She could hope that the Stargate would be destroyed along with the rest of the city, but hope had limits, and this was a risk they couldn't take. If Radek's plan worked…
In an instant, a realization washed her despair away. She knew exactly how to save the expedition, confine the nanites to this planet, and leave the people of Polrusso unharmed. They just needed one small bit of luck.
"All set," came Stackhouse's voice through her earpiece. "This is really going to power the city?"
"It will," assured Radek. "This is the rare instance where we have previous experience to draw upon. All of you must now take shelter on the Daedalus. It and the control room are shielded against the electrical surge."
"We're on our way."
The exhilaration Elizabeth felt must have showed on her face when she rushed out of her office, because Radek looked at her as if she'd lost her mind. Not bothered, she skidded to a stop in front of him. "I have an idea."
A squid thing that bore an uncanny resemblance to Cthulhu had also tried to ingest the jumper, freaking Rodney out a second time, but that was only a hint of the weird encounters to come. Thousands of sea creatures flashed as dots on the HUD and in the flesh beyond the jumper's shield, lighting up the ocean like a star-filled sky. John was intrigued by the sight and more than a little alarmed. All of them were heading away from the direction in which the jumper was traveling.
"They are fleeing the gray goo," Teyla observed. "The animals on the mainland did likewise, although then we were all traveling in the same direction."
"It makes sense that we're swimming upstream, so to speak." Rodney gestured toward the route map on the HUD, clearly doing his best to pretend the creatures weren't flying past the windshield behind it. "We're coming up on the shallow section-and what a surprise, it's already gone gooey."
Meaning they'd have to go through that muck. John knew Teyla had done it before, but he still didn't like it. "How are we doing on shield power?"
Before he'd finished asking the question, Rodney had already moved to the rear of the jumper. "There'll be some needle-threading involved. I'll hook up each power cell as the prior one falls below the ten-percent level. The water pressure on the hull is no longer a factor, so I'll reduce power to a minimum. But if the shield is compromised at any point, the temporal field that breaks through will age us so fast the Wraith would weep with envy."
"Then let's get this over with." John twisted around to face the rear compartment. "Are we ready?"
Rodney didn't look ready, but he gave a jerky nod. "Go for it "
Expecting to have to rise into the goo, John was surprised to see the gray shroud descending with such speed. He needed only to wait a few seconds before the jumper was enveloped. The points of light provided by the last of the sea creatures winked out, leaving them in darkness.
A few more seconds passed before Rodney's voice broke the tense silence. "Power consumption is steady. Fast, but steady."
When the thick curtain of nanites caused the HUD to stutter and eventually stop updating entirely, John started to get the now-familiar sensation of losing his bearings. On Earth, flying on instruments, he'd always had gravity and a seat-of-the-pants sense to help tell him which way was up, but the jumper's inertial dampeners had shot those instincts to hell. All he could do was stay on the course the HUD had marked before it fritzed out, keeping a mental image of where he wanted to go. Come on, you sweet little mind-reading ride, don't let me down.
From the back, Rodney cursed. "Down to fifteen percent on the second cell."
"Already?" John didn't like the sound of that. "I thought you said-"
"Given my complete lack of experience with this situation, it's possible my estimate was only marginally accurate." Rodney connected the third power cell.
"So we're down to how many spares?"
"One.,
That had to be a joke. Except Rodney was obviously not in a joking mood. "One?" John pressed.
"Look, don't shoot the messenger, all right?"
They'd have to head down sooner than the original route suggested, just to escape the goo. Not too soon, of course, or they could pop out of the goo only to run smack into a not-yet-converted underwater mountain. It wasn't the kind of thing John liked to guess at, but, given no other choice, he checked their last known speed and position, did a quick-and-dirty rate-of-descent calculation in his head, and aimed the jumper's nose downward.
Before long, he could hear Rodney starting to connect the last power cell. Fabric rustled, repeatedly, and John suspected that the scientist was wiping sweaty palms on his pant legs.
Abruptly, they broke out from the goo, and darkness gave way to an ocean jam-packed with marine life. Every living thing that had managed to outrun the goo had been pushed down to the remaining water at depth. Some of the fish-type things were huge, snapping at each other, adding to the chaos. Not all of the critters had survived the rapid pressure change, either- and the victims were quickly being devoured by the survivors.
The frenzy quickly encompassed the jumper. "Holy-" Returning to the front seat, Rodney flinched as a school of massive barracuda-like animals swarmed over the shield, bumping and jostling the craft. The space that Jumper One pushed through seemed to be filled with more fish than water. Fortunately, the HUD came back to life once the nanites' interference was gone, and John could see the trench that was their objective not far away. "Teyla, you're on deck."
Encased in the HAZMAT suit, Teyla pulled her hood on and, nodding, held her hand out to Nabu to take the machine. "I am prepared."
Just as John aimed them into the trench, Rodney cursed. "Power level's dropping. The goo's coming down on top of us!"
"How does it keep getting faster like that?" Ronon wanted to know.
"It is an exponential expansion," Nabu explained from the rear of the jumper. He was still holding the exogenesis machine. "The more of the gray substance that exists, the faster it can spread."
"Well, I can't make us go any faster, so pick a vent, quick." John flung a hand toward the windshield, where streams of thin bubbles and roiling yellowish clouds of what the HUD described as sulfur trailed from a series of chimney-stack pipes on the ocean floor, and up into the goo above. He had no idea what was lighting the trench, but right about now he didn't much care.
"Just a second." Studying the sensor readout, Rodney showed an uncharacteristic level of anger by pounding a fist into the armrest. "None of the vents are big enough to drop the machine into!"
At last, something he could solve. "Then we'll make one big enough," John growled, reaching for the weapons panel.
"Okay, good. For once, your propensity for shooting things is in no way misguided."
On command, the weapon bay door opened on the side of the jumper, deploying a drone into the water. The projectile found its mark- and then some.
Huge bubbles of superheated gas erupted from the point of impact, roiling upward. The force of the rupture caught the jumper and lifted it, thrusting it into the goo above.
A bleak sense of failure descended over John as swiftly as the darkness fell. They were out of time, water, ideas, and about to be out of power. There was nothing left.
He wasn't normally the praying type, but he offered a silent, fervent wish to anyone who might listen that Elizabeth and the others had made it.
Chapter Twenty-two
"Wait!" Inspiration struck, and Rodney leaped to his feet and snatched up the exogenesis machine. Stumbling as the jumper tilted, he was steadied by Nabu. "We don't need the planet's heat to drive the machine," he asserted. "That was necessary at the beginning, but the spread of the nanites has demonstrated that the reaction is self-sustaining. We just have to get the machine into the gray goo."