“Not me! Him!” A jerk of his chin, at a pillar.
Not the pillar, Teyla realized, her throat tightening. The two crumpled shapes behind it, one piled on top of the other. She scrabbled over on all fours.
The man on top looked familiar, naggingly so, until Teyla realized that she had seen him at the briefing for the security details. An eternity ago, or so it seemed. He was still alive, his breathing labored, and his skin felt searing hot to the touch. He was sick for sure, and she might just have infected herself.
But at this moment it didn’t matter one whit to her. She shoved the man aside. John Sheppard lay beneath him, motionless. She reached for his neck, fingers searching for a pulse, and wanted to shout with relief when she felt a faint flutter. Just unconscious. Not dead. Just unconscious.
Not far from where he lay, she spotted his gun, lost or, more likely, tossed aside. Between that and his injuries, Teyla could well imagine what had happened. He had run out of ammunition and fought his attacker bare-handed. And it must have been a murderous fight.
There was a bleeding gash above his eyebrow, his bottom lip was split, and the flesh over his cheekbone was puffed and turning purple. Purple marks on his neck, too. Worst of all, his shirt was torn off his back and there was a deep bite wound on his shoulder. The attacker had drawn blood. Despite the stifling heat in the corridor, Teyla felt chilled to the bone. John most certainly was infected.
A commotion at the far end, near the staircase, drew her attention, and the chill eased a little. Dr. Beckett and four teams of medics made their way through the door.
She rose, a head-rush hitting her like a hammer blow, making her realize that the air quality was taking its toll on her. Never mind. She’d last. One hand propped against the pillar to steady herself, she waved with the other. “Carson! Over here!”
The medics went to work on the nearest victims, but Carson and two of his staff came down the hallway in as much of a run as they could manage between the sprawling bodies. The two medics began tending to Ronon; Carson himself turned his attention to John, amid a muttered, angry stream of words in a language Teyla didn’t understand. His native Gaelic, she presumed. The final flourish came in English, however. “Stubborn bloody man!”
She could subscribe to that. Her gaze drifted across the bodies in the corridor again. “How could they do this?” she murmured. “How could they turn on their own people like this? Is it the virus?”
“No.” Carson shook his head. “The fever probably didn’t help, but it really is a primal thing. The human animal will kill to ensure its survival. Mostly we can control that instinct, but sometimes, especially if it’s a whole crowd, well, inhibitions fly out the window and people turn on anyone who stands between them and safety.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that. Some forty years ago in Glasgow, sixty-six people, children among them, were killed at a football match. They were literally crushed to death by a panicked mob trying to get out of the stadium. Back where I come from, every child learns about the Ibrox disaster in school… and there’s hundreds of other documented incidents.” He sighed, then hollered at a couple of medics about to load a technician onto a stretcher. “You two! Colonel Sheppard goes first! Come on, move it!” Looking up at Teyla, he added, “You go with them. I need to run a blood test on you. I don’t suppose I have to tell you to give people a wide berth until I’ve cleared you.”
“I understand, Dr. Beckett.”
“I distinctly remember you saying that when I told you not to touch anyone.”
“Circumstances demanded it.”
“Aye. That’s your excuse, and you’re sticking to it. Go on now. Go!”
The medics had lifted John onto the stretcher, and Teyla followed them willingly. She was glad to be able to keep an eye on John. As glad as she was to leave this corridor behind.
Chapter 21
That sole surviving plate, now minus the vine leaves and spanakopita— Amara had mowed her way through that like someone who, well, hadn’t eaten in ten thousand years— sat on the ground, stubbornly refusing to move. Cassie couldn’t shake the impression that the damn thing was mocking her.
“No.” Amara sat opposite, head cocked, watching intently. Somehow, while they were waiting for the long Mediterranean afternoon to fade into darkness, she’d wormed the whole story out of Cassie and offered to help. So far the levitation lessons weren’t going too well. “It doesn’t work, because you don’t want it to work,” she diagnosed.
“I do want it to work!”
“Think! You do it in your sleep. When you’re not in control. That tells me that, when you’re awake, you refuse to surrender control. You need to allow that which is within you to be the guide.” Suddenly a flash of realization lit the woman’s strange, golden eyes. “You’re ashamed of it, aren’t you? You reject it, that’s why you won’t allow yourself to surrender.”
“I just want to be like anyone else! Normal!”
“You are you. And this is normal for you. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you can proceed on the path to enlightenment.”
Oh yeah. Sure. Enlightenment. Just where she’d wanted to go… But Amara was right, wasn’t she?
“It’s part of you, Cassandra,” the woman added more gently. “For better or worse. But without embracing it, you can’t be everything you’re meant to be. Everything you need to be.”
Everything she needed to be… For some reason that strange dream popped back into Cassie’s mind. The dream that wasn’t a dream. The dream where she’d brought her friends home. Perhaps it was linked to all this, and perhaps, if she didn’t accept what she was, Sam and Jack and Daniel and Teal’c would be lost.
She closed her eyes and let go. Simply let go. Imagined that plate rising and rising, spinning like a saucer atop a Chinese acrobat’s bamboo rod. Lifting some more, just for the—
“Someone is coming!” snapped Amara, followed by a crash.
Cassie’s eyes snapped open, and she found herself staring at a scatter of shards. The plate must have dropped from some height…
“Someone’s coming.” Amara rose and quietly moved toward the opening into the tunnel.
Oh, no, no, no!
Cassie scrambled to her feet, tripping over debris, and stumbled after her, grabbed her arm. “No!” she whispered. “They mustn’t see you! I’ll take care of it!”
Amara turned that disconcerting golden stare on her. “It may be my people. It may be the Teacher.”
“I doubt that. It’s been ten thousand years, Amara. They’re long gone.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t know what we’re capable of.”
Wrong. Cassie had a pretty good idea. She’d watched Amara in action. Precisely because of it, she felt a need to protect her. “It won’t be your people or that teacher of yours, I guarantee you. It’s the guys who’ve kept me prisoner, and they’ve come to see what’s going on. Let me handle it.”
“How?”
“There are other ways. Ways those people are used to. Ways that won’t tell them what you can do. They mustn’t know, Amara. For your sake.”
Finally, very slowly, Amara nodded. “Very well. Thank you. I… I hadn’t expected you to care.”
“Well, I do.”
Other ways.
Weapons. Cassie needed a weapon.
Number One had had a gun.
She turned back, stared at his body, felt bile rise in her throat. Pleasant or not, it would have to be done. And quickly. He lay supine, flung on his back by the blast. No shoulder holster, so the gun probably would be in a hip holster at the small of his back. She’d have to flip him over.
Great.
Closing her eyes for a moment, she blew out a breath, clenched her teeth, and shoved. Rigor mortis wasn’t fully developed yet— the cave was too warm— and Cassie couldn’t decide if that was a blessing or a curse. The body was heavier than she’d anticipated. Suddenly it took on a life of its own— pardon the pun— and flopped over
with a limp slapping noise. The holster sat where Cassie had hoped it would be, and she opened the catch, pulled out the gun.
That was heavier than anticipated, too.
A semiautomatic. Nine millimeter, going by the size of it. It was black and cool and smooth, and it smelled funny. Oil, probably. She studied it, noticed a small switch that had to be the safety.
Which position was it in?
On or off?
After a moment’s deliberation Cassie decided that, likely as not, Number One would have taken precautions against accidentally shooting himself in the butt. Off, then.
She slid the little switch back.
All set now. Just point and pull the trigger, right?
Amara stared at the gun, then at her. “A projectile weapon? They have made progress, I see. I remember axes and spears and slingshots.”
“If you want to call that progress,” Cassie muttered and rose, peering at the glowing panels in the walls. If the light were lower, they’d offer less of a target. “Can you dim those a little?”
“You could do it yourself if you tried.”
“Look, I’m sure I could, but I don’t have the time to mess around. So, please! Just do it! And then hide.”
The panels darkened to a dull reddish gleam that made the cavern look as though it were bathed in blood. Not too far from the truth, Cassie thought grimly as she tiptoed to the arch that led out into the tunnel. Directly opposite the entrance was a crevice, barely visible in the low light. For anyone coming through the passage it wouldn’t be visible at all. She dashed over, flattened herself into the niche.
Perfect.
Pistol clamped in both hands she waited and listened.
Yes, somebody was coming, though without Amara’s warning she doubted she would have interpreted the sounds correctly, let alone paid any attention to them. A rustle here, a soft scrape there, nothing that couldn’t have been caused by bats or some other small cave dweller. Except, the sounds were closing steadily. Whoever these guys were, they were very, very quiet. Like they knew what they were doing.
Which meant that she had to get the jump on them. It also meant shooting for real, but that still was better than the energy blast. Apart from anything else, Cassie wasn’t sure that the tunnel would hold if Amara did her thing out here. If the ceiling came down, they’d be toast.
Amid the rustles and scrapes she now could hear the odd footfall.
Hands and feet tingling, Cassie readied herself, could have sworn that she felt acid pooling in her stomach. So this was how people got ulcers…
They’d follow the light. They wouldn’t expect her here.
Then she saw motion. The first black shape cautiously, silently appeared among the shadows of the tunnel. He signaled behind, telling her that others were following. It was now or never.
Gun clutched in a death grip, Cassie snapped from her hideout, aimed, thought she heard yelling over the whoosh of blood in her ears.
“Cassie! Don’t shoot!” A woman’s voice, ping-ponging madly from the tunnel walls, making no sense at all.
Realization came a heartbeat to late, the same second as the violent jump of the recoil slammed the gun upward and hammered Cassie’s fist into her face.
The report was deafening, a furious bellow, its echo tumbling and pushing through the passage like a living creature. Jack flew off his feet, was knocked back into Daniel, who caught him reflexively and without actually grasping what had happened. The noise was a physical thing, clawing at Daniel’s eardrums and mind, making it impossible to concentrate on anything else around him.
The echoes died down, clinging on to little rumbles as though they resented silence, and dammit, why didn’t Jack get his feet under him? The man weighed a ton!
And then time started moving again.
Daniel realized that his hands, clamped across Jack’s chest, were wet. Warm and wet. Sticky and wet. Not ten paces in front of him stood Cassie, stiff as a statue, white as wax in the beam of Sam’s flashlight, wide-eyed, mouth open as though she wanted to scream and had forgotten how.
The gun lay at her feet. She’d dropped it.
“Jack!”
No reply.
But he was breathing, Daniel could hear it, a terrible, strained rattle, as if his lungs were being squeezed into oblivion.
“We need more light,” Daniel heard himself say as he carefully lowered Jack to the ground. “And maybe there’s a first aid kit somewhere.” Even as he said it he knew that no first aid kit in the world would fix this.
“You okay, Daniel?” Sam’s voice sounded dead flat, brittle, devoid of any kind of emotion, as though she were afraid that her defenses would break if she allowed so much as a pinch of concern past them.
“I’m fine. I… it’s not my blood,” he stuttered.
“Good. Teal’c, stay with General O’Neill. Daniel, check what’s past that opening. We want to avoid any other surprises. I need to see to Cassie.”
Perhaps it was hearing her name, perhaps it just happened to be the moment when events had finally percolated through, but Cassie snapped to life. “Don’t!” she shouted. “Daniel, don’t go in there. Let me go first!”
“Cass, be reasonable.” Sam grabbed for her arm, missed. “We need to—”
The girl had already twisted past her and into a gloomy cavern. What little light fell into the passage leaked from in there. “Amara?” Cassie called softly. “It’s me. Don’t do anything.”
And who or what the hell was Amara?
Daniel stepped through the opening and into a disaster zone. It literally looked like a bomb had gone off. The rank smell that had been noticeable even in the tunnel, intensified tenfold. He nearly tripped over one of the sources and winced. A woman, dumped like a rag doll amid the remains of what probably had been a computer. Or several.
He frowned.
If this was a dig, how did a bank of computers come into it?
And if this had been an explosion, how come the body was so intact? More pertinently, how could Cassie possibly have survived it?
Later.
The time for questions was later.
Or maybe not.
At Cassie’s call, a woman slowly rose from behind a turned-over desk, where she’d been hiding. Daniel’s gun came up almost of its own volition. The woman seemed unafraid. As a matter of fact, she smiled, a small ironic smirk that curled one corner of her mouth.
“You cannot harm me,” she observed calmly, raising her hands in a gesture that he remembered only too well.
As a matter of fact, it was one of the first memories he’d regained after his return, possibly because it was so closely linked to the very actions that had prompted the Ancients to send him back, to un-Ascend him. And she was right. He couldn’t harm her. Quite the opposite, which actually did explain the devastation around him. Right now, he didn’t get a sense of menace, though. Just great power, and Daniel remembered that, too.
Lowering his weapon, he caught sight of the open stasis chamber at the back of the cavern. It stopped him cold. Stavros’s discovery, no doubt about it. And that ruined array of technology had been used to open the chamber. But this couldn’t be right. If the woman was an Ascended Ancient, why would she have needed the chamber? And if she wasn’t Ascended, who’d destroyed the cavern?
“Who are you?”
“The girl told you my name,” she said.
Yeah. Next question: Why did they all have to be so damn forthcoming all the time?
“My name is Daniel,” he offered. “I’m a friend of Cassie’s.”
“He’s telling the truth,” Cassie piped up, her voice sounding reedy with shock, high and thin as a child’s. “They’ve come to get me… us out of here.”
The woman’s— Amara’s— eyes narrowed with suspicion. “You did not tell me that we were waiting here for your friends.”
“I didn’t expect them to find us. They’ve come from a place a long way away from here.”
“Then why did you attempt to k
ill one of them?”
Cassie flinched as though she’d been struck. “I didn’t realize it was them. I told you, I didn’t expect them to find us.” A violent shiver racked her body.
“We mean you no harm.” It seemed a valid point to make, and to confirm it, Daniel tucked the weapon back into his pants. “And I know you can help.” He cast a glance over his shoulder, at Sam, and at Teal’c who knelt by Jack’s side out in the passage.
“Sam, Teal’c, meet Amara,” said Daniel and went out on a limb. “Amara is an Ancient. But I’m thinking that she’s much further along in their journey toward Ascension than Ayiana was. I’m right, aren’t I, Amara?”
She blinked at him, as slow and inscrutable as a cat. “Without knowing who this Ayiana is, I can’t confirm or deny what you’re saying.”
“Ayiana was an Ancient woman my friends found frozen in the southern icecap of this planet. She would have been unable to defend herself the way you did”— Daniel’s sweeping gesture encompassed the cavern and the dead— “but she had tremendous powers of healing.”
“You’re not like them.” Amara nodded in the direction of Sam and Teal’c and Jack. “And yet you are different from her.” Another nod, at Cassie this time.
Then she approached, and Daniel prayed that Sam and Teal’c would keep their cool— and that this interminable introduction ritual would be over with soon. Jack was dying. And though the Ancients could cure any ailment known to man, one trick was beyond them: raising the dead.
Amara reached out, her fingers brushing Daniel’s arm, and suddenly those amber cat’s eyes went wide with surprise. “You returned! You have achieved what my people long for and you rejected it!”
How she could tell was beyond Daniel. To the best of his knowledge, the Ancients weren’t telepathic. His most plausible guess was that their healing gift allowed them to analyze body chemistry, cell structure, or whatever else might carry an imprint of the changes brought about by his Ascension.
“I didn’t reject it as such,” he said at last. “I was sent back.”
STARGATE SG-1: Transitions Page 15
