She leaned a little closer to him. “Could it work?” she asked quietly. “Honest answer, Rodney. If what we’ve got here is the same as what you found in the Replicator facility, could the APE kill it?”
“Honest answer?”
“Please.”
“I don’t know.”
She sagged. “Okay. Guess there’s no way you could.”
For a moment, he could see, the pressure had almost gotten to her there. And McKay realized, in that instant, why the thought of his time with Angelus was making him sick. It wasn’t that he could have been killed by the hybrid at any time, if Angelus was indeed the Replicator’s feared chimera. It wasn’t that the physics he had been so engrossed in, so seduced by, had been stolen from him again.
It was because he had let everyone down.
He had been closer than anyone to the Ancient, and hadn’t noticed anything amiss. If he’d seen something earlier, he could have warned them. People might not have died.
But he had been so in love with the science that he hadn’t even spotted the fact he was working with a monster.
“Sam? Let me go through what I’ve gotten from Laetor. If the APE is in there, I can build it for you, I swear to God.”
I won’t let you down again, he thought. Although he could never bring himself to say it out loud.
The contents of Laetor’s head, in terms of nanite code, were immense. The laptop’s storage, even with the massive increase it had gained by McKay’s installation of an Ancient data crystal, was filled with a solid mass of supercompressed data. Each fragment of code had to be extracted from that mass, run through a decompression routine to expand it back to its original size, recombined with all the nearby fragments in order to form viable blocks of data and then finally sent through a series of translation protocols to turn the data from pure nanite code to something readable by human beings. It was a mammoth task, and if McKay hadn’t set all his routines up to be extremely selective in what they extracted and expanded, one that could easily have taken years.
There was, however, just one area of information that the programs were interested in. They still vomited out terabytes of data, but at least it was a manageable amount. Before too long McKay was able to start filtering it by relevance to the hybrid.
The rest of the information, that which didn’t have any direct relevance to Laetor’s experiences on Chunky Monkey, would have to stay in storage for now. McKay hoped that, once this present crisis was over, he would be able to return to it and add it to the Atlantis database. One could never know too much about an enemy, and certainly not one as dangerous and implacable as the Asurans.
He was alone in the lab when he first found something helpful. Zelenka had finished his run of simulations, and had gone to find Carter and give her the results. From the look on his face when he left, they hadn’t been entirely what he was hoping.
What McKay had started seeing wasn’t exactly what he had been looking for, either. In the data blocks he was first able to read there was little or no mention of the APE, and nothing at all in the way of specifications for it.
What he did find, however, were some very interesting facts about the hybrid itself.
Interesting enough to have him running out of the lab, so fast that he collided with a junior technician on the way in. The tech had a mug of coffee in her hand, no doubt trying to stay alert after a long night’s work. The coffee wasn’t as hot as it might have been — presumably the tech had carried it all the way down from the mess hall — but it still made McKay yelp as it soaked through his shirt.
“Ow! Son of a —” He stepped back, batting at himself. “Ooh, hot… What the hell are you doing?”
“I’m sorry, doctor,” the woman stammered. “I was just —”
“What? Just what? You know I’m scalded, don’t you?” She was looking at him in utter horror, and seeing that, he relented slightly. There could be no-one in the city who wasn’t on an edge of tension at the moment, even though the exact details of what had been occurring hadn’t been completely disclosed. “Screw it, just forget it, okay? Look where you’re going from now on, yeah?”
She nodded.
McKay started away, then paused. “Were you looking for me?”
“No doctor. I was just going in to use my workstation.”
“Really?” McKay blinked. “You’ve worked in here?”
“Yes.”
“While I’ve been here?”
“Yes.” Maybe she saw that he was looking bewildered, because she said: “It’s all right, doctor. I don’t think we’ve ever spoken.”
“Oh, okay then…” He gestured vaguely upwards. “I’ve got to, uh… Upstairs. Control room.”
She gave him a shy smile. “Do you want me to lock up when I’m done?”
“No, no. I’ll be right back.” The woman was quite attractive. Had he really not noticed her before? “Sorry, what did you say your name was?”
“Solomon. Gina Solomon.”
“Well, pleased to, er…” He waved her into the lab. “Carry on.”
With that, he carried on, more slowly now, and rather lost in thought. He stayed that way until he got up to the control room.
There was a marine stationed at the entrance, standing at ease to one side of the door. He nodded to McKay as he came in. McKay returned the greeting on reflex, then paused. “What, we need guards on this place now?”
“I’m sorry? Oh, no doctor. I’m a message runner.”
“Oh, I see! I thought things had gotten worse.” He glanced past the man, into the control room, but he couldn’t see anyone there but the usual technicians. “Ah, is Colonel Carter around?”
“Out on the balcony.”
“Thanks.” McKay left him there, crossed the control room and opened the balcony doors.
Carter was there, near the rail, looking up into the sky with a pair of binoculars. Zelenka was there too, standing nearer to the wall, and Sheppard was right up against the rail, looking upwards with a hand cupped over his eyes.
“Hey,” McKay said warily. “What are you looking at?”
“Major Lorne,” Sheppard replied.
“Up there?”
“He’s in a jumper,” said Carter. “Doing a flypast of the lockdown zone.”
“Oh, I see…” McKay looked up, but couldn’t see anything. “Observation, or target acquisition?”
“Bit of both.” Sheppard pointed. “There he is!”
McKay joined him at the rail, and followed the line of his finger. As he did so a metal splinter raced up from his far right, catching the sun as it skimmed low over the west pier. “He’s moving fast.”
“He started off slower,” said Zelenka, sounding unhappy. “Something reached up and tried to grab him.”
“Holy…” McKay turned his attention to the pier itself, shielding his eyes from the high sun. For a few moments he saw nothing, but then, between two structures, something moved convulsively. “Okay, that’s nasty.”
“Third pass,” Carter muttered. “He should be coming in now. Hi Rodney.”
The jumper sizzled past again. “Okay,” said Sheppard, with an edge to his voice. “Fourth pass.”
“He’s probably, you know, just being thorough.” McKay turned away from the view. “Look, guys? I’ve managed to translate some of Laetor’s head. You might want to hear this.”
Zelenka looked puzzled. “Laetor?”
“The zombie Replicator we interrogated on Chunky Monkey. Didn’t I tell you his name?”
“You don’t tell me anything.”
“Yeah, well.” McKay waved him away. “The important thing is, I think I know what we’re dealing with here. The hybrid.”
Carter lowered her binoculars and turned to him. “Go on.”
“It’s a weapon,” he said proudly.
There was a few moments when no-one spoke. Then Sheppard said: “We know.”
“You do?”
“Er, that’s what Laetor called it, remember?”
“What? Oh, that!” McKay shook his head. “No, I mean now I really know.”