“That’s incredible,” muttered Sheppard.
“Truly. And they were not ignorant of the Wraith’s danger, either. They had developed a sacrificial culture, entire villages on the surface, living as though they knew nothing of the cities under their feet. When the Wraith came, time after time, they found scattered groups of primitives, subsistence farms, iron tools. They never saw the teeming millions, just the devoted few…” His eyes, open again now, gleamed. “This is what I found when I awoke. If my experiments had still been a priority, they would have been validated beyond my imagination.”
“What did you do?” asked Carter, sounding a little stunned.
“At first? I walked the land.”
“Meaning…”
“I spent ten years walking among the Eraavi,” Angelus replied. “Learning their history, their culture… I had arrived with every intention of building a society in my own image, but I now found myself exploring a whole new one.”
“That must have been amazing…” Carter pulled a seat close and sat down carefully. “You must have been very proud.”
“I think I was beyond pride at that point, Colonel.” Perhaps following Carter’s lead, Angelus sat too, perching on the edge of the bed. Sheppard watched him sit down, judged how quickly the Ancient could get to Carter if he went for her, calculating how many shots he could get off if that happened. Enough.
“When was this?” he asked. “Our time.”
“I finished my travels a year ago, John Sheppard. Believe me, I could have spent my whole life travelling there, and would have done had I not learned two things. Firstly, that I had been remembered. The Eraavi still revered their Father.”
“And second?”
“That the Wraith were coming back.” Angelus raised his hands, a strange gesture, and sat looking at them for a moment. “The Eraavi were too numerous, I could see that. If there was another cull, they might not be able to remain hidden. Their expansion and that of the Wraith were on a collision course. Sooner or later, all this wonder would be brought to ruin.”
Something in his voice lodged a shard of ice under Sheppard’s sternum. “What did you do?”
“I did what any loving father would have done,” the man replied. “I gave them the means to destroy the Wraith.”
“We need to get back to IOA,” Sheppard told Carter a few minutes later, as they walked back towards the tower. “Jesus, if they knew about this —”
“If they knew about this they’d throw eight kinds of fit,” Carter said quickly. “Listen, John. Be careful about who you tell for the moment, okay? Believe me, IOA could really go the wrong way on this one. We’re going to need confirmation at the very least.”
“How are we going to get that?”
“Give me time.”
“Sam, if what he told us is true we might not have any time!”
She stopped, and put her hands up placatingly. “Look, we’ve been over this with Ellis, and the situation hasn’t changed. If they knew he was here, they’d be all over us already. If we get this wrong, shoot our mouths off to IOA before we’ve got all the facts, then yeah, we could find ourselves up to our ears in bad guys before we could spit. So we’ve got to be careful.”
Sheppard pointed back towards Angelus’ room. “Like he was careful?”
“He didn’t know about the Replicators. How could he have done? If he did, maybe he wouldn’t have been so quick to do what he did. But one way or the other, John, we need to know.”
He took a deep breath, tried to calm the angry slamming of his heart. “Okay. Okay, maybe you’re right. Question is, what do we do now?”
“We get back with the others, tell them what we know and see if they’ve gotten any results. And we get a message to the Apollo. We’ll need Ellis on this one.”
“Right.” He put his hands to the back of his neck, fingers linked, trying to stretch out a sudden knot of tension there. “I’ll light a fire under ’em.”
“Good.” She gave him a quick, grin. “And try not to panic.”
Despite himself, he chuckled. “Sure. Hey, Sam?”
“Hm?”
“You don’t think it could have worked, do you? What he was trying to do?”
She shrugged. “I have no idea. But that’s one of the reasons I don’t want IOA in on this yet. If they even get a taste of this…”
“They’ll be all over us, I get it.” He stretched his arms out, fingers still woven, and cracked his knuckles. “Okay, let’s see how far across the hangar I need to kick Rodney.”
Chapter Four
The Sixth Circle
Apollo jumped into the M4T system with shields set to maximum, all forward railguns live and eight missiles, including a pair of tactical nukes, hot in their tubes and ready to fire. Even though the Replicator ship he had encountered the previous day had been an easy kill, Ellis was in no mood to take chances.
He was on the edge of his seat, quite literally, as the ship broke out of hyperspace. Despite the inexorable downward slope the tunnel effect seemed to have these days, he had fixed his attention on it for the past several minutes, his eyes narrowed, staring down that silver-blue throat as if he could force himself, by sheer will, to see what lay beyond. Foolish, he knew, but if there was anything waiting for him at the other end, he didn’t want to blink and miss it.
There wasn’t. Apollo lurched out of hyperspace and into still, silent darkness.
“Stay frosty,” Ellis growled, glaring out at the starfield. “We thought it was gonna be quiet last time, too. Meyers?”
“Yessir?”
“Full sweep. Deacon, shut down the main drives. Thrusters only while we try and shed some heat.”
Deacon tapped at his control board, and Ellis heard the faint grumble of the drives attenuate as they were throttled back. Apollo still had plenty of forward momentum, even after leaving most of its velocity in hyperspace, and would continue to coast forwards forever until some other force was applied to it. That suited Ellis just fine for now: the heat from the main drives would light Apollo up like a torch against the freezing background temperatures of space, and while the battlecruiser could never shed enough thermal energy to become invisible, every degree lost could be an advantage, however slight.
Trying to stealth any kind of ship without a cloaking field was damn near impossible; Ellis was all too aware of that. But he wasn’t going to advertise his presence in the system any more than he could help. Besides, if trouble did arise, Apollo’s main engines could be brought back online within moments.
“Meyers, how’s that sweep coming along?”
“Still building up a picture, sir, but no significant returns yet. So far, it looks like we’re all alone out here.”
“Just how I like it. Okay, let’s get McKay’s program running.”
Behind him, two technicians began the process of loading Rodney McKay’s guidance program into Apollo’s computers. The stealth sensors, still chilling on their racks down in the bomb bay, needed to be dropped at a very precise location in the system. Their operational range was vast, several Astronomical Units in radius, but the arrays needed to mimic the orbits of existing debris. McKay’s program would, the scientist had claimed, take charge of Apollo’s own sensors, map out a gravitational diagram of the system in precise detail, and work out exactly where to drop the sensors. McKay had boasted of the program being accurate to within ten kilometers, but Ellis wasn’t buying that. Still, on an interplanetary scale, even distances in the thousands of kilometers became vanishingly small.