02 - Reliquary

by Martha Wells

  “Well, that’s just fantastic.” Rodney sat down at one of the locked stations, rubbing his eyes. It explained why Dorane needed Rodney to disconnect the naquadah generators. He hadn’t maintained that strict control over Kavanagh initially, but the first order he must have given was for Kavanagh to forget anything out of the ordinary had happened. That kind of loose control wouldn’t work on people who were dismantling Atlantis’ power grid.

  Grodin said quietly, “He tried to initialize some of the other consoles, the ones we haven’t been able to make work, but he couldn’t. Is—”

  One of the Koan came and stood over them, glaring suspiciously, but after that Grodin kept trying to catch Rodney’s eye, until Rodney turned and gave him the “oh my God, will you stop that” glare. Ford, his head still bandaged from the blow Kavanagh had given him, stood nearby watching them completely without expression, like some alien pod-person replica of the real man. Rodney had no idea whether Ford would be compelled to volunteer information to Dorane or not, but he didn’t want to take the chance.

  “McKay,” Grodin whispered.

  “Not now,” Rodney said through gritted teeth.

  Grodin persisted, “Sergeant Stackhouse’s team has been on that three-day trading mission to the Enarians. They’re due back later tonight—”

  Rodney interrupted, “He’ll order you to open the force field. You won’t have to kill them.” Though if we don’t get out of this, they may not thank you for that later.

  “How do you—”

  “He doesn’t want them dead. That’s what, six more bodies for his experiment? Markham’s with them, so that’s one more Ancient gene carrier to torture.”

  Grodin hesitated, watching Rodney uncertainly. “What did he do to Sheppard?”

  “What did it look like?” Rodney snapped. He was desperately afraid of giving something away, and starting to have flashbacks to the Genii and Kolya’s occupation of the city. Not to mention the sour stomach and a pounding in his left temple that signaled the incipient arrival of a headache from hell.

  He finally saw Sheppard and Dorane emerge from the conference room, the Koan and Benson following. The tight pain between Rodney’s shoulderblades eased just a little. He realized he had been waiting for the sound of gunfire.

  Sheppard swept the gallery with one tight glance, giving nothing away, then went down toward the center stairwell without glancing back, the two Koan following him like well-trained attack dogs at heel.

  Rodney swallowed in a dry throat, craning his neck until Sheppard was out of sight. Great, great, great. I have no clue what we’re doing. Or if Sheppard had a clue what they were doing. In the shadows of the gallery it was impossible to tell if he looked any worse. In the bright sunlight before stepping through the ’gate, he had already looked drawn and obviously ill. Sheppard had always seemed as if he was nothing but bone and muscle, but in the last few hours Rodney was willing to swear the man had actually lost weight.

  “You are concerned for him?” Dorane asked, and Rodney realized with a start that he had been watching him. Dorane strolled down the gallery toward him. “He betrayed you.”

  “Well, you know, that would really be your fault, wouldn’t it?” Rodney snapped, swiveling around to face him. “And can we just get back to threatening me? Because frankly I’m not comfortable discussing my personal relationships with you, considering how you’re planning to kill everyone I know.”

  Dorane dismissed that with a slight shrug. “It will be interesting to see how long he survives.”

  Rodney hesitated, knowing he shouldn’t fall for the bait but unable to stop himself. “What do you mean?”

  Dorane watched Rodney, his eyes opaque. “The Lantian-descended Thesians I tested that particular strain on only lived for one or two days. But I understand that your people also have some degree of genetic variation from the prototypal Lantian stock, so that estimate may be unrealistic.” His voice hardened. “Now, let’s get started on your naquadah generators.”

  Rodney stared at him, trying to tell if that was the truth or just another sick little lie. It was depressing enough to be the truth. His jaw set, he stood up. Dorane would be gauging the time by the rotation of the repository’s planet, and by that measure it had already been a full day since Sheppard was infected.

  They didn’t have much time.

  John took the central stairs down, ignoring the two Koan for now. Despite this minor victory, he couldn’t shake the feeling that Plan B was still circling the drain. The problem was that Dorane really, really liked playing with people, and he had a tremendous amount of experience at it. John could too readily imagine that Dorane was playing both him and McKay, making them think they were fooling him.

  But he obviously wanted that memory core very badly, badly enough to risk letting John run loose around the city to get it.

  They had speculated that all the Ancients’ tinkering with the Stargate had been a cat and mouse game to force Dorane to give up something. If all he gave up was information… what’s the point in getting it back? But if there was something else there, something the Ancients might have recorded on the core that Dorane needed, or at least thought he needed, maybe to keep his experiments going… Since he now had a new pool of human DNA to meddle with, he would be all the more anxious to get it.

  John paused on the next landing, getting a view down the corridor. There was a room down there that was used for big meetings and science team conferences. It had one door and had always looked as if it would be relatively easy to secure. And yes, there were at least six Koan and four dead-eyed Marines stationed outside it. That had to be where Dorane was keeping the rest of the operations staff and the other expedition members he had managed to capture.

  John eyed the corridor, considering it. Dorane had basically tried to hand them a scenario where John would have to kill half the Marines to save the rest of the expedition. But John had no plans to take him up on that one. Though it was really starting to worry him that he hadn’t seen Teyla yet. He had expected to find her guarding the prisoners.

  The Koan growled, and John moved on.

  The lights were dimmed through every section they passed, the green bubble pillars motionless and silent. A few levels down in an open foyer, another group of Koan were gathered around the sealed door to the medlab corridor. They growled, glaring at John, but apparently they had gotten the word to let him through. He pushed past them, pretending to ignore the claws and bared teeth and the inexpertly held guns. As he reached the door, it slid open without waiting for him to touch the control, invitingly undefended. It revealed the long corridor that accessed most of the labs and work areas on this level, the walls decorated with copper bands enclosing squares of soft metallic grays and blues. The Koan hung back uneasily.

  The half-light was like daylight to John’s altered eyes, and he could see there were six dead Koan scattered at various points down the hallway. It was probably lucky that Dorane was using the Koan for cannon fodder so far, obviously meaning to save expedition personnel for experiments.

  John took a long step forward and, without glancing back, said, “Bye, guys,” and told the door to close.

  It slid shut, leaving the Koan on the other side.

  He studied the corridor again, making out a wet area about midway along, and something further down that looked like a car battery that had been blasted to bits with gunfire. John would bet that the car battery object was a decoy; this corridor had been booby-trapped by desperate and frightened men and women, some of whom had been able to build atomic bombs by the time they were twelve. There was no way he was going down there, not even in rubber-soled boots.

  Maybe that was the game Dorane was playing; he had sent John down here to be accidentally killed by his own people.

  John turned left instead, taking the side corridor toward the outer ring of this section. He knew it would be easier to get to the medlab from the level above through some access passages in the floors, but he didn’t want the Koan
to twig to that. Dorane obviously didn’t know about it, or he would have tried it by now.

  Even though Dorane had lived here with the Ancients for a time, they had probably never had to send people to crawl around in the floors replacing fried crystal conduit, with Kavanagh and Simpson debating the right procedure and giving contradictory instructions via headset radio, with the added attractions of McKay berating them between bouts of claustrophobia and Miko having to be retrieved from where her pants had gotten caught on a support brace. The Ancients probably had robots or genetically-trained sea monkeys or something to do those little jobs for them.

  The next doorway was quarantine-sealed and stubbornly refused to respond to the wall console or ATA coaxing, but John fiddled the crystals the way McKay had shown him. As the door started to slide open, John got the sunglasses on, wincing. Even though the sky was starting to redden into sunset, the glare off the water was still bright enough to blind him.

  Outside, his back to Atlantica’s endless sea and the cool evening breeze ruffling his hair, John sized up the expanse of city wall looming above him. There were tiny little ledges and arching girders that formed a decorative roof over all the balconies. The open platform he thought he had remembered was there, up one level and over to the side. It was the “over to the side part” that was going to be tricky. It would have been crazy to try this without the claws; they would give him just enough extra purchase to make it possible. Sort of possible.

  John stepped up on the railing, balancing easily. A long way down, waves washed up against the platforms and supports at the tower’s foot. He knew his own weight and the approximate distance down, so it was hard not to automatically calculate the velocity he would reach by the time he hit the base. Right. Here goes. He caught a handhold in the decorative embossing, and wedged a boot into the junction where the girder met the wall, and hauled himself up.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Rodney really, really didn’t see a way out of this. Watched carefully by the Koan, he was forced to follow Dorane, two Marines, and Ford to the naquadah generator that powered the lower center section of the city, including the medlab. Rodney had tried to steer Dorane toward one of the generators for the other sections, but Dorane hadn’t gone for that.

  Part of him was wondering how much of the system Zelenka had trashed while sealing off the medlab. As Rodney knew very well, there was nothing like the threat of certain death to inspire speed and creativity. Between the damage Dorane and the Koan had caused, and the damage Zelenka and the others had done trying to stop them, it would probably take a month to repair everything. If they got out of this alive. Rodney groaned mentally, wishing an insane repair schedule was his only problem.

  If the power was completely cut, the doors on the medlab level could be pried open manually. Rodney knew that was where Dorane had sent a large number of the Koan and several of the expedition’s military personnel that he had under his control, ready to move in.

  In the lead, Ford took the last turn in the corridor, reaching the doorway to the generator room. A cardboard sign with the words “stay out” and a badly-drawn skull and crossbones had been stuck on the wall next to it with sticky tape. At the time Rodney had thought the symbolism was a nice touch; now it was all too appropriate. Even if some of the expedition members escaped into the unexplored sections and managed to evade Dorane, how were they going to survive with the city a dead powerless hulk? And Rodney didn’t suppose Dorane would be stupid enough to leave any jumpers behind.

  The door slid open to reveal a dimly-lit five-sided room with antique gold walls and burnished copper trim, colors that suggested an upscale restaurant more than they did a main access point to the city’s power grid. Unless you were Ancient, apparently. There were three other sealed doors, all corridor accesses, and the naquadah generator sat near the center. It was small for something so powerful, positioned on a low pallet and connected into Atlantis’ system through the access points in the floor and wall panels. Dorane eyed it with an expression Rodney could only interpret as skepticism, asking Kavanagh, “Is that it?”

  “Yes,” Kavanagh said, as bland as if they were discussing the weather. “That’s the generator.”

  Rodney eyed him sharply. He told Dorane, “You shouldn’t have killed Kolesnikova. She knew more about naquadah power generation than Kavanagh could ever learn.”

  “I could control Kavanagh,” Dorane replied easily, as if it was nothing. “She had your gene retrovirus.”

  Rodney had wondered if Dorane had ordered Kavanagh to kill Irina. But that sounded as if he had done it himself.

  Rodney remembered thinking once that it was bizarrely unfair that Sheppard and Carson and the others had come by the gene naturally, just because they had promiscuous ancestors who must have been lining up at the proverbial dock the day the Ancients had landed on Earth. And it had been a huge relief when the ATA therapy had worked for Rodney. Now it was going to get all of them killed in a horrible way, and that was just typical.

  “You know why we’re here. Prepare it for transport.” Dorane looked at Kavanagh. “Bring the tools. Make sure he uses only the correct ones needed for the job at hand.”

  Rodney looked down at the generator, grimacing. He had put so much work into getting these things to mesh with the city’s more advanced systems; taking it out was really going to hurt. At least he could do it slowly and blame the low emergency lighting. “I assume you want it intact, and not in burnt-out pieces, so it’s going to take some time since I can barely see what I’m doing.”

  “That can be remedied,” Dorane told him, his expression bland.

  Rodney threw him a wary look, not sure if he meant a flashlight or a little genetic adjustment. Except for the lights on the P-90s, which the men weren’t using because of the Koan, nobody seemed to be carrying a flashlight. He said stiffly, “I’ll make do.”

  Kavanagh brought a tool case over and opened it. Rodney glared at him, but Kavanagh’s normally annoying face was blank, just like the Marines and Ford. Rodney selected the screwdriver needed to get the generator’s panels open, holding it out to Kavanagh for inspection. Kavanagh nodded, and Rodney sneered, saying, “I’m not quite insane enough to blow this thing up with me standing over it.” Not yet, anyway. If they got to the fifth generator and Sheppard still hadn’t shown up, Rodney knew he might rethink that position. For all he knew, Dorane’s genetic tampering had finally run its course and Sheppard was already lying dead in one of the corridors.

  Dorane watched him get the panels off the generator’s access points, and it made the back of Rodney’s neck sweat. He flinched when Dorane said suddenly, “I am only just realizing how apt my earlier comment was about the city being fit only for scavengers. Your technology is cobbled together from many different sources, is it not? You weren’t lying about coming here from another galaxy.”

  I’m only just realizing how apt my earlier comment was about you being a serial killer. Rodney said flatly, “No, we weren’t lying.” Dorane seemed to know the Ancient systems fairly well, but it was the interfaces with Earth-based computers and technology that baffled him. Considering how much of it was a hybrid mix of Terran, Goa’uld, Asgard, and Ancient, it probably wasn’t surprising that Dorane didn’t understand it. Or us.

  “You did not know of the Wraith, when you came here to loot Atlantis? I suppose your Lantian ancestors did not bother to pass along the story of their defeat.”

  Rodney set his jaw, barely managing to stifle his first knee-jerk reply. He knew Dorane wanted him to assert the expedition’s right to the city, based on Earth’s inheritance from the Ancients. Guess what? You’re the only person with an ATA gene handy, and he wants an excuse to torture you. He said only, “We didn’t know.”

  Dorane continued to watch him from what Rodney thought was way too close a distance, but didn’t reply. Rodney tried to focus his attention on the delicate maze of circuitry inside the generator’s connection panel and ignore the lingering painful death that was in his imme
diate future.

  In his more optimistic moments, of which there were few, Rodney had imagined what things would be like if they ended up staying here forever, or at least all lived long enough to die of natural causes. Somehow in that scenario, Sheppard had still been here too, though God knew after years of crash landings, head injuries, and Wraith stunner attacks he would probably have even more impulse-control issues than… Of course, Rodney thought with a sudden surge of hope. He leaned down over the connecting conduit to conceal his expression. Now he knew what the plan was.

  He just hoped Sheppard was still alive to carry it out.

  The climb was an intense few minutes, but John was able to make the other balcony without dying. From there he went to the corridor just above the one that approached the medlab from the outer wing of the city, then found the correct floor access panel. He pried it open and crawled through the floor to find the ceiling panel that would open inside the quarantine-sealed area, on the opposite side of the medlab from the booby-trapped corridor of death that led from the center stair shaft.

  The floor space was just as cramped as he remembered it, and much warmer. Not to mention airless, he thought, wriggling past the layers of conduit. When they had had people working down here, McKay had managed to deflect the return air for the circulating system through this passage, and John hadn’t realized what a difference it made. It was also much noisier this time, with the sounds from the ATA growing into a painfully incessant clamor. By the time he reached the ceiling panel, John was gritting his teeth and having unpleasant flashbacks to the repository.

  He hung upside down out of the ceiling for a moment, just glad to be able to take a full breath, checking the copper-colored floor for suspicious objects and substances. He had been hoping this corridor would be clear, that Beckett’s group had planned to retreat down it if the medlab was compromised. Not seeing anything indicative of traps, he unfolded himself out of the narrow panel and dropped to the floor. The door to the rear area of the medlab area was around the next corner, and it was sealed tight.