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  Carter had given him a lost look. “That’s the part we haven’t worked out yet.”

  The bomb bay was cold. Ellis could see his breath as pale vapor as soon as he keyed the hatch open.

  McKay’s stealth sensors were a strange mix of the old and the new; naquadah generators and pulsed communications lasers, subspace encoders and liquid-fuelled rockets. Had the scientist and his team been given longer to work on the units they could probably have functioned perfectly well at room temperature, but in the panic of watching the Asurans and the Wraith tearing at each other across dozens of nearby star systems, some features had fallen by the wayside. A suitable cooling system for the superconducting circuitry was one such omission.

  In the deep cold of space, this wouldn’t be a problem. Here in the bomb bay, Ellis decided he’d better be careful not to touch any bare metal.

  He walked briskly out into the bay, between the launch racks. The racks had been lowered just after Apollo had left Atlantis, so McKay could make final adjustments to his sensors, and Ellis wasn’t surprised to see them still down. McKay, despite being a genius, couldn’t keep time worth a damn.

  Either that, or he just worked best under pressure. As long as he kept coming up with the goods, Ellis didn’t care much which it was. “Doctor McKay? Are you in here?”

  “Yes!” McKay popped up from behind the next rack along, clutching a laptop, his jacket fastened tightly up to his neck. “Please don’t tell me we’re there yet.”

  “Not yet.”

  The man sagged visibly. “Thank God.”

  “You’ve got twelve minutes.”

  “Twelve?” McKay stared at him, then at the laptop screen, then at Ellis again. “You’re joking!”

  Ellis folded his arms. “Not something I do on a regular basis, Doctor.”

  Abe Ellis had met few people who were as completely opposite to him as Rodney McKay. Physically, they were poles apart; Ellis dark-skinned and compact, where McKay was pale and half a head taller. While Ellis could remain still and quiet for as long as he needed to, McKay seemed almost unable to not move, and once he started talking it was often difficult to get him to stop. He was nervy and animated and ever-so-slightly out of control, or at least he always had been in Ellis’ presence.

  Ellis knew that McKay possessed an intellect that exceeded his own by an order of magnitude, and that he was one of the most valued and respected members of the Pegasus expedition. Despite this, if he was honest with himself, he didn’t like the man much. Besides, the thought of a civilian calling any kind of shots made him uncomfortable.

  McKay was waving the laptop at him. “It’s too soon! Look, these calculations are extremely complex. I mean, twelve minutes? Couldn’t you just go around the block a couple of times?”

  “Doctor, we’ve already been around the block.” A very long way around, in fact; in order to throw any potential observers off the scent, Apollo had been backtracking in and out of hyperspace for two days. “We arrive at M3A-242 on schedule, like it or not.”

  “I know, I know.” McKay sighed, breath steaming. “Okay, I guess they’re probably good to go anyway. I’m not sure about some of these vectors, but there’s a margin of error built into the software just in case any of my mass readings are out of whack…”

  “Error?”

  “Let’s call it wiggle room. Colonel, this isn’t easy. If all we had to do was drop these things and go home, we’d be done by now. But each cluster has got to align into a Very Large Array using nothing more than a couple of thruster burns, mimic pre-existing orbital dynamics and keep in relay LOS over distances of millions of kilometers. Even for me, that’s not exactly a walk in the park.”

  “Not to mention doing it under the noses of both the Wraith and the Asurans.”

  McKay paled slightly. “Yes, well. Quite frankly I’d been trying not to think about that part. How long now?”

  “Not long enough.” Ellis jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Move it, Doctor. Unless you want to be here when I depressurize the bay.”

  McKay snapped the laptop closed. “Fine. I’ll just tell everyone to keep their fingers crossed.”

  Ellis moved back slightly to let McKay past, as the man began to head towards the exit hatch. “Doctor, M3A is in spitting distance of Atlantis, and the Wraith might be on their way there right now. Believe me, we’ve already got our fingers crossed.”

  They almost made it back to the bridge before Apollo was hit, but not quite. Meyers had just warned Ellis that the ship was about to leave hyperspace, and rather than risk being caught off-balance when Apollo decelerated he had stopped in the bridge access corridor. McKay, sensibly, had done the same. Both men felt the ship lurch as it returned to realspace; that was quite normal. There was no way that several thousand tons of metal was going to rip a hole in the universe without a jolt.

  The second impact, however, caught Ellis quite off-guard. “That’s not good,” he growled.

  McKay gave him a quizzical look. “What was that? Did we go back into hyperspace?”

  “I don’t think so. That felt almost like —”

  The deck shook again. As it did so, Ellis’ headset crackled. “Sir?”

  “Meyers, what the hell?”

  “Colonel, you’d better get up here…”

  They ran the last few meters onto the bridge. Ellis keyed the hatch open, quickly skirted the tactical map and stopped dead when he saw what was outside the viewports.

  He heard McKay swallow hard. “That’s, ah… Is that what I think it is?”

  “Yeah.” Ellis sat down slowly. “We’re too late.”

  There was a Wraith warship directly ahead of the Apollo.

  It was close, a dozen kilometers away or less, and it dominated the view from the forward ports. Apollo had broken out of hyperspace in high orbit around M3A, and Ellis could see the dark glitter of that world’s nightside to the right of the viewport. The Wraith ship filled much of the rest of his view.

  It was canted at an odd angle, well off the ecliptic, and embers of orange light glowed fitfully over its hull.

  Ellis narrowed his eyes. “Meyers?”

  “Unknown type, sir,” the Major reported, tapping out commands on her board. “Bigger than a cruiser, smaller than a hive ship.”

  “Everything’s smaller than a hive ship,” snapped McKay, but Ellis threw him a warning glare. “List it as a ‘destroyer’. What else can you tell me?”

  “It’s dead. Massive weapon hits all over, power system failure, hull’s opened up along the port side. We hit some debris as we broke out, sir. One of the engines.”

  “Damage?”

  “To us? Superficial.”

  Ellis nodded, relieved. Apollo’s shields were up, standard procedure upon dropping out of hyperspace, but large solid objects could hit a shield hard enough to batter a ship to pieces. Shields protect against small, powerful impacts in localized areas, like Kevlar body amour stopping bullets. Hit a man in Kevlar with something big and heavy enough and he’ll die, amour or no amour.

  Apollo was drawing closer to the Wraith ship now. The space around it was full of twinkles, as fragments of debris turned over and caught the sunlight. Ellis could see that some of the closer twinkles had arms and legs, although not always in the correct number.

  “There’s another one,” said McKay.

  As Apollo neared the stricken vessel, a second wrecked ship had emerged from its shadow. Like the first, this ship was broken, tumbling, alive with internal fires, but it was very different in form; faceted where the Wraith ship was smooth, absorbing sunlight where the other reflected it from the glossy bone of its hull.

  “Replicator cruiser.” That was Deacon. “Looks like they blew it clear in half.”

  Meyers half-turned to Ellis. “Sir? I’m picking up more. This system’s a scrapyard.”

  McKay snorted. “So I guess we won’t be deploying our little sensor array then, huh?”

  “Not much goddamn point now.” Ellis rubbed a hand back ove
r his scalp. “Run a sensor sweep. Is anything alive out there?”

  “I hope not,” Deacon replied. He wore spectacles, and it was a nervous habit of his to push them back up his nose even when they hadn’t slid down. He did so now. “I’d hate to do any fancy flying in this mess.”

  “Noted,” growled Ellis, and sagged back a little in the command throne. “Meyers?”

  “Working on it, sir.” She tapped out a command chain on her board, ran her finger quickly down the list of results. “Okay… I’m getting a lot of interference from the debris, and the LIDAR is picking up more traces than it can handle. But I’m not reading anything that’s changing vector, or anything that isn’t cooling down. I think we’re on our own out here.”

  “That’s a good thing, right?” McKay leaned down to scan Meyer’s results over her shoulder, then turned back to Ellis. “Whatever happened here, at least we missed it.”

  “Looks that way,” Ellis agreed. “Doctor, is there any reason for us to stay?”

  “Hmm? Me?” McKay pointed to himself, eyebrows raised. He seemed genuinely surprised to be consulted. “Er, no, I don’t think so. I mean, we’ve all seen dead Wraith before, and frozen Replicators are even more boring.” He shook his head and put his hands in his pockets. “I’d say we’re done here.”

  “That’s good enough for me. Deacon?”

  “Sir?”

  “Find us a clear area to jump out. I don’t want any of this crud ripping a hole in the shield when we go to hyperdrive.”

  “Yes sir.” Deacon began tapping at his own board, then paused and frowned. “Er…”

  “‘Er’ what?”

  “Colonel?” McKay was staring out of the viewport. “I think we’re in trouble.”

  A point of silver-blue light had appeared to the right of the port. Something was breaking out of hyperspace ahead of Apollo’s starboard bow.

  Ellis jumped to his feet, watching the light billow out into a whirling cloud. “Weapons hot! Shields to max power!”

  The hyperspace emission shrank in on itself and vanished, spitting a brilliant shard of metal as it faded. As Ellis watched, the shard glowed at one end and began to accelerate smoothly towards Apollo. “Meyers? What have we got?”

  “It’s small, sir. I’m not reading any weapons signature.”

  “A missile?”

  “Unknown.”

  If the shard was a ship, it wasn’t much bigger than a puddle jumper. “Distance?”

  “Three thousand meters and closing.”

  “If it gets within a kilometer, burn it.”

  As he spoke, the comms screen on Deacon’s board lit up. There was a burst of static, then a brilliant flare of pixels that, in a second or two, resolved themselves into a face.

  No, not a face — a mask. A construct of gleaming, polished gold that was part Greek, part Roman, and part something Ellis had never seen before. Something ghostly.

  Behind the mask, dark eyes gleamed in fear. “Tau’ri, egoo sum sub incursis! Comdo, egoo indeeo templum!”

  “What?” McKay was shoving his face into the comms screen, almost clambering over Deacon to do it. “What? Did you hear that?”

  “Yeah, I heard it. Didn’t understand a damn word. Now get off him!” Ellis shoved the scientist aside, sending him scurrying away, then turned his attention back to the golden apparition on the screen. “Unidentified pilot. Do you require assistance?”

  Light, reflected from the golden mask, spilled through the screen. At the same instant a similar glare washed through the viewport.

  “Another hyperspace window,” said Meyers. “Either he’s brought some friends, or —”

  A stream of sparks arced out of the darkness. One of them struck the mask’s ship, flaring off a shield but hitting the little vessel hard enough to change its vector. It slewed sideways.

  “Not friends,” gasped McKay. “Definitely not friends.”

  The second burst of blue was further away, but larger. The vessel it was vomiting out was huge; a hunched, faceted thing, studded with weapons emplacements. A Replicator cruiser, its drives glowing blue-white as it began to accelerate.

  “Okay,” muttered Ellis. “Now it’s on.”

  The comms screen flickered. For an instant, it showed a different face, one that looked human, but then that was gone too. Ellis was left looking at a panel of fluttering static. “We’ve lost comms.”

  “We’re being jammed,” someone reported from behind him. “All frequencies are down.”

  The Asuran ship must have locked onto Apollo’s communications, Ellis thought grimly. They didn’t want anyone shouting for help. “Make sure our firewalls are up. I don’t want them feeding a virus through that static. Deacon, get us between the Replicators and that first ship. I didn’t get what Goldie was saying, but it sounded like he was asking for help.”

  “He was,” said McKay quietly.

  Ellis felt the ship move under him, saw the view from the forward ports tilt and slide as Apollo began to vector between the two other vessels. The main drives were throttling up under Deacon’s control, the ship’s speed increasing.

  Sure enough, the other ships were reacting. The shard was drawing closer, the glow from its blunt end dimming fitfully. It had crossed Apollo’s bow and was now on the low port side, trying to put the battlecruiser’s bulk between it and the pursuing Asurans. And the Replicator ship was swinging about hard, impossibly fast for something so big, trying to bring its prow to bear on the shard.

  Streams of energy were still hosing towards the smaller ship. A few shots caromed off Apollo’s shields — Ellis saw pinpoint glows appearing above the hull, illuminating the hazy dome of the shield, and felt the distant hammer of their impacts — but most of the fire was still directed at their first target. Any ordnance hitting Apollo seemed an afterthought.

  He didn’t like it, though. “Get us in closer, and ready the missiles. Let’s teach them to pick on somebody their own size.”

  McKay blinked at him. “You didn’t actually just say that, did you?”

  “Shut up.”

  Meyers keyed the missile launchers online. From the corner of his eye Ellis saw power bars on her board filling up, but his main attention was on the viewport. The masked man’s ship was drawing level, now; almost Apollo’s entire bulk was shielding it from the Asurans.

  “Replicator ship has lowered its shields,” Meyers said suddenly. “It looks like they’re diverting power to a primary weapons system. Sir, they’re going to —”

  Lightning erupted from the Asuran’s bow, a twisting river of raw energy that cavorted out towards the shard and sent it whirling. The lightning carved a leaping track through Apollo’s shield, forks snapping through it to scorch the hull, multiple strikes ripping down like a storm in the desert. Even when it faded out a second later, Ellis felt the ship shivering, saw sparks the size of buses crawling across the upper armor.

  “What the hell was that?”

  “Whatever it was,” Meyers said, “it looks like all they had. Main power systems on the Asuran are down, they’ve gone into some kind of recharge cycle.”

  “Then let’s finish this before they get their breath back. Open fire, all forward railguns.”

  Space lit up.

  Multiple weapons emplacements mounted along Apollo’s forward hull had come to abrupt and terrible life, directing streams of hypervelocity ingots towards the Replicator cruiser. The vessel seemed to shudder as the railguns carved into it, ripples of vibration coursing along its flank as the weapons blowtorched through its outer plating. The ship’s hull blistered, shedding metal and great gouts of burning atmosphere.

  Its engine glow faltered, flickering as the power began to fail. Whole lines of windows began to glow horribly bright as fires engulfed its decks.

  Ellis took no pleasure in watching the slow death of an enemy. “Missiles,” he ordered.

  Apollo was passing under the Asuran vessel, Deacon pouring power into the thrusters, swinging the ship down in a sharply a
ngled burn. As the Replicator’s shadow passed over the viewports, Meyers triggered the missiles. Four sparks appeared at Apollo’s bow, rose, then darted back along the ship’s hull. Ellis resisted the urge to follow them with his gaze as they passed over him and out of sight.

  A second passed, and then — for a brief time — night turned to day.

  It took some time to get the shard on board. It had been rendered inert by the Asuran attack, and was drifting amongst an expanding cloud of debris from the cruiser. Meyers had some difficulty finding it amidst all the scrap metal.

  Eventually, though, the ship was located. Deacon, despite his earlier misgivings, was able to execute some very fancy flying indeed, even surrounded by the shattered corpse of the Replicator vessel, and matched vectors with it. With the doors to the bomb bay open, Apollo was able, very slowly and very gently, to scoop the little craft aboard.

  Now that it was close enough to see, the vessel was certainly striking. Partly because of its design; it was at once cluttered and graceful, sinister and effortlessly elegant, as though a predatory insect had been frozen halfway through changing into a musical instrument. But the ship also caught the eye because of what it seemed to be made of.

  Ellis, standing with McKay just outside the ring of armed marines he had posted around the ship, was having a hard time taking his eyes off it. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “What, gold? Yeah.”

  “Who would have a gold spaceship?”

  “Somebody rich.”

  There were technicians checking the ship out, scanning it for radiation, toxins, or any sign it was about to blow up and take half of Apollo with it. They had been checking for several minutes, but no-one had started running yet. Ellis was almost hopeful.

  “So you’ve not seen anything like this before.”

  McKay shook his head. “No. Nothing like this design at all. It’s not Goa’uld, not Asgard, certainly not Wraith… I’ve checked through every database I can lay hands on, but I’ve got nothing.”

  “But you recognized the language he was speaking.”