02 - Reliquary (16 page)

Then he was dreaming about being a kid again, about the time he had been
attacked by fire ants. The little bastards crawled all over you, waiting to bite
until they had swarmed over as much of your skin as they could reach. Then they
sent a chemical signal and all bit at once, and the bites hurt like hell, like
little pinpoints of acid in your flesh, and then itched and itched—

“Stop it, don’t scratch,” Rodney ordered, leaning over him and slapping at
his hands.

“Don’t hit,” John told him, shoving his hands away and glaring. He was lying
on the floor, in the little room he remembered, and there was the flashlight and
the ZPM, apparently not a hallucination. The itching was real, too. He still
felt too hot, but he was sweating now, as if the fever had broken. “What—what
are—” He wiggled his fingers, surprised to see them in a pair of slightly
oversized lab gloves from the medical kit. “Why am I wearing gloves?”

Rodney looked exhausted. “You were scratching at your skin, leaving marks, I
was afraid you were going to hurt yourself,” he explained. He brandished a water
bottle. “Here, you need this.”

John realized his throat was painfully dry. “Yeah.” He struggled to sit up,
accepted the bottle and took a cautious sip, not letting himself drink as much
as he wanted. “This isn’t all we have, is it?”

“We have enough for now.” McKay nodded toward the pitiful little cache of
supplies arranged next to the ZPM. There were now two more bottles.

John handed the water back. He eyed the non-hallucinatory ZPM. “That’s a
ZPM.”

“Very good, Major.” McKay was obviously too tired to give the sarcasm the
usual bite. “When it was time for sunset on the surface, the Koan temporarily
cleared out of Dorane’s lab area. I went up there and tried to find any of our
supplies. There wasn’t much. I found Kolesnikova’s pack, but her pistol and
ammunition were gone. So I took the opportunity to poke around through Dorane’s
data storage, and take the ZPM. He had three! Three! But two were at maximum
entropy, and that one is almost completely drained.” He gave the ZPM a disgusted
look, as if it was at fault for being a disappointment.

John still felt distanced from reality. “You went back there alone?” It
seemed like a bad idea, even with the detector.

McKay glared at him. “Hello? You were unconscious.”

“Okay, okay.” John let it drop. He knew McKay had gone for the water because
he needed it to keep John’s fever down. “How long was I out?”

“About ten hours. It’s dark up on the surface now, and most of the Koan are
up there, so there isn’t much we can do.” McKay hesitated, shifting
uncomfortably. “At first light, if you feel up to it, we’ll have to get moving.”

“Ten hours? I feel fine, I just…” John absently ran a hand through his hair
and felt something prickle against his palm.
Huh?
He rubbed his head,
baffled, then froze. He stared at McKay. “What do I look like?”

McKay didn’t even blink. “I don’t think we should discuss that right now. I
think we need to talk about what we’re going to do at dawn when the Koan come
back down here. I’ve had good luck avoiding them using the detector, and—”

“Rodney…” John said slowly, with emphasis. McKay was way too calm, which
meant it was really, really bad. He must have gone so far past panic he had come
out on the other side. “What do I look like?”

McKay met his gaze, eyes narrowing in determination. “Major, Dorane has been
in Atlantis for more than ten hours. Think about that.”

John took a breath and looked away. Everybody in the expedition could be
dead.
And the Athosians, damn it.
Would Dorane find them on the mainland?
Oh hell, of course he will. He’ll show up in a jumper, with Teyla or somebody
else he’s controlling to smile and say he’s an Ancestor and everything s
hunky-dory, and they’ll welcome him with open arms.
It made John’s stomach
try to turn.

His face must have shown his feelings because McKay abruptly broke down. “All
right, fine! You have those little silver spiny things, like the Koan. They’re
on the outside of your ears and in your hair and eyebrows. It’s not shocking or
awful or even particularly unattractive. It’s just a little odd. That’s the only
physical change I’ve noticed.” McKay cocked his head, squinting. “I’m almost
certain your ears were always that shape. Of course, if I see you every day and
I can’t tell, it’s probably not a big issue.” He added, “I was hoping the spines
were sensory organs, and you’d be able to tell how the Koan communicate with
Dorane, maybe figure out if they know where we are. Any luck on that?”

“Uh, no, I don’t—” John shook his head helplessly. He touched his ear, felt
the spines. They were unexpectedly soft, like thick coarse hair. He suppressed a
shudder. His body suddenly felt weird and foreign, like an outsized boot he was
knocking around in. “Rodney, I’m not just going to look funny here, there’s
mental changes too. They used to be just like us, and the Ancients apparently
thought they could make the genetic changes stable, until Dorane messed with
them more and drove them all nuts. I could go crazy and try to kill you, and you
could be all Atlantis has left.” He took a deep breath. “You’ve got to go.”

McKay rolled his eyes, flung his hands up in irritation. “Will you stop
saying that while I’m trying to think?” he snapped.

“I can’t stop saying that, dammit! You’re the only one left who can do
something to stop Dorane. I’m a liability. You have to—”

“No, Major.” McKay sounded bitterly angry. “I’m not leaving you to die here.
I know what you think of me, but I’m not a coward, and I’m certainly not a
quitter.”

“Rodney, I don’t think that!” John sputtered. “And will you stop trying to
make this about you? I’m the one with the problem, and I’m being practical here!
Before I go nuts, you have to—”

“Shut up or I’ll—”

“Kill me?” John interposed. “Promises, promises.”

“Oh, ha ha,” McKay snarled. “Morbid humor, still not helping!”

John tried, “Hey, if you asked me to kill you I’d do it.”

“No, you would not,” Rodney snapped. “You wouldn’t give up. You’d do
something flashy and heroic and crazy, and you wouldn’t give up until you saved
my life or got yourself killed too. You don’t think I know that? Now stop
confusing the issue so we can decide what to do!”

John sat back, thwarted. He was also oddly touched, but maybe that was the
fever talking. And it was probably incredibly stupid to sit here trying to
convince McKay to kill him or leave him when they still needed a plan, whether
John was sane enough to participate once it was time to implement it or not.
“Okay, okay, fine. At dawn we go to the surface.”

“Yes, exactly.” Rodney threw him a suspicious glare. “Now, as I’ve been
trying to say for the past five minutes, I’ve had good luck avoiding the Koan
with the detector, so at dawn, if you’ve recovered enough to walk, that
shouldn’t be a problem. Then we have to get back to Atlantis.”

“Well, yeah, that’s kind of the plan’s problem area.” John rubbed his eyes.
“Dorane took the damn jumper, and the Ancients blew up the DHD to keep him from
using the ’gate.” He looked up sharply as a solution occurred to him. “You can’t
build a new DHD, can you?”

“No, I can’t, but thank you for the thought.” McKay looked mollified by the
suggestion. “But we don’t need a DHD, we can dial that ’gate manually.”

“That’s right.” John should have remembered that, but his head was
intermittently aching, making it hard to think. There had been a few instances
where SG teams had dialed ’gates manually; it was in the mission reports in the
expedition’s database. “We can shove the inner ring around like a giant rotary
phone. All we need is a power source.” He looked at the ZPM. “Which apparently
we have.”

“Exactly! The first Stargate experiments in the 1940s did it with a
generator. And in fact, the Heliopolis in our galaxy had a broken DHD and the
gate had to be dialed manually, using a lightning strike for power. We, however,
don’t need such extreme measures, since we have—” McKay gestured triumphantly
“—a ZPM.”

So that was why McKay had taken it, plunging the entire complex into
darkness. He had probably wanted to conserve its resources, saving them for the
’gate. And hopefully for Atlantis, if they could get it there and deal with
Dorane. “So we have a plan. Except that if Dorane’s taken over the ’gate
room—which he probably has by now—he’s not going to open the force shield for
us.”

“Yes, the plan has flaws,” Rodney admitted.

“The plan’s flaws could end up turning us into impact events.” If they tried
to go through the ’gate to Atlantis with the force shield up, it would be
suicide. When the Genii had tried to invade the city, John had killed around
fifty-five of them by managing to raise the shield while they were in transit
through the wormhole. He hadn’t had any other choice, and seeing the city that
was the only chance of protecting his people from the Wraith about to be invaded
had made it an easy decision. He shifted uncomfortably on the hard floor. The
itching had mostly stopped, but now he was having weird aches in his hands and
arms. “But we can go to another world, some place we have a trading agreement
with, then dial Atlantis from there and try to bluff our way in—”

McKay grimaced unhappily. “We can try. But I suspect that the Ancients did
more than just blow up the DHD. If they wanted to keep Dorane here, the logical
thing to do is to alter the gate’s control crystal so it couldn’t dial anywhere
except Atlantis. They could still ’gate back and forth through it using the
jumpers, but Dorane would have no choice but to stay here or dial Atlantis and
walk into the force shield.” He gave a little shrug. “It could also explain why
he wasn’t too worried about finding me, or making sure you were dead. If the
only way off this planet is the ’gate, and the ’gate will only connect to
Atlantis, a place which he would shortly control, there’s not much point in
hanging around here eliminating pesky survivors. We’ll have to test it, but—”

“But you’re right, that is logical.” John let out his breath wearily. He
started to run a hand through his hair and dropped it abruptly when he
encountered the spines. Something else occurred to him, and he said, “You know,
that holo projector, set off by itself in that room like it is—I bet it was a
memorial to the Thesians, the people who died here, that Dorane killed. Whoever
they were, the Ancients picked them to help build this place. Their meeting
hall, their United Nations of the Pegasus Galaxy. They must have been pretty
special people.”

McKay’s mouth twisted downward. “And Dorane probably developed his control
drugs so the Ancients could show up here to check on things, see it all looked
normal from the outside, and not have any reason to question anyone’s word that
everything was fine.”

John grimaced in agreement. It would be the same way on Atlantis with the
Athosians and any ’gate teams who had been out during Dorane’s arrival.
Everything would look fine until it was too late.

They sat there for a time in glum silence. John shook his head, shifting with
a wince. His arms were aching right down to his fingertips. To distract himself,
he said, “We’ll need to go back up through that main shaft. That could be tricky.”

“The one Kavanagh ‘discovered’?” McKay’s expression was sour. “The Koan
probably don’t use it. It didn’t look as if it had been opened in years, and I
don’t think they could fake that.”

John nodded. “We can duck in somewhere out of sight until the detector shows
it’s clear up on the surface—and hope Dorane didn’t leave them another jammer.”
It wasn’t so much a plan as a statement of intent, but it was what they had at
the moment. “We need to—Oh, crap—” An intense pain seized John’s hands, as if
he had thrust both into a wood chipper. He doubled over, tucking them under his
arms, trying to curl into a fetal ball against the agony.

After an endless moment the pain receded, and John managed to gasp a breath.
His eyes were watering and he was trembling and Rodney was hovering over him
repeating, “What happened? What happened? What happened?”

“Just…shut up for a minute. I’ll tell you when I know.” His stunned brain
was starting to process sensation again. Biting his lip, he wiggled his fingers
tentatively.
Oh, yeah, it’s worse.
He pushed himself upright, Rodney
gripping his shoulder when he nearly swayed over. John leaned back against the
wall and took a deep breath.
Might as well get it over with.
He pulled
the first glove off.

McKay made a garbled noise, then coughed and managed to say, “Well, that
was… Not entirely unexpected.”

John had claws. Short and curved and silvery-gray, they protruded from his
fingertips, formed out of what had been his fingernails. He flexed his fingers
and they slid back into their nearly invisible sheaths. He knew the Koan had
claws, but somehow, whatever Rodney said, he hadn’t expected this. He pulled off
the other glove to examine that set, wondering what else he should be expecting.

Rodney was staring, fascinated. “That’s so—” He reached out, carefully
pressed John’s fingertip and a half-inch of claw slid out. “It’s very like a
cat’s claws. I wonder—”

“Hey, stop that.” Indignant, John yanked his hand back. “That feels weird.”

“It looks pretty weird, too,” Rodney admitted readily.

John took a deep breath. It had been a really, really long day, and he
thought his and Rodney’s relationship could benefit from a time-out just at the
moment. He used his forearm to rub the sweat off his face. “I don’t want to talk
about this anymore. Look, you need to get some sleep before dawn. Give me the
pistol and I’ll watch the detector.”

McKay sat up straight, eyeing him narrowly. “No.”

“Huh?” John stared at him, then pressed his lips together. Even though it
proved his argument, it still pissed him off, which ought be a sign of
approaching insanity, only it actually felt pretty normal. “Oh, a minute ago,
everything’s fine, and now my claws grew out, so you don’t want me to have our
only weapon. Doesn’t that prove my point?”