Peter Evans - Angelus

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 system 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.”