02 - Reliquary (22 page)

Dorane lifted his brows. “I thought you said that they would no longer trust
you, or consider you one of them, after your transformation?”

Crap.
John hesitated for a half a heartbeat, then remembered just in time
that he was supposed to be crazy and crazy people believed contradictory things
all the time; he shouldn’t be trying to come up with an elaborate
rationalization here. He made himself look confused, and gave Dorane his best “I
said what?” expression.

It worked. Dorane’s eyes went hooded. “Very well. I suppose it will be
quicker than waiting until they starve.” He leaned back in his chair. “The Koan
will follow you to the first obstructed passage.”

On the control gallery, the Koan guards, who seemed more in charge here than
the Atlantis personnel Dorane had under his control, let Peter Grodin untie
Rodney’s hands. Squinting in the dim light, Rodney eyed him suspiciously.
Kavanagh had behaved normally, or at least in a Kavanagh-like fashion, for a
long period after being infected. “Why didn’t he give you the control drug?”

Grodin threw a grim look at Ford. “He wanted someone to operate the equipment
up here. As far as I can tell, he can’t allow an infected individual enough
initiative to perform any kind of complicated task without losing control over
them. Unfortunately, ‘stand here and shoot anyone who disobeys orders’ isn’t a
complicated task.”

“Well, that’s just fantastic.” Rodney sat down at one of the locked stations,
rubbing his eyes. It explained why Dorane needed Rodney to disconnect the
naquadah generators. He hadn’t maintained that strict control over Kavanagh
initially, but the first order he must have given was for Kavanagh to forget
anything out of the ordinary had happened. That kind of loose control wouldn’t
work on people who were dismantling Atlantis’ power grid.

Grodin said quietly, “He tried to initialize some of the other consoles, the
ones we haven’t been able to make work, but he couldn’t. Is—”

One of the Koan came and stood over them, glaring suspiciously, but after that Grodin kept trying to catch Rodney’s eye, until
Rodney turned and gave him the “oh my God, will you stop that” glare. Ford, his
head still bandaged from the blow Kavanagh had given him, stood nearby watching
them completely without expression, like some alien pod-person replica of the
real man. Rodney had no idea whether Ford would be compelled to volunteer
information to Dorane or not, but he didn’t want to take the chance.

“McKay,” Grodin whispered.

“Not now,” Rodney said through gritted teeth.

Grodin persisted, “Sergeant Stackhouse’s team has been on that three-day
trading mission to the Enarians. They’re due back later tonight—”

Rodney interrupted, “He’ll order you to open the force field. You won’t have
to kill them.”
Though if we don’t get out of this, they may not thank you for
that later.

“How do you—”

“He doesn’t want them dead. That’s what, six more bodies for his experiment?
Markham’s with them, so that’s one more Ancient gene carrier to torture.”

Grodin hesitated, watching Rodney uncertainly. “What did he do to Sheppard?”

“What did it look like?” Rodney snapped. He was desperately afraid of giving
something away, and starting to have flashbacks to the Genii and Kolya’s
occupation of the city. Not to mention the sour stomach and a pounding in his
left temple that signaled the incipient arrival of a headache from hell.

He finally saw Sheppard and Dorane emerge from the conference room, the Koan
and Benson following. The tight pain between Rodney’s shoulderblades eased just
a little. He realized he had been waiting for the sound of gunfire.

Sheppard swept the gallery with one tight glance, giving nothing away, then
went down toward the center stairwell without glancing back, the two Koan
following him like well-trained attack dogs at heel.

Rodney swallowed in a dry throat, craning his neck until Sheppard was out of sight.
Great, great, great. I have no clue what we’re
doing.
Or if Sheppard had a clue what they were doing. In the shadows of the
gallery it was impossible to tell if he looked any worse. In the bright sunlight
before stepping through the ’gate, he had already looked drawn and obviously
ill. Sheppard had always seemed as if he was nothing but bone and muscle, but in
the last few hours Rodney was willing to swear the man had actually lost weight.

“You are concerned for him?” Dorane asked, and Rodney realized with a start
that he had been watching him. Dorane strolled down the gallery toward him. “He
betrayed you.”

“Well, you know, that would really be your fault, wouldn’t it?” Rodney
snapped, swiveling around to face him. “And can we just get back to threatening
me? Because frankly I’m not comfortable discussing my personal relationships
with you, considering how you’re planning to kill everyone I know.”

Dorane dismissed that with a slight shrug. “It will be interesting to see how
long he survives.”

Rodney hesitated, knowing he shouldn’t fall for the bait but unable to stop
himself. “What do you mean?”

Dorane watched Rodney, his eyes opaque. “The Lantian-descended Thesians I
tested that particular strain on only lived for one or two days. But I
understand that your people also have some degree of genetic variation from the
prototypal Lantian stock, so that estimate may be unrealistic.” His voice
hardened. “Now, let’s get started on your naquadah generators.”

Rodney stared at him, trying to tell if that was the truth or just another
sick little lie. It was depressing enough to be the truth. His jaw set, he stood
up. Dorane would be gauging the time by the rotation of the repository’s planet,
and by that measure it had already been a full day since Sheppard was infected.

They didn’t have much time.

John took the central stairs down, ignoring the two Koan for now. Despite
this minor victory, he couldn’t shake the feeling that Plan B was still circling the drain. The problem was that Dorane
really, really liked playing with people, and he had a tremendous amount of
experience at it. John could too readily imagine that Dorane was playing both
him and McKay, making them think they were fooling him.

But he obviously wanted that memory core very badly, badly enough to risk
letting John run loose around the city to get it.

They had speculated that all the Ancients’ tinkering with the Stargate had
been a cat and mouse game to force Dorane to give up something.
If all he
gave up was information… what’s the point in getting it back?
But if there
was something else there, something the Ancients might have recorded on the core
that Dorane needed, or at least thought he needed, maybe to keep his experiments
going… Since he now had a new pool of human DNA to meddle with, he would be
all the more anxious to get it.

John paused on the next landing, getting a view down the corridor. There was
a room down there that was used for big meetings and science team conferences.
It had one door and had always looked as if it would be relatively easy to
secure. And yes, there were at least six Koan and four dead-eyed Marines
stationed outside it. That had to be where Dorane was keeping the rest of the
operations staff and the other expedition members he had managed to capture.

John eyed the corridor, considering it. Dorane had basically tried to hand
them a scenario where John would have to kill half the Marines to save the rest
of the expedition. But John had no plans to take him up on that one. Though it
was really starting to worry him that he hadn’t seen Teyla yet. He had expected
to find her guarding the prisoners.

The Koan growled, and John moved on.

The lights were dimmed through every section they passed, the green bubble
pillars motionless and silent. A few levels down in an open foyer, another group
of Koan were gathered around the sealed door to the medlab corridor. They
growled, glaring at John, but apparently they had gotten the word to let him through.
He pushed past them, pretending to ignore the claws and bared teeth and the
inexpertly held guns. As he reached the door, it slid open without waiting for
him to touch the control, invitingly undefended. It revealed the long corridor
that accessed most of the labs and work areas on this level, the walls decorated
with copper bands enclosing squares of soft metallic grays and blues. The Koan
hung back uneasily.

The half-light was like daylight to John’s altered eyes, and he could see
there were six dead Koan scattered at various points down the hallway. It was
probably lucky that Dorane was using the Koan for cannon fodder so far,
obviously meaning to save expedition personnel for experiments.

John took a long step forward and, without glancing back, said, “Bye, guys,”
and told the door to close.

It slid shut, leaving the Koan on the other side.

He studied the corridor again, making out a wet area about midway along, and
something further down that looked like a car battery that had been blasted to
bits with gunfire. John would bet that the car battery object was a decoy; this
corridor had been booby-trapped by desperate and frightened men and women, some
of whom had been able to build atomic bombs by the time they were twelve. There
was no way he was going down there, not even in rubber-soled boots.

Maybe that was the game Dorane was playing; he had sent John down here to be
accidentally killed by his own people.

John turned left instead, taking the side corridor toward the outer ring of
this section. He knew it would be easier to get to the medlab from the level
above through some access passages in the floors, but he didn’t want the Koan to
twig to that. Dorane obviously didn’t know about it, or he would have tried it
by now.

Even though Dorane had lived here with the Ancients for a time, they had
probably never had to send people to crawl around in the floors replacing fried
crystal conduit, with Kavanagh and Simpson debating the right procedure and giving contradictory
instructions via headset radio, with the added attractions of McKay berating
them between bouts of claustrophobia and Miko having to be retrieved from where
her pants had gotten caught on a support brace. The Ancients probably had robots
or genetically-trained sea monkeys or something to do those little jobs for
them.

The next doorway was quarantine-sealed and stubbornly refused to respond to
the wall console or ATA coaxing, but John fiddled the crystals the way McKay had
shown him. As the door started to slide open, John got the sunglasses on,
wincing. Even though the sky was starting to redden into sunset, the glare off
the water was still bright enough to blind him.

Outside, his back to Atlantica’s endless sea and the cool evening breeze
ruffling his hair, John sized up the expanse of city wall looming above him.
There were tiny little ledges and arching girders that formed a decorative roof
over all the balconies. The open platform he thought he had remembered was
there, up one level and over to the side. It was the “over to the side part”
that was going to be tricky. It would have been crazy to try this without the
claws; they would give him just enough extra purchase to make it possible. Sort
of possible.

John stepped up on the railing, balancing easily. A long way down, waves
washed up against the platforms and supports at the tower’s foot. He knew his
own weight and the approximate distance down, so it was hard not to
automatically calculate the velocity he would reach by the time he hit the base.
Right. Here goes.
He caught a handhold in the decorative embossing, and
wedged a boot into the junction where the girder met the wall, and hauled
himself up.

Rodney really, really didn’t see a way out of this. Watched carefully by the
Koan, he was forced to follow Dorane, two Marines, and Ford to the naquadah
generator that powered the lower center section of the city, including the
medlab. Rodney had tried to steer Dorane toward one of the generators for the
other sections, but Dorane hadn’t gone for that.

Part of him was wondering how much of the system Zelenka had trashed while
sealing off the medlab. As Rodney knew very well, there was nothing like the
threat of certain death to inspire speed and creativity. Between the damage
Dorane and the Koan had caused, and the damage Zelenka and the others had done
trying to stop them, it would probably take a month to repair everything. If
they got out of this alive. Rodney groaned mentally, wishing an insane repair
schedule was his only problem.

If the power was completely cut, the doors on the medlab level could be pried
open manually. Rodney knew that was where Dorane had sent a large number of the
Koan and several of the expedition’s military personnel that he had under his
control, ready to move in.

In the lead, Ford took the last turn in the corridor, reaching the doorway to
the generator room. A cardboard sign with the words “stay out” and a badly-drawn
skull and crossbones had been stuck on the wall next to it with sticky tape. At
the time Rodney had thought the symbolism was a nice touch; now it was all too
appropriate. Even if some of the expedition members escaped into the unexplored
sections and managed to evade Dorane, how were they going to survive with the
city a dead powerless hulk? And Rodney didn’t suppose Dorane would be stupid
enough to leave any jumpers behind.

The door slid open to reveal a dimly-lit five-sided room with antique gold walls and burnished copper trim, colors that suggested an
upscale restaurant more than they did a main access point to the city’s power
grid. Unless you were Ancient, apparently. There were three other sealed doors,
all corridor accesses, and the naquadah generator sat near the center. It was
small for something so powerful, positioned on a low pallet and connected into
Atlantis’ system through the access points in the floor and wall panels. Dorane
eyed it with an expression Rodney could only interpret as skepticism, asking
Kavanagh, “Is that it?”