Had she made a mistake? She had known that the Advisory wanted what Angelus was offering, but perhaps she’d underestimated just how badly. And seriously, she wondered, how could they trust her with a decision like that? She had proven herself to be an effective agent in her time at Stargate Command, sure. She’d been promoted, in the field; she’d fought and led men into battle and, on more occasions than she trusted herself to count, she had been instrumental in saving the day.
But she’d been in Elizabeth Weir’s shoes for three weeks. It wasn’t enough.
Her headset crackled softly, a certain sign that it was about to admit a call. Carter sighed, put her elbows on the desktop and her head in her hands, and closed her eyes.
As she did so the speaker blipped in her ear. She touched the control on its side. “Carter.”
“Colonel? It’s Jennifer Keller, down in the infirmary.”
Carter’s eyes snapped open. There was something in Keller’s voice she didn’t like at all. “What’s wrong?”
“There’s been an incident. Rodney McKay’s been injured.”
“Seriously?”
“No,” said Keller quickly, “it’s not serious.”
In the background, almost out of range of the pickup, Carter heard McKay begin to disagree vehemently, and she puffed out a relieved breath. “Sounds like his voice hasn’t been impaired, anyway.”
“Oh no, that’s working just fine. But Colonel, he wants to talk to you. Alone.”
“So put him on.”
“In person. He’s extremely insistent.”
“I’ll be right down.”
Carter hurried to the nearest transporter. She was most of the way there when she heard her name called, and turned to see Radek Zelenka running towards her.
Zelenka was the expedition’s second expert in Ancient technology, just below McKay in the Atlantis scientific hierarchy. He was a slight, bespectacled man, a native of the Czech Republic. Carter hadn’t really spent enough time in his company to know much about him, but he seemed extremely competent. Certainly, his soft voice and slightly withdrawn nature was often a welcome opposite to McKay’s bombast.
He skated to a halt, slightly out of breath. “Colonel Carter? May I speak with you?”
“Is it about Rodney?”
He looked at her blankly. “Should I be speaking to you about Rodney?”
“I guess not. Look, I’m in kind of a hurry…”
Zelenka nodded. “I understand, but this is rather important. May I walk with you?”
“Sure.” She gestured down the corridor. “I’m heading to the transporter, so I can go with you as far as there. What did you want to talk about?”
“Well…” He fell into step alongside her as she set off. “That report on the power fluctuations. Have you had a chance to read it yet?”
The report was one of the documents in Carter’s mystery folder. For the past twenty hours, parts of the city’s power grid had been experiencing unexplained drops in power. There hadn’t been many — four at last count — but they had been noticeable. Carter had asked Zelenka to look into the problem, just in case anything was wrong with the ZPMs. “I have, yes.”
“I think, perhaps, you should throw that report away.”
Carter raised an eyebrow. “Why is that?”
“It’s inaccurate. No, I’m sorry. What I mean to say is, it is no longer the whole picture. Um…” He scratched his head absently, brushed hair out of his face. “The fluctuations are different now.”
“Worse?”
“Not as such. They are not as strong now. The level of the drops in power has now decreased to only one or two percent of what they were.”
“Well, that doesn’t sound so bad.”
He gave her a slight shrug. “True. But they are now occurring once every forty-one seconds.”
Carter stopped dead. “You’re kidding.”
“I am not. Where we were experiencing severe power drains at random, now the grid has settled into a kind of pulse. The drops are almost too small to notice — if I hadn’t already been looking for them I wouldn’t have known they were there.”
“That’s just weird.” Carter got her feet moving again. They were coming up on the transporter now, and if Rodney wanted to speak to her alone she was going to have to dump Zelenka in the next few meters. “Have you tracked down a source for the drain yet?”
“No. It’s system-wide as far as I can tell. And yes, that lab was the first place I looked. So far, I cannot pin it down to there.”
Carter got to the transporter and stopped, turning to Zelenka as the doors slid open. “Okay, thanks for telling me. Radek, can you stay on top of this? Maybe it’s nothing, a side-effect of the extra computing power we’re feeding Angelus, but I’ve got a bad feeling about it anyway.”
“You and me both.” He was standing a little way from the transporter, and she realized, with some relief, that he wasn’t planning to get in with her. “I’ll keep you posted. Say hi to Rodney for me.”
“Sure,” she smiled, and stepped inside. And then, as the doors closed, remembered that she hadn’t told him who she was going to see.
Obviously, she hadn’t needed to. She chuckled softly, touched the nearest activation dot to the infirmary and vanished in a flare of blue-white light.
McKay was alone in the infirmary when Carter arrived. He was on a gurney, sitting back against the raised backrest with his legs stretched out in front of him. As the door opened he started upright, then relaxed slightly as Carter came in. He raised a hand. “Hey.”
“Hey yourself.” McKay’s right trouser-leg had been raggedly cut away just below the knee, and his entire lower leg was wrapped tightly in white bandages. Carter pointed at it. “What happened to you?”
“Got into a fight with Angelus’ ship. Guess who won.”
She pulled up a nearby seat and sat down. “It’s not like you to go picking fights with starships.”
“Trust me, I didn’t start it.” He sat up straighter, and swung himself around, wincing as he eased his damaged leg off the edge of the gurney. “Damn it, that stings. You know, I asked Keller for morphine, and she laughed. Can you believe that? Laughed. Does this look like ‘just a scratch’ to you?”
She could only shrug. “I’m not a doctor. Speaking of which, where is she?”
“Down in one of the labs. Something screwy with the MRI machine, or something.” He stretched, as if he had been lying still for too long. “Sorry to drag you all the way down here, but Keller won’t let me out just yet and I’m not entirely sure if I trust the comms, especially if that observer’s around.”
“Oh yes,” Carter muttered. “He’s around. But what about you, staying here because Keller said so? When did you start following other people’s advice?”
He looked slightly hurt. “It’s been known. Hey, I’ve been injured, okay? And, I might add, in the line of duty. Keller might not have the most wonderful bedside manner, but if she says she wants to run some more checks on me then I figure it’s probably best to, you know, let her do it.”
Carter could understand his aversion to leaving the infirmary. He probably hated being in here, but if there was any chance at all something might still be physically wrong with him he wouldn’t take the risk. McKay was a legendary hypochondriac. “So what’s your beef with the comms? Apart from Fallon.”
“Let’s just say I’ve already been physically assaulted by one inanimate object today.” He took a deep breath, squared his shoulders a little. “Okay, here’s the thing. When I was in the hopper, I managed to get some readings on a PDA before the door closed. And there’s a whole bunch of stuff about that ship which doesn’t add up.”
“Like what?”
“Well… First I was concerned because it didn’t look like an Ancient ship. The detail was all wrong, the shape of the thing… But I checked out the database and spotted a class of ceremonial vessel that wasn’t completely different. And it turns out that the Eraavi blinged it up for him as a mark of respect, same time as they made him the mask.”