“No more than usual. Where are you headed?”
“ZPM lab. Zelenka’s got some new data to show me. I think McKay’s down there too — he’s been in and out of there since Norris trashed his lab.”
“Yeah, he wasn’t happy about that. Said I’d ‘dawdled’.” He nodded down the corridor. “Shall we?”
“Sure.” She set off again, and he fell into step alongside her. “So, what’s the news?”
“Right now, nothing good. No-one’s seen Clarke. He’s officially AWOL.”
Clarke was the marine who had been working as a message runner from the control room. He had vanished at the same time the hybrid had launched its offensive. “So either something’s grabbed him, or…”
“He guarded Angelus for a while. Same as Kaplan and DeSalle.”
“Chances are he’s hybrid too, then. Who was he partnered with on that, Bowden?”
“Also missing.”
“Well, if he turns up and he still acts human, throw him in the brig. Tell him it’s for his own protection.”
The corridor branched; Carter headed for the nearest transporter. As she did the lights dipped noticeably, and Sheppard looked warily up at the ceiling. “Has that been getting worse?”
“Yeah. Whatever the hybrid’s up to, its definitely drawing more power.”
“Still hungry, eh?”
“Always, according to McKay.”
There was silence for a few meters. Then Sheppard said: “Sam… How are you doing?”
“I’m fine,” she smiled, slightly surprised to have been asked.
“Okay,” he replied. “I’ll try again. How are you doing? Really.”
She didn’t answer immediately. The question wasn’t an easy one to answer; ever since the hybrid had gone on the attack she’d barely had time to think. Organizing the city against the creature had been difficult enough when it was skulking in the lockdown zone. Now that it was active, the job was doubly hard.
So far, apart from the awful thing in the hangar, there had been no other violent attacks. But it was obvious the creature was testing her defenses. It was as if the thing was probing her; acting in a certain way to see what she would do, then changing tactics. Prodding her, testing her responses. Keeping her on edge.
After the hangar incident, and the destruction of McKay’s lab by the Norris replica, things had gone quiet for a short time. Then a report had come in from the medical lab, the one in which Angelus’ blood samples had mysteriously vanished — an element of the hybrid had been discovered there by some of the nursing staff. The lab had been sealed, but the thing inside had been crashing about, obviously trying to attract attention. It had been driven off without injury, thankfully, but the whole incident had resulted in considerable disruption to the running of the infirmary.
The missing blood, Carter guessed, had been nothing of the kind. Tiny fragments of the hybrid, they had crawled out of the sample tubes and gone on to assimilate part of the locker.
Since then there had been more sightings of replicas, isolated attacks, and several attempts to hack into vital systems. For some reason the hybrid hadn’t been able to disrupt the water supply, the transporter system or the ventilation network, despite having tried to do so on several occasions. It seemed, thankfully, that there were still parts of the city it hadn’t figured out yet.
Still, it was keeping Carter on her toes. At the moment she considered the situation a stalemate, but she had the uneasy feeling that it couldn’t last. She was being too reactive. Sooner or later, in the next day, the next hour or minute, the hybrid would make a new move and tip the balance.
That was how Carter was. Fearful, frantic, worried, overstretched. Angry and sickened. Violated and exhausted. Almost at the limits of her endurance, and completely unable to stop, to falter, to give in. To do so would be to hand Atlantis over to the hybrid, and there was simply no way she could do that. It was beyond her.
What to tell Sheppard, then?
“Really, I’m okay,” she said.
“Tired?”
“No, I’m so hopped up on coffee I can barely see straight.” She glanced sideways at him as they reached the transporter. “What about you?”
“Me? I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck. Why’d you ask?”
The transporter doors slid apart. Once the two of them were inside and the doors had closed again, Carter selected the nearest transport point to the ZPM lab, six levels down from the gate room. There was a brief flash, a fizzing sensation and a moment’s disorientation, and then the doors opened onto a different scene.
Carter stepped out. “By the way, did you get a look at Lorne’s flypast scans?”
Sheppard made a face. “Sure did. Apart from the ones with the scratch in one corner they were pretty… What’s the word I’m looking for?”
“Informative?” Carter suggested, heading into the ZPM lab.
There were few words to properly describe what the jumper’s flypast had revealed. Barring the first few images, which showed nothing awry and were quite obviously fake, the scans had shown an area of the city that was almost completely taken over the by the hybrid. Not only had the creature grown vast amounts of new flesh while it hid in the lockdown zone, it had also started to assimilate the structure of Atlantis itself. Parts of the pier had changed, become ridged and rippled and twisted into disturbing new formations, as if the chimera had learned the trick of manipulating the very stuff of the city.
The pictures that stuck in Carter’s mind, though, were the ones showing, however briefly, that while Lorne looked down on the hybrid from the air, something very like a vast, unblinking eye had been staring back up at him.
She looked quickly around the ZPM lab as she went in, but McKay was not in sight. Zelenka sat at a workstation, his back to her, and a couple of other technicians were busy at other parts of the lab.
He glanced around as she entered. “Ah, Colonel. Sorry, Colonels, plural. Any more developments?”
“Nothing that wouldn’t give you nightmares.” She moved next to him and sat down. Sheppard stayed behind them both, arms folded. Guarding as well as watching. “Where’s Rodney?”
“I’m not sure. He said there was something he needed to work on, but he wouldn’t tell me where. Maybe something to do with his new pets, I don’t know.”
Carter hid a grimace. Some of the pieces of hybrid McKay had salvaged after the hangar encounter had remained alive, and he was keeping them in an isolated lab under constant guard. She had reports of certain tests he had performed on them — she hesitated to use the word experiments — and while she could summon no sympathy for the hybrid or its works, the idea of McKay vivisecting squirming chunks of protean biomatter made her stomach roil.
She pushed the thought aside; there were more pressing matters at hand. “So what do you have for us?”
“Okay.” He tapped at his keyboard, bringing a map of the city up on the workstation monitor. “Firstly I’ve been able to verify the output of the biometric sensor. I thought the hybrid had hacked it, but I’ve run some sequence tests and I’m pretty sure it’s one of the systems it can’t get into yet.”
Carter felt the word ‘yet’ settle in her gut like a ball of cold stone. “What does that show us?”
“This.” Zelenka hit a key, and the map was overlaid with a series of crimson shapes. “I took some readings from one of McKay’s new friends and re-tuned the sensor. You can see the lockdown zone here — obviously, most of the activity is confined to that area. But we’ve also got incursions in the tower.” At the press of another control, the map turned, revealing itself to be a 3D model of the city. The virtual viewpoint zoomed in on the control tower, and as it drew close two red splotches appeared most of the way up. “This lower one hasn’t moved, but this one here has spread itself thin between the hangar ceiling and the gate room.”
“Damn,” Carter breathed. “I hadn’t realized it was still there… What do you think it’s doing?”
“Could be trying to hack into the control room systems. Maybe even the gate.”