02 - Reliquary (25 page)

“You didn’t go to the sealed area through the main corridor,” Dorane said,
watching him carefully.

“Well, no, since I’d be dead if I had. I knew another way in.” John lifted a
brow. “Isn’t that what you were counting on?”

Dorane didn’t bother to answer. “But you found the memory core.”

John fished the stick out of his pocket and held it out. McKay stared,
winced, and ducked behind the generator. John knew the stick probably didn’t
hold a tenth of what the actual Ancient core held, but Dorane wouldn’t know
that. He just hoped it didn’t occur to the man to ask Kavanagh.

Dorane’s expression was impossible to read. He didn’t reach out to take the
stick. “What is that?”

“It’s a data storage device for our computers,” John told him. “I couldn’t
get the core itself.”

Dorane looked at Kavanagh, who put the toolkit down and came forward. Kavanagh took the memory stick from John, glanced at it
briefly, and held it out to Dorane, saying, “That’s correct, it’s a data storage
device.”

John knew Dorane was still wearing the personal shield.
But he really
doesn’t trust me, and it obviously occurred to him that I might hand him
something that would blow up or even short out the shield.
Too bad John
didn’t have anything like that. But Dorane obviously knew nothing about their
technology; maybe he had seen just enough to realize there were elements of it
he didn’t understand.

Dorane finally took the stick from Kavanagh, his lips thin with distaste.
“And I assume this will only display on one of your devices. Which one of you
will have to operate for me.”

John shrugged, as if he didn’t care. “I guess.” He took a couple of
distracted paces to the left, so his back was to the Koan, Kavanagh, Ford, and
the others.

Dorane watched him, eyes narrowing. “Surely you know.”

“He doesn’t know,” McKay sneered, looking up from where he was crouched
beside the generator. He had obviously reached the overly aggressive stage of
his blood sugar crash. “He can barely check his email.”

Dorane turned to regard him, probably with a great deal of skepticism. Rodney
glared up at him, and John took the opportunity to mouth the words “big
distraction, soon”.

Rodney twitched in alarm, but he looked so flustered and annoyed, it would
have been hard for someone who didn’t know him to tell. He told Dorane, “You’ll
need a laptop to read it. That’s one of the computers in the silver cases.”

Dorane turned back toward Kavanagh, who said, “Yes, that’s true.” Something
in the way Dorane was holding the memory stick suggested a great deal of
frustration. Whatever was on the memory core, Dorane didn’t want anyone else to
see it, apparently not even one of the people he had under control.

John made an idle circuit of the room, still listening hard for the control device. He was fairly certain now it wasn’t on Dorane, but
surely it was nearby. If it was up in the ’gate room… No, it had to be closer
than that.
If it isn’t, we may be seriously screwed.
But would Dorane
just stick it on a shelf somewhere and leave it? The naquadah generators were
spaced out widely over the center portion of the city; did this thing have the
kind of range that it could…
Or he gave it to someone else to carry.

“Is there one of these laptops nearby?” Dorane was asking Kavanagh.

Kavanagh shook his head; his attention was on Dorane and not what Rodney was
doing with the generator. “I don’t know. They would be in the ’gate room, the
labs, the living quarters and offices—”

John wandered past Kavanagh, the two Marines, Ford, and caught the first hint
of a tiny disruption in the ATA’s ongoing cacophony. It wasn’t insistent enough
to be coming from one of them. The nearest Koan growled nervously as John went
to the wall and leaned back against it. Dorane, still questioning Kavanagh about
nearby labs, threw him a cold look, but he obviously wasn’t much interested in
however John wanted to occupy his last moments. John closed his eyes, tipped his
head back against the metal, and tried to shut everything else out.

And there it was, somewhere on the other side of this wall, a thread of
discordant sound, moving away.
Yeah, he gave it to someone who’s been
following-him around the city. And I bet I know who.

John opened his eyes to see McKay crouched by the generator, fiddling with
the last connection, watching him anxiously.
And here we go.
John lifted
a brow, giving him a “what are you waiting for” look.

McKay glared at him, then took a filament-thin loop of clear cable out of the
floor access and did something with it inside the generator’s panel.

John felt the shudder travel through the wall before he heard the explosion.
The abrupt blast came from the south, from the outer part of this section, and
it wasn’t at all distant.
Oh, crap,
John thought, aghast,
what the
hell did he do?

His expression of stunned dismay bought them an extra few seconds as Dorane
looked first at him, then at McKay, who was staring at the generator as if he
had never seen it before. “What was that?” Dorane demanded.

Still looking at the generator, Rodney shook his head, as if really baffled.
Then he grimaced in relief and said, “Oh, there it goes.” He shoved himself back
just as silvery sparks fountained from the access, shooting up toward the
ceiling.

Even under low power, the ATA didn’t so much switch on as burst to life
inside the walls. John was suddenly aware of circuits threaded in the metal
behind him, felt something whoosh through piping as if the room was drawing a
breath; he knew exactly what was about to happen. Ducking around the bewildered
Koan, he winced away from the sparking generator. The emergency lights
flickered, a wailing Atlantean klaxon sounded, and all four doors shot open.
John slammed Ford out of his way, feeling the first blast of something that
wasn’t air. McKay was on his feet and John tackled him, sending them both out
the nearest door and into the corridor. They landed hard and John thought
close, close, come on, close
at the door. Somebody got off a burst from a P-90 and bullets bounced off the
silver wall panel right above their heads, just before the door slid shut.

Rodney was glaring up at him. “Oh fine, you just broke half my ribs.”

John rolled off him, asking, “What about Ford and the others?” He shoved
unsteadily to his feet, dragging McKay with him. He had gotten a lungful of the
gas released by the emergency system and his throat felt raw. He could hear Koan
howling and pounding on the door behind them, but it refused to budge.

McKay was red-faced and breathing hard, and he had to steady himself against
the wall. But he said, “They’re fine. The system will sense that there’s no fire
and flush the room with outside air.”

That was a relief, at least. “God, Rodney, I said ‘diversion’ not ‘blow up
half the city’!” John started down the corridor, coughing. “And what was that
stuff, halon?”

McKay hurried after him. “It’s similar. And I’m fairly confident that the
Ancients wouldn’t use a fire suppressant that was poisonous to humans. That
sparking was just a harmless light show, and the explosion was just the
grounding station in this wing—”

“Oh, was that all? A harmless naquadah light show? And don’t we need that
station for grounding electricity?” John took the next corridor intersection.
The lights were a little dimmer, and he couldn’t sense any Koan moving towards
them. But he could hear the control device heading rapidly away from the
direction of the blast, trying to get back to Dorane, looking for a way around
the sealed doors now blocking the direct path.

McKay waved his hands like John was being unreasonable. “That wasn’t actually
naquadah, that was just electricity, and this section can do fine without a
discharger—for a while, unless there’s a storm, or a buildup of static—Anyway,
I created a small power surge in the generator that started a feedback loop between it and the grounding station. With Dorane shutting down
most of the city systems, I wasn’t sure the fire-control was still online. It
probably helped that your Ancient gene panicked and set off the protocols.”
Rodney stopped at a wall console at the end of the corridor and tapped a rapid
sequence into it. “Now that the fire-control is active I can tell it to block
access to the generator room, which should seal off all the doors in this
section.”

“Dorane will have to get the doors to open individually.” John was starting
to feel a little better about the whole “let’s blow important and dangerous
stuff up as a distraction” plan.

“So will we, but I’ll be faster at it than he is.” McKay finished keying in
the sequence and the panel beeped quietly, displaying a series of Ancient
characters. “Right, that should do it.”

“Good. Now come on.” John started down the corridor to the outer portion of
the wing. The device was moving fast and he didn’t want to lose it.

McKay jogged to catch up with him, but protested, “Why are we going this way?
We should go—”

“Beckett and Zelenka thought Dorane had to have some kind of device that’s
helping him control our people. I think I saw him with it back at the
repository, I just didn’t know what it was. It’s using his version of the ATA,
and I can hear where it is.” John barely paused at the next intersection,
knowing his quarry was already about two corridors ahead. The emergency lighting
was growing dimmer; this roundabout route took them into a part of the wing that
had been damaged in the flooding just before the city rose from the sea bottom.
The ATA was just a low background whisper, blending with the distant sound of
the sea outside the walls, making the sour thread of the controller device much
easier to follow. “Any reason he’d give it to someone else to carry?”

McKay gestured erratically. “Lots of reasons. That personal shield might
interfere with any device emitting a signal. Or the device might interfere with
the shield. We have no idea how compatible his version of the gene is with the real thing, and
those shields are highly attuned to whoever’s wearing them.” He added in
exasperation, “And just where is everybody? Didn’t you go down there to get the
Wraith stunners—”

“Yes. Bates is getting our people out of—”

“What about me? Us? We need to be rescued too!”

“You need to wait your turn, Rodney.” The air was getting dank, and it was
laced with the odor of stale seawater. Somewhere off in the dark corridors there
were doors that were permanently sealed, deep shafts jammed with sand and sea
wrack, rooms full of strange equipment that no longer operated. John knew this
section fairly well; they weren’t far from the passage out to the grounding
station McKay had blown up. He didn’t think Teyla had been through here before,
and the way she kept trying to take direct routes suggested that Dorane was
giving her instructions instead of simply commanding her to return to him and
letting her find her own way. Hopefully that was because she was still trying to
resist him.

McKay caught John’s arm, saying, “About the waiting thing.” He sounded
worried and deeply uncomfortable. “That drug Dorane gave you, he said—He’s
probably lying, but he said—”

John pulled free and kept walking. “Rodney, I know, Beckett scanned me. And
if Dorane said how long it would be, don’t tell me, all right? I don’t want to
be looking at a clock while I’m doing this.”

“Wait, wait!” Rodney caught up, staring at him incredulously. “Carson knows
about this and he didn’t do anything?”

“Like what? He didn’t have any time.”

“I can’t believe that! He’s supposed to be so damn brilliant and he just let
you walk out of there—”

“Rodney, for God’s sake, shut up about it!” After a short curve the corridor
opened into a walkway over a larger chamber. “And shut up, period. You want her to hear you?” The few working
emergency lights made the big space look as if it was etched in black and
silver, and John could see it was empty. He paused before stepping out onto the
walkway, trying to get his bearings. Teyla was past this point, down and to the
right somewhere in the other corridor that led off the lower level of this room.

“Who? I don’t even know what we’re doing!” McKay whispered furiously.

“We’re looking for Teyla.” John thought he had said that already, but even in
panic mode, McKay wouldn’t have forgotten or misheard a piece of information as
vital as that. It scared John the way nothing else had so far; they didn’t have
much time to pull this off, and he couldn’t afford to lose his concentration. He
started across the walkway, not wanting McKay to notice the moment of
uncertainty. “I think Dorane gave her the device.”

Fortunately, McKay had too many other things to panic about to notice. “How
are we going to get it away from her? You don’t even have a gun.”

“That part’s a little fuzzy,” John admitted.

“Oh, God. This is a woman who puts on a dress to beat the crap out of you in
that stupid stick fighting, and now you’re dying, how are you going to—”

“Rodney, can we go, I don’t know, maybe a minute without you reminding me
that I’m dying? And you really need to shut up.” John found the stairway down to
the lower level of the room and started down it. He stopped abruptly and McKay
bumped into him from behind. “She’s coming back.” There were two doors in that
lower corridor that he distinctly remembered were wedged open, the metal around
them buckled when the pressure from the sea had hit this section. After that he
thought the corridor led back into the powered portion of the wing, but the
fire-control must have blocked her path again.

John turned, and McKay scrambled back up the stairs.

John pushed him in the direction of the sheltered corridor access, and McKay
hurried back along the walkway in the dark. He stopped at the doorway,
flattening himself against the wall, and John crouched down where he was, at the
head of the stairs, trying to fold in on himself and blend in with the darkness
and the silvery material of the walkway.