02 - Reliquary (20 page)

John went to the MALP to start powering up the transmitter, making sure it
was ready to send as soon as they got the last chevron locked. “Right. How about
a chorus
of Always Look on the Bright Side of Life?”

“Maybe later.”

Having McKay’s hands awkwardly tied with the belt made pushing the inner ring
more difficult, but the symbols for Atlantis’ address each locked without
hesitation when the ring slid into place. They hastily scrambled out of the way
as the last chevron encoded.

The wormhole whooshed into existence with a blast of ozone and a bass fugue
John could feel through his whole body as he bolted around to the MALP. The
jumpers’ instant response to him was like coming home, but he wasn’t comfortable with this
intimate a relationship with a Stargate, let alone random data pads and ZPMs. He
reached for the transmitter and froze. He felt something building in the DHD’s
ruined base, heard a weird little scatter of dissonant notes. Then it cut off
abruptly. He realized what it was and swore in frustration. “Rodney, I think the
’gate just ate the ZPM.”

Rodney stepped to the DHD’s pit, staring down into it. He moaned a little,
sounding as if he was deeply in pain. “I think the Ancients might have
anticipated that Dorane might try to dial manually. Obviously, they wanted to
keep that to a minimum, so they not only doctored the crystal, they
booby-trapped the DHD to eat any directly connected power source.”

“Yeah. I guess it didn’t take him long to use up those two ZPMs after all.”
And that meant they only had this one chance to convince Dorane to let them in.
“Here we go.” He keyed on the transmitter. “Sheppard to Atlantis.”

The radio crackled and static filled the little screen. The moment stretched
and John had time to wonder what he would say if Peter Grodin answered as though
everything was normal. The moment stretched longer, and every muscle in his body
tensed as he felt the sudden conviction that no one was going to answer, that he
was talking to a dead city, as dead as the ruins behind him. Then Dorane’s voice
said, “Now this is unexpected.”

“Unexpected is right,” John said, having no problem making his voice sound
rough and on edge. His imagination presented him with a picture of Dorane
standing at the ’gate control console on the gallery, surrounded by dead
operations staff. “The Koan didn’t eat me, though not from lack of trying. How’s
that invasion of Atlantis going?”

“It surprises me that you were able to dial the Stargate.” Standing next to
John, Rodney mouthed the words
no, really.
“Why did you bother?”

“My guess is it’s not going so well there. I figure you didn’t realize how many changes we’d made, how many of the Ancient components
had failed, how jury-rigged everything was.” Dorane would have been expecting
Atlantis as it was before the Ancients left, not consoles with laptops tied into
their systems and naquadah power generators.

No answer.
He wouldn’t be talking at all if he wasn’t at least curious,
John reminded himself. He said, “I have something that could make the
transition a little easier for you.”

“And that would be?”

“McKay. The Koan didn’t eat him either. He knows more about how our equipment
meshes with the Ancients’ than anybody else there.”
If he’s got Zelenka under
his control, this is so not going to work.

Another long silence, while John’s nerves grated. He forced himself not to
speak, to pretend he was the one holding all the cards. Then Dorane said,
“Better than Kavanagh?”

Beside him Rodney rolled his eyes in disgust. John said, “Kavanagh’s a
specialist; McKay knows the whole city. He set up the new power grid, the new
’gate protocols.” McKay was motioning with his bound hands, encouraging John to
continue. “Everything.”

“And he will agree to help me, to buy your freedom from my old prison?”

“Well, he won’t agree, but I’m sure you can convince him otherwise. He
doesn’t have a choice.”

Dorane still didn’t sound that interested. “You would turn against your own
people to assist me?”

John took what he figured was their last chance. “Maybe you ought to turn on
the visual and take a look.”

McKay, now hovering behind John and hopping from foot to foot, apparently
decided he should be unconscious, and threw himself down on the platform,
sprawling half on his side, bound hands stuck out obviously in front of him. He
raised inquiring brows at John, who nodded and gave him a thumb’s up. McKay was
right, it did look convincing. The video crackled into life, and McKay slumped
over, eyes closed. The MALP’s camera swiveled toward them, but John was more
interested in the image fuzzily forming on the screen. It was the ’gate control
gallery, Dorane standing over the dialing console, frowning thoughtfully at
something beyond the edge of the screen. The MALP’s telemetry and video went
through a laptop, and John wondered if Dorane realized the little thingy to the
side was a camera, that the system had been set to send video at the same time
it received it.
As soon as we step through, J can get him from the ’gate
platform.
His chest tightened at the thought that this plan just might work.
Knowing where Dorane was standing in the large ’gate room was going to shave
seconds off his time.

Someone else moved in the video’s background, and John saw it was Peter
Grodin. He was sitting down and someone was covering him with a P-90. Grodin
craned his neck to see the laptop’s screen, his expression confused and
incredulous. Then Dorane said, “Take off the eye protection.”

John gritted his teeth, feeling like somebody’s science exhibit, and pulled
off the glasses and the bandana. The light stung his eyes, and he shaded them
with a hand, flexing his fingers to extend the claws.

Dorane said nothing. Afraid he was losing his audience, John added, “Yeah, it
worked. You think my own people would take me back after this? I’m not human
anymore! If they got their hands on me, I’d spend the rest of my life locked up
in a lab, as somebody’s pet experiment, cut to pieces while they took tissue
samples and made things out of my blood!” He put the glasses back on, unable to
stand the glare, and saw Peter looked shocked, utterly boggled, and a little
offended, as if he couldn’t believe John would really think that. John started
playing to him, finding it easier than trying to convince Dorane. He twisted his
face into his best impression of Jack Nicholson playing an ax murderer, and
added on a note of rising hysteria, “And they never trusted me in the first
place! I’m only the military commander because I shot Colonel Sumner! He never
even wanted me on the expedition, I’m only here because I had the gene and O’Neill forced him to take me!” He
paused for breath. His throat was dry and it made his voice so rough he barely
recognized it.

Grodin’s expression now clearly said, “Fine, Sheppard’s turned into an alien
and gone barking, that’s just lovely.”

Behind John, Rodney groaned, obviously wanting in on the drama. John
pretended to kick him, his boot connecting with Rodney’s ribs though not nearly
as hard as it would look. He hissed a heartfelt, “Will you shut up!”

John saw Dorane turn his head, and heard him ask someone, “Who was this
Sumner?”

A voice, so dull and lifeless that John couldn’t recognize it, answered, “The
military commander of the expedition.”

John took a deep breath. Dorane had obviously been using his control drug.
Dorane asked, “Did your friend Sheppard truly kill him?”

“That’s what we were told. He said…it was because a Wraith was killing
Sumner, he was dying.”

Whoever it was, was speaking literally, as if he was under hypnosis, but the
effect of it was to make the incident sound less like a mercy killing and more
like a murder. Feeling this just might work, John snarled, “Hey! Are you going
to drop the force shield, or should I just kill McKay?” The Stargate’s bass
harmonic was turning impatient as it counted down its thirty-eight minute
window. He shouted, “Come on, the Star-gate’s getting pissed off!”

Dorane looked into the video monitor for another long moment. Then he smiled.
“I’ll drop the shield. Come through.”

John cut the transmission, made sure the light on the MALP’s camera was out.
“We’re clear.”

McKay shoved himself into a sitting position and glared at him. “Ow,” he said
pointedly.

“That didn’t hurt.” John gave him an arm up. “I could see Grodin in the
monitor. He looked okay, and I think he bought the act.”

“Who knew Peter was that big an idiot.” McKay took a deep breath. “It occurs
to me that if you don’t take Dorane out in the first minute, I’m going to be
tortured to death and you’re going to be dissected, and everybody else will
still die.”

“Yeah, Plan B sucks, but considering that Plan C was hanging ourselves—” The
Stargate informed John that the shield on the receiving gate was down and they
were clear for entry, so go already. He picked up the 9mm and made sure it was
ready, then grabbed McKay’s arm. They stepped through the wormhole.

After the heat of the plain, the cool air of Atlantis was a mild shock. They
walked into a ’gate room that was lit only by low-level emergency lights and the
wormhole’s watery blue glow, the late afternoon sun muted by the colored window
insets. The Stargate was playing a loud surrealist concert in John’s head, and
he hadn’t stepped into a darkened ’gate room since they had first found Atlantis
resting on the bottom of its alien ocean, just before the city had come alive to
welcome him and the others who had the Ancient gene. The large space would be
oppressively dim to normal human eyes, but John could see and recognize the
figures standing on the gallery level.

There were a dozen or more Koan up there, as well as Ford, Benson, Kinjo,
Parker, and Yamato, all with P-90s, all of whom must be under Dorane’s control.
That really wasn’t good. But Dorane still stood beside the dialing console, and
he couldn’t control anybody if he was dead. John pulled off the sunglasses,
meaning to disguise the motion of raising the pistol; he stopped just in time.

Though he couldn’t see it, there was a little harmonic of active Ancient
technology, announcing its presence right in the center of Dorane’s chest.
Oh, crap,
John thought, sick, his hand tightening on the pistol’s grip.
Apparently Plan B was worse than we thought.
He kept the pistol at his side.

Managing to talk without moving his lips, Rodney said, “Why aren’t you
shooting him?”

Teeth gritted, John replied the same way. “Because he’s wearing a personal
shield.”

“Oh, God,” Rodney said aloud.

“Shut up,” John snarled at him, making it loud enough to hear up in the
gallery. All they had between them and being shot by their own people was convincing Dorane. And John had just recalled
that McKay, like most people with minimal filtering between brain and mouth, was
kind of a lousy liar. “Seriously,” he added, hoping McKay got it. McKay looked
righteously offended, so John could only hope he had.

John heard the Stargate make a low bass groan right before it shut down. The
wormhole popped out of existence, plunging the ’gate room into another level of
shadow. In its absence John could hear whispers and echoes in the crystals and
conduits, murmurs under the floor, in the walls, stretching up into the sealed
jumper bay above the room. It didn’t hurt, it wasn’t intrusive, but it made his
skin crawl like a constant low-level electric charge. In a way, it was a relief.
If Atlantis’ ATA had sounded anything like the repository’s screaming and
dissonance, John would have been out of his head before he got ten feet away
from the Stargate. But still, he had the feeling this wasn’t right.
I really,
really don’t think the ATA gene is supposed to work this way.

Dorane was coming down the steps from the gallery, dressed now in a loose
gray jacket and pants. It might just be John’s altered eyesight, but he looked
different. The flesh around his eyes was sunken and his cheeks were hollow, as
if he had aged another decade in the past day. It might be some kind of delayed
effect of the stasis container.

John could see Peter Grodin up at the dialing console, watching anxiously. It
was Ford who was covering Grodin with a P-90, and that was just weird. Ford’s
face was blank, his eyes on Grodin. He hadn’t looked down at the Stargate, at
John and McKay standing on the embarkation floor. It suddenly occurred to John
that they had been assuming the people who were infected with the mind control
would get over it, either with help or on their own, and they had no guarantee
of that. The empty expression on Ford’s face made John wonder what it did to
your mind, your brain, if there was permanent damage.

Dorane stopped at the base of the stairs, watching them with that thoughtful absence of emotion. Carson Beckett probably felt more in
common with his lab mice than Dorane did with his experimental subjects; he
certainly treated them better. “I’m surprised you trusted me to open the force
shield,” Dorane said. He made no signal, but several Koan followed him down from
the gallery, moving fluidly in the half-light. Most of them were armed now with
pistols or P-90s. John wondered what their learning curve was, how many of them
had accidentally or on purpose shot each other so far.

“I didn’t have to trust you,” John told him, “The Stargate said it was open.”
Dorane must know John could hear the bastard version of the ATA gene that the
repository was saturated with; John just wasn’t sure if he knew about the side
effect on the real ATA gene. And it was easier to sound crazy if he could just
stick with the truth and not have to make things up.

Dorane’s gaze flicked to the Stargate, but he didn’t argue. He said, “Then
demonstrate trust by giving up your weapon.”

John could see from here that the personal shield, a small crystal device
that rested on the chest, was concealed by a fold of Dorane’s jacket. If John
hadn’t had the new sensitivity to the Ancient technology, he wouldn’t have known
it was there and would have blown what little cover they had.
So giving me a
clear shot at him was a test.
Maybe Dorane really did need them here for
some reason, which seemed to indicate they might survive longer than the five
minutes that was John’s original estimate. He grabbed McKay’s arm, dragging him
forward, while McKay helped by saying, “Ow,” a lot and trying to look more beat
up than he actually was.