STARGATE ATLANTIS: From the Depths (SGX-08) Read online

  “Could be mating behavior,” Ivanova said.

  “I don’t think so. It’s too complex. Keep recording.”

  “I promise, I’m recording.”

  “I’m seeing repeating patterns,” Ivanova said. “See that, red shifting to blue, like an arrow, always oriented in the same direction —”

  “Migration behavior? We could be watching a migratory group form —”

  “There are other repeating patterns, with variations. We’re looking at something at least as complex as birdsong here. At least.”

  Both scientists were squeezing forward, their noses nearly up against the viewscreen. Lorne found himself craning forward to see, too, despite knowing essentially nothing about the biology of squid. One thing he’d discovered while ferrying scientists all over the Pegasus Galaxy was that enthusiasm for any subject, no matter how mind-numbingly boring on the face of it — plants, rocks, watching old ruins get older — tended to be contagious.

  “Humor me for a moment,” Moore said, leaning back in his seat and squinting at the squid as they darted back and forth through the water, surprisingly swift for creatures their size. “Is it possible to run the footage we’re getting of their communication through the jumper’s computer and see if it suggests meaningful groupings of symbols?”

  “You think it’s some kind of language?”

  Moore shrugged. “The patterns we’re seeing are suggestive. So —”

  “That’s not something that the jumper’s computers are set up to do,” Lorne said. “We can take this back and let one of the linguists take a look at it. This might be right up Lynn’s alley.” William Lynn had come out to Atlantis the year before as a civilian linguist, and while his specialty was analyzing the origins of the Wraith language in the language of the Ancients, Lorne thought he might be willing to take a break to figure out whether the squid were talking.

  “Let’s get some more recordings,” Moore said. “Can you get us in closer?”

  As Lorne edged the jumper cautiously closer, the squid veered out of his way. Many of them were longer than the jumper, and he tried to give them a wide berth. While they hadn’t proven aggressive so far, he wasn’t sure he liked the idea of being swarmed by them. Near him, the creatures’ flashing colors changed their pattern even more rapidly, and groups of the creatures circulated in tight knots before zooming off to other parts of the large shoal. The tentacles and arms trailing through the water gave the appearance of enormous, writhing knots of seaweed, or possibly something out of an old monster movie.

  “I think we’re upsetting them,” Lorne said.

  “Can’t you use the cloak?”

  “Not without dropping the shield, and unless you want to risk having to swim home, we’re not going to do that.” He backed the jumper away, still recording. “We’re going to have to surface soon,” he said. “Using the shield underwater eats power. In fact, it’s dropping pretty fast.” He frowned at the readings. “Actually, a lot faster than it’s supposed to. I think we’d better take this jumper back and get it checked over.”

  “It would be ideal if we could bring one of the creatures back with us,” Moore said.

  “Considering their size, how are we actually going to do that?” Lorne asked, hoping he sounded more patient than he felt. He’d learned to expect the scientists to say things like “maybe we could bring the glowing tree back to the botany lab” and “it looks like it may have poisonous fangs, let’s get a closer look!” and “it’s possible that the radiation it’s emitting is some kind of greeting, so if we put on radiation suits, maybe we can say a proper hello.” He’d also learned that it was important to introduce practical considerations early and often if they were actually going to be heard.

  “They’re not going to fit in a bait cooler,” Ivanova said. “We might be able to snag another tissue sample if someone goes out there in a wet suit.” She sounded wearily sure of who that someone was likely to be.

  “Let’s go talk to the linguists first,” Lorne said. “I don’t like the idea of staying out here in a malfunctioning jumper, and if there’s any chance that we’re dealing with an intelligent species here, scraping off samples of their skin isn’t a great way to say hello.”

  He brought the jumper around, heading back toward Atlantis, and then frowned as the life sign readings changed. “It looks like we’ve attracted some attention.”

  “They’re pursuing?” Moore asked. “Possibly trying to drive us out of their territory, don’t you think?” The last was presumably to Ivanova, who shrugged. “In that case, they shouldn’t pursue us for long.”

  “Let’s put some distance between us and our friends, just to be sure,” Lorne said. He surfaced, the jumper shedding water as it lifted into the air, and then checked the life sign readings again. “Ah — doc, they still seem to be following us.”

  “Ridiculous,” Moore said. “They certainly can’t see us now that we’ve left the water.”

  Lorne tested this comforting theory by setting a zig-zag course back toward Atlantis. While the squid didn’t follow his zigs and zags, and quickly lagged behind the jumper’s airspeed, they did maintain their own steady course in the direction of the city. And not just a few angry squid — it looked like the whole group of the creatures was heading directly for Atlantis.

  “It could be a coincidence,” Ivanova offered, leaning over his shoulder to see the life-sign readouts. “Maybe they’re done with whatever they were doing, and now they’re ready to move on.”

  On a hunch, Lorne had been expanding the radius of his life-sign scan, and he brought the readings up on the heads-up display. “I’m not sure how that explains this.”

  Around the city, from every direction, life-sign readings were arrowing toward Atlantis.

  “It looks like we’re going to have a whole lot of company,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “AND ALL these life sign readings are squid?” Elizabeth asked. Across the conference room table, John looked at Ronon, who shrugged as if to say that this wasn’t a problem they ever had on Sateda. Teyla looked concerned, while from the way that Rodney had his head bent over his tablet she wasn’t certain he was paying attention. William Lynn, the linguist, had his tablet propped on the table in front of him like a student anxious for a chance to read his notes in class.

  “It looks like it,” Lorne said on the radio. “They’re pretty speedy, too. If they keep moving at this speed, the first of them are going to reach the city in about an hour.”

  “Raise the shields,” Elizabeth said. There was a pause, and John cleared his throat. “I’m sorry. Colonel Sheppard?”

  “Raise the shields,” John said. “Not that we’re probably in that much danger from angry squid.”

  “If something hits the underwater observation windows hard enough, it could be a problem,” Lorne said. “We could have some flooding of the lower levels and some damage that would be a pain to repair. And there are critical systems on the underside of the city; they’re not fragile, exactly, but it wouldn’t do them any good to have a giant squid grab them and try to twist them apart.”

  “So let’s avoid that,” John said.

  “Not exactly a city-wide crisis, though,” Rodney said. “Unless we plan to make a lot of calamari, I’m not sure why we need a full briefing on this. Keep the shield up until they finish mating, or feeding, or whatever it is they’re doing —”

  “There is still the possibility that the squid represent an experiment similar to the one that created the Wraith,” Teyla said.

  “Yes, but do we have the slightest bit of evidence that they do?”

  Lynn shifted in his seat, and John turned his way. John used fewer words in his moderation of the conversation around the table than Elizabeth would have, but Lynn seemed clear enough that he had the floor. “We don’t,” Lynn said. “But —” He spoke up over Rodney’s attempt to launch into a dismissal of the entire topic of the squishy sciences. “But, that said,” he went on with determination,
“there are some indications we may be dealing with an intelligent species.”

  “Which are?” John prompted.

  “I’ve taken a quick look at the data that Moore and Ivanova brought back. I should prefer to have several days to analyze them and report my findings, rather than an hour —”

  “Try doing nuclear physics in ten minutes while in constant danger of dying,” Rodney muttered.

  “But I’ve arrived at some tentative preliminary conclusions, granting that this is a highly inadequate sample —”

  “No one is asking you for data that will survive peer review,” Elizabeth said. “What are you seeing?”

  “There are color variations that occur in complex patterns with partial repetition,” Lynn said. “At first I wondered if we were looking at something like birdsong — very complex learned behavior, and certainly a primitive form of communication, but not symbolic language. But something about the patterns was nagging at me, so I ran the whole thing through the city’s computers, looking for any relevant data, and what I found was this.” He turned his tablet around to display a rapidly changing series of colors and patterns.

  “The Ancients were interested in squid?” Ronon asked.

  Lynn looked pleased, like a teacher whose student had provided the correct next line to carry the lecture forward. “Not from anything I’ve found. But they did record this visual code, a form of the Ancient language that could be conveyed entirely through color and pattern. I’m not sure whether the Ancients created it themselves — frankly, I’m not sure why they would have needed to — or whether it was created by some group of humans in the Pegasus galaxy. If you didn’t have the technology for subspace communication…”

  “You could use this to signal between spaceships,” Rodney said, finally looking grudgingly interested. “I see that.”

  “Or aircraft,” John said. “Or submarines. Okay. Is this what the squid are using?”

  Lynn’s eyes slid sideways. “Well. That’s where it becomes relevant that we have an extremely small sample of extremely complex communication that has almost certainly evolved significantly from this system, even if it was based on it originally.”

  “Dr. Lynn…” Elizabeth began.

  “Yes or no,” John said.

  “A definite maybe. I’ve identified several different groupings that look like they could represent words. Some of them make more sense than others, I’m afraid.”

  “So you’re not sure,” Rodney said. “Personally, I’m leaning toward no.”

  “You sound skeptical,” Teyla said. “We have seen stranger things.”

  “Sure, but it’s the time frame,” Rodney said. “Even if the ancestors of these squid were smart enough to talk and learned how to do it from the Ancients, would their descendants really remember enough Ancient to still be using it thousands of years after the Ancients left?”

  “Human worlds do,” Ronon said.

  “Yes, but most human worlds have contact with other human worlds,” Lynn said. “Contact through the Stargate helps to prevent linguistic drift. Most other worlds that have been isolated for a very long time have had written language for at least part of that time, which is another stabilizing factor. The squid, presumably, have neither.”

  “Which side of this are you arguing?” John asked.

  “I told you, I don’t have enough data. And we’re not going to get it with the shields up. Why don’t we leave the shields down until we have a chance to try to establish communication?”

  “That’s an option,” Elizabeth said, but John shook his head.

  “Let’s see what they do when they get here,” he said. “If they’re just passing through, we can lower the shield once they’ve moved on. But I don’t think we want to test the structural integrity of the docking bay doors or the observation windows by letting them get pounded on by angry squid.”

  ***

  “There’s something very odd about these shield fluctuations,” Zelenka said.

  Lorne frowned and stretched to look over his shoulder, although he couldn’t make much of the readouts scrolling across Zelenka’s screen. He understood the jumper’s controls from a pilot’s point of view, but he couldn’t tell much from the readout except that the jumper’s power had been dropping. “Think the shield generator’s giving out?”

  “If so, I am at a loss to explain why. And it has been performing perfectly in every test I’ve put it through so far.” Zelenka tapped his fingers on the tablet. “It could simply be a result of operating the jumper underwater,” he said. “That does drain shield power quickly, but the rate should be directly proportional to the depth that the jumper is submerged, because it’s a function of the pressure being exerted on the jumper by the water. But look at these graphs, here. The power is declining as expected, and then — bang, it begins plunging. Then the drain on the power decreases, even though the jumper appears to be remaining at a constant depth.”

  “So what’s wrong with it?”

  “It’s possible that the depth sensors are malfunctioning. If you drifted deeper, that might explain the increased power consumption.”

  “I don’t think so,” Lorne said. “That was at the point that we were observing the squid, and they were pretty near the surface, doing whatever they were doing. Part of this time, the jumper wasn’t moving at all. I think I would have noticed if we’d actually been sinking.”

  “While you were observing the squid?” Zelenka said, looking up sharply from the tablet.

  “Yeah. And the power drain stopped when we moved away from them. But I can’t think of any reason why being near them would affect a shield generator.”

  “Let us go and talk to the biologists,” Zelenka said. “This is sounding more like a biological sciences problem.”

  “Is that a good thing, or a bad thing?”

  “Bad, as far as I am concerned. Physics is easier.”

  They found Dr. Moore and Dr. Lynn in the marine biology lab. “We’re missing a channel of communication,” Lynn said. “These symbols are clearly intelligently used, but they’re incomplete. If there’s a perceptible electrical field —” He broke off as he caught sight of Lorne and Zelenka. “I’m sorry, does Sheppard want this yesterday? Because I think he’s going to have to settle for tomorrow.”

  “No, this is idle curiosity, crossed with not-so-idle worry,” Zelenka said. “Tell me, is there anything about the biology of the squid that suggests that they might be able to produce interference with the jumper’s shield generator?”

  “Interesting,” Moore said. Zelenka winced.

  “I’m going to take that as a ‘yes,’” Lorne said.

  “The squid are producing electrical signals of some kind, and we think that may be part of their communication method,” Dr. Moore said. “While it’s unlikely that such a signal could interfere with the jumper’s shield generator, it does become less unlikely if you have a reason to ask that question.”

  Zelenka muttered something unhappy-sounding in Czech. “I think you should take the jumper back out and see if you can reproduce the phenomenon.”

  “Even if the squid do interfere with the jumper’s shields, we should be able to steer clear of them in future,” Lorne said. “It’s a problem, but maybe not a big problem.”

  Zelenka threw up his hands. “There are thousands of these creatures converging on the city. The city that is protected by a larger version of the same shield generator, yes? So what do we think is going to happen when we are surrounded by the squid?”

  “Okay, that’s a big problem.”

  “Please go and get me more data.”

  “Will do,” Lorne said.

  From the air, Atlantis at night was beautiful as always, its strong geometric lines jutting up toward the sky like illuminated shafts of ice. The shield was a marbleized bubble above him and, once it had closed behind him, the city looked like it was under a dome of antique glass. Above the dark sea, the aurora shimmered on the horizon, sheets of wavering green and blue
streaking the sky.

  Below, around the city, a tentacle broke the water, and then another. The water rippled in currents that didn’t seem natural. He put a cautious amount of distance between the jumper and the squid before submerging and looking for a smaller grouping to approach.

  He returned with news he knew the scientists weren’t going to like. “Every time I get near the squid, my shield power starts dropping,” he said. “The effect is clearly stronger the more of the creatures are around, so if you plot the declines in shield power against the life-sign readings —”

  “It’s possible that we could get some information about how the creatures are using their electrical generation to communicate,” Dr. Moore said.

  “Yes, true, but I think Major Lorne’s point was that we could use the life-sign readings to get some idea of how much shield power declines as more creatures enter the area,” William said.

  “That would be a good idea, yes,” Zelenka said. “We need to find out —” He was interrupted by his radio activating. “Yes, Zelenka here.”

  “Dr. Zelenka, this is Airman Salawi up in the control room. We’re reading some power fluctuations in the city’s shield — it’s not a problem with the ZPM power, or if it is, it’s not showing up on the main board, but the shield generator itself doesn’t seem to be working at full efficiency.”

  “It seems that we have more data,” Zelenka said, pushing his glasses up his nose. “I will go see what we can do to keep our shields functioning, and you can wake up Colonel Sheppard and explain the problem.”

  “And you know I just love to do that,” Lorne said dryly.

  ***

  A few hours later, as the sun rose over the icy sea, John nursed a cup of coffee in the conference room where he’d called an early morning meeting and wished that he was having a squid-free day. “They aren’t showing any signs of leaving?”