After spending so long in the hyperspace-capable jumper on his way to and from Chunky Monkey, Sheppard had hoped not to be inside one of the machines for a while. Still, few of his hopes came to fruition these days; he was rapidly coming to terms with that.
And so, as he took a standard jumper up and out of the bay, he did not allow himself to hope.
In the time that he had taken to get there and take off, the hybrid had moved another few hundred meters. It had used its beam weapon again as well — another building was a raging inferno from the middle levels upwards. Seeing it, Sheppard cursed. Buildings could be repaired, he knew; at times, structures within Atlantis had been returned to pristine condition within startlingly short periods of time. But the lost lives horrified him. People were dying down there, in that great metal city, people he had spoken to, known, liked. In one single flare of energy, lives were being snuffed out.
As a soldier, death in battle was a fact he was intimately aware of. But he knew that it was not something he could ever fully accept. Human lives had their worth, he had decided long ago. And any one of them was worth more than the ravenous ambitions of the abomination stalking towards the city core beneath him.
He brought the jumper round in a long, swooping arc, testing his flight path above the hybrid. It grew in the forward viewport, the full awful shape of it spread out in front of him, then it whined away beneath him and out of sight. He wrenched the controls about, bringing the ship around for another pass.
His communications board lit up. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Sam, I’m going to drone this thing. It’s too close to the core to use drones from the launchers, but if I can come in low enough there shouldn’t be too much damage.”
There was a pause. He knew her instincts would be to order him back, but there was no point to that and she knew it. Besides, he was right. “I’ll send out some more ships.”
“Wait until I give this a try. I’d like to be the only thing in the sky at the moment.”
“Don’t take too long.”
The hybrid was almost in his sights again, the center of a web of tracer fire and rocket trails. He thought a drone into life, and as he did so the comms board lit up again. “Sheppard.”
He didn’t immediately recognize the voice. “Get off the damn line, I’m busy.”
The board went dark. Sheppard gave the mental command to launch the drone, sent it hissing away from the craft. Instantly his mind opened to encompass it; in one version of himself he was hauling the jumper up and over the hybrid’s bulk, in another he was guiding the drone right towards it. There was no conflict involved, no effort. The Ancient gene he carried had attuned him to the technologies involved as completely and accurately as he was attuned to his own fingertips.
He spun the jumper around in a turn that made his chest ache, in time to see the drone strike the hybrid squarely in one leg. There was a sheet of flame, a globe of brilliant light expanding into a bubble of debris, and the leg sagged away. The material above and below the strike point was white-hot, glowing liquid like magma, and as it cooled into yellow it stretched, softened. The leg broke away, the clawed end of it striking the deck below, catching, so the entire severed limb stood, tilted, crashed down like a tree.
“Not bad,” he grinned. “Not too bad at all.”
The hybrid’s beam weapon seared up at him and hammered into the side of the jumper.
The machine slewed wildly sideways. Sheppard’s hands were ripped from the controls by the impact, and his seat spun, almost tipping him out. He dragged himself back to the controls in time to see the city core racing up to meet him, grabbed the yokes and hauled them back. The jumper leapt under him, climbed sickeningly fast. Something hit its belly, a deafening screech of metal on metal, and then he was in the air again and heading for the sky. He leveled off. “Okay then. Complacency in combat situations: not good.”
An incoming communication crackled through his speakers. “Sheppard, you cannot win this.”
It was the same voice as before, but this time he recognized it. “Go to hell, Angelus.”
“I am there already. In order to finish this, you need to join me.”
Sheppard didn’t answer. The hybrid was ahead of him again. It was in the city core, among the buildings. He slowed, looped the ship around. There was too much structure in the way. “Come on,” he found himself murmuring. “Incey wincey spider, get up that damned water spout…”
The beam lashed out again. It missed the jumper, but it was close; he felt the fizz of static from its passing, and the ship rocked under him. He increased speed, took the jumper a couple of kilometers out to sea, then around in a long, wave-skimming turn.
The hybrid was climbing the tower.
It was a hundred meters up, reaching out with one leg, spearing its clawed foot through the shell of the tower before doing the same with another. It would have been slow progress had each stride not been fifty meters long. Sheppard watched it grow in his viewport, marveling at the strength of the thing. It was one thing to drag itself across the pier with those titan limbs, quite another to haul itself vertically up a smooth surface.
Still, it was in the open now. He thought up another drone, launched the brilliant thing towards the hybrid’s body. If it fell from the tower, the buildings below would suffer terrible damage, but what else was there to do? He could only attack this armored nightmare, and keep on attacking it, until one or the other of them was no more.
The drone sliced through the air, completely on target. Sheppard smiled as he thought it through the last hundred meters, half a second…
The hybrid whipped a limb back, insect-quick, a car-sized piece of tower wall still impaled on the end of it. The speed was enough to fling the debris directly into the path of the drone. The explosion atomized the chunk of plating, washed the jumper in fire as the ship went right through it. Sheppard was battered back into his seat and then forward with massive force into the controls. He hauled the yokes back, a cry of fury ripping out of him.
Water sprayed up. He was out to sea, slicing the tops from waves. The jumper had a limited automatic pilot, he knew: either it had cut in at the last moment, or he was an even better flyer than he thought he was.
He turned the ship around again, but something was wrong. The controls were loose in his hands, the engine note wavering behind him. He checked the drones mentally and came back with no returns. The weapons were offline.
And the hybrid was most of the way up the tower. Almost at the level of the ZPM room.
If it used its beam weapon to cut into the tower, it could shut the city down in a second. Or strike a ZPM and send most of Atlantis into orbit in pieces no larger than a suitcase.
There was only one thing left to do, Sheppard realized. And the less time he had to think about it, the better.
He aimed the jumper at the hybrid, brought the engines up to maximum power, and locked the controls.
Maybe the creature simply didn’t believe what he was trying to do, or maybe it was so close to the source of power it craved that it had forgotten him in its lust. In either case, it didn’t try to defend itself. The jumper struck it between the upper joints of two legs, in its open flank.
The impact was gigantic. Sheppard’s last conscious memory was seeing the rear door of the jumper racing up towards him, a dreadful sense of tumbling, free-fall, and then all was noise and darkness.
“Sheppard?”
There were no words in him, no breath, no thought. He was still, and unable to be other than still.
“Sheppard?”
He couldn’t move to wave the voice away. It pained him in ways he could not describe, but all he could do was endure it.
“Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard.”
“G’way,” he mumbled. His mouth was full of something coppery and foul. He opened his aching jaw and let some of it fall out. He felt it splash warm on his chest.
Light filtered in through closed eyelids, and there was a rocking sensation. Somewhere above him, a deep, organic groan. The sound was massive, heavy, like a great boulder poised above his head. He didn’t like it at all.
“You have to open your eyes.”
He did. Doing so was an effort, and it hurt. And when he had them open, what they saw still made no sense.
He was looking at chaos; a twisted, mangled space of deranged complexity. Part of it close to his head was metal, some recognizable and some completely alien to him. Other parts were pulpy, fleshy, crimson and pulsing. There was as dreadful smell in the air, like the inside of a rotting carcass, and the space around him was hot and foully damp.
He tried to move, and found that he couldn’t. A mass of pulsing silver tubes was running over and around him, holding him against a wall of debris. As he watched they slowly retracted, slid away, and he fell, gently onto something that had once been a puddle jumper floor.
“Get up,” the voice said. “We don’t have much time.”
“Until what?”
“Until the hybrid wakes up.”
He knew the voice, now. “Angelus, you are the goddamn hybrid.” He looked around, still trying to make sense of the cramped space around him. “Okay, I’ll bite. Where am I?”
“Partly inside the hybrid. Partly in the crater it made in the southwest pier when it landed. Partly in the remains of your ship. John Sheppard, I commend your bravery, but not your common sense. Did you really think that a simple mechanical impact would destroy this creature?”
“It always works in the movies.”
“As Colonel Carter said to another man recently, this is not a movie. Sheppard, you have only stunned the creature. I was able to take back some measure of control when your ship struck it, and managed to cushion your fall. And I can talk to you now. But this situation is not one that will last once the hybrid regains control of its core functions. When that occurs, the space you are in will collapse, you will die and then everyone in the city will die soon after that.”
Sheppard got to his feet. Every part of him hurt. “I don’t understand. Why are you even talking to me? Why don’t you just eat me and get on with chewing up the city?”
“That can be explained more easily if you step through the hole to your left. Between the jumper’s engine module and that section of flooring.”
Sheppard peered to his left. In the dim, ruddy light pervading the space, he could see an irregular patch of darkness. “If I don’t?”
“My fate is sealed in either case.”
Above him, the hybrid groaned again. Sheppard muttered a curse under his breath and clambered through the hole.
Beyond it was another space, no less jumbled. The floor here was steeply angled, part of the crumpled deck of the pier. The impact of the jumper must have knocked the hybrid a considerable distance, Sheppard realized. Not just down from the tower, but clear of the city core altogether. If he ever made it out of here, he decided, he would love to see film of that. He hoped a security camera had been pointed in that direction when the jumper hit.
There was something on the far wall of the space, moving fitfully. It was high up, and embedded in a wall of tangled debris and pulsing biomechanical organs. Sheppard peered at it, but couldn’t make out its shape in the meager light. He searched around in his tacvest pockets and found a small LED penlight. Luckily, it had survived the fall in better shape than he had.
In the bright beam of the light, Angelus looked down at him.
The false Ancient was far from the man he had once been. There was little more than a tattered remnant of him up in the wall; a curl of spine, a distorted cage of ribs, a few other sundries that shook and twitched among the wreckage. Most of the remnant’s frame was not bone, but glistening metal, the same bright, liquid silver of the hybrid’s internals, but there were a few shreds of Angelus’ face adhering to the nodding skull.
In the midst of the glitter, a single eye looked down at Sheppard, and the ragged frame of an arm moved in fitful greeting.
“I apologize for my appearance,” Angelus said, although the voice didn’t come from his ruin of a face. It issued from everywhere. Sheppard didn’t want to think about the mechanism that formed it. “I was almost completely absorbed. This is all that I’ve been able to reconstruct in the time I’ve had.”
“I’ve been in better shape myself.” Sheppard felt at his hip.
“Your sidearm is elsewhere,” the remnant said, a slight sigh in his voice. “I thought that removing it would save the time otherwise spent by you emptying it into my face.”
“Can’t blame me for wanting to.”
“Indeed, I cannot. I brought untold ruin to your door. But there is no time for recriminations. You have to destroy the hybrid.”
“Yeah, you know what? I’d love to!” Sheppard looked around for a weapon to hit Angelus with, but there was nothing loose in reach. That was no accident, he was sure. “But I’m kind of out of options here!”
“Only because you will not listen. Together, you and I have the means to end this, but you must trust me first.”
The word stopped Sheppard in his tracks. “Trust?”
“Sheppard, I am not the hybrid, not in the sense you believe I am. It made me from itself, but I have only recently become aware of that.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Listen to me. Who makes the best liar?”
Sheppard shook his head, helplessly. The surreal nature of his situation was rapidly robbing him of reason. “I give.”
“The best liar is one who believes his lies. Sheppard, when I came to you I was Angelus. Everything I told you was true…” The Ancient’s voice was strange, almost wistful… There was a sorrow to it that stabbed at Sheppard, despite the derangement all around him. “My history, my origins, my children. Everything.”
“It wasn’t true. That’s bull. You didn’t come from that planet!” He pointed upwards, a random direction. “There’s no way you could have made it from there!”
“Of course not. Sheppard, don’t you understand? The hybrid needed to get to Atlantis. It needed to be left there, alone and undisturbed for long enough to regain its strength after the Asurans damaged it. While it was escaping its birthplace, it accessed the memories of Elizabeth Weir and used them to create the perfect bait, the perfect cover story. It invented Angelus!”
Sheppard stopped looking for a weapon. He turned, slowly, to look back at the remnant. “Are you telling me you didn’t know?”
“Angelus was a construct from beginning to end, a pretty prize that your people couldn’t help but take into their arms. A Trojan horse, to use a human phrase… It learned what to do from Doctor Weir’s uploaded mind. Her memories are part of the collective’s database.” The arm waved sluggishly. “But in order to deliver that prize, it built me from itself. Gave the memories and form of the Ancient called Angelus to me. I sought out the Apollo believing I was who I said I was. That what my memories told me had happened had really happened.”
Sheppard stared. “That’s… That’s insane.”
“Can you imagine? Discovering that you are a monster, that everything you believed is a lie? That you were not born ten thousand years ago, but extruded from a biomass a week before? Can you imagine?”
The hybrid shifted, moaned a long, mournful bellow. There were other sounds too, distant thumps and bangs. People were still shooting at the thing, Sheppard realized. If they were still around when the hybrid awoke, it would kill them all.
“Do you know what hurts more than anything?” Angelus asked him. “I can still remember Eraavis. My children. The cities… Oh, Sheppard, if you could have seen the cities! Soaring under mountains…” The awful head dipped. “The fact that all those memories are utterly false is something I cannot bear to fully comprehend.”
“We saw a planet,” Sheppard breathed. “Burning…”
“The Asurans attacked that world. To test planetary bombardment techniques. There was no human life there.”
“Target practice?” It was too much. Sheppard was reeling, his aching head full and pounding. How could he believe this, in such a place? It was a reversal of everything he had known.
But then, if Angelus was telling the truth, wasn’t he in the same situation? And if he was lying, why was Sheppard even alive?
“Okay, just in case we’re not both crazy right now, what do I do? To kill the hybrid.”
Angelus lifted his unmade head. “I have control over a few of the hybrid’s most basic functions for the moment. I was able to build myself this vessel and regain what little individuality I ever had… I can introduce an infectious element into its system. Before it regains control. A vaccine.”
“Vaccine?” Sheppard shook his head. “Something this big? I don’t —”
“Sheppard, the hybrid is comatose. It is defenseless. It is a made thing; not an evolved creature, but a construct. It has no immune system other than its own conscious defenses. If we infect it now, it will be poisoned before it can recover.”
“What do you need?”
“Something external. Something alien to the hybrid. You.”
“Me?”
“Not all of you. Some blood… A little of the Ancient gene. I am a part of the hybrid, and so I can use its weapons against it. In the same way it grows flesh, I can grow a poison. Give me your arm.”
Angelus reached out. The metal bones of his hand were suddenly alive with silvery worms, their tips needles.
Sheppard had seen those glistening tendrils before, when he had pulled the Replicator’s hand free of McKay’s ankle in the weapons facility. Carter had seen them tear a man inside-out, make a replica of him. He jerked back in horror. “Not a chance!”
“Sheppard, we have no more chances!” The arm turned slightly, the hand outstretched. “I do not know what happened to Elizabeth. The hybrid was made soon after she arrived on Asuras… Her fate is unknown to me. But if she knew of this… Her memories, used as a weapon against her friends… Would she want you to hesitate?”
Sheppard stared up at the remnant for a long moment. The hybrid could still be lying. Maybe it needed a jolt of blood to kick-start its recovery. Maybe everything Angelus had told him was more lies.
But if it was true, then Angelus was right. Elizabeth should not be used this way.
He stepped forwards. “Do it.”
The hand clasped his. The metal of it was warm, and the needle-tips of the worms frighteningly sharp. “This will cause you pain,” Angelus told him gently. “I am sorry.”
The worms slithered into the flesh of Sheppard’s forearm.
He cried out, tried to yank his hand away on reflex, but Angelus was holding him too tight. The remnant’s arm, for all its frail appearance, was machine-strong. Sheppard could no more have pulled himself free of that gleaming hand than he could from locked handcuff. All he could do was sink to his knees, staring at the pulsing worms sliding deeper and deeper under his skin.
His flesh was alive with them. He could feel them draining him, gnawing at him, drawing his blood away into their metal throats. Angelus had lied, he thought wildly. He was a vampire, sucking down one last draught of hot blood…
The worms snapped back, out of him and away. He fell.
“Sheppard?”
He rolled onto his back, staring up at the pulsing ceiling. He penlight was spinning on the floor, strobing crazy shadows.
“John? It is done. You have to leave now.”
Sheppard struggled up, onto his knees. “I don’t think I can.”
“You can.” The Ancient’s voice was weaker, thinner. It sounded as though it were coming from far away. “I’ll help.”
The hybrid had already started to die when Sheppard made it out. Angelus had taken control of some more of its structure, opening a way for him in the same way as it had cocooned him for the fall from the tower. The false Ancient’s control failed in the last few meters, leaving him to struggle out though a liquefying mass of flesh and metal before he finally reached a gap in the armor plating and freedom.
He emerged, according to what he was told later, in front of several terrified marines, covered in bloody slime and making incoherent bubbling noises. It was only by luck, and the fact that he had collapsed unconscious almost immediately, that he hadn’t been shot dead on sight. If he had continued towards the marines, they would have thought him some kind of birthing from the stricken hybrid, and ended him.
It took the hybrid a long time to die, and even longer to fully disintegrate. While Sheppard lay insensate in the infirmary, Carter had the nauseating mass pushed close to the edge of the pier, so that its oozings could drain off into the ocean. It was pollution of the worst kind, but there was nothing else to be done. Hopefully the ecosystem of M35-117 was pristine enough to recover from such a slight.
As it was, the slick of dissolved hybrid was visible for days, and the reek of it drove the inhabitants of Atlantis to stay inside with the windows closed for longer than that.
Gradually, Sheppard recovered. Angelus had taken more than two liters of blood from him, which was a worrying amount, and he had suffered multiple injuries from the crash and the fall. Under Keller’s care, though, he became himself again, and within a short time was finding the enforced bed-rest distasteful. It was then, Keller told him, that she had known he was going to be all right.
Later, his friends and colleagues came to deliver news to him and to wish him well. McKay arrived and told him that the hangar space was damaged beyond repair, and would have to be welded shut. Not only that, but the city’s antibody system had shut down completely after it had been boosted by McKay’s signal, and could no longer be reactivated. That might have been because there was no longer a threat, or because it had been overloaded and destroyed. No-one knew.
Teyla brought him a portable DVD player and a selection of movies to watch, and told him that contact had been re-established with the Apollo. Ronon Dex challenged him a to stick-fight as soon as he was fit enough, and let him know that the Atlantis security protocols were being revised completely in view of what had occurred. There would be a lot of work for them both when Sheppard’s stay in hospital was done.
Eventually, when she had a free moment, Carter arrived.
They spoke of many things, some pleasant, many somber. The casualty figures had to be discussed — twenty-eight dead, thirty-six injured, not counting casualties that had occurred on the Apollo. Apparently, McKay’s fears for the ship had been justified. Ellis had suffered a hybrid outbreak of his own.
There were also some personnel for whom the experience had been too much. Nineteen members of the Pegasus expedition were ending their tours early. Alexa Cassidy was going home on medical leave. There were high hopes for her recovery, but she would not be returning to Atlantis.
Finally, Carter brought up the subject of Angelus. “So, he was telling us the truth after all.”
“What he thought was the truth, sure.” Sheppard closed his eyes for a moment, but all he could see was the pain in the Ancient’s tattered face, so he opened them again. “Poor bastard. He lost them twice.”
“Hm?”
“The Eraavi. He lost them when the Replicators killed them all, then again when he discovered they were never real in the first place.” He sighed. “Sam? How the hell do we tell people he wasn’t the bad guy?”
She shook her head. “We don’t, not the IOA. It’s too risky. If we tell them the truth about him, they might be more inclined to believe the next fake Ancient that turns up on our doorstep.” She smiled. “Besides, I know for a fact that most of them just wouldn’t get it.”
“Yeah, well. It’s pretty hard to get. I keep thinking, all the different things he told us… He believed them all, and none of them were true.” Another memory jolted him. “Hey, that’s it. The weapon he was going to build… What was he actually doing down there?”
Carter shrugged. “Most of it was lost when the lockdown happened. McKay saved some of it — a big chunk of the science looks like stuff the Replicators already knew, and there was a lot of random gibberish.”
Sheppard laid back, staring up at the ceiling. “Rodney’s gonna hate that.”
“Yeah, he does.” She stood up. “Anyway, Keller says you’re ready to be discharged tomorrow. I’ll leave you to your final night of peace.”
“Why’d you say that?”
“Because one of the buildings that got cooked was right outside your quarters. You’re going to be hearing the repairs crews there for weeks.” She went to the door, and waved as she stepped out. “Goodnight!”
“Thanks a bunch.” He settled back.
Slowly, the stillness surrounded him, settled on him like a membrane.
Even now, out in Atlantis, panels were being replaced, walls repaired, wiring checked and fixed. The city would, over a period of weeks, return to how it had been before. The gaping holes in the west and southwest piers would be covered. The events of the past few days would pass into history, just like the people that had been lost to them.
Which was worse, he wondered: killing twenty-eight people, or killing an entire planetary population that had never existed? To him, the former, without question. To Angelus?
He didn’t know. And he found that he could not speak for the man, even though he too had never been. A false man mourning false children. The death of a lie breaking the heart of a man who was only a lie himself.
It was beyond him, a paradox without answer. Maybe, one day, he might be able to ask the opinion of the only person he felt might know its solution.
Until he found her, though, he would have to let the matter rest.