“Delivery system?” ventured Carter.
“As good a phrase as any. The first principle is that of a certain particle, one of the family of plenus verto proprii, which forms its interactions under the validus vis nuclei…”
McKay held up his hands. “Wait, wait, wait a second,” he said quickly. “Plenus… turn, turning? Fully turning… Full turn particle?”
“Oh!” said Carter. “A particle with a full spin!”
“A boson? And then validus vis… Oh, wait! I know this one… Strongest force! We’re talking about mesons!”
“That is your word for them?”
“Yeah.” McKay nodded. “Bosons are the family of particles that have an integer spin, as opposed to fermions which only have a half spin. Mesons are strongly interacting bosons. It’s pretty basic quantum chromodynamics.”
Angelus smiled, quite broadly. He looked, for the first time, almost happy. “These are terms I must remember, Doctor McKay. It will facilitate working with you in the future, as will your grasp of my language.”
“Well, the Ancient language isn’t a million miles away from Latin, and I kinda got that drummed into me back at school. Before I got taken out of school, anyway…” He glanced at Carter. “Where was I?”
“Mesons.”
“Oh yeah. The delivery system.”
“Indeed. The system begins with a beam of mesons, fired at extremely high energy levels and pulsed at high frequencies. This causes a… How might you say it? A susceptibility in the planes most basic to tracto vicis, the dimensions, those planes associated with vis fluctuates. There is a vibration which-“
“You’re losing me,” said Carter, but McKay shook his head. “No, I got it. Keep going.”
“Very well… Ah, this susceptibility can be exploited if enough energy is fired along the meson beam in a single pulse. This energy, which I calculated to be roughly the equivalent of a single lacuna navitas fabrica released in no more than one millionth of a second… This burst of energy then travels along the meson beam until it interacts with the plane instability and causes a perturbo una locus of the agri totalis vulgus propria. You see?”
There was a long silence. Finally, McKay shook his head. “Sorry. You lost me at lacuna fabrica.”
Angelus pointed at the floor. “The city requires three of them to provide its power.”
“Oh,” said McKay. “ZedPMs!”
“Hold on,” said Carter. “Each shot from this weapon requires a whole ZPM?”
“Yes,” Angelus replied. “Did you realize you both pronounce that phase differently?”
“He’s from Canada. Look, we can’t go around shooting ZPMs off into space! What happens to the city?”
“Please don’t concern yourself with that, Colonel. I’ll show you how to make more.”
It took another half an hour of gradual translation and explanation before McKay told Carter he was satisfied. He was sweating by the time he said it, and Carter couldn’t blame him. The intricacies of the Ancient’s plan might have been understandable had they been laid out in languages Carter was used to, but instead of Angelus adopting more English terms, McKay had started to use more and more Latin, until the conversation between the two of them had become an indecipherable morass of bilingual theoretical physics.
That branch of science was more McKay’s specialty than hers. Even so, the conversation seemed to have taken something out of him.
Once Carter had excused herself and McKay, she walked with him in silence until she was completely out of the Ancient’s earshot. Then she stopped. “What do you think?”
“I think that’s probably the most scary discussion of quantum electrodynamics I’ve ever had,” he replied. “Jesus, Sam… If he’s right about this… I mean, I can see why the Replicators came after him, put it that way.”
“How do you mean?”
McKay took a deep breath. “How far did you get?”
“Just give me the basics.”
“Okay… You generate a high-energy meson stream, pulsed at an ultra-high-frequency. Tune that to generate a specific form of instability in the spacetime dimensions most closely tied to quantum fluctuations. And then you unleash one almighty energy surge up the meson beam, again tuned to the exact same frequency but in anti-phase to the waveform of the initial beam. That rips open a series of dimensional rifts in a kind of cascade, but concentrated into a tiny space. About half the size of a hydrogen atom, or the effect dissipates.”
Carter frowned. “That’s a lot of energy in one space.”
“No kidding. Spacetime can’t handle that kind of energy-load, so it breaks down. And what you get is a localized destabilization of the Higgs-Boson field.”
She stared at him. “That’s insane!”
“See what I meant?”
She did indeed. The Higgs-Boson field was, according to recognized theories of high-energy physics, one of the most fundamental forces in the universe. It was what gave particles mass. Without it, the universe would never have evolved out of its most early form — that of a searing sea of undifferentiated elemental protomatter.
Switch off the Higgs-Boson, Carter thought wildly, and all matter ceases to be. That part of the universe returns to how it was a billionth of a second after the big bang. Angelus had devised a method of turning bits of spacetime back into primal Hell.
The destructive power of such an event would be unimaginable.
“Rodney, can you start that report right away? If we can get across to General Landry what Angelus is trying to do, I think we’ve got a good chance of stopping this before it gets dangerous.”
“Sure. Hey, Sam?”
“Hm?”
“Something just occurred to me…” He glanced over his shoulder, quickly, as if to make sure no-one was close by, then leaned closer to Carter. “What we saw on Eraavis, that mess back there. Crust scored, all life burned away, lava everywhere…” He nodded back towards the Ancient’s room. “What if he did it?”
“Angelus? How?”
“An accident? Look, if he was messing around with fundamental physics, what if something went wrong and he melted his own planet?”
Carter thought about that for a moment. “No. Apollo’s scans showed up clear signatures of Replicator weapons fire. Besides, if he’d set off a weapon like that anywhere near a planet, there wouldn’t have been enough of it left to sweep up and send back to us in an envelope.”
“I guess.” McKay seemed to brighten. “When you put it like that, the thought of an explosion on a scale unseen since the Big Bang seems almost comforting.”
Suddenly, looking at McKay, Carter found him very strange. Almost as alien as Angelus, although in a totally different way. Out of the two, she found herself abruptly unable to decide which frightened her more.
“Okay,” she said. “Take comfort in that while you put the report together. I’m going to find Angelus a lab. One that he’s not going to do any work at all in.”
Chapter Six
Blood and Gold
Rodney McKay had a kind of epiphany, two days after Angelus had begun work on the weapon. He realized, quite suddenly and without any particular provocation, that he was being torn in two.
It was an intellectual quandary he really hadn’t anticipated. The realization, when it came, literally stopped him in his tracks, in the middle of the corridor that lead to the control room and Sam Carter’s office. He halted so abruptly that somebody almost collided with him: a female technician must have been walking quite closely behind him, and McKay saw her stumbling around him to get past, clearly thrown off-balance by the sudden stop.
Dimly, he watched her go, feeling disconnected. At that moment, he could have been viewing an abstract image moving past him and felt no more recognition. The knowledge of just how deeply conflicted he felt had stunned him.