Sheppard got to his feet. Every part of him hurt. “I don’t understand. Why are you even talking to me? Why don’t you just eat me and get on with chewing up the city?”
“That can be explained more easily if you step through the hole to your left. Between the jumper’s engine module and that section of flooring.”
Sheppard peered to his left. In the dim, ruddy light pervading the space, he could see an irregular patch of darkness. “If I don’t?”
“My fate is sealed in either case.”
Above him, the hybrid groaned again. Sheppard muttered a curse under his breath and clambered through the hole.
Beyond it was another space, no less jumbled. The floor here was steeply angled, part of the crumpled deck of the pier. The impact of the jumper must have knocked the hybrid a considerable distance, Sheppard realized. Not just down from the tower, but clear of the city core altogether. If he ever made it out of here, he decided, he would love to see film of that. He hoped a security camera had been pointed in that direction when the jumper hit.
There was something on the far wall of the space, moving fitfully. It was high up, and embedded in a wall of tangled debris and pulsing biomechanical organs. Sheppard peered at it, but couldn’t make out its shape in the meager light. He searched around in his tacvest pockets and found a small LED penlight. Luckily, it had survived the fall in better shape than he had.
In the bright beam of the light, Angelus looked down at him.
The false Ancient was far from the man he had once been. There was little more than a tattered remnant of him up in the wall; a curl of spine, a distorted cage of ribs, a few other sundries that shook and twitched among the wreckage. Most of the remnant’s frame was not bone, but glistening metal, the same bright, liquid silver of the hybrid’s internals, but there were a few shreds of Angelus’ face adhering to the nodding skull.
In the midst of the glitter, a single eye looked down at Sheppard, and the ragged frame of an arm moved in fitful greeting.
“I apologize for my appearance,” Angelus said, although the voice didn’t come from his ruin of a face. It issued from everywhere. Sheppard didn’t want to think about the mechanism that formed it. “I was almost completely absorbed. This is all that I’ve been able to reconstruct in the time I’ve had.”
“I’ve been in better shape myself.” Sheppard felt at his hip.
“Your sidearm is elsewhere,” the remnant said, a slight sigh in his voice. “I thought that removing it would save the time otherwise spent by you emptying it into my face.”
“Can’t blame me for wanting to.”
“Indeed, I cannot. I brought untold ruin to your door. But there is no time for recriminations. You have to destroy the hybrid.”
“Yeah, you know what? I’d love to!” Sheppard looked around for a weapon to hit Angelus with, but there was nothing loose in reach. That was no accident, he was sure. “But I’m kind of out of options here!”
“Only because you will not listen. Together, you and I have the means to end this, but you must trust me first.”
The word stopped Sheppard in his tracks. “Trust?”
“Sheppard, I am not the hybrid, not in the sense you believe I am. It made me from itself, but I have only recently become aware of that.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Listen to me. Who makes the best liar?”
Sheppard shook his head, helplessly. The surreal nature of his situation was rapidly robbing him of reason. “I give.”
“The best liar is one who believes his lies. Sheppard, when I came to you I was Angelus. Everything I told you was true…” The Ancient’s voice was strange, almost wistful… There was a sorrow to it that stabbed at Sheppard, despite the derangement all around him. “My history, my origins, my children. Everything.”
“It wasn’t true. That’s bull. You didn’t come from that planet!” He pointed upwards, a random direction. “There’s no way you could have made it from there!”
“Of course not. Sheppard, don’t you understand? The hybrid needed to get to Atlantis. It needed to be left there, alone and undisturbed for long enough to regain its strength after the Asurans damaged it. While it was escaping its birthplace, it accessed the memories of Elizabeth Weir and used them to create the perfect bait, the perfect cover story. It invented Angelus!”
Sheppard stopped looking for a weapon. He turned, slowly, to look back at the remnant. “Are you telling me you didn’t know?”
“Angelus was a construct from beginning to end, a pretty prize that your people couldn’t help but take into their arms. A Trojan horse, to use a human phrase… It learned what to do from Doctor Weir’s uploaded mind. Her memories are part of the collective’s database.” The arm waved sluggishly. “But in order to deliver that prize, it built me from itself. Gave the memories and form of the Ancient called Angelus to me. I sought out the Apollo believing I was who I said I was. That what my memories told me had happened had really happened.”
Sheppard stared. “That’s… That’s insane.”
“Can you imagine? Discovering that you are a monster, that everything you believed is a lie? That you were not born ten thousand years ago, but extruded from a biomass a week before? Can you imagine?”
The hybrid shifted, moaned a long, mournful bellow. There were other sounds too, distant thumps and bangs. People were still shooting at the thing, Sheppard realized. If they were still around when the hybrid awoke, it would kill them all.
“Do you know what hurts more than anything?” Angelus asked him. “I can still remember Eraavis. My children. The cities… Oh, Sheppard, if you could have seen the cities! Soaring under mountains…” The awful head dipped. “The fact that all those memories are utterly false is something I cannot bear to fully comprehend.”
“We saw a planet,” Sheppard breathed. “Burning…”
“The Asurans attacked that world. To test planetary bombardment techniques. There was no human life there.”
“Target practice?” It was too much. Sheppard was reeling, his aching head full and pounding. How could he believe this, in such a place? It was a reversal of everything he had known.
But then, if Angelus was telling the truth, wasn’t he in the same situation? And if he was lying, why was Sheppard even alive?
“Okay, just in case we’re not both crazy right now, what do I do? To kill the hybrid.”
Angelus lifted his unmade head. “I have control over a few of the hybrid’s most basic functions for the moment. I was able to build myself this vessel and regain what little individuality I ever had… I can introduce an infectious element into its system. Before it regains control. A vaccine.”
“Vaccine?” Sheppard shook his head. “Something this big? I don’t —”
“Sheppard, the hybrid is comatose. It is defenseless. It is a made thing; not an evolved creature, but a construct. It has no immune system other than its own conscious defenses. If we infect it now, it will be poisoned before it can recover.”
“What do you need?”
“Something external. Something alien to the hybrid. You.”
“Me?”
“Not all of you. Some blood… A little of the Ancient gene. I am a part of the hybrid, and so I can use its weapons against it. In the same way it grows flesh, I can grow a poison. Give me your arm.”
Angelus reached out. The metal bones of his hand were suddenly alive with silvery worms, their tips needles.
Sheppard had seen those glistening tendrils before, when he had pulled the Replicator’s hand free of McKay’s ankle in the weapons facility. Carter had seen them tear a man inside-out, make a replica of him. He jerked back in horror. “Not a chance!”
“Sheppard, we have no more chances!” The arm turned slightly, the hand outstretched. “I do not know what happened to Elizabeth. The hybrid was made soon after she arrived on Asuras… Her fate is unknown to me. But if she knew of this… Her memories, used as a weapon against her friends… Would she want you to hesitate?”