by Martha Wells
“Oh my God,” Elizabeth said suddenly. She grabbed Grodin’s shoulder, leaning in beside him to study the image. “That looks like—Am I imagining the resemblance—”
“You’re not.” McKay shouldered forward, unceremoniously shoving Zelenka aside and stepping on John’s feet. “It’s very similar. Grodin, can you—”
“Pull up the description so we can compare it, yes.” Grodin had already turned away to another nearby laptop, typing quickly. Even he looked quietly excited.
“What?” John demanded. “What is it?”
Watching intently, Zelenka explained, “It is like the description we have of Heliopolis, the repository found in the first year of the Stargate program.”
“Seriously?” John’s brows lifted, and he whistled softly. “Hot damn.” He hadn’t been in the SGC before Atlantis, but he remembered the story from the Stargate Command mission reports that were available to all expedition members.
“Heliopolis?” Teyla echoed, leaning in to listen. “What place is this?”
Zelenka told her, “It was one of the first indications we had that the Goa’uld did not build the Stargate network, that they were parasites using the remains of an earlier civilization. It was later concluded that Heliopolis was a meeting place where the Ancients shared information with the other great races of the time, the Asgard, the Furlings, and the Nox. There was a database designed for interspecies communication, that if we could have studied it—” He waved his hands helplessly.
“They lost it when a big storm came up and the building collapsed into the ocean,” John finished the .story for Teyla.
“They barely got out in time, then when they tried to redial to see if the ’gate was still there, they got nothing.”
Teyla nodded understanding, her expression intrigued. “Then this could be a wonderful discovery.”
“The resemblance isn’t exact,” McKay was saying, “but the shape of those towers, the height of the walls, even the fact that it seems to be near a sea, it’s all very suggestive. We have to check this out.”
Elizabeth nodded slowly, but a smile tugged at her mouth. “If it is another Heliopolis—”
McKay’s grin was smug. “Then maybe we did find a ZPM factory.”
They geared up for the trip in record time, with McKay actually changing into his field uniform in the puddlejumper bay while John was running the preflight check. But it was late in the day on the destination planet, and the jumper shot out of the Stargate into a cloud-streaked sky already reddening with sunset. John dropped speed, guiding the little ship up to give them a sweeping view of the area. He thought about sensors and the jumper obligingly popped up holographic life sign and energy detector screens.
In the near distance he could see the building that they hoped was a repository, the dark stone standing out against the lighter grays of the sky, the storm-colored sea, and the rocky shore. It was about a mile from the Stargate, maybe a little more, standing in the center of a scattered complex of dark stone ruins on a flat rocky plain. The sea curved around it, bordered by a wide gravel beach. Inland, past the edge of the ruins, grew a sparse forest of tall slender trees with light green leaves. Nothing stirred, except a small flock of gray and white birds, startled into flight by the jumper’s arrival. The screens confirmed it, showing only the little flickers that meant local fauna.
In the shotgun seat, Ford said, “See that? Somebody’s bombed the. crap out of it.”
“Hell, yes,” John agreed, sparing a look out the view port. “That’s not encouraging.”
This close, the damage was more evident than it had been on the MALP’s camera. John could see big bomb craters in the surrounding ruins, and the spires in the onion dome towers had cracks or holes, the exposed girders bearing a distinct resemblance to skeletal remains. He grimaced, but it wasn’t a surprise; the Wraith didn’t like their food source to get uppity and fight back, and the Ancients had fought back until they had been nearly exterminated.
“The Wraith must have attacked here, perhaps after the Ancestors left,” Teyla commented from the other jump seat, her tone regretful. “But still, you can see what a beautiful place it must have been.”
McKay was less impressed. “No energy readings. And it’s far more damaged than we thought, but the MALP’s image was so pixelized, it could have been sitting in the middle of Miami Beach. This is probably a waste of time.” He sounded bitterly disappointed.
“Oh, stop it.” Splitting his attention between the port and the HUD, John banked the jumper back around toward the Stargate. It sat on a large elevated stone platform, about twenty meters high. At one time a stairway had led up to it, but now it was just a pile of rubble. The MALP had trundled itself off to the side, out of the path of the wormhole’s blowback, its camera still pointed toward the ruins. John told McKay, “You’re just still mad because you’re not the one who made the new holo-thingy work.”
“The new holo-thingy is broken, Major,” McKay reminded him pointedly. “If it weren’t, we might know exactly who attacked this place. And if this repository had anything like Atlantis’ full defensive capacity, it had to be one hell of an attack.”
“Grodin was right, there’s no DHD,” Ford pointed out, studying the area around the ’gate. “The Wraith must have destroyed it. Funny, we’ve never found a damaged ’gate like that before.”
“My people never encountered damage like that either.” Teyla added wryly, “Fortunately, since we would not have been able to return through the ’gate.”
The jumpers came equipped with their own Dial Home Devices for the Stargates, right between the pilot’s and copilot’s seats, so the MALP’s inability to locate the DHD hadn’t been an impediment to coming here. “That’s weird,” John said, as the corollary occurred to him. “Why would anybody bother to blow up the DHD when the Ancients probably did most of their ’gate traveling in the jumpers?”
“Major, down there,” Ford said suddenly. “They must have taken a direct hit.”
John craned his neck, hearing Teyla make a startled exclamation. As the jumper came around the far side of the big complex, they could see that the outer wall of one wing was partly missing, revealing a mass of arched girders and partial stone walls. But it all looked a little too neat to be bomb damage. “No, I don’t see any rubble. I don’t think that section was finished.”
Rodney snorted derisively. “That doesn’t bode well for us finding a cache of ZPMs or another Ancient database.”
“Cache, schmache,” John said, though he thought McKay was probably right. “I’ll be happy with one ZPM. So will you.”
“That’s true,” Rodney admitted grudgingly.
John put the jumper down on a flat and relatively clear stretch of paving near the base of the repository’s wall, in a section with terraces and a big doorway that seemed to be the main entrance. He lowered the ramp, and Teyla bailed out of the back first, walking out onto the cracked pavement of the plaza and pivoting for a look around, cradling her P-90. John joined her a moment later with Ford and McKay.
The air felt damp, smelled of sea salt, and was warm enough that the cool breeze off the beach was welcome. There was also a faint foul odor underneath, like rotten fish. The building itself stood on a slight rise, so they had a good view of the field of scattered stone ruins where it followed the shallow curve of the beach.
It had been a large city at some point. Many of the buildings still had slab roofs that were mostly intact, though any other features had been stripped away by time and the violence of the long-ago bombing. Some were just roofless stone boxes, some only the outlines of foundations, but John could see where the streets had been laid out, where there were open squares that might have been anything from outdoor meeting areas to shopping malls.
Teyla was studying the ruins, her brow furrowed. “It is very… I want to say empty, but that is rather obvious.”
Ford was surveying the area with his binoculars. “The word you’re looking for is ‘spooky’.”
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br /> “Or ‘creepy’,” John added, frowning. The dark oblongs of the empty doorways and windows looked too much like eyes that were staring at you. He turned toward the building, and glass, broken and ground nearly to powder, crunched under his boots; it gave him a weird feeling for a moment, that somebody-walking-over-your-grave sensation. He shrugged it off, glancing over at the others. McKay was studying the handheld Atlantean life sign detector, his hard mouth twisted into a grimace. John stepped in to look over his shoulder. “Anything?”
“No. Go away.” McKay, who hated people reading over his shoulder, elbowed him.
“I am not sensing the presence of any Wraith,” Teyla said, sounding thoughtful. She had the hereditary ability of some Athosians to know when the Wraith were nearby; it gave you just enough time to bolt for cover or the nearest Stargate and was a valued survival trait.
It wasn’t an ability that the expedition had any scientific explanation for so far, but it was definitely real, and it had led to some initial suspicion of Teyla, at least on the part of Sergeant Bates, whom Elizabeth had appointed head of city security. John preferred some level of paranoia in the person who held that job, but Bates had never trusted the Athosians in general and Teyla in particular, and it had gotten in the way. Even before Bates had accused Teyla of betraying them to the Wraith, Bates had made a snide comment about John wanting his new friend on his ’gate team. Unsure at the moment whether Bates meant Teyla or Rodney, John had pretended to think that Bates meant Ford, and told him not to talk that way about the lieutenant or he would put Bates on report, and things had gone downhill from there. Now Bates’ paranoia just made John paranoid, mainly about Bates.
“No Wraith, that’s always encouraging to hear,” McKay muttered, still studying the detector. It wouldn’t identify the presence of hibernating Wraith, just conscious ones. They had found that out the hard way.
“We’re not going to have much time to look around before dark.” John went to the end of the plaza and up a short set of steps to the big double doorway. Through it he could see a hall, littered with blown sand and powdered glass, quiet, dusty, and dead. No bodies, but then this was old destruction; any remains would have long ago rotted away. Still, it just looked like a place where John would have expected to see bodies.
The two doors had both been blasted off and lay on the paving. One had tumbled down so the outer side lay face up; it was unadorned except for some embossed circles, which didn’t necessarily mean anything. The Ancients hadn’t been big on brand names, or even just labeling stuff. He started inside, the others following.
Inside the big foyer, McKay paused to take some more readings, and John stopped beside him, frowning, trying to get a feel for the place.
At the far end a giant spiral stairway curved up into a large shaft. It was made of cracked slabs of stone and charred metal, still mostly intact, but John wouldn’t have wanted to chance it, not without climbing gear. Still, he would rather trust stairs than the transporter/elevators, if there were any and if there was anything left to power them. Behind the stairway was a big triangular archway, opening into a passage toward the center of the repository. It had all been grand and lofty once, but the dark gray stone of the walls and floor was scarred where broken pieces of the stairway’s elaborately curled metal balustrade had shattered and slammed into it.
“I thought I had something for a second,” Rodney muttered, glaring at the detector. “An energy signature.”
John frowned at it too. “From where?”
“Couldn’t tell, it wasn’t there long enough for the detector to get a direction.” Rodney grimaced. “Let’s try that way.” He nodded toward the triangular passage and gave a mock-shudder at the stairway. “Better than climbing that deathtrap.”
“If we search this whole place, we’re going to have to tackle the deathtrap levels sooner or later,” John pointed out. He caught Ford’s eye and, with a jerk of his head, told him to watch their six.
“We?” McKay’s brow furrowed, his attention still on the detector. “We who, kemosabe?”
John led the way through the foyer and the big arch, Teyla coming up to walk beside him. Ahead he could see the corridor opened into another large space, streaked with light and shadow. John flicked on the light attached to his P-90.
They reached the triangular arch at the end of the corridor and saw what lay beyond. John said softly, “Wow. J guess they didn’t get any time to pack.”
The eight-sided chamber was huge and shadowy, bigger than Atlantis’ gate room, with three levels of open gallery above it, all intact. At the highest level, the walls curved up, meeting in a point overhead. Long diagonal open spaces had once held skylights, the glass long shattered by the bombing, allowing in dimming light from the overcast sky. Directly across from the archway, a bunch of giant silvery tubes like the top of an immense pipe organ stretched up and away, vanishing into the ceiling high above. The place was littered with debris: broken consoles that had been ripped off their platforms, smashed crystals, twisted metal, bits and pieces of Ancient technology, scattered and smashed like a trash heap. On this level alone, a dozen archways led off in all directions, into dark rooms that seemed to be filled with odd-shaped equipment.
McKay looked up from the detector and his jaw dropped. “Oh, oh yes, this is going to take a while.”
CHAPTER TWO
The sun was already setting over the sea when they took the jumper up and dialed the Stargate back to Atlantis to transmit a report to Elizabeth. After a three-way radio conversation between her, John, and Rodney, they decided to go back for the night and return with a larger team when it was morning on the planet. This Heliopolis, ruined or not, was in no danger of falling into the ocean.
The next morning, John put the jumper down in the plaza near the entrance again, saying, “Everybody out. Last one to Heliopolis II is a rotten egg.”
Unbuckling her seat restraints, Teyla stared at him, smiling incredulously. “What?”
“It’s an old joke,” he explained.
“Don’t worry if you don’t get it, it’s not funny.” Rodney dug the life sign detector out of his pack and headed for the ramp.
Ford and the other two Marines exited first to walk a perimeter. Both Kinjo and Boerne had field experience on Bates’ recon team, and Boerne had received the Ancient gene therapy and had been training to fly the jumpers. Locking down the console, John heard Boerne’s startled “whoa” at the view of the repository and the ruined city spread out at the end of the plaza. Sitting in the back of the jumper, most of the team hadn’t been able to get a good view of it from above. John followed McKay and Teyla out, while Kavanagh, Corrigan, and Kolesnikova were still picking up their packs.
John paused on the plaza, taking a deep breath. The sun was out this morning, and the sea gleamed blue, though the color was duller than the sea around Atlantis. It didn’t have that crystal-clear morning of creation quality, of a world that had never been touched by pollution. Then the breeze turned and John winced and coughed. “Damn.” Atlantis doesn’t have that, either. The odor of rot was stronger today, worse than the dead fish smell usually associated with sea ports.
Dr. Kavanagh emerged from the puddlejumper, his expression torn between curiosity and wary disgust; John figured that was probably from the smell. Kavanagh was a tall thin man, with glasses, a high forehead, straight hair pulled back into a tail, and a sort of permanently pissed-off expression. He watched Rodney pace around with the life sign detector, asking sharply, “Anything?”
“Yes, there’s an entire horde of Wraith about to descend on us, I just failed to mention it because I was waiting to be asked,” Rodney snapped. “There’s no life signs except us. I’m checking for energy readings now.”
Kavanagh snapped back, “If you can’t answer a simple question, McKay, then don’t bother.” Kavanagh wasn’t exactly the best team player in the expedition, but sometimes biting McKay’s head off was the only way to deal with him. John frankly preferred scientists who
bit; McKay had some of the less aggressive science team members cowed into hysterical submission, not counting the ones with Stockholm Syndrome.
“Boys, please, we’ve only just arrived.” Irina Kolesnikova shaded her eyes, looking up at the dark wall looming over them. She added worriedly, “Yes, the destruction is far more severe than the MALP indicated. We have a large job ahead of us.” Kolesnikova was short and plump, with a round plain face and short dark hair. She also had a deep voice for a woman, sort of like Lauren Bacall with a thick Russian accent, and John could have listened to her all day. Like McKay and Boerne, she had had the ATA gene therapy. This was her and Kavanagh’s first trip away from Atlantis; Corrigan was an archeologist and had been going out on ’gate missions with Sergeant Stackhouse’s team.
All the scientists were dressed in tac vests over the blue science uniform shirts and tan pants, carrying a small pack for tools and other supplies. It was warm enough in the ruin for John just to wear his tac vest over a t-shirt, and he was leaving his BDU jacket in the jumper. He also carried a P-90, like Teyla, Ford, Boerne, and Kinjo. The scientists had been issued 9mm sidearms, though Corrigan and McKay were checked out on the P-90; McKay just didn’t like to carry one, saying he could run faster without it.
John used the binoculars, scanning the ruined buildings around them, but there was no hint of movement. They hadn’t taken the time to look at the city much yesterday. Today the contrast between the bright sunlight and those empty dark windows reminded him of something straight out of a post-nuclear-holocaust or disaster movie.
Teyla came up to stand beside him. Surveying the scene with a preoccupied expression, she said, “I am not sure I like this place, Major Sheppard.”
“Oh, what’s not to like?” John teased her. She lifted a brow at him, her mouth set in an unamused line, and he gave in. “Yeah, I know. It’s going to be a logistical nightmare trying to explore this thing, even if there aren’t any…monsters and whatnot. I wouldn’t worry so much if it was just our team.” He looked back at the group by the jumper, frowning a little. The last time he had gone on a mission with inexperienced scientists, it hadn’t ended well. They had been investigating an Ancient Lagrangian Point satellite in orbit around the second planet in Atlantica’s system and found a downed Wraith supply ship on the planet’s surface. Unfortunately, there had been one last surviving Wraith, hibernating after having eaten all the stored humans on board and then all his Wraith friends. John and Rodney had managed to survive; the two scientists with them hadn’t. “Kavanagh and Kolesnikova don’t have any experience with field work, and keeping people from getting hurt in all that debris is going to be hard enough.”
