02 - Reliquary (11 page)

Rodney allowed himself a restrained sneer. “The fact that our professional
communications function on a level that Kavanagh doesn’t comprehend is not my
problem.” Focusing his annoyance on Kavanagh made it easier to pretend he wasn’t
worried.

Rodney had always hated relying on other people, who were inevitably fallible
and wrong and usually stupid, but once they had arrived in Atlantis it had
startled him how quickly he had come to rely on Sheppard. It had occasionally
been difficult to reconcile the fact that the surfer/pretty boy type who
qualified for MENSA but couldn’t be bothered to join was the same person who had stalked and killed Genii in the city’s
corridors like they were cockroaches, could snap a man’s neck, and was crazy
enough to attack a super-Wraith with a belt knife. But Rodney was over that now.

“What is this part of the facility for, exactly?” Rodney asked, once he could
get a word in. “This whole underground section doesn’t look like it was part of
the original design of the repository, athenaeum, whatever.”

“We believed it was a hospital and medical research facility,” Kavanagh told
Dorane, and Rodney swore mentally. He wanted Dorane’s version, in his words,
uncluttered by any of their suppositions and suspicions.

“You are correct, the underground levels were a hospital, also a facility for
biological research,” Dorane told him, glancing up. He was seated on the couch
again and still looked a little pale, sweat standing out on his forehead. “The
settlement on this planet suffered from a sickness, originally created by the
Wraith, in their experiments on their human livestock.” He gestured around a
little helplessly. “We were making some slow progress in defeating it when the
Wraith attacked again.”

McKay frowned. That wasn’t a strategy they had heard of the Wraith using
before. “Didn’t you have shields, like those on Atlantis?”

“We did, but—” Dorane looked up, brow furrowed in thought. “How long have you
been here?”

“A little more than a day,” Kolesnikova answered, watching him thoughtfully.
“Why did the stasis chamber wake you now?”

“I had set the controls to wake me if any of my own people opened the blast
door and entered the upper chamber.” Dorane smiled around at them all. “You are
our descendants indeed. Atlantis’ children.”

“Yes, yes, whatever, but what happened with the shields?” Rodney persisted.
For some reason, Kavanagh glared at him. Rodney glared back.
Oh please, like
you don’t want to know too.

“The Wraith used the Koan to infiltrate the outpost from within, and shut
down the shields and other defenses,” Dorane explained. He looked a little
confused, as if he wondered what was so urgent about the question.

“Oh. So the shield generators could still function?” Rodney prodded. “We
could turn them back on, protect this place from Wraith attack? Once we got rid
of the Koan, that is.” He wasn’t personally fond of this place, but if something
happened to Atlantis, it was essential to have a safe point to retreat to. Or if
they couldn’t turn the repository into a secure Alpha Site, they could
cannibalize the working systems to shore up Atlantis’ failing power grid.

Dorane shook his head. “Unfortunately, they were destroyed by the Wraith
deliberately during the attack. But I have never needed the shields. The Wraith
believe this planet to be uninhabited, and have never returned here, that I know
of. I am safe enough, if isolated.”

Kavanagh said earnestly, “You can’t mean to stay here. You must come back to
Atlantis with us. There’s still much we don’t understand.”

“You could help us a great deal,” Kolesnikova added. “And you would be
returning to your home.”

Dorane smiled at her. “Why yes, I would be happy to accompany you.”

This was what Rodney had been waiting for. He added, “Hey, since you’re
coming with us, you can bring your ZPM. Your Zero Point Module? The subspace
power source?”

Dorane gestured absently, as if it didn’t matter. “If you like. I’m not sure
how much power it has left.” With a rueful expression, he added, “It has been
working a long time.”

Oh, hell.
Rodney had nearly been able to smell that ZPM since they had
first seen this place on the MALP’s fuzzy transmission. He couldn’t wait; he
needed to find out now. “I need to take some more readings.” He snapped his
fingers impatiently at Kavanagh. “Give me your detector.”

Kavanagh snorted in annoyance, but retrieved the device from his vest pocket and handed it over.

Rodney ducked out, following the short passage back to the stairwell. He got
a base reading and found the nearest power conduit, then started across the
room. From the gallery, Ford asked, “Dr. McKay, what are you doing?”

Rodney barely glanced up. “I’m going to check out his ZPM.”

Ford started down the stairs, whispering urgently, “You’re not going to steal
it!”

“Of course I’m not going to steal it!” Rodney rounded on him, glaring. “He’s
coming back to Atlantis with us, I presume he’ll want to bring it with him since
it would be criminally stupid to leave it.”
You take one ZPM that looks like
it’s just there for no reason, and suddenly everyone thinks you’re the mad ZPM
bandit of the Pegasus Galaxy.

“Oh.” Ford stopped, shifting his weapon in a somewhat chastened way. “So why
are you going to check it out?”

“To see if it’s the only power source. It would be nice to be able to have
lights on the way out. Hey, and you’re supposed to be guarding, so guard.”

“Okay, okay. I was just asking.” Ford held up a placating hand, retreating
back to the gallery.

Still huffy, Rodney followed the power conduits, tracing them back through
the big room. He didn’t know how useful Dorane was going to be; the man seemed a
little off, a little confused, and Rodney thought the isolation here might have
driven him over the edge.

Rodney had had nightmares that involved being the last one left alive in
Atlantis after a Wraith attack, and they weren’t pleasant.

It didn’t help that it wasn’t all that far beyond the bounds of possibility;
Sheppard, Ford, Teyla, and the other military personnel would be on the front
line, the operations team not far behind them, while Rodney, Zelenka, and the
other scientists would be deep inside the city nursing the power grid or trying
to get that damn weapons chair activated. Rodney didn’t expect that witnessing the actual effect on someone unlucky enough to
be a lone survivor would change any of his nightmare scenarios. He made a mental
note to run some calculations on the possibility of placing triggers for the
self-destruct sequence at multiple locations around the city, to see if it
justified the risks involved.

He came to a landing with a short set of stairs leading down into an open bay
with several hatch-like doors. Rodney followed the detector to the nearest, and
tapped its control pad. It slid upward, revealing a small power room filled with
bundles of what looked like jury-rigged conduit. Two Zero Point Modules lay in
open metal cases on a low bench, and a third was seated in the round unit that
tied it in with the power system. “Oh, oh, oh,” Rodney whispered. “Oh, yes.”

But after a few moments of examining them, he grimaced in disappointment.
Dorane hadn’t exaggerated the problem. The two ZPMs in cases were at maximum
entropy and dead. The third one, still powering the system, was drained to only
a partial charge.
That’s a hell of a lot of power,
Rodney thought,
studying the detector. Especially for a facility that had been drawing minimal
power for ten thousand years or so. Atlantis’ ZPMs had been in a similar state,
but they had been maintaining systems that had held Atlantis stable on the
bottom of an ocean, keeping the city intact and pressurized by tremendously
powerful force fields. Even if most of this facility’s power had been expended
trying to defend against the Wraith…
Except he said the Koan shut down the
shields before the attack started; that eliminates the major power drain.
All these ZPMs had been doing since then was running one stasis container and
waking Dorane occasionally to putter around and check his com system, plus
maintaining the minimal lights and air movement.
This…doesn’t add up.
Literally.
He started to take more readings, running some mental
calculations.

The tunnel led out from the complex to the south, and the going was fairly
easy. The floor was metal grating, the walls weren’t overly dank, and the blue lights were set every twenty or so paces.
Other passages branched off, curving away into darkness, but Dorane had said the
surface shaft would be at the end of the main passage.

“I have never heard of a race called the Koan, or of the Wraith using another
species to attack a human settlement,” Teyla said, throwing John an uneasy
glance, her face shadowed by the blue light. “I hope that is a trick they have
forgotten.”

“Maybe it was a one-shot deal,” John said, though he didn’t think that was
too likely. The Wraith they had run into didn’t tend to vary their methods of
attack. Being at the top of the food chain didn’t encourage innovation. “Maybe
they ran out of Koan, ten thousand years ago. And maybe Dorane hasn’t told us
everything that happened yet.” That sounded a little grim, so he added, “He
seemed a little confused.”

“I do not think he is…well. Despite his protestations. I could not live
without knowing my people’s fate, even if it meant giving up all hope that they
had survived.”

“Yeah,” John admitted, “I didn’t get that either.” He hadn’t gotten the
impression that the Ancients had been that…distant. Atlantis was example
enough that, as a people, they had liked color and light and life. But everybody
was different.

After a short time the ground turned to uneven dirt and rock, though they
still kept passing branching passages. John kept trying to reach Boerne and the
others on the radio, but all he got was static.

Teyla said slowly, “I am beginning to wonder… When you saw Dorane, did you
not feel any sense of recognition?”

“No.” John checked the life sign detector again and saw the area around them
was still clear. But with the Koan possibly having some kind of Wraith jamming
device, that didn’t mean much. He threw Teyla an odd look. “Why? Did you?”

“I felt something, as if I had seen him before, though that is impossible.
And…it was not what I would have expected.” She bit her lip, looking troubled,
and asked, “Do you not think that you would recognize an Ancestor if you saw one? You have the
Ancestor’s gene from birth, not through Dr. Beckett’s therapy, as the others
do.”

“I don’t think so.” Considering it seriously, John glanced down at her. “It’s
not like I’m psychic or anything. I just have a gene that lets me control the
jumpers and turn on the lights and initialize the systems and stuff just by
thinking about it.” He considered that for an instant. “Okay, I know that didn’t
sound like it supported the argument I was trying to make, but you know what I
mean. And you said ‘if I saw an Ancestor’.” He stopped, regarding her seriously.
“You don’t think he is one?”

Teyla shook her head, then got what John could only describe as a very weird
expression, as if something disturbingly strange had just occurred to her. But
she said, “I—I cannot say.”

“You cannot say? Huh? Teyla—”

She was a few steps ahead of him as they passed another intersecting passage,
so John had a heartbeat’s warning when the Koan dropped out of the shadows onto
her shoulders.

With a yell, John surged forward. Teyla staggered but managed to flip the
struggling Koan off her back. It snarled, clawed hands snatching at her as she
kicked it in the chest. John fired up into the dark space above her, the P-90’s
flash catching another Koan just leaping out of concealment. He spun to cover
the rest of the ceiling but the next Koan slammed right down on top of him.

Half-expecting it, John twisted to land on his back, getting the breath
knocked out of him but still managing to slam the creature in the head with the
gun’s butt. It reared back, and he pulled the P-90 down and triggered it,
catching the Koan nearly point blank in the chest. It toppled back, and he
shoved it off his legs, rolling to his feet.
God, these things smell foul.
Teyla was already firing down one cross-passage, and John turned to fire
down the other just as a dozen dark shapes charged toward him. The first three
fell. The others yelped and scrambled back.

John caught movement out of the corner of his eye and ducked. A heavy metal
rod split the air right where his head had been. He got off a three-shot burst
as the Koan lifted the rod for another blow; one bullet caught the creature in
the upper thigh. It bellowed and flung the rod at John’s head.

John fell backward, deflecting it with his shoulder. He lifted his weapon but
his light showed the Koan was already fleeing back up the cross passage with a
kind of limping gallop, the others in full retreat ahead of it. He decided not
to waste the ammo. It looked like the Koan had changed their minds about the
ambush.

Teyla had shot her first attacker and was covering the other two passages.
“Are you all right, Major?” she asked a little breathlessly. Her arms had long
shallow scratches from the creature’s claws, but she wasn’t bleeding too badly.

John took a long look around. There was no movement in the shadows down the
corridors. His shoulder hurt, but nothing was broken. “Yeah, you?”

“I feel badly in need of a bath,” she admitted. “The Koan do not believe in
basic hygiene, apparently.”

It was pretty rank in here now. John stepped past her to where the first Koan
lay sprawled against the rock wall. In life, the creature hadn’t cared for
itself well. The gray and silver splotched skin looked like it was molting, and
the white hair was ragged and lank. There were white and silver spines through
the hair and bristling from its ears, but John saw for the first time how human
its facial features actually were, scrunched up in pain from the wounds in its
chest. It looked fairly young, about Ford’s age.