Angelus Page 9

  “Very well…” The Ancient’s smooth white brow furrowed very slightly. “I must warn you, the principles are rather obscure.”

  “I think I can handle them.”

  “I have no doubt. I’m just not sure my grasp of your language can.” He took a step backwards to the bed, and leaned on the edge of it, not taking his feet from the floor. “There are two fundamental principles; the first concerns the… Vindicio ratio… Method of sending, for the second.”

  “Delivery system?” ventured Carter.

  “As good a phrase as any. The first principle is that of a certain particle, one of the family of plenus verto proprii, which forms its interactions under the validus vis nuclei…”

  McKay held up his hands. “Wait, wait, wait a second,” he said quickly. “Plenus… turn, turning? Fully turning… Full turn particle?”

  “Oh!” said Carter. “A particle with a full spin!”

  “A boson? And then validus vis… Oh, wait! I know this one… Strongest force! We’re talking about mesons!”

  “That is your word for them?”

  “Yeah.” McKay nodded. “Bosons are the family of particles that have an integer spin, as opposed to fermions which only have a half spin. Mesons are strongly interacting bosons. It’s pretty basic quantum chromodynamics.”

  Angelus smiled, quite broadly. He looked, for the first time, almost happy. “These are terms I must remember, Doctor McKay. It will facilitate working with you in the future, as will your grasp of my language.”

  “Well, the Ancient language isn’t a million miles away from Latin, and I kinda got that drummed into me back at school. Before I got taken out of school, anyway…” He glanced at Carter. “Where was I?”

  “Mesons.”

  “Oh yeah. The delivery system.”

  “Indeed. The system begins with a beam of mesons, fired at extremely high energy levels and pulsed at high frequencies. This causes a… How might you say it? A susceptibility in the planes most basic to tracto vicis, the dimensions, those planes associated with vis fluctuates. There is a vibration which-“

  “You’re losing me,” said Carter, but McKay shook his head. “No, I got it. Keep going.”

  “Very well… Ah, this susceptibility can be exploited if enough energy is fired along the meson beam in a single pulse. This energy, which I calculated to be roughly the equivalent of a single lacuna navitas fabrica released in no more than one millionth of a second… This burst of energy then travels along the meson beam until it interacts with the plane instability and causes a perturbo una locus of the agri totalis vulgus propria. You see?”

  There was a long silence. Finally, McKay shook his head. “Sorry. You lost me at lacuna fabrica.”

  Angelus pointed at the floor. “The city requires three of them to provide its power.”

  “Oh,” said McKay. “ZedPMs!”

  “Hold on,” said Carter. “Each shot from this weapon requires a whole ZPM?”

  “Yes,” Angelus replied. “Did you realize you both pronounce that phase differently?”

  “He’s from Canada. Look, we can’t go around shooting ZPMs off into space! What happens to the city?”

  “Please don’t concern yourself with that, Colonel. I’ll show you how to make more.”

  It took another half an hour of gradual translation and explanation before McKay told Carter he was satisfied. He was sweating by the time he said it, and Carter couldn’t blame him. The intricacies of the Ancient’s plan might have been understandable had they been laid out in languages Carter was used to, but instead of Angelus adopting more English terms, McKay had started to use more and more Latin, until the conversation between the two of them had become an indecipherable morass of bilingual theoretical physics.

  That branch of science was more McKay’s specialty than hers. Even so, the conversation seemed to have taken something out of him.

  Once Carter had excused herself and McKay, she walked with him in silence until she was completely out of the Ancient’s earshot. Then she stopped. “What do you think?”

  “I think that’s probably the most scary discussion of quantum electrodynamics I’ve ever had,” he replied. “Jesus, Sam… If he’s right about this… I mean, I can see why the Replicators came after him, put it that way.”

  “How do you mean?”

  McKay took a deep breath. “How far did you get?”

  “Just give me the basics.”

  “Okay… You generate a high-energy meson stream, pulsed at an ultra-high-frequency. Tune that to generate a specific form of instability in the spacetime dimensions most closely tied to quantum fluctuations. And then you unleash one almighty energy surge up the meson beam, again tuned to the exact same frequency but in anti-phase to the waveform of the initial beam. That rips open a series of dimensional rifts in a kind of cascade, but concentrated into a tiny space. About half the size of a hydrogen atom, or the effect dissipates.”

  Carter frowned. “That’s a lot of energy in one space.”

  “No kidding. Spacetime can’t handle that kind of energy-load, so it breaks down. And what you get is a localized destabilization of the Higgs-Boson field.”

  She stared at him. “That’s insane!”

  “See what I meant?”

  She did indeed. The Higgs-Boson field was, according to recognized theories of high-energy physics, one of the most fundamental forces in the universe. It was what gave particles mass. Without it, the universe would never have evolved out of its most early form — that of a searing sea of undifferentiated elemental protomatter.

  Switch off the Higgs-Boson, Carter thought wildly, and all matter ceases to be. That part of the universe returns to how it was a billionth of a second after the big bang. Angelus had devised a method of turning bits of spacetime back into primal Hell.

  The destructive power of such an event would be unimaginable.

  “Rodney, can you start that report right away? If we can get across to General Landry what Angelus is trying to do, I think we’ve got a good chance of stopping this before it gets dangerous.”

  “Sure. Hey, Sam?”

  “Hm?”

  “Something just occurred to me…” He glanced over his shoulder, quickly, as if to make sure no-one was close by, then leaned closer to Carter. “What we saw on Eraavis, that mess back there. Crust scored, all life burned away, lava everywhere…” He nodded back towards the Ancient’s room. “What if he did it?”

  “Angelus? How?”

  “An accident? Look, if he was messing around with fundamental physics, what if something went wrong and he melted his own planet?”

  Carter thought about that for a moment. “No. Apollo’s scans showed up clear signatures of Replicator weapons fire. Besides, if he’d set off a weapon like that anywhere near a planet, there wouldn’t have been enough of it left to sweep up and send back to us in an envelope.”

  “I guess.” McKay seemed to brighten. “When you put it like that, the thought of an explosion on a scale unseen since the Big Bang seems almost comforting.”

  Suddenly, looking at McKay, Carter found him very strange. Almost as alien as Angelus, although in a totally different way. Out of the two, she found herself abruptly unable to decide which frightened her more.

  “Okay,” she said. “Take comfort in that while you put the report together. I’m going to find Angelus a lab. One that he’s not going to do any work at all in.”

  Chapter Six

  Blood and Gold

  Rodney McKay had a kind of epiphany, two days after Angelus had begun work on the weapon. He realized, quite suddenly and without any particular provocation, that he was being torn in two.

  It was an intellectual quandary he really hadn’t anticipated. The realization, when it came, literally stopped him in his tracks, in the middle of the corridor that lead to the control room and Sam Carter’s office. He halted so abruptly that somebody almost collided with him: a female technician must have been walking quite closely behind him, and McKay saw
her stumbling around him to get past, clearly thrown off-balance by the sudden stop.

  Dimly, he watched her go, feeling disconnected. At that moment, he could have been viewing an abstract image moving past him and felt no more recognition. The knowledge of just how deeply conflicted he felt had stunned him.

  The only thing more surprising was that he hadn’t noticed it before.

  McKay stood there for a moment, still clutching the data tablet he had been taking to show Carter. After a few seconds he set off again, but more slowly this time, and only after making sure no-one else was in the corridor with him. And when the way branched, he diverted from his original path and instead set off towards the nearest transporter.

  There was a lot to think about, and he couldn’t do that while giving Carter his report. That would have to wait.

  The transporter took McKay to the mess hall. Once there he found an empty table near one of the long windows and sat, placing the tablet on the table in front of him. He found himself looking at it as though not entirely sure what it was.

  “Wow,” he breathed, blinking as though clearing his vision would help to clear his mind. “Wow.”

  It had taken quite some time to get the lab set up properly, which could almost certainly be put down to deliberate delays on Carter’s part. She wanted Angelus to hold off starting anything fundamental before she had all her methods of surveillance in place. But Angelus was eager to work, and despite the delays had been frantically calculating from the outset.

  And since the start of this, McKay had been swept along by the Ancient’s plans.

  He had been working with Angelus almost that entire time, and had only taken short breaks away to eat and sleep. For a while he had remembered his instructions from Carter and followed them diligently — gain as much information about the weapon as possible, collate everything, and report back on a regular basis. Together with the data being recorded from the surveillance suite, the case against building the weapon had really started to come together.

  It wasn’t a duty that McKay took lightly, either. He held his position in the Atlantis expedition in high regard, and while he would be the first to admit that there were those among his team-mates who were, perhaps, more instinctively loyal then he, McKay liked to believe that he could at least be counted on. Letting people down wasn’t something he liked to do at all, even when their demands were, as was so often the case, petty, small-minded, distracting or just plain difficult. Although those people frequently failed to appreciate just how vital his work was, and how annoying being pulled away from it to fix the most simple faults could be, he still tried, as hard as he was able, to come through.

  To do otherwise, at least in the eyes of those making such continuous and unjustified demands on his time, would be seen as failure. McKay was a sensible enough man to accept that failure was an intrinsic part of human existence, but there was no denying that it made him look bad.

  Not only that, but he had friends here. Perhaps not close friends — feelings of that nature weren’t ones he felt especially comfortable with, and he tended to avoid them if at all possible. But there were some whose company he found agreeable. Others he respected, for various reasons. If he was honest with himself, there were probably more people in the city that he respected and didn’t like, but that was beside the point. He didn’t want to see any of them — with no more than a handful of exceptions — immolated in a Replicator assault.

  And far more importantly, Rodney McKay did not want to see a hail of energy beams crashing down onto his own head, either.

  The danger represented by Angelus and his continued residence in the city chilled McKay to the core. The video footage Apollo had sent back from Eraavis had been truly horrifying. He had seen destruction before, but never on such a sustained, determined level. If the Replicators had somehow blown the planet apart, that would, in a way, have been less frightening. It would have been an instant of violence, a sudden unleashing of fury. It would have been comprehensible.

  But to do what they had done to Eraavis, the Asurans must have fired on the planet, continuously and mercilessly, for hours.

  The longer Angelus remained in the city, the more likely it became that Atlantis would suffer the same fate; McKay was in no doubt of that. And if the Ancient began actually reproducing his weapons experiments, there really wasn’t any hope at all. He’d attracted the Asurans once. There was no reason to assume he wouldn’t do so again, for all his promises to the contrary.

  All these factors made for a compelling case. And, for a few hours, McKay had been honestly compelled.

  It hadn’t lasted, he knew now. And it couldn’t have lasted. The science was just too seductive.

  McKay knew he was being tempted, that was completely clear to him. What wasn’t clear was how he could possibly avoid giving in to that temptation. He had been fascinated by theoretical physics since childhood — the interactions of subatomic particles, in all their sublime and boundless variety, awed him. It was the foundation on which everything vital about himself was built — his intellect, his skill, his thirst for insight into the most fundamental properties of the universe. It wasn’t simply that McKay liked to know how things worked, he needed to know how. It was a hunger, one that had pulled him onwards almost all his life: from the school science project that had brought his abilities to the attention of the CIA, through his time at Area 51, and then to Antarctica and finally across the gulf between the galaxies themselves, here to Atlantis.

  His dreamed of theoretical physics, on occasion. That is, when the dreams weren’t shudder-inducing nightmares about his own impending doom, which tended to be the norm. But on the good nights, he would find himself in vast libraries, the bookshelves groaning with heavy tomes; each a wealth of answers, only needing to be opened…

  Angelus, for all his dangers, was holding a book open for Rodney McKay. The science he was offering went beyond any experiment or study in history. The principles behind this weapon made even the Stargates seem mundane.

  The Ancient’s weapon could, in one blast of unimaginable cosmic violence, recreate the Big Bang itself.

  How could he resist that? How, after searching his whole life for the answers, could he give them up? It was impossible.

  The dream-books were being opened for him, and they were almost close enough to read. And if McKay had been asked, at that moment, whether the secrets held within were worth dying for, he could not have honestly answered: “No.”

  His reverie in the mess hall lasted an hour. When he finally felt ready to return to the world, McKay called Carter on his headset and told her he had nothing worth bothering her with, and would be staying in the lab with Angelus until something interesting happened. Then he opened up his latest report on the data tablet, thought for a moment or two about simply deleting it, and then let his conscience get the better of him. He opened up an encrypted folder and stored the file there.

  Then he went back to the lab.

  The journey took some time. McKay had deliberately chosen a location that was away from the core of Atlantis, out on the west pier. On the one hand, that kept it away from the most vital areas of the city, but it also made getting there a chore. The nearest transporter was several hundred meters away, through a series of corridors that, like much of the city’s internal architecture, all looked very much the same, and finally along a covered gallery that ran along a long, open slot in the pier’s upper surface. Whenever he returned to the lab, it was always something of a relief for McKay to reach the gallery. Not only was it a welcome exposure to fresh air, but it also meant that he hadn’t gotten lost again.

  By the time he got back to the lab this time, his legs were starting to ache and the tablet was feeling a lot heavier than it should have done. He noticed that his pace had slowed considerably as he came in off the gallery, and picked it up a little as he approached the guard station. There were two marines sitting behind the armored glass of the station, and they nodded to McKay as he drew level. H
e smiled briefly back at them as he strode past, arms swinging, trying to make it look as if he had been pounding along since leaving the transporter. As soon as they keyed open the lab doors, though, he practically staggered inside and dropped the tablet on the nearest table.

  There was an ache in his chest. Was that from breathing too hard, or was it something else? He rubbed his sternum nervously, and then noticed that Angelus was watching him.

  The Ancient was wearing his golden mask. It could only have been a trick of the light, but the eyeholes seemed frighteningly empty.

  McKay dropped his hand. “Hey.”

  “Welcome back, Doctor McKay. You seem out of breath.” Angelus reached up and took the mask off, set it down on the terminal next to him. He was sitting at the image processor, a hexagonal ring of terminals that bulked at the center of the lab. The processor terminals surrounded a holographic projector, and McKay could see a series of gridded planes whirling in the air above it.

  He found a nearby swivel chair and sank into it. “It’s quite a walk.”

  “Back to the tower?”

  “What? No, to the transporter.” McKay squinted at the Ancient’s slender form for a moment, then down at his own torso. There was a quite a difference. “Well, I’ve never been much of a hiker, you know?”

  Angelus turned to him. “You surprise me.”

  “I do?”

  “Of course. You seem to think well on your feet, Doctor. I have seen you walk around this space many times when you have been trying to define a concept or solve a calculation.” He touched a control, without looking at the panel, and the holographic image faded out. “I could easily see you covering many stadia in your quest for answers.”

  “I guess I’m more of a pacer.” McKay took a breath and held it, checking on the feeling in his chest. It didn’t spike, so he decided that he was probably okay. He stood up and moved over to join the Ancient at the display.