02 - Reliquary (5 page)

They finished up, everybody packing the remains of the meal away into the
trash container on the jumper, to be taken back to Atlantis for recycling. This
was part environmental policy, part safety; it would be dangerous to leave
indications of their recent presence to any Wraith that might come sniffing
around after them. John always found the practice a little depressing; it made
him feel like the rabbits in
Water-ship Down,
trying to keep from luring
foxes to their burrow, helpless to defend themselves against a stronger enemy.
War and Peace
had its share of issues, but he was glad he had brought it
to Atlantis instead.

Corrigan wanted to do a survey of the city ruins, so John sent Boerne and
Kinjo with him, both men seeming glad to have something constructive to do
besides watch the inert Stargate and the empty sky. John scanned that sky one
more time, then went inside with the others, heading back through the cavernous
foyer toward the control area.

As they passed it, John cast a thoughtful look at the big and apparently
unstable spiral staircase. From its position in the building, it probably led up
into the damaged spires, which the galleries above the control area weren’t
connected to. If nobody turned up any clues to where a ZPM might be soon, they
would have to search up there, and it might be better if he and Teyla started on
that now. But he found himself still reluctant to separate the group to that
extent, even with everyone wearing a headset, even with Boerne and Kinjo
outside, even with Ford standing watch over the others.
Just because the last
time you left a couple of scientists on their own Abrams got eaten and Gall
ended up offing himself in front of Rodney,
he thought bitterly.
Yeah,
let’s make that mistake again.

McKay, walking along beside him, still messing with his pack, muttered, “This
is a waste of time.”

Surprised, John stopped him at the top of the corridor while the others continued into the control area. “Hey, what’s with you? Why are
you so pissy now about exploring this place? You were as enthusiastic as
Corrigan and Kavanagh when we saw the image on the MALP.”

“Pissy?” McKay lifted his brows, but John just continued to watch him
inquiringly, and he finally sighed. He admitted, “Okay, fine. I was as gung-ho
as the rest of you at first, but I just wasn’t expecting—The state of
disrepair—” He stopped, mouth twisted as he thought it over. “I have no idea.
Maybe I’m coming down with something.”

“Oh.” John nodded, and decided reluctantly that he had started the
conversation, he might as well finish it. “I asked, because I was gung-ho too
when we got here, and now I’m creeped out, like I’m walking in a vandalized
graveyard, and I have no idea why.” He jerked his chin at Teyla, who was
watching them with a puzzled expression. “And you’re acting the same way. As
soon as we got here, you were talking about the flesh-eating zombies.”

“That was you,” Teyla corrected firmly. “I do not even know what flesh-eating
zombies are. Nor do I wish to know, so please do not explain.”

“I know that,” John persisted, “But you said you didn’t want to meet anybody
who’d choose to live here, and that started the whole zombie conversation.”

“I take back my earlier agreement,” Rodney said unhelpfully, “I think you’re
insane.”

Teyla tilted her head, looking thoughtful. “Many people must have died in the
attack that destroyed this place. Why shouldn’t we feel as if we walk on their
graves?”

“Because they’re not here.” John gestured broadly, taking in the big shadowy
room beyond. Kolesnikova was getting tools out of her pack, and Kavanagh had
moved on to the center of the room, back to the spot where it looked like a
Stargate should be but wasn’t. “It’s not like we’re finding any kind of human
remains. We’ve been to lots of ruins from before the last Wraith culling, and
this is really no different. Except in the creepiness factor. Which is fricking off the scale.”

“Do you have a point?” McKay demanded.

“Yes! No.” John gestured in frustration. “My point is that I know for a fact
that the three of us wanted to come here and investigate this place, and as soon
as we started, we all changed our minds and thought it was a bad idea.” He shook
his head, gesturing helplessly. “It’s oddly…odd. That’s all.”

“All right, all right.” McKay considered it, or at least pretended to
consider it, it was hard for John to tell. “If that isn’t just a sign that we
three have a more highly developed sense of survival than the others, what is
it? What does it indicate?”

John sighed. “I don’t know. If I knew, I wouldn’t need to irritate myself by
asking for your opinion.”

“Oh, well, thank you, Major! Here I was—”

Metal cracked and groaned and the floor vibrated under John’s feet. He swore,
lifting the P-90, looking frantically around. From across the control chamber,
Kavanagh shouted, jumping up from the console he had been digging into, staring
down. John ran toward him, skidding to a halt when he saw what had caused the
disturbance.

The spiral design in the center of the chamber floor was moving, becoming
three-dimensional as the little metal tiles forming it shifted fluidly. The
whole floor was still vibrating, making the glass and metal debris jump and
dance. Something groaned again below their feet, and the spiral began to sink
into the floor.

Standing at John’s elbow, McKay glared at Kavanagh, his mouth twisted in
annoyance. “What did you do?”

John wasn’t thrilled either. “Some warning would have been nice, Doctor.”

Teyla and Ford watched the spiral uneasily, Kolesnikova a few steps behind
them. Kavanagh shook his head, his eyes still on the metal sinking into the
floor, his gaze rapt. “I wasn’t sure it was really here, if the power source was
still active. If I was…imagining it…”

The groaning rumble of metal parts undisturbed for ages was growing louder,
and John wasn’t sure he had heard right. “What?” he said, having to raise his
voice over the din. “Why did you think you were imagining it?”

“I was imagining what?” Distracted, Rodney stepped sideways, moving along the
edge of the shaft, craning his neck to watch the spiral’s progress.

“I wasn’t talking to you,” John shouted back, “I was—”

“Wait.” Rodney straightened up suddenly, looking at John. “It occurs to me
that something may come out of here that could kill us.”

John swore and yelled, “Fall back, now!”

Everybody scrambled back toward the shelter of the main entrance corridor.
Kavanagh didn’t move immediately but came along readily enough when Teyla took
his arm and pulled him away. That was another good thing about civilians used to
dealing with alien technology, John reflected, backing rapidly toward the
corridor and making sure everyone was clear—when you yelled
Run!
no one
stopped to ask why.

John halted in the shelter of the archway. The metallic groaning and thumping
continued, and McKay looked at the detector again, chewing his lip. “Now I’m
getting power readings,” he said, sounding peeved about it.

“Well, I assumed this wasn’t some kind of Rube Goldberg device,” John told
him, watching the effect warily. He couldn’t see much from here, but it sounded
like the spiral had originally been an elevator platform, and was now
ponderously lowering itself down its shaft. Maybe Kavanagh had been right in the
first place, and this had been a Stargate operations chamber, with the ’gate
itself in a safety well on a lower level.

McKay spared John a glare. “If there’s shielding in this floor and no active
power sources in any of the equipment we found, how did Kavanagh manage to
activate it?”

Kavanagh stood a few steps away, staring intently at the sinking floor. John pointed out, “You could ask him.”

“I’m thinking out loud!” Rodney snapped. Asking Kavanagh for information was
apparently a fate worse than death, to be resorted to only under the most
extreme conditions.

Which meant John had to do it. “Kavanagh, how did you find this thing?”

He shook his head. “It was an accident. I must have triggered a circuit that
still had power, even if it wasn’t showing up on the sensors.”

The rumbling stopped. McKay consulted the detector again, brow furrowed.
“Still no life signs. I am getting low-level power signatures.”

“Right.” Not taking his eyes off the dust cloud above the spiral, John said,
“Teyla?”

“Yes, Major Sheppard?”

“We’re still negative on sensing any Wraith, correct?”

Teyla sounded grim. “If that changes, Major, you will be the first to know.”

“Just checking. Everybody stay where they are.”

Moving forward cautiously, John heard Kolesnikova mutter, “I want to be the
first to know, I need more time for running than the rest of you.”

Ford told her, “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.”

It was the right thing to say, and Ford sounded like he believed it; John
just wished they could make those kind of guarantees. Kolesnikova had told him
once that it was unlucky to be Russian and to be in the Stargate program. When
John had finished reading the SGC reports he had understood why. Most of the
scientists, techs, and field operatives in the original Russian program had been
killed. The ones who had come over to work in the SGC hadn’t fared well either.

John got close enough to look down into the spiral’s shaft. It was round and
carved from the rock substructure, with bands of a dull-gray metallic material.
He reached the edge, where he could shine the light on his P-90 directly down,
and saw the spiral had come to rest about fifty feet below. Small lights gave off a faint blue glow. They looked like emergency lights, meant to
function under low power and guide the inhabitants out in a blackout. The air
coming up from the shaft was cool and dry, laced with a musty odor. Oddly, it
carried that hint of rot underneath that John could smell outside. He had
thought it came from dead fish or other sea life washed up along the beach, but
maybe not.

Shining the light around, John saw there was actually a ladder, set in under
the edge of the floor, in the wall of the shaft. It was narrow, partly carved
from the rock, with metal rails and treads, and it looked stable.
But that
first step is still a killer.
This was obviously meant for emergency use
only. “Guys,” John said, “We got a bunker here.”

After the Genii, John regarded all bunkers with suspicion on principle, but
the detector still wasn’t finding any life signs, just the low and intermittent
power readings. With that evidence, it wasn’t likely anybody had survived down
there; or if they had, they had long since departed the area, and maybe the
planet.

John sent Ford back to the jumper for some climbing rope and carabiners, then
the others stood or crouched around the opening as he, John, and Teyla rigged a
safety line. They had lost enough expedition members to dangers that couldn’t be
avoided; John would be damned before he lost somebody because of a stupid fall.

“That’s a waste of time,” Kavanagh said, arms folded, his face tight with
impatience.

Saving John the trouble, Rodney said, “There’s no way you’re getting me or
anybody else—which includes you, whether you like it or not—on that insanely
narrow ladder without something to grab on to when it inevitably gives way.”

“There could be a ZPM down there. A half a dozen ZPMs,” Kavanagh snarled. “We
need to get down there and find them.”

His expression deeply sardonic, McKay drew breath to answer, but Kolesnikova
cut him off by pointing out mildly, “There might be a hundred ZPMs, but they
aren’t going anywhere in the next fifteen minutes.”

John checked the line where it was secured to a heavy pillar supporting the
gallery. He still didn’t like splitting the team, but in this case there wasn’t
much choice. Besides, he could tell Kolesnikova was nervous of the whole idea,
and while John was willing to drag Rodney protesting and predicting their imminent deaths into these kinds of situations, he wasn’t
willing to do it to the other civilians. At the moment, when they didn’t even
know if there was anything useful down there, this was for volunteers only.
“Ford, you’ll stay up here with Kolesnikova. Keep up the regular updates with
Boerne’s group.”

A flicker of disappointment crossed Ford’s face. The kid was the poster boy
for gung-ho; he actually wanted to go down into the dark hole to see what was
there and hopefully kick its ass. But he said sharply, “Yes, sir.”

Kolesnikova just nodded, relieved. John could tell she had been willing to go
if ordered to, but was more than glad to stay up here. “You will call us if
there is anything of interest?”

Rodney leaned over to look down the shaft, his mouth set with distaste.
“Call, scream, whichever seems more appropriate at the moment.”

Climbing down one by one with the safety line clipped to a harness was slow
but uneventful. John went first and checked out the bottom of the shaft with the
P-90’s light while he waited for the others. There was a big space at the
bottom, with eight corridors leading off it. The walls were dark gray, metal
bonded to rough stone, with the little blue globe lights set high in the
ceiling. It was warm, but the air wasn’t as stale as it should have been; some
kind of recycling system must still be minimally functional. The odor of rot
came and went, drifting on some barely existent breeze. As McKay reached the
bottom and extracted himself from his harness, John said, “Searching this place
may take a little longer than we thought.”

“Always look on the bright side, Major.” McKay came over to join him at the
entrance to the nearest corridor, getting the detector out of a vest pocket. He
checked it again, then rolled his eyes. “Except there is no bright side. Power
signatures are still present but intermittent. If there is a ZPM here, it’s turned off, drained, running on minimal capacity, or actively
trying to play hide and seek with us. We’re going to have to find it the hard
way.”