There was an ache in his chest. Was that from breathing too hard, or was it something else? He rubbed his sternum nervously, and then noticed that Angelus was watching him.
The Ancient was wearing his golden mask. It could only have been a trick of the light, but the eyeholes seemed frighteningly empty.
McKay dropped his hand. “Hey.”
“Welcome back, Doctor McKay. You seem out of breath.” Angelus reached up and took the mask off, set it down on the terminal next to him. He was sitting at the image processor, a hexagonal ring of terminals that bulked at the center of the lab. The processor terminals surrounded a holographic projector, and McKay could see a series of gridded planes whirling in the air above it.
He found a nearby swivel chair and sank into it. “It’s quite a walk.”
“Back to the tower?”
“What? No, to the transporter.” McKay squinted at the Ancient’s slender form for a moment, then down at his own torso. There was a quite a difference. “Well, I’ve never been much of a hiker, you know?”
Angelus turned to him. “You surprise me.”
“I do?”
“Of course. You seem to think well on your feet, Doctor. I have seen you walk around this space many times when you have been trying to define a concept or solve a calculation.” He touched a control, without looking at the panel, and the holographic image faded out. “I could easily see you covering many stadia in your quest for answers.”
“I guess I’m more of a pacer.” McKay took a breath and held it, checking on the feeling in his chest. It didn’t spike, so he decided that he was probably okay. He stood up and moved over to join the Ancient at the display.
The lab was in the same state of slightly chaotic activity as it had been for the past two days. A trio of technicians had been assigned to work with Angelus, but according to Carter they were still being ‘vetted’. Their eventual arrival had been catered for, though: several laptops, data tablets and pieces of test equipment had been arranged on folding tables along two of the lab’s walls. All the screens McKay could see, including three big flatscreens on the wall above the tables, glowed with animated graphics and streams of raw data. The calculations involved in the weapon design were immense; beam power and pulse frequency exhibited in fractally recursive forms so complex that several of the most powerful processors on Atlantis had to be wired up in parallel just to handle them. Along another wall, four squat blocks of metal sat humming, surrounded by electric fans: multiple disc drives, running far beyond their normal capacity in order to store the processed data. If it hadn’t been for the fans, the drives would have melted in their towers.
There was a lot of equipment here, and Angelus was pushing all of it to its limits. So far, though, the only work being done here was calculation, so Colonel Carter had been content to let it continue as long as she was kept updated. Perhaps McKay shouldn’t have been helping this phase of the Ancient’s project take shape so enthusiastically, but he had accepted, during his introspective hour in the mess hall, that he could not stop himself. It was unfair of Carter to make him try.
McKay got to the image processor just as the Ancient brought a new series of forms into being above it. “What’s this now?”
“This simulates the target point instability during the initial delivery strike.” Angelus tapped out a series of commands on a portable keyboard, his fingers moving with startling speed. “Some of the values required are still estimates, I’m afraid. The recursions are not yet at a suitable level of iteration to provide the accuracy we need.”
McKay knew all about the level of accuracy. Considering the amount of energy delivered by the meson pulse, and the tiny amount of space it had to be compressed into, it was a wonder that conventional mathematics could even describe the required precision. “How may iterations have they been through?”
“Ninety-three.”
“Right. We’ll need, what, twice that? And with each recursion taking exponentially greater processing power to process…” McKay glanced around, feeling slightly frantic. “We’re gonna need a bigger lab.”
“I believe what we have should be sufficient. Once we pass one hundred iterations I shall deploy an inverse compression algorithm. That will limit the amount of data overflow in direct proportion to the level of accuracy we reach.”
“Neat trick.” There were no seats around the image processor. McKay thought about dragging one closer, but decided it would make him look foolish. He leaned against a terminal instead, trying to take the weight off one foot at a time.
The golden mask was resting next to his arm. It looked cool and heavy, its gleaming face reflecting the holographic light in strange curves. He found himself, not for the first time, studying it from the corner of his eye.
It was an odd thing, both sinister and beautiful, and the Ancient’s habit of wearing it so often was intriguing. McKay had almost asked about it before, several times in fact, but until now had always held back. He couldn’t quite decide why, but there was an air of privacy about the mask, a kind of intimacy that had made him uncomfortable broaching the subject.
And, bizarrely, there was something about Angelus that made McKay loathe to upset the man.
But now, maybe for the first time, the mask was closer to McKay than it was to Angelus, and the proximity of it was strangely heady. He reached out, hesitated, then leaned forwards and picked it up.
It was actually heavier than he had anticipated. “Sorry, Angelus. I never asked… What does this do?”
“Do? The visios?”
“Yeah. You wear it a lot, and I just wondered what it’s function was.”
The Ancient looked at him, a strange, slightly haunted expression on his face. “It does nothing, Doctor. Except to remind me of happier times.”
“So it’s just a mask, then.” McKay felt almost disappointed. He had been expecting the golden artifact to have some kind of exotic property — for it to induce hypnotic states, maybe, or aid concentration. He hadn’t really thought that Angelus might just have been sitting around with a mask on.
“I suppose it is,” the Ancient replied. “To anyone but me.”
McKay found himself feeling rather embarrassed. He had obviously strayed into deep emotional territory; not a place he felt comfortable about going. He decided to change the subject. “Anyways, the simulation. Even with the estimated values, it’s looking pretty detailed.”
Angelus’ gaze stayed fixed on the visios for a moment, then he returned his attention to the holo display. “At this point, the simulation is running more as a test of its own capabilities than a true indication. There are some elements that I am storing in order to refine them later, though.” He pointed at the edges of a stack of planes, the way they rippled through each other in a series of perspective-defying loops and whorls. “These waveforms, for example, seem common to all levels of simulation. I believe we will encounter them under full test.”
“Brane interaction? That’s going to send instability phases right through the incursion space.” McKay straightened up. “That could be bad.”
“Indeed. At worst, such an instability could reflect the field effect back down the transmission beam.”
“Oh lovely.” McKay stalked away from the processor, turning the visios over and over in his hands, then spun on his heel and walked back. Angelus was right, he always did think better on his feet, even if they did hurt. “You’d end up with the Higgs-Boson shutdown occurring at the point of firing, not the target.”