STARGATE ATLANTIS: Angelus Read online

  Angelus

  By Peter J. Evans

  An original publication of Fandemonium Ltd, produced under license from MGM Consumer Products.

  Fandemonium Books

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  Surbiton

  Surrey KT5 8YB

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  Visit our website: www.stargatenovels.com

  ©2011 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. All Rights Reserved. Photography and cover art: ©2004-2011 MGM Global Holdings Inc. All Rights Reserved.

  METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER Presents

  STARGATE ATLANTIS™

  JOE FLANIGAN TORRI HIGGINSON RACHEL LUTTRELL JASON MOMOA

  with PAUL McGILLION as Dr. Carson Beckett and DAVID HEWLETT as Dr. McKay

  Executive Producers BRAD WRIGHT & ROBERT C. COOPER

  Created by BRAD WRIGHT & ROBERT C. COOPER

  STARGATE: ATLANTIS ©2004-2011 MGM Global Holdings Inc. STARGATE: ATLANTIS is a trademark of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. All Rights Reserved. METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER ™ & ©2011 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written consent of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  Contents

  Prologue: Fire from Heaven

  Chapter 1: The Fall

  Chapter 2: …For I Have Sinned

  Chapter 3: Suffer the Children

  Chapter 4: The Sixth Circle

  Chapter 5: Creator

  Chapter 6: Blood and Gold

  Chapter 7: Fragments

  Chapter 8: Insecurity

  Chapter 9: My Little Eye

  Chapter 10: What Lies Beneath

  Chapter 11: Lock and Load

  Chapter 12: By the Sea

  Chapter 13: Immortal Remains

  Chapter 14: Dead Metal

  Chapter 15: In the Zone

  Chapter 16: Phage

  Chapter 17: Open Season

  Chapter 18: Resistance

  Chapter 19: Kill or Cure

  Chapter 20: Old Friends

  Epilogue: Fire from Heaven Redux

  Prologue

  Fire from Heaven

  The sky was dark, and death was in the air.

  The Father could smell it, taste it on his tongue. The sun was high, but he couldn’t see its light — the clouds of smoke and dust were too thick. A sluggish, sickly night-time was sprawling towards him from the far horizon, lit with stuttering flashes.

  Those sparks were getting closer, he knew. Some of them were lightning, static electricity ripped from the skies by all the particulates in the air. But many of them, the brighter, straighter ones, were not electricity in any form recognized by nature.

  They were anger, those lights. They were rage and revenge, and they were directed at him. For what he had done.

  He turned away. He had a cloth held to his mouth to keep out the worst of the stink, but the miasma of burned rock and roasted flesh was getting too strong. The last city had been immolated just minutes before, the bright beams lancing down from the sky to lay open its protective mountain and boil what lay inside. How many of his children had vaporized in that searing attack, he wondered? A hundred thousand? More? It was impossible to tell. He had spent a year in that city and had never explored one tenth of it.

  There would be no more exploring now. The city didn’t even exist as rubble any more, its citizens could not even be called corpses. They were dust and smoke and a foul taste in the air, and that was all.

  He would be next. The beams were getting closer.

  The attackers had shown not the slightest trace of mercy, not a second’s hesitation. There had been no attempt at communication, no warning, no negotiation. They didn’t want anything from the planet or its people, they simply wanted them gone. And they had gathered all their energies to that one end, and sent them stabbing down from orbit in a storm of light.

  The planet had fallen in hours. There was no defense. The people had relied on their mountains to protect them, had hidden their great works underground for millennia. The cities had sprawled under the hills and the cliffs and the great peaks, unseen, for thousands of years, and it had been enough.

  But this was a new enemy, sending down their fire from heaven, and stone was no match for their weapons.

  A beam snapped down a kilometre away, the sound of its passing a horrid ripping noise, deafening even from this distance. The Father felt the heat of it, the sizzle of its electricity over his skin, and it nearly knocked him off his feet. As he stumbled, he saw, briefly, the circular hole it left in the clouds, before the beam cut off and the smoke roiled back in to close the gap.

  Where the beam had touched ground, a cone of grey was rising.

  A thousand tons of pulverized rock and soil spat up into the greasy air, the initial blast from the beam’s transfer of energy. It came up in a tall narrow fountain, almost smooth from this distance, regular, until the upper edges of it slowed to a point where they began to surrender to gravity. But even as the cone started to unravel, light was growing at its base. That gush of powdered rock was little more than a cosmetic effect. The beam had penetrated kilometers down into the planet’s crust, and a powerful reaction was growing there.

  Behind him, another beam speared the clouds and violated the world. And another.

  There was no chance he could get to his sanctuary now. The facility was too far away, over the next hill, and it would take too long to prep the starhopper anyway. The machine had slept for too long. He had never even been sure it would still work.

  He hadn’t expected to need it.

  He steadied himself, ready for the end.

  Where he had seen the beam strike, a sphere of light was rising, swelling, insanely bright. Mass became energy in the centre of that sphere, matter ceased to be. Hell was being born in front of his eyes.

  Finally, the ground itself reacted to the light, and heaved, rippled into a titan blastwave that erupted outwards from the sphere, hid it in an expanding disc of flying rubble. It spread terrifyingly fast, the heat of a new sun driving it onwards.

  The Father knew it was going to kill him. He spread his arms in the face of it, his eyes open, daring it to take him.

  The sound of it was thunder, battering his ears.

  And the rolling blastwave seemed to shrink back from him, to coalesce, its edges solidifying and hardening into planes of dark gold. The sky above it turned black, the ground beneath it shrank away. The entire scene focused and attenuated and became metal.

  He was inside the starhopper.

  He stared, blinking into the darkness of space. The optic portal was set to full transparency, and a panoramic starfield surrounded him. Above his head and to either side, status boards pulsed calming mandalas of data, while the controls under his fingertips were slightly warm; the subtle exchange of energy between his body and the mechanisms beneath.

  The screams of burning children, the thunder of the beams, all were gone, stilled. He was alone.

  He raised his hands from the controls, ignoring the hopper’s gentle complaint, and turned them over. They were as they always were — the lines across his palms, the whorls of his fingerprints, all as they should be. But the transition from the dream to reality, the unbidden jump from a slaughtered world to the still womb of the starhopper, had jarred him terribly. The vision of the dying cities had been so real, and waking up hadn’t felt like waking at all. Had he really been asleep so long?

  How, ind
eed, could he have slept at all, with the cries of his people so fresh in his ears?

  He looked over to the storage alcove, where his visios hung from a levitation clamp. The mask seemed to glare at him, accusing, the glossy gold reflecting his own face as he studied it. The empty eyeholes gaped, lifeless. When he reached out to touch the visios, it felt cold enough to burn.

  As his fingertips met the metal, the control board began to chime plaintively for his attention. The proximity alarm was sounding.

  There was another ship approaching. They had found him.

  He laid his hands flat against the vector cascades, and thought the starhopper’s drives into searing life. As the acceleration pushed him back into his throne he concentrated on the sensors, ordering a tactical map onto the portal. Threads of light appeared in front of him, sewing themselves into twists and skeins, globes and planes that rotated dizzyingly in the air above his hands. And there, finally, in the midst of those dancing graphics, a pulse of brilliant white, shining like a jewel.

  His objective. At last, that which he sought was drawing near.

  Hope rose in him, for the first time in as long as he could remember. Perhaps, if he was quick enough and strong enough, he might survive.

  Whether he lived or died, he decided suddenly, he would go to his fate appropriately dressed. He snatched the visios from its alcove and settled it onto his face, felt the cold metal hug his skin. His gaze narrowed behind the eyeholes, and he returned his hands to the controls, spurring the hopper to maximum speed. It resisted for a moment, then leapt forwards.

  Weapons fire erupted from behind him, scoring the hopper’s phase-shield. But the little ship was already opening up a hole in the dark, its hyperdrives reaching out into the night and wrenching spacetime open in a burst of silver-blue light.

  The hole billowed in front of him, filling the optic portal. Putting all memories aside, he let it envelop him, knowing that his pursuers would be close behind, but somehow at peace with that.

  The jewel on his tactical display still pulsed. Atonement was within his grasp.

  Chapter One

  The Fall

  Horrors often start off small.

  A suggestion of a footfall outside the bedroom door, late and close to sleep, and the careful testing of a handle. The far-off sheen of ice on a night-time road. A tickle behind the eye. Little things, caresses at the edge of consciousness, too subtle to fear. It is only when these horrors have been given time to grow and fester that they become known for what they are.

  The handle turns, and the door swings inwards.

  The ice is an oil-sheened slickness under tires that no longer grip.

  The tickle grows into a grinding headache, resistant to drugs, resistant to prayer, steadily building day on day...

  So it was with the horror that took Atlantis. It began small, almost too small to see, but it was only awaiting its chance to metastasize. Despite later recriminations, no-one could have foreseen it. Even Colonel Abraham Ellis couldn’t, though the horror began with him.

  He never saw it coming. It was too far away, at the end of a tunnel made from swirling blue light.

  The tunnel was an illusion, Ellis knew; some weird artifact of the hyperdrive engines. He had no idea why the strange, supercompressed universe his ship was flying through should appear the way it did, no more than he could explain the careening sense of headlong motion he had experienced the few times he had been through a Stargate. In fact, while he knew the specifications and capabilities of his ship down to the last kilo of thrust, Ellis could claim no real knowledge of how the hyperdrives even worked, let alone how Apollo appeared to be lit blue and silver by a light that probably shouldn’t be there.

  The mystery didn’t bother him. As long as the drives did their job, flinging the great ship between the suns at untold multiples of lightspeed, he was quite content to let them get on with it. Let fuller minds than his ponder the true nature of the light flooding his bridge. The Asgard had, in all likelihood, taken its secret with them to their collective grave.

  No, what was really bugging Ellis was the unmistakable, and quite ridiculous feeling that Apollo was falling.

  He closed his eyes momentarily, settled back in the command throne, took a long breath. All the familiar sensations were still there — the faint vibration of the deck through the soles of his boots, the cool metal edges of the throne arms, the click and chatter of the systems surrounding him. Somebody walked across the bridge behind him, and he heard their footfalls on the deck. But with his eyes closed and his senses grounded, the falling sensation wasn’t there at all.

  He opened his eyes. Through the wide forward viewport, between the weblike support braces, the hyperspace tunnel soared and shone. And once again, Ellis was dropping down into a pit of blue light.

  “Dammit,” he muttered, very quietly.

  Major Meyers glanced up from the weapons console, one eyebrow raised. “Sir?”

  In response, he just nodded curtly at her panel. Meyers’ attention hastily returned to the firing solution she’d been working on.

  She hadn’t looked up at the viewport, Ellis noticed. In fact, she’d tilted her head, almost unconsciously, as if to avoid looking at it.

  Did she feel it as well?

  Ellis had heard of the phenomenon, but he’d always dismissed it up until now. Something that civilians might experience, perhaps, or the kind of mess-hall backtalk that went around when the ship was on a long haul and the usual bitching about drills and shore leave was wearing thin. As far as he was aware, there wasn’t even a name for it.

  Just a feeling that some people had, when looking too hard and too long at the hyperspace tunnel effect, that it either tilted up towards the heavens or dipped right down to the depths of Hell.

  Ellis shook himself, angry at his own weakness, and got up. It was nothing, just a failure of perspective, a trick of the eye. Nothing that should be on his mind now, not when he was flying his ship into the middle of a war. “ETA?”

  “Seventeen minutes,” Kyle Deacon reported from the helm.

  “Good. Meyers, get me the bomb bay. No…” He frowned. “Second thoughts, I’ll head down there myself. Give McKay a scare.”

  “Yessir. I’ll call you before we break out.”

  He walked past her console to get to the hatchway, and as he did, leaned down and tipped his head towards the viewport. “What do you think?” he breathed. “Up or down?”

  “Down sir,” she replied, eyes fixed steadily on her readouts. “Definitely down.”

  Out in the lightless gulfs of space, two great powers coiled around each other like monstrous serpents. And, like monsters, they fought and tore.

  A week before, Ellis had watched the blood of the two serpents spread across Colonel Carter’s starmap in a series of vivid splashes: a brilliant, icy blue for the Wraith, a gory scarlet for the Asurans. Each splash, Carter had told him, was the site of a known engagement. Between these battle markers lay the serpents themselves, twisting wildly through each other in three dimensions — an approximation of the two powers’ battle lines.

  The whole map, in fact, was an approximation, and therein lay the danger of it. “Most of this information is days old,” Carter had told him, pointing vaguely at a cluster of splashes. “At best we find out about one of these engagements a few hours after it’s over and done. Really, we’ve got no idea exactly where the fighting is going on.”

  Ellis had peered closely at the map, a gnawing feeling of worry under his sternum. Carter had scaled the display to take in dozens of star systems, and already half of them were enveloped by the serpents and their terrible wounds. “Is there anything you can be certain of?”

  “Just this.” Carter had touched a control, and a small green dot had blinked into life in the centre of the display.

  “Let me guess.” Ellis straightened up. “Atlantis.”

  Carter nodded. “Trying to get a true picture of events over these kinds of distances is hard. Information travel
ling at C or below means that simultaneity is bunk — you can’t tell if two things are happening at the same time because in relativistic terms there’s no such thing as the same time. And information above C, like gate or hyperspace travel, plays havoc with event ordering.”

  “So we’re screwed.” Ellis rubbed his chin, still glaring at the map. “We can’t get a true picture of what’s going on, and what we don’t know could kill us.”

  “Yeah,” Carter said grimly. “If the Wraith find out where Atlantis is, they’ll swarm us. If the Replicators find out, they’ll do worse. The city’s long range sensors are great at picking up moving objects, but as for what those objects are doing… Right now I feel like a kid caught up in a bar fight, hiding under the table. I can hear pool cues on heads, but I don’t dare stick my own head out to see where the danger is.”

  Ellis had been in a few bar fights in his time, although he had normally been wielding the cue. “But McKay says he’s got a plan?”

  “Hasn’t he always?” Carter had smiled at him, briefly. “He’s gone all retro on us. A series of early-warning sensors, dropped into these systems here…” She touched another key and a chain of yellow dots flared into life and started pulsing. The map turned around on itself, stars swimming past each other as the galaxy rotated about the Atlantis marker, and Ellis could see how the yellow dots were spread evenly around it; close to, but never quite touching, the two serpents. “The sensors are stealthy — scanner absorbent, mostly passive… They spread out to form VLAs, then communicate with their relays through narrow-beam communications lasers. That’s old technology, but they’ll be pretty hard to spot.”

  “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.”