“So, what then?”
“That’s the problem. There’s no way that ship came from Eraavis.”
Carter tilted her head slightly, puzzled. “Say again?”
“I got some pretty detailed readings on the quiescent emissions from the drive system. I couldn’t from the outside because there’s some kind of shielding, but once I got in there… Anyways, it’s got a hyperdrive, but a pretty pathetic one. If Angelus wanted to cross Replicator space in that thing, he’d need to do it in microjumps. Seriously, I don’t think he could have done the trip in less than a month.”
A cold knot had appeared in Carter’s gut. “Can you confirm that?”
“My calculations? Yeah, as soon as I’m out of here. As for the readings themselves, I’m guessing I won’t get another chance to get inside. Even if I could…” He screwed up his face, as though tasting something sour. “Thanks, but no thanks.”
“I can understand that,” she lied. There was something he wasn’t telling her, something not right about the entire conversation. “Rodney…”
“You want to know what else?” he interrupted. “It’s lost weight.”
She blinked. “The ship? I don’t —”
“I got mass readings on it when I was on Apollo. And while I was cross-referencing what I got on the PDA, I ran it through the load records on the jumpers that hauled it in. There’s a discrepancy of almost fifty kilos.”
“What does that mean?”
“I have absolutely no idea.”
Carter remained silent for a moment or two, thinking hard. What McKay was telling her felt like more pieces of her mystery folder — strange, unconnected incidents that seemed as though they should fit together somehow. The chemical analysis of Eraavis had shown discrepancies, and if McKay’s assessment of the starhopper’s hyperdrive was correct, then that meant…
“You think Angelus is lying to us.”
“I don’t know,” McKay replied, sounding oddly subdued. “If you’d asked me that before today, I’d probably have said no. In the time I’ve spent with him, I’ve never got the feeling that he’s being anything but honest. Then again, my instincts aren’t always one hundred percent accurate…” He sighed. “Sam, I swear I just don’t know. Maybe it’s the ship that’s lying!”
Despite herself, she smiled. “I’ll have it arrested.”
“Well, you could maybe have Angelus arrested instead.”
“Not a chance. If I tried it Fallon would just claim you were interfering with the ship and have it cordoned off. Or he’d have you reprimanded. Actually, both. Trust me, the Advisory want this weapon so bad they can taste it, and they don’t care what happens to us as long as they get it.”
“No big surprise there,” McKay sighed. “Okay, I guess we’ll just have to leave him to it for now. Until I can, you know, confirm what the Hell’s going on.”
“It’s a risk.”
“Well, he’s contained. I spent a lot of time down there with him, you know? He’s under guard the whole time, there’s the surveillance… Sheppard installed guillotines in the lab’s power feeds when he was setting the cameras up. If Angelus even looks like he’s going to jeopardize the city with some kind of wild experiment, he can be shut down in a second, whatever this Fallon guy says. Hold on, I’m just going to try this…” He eased himself off the edge of the gurney, testing his weight on the bandaged leg. Carter saw him wince, but he didn’t seem to have any trouble standing.
“Okay, that’s not too bad,” he muttered. “Anyway, back to Angelus. Why would he be trying to pull something? So far we’ve given him everything he wants, however reluctantly. Believe me, I’ve been over and over this. It doesn’t make sense.”
“You’re right.” She got up. “We haven’t got all the right bits of the puzzle yet.”
“Hm?”
“Never mind. Look, we have the sensor data from Apollo, we’ve got your PDA readings… Surely we could plug that information into the stellar database.”
“To find out where he actually came from?” McKay nodded tentatively. “Yeah, I guess we could do that. There’s only a finite number of bio-capable worlds, and the hyperspace trajectory data from Apollo could round down the point of origin even further… Yeah, that’s do-able.”
“Great.” She got up. “Come on, we’re leaving.”
His eyes went wide. “What about my tests?”
“I’ll have Keller book you back in later. Can you walk on that leg?”
McKay, as it turned out, was quite capable of walking. His wounds might have been painful, but they were by no means serious. Carter had already decided to call back on Keller and make sure before she put McKay through anything strenuous, but the fact that he kept forgetting to limp when he thought she wasn’t watching clued her in.
They went back to the control room. McKay hauled himself theatrically in front of a terminal and set to work on the PDA data. Carter left him to it and went in to her office, opened a word processor on her computer and quickly typed out a summary of what McKay had told her in the infirmary. Then, without saving the file, she printed it out and deleted the text.
The hardcopy went into her mystery folder. One more piece of the puzzle, awaiting it’s place.
By the time she was finished, McKay was already waving at her from his terminal, occasionally gesturing at his leg as if to let her know he was quite unable to walk the several meters from his chair to the office. Sighing, Carter got up and went across the gangway to join him. “Have you found something?”
“If by ‘something’, you mean our guest’s true point of origin, yes I have,” he told her, triumphantly.
“Wow, that was fast.” She leaned closer to his terminal screen, genuinely impressed. “You got that down to one out of how many planets?”
“Well, okay, lets say points of origin.”
“Rodney…”
“There’s no way to be certain exactly which one it is, okay? There’s too many variables. And this is assuming that he’s telling the truth about how long he spent out there in the first place.”
“Please don’t make this any more tenuous than it already is. I can only imagine what Colonel Ellis is going to say when I send him off on- How many was it?”
“Four,” said McKay, glumly.
“Four new detours.”
He looked up at her. “You’re not going to make me tell him, are you?”
“Not this time. I’ll take the flak on this one. Just upload those points to my terminal.”
She went back into her office, and then used her headset to call Palmer. “Simon, can you set up a subspace hail to Apollo?”
“I’m sorry, Colonel, but didn’t Colonel Ellis forbid patching into Apollo unless it was an emergency? He doesn’t regard subspace as being secure.”
“He’s probably right, but I can’t risk waiting until he reports in again. He’s already overdue. Tell him it is an emergency. I’ll take responsibility.”
She cut the connection, and waited. A few seconds later an upload from McKay appeared. Carter opened it, quickly arranged the planetary ident codes into the order she would give them to Ellis, and then heard her headset crackle.
“Carter.”
“Colonel, it’s Palmer. There’s a problem. I can’t raise Apollo.”
She stood up. Through the glass wall of her office she saw Palmer over by the comms board. He saw her looking and spread his hands. “There’s no return at all,” he went on. “The hail’s going out, but it’s not reaching anyone.”
“That’s odd.” And a little frightening, she thought to herself. “Keep trying. They might be in a blind spot, or be having technical difficulties. Let me know as soon as they pick up the hail.”
She sat down, slowly. There was a Plan B, of course — Carter knew she couldn’t always rely on Apollo being at her beck and call, so she had decided some time ago what to do if the battlecruiser wasn’t available. She would wait a short time for Palmer to work his magic on the subspace comms, but if Ellis continued to prove elusive, that secondary plan might have to be put into operation.