“We’ve got — something — doc.”
“Something?” Radek repeated. He stopped behind Mcmillan, and Taggert edged away, giving him room. “Let me see.”
“It’s gone,” Mcmillan said. He was older, another sergeant, with graying hair cut close to his scalp and a constant wary look that seemed to have developed at Cheyenne Mountain and hadn’t improved since he’d joined Atlantis.
“What is gone?” Radek asked. The readings all looked normal, even perfect — Mcmillan was monitoring the external sensors, and they rarely showed small anomalies. Except for the pigeons, of course, and a minor issue with falling ice…
“There,” Taggert said, and Mcmillan hit keys to freeze the image. He dragged the result to a secondary screen, revealing readings once again reset to nominal.
“OK,” Radek said. He slid into the seat next to Mcmillan’s console. “What does it say that was?”
“It doesn’t even say it happened,” Mcmillan said.
“That is not a good sign,” Radek murmured. He tipped his head to one side, studying the screen. It claimed to have picked up an anomaly on the sensors below the old North Pier, something small and dense and close. Like a bomb, he thought, with a jolt of adrenaline, and then common sense reasserted itself. A bomb was not on the face of it impossible, but it was impossible for one to simply appear beneath the city, not without triggering sensors designed to watch for those very things. “Salawi, run a diagnostic on the North Pier underwater array, please — the old North Pier, I mean. Sergeant Taggert, is there anything on your arrays?”
Taggert was already back at her workstation, paging rapidly through screens. “No, nothing. I show everything nominal.”
“North Pier array is nominal, too,” Salawi said. “Sir, could it be one of those squids?”
They seemed to have caught everyone’s attention, Radek thought, along with the pigeons. “Too dense,” he said, absently. Not a real reading, not something actually out there, but not a normal malfunction, either. A power issue? Some kind of fluctuation that triggered a ghost signal when the current hit a crucial point? He looked at Mcmillan’s screens, and nodded as he saw the other man already typing in the query.
“Power’s steady, doc,” Mcmillan said, and Radek sighed.
“OK.” He looked at the other boards again, the reassuring green lights, the steady pulse of data. At least it was not an immediate crisis — and perhaps not even a crisis at all, but he knew better than to make that assumption. “OK,” he said again. “We are going to decouple the outgoing comm array from the main city system. Salawi, you’ll handle communications manually until I say otherwise. And when it’s done, get me Mr. Woolsey, please.”
“OK, Dr. Zelenka,” Salawi said, and shifted to the new position.
Taggert’s hands were already busy on her keys, and Mcmillan came around the front of the consoles to flip the last switches.
“Done,” he said, and Taggert nodded.
“Confirmed.” She gave him a sideways glance. “Are we in trouble?”
“I have no idea,” Radek answered. “Better to be safe.”
“Amen,” Taggert said, and Salawi cleared her throat.
“Mr. Woolsey’s on his way, Doctor.”
“Thank you.” Radek saw the door open, Woolsey bustling out with a wary look on his face, and made himself focus on the consoles. There was no real reason to think that someone — say it, he told himself, that Rodney had been forced to write a program that would make the city broadcast its location, no reason except that it had been done before, and it was better to be safe…
“Is there a problem?” Woolsey asked.
“I don’t know,” Radek answered. “We picked up an errant sensor reading, which I am not sure is actually a sensor issue, but more likely to be a code issue.”
“One of Dr. McKay’s back doors?” Woolsey sounded pained.
“Possibly. Possibly someone using one of them. And quite possibly nothing.” Radek took a breath. “I’ve disconnected our communications from the city’s main systems as a precaution.”
“That’s quite a precaution,” Woolsey said. “Can we manage this way?”
“Oh, yes, yes, that’s not a problem,” Radek said. “It’s just — I need to look at this code more carefully — ”
“Please,” Woolsey said. “Go right ahead.”
Radek settled himself in front of his screen, shoving his glasses to a more comfortable position, frowned as the code for the sensor array began to scroll slowly past. There wasn’t much an intruder could do from here, he thought — well, Rodney could do something, and he himself could probably find a way to promote himself into more critical systems, but it wasn’t the place he would have chosen to start. Something in the Ancient code caught his eye, a break in the hypnotic pattern, and he touched keys to stop the scrolling. Yes, there it was, a line, ten lines, that shouldn’t be there, that weren’t Ancient but definitely their own. Except that they had not recorded a modification to this section of the system. Perhaps in the early days, when they’d been struggling just to stay alive? But the underwater sensors had hardly been a priority then. He stared at the screen, trying to make sense of the neat, elliptical code. It was Rodney’s style, for sure — it was amazing how terse his code was, for such a talkative man — and a voice spoke behind him.
“Problems?”
And that, of course, was Colonel Carter, though how she had heard that something was happening was outside Radek’s ability to guess. “A very good question,” he said loud, and she came down to the second tier of consoles to look over his shoulder.
“What have you got?”
“This,” Radek said. “This is Rodney’s work, I think.” He highlighted the lines of code, expanded them so that they filled the screen. “But we did not record him working on this part of the city’s programming, and I do not see — ” He stopped, exhaled sharply. “Except now I do.”
“What?” Woolsey asked.
Carter leaned closer, peering at the screen. “A back door?”
“Of a kind.” Radek glared at the symbols. “I have spent six hours already today removing one problematic routine from our systems, and now — this is what results. It is not progress.”
It was Woolsey who spoke first. “So this is definitely something of McKay’s.”
“Yes. Well, I am nearly certain. But yes. This is another iteration of the program I removed earlier, set to pop up again after a certain amount of time.” Radek pushed his glasses up again. “And it is now caught and contained, so — ”
“No harm, no foul?” Carter said. The words had a distinctly dubious tone.
“Yes. But there will be more. There are more.” Radek shrugged. “And I am running out of places that I think Rodney would think to look.”
“Mrs. Miller will be here on Daedalus,” Woolsey said. “In five days. That will help.”
Radek took a deep breath, and then another. He despaired sometimes of explaining anything technical to Woolsey — though perhaps the question was intended to remind the rest of the gateroom crew that help was on the way. That would be almost Machiavellian enough for Woolsey.
“We hope Mrs. Miller will be able to speed up the process,” he compromised. “And of course Colonel Carter’s help has been invaluable — ”
“Then we will carry on,” Woolsey said, firmly, and turned away.
Radek said something in Czech that he sincerely hoped no one would repeat and thrust his hands into his hair.
William Lynn found an empty table in the corner of the Daedalus’s messroom, and opened his laptop like a shield. The room was crowded, even after the hot food service had ended, airmen and officers gathering for a snack or a cold meal or quick cup of coffee as they went on and off duty, and the volume of conversation was not going to be overcome by the music he had on his computer. But it was better than the narrow cabin he shared with three other men. At least his age and seniority had gotten him a lower bunk — that and being both quick and politely determined — but the poor reservist who had the bunk above him snored, and the meteorologist opposite was an insomniac who lay awake for hours reading from his phone. The fourth man — a wormhole physicist — hadn’t said much of anything since offering to take the upper bunk, just lay there listening to his iPod with his forearm thrown across his eyes. Having second thoughts, William guessed: he was willing to bet all the civilians had signed their contracts before things started to go wrong in Pegasus.