The only thing more surprising was that he hadn’t noticed it before.
McKay stood there for a moment, still clutching the data tablet he had been taking to show Carter. After a few seconds he set off again, but more slowly this time, and only after making sure no-one else was in the corridor with him. And when the way branched, he diverted from his original path and instead set off towards the nearest transporter.
There was a lot to think about, and he couldn’t do that while giving Carter his report. That would have to wait.
The transporter took McKay to the mess hall. Once there he found an empty table near one of the long windows and sat, placing the tablet on the table in front of him. He found himself looking at it as though not entirely sure what it was.
“Wow,” he breathed, blinking as though clearing his vision would help to clear his mind. “Wow.”
It had taken quite some time to get the lab set up properly, which could almost certainly be put down to deliberate delays on Carter’s part. She wanted Angelus to hold off starting anything fundamental before she had all her methods of surveillance in place. But Angelus was eager to work, and despite the delays had been frantically calculating from the outset.
And since the start of this, McKay had been swept along by the Ancient’s plans.
He had been working with Angelus almost that entire time, and had only taken short breaks away to eat and sleep. For a while he had remembered his instructions from Carter and followed them diligently — gain as much information about the weapon as possible, collate everything, and report back on a regular basis. Together with the data being recorded from the surveillance suite, the case against building the weapon had really started to come together.
It wasn’t a duty that McKay took lightly, either. He held his position in the Atlantis expedition in high regard, and while he would be the first to admit that there were those among his team-mates who were, perhaps, more instinctively loyal then he, McKay liked to believe that he could at least be counted on. Letting people down wasn’t something he liked to do at all, even when their demands were, as was so often the case, petty, small-minded, distracting or just plain difficult. Although those people frequently failed to appreciate just how vital his work was, and how annoying being pulled away from it to fix the most simple faults could be, he still tried, as hard as he was able, to come through.
To do otherwise, at least in the eyes of those making such continuous and unjustified demands on his time, would be seen as failure. McKay was a sensible enough man to accept that failure was an intrinsic part of human existence, but there was no denying that it made him look bad.
Not only that, but he had friends here. Perhaps not close friends — feelings of that nature weren’t ones he felt especially comfortable with, and he tended to avoid them if at all possible. But there were some whose company he found agreeable. Others he respected, for various reasons. If he was honest with himself, there were probably more people in the city that he respected and didn’t like, but that was beside the point. He didn’t want to see any of them — with no more than a handful of exceptions — immolated in a Replicator assault.
And far more importantly, Rodney McKay did not want to see a hail of energy beams crashing down onto his own head, either.
The danger represented by Angelus and his continued residence in the city chilled McKay to the core. The video footage Apollo had sent back from Eraavis had been truly horrifying. He had seen destruction before, but never on such a sustained, determined level. If the Replicators had somehow blown the planet apart, that would, in a way, have been less frightening. It would have been an instant of violence, a sudden unleashing of fury. It would have been comprehensible.
But to do what they had done to Eraavis, the Asurans must have fired on the planet, continuously and mercilessly, for hours.
The longer Angelus remained in the city, the more likely it became that Atlantis would suffer the same fate; McKay was in no doubt of that. And if the Ancient began actually reproducing his weapons experiments, there really wasn’t any hope at all. He’d attracted the Asurans once. There was no reason to assume he wouldn’t do so again, for all his promises to the contrary.
All these factors made for a compelling case. And, for a few hours, McKay had been honestly compelled.
It hadn’t lasted, he knew now. And it couldn’t have lasted. The science was just too seductive.
McKay knew he was being tempted, that was completely clear to him. What wasn’t clear was how he could possibly avoid giving in to that temptation. He had been fascinated by theoretical physics since childhood — the interactions of subatomic particles, in all their sublime and boundless variety, awed him. It was the foundation on which everything vital about himself was built — his intellect, his skill, his thirst for insight into the most fundamental properties of the universe. It wasn’t simply that McKay liked to know how things worked, he needed to know how. It was a hunger, one that had pulled him onwards almost all his life: from the school science project that had brought his abilities to the attention of the CIA, through his time at Area 51, and then to Antarctica and finally across the gulf between the galaxies themselves, here to Atlantis.
His dreamed of theoretical physics, on occasion. That is, when the dreams weren’t shudder-inducing nightmares about his own impending doom, which tended to be the norm. But on the good nights, he would find himself in vast libraries, the bookshelves groaning with heavy tomes; each a wealth of answers, only needing to be opened…
Angelus, for all his dangers, was holding a book open for Rodney McKay. The science he was offering went beyond any experiment or study in history. The principles behind this weapon made even the Stargates seem mundane.
The Ancient’s weapon could, in one blast of unimaginable cosmic violence, recreate the Big Bang itself.
How could he resist that? How, after searching his whole life for the answers, could he give them up? It was impossible.
The dream-books were being opened for him, and they were almost close enough to read. And if McKay had been asked, at that moment, whether the secrets held within were worth dying for, he could not have honestly answered: “No.”
His reverie in the mess hall lasted an hour. When he finally felt ready to return to the world, McKay called Carter on his headset and told her he had nothing worth bothering her with, and would be staying in the lab with Angelus until something interesting happened. Then he opened up his latest report on the data tablet, thought for a moment or two about simply deleting it, and then let his conscience get the better of him. He opened up an encrypted folder and stored the file there.
Then he went back to the lab.
The journey took some time. McKay had deliberately chosen a location that was away from the core of Atlantis, out on the west pier. On the one hand, that kept it away from the most vital areas of the city, but it also made getting there a chore. The nearest transporter was several hundred meters away, through a series of corridors that, like much of the city’s internal architecture, all looked very much the same, and finally along a covered gallery that ran along a long, open slot in the pier’s upper surface. Whenever he returned to the lab, it was always something of a relief for McKay to reach the gallery. Not only was it a welcome exposure to fresh air, but it also meant that he hadn’t gotten lost again.
By the time he got back to the lab this time, his legs were starting to ache and the tablet was feeling a lot heavier than it should have done. He noticed that his pace had slowed considerably as he came in off the gallery, and picked it up a little as he approached the guard station. There were two marines sitting behind the armored glass of the station, and they nodded to McKay as he drew level. He smiled briefly back at them as he strode past, arms swinging, trying to make it look as if he had been pounding along since leaving the transporter. As soon as they keyed open the lab doors, though, he practically staggered inside and dropped the tablet on the nearest table.