02 - Reliquary (13 page)

He told Dorane, “Now move.”

Dorane turned reluctantly, starting across the chamber. He said, “I was not
lying when I said my people were attacked by the Wraith. We tried to use
biological and chemical weapons to fight them, but the Lantians would not help
us. We believed our biological weapons would only affect the Wraith; we didn’t
realize they would affect us as well. Our weapons drove the Wraith
away—temporarily—but they also caused terrible genetic changes in our own
people.” He paused to look back at John. “I went to the Lantians to beg for
help, and they allowed me to stay with them for a time, working in their
laboratories. They pretended to help me.”

“Pretended, yeah, uh huh, keep moving,” John echoed skeptically. He didn’t
get it. The Koan didn’t act like any kind of people, genetically altered or not;
there was something wrong with their minds, not just their bodies.

Dorane’s eyes narrowed. He was obviously angry that John wasn’t paying
attention to his little story. “They betrayed me. The attempts they made to
stabilize the damage only made the situation worse, and my people were
destroyed.”

John said pointedly, “They weren’t gods, they were just people.
Technologically advanced people. They couldn’t fix everything or they would have
destroyed the Wraith.” He squeezed off a three-shot burst, scarring the floor
about two inches from Dorane’s feet. “Now keep moving, or the next time I’ll shoot your kneecaps, and drag you.”

Dorane hadn’t flinched, but his face had gone still. He turned, leading the
way toward the stairwell on the far side of the room. He said, “The Lantians
obviously gifted your people, their favored descendents, with the gene, but they
withheld it from us.” Dorane gestured like a man who was only being reasonable.
“It would have helped us recover, but of course it would also have given us
access to all their technology, all their secrets. I begged, but they refused to
share it.”

John pressed his lips together. He doubted Dorane was giving him an accurate
account of what had happened. The Ancients probably had tried to help the Koan,
but it could have been too late to do anything for them. The Ancients hadn’t
been able to stop the plague that had driven them to the Pegasus Galaxy in the
first place, either. “But you’ve got the gene. We saw you activate the com
system, or was that another trick?”

Dorane reached the stairwell, looking back at John with an almost
noncommittal shrug. “They would not share it, so I created my own. I developed a
drug—You would perhaps not understand the details.”

“We call it a retrovirus.” The big room was too dark to see much, but a door
now closed off the archway into the stasis chamber. There was a trap here, John
could practically taste it, but he couldn’t see where it was coming from. Maybe
more Koan hiding in the stasis lab? “Keep moving.”

Dorane started down the stairs. “Yes. I knew your people must have an
artificial way to give yourselves the gene. Even in crossbred human-Lantian
populations it is rare. Of your companions who had it, I could tell you were the
only one born with it. I could smell it on you.” While John thought,
oh, that
wasn’t creepy. He sounds like a Goddamn Wraith,
Dorane continued, “The
Lantians were so confident in their superiority that they let me do what I
wished in their great city. I could go where I wanted, copy what I wanted. I
stole the secret of a great many of their precious devices, completed my work on my alternate gene serum, and escaped back to my world. But it was
too late. Most of my people were dead. I brought a group of survivors here to
this planet, to where the Thesians were building this place to the Lantians’
direction. Here I could continue my experiments and try to reverse the physical
and mental damage the survivors had suffered.”

They reached the bottom of the stairs. “It looks like you didn’t do so great
at that.” John was enjoying pretending lack of interest in a sick kind of way,
but he couldn’t help asking, “What happened to the Thesians? Were they locked up
in those little cells?”

“I needed a baseline human population to test my attempts to cure the other
Koan. I told them I was a Lantian, that I had come to help them finish the
repository and to use it to defeat the Wraith.”

“Yeah. That works every time,” John said. They had reached the doorway of the
stasis lab. “Open the door.”

“Of course it does. It certainly worked when the Lantians tried it on us,”
Dorane agreed. He faced John calmly. “I’ll have to turn the power back on.”

“I hope you can do it from here, for the sake of your kneecaps.”

Dorane nodded toward the stairs. “There is a routing control over there, in
the wall.”

“Okay, you know the drill, do it with your mind.”

Dorane snorted amusement. “It’s not that kind of technology,”
John said over his shoulder, “Teyla, see if you can get the power turned on.
If that’s a trick,” he added to Dorane, “you’re going to get really, really
hurt.”

“I didn’t expect you back alive.” Dorane shrugged slightly. “There was no
time for more tricks.”

John kept part of his attention on Teyla, as she moved around under the
stairs searching for the control with the P-90’s light. Dorane continued, “But
the Lantians discovered me. They invaded through the Stargate, destroyed my defenses, took away all my subjects… They left me here, meaning this place
to be my prison. Their last act was to leave an explosive device on the
Stargate’s dialing apparatus.”

“They must have been really pissed off. Like me.” Finding their repository
turned into some kind of nightmare genetics lab and the people they had chosen
as builders and custodians for it being used as guinea pigs, the Ancients must
have gone completely berserk. Or maybe John was just projecting. Then he
remembered the bomb craters outside, and thought maybe not.

“Here it is, Major,” Teyla said, her voice cracking with effort.
Crap,
something’s wrong, I have got to get her out of here,
John thought. The
overhead lights flickered and he heard a low-power hum.

Dorane put his hand on the door control, as if waiting for the power to come
completely online. He said, “Supplies were very low, so I put myself and the
remaining members of the Koan in the stasis containers I had used to secure
subjects with particularly interesting results. I set my container to wake me
periodically so I could continue the experiments. I did not mean to let the
Lantians stop me.” Dorane’s face changed, a look of weary relief passing over
his features. “Finally. Your companion is strong. Almost too strong.”

The blow came from behind.

Plunging through the blue twilight corridors, Rodney estimated he had been on
the run for about half an hour. He wouldn’t have lasted five minutes, but he had
run into another blast door and discovered that, while the lights were out, the
main power grid was still functioning. That gave him some options. He had sealed
the door behind him and, working quickly, flashlight clutched in his teeth, had
reconnected some cabling in the circuit panel to deliver a substantial shock to
the next person to touch the door. A Koan shriek muffled by the thick metal was
his reward as he bolted away.

Now, using the detector to trace power signatures, he made his way rapidly
through a maze of rock-walled passages. About twenty yards ahead of the Koan, he
found a maintenance crawlspace roughly carved out of the stone. He managed to
cram himself into it and scrambled through and down into another corridor on a
lower level. The main lights were still on, which meant that Dorane hadn’t
expected any of his visitors to make it down here. Sitting back against the
wall, breathing hard, Rodney set the detector to map the power grid around him,
which should supply him with a rough idea of the layout of rooms and passages in
this area, and watched the alternate screen for life signs.

It would be nice to know what the hell had just happened.
Kavanagh is
working with the Koan? I knew the man was a jackass, but how the hell does that
happen?
The whole thing was a nightmare. And speaking of nightmares, if he
was the only survivor… Sheppard and Teyla had walked off into a trap, Ford
might or might not be alive, the radio was still dead and he had no way to
contact the others on the surface for help. Rapidly calculating how much current
it would take to blow out the last ZPM in the power grid and wondering how tough it would be to crack this area’s computer system if he could find a
working console, he absently thought,
Oh yes, dead man sitting here. Very
dead. Dead, deader, deadest.

Then he saw two other life signs appear on the edge of the detector’s range,
making their way in toward the signs still moving through the upper lab area.
Rodney sat up straight, heart pounding with sudden hope.
Sheppard and Teyla.
The direction was right. Then all the life signs vanished.

They’re dead?
Rodney thought, incredulous and horrified. Then he
grimaced at himself. Every life sign, even the ones that must be Koan, had
disappeared simultaneously.
That was the apocryphal Wraith sensor-jammer
Dorane mentioned, obviously.

Rodney tried his radio again and snarled in irritation when all he could pick
up was static. He had to get back up to Sheppard and Teyla, but the route he had
taken down here passed right through the last known position of the highest
concentration of Koan. He checked the readings the detector had managed to take
before the jammer had cut in, hoping for more options.
Hmm, that’s
intriguing,
he thought, studying a high concentration of power signatures in
this lower area. It just might be a lab or other work area. Labs meant tools,
and weapons. His kind of weapons. Taking a deep breath, Rodney pushed to his
feet.

John hit the floor face first, and everything after that was hazy and vague.
He remembered being dragged up off the floor by Koan—he knew they were Koan from
the smell, though he couldn’t get his eyes open all the way. Then he was being
carried and had a strange upside down view of a dim corridor.

He came to when he was dumped face down onto a cold stone surface. He rolled
over in time to get slammed on his back by another Koan. He punched it, feeling
bone crunch under his fist in a particularly satisfying way, and it staggered
back. But as he tried to push himself up another jumped on him, straddling him and pinning him down. He writhed and shoved, getting a
knee up into a vital spot and a hand on the creature’s throat. Its snarl turned
into a choked gasp, its claws digging painfully into his shoulders through the
thin fabric of his t-shirt. Then somebody else slammed John’s head back into the
stone.

He didn’t lose consciousness completely, but he was woozy enough that he
couldn’t resist when the Koan moved around, locking his wrists and ankles into
manacles. When he finally managed to fight past the throbbing in his head and
the scene came back into focus, Teyla was leaning over him. There were two Koan
standing behind her impatiently, as if they were waiting for her. And she still
had her P-90 slung around her neck.

John blinked and squinted, for a moment thinking he was having a
head-injury-induced hallucination.
Something is wrong with this picture.
Maybe it was him. “Teyla—What—”

She braced her hands on the stone thing he was lying on, shuddered, winced,
then choked out, “I am sorry, Major.”

“Sorry for what?” John said. He knew he wasn’t going to like the answer. He
felt weirdly pathetic, like they had been dating and she was breaking up with
him and he had no idea why. His blurred vision was starting to clear, and he saw
that the chamber they were in was high-ceilinged and round, almost like a large
well. There were a couple of lights high in the ceiling focused in on the lower
part of the well, leaving the top in half-shadow. There was a gallery up there
with metal railings; a gate led to a narrow spiral stairway that curved down the
wall to reach this lower level.

“I have to do what he says. He has something, a drug, it affects the mind, it
forces you to obey him.” Teyla squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. “He says you
should understand it. It works on humans the way the Ancestors’ gene works on
their machines.”

John stared. “Are you serious? Sorry, stupid question.” He tested the chains,
putting his full strength, augmented by the adrenaline now pumping freely through his body, against each one, but the
links held firmly. They were solidly cemented into the block and probably would
have held a Wraith, let alone him. He was missing his tac vest and belt but his
shirt, pants, and boots were still present and accounted for, which made the
situation marginally less terrifying. He could feel that his sidearm was gone,
as well as his knives, probably including the little one that he kept for the
can and bottle opener. “He just—What, you can hear him in your head?”

She gritted her teeth. “Yes. It’s like nothing—” She shook her head
violently. “I cannot make it stop. I cannot make myself stop.”

John was getting a scary picture of what had happened. Teyla hadn’t been ill
up in the lab, she had been fighting off a drug she hadn’t even known she had
been given. “Teyla, you’re strong, you’re the strongest person I know, you can
fight it.”

She just took a sharp breath, her face strained with effort. “He gave it to
Dr. Kavanagh, not long after we first arrived. Dr. Kavanagh did not know he had
been infected, and was forced to pass it along to me. But it did not work on me
as quickly as it should have. He has now given it to Ford also. It does not work
well on those who have the gene or the gene therapy.” For an instant, tight
anger replaced the fear and frustration on her face. “He killed Dr. Kolesnikova,
I saw her body. He says the Koan have killed Dr. McKay.”