Peter Evans: Angelus

“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 over 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.