02 - Reliquary (15 page)

John glared up at him, frustrated. “Rodney, you don’t understand—”

“Of course I understand!” Trying to shout quietly, McKay’s voice cracked.
“Who the hell do you think you’re talking to? A nutjob looking for revenge on people who have been dead ten thousand
years tried to turn you into a monster by giving you a drug that’s going to
wreck havoc with every cell in your body! And will you shut up while I’m trying
to think? We need a plan here!”

“Okay, okay! Just calm down!” About the last thing John needed right now was
to have to talk McKay down from a panic attack. But part of him knew that if
McKay, of all people, had gone all sympathetic, it would have been that much
worse. John would much rather have him acting normal, which meant yelling like a
crazy man and making it all about him. “But you have to stop him from getting to
Atlantis. Or warn them. When he dials the Stargate, you can use that
communications suite to—”

“I tried that first, as soon as I could get back into that area. I thought
I
could call Boerne and the others for help,” McKay said flatly. “That console
hasn’t worked in hundreds of years. The key control crystals are missing and the
others are broken. There were only enough left to make a convincing display of
blinky lights and noise when Kavanagh was pretending to use it. That’s why he
wouldn’t let me near it.”

“Oh. Crap.” John pressed his hands to his eyes. The pounding in his head was
just getting worse. “Look, just go. I’ll catch up with you. Just—” John didn’t
remember what he was going to say after that, because the room swung around and
then he fell over.

He wasn’t really unconscious, just in a kind of waking delirium that made it
really difficult to talk or stand or help while McKay dragged him up, shouldered
his arm, and started hauling him up the stairs to the gallery. McKay had taken
off his pack to do it, and John hadn’t been able to tell him not to, which was
even more annoying. He started to come back to his senses a little, mostly in
self-defense, when McKay banged John’s head against a metal support. He grabbed
the railing to help steady McKay, who was muttering, “—find a stranded survivor
in a stasis container in the middle of a bombed-out Ancient repository, you’d think he was an Ancient, right, but
no, this is the Pegasus Galaxy, so he’s a serial killer! And you, you obstinate
product of the military industrial complex, expect me to leave you in this
filthy pit, surrounded by decomposing genetically altered people, and dead
people I might add, like something out of a Dr. Phibes movie—”

“That was Dr. Moreau,” John told him, then the rest of that little speech
registered. “Are you still bitching about me telling you to leave me? ’Cause
nothing’s changed, you’re going to have to leave me.”

“Can I not emphasize strongly enough the fact that you should shut up right
now?”

“Hey, I’m still in command here.” They staggered off the stairs onto the
gallery level, and the way John felt at the moment, it made reaching Camp IV on
Mount Everest seem like a walk in the park. His knees gave out, and McKay
managed to lower him to the floor.

McKay leaned over him, breathing hard. “There may only be two of us left on
this hellish planet, Major, and until we can make contact with the others or
Atlantis again, we’re an autonomous collective.”

“Go get your pack,” John ordered. His head hurt like crazy, and even the
reflected glow from the flash light stung his eyes.

“Yes, yes, I know, I’m going!” McKay turned back for the stairs.

“And if we’re an autonomous collective, how come you keep telling me to shut
up?” John added, as McKay clattered down the steps. He tried to sit up, realized
that was a mistake when his stomach lurched and his head swam, and eased back
down again.

John watched the dark ceiling swing around until McKay reappeared, the 9mm in
his holster, the pack slung over his shoulder, the flashlight stuffed into a
pocket. John shoved himself up, grimacing, ignoring nausea and vertigo. McKay caught his arm as John flailed to his feet, saying, “We have to hurry, the
Koan are coming back.”

John squinted and saw McKay had the life sign detector in his free hand and
it was blinking urgently. At least the Koan weren’t using that damn jammer. He
was willing to bet Dorane had taken that with him. “Right, let’s go—Where?”

“Good question.” Sounding a little desperate, McKay hauled him along the dark
gallery, back into a narrow passage. “I have a vague idea but I haven’t had a
chance to—” they reached a metal door, round like a hatch, standing partly open,
and McKay shoved at it “—test it.”

“Good, I love it when we wing it.”

The hatch opened into a landing overlooking a big shadowy room, with more of
the swooping pipes overhead. There was a walkway along the wall just under the
pipes and McKay helped John along it, then down a series of twisty rock-walled
passages and through another hatch. He said in relief, “Good, these passages do
connect, I wasn’t certain.” He added, “There’s a control area with sensors and a
security system through here that Dorane somehow neglected to point out when we
first arrived.” The sarcasm in McKay’s voice was more biting than usual.

“How the hell did you find me?” John demanded. The hatch opened into a small
control room with consoles, a holographic screen, and a couple of semi-circular
bench seats with gray padding.

“Did I not just say sensors and security screens—” McKay looked down at him,
then pressed his lips together. “Never mind.”

“Oh, right.” John sprawled on one of the benches while McKay bent over the
largest station and tapped the touch-pads. John closed his eyes, forced the
dizziness down. “Can you find Dorane?”

“Yes, yes, yes, hold on. Let me check the Stargate… Oh.”

“What?” John opened his eyes, saw McKay staring grimly at the flickering
screen. He shoved himself upright, nearly lurching to the floor as he leaned forward to see.

It was a long-distance view of the Stargate, in color though fuzzy and
pixilated as the system tried to enlarge the distant image. The ’gate held an
active wormhole, and a puddlejumper hovered in front of it. Their puddlejumper.
John swore.

McKay spread his hands helplessly, his face bleak. “There’s nothing I can do.
These are just sensors, cameras, there’s no communications equipment. No
weapons. Though if we had weapons what would we do? He’s got our people in
there.”

John shook his head, sick. It wasn’t McKay’s fault. “He’ll come back for the
Koan, the ones that still follow his orders. After he gets control of our
’gate.”

The tiny jumper on the screen vanished into the worm-hole’s event horizon.

Confusion reigned in the jumper bay for some time before Elizabeth Weir found
herself facing their new guest. Lieutenant Ford and Private Kinjo had both been
injured and taken off on gurneys, and Dr. Corrigan had seemed confused and
probably needed to go to the medlab as well. She had gotten the most
information out of Dr. Kavanagh, upset and barely coherent himself. He had told
her that they had encountered a group of about fifty refugees from another world
hiding in the ruins, that there had been a Wraith attack, and that Dr.
Kolesnikova and Corporal Boerne had been killed. The Wraith had withdrawn
temporarily but the Stargate was such a distance from the repository that the
refugees were afraid to approach it in daylight. They had agreed to come out
once night fell.

Boerne and Kolesnikova.
Elizabeth felt it like a little stab in the
heart.
Two more dead.
She had taken a sharp breath and asked, “Where are
Major Sheppard and Rodney?” The medical team had cleared out of the back of the
puddlejumper, and she could see now that no one else was aboard. “Who flew the
jumper back?”

“It was Dorane,” Kavanagh had said, already backing away from her, avoiding
her eyes and her first question. “His people have the Ancient gene as well.”

Now, facing Dorane and Teyla in the relative quiet of the jumper bay, with
Zelenka, Sergeant Bates, and the Marine security detail gathered around her, she
could finally ask the question again.

Dorane was saying, “I would ask you to send a gateship back for the rest of
my people, but they feel they must wait until nightfall, when they can go to the
Stargate under the cover of darkness.”

“Yes, of course. Are Major Sheppard and Dr. McKay waiting with them?”
Ignoring the tightness in her chest, Elizabeth tried to keep her eyes on their
visitor, not Teyla. The other woman looked awful, her face drawn and ill, and
the look in her eyes told Elizabeth she had seen something terrible. She knew
Sheppard would have stayed behind to make sure the stranded refugees reached the
Stargate safely, but would he have kept Rodney with him rather than Teyla?

Dorane looked startled and uncertain. “Did no one tell you?” He shook his
head, spreading his hands regretfully. “I am sorry, but there was nothing we
could do. In the Wraith attack—They are gone.”

John was in that drifting state of consciousness again. He couldn’t remember
how long he had been here, or why it was happening. The heat came and went in
cycles, as if he was staked out on a beach under the hottest sun imaginable,
with only an occasional wave washing up high enough to give him some relief.

There were long periods where he was convinced that he had been taken by the
Wraith.

Sometimes it was the Wraith from the downed supply ship, and it had him
pinned to the floor of the jumper, sucking his life out slowly, trying to make
him unlock the controls so it could go to Atlantis. Sometimes he was webbed up
in one of those little cubbies, sick with fear and writhing uselessly against the
sticky bonds, hearing familiar voices—Rodney, Teyla, Ford, Elizabeth,
Kolesnikova, Zelenka, Stackhouse, Beckett, Hailing, Jinto—calling frantically to
each other somewhere in the darkness of the hive ship.

Fortunately for John’s sanity, there were times he knew clearly that he was
badly ill and that Rodney was trying to take care of him, making him sit up to
drink water or just pouring it down his throat when he was so out of it he
refused to drink. He remembered having several conversations where he kept
asking questions and fading out when Rodney tried to answer him.

When John finally woke up, everything was still weirdly vague and dreamlike.
He was lying on an uncomfortably hard floor in a small rock-walled room, and he
couldn’t remember much of the immediate past. He could see, because there was a
small pocket flashlight balanced on its base, pointing upward so it mostly lit
the little space. His head was propped on a pack which felt like it was stuffed
with hammers. Large awkwardly-shaped hammers.

The fever was burning through him, making his own body feel distant and
strange; his skin felt too tight, as if it had shrunk a little in the heat. He
remembered that they had been moving around a lot, finding different places to
hide. McKay had seen the Koan coming toward the security area on the detector,
and they had had to run for it or, in John’s case, hobble for it. They couldn’t
afford to be boxed in, for the Koan to trap them in a room and starve them out.

He shifted a little and winced. His leg was throbbing where the Koan had
clawed him, and his wrist still hurt; McKay had had a small medical kit in his
pack and had wanted to use most of the contents on him. John had argued him
down to pouring antiseptic into the punctures and bandaging his wrist, and he
had taken a couple of antibiotics. Other than that, there wasn’t much else to be
done. They had an epinephrine hypo McKay kept because he was allergic to just
about everything;

it would come in handy if John went into respiratory arrest, but it wouldn’t
do a damn thing for his other problems.

Head swimming, he pushed himself up enough to see that there was a half-empty
water bottle, a couple of power bars, and the medical kit stacked neatly within
easy reach. There was no sign of McKay.

He left. Good,
John thought, easing back down onto the hammer-stuffed
pack. He remembered ordering Rodney to leave, several times.
You got your
way. He followed your orders. You can lie here and die alone. Yay for you.
It didn’t matter. John was history, and Rodney had to stop Dorane from reaching
Atlantis.

But was it really a good idea to send an astrophysicist who was an average
shot at best and had barely started to learn unarmed combat after a
ten-thousand-year-old man who had dozens of genetically-altered Koan to back him
up, a puddle-jumper, and who was holding a few of your friends as helpless
mind-controlled hostages?

You know, if you sent Rodney off to die, you’ll never know. You’ll die and
rot or turn into a Koan and spend your short life eating other Koan, because
Dorane didn’t leave any food.
Or maybe the smart ones went off into the
woods or learned how to fish in the ocean. He didn’t see why they shouldn’t.

Then John hazily remembered that they had seen the jumper go through the
’gate. Dorane would have to come back for the Koan, but that wouldn’t take long.
And they were stuck down here, trapped by the Koan Dorane hadn’t wanted to take
along. And even if they got up there, how could they stop them? McKay had said
he only had one extra clip for the pistol. He tried to sit up again and
something fell off his chest. He picked it up, realizing it was a folded square
of paper.

It took him a while to get his eyes focused well enough to read it. It said,
“Back soon,” and was signed Dr. Rodney McKay, Ph.D., like John might have
thought somebody else had left it. He crumpled the note and dropped back on the
pack, groaning. “God, Rodney, don’t get yourself killed.”,.

The next time John drifted back to half-awareness, there was a ZPM next to
the flashlight.
Was that there before?
he wondered vaguely. Maybe this
was some sort of wish-fulfillment hallucination.