“So you don’t know exactly what he’s been up to either?”
“Not precisely, no. But he’s up in the control room, I know that. Hopefully he can fill us in when we get there.”
“Hopefully?” Sheppard gave her a wry smile. “Do you actually think he’d be able to resist?”
Carter could not have been out of action for more than thirty minutes or so, but it had been a busy half hour for John Sheppard. Ever since McKay had destroyed the Fallon replica, the hybrid had been reacting with a new ferocity. Although he would not admit it, Sheppard had found himself honestly believing that the creature was now on the verge of overwhelming all human efforts to resist it.
The loss of the Fallon-thing must have alerted it to the fact that it was in real danger. Sheppard wasn’t certain how McKay had done what he had — he had been in the ZPM lab when the scientist had run out with his PDA, yelling cryptic technobabble about antiphase pulses and immune systems — but whatever he had done had been at least as effective as the APE on Chunky Monkey. In response, the hybrid had doubled its efforts.
Zelenka’s seismic detectors had gone berserk; the thing in the lockdown zone had started to thrash with rage, its hammerings tripling in frequency and strength. The marines stationed at the blast doors had reported terrible sounds from within; shrieks and bellows the likes of which they had never heard before or wished to again. Two technicians observing from a higher structure had been studying the zone with binoculars, but after the increase in activity they had left their posts and refused to look back into that nightmare place again. Neither would discuss what they had seen, and Sheppard had decided not to press the matter. There were some things he simply didn’t want to know.
There had been other reactions, too. Sheppard had been told of alterations to the structure of the city itself; in certain areas, the walls had started to blister, the blisters flowing together into strings as though roots were spreading behind the panels. A marine had been trapped between two sliding doors in a storage area, his arm crushed. Part of the ceiling in the hangar had opened and grown teeth.
And according to Zelenka, the fractal pattern of disturbance pervading the city’s systems had increased massively. The hybrid was unleashing every weapon in its arsenal in its efforts to turn Atlantis into more of itself. And from where Sheppard was standing, it was very likely to succeed.
When Sheppard and Carter got to the control room, McKay was already hard at work. Two of the consoles were open, their crystalline innards exposed, glowing with multicolored light. Palmer and Franklyn had been banished to the edges of the room, but from what Sheppard could see they were only too pleased to be away from their posts; dozens of cables had been plugged into the consoles and were snaking across the control room floor in a confusing tangle. Most of the cables were thin, fiber-optic lines for transferring data at high speeds, but there were some big power leads in the mix too.
It looked, at best, desperately unsafe.
As Sheppard stepped through the doorway McKay popped up from behind a cable. “Sam!” he smiled. “You’re okay!”
“More or less. Rodney, what the hell?”
“Give me a minute.” He raised a hand to his headset. “Zelenaka, how’s the water? Warm?”
Carter gave Sheppard a look, and mouthed water? at him. McKay caught it, and raised his hand a little higher. “Rolling boil. Oh lovely. I’ll get back to you.”
“It’s code, obviously,” he told them, once the connection was cut. He lifted a cable, checked a plug at the end and fitted it into the console. There was a spray of sparks. He jerked back on reflex, then studied the connection he’d made and nodded. “Mm-hm. Zelenka’s monitoring the hybrid’s interference pattern. I don’t have time to have people running about with messages, so we’re using a code instead.”
“Will that work?” Sheppard asked him. McKay shook his head.
“I very much doubt it. Its just what Eliz- Just what I’d expect.”
Carter was peering into a console, supporting herself on its open frame. “This is a patch into the communications network, right?”
“Among other things. Did Zelenka talk to you about this?”
“No-one’s talked to me about this.”
“Really?” McKay seemed surprised. “I thought someone would have filled you in.”
“No. I haven’t heard anything since Zelenka threw us out of the ZPM lab. Next thing I know, you’re stabbing Fallon with a PDA and he sort of…” She made a face. “Melted.”
“In fact, if I remember rightly,” said Sheppard, “it was Zelenka who said he knew how to fight this thing.”
“Hey hey hey…” McKay raised his hands. “Credit where it’s due, please. Okay, maybe Zelenka came up with the seeds of the idea, but do you see him up here risking his neck in a sea of high-energy re-routes? No, I didn’t think so.” He picked up another cable, a data-line this time, then picked his way through the mess to the other opened console. “It’s one thing to follow a medical analogy through. I’ll give him that, some of his imagery was useful…”
“Medical?” Carter tilted her head slightly, the way Sheppard had seen her do when she was working out some complex problem. “We were talking about smart diseases, the way the hybrid’s acting like a metastasizing tumor… Then he…” Her face lit up. “Oh, you’re kidding me…”
“The antiphase pulse was clustering around the protected systems as well as the edges of the lockdown zone. One of us was going to work it out eventually.”
“You’re just jealous he got there first,” Carter grinned.
“Sam?” Sheppard leaned towards her and lowered his voice. “Am I being especially dense here, or —?”
“No, no…” She got up from the console. “When the hybrid first shut itself into the lockdown zone we noticed there was something happening around the zone’s edges… I remember Palmer called it ‘functionality’. Basically a system no-one had seen working before had come online. Zelenka spotted it too, it was like a pattern that was interacting with the hybrid’s control attempts.”
“Is this to do with the systems it couldn’t get into, like the transporters?”
“That’s right. I’m guessing, but I think what Rodney’s saying is that the city has something like an immune system.”
“What, like antibodies? Against disease?”
McKay had gotten close enough to overhear. “It’s only a very rough analogy,” he said. “But yeah, when the city got infected it activated a set of new functions to stave off the infection. Read the hybrid’s pattern, created opposing systems and set them working. Tried to protect essential systems as long as it could, while fighting the disease.”
“Power’s an essential system.”
“Yeah, but power is the hybrid’s number one priority. That what it’s built to consume; or really, what its builds itself to consume. And anyways, the city’s immune system isn’t all that hot. It might have been built for something other than Replicator infiltration, I don’t know. But the hybrid was going to overwhelm it sooner or later.”
Sheppard heard a faint crackling sound from the cables near his feet, and stepped gingerly away from them. “So what’s this you’re doing now? Boosting the immune system?”
McKay nodded. “By a factor of about a thousand, yeah. Same principle as the APE.”
“I thought the APE was an EMP emitter.”
“So did I. That’s why it didn’t work when I tried to recreate it here: the EMP was a carrier wave for the antiphase pulse, not the pulse itself. If you hadn’t let Norris trash my lab I’d have gotten that from Laetor.”
Sheppard glared at him, but decided not to press the matter further. The crackling was getting louder. “Should we even be in here? Something sounds like it’s going to catch fire.”
McKay was about to answer when there was another loud crackle from the floor, and almost immediately another one directly above. Sheppard looked up.