Angelus Read online

  The lab was in the same state of slightly chaotic activity as it had been for the past two days. A trio of technicians had been assigned to work with Angelus, but according to Carter they were still being ‘vetted’. Their eventual arrival had been catered for, though: several laptops, data tablets and pieces of test equipment had been arranged on folding tables along two of the lab’s walls. All the screens McKay could see, including three big flatscreens on the wall above the tables, glowed with animated graphics and streams of raw data. The calculations involved in the weapon design were immense; beam power and pulse frequency exhibited in fractally recursive forms so complex that several of the most powerful processors on Atlantis had to be wired up in parallel just to handle them. Along another wall, four squat blocks of metal sat humming, surrounded by electric fans: multiple disc drives, running far beyond their normal capacity in order to store the processed data. If it hadn’t been for the fans, the drives would have melted in their towers.

  There was a lot of equipment here, and Angelus was pushing all of it to its limits. So far, though, the only work being done here was calculation, so Colonel Carter had been content to let it continue as long as she was kept updated. Perhaps McKay shouldn’t have been helping this phase of the Ancient’s project take shape so enthusiastically, but he had accepted, during his introspective hour in the mess hall, that he could not stop himself. It was unfair of Carter to make him try.

  McKay got to the image processor just as the Ancient brought a new series of forms into being above it. “What’s this now?”

  “This simulates the target point instability during the initial delivery strike.” Angelus tapped out a series of commands on a portable keyboard, his fingers moving with startling speed. “Some of the values required are still estimates, I’m afraid. The recursions are not yet at a suitable level of iteration to provide the accuracy we need.”

  McKay knew all about the level of accuracy. Considering the amount of energy delivered by the meson pulse, and the tiny amount of space it had to be compressed into, it was a wonder that conventional mathematics could even describe the required precision. “How may iterations have they been through?”

  “Ninety-three.”

  “Right. We’ll need, what, twice that? And with each recursion taking exponentially greater processing power to process…” McKay glanced around, feeling slightly frantic. “We’re gonna need a bigger lab.”

  “I believe what we have should be sufficient. Once we pass one hundred iterations I shall deploy an inverse compression algorithm. That will limit the amount of data overflow in direct proportion to the level of accuracy we reach.”

  “Neat trick.” There were no seats around the image processor. McKay thought about dragging one closer, but decided it would make him look foolish. He leaned against a terminal instead, trying to take the weight off one foot at a time.

  The golden mask was resting next to his arm. It looked cool and heavy, its gleaming face reflecting the holographic light in strange curves. He found himself, not for the first time, studying it from the corner of his eye.

  It was an odd thing, both sinister and beautiful, and the Ancient’s habit of wearing it so often was intriguing. McKay had almost asked about it before, several times in fact, but until now had always held back. He couldn’t quite decide why, but there was an air of privacy about the mask, a kind of intimacy that had made him uncomfortable broaching the subject .

  And, bizarrely, there was something about Angelus that made McKay loathe to upset the man.

  But now, maybe for the first time, the mask was closer to McKay than it was to Angelus, and the proximity of it was strangely heady. He reached out, hesitated, then leaned forwards and picked it up.

  It was actually heavier than he had anticipated. “Sorry, Angelus. I never asked… What does this do?”

  “Do? The visios?”

  “Yeah. You wear it a lot, and I just wondered what it’s function was.”

  The Ancient looked at him, a strange, slightly haunted expression on his face. “It does nothing, Doctor. Except to remind me of happier times.”

  “So it’s just a mask, then.” McKay felt almost disappointed. He had been expecting the golden artifact to have some kind of exotic property — for it to induce hypnotic states, maybe, or aid concentration. He hadn’t really thought that Angelus might just have been sitting around with a mask on.

  “I suppose it is,” the Ancient replied. “To anyone but me.”

  McKay found himself feeling rather embarrassed. He had obviously strayed into deep emotional territory; not a place he felt comfortable about going. He decided to change the subject. “Anyways, the simulation. Even with the estimated values, it’s looking pretty detailed.”

  Angelus’ gaze stayed fixed on the visios for a moment, then he returned his attention to the holo display. “At this point, the simulation is running more as a test of its own capabilities than a true indication. There are some elements that I am storing in order to refine them later, though.” He pointed at the edges of a stack of planes, the way they rippled through each other in a series of perspective-defying loops and whorls. “These waveforms, for example, seem common to all levels of simulation. I believe we will encounter them under full test.”

  “Brane interaction? That’s going to send instability phases right through the incursion space.” McKay straightened up. “That could be bad.”

  “Indeed. At worst, such an instability could reflect the field effect back down the transmission beam.”

  “Oh lovely.” McKay stalked away from the processor, turning the visios over and over in his hands, then spun on his heel and walked back. Angelus was right, he always did think better on his feet, even if they did hurt. “You’d end up with the Higgs-Boson shutdown occurring at the point of firing, not the target.”

  “Which would be, as you say, bad.”

  Angelus turned back to the processor, and began typing again. McKay watched him for a while, then wandered away, deep in thought, images of the instability simulation spinning in his mind. If he concentrated, he could almost see the network of calculations and crumpled dimensions needed to destabilize the spacetime plane, but only in abstract. If he tried to pin it down it simply slipped away from him. There was something here he was missing, he was certain, something that was only just out of his reach. Perhaps if he could see some of the simulated data after the compression algorithms had done their work, it would all become clear.

  He rubbed the bridge of his nose, wincing at a sudden needle of pain there. “Oh man, is the air dry in here? Is it the heat coming off those stacks?”

  Angelus glanced around at him. “Is anything wrong, Doctor?”

  “I dunno. Something’s starting to play hell with my sinuses, that’s all.” He walked over to where the storage blocks had been set up, putting his hand out to feel the warm air wafted off them by the fans. “Damn. Yeah, it’s these things.”

  “Perhaps you would benefit from a walk outside. Call it pacing in a single direction.”

  The thought of walking again so soon didn’t really appeal, but the pain in McKay’s forehead was getting worse. He didn’t answer Angelus, but instead wandered away from the stacks.

  The mask in his hands was still invitingly cold, despite the dry heat of the air. He flipped it over, studying the interior for the first time. When he had seen Angelus wearing it, it had always seemed to hug his face securely, but he could see no mechanisms inside. Just cool, polished metal.

  Through the eyeholes, the floor seemed to waver, as though through a heat-haze. “Yeah, maybe,” he muttered absently. “Thing is, if I go out there, get a good dose of cool sea air, then come back in here, my head’s going to explode.”

  “Then perhaps you should —” Angelus halted in mid sentence. Then he said: “Doctor?”

  McKay lifted the mask, trying to see more clearly through the eyeholes. As he did, the wavering seemed to increase. “Yeah?”

  There was no answer. He raised the
mask to his face, and suddenly he was flying backwards.

  A folding table hit him in the back. He bounced off it, awkwardly, sending a couple of data tablets flying, and just about regained his balance before he went over. He reached out and grabbed a nearby terminal for support, and as he did so realized that he didn’t have the mask any more.

  Angelus was holding it, in both hands, protectively. He must have launched himself from the processor like a cat, and grabbed the mask as he hurled McKay into the tables. How could anyone move so fast?

  And more to the point, why? He didn’t look angry. If anything, his face was a picture of fear and confusion. His dark eyes were wide, staring at McKay.

  “Are you all right?” he gasped.

  McKay opened his mouth and tried to speak, but there wasn’t any air in him. He dragged in a breath, and managed to nod.

  “Are you certain?”

  “Yeah, I think so… Angelus, what the hell?”

  “I am sorry…” The Ancient shook himself, stared down at the visios. “There was no call for that, it was… Unforgivable.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Angelus shook his head. “I- You must not…” He took a deep breath of his own, and that seemed to calm him slightly. “The visios is the only thing I have left to remind me,” he explained. “It is for me alone. I am sorry, Doctor. I should not have struck you. But you cannot wear this.”

  “Look, I didn’t mean to offend you, okay? But you could have…” McKay winced, put a hand to his chest. He was just starting to realize how much his ribs hurt. “Ow… You could have just told me!”

  “I know.” He stepped away, and seemed about to place the mask back down on the processor. Then he paused, and came back. He reached out.

  McKay flinched, but Angelus was holding the mask out to him.

  He laughed nervously. “Yeah, it’s okay. Really. You keep it.”

  “No. Doctor, I believe… Maybe it is time to put this away. I have been dwelling on the past too long. Would you return this to the starhopper?”

  “Your ship?” McKay took the mask from him, holding it nervously. “It won’t open.”

  “It will now.” The Ancient’s expression had turned to one of gentle sadness. “Please, take it back for me.”

  “Okay…” The idea of getting into the golden ship was tempting, he couldn’t deny that. So was the thought of getting away from Angelus for a bit. “It might take a while.”

  “Take all the time you need.”

  “Sure. Okay then, I’ll…” He backed away, still very much aware of how fast the Ancient could move. “I’ll put this back, right where it’ll be safe...”

  The door opened for him as he reached it. He turned, and hurried out into the corridor and past the guard station. Only then, quite out of earshot, did he call Sheppard on his headset and tell him to drop everything and meet him in the hangar.

  The hangar was a wedge-shaped segment of the city’s central tower, a two-story space that had been almost unused by the Pegasus expedition since they first arrived. Parts of the tower’s outer wall in that area had been found to be modular, and could be convinced, under power, to fold away, leaving sizeable entranceways. The function of this was not known, but it was hypothesized that occasionally the city’s builders had needed to store things bigger than could be ferried in through the Stargate. In any case, once the equipment stashed there had been moved back against the rear walls and covered with tarpaulins, a space about twenty meters across had been available to house the starhopper.

  There was a big double door at the thin end of the wedge, towards the tower core, and Sheppard was waiting there when McKay arrived. “Okay Rodney, what’s up?”

  McKay had been walking as fast as he could all the way to the hangar, via various transporters. By the time he got there he was quite out of breath, and his chest was aching. At least now, there was good reason for it to do so. “Give me a minute.”

  “You are so out of shape.”

  “I am not. I just got a punch in the sternum, okay? A minute.” He bent over, stood with his hands on his knees for a few moments, breathing hard. Then he straightened up. “Angelus just attacked me.”

  “He what?”

  “Look… Maybe attacked is the wrong word. But he sure hit me pretty hard.”

  Sheppard was looking at the visios. “Because you stole his mask?”

  “No! Well, actually, yes.” McKay held the thing up. “I was with him in the lab, we were talking about the simulations, you know… There’s this neat algorithm he’s going to use to shave the data down as it goes through multiple recursions, I mean it’s some seriously cool stuff —”

  “Rodney,” said Sheppard warningly. “I have other things I could be doing.”

  “Sorry. But anyways, I’d picked this up, and there was something funny about the eyeholes. Or I thought there was.” He held the mask higher and stared through its eyes, but there was none of the distortion he had seen in the lab. “Oh. Maybe it was the heat coming off the stacks. So I was going to put it on, and —”

  “You were going to put it on?” Sheppard’s eyebrows went high. “Don’t you think that’s a little, I don’t know, rude?”

  “It is?” McKay frowned, feeling as though the conversation was getting away from him. “Listen, he’s the one who hit me! Slammed me right across the damn lab!”

  “Really.” Sheppard pretended to look impressed. “That’s a big lab. I’m surprised you’re not getting Keller to check you out after such a mighty blow.”

  “All right, more like shoved.” McKay rubbed his chest idly. “But he pretty much knocked the wind right out of me, you know? I never knew how fast he could move.”

  “You want me to pull it up on the surveillance?” As per Carter’s instructions, Sheppard and a small team of specialists had fitted the lab with a network of cameras, microphones, motion sensors and taps into all the computers Angelus would be using. He had boasted at the time that the Ancient wouldn’t be able to fold up a paper airplane without it being recorded. “Shouldn’t be too hard, what with him throwing you around like a sack of beans.”

  “Something tells me you’re not taking this entirely seriously.”

  Sheppard put his hands up. “Okay, okay. You just seem in pretty good shape after all this violence, that’s all. But I’ll get the recordings up, don’t worry.”

  “I’d appreciate it. And yes, I’ll be going to see Keller after I’ve checked out this ship of his.” He stepped up to the door control and waved his hand across it. After a moment’s hesitation, the doors parted, slid aside with a thin, metallic scraping.

  Beyond them lay the golden ship, the starhopper. Just as it had before, the sight of it stopped him cold.

  The ship was side-on to him, facing away from the modular wall and at a slight angle, evidence of the rather imprecise method by which it had arrived in the tower. The hangar was probably about the same size as Apollo’s bomb bay, but somehow the ship had seemed smaller there. Here, it loomed, hunching slightly forwards, as though ready to leap away. The dim light of the hangar sparked off its strange curves and leant a glossy, organic sheen to the opaque domes at its prow, and the surface of it still shone with the subtle opulence that only brushed gold can lay claim to.

  It looked like jewelry. No, McKay thought, wonderingly: it looked like a sleek, wingless insect, disguising itself as jewelry in order to get the drop on some unknown prey.

  As McKay stood there, watching, Sheppard stopped next to him. “Really takes some getting used to, doesn’t it?”

  “No kidding.”

  “Rodney, you said you couldn’t open this thing.”

  “I think it’s under Angelus’ control. He said to Sam and I that he let me in, back on Apollo. I think, if he wants me in there now…”

  As if in answer, part of the ship’s flank turned into a jigsaw of glittering panels and folded away to nothing.

  “Okay,” said Sheppard. “That’s creepy.”

  “I f
orgot, you’d not seen it do that.” McKay swallowed, then squared his shoulders. “Come on, where’s your sense of adventure?”

  “Left it in my other pants.”

  “Look, this might be the only chance I get to study this ship from the inside. Sam said we needed all the info we could get, right?” He set off towards the hopper. “And I’m damned if I’m going to set foot in this thing on my own, so get in gear!”

  He had left his data tablet back at the lab, but he still had a PDA that he’d upgraded. He took it out of his jacket pocket and switched it on, setting the integral sensors to the broadest settings they could muster. He might not have long in the starhopper — only as long as Angelus let him stay, assuming he was right and that the vessel was directly under the Ancient’s control — and he was determined to gather as much data about the ship as he could in whatever time he was allowed.

  “Want me to go in first?” Sheppard asked him as they reached the open hatch. McKay shook his head.

  “Much as my self-preservation says yes, my self-esteem says no.” He peered inside, holding the PDA in front of him like a talisman. On its tiny screen, data began to accumulate. “Okay, let’s see… When I was in here last, on the Apollo, there was this —” He stopped, frowning into the gloom. “Hold on.”

  “What?”

  “It’s different. There was a kind of bulkhead on either side of the door.” McKay looked about, letting his eyes adjust to the gloom inside the hopper. Sure enough, not only could he see all the way to the control couch at the front of the ship, but the area that had been closed off to him before was now laid open too.

  He climbed in, unsure of where to head first. The interior space of the vessel was shaped roughly like two elongated eggs, set end to end, with a cylindrical ‘waist’ where they joined. The smaller egg contained the cockpit — McKay could see the couch where he and Ellis had first seen Angelus, and beyond that the softly glowing panels of the control system. What lay in the larger aft section was more difficult to make out. The only light came from a double row of fist-sized jewels running along each side of the ship, pulsing faintly blue-green like the bioluminescent markings of some deep-sea fish. There was something taking up most of the hopper’s aft space, some kind of engine or power module, perhaps, but its outline was complex, jumbled. With the lack of light, he couldn’t really make out what it was he was seeing. “Sheppard? This mess at the back here? What does that look like to you?”