A suggestion of a footfall outside the bedroom door, late and close to sleep, and the careful testing of a handle. The far-off sheen of ice on a night-time road. A tickle behind the eye. Little things, caresses at the edge of consciousness, too subtle to fear. It is only when these horrors have been given time to grow and fester that they become known for what they are.
The handle turns, and the door swings inwards.
The ice is an oil-sheened slickness under tires that no longer grip.
The tickle grows into a grinding headache, resistant to drugs, resistant to prayer, steadily building day on day…
So it was with the horror that took Atlantis. It began small, almost too small to see, but it was only awaiting its chance to metastasize. Despite later recriminations, no-one could have foreseen it. Even Colonel Abraham Ellis couldn’t, though the horror began with him.
He never saw it coming. It was too far away, at the end of a tunnel made from swirling blue light.
The tunnel was an illusion, Ellis knew; some weird artifact of the hyperdrive engines. He had no idea why the strange, supercompressed universe his ship was flying through should appear the way it did, no more than he could explain the careening sense of headlong motion he had experienced the few times he had been through a Stargate. In fact, while he knew the specifications and capabilities of his ship down to the last kilo of thrust, Ellis could claim no real knowledge of how the hyperdrives even worked, let alone how Apollo appeared to be lit blue and silver by a light that probably shouldn’t be there.
The mystery didn’t bother him. As long as the drives did their job, flinging the great ship between the suns at untold multiples of lightspeed, he was quite content to let them get on with it. Let fuller minds than his ponder the true nature of the light flooding his bridge. The Asgard had, in all likelihood, taken its secret with them to their collective grave.
No, what was really bugging Ellis was the unmistakable, and quite ridiculous feeling that Apollo was falling.
He closed his eyes momentarily, settled back in the command throne, took a long breath. All the familiar sensations were still there — the faint vibration of the deck through the soles of his boots, the cool metal edges of the throne arms, the click and chatter of the systems surrounding him. Somebody walked across the bridge behind him, and he heard their footfalls on the deck. But with his eyes closed and his senses grounded, the falling sensation wasn’t there at all.
He opened his eyes. Through the wide forward viewport, between the weblike support braces, the hyperspace tunnel soared and shone. And once again, Ellis was dropping down into a pit of blue light.
“Dammit,” he muttered, very quietly.
Major Meyers glanced up from the weapons console, one eyebrow raised. “Sir?”
In response, he just nodded curtly at her panel. Meyers’ attention hastily returned to the firing solution she’d been working on.
She hadn’t looked up at the viewport, Ellis noticed. In fact, she’d tilted her head, almost unconsciously, as if to avoid looking at it.
Did she feel it as well?
Ellis had heard of the phenomenon, but he’d always dismissed it up until now. Something that civilians might experience, perhaps, or the kind of mess-hall backtalk that went around when the ship was on a long haul and the usual bitching about drills and shore leave was wearing thin. As far as he was aware, there wasn’t even a name for it.
Just a feeling that some people had, when looking too hard and too long at the hyperspace tunnel effect, that it either tilted up towards the heavens or dipped right down to the depths of Hell.
Ellis shook himself, angry at his own weakness, and got up. It was nothing, just a failure of perspective, a trick of the eye. Nothing that should be on his mind now, not when he was flying his ship into the middle of a war. “ETA?”
“Seventeen minutes,” Kyle Deacon reported from the helm.
“Good. Meyers, get me the bomb bay. No…” He frowned. “Second thoughts, I’ll head down there myself. Give McKay a scare.”
“Yessir. I’ll call you before we break out.”
He walked past her console to get to the hatchway, and as he did, leaned down and tipped his head towards the viewport. “What do you think?” he breathed. “Up or down?”
“Down sir,” she replied, eyes fixed steadily on her readouts. “Definitely down.”
Out in the lightless gulfs of space, two great powers coiled around each other like monstrous serpents. And, like monsters, they fought and tore.
A week before, Ellis had watched the blood of the two serpents spread across Colonel Carter’s starmap in a series of vivid splashes: a brilliant, icy blue for the Wraith, a gory scarlet for the Asurans. Each splash, Carter had told him, was the site of a known engagement. Between these battle markers lay the serpents themselves, twisting wildly through each other in three dimensions — an approximation of the two powers’ battle lines.
The whole map, in fact, was an approximation, and therein lay the danger of it. “Most of this information is days old,” Carter had told him, pointing vaguely at a cluster of splashes. “At best we find out about one of these engagements a few hours after it’s over and done. Really, we’ve got no idea exactly where the fighting is going on.”
Ellis had peered closely at the map, a gnawing feeling of worry under his sternum. Carter had scaled the display to take in dozens of star systems, and already half of them were enveloped by the serpents and their terrible wounds. “Is there anything you can be certain of?”
“Just this.” Carter had touched a control, and a small green dot had blinked into life in the centre of the display.
“Let me guess.” Ellis straightened up. “Atlantis.”
Carter nodded. “Trying to get a true picture of events over these kinds of distances is hard. Information travelling at C or below means that simultaneity is bunk — you can’t tell if two things are happening at the same time because in relativistic terms there’s no such thing as the same time. And information above C, like gate or hyperspace travel, plays havoc with event ordering.”
“So we’re screwed.” Ellis rubbed his chin, still glaring at the map. “We can’t get a true picture of what’s going on, and what we don’t know could kill us.”
“Yeah,” Carter said grimly. “If the Wraith find out where Atlantis is, they’ll swarm us. If the Replicators find out, they’ll do worse. The city’s long range sensors are great at picking up moving objects, but as for what those objects are doing… Right now I feel like a kid caught up in a bar fight, hiding under the table. I can hear pool cues on heads, but I don’t dare stick my own head out to see where the danger is.”
Ellis had been in a few bar fights in his time, although he had normally been wielding the cue. “But McKay says he’s got a plan?”
“Hasn’t he always?” Carter had smiled at him, briefly. “He’s gone all retro on us. A series of early-warning sensors, dropped into these systems here…” She touched another key and a chain of yellow dots flared into life and started pulsing. The map turned around on itself, stars swimming past each other as the galaxy rotated about the Atlantis marker, and Ellis could see how the yellow dots were spread evenly around it; close to, but never quite touching, the two serpents. “The sensors are stealthy — scanner absorbent, mostly passive… They spread out to form VLAs, then communicate with their relays through narrow-beam communications lasers. That’s old technology, but they’ll be pretty hard to spot.”
“And they send data back to Atlantis via subspace?”
“Yes, but only through an encoded network. Basically a lot of dummies, really short messages and some fancy coding.” She tapped the map’s surface. “If anything bad happens within three light-years, we’ll know about it thirty minutes later.”
Ellis had nodded, lost in thought. “Not bad… Although if something did pop in your backyard, what would you do? Move the city again?”