“Aw crap,” he muttered.
The ceiling above his head was deforming slowly, a series of welts rising in the metal to form a long, branching track. It looked as though something was growing there, roots or veins, splitting and dividing and inching forwards to form a slow, inexorable network above their heads.
“The hybrid,” said Carter quietly. “It’s infiltrating the control room.”
McKay had a hand to his headset. “Ah, Radek? Just a point, but how’s the water in my immediate vicinity, hm? Warm yet? Oh, hissing and spitting. Thank you so much.” He looked up at Sheppard. “We’re in trouble,” he said.
“Is that more trouble than a minute ago?”
Behind him, down in the gate room, there was a grinding noise, a deep, gritty scraping. Sheppard ran onto the internal balcony and looked down in time to see a section of the floor bounce up, as though something massive had slammed into it from below. A moment later, that section of floor began to deform too. “Rodney, maybe you could speed things up a little here?”
“Yeah, I’ve not exactly been taking my time on this, you know!” Sheppard saw him look up from his console, hands filled with cables. “What’s happening?”
“Let’s just say you’ve got its undivided attention!”
He looked back. McKay was frantically plugging cables together, and Carter was taking calls on her headset. He couldn’t hear what she was saying, but from her movements and the tone of her voice he guessed she was taking multiple reports.
The root-like deformations were on the outside of the control room now; Sheppard saw one accelerating along the frame of one of the big windows, spreading out to cover the metal surface. A second later the window transparency itself shivered and split, detonating an instant later in a shower of razored shards. He ducked away as they crashed down past him, onto the gate room floor.
Something down there, beneath the balcony, was issuing a thin, whistling scream.
“Damn it.” He marched back into the control room. “We haven’t got long.”
“It’s all over the city,” Carter told him. “I think it’s breaking through the immune system.”
“So we’re too late?”
“Don’t panic,” muttered McKay. “I’m already panicking, so more panic would not be good. There.” He snapped two final cables together, then scampered across the control room to the center console. He lifted something up, a small slab of metal connected to several thin cables. A PDA, Sheppard saw.
“Is that it? Are you ready?”
“Yeah.” McKay frowned at the PDA. “You know, for something this momentous, you’d think there’d be a bigger switch.”
“Rodney, just for once, will you please take your ego out of gear and do this thing?”
“Fine, fine. Kill the moment.” He tapped the PDA screen with a fingertip.
Sheppard felt something pass through him, up through his boots and down through the top of his head. It wasn’t like the APE going off — that had been a surge of raw electromagnetic power. This was different, somehow more subtle but at the same time far more unpleasant. It sang over his nerves, through his bones. He felt it in his teeth, the backs of his eye sockets, down his spine, in his fingernails. It crawled through his hair like a nest of ants, made the fillings in his teeth shiver. It was horrible.
“God almighty,” he yelled, cringing. “What is that?”
McKay had his eyes closed, his face screwed up. “The antiphase,” he answered through gritted teeth. “Broadcasting…”
Out in the gate room, the thing under the balcony was shrieking. Sheppard staggered out, leaned over the rail. As he touched the metal he felt static electricity bite him, crawling pains eating into his fingertips. He ignored it, searching for the source of the screams.
Below him, something lurched into view, shedding parts of itself as it stumbled towards the Stargate. It was impossible to tell what it might have once looked like; now it was sagging apart as he watched, dripping gouts of liquescent flesh and metal, sloughing down into a droozing pile that shuddered once, tried to rise, and then collapsed. When it hit the floor, crimson slime spattered a meter out from it in every direction.
A thin reek rose from it, rot and vomit.
Sheppard backed off in disgust. The deformations in the control room ceiling were crumpling in on themselves, some sections smoothing back out, others dripping like mercury, leaving open scars in the metal.
The hybrid was dying. McKay’s signal, rippling out through the city on a wave of energy, was attacking it like a human immune system attacks a disease. Where before the antiphase pulse only had the strength to keep the hybrid’s infiltrations from attacking the most vital systems, now it had been copied and turned into data and broadcast in a massively amplified form. It was killing the hybrid just like the APE had killed the hybridized Replicators on Chunky Monkey, but without the destructive electro-magnetic pulse. Atlantis had the immune system built-in. It was designed to carry it.
The physical effects of the signal were lessening now, Sheppard realized. Either that, or he was becoming inured to them. He went back into the control room, trying not to touch any metal. “I think it’s working,” he said. His mouth still felt like it was full of tinfoil, but it was nothing he couldn’t deal with for now. “How long do you need to keep it going for?”
McKay shook his head. “I have no idea. The smaller sections of hybrid will be dead pretty soon, but I’m not sure how much of this the main part will need. I’ll have to call Zelenka, see if he can get —” he broke off, suddenly, looking over Sheppard’s shoulder.
Sheppard turned. Zelenka was there behind him, totally out of breath. He looked like he’d just run the six flights of stairs from the ZPM lab.
“What the hell?” McKay scowled, putting the PDA carefully down onto the console. “Why aren’t you monitoring the hybrid?”
Zelenka didn’t speak for a few seconds, just stood holding onto the doorframe and gulping air. Finally he pointed at the doors to the external balcony. “Problem,” he gasped.
“What do you mean, problem? It’s working.”
“Seismic,” said Zelenka, quite white. “Something’s wrong…”
Sheppard ran for the balcony doors. As they hissed open he went straight for the rail, looking out towards the west pier. He was groping for the folding binoculars in his tacvest when he realized he didn’t need them. The problem, as Zelenka had so succinctly called it, was perfectly visible from where he was standing.
The lockdown zone was in turmoil. There were clouds of dust rising from it, so big they were easily definable from two kilometers away. Sheppard could hear distant crashing noises from within, howls and roars, softened by the distance but still horrifying. As he watched, a chunk of debris whickered out from the dust clouds, high into the air, catching the light for a second before it topped its arc and fell end over end into the sea.
The sound of its splash reached him a second after he saw it.
McKay was next to him, hands clamped tight onto the rail. “Is it dying?”
“I don’t think so…” Sheppard cupped a hand over his eyes. The sun was high, and coming from the relative gloom of the control room had made sparks swim his vision. There was something happening past the dust and the debris, but he couldn’t make it out. He took the binocs out of his vest anyway, flipped them open and focused on the lockdown zone.
For a moment, he still saw nothing but clouds. Then a great form rose from behind the dust, unfolded, slammed down out of sight.
“Whoah,” he whispered. Whatever that object had been, it was big, truck-sized. And fast. Debris had flashed up from its impact with the pier.
“What can you see?” said Carter. “John?”
The dust was clearing. Behind it Sheppard caught an unidentifiable darkness, like a great shadow… Then his perspective shifted, and he was looking into a hole. Almost the entire upper surface of the lockdown zone was gone, collapsed inwards and open to the sky.