Large parts of it had been blasted open, too. The violence Sheppard had noticed further along the hill must have been concentrated here.
“Rodney? You getting any residuals off these blast patterns?”
“I kind of wish you hadn’t asked that.”
“Why?”
“Because then I wouldn’t have had to tell you this was done by Replicator weapons.”
Sheppard snapped the P90’s fire control selector down from safe to semi-automatic. Behind him, he heard Ronon’s blaster charge with a thin whine. “Any idea what this place is?”
“Not a clue.”
“I was afraid of that. Okay, let’s start looking for a way in.”
“Hm?” McKay gave him a quizzical look, still squinting against the rain. “Oh, I’ve already found one of those.” He stumbled a few steps closer to the structure, and pointed. “See?”
Past a jumble of broken rock and twisted metal, an uninviting wedge of gloom. An explosion had opened up a rift in the structure’s wall, a piercing wound that went deeper than Sheppard could see, and wide enough to crawl through.
The prospect was far from enticing. “Well,” he muttered, mostly to himself. “It’ll be out of the rain.”
He stepped towards the wound and leaned inside. He heard water, a cacophony of echoing drips and rushes, and he could smell metal and something burnt.
There was no light. He reached into one of his vest pouches and took out a tactical light, flicked it on and shone the beam inside. The light caught water first — streams of fat droplets cascading from the fractured, leaking ceiling, and filling the floor ankle-deep. Past the initial meter or two of rubble Sheppard could see that the wound opened up into some kind of tunnel or corridor, walled with repeating slabs of grayish metal. What little he could see looked functional, utilitarian.
It also looked oddly familiar.
“Okay, it widens out in there. We’re going to get our feet wet, though.”
“My feet are already wet,” McKay griped. “See anything else?”
“No.” Sheppard gripped the edges of the wound and pulled himself up, putting his boots in first and lowering himself past the opening. He had to slither down an incline of debris, and carefully. Not all of it was rock — twisted spars of metal, their edges ragged, poked through the mess in several places.
Finally, he splashed down into the corridor. He froze as soon as he was able to stand, letting the echoes of his entry die away, keeping the beam of the taclight focused on the end of the corridor.
Nothing. The darkness ahead of him stayed as impenetrable as before, and the tunnel noiseless save the constant pat and splatter of water. “Clear,” he called back. “And watch your way in. There’s sharp stuff.”
McKay followed next, rather more quickly than he would have expected, and with several choice curses. It took Sheppard a moment to realize that Dex had probably picked him up and dropped him through the opening. The Satedan followed close behind, and within a few seconds the three of them were standing up to their ankles in warm, moving water.
Dex flicked his own flashlight on, and scanned it around. “See the walls?”
McKay had taken a plastic headband from his pack, and settled it down over his hair. Sheppard saw him tighten it, then switch on two tiny halogen lamps, one at either temple. It looked slightly ridiculous, but the light wasn’t much less than that from a standard-issue taclight and it left his hands free.
He looked around, the twin beams following his gaze. “Oh yeah. Carbon scoring.”
“There was a firefight in here,” said Sheppard. “Energy weapons, lots of ’em.” He clipped the tactical light to the Picatinny rail on the P90’s receiver, then set off down the corridor, moving his boots slowly through the water. “Looks like somebody had to fight their way in.”
“You want to know what else is weird about the walls?” McKay splashed up behind him.
“Well, they look kind of familiar.”
“Oh, you noticed too.”
They moved on without speaking for a few meters. The leaks in the ceiling lessened as they made their way further into the hill, the sound of water dropping away behind them. Sheppard welcomed that: the splattering had been random, like static. It made listening difficult.
Ahead, so far, was only silence.
Abruptly, the corridor ended. There was no door, just a dark expanse of open space behind it. Sheppard noticed that the water was getting shallower as he neared the end, and looked down to see it spiraling down into vents in the floor. As he walked into the open space, he left the last of it behind.
There was a glossiness to the floor in front of him that had nothing to do with water, a greenish tint to the walls he knew but couldn’t immediately place. The room he now stood in was oddly shaped, all angles, set with several doorways and tall, glassy panels that would probably have supplied light if there had been power in the building.
There were no curves anywhere. He was in a world of straight, hard lines. “Rodney,” he said slowly. “Tell me I’m wrong.”
McKay had his PDA up, the light from its screen a hazy block on his face. “Trinium, refined titanium, superdense polymers… Oh man.”
“What?” said Dex.
“You don’t want to know.”
The Satedan raised an eyebrow. “I think I do.”
“Yeah, well, you’ll wish you hadn’t asked,” Sheppard told him. He gestured ahead with the barrel of the P90. “This is Asuran technology.”
“Replicators?”
“Uh-huh. We’ve walked right into the goddamn lion’s den.”
Chapter Thirteen
Immortal Remains
In some ways, the revelation made perfect sense. In others, none at all.
Now that he knew what he was looking at, Sheppard could see the work of the Asurans everywhere. The structure wasn’t a direct copy of any Replicator buildings he had seen, but its design aesthetic was identical. The doorways, although gaping open in the darkness, were of the same proportions as those on Asuras and in Atlantis, each with the same tubular activation sensor set alongside. The walls had the same repetition of form, the angles at which they met suggested the interior of some great prism rather than a conventional building. With knowledge as well as torchlight to illuminate him, he could see it quite clearly now. McKay was right.
But by the same token, McKay couldn’t be right.
Ronon Dex obviously had the same idea. “That’s crazy,” he growled. “You said the weapons fire was from Replicators.”
“It is.”
“Replicators don’t shoot each other, Rodney.” Sheppard scanned the P90 around, letting the taclight beam come to rest on a nearby doorway. “They’re part of a collective, remember?”
“I know that! I didn’t say I could explain it.”
Sheppard walked over to the doorway. There was something there, something reflective, sending his light back out in a complex interplay of overlapping beams. He drew closer, peered inside, and for an awful second saw a face looking back out at him. But it was only his own reflection, and he recovered from the start quickly enough for the others not to notice.
As he stepped through the doorway, he heard Dex ask McKay if he could hear ticking.
He was in a small chamber, maybe a couple of meters across, perfectly hexagonal. One of the six walls was open, the doorway at his back, but the others were set with transparent panels, and behind the panels were narrow spaces, cells, the back wall of each a slab of incomprehensible technology.
Sheppard moved close to one of the cells, touched the panel with his fingertips. It wasn’t cold, more a neutral temperature. Maybe a kind of plastic, then, rather than glass.
He scanned the taclight up, and saw nothing. Then he scanned it back down, and with a start of raw horror saw what was tangled in the bottom of the cell.
A curse ripped its way out of him.
The corpse was naked, its limbs pale sticks, its skin white and papery in the beam of the flashlight. I
t was crumpled up and facing the wall, and for that Sheppard was grateful. The back of it, that shriveled rack of ribs and spine with their covering of withered skin, was quite enough for him. He had no desire to see its face.
Its head had been shaved.
Not wanting to, knowing he had to, he moved the flashlight around. And as he had feared, each cell was occupied.
There were three men in the chamber with him. There was a woman. There was a child. All were naked, shaved, crumpled like driftwood in the floors of their cells. Some had turned away from the glass as death overtook them, but not all. One of the men had died trying to get out. His face, a shrunken nightmare, was pressed against the cell door.
The transparency in each compartment was smeared with long, bloody marks. The fingertips of each corpse were worn down to the bone.
McKay must have heard him shout. “Did you say something? Ronon says he can hear —”
He stopped in the doorway. Sheppard heard him swallow hard. “What the hell?”
“They were trying to get out,” Sheppard said flatly. “They tried to break the glass, but it’s not glass and they couldn’t break it…”
“Sheppard —”
“There’s a goddam kid in there, Rodney!”
“I know, I can see.” McKay put a hand on his shoulder, pulled him gently away from the cells, towards the door. “You can’t do anything for them.”
Sheppard turned, and pushed past him. As he stepped out into the open room, Dex emerged from another doorway. His face was dark with rage.
“More?”
“Bodies?” The Satedan nodded. “Yeah. Locked in and left to die.”
McKay joined them. “Look, there’s two more chambers I can see from here. We don’t need to go into them all.”
“I guess not. Whatever happened here, we missed it.”
“Right. But that energy trace is still active, and Ronon can hear something coming from that corridor over there.” He pointed. “Much as I’d really like to head back to the jumper right now, I think we’ve got to check this out.”
Sheppard looked back into the chamber doorway once more, trying not to imagine how long the occupants of those unbreakable cells had pounded and scraped at the not-glass. How long can a human survive without water?
Too long, sometimes.
He walked away, over to the corridor McKay had indicated. “In here?”
“Yeah.” McKay fell into step alongside him, and he heard Dex’s catlike tread following behind.
“Have you seen anything like this before?”
“From Replicators? No.” McKay shook his head, the beams from his halogens dancing wildly. “If anyone was going to wall people up it should be the Wraith, and they, well…”
“Eat them?” Dex chimed in helpfully. McKay grimaced.
“Okay, I wasn’t actually going to go there, but yes.”
The new corridor was as dark as the rest of the structure. From its position, Sheppard guessed he was now some distance under the hill itself. The thought made him want to stoop, to duck under the weight of rain-sodden rock scant meters above his head. He wasn’t usually claustrophobic, but the fate of the people in the cells had sparked a horror in him that only open sky could dispel.
But he couldn’t go back. Not yet. He needed to know what had happened here. If he left without an answer, if the reason those wretches had died their dry, lonely death remained a mystery, then their withered eyes would haunt his dreams.
He had to go on. Besides, now he was in the corridor he could hear ticking too.
It wasn’t regular. It was staccato, random, like the clicking of a bug on its back. Faint, but unmistakably mechanical. McKay’s power source was here, and something connected to it was moving.
“This place smells,” said Dex.
“Oh God,” muttered McKay thickly. “Oh no, I just got a sniff of that. Something’s died in here too, hasn’t it.”
The corridor ended in a corner. Sheppard rounded it, and put a hand to his mouth on reflex. The stench of rot, suddenly, was sickening.
There was a room in front of him, narrow, widening towards the far wall. A long structure, flat and waist-high, dominated the center of the chamber, while the walls were lined with what looked like murky fishtanks.
A fitful light, bluish and dull, fluttered under the surface of the long structure, a sputtering electrical glow. “I guess that’s your power source.”
“No, I don’t think so.” McKay was studying the screen of his PDA. “Whatever’s in here is just trace energy, some kind of backup battery. The main source is somewhere else.”
“Great.” Sheppard walked in, slowly, and drew closer to the structure. It was a table, like a long bench but deep, faceted and paneled in smooth white and gleaming steel. Hinged arms were attached to it at one end, dozens of them, folded back on themselves like the limbs of a waiting mantis. Sheppard could see a continuous rail around the table, the arms mounted on it so they could reach any part of its surface with the knives and claws and razored spindles that tipped them.
The arms twitched, clicking one against another, as if eager to be at work.
Sheppard leaned over the glassy surface of the table, just far enough to see what lay in the cavity beneath it. After a moment, he grimaced and looked away.
McKay was staring at him. “What? What’s under there?”
He gestured back at the glittering metal arms. “What do you think?”
“Oh.” A queasy realization crossed McKay’s face. “Oh. Okay.”
Dex raised an eyebrow. “Dead?”
“Very.” For longer than the prisoners in their glass coffins, Sheppard guessed, although it was hard to be sure. The arms had done their work well, and enthusiastically. What lay in the cavity was still shaped like a man, but only just.
“Rodney? Anything else you need to see in here?”
McKay shook his head emphatically. “Believe me, I’ve seen more than enough.”
“So okay, at least we know why they were keeping people in cells,” Dex whispered a few minutes later, as they prepared to go back into the exit corridor. They had paused at the edge of the water to let McKay investigate some random technological anomaly he had spotted.
“We do?”
“Yeah, to do experiments on them.”
“Oh, right.” Sheppard nodded. “Yeah, we know what they were doing. But why were they doing that? The Asurans have got access to pretty much all the Ancients knew, haven’t they? What would they need to know about humans that they couldn’t just get from a book?”
“And here’s another one.” Dex made a sweeping gesture. “What’s Angelus got to do with all this?”
“You got me there. Hell, maybe this has got nothing to do with the guy. He’s not a Replicator — Ellis would have spotted that the moment he set foot on Apollo. Besides, the Replicators were trying to kill him.”
Dex shrugged. “Maybe he saw this, and that’s why they were after him. To keep him quiet?”
For a moment, that seemed almost plausible, but Sheppard found himself having to dismiss it too. Mainly due to the outrageous arrogance of the Asurans. If they had decided to go picking people apart to see how they worked, they wouldn’t have let a witness bother them. Replicators did whatever was best for Replicators. Why would they fear exposure?
He shrugged. “It’s got me beat. Maybe Rodney can get some answers out of all the readings he’s taken. I don’t think there’s much more to see here.”
“Or that we want to.” Dex looked away. “I don’t know, John. I’ve seen a lot of bad things. They don’t usually bother me. Death’s just something you get used to. But this?”
“Yeah, I know what you mean.” He slapped the Satedan’s shoulder and moved past him, towards the spot where McKay had been working. “Hey Rodney! Come on, we’re outta here.”
There was no answer. Come to that, there was no McKay, either.
Sheppard aimed the taclight at the spot. There was another corridor exit there, equ
idistant between the waterlogged entrance and the way to the dissection rooms. McKay had noticed something unusual there, and the last time Sheppard had seen him he had been crouching at the entrance to the corridor, taking more readings with his custom PDA.
There was no sign of him now.
“McKay?” Sheppard’s voice echoed eerily as he called out. But once the echoes had gone, there was only silence.
And then a strangled cry, followed by the stuttering hammer of a P90.
Sheppard hurled himself into the corridor, Dex on his heels, the barrel of his own gun nosing for a target. The corridor was short, just an angled opening into another open space.
Beyond it, McKay was standing rigid, his gun raised with the butt jammed into his shoulder. There was a square of dim light spinning down on the floor: the PDA.
“Rodney?”
“Replicators,” he hissed.
“What? Where?”
“Over there. On the ground.”
There was no other sound in the chamber, no movement Sheppard could detect. He moved ahead of McKay, lowering his weapon slightly, scanning the taclight beam left and right.
What he saw made no sense. “What the hell?”
McKay had been right. There were indeed Replicators in the chamber — Sheppard counted a dozen, maybe more. Their uniforms were unmistakable.
But the Asurans were on the floor. They lay sprawled like dead men.
Sheppard glanced quickly across at McKay, seeing the man’s knuckles still white around the P90’s grip. “Were they moving?”
McKay’s eyes met his for an instant. “Not as such.”
“So you fired because…”
“It’s dark, okay?” McKay lowered the gun. “I just saw a face, and…” He gestured angrily at a perforated Asuran.
“And you panicked,” said Dex.
“I did not panic!” McKay snapped. “My reaction-time got the better of me, that’s all.”
“It’s okay,” Sheppard told him, “I don’t think he’s going to lodge a complaint.” He moved further into the room, keeping his finger lightly on the trigger, using the taclight beam to illuminate the crumpled Replicators one by one.
STARGATE ATLANTIS: Angelus Page 21
