And the hybrid was climbing out of it.
Sheppard lowed the binoculars. “We are so boned.”
Now he knew why the hybrid had been hammering, hidden in the lockdown zone; what it had been doing for these past days. It had been preparing for this very moment, building what it would need to protect itself should the puny, fleshy creatures infesting its new food source gather enough of their wits together to do it harm. It had built a body for itself, armored it, protected it, and set it clambering on massive, articulated limbs out of the lockdown zone and onto the pier.
Its shape was impossible to completely make out: it was shifting, protean, great panels of curved metal sliding over raw flesh, tendrils swarming from it, new segments erupting and old ones sucking back into the mass. There was something of a spider to it, or a great crab, but it was far more complex and far less elegant than that. Its legs rose out of sequence, reaching out to grind down into the metal surface of the pier so the whole vast weight of the hybrid could drag itself forwards. It was like a crippled thing on pistoning crutches. Despite its size, its power, there was a sickening, fetal vulnerability to it.
It was heading for the control tower.
Sheppard couldn’t help himself, even in the face of this nightmare. He turned to McKay. “Now look what you did!”
“What?” McKay gaped. “I didn’t know it was going to do that! How the hell could I know it was going to do that?”
“Well, now you’ve turned it into a giant spider and we’re all going to die.”
“John,” warned Carter. “Don’t tease him.” She turned to Zelenka. “Radek, can you confirm that the rest of the hybrid is gone?”
“I’ll run up the biometric sensor,” he replied, and vanished back into the control room.
Carter touched her headset. “This is Colonel Carter to all military personnel. We have a hostile lifeform on the west pier — trust me, you can’t miss it. Do not approach it closely, but hit it with everything you’ve got. I’d recommend AT-4s if they can be set up in time. Carter out.”
The hybrid was almost mid-way long the pier already. In spite of its bulk and the shambling way it dragged itself forwards, it was deceptively fast. Sheppard found himself trying to gauge how long it would take before it reached the tower. At the rate it was moving, he thought, not all that long.
A rattling sound rose over the city, distant and faint, but growing steadily louder. Gunfire.
The hybrid was still too far away to see the effects, if any, that the bullets were having. Most of the fire was invisible, but Sheppard saw a stream of tracer spring from a building partway along the pier. It was joined by another, and a third, far enough away for him to see the faint curve they made as gravity pulled them down.
Those must have been heavier weapons, he thought. M60s, emplacement-mounted to protect the city against air assault by Wraith darts. He could hear the difference in the tone of those weapons, the deeper rattle of their fire as opposed to the high, rapid stutter of smaller guns. The first people to open up on the hybrid had used P90s and sidearms.
As the tracer began to strike the hybrid’s flanks, it hesitated, as if waiting to see if any damage was inflicted. A moment later, though, it moved on. “It’s not working,” Sheppard breathed. “Got to get something bigger down there.”
“Give them time,” Carter replied.
As she spoke, something in the city flashed, and a trail of smoke reached out to touch one of the hybrid’s legs. There was a spark of yellow fire, a cloud of smoke whipped away by the wind. Fragments of debris spun away, arcing down like metal rain over the city. Another rocket lanced up, striking the main body of the thing. Two more.
The hybrid was being hit from all sides by machine gun fire and AT-4 missiles, but it still wasn’t slowing. Sheppard could see pocks of damage on it now, scorch-marks from rocket explosions, small fires burning on its armor. But the effect was minimal. “It’s too damn strong.”
“Something’s happening,” said McKay suddenly, pointing.
Sheppard followed his finger, and saw that a part of the hybrid’s forward body had opened up. An instant later, a thread of impossible brilliance connected the opening to a building that had been firing tracer rounds; the entire upper floor of it simply turned to fire, expanded, blasted apart in a shattering explosion of metal and glass. Sheppard heard the thump of it, felt the blast in his guts, watched burning pieces of debris carving tracks of smoke through the clear air.
The thread went out, vanished as abruptly as it had appeared. “Holy God,” Sheppard whispered. “Where did it learn to do that?”
“It knows everything the Replicators know,” groaned McKay. “It knows how to build beam weapons, everything.”
“Yeah,” spat Sheppard. “And we gave it a goddamn lab and all the time it needed, didn’t we?”
“I should have told Apollo to stay,” Carter whispered. “If I hadn’t sent them away we’d have 302s, railguns…”
“You couldn’t have known.”
“I should have done,” she replied, her voice dead. “I should have known.”
Sheppard couldn’t answer. She was in charge. This had happened on her watch. He knew there was no blame to be appointed here, but how could he tell her that? If he could not convince himself that he had not brought this on Atlantis by abandoning Elizabeth Weir to her fate, how could he comfort Carter in this dark hour?
There was no comfort to be had. He turned away, ran to the doors.
Carter called after him. “John? Where are you going?”
“Up,” he told her. And kept on running.
Chapter Twenty
Old Friends
After spending so long in the hyperspace-capable jumper on his way to and from Chunky Monkey, Sheppard had hoped not to be inside one of the machines for a while. Still, few of his hopes came to fruition these days; he was rapidly coming to terms with that.
And so, as he took a standard jumper up and out of the bay, he did not allow himself to hope.
In the time that he had taken to get there and take off, the hybrid had moved another few hundred meters. It had used its beam weapon again as well — another building was a raging inferno from the middle levels upwards. Seeing it, Sheppard cursed. Buildings could be repaired, he knew; at times, structures within Atlantis had been returned to pristine condition within startlingly short periods of time. But the lost lives horrified him. People were dying down there, in that great metal city, people he had spoken to, known, liked. In one single flare of energy, lives were being snuffed out.
As a soldier, death in battle was a fact he was intimately aware of. But he knew that it was not something he could ever fully accept. Human lives had their worth, he had decided long ago. And any one of them was worth more than the ravenous ambitions of the abomination stalking towards the city core beneath him.
He brought the jumper round in a long, swooping arc, testing his flight path above the hybrid. It grew in the forward viewport, the full awful shape of it spread out in front of him, then it whined away beneath him and out of sight. He wrenched the controls about, bringing the ship around for another pass.
His communications board lit up. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Sam, I’m going to drone this thing. It’s too close to the core to use drones from the launchers, but if I can come in low enough there shouldn’t be too much damage.”
There was a pause. He knew her instincts would be to order him back, but there was no point to that and she knew it. Besides, he was right. “I’ll send out some more ships.”
“Wait until I give this a try. I’d like to be the only thing in the sky at the moment.”
“Don’t take too long.”
The hybrid was almost in his sights again, the center of a web of tracer fire and rocket trails. He thought a drone into life, and as he did so the comms board lit up again. “Sheppard.”