02 - Reliquary (12 page)

It wasn’t wearing anything like clothing, but it had a cord around its neck
with a small handheld data pad attached.

John picked it up, staring at it incredulously. The case looked like it had
been scavenged from something else, like a puddlejumper remote or maybe a
handheld sensor of some kind. An Ancient control crystal that was a little too
big for the case had been crammed into it. The rest of the insides, even from John’s
limited experience, looked makeshift. Teyla recovered the life sign detector
from where John had dropped it and held it out, showing him the screen. She said
softly, “It does not even show us, now.”

“Yeah. This is the jammer, all right. But it wasn’t built by the Wraith.”
John felt cold, the adrenaline rush of the fight giving way to grim realization.
It was just believable that the original Wraith sensor-jammers might be lying
around here after ten thousand years, still functional. They had certainly
gotten bitten in the ass by other lost pieces of Wraith technology that had
lasted at least that long. That the Koan would know what the jammers were and
remember them as a thing to take with them when they hunted humans was vaguely
possible too. But that they could be living like this and figure out a way to
build one from scratch, from scavenged Ancient technology?
I don’t think so.

John used his knife to cut the cord, then pushed to his feet, controlling a
surge of homicidal fury. The immediate thing was that he no longer thought it
was Corrigan, Boerne, and Kinjo who were in danger. He tucked the jammer into a
vest pocket and said deliberately, “Let’s go surprise somebody.”

Rodney hurried back through the passages, checking the life sign detector to
make sure Dorane was still down in the other room with Kavanagh and Kolesnikova.

Ford watched his approach from the gallery, brows drawing together. “What’s
up?”

Rodney motioned urgently for him to come closer and met him halfway up the
stairs. “I think something’s wrong. Dorane is lying to us about the timing.”

Ford shook his head slightly. “What do you mean?”

Intent, Rodney explained, “This facility was powered by three ZPMs, with two
now at maximum entropy and one at minimal power. From the readings I’m getting,
the draining had to have occurred at least fifty years before the Ancients left Atlantis for Earth.”

Ford stared. “That doesn’t make sense. Why didn’t they come here to look for
survivors, then? Why couldn’t he contact them through the Stargate?”

“My point exactly.”

“Are you sure?” Ford demanded. He touched his radio headset, then grimaced,
obviously recalling that Sheppard was out of reach.

“Of course I’m sure.” Rodney gestured impatiently. “Look, I need to examine
that stasis container. I want to see how long he was actually in that thing. I
need you to keep an eye out and make sure I don’t get caught at it.”

Ford nodded, his mouth set in a grim line. “Yeah, let’s do that.”

Rodney started back down into the stasis chamber area, Ford behind him,
moving quickly and quietly. This whole thing was making Rodney’s skin creep. It
would be nice if Dorane was confused, his memory a little scrambled by putting
himself in and out of stasis. If the trauma of the repository’s destruction had
so unhinged him that he couldn’t remember the exact sequence of events.

It would be nice. But according to Rodney’s experience in the Pegasus Galaxy,
things were never nice.

Rodney crossed the foyer into the stasis chamber lab. Behind him, Ford took
up a position in the archway, where he could watch the passage to the
communications room.

The stasis container had closed itself up again, looking like a glass coffin
on a metal plinth, as if it was meant for a postmodern Snow White. Rodney knelt
beside the control console at the foot end, tapping the pads, trying to get it
to bring up a diagnostic. The container, like the ZPMs, was definitely Atlantean
technology, no question about that. The controls were similar, and the displays
used the Ancient language. But there was a haphazard quality to the way it was
tied into the other systems and the power conduits, that weirdly awkward air
flow system with the pipes. He recognized that quality from his own attempts to mesh Earth-built components with Ancient systems.

After several minutes of struggle and coaxing, he got the panel to run a
diagnostic. He ran a finger down the crystalline display, muttering under his
breath as he translated the Ancient figures, rapidly calculating the power
outputs and shutdown sequences, translating the time markers into hours and
minutes.

The answer was worse than he thought. “Three days.” Rodney sat back on his
heels, appalled. The container had been powered down a little more than three
days ago, immediately after the MALP had come through the Stargate. “He knew we
were here all along.” The system was configured to automatically cycle down and
release the occupant when an external sensor suite recorded a power surge from
the direction of the Stargate. The diagnostic showed that it hadn’t been powered
up again until roughly six hours ago.
When I started picking up intermittent
power signatures. The intermittent power signatures that lured us down here.

Rodney pushed to his feet and headed for the door.
So if it’s a trap, and
obviously, it’s a trap, why did he let Sheppard and Teyla go up to the surface?
He answered himself,
Obviously, he didn’t.
Ford was still in the
foyer, warily watching the doorways and stairwell. “Lieutenant,” Rodney
whispered harshly. “We need to go after the Major and Teyla. They—” The lights
went out. “That wasn’t a coincidence!” He swung his pack around, frantically
digging for his flashlight.

The light on Ford’s P-90 snapped on, and he said, “Listen.”

Rodney froze. The silence seemed complete. He fumbled out the detector and
showed Ford the screen. “There’s nothing,” he whispered. “Wait. Oh, no.”

Ford’s eyes widened as the screen suddenly came alive with blinking dots.
Twenty, thirty, more, filling the level just above them. Ford swore and ran for
the stairs.

His light flashed across the doorway, giving Rodney a good view as the first Koan crowded in. The silver-mottled skins, the wild
spiny hair glinted in the light. They spotted Ford and howled.

Ford halted on the steps and fired up through the doorway, driving the first
surge back with a spray of three-shot bursts. “Get the others!” he shouted. “We
need to fall back.”

“Right!” Rodney dashed for the passage down to the com room, bumping off the
rocky wall in the dark.

“Hey, there’s—” He froze in the doorway. His flashlight revealed an empty
room. Empty except for Kolesnikova, sprawled facedown on the floor. Rodney
swore, jolting forward, dropping to his knees beside her. He grabbed her
shoulders, rolling her over. “Irina—”

There was a stain on her chest just above her tac vest, dark against her blue
uniform shirt. Her eyes were open. Rodney automatically felt for a pulse in her
neck, even as part of his mind cataloged the fact that he was kneeling in a pool
of blood, that it was minutes too late.

He choked down a sudden rush of nausea and shoved to his feet. “Oh, God,” he
breathed. Where the hell was Kavanagh?

Rodney turned back for the passage, shouting, “Ford!” over the staccato
bursts of gunfire. He reached the foyer again and saw Ford braced against the
railing, firing up at the Koan. In the muzzle Hashes Rodney could see more of
them crowding around the doorway, ducking in, forcing Ford to shoot to keep them
back, pinning him down in the stairwell. Rodney tucked the flashlight under his
arm and dragged out his sidearm, fumbling for the safety. “Ford, Kolesnikova’s
been killed! Something’s—Someone’s—” Distracted, Rodney stared as his light
caught another figure, running across the dark chamber toward Ford. It was
Kavanagh. “Kavanagh,” he shouted, anger and relief that at least the bastard was
still alive temporarily overriding fear. “Where the hell were you? What happened
to—”

Ford threw a glance over his shoulder and spotted Kavanagh. He turned back to
face the Koan, starting to back away from the stairs. “McKay, fall back to that second passage, try to—”

Kavanagh came up behind Ford and Rodney saw his arm lift. He didn’t see the
gun in Kavanagh’s hand until he cracked Ford across the head with it. Rodney
stared in shock, his mouth hanging open, as Ford jerked forward and fell across
the steps. The Koan howled and poured through the upper doorway. Then Kavanagh,
his face blank and preoccupied, swung toward Rodney, lifting the pistol, aiming
it at him.

Rodney’s brain lurched back into gear, and he clicked off his light, throwing
himself sideways. The shot went off but missed him completely. Thinking,
Oh,
no, oh, no, oh, no,
Rodney fired into the dark shapes of the Koan,
scattering them, even as he scrambled for the open passage behind him. He pushed
to his feet, fired two more shots, then bolted off into the dark, the Koan
howling after him.

John half expected the door at the end of the passage to be locked, but it
started to slide open when he touched the controls.

Confirming the bad feeling he had about this whole situation, he saw as it
started to lift up that the room beyond was now dark.
Oh yeah,
John
thought,
now I’m really pissed off.
He braced against one wall, Teyla
against the other.

The door opened fully, and their lights revealed no movement. A few of the
blue emergency lights were on, but none of the brighter overheads. John flicked
the P-90’s light off and eased out into the room cautiously, saying, low-voiced,
“Teyla, I think somebody played a little trick on us.”

“I do not understand this,” she whispered harshly, following his lead.
“Surely, even if he was lying about being an Ancestor, he would want to be
rescued from this place.”

“Well, you know, maybe he didn’t.” John checked the detector; the
sensor-jammer had been jury-rigged, which meant there might only be one of them.
He grimaced. “Oh, here we go.” There were life signs, about twenty of them, in the direction of the area with the stasis chamber. Where they had left Rodney
and the others. Coldly angry, John thought,
If he’s touched one of
them
—He handed off the detector to Teyla, then switched on the Koan’s handy
sensor-jammer. “Let’s find him and ask him if he wants to be rescued.”

John and Teyla found an alternate route through the maze of passages, coming
out into the big room with the support pillars. The room was lit only by the
blue lights, but John could easily see Dorane standing in the center. He was
holding something that looked like an Ancient life sign detector, frowning at
its screen. A couple of Koan stood near him, their silver-gray skins tinged blue
by the light, the spines in their wild hair glittering. It looked as if they
were waiting for orders. The blast door out into the corridor was open and more
Koan hovered near it, with still more loitering out in the corridor. There was
no sign of Rodney, Ford, or the others.

John glanced at Teyla, got a grim nod in response, and stepped out of cover
into the room. “Hi. Somehow I get the idea you’re not really an Ancient.”

Dorane turned, startled.

“Put whatever that is down,” John instructed, watching him narrowly. “Or I’ll
blow it out of your hand. And, you know, your hand’ll have to go too.”

Dorane stared at him for a moment, his face expressionless. He didn’t make
the mistake of underestimating John’s sincerity and carefully lowered the device
to the floor. As he straightened up, John thought incredulously,
Is he
taller?
He must have been slumping a little earlier, making himself look
less threatening. Dorane said lightly, “You used the jammer. How astute.”

“Yeah, well, I catch on pretty quick when I’m attacked. What did you do with
my people?”

Dorane folded his arms, and weirdly it reminded John of one of the older and
calmer science team members explaining a theory. “There is nothing to fear. I
locked them in the laboratory where my stasis container is.”

“Okay.”
He’s lying,
John’s instinct said. His worst fear added,
he’s killed them.
He pushed the thought aside. The detector hadn’t shown
them, but then with all this shielding they might have been out of range. But if
Dorane had locked McKay, Kavanagh, and Kolesnikova in a lab, of all places, with
tools and power, John couldn’t believe they would be in there for more than five
minutes. And he knew damn well that Ford was carrying extra ordnance in his
pack. John would reserve shooting bits off of Dorane for a last resort, though
at the moment it was his first choice for getting accurate information. “Let’s
go get them out.”

Dorane said easily, “Very well.” He smiled. It wasn’t the evil smile John had
been half expecting. There was a quality to it he couldn’t quite define. “This
way.”

John didn’t move. “Tell your friends there to back up, right out through that
doorway.”

Dorane turned back to him, lifting a brow. “They aren’t my friends, they are
my people.” He touched the iridescent shoulder of one of the Koan. It twitched
away from him with a growl, edging back.

John’s brows lifted. “What?”

“Oh, we were like you once,” Dorane assured him. “Human, or so genetically
similar that any difference was immaterial. We knew the Lantians, the people you
call the Ancients, your honored ancestors. They shared their technology with us,
in dribs and drabs, built the Stargates. And antagonized the Wraith into
destroying us.”

The last was said in almost the same even tone. Almost. “Antagonizing the
Wraith isn’t that hard to do,” John felt compelled to point out. “Now tell them
to leave, or I’ll kill every one of them. This gun holds a lot of bullets. Their
buddies in the tunnel found that out.”

Dorane’s expression turned a little colder, but the Koan, in response to some
invisible signal, backed away, muttering uneasily among themselves. They moved
out through the doorway into the corridor, and when they were clear John flicked a look
at Teyla, a jerk of his head telling her to seal the door. She moved over to it,
sparing a hand from her weapon to hit the controls. As the door slid closed,
John caught a glimpse of her in the light. She didn’t look so good, her face
paling enough that her eyes seemed enormous. Her bangs were matted with sweat,
though it wasn’t that warm. He remembered she had been acting oddly right before
the Koan attack;
oh great, maybe there is an airborne disease down here.
They had to find the others and get this over with fast.