by Martha Wells
“Oh, I don’t know.” From his voice, Rodney was giving this serious consideration. “Not in the ruins. Down by the beach, maybe? I think that would be nice.”
Listening to the detailed plans for the funeral that John was apparently going to hold in his copious spare time after Rodney died later that day was better than listening to unintelligible whispers from the ZPM. John choked about half the water down, made Rodney drink the rest, and by that time the detector showed the Koan life signs moving back down below the surface.
When the detector and John’s instinct said it was clear, they found their way back to the little elevator, went through the side panel, and started up the ladder. John reached the intensely dusty cubby at the top, sitting on the edge while below him McKay climbed awkwardly, the ZPM clutched under one arm. A little daylight leaked through from a sliding panel that no longer fit properly, enough to tell him that they were on the surface. Then he froze, listening. He could hear voices. Shrill voices, like people in pain, murmuring in a language he couldn’t understand. “What the hell is that?”
“What the hell is what?” McKay said from below, breathless with the effort of the climb. “Would you please consider giving me a hand with this thing?”
John braced his leg across the opening and reached down to help, just as McKay’s hand slipped. John caught his arm with one hand, grabbed the ZPM that was slipping out of his grip with the other.
As John deposited the ZPM safely on the floor, McKay got a better grip on the ladder and pulled himself up. “Okay, that was scary, but I have to admit you really do have some tactile control with those things.”
“What?” John stared at him. McKay was thoughtfully rubbing his arm just below the sleeve of his shirt, and John realized that he had grabbed him with his claws out. But the skin wasn’t broken, just dented. He was more worried about the voices. “Don’t you hear that?” he demanded.
“Hear what?” McKay looked at him for a long moment, though it must be hard for him to see in the near darkness. “Major, it’s quiet out there.”
John swallowed in a dry throat. Oh, this isn’t good. At least these voices drowned out the whispering ZPM. “Seriously?”
“Seriously.” McKay was regarding him worriedly. “What do you hear?”
“Just people…screaming, and…things. And the ZPM’s been talking to me.” Knowing you were going to go crazy was one thing; having it actually happening right this moment was really another.
McKay nodded slowly. “Okay.” His mouth twisted, and he rubbed his forehead. “Okay. Okay. I have to stop saying okay. Let’s just…try to get out of this closet.”
John helped him push the panels apart, squeezing his eyes shut. With his eyes closed, the voices were worse, coming together in a growing swell of shrill sound. But trying to open his eyes was like being stabbed in the head. As McKay stepped out of the shaft, John followed him, but he kept a hand pressed over his eyes. “I can’t see out here.”
“It’s barely dawn.” He heard Rodney’s steps on the gritty floor, pacing back and forth nervously, nearly drowned out by the rising noise. “Wait, wait. I’m going to go see if I can find something you can use.”
John sank down beside the wall, barely hearing him over the voices. This is not going to work, he thought, resting his aching head in his hands. He fumbled the bloody bandana out of his pocket and got it tied around his forehead, the dark fabric blocking out some of the piercing light. He could live with not being able to see if he could just shut that noise out of his brain. Just for one minute. Just for one second.
John wasn’t sure how long Rodney was gone. It took all his concentration just to keep still, not to start screaming himself. Finally over the cacophony he heard, “Major! Major, here, I found a pair of sunglasses.”
It still took John moments to realize what they were when McKay put them in his hand. He squeezed his eyes shut and pushed the bandana up far enough to fumble the glasses on. He opened his eyes cautiously. He could see. It was bright, achingly bright, but the glasses helped. Now he just needed ear plugs. Mental ear plugs. Or a lobotomy. He could really go for one of those at the moment. He pushed unsteadily to his feet.
“Those are Boerne’s.” Something in McKay’s voice made John focus on him. McKay looked sick. “I found him. What was left of him, near where we camped last night. It must have been the Koan. His clothes were nearby, and those were in the pocket. Just him, not Corrigan or—God, what’s his name? The kid, the Asian Marine kid—”
“Kinjo,” John supplied automatically. Rodney’s voice was very far away and John could barely understand him over the roar of sound.
“Right, they weren’t there. Dorane must have taken him and Corrigan. They didn’t have the gene or the therapy, did they? Just Boerne.”
“Rodney, I can’t—I have to go.” The voices were rising into a crescendo and John was terrified of what would happen for the finale. He might be crazy, but he didn’t want to hurt Rodney.
“Major, don’t! I can help you.” Rodney reached for his arm and John stepped sideways away from him, moving so fast Rodney flinched.
“You have to get out of here. I can’t—” Waves of sound were crashing in his head with hurricane intensity, drowning out his thoughts. John held on just long enough to dump the pack off his shoulder, stooping to set the pistol on top of it. Then he ran.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“How did they take the operations tower so quickly?” Carson Beckett asked in frustration. It was really a rhetorical question. They were losing Atlantis, and there was nothing he could do but look over Radek Zelenka’s shoulder and go mad with worry.
There were only three casualties in the medlab so far: two botanists with minor injuries who had managed to escape their lab moments before the alien what’s-its had arrived, and a badly wounded Marine. Sergeant Bates had dragged him through the corridor access doors just before Radek had sealed off this section. Dr. Sayyar was tending to him, leaving Carson with nothing to do but fret. They had all heard the shooting and the calls for help before the radios had gone dead, and Carson knew there must be wounded all through the upper levels of the operations tower; they just couldn’t bloody get to them. First Rodney, Sheppard, Irina, and Boerne are killed, Carson thought, sickened. They had barely begun to reel from that disaster. Now we’re inches from losing the whole city.
Zelenka looked up from the laptop to gesture helplessly. “The aliens must have come back on the jumpers sent to rescue supposed refugees, but I do not understand how they took over our systems so quickly. It’s as if they had all our security codes.”
Carson nodded bleakly. Zelenka had set up his equipment in the back research bay, and Carson wasn’t certain what he was doing, but it was keeping the invaders out of the medlab’s section. The other scientists were ransacking the medlab’s emergency stores, trying to put together things they could use for weapons, booby traps to protect the corridor. Besides Bates, only two other members of the expedition’s small military contingent had made it here; they were Marines who had been patrolling the edge of the city’s secure area and had barely made it to the lab before Radek had had to seal the corridor. Carson was badly afraid that the others were lying dead in the ’gate room, where the attack had begun. “Security codes,” he said, mostly to himself. “You don’t think this Dorane got them out of Rodney or Sheppard somehow?” He didn’t feel particularly hopeful; it might mean the story about the Wraith was so much rubbish, but it didn’t mean that Dorane hadn’t killed both men.
Radek winced, but before he could answer, the Atlantean com system clicked on and Carson heard a woman’s voice saying, “—try it now, it should be through to the medlab—”
Startled and hopeful, Radek said, “Dr. Simpson, is that you?”
But it was Elizabeth’s voice that replied, “This is Weir—”
Carson asked urgently, “Elizabeth, are you all right?”
Then Bates pushed in from the other bay, cutting through the confusion to demand, �
��Dr. Weir, what’s your situation?”
Elizabeth’s voice was rushed but calm. “I’m in the small science meeting room below the operations level, with Simpson and some of the operations staff. Simpson’s managed to keep them from getting the door open.” She took a sharp breath. “It was Dorane. Sending the jumpers back to the repository was a trap. And he’s done something to our people. Ford, Teyla, Kavanagh, and the two jumper crews who came back with the aliens are obeying him like robots, like they were under some kind of mental control. They captured the ’gate room before we even knew the aliens were here. I don’t know how he’s—”
The com cut off. “Dr. Weir!” Bates shouted. There was no response.
“My God,” Radek muttered into the sudden silence, sounding horrified. “That explains the codes. If he is controlling our people…”
Bates’ face could have been carved from stone. He turned to Carson, asking, “Do you know what would cause that?”
“Son, I don’t have a bloody clue.” He wondered if the man could handle this. He had briefly wondered the same thing about Sheppard, until the Major had taken a team to a hive ship and brought all their missing people back, except for Colonel Sumner and one of the Athosians. After that, Carson hadn’t wondered. And he knew Bates could be something of a bastard, but no one in his right mind would want Sheppard’s job, and Bates certainly didn’t look as if he wanted it now. He explained, “I need data, something to work with. If we could get one of the affected people down here—”
“That’s not an option at the moment, Doctor,” Bates snapped. One of the Marines called for him and he walked away toward the main part of the lab.
“He is afraid,” Zelenka murmured, turning back to the laptop. “It is bad enough that Dorane could take hostages. If he can send our own people to fight us…”
“Aye,” Carson answered, not wanting to hear the rest of it aloud. “It scares me, too.”
John came back to himself leaning against the rough warm trunk of a tree, at the edge of the forest that lay past the Star-gate’s platform. Breathing hard, almost sobbing, he realized he couldn’t hear anything except the rush of the surf. That… was freaky, he thought, cautiously glad he could think at all. He pushed off from the tree, his legs still shaky from adrenaline overload, the puncture wounds from the Koan throbbing painfully. Dry leaves crackled under his boots, reassuringly normal. The breeze was sweet and cool, and birds were singing somewhere in the forest, the song a strange mix of familiar and exotic. He could see the ocean through the scattered trees, where the land curved around to embrace the bay. It wasn’t long after dawn. I’m running around blind—literally if I lose these glasses—on an alien world. That’s incredibly stupid.
Without that cacophony in his head, he could think now. I didn’t imagine that. It was there. It had been as real as a punch in the gut. As a whole lot of punches in the gut. He looked back toward the dead city, the dark shape of the repository looming over it. It had been like a mental broadcast that only he—and the Koan?—could hear.
Dorane had said he had developed his own altered version of the ATA gene. And on their first night here McKay had talked about a theory, that the people who had taken over the repository after the Ancients had tried to imitate the Ancient Technology Activation, and that the differences in their version of whatever field it broadcast was what was making the people with the gene and the ATA therapy feel so uneasy.
Rodney was right again, damn him. Then, Crap, I left him alone.
Cursing himself and Dorane and this planet and life in general in the Pegasus Galaxy under his breath, John started back inland, moving along the edge of the forest toward the Stargate.
He moved quietly by habit, walking in the short yellow grass, sticking to the shadow of the trees. After a couple of hundred yards, he felt a tingling in the back of his neck and knew there was a Koan nearby. Oh great, I can sense them. Rodney was right about that, too, John growled mentally, turning back under the shadow of the trees. He didn’t have time for this.
He circled around, then saw a shape ahead, crouched at the base of a tree.
It was facing away from him, looking toward the city, a slight figure in a rough sleeveless tunic. It was also wearing a hooded wrap, a fold of fabric pulled forward to shield its face, and its hair was long and silver-gray, collected in a neat braid that hung down its back. And there was something else on its face, too. Fascinated, John stepped forward and a dry twig shifted under his boot.
The figure shot to its feet in alarm, causing John to leap backward from pure adrenaline. It was a Koan; he could see the silvery mottling on its bare arms and chest, the spines on its ears as its hood fell back. It was wearing a pair of primitive goggles, the lenses tinted dark. Instead of attacking him it scrambled back in confusion and bolted away through the trees.
Well, that was different, John thought, staring after it.
He studied the ground, kicking aside dead leaves and twigs, and something rolled free. Slowly, John picked it up.
It was a wooden tube, with a braided cord strap for carrying, with little decorative bands inset with bits of polished rock or shell. He turned it over, looked down one of the open ends and realized he was holding a telescope. The lens was colored with some kind of amber pigment. John peered through it, found it too dark, and had to cautiously lift up his sunglasses to see through it. Turning toward the city, he could see the repository’s main entrance from here, though he couldn’t make out much detail.
He lowered the telescope, looking off into the quiet forest. He didn’t need Corrigan to tell him a species composed entirely of animalistic psychopaths didn’t figure out how to grind lenses or make eye protection against the daylight.
So they aren’t all crazy. Over the years some of the Koan must have escaped Dorane’s influence, traveled away from the ruined city, reinvented some kind of life for themselves. And Dorane had said the Ancients had tried to stabilize the Koan’s genetic changes. Maybe they had succeeded, and it had just taken a few generations or so to show up. And Dorane had been too bent on revenge by that point to notice, or care. John looked back at the city. If the ones still inside hear those voices, that noise, all the time… No wonder they were nuts.
John found a branch at about eye level and hung the telescope on it, so the guy could find it if he came back. He searched himself for something else to leave and came up with a power bar wrapper he had shoved in his pocket by habit. He attached it to the branch next to the telescope, It wasn’t much of a way of conveying “I come in peace, sorry I scared the crap out of you” but it was all he had. He could, at least, say it to McKay.
John found Rodney trudging doggedly across the plain between the city and the Stargate, the pack slung over his shoulders, carrying the ZPM. His shirt was stained with sweat and his face red from exertion. He knew Rodney wasn’t in that bad a shape; he must have chased John most of the way through the city before having to give up. As John jogged toward him Rodney stopped, waiting for him to approach, regarding him hopefully. Reaching him, John said, “Sorry. Had a moment back there. Want me to carry that?”
“Yes.” Rodney handed the ZPM over with a gasp of relief.
John hefted the ZPM against his chest. It felt inert, like a kitchen appliance, and not like a subspace power source that when fully charged made a nuclear bomb look like a popgun. It whispered to him again, but this time, without Dorane’s dying technology screaming in his head, he understood it. It was speaking in something that was more like musical notes than words, but he knew it was saying that it was at minimal capacity, and needed maintenance. It was a reassuringly ordinary thing for a ZPM to say, if you thought about it.
They walked for a few moments, and John cleared his throat. “I think I know why the Koan are crazy. It’s got something to do with Dorane trying to create his own version of the ATA gene. Even with everything broken and powered down, something in that equipment in there is still broadcasting, and once he gives you his Koan gene retrovirus, it gets
louder and louder until it’s screaming in your head. You were right, that was probably what was making us feel so weird when we first got here. Why we thought the place was creepy. Why I kept smelling rot and dead things when nobody else did.”
McKay nodded, wiping his forehead off on his arm. He took it all in like they were sitting around in a lab or conference room talking about how the puddlejumper’s propulsion system worked. “Because of the gene and the ATA therapy, we were subliminally conscious of it but couldn’t sense it well enough to be more than minimally affected.”
“Right. It didn’t really hit me until we got to the surface. Once I got far enough away from it, I could think again.” John shrugged awkwardly. “And I saw another Koan out there. He was watching the city and ran off when he saw me. So some of them must have escaped over time, and, you know, got over it. They probably saw the jumper land and they’ve been watching us from a distance ever since.”
“Sensible of them.” McKay took a deep breath. “All that aside, I had an idea. If we find the ’gate is actually locked against any destination except Atlantis, we can transmit a message with the MALP. If you can convince Dorane that you want to join him, he may open the shield for us. Then when we get there, you can shoot him. We’ll still have to do something about all the Koan, but if he’s not there to control them, it should be a little easier.”
John lifted his brows. It wasn’t exactly the best plan ever, but they didn’t have a lot of options. “Okay, so he figures I’m due for a psychotic break around about now and believes me. But suppose he doesn’t care how his experiment on me turned out. He’s got plenty of Koan already; what do I tell him I have that he might want?”
Rodney smiled, a weird combination of his normal smug expression and a look of resignation and terror. “Me.”
Any stairs or ramp that had led up to the Stargate platform had been a casualty of the bombing, and the scramble up the resulting pile of rock and rubble was not made any easier by the ZPM. John and McKay reached the top without dropping it or breaking their own necks. The MALP still sat to one side of the platform, coated with a layer of blown sand but otherwise unharmed.