by Martha Wells
They finished up, everybody packing the remains of the meal away into the trash container on the jumper, to be taken back to Atlantis for recycling. This was part environmental policy, part safety; it would be dangerous to leave indications of their recent presence to any Wraith that might come sniffing around after them. John always found the practice a little depressing; it made him feel like the rabbits in Water-ship Down, trying to keep from luring foxes to their burrow, helpless to defend themselves against a stronger enemy. War and Peace had its share of issues, but he was glad he had brought it to Atlantis instead.
Corrigan wanted to do a survey of the city ruins, so John sent Boerne and Kinjo with him, both men seeming glad to have something constructive to do besides watch the inert Stargate and the empty sky. John scanned that sky one more time, then went inside with the others, heading back through the cavernous foyer toward the control area.
As they passed it, John cast a thoughtful look at the big and apparently unstable spiral staircase. From its position in the building, it probably led up into the damaged spires, which the galleries above the control area weren’t connected to. If nobody turned up any clues to where a ZPM might be soon, they would have to search up there, and it might be better if he and Teyla started on that now. But he found himself still reluctant to separate the group to that extent, even with everyone wearing a headset, even with Boerne and Kinjo outside, even with Ford standing watch over the others. Just because the last time you left a couple of scientists on their own Abrams got eaten and Gall ended up offing himself in front of Rodney, he thought bitterly. Yeah, let’s make that mistake again.
McKay, walking along beside him, still messing with his pack, muttered, “This is a waste of time.”
Surprised, John stopped him at the top of the corridor while the others continued into the control area. “Hey, what’s with you? Why are you so pissy now about exploring this place? You were as enthusiastic as Corrigan and Kavanagh when we saw the image on the MALP.”
“Pissy?” McKay lifted his brows, but John just continued to watch him inquiringly, and he finally sighed. He admitted, “Okay, fine. I was as gung-ho as the rest of you at first, but I just wasn’t expecting—The state of disrepair—” He stopped, mouth twisted as he thought it over. “I have no idea. Maybe I’m coming down with something.”
“Oh.” John nodded, and decided reluctantly that he had started the conversation, he might as well finish it. “I asked, because I was gung-ho too when we got here, and now I’m creeped out, like I’m walking in a vandalized graveyard, and I have no idea why.” He jerked his chin at Teyla, who was watching them with a puzzled expression. “And you’re acting the same way. As soon as we got here, you were talking about the flesh-eating zombies.”
“That was you,” Teyla corrected firmly. “I do not even know what flesh-eating zombies are. Nor do I wish to know, so please do not explain.”
“I know that,” John persisted, “But you said you didn’t want to meet anybody who’d choose to live here, and that started the whole zombie conversation.”
“I take back my earlier agreement,” Rodney said unhelpfully, “I think you’re insane.”
Teyla tilted her head, looking thoughtful. “Many people must have died in the attack that destroyed this place. Why shouldn’t we feel as if we walk on their graves?”
“Because they’re not here.” John gestured broadly, taking in the big shadowy room beyond. Kolesnikova was getting tools out of her pack, and Kavanagh had moved on to the center of the room, back to the spot where it looked like a Stargate should be but wasn’t. “It’s not like we’re finding any kind of human remains. We’ve been to lots of ruins from before the last Wraith culling, and this is really no different. Except in the creepiness factor. Which is fricking off the scale.”
“Do you have a point?” McKay demanded.
“Yes! No.” John gestured in frustration. “My point is that I know for a fact that the three of us wanted to come here and investigate this place, and as soon as we started, we all changed our minds and thought it was a bad idea.” He shook his head, gesturing helplessly. “It’s oddly…odd. That’s all.”
“All right, all right.” McKay considered it, or at least pretended to consider it, it was hard for John to tell. “If that isn’t just a sign that we three have a more highly developed sense of survival than the others, what is it? What does it indicate?”
John sighed. “I don’t know. If I knew, I wouldn’t need to irritate myself by asking for your opinion.”
“Oh, well, thank you, Major! Here I was—”
Metal cracked and groaned and the floor vibrated under John’s feet. He swore, lifting the P-90, looking frantically around. From across the control chamber, Kavanagh shouted, jumping up from the console he had been digging into, staring down. John ran toward him, skidding to a halt when he saw what had caused the disturbance.
The spiral design in the center of the chamber floor was moving, becoming three-dimensional as the little metal tiles forming it shifted fluidly. The whole floor was still vibrating, making the glass and metal debris jump and dance. Something groaned again below their feet, and the spiral began to sink into the floor.
Standing at John’s elbow, McKay glared at Kavanagh, his mouth twisted in annoyance. “What did you do?”
John wasn’t thrilled either. “Some warning would have been nice, Doctor.”
Teyla and Ford watched the spiral uneasily, Kolesnikova a few steps behind them. Kavanagh shook his head, his eyes still on the metal sinking into the floor, his gaze rapt. “I wasn’t sure it was really here, if the power source was still active. If I was…imagining it…”
The groaning rumble of metal parts undisturbed for ages was growing louder, and John wasn’t sure he had heard right. “What?” he said, having to raise his voice over the din. “Why did you think you were imagining it?”
“I was imagining what?” Distracted, Rodney stepped sideways, moving along the edge of the shaft, craning his neck to watch the spiral’s progress.
“I wasn’t talking to you,” John shouted back, “I was—”
“Wait.” Rodney straightened up suddenly, looking at John. “It occurs to me that something may come out of here that could kill us.”
John swore and yelled, “Fall back, now!”
Everybody scrambled back toward the shelter of the main entrance corridor. Kavanagh didn’t move immediately but came along readily enough when Teyla took his arm and pulled him away. That was another good thing about civilians used to dealing with alien technology, John reflected, backing rapidly toward the corridor and making sure everyone was clear—when you yelled Run! no one stopped to ask why.
John halted in the shelter of the archway. The metallic groaning and thumping continued, and McKay looked at the detector again, chewing his lip. “Now I’m getting power readings,” he said, sounding peeved about it.
“Well, I assumed this wasn’t some kind of Rube Goldberg device,” John told him, watching the effect warily. He couldn’t see much from here, but it sounded like the spiral had originally been an elevator platform, and was now ponderously lowering itself down its shaft. Maybe Kavanagh had been right in the first place, and this had been a Stargate operations chamber, with the ’gate itself in a safety well on a lower level.
McKay spared John a glare. “If there’s shielding in this floor and no active power sources in any of the equipment we found, how did Kavanagh manage to activate it?”
Kavanagh stood a few steps away, staring intently at the sinking floor. John pointed out, “You could ask him.”
“I’m thinking out loud!” Rodney snapped. Asking Kavanagh for information was apparently a fate worse than death, to be resorted to only under the most extreme conditions.
Which meant John had to do it. “Kavanagh, how did you find this thing?”
He shook his head. “It was an accident. I must have triggered a circuit that still had power, even if it wasn’t showing up on the sensors.”
> The rumbling stopped. McKay consulted the detector again, brow furrowed. “Still no life signs. I am getting low-level power signatures.”
“Right.” Not taking his eyes off the dust cloud above the spiral, John said, “Teyla?”
“Yes, Major Sheppard?”
“We’re still negative on sensing any Wraith, correct?”
Teyla sounded grim. “If that changes, Major, you will be the first to know.”
“Just checking. Everybody stay where they are.”
Moving forward cautiously, John heard Kolesnikova mutter, “I want to be the first to know, I need more time for running than the rest of you.”
Ford told her, “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.”
It was the right thing to say, and Ford sounded like he believed it; John just wished they could make those kind of guarantees. Kolesnikova had told him once that it was unlucky to be Russian and to be in the Stargate program. When John had finished reading the SGC reports he had understood why. Most of the scientists, techs, and field operatives in the original Russian program had been killed. The ones who had come over to work in the SGC hadn’t fared well either.
John got close enough to look down into the spiral’s shaft. It was round and carved from the rock substructure, with bands of a dull-gray metallic material. He reached the edge, where he could shine the light on his P-90 directly down, and saw the spiral had come to rest about fifty feet below. Small lights gave off a faint blue glow. They looked like emergency lights, meant to function under low power and guide the inhabitants out in a blackout. The air coming up from the shaft was cool and dry, laced with a musty odor. Oddly, it carried that hint of rot underneath that John could smell outside. He had thought it came from dead fish or other sea life washed up along the beach, but maybe not.
Shining the light around, John saw there was actually a ladder, set in under the edge of the floor, in the wall of the shaft. It was narrow, partly carved from the rock, with metal rails and treads, and it looked stable. But that first step is still a killer. This was obviously meant for emergency use only. “Guys,” John said, “We got a bunker here.”
CHAPTER THREE
After the Genii, John regarded all bunkers with suspicion on principle, but the detector still wasn’t finding any life signs, just the low and intermittent power readings. With that evidence, it wasn’t likely anybody had survived down there; or if they had, they had long since departed the area, and maybe the planet.
John sent Ford back to the jumper for some climbing rope and carabiners, then the others stood or crouched around the opening as he, John, and Teyla rigged a safety line. They had lost enough expedition members to dangers that couldn’t be avoided; John would be damned before he lost somebody because of a stupid fall.
“That’s a waste of time,” Kavanagh said, arms folded, his face tight with impatience.
Saving John the trouble, Rodney said, “There’s no way you’re getting me or anybody else—which includes you, whether you like it or not—on that insanely narrow ladder without something to grab on to when it inevitably gives way.”
“There could be a ZPM down there. A half a dozen ZPMs,” Kavanagh snarled. “We need to get down there and find them.”
His expression deeply sardonic, McKay drew breath to answer, but Kolesnikova cut him off by pointing out mildly, “There might be a hundred ZPMs, but they aren’t going anywhere in the next fifteen minutes.”
John checked the line where it was secured to a heavy pillar supporting the gallery. He still didn’t like splitting the team, but in this case there wasn’t much choice. Besides, he could tell Kolesnikova was nervous of the whole idea, and while John was willing to drag Rodney protesting and predicting their imminent deaths into these kinds of situations, he wasn’t willing to do it to the other civilians. At the moment, when they didn’t even know if there was anything useful down there, this was for volunteers only. “Ford, you’ll stay up here with Kolesnikova. Keep up the regular updates with Boerne’s group.”
A flicker of disappointment crossed Ford’s face. The kid was the poster boy for gung-ho; he actually wanted to go down into the dark hole to see what was there and hopefully kick its ass. But he said sharply, “Yes, sir.”
Kolesnikova just nodded, relieved. John could tell she had been willing to go if ordered to, but was more than glad to stay up here. “You will call us if there is anything of interest?”
Rodney leaned over to look down the shaft, his mouth set with distaste. “Call, scream, whichever seems more appropriate at the moment.”
Climbing down one by one with the safety line clipped to a harness was slow but uneventful. John went first and checked out the bottom of the shaft with the P-90’s light while he waited for the others. There was a big space at the bottom, with eight corridors leading off it. The walls were dark gray, metal bonded to rough stone, with the little blue globe lights set high in the ceiling. It was warm, but the air wasn’t as stale as it should have been; some kind of recycling system must still be minimally functional. The odor of rot came and went, drifting on some barely existent breeze. As McKay reached the bottom and extracted himself from his harness, John said, “Searching this place may take a little longer than we thought.”
“Always look on the bright side, Major.” McKay came over to join him at the entrance to the nearest corridor, getting the detector out of a vest pocket. He checked it again, then rolled his eyes. “Except there is no bright side. Power signatures are still present but intermittent. If there is a ZPM here, it’s turned off, drained, running on minimal capacity, or actively trying to play hide and seek with us. We’re going to have to find it the hard way.”
“Color me surprised.” John tapped his headset. “Ford, can you hear me?” No answer. “Crap.” He moved back into the shaft, into the fall of light from above. Kavanagh was nearly down, and Teyla was starting her climb, moving lightly and easily down the awkward ladder. “Ford?” he tried again.
The radio responded immediately, “Here, Major.”
“It looks like the shielding up there is interfering with our communications. We’ll come back here and check in on the hour.”
“Yes, sir. Be careful down there.”
McKay picked a corridor before Kavanagh could dispute the selection. John led the way, putting Teyla at their six. “The construction is more primitive down here than on the upper levels,” Kavanagh pointed out, as John moved his light over the walls and ceiling.
“More support for my theory.” McKay said this in a little singsong, calculated to drive Kavanagh insane.
It worked. “Your theory is crap,” Kavanagh snapped, his eyes on his own detector. “It could have been built later, when their resources started to fail.”
“Kids, don’t make me separate you,” John said, keeping his attention on the corridor ahead. “Or beat you unconscious.” Privately, he thought Rodney was right. The blue light gave everything a spooky glow, but their flashlights showed that the metallic material in the walls was rougher, with rivets and seams. There were gray-green patches that might be some kind of mold, creeping in wherever the metal met stone.
“It is very odd,” Teyla said from behind them. “There is just something that is not…”
Something that’s not right, John finished. Yeah, that too. He found himself straining to listen, but all he could hear were their own movements and the whisper of air in ancient vents.
About twenty paces down the corridor the walls widened into a large circular chamber, with the walkway forming a bridge across a lower level. The platform held a couple of big work stations, the screens shattered and the metal melted from a blast by an energy weapon. Warily, John flashed the P-90’s light across the level below, but all he could see were closed metal doors, three on each side.
Kavanagh immediately went to the first console, wrenching the top off and asking Teyla to hold a light for him. “Don’t touch anything without gloves,” he told them.
“No, really?” McKay said, p
laying his flashlight over the rubble. “I’ll try to resist the urge to lick the debris.”
John looked down into the well, at the nearest door. Something about this setup gave him a bad feeling. Maybe it was for storage. Volatile materials, something else that needed to be monitored. He looked at Kavanagh, intent on the damaged equipment, Teyla holding the light but still surveying the room warily, and Rodney, who was balancing his flashlight with the detector. The blue light washed out color and bleached skin, making them all look like they had drowned in cold water. John said, “Let’s check this out.”
Rodney just nodded grimly.
The metal steps creaked as they climbed down. John picked a door at random, standing back ready to fire, waiting for McKay to open it. But the circular handle was too stiff for McKay to wrench open on his own. John still felt uneasy about taking both hands off his weapon to help, even with no life signs on McKay’s detector. He was glad Teyla was up on the gallery above them, keeping watch.
John had to put his shoulder to the handle, with McKay hauling from the other side before it squeaked hesitantly into motion. “I saw this in a movie once,” Rodney said through gritted teeth. “Everybody died.”
“I saw this in fifty movies, and it’s never a great idea,” John told him, his voice grating as he struggled with the wheel. He felt the click as it finally gave way and the heavy door shifted a little.
McKay backed away as John swung the P-90 up and pulled the door open. He flashed the light on a little cell, maybe ten by ten, bare stone walls streaked with mold.
The air was dead and stale inside, but it had been so many years the odor of rot was just a ghost, barely enough to make John wince. He was pretty sure he knew what the crumpled little bundle in the corner was.
He stepped inside reluctantly, pausing to note there was no mechanism to open the door, no handle, button, or lever, from the inside. Moving closer he saw the skull and the rib bones, lying in a pile of residue that was all that was left of the rest of the body, flesh and clothing rotted together. “Don’t touch it, or get too close,” Rodney cautioned him from the door, low-voiced. “Sometimes there’s still bacteria, even after years of being sealed in like this. You could get a fungus.”