The sensors would be dropped in the right place, he had no doubt, or would find their way there.
Within a few moments, Deacon’s control board chirruped, and a tactical display flowered open on his centre screen. Similar readouts sprang to life on the weapons panel, too. “Damn,” said Ellis. “That guy’s scary. Okay, people, looks like we have our drop point. How long to get there on thrusters?”
Deacon ran through a swift set of calculations on his panel. “About two hours. We’ll need to swing around the second moon to grab enough extra velocity, but that will set us up for dropping the sensors at the right speed, too. We’ll only need to make a couple of course corrections before we set them free.”
Ellis nodded slowly. “Outstanding… Helm, let’s do this.”
“Into the hands of Rodney McKay,” he heard Deacon mutter, “I commend my spirit.” And with that, the thrusters began to fire.
Just as predicted, the journey took over two hours. With Deacon monitoring the ship’s course, Meyers keeping a watchful eye out for potential threats and the rest of the bridge crew making sure Apollo and the program kept in synchronization, Ellis allowed himself the luxury of taking some of that time away from the bridge.
Touring the ship was a habit of his, but one he seldom got to indulge in. Apollo was a big vessel, over one hundred and fifty meters from prow sensors to drive bells, and even to walk from one end to the other could take more than an hour. Had the distance been in a straight line, Ellis could have jogged it in a couple of minutes, but the interior of the ship was almost unimaginably complex. Split into dozens of rooms and compartments, connected by hundreds of meters of corridors, gangways, service ducts and bulkheads, Apollo’s innards formed such a maze that new recruits to the ship were given photocopied maps as soon as they set foot aboard.
To be seen actually using one was to invite ridicule, but they were a fact of life, nonetheless. Ellis still had his, somewhere, as a souvenir. Nowadays, of course, he could have found his way around the ship blindfold.
Given the situation, Ellis decided to restrict his wanderings to the rearmost section of Apollo — that way, he could be back on the bridge in the shortest time should anything warrant his attention. He stopped off at the wardroom to grab a mug of coffee, setting the dispenser there to produce a brew both darker and sweeter than should technically have been possible, then took off down one of the aft gangways. One that would lead him, via a series of other compartments, to the 302 bays.
He was halfway there when he realized there was something wrong with the ship.
At first, he couldn’t even be sure what made him think so. The deck seemed steady under his feet, the constant background noise of the air-circulation and heating systems was uninterrupted, and there were no warnings or alerts. In fact, for a few minutes, Ellis remained convinced that his intuition was deceiving him. If there really was something not right with Apollo, surely he would have been informed by now?
It wasn’t until he was making his way through one of the aft service areas that he discovered what had tipped him off. It wasn’t something that could be easily seen in the open gangways or the more brightly lit sections, and even in the relative dimness of the service compartment it was hard to be sure. Ellis stood quite still, coffee mug in hand, for a long minute before he was certain.
The lights were flickering.
The flicker was amazingly subtle; not constant or obvious, but a momentary variation in brightness occurring once every forty seconds or so. Almost impossible to see. If Ellis hadn’t known the ship as well as he did, if he hadn’t made himself learn every quirk of its design and every idiosyncrasy of its operation, he would never have noticed it.
But yes, there it was again. A fluttering dip in brightness, then a slight surge, then normality again. Not random, but regular. He reached up with his free hand and keyed his headset. “Meyers?”
“Sir?”
“How’s everything up there?”
There was a slight pause, probably while she checked her readouts. “All quiet, sir.”
“Good… Look, Meyers, get one of the techs to run a power diagnostic.”
“Will do, Colonel. Is there a problem?”
He took a gulp of the coffee, but it didn’t taste all that good any more. “Looks like an intermittent fault in the lighting system. Might be nothing, but if there’s a pulse in the power grid I want to know about it.”
“I’ll get somebody on it right away, Sir. Will you be long coming back?”
“No,” said Ellis. “I won’t be long at all.”
True to her word, Meyers had the results of a full diagnostic check on the grid ready for Ellis when he returned to the bridge.
There were no faults. The grid was totally clean.
Someone less sure of himself might have put the flickering lights down to imagination, or set the problem on the back burner until a less critical time, but Ellis didn’t do that kind of thing. He was acutely aware of just how dangerous an environment space could be, and even the thousands of tons of weapons, armor, systems and personnel that made up a ship like Apollo could be brought low in a moment if even the slightest fault wasn’t checked out immediately. Ellis studied the diagnostic for a while, then decided to ignore it and do things the old fashioned way. He called up a team of engineers and told them to deal with it.
The next hour passed quickly. Apollo swung around the second moon on the course Deacon had plotted, smoothly transferring a fraction of the planetoid’s momentum to the battlecruiser. It was, in accordance with the physical laws of the universe, an equal swap: the moon slowed down while Apollo sped up. Of course, the moon was millions of times more massive than the ship, so while Apollo almost doubled its velocity, the impact on the moon was all but undetectable. Perhaps the day it finally surrendered to the gravity of its parent world had been brought forward by an hour or so, but Ellis knew he would be dust a billion years before that mattered to anyone at all.
McKay’s program warned them in good time before the sensors were due to be launched. Back when the system was being designed there had been talk of an automatic activation, but Ellis had vetoed that without a moment’s hesitation. He didn’t mind McKay’s computer program letting him know what should be done and when, but there was no way he was going to let it take over his ship. Ellis believed, very firmly, in the human element.
Which is why it was Major Emma Meyers who fired the first sensor array out into space. Ellis watched it go from the command throne, on a tablet computer slaved to cameras in the bomb bay. He saw the rack descend into position, slow on its hydraulic rams, and the clustered sensors dart free as McKay’s program sounded its alarms.
Moments later, they were gone from sight, too small to make out with their matte surfaces absorbing the meager starlight. The tiny thruster burns that would spread them out into an array thousands of kilometers across would take many hours to complete, but Apollo couldn’t stay around that long. Ellis had a report to make, and for that he needed a Stargate.
“Phase one is complete,” he told Sam Carter, just over an hour later. “You should start getting test returns from the array within a day or so.”
“That’s good to know, Colonel. I’ll make sure we’re listening for that.”