Something nagged at him, a moment in the past, before the creature in corridor nine had taken up all his thoughts. What had Apollo got, even now, that the Wraith did not?
A stream of energy bolts hosed past the bridge, lighting up the viewport as it lanced away into the water layer. Ellis saw it illuminate the jovian from the inside for a few seconds before it faded.
In the far distance, blue-white light fluttered and was gone. The storm.
“Sharpe, full evasive. Give it everything you’ve got. Meyers, what’s the status on that storm front?”
“About a five hundred kilometers dead ahead. We can avoid it now that we’ve got the thrusters fully online, though.”
“I don’t want to avoid it. Sharpe, get us in there.”
“Damn it,” muttered Sharpe, tapping frantically at her board. “I knew I should have gone home when I had the chance.”
“Sir?” Meyers turned to face him. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to tell you your business, but flying this ship into the storm is nothing less than suicide.” She grabbed at her console as Apollo slewed violently to port, one of Sharpe’s evasive maneuvers. “Without shields we’ll be a kite in a hurricane.”
“I appreciate your concern, Major. And believe me, I’m aware of the risks.”
The ship dropped several hundred meters. Energy bolts screeched overhead, audible in the jovian’s atmosphere. “Sir, I don’t understand.”
“Faraday,” Ellis told her. “Now give me the best course you can through that storm front. All we have to do is survive until the main drives fire up.”
Meyers went back to her console. Ellis wasn’t sure if she understood the reference, but right now it wasn’t necessary that she did. As long as she could fly Apollo into the storm without getting the ship torn apart between the convection cells, then they had a chance.
The storm was approaching fast, now: Ellis could see flashes of lightning ahead, a continuous series of sparks snapping between the ammonia sky and the hydrogen layer. Each of those sparks, tiny in the far darkness, was a hundred kilometers long. The energy contained in them made the Wraith blasts seem small, attenuated.
Ellis got up, went to stand by Meyers. “Where are the cruisers?”
She tapped out a command, and on his side of the console a screen flipped from data readout to a tactical view. The cruisers were still in formation behind Apollo; one slightly ahead, the others further back and to either side. Pulsing red indicators showed which were charging weapons and which were unleashing streams of lethal energy towards the battlecruiser. So far, their aim had been appalling, their sensors possibly confused by the conditions inside the jovian. Ellis was surprised by that, but relieved. The cruisers should have had an advantage, at least in terms of maneuverability. Despite their size, they were almost aerodynamic.
Lightning snapped down to Apollo’s starboard. Ellis felt the ship judder as the atmosphere around the bolt exploded with heat. They were in the outer edges of the storm, now, and the going was starting to get rough.
It was going to get rougher. “Hold onto something, people.”
“Sir?” Meyers didn’t look up from her board, but her voice was urgent. “Shields are coming online. Should I raise them?”
“No.” The Wraith would have their shields up. And with all this electricity flowing around, pouring more energy into the mix might not be the best idea.
The Replicator weapon, the one they had tried to kill Angelus with, had been mostly lightning. It had carved through Apollo’s shields without trying, but the damage had been minimal. And that, plus the biomechanical nature of the Wraith ships, was exactly what Ellis was betting on.
It was a sizeable gamble, he knew, maybe the biggest of his life. But what else could he have done? If he failed, if he died, at least it would be in a blaze of glory.
There were worse ways to fall.
Lightning lit the bridge again. It was close, close enough for a fork to lick Apollo’s hull. Again the ship rocked as the atmosphere around it roiled, and again as another bolt came close, and another… The shuddering was constant, as were Sharpe’s course corrections. She was flinging the ship around as hard as its structure would allow, following Meyers’ flightplan, adding violent evasive maneuvers of her own. So far she had avoided the worst of both the storm and the Wraith firepower, but it couldn’t last.
It didn’t. The next lightning bolt struck Apollo directly in the center of the upper hull.
The ship bucked. Ellis saw the lightning flash down, painfully bright, splashing out into a million coursing forks over the hull. For a few seconds Apollo was alive with sparks, the air in the bridge greasy with static, and then just as suddenly it was over.
One of the Wraith cruisers vanished from the tactical screen.
Ellis switched to a rear camera view, just in time to see the stricken vessel tumbling away, trailing fire and debris. The camera view dissolved in static for a moment as another lightning blast hit Apollo and coruscated over the hull, but when it came back one of the two remaining Wraith ships was climbing, fast, up into the ammonia layer and away.
The last ship accelerated, got close, and fired all its weapons at once.
In an instant the space around it was riddled with electricity. The plasma pouring from the Wraith ship was acting as a conduit for the lightning, focusing it straight into the heart of the vessel. Ellis saw it swell, split, break apart in a great cloud of fire that dropped back and down, gone in a final few seconds.
“Sharpe, take us up. Fast. We’ve been lucky so far, let’s not overplay our hand.”
The storm began to drop. Meyers let out a long sigh. “Sorry sir. Forgot my physics.”
“Sometimes there are advantages to being inside a metal hull.” Ellis went back to the command throne and slumped into it. “Do we have main drive yet?”
“In the next few seconds,” Sharpe reported.
“As soon as we clear the atmosphere, full thrust away from the Wraith fleet. At this range we should be able to outrun them until we can get the hyperdrive back, unless that last cruiser tries anything funny.”
If the Wraith had even made it out of the jovian, he thought tiredly. Its hull, comprised of the strange, biomechanical armor the Wraith used for all their vessels, would not have acted like Apollo’s trinium hull in the midst of the storm. The battecruiser, clad in metal, had acted like a Faraday cage, in just the way airliners in the skies of Earth were struck by lightning every day — the electricity had simply conducted around the ship. Certainly there had been some damage; scoring and blown systems due to static, plus the awful effects of the storm’s titan winds.
The Wraith ship, partially alive, could never have survived such a strike.
In front of Ellis, the clouds whipped away, thinned to nothing, and opened up into a black sky full of glittering stars. And he felt Apollo leap forwards, eager to be away.
Me too, he thought. So let’s go. Anywhere but here.
Chapter Eighteen
Resistance
Carter was on her way to the ZPM lab when Sheppard caught up with her. She had been walking fast, lost in her own racing thoughts, and had not heard him calling her. He had to put a hand on her shoulder before she noticed he was there.
The contact made her jump slightly. “Damn it, John. Don’t do that.”
“Sorry.” He was wearing a tactical vest over his uniform, and had a P90 cradled against his chest. All the city’s military personnel were on full combat alert, and most were armed and armored in the same way. “I was yelling from halfway back there.”
“Is something wrong?”