She awoke, suffocating. The sheet was tangled around her, pinning her to the narrow bed, and the darkness pressed down around her like wet sand. There was a noise close to her head, a shrill buzzing that scratched at her ears, but she couldn’t identify it nor reach out to silence it. The depth of her sleep, and the suddenness of her waking, had nailed her down.
She fought the pressure, the crushing fatigue, convulsing sluggishly on the bed until, finally, some measure of control returned to her deadened body. She got an arm free, flailed until she found her headset, and shut off its insistent whirring.
Carter sat up in bed, not remotely awake, and pressed the headset into her ear. “Wha?”
“Colonel? Is that you?”
“Teyla? What… What’s going on?” She swung her feet free of the sheet and stood up, swaying a little. According to the clock next to her bed she had been out for no more than a few minutes. Just long enough to fall really, soundly asleep, which made waking all the harder.
There were noises coming through the headset; scuffling, panting, as though Teyla was running. Another voice, too far out of pickup range to identify. Something that sounded like sobbing.
“Colonel, something has happened. We were attacked, the lights have failed —”
“Attacked? Lights?” Carter rubbed her eyes, trying to shake the edges of fatigue away. “Where are you?”
“We are near to the Ancient’s lab. Colonel, we were attacked by two of the marines guarding him. I do not think they are human.”
“We? Who —?” Carter stopped in mid-sentence, aware that she was doing nothing but asking random questions. “Okay, let’s start again. Are you injured?”
“I am not. Radek is fine too, but Alexa Cassidy is in extreme shock.”
A thin tone broke through the Athosian’s words; another call coming through on the headset. “Teyla, hold on a moment, I just need to switch channels.” She keyed the new call in. “Carter.”
“Colonel, this is Palmer in the control room. We’ve got a serious situation here. Looks like an entire section of the west pier has gone into some kind of lockdown.”
“I’ll be right up.” Carter switched channels again. “Teyla, get yourselves up to the infirmary, as quickly as you can. I’ll meet you there in a few minutes.”
She dressed quickly, in the dark, something she had done so many times that she could let her body deal with the task while her mind went elsewhere. The west pier was, of course, where McKay had chosen to set up Angelus’ lab. That was no real surprise to her — in fact, it had a kind of sickening inevitability. Despite all her efforts to keep the situation with Angelus under control, all her hopes of dealing with the Ancient’s plans peacefully, through diplomacy and reason and common sense, the whole thing had slid out from under her. Now she was getting wild calls in the middle of the night and Fallon was going to have her skinned alive.
Carter was out of her quarters no more than three minutes after she had first woken, and within five was striding into the control room. “What have we got?”
Palmer was waiting for her, standing next to the sensor terminal. The screen showed a vector image of the city, a broad, angular snowflake drawn in threads of pastel blue. A red circle pulsed ominously on one of the piers. “It’s here,” he told her. “We picked it up just a few minutes ago.”
“Can you zoom in on that?”
He did so. The picture of the city spread abruptly, making Carter feel like she was swooping uncontrollably down into its complexities. In a few moments the pier filled the screen, and the red circle now centered around a rectangle of the same color.
Carter looked at it warily. “Okay, what am I seeing here?”
“Basically, nothing. It’s a hole in the city — not a physical hole, but we’re no longer getting any returns from it at all. No external lights, no communications in or out, and no sensor readings of any kind. There’s a whole bunch of functionality at its edges we can’t identify, as well.”
“Functionality?”
“Systems we weren’t previously aware of activated at the same time the section went dark.”
“Right,” said she quietly. The Pegasus expedition had been occupying the city for years, now, and they were still finding new pieces of kit to trip over. Even in a structure as large and as complex as Atlantis, she couldn’t help but wonder how the previous administration had been spending its time if there was still ‘functionality’ here that no-one could identify. “Give me a minute.”
There were times, Carter thought ruefully, as she opened the doors to the balcony, that being in command was no fun at all. In principle, it was what every soldier strove for; promotion after promotion, the recognition of one’s superiors, the inexorable climb up the ladder of command.
But damn, things were a hell of a lot easier when she had someone to tell her what to do.
She walked out onto the balcony, letting the doors slide closed behind her. The air was cold, almost freezing, the sky above her clear and bright with stars. The planet’s two visible moons were up, neither full, but each casting a silvery light across the ocean. She could smell brine, and, if she listened hard past the soughing of the wind, could hear the far-off, rhythmic rushing of the sea.
There was a cold beauty to it, although at that precise moment Carter would rather have been in bed.
She looked down, out across the city. Little of its actual structure could be seen, given the altitude and the darkness, just silver-blue edges caught in moonlight and a constellation of golden lights. The sight was strange, surreal, made even more so by the missing part of it.
On the west pier, far to her left, was a very regular rectangle of pure darkness.
Palmer’s diagram had been informative enough, but the true enormity of the situation didn’t hit her until she saw that black space for herself. It was shocking as a missing limb.
She looked out at it for a long minute, until the bite of the night wind began to hurt her, then she spun on her heel and marched back inside. “All right, as of now the city is on full alert status.”
Palmer was at the communications terminal. Carter saw him punching buttons, and a few seconds later the lights in around her rose to their daylight levels. The same would be happening everywhere else, too; inside living quarters, corridors, public areas, labs… Within minutes, the city would be awake.
Whether or not the same could be said if the locked section, she couldn’t say. Effectively, that was now no longer part of the city. It was a sovereign state, answerable to no-one. What, if anything, was occurring in there was a mystery to which she would have to devote all her efforts.
Right now, nothing else mattered. Not Fallon, not the IOA, nothing. The dark space was her only concern.
“Palmer? I’ll need city-wide comms. And how long do you think the rest of the control staff will take to get here?”
“Fifteen minutes?”
“Call them individually, tell them they’ve got five.” She walked a couple of steps away from him, taking a deep breath, readying herself. Then she switched her headset on. “Pegasus expedition, this is Colonel Carter. As you are probably aware by now, the city of Atlantis is on full alert. All active personnel are required to go to their duty stations, all others please make yourselves ready and await further instructions.”
She let the echoes of her own voice die away, then said: “In addition, it’s possible there may be non-human intruders in the city. Please be as vigilant as you can.”
With that, she closed the connection. “I take it there’s been no response from Apollo?”
“Not a word, Colonel. I’ve been sending out hails every fifteen minutes…” He gave her a small, helpless shrug. “So far, nothing.”
Carter nodded briskly. She’d have been alerted if Ellis had reported in, that was certain, but she’d still had to ask. Just to make sure that things were as bad as she thought they were. “Keep trying. Palmer, are you going to be okay up here on your own until the rest arrive?”
“Sure. Are you not going to be here?”
“I’ll be back shortly. There’s some things I need to do first. Oh, and one more thing… Now that it’s all just hit the fan, Andrew Fallon is probably going to be looking for me. If he asks, tell him I’m in the ZPM room.”
“Is that where you’ll be?”
“No. But tell him anyway.”
The lights in the infirmary were up very high, higher than normal by some considerable degree. The brightness struck Carter as soon as she came in, and her made wince. She still didn’t feel truly awake. A mug of furiously strong coffee was helping slightly in that regard, but she couldn’t shake the strange feeling that she was lagging behind the rest of the world by about a quarter of a second.
Keller looked up as she heard Carter come in. “Colonel,” she said, very quietly.
“Morning, Doctor.” Carter kept her voice at the same level. She had been warned to do so before she’d arrived. “I think this just about counts as morning, doesn’t it?”
“Only just.” Keller got up. “If you’re looking for Teyla and Zelenka, I stashed them in the lab next door.”
“Were they okay?”
“I checked them out and they seem fine. Just a little shaken up.”
Carter gestured over to a screened-off area. “Is Cassidy in there?”
“Yeah. I gave her a sedative. She was in quite a state when they brought her in, poor kid.” Keller hugged herself nervously. “Some of the stuff she was saying… Jesus.”
“Can I talk to her?”
“I’d rather you didn’t.” Keller glanced back at the screened-off area. “Colonel, is what they were saying true? Teyla and Zelenka?”
“I have no idea. All I know is that we’ve lost an entire section of pier, and that Fallon’s going to have my hide.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’ll let you know when I’ve woken up. In the meantime, take care of Cassidy.”
“I will. She’s sleeping okay at the moment, as long as I leave the lights on full. If I try to lower them, well…” She sighed. “Let’s just say it doesn’t matter how much sedative I give her.”
Carter thanked her, then went into the adjacent lab. Teyla Emmagan was there, pacing in the small space. Zelenka was busying himself with a data terminal. He looked up as she came in. “Hello Colonel.”
“Hi Radek, Teyla. How are you both doing?”
“Physically, we are both well,” Teyla replied. She was practically bouncing with nervous energy. “Colonel, you need to post guards around the affected area.”
“I already have.” Carter had spent the journey down to the infirmary on her headset. “I’ve got a full marine squad on their way, and more standing by if needs be. Don’t worry, nothing’s going to get in or out of there until we give the word.”
Teyla looked unconvinced. “From what I saw, leaving is not their intention.”
“Blast doors,” said Zelenka helpfully. “I’d not seen them before, but they looked thick, heavily armored. They shut the corridor off just before the lights went out.”
“Okay…” Carter found a seat, a high lab stool, and perched on it. “Teyla, exactly what happened down there? You said you were attacked?”
“That is correct. Radek and I had both decided separately to observe Angelus, and we met in the gallery. While I was there, I noticed that the marines on guard were acting in a strange way.”
“They’d both left their post when I arrived,” Zelenka cut in. “Teyla saw them go and come back. But then that poor girl screamed…”
“Cassidy?”
“That is correct,” said Teyla. She had a haunted look to her now, remembering. “We found the guards trying to force her back into the lab. She was terrified of something there, and would not return. When we intervened, the marines turned on us. I shot Lieutenant DeSalle.”
Carter stared at her. “You shot him?”
“In the head. However, he did not seem unduly concerned.”
Zelenka stood up. “Colonel, I know that part sounds hard to believe. But it happened right next to me. DeSalle should have been dead before he hit the ground, but he was acting as if nothing had happened. That was when the blast doors closed and all the lights went out.”
Before Carter could answer, her headset crackled. “Colonel Carter, this is MacReady.”
Major MacReady was leading the marine squad she had sent down to observe the dark section. “Good to hear from you, Major. What can you tell me?”
“I’ve had my people do a full sweep. Looks like every corridor in is blocked by armored doors — tried to run a bypass on a set of ’em, but got nothing. And the lights are out to a perimeter roughly ten meters outside the doors in all directions. Colonel, that section of pier is nailed shut like a cheap coffin.”
“Thanks, Major. We’ll need each set of blast doors guarded, two marines per. Stay in constant contact — if anyone tries to go in or come out, I want to know about it.” She caught a glimpse of Teyla’s expression. “Oh, and Major?”
“Yeah?”
“There’s a possibility that there could be non-humans inside that area, masquerading as our people. Be careful — normal weapons fire might not bring them down.”
“Understood. MacReady out.” The man’s tone of voice hadn’t changed, as though bullet-proof shapeshifters was something he dealt with on a daily basis. Carter couldn’t help but allow herself a wry smile at the thought of that.
“Looks like you were right about the blast doors,” she told Zelenka. “They’ve come down in all the access corridors to the lab. Could Angelus have activated some kind of security protocol?”
“It’s possible. He is an Ancient, after all. If anyone could, it would be him.”
“If you found what he’d done, could you undo it?”
“Again, it’s possible. I’d need to track down the exact protocol he’d used first. That might take some time.”
She took a sip of her coffee, but it was getting cold. “Get right on it. Oh, and before you get set up, can you find someone on your team to get down there with some cutting equipment? If the high-tech approach doesn’t work, we’ll need some brute force instead.”
“Absolutely. Norris knows how to use a oxy-acetylene torch. I’ll call him and Bennings up when I get to the ZPM lab.”
“Fine, I’ll see you there later…” Something behind him had caught Carter’s eye. She stepped aside as he went for the door, not taking her eyes off it. Suddenly, half the pieces in her mystery folder had just arranged themselves into new and terrible configurations.
“Teyla, can you go up to my office and meet me there? I need your help with something.”
“Very well.”
“Actually, can you wait ten minutes? I need to check on something first, but I don’t want Fallon to catch you up there without me around. He’s probably on the warpath right about now.”
Teyla raised an eyebrow. “I am not afraid of Mr Fallon.”
“Neither am I. But I’m afraid for him.” She gave the Athosian a brief smile. “I’ll see you up there.”
“Very well.” With a final, slightly puzzled look, Teyla followed Zelenka out of the door.
When she had gone, Carter walked slowly up to what she had seen; a row of empty sample tubes, racked for storage above one of the lab’s benches.
Blood, she thought.
She went to the door and poked her head out. Keller was still there, but now a few of her nursing staff were bustling around as well, readying the infirmary in case of injuries. And to Carter’s surprise, Alexa Cassidy was awake; the physicist was sitting up, the screen partially drawn back, sipping at a cup of something that steamed. There was a nurse with her, standing alongside the bed.
The lights were still very bright, and it was obvious that Cassidy could still not be left alone.
Carter waved at attract Keller’s attention, then beckoned her over. “Doctor, can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“One of your nurses sent in a report a couple of days ago. There was a screw-up with some blood samples?”
“Er, yeah. That was Neblett — she’s over there with Cassidy.”
“So what happened?”
“You can ask her yourself. Hold on a second.” Keller went over to join Cassidy and the nurse. A few words were exchanged; Carter saw the nurse nod, then get up. Keller took her place.
When Cassidy looked over at Carter, she gave the physicist a wave and a reassuring smile. She hoped it would do some good.
“Colonel Carter?” Neblett was somewhat shorter than Carter, with dark hair tied back. “Is there a problem?”
“No, not at all.” Carter gently drew her away, out of Cassidy’s view. “I just wanted to follow up on that report you sent me. The blood samples?”
The woman’s expression changed, very slightly. As if she had been reminded of something she had been trying to forget. “Colonel, I don’t know what to say about that. I guess someone could have been playing some kind of a trick, or —”
“Really, it’s okay. I just need to know what happened.”
Neblett paused, gathering herself. “Well, like I said in the report, I’d put the samples in a TCL for storage —”
“Sorry, TCL?”
“Temperature-controlled locker. If the blood needs to be kept for long periods we’ll freeze it down to minus eighty, but we were planning to re-analyze it after forty-eight hours, so I just locked it up at four degrees C.”
That sounded like reasonably standard procedure to Carter. “Go on.”
“Well, when I went back to check it the next day, the blood was gone.”
“All of it?”
“Yeah, every drop.”
“But the sample tubes were intact.”
Neblett nodded. “Colonel, I swear the tubes hadn’t been tampered with. The locker was still shut tight, too.”
“Can you show me?”
“Sure. It’s right in here.” Neblett led her back into the lab. “This is the locker. I’ve not put anything in it since. It’s just how I left it.”
Carter peered at the thing: it was thoroughly unremarkable, a stainless steel cube with a pull-twist handle and a small temperature LCD above the door. She touched the surface of it, felt a slight warmth through the metal. All the heat taken out of the interior had to go somewhere, after all.
She twisted the handle and pulled the locker open.
Sure enough, a small rack of empty sample tubes stood on the top shelf, very much like those that had reminded her of the report. Carter lifted one of the tubes; it came up with a very slight resistance, as though it had part-frozen to the rack, but in all other respects it was exactly as she had expected it to be.
Including the label, which had the name ‘Angelus’ printed on it.
Carter put the tube back in the rack, and carefully closed the locker door. “Rhonda?”
“Yes?”
“I’m going to send someone to collect this locker. In the meantime, don’t touch it.”
“Is there something wrong?”
“Probably not. I’m just allowing myself a little paranoia right now.” She backed away from the locker, and turned to leave.
Then she paused. “In fact, come to think of it, it might be better if no-one comes in here at all until this is sorted out. Is there a lock on this door?”
Once Carter was out of the infirmary, she called a couple of marines in to seal the medical lab. Still wary of Cassidy’s fragile state of mind, she asked them to do so in civilian clothing.
As she had told Neblett, it was probably nothing. A mistake, or an act of theft. Maybe Angelus had spirited his own blood away somehow, unwilling to have it subjected to further tests; she had no real idea of the extent of his powers, if he had any at all.
But still, in these troubled times, she felt it best to take no chances.
She must have been a little early getting to the control room: Teyla was nowhere to be seen, but Andrew Fallon was already waiting for her. To her relief, though, he looked more concerned than angry.
“Colonel,” he said politely. “You can be hard to find, sometimes.”
“I’m sorry. As you might expected, these aren’t exactly normal circumstances.”
“Oh, I’m well aware of that.” He walked over to the sensor terminal, eyes fixed on the map and its pulsing circle. “I take it there’s been no change?”
“None at all. I’ve posted guards around the blast doors, just in case, but right now it’s completely locked down.”
“So basically we don’t know what happened in there, or what’s happening now.”
“Well, I’ve been told what happened —”
“Yes,” he muttered. “That news traveled quite fast, I can assure you.”
She shouldn’t really have been surprised at that. “You don’t believe it?”
“That Teyla Emmagan shot a man in the head and he didn’t die? I have to admit I have a difficult time with that element of it, yes. In all the zombie movies I’ve seen, a shot in the head normally does the trick.”
“This isn’t a movie.”
“More’s the pity. I’d probably know who the bad guys were if it was.” He went over to stand in front of the balcony doors. He didn’t open them, just stood there, looking out through the glass. “Colonel, how well do you know Teyla?”
“Not well at all,” she replied, after some hesitation. “But I like to think I’m a pretty good judge of character. I’ve seen nothing to make me think she’d cook something like this up.”
“There’s only three explanations,” he said. “She’s telling the truth, she’s lying, she’s mistaken. Until we find out which is which, all we’re doing is chasing our tails.”
“What do you suggest?”
“Well, if she’s telling the truth, I guess that’s your ball game. If she’s lying, it’s mine. Even if she’s just mistaken, it still leaves us with why she and Zelenka were down there in the first place, and why Alexa Cassidy is acting so spooked.” He glanced over at Carter. “Teyla and Zelenka aren’t a couple, are they?”
Carter eyebrows rose. “I’m pretty certain they’re not.”
He gave a slight shrug. “Just a thought.”
“Mr Fallon, Alexa Cassidy hasn’t shown any sign of mental weakness prior to this. If she had, she’d not be in Atlantis. She’s not just acting, believe me. Something frightened the hell out of her down there.”
“Look, Colonel…” He turned away from the doors, leaned back against them with his arms folded. “My first responsibility is to Angelus and his project. If your people went down there, and caused him to lock himself in for whatever reason, then trust me, there will be trouble. On the other hand, if they’re telling the truth about what they saw, then I consider that a direct threat to Angelus too. You’ve already said that the Replicators have tried to kill him — what if they’ve infiltrated Atlantis?”
Carter frowned. “There’s no way they could do that.”
“How much are you willing to bet? Colonel, right now, priority number one is that we find out what’s happening behind those doors. Let me talk to Angelus.”
“He’s not answering. We’ve tried.”
“You’ve tried. I haven’t. It’s possible he sees you as an enemy now.”
Carter mulled this over for a moment. If Zelenka couldn’t convince the blast doors to open from the outside, maybe Fallon could talk Angelus into reversing whatever protocol he had invoked to lock the section down. And then, she thought, she would take great satisfaction in throwing the Ancient right back where he had come from.
Wherever that was.
“I guess it couldn’t hurt,” she told him. “I’ll give you full access to the comms system. I hope you have better luck than us.”
“So do I. In the meantime, please keep Teyla and Zelenka away from Angelus. I don’t want him thinking anyone else is going to get shot in the head.”
Once she had set Fallon up at the communications terminal, Carter went to her office. Teyla joined her a few minutes later.
Carter sat the Athosian down and, over the next few minutes, outlined what it was she needed Teyla to do. She had wondered at first whether the woman was the right person for the job, whether she should simply have drafted in a technician instead. But Teyla had been in the corridor when the blast doors had slammed shut. She knew what to look for. And she knew John Sheppard well.
Besides, having Teyla in the office allowed her to keep an eye on Fallon. And Fallon, seeing Teyla there, would hopefully be less troubled by thoughts of her trying to inconvenience Angelus.
The fact that she would be doing exactly that, right under his nose, was neither here nor there.
Once Teyla had started work, Carter set off to find Zelenka. As expected, he was in the ZPM lab. Stepping from the transporter there gave her an odd, uneasy sensation — the memory of those sinister noises Zelenka had conjured from his computer were still fresh in her mind, and remembering them made her shudder.
It was an eerie feeling, going back.
Zelenka had four terminals open at once; three were displaying complex rotating graphics, the fourth streams of raw numerical data. He looked up as Carter came in. “Colonel,” he said. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“Have you had any luck?”
“Depends how you define luck.” He leaned back, and tapped the screen of one terminal. “I have managed to access a partial database of emergency protocols. I can’t tell how partial, and right now I’m only certain what about twenty percent of the ones I have found do — if Rodney was here, I’m sure he’d be able to identify them far more readily than I.”
“And he’d enjoy rubbing it in your face, too.” Carter gestured at the screen. “Come on, Radek. McKay’s not here — it’s you I’m relying on right now. What are we seeing?”
“Well…” He pointed at a graphic. “These are the protocols, in 3-D form. Basically, they present as virtual crystals.”
“That makes sense.”
“Identifying the purposes of the crystals gives us clues as to what the protocols do. This one right here, this is to do with the transporters — I think it would re-route all transporter traffic to a central location. This one here, though, is purely decorative. Flashing all the city lights in sequence.”
“Pretty,” said Carter. “Have you found any that reference the blast doors?”
“No, I haven’t. I have found some that reference local power nodes, though.”
“That’s great! How many?”
He looked glum. “About six hundred.”
“Damn,” Carter muttered.
“Oh, and one other thing. Just in case you weren’t feeling quite futile enough.” He nodded at the screens. “So far I have no evidence that any of the city protocols have been activated, apart from the alert status.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Carter breathed.
The lockdown, as she understood it, would require many processes to occur at once. Activating those processes one at a time would be no great feat — anyone with enough knowledge of the city’s systems could cause a door to close and lock, to interrupt communications along a limited path, to extinguish an exterior light, and so-on. But in order to set off an entire series of those processes, like raising all the city’s internal lights when the alert status was sounded, would require a large set of programmed instructions keyed to a single command. A protocol.
If no protocol had been activated, how had Angelus been able to close and lock all the blast doors at once? To shut down all communications in the section? It was impossible.
“It must be one you’ve not found yet,” she told Zelenka. “There’s no way he could do that without a protocol.”
“I’ll keep looking,” he said. “There’s something else. Around the edges of the lockdown zone, there’s some kind of activity.”
“What do you mean? Where?”
“Everywhere. Well, not exactly… What I mean is, all the systems around the lockdown are showing this activity. Power, sensors… It’s something I’ve not seen before, like a set of new functions being applied.”
That rang a chime in Carter’s memory. “Hey, you know Palmer? In the control room… He said there was unidentified functionality around that area. Could it be those armored doors you saw?”
Zelenka weighed this up for a moment. “It could be. On the other hand, it does seem to have some similarities to the signal pattern I detected earlier. Or it could be nothing at all.”
“I guess…” Carter shivered slightly. A coldness had moved across her, a terrible sense of things moving into place. For a moment, it felt to her as if everything that was happening now had been somehow set in motion long ago, that tonight was the end result of some vast and dreadful process. That rectangle of darkness out on the west pier was merely the final domino toppling over: hidden hands had tipped the first one at some distant point in the past, knowing exactly when and where the ultimate impact would occur.
Behind her, something moved, and a shadow fell across the lab.
Carter turned around, and saw Teyla Emmagan in the doorway. She was about to welcome her in, glad of the extra company, but then she saw the distraught look on the woman’s face. “Teyla? What’s wrong?”
Teyla remained very still. “Colonel, I did as you asked.”
“Jesus, Teyla, you look terrible. Get in here and sit down.” Carter drew a seat out for the Athosian, who walked slowly in and dropped onto it. “What happened?”
“The cameras… Most of them are malfunctioning. There was very little footage. I saw…” She fell silent.
“What?” whispered Zelenka. “What do you mean?”
“I had Sheppard install a surveillance suite before Angelus moved into the lab,” Carter told him. “He gave me the access codes. I was hoping Teyla could download what they’d been recording, but —”
“Maybe he found the cameras,” Teyla said bleakly. She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a USB thumbdrive. “All I saw is here.”
Carter took the drive from her, found an unused terminal and plugged it in. Together, the three of them watched what Sheppard’s cameras had recorded earlier that night.
Later, Carter found herself back in her office with only the vaguest recollection of how she had gotten there.
After she had seen the surveillance footage, there seemed to be almost no words that could be exchanged between her and Teyla. Zelenka had been shocked into silence too, apart from a few half-hearted denials. But in the main, the film on the thumbdrive had robbed them all of voice.
Since returning to the office, Carter had seen the film three more times, perhaps hoping for some hint of insight with each successive viewing. But each time was the same.
The footage was not good quality: the picture was grainy, monochrome. An annoying diagonal scratch of interference hovered around one corner, and dark specks danced distractingly across the screen every few moments. There was no sound. However, the scene, and the players in it, was unmistakable.
Rewinding the footage back to its start, Carter once again found herself looking into the corridor that led to Angelus’s lab on the west pier.
The camera had been set high, near the ceiling, probably in an air vent or close to a light panel for concealment. It was aimed back towards the gallery, with the end of the corridor a skewed rectangle of black at one side of the picture.
In the center was a small knot of people. Closer to the camera lens, with their backs to it, were two men in marine uniform; Kaplan and DeSalle. Facing them were Zelenka and Teyla, with Alexa Cassidy off to one side.
Teyla had a gun pointed at DeSalle’s face.
Carter hit the Play control, and the picture shivered into motion. Cassidy was backing away, hands to her mouth. Zelenka was looking at Teyla with a shocked expression on his face. Teyla was shouting, enraged, the gun centered on DeSalle’s forehead.
She watched as Kaplan turned to the wall, began working at a control panel there. The picture shuddered, and then diagonal slabs of metal appeared at the corners of the corridor. The blast doors, sliding smoothly towards each other, the space between them a rapidly-shrinking diamond.
Teyla must have seen the doors rising between her and the marines. She stepped back and fired. Carter saw the flash from the muzzle, pixilated fuzzy white on the screen.
DeSalle ducked away from the shot, turned, his face a mask of shock, and then dropped to the floor. He lay there while the blast doors rose up. And then, once they had closed, he rose and turned back down towards the corridor. He shouted something.
The footage froze in mid-shout, DeSalle’s mouth open, hovering between two final frames. Juddering endlessly.
There had been no attack on Teyla Emmagan. DeSalle had evaded the bullet she had fired, unprovoked, at him. The doors had been activated by the two marines for their own safety.
Teyla’s story, backed up by Radek Zelenka, was a lie.
Carter leaned back in her seat, rubbing her eyes. There was no sense she could make of this. Unless Teyla and Zelenka were suffering from some kind of shared hallucination, the only other possible explanation was that they had deliberately concocted the story.
No wonder Angelus had locked himself away.
An insistent buzzing from her headset broke into her thoughts. If she was honest with herself, she rather welcomed the distraction. “Carter.”
“Colonel? This is Andrew Fallon.”
She leaned across her desk to peer along the gangway. There was a man at the communications terminal, but it wasn’t Fallon. “Where are you?”
“I’m with Major MacReady, down by the gallery blast doors. Angelus has agreed to let me in.”
“Good grief…” Carter found herself quite stunned. “You spoke to him?”
“While you were away. I’m afraid it looks like your people have been stringing you along, Colonel. Angelus says that DeSalle’s alive and well, despite Teyla trying to shoot him when the blast doors started to close. She was threatening Angelus, and they closed the doors to keep her from carrying out those threats.”
“Mr Fallon, can you ask him to open the doors and return that section to our control?” Carter was looking at the picture on her terminal, but not really seeing it. The two frames still shuddered one to the other, everything on screen shaking back and forth, over and over. Only the corner scratch stayed stable. “I can guarantee his safety.”
“I’ve already asked that, Colonel. Angelus no longer trusts you, I’m afraid. He knows you’ve been working to obstruct his project.”
“Fallon? Tell him…” Carter fell silent, frowning. Something about the picture in front of her was familiar. It nagged at her, itched like a bug in her ear… “Wait. Hold on. Don’t do anything.”
She slid her seat back to get to her desk drawer, opened it and pulled her mystery folder free. Her hands were trembling slightly — fatigue, she told herself — and she fumbled with the folder, scattering its contents across the desktop.
“Colonel? The doors are opening.”
“Wait!” The top few sheets were reports. She slid them aside, the paper elusive under her dry fingertips. Under them, photographs. Scans from Keller’s examination of Angelus.
A side–on x-ray of the Ancient’s skull. Down in the bottom right, a diagonal scratch of interference.
An oblique false-color CAT scan of the skull and spine. In the corner, the same scratch.
Her eyes darted up to the screen. The line of bright, random pixels along the bottom right corner was identical. “Fallon? Don’t go in there! For God’s sake, don’t go in! He can fake images!”
There was no answer. Only a soft, rhythmic rushing that sounded, if she listened very hard, like the rise and fall of distant voices.