Peter Evans - Angelus

“And they send data back to Atlantis via subspace?”

“Yes, but only through an encoded network. Basically a lot of dummies, really short messages and some fancy coding.” She tapped the map’s surface. “If anything bad happens within three light-years, we’ll know about it thirty minutes later.”

Ellis had nodded, lost in thought. “Not bad… Although if something did pop in your backyard, what would you do? Move the city again?”

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.