02 - Reliquary (19 page)

Rodney was right again, damn him.
Then,
Crap, I left him alone.

Cursing himself and Dorane and this planet and life in general in the Pegasus
Galaxy under his breath, John started back inland, moving along the edge of the
forest toward the Stargate.

He moved quietly by habit, walking in the short yellow grass, sticking to the
shadow of the trees. After a couple of hundred yards, he felt a tingling in the
back of his neck and knew there was a Koan nearby.
Oh great, I can sense
them. Rodney was right about that, too,
John growled mentally, turning back
under the shadow of the trees. He didn’t have time for this.

He circled around, then saw a shape ahead, crouched at the base of a tree.

It was facing away from him, looking toward the city, a slight figure in a
rough sleeveless tunic. It was also wearing a hooded wrap, a fold of fabric
pulled forward to shield its face, and its hair was long and silver-gray,
collected in a neat braid that hung down its back. And there was something else
on its face, too. Fascinated, John stepped forward and a dry twig shifted under
his boot.

The figure shot to its feet in alarm, causing John to leap backward from pure
adrenaline. It was a Koan; he could see the silvery mottling on its bare arms and chest, the spines on its ears as
its hood fell back. It was wearing a pair of primitive goggles, the lenses
tinted dark. Instead of attacking him it scrambled back in confusion and bolted
away through the trees.

Well, that was different,
John thought, staring after it.

He studied the ground, kicking aside dead leaves and twigs, and something
rolled free. Slowly, John picked it up.

It was a wooden tube, with a braided cord strap for carrying, with little
decorative bands inset with bits of polished rock or shell. He turned it over,
looked down one of the open ends and realized he was holding a telescope. The
lens was colored with some kind of amber pigment. John peered through it, found
it too dark, and had to cautiously lift up his sunglasses to see through it.
Turning toward the city, he could see the repository’s main entrance from here,
though he couldn’t make out much detail.

He lowered the telescope, looking off into the quiet forest. He didn’t need
Corrigan to tell him a species composed entirely of animalistic psychopaths
didn’t figure out how to grind lenses or make eye protection against the
daylight.

So they aren’t all crazy.
Over the years some of the Koan must have
escaped Dorane’s influence, traveled away from the ruined city, reinvented some
kind of life for themselves. And Dorane had said the Ancients had tried to
stabilize the Koan’s genetic changes. Maybe they had succeeded, and it had just
taken a few generations or so to show up. And Dorane had been too bent on
revenge by that point to notice, or care. John looked back at the city.
If
the ones still inside hear those voices, that noise, all the time…
No
wonder they were nuts.

John found a branch at about eye level and hung the telescope on it, so the
guy could find it if he came back. He searched himself for something else to
leave and came up with a power bar wrapper he had shoved in his pocket by habit.
He attached it to the branch next to the telescope, It wasn’t much of a way
of conveying “I come in peace, sorry I scared the crap
out of you” but it was all he had. He could, at least, say it to McKay.

John found Rodney trudging doggedly across the plain between the city and the
Stargate, the pack slung over his shoulders, carrying the ZPM. His shirt was
stained with sweat and his face red from exertion. He knew Rodney wasn’t in that
bad a shape; he must have chased John most of the way through the city before
having to give up. As John jogged toward him Rodney stopped, waiting for him to
approach, regarding him hopefully. Reaching him, John said, “Sorry. Had a moment
back there. Want me to carry that?”

“Yes.” Rodney handed the ZPM over with a gasp of relief.

John hefted the ZPM against his chest. It felt inert, like a kitchen
appliance, and not like a subspace power source that when fully charged made a
nuclear bomb look like a popgun. It whispered to him again, but this time,
without Dorane’s dying technology screaming in his head, he understood it. It
was speaking in something that was more like musical notes than words, but he
knew it was saying that it was at minimal capacity, and needed maintenance. It
was a reassuringly ordinary thing for a ZPM to say, if you thought about it.

They walked for a few moments, and John cleared his throat. “I think I know
why the Koan are crazy. It’s got something to do with Dorane trying to create
his own version of the ATA gene. Even with everything broken and powered down,
something in that equipment in there is still broadcasting, and once he gives
you his Koan gene retrovirus, it gets louder and louder until it’s screaming in
your head. You were right, that was probably what was making us feel so weird
when we first got here. Why we thought the place was creepy. Why I kept smelling
rot and dead things when nobody else did.”

McKay nodded, wiping his forehead off on his arm. He took it all in like they
were sitting around in a lab or conference room talking about how the puddlejumper’s propulsion system worked.
“Because of the gene and the ATA therapy, we were subliminally conscious of it
but couldn’t sense it well enough to be more than minimally affected.”

“Right. It didn’t really hit me until we got to the surface. Once I got far
enough away from it, I could think again.” John shrugged awkwardly. “And I saw
another Koan out there. He was watching the city and ran off when he saw me. So
some of them must have escaped over time, and, you know, got over it. They
probably saw the jumper land and they’ve been watching us from a distance ever
since.”

“Sensible of them.” McKay took a deep breath. “All that aside, I had an idea.
If we find the ’gate is actually locked against any destination except Atlantis,
we can transmit a message with the MALP. If you can convince Dorane that you
want to join him, he may open the shield for us. Then when we get there, you can
shoot him. We’ll still have to do something about all the Koan, but if he’s not
there to control them, it should be a little easier.”

John lifted his brows. It wasn’t exactly the best plan ever, but they didn’t
have a lot of options. “Okay, so he figures I’m due for a psychotic break around
about now and believes me. But suppose he doesn’t care how his experiment on me
turned out. He’s got plenty of Koan already; what do I tell him I have that he
might want?”

Rodney smiled, a weird combination of his normal smug expression and a look
of resignation and terror. “Me.”

Any stairs or ramp that had led up to the Stargate platform had been a
casualty of the bombing, and the scramble up the resulting pile of rock and
rubble was not made any easier by the ZPM. John and McKay reached the top
without dropping it or breaking their own necks. The MALP still sat to one side
of the platform, coated with a layer of blown sand but otherwise unharmed.

McKay went immediately to the hole in the platform where the DHD had been. He poked around at the remains of it for a few moments,
then sat back, shaking his head. “I was right, this DHD wasn’t destroyed by an
energy weapon, there was some sort of internal overload. Which means that maniac
was out here trying to get around whatever control inhibition the Ancients
placed on the crystals and blew the damn thing himself.”

John chewed his lip, thinking about it. “He would have still tried to dial
manually. Maybe he tried it a lot.”

McKay had followed his thought. He snorted. “You think he killed two ZPMs
manually dialing a ’gate? It’s impossible. It takes comparatively little power
to initiate a ’gate, which is probably a safety feature to keep travelers from
being stranded. The outside power source isn’t creating the worm-hole, it’s just
unlocking the inner ring and then locking in the chevrons for the address. He
would have to dial…” McKay frowned.

John lifted his brows. “Over and over again for ten thousand years? In
between stasis chamber naps?”

“And I thought I was obsessive-compulsive,” McKay muttered, diving back into
the hole. “I find the fact that he must have been unsuccessful all this time
mildly terrifying.”

John wasn’t thrilled with it either. “Maybe he wasn’t unsuccessful. Maybe he
went there after the Ancients left for Earth. Which means—” He hesitated, not
liking where this was going. “It’s not the city he wants, it’s us. He wants to
keep experimenting.” He took a frustrated breath, looking out over the bright
plain. “Why didn’t the Ancients just kill him? All these tricks with the ’gate,
it’s like they wanted him to squirm around trying to escape.”

“Or as if they wanted something from him,” McKay said quietly. “They didn’t
touch his inner sanctum lab complex. Or they searched it, didn’t find what they
wanted, and left it intact hoping the answer was just hidden too well. That they
could force him to reveal it eventually.”

Antidotes,
John thought. For the Thesians, for whoever else Dorane had managed to infect. He didn’t want to say it aloud; he didn’t
want to sound that hopeful—as if it would tempt the universe to conspire against
him.

McKay was quiet for a moment, then he said, “You look like an alien biker,”
and started working again. He poked and prodded at the DHD’s remnants, dug tools
out of his pack, and muttered to himself. The day was getting hot, the sun
reflecting off the stone platform, and the brightness was giving John yet
another headache. Then McKay connected in the ZPM, and John felt a sudden shiver
travel down his back. It was not an unpleasant sensation.

He stared up at the Stargate, which still looked like an inert hunk of
naquadah, but something in John’s head told him it was now powered up, ready to
be dialed. “You did it,” he said, just as McKay sat back from the ragged hole in
the paving and said, “I did it.”

“What?” they both said at the same time. John waved for McKay to shut up. “I
felt it. Like it was an Ancient gene thing. Except I’ve never felt a ’gate
before. And ZPMs have never talked to me.”

“I actually didn’t think you had been holding out on us all this time,
Major.” McKay stared at the Stargate, then at John. “Maybe that’s what the
spines are for. Maybe they’re meant to enhance reception of Dorane’s alternate
mental technology activation, and they also function that way for the real ATA.”

John caught himself trying to roll his eyes back to see the spines in his
brows. “Like antennae?” It did make a sort of sense.

McKay rubbed sweat and dust off his face with his shirtsleeve. “Can you dial
the ’gate mentally, by any chance? Because that damn thing looks heavy.”

“Let’s see.” John concentrated on the first symbol for Atlantis, then for a
few other destinations he had memorized. Nothing. The inner ring just sat there,
making a deep metallic purring noise that John could feel in his back teeth. He
felt like it was staring accusingly at him. Or possibly laughing. “Guess not.”

“Of course.” McKay pushed to his feet, stumbled, and John stood, giving him a
hand up. “That would be too easy.”

They decided to test the theory that all destinations except Atlantis had
been locked out to keep Dorane here. If they could dial another destination,
that meant they could use Plan A, which was to try to dial into Atlantis from
another ’gate address, and trick Dorane into letting them in by pretending to be
traders or something else unspecified that they hadn’t quite figured out yet.
“Let’s try the Hoffans,” McKay suggested, leaning tiredly on the gate. “They
were nice people. Hopefully a few of them are still alive.”

“It’s worth a shot,” John agreed. The Hoffans put a high value on fighting
the Wraith with science, and were advanced enough to understand genetics. If any
of them were still around, they would probably be willing to give them the
benefit of the doubt and listen to McKay’s explanations, instead of shooting the
freaky alien creature who had just come through their ’gate (i.e. John) on
sight.

They wrestled with the ’gate’s inner ring. It was heavy, like pushing a
loaded truck up a hill. But while it would rotate all around, it stubbornly
refused to lock in the first symbol in the Hoffans’ gate address, no matter how
hard they both shoved at it, or how hard John mentally begged it. John swore.
“It’s going to have to be Plan B.”

McKay stepped back, eyeing the ’gate with weary disgust. “You know what
you’re going to say?”

John had no idea what he was going to say. He thought he would be better
winging it. “I can sound crazy and desperate, how’s that?”

“Crazy and desperate is standard operating procedure.” McKay went to his
pack, rooted around in it for a moment, and pulled out something that looked
like a little PDA, but John could tell it was Ancient technology. It buzzed with
a low note, a minor key compared to the bass orchestra of the Stargate, but much friendlier. “Major, I’m going to put this in the MALP. I
assume if this goes hideously wrong, we’ll both be searched and I don’t want
Dorane to find it.”

“Okay.” John blinked, distracted, as the little device sang that it had lots
of data but was ready for more. “Uh… What is it?”

“A download from Dorane’s database. He thought he had it adequately
protected, but let’s say his system security skills don’t match his
Frankensteinian expertise in biochemistry. The Ancients must have been able to
get this data too, so I don’t know how useful it might be, but it’s still worth
saving.” Rodney tucked it into one of the MALP’s code-locked compartments. The
metal muted the little device’s song, and it settled into quiet. McKay dusted
his hands off on his pants. “Now, this has got to look good. We need some stage
dressing. I have to look like your prisoner.” Covered with a sticky combination
of sweat, dust, and sand, and turning red from incipient sunburn, McKay already
looked like he had been dragged to the Stargate by the ankle. He patted his
pockets and handed over the 9mm to John. “You should tie me up,” he added,
looking absently around. “Better use my belt. There’s some cable in the MALP’s
compartment, but we’ll need that to hang ourselves if this doesn’t work.”