rustle through the air-now there was the unchecked wailing of the klaxons. Of all the pointless noises...
Beneath him, Selena stirred and gave a groan loud enough to be heard over the racket. "Get off me," she yelped. "I can't breathe!"
"Sorry"" He rolled off her, crawled out from under the desk and rose to survey the damage.
The holographic projector had been knocked out this time, obliterating that entirely redundant simulation of the rate at which the planet expanded. Sadly, Radek's glee at finally finding something useless destroyed wasn't meant to last. Selena's computer terminal was dead, too, and the readings, which he'd never had a chance to study properly were gone. Instead of figures, her holo-screen showed a multicolored fizz of static.
"Oh damn!" Selena had climbed to her feet behind him and stared at her ruined terminal. She was bleeding from a cut above her eyebrow, and the crimson trail of blood had painted a stark pattern into the mortar dust that caked her face.
"K certu!" Radek echoed glumly, his voice struggling for audibility under the screech of the alarms.
The chunk of masonry that had destroyed the terminal had also diminished their last chance, however insignificant, to get the gate to work and save all those people who had flooded into the hills like lemmings. And they still kept coming.
Ironically, the only piece of lab equipment still working was a bank of monitor screens that showed constant surveillance images of the Stargate and the area surrounding it, which was fast getting choked with refugees, all terrified, all desperate to escape. A whole throng of people had gathered under the awning that protected the dialing console and some clearly knew enough to be aware of what the device was supposed to be doing. Which was the extent of their knowledge. A dozen hands at once frantically-and randomly-pushed glyphs, while some impatient or frustrated souls kicked at the base of the console. One of them was attempting to pry open a maintenance hatch. If he succeeded, the mob was bound to pull out the crystals and destroy the device.
Radek supposed he should get worried or try to contact the authorities in a vain effort to dispatch someone to stop these people. But what difference would it make? Selena seemed to have come to the same conclusion.
"Just look at them," she said tiredly. "Poor devils."
It seemed the authorities were on to the situation without being alerted, though whether the soldiers were there in any official capacity was anyone's guess. Radek assumed they merely were fugitives like everybody else-any kind of societal structure had gone out the window weeks ago, even if, mercifully, the disorder had stopped short of rioting and violence-and they simply chipped in because they felt it was their duty. They pushed through the throng, where necessary shoving people aside physically, and at last plowed their path to the dialing console. In their majority, the people pawing the device stepped back as soon as they saw the officers approach, but a handful, including the man attempting to get into the maintenance hatch, kept prodding, kicking, and poking.
The fight developed almost in slow motion. An officer stepped in, addressed one of the amateur technicians. The man ignored him until the officer tugged at his sleeve. On the monitors, mouths opened and faces contorted with silent screams. When the first fist flew, Selena gasped.
"What is he doing?"
"He is being scared," Radek replied as gently as one could if contending with klaxons. "When people are scared, they lash out. Even people as peaceful as you."
By the looks of it, people were very scared. After that initial, almost reflexive punch, the melee spread like ripples in a pond, but, unlike ripples that would quiet down with time and distance, the situation escalated further and further. Men, women, children were swept away and pulled under in a maelstrom of panic.
With a mix of dread and fascination, barely aware of Selena's sobs, Radek watched the sea of heaving, thrashing bodies, half thinking that perhaps this was a better way to die; at least they went out fighting. He was so wrapped up in the macabre spectacle that he almost missed it. A chevron had lit up on the outer ring of the Stargate.
"Selena!"
She blinked, stared where he'd stabbed his finger at the screen. "They actually dialed an address!"
"No." Radek's throat had gone dry and that one syllable stuck in his craw. Which might be just as well, because right now that blockage seemed to be the only thing that kept his wildly hammering heart in place. "No. Look again."
"You're saying it's an incoming wormhole?"
"Yes! Look at the console. If they'd managed to dial a valid address, the symbols would be lit."
The dialing pads were dark. The Stargate, on the other hand, showed four glowing chevrons now, with a fifth coming alight just as Radek glimpsed back at it. The crowd had spotted it, too, and they began pushing toward the gate as their way out, like an audience trying to escape from a burning theatre or sports stadium.
------------- " Zadna." he shouted, horrified. "Stay back! For God's sake, get away from there!"
"They can't hear you!"
Of course they couldn't. And even if they could have, they wouldn't have listened. Helpless, Radek looked on as the seventh chevron locked and the event horizon surged into the throng-men, women, children-and vaporized everyone and everything in its path. Selena let out an inarticulate scream and clutched his arm.
The eight foot swath of annihilation had finally brought the crowd to a dead halt. Too late they came to their senses, faces white and slack, all of them so shell-shocked that they barely seemed to be able to take in what was happening when a squat, roughly cylindrical little vessel pushed its way out of the Stargate.
"Oh, my God," whispered Radek. "Oh, my God...
He hadn't seen a puddle jumper in twenty-six years, but there was no mistaking it. For a moment he simply stood there, unable to move a muscle, staring like an idiot with his mouth hanging open. Then he grabbed Selena's arm and yanked her toward the door.
"Come! Quickly! We've got to get to the gate. Now!
It was as though the events they'd witnessed only moments ago had sapped the life from her. She let h
erself be dragged over and around the rubble that littered the floor and out the door. Only when they reached the stairwell, she seemed to wake up from her fugue.
"Where are we going?"
"To the Stargate! I told you!" he snapped impatiently, regretting the outburst almost at once.
"But-"
"I'll explain later, I promise. But now we have to go. There's no time." He let go of her, patted her shoulder by ways of encouragement, and started racing down the stairs, trusting Selena would follow. Her curiosity was reliable enough.
The stairwell was a deathtrap, and in his mad scramble to the ground floor all he could do was pray that it wouldn't come crashing down around their ears. Twisted all out of shape, the banister wobbled dangerously, and pieces of jagged metal stuck out everywhere. More than once his coat caught on an edge, and he had to rip himself free again to rush on, skipping broad holes where steps had broken off and ducking under loose wiring. The air was thick with dust, and every breath he took-far too many-made his lungs feel as if they were filled with ground glass.
By the time he reached the ground floor lobby, he was dizzy with exertion, wheezing for air, but he only stopped long enough to determine a safe route to the exit. Once a soaring space illuminated by skylights and designed to convey the lofty goals of those who worked here-pursuit of knowledge and universal betterment-the lobby lay in ruins. They'd actually heard the crash all the way up to the twelfth floor. The ceiling had caved in and the skylights had turned the floor into a minefield of shards. And worse. He quickly decided that it would be wiser not to examine what lay beneath the glitter of destruction. There was no telling how many people had been in here when the lobby collapsed, but those who hadn't made it out in time must have been caught in what amounted to a hailstorm of glass daggers...___
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