His questing feet encountered nothing, and he slipped suddenly backward down a vertical shaft, falling perhaps two meters before he landed on his feet. Beneath him a grid gave slightly, and he glanced down, his breath sounding harsh in his own ears. It was a ceiling vent in an unoccupied corridor one level down. Radek went to his knees on the grid. Was this the kind of vent… yes! There was ductwork running in both directions above the ceiling. He could easily crawl along it safely with the Wraith who had been hunting him unable to get him as he was now beneath the floor. An excellent plan. But which direction? After a moment to get his bearings, Radek started off down the duct.
He was alone, deep in the superstructure in chambers he’d never seen before. Of course he could look for a terminal and activate it, which would involve finding some sort of control facility with power. Or he could turn on his radio, which would be tantamount to telling the Wraith where he was. This did not seem like a good idea. Better, he thought, to look for a terminal or a turning that would lead him to a familiar part of the city. There were literally a hundred kilometers of corridors beneath the surface, and he had only begun to learn the least of the city’s secrets in the year he had lived here.
Radek crawled along the ducts until he came to another vertical shaft. At the bottom there was a grate in the wall, an outlet into the room below. Carefully he slid down and looked out.
The room was mostly dark, a sole emergency light illuminating what had probably once been office space judging by the built in surfaces at desk height along one wall. There was no sound except the faint whisper of the ventilation, the city breathing. Excellent. The grate stuck and he had to kick it out, but he told himself the sound would not carry far coming from inside a closed room.
Radek got to his feet. Yes, some kind of office. There was a closed door which probably led to the corridor he had just paralleled in the ceiling. The door stuck. No power, but the manual override was just inside. He opened the door very quietly.
Indeed it was a major corridor. It had the barred lighting fixtures in the walls, which even dimmed gave off enough light to see clearly. Turned on full, they would be bright as daylight. Wide and unobstructed, this corridor went somewhere important. Perhaps it was one of the main access corridors that crisscrossed the city. If so, he would soon reach a transport chamber. Yes, they were deactivated, but they had maps…
A noise ahead caused him to dash into the nearest cross corridor. It was narrower and darker, only illuminated by the light bleeding in from the main hall. Radek hurried down it a little way, stopping behind one of the pillars that jutted out into it containing things that looked like fishtanks that may once have been decorative. He stopped, his breathing sounding very loud to himself.
Slow footfalls. Long, slow footfalls like a man in boots walking cautiously. Wraith.
Radek froze. Perhaps he had gotten far enough down. If he moved now, the Wraith would hear him. If he ran, the Wraith would stun him and then feed at leisure. And he was unarmed. No, his best hope was to be as quiet as possible.
The footsteps stopped. Was the Wraith scanning? Listening? Radek didn’t move.
There was an explosion of sound in the main corridor, a P90 opening up with a spray of bullets, the horrible sounds of impacts. A two second burst, and then it stopped. Radek looked around the pillar, ready to thank the Marines. Ah, not Marines.
The young man who bent over the Wraith’s body to check him for signs of life was Athosian, small and lean and dark haired, his hair pulled back in a long tail with a twisted steel clasp. Another Athosian stood behind him, a P90 in his hands, tall and broad-shouldered and vaguely familiar. The two women with them wore Atlantis scientists’ uniforms, one South Asian and the other with short red hair, a P90 slung across her chest like she was used to it.
The red haired one asked in clipped British tones, “Dead?”
“Dead,” the Athosian who bent over the body said. He looked up. “Dr. Chandrapura, anything on the life signs detector?”
The South Asian woman glanced down at the white box in her hand. “No more Wraith. But there is a human. There.” She looked up, her eyes meeting Radek’s as he stepped from behind the pillar.
“You have a life signs detector,” he said. “You have the ATA gene.”
“Yes.”
The big Athosian was staring at him. “Dr. Zelenka?”
“Yes.” Radek drew himself up. “Who did you expect?”
“We need to go,” the British woman said quickly.
The young Athosian who had checked the body met her eyes. “Do we?”
Radek looked at him, at the big Athosian who seemed familiar. “You are Athosians who wanted to stay and fight and who the Colonel gave weapons.”
The big man’s hands relaxed out of fists, and he swallowed. “Absolutely,” he said. “Teyla said we could help find the Wraith who were in the city.”
Which was absolutely true. Teyla had recruited some of the Athosians to help guard the city, and Colonel Everett had armed them. The younger Athosian was unfamiliar, but Radek did not know all the Athosians. But the big man was lying. He was staring at Radek like he’d seen a ghost, and his unease was palpable.
“And you.” Radek looked at the two women. “I know every single scientist in the city. I supervise every scientist in the city. I do not know you. And we do not have a Dr. Chandrapura with the ATA gene. There is no such person.”
“We came with Colonel Everett,” the British woman said quickly.
Radek’s eyebrows rose. “I did not see any civilians come with him. In fact, we have evacuated most of our civilian scientists to the Alpha site. Who are you really?”
“She’s a Marine,” the tall Athosian said.
“Then why is her accent British rather than American?” Something was very, very wrong here.
“I’m a British Marine,” she said crisply. “Lt. Jillian Draper, Royal Marines.”
“A female Commando?”
Her eyes widened slightly. “We have them now,” she said. “It’s not 1940.”
Radek shook his head. “You’re lying,” he said. “If this is a trick of the Wraith, it’s very, very good. But not quite good enough.” If it was, he was trapped, but being trapped made him bold. “I do not know who you are, but you are all lying.”
The young Athosian with the long dark hair stood up abruptly. “There’s no point in deceiving Dr. Zelenka,” he said. “Remember? He has to know.”
“T.J.,” the other Athosian began.
“He has to know,” the Athosian named T.J. continued. “Because he already does. Otherwise he couldn’t have told General Carter.”
“You can’t say that in front of him,” Lt. Draper said.
“Why not? There might be lots of General Carters. Dr. Zelenka has to know.”
The tall Athosian let out a long breath. “T.J. has a point.”
“Know what?” Radek demanded. Not a trick of the Wraith, but something far stranger. “Who are you?”
Draper looked at T.J. and then Radek, then nodded slowly. “If we must. Go on.”
T.J. took a step toward Radek, his hands held away from his sides. “Dr. Zelenka, have you ever seen me before?”
He was small and dark, lean muscled arms beneath a brown leather vest that laced over loose black pants, his only ornament the oddly scrolled steel clasp in his hair. He looked like a martial artist. He was a stranger, and yet there was something about him that reminded Radek of someone, something that teased at the edge of his thoughts. “I do not think I have,” he said.
The young man’s eyes did not leave his. “What would you say if I told you that you will see me for the first time four years from now upstairs in the infirmary, when I lie in my mother’s arms as a day old baby? You will come to see me and you will bring me a stuffed giraffe and you will tel
l my mother that you had never lost hope that she would be saved. And you will say no more because you cannot. You cannot say that you knew I would be born and that she would be rescued.”
“What?” Radek said.
He lifted his chin. “My name is Torren John Emmagen. We are here from the future.”
Radek took a deep breath. He should say it was impossible, but he knew it was not. There had been accidents with the Stargate at the SGC, accidents that had created temporal paradoxes, that oft-written about and theoretically impossible thing — time travel. It could happen. An accident with the gate… But no. They had not spoken like people who were lost, the victims of a random conjunction of a solar flare and an outgoing wormhole. They were exactly where they were meant to be. They had learned to control the phenomenon that Lt. Colonel Carter had described. General Carter. Of course.
All this went through Radek’s mind in the moments that they waited, looking at him. He put his hands in his pockets. “So General Samantha Carter sent you into the past?” he asked calmly. “From what year?”
Dr. Chandrapura looked nonplussed. The tall Athosian started laughing. “I told you Dr. Zelenka was the smartest man in Atlantis,” he said to her. “Didn’t I tell you so, Saroj?”
Another piece fit into place. “Jinto?” Radek looked at the big man over the top of his glasses? “Is that you?”
“It’s me.” Jinto grinned. “It’s Dr. Hallingson now. I have a PhD from a university on Earth.”
“In what?”
“Mechanical engineering,” he replied. “Thanks to you, Dr. Z. If you hadn’t…”
“You shouldn’t tell him that,” Dr. Chandrapura said. “Remember, if it’s not about the mission…”
“Quite right,” Radek said briskly, though he itched to know. “You should not tell me more than is necessary. But Jinto, I presume Lt. Draper and Dr. Chandrapura were on Earth, and T.J. was not born yet — but is not your presence here a paradox?”
Jinto shifted from one foot to the other. “I think it would be if I ran into myself. But as General Carter discovered when she visited 1969, it’s possible to be in the same time twice if you’re not in close proximity. She traveled from Colorado to New York in 1969 when she was also a baby at Pope Air Force Base. General O’Neill was a teenager in Minnesota and Dr. Jackson was a young child in Seattle. All three of them were already on Earth in that same time, but they were careful not to go anywhere they might encounter themselves. In this time…” he glanced around the walls of the corridor, “I’m already at the Alpha site. Eleven year old me, that is. As long as I’m gone before I get back, it shouldn’t be a problem.”
Radek frowned. “So why are you here?”
“To help you,” Jinto said simply.
Lt. Draper cleared her throat. “Rather, to make certain that the command chair is functional before the Wraith fleet arrives. If it is not, Atlantis will fall to the Wraith before the Daedalus brings the ZPM that will allow you to power the shield. And the only way for the chair to be functional is for you to reach it alive. Currently you’re cut off from the chair and from the nearby transport chambers by at least ten Wraith. It is highly likely that without assistance you will never reach it.”
“And then our world will never exist,” T.J. said solemnly. “I will never exist. My mother will be killed in the last defense of Atlantis.”
“Teyla’s son.” Now that he knew, he could see it. T.J.’s hair was darker, but he had the same lithe, compact form, the same shape to his face. His voice sharpened. “Ten Wraith between here and the chair room? How do you propose to get there? Even with four armed people we are seriously outnumbered.”
“We’re not going to go through them,” Draper said. “We’re going to go around them.”
“How?” Radek gestured upward. “Fly? We are deep in the city’s infrastructure, probably below the waterline by several stories. The transport chambers are not working and in any case you say we are also cut off from them. If you do not mean to shoot your way through…”
“We’re going to go under the city,” Draper said. “Underwater.”
“What, in wet suits?”
“We have a better idea,” Dr. Chandrapura said with a smile. “And that’s why I’m here. I have the ATA gene naturally expressed.” She shifted her weapon. “Did you think we came in through the Stargate without anyone seeing? How could we have done that?”
“Then how did you get here?” Radek asked.
“By puddlejumper,” T.J. said.
“A rather special puddlejumper,” Dr. Chandrapura said. “It’s a long story.” She looked at Draper. “Now that we’ve found Dr. Zelenka, perhaps we should go back to it as quickly as we can?”
Jinto nodded. “It’s this way. Come on, Dr. Z.” He led the way with Radek and Lt. Draper. Dr. Chandrapura was just behind them while T.J. dropped back to take six, his steps so light that Radek could barely hear him. They hurried down the main corridor and then a second one without consulting any map or device.
“You know your way around,” Radek observed to Jinto.
He smiled. “I explored the city for years as a boy, and I know it as a man. That’s one reason I came on this mission. Lots of people know Atlantis today, but I explored it in this period, before…” He broke off.
“Yes, yes, before something happened you can’t tell me about,” Radek said, but his curiosity was piqued. “So you know Atlantis, and Dr. Chandrapura has a strong ATA gene. Lt. Draper is obviously in charge of your team. Why is T.J. here?”
“He has some skills that are useful,” Jinto evaded.
He was spared from saying more because T.J. said calmly, “There are Wraith ahead. Two.”
They halted and Draper looked back. “Work around?”
“They’re in the chamber beyond the next bulkhead,” T.J. said.
“Then we can go down this way,” Jinto said, “if we backtrack one section.” He turned to go back.
“Wait,” Radek said. “There are only two. Can’t you take them on?”
“We could,” Draper said.
“If you leave them, who knows what they will do?” Radek said. “What sabotage, or who they might kill.”
“We know exactly who they might kill or what they might do,” Lt. Draper said evenly. “We know who died. And we know what sabotage happened and what didn’t. If we engage these Wraith, we don’t know what will happen as a consequence. They could go a different way and kill someone different, or blow up something critical that they never reached before.”
“You don’t know that,” Radek said. “You might spare the lives of people who they killed.”
“Or they might kill you, and the Wraith might take Atlantis,” Draper said. “Or find the puddlejumper and change the course of the war.” She shook her head. “We can’t change random things. We’re not supposed to interact with anyone except you. If we start changing a load of other things we might lose this siege. In war you never know exactly what small thing is going to be critical.” She turned to follow Jinto, shepherding him along. “We’re going to leave the Wraith alone. If we can do this without a firefight, we will.”
They hurried along the connecting corridor and then through a large, open empty room. Radek wondered what it had once been. A warehouse? A ballroom? There was nothing to tell him, just empty space that they skirted from one door to another, their footsteps echoing.
Once more T.J. stopped them. “Wait,” he said quietly, and they halted by the door for some minutes, their breath seeming loud in the silence, until he said it was safe to go on.
“What is he doing?” Radek asked Jinto in a low voice. “Dr. Chandrapura has the life signs detector.”
Jinto looked uncomfortable. “T.J. senses the Wraith,” he said.
“Like Teyla.”
Jinto opened his mouth
and shut it again.
“It’s ok,” Radek said. “We found that out while you were at the Alpha site. We already know that. You are not telling me something I do not know.”
“It’s just that the Gift is a touchy subject among Athosians, especially now that we understand its origins…”
Jinto was interrupted by the door ahead opening into yet another chamber. If the last one had been bare, this one was breathtaking. Floor to ceiling, there was a window that looked out into the sea. They were perhaps ten or fifteen meters below the surface, the water only slightly clouded. It was full day, and the sun filtered down through shoals of pink and yellow fish, some the size of his hand and others much larger. They had six fins each, and the largest spread them like umbrellas stretched to catch the light coming down.
“Oh wow,” Dr. Chandrapura said, stopping short. “Any aquarium on Earth would envy this view.”
“Absolutely,” Draper said.
It was magnificent. “Where are we exactly?” Radek asked. He had lost track of the turnings.
“Directly between the city’s main sublight engines,” Jinto said. He gave Radek a sideways grin. “This is one of your favorite places.”
“It is now,” Radek said.
T.J. went to the window and pointed. “And that’s where we’re going,” he said.
Radek looked out. The city’s superstructure protruded, a long stretch reaching out that was probably the underside of one of the piers. Not far along, just around the corner really, was a familiar stubby shape. It looked like the front of a puddlejumper docked with the rear hatch against the city. “They go underwater?”
T.J. looked surprised. “You don’t know that?”
“Not yet, apparently,” Radek said. “But I suppose it makes sense. They are air tight in vacuum, and they must withstand unusual pressure. So a few tens of meters like this could not be a problem to them, if their propulsion works…”
Stargate SG-1 & Atlantis - Far Horizons Page 32
