He didn’t immediately recognize the voice. “Get off the damn line, I’m busy.”
The board went dark. Sheppard gave the mental command to launch the drone, sent it hissing away from the craft. Instantly his mind opened to encompass it; in one version of himself he was hauling the jumper up and over the hybrid’s bulk, in another he was guiding the drone right towards it. There was no conflict involved, no effort. The Ancient gene he carried had attuned him to the technologies involved as completely and accurately as he was attuned to his own fingertips.
He spun the jumper around in a turn that made his chest ache, in time to see the drone strike the hybrid squarely in one leg. There was a sheet of flame, a globe of brilliant light expanding into a bubble of debris, and the leg sagged away. The material above and below the strike point was white-hot, glowing liquid like magma, and as it cooled into yellow it stretched, softened. The leg broke away, the clawed end of it striking the deck below, catching, so the entire severed limb stood, tilted, crashed down like a tree.
“Not bad,” he grinned. “Not too bad at all.”
The hybrid’s beam weapon seared up at him and hammered into the side of the jumper.
The machine slewed wildly sideways. Sheppard’s hands were ripped from the controls by the impact, and his seat spun, almost tipping him out. He dragged himself back to the controls in time to see the city core racing up to meet him, grabbed the yokes and hauled them back. The jumper leapt under him, climbed sickeningly fast. Something hit its belly, a deafening screech of metal on metal, and then he was in the air again and heading for the sky. He leveled off. “Okay then. Complacency in combat situations: not good.”
An incoming communication crackled through his speakers. “Sheppard, you cannot win this.”
It was the same voice as before, but this time he recognized it. “Go to hell, Angelus.”
“I am there already. In order to finish this, you need to join me.”
Sheppard didn’t answer. The hybrid was ahead of him again. It was in the city core, among the buildings. He slowed, looped the ship around. There was too much structure in the way. “Come on,” he found himself murmuring. “Incey wincey spider, get up that damned water spout…”
The beam lashed out again. It missed the jumper, but it was close; he felt the fizz of static from its passing, and the ship rocked under him. He increased speed, took the jumper a couple of kilometers out to sea, then around in a long, wave-skimming turn.
The hybrid was climbing the tower.
It was a hundred meters up, reaching out with one leg, spearing its clawed foot through the shell of the tower before doing the same with another. It would have been slow progress had each stride not been fifty meters long. Sheppard watched it grow in his viewport, marveling at the strength of the thing. It was one thing to drag itself across the pier with those titan limbs, quite another to haul itself vertically up a smooth surface.
Still, it was in the open now. He thought up another drone, launched the brilliant thing towards the hybrid’s body. If it fell from the tower, the buildings below would suffer terrible damage, but what else was there to do? He could only attack this armored nightmare, and keep on attacking it, until one or the other of them was no more.
The drone sliced through the air, completely on target. Sheppard smiled as he thought it through the last hundred meters, half a second…
The hybrid whipped a limb back, insect-quick, a car-sized piece of tower wall still impaled on the end of it. The speed was enough to fling the debris directly into the path of the drone. The explosion atomized the chunk of plating, washed the jumper in fire as the ship went right through it. Sheppard was battered back into his seat and then forward with massive force into the controls. He hauled the yokes back, a cry of fury ripping out of him.
Water sprayed up. He was out to sea, slicing the tops from waves. The jumper had a limited automatic pilot, he knew: either it had cut in at the last moment, or he was an even better flyer than he thought he was.
He turned the ship around again, but something was wrong. The controls were loose in his hands, the engine note wavering behind him. He checked the drones mentally and came back with no returns. The weapons were offline.
And the hybrid was most of the way up the tower. Almost at the level of the ZPM room.
If it used its beam weapon to cut into the tower, it could shut the city down in a second. Or strike a ZPM and send most of Atlantis into orbit in pieces no larger than a suitcase.
There was only one thing left to do, Sheppard realized. And the less time he had to think about it, the better.
He aimed the jumper at the hybrid, brought the engines up to maximum power, and locked the controls.
Maybe the creature simply didn’t believe what he was trying to do, or maybe it was so close to the source of power it craved that it had forgotten him in its lust. In either case, it didn’t try to defend itself. The jumper struck it between the upper joints of two legs, in its open flank.
The impact was gigantic. Sheppard’s last conscious memory was seeing the rear door of the jumper racing up towards him, a dreadful sense of tumbling, free-fall, and then all was noise and darkness.
“Sheppard?”
There were no words in him, no breath, no thought. He was still, and unable to be other than still.
“Sheppard?”
He couldn’t move to wave the voice away. It pained him in ways he could not describe, but all he could do was endure it.
“Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard.”
“G’way,” he mumbled. His mouth was full of something coppery and foul. He opened his aching jaw and let some of it fall out. He felt it splash warm on his chest.
Light filtered in through closed eyelids, and there was a rocking sensation. Somewhere above him, a deep, organic groan. The sound was massive, heavy, like a great boulder poised above his head. He didn’t like it at all.
“You have to open your eyes.”
He did. Doing so was an effort, and it hurt. And when he had them open, what they saw still made no sense.
He was looking at chaos; a twisted, mangled space of deranged complexity. Part of it close to his head was metal, some recognizable and some completely alien to him. Other parts were pulpy, fleshy, crimson and pulsing. There was as dreadful smell in the air, like the inside of a rotting carcass, and the space around him was hot and foully damp.
He tried to move, and found that he couldn’t. A mass of pulsing silver tubes was running over and around him, holding him against a wall of debris. As he watched they slowly retracted, slid away, and he fell, gently onto something that had once been a puddle jumper floor.
“Get up,” the voice said. “We don’t have much time.”
“Until what?”
“Until the hybrid wakes up.”
He knew the voice, now. “Angelus, you are the goddamn hybrid.” He looked around, still trying to make sense of the cramped space around him. “Okay, I’ll bite. Where am I?”
“Partly inside the hybrid. Partly in the crater it made in the southwest pier when it landed. Partly in the remains of your ship. John Sheppard, I commend your bravery, but not your common sense. Did you really think that a simple mechanical impact would destroy this creature?”
“It always works in the movies.”
“As Colonel Carter said to another man recently, this is not a movie. Sheppard, you have only stunned the creature. I was able to take back some measure of control when your ship struck it, and managed to cushion your fall. And I can talk to you now. But this situation is not one that will last once the hybrid regains control of its core functions. When that occurs, the space you are in will collapse, you will die and then everyone in the city will die soon after that.”