“Not now!”
“Was that call you got about Angelus’ ship?”
She was clattering down the stairs to the next level, drawing her sidearm. “No. That was MacReady — he’s lost another two marines. Looks like one set of blast doors opened up and they got attacked before they could even call in.” She skated to a halt outside the doors to the hangar, waved her hand over the control. “The hybrid’s gone on the offensive. Something tipped it off.”
The doors opened onto utter chaos.
When McKay had last been here, the hangar had seemed cavernous, dark and quiet around the golden ship. Now it was an assault on the senses; the stuttering glare of muzzle-flashes, the deafening hammer of machine guns, the reek of blood and cordite. McKay yelled in shock at it, clapped his hands over his ears to shut out the din, squeezed his eyes shut to block out the sight. It was insane, hellish.
He felt someone grab him, pull him down into cover. It was Carter, he saw as he opened his eyes again, her pistol leveled, her head turned slightly away from the gunfire. He hadn’t even known that there had been guards stationed around the golden ship — from what he could see now, peeking over a tumbled crate, there had probably been about a dozen of them, armed with everything from conventional firearms to anti-Replicator guns. What formation they had taken around the starhopper he could only guess, because those still on their feet were now clustered at the long sides of the hangar, taking cover behind the piled equipment and stores that the ship had displaced.
They were firing almost continually at the starhopper, or what the hopper had now become. The noise was insane, an earsplitting racket of stuttering machine guns, the whining snarls of ARGs, the hooting of the alarm.
There were screams, too. Some of the screaming came from injured men. Most issued from the towering, writhing tangle in the center of the hangar.
The golden ship was gone. McKay could see elements of it in the mass — a fin here, the glossy globe of a viewport there — but even those last fragments were unraveling before his eyes. It was as if the entire vessel had turned to fluid, risen up into a great column of liquid metal veined with pulsing flesh, connecting floor and ceiling and lashing out in every direction with a thousand whipping, squirming tendrils.
The noise it made, that cacophony of whistling shrieks and metallic, bass bellows, was simply astonishing.
Carter was firing her pistol into the thing: McKay saw her empty the magazine, the slide locking back, the empty mag falling to the floor and another in its place before it struck. She opened fire again, squeezing off shot after shot, placing each one. She was testing the hybrid, McKay saw, not just firing randomly but planting each bullet in a different location, seeing if any of them had an effect.
Zelenka was just behind him. He shouted something, but McKay couldn’t hear him over the noise. He looked back. “What?”
“Up!” Zelenka pointed frantically. “It’s trying to go up!”
McKay turned, and saw that Zelenka was right: there was now less of the mass on the floor than there was spreading out over the ceiling. It was hauling itself upwards like an inverted tree, sending out thousands of pulsing metal roots that locked into the panels above and dragged it, hissing and howling, off the ground.
A marine ran forwards, dropped to one knee a few meters in front of the doorway. He had a weapon over one shoulder, some kind of rocket-launcher. He shouted a warning over his shoulder; behind him, marines covered their heads.
He never fired it. McKay saw the man correct his aim slightly, angling the launcher upwards, and then a limb of metal snapped down towards him. It coiled around him with insane speed, enveloping his chest and head before he could loose a cry, let alone a missile. The launcher tumbled from his grasp as he was whipped up into the air.
McKay saw the launcher fall, strobe-lit by weapons fire. Reflexively he went to grab it, desperate to stop the impact setting the missile off. But he was too far away; it skidded out of his grasp.
It hit the floor end-first, bounced, toppled. Swung back towards the doorway.
Carter snatched it up, dropped to one knee and fired it in a single action.
There was an almighty sound, so loud and so vast that it was almost beyond noise. McKay felt it like a punch over his entire body. It had him off his feet. The light, a blast of searing flame in the center of the hangar, lit up everything.
There was an instant of almost pure peace. For a fraction of a second McKay saw nothing but light, felt nothing but heat, heard nothing past the wall of silence in his ears. He was alone, gliding backwards. Nothing could touch him.
The floor came up and smashed into him rump-first, so hard his teeth snapped together. The air was full of smoke and water, and everything was on fire.
The hybrid had stopped screaming.
McKay, his vision blurring and clouded with spots, could just about make out what had happened to the chimera. Carter’s missile had struck it a third of the way down, blasting it entirely in two. There was a foaming, burning mess of it on the floor, leaping and convulsing in eerie silence, while the part on the ceiling was a gigantic inverted crater, ringed with ragged tendrils, shrinking in on itself as it retreated.
There were bits of it everywhere. Most of them, McKay saw to his horror, were still moving.
He scrambled to his feet. Oddly, he was soaked through; when the launcher had gone off a back-blast of hot brine had covered him from head to foot. There were small secondary fires on whatever tarpaulin hadn’t been saturated, and a couple of marines were batting out minor flames on their uniforms.
The smoke was clearing, slowly. McKay saw Zelenka getting up, his hair plastered to his head and his glasses knocked askew. Carter was curled up on the floor with her arms over her head.
McKay went over to her and helped her up. “Nice shot,” he said, his own voice dim in his ears.
“Did I get it?” She was blinking fiercely, trying to focus.
“Oh yeah.”
The hybrid was mostly gone, now. The part that had been on the ceiling was sucking itself up into whatever crawlspace existed between the hangar and the level above. The lower section, that which wasn’t scattered in chunks around the floor, was making a similar escape. The last of its tendrils, ridged like silvery worms, vanished out of sight as he watched.
There was something broken in its actions, though. It was running, not attacking. The explosion, while far from fatal, had done enough to drive the thing into full retreat.
It had left some objects behind, McKay noticed. Getting closer, he could see that at least one of the objects had been a marine, although it was hard to tell. But there was machinery too: something that looked like a stretched car engine married to a series of coils, twisted and scorched by the explosion. Other parts that were even less identifiable.
Zelenka was close by. “This looks like Replicator technology,” he said, pointing at the largest section. “A hyperdrive?”
“Maybe.” He rolled it over with his foot. “It was pretending to be a spaceship, but it still needed an engine. Must have stolen it from the Replicator landing party.”
He went back to Carter. She was tending to a wounded marine, tying a tourniquet around the ragged mess that had been his right leg. “Medics are coming,” she told him. “Just hold on.”
“Sam?”
“Rodney.” She glanced up from her work. “Are you okay?”
“What, apart from drowning?” He waved around at the mess. “Look, we need to collect some of these fragments. I can test them and use the data to get the pulse frequencies for the APE.”
“Sure. I’ll get a couple of guys on it.”
“Yeah…” He gazed around, at the chaos, the fires, the scattered chunks of hybrid and human. “I just thought of something else.”
“Let me guess. Something bad.”