by Martha Wells
Then Ronon said, "What's that?"
John pulled himself out of the bubble. "What?"
"Right there." Ronon leaned over to point, so John could sight along his arm.
It was a structure, standing on the plaza about midway around the Mirror, a couple of hundred yards from the frame. It was dark-colored like the stone, making it hard to spot. It had curving sides, the walls shaded from black to blue to near purple at the round base; John judged it was about the size of a two story house. It looked like a giant inverted tulip. He shook his head. "I don't know. Some kind of observatory?"
Miko stepped up beside him, adjusting her glasses to peer at it. "It could be, but it doesn't resemble the main structure. The shape is very. .. and..." She trailed off, leaning forward to stare intently at the little building. "Dr. McKay, Dr. Zelenka, please, look at this."
John's brow furrowed. "What?"
Zelenka stepped up beside Miko, peering uncertainly. "That ...is a spaceship."
"What?" Rodney's annoyance fled as he stepped up to the port. "Right, those are drive pods. It's just hard to tell because they're vertical and-" He stared, his jaw dropping. "Wait, wait, what?"
"But it doesn't look anything like the jumpers," John said. He was beginning to get that feeling, that feeling that things were about to take a very bad turn. "How do you go from square box to giant tulip?"
"There could be variations, among different Ancient cultures, as there is between Atlantis and some of the other sites we have found," Zelenka said uncertainly. "Corrigan or one of the other archeologists might be able to say."
"Or it could be alien," John said. Yeah, he had a bad feeling about this. Rodney was still staring at the ship, his face rapt.
Teyla was trying to listen while keeping an eye on the corridor. "But it has been here since this place was abandoned." No one answered her and she added with some concern, "Has it not?"
Rodney, Zelenka, and Miko didn't answer, and Ronon was watching John, a wary line between his brows. Then something flashed along the Mirror's frame, and the port suddenly grayed out into an opaque metal shield. John stepped back, startled. "What-"
"That was a discharge from the Mirror," Rodney said, looking toward the consoles. "The port must be responding to it. But it doesn't seem to be-"
John looked up at a muted rumble, like thunder; he felt it roll through the structure, shaking the stone and metal underfoot, vibrating through his bones. Ronon twitched uneasily.
Nervously, Rodney finished, "-serious. On the other hand-"
"Okay, that's it," John began, "We're-"
An alarm klaxon blared and John jerked up his P-90 in pure startled reflex as everyone else flinched. "-leaving," he finished. "What the hell?"
"It's a security system," Rodney bellowed over the noise, looking around the room in frustration. "Did one of you touch something?"
Teyla shook her head, wincing at the noise, and Zelenka and Miko held up empty hands. Ronon was staring back down the corridor. John had been facing away from the port, and he knew none of the others had moved. He said, "Nobody touched anything. We need to get out of here, move, now!"
Teyla headed for the corridor as John swept out an arm to herd Zelenka and Kusanagi after her. But Ronon stepped into their path to stop them, his face urgent. "Do you hear that? That crashing?"
Teyla's face went still with concentration, her head tilted as she listened. Rodney was looking at the detector, saying, "Still no life signs. The system must have been on some kind of delay. Opening the outer door should have triggered-"
"Shut up for a second!" John told him. In another moment he heard it too: in between each deep blare of the alarm, there was a heavy metallic thud. "Oh crap," he breathed.
Rodney was looking at him, eyes wide in alarm. "Blast doors. The blast doors are closing!"
John ducked out into the corridor. The nearest blast doors hadn't shut, but the metallic thuds were closer, the echo carrying all through the building. "Ronon, which way is it coming from?" he shouted. If the doors were closing sequentially in one direction, they had a chance.
Ronon went still and cocked his head. "That way," he said a moment later, pointing to the right, the direction they had come from. The direction of the nearest stairwell. That really wasn't what John wanted to hear.
He yelled, "Run the other way, go, go," and gave Ronon a shove to tell him to take the lead.
Ronon bolted and John waved the others after him. He took their six, wanting to make sure Miko didn't fall behind. But she took off like an Olympic sprinter, keeping up with Teyla and Rodney easily, and it was only Zelenka that John had to worry about.
Another discharge shook the floor underfoot, slowing them down. They made it about fifty yards down the corridor when John heard the metallic thuds become exponentially louder. He threw a glance over his shoulder in time to see a green metal blast door slide up to hit the ceiling, just at the curve of the corridor. He swore, turning back, and Zelenka panted, "What?"
"Just run," John said, but he didn't hear the next thud until ten seconds later, and that was just after Ronon shouted, "Stairs!"
We can make it, John thought, and grabbed Zelenka's arm, urging him along.
Then a green wall slammed upward just in front of Ronon, so abruptly he bounced off it before he could stop. The others slid to an abrupt halt, and John whirled around in time to see the blast door just behind them thumping into place. Rodney was shouting, "They closed out of sequence! Dammit-"
"Rodney!" John said through gritted teeth. "Think of something."
Breathing hard, Zelenka stepped to the blast door, pulling out his tablet again, studying it intently. "Door is solid mass. This is not good."
John looked back. Miko was frantically running her hands over the other door. She said, "There are no controls here-" Ronon growled and slammed his hand against the stone.
"Wait, wait, wait!" Rodney bellowed. In the immediate silence, he pressed a hand to his forehead and said thickly, "This is a safety feature."
"Yes, but we did not know what to do, where to go, when the alarm went off," Teyla said, turning to study the walls uneasily.
Exasperated, John began, "It trapped us here-"
"It stopped us here," Rodney snapped. "We were nearly to the stairs and it stopped us-" He halted abruptly, his eyes narrowing.
Getting it an instant later, John said, "Because there's a closer exit in this section."
Zelenka and Miko were already converging on Rodney, Zelenka saying rapidly, "It should have opened automatically-"
"The mechanism could be damaged-" Miko added.
"Look for seams in the outer wall," Rodney finished.
John scrambled with the others, running his hands over the stone, down the metal bands. It felt like forever but it must have been only a few moments before Teyla said, "Here!"
Rodney practically flung her out of the way, running his hand down the band. "It's not responding. Colonel-"
John stepped forward, pressing his hand to the band, but he didn't think this was a natural Ancient gene thing. The doors below had responded easily to Rodney's artificial gene, and there was no reason these should be different. The band didn't budge. "No, nothing," he said tightly.
"The crystals must be damaged," Rodney snarled, elbowing John out of the way.
Miko dropped to the floor, unslinging her pack and pulling out tools to hand Rodney and Zelenka as they pried at the band.
John felt another low rumble travel through the build ing. He saw Rodney throw a worried look at the ceiling. It would be just our luck that this place picks now to collapse, John thought sourly. Then a section of the band popped open, revealing the Ancient control crystals set into the deceptively simple matrix. Zelenka pointed, agitated. "There, there!" Rodney said, "I know, I know!" and rapidly switched around three of the crystals.
A section of the inner wall next to the band slid sideways, releasing a puff of stale displaced air. Inside was a circular shaft like the one they had found i
n the stairwell. The blue and silver light strips flickered on.
"The readings say the transporter effect should be working," Miko reported tensely, studying the tablet's readout.
Rodney fumbled in the pockets of his tac vest. "Hold on, I'll test it."
Ronon said, "I'll do it," and stepped into the shaft. Rodney gasped in alarm and John and Teyla both lunged for Ronon, but he had already vanished. "Ronon!" John yelled.
"It works!" Ronon's voice echoed up from below. "There's a door down here."
John swore, Teyla rolled her eyes incredulously, and Zelenka and Miko exchanged an appalled look. Rodney clapped a hand to his forehead and said, "That was not what I had in mind."
"Just go, come on, one at a time," John said. Miko went first, gripping her pack tightly, then Rodney shoved Zelenka in and jumped after him. John gave Teyla a nod, telling her to go next. He had one hand on the edge of the doorway, ready to step in, when a gleam of light caught his eye.
There was a small silver disk high up on the wall, standing out and angled so it was pointing at him. He froze for an instant, because he was damn sure it hadn't been there a few minutes ago when they had been frantically searching for the way out.
He took a half-step toward it. Then from the transporter shaft, Rodney shouted, "Colonel!"
John shook himself, recalling that he didn't have time for checking out mysterious objects, and stepped into the shaft.
CHAPTER THREE
ohn suddenly found himself standing at the bottom of the shaft, facing Rodney. Rodney yelped and flinched backward, then shouted, "What the hell took you so long?"
John shook his head; they used the transporters constantly in Atlantis, the size of the city made it impossible not to. But without the cushioning effect of the chamber it was just as disorienting as being grabbed suddenly by the Daedalus' Asgard transport beam.
This part of the shaft opened up into a larger well, with a darker green circle on the floor, which probably marked the space it was a bad idea to stand in if more people were coming down. The others were backed against the wall, watching Zelenka and Miko work on an open panel. John stepped out of the circle, just in case the transporter decided to reverse abruptly, and said, "I thought I saw something." He jerked his chin toward the door. "Can we get out of here?"
"Working on it!" Rodney snapped, turning back to the panel. He took Miko by the shoulders and shifted her out of the way.
"What did you see?" Teyla asked John, brows lifted.
"Something came out of the wall," he told her. "A little thing, angled like it was pointing at us."
Ronon looked up toward the top of the shaft. "A weapon?"
John shook his head. "No way to tell. Could have been a camera, too." All three of them pivoted, checking the walls. John couldn't see anything like it down here, but with the blue-green lights and the strips of embossed metal that might be decorative or something to do with the transporter function, there were too many places for a tiny device to hide. He added, "Whatever it was, it could've just been automatically tracking our movements."
"Or something could be watching us," Ronon added.
Teyla shook her head, though she still looked uneasy. "The life signs detector showed nothing."
"But this structure is very large," Miko put in, glancing back at them and adjusting her glasses. "And the shielding is unusual. If someone was several sections away, I'm not sure the detector would find him."
They all looked at her. "Oh," John said, turning that unpleasant thought over. Considering they had no idea if the ship near the Mirror was Ancient or not, if it had been here since the Mirror had been abandoned or since yesterday, it wasn't encouraging. "Great."
Zelenka was saying, "Ah, here, relay is damaged-"
"Got it!" Rodney stepped back from the panel, lifting the mask part of his SCBA unit. "Everyone put your breathing gear back on. This system was designed to get people out of this structure as quickly as possible if the Mirror destabilized. We could run into something that might pop us right outside."
"Important safety tip. Thanks, Rodney." John adjusted his breathing unit, made certain everyone else had theirs on, then gave Rodney the nod to open the door.
Rodney made a last adjustment to the crystals and the door slid sideways. The first thing John noticed was that the door itself was nearly a foot thick, as heavy as the blast doors. The second was that the large room it opened into was not the ground floor corridor he had been expecting to see.
The ceiling was lower and instead of the dark indigo stone, the walls were the metallic blue-green, with more strips of the tiny blue lights. Most of the illumination came from square pillars, set with blocky white glowing fixtures, not unlike the ones in Atlantis. But the lights toward the back of the room weren't on, leaving most of it in shadow.
John stepped through the doorway cautiously. He really didn't like not knowing where they were in relation to the jumper. "Rodney?" he said. "Any thoughts?"
Rodney stepped up next to him, saying uncertainly, "I have no idea. I thought we were on the first level."
"Yeah." John thought, we jumped into a strange transporter and we have no idea where it took us. Good one, John. "But we could hear Ronon when he called up the shaft. If this isn't the ground floor, then it has to be above or below it. It couldn't have taken us to another building." He added uneasily, "Or, you know, planet." Don 't let it be another planet.
"Unless there was a communications device in the shaft that was transmitting his voice back to us," Rodney said. John stared at him, appalled. Rodney added hurriedly, "But what's more likely is that we're a level or two below ground. Think about it: escaping a massive energy discharge by running outside the structure into the open is not the best option. It's more likely that there's a protected escape route down here." He looked around, brow creased in worry. "Somewhere."
"Okay, that is more likely," John admitted. He glanced back at the others. Teyla and Ronon had stepped out behind him, and were gazing around the room suspiciously, flashing their lights into the shadows. Zelenka and Kusanagi had put their tools back in their packs and were anxiously watching him. "It's okay. This happens all the time," John told them, judging this was a good time to throw honesty out the window and concentrate on reassurance.
"It does?" Ronon commented skeptically.
"Yes. Yes, it does," Teyla said, spearing him with a look. She turned to give Radek and Miko a reassuring smile, adding, "We need only look for the way to the surface."
"Right." John turned back to the shadowy room. "Stay together."
There was an open triangular archway at the back of the chamber, leading to an almost identical space, but unlit. John had thought the lights would come on once they got into the darkened section; they did in Atlantis, responding to any movement now that they had been initialized by the Ancient gene. But the pillar-lights here stayed dark. "That's not good," John commented, carefully examining the walls with his P-90's light while Zelenka and Kusanagi got out flashlights. He didn't see anything like a console to turn the lights on manually, either.
"This area must have taken some damage," Rodney agreed sourly, looking from the life signs detector to his tablet. "Everybody turn on your breathing units; there's a strong flow of air, but this section isn't holding pressure." He tucked the tablet under his arm and switched on his own unit, looking up with a wince. "I hope our hypothetical escape route doesn't need power."
"Great," John muttered, switching his unit on. He caught a worried look from Teyla. Yeah, they were potentially in a lot of trouble here. They had about an hour's worth of air in each tank, which had seemed like a lot when they had had a clear path back to the jumper.
Rodney said uneasily, "At least the chamber at the bottom of the shaft is pressurized, if we, ah..." He tapped the strap of his breathing tank significantly.
John just said, "Right," and picked up the pace. The air at the bottom of the shaft might keep them alive, but staying there didn't exactly offer a lot of options fo
r searching for the way out.
They went through three more rooms and a couple of corridors, all unlit. Then the escape route stopped being hypothetical, but might as well have been mythological for all the good it was going to do them. Their lights had started to find cracks in the walls and the floor had become grainy with dirt and pebbles. Then they found the tumble of rock blocking the end of the next large room. Rodney swore, and John agreed, "Yeah, this sucks."
"But look at this," Teyla said, directing her light toward the far wall. There was a narrow silver track set into the floor, partially concealed by dust and rubble.
"Huh, that's intriguing," Rodney muttered, starting toward it. John used his longer legs to get there first, sweeping his light around to check the ceiling for any sign of imminent collapse. It looked like the wall had buckled, the rock pushing through the metal panels and piling up on the floor, but the roof hadn't given way and didn't look inclined to it. Rodney moved back and forth, his flashlight flickering around impatiently, picking out a large rounded shape buried under the rubble. "There's something under here, some kind of small underground vehicle. It must use that track-"
"What, like a little subway?" John asked.
Rodney waved his hands. "Yes, that is what an underground vehicle would be called, yes. But it's obvious this is-
"Perhaps it goes to the spaceport," Miko said, standing on tiptoes to see as she stood next to John. She had apparently taken the order to not get ahead of the military personnel literally, and he sure as hell wasn't going to fault her for it.
"Yes, exactly." Zelenka crouched with his flashlight, trying to get a better look at the smashed metal and glass under the rocks. "If this is escape route, it would make the most sense for the subway to head directly there, at very high speed. And it could have a self-contained power source, like a jumper, and wouldn't be affected by power loss in the main complex, as a transporter would."