Angelus Page 4

  “Thorough?” ventured Carter. Woolsey smiled.

  “I was going to say ‘torturous’, but ‘thorough’ will do.”

  Ellis stepped forwards. “And the Apollo?”

  “Personally,” said Sheppard, “I’d feel a whole lot better with Apollo still in my sky for now. From what Colonel Ellis here says… You’re sure about that, Colonel? The Replicators actually dropped their shields?”

  “Absolutely. Damnedest thing I ever saw.”

  “So whoever this Angelus is, they were prepared to sacrifice a whole cruiser just to get one decent shot at him. I don’t know about you guys, but that makes me just a little nervous about having him around.”

  “I concur,” said Woolsey. “Colonel Carter?”

  Carter shook her head. “Actually, I disagree. As far as we know, the location of Atlantis is still a secret, and I’d like to keep it that way for as long as possible. I’m sorry, Colonel, but that means not having Apollo around right now.”

  Sheppard leaned slightly towards her and dropped his voice. “Doesn’t that leave us a tad, you know, exposed?”

  “Sure it does. But come on, if the Replicators want him that badly and they knew he was here, they’d be all over us right now. I’d rather have Apollo seeding those stealth sensors. The more information we have about who’s in our neighborhood the better.”

  “I’m with Colonel Carter,” said Ellis. “Even without Angelus in the picture, the Wraith and the Replicators are still at each others’ necks. If their war threatens to spill over into this system, you need to know about it.”

  Woolsey slapped his folder in exasperation. “But Colonel Carter can’t spare McKay! Not if she’s going to investigate Angelus and his ship!”

  “McKay’s done all he needs to on the sensors.” Woolsey opened his mouth to speak, but Ellis put his hand up. “Yes, I know he’ll tell you differently. But you know what he’s like. You all do. He’ll tinker until the last possible moment if you give him the chance, but if you take that chance away, he’ll come through. At least, he always has so far.”

  Woolsey looked for a moment like he was going to keep on arguing, but then he leaned back pushed the folder away from him. “Colonel Carter, it’s your call.”

  “Thank you,” she replied. “Colonel Ellis, is there anything else you need before you head out?”

  “Nothing that can’t wait until we get back.”

  “Very well.” She smiled. “As soon as Angelus is out of your hair, I’ll let you get out of ours.”

  Ellis ran a hand back over his smooth scalp, and gave her a rare grin. “My pleasure, Colonel.”

  Looking at Angelus, Sam Carter found herself incapable of judging his age.

  He was lying on a bed in the infirmary, screens drawn up around him for privacy. He was quite still, his eyes closed, arms folded lightly across his chest in the manner of a Pharaoh. The medical gown he wore hung from him like a robe, and his hair — long, darkly curled, peppered with grey at the temples — spread in a halo over his pillow.

  He could have been some ancient king, laid out for burial, if it hadn’t been for the blood-volume sensor clipped over one forefinger.

  But his face… That was where Carter’s intuition failed. His features were oddly fine, the closed eyes deep, the nose long but slender. His skin was pale, but unlined. He could, Carter realized, be any age between thirty and sixty, and she could not trust herself to make a guess which was closer.

  Of course, if his claims were true, she could add ten thousand years onto any age she came up with.

  “How long has he been like this?” she asked.

  Jennifer Keller was on the other side of the bed, looking at Angelus with the same kind of slightly perplexed expression that Carter guessed she’d probably been wearing. “Hmm?”

  Carter gestured to the sleeping man. “Has he woken up at all? Said anything?”

  “Ah, yeah. He woke up just after he was brought in, asked who I was.”

  “Anything else?”

  Keller put her head to one side. “Yeah, now that you mention it. He asked if he was home.”

  “Home…” Carter barely whispered the word. Of course, to a Lantean, Atlantis would be home. The human expedition occupying it now were only interlopers. Before today, it had seemed completely natural for Carter and her team to be here in this alien city; necessary, even. Now, with the possibility that one of the original owners was here, her whole perspective was threatening to come unglued. Suddenly, she was no longer sure of how she saw herself.

  Charitably, maybe she could call herself a guest. From another point of view, though, little more than a trespasser.

  If Angelus was truly an Ancient, she wondered, which view would he hold?

  She shook herself. “All right, what else can you tell me?”

  “Okay, I’ve run a full series of MRI scans, done blood tests, taken tissue samples… EEG and ECG too.” Keller was nodding to herself slightly as she spoke, as if running through a list of her own actions in her mind. “Pretty much everything I can do with what I have here.”

  Carter hadn’t known the woman for long, but could already see that while Keller was a competent doctor, she could be uncertain of herself. “I’m sure you’ve been thorough,” she told her.

  Keller half-shrugged. “I’ve probably forgotten something… Anyway, I’ve run the results against everything we know about the Lanteans. As far as I can tell without a complete genome-sequence, I don’t see anything that disproves his story.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Look, I’ll show you.” Keller pointed to a nearby table, outside the screens, and when Carter moved over to it she followed her there. “X-Rays here, brainwaves here… I’m still waiting on final analysis of the blood samples, but the gross chemical makeup is a match. See?”

  Carter rubbed the back of her own neck, trying to loosen up a niggling stiffness there. “I was right, you’ve been thorough.”

  “Thank you.”

  “So what do you think?”

  “Me?” Keller gave that little half-shrug again. “Honest opinion? I think- Oh!”

  The woman’s hand had flown to her mouth, and she was staring at Angelus.

  The man was sitting up.

  Carter walked quickly over to him. “How are you feeling?” she said quietly.

  Angelus was blinking repeatedly, a slightly puzzled expression on his face. His eyes, now that Carter could see them, were very dark, with almost no difference in color between iris and pupil. “Luxis est valda perspicuous… Excuse me, I mean that it’s very bright here. The light.”

  “We can turn them down…” Carter nodded to Keller, who went over to a panel and dimmed the lights. “That better?”

  “Yes, thank you.” He looked up at Carter. “In answer to your question, I feel quite well. Where is this place?”

  “You’re in Atlantis. We call this section the infirmary, it’s where we heal our sick.”

  “And injured…” A frown darkened his features for a moment, then he seemed to gather his thoughts. “Please, forgive my rudeness. My name is Angelus.”

  “I’m Colonel Samantha Carter. Do you remember meeting Doctor Keller?”

  “Of course.” He bowed slightly to Keller, then fixed Carter with a strange, intense look. “Colonel? Is that a signifier of authority?”

  “It’s a military rank.”

  “I see. And is there anyone of higher rank here in Atlantis?”

  “No, I’m in charge of this expedition.”

  Angelus nodded slowly, as if taking the information in. “Very well. In that case, Colonel Samantha Carter, I have a request to make of you.”

  “Me, personally?”

  “As leader, it should be no other.”

  Carter took a deep breath. “What do you need me to do?”

  “I need you, “ said Angelus, “to hear my confession.”

  A second passed, while what Carter had been expecting to hear and what she had actually heard collided in
her mind and then dodged around each other for a while. Finally she mastered her surprise enough to say: “Excuse me?”

  Angelus got to his feet, and as he did Carter saw that he was very tall. When he reached out and took her hands in his, his skin was cool, and oddly smooth. “You, Colonel,” he said quietly, “shall be my confessor. I have done things, things you need to hear about. I must confess to you.”

  “What?” Carter whispered, in spite of herself. “What did you do?”

  The Ancient gave her a sad smile. “I killed my children,” he said.

  Chapter Three

  Suffer the Children

  It was dark, and someone was crying for help. He could hear her screams even through the weight of sleep, scratching at him, over and over. But his arms were like lead, too heavy to move, and no matter how he tried he couldn’t reach her. He couldn’t even shout back, to let her know help was coming.

  If he had, it would have been a lie.

  Sheppard blinked awake, staring up into the dark. His alarm clock was chirping at him, an insistent two-tone whine, and the display was flashing plaintive green digits into the gloom. Sheppard turned his head, squinted at the numbers, then reached out and hit the alarm button hard.

  Harder than he should have done. There was a dull cracking sound from the clock’s innards and the numbers went out.

  “Snooze,” he muttered.

  Silence was preferable to the sound of the alarm, but Sheppard was already regretting the destruction. He’d have to requisition a new clock, now, and lie about what had happened to the old one. Still, a story about how the thing had mysteriously fallen off the table and broken sounded better than the truth. He couldn’t have told anyone that.

  He sat up, shaking his head to clear the last vestiges of dream from his mind. Maybe the next clock he was given wouldn’t have an alarm that sounded so much like distant cries.

  Or at least not ones in a voice he remembered so well.

  Carter was waiting for him outside the conference room. She was looking at her watch as he walked towards her, and for a moment he wondered if he was late. His sleep had certainly been disturbed — he had lost count of the number of times he had woken during the night — but he couldn’t remember lapsing back into slumber after he had murdered the alarm. Perhaps, he thought, the clock had exacted a final revenge on him, stealing a few minutes to make him look bad at the briefing.

  Then again, he wouldn’t have been the only one not at his best. Sam Carter looked as if she hadn’t slept at all during the night, or at least had gotten up in even more of a hurry than he had.

  “Morning,” he said as he drew close.

  “Colonel.” She smiled, but he could see that her hair was just a little unkempt, odd strands of it sticking out at random angles. The folder under her arm was in a similar state, with printouts and scraps of paper jutting from it.

  Sheppard jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. “Look, I’m sorry, but my alarm got busted… I must have —”

  “What?” She gave him a blank look, then glanced down at her watch again. “Oh, I see! No, it’s not you, it’s Rodney.”

  “Rodney’s late?”

  “No, he’s early. Dragged us all in there twenty minutes ago. I’m surprised he wasn’t knocking on your door too.”

  “He knows what I’d do to him if he did.” He frowned at her. “Sam, are you all right?”

  “Hm? Yeah, I’m fine. Just a lot to take in, that’s all.” She gestured towards the doors. “Come on.”

  “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 sys
tem 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.”