“Cover me,” he murmured in Ronon’s direction and slipped out from behind the pillar.
People behaved like a single entity now; crowd dynamics having well and truly kicked in. John had seen it happen before. You got so attuned to the folks around you that you practically anticipated their every move. Or maybe it was because you stopped thinking altogether and everybody was obeying the same basic instincts. In this case, the entity halted for a couple of seconds when it clapped eyes on him, then resumed its march at a slightly quicker pace. People who were armed raised their weapons. Oh goodie.
They were close enough for John to recognize the two guys out front, and he bit back a curse. His own men. Sergeants Miller and Levy, US Air Force, part of one of the security details.
Lou Miller raised a balled fist. The crowd stopped, and he and Levy took another few steps toward John. In the weird tangerine glow from the emergency lights, he could see the dark damp patches on their BDUs, their sweat-glazed faces, eyes that shone way too bright. Fever… or good old-fashioned insanity. Oddly enough it came as a relief to find that they were sick. Almost anything was better than the notion of his guys having committed cold-blooded murder.
“Stand down, sir, please,” wheezed Miller, breathy-voiced with exertion. “We only want to get these people to safety, back to Earth.”
“Can’t let you do it, Lou,” John said as calmly as he could manage. “I can’t let you take this thing back to Earth, and you damn well know it.”
“None of us are sick,” gasped Al Levy. “And every second you keep us here you’re putting us at risk! You tryin’ to kill us, Colonel?”
It brought angry murmurs from the crowd. Weapons twitched, and John felt a bit as if he were featuring in a high school production of Julius Caesar. The Senate scene. He also started feeling pretty hot. The sealed section of the corridor was short, and it was getting stuffy. Stuffy was good.
“I hate to be the one to break the news, Sergeant,” he said, “but you are sick! And you’re not the only one. I can see at least ten people who’re showing symptoms. The longer you keep this up, the longer it’ll take until you and your pals get proper medical attention.”
“Liar!” Levy fired.
The round missed John by a mile, because Levy’s hands were shaking so badly he couldn’t have hit a barn door at ten paces. The man seemed to entertain a similar thought and started fiddling with the selector switch.
“Bad idea,” Ronon diagnosed from somewhere behind John. “Drop the gun.”
Putting on a mulish look, Levy kept fiddling, and John knew exactly how this was going to end up. Convincing a Wraith Queen to go vegan…
“Ronon, hold your—” he snapped the precise moment the Satedan fired.
Levy went down, and a howl went up from his cohorts.
“You shouldn’t have let him do that, sir!” croaked Miller, barely audible over the shouts of his companions. “Why couldn’t you just let us go?” He brought up his gun, staggered forward.
“Oh, dammit, Miller! I really do resent this!” John fired a single round over the heads of the crowd, knowing even as he squeezed the trigger that nothing would stop what was about to happen. “Stay right where you are!”
The reply was aimed at his head rather than over it.
Escalation. Gotta love it.
He ducked back behind the pillar, yanking Ronon with him and mentally computing the volume of air in this twenty-yard stretch of corridor and the rate at which thirty-six— thirty-eight— agitated people were using up oxygen. Not fast enough.
“You should have gotten out of here,” he said to Ronon as the battle for the command center doors started.
Chapter 19
The yacht was a nicely proportioned, lavishly appointed forty-footer called Jenny III, and off its portside rose the northern shore of Therasia, a forbidding jumble of steep cliffs, interspersed with barely accessible coves. A little while ago Michael, who was skippering and clearly having the time of his life, had switched off any and all illumination on the yacht, including position lights, and throttled the big diesel engines back to a slow throb. He was navigating by radar and sonar rather than sight.
Not that you could see a hell of a lot. There was no moon, and the only visible sign of the yacht’s passing was a ghostly, starlit wake.
The camp was located in an abandoned village, and Michael was threading a course between the underwater reefs of a neighboring cove. More than once Sam thought she heard low but distinct scraping noises from somewhere deep on the hull, but each time he’d merely shrugged. He had to know, she figured. He’d been here before.
At last the Jenny III glided to a stop in a tiny bay embraced by cliffs high enough to turn the sky into a round, star-studded stencil. It might have been a volcanic vent at some point, now it was a perfect hiding place. Question was for how long.
The anchor dropped, and the clatter of the chain paying out bounced off the basalt walls around them like a maniacal thunderstorm. Surely anyone within a mile from here would have heard it. General O’Neill, who’d been hovering on the bridge the entire trip, itching to nudge Michael away from the wheel and try the toys for himself, flinched.
“Don’t worry,” Michael said. “The acoustics in here are interesting. A bit like an amphitheatre. What’s dropped here, stays here, so to speak.”
They could but hope, Sam figured.
“Come have a look at this.” Michael switched on a pinpoint light above the chart desk and smoothed out a topographical map of the island.
Daniel and Teal’c had been a couple steps down in the salon, making a dent in the onboard coffee supply. They’d all been virtually mainlining the stuff in an effort to stay ahead of the jetlag. Now everyone and their coffee mugs congregated around the desk.
“This is where we are now.” Michael’s index finger stabbed the small O of the cove, then slid a couple of inches over to a larger, more open bay. “There’s the camp. See that, along there?” The finger backtracked those two inches in a squiggly line. “That’s a trail, well, kind of a trail; it hasn’t really been used much since the last villager left. Stavros took me up there once, to show me where he’d found what he believed was a tunnel. As far as I know, this is where he’s been digging, but I can’t be sure. I haven’t been back here in almost three months, and his last reports were a little cryptic, to say the least. Anyway, I remember the footing being pretty bad in places, so you’ll have to watch that, but there’s also plenty of what you guys would call cover, so you should be able to get to the camp unnoticed.
“Except there.” The finger poked down on the midway point of the trail. “That’s roughly where the entrance to that tunnel should be. Now, if this actually is where they’ve been excavating, chances are there’ll be guards, especially if Stavros really did find Atlantis or the philosopher’s stone or whatever he thought he’d unearthed.”
Michael paused briefly, glanced up from the map and at the team. “You sure you don’t want me to come with you?” He sounded like a kid asking for an ice cream cone.
“Positive!” General O’Neill replied, a little too quickly.
“It might be dangerous,” Daniel cut in, smoothing ruffled feathers as always, before following it up with his trump card. He put it gently, though. “And there might be… well, people might get hurt.”
“Hey!” Their host, skipper, and helping hand frowned. “I may be an old hippie, and I don’t like violence, but that doesn’t mean I can’t give a deserving guy a bloody nose if required.”
“Requirements almost certainly will exceed bloody noses, Michael Webber,” Teal’c offered and emphasized the point by staring at the general’s hip and the handgun holstered there.
“Oh,” said Michael, following Teal’c’s gaze and taking an involuntary step back. He looked as though, for the first time in all this, he was wondering what he’d gotten himself into.
“Subtle, T. Really subtle,” growled O’Neill. “How about throwing in a few juicy stories about blo
ody entrails?” Then he turned to Michael. “Look, we really appreciate what you’re doing, but believe me, it’s better if we keep your involvement to the absolute minimum. For any number of reasons.”
Michael nodded, gave a weak grin. “Alright. I get it. I’ll be here when you get back. Hopefully you’ll find a lead that takes you to your friend.”
“If we’re not back two hours from now, you get out of here,” the general said. “Get yourself back to Canada, and if anybody asks, you don’t know what they’re talking about.”
“But—”
“Two hours!”
“Alright. Good luck!”
He didn’t join them when they filed on deck and astern to lower the yacht’s dinghy into night-black water. The ride ashore was quick, a couple of minutes. As they pulled the little inflatable up onto the beach, Sam looked back at the Jenny III, saw a dark silhouette standing on the bridge. She suspected that Michael would stay there, keeping watch the entire time, and somehow that thought was surprisingly reassuring.
“Teal’c, take point,” General O’Neill whispered.
Daniel fell in behind her, leaving the general to bring up the rear. This slipping into old patterns held reassurance, too. If it weren’t for the reason they were here, she actually would be enjoying this.
The trail led off the eastern end of the beach, and it definitely lived up to the advertising. And then some. It zigzagged sharply up the inside of the cliffs that cradled the cove, and it was steep enough to give a mountain goat second thoughts. The faint trickle of starlight seemed to give up before it reached down here and— go figure!— they’d left the night vision goggles at home. At a hunch, the only one who actually saw where he was going was Teal’c, whose sight and hearing beat those of a human hands down. The rest of them were more or less guessing, and Sam made very sure to step exactly where Teal’c was stepping.
At last the trail wound out of the enclosure of the bay to run fairly level along the outside of the cliffs, facing open water. The footing became easier, or perhaps it was simply the fact that visibility improved once they’d left the dark well of the cove. They moved quickly now, and after less than ten minutes they neared the spot where Michael had indicated the excavation site.
Suddenly Teal’c’s right hand flew up, fist balled, and he ducked sideways behind a rock. Sam followed, Daniel and General O’Neill pushing in behind her.
“What is it?” she breathed.
“It seems that Michael Webber was correct,” Teal’c replied just as quietly. “There is indeed a guard.”
They split up, with Teal’c silently disappearing among the rockscape above the trail, and the rest of them continuing on the path, slower now and careful to avoid any sound. It took another couple of minutes for Sam to hear what Teal’c had heard. A single male voice, talking in irregular spurts. Radio. Had to be, the rhythm was obvious in the way he waited for the replies. Though Sam couldn’t make out the words yet, she could tell that the man sounded insecure, nervous.
Not good.
She could think of only one reason for it— somehow they had been made, and the bad guys knew they were coming. Sam strained to listen for sounds that would betray the arrival of reinforcements.
Nothing. Nothing but the swishing of the surf far below, her own soft breaths, and carefully muted footfalls. No sign of Teal’c, but that was to be expected. If he wanted to, he could move like a ghost.
Ahead, the trail snaked around an outcrop. The guard had stopped speaking, and Sam had no way of accurately judging how close they were. But unless she’d got it completely wrong, the excavation site had to be around that bend. She signaled another halt.
No more talking now, no matter how quiet, and she sensed rather than heard Daniel and the general stopping behind her.
Flattened against rock still warm from the day’s heat, she snuck forward until she could peer around that singularly inconvenient jut. Some thirty meters further up the trail, a squat triangular opening gaped black in charcoal rock. In front of it, no more than a shadowy outline, a lone guard was fretfully stepping from one foot to the other. Nobody else on the trail, no light, no sounds.
Except… Sam thought she saw a blur of motion just above the tunnel entrance.
It was all that gave Teal’c away.
A heartbeat later, he sailed through the air, oddly gracefully, and landed on top of the guard. The man didn’t stand a chance, probably was out cold even from the initial impact, and never mind that Teal’c made doubly sure with a sharp blow to his temple.
Sam spotted the hand signal, turned around. “All clear,” she whispered. “There was only one of them. Teal’c’s waiting.”
By the time they reached the tunnel entrance, Teal’c had relieved the guard of a rather handy selection of weapons— an Uzi, a semi-automatic, and a K-bar knife— and trussed him up like a Christmas turkey.
“Sweet!” General O’Neill eyed the mini-arsenal. “Mind you, a couple grenades might have been good…”
Sure, but you didn’t look a gift horse in the holster. He’d had the foresight to pack his personal gun; apart from him, however, none of them carried weapons. Handing Daniel his Beretta, he kept the K-bar for himself. Teal’c got the machinegun, and Sam picked up the semiautomatic, a Glock 19 with a spare clip. It would do nicely.
“Now what?” Daniel was tucking the handgun into the back of his pants.
“We should not proceed along the trail,” said Teal’c. “It would appear that the guard was waiting for a group who entered the cave in the afternoon. So far they have failed to return, and he was getting increasingly anxious. As he was under orders not to enter the tunnel on any account, he has radioed for assistance from people who are authorized to do so. I expect they will be arriving shortly, and they will be arriving from the camp.”
It didn’t leave them with much of a choice.
“Fine.” O’Neill shrugged. “Daniel, you’re gonna like this. We check out the cave. Whoever’s in there won’t be expecting us, and neither will the reinforcements when they roll in. Picking them off definitely will be easier in there. ‘Sides, might as well get a handle on what Professor Crackpotopoulos got all excited about.”
Chapter 20
Teyla Emmagan had to struggle for patience, which was rare for her. All things took their allotted time, all things went their course, and there was little one could do to change it. Such was nature, and you forced it at your peril.
This, however, was different. It wasn’t natural to wait while your friends fought for their lives. But John’s orders had been unequivocal.
Wait!
“Ma’am?” The young soldier at her shoulder seemed to feel the same way, his face drawn with the strain of waiting.
“Be quiet, please,” she said.
He and six other men behind them rustled into uneasy silence. Closing her eyes, Teyla pressed herself against the door— she had come to detest this door— and listened.
Moans and slow shuffling.
Maybe.
It was difficult to tell now, and she couldn’t say what was worse, the quiet or the noise she had heard even minutes ago; reports of gunfire, the bellow of the blaster— Ronon was in there, too— and the screams of people enraged or wounded.
At any rate, it was silent enough now, she decided.
Turning to the men, Teyla nodded. “Open it. But be prepared for resistance.”
Two of the soldiers attacked the door with crowbars, wedging the panels apart. The rest brought up their weapons, as did she.
When the doors opened at last, the stale, leaden smell of the air made her choke. The oxygen flooding in from the stairwell now would be just enough for them to do what they needed to do.
Slowly her eyes adjusted to the emergency lighting. The first thing she noticed was that its dull orange glow made the blood appear black. There was too much black, spattered on the floor and wall panels, staining faces, hands, and clothing. People lay curled on the ground, sat propped against walls, against
pillars, some were holding on to their neighbors, seeking support or supporting.
But all of those at the near end of the corridor were alive, though their breathing was rapid and shallow, their lungs struggling to filter oxygen from spent air.
No one so much as attempted to resist.
“Dr. Beckett,” she said into her stalk mike. “This is Teyla. We have control of the corridor. You may send your people to get the survivors.”
“Aye. On our way.” The reply was brisk, strained. Carson Beckett had been on duty for almost twenty-four hours now, and despite his efforts the situation was getting worse. He’d compared it to trying to plug a leaking dike by sticking your finger in it. The one piece of good news he’d had to offer was that the virus underwent a change within the host, destroying its ability to survive airborne.
“Please, hurry,” she added after a brief pause, and only belatedly admitted that this hadn’t been necessary. Carson knew as well as she did who else was in this corridor.
Ignoring the groans for help all around her, she headed further along the hallway. More people here, closer to the command center door, and here there were bodies. Teyla picked her way over sprawling limbs and scattered weapons, some makeshift, some military issue, all lethal. Empty shell casings littered the floor, too many to count, and the walls were marred with bullet holes. She shivered, trying not to imagine what had taken place here.
His back resting against the door panel, Ronon still sat guarding the command center. He was conscious. Just. Fingers curled around the blast gun, he squinted up at her. “’Bout time,” he croaked, gasping as soon as he’d said it.
“Sh!” she admonished, crouching next to him and helping him to remove the face mask. “Don’t waste any air.”
His lips were blue, his eyes bloodshot. She was about to unbutton his shirt to see if he was hurt when his fingers snapped around her wrist with surprising force.
STARGATE SG-1: Transitions Page 14
