“Hey, wait a minute.” He put up a hand, peeking slightly around her as he did so. The doors were open, multiple panes hinged apart as one, and he could see part of the conference room past Carter’s shoulder. A shadow moved there, changing shape as it crossed the wall, the table… Sheppard felt himself tense for a moment, until he saw that the shadow was just McKay, prowling nervously with a data tablet in one hand.
He felt a chill. Maybe he hadn’t shaken the dreams off as thoroughly as he’d hoped. “Listen, this Angelus guy. What’s he been saying?”
She held up the folder. “I was, you know, kind of planning on telling you in there…”
“No, this ‘killing his kids’ thing he’s got going on. Is this something we should be hearing?”
Carter took his arm, quite firmly. “It’s more complicated than that,” she hissed, and propelled him through the doors.
He always forgot how strong she was. Sheppard went into the conference room a little off-balance, almost stumbled, but righted himself just before McKay walked into him.
“Hey,” he said, feeling just a bit foolish.
McKay blinked at him. “What kept you?”
“Traffic.” Sheppard glanced quickly around the room. As well as McKay, and Carter following him in, Teyla Emmagan was there, perched on a chair at one of the table’s flattened corners. Ronon Dex, too, lolling back in his seat with his arms folded.
Angelus was not in the room. Sheppard hadn’t really expected him to be, but still found himself strangely relieved. “Hey guys.”
“John.” Dex nodded a greeting. “I’m glad you’re here. McKay’s going crazy.”
McKay glared. “I am not!”
“Sorry, I meant to say ‘driving the rest of us crazy’.”
“Play nice, boys,” said Carter, sounding tired. “John, sit down and I’ll run through this. Rodney, you too.”
“Can I, you know, not?” McKay waved his data tablet. “I’m still trying to get my head around some of this and I can do that better on my feet for some reason.”
“Rodney?”
“Yes?”
“Sit down. You’re driving me crazy.”
He sat. Sheppard flashed him a quick grin, then found a chair alongside him and dropped into it. He swung around to face Carter. “So, what’s the verdict?”
She slid the folder over to him. “Okay then. Long story short; so far we’ve got nothing at all to say Angelus is anything other than what he claims.”
“Really?” Sheppard realized he was actually surprised at that. He hadn’t been consciously expecting Angelus to be a fake, but now that he was being told the opposite, something in him was jolted. He pulled a sheet of printout from the folder, and squinted at the network of colored bars that covered it. “What’s this?”
“Genome comparison,” Carter replied. “Rodney, what about the ship?”
“The ship is, well, frustrating.” McKay looked sour. “I haven’t been able to get into it.”
“I thought you opened it up on Apollo.”
“Yes, yes I did.” The scientist stared at his data tablet for a moment, and then dropped it onto the tabletop in disgust. “But I don’t know how.”
“You don’t —”
“It just opened up, okay? I have got no idea what I did to get it to do that… I spent three, no four hours last night poking the damn thing in every conceivable place and all I’ve got to show for it is sore fingers. So I’m sorry, but for the moment I’ve got nothing to add to this conversation.”
Dex leaned forwards, arms still folded, a predatory grin all over his face. “That’s why he’s cranky.”
“Mm.” Sheppard was looking at a side-on X-ray of a human skull, the contrast of the image altered to show soft tissues, nerves, blood vessels. The bones seemed unremarkable, but the space behind the eyes seemed more densely packed than he would have expected, a complicated network of whorls and convolutions.
There was a scratch on the printout, a line of dead pixels diagonally along one corner. Sheppard traced it idly with his fingertip. “That still doesn’t explain how he’s not ten thousand years old, not ascended and not dead. Ship or no ship, this doesn’t add up.”
“Well, actually, yes it does,” said Carter. “According to what Angelus told me, he would have been in stasis for almost that whole time.”
“Stasis?” Sheppard glanced up from the next printout. “Where?”
“He called the planet Eraavis,” she replied. “He said it was in a system on the far side of Replicator space.”
Sheppard glanced over at Teyla, but the Athosian shook her head. “It is not a world I am familiar with,” she told him. “But given its location, perhaps that is not entirely unexpected.”
Another scan result, this time in three dimensions, an oblique view across the Ancient’s skull and spine. The folds compacted into that skull looked like none Sheppard had ever seen, and the sight disturbed him oddly. He wasn’t a squeamish man — he had seen the damage that weapons could do to flesh, more times than he cared to count — but on the whole he preferred people’s insides to stay on the inside. Even this image, computer-enhanced and false-colored as it was, gave him a visceral reaction, and he found his attention straying to another scratch in the printout, just like the X-ray. Keller was going to need to change her printer cartridge. “So what was he doing there?”
“Looking after his children.”
He put the scan back down. “Are we actually talking about kids here?”
“No.” Carter shook her head. “He regards the population of Eraavis as his children.”
Sheppard closed the folder and slid the whole thing along to McKay. “Okay, I’m listening.”
“Back before the war with the Wraith, Angelus was a scientist. Split his time between physics and some kind of experimental sociology. He says he’d devised a way of increasing a population’s intelligence by behavioral influences… What did he call it? ‘A programming language that functioned in terms of geosocial interactions’.”
McKay snorted. “Does that make any sense at all?”
Carter cocked her head to one side. “It wouldn’t be the first time an Ancient’s tried to play God.”
“True. But how long would that take? I mean, even if he was going to artificially advance their intelligence by modifying their brains, it would take, what decades?” McKay shook his head. “And what you’re talking about, it seems, I dunno, a lot more subtle…”
“That’s why he was in stasis,” Sheppard guessed out loud.
“Right,” Carter agreed. “He had a kind of lab hidden underground, mainly built around a series of expert systems and a stasis facility. Whenever his computers thought he needed to wake up and screw around with the Eraavi they’d get him online, and the rest of the time he’d be frozen. He was planning this experiment to last about a thousand years, but only to be awake for about fifty of those.”
Sheppard whistled. “Talk about being in for the long haul.”
“Yeah, but he was a little too successful. He advanced the Eraavi too far, and the Wraith got a scent. He was in stasis when they attacked.”
“His children were culled?” whispered Teyla.
“He doesn’t know exactly.” Carter ran a hand back through her hair. “Whatever happened, it must have been bad. Either his computers decided to keep him frozen until they thought it was safe, or they took a hit and malfunctioned. He was in stasis for almost ten thousand years.”
“Holy crap,” breathed Sheppard.
“Is that even possible? “ McKay asked. “I mean, the Ancients we found on the Aurora had been in stasis for that amount of time, but they’d still aged. They couldn’t even survive outside the tubes.”
“I don’t know,” Carter replied. “Maybe he had a more advanced version, or he tinkered with it somehow. He didn’t say.”
“So that’s what he meant by killing his children,” said Sheppard. “Advancing them to the point they became Wraith food.”
“No, that’s the odd part. He says the Eraavi were alive when he got out of the lab. The thing is, that’s as far as we got. Keller pretty much threw me out of the infirmary.”