He followed her, plainly puzzled. “Colonel?”
“Sorry. I didn’t want to say this in there, not yet.” She walked up to the rail and leaned on it, looking down to the smooth, raised floor of the gate room. “Radek, how much explosive force would we need to blow off the west pier?”
There was a moment of pure silence. Then: “I’m sorry?”
“Look, I know that sounds extreme. It’s a worse-case scenario, but right now I’m having trouble thinking of anything else. I wasn’t kidding when I called that thing a tumor — this city has a malignant cancer, eating away at us from inside the lockdown zone. It’s infiltrated our vital systems to feed itself, it can defend itself against us, and it’s growing. We don’t have much time left.”
“So, to continue the medical analogy, you’re talking about amputation.”
“I guess I am.”
He puffed out a long breath. “Well… Back when we thought the Wraith were going to take the city, I modeled the effect of the self-destruct system on Atlantis. That broke the whole city into pieces, though…” He rubbed his chin, deep in thought. “Seriously, I don’t think you could remove a pier with anything less that ten kilotons.”
“Seriously?” Ten kilotons would only be a little less explosive force than that of the Hiroshima bomb. Letting something the size of Little Boy off inside the city wasn’t something she wanted to do. “That would wipe us out.”
“Almost certainly. The piers are tough, you see… Atlantis is constructed of fantastically strong alloys. It has to be, to hold together in flight. If they were made from conventional materials, all the piers would still be on Lantea. They’d never have survived the takeoff stress.”
“Damn,” she said. “Could we shrink the shield? Activate it, but draw it in until it covers the city core and leaves the piers exposed?”
“It’s possible. The last time that happened was when we left Lantea, an automatic response to the power drain. I suppose we could try to contract it intentionally this time.” He put his hands into his jacket pockets, looking uncomfortable to even having the conversation. “But Colonel, what are you going to use as a bomb?”
“Drones,” she said. “A massed drone launch, take them straight up and then right down onto the pier. If we hit it hard enough, we could sever the entire structure.”
“You know, I’d never thought about using drones against ourselves before.” His eyes were a little wide, but she could tell he was mulling it over. “Perhaps you wouldn’t even need to remove the whole pier. If you launched enough drones, aimed them right at the lockdown zone… With the shield to protect the city core, we could cut structural loss down to no more than six, seven percent of the city.”
“That’s great!” smiled Carter. Then the smile fell away. “Oh my God, what am I saying? That’s not great at all… I’ve been in Atlantis three weeks and already I’m going to blow six percent of it apart…”
There was a movement behind her. She looked back and saw Palmer there. “Colonel? Something’s happening. We’ve got an incoming wormhole.”
“What? Have you got an IDC?”
“It’s a jumper.”
As he spoke, the gate activated.
There was a hissing, a liquid metallic growl that filled the gate room. A ring of glittering quantum foam appeared at the inside edge of the gate, whirled inwards to form a membrane that erupted out into the gate-room, a billowing horizontal splash. The splash paused, then recoiled, dragged by its own field stresses into a vertical mirror, a rippling plane of tension a billionth of a millimeter thick and untold light-years long. The event horizon.
The gate was open. A few seconds later the angled nose of a puddle jumper split the mirror.
The jumper decelerated smoothly, coming to a halt in the middle of the gate room. Behind it, the event horizon lost cohesion and spun away to nothing, the gate suddenly a dark, empty ring once more. Carter caught a glimpse of John Sheppard through the jumper’s viewport just before the ceiling irised open and the craft fled upwards and out of sight.
“Radek,” Carter said bleakly. “What am I going to tell them?”
“Everything,” he said. “And as quickly as you can. Like you said, we don’t have much time left.”
Chapter Sixteen
Phage
Rodney McKay felt thoroughly sick.
His nausea wasn’t the result of the unending smell of Chunky Monkey’s algae-laden rain, although the quick shower he had taken had done little to get the reek of the stuff out of his clothes and skin. Surprisingly, it also had little to do with the thought of what was lurking out on the west pier, in the center of what people were calling the lockdown zone. The thought of that was terrifying, certainly, and McKay wouldn’t argue that there was a queasy sense of violation in the thought of something so cancerous, so vigorously alive insinuating itself into the city’s structure. But no, what really had his stomach roiling was the two days he had spent in the center of that enclosed, diseased area, working on what he had thought of as the cutting edge of high energy physics.
Setting up to translate the nanite code he had downloaded from Laetor helped him forget that, for periods of several minutes at a time. But every now and then, while he worked, some train of thought would lead his mind back to that time, and a wash of nausea would sweep over him and leave him in a cold sweat.
It was only a matter of time, of course, before Zelenka saw it happen. “Rodney?”
“What?”
“Is everything all right? You don’t look so good.”
He waved Zelenka away. “I’m fine. Just keep… Doing whatever it is you’re doing.”
“What I’m doing is monitoring the unknown functionality around the lockdown zone,” Zelenka snapped. “For your information, while you were out doing whatever it was you were doing I’ve located a series of antiphase pulses that —”
“Yeah, yeah.” McKay swallowed hard a couple of times. The server he was setting up for the nanite code was almost complete; the stack of high-capacity drives installed, the decompression and translation routines ready. His main concern now was with the output — normally he would have downloaded all the translated information to the Atlantis main servers for storage, then sorted through it by relevance later. But things were a lot more difficult now. Not only couldn’t he use a networked server for the raw nanite code, but he couldn’t even have the output go anywhere online either. There was the constant suspicion, now, that Angelus had hacked into the network and was watching the city’s data traffic. McKay couldn’t discuss important information over the communication system, and he couldn’t send important data, either. It was immensely restricting, having to work in whispers and mime.
He sat back, running his hands through his hair and clasping them at the back of his neck, trying to get some of the kinks out. Being cooped up in the puddle jumper for so long hadn’t done his spine any good at all.
Zelenka was still looking at him. “Dammit, what?”
“Are you ill? Maybe you should get Keller to check you out.”
“I’m not ill, okay? It’s just been a rough couple of days…” He glared at Zelenka. “What the hell are you looking at me like that for?”
Zelenka shrugged, and returned his attention to the program he was working on, an algorithm for restructuring the shield in case Carter went ahead with her plan to launch drones into the lockdown zone. “I don’t know.”
“Yes you do! You think I’m one of those things, like you and Teyla saw.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to!”
“Would I be sitting here if I thought you were?” Zelenka didn’t take his eyes off the screen, just kept typing out his command strings. “I just asked if you were okay. You look a little…” He flicked a glance over at McKay. “Peaky.”
Yeah, well. You’d look peaky too if you’d —” He broke off and jerked upright, almost knocking his seat over. “Jesus, what was I doing down there?”