Ever since she had decided to bypass the authority of the IOA, Sam Carter had been preparing three dossiers in parallel. The first was, of course, a series of compiled reports for the Advisory, detailing what progress had been made on the Angelus project. The second, Carter’s dossier for General Landry, contained almost exactly the same information as the first, although the order and intent of its contents varied considerably.
The third, though, was very different. Its contents would have made no sense at all to anyone but Carter herself — in fact, they made little enough to her. And while the first two dossiers were purely digital in form, this last file was strictly old-school: a manila folder containing paper documents, many stapled together or held in place with paper clips.
There were printouts in there, photographs, scans and transcripts, reports and requisitions; a collection of papers that seemed to have no correlation to one another at all. Carter had been putting the file together for two days, now, and she still wasn’t entirely sure why. It was as though the documents it contained were pieces of a puzzle, but a puzzle she wasn’t completely sure even had a solution.
Still, she couldn’t shake the feeling that the file’s contents needed only to be laid out in the correct order for their meaning to become clear to her. And it was this order that Carter was trying to find when the IOA observer arrived on Atlantis.
Carter had been sitting at her desk, a piece of paper in each hand, trying to read both at once in the hope that somehow they would make more sense together than they did alone. One was a form from one of the Atlantis medical staff, one Nurse Rhonda Neblett, who was reporting the loss, possibly theft, of a series of blood samples. Apparently, even though the blood had been in test tubes and locked in up one of the medical labs, it had vanished overnight.
The test tubes had not. They were exactly as Neblett had left them.
The other sheet contained information that was even more obscure. When Colonel Ellis had reported back to Atlantis after jumping into the M19 system, all the sensor readings gathered during Apollo’s orbits of Eraavis had been compressed into a data packet and sent back through the Stargate. Most of the data was video footage, the now-infamous film of the planet’s scorched and blasted surface. In addition to this, however, were the results of all the chemical, radar and gravimetric scans that the ship had carried out while it was filming. A part of this information, translated into a series of complex graphs and charts, was in front of Carter now.
Much of it was a mystery to her: the chemical sciences were not really her field. But even with her level of knowledge she could see holes in the data. There were elements that should have been in the atmosphere of that slaughtered world that, according to Apollo’s sensor suites, were quite absent.
Together, Carter was certain that the documents in her folder, especially these two, meant something desperately important. Part of her was almost afraid to know what that might be.
A distant rumbling broke into her reverie, making her start slightly. Carter often found the world around her shrink away when she was working on a difficult problem; her perceptions would narrow, collapse into a into a single point encompassing only the mystery she was trying to unravel. It could be useful, that sheer degree of concentration, but there was a downside. When the real world decided it required her attentions, the switch in focus could be startling.
The rumble turned into a rising, rushing snarl. Carter put the papers back into their folder and stood up as the Stargate activated, the growl of the forming event horizon dropping back into a liquid hum. The activation was scheduled, and should have come as no surprise: Andrew Fallon, the IOA’s chosen observer, was on his way through.
Carter put the folder away, and went down to the gate room to meet him. The Stargate had shut down by the time she got there, leaving the observer standing in front of an empty, open ring of stone.
She trotted up to meet him. “Mr Fallon?”
“Colonel Carter.” He extended a hand, and she took it to shake briefly. “That’s an unusual experience, isn’t it?”
“The gate?” Carter looked up at it. “Really? I don’t even notice any more.”
Fallon blinked a couple of times, as if trying to clear his vision. “Well, if you need reminding, it’s like riding Space Mountain in a hamster ball.”
The observer was, in terms of appearance, quite unremarkable; a man of middling height and build, clean-shaven, with graying hair. His voice was soft, and his accent hard to place. He was, Carter judged, a man who was quite used to having people not notice he was there.
To some, that can be a curse. A few, though, turn it into a career.
He had a small suitcase in one hand and a coat draped over his shoulders, which told Carter that he intended to be around for a few days at least. Carter’s heart grew a little heavier to know that, but she should have expected it. Her hope that the IOA’s observer would look around, make his report and then go home again could only have been a vain one.
She dismissed it. “Do you want to settle in? There are spare rooms on the accommodation level — if you like, we can get one set up pretty fast.”
Fallon smiled. “I’d prefer that to happen in the background if at all possible. Midway has me a little stir-crazy, so maybe we could start right away?”
“Of course. My office is just up here.”
She led him back up the stairs and through the control room. He waited at the door to her office for her to go in, and then stood until she sat behind her desk. Then he set down his case, folded the coat neatly on top of it, and sat opposite her.
Precise, thought Carter, summing the man up in that single word. She patched a call down to the techs in charge of the accommodation level and asked them to set a room up, aware that Fallon was watching her carefully the whole time.
“So,” he said, when she was done. “Here we are. The seat of power.”
“I don’t exactly think of it like that.”
“Well, it’s not always a good thing. Like it says in the comics, with great power comes great responsibility. And you do bear a lot of responsibility here, Colonel.” He folded his fingers together, settling back a little into his seat. Carter could feel him weighing her up.
She half-smiled. “It’s very much a team effort. I’ve only been here three weeks, but I don’t feel like I’m bearing the responsibility alone.”
“And you’ve taken it upon yourself to manage the Angelus matter?”
Her smile died. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Angelus has been working for two days now, but the Advisory are sensing a lot of reticence in the reports they’ve been getting back.”
Carter felt herself go a little bit cold. Just how much did the IOA know? “He hasn’t complained to me.” Not directly, anyway.
“It took almost twenty-four hours to find some electric fans because the computers you gave him kept overheating. Longer to fit a bunk so he can stay in the lab and work around the clock, which is what he wants to do. He’s got no tech team, apart from Doctor McKay. To be blunt, Angelus is starting to think you’re deliberately holding him back.”
“I’ll admit there have been supply issues…”
Fallon just raised an eyebrow.
“Okay,” Carter sighed. “Cards on the table. Like you said, I’ve got a responsibility. And I believe I’d be failing that if I let Angelus start building death rays in my basement unimpeded.”
“Because of the danger to Atlantis?”
“Sure. You must have seen the Eraavis footage.”
“According to your last report — two days ago — Angelus says he can develop this project without alerting the Replicators again.”
“And I don’t believe him.”
“I see.” Fallon glanced about, as if taking in the sight of the office. The office, the control room beyond it, and more… “Colonel,” he said levelly. “Let me ask you this: what are you doing here?”
“Excuse me?”
“Simple enough question.” He leaned back in his seat and gestured around him. “All this. The Pegasus expedition, Atlantis, everything. What’s it for, Colonel? What are you actually doing here?”
Carter narrowed her eyes. “I’m sorry, Mr Fallon, I’ve really got no idea what you’re getting at.”
“Okay, I’ll spell it out for you. Stargate Command had a clear purpose, at least in the beginning. Secure the gate. Make sure nothing bad came in from outside. Once they failed in that remit, and bad things started coming in anyway, the purpose was expanded — gather technologies, information and alliances to help protect Earth.”
“I know,” Carter grated. “I was there.”
“Which is why I don’t understand your position, Colonel. Seriously, what is Earth getting out of Atlantis? What new technologies developed here are making things better for the people at home? How many of Earth’s homeless are you housing? How many hungry people are you feeding?” He nodded at the techs working outside. “Because from where I’m sitting, Atlantis is a drain on resources and personnel that could be better used elsewhere.”
“You won’t find that a popular opinion in these parts, Mr Fallon.”
“I wouldn’t expect to.”
Carter leaned towards him. “Listen, right now Atlantis the only thing standing between Earth and the Wraith. If it wasn’t for the alliances we’ve made here, the information we’ve gathered and the continual vigilance of the people in this city, then the Wraith would be on their way through the gate and everyone on Earth would find themselves on the menu. Hungry and homeless alike.”
Fallon smiled. “I’ve heard some twisted reasoning in my time, but that about takes the cake.”
She stared. “I beg your pardon?”
“Colonel, if there had never been an expedition to Atlantis the gate here would still be at the bottom of the ocean on Lantea. If Weir’s people hadn’t blundered into the Wraith they would never have become the threat they are. If your local braniacs hadn’t screwed around with the Replicators’ core programming you wouldn’t be in the middle of an interstellar war.” He shook his head, wearily. “Do you know what you’re actually doing here, Colonel? Damage control.”
Carter opened her mouth to yell him out of the office, but stopped herself. She took a deep breath and unbunched her fists. “Care to explain what you mean by that?”
“Colonel, you’re no fool. You know exactly what I mean: ever since the first Stargate was dug out of the sand we’ve been in trouble. The Goa’uld, the Replicators, the Wraith… The universe has proved itself, over and over again, to be full of enemies. Enemies that didn’t even know we were here until you people started poking them with a stick. And every time you wake some new species of cannibal psycho you stumble around, get people killed, and then find a way to hold them off for a while by blundering good luck. Tell me, does that really seem like an appropriate use of resources to you?”
“So what would you rather do, Fallon? Hide in a cave and wait for them to come to us?”
“Not any more. You’ve poked too hard. If the Stargate had been left under the sand, if O’Neill hadn’t blown up a System Lord saving a few grubby throwbacks on Abydos, if Weir hadn’t dragged this city up off the seabed and told the Wraith all about us, we’d probably have been left in peace long enough to come up with our own solutions. But not now.”
He stood up. “This project has put the whole of Earth into deadly jeopardy, and now your job is to do something about it. And guess what? The opportunity has just fallen into your lap.”
Carter was on her feet too. “I don’t believe Angelus is a solution. Considering what happened to Eraavis, I think he’s as dangerous as any enemy. Right now, he’s the stick we’re poking the Asurans with.”
“Weir poked them long before you got here, Colonel. Thing is, you’ve got a chance to do something worthwhile here, to make Atlantis mean something. And it looks to me like you’re doing everything in your power to obstruct that.”
“Mean something? Are you insane?”
“Bottom line, Colonel — as far as the Advisory is concerned, Angelus is developing a weapon that can protect Earth from the threats you’ve stirred up. And if that costs us Atlantis, then that’s a fair trade.”
“You have got to be kidding,” she hissed.
“I’m not. From now on, you’ll not only offer Angelus every assistance, you’ll also cease any attempts to impede his research. You’ll assign him a tech crew and any expertise he’ll require. I’m under strict instructions to report all progress back to the Advisory on a twice daily basis, and if I see something I don’t like we’ll pull Angelus back to Earth and set him up with a lab there.”
“Earth?” Carter stared at him, horrified. “Fallon, he screwed up on his own planet and the Replicators melted it —”
“The Replicators are a long way from Earth. But you know what? You’re right — if some part of this weapon does attract the bad guys, maybe it would be better if they came here rather than to Earth, hm? That way, only a few hundred people will die in flames and not six billion.”
“If we kick him out of the damn city maybe nobody dies!”
Fallon shook his head. “He’s too valuable. He either works here or at home. Your choice.” He picked up his case and coat, turned away from her, and headed for the door. As he reached it, he paused. “This whole mess is your fault, Colonel,” he said quietly, not looking back. “All you exploration junkies, spinning your Stargates just to see what would happen… Here’s your chance to atone. Don’t screw it up.”
“Fallon?”
“Yeah?”
“This isn’t over.”
“Damn right it isn’t. I’ll go and see Angelus now, let him know how things are going to be run around here.”
With that, he was gone. Carter watched him making his way to the stairs, half of her hoping that he’d fall and break his spine.
The other half wondering if he was right.
She sat in the office for some time, listening to the soft chatter of the control room, trying to calm herself and failing. The conversation with Fallon had shaken her.
Three weeks, she thought. She had been in charge of the Pegasus expedition for three lousy weeks, and already she’d had the authority ripped out from under her.
Had she made a mistake? She had known that the Advisory wanted what Angelus was offering, but perhaps she’d underestimated just how badly. And seriously, she wondered, how could they trust her with a decision like that? She had proven herself to be an effective agent in her time at Stargate Command, sure. She’d been promoted, in the field; she’d fought and led men into battle and, on more occasions than she trusted herself to count, she had been instrumental in saving the day.
But she’d been in Elizabeth Weir’s shoes for three weeks. It wasn’t enough.
Her headset crackled softly, a certain sign that it was about to admit a call. Carter sighed, put her elbows on the desktop and her head in her hands, and closed her eyes.
As she did so the speaker blipped in her ear. She touched the control on its side. “Carter.”
“Colonel? It’s Jennifer Keller, down in the infirmary.”
Carter’s eyes snapped open. There was something in Keller’s voice she didn’t like at all. “What’s wrong?”
“There’s been an incident. Rodney McKay’s been injured.”
“Seriously?”
“No,” said Keller quickly, “it’s not serious.”
In the background, almost out of range of the pickup, Carter heard McKay begin to disagree vehemently, and she puffed out a relieved breath. “Sounds like his voice hasn’t been impaired, anyway.”
“Oh no, that’s working just fine. But Colonel, he wants to talk to you. Alone.”
“So put him on.”
“In person. He’s extremely insistent.”
“I’ll be right down.”
Carter hurried to the nearest transporter. She was most of the way there when she heard her name called, and turned to see Radek Zelenka running towards her.
Zelenka was the expedition’s second expert in Ancient technology, just below McKay in the Atlantis scientific hierarchy. He was a slight, bespectacled man, a native of the Czech Republic. Carter hadn’t really spent enough time in his company to know much about him, but he seemed extremely competent. Certainly, his soft voice and slightly withdrawn nature was often a welcome opposite to McKay’s bombast.
He skated to a halt, slightly out of breath. “Colonel Carter? May I speak with you?”
“Is it about Rodney?”
He looked at her blankly. “Should I be speaking to you about Rodney?”
“I guess not. Look, I’m in kind of a hurry…”
Zelenka nodded. “I understand, but this is rather important. May I walk with you?”
“Sure.” She gestured down the corridor. “I’m heading to the transporter, so I can go with you as far as there. What did you want to talk about?”
“Well…” He fell into step alongside her as she set off. “That report on the power fluctuations. Have you had a chance to read it yet?”
The report was one of the documents in Carter’s mystery folder. For the past twenty hours, parts of the city’s power grid had been experiencing unexplained drops in power. There hadn’t been many — four at last count — but they had been noticeable. Carter had asked Zelenka to look into the problem, just in case anything was wrong with the ZPMs. “I have, yes.”
“I think, perhaps, you should throw that report away.”
Carter raised an eyebrow. “Why is that?”
“It’s inaccurate. No, I’m sorry. What I mean to say is, it is no longer the whole picture. Um…” He scratched his head absently, brushed hair out of his face. “The fluctuations are different now.”
“Worse?”
“Not as such. They are not as strong now. The level of the drops in power has now decreased to only one or two percent of what they were.”
“Well, that doesn’t sound so bad.”
He gave her a slight shrug. “True. But they are now occurring once every forty-one seconds.”
Carter stopped dead. “You’re kidding.”
“I am not. Where we were experiencing severe power drains at random, now the grid has settled into a kind of pulse. The drops are almost too small to notice — if I hadn’t already been looking for them I wouldn’t have known they were there.”
“That’s just weird.” Carter got her feet moving again. They were coming up on the transporter now, and if Rodney wanted to speak to her alone she was going to have to dump Zelenka in the next few meters. “Have you tracked down a source for the drain yet?”
“No. It’s system-wide as far as I can tell. And yes, that lab was the first place I looked. So far, I cannot pin it down to there.”
Carter got to the transporter and stopped, turning to Zelenka as the doors slid open. “Okay, thanks for telling me. Radek, can you stay on top of this? Maybe it’s nothing, a side-effect of the extra computing power we’re feeding Angelus, but I’ve got a bad feeling about it anyway.”
“You and me both.” He was standing a little way from the transporter, and she realized, with some relief, that he wasn’t planning to get in with her. “I’ll keep you posted. Say hi to Rodney for me.”
“Sure,” she smiled, and stepped inside. And then, as the doors closed, remembered that she hadn’t told him who she was going to see.
Obviously, she hadn’t needed to. She chuckled softly, touched the nearest activation dot to the infirmary and vanished in a flare of blue-white light.
McKay was alone in the infirmary when Carter arrived. He was on a gurney, sitting back against the raised backrest with his legs stretched out in front of him. As the door opened he started upright, then relaxed slightly as Carter came in. He raised a hand. “Hey.”
“Hey yourself.” McKay’s right trouser-leg had been raggedly cut away just below the knee, and his entire lower leg was wrapped tightly in white bandages. Carter pointed at it. “What happened to you?”
“Got into a fight with Angelus’ ship. Guess who won.”
She pulled up a nearby seat and sat down. “It’s not like you to go picking fights with starships.”
“Trust me, I didn’t start it.” He sat up straighter, and swung himself around, wincing as he eased his damaged leg off the edge of the gurney. “Damn it, that stings. You know, I asked Keller for morphine, and she laughed. Can you believe that? Laughed. Does this look like ‘just a scratch’ to you?”
She could only shrug. “I’m not a doctor. Speaking of which, where is she?”
“Down in one of the labs. Something screwy with the MRI machine, or something.” He stretched, as if he had been lying still for too long. “Sorry to drag you all the way down here, but Keller won’t let me out just yet and I’m not entirely sure if I trust the comms, especially if that observer’s around.”
“Oh yes,” Carter muttered. “He’s around. But what about you, staying here because Keller said so? When did you start following other people’s advice?”
He looked slightly hurt. “It’s been known. Hey, I’ve been injured, okay? And, I might add, in the line of duty. Keller might not have the most wonderful bedside manner, but if she says she wants to run some more checks on me then I figure it’s probably best to, you know, let her do it.”
Carter could understand his aversion to leaving the infirmary. He probably hated being in here, but if there was any chance at all something might still be physically wrong with him he wouldn’t take the risk. McKay was a legendary hypochondriac. “So what’s your beef with the comms? Apart from Fallon.”
“Let’s just say I’ve already been physically assaulted by one inanimate object today.” He took a deep breath, squared his shoulders a little. “Okay, here’s the thing. When I was in the hopper, I managed to get some readings on a PDA before the door closed. And there’s a whole bunch of stuff about that ship which doesn’t add up.”
“Like what?”
“Well… First I was concerned because it didn’t look like an Ancient ship. The detail was all wrong, the shape of the thing... But I checked out the database and spotted a class of ceremonial vessel that wasn’t completely different. And it turns out that the Eraavi blinged it up for him as a mark of respect, same time as they made him the mask.”
“So, what then?”
“That’s the problem. There’s no way that ship came from Eraavis.”
Carter tilted her head slightly, puzzled. “Say again?”
“I got some pretty detailed readings on the quiescent emissions from the drive system. I couldn’t from the outside because there’s some kind of shielding, but once I got in there… Anyways, it’s got a hyperdrive, but a pretty pathetic one. If Angelus wanted to cross Replicator space in that thing, he’d need to do it in microjumps. Seriously, I don’t think he could have done the trip in less than a month.”
A cold knot had appeared in Carter’s gut. “Can you confirm that?”
“My calculations? Yeah, as soon as I’m out of here. As for the readings themselves, I’m guessing I won’t get another chance to get inside. Even if I could…” He screwed up his face, as though tasting something sour. “Thanks, but no thanks.”
“I can understand that,” she lied. There was something he wasn’t telling her, something not right about the entire conversation. “Rodney…”
“You want to know what else?” he interrupted. “It’s lost weight.”
She blinked. “The ship? I don’t —”
“I got mass readings on it when I was on Apollo. And while I was cross-referencing what I got on the PDA, I ran it through the load records on the jumpers that hauled it in. There’s a discrepancy of almost fifty kilos.”
“What does that mean?”
“I have absolutely no idea.”
Carter remained silent for a moment or two, thinking hard. What McKay was telling her felt like more pieces of her mystery folder — strange, unconnected incidents that seemed as though they should fit together somehow. The chemical analysis of Eraavis had shown discrepancies, and if McKay’s assessment of the starhopper’s hyperdrive was correct, then that meant…
“You think Angelus is lying to us.”
“I don’t know,” McKay replied, sounding oddly subdued. “If you’d asked me that before today, I’d probably have said no. In the time I’ve spent with him, I’ve never got the feeling that he’s being anything but honest. Then again, my instincts aren’t always one hundred percent accurate…” He sighed. “Sam, I swear I just don’t know. Maybe it’s the ship that’s lying!”
Despite herself, she smiled. “I’ll have it arrested.”
“Well, you could maybe have Angelus arrested instead.”
“Not a chance. If I tried it Fallon would just claim you were interfering with the ship and have it cordoned off. Or he’d have you reprimanded. Actually, both. Trust me, the Advisory want this weapon so bad they can taste it, and they don’t care what happens to us as long as they get it.”
“No big surprise there,” McKay sighed. “Okay, I guess we’ll just have to leave him to it for now. Until I can, you know, confirm what the Hell’s going on.”
“It’s a risk.”
“Well, he’s contained. I spent a lot of time down there with him, you know? He’s under guard the whole time, there’s the surveillance… Sheppard installed guillotines in the lab’s power feeds when he was setting the cameras up. If Angelus even looks like he’s going to jeopardize the city with some kind of wild experiment, he can be shut down in a second, whatever this Fallon guy says. Hold on, I’m just going to try this…” He eased himself off the edge of the gurney, testing his weight on the bandaged leg. Carter saw him wince, but he didn’t seem to have any trouble standing.
“Okay, that’s not too bad,” he muttered. “Anyway, back to Angelus. Why would he be trying to pull something? So far we’ve given him everything he wants, however reluctantly. Believe me, I’ve been over and over this. It doesn’t make sense.”
“You’re right.” She got up. “We haven’t got all the right bits of the puzzle yet.”
“Hm?”
“Never mind. Look, we have the sensor data from Apollo, we’ve got your PDA readings… Surely we could plug that information into the stellar database.”
“To find out where he actually came from?” McKay nodded tentatively. “Yeah, I guess we could do that. There’s only a finite number of bio-capable worlds, and the hyperspace trajectory data from Apollo could round down the point of origin even further… Yeah, that’s do-able.”
“Great.” She got up. “Come on, we’re leaving.”
His eyes went wide. “What about my tests?”
“I’ll have Keller book you back in later. Can you walk on that leg?”
McKay, as it turned out, was quite capable of walking. His wounds might have been painful, but they were by no means serious. Carter had already decided to call back on Keller and make sure before she put McKay through anything strenuous, but the fact that he kept forgetting to limp when he thought she wasn’t watching clued her in.
They went back to the control room. McKay hauled himself theatrically in front of a terminal and set to work on the PDA data. Carter left him to it and went in to her office, opened a word processor on her computer and quickly typed out a summary of what McKay had told her in the infirmary. Then, without saving the file, she printed it out and deleted the text.
The hardcopy went into her mystery folder. One more piece of the puzzle, awaiting it’s place.
By the time she was finished, McKay was already waving at her from his terminal, occasionally gesturing at his leg as if to let her know he was quite unable to walk the several meters from his chair to the office. Sighing, Carter got up and went across the gangway to join him. “Have you found something?”
“If by ‘something’, you mean our guest’s true point of origin, yes I have,” he told her, triumphantly.
“Wow, that was fast.” She leaned closer to his terminal screen, genuinely impressed. “You got that down to one out of how many planets?”
“Well, okay, lets say points of origin.”
“Rodney…”
“There’s no way to be certain exactly which one it is, okay? There’s too many variables. And this is assuming that he’s telling the truth about how long he spent out there in the first place.”
“Please don’t make this any more tenuous than it already is. I can only imagine what Colonel Ellis is going to say when I send him off on- How many was it?”
“Four,” said McKay, glumly.
“Four new detours.”
He looked up at her. “You’re not going to make me tell him, are you?”
“Not this time. I’ll take the flak on this one. Just upload those points to my terminal.”
She went back into her office, and then used her headset to call Palmer. “Simon, can you set up a subspace hail to Apollo?”
“I’m sorry, Colonel, but didn’t Colonel Ellis forbid patching into Apollo unless it was an emergency? He doesn’t regard subspace as being secure.”
“He’s probably right, but I can’t risk waiting until he reports in again. He’s already overdue. Tell him it is an emergency. I’ll take responsibility.”
She cut the connection, and waited. A few seconds later an upload from McKay appeared. Carter opened it, quickly arranged the planetary ident codes into the order she would give them to Ellis, and then heard her headset crackle.
“Carter.”
“Colonel, it’s Palmer. There’s a problem. I can’t raise Apollo.”
She stood up. Through the glass wall of her office she saw Palmer over by the comms board. He saw her looking and spread his hands. “There’s no return at all,” he went on. “The hail’s going out, but it’s not reaching anyone.”
“That’s odd.” And a little frightening, she thought to herself. “Keep trying. They might be in a blind spot, or be having technical difficulties. Let me know as soon as they pick up the hail.”
She sat down, slowly. There was a Plan B, of course — Carter knew she couldn’t always rely on Apollo being at her beck and call, so she had decided some time ago what to do if the battlecruiser wasn’t available. She would wait a short time for Palmer to work his magic on the subspace comms, but if Ellis continued to prove elusive, that secondary plan might have to be put into operation.
And McKay wasn’t going to like it. Not one bit.