By the time Sheppard got to the infirmary, the remains of the Fallon replica had been largely cleared away. A couple of the medical staff were disposing of the last scraps, watched over by armed marines, and an orderly was on his hands and knees with a scrubbing brush and a bucket. The replica’s dissolution had left a stain on the flooring, as though a vat of medical waste had been tipped out there and left to rot. Sheppard stepped carefully past it on his way to see Carter, trying not to breathe in too hard. What he had experienced of the hybrid close up had been less than fragrant when it was intact. Dead, it stank.
Carter was already on her feet, looking pale and bruised. Her jacket was off, and he could see the outline of bandages under her vest — from what Keller had told him, she had been knocked around quite badly in the fray.
When she saw him approaching she managed a weak smile. “John,” she said. “I guess you heard we had some fun down here.”
“Sorry I missed it.” He glanced around, at the other patients. Several marines were being treated around him, mostly minor injuries from various encounters with the hybrid. He knew there were more serious wounds being dealt with as well, but those were hidden from sight. He couldn’t see Dex or Teyla. “How is everyone?”
“Ronon’s going to have a sore shoulder for a few days, but he’ll deny it, of course. Teyla’s fine. Fallon just knocked her out of the way. He was after me.”
“It wasn’t Fallon.”
“I know.” She tilted her head around, flexing her shoulder and wincing. “Even the clothes melted when Rodney jabbed him. But the likeness was frightening.”
Sheppard stepped aside to let nurse Neblett go past him. She had what looked like a partially melted human jaw clasped in a pair of biohazard tongs, her arm outstretched and a look of complete disgust on her face. “Oh,” he muttered. “Nice.”
“I shouldn’t be surprised, really,” Carter went on. “Clarke was running messages for us for, oh, how long?”
Sheppard nodded. “I hear you. The replica situation is one I’ve tried to keep under wraps as much as possible. I don’t like keeping secrets from people around here, but there have been some incidents…”
“What kind of incidents?”
“Just paranoia. But it’s one thing to have a giant squishy monster on the west pier, people can deal with that. Not knowing if the guy standing next to you is human or not affects them in a whole different way.”
“All the more reason to finish this quickly.” She reached for her jacket, but the movement made her gasp quietly. Sheppard picked the garment up and handed it to her. “Thanks.”
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine. I’ve got to be.” She shrugged carefully into the jacket. “John, we’ve all been knocked around. You too, and I don’t see you resting.”
That was a point he had to concede. The very thought of slowing down, of stopping to rest or tend his injuries hadn’t even occurred to him. Compared to some, he had come through the events of the past few days largely intact, although his jaw still throbbed from the beating Dex had given him, and there was a tiredness in him that went into his very bones. But Carter was right — to rest for a minute would be to allow the hybrid an advantage, and that was a concept that bordered on the terrifying.
Especially now. The creature knew it was under threat.
“So,” he asked, stepping around the stain again. It didn’t appear to be coming off all that easily. “Have you spoken to McKay since then?”
“Not really.” She looked a little embarrassed. “I sort of lost consciousness for a bit after that. When I came around he was already gone.”
“So you don’t know exactly what he’s been up to either?”
“Not precisely, no. But he’s up in the control room, I know that. Hopefully he can fill us in when we get there.”
“Hopefully?” Sheppard gave her a wry smile. “Do you actually think he’d be able to resist?”
Carter could not have been out of action for more than thirty minutes or so, but it had been a busy half hour for John Sheppard. Ever since McKay had destroyed the Fallon replica, the hybrid had been reacting with a new ferocity. Although he would not admit it, Sheppard had found himself honestly believing that the creature was now on the verge of overwhelming all human efforts to resist it.
The loss of the Fallon-thing must have alerted it to the fact that it was in real danger. Sheppard wasn’t certain how McKay had done what he had — he had been in the ZPM lab when the scientist had run out with his PDA, yelling cryptic technobabble about antiphase pulses and immune systems — but whatever he had done had been at least as effective as the APE on Chunky Monkey. In response, the hybrid had doubled its efforts.
Zelenka’s seismic detectors had gone berserk; the thing in the lockdown zone had started to thrash with rage, its hammerings tripling in frequency and strength. The marines stationed at the blast doors had reported terrible sounds from within; shrieks and bellows the likes of which they had never heard before or wished to again. Two technicians observing from a higher structure had been studying the zone with binoculars, but after the increase in activity they had left their posts and refused to look back into that nightmare place again. Neither would discuss what they had seen, and Sheppard had decided not to press the matter. There were some things he simply didn’t want to know.
There had been other reactions, too. Sheppard had been told of alterations to the structure of the city itself; in certain areas, the walls had started to blister, the blisters flowing together into strings as though roots were spreading behind the panels. A marine had been trapped between two sliding doors in a storage area, his arm crushed. Part of the ceiling in the hangar had opened and grown teeth.
And according to Zelenka, the fractal pattern of disturbance pervading the city’s systems had increased massively. The hybrid was unleashing every weapon in its arsenal in its efforts to turn Atlantis into more of itself. And from where Sheppard was standing, it was very likely to succeed.
When Sheppard and Carter got to the control room, McKay was already hard at work. Two of the consoles were open, their crystalline innards exposed, glowing with multicolored light. Palmer and Franklyn had been banished to the edges of the room, but from what Sheppard could see they were only too pleased to be away from their posts; dozens of cables had been plugged into the consoles and were snaking across the control room floor in a confusing tangle. Most of the cables were thin, fiber-optic lines for transferring data at high speeds, but there were some big power leads in the mix too.
It looked, at best, desperately unsafe.
As Sheppard stepped through the doorway McKay popped up from behind a cable. “Sam!” he smiled. “You’re okay!”
“More or less. Rodney, what the hell?”
“Give me a minute.” He raised a hand to his headset. “Zelenaka, how’s the water? Warm?”
Carter gave Sheppard a look, and mouthed water? at him. McKay caught it, and raised his hand a little higher. “Rolling boil. Oh lovely. I’ll get back to you.”
“It’s code, obviously,” he told them, once the connection was cut. He lifted a cable, checked a plug at the end and fitted it into the console. There was a spray of sparks. He jerked back on reflex, then studied the connection he’d made and nodded. “Mm-hm. Zelenka’s monitoring the hybrid’s interference pattern. I don’t have time to have people running about with messages, so we’re using a code instead.”
“Will that work?” Sheppard asked him. McKay shook his head.
“I very much doubt it. Its just what Eliz- Just what I’d expect.”
Carter was peering into a console, supporting herself on its open frame. “This is a patch into the communications network, right?”
“Among other things. Did Zelenka talk to you about this?”
“No-one’s talked to me about this.”
“Really?” McKay seemed surprised. “I thought someone would have filled you in.”
“No. I haven’t heard anything since Zelenka threw us out of the ZPM lab. Next thing I know, you’re stabbing Fallon with a PDA and he sort of…” She made a face. “Melted.”
“In fact, if I remember rightly,” said Sheppard, “it was Zelenka who said he knew how to fight this thing.”
“Hey hey hey…” McKay raised his hands. “Credit where it’s due, please. Okay, maybe Zelenka came up with the seeds of the idea, but do you see him up here risking his neck in a sea of high-energy re-routes? No, I didn’t think so.” He picked up another cable, a data-line this time, then picked his way through the mess to the other opened console. “It’s one thing to follow a medical analogy through. I’ll give him that, some of his imagery was useful…”
“Medical?” Carter tilted her head slightly, the way Sheppard had seen her do when she was working out some complex problem. “We were talking about smart diseases, the way the hybrid’s acting like a metastasizing tumor… Then he…” Her face lit up. “Oh, you’re kidding me…”
“The antiphase pulse was clustering around the protected systems as well as the edges of the lockdown zone. One of us was going to work it out eventually.”
“You’re just jealous he got there first,” Carter grinned.
“Sam?” Sheppard leaned towards her and lowered his voice. “Am I being especially dense here, or —?”
“No, no…” She got up from the console. “When the hybrid first shut itself into the lockdown zone we noticed there was something happening around the zone’s edges… I remember Palmer called it ‘functionality’. Basically a system no-one had seen working before had come online. Zelenka spotted it too, it was like a pattern that was interacting with the hybrid’s control attempts.”
“Is this to do with the systems it couldn’t get into, like the transporters?”
“That’s right. I’m guessing, but I think what Rodney’s saying is that the city has something like an immune system.”
“What, like antibodies? Against disease?”
McKay had gotten close enough to overhear. “It’s only a very rough analogy,” he said. “But yeah, when the city got infected it activated a set of new functions to stave off the infection. Read the hybrid’s pattern, created opposing systems and set them working. Tried to protect essential systems as long as it could, while fighting the disease.”
“Power’s an essential system.”
“Yeah, but power is the hybrid’s number one priority. That what it’s built to consume; or really, what its builds itself to consume. And anyways, the city’s immune system isn’t all that hot. It might have been built for something other than Replicator infiltration, I don’t know. But the hybrid was going to overwhelm it sooner or later.”
Sheppard heard a faint crackling sound from the cables near his feet, and stepped gingerly away from them. “So what’s this you’re doing now? Boosting the immune system?”
McKay nodded. “By a factor of about a thousand, yeah. Same principle as the APE.”
“I thought the APE was an EMP emitter.”
“So did I. That’s why it didn’t work when I tried to recreate it here: the EMP was a carrier wave for the antiphase pulse, not the pulse itself. If you hadn’t let Norris trash my lab I’d have gotten that from Laetor.”
Sheppard glared at him, but decided not to press the matter further. The crackling was getting louder. “Should we even be in here? Something sounds like it’s going to catch fire.”
McKay was about to answer when there was another loud crackle from the floor, and almost immediately another one directly above. Sheppard looked up.
“Aw crap,” he muttered.
The ceiling above his head was deforming slowly, a series of welts rising in the metal to form a long, branching track. It looked as though something was growing there, roots or veins, splitting and dividing and inching forwards to form a slow, inexorable network above their heads.
“The hybrid,” said Carter quietly. “It’s infiltrating the control room.”
McKay had a hand to his headset. “Ah, Radek? Just a point, but how’s the water in my immediate vicinity, hm? Warm yet? Oh, hissing and spitting. Thank you so much.” He looked up at Sheppard. “We’re in trouble,” he said.
“Is that more trouble than a minute ago?”
Behind him, down in the gate room, there was a grinding noise, a deep, gritty scraping. Sheppard ran onto the internal balcony and looked down in time to see a section of the floor bounce up, as though something massive had slammed into it from below. A moment later, that section of floor began to deform too. “Rodney, maybe you could speed things up a little here?”
“Yeah, I’ve not exactly been taking my time on this, you know!” Sheppard saw him look up from his console, hands filled with cables. “What’s happening?”
“Let’s just say you’ve got its undivided attention!”
He looked back. McKay was frantically plugging cables together, and Carter was taking calls on her headset. He couldn’t hear what she was saying, but from her movements and the tone of her voice he guessed she was taking multiple reports.
The root-like deformations were on the outside of the control room now; Sheppard saw one accelerating along the frame of one of the big windows, spreading out to cover the metal surface. A second later the window transparency itself shivered and split, detonating an instant later in a shower of razored shards. He ducked away as they crashed down past him, onto the gate room floor.
Something down there, beneath the balcony, was issuing a thin, whistling scream.
“Damn it.” He marched back into the control room. “We haven’t got long.”
“It’s all over the city,” Carter told him. “I think it’s breaking through the immune system.”
“So we’re too late?”
“Don’t panic,” muttered McKay. “I’m already panicking, so more panic would not be good. There.” He snapped two final cables together, then scampered across the control room to the center console. He lifted something up, a small slab of metal connected to several thin cables. A PDA, Sheppard saw.
“Is that it? Are you ready?”
“Yeah.” McKay frowned at the PDA. “You know, for something this momentous, you’d think there’d be a bigger switch.”
“Rodney, just for once, will you please take your ego out of gear and do this thing?”
“Fine, fine. Kill the moment.” He tapped the PDA screen with a fingertip.
Sheppard felt something pass through him, up through his boots and down through the top of his head. It wasn’t like the APE going off — that had been a surge of raw electromagnetic power. This was different, somehow more subtle but at the same time far more unpleasant. It sang over his nerves, through his bones. He felt it in his teeth, the backs of his eye sockets, down his spine, in his fingernails. It crawled through his hair like a nest of ants, made the fillings in his teeth shiver. It was horrible.
“God almighty,” he yelled, cringing. “What is that?”
McKay had his eyes closed, his face screwed up. “The antiphase,” he answered through gritted teeth. “Broadcasting…”
Out in the gate room, the thing under the balcony was shrieking. Sheppard staggered out, leaned over the rail. As he touched the metal he felt static electricity bite him, crawling pains eating into his fingertips. He ignored it, searching for the source of the screams.
Below him, something lurched into view, shedding parts of itself as it stumbled towards the Stargate. It was impossible to tell what it might have once looked like; now it was sagging apart as he watched, dripping gouts of liquescent flesh and metal, sloughing down into a droozing pile that shuddered once, tried to rise, and then collapsed. When it hit the floor, crimson slime spattered a meter out from it in every direction.
A thin reek rose from it, rot and vomit.
Sheppard backed off in disgust. The deformations in the control room ceiling were crumpling in on themselves, some sections smoothing back out, others dripping like mercury, leaving open scars in the metal.
The hybrid was dying. McKay’s signal, rippling out through the city on a wave of energy, was attacking it like a human immune system attacks a disease. Where before the antiphase pulse only had the strength to keep the hybrid’s infiltrations from attacking the most vital systems, now it had been copied and turned into data and broadcast in a massively amplified form. It was killing the hybrid just like the APE had killed the hybridized Replicators on Chunky Monkey, but without the destructive electro-magnetic pulse. Atlantis had the immune system built-in. It was designed to carry it.
The physical effects of the signal were lessening now, Sheppard realized. Either that, or he was becoming inured to them. He went back into the control room, trying not to touch any metal. “I think it’s working,” he said. His mouth still felt like it was full of tinfoil, but it was nothing he couldn’t deal with for now. “How long do you need to keep it going for?”
McKay shook his head. “I have no idea. The smaller sections of hybrid will be dead pretty soon, but I’m not sure how much of this the main part will need. I’ll have to call Zelenka, see if he can get —” he broke off, suddenly, looking over Sheppard’s shoulder.
Sheppard turned. Zelenka was there behind him, totally out of breath. He looked like he’d just run the six flights of stairs from the ZPM lab.
“What the hell?” McKay scowled, putting the PDA carefully down onto the console. “Why aren’t you monitoring the hybrid?”
Zelenka didn’t speak for a few seconds, just stood holding onto the doorframe and gulping air. Finally he pointed at the doors to the external balcony. “Problem,” he gasped.
“What do you mean, problem? It’s working.”
“Seismic,” said Zelenka, quite white. “Something’s wrong…”
Sheppard ran for the balcony doors. As they hissed open he went straight for the rail, looking out towards the west pier. He was groping for the folding binoculars in his tacvest when he realized he didn’t need them. The problem, as Zelenka had so succinctly called it, was perfectly visible from where he was standing.
The lockdown zone was in turmoil. There were clouds of dust rising from it, so big they were easily definable from two kilometers away. Sheppard could hear distant crashing noises from within, howls and roars, softened by the distance but still horrifying. As he watched, a chunk of debris whickered out from the dust clouds, high into the air, catching the light for a second before it topped its arc and fell end over end into the sea.
The sound of its splash reached him a second after he saw it.
McKay was next to him, hands clamped tight onto the rail. “Is it dying?”
“I don’t think so…” Sheppard cupped a hand over his eyes. The sun was high, and coming from the relative gloom of the control room had made sparks swim his vision. There was something happening past the dust and the debris, but he couldn’t make it out. He took the binocs out of his vest anyway, flipped them open and focused on the lockdown zone.
For a moment, he still saw nothing but clouds. Then a great form rose from behind the dust, unfolded, slammed down out of sight.
“Whoah,” he whispered. Whatever that object had been, it was big, truck-sized. And fast. Debris had flashed up from its impact with the pier.
“What can you see?” said Carter. “John?”
The dust was clearing. Behind it Sheppard caught an unidentifiable darkness, like a great shadow… Then his perspective shifted, and he was looking into a hole. Almost the entire upper surface of the lockdown zone was gone, collapsed inwards and open to the sky.
And the hybrid was climbing out of it.
Sheppard lowed the binoculars. “We are so boned.”
Now he knew why the hybrid had been hammering, hidden in the lockdown zone; what it had been doing for these past days. It had been preparing for this very moment, building what it would need to protect itself should the puny, fleshy creatures infesting its new food source gather enough of their wits together to do it harm. It had built a body for itself, armored it, protected it, and set it clambering on massive, articulated limbs out of the lockdown zone and onto the pier.
Its shape was impossible to completely make out: it was shifting, protean, great panels of curved metal sliding over raw flesh, tendrils swarming from it, new segments erupting and old ones sucking back into the mass. There was something of a spider to it, or a great crab, but it was far more complex and far less elegant than that. Its legs rose out of sequence, reaching out to grind down into the metal surface of the pier so the whole vast weight of the hybrid could drag itself forwards. It was like a crippled thing on pistoning crutches. Despite its size, its power, there was a sickening, fetal vulnerability to it.
It was heading for the control tower.
Sheppard couldn’t help himself, even in the face of this nightmare. He turned to McKay. “Now look what you did!”
“What?” McKay gaped. “I didn’t know it was going to do that! How the hell could I know it was going to do that?”
“Well, now you’ve turned it into a giant spider and we’re all going to die.”
“John,” warned Carter. “Don’t tease him.” She turned to Zelenka. “Radek, can you confirm that the rest of the hybrid is gone?”
“I’ll run up the biometric sensor,” he replied, and vanished back into the control room.
Carter touched her headset. “This is Colonel Carter to all military personnel. We have a hostile lifeform on the west pier — trust me, you can’t miss it. Do not approach it closely, but hit it with everything you’ve got. I’d recommend AT-4s if they can be set up in time. Carter out.”
The hybrid was almost mid-way long the pier already. In spite of its bulk and the shambling way it dragged itself forwards, it was deceptively fast. Sheppard found himself trying to gauge how long it would take before it reached the tower. At the rate it was moving, he thought, not all that long.
A rattling sound rose over the city, distant and faint, but growing steadily louder. Gunfire.
The hybrid was still too far away to see the effects, if any, that the bullets were having. Most of the fire was invisible, but Sheppard saw a stream of tracer spring from a building partway along the pier. It was joined by another, and a third, far enough away for him to see the faint curve they made as gravity pulled them down.
Those must have been heavier weapons, he thought. M60s, emplacement-mounted to protect the city against air assault by Wraith darts. He could hear the difference in the tone of those weapons, the deeper rattle of their fire as opposed to the high, rapid stutter of smaller guns. The first people to open up on the hybrid had used P90s and sidearms.
As the tracer began to strike the hybrid’s flanks, it hesitated, as if waiting to see if any damage was inflicted. A moment later, though, it moved on. “It’s not working,” Sheppard breathed. “Got to get something bigger down there.”
“Give them time,” Carter replied.
As she spoke, something in the city flashed, and a trail of smoke reached out to touch one of the hybrid’s legs. There was a spark of yellow fire, a cloud of smoke whipped away by the wind. Fragments of debris spun away, arcing down like metal rain over the city. Another rocket lanced up, striking the main body of the thing. Two more.
The hybrid was being hit from all sides by machine gun fire and AT-4 missiles, but it still wasn’t slowing. Sheppard could see pocks of damage on it now, scorch-marks from rocket explosions, small fires burning on its armor. But the effect was minimal. “It’s too damn strong.”
“Something’s happening,” said McKay suddenly, pointing.
Sheppard followed his finger, and saw that a part of the hybrid’s forward body had opened up. An instant later, a thread of impossible brilliance connected the opening to a building that had been firing tracer rounds; the entire upper floor of it simply turned to fire, expanded, blasted apart in a shattering explosion of metal and glass. Sheppard heard the thump of it, felt the blast in his guts, watched burning pieces of debris carving tracks of smoke through the clear air.
The thread went out, vanished as abruptly as it had appeared. “Holy God,” Sheppard whispered. “Where did it learn to do that?”
“It knows everything the Replicators know,” groaned McKay. “It knows how to build beam weapons, everything.”
“Yeah,” spat Sheppard. “And we gave it a goddamn lab and all the time it needed, didn’t we?”
“I should have told Apollo to stay,” Carter whispered. “If I hadn’t sent them away we’d have 302s, railguns…”
“You couldn’t have known.”
“I should have done,” she replied, her voice dead. “I should have known.”
Sheppard couldn’t answer. She was in charge. This had happened on her watch. He knew there was no blame to be appointed here, but how could he tell her that? If he could not convince himself that he had not brought this on Atlantis by abandoning Elizabeth Weir to her fate, how could he comfort Carter in this dark hour?
There was no comfort to be had. He turned away, ran to the doors.
Carter called after him. “John? Where are you going?”
“Up,” he told her. And kept on running.