02 - Reliquary (4 page)

“The only thing missing is the Stargate,” Kavanagh put in. Corrigan was still
filming, and Kolesnikova was already moving toward the intriguing heaps of dead
machinery, both as eager as kids in a toy store. Kavanagh was frowning at a spiral design in the center of the floor, directly below the peak of the
ceiling. It was too obscured by dust and debris for John to make out much, but
it looked as though it was made of little silver tiles. Kavanagh shook his head.
“The Heliopolis in our galaxy had an interior ’gate. The one here must have
been removed at some point.”

“You think?” McKay glanced up, intrigued, studying the chamber again. “It
would have to be here in the center, and I’m not seeing anything like a well or
a platform safety zone. Though it could be—”

“If there was a ’gate here, we’ll find evidence of it,” Kavanagh cut him off.

“Listen up.” John raised his voice to make sure they all heard. They had gone
over this with the new kids before leaving, but he wanted to emphasize the
point. “Everybody remember the rules. Especially the one about not going
anywhere alone. Stay in sight of me, Ford, or Teyla at all times. If you see
something interesting in another room and need to take a closer look, tell one
of us and we’ll come with you. At the moment we have plenty of time, and there’s
no point in not practicing safe science.”

“He means,” Rodney added, digging through his vest pockets distractedly,
“Don’t do anything stupid and get killed. This is an alien planet, possibly
filled with things that will try to eat you. Listen to the man who had a giant
bug attached to his neck, he knows.”

John rolled his eyes.
I am never living the giant bug thing down.
He
asked Rodney, “Can you not bring that up every time we go out with new people?”

Rodney already had a power bar unwrapped and shoved into his mouth. He said
around it, “It makes an excellent object lesson.”

“We know what he means, McKay,” Kavanagh snarled and started toward the
nearest pile of debris.

Leaving Ford on guard in the central chamber, John and Teyla did a brief
survey of the dozen or so connecting rooms. Their flashlights revealed nothing but more shattered glass and
twisted metal, bits of the crystalline material the Ancients had used for their
circuitry and wiring, the remains of incomprehensible machines, melted lumps of
plastic-like substances and ceramics. Everything was so wrecked, John suspected
that it wasn’t just the random destruction of a bombing and a surface battle. It
looked methodical and deliberate, as if someone had been careful to destroy
every working console, to leave nothing intact. “The Wraith must have been very
angry at this place,” Teyla commented, sounding sober and a little regretful.

“We don’t know it was the Wraith.” John flicked a look at her, but it was too
dark to read her expression. He was glad to hear she thought the destruction was
unusual too, that it wasn’t just his imagination. “But yeah, whoever it was
definitely had anger issues.”

They came back through the center chamber to find Ford keeping a wary eye
out, Kolesnikova and Corrigan hard at work, and McKay and Kavanagh having a loud
emphatic discussion that was probably another one of Kavanagh’s attempts to
challenge McKay’s position as alpha male of the science team. John trusted one
of the others to break it up if it progressed to the hitting stage. He decided
to risk a set of wide stone stairs that still seemed stable and do a quick sweep
of the upper galleries.

There was no sign that anything alive had been in here for decades, despite
the open access through the doorway and the broken skylights. Up on these
levels, an undisturbed layer of dirt and dust coated nearly every surface, made
thick and corrosive by the moisture and salt in the air. There wasn’t even
anything like bird or rat droppings, no spider webs or other signs of insect
life. The local fauna seemed to be carefully avoiding this place. It was quiet,
except for his and Teyla’s footsteps and an occasional exclamation or clatter
from below.
Creepy,
John thought, and felt glad to rejoin the others on
the main level.

Once they were back down in the center chamber, Teyla moved off to tell Ford
they hadn’t found anything, and John went over to Rodney.

He was crouched down, already half-buried in the center control station near
the giant organ-pipe-tubes, taking what was left of it apart. John knew he was
trying to get some idea of what the connections to the power system were like,
hoping for a clue to where a ZPM might be hiding. McKay was also assembling a
little pile of useful spare parts to drag back home to Atlantis.

“Hey, you think this damage looks deliberate?” John asked him.

Rodney snapped automatically, “If I look busy it’s because I am!” Then John’s
question must have penetrated, because he pulled his head out of the console to
stare up at him. “What, you think it was accidental? Somebody tripped and
accidentally pushed the ‘bomb our own city back to the stone age’ button?”

“No, no, I do not.” John held onto his patience. “I mean, like somebody came
through here with a crowbar or the high-tech equivalent and made sure nobody
would ever be able to use any of this stuff again.”

McKay sat back on his heels, poking into his pack for another tool. “Wrecking
whatever human technology they can find still intact is probably standard
operating procedure for the Wraith, Major. What are you getting at?”

“I know, but this looks different.” John gestured helplessly, giving up. He
didn’t know what he meant.

He left Rodney to get on with it and paced, trying to keep an eye on
everybody, feeling a little like a hen with too many chicks. The back of his
neck kept itching, but he didn’t see how anybody or anything could be watching
them. Ford was helping Kolesnikova shift some twisted pieces of metal to get to
the crystals and circuits underneath, Corrigan was making notes on his PDA, and
Teyla stood across the big chamber, watching the corridors that led off into
unlit areas. She didn’t look like she was having a great time, but it wasn’t like she wouldn’t have
mentioned it if she started sensing Wraith. And—
Where the hell is Kavanagh?

Gritting his teeth, John keyed his radio on and said into the headset, “Dr.
Kavanagh, come in, please.”

He heard a distant crackle from the headset, then nothing.
Crap.
“Kavanagh, come in.”

McKay looked up, frowning. “What? What’s wrong?”

Frustrated, John took a moment to say, “Rodney, is your name Kavanagh? Then
shut up.” The others had heard him on the radio and were starting to look
around. He called, “Teyla, Ford, did you see where Kavanagh went?”

Ford started across the chamber. “He was right over there, sir, looking at
the stuff over in that back—There he is.”

Kavanagh was coming out of the shadowy passage to a side room, his face
distracted. John waved Ford off, crossing over to say pointedly, “Uh, Dr.
Kavanagh, why didn’t you answer your radio?”

Kavanagh looked up, startled. “Did you call me? I didn’t hear it.” He fumbled
his headset off. “It was working earlier.”

“Yeah, I know.” John looked past Kavanagh. The passage the man had come out
of led to a room with side areas sectioned off by empty metal panels that had
probably once held colored glass. The only thing interesting about it was a
round swirly design in the floor. John was pretty sure Corrigan had already
filmed anything in here that looked like a decoration or a symbol. “Look, you
need to stay in sight at all times. I know this place seems safe—”

Kavanagh blinked, his glasses reflecting the dim light. “Sorry. I was only
gone a moment. I thought I heard something, but it must have been my
imagination.”

John let out his breath. He had cleared that room himself earlier, something
Kavanagh probably knew and was refraining from pointing out. “Right. Just…be
careful about that.”

John sent Ford back to the jumper to get another headset for Kavanagh. When that was taken care of and everyone had gone back to work,
Ford pulled John aside to say, “Sorry I lost him, sir. I’m used to keeping an
eye on Dr. McKay, and Dr. Kavanagh moves faster than he does.”

Rodney, who had a preternatural ability to know when people were talking
about him, popped out from under a wrecked console and glared at them.

“It’s okay,” John told Ford. “Just stay sharp.”

Everyone kept working and they expanded their explorations, making their way
across much of the ground floor, with cautious forays up into the more stable
upper levels. Corrigan confirmed that some of those levels had unfinished
sections, where construction had stopped at some point before the bombing had
occurred. After a couple of hours they took a break, going back out to the plaza
to let the scientists regroup and to refill water bottles and pass out MREs. The
day was still warm and pleasant, and they sat down on the steps up to the
repository’s outer door. It was a good spot, allowing a view of the beach and
the sea, and the distant Stargate.

As they ate, the dust from knocking around inside the ruin was making
everybody sniffle, even John, who didn’t normally have allergies. He felt it was
probably because he had gotten too used to Atlantis, with its automatic cleaning
systems and fresh air.

Poking at her MRE thoughtfully, Kolesnikova said, “Have you boys got any idea
yet what this place was for? It can’t be simply a repository. They had more
equipment in that one room than in the operations tower at Atlantis, systems
that must have supported weapons, communications. Yet the ’gate is well outside
the complex. This looks very much like a support or control center for
something, but for what?”

Kavanagh’s brow furrowed. “I’m finding a great deal of monitoring systems,
possibly meant for the unfinished upper levels of the towers, though with so
much damage it’s hard to tell.” He seemed uncharacteristically hesitant,
especially for a man who regularly got in Elizabeth Weir’s face about how she was running the expedition and who had nearly as practiced a turn for
tearing people’s heads off as Rodney. “I think this facility was meant to
include a hospital.”

. “Abandoned hospitals are inherently creepy,” John said. Teyla lifted a
puzzled brow, Ford nodded emphatically, and McKay looked at him as though he
wanted to ask if John had forgotten to take his lithium or something. Everyone
else was too busy considering Kavanagh’s suggestion to notice John’s comment.

“Atlantis wouldn’t need an offsite hospital for its own inhabitants, of
course,” Kolesnikova said slowly, thinking it over. “But if they meant this to
be a meeting place for many cultures—and that large space in the unfinished
section certainly seemed intended to be an auditorium—a hospital may have been
part of the services provided. Or if this world is perhaps inhabited—or was
inhabited—by another human culture…”

“We didn’t pick up any communications from the puddle-jumper, and neither did
the MALP,” Corrigan pointed out. “But if the people of this world have been
bombed back to primitive conditions by the Wraith, they might not have recovered
enough to have radio traffic yet.”

McKay eyed Kavanagh narrowly but didn’t comment on the hospital theory. The
word John had gotten earlier from Ford was that Kavanagh had found some intact
control crystals in one of the pieces of equipment near the center shaft and
that McKay hadn’t found any; McKay was undoubtedly still constructing his game
plan for getting them away from the other scientist. McKay asked Corrigan, “You
still think this place is Ancient?”

Everybody stared, even Boerne and Kinjo, who had been having a separate
conversation about city duty shifts. Corrigan frowned doubtfully, as if he
suspected McKay of setting him up for something. “The writing on the consoles is
Ancient, and so is the design of the equipment. The building itself resembles
Heliopolis. But…” He shrugged, looking around again.

“It doesn’t look like Atlantis, at least from inside that main control area,”
Ford said, glancing at the big doors behind them. “Even in the technical areas,
Atlantis is made to look pretty. This is all just mostly functional.”

“I agree,” Teyla said. She had finished her meal first because McKay had
talked her out of the brownie and was neatly tucking the remnants back into
their foil bag. “This place does not have the same…” She hesitated, looking
thoughtful. “The same feel as Atlantis. I do not think the Ancestors were here
for very long.”

“Well, part of that could be because the structure is unfinished,” Corrigan
told her, “But that triangular archway, the way the walls are put together, the
colored material in those skylights—those are Atlantean design. It could be
another branch of Ancient culture—”

McKay shook his head. “I doubt that. The technology that created that
equipment was inferior. It isn’t integrated with the building’s superstructure
in the same way the Ancients would do it. A lot of it was added after
construction. And Irina’s right, there’s too much of it for just a repository
and meeting area—far more than was recorded in even the brief examination of the
original Heliopolis conducted by SG-1.” He sniffed, possibly in disdain,
possibly from the dust. “I think this place was taken over before it was
completed by scavengers who had access to Ancient technology.”

Kavanagh looked annoyed. “What kind of evidence have you seen for that?”

Kolesnikova shook her head. “I don’t think we’ve seen enough to make that
call. Why would a culture advanced enough to understand and use this technology
need to scavenge?”

“What do you think, Major?” Ford asked.

“It’s sort of Atlantean. And sort of not,” John admitted.

“Oh, that’s helpful.” Rodney snorted. “I’m glad we have a consensus.” He
leaned toward the spaghetti MRE John had been picking at. “Are you going to finish that?”

“Yes.” John shifted it out of range.