“Why the gate?” asked Sheppard. “It’s not trying to go anywhere, is it?”
Zelenka shrugged. “The gate has direct power connections to the ZPMs. Maybe it’s trying to get a better source of energy.”
Carter leaned closer to the monitor. “It’s only a few levels away. Why not try to go for the ZPMs directly?”
“I’m not sure.” He sat back. “There are a number of systems it hasn’t gotten into yet, and I don’t know why. I have a theory… McKay shot it down in flames, of course, and he might be right. But there do seem to be some essential elements of the city’s function that I would have expected the hybrid to take over first. Now that its out in the open, why not shut down the transporters? Poison the air or the water?”
“It wants us alive, maybe?” Sheppard stepped closer, peering at the map. “Maybe we taste better fresh.”
“What’s your theory?” Carter asked. “Forget McKay — what do you think?”
“I think it’s possible there’s a connection between the unaffected systems and the unknown functionality we’ve been seeing. There’s a signal component to the activity that seems to be in antiphase to the hybrid’s pattern…” He sighed. “I’m sorry, I don’t have much more than that.”
Carter gave him a smile. “Don’t worry. It’s certainly worth looking into. In the meantime, this biometric data is a godsend. If we can use it to track the hybrid elements…” She squinted at the map. “Can it show us the replicas?”
“It’s not quite tuned that finely yet, but I’m working on it. Oh, and there’s one more thing. The seismic detectors are showing even heavier vibration in the lockdown zone. It’s still hammering away in there.”
“That’s so odd.” Carter looked over her shoulder at Sheppard. “Building something?”
“Doesn’t seem like the constructive type. If I had to lay money down, I’d say it was probably ripping the pier apart and eating it piece by piece.”
“That makes a depressing kind of sense, actually.” Carter straightened up. “Although I still don’t get why it’s obsessed with increasing its mass when what it’s short of is power.”
“Fat guys don’t stop eating. It’s kind of a vicious circle, I guess.”
“Actually, it’s a little more than that.” McKay walked into the room, a laptop under his arm. “Hey everyone. Did I miss anything?”
Carter pointed at the workstation. “Zelenka’s found out how to track the hybrid.”
“Really?” McKay gave the screen a cursory glance. “Yeah. That’s, ah, really interesting.” He put the laptop down and flipped it open. “Anyways,” he went on, bringing the machine off hibernation. “The hybrid’s mass. The bigger it gets, the more of its own power it can generate. It’s working towards a point where it’ll be self-sustaining.”
Zelenka looked up at him, blinking. “How did you find that out?”
“Oh, you know. A little applied science, a little raw genius.” He brought up a graphic on the laptop screen. “Here you go. I’ve been analyzing those sections we saved, you know, from the hangar? And the mass to power ratio has got a definite curve. Extrapolating, I can tell within a fairly thin margin when it will have reached a big enough mass to not be hungry any more.”
“That’s great,” said Carter. “Maybe, if we just find the thing enough to eat, it’ll get full.”
“Okay, two problems with that,” McKay told her. “Firstly, there’s no guarantee that it will stop — just that it will be self-sustaining and no longer tied down to draining power from the grid. And secondly, I don’t think we’ll be able to find it enough to eat.”
“Why, how much will it need?”
“About half the city.”
Carter sagged. “Damn. I thought we actually had a piece of good news.”
“Yeah, sorry about that.” McKay rubbed the back of his neck. “Ouch. That thing you fired in the hangar… I tell you, ever since that, my neck’s been killing me.”
“You were pretty close to it,” said Zelenka, not unkindly. “Maybe you sprained some muscles when you landed.”
“I was in the air?”
“Oh yes. I watched you.”
“Wow. I thought that was just an out of body experience.” He looked around at Carter. “And what was with all that water, anyway?”
“Confined-space version,” she told him, rather impatiently. “There’s a saltwater countermass to dampen the backblast. Rodney —”
“‘Dampen’ being the operative word.”
“Hey,” said Sheppard. “At least you weren’t on fire.”
“Okay guys, come on.” Carter folded her arms. “Focus. Rodney, are we any further on the APE?”
His gaze dipped. “Not so much. Without the data we got from Laetor I’m kind of groping in the dark. I’ve not been able to tune a pulse that has any effect on the hybrid. Not the pieces of it I’ve got in the lab, anyway.”
“Radek?”
“There’s no immediate way to deform the shield, not with the hybrid’s pattern interfering with the power grid. Sorry.”
Carter suppressed the urge to swear. “John?”
“I’ve got nothing.”
“Great.” She raised her hands to her face, cupped them over her eyes to block out the world for a moment. The respite was welcome, but momentary. “So we’ve got a giant tumor in the west pier that’s not going to stop before it’s eaten half the city, a bunch of zombie clones of Atlantis personnel that we have no way to track, carnivorous biomass in the crawlspaces under the gate room and who-knows-where else, and Rodney’s got a bad neck. Anything else?”
There was a long silence. Finally, Sheppard said: “I think that covers it.”
For a moment, just a heartbeat, Carter almost lost control. A wave of anger and despair hovered over her, like the crest of some dark breaker about to surrender to its own mass and slam down on her, sluicing her away.
It didn’t last long. Carter had never been a woman to give in to such feelings, even when all hope was gone. But the temptation to rage and howl and quite possibly pick up the laptop and shatter it over Rodney McKay’s head was a very real one.
Embrace despair, someone had once told her. Turn it into anger. Use anger as energy.
“Okay,” she said, her voice very calm. She pulled a seat out from under the workstation bench and sat down. “If what we’ve been working on so far has gotten us flat nothing, what else can we work on?” She glanced up at McKay. “How do you cure a smart disease?”
“Maybe you should be talking to Keller.”
“Could be…” She frowned, thinking hard. “The tumor’s metastasized. It’s spread to other areas of the city, set up new infections there… It’s acting just like a cancer, but a cancer that knows all about us. How does it know so much?”
“I think that’s pretty obvious,” said McKay, his voice low.
“Rodney,” replied Sheppard, a note of warning in his voice. “Don’t go there.”
McKay rounded on him. “What, you think you’re going to make it not true by not saying it?”
“It doesn’t need to be said!”
“There’s no way she could have kept anything back!” He slammed the laptop screen down in sudden anger. “John, you know as well as I do that they had everything as soon as Oberoth stuck his damned hand into her head!”
“Shut up!” Zelenka had jumped to his feet. “All of you! Just be quiet!”
“He’s right, “ Carter began. “There’s no need —”
“No, you too.” Zelenka had a wild look in his eye, but it wasn’t anger. “I’m sorry, Colonel, but I need everyone not to be talking right now. In fact, it might be best if you and Colonel Sheppard had something else to do.”
“You’re throwing us out?”
“Yes. Rodney, you have to stay. We’ve got a lot of work to do. Everyone else…” He pointed to the two other techs in the room. They were staring at him incredulously. “No, you stay too.”
Carter stood up. “Radek, what’s going on?”
“I think I know how you cure a smart disease,” he told her. Then he waved at the door. “I’m really, really sorry, and you can fire me later if you like. But for now, go.”
Carter had a lot to think about on the way back up to the control room, and she wasn’t disturbed in her thoughts. Although Sheppard accompanied her, he wasn’t saying anything.