“I would have thought it was pretty obvious!”
“Would you just listen to me for a minute?” McKay waved a hand out towards the lockdown zone. “That is not what it’s supposed to be doing!”
“If we told it that,” ventured Zelenka, “would it stop?”
McKay gave him the sour eye, but didn’t answer him. “It’s a pet project of Oberoth’s. I’m guessing part of an instant arms race we kicked off when we screwed with the Asuran base code.”
Sheppard raised a hand. “Hold on, Oberoth directly?”
“Oh yeah, his name’s all over the code. Figuratively. Anyways, the original plan for the hybrid wasn’t that mess over there. What it’s supposed to do is make more Replicators.”
“That doesn’t make any sense at all,” said Zelenka.
McKay made an exasperated noise. “Of course it does! It makes perfect sense… Listen, the Ancients lost the war with the Wraith because they were outnumbered, yeah? So the Replicators design something they could, I dunno, get into a hive ship, or drop onto a populated world, whatever. It disguises itself, uses all kinds of ninja tricks to avoid getting caught, and quietly starts grabbing people and turning them into new hybrids. Two become four, four become eight… Wouldn’t be too long before the whole planet’s full of Replicators.”
“Replicators can’t reproduce like that,” said Zelenka.
“That’s why it needed to be a hybrid. Living tissue can be infectious — this thing isn’t part Replicator, part human. It’s part replicator, part disease.”
“My God,” breathed Carter. “That’s just…”
“I think the word you’re looking for,” Zelenka muttered, “is ‘disgusting’.”
“You defeat your enemy and increase your own forces at the same time.” Sheppard gave a low whistle. “Holy cow.”
“Yeah. Except it doesn’t work.”
“Seems to be doing okay to me.”
“What?” McKay nodded out to sea. “That? We know all about that! Sure, it’s got the upper hand at the moment, with all the ninja tricks it knows, but as a stealth weapon it’s blown its cover big time.”
“And you know why, don’t you,” smiled Carter. “C’mon, Rodney. You so want to tell us…”
“Ah, you know me so well,” he grinned. “As a matter of fact, I do. It’s hungry.”
He looked at the three of them, and was met by three blanks stares. “Oh, for goodness… The Replicators must have made an error in the design. Hugely underestimated how much power it would take to keep the nanites and living tissue functioning together. The hybrid works, but it’s energy-poor. It’s starving, in a way we can’t even comprehend. It’s mad with hunger — that’s what drove it beyond its programming.”
“And the Replicators found out what it was capable of,” Carter said, very quietly. “Once it went mad. They knew they couldn’t control it. They had to destroy it.”
“Hold on…” Sheppard had a hand at his headset, no doubt taking a call. McKay hoped it wasn’t anything important — even though the hybrid was insane with hunger, it was still startlingly intelligent. And not only that, it was imaginative, a complex function that that had probably evolved from the stealth techniques programmed into it by its creators.
This wasn’t just artificial intelligence, he thought. It was artificial cunning.
And that made the hybrid, in its present, imperfect form, even more dangerous. In order to satisfy its insatiable appetites the chimera could be capable of almost anything, the full range of action from stealth to huge and overt violence. It would hide in the shadows and strike like an assassin in the night, and in the next instant would unleash unimaginable fury and brutality right out in the open. It was unpredictable and ruthlessly efficient and completely terrifying.
No wonder the Replicators had sacrificed an entire starship to destroy it. The hybrid would consume anything, Asuran and Wraith and human alike. It had to.
“Lorne’s down safely,” Sheppard reported a moment later. “I’d better get in there and see what he’s got.”
“I’ll come with you,” said Carter. She walked across to the doors and waved them open. “Rodney, that was good work.”
“I thought so.”
“At least we know what we’re dealing with now…” Closer to him now, she sniffed. “Is that coffee on you?”
“Yeah, a tech threw it at me. I think it was a sign of affection.”
“Keep thinking that,” Zelenka told him, then turned to Carter. “Colonel, should I give up on the shield deformation? With what Rodney has discovered, surely the pulse emitter has got to be our best option.”
She shook her head as she went through into the control room. “No, keep on that. The more options we have the happier I’ll be.”
“We might still need to do both,” said Sheppard, looking grim. “The APE didn’t work for the Replicators, not all the way. It escaped.”
“At least part of it did.” McKay followed Carter through the doors. “But yeah, we might have to zap it more than once. Or…” He trailed off. Gina Solomon, the technician who had spilled her coffee on him, was standing at the entrance door. She waved to him nervously, as if to try and attract his attention without drawing any to herself.
McKay gave Zelenka a nudge. “’Keep thinking that’, huh?” he murmured, then strode over to her, smiling. “Doctor Solomon, what brings you up here?”
“I was trying to find you.” She glanced nervously around, and paled slightly as she saw Carter and Sheppard there. When she next spoke, her voice was very low. “Something’s happened.”
His smile dipped. “What kind of something?”
“Well, I was in the lab, where I met you? I set up what I needed to and left the program running, and then when I was coming out, another tech came in. He didn’t say anything, and I didn’t really look at him…”
Carter had obviously overheard, despite Solomon’s hushed voice. She walked quickly over to join them. “Is there a problem?”
“I’m not sure, Colonel.” Solomon was looking deeply uncomfortable. “I… I’d forgotten my mug, so I went back to get it. But the lab door was locked from inside.”
McKay’s stomach lurched. “Locked? Somebody locked themselves into my lab?”
She nodded miserably. “I think it might have been Doctor Norris.”
“Norris? But isn’t he… Oh no.” McKay put a hand over his face. “Oh no nononono!”
“Colonel Sheppard,” said Carter. “Get a squad down to Doctor McKay’s lab. Get that door open. Blow it off its rails if you have to.”
“On it.” He raced away. McKay almost went after him, then thought how futile it would be. “Damn it, Solomon,” he hissed. “Didn’t it occur to you that Doctor Norris might not exactly be himself right now?”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I didn’t —”
“Oh, this is perfect!” McKay snarled. “Everything we got from Laetor will be trashed by now…”
“Doctor, calm down,” Carter snapped. “It’s obvious we’ve got a change in situation here. Where’s Clarke?”
“Who?”
“The runner, he was just here.”
McKay glanced around. The marine he had seen on the way in was gone. “Maybe he had to use the bathroom or something.”
“I sure hope that’s it…” Carter suddenly dipped her head, putting a hand to her headset.
“That’s not a good sign,” McKay moaned, watching as she nodded and muttered her end of a terse conversation. “That’s not supposed to happen.”
Zelenka looked around, suddenly. “Do you hear sirens?”
McKay listened hard. Sure enough, from somewhere else in the tower, an alarm had begun to hoot mournfully. A moment later they were joined by chimes from one of the workstations, more musical but identical in pitch and rhythm.
One of the techs, Palmer, sprinted to the workstation screen, scanning its readouts. “Colonel?” he called. “Alert in the hangar — someone activated an alarm, and I’m also picking up weapons fire.”
“The ship,” groaned McKay. “Angelus’ ship… What, is he trying to fly out of here or something?”
Carter was already running past him. He followed her, with Zelenka on his heels. “Sam?”