02 - Reliquary (14 page)

“No.” John’s gut went cold.
Rodney’s dead. God, Kolesnikova should never
have come here. I can’t believe Rodney’s dead.

“He is going to use us to take the jumper back to Atlantis, he wants to—”
Teyla gasped in pain and her brow furrowed with effort. “He says I have to give
you this.”

She lifted her hand. In it was a little box of black metal or plastic, hardly
bigger than her palm. She turned it and as it caught the light he saw one side
was all needles, like an old polio vaccination injector.

“By ‘give’ I guess you don’t mean you’re going to hand it to me.” John’s
throat was dry. “Is that the mind-control drug thing?” He jerked involuntarily
on the chains, feeling sweat break out all over his body; the thought of having
Dorane in his head giving him orders he was helpless to resist…

“No.” Teyla stared down at the device in her hand as if she was holding a
venomous snake and was powerless to drop it. “This is the retrovirus he gave the
Koan, and the Thesians, to make them like the Koan so he could experiment on
them. Some of the Thesians also had the Lantian gene—he said this made them all
go mad.” She choked on the words, but couldn’t seem to stop herself. “He thought
since you believed so strongly in the Lantians’ genetic superiority, you would
benefit from the demonstration.”

“Hey, I did not say I believed in the genetic superiority of anybody, that’s
stupid Nazi-talk from a bad movie, I said—” He couldn’t remember what he had
said.
She’s really going to do this.
“Teyla, don’t! Teyla, try to fight
it!”

“I am trying!” He saw her arm tremble. Her face was set in harsh lines, her
jaw clenched with effort. Then she slammed the injector down onto the underside
of his bare arm, jerking it away almost immediately.

John yelled, more from surprise than pain. It had been too quick to hurt
much; he craned his neck to see the neat square of red marks on his arm. The
skin there tingled and burned, and he felt a sudden flush of heat through his
triceps.

Teyla stepped back, staring horrified at the injector in her hand. She
started to speak and her voice cracked. She managed to say, “He is leaving you
here, with the Koan that are too far gone into madness to obey him well. They
may release you and let you live, to join them. Or they might eat you. It is
their choice.” She turned away, nearly fell across the first steps of the
stairway, then stumbled up.

“Teyla!” John yelled after her, but she didn’t pause, didn’t answer, didn’t
look back. She reached the top and disappeared into the shadows of the upper
gallery.

He swore, wincing as he dropped his head back against the stone. The warmth
was already fading from his arm, though he could still feel the sting of the
needles.
Maybe Dorane was lying, maybe it was nothing.
He didn’t feel any
different, but he was still half-expecting to die of anaphylactic shock in the
next few minutes.

John could hear more Koan up on the gallery, making those soft noises at each
other that sounded like distorted speech. This place looked an awful lot like an
operating theater or a room for experiments that you needed to watch but that
you definitely didn’t want to get too close to. Neither of which was a pleasant
thought.

He took a deep breath.
Okay, think. Get yourself out of this.
The
manacle on his right arm was just a little loose. John worked his wrist,
gritting his teeth, through sharp pain to dull pain to numbness, but he couldn’t
drag his hand out of the manacle.
Hold it, now how do magicians do this? Oh,
that’s right, they swallow the keys first. Or dislocate a joint or something.
But there was another way. The manacle hadn’t been machined very well, and
one edge was a little sharper than the other. John ground his inner wrist
against it, grimacing. It was a little like trying to cut yourself with a spork;
a sharper edge would have hurt a lot less. But he only needed a little blood,
just enough to lubricate his skin.

Finally he felt moisture on his wrist. He worked his hand around, getting
slick wetness everywhere, then pulled with all his strength.

It hurt like crazy, but his hand popped out. “Ow. Ow, ow, ow,” John hissed,
fumbling at the other manacle. His fingers were almost too numb to be able to
tell, but he couldn’t find a release or even a lock. “Son of a bitch,” he said
wearily, letting his abused arm fall limp. The catch or whatever it was must be
lower down to prevent just this kind of escape attempt. He was going to have to
do the same damn thing to the other wrist, only that manacle didn’t seem to have
that extra few millimeters of room. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do about the ankle chains if he still couldn’t reach any kind of a
release mechanism. But if he could get his boots off maybe—

A scraping sound made him look up toward the gallery. A Koan had opened the
gate and stood on the narrow stairway. It had a bloodstained rag wrapped around
one leg. John rolled his eyes in exasperation. “Oh, I bet you’re the one
I
shot.” It had to be the one he had wounded in the passage, when they had found
the sensor-jammer. “That’s what this situation needed,” he said sourly.

It started down the narrow stair, limping badly on its wounded leg. It was
growling softly to itself, sounding almost amused.

It reached the floor and moved closer to him, sniffing. John said reasonably,
“Come on, I know there’s a person in there somewhere. You don’t want to hurt me.
Didn’t you hear what Dorane made Teyla do? I’m, you know, one of you now. Or
whatever. This isn’t working, is it?” He kept both arms limp; he wasn’t sure it
realized he had a hand free.

It circled the slab, passing close enough that he could see its eyes. They
were yellow, the pupils dark ovals, and there was no awareness there. They were
empty, like looking into the eyes of a shark, and that made its human features
just that much more terrible. “I have a bad feeling there’s nobody home in
there.” John felt a sick fear settle into his stomach.
He gave you something
that’s going to make you end up like that.
He shoved the thought aside.
Maybe it had been a lie, just to torture Teyla and scare the hell out of him.
Well, it worked.

The Koan reached the end of the slab and stood thoughtfully, long enough for
John to wonder again if maybe he could talk to it. Then it lifted a hand and
stabbed its claws into his thigh.

John swore through gritted teeth, reflexively jerking away from the pain and
feeling the manacles grind into his flesh. “Oh, yeah, I get it,”
he said with a gasp, “I hurt you, you hurt me. We’re even now. All’s forgiven. Bye.”

It pulled its claws free, and he felt blood well up. It moved up the slab to
lean over him, one hand resting on his chest, the claws just snagging in the
material of his shirt. John held his breath, waited until it started to press
down. Then with his free hand, he punched it in the larynx.

It staggered back, clutching at its throat and making gagging noises. But
John could tell he hadn’t had the leverage to make it a killing blow. “Oh,
crap,” he muttered. The creature eyed him with pure hate, gasping for a breath.
Yeah, I’ve done it now, all right.

The lights went out abruptly. Something clanged as it hit the metal floor of
the gallery, and a brilliant white light exploded in the darkness. The Koan up
there yelled in pain, and John winced away. A quick scatter of shots echoed off
the stone while a flashlight beam waved wildly around. John twisted frantically,
trying to see who it was. He could tell from the sound that whoever was shooting
had a 9mm but—

His Koan buddy snarled angrily and flung itself toward the stairs. The
flashlight beam swung toward it, catching it midway up. Another shot from the
9mm dropped it. It sprawled across the steps, twitched a few times, then went
still. “Major Sheppard?” It was McKay’s voice, coming from the gallery. “Are you
all right?”

“Rodney!” John’s throat went tight with relief. He should have known it;
McKay was too smart to get killed. “Yeah, I’m fine, get down here!”

“Good, I didn’t know—” More thumping and clanging and flashlight waving, as
McKay must have been wrestling the gate open. He sounded harried and breathless
and almost as relieved as John. “—how I was going—” There was a gasp as the gate
gave way and muted thuds as he half-climbed, half-fell down the narrow steps
“—drag you out of here if you weren’t conscious.” Then McKay was standing over
him, waving a 9mm and a pocket flashlight. He shoved the pistol back into its
holster and pointed the light around, demanding, “Are you hurt?”

“Rodney, Rodney, not in the eyes,” John said urgently, twisting his face
away. His eyes still felt sunburned from the explosion of light up on the
gallery.

“Sorry.” McKay juggled the flashlight and something that had the low power
hum of a laser cutting tool. The light flicked around to the manacles. “You’re
bleeding—Did that thing bite you?” he asked worriedly. “God knows what kind of
diseases—”

“It clawed my leg a little, and that manacle was loose and I was using the
blood to work my wrist—” With McKay, alive and well, standing over him
apparently loaded down with weapons and tools, it now sounded kind of crazy. “I
was trying to escape, okay? What did you do up there, what was that explosion?”

“Potassium perchlorate and aluminum powder. I found a biochem lab that still
had some viable materials.” McKay put the flashlight in John’s free hand,
positioning it so the beam would illuminate the other wrist manacle. “Hold that
still. And don’t move.”

McKay cut through the manacle, and John sat up, then nearly reeled over as a
wave of dizziness hit. He felt flushed and hot and had to take a deep breath to
keep from throwing up.

McKay was too busy working on the ankle restraints to notice; he snapped,
“Will you hold that light still? I don’t think either of us wants any accidental
amputations here.”

John pushed himself up again, taking deep breaths to clear his head and
trying to steady the light. It might be blood loss. He could see now that his
wrist was bleeding a lot more than he had thought, to the extent where trying to
free the other arm the same way might have been a big mistake. His last mistake.
While McKay cut through the ankle chains John held the flashlight in his mouth
so he could dig out a bandana to wrap around his wrist. His pockets were empty
of anything else that might be useful. He said around the flashlight, “He took the others to the surface, to the jumper. They’re going to Atlantis. We
need to get up there.”

“Yes, I thought it must be something like that.” Sounding exasperated, McKay
asked, “What the hell was up with Kavanagh? He attacked Ford.”

John tied off the bandana and took the light out of his mouth, holding it out
for McKay. His eyes still hurt, but considering the massive headache and the
puncture wounds, it was the least of his problems. “Teyla said Dorane got
Kavanagh with this mind-control drug. It works like the Ancient Technology
Activation, but on people. Once you’ve been dosed with it, apparently you just
do what he wants you to do, you can’t stop yourself. He got Kavanagh with it
when we first arrived, and Kavanagh passed it on to Teyla. The drug doesn’t work
too well if you have the Ancient gene or the therapy, so he couldn’t get
Kolesnikova or you or me. It didn’t take right away on Teyla, probably because
she’s Athosian.”

McKay’s voice was grim. “The sick bastard killed Irina, did you know? I found
her body.”

“Yeah, Teyla told me.” John took a sharp breath. One more civilian he hadn’t
been able to protect.
She shouldn’t have been here, we never should have
brought so many civilians, she should have been home in a lab discovering stuff.
“She had the ATA therapy, that was why he killed her.”

McKay looked up, frowning. “I’ve got the ATA therapy.”

“He told me you were dead too.”

“Well, despite what you and Ford think, I’m a hell of a lot faster than
Kavanagh at everything, including running in panic down dark corridors.” McKay
got the last chain cut away, and John hopped off the slab. He started to tell
McKay to give him the pistol, but the dizziness hit again. John dropped to his
knees, just barely able to keep himself from doing a face-plant on the stone
floor.

“What’s wrong?” McKay asked urgently, leaning over him, fumbling with the
flashlight. “Did he shoot you? You should have mentioned it earlier. Rugged
stoicism has its place in these situations, but—”

“Can you tell if I feel hot, if I have a fever?” John asked him. He felt like
heat was radiating off him in waves. This wasn’t from blood loss, and it wasn’t
from getting hit on the head.

McKay sat on his heels and put the back of his hand to John’s forehead. “Yes,
you’re burning up. Are you sick? How did you get sick? This is lousy timing—”

“Rodney, just shut up and listen.” John bit his lip. He had to admit it to
himself; Dorane hadn’t been lying about the injection. Whatever Teyla had given
him, it was starting to take affect. Concussions didn’t give you fevers. But
saying it aloud was like giving in to it. “Dorane made Teyla give me a drug.”

“What? Like the mind-control thing, whatever, that he gave the others—”

“No, no. She gave me what he’s been giving the Koan. The drug he developed
when he was experimenting on the humans who used to live here. It’s like
Beckett’s retrovirus. It was because I had the Ancient gene, that I was born
with it instead of needing the therapy like you guys. It’s like he thought I was
one of them, or something. And he really hates them.”

In the glow of the flashlight, John saw McKay’s mouth twist down. For a long
moment McKay didn’t say anything, then he let his breath out. “Right. I’ll have
to get into his database—hopefully he used the Ancient nomenclature—chances are
he didn’t take the time to destroy it. Or he couldn’t bear to destroy it.
Megalomaniacs are often unable to take those kinds of preventative measures.” He
pushed to his feet. “But how am I going to get you up those stairs? Maybe a
safety rope—”