02 - Reliquary (8 page)

“No, no, it’s nothing like that. I’m not physically ill,” he assured her so
readily that Teyla believed him. “It’s just…” He gestured helplessly. “I’m not
sure what it is. Just restlessness, I suppose.”

Teyla could understand that. She felt restless herself. “Do you truly
think… I cannot believe that the Ancestors would use this place to experiment
on humans, even if they meant to find a way to destroy the Wraith.”

Kavanagh didn’t hesitate. “They wouldn’t. McKay’s an ass, but he’s right
about that. Frankly, they wouldn’t need to. Their science was so advanced, they
could run their experiments as simulations on artificially created genetic
material. They wouldn’t have needed human test subjects at all, much less
unwilling ones.”

Teyla nodded, feeling a flash of relief. It was just one other learned man’s
opinion, but from what she knew of him, Kavanagh was a very unsentimental
person. She thought that he didn’t romanticize the Ancestors the way her people
and many of the expedition members did.

He took a deep breath, putting his hands in his pants pockets. “There’s some
other factor here. Something we aren’t quite understanding, or interpreting correctly. You know, I thought I had it
earlier today, but now I’m not so sure.” He shook his head, started to turn away
back toward their shelter.

Teyla heard stone click and slide, and reached out to steady him as his boot
slipped. He caught her arm, leaning heavily on it for a moment, then found his
footing. “Sorry,” he said. He lifted a hand to his head, saying a little
vaguely, “Maybe I’m more tired than I thought.”

“You should go back and rest,” Teyla urged him. Like McKay, like all the
scientists, Kavanagh would work himself to exhaustion if allowed to. “We have
another long day tomorrow.”

“I will,” he said, still sounding distracted. “Good night, Teyla.”

“Good night, Dr. Kavanagh.” Absently scratching her arm, she watched him make
his way back toward their shelter, just a dark shape in the shadows. He had
spoken of “another factor” and she thought he was right. There was something
here they just didn’t understand yet.

“This is odd.” Rodney crouched near the lip of the shaft, frowning at the
life sign detector.

John, checking the safety rope for today’s descent, looked up sharply.
“What?”

Rodney gave him that look. “Again, I point out that if I had seen indications
of a ravening horde of something, I would have said, ‘My God, Major, run!’
rather than, ‘This is odd.’”

John rolled his eyes and deliberately turned his attention back to the safety
rope. “Fine, then. Golly gee whiz, Dr. McKay, what’s so odd on this lovely
morning?”

So he was still jumpy. Last night hadn’t helped. John was used to Marines and
airmen, who slept when it was time to sleep. Scientists who got up every five
minutes and wandered around, he would never get used to. McKay’s ability to
function on little or no sleep for long periods of time was great when lives
were in danger, irritating when he was standing on the edge of your sleeping bag
chewing loudly on a power bar and contemplating the meaning of life and time or
whatever the hell he was doing in the middle of the fricking night. What made it
intolerable this time was that Kavanagh and Kolesnikova shared this bizarre
behavior. John had stopped asking people where the hell they were going when
Kolesnikova had replied with some annoyance, “I’m going to pee, Major, and I
didn’t think you all would like it if I did it in here.”

And it also didn’t help that it was a lousy morning. The sky was dark and
overcast and the white-capped sea like dull pewter. The forest on the other side
of the Stargate’s platform was a brighter green against the purple-gray clouds,
and the wind blew sand through the ruins and across the plaza. John had taken
the jumper up into the atmosphere to look around and check the long range
sensors, making sure this coast wasn’t about to be hit by a hurricane or a tropical storm. All he had found
were ordinary rain clouds, and he had landed again feeling inexplicable
disappointment.

Kolesnikova had told him earlier that she had seen all there was to see in
the repository’s command center and wanted to tackle the lower levels with them.
He hadn’t argued with her, having the feeling that she thought she had let them
down by not going yesterday. Corrigan was actually gleaning far more information
in the city’s ruins, and wanted another day out there. John was leaving Boerne
and Kinjo up top again, to keep watch and back up Corrigan. Ford had been
chafing at the inactivity yesterday and he wasn’t needed on the surface, so John
was adding him to the belowground group. Hopefully more searchers meant faster
progress. And maybe with Kolesnikova’s engineering background, she would see
something that McKay and Kavanagh had missed.

“I’m getting more pronounced energy readings,” McKay said, finally answering
the question.

That got Kavanagh’s attention. He nearly dropped the pack he had been sorting
through and strode to the shaft, pulling out his own detector. McKay lifted his
brows and sat back on the floor, making a production out of waiting for
Kavanagh’s assessment.

Fortunately for team harmony and John’s already depleted supply of patience,
Kavanagh didn’t notice. “You’re right,” he said, also failing to notice when
McKay took an ironic half-bow. “This is markedly different from the readings we
took yesterday.”

“Thus the choice of the word ‘odd’ in my original statement,” McKay added. He
pushed to his feet. “Something changed down there.”

“Maybe you guys tripped something without knowing it,” Ford said, leaning out
to peer down into the shaft. “Set off something that increased the emergency
power, or activated some other stuff.”

“But there appeared to be no changes.” Teyla shook her head. “We took readings throughout our search, and before we left, and there
was no increase in power at that time.”

“What she said,” McKay added.

Ford shook his head, gesturing helplessly. “Maybe it took a while to get
going.”

For some reason, everybody then looked at John. He shrugged, pretending this
new development didn’t make him uneasy. “We’re not going to figure it out up
here.”

Once they had gotten down to the bottom of the shaft, the readings were
stronger. “This way.” His eyes glued to the detector, McKay pointed them toward
a corridor John knew they had tried yesterday. They hadn’t found any cells along
it, just debris from laboratories smashed so thoroughly that McKay and Kavanagh
had only been able to make guesses as to what their original purpose had been.

The blue emergency lighting glittered off the wreckage of twisted metal and
the unidentifiable stains on the stone walls on either side of the broad
walkway. John had a bad feeling about this; he remembered what else they had
found down this corridor and he had a strong suspicion of where the detector was
going to lead them.

McKay dug out the PDA with the map he had made yesterday and wordlessly
shoved it at Kavanagh. Bringing up the map, Kavanagh scanned the screen
hurriedly. “Damn,” he muttered, obviously coming to the same conclusion John had
just drawn. “I wouldn’t have expected that. Our suppositions about the layout of
the active power conduits must have been—”

“Wrong.” McKay’s voice was grim. He stopped next to a round opening in the
walkway, where metal stairs curved down into a dark well. They hadn’t bothered
to search down there or in any of the other dark areas yesterday, believing the
power source would be where the active power grid lay. McKay let out his breath,
looking up and shaking his head in exasperation. “Well, this is just fantastic.
It’s pitch dark down there.”

John stepped to the lip of the well, shining the P-90’s light into the
depths. Teyla moved up next to him, leaning over to peer downward. He estimated
the stairs descended about forty feet; the light reflected off a metallic floor.
If he had a choice of where to lead their little group, a dark hole in a ruined
bunker was about the last place he would pick.

Grimly resigned, he took a moment to get the infrared night-vision goggles
out of his pack, Ford doing the same. They would rely on the flashlights since
the scientists’ field packs didn’t include the goggles, but John wanted to be
ready in case something attacked them and they needed to kill the lights.
Everybody else used the time to check their handlight batteries. When everyone
was ready, John looked them over. He knew McKay had too much awareness of his
own mortality to wander off in the dark, and Kolesnikova, uneasy but game, would
stay as close to Ford or Teyla as she could without actually holding hands with
one of them. “Now everybody stick together. Do not go off on your own, under any
circumstances. Do not stop to examine anything without letting me know. And yes,
I’m mainly talking to you, Dr. Kavanagh.”

John went first, testing the stairs cautiously with each step, the P-90’s
light revealing a passage larger than the one above, high-ceilinged, with a
jumble of the large opaque pipes branching down. The pipes joined up with
another set and ran off along the far wall. The sinuous shapes were almost
organic, their material gleaming faintly in his light; John was uncomfortably
reminded of movies where aliens exploded out of people’s chests. The smell,
which he had been trying to ignore, was distinctly worse. “What the hell are
those pipes, did we ever figure that out?” he asked, exasperated. “It’s like the
damn
Nostromo
down here.”

Kavanagh, just stepping off the stairs and pausing to give Kolesnikova a
hand, said, “It’s part of the air system, Major.” His tone was laconic but still
managed to have an element of

are you stupid?
in it.

The others made their way down, and John leaned over to look as McKay
consulted the detector again.

“It’s stronger now. This way,” McKay said, jerking his chin toward the other
end of the large passage. “Back toward the center portion of the building.”

“That makes sense,” John said. McKay threw a look at him that he couldn’t
quite read in the reflected glow of the detector. “What? The power source would
be under the main part of the complex.”

“It makes as much sense as anything does,” Kolesnikova answered for him.
“This signal is strong, you should have picked it up yesterday.”

Kavanagh shook his head, watching his own detector. “We must have activated
something. Like the lights and the other systems that came online when we first
arrived in Atlantis. It just took some time to power up.”

“That’s what I thought,” Ford pointed out.

John had to admit it was reasonable, but it didn’t make him feel any less
uneasy. Still studying his detector, McKay grimaced suddenly and said, “I think
the floor above us is shielded. And there seems to be some electromagnetic field
activity—Check your radios.”

John tried his headset and got nothing but static. From what he could hear
from the others, he wasn’t the only one. He swore. “Oh, that’s all we need.” The
detectors were Ancient technology and wouldn’t be affected, but their
communications equipment was all good old-fashioned Earth-manufacture.

He took the lead with McKay to guide them with the detector, and put both
Ford and Teyla to watch their six. Ford was leaving route markers with a
reflective spray paint to keep them from mistaking the way. Their lights seemed
to make the shadows even darker, and the detector led them into one branching
corridor, then another. The giant pipes veered up the walls and over the
ceiling, and they caught sight of more piles of wreckage.

The uselessness of the radios was making John’s nerves jump. As they moved
through the large dark space he had to suppress the impulse to make everybody
choose a buddy and hold hands. If they lost somebody down here, if someone fell
in a hole, got lost, wandered off… And the more ground they covered, the worse
that odor got.

Finally, after they had been threading their way through this giant maze for
about twenty minutes, he couldn’t ignore it anymore. He said, plaintively, to
McKay, “Look, seriously, are you sure you don’t smell that?”

“No.” McKay threw another opaque look at him. “I have a theory about that.”

“Oh, right, that theory. I’m really beginning to resent the implication that
I have schizophrenia. I—”

“I did not say you had schizophrenia. I said—” McKay stopped abruptly,
staring at the detector. “Hold that thought, I think we’re here.”

“Where?” Kolesnikova asked anxiously.

“There.” McKay flashed his light on a section of wall and John made out the
shape of a large blast door. The pipes that ran along the walls swooped in from
across the passage and above to end in the wall around the door.

“A bunker within a bunker,” John said. “That’s…vaguely disquieting.” He
steadied his light on the door as McKay’s flash flicked around wildly for a
moment, then settled on a panel to one side.

“Vaguely?” Kolesnikova questioned softly.

“It makes perfect sense,” Kavanagh said, his voice tense with suppressed
excitement. “Extra shielding for their power source. We should have expected
that.”

McKay had already pried the panel open, holding his pocket flashlight in his
mouth so he could see. John didn’t see any control crystals, just a mass of dark
wiring and circuits. McKay threw Kavanagh a hard look, taking the light out of
his mouth so he could talk. “This panel is the only intact piece of equipment we’ve found so far.”

“Hold it.” John stepped closer so he could see Rodney’s expression. “Are you
saying we shouldn’t open this?”

John ignored Kavanagh’s “Of course we should! Are you out of your mind?”
Rodney took a breath, his mouth twisted. He looked distinctly uncomfortable.
“There aren’t any life signs, just the energy signatures, and Teyla’s not
sensing any Wraith. Of course, that means there could be anything in there from
evil cybernetic guards to people-eating nanites. But the chances that there’s a
ZPM inside—We have to open it.”