by Martha Wells
“Communications system?” That was the best news John had heard all day. Their radios might not be able to punch through the shielding and electromagnetic interference, but John bet an Ancient communications setup would. “Look, we were attacked on the way in here by some kind of aliens, creatures, something. Three of our people are still up on the surface, and we can’t reach them with our radios to warn them.”
“The Koan,” Dorane said with a grimace of distaste. “I had hoped they were dead, after all this time. Yes, the communications system is there.” He didn’t look or gesture or anything else, but a metal section of the wall slid aside, and a light flickered on, revealing a cubby with a circular console. It looked a little battered, not as pristine as the Ancient equipment in Atlantis, but John could see lights and readouts blinking on as the system powered up. “We are safe enough in here. All entrances to this lab area are sealed blast doors.”
“So you really are an Ancient?” Kavanagh said, getting to his feet and stepping up to the console. “You lived in Atlantis?”
“I don’t think of myself as ancient,” Dorane said, a little bemused as Kavanagh beat McKay to the console and took a seat there. “I did live in Atlantis, very long ago.”
“Do the Koan go up on the surface?” Teyla asked, watching Dorane carefully. “We had seen no sign of them before this.”
Dorane gestured helplessly, shaking his head. “They were nocturnal creatures and didn’t go to the surface during the day, but that was when they first came here.” He looked bleakly at John. “I thought their species would have died off by now.”
John nodded, relieved. It wasn’t midday yet, and Corrigan and the others would be outside, searching through the ruins; that gave them a little time. He said, “Kavanagh, if you can’t get them on their headsets, try to call the jumper.”
Dorane looked up, lifting his brows. “The what?”
“The ships that can dial the ’gate.” McKay made gestures indicating something vaguely square.
Dorane lifted his brows. “Ah, you have a gateship from Atlantis.”
McKay threw John a dark look. “I told you we should have called them gateships.”
. “Nobody cares,” John told him firmly. He answered Dorane, “That was the only way to use your Stargate. The dialing console isn’t there anymore.”
Dorane shook his head, smiling in bitter amusement. “I wondered why I had no visitors. I had begun to fear that the Wraith had eliminated all human life in this galaxy.” He hesitated. “As I said, I have lost track of the time. How long has it been?”
“It’s been ten thousand years,” McKay told him. “We have no idea what happened to the Ancients after they went to Earth. We have theories that they either died out or ascended at some point after that time, but there’s no proof.” Dorane looked up, startled, and McKay winced in sympathy. Low-voiced, he added to John, “This is a little awkward. I can see now why Elizabeth usually wants to handle anything more complicated than ‘We come in peace and would like to trade with you for food and/or ZPMs.’”
Dorane was staring at nothing, shaken. He looked weary and old. “I see,” he said finally. He shook his head and looked up, obviously making himself smile. “Then you are…our descendants. The children of my people.”
“In a way. Some of us more than others.” McKay asked Dorane, “Did the Ancients—your people—build this place? We thought it resembled an Ancient meeting place and repository in our own galaxy.”
“Yes, we were building it with the help of the Thesians. They had agreed to be the caretakers of it, and they came from their own world to build a colony here and to aid us in constructing our athenaeum,” Dorane explained. He looked away, his jaw set. “Then the Wraith came.”
Teyla nodded in resignation, and John exchanged a grim look with McKay. The Wraith always came.
“But why did you stay here?” Kolesnikova asked in the sudden silence. “After the attack, I mean. You didn’t know the dialing device was gone, so you never tried to leave? Were all the puddlejumpers—gateships—destroyed?”
“They were destroyed. But it didn’t matter. I had nowhere to go,” Dorane said simply. “The last message I received from Atlantis was that they were also under attack and could not come to our aid. I knew they meant to abandon the city if the Wraith’s advance continued. After the attack, when they never came here or tried to communicate, I knew they were gone.” He shrugged, glancing at Kolesnikova with a smile. “I know it sounds odd, and perhaps I am odd, after this long time of sleep and waiting. But if I didn’t go to Atlantis, I couldn’t find them dead. I could think of them as safe, somewhere.”
Kolesnikova nodded slowly. John thought he understood what Dorane meant, it just wasn’t a course of action that would ever have appealed to him, under any circumstances. Kolesnikova asked suddenly, “Why didn’t you ascend?” Dorane stared at her, startled, and she actually blushed a little. “I’m sorry, but we know many of the Ancients ascended, either before or after leaving this galaxy.”
Dorane hesitated, and John squashed the urge to intervene. It was probably a very personal question to ask on short acquaintance, but he thought they needed to know the answer. Then Dorane smiled, a little bemused. “I preferred to live and hope.” He shrugged. “Hope that my people would return with a way to destroy the Wraith, that I could reclaim this world, all our work here.” He added ruefully, “And I was given to understand that Ascension can be rather…dull. Not that my life here has been terribly exciting.”
“Major, I’m not getting any response from the jumper,” Kavanagh said, brow furrowed as he glanced up at John. “Or from their radios.”
“Are you on the right frequency?” McKay demanded, stepping up behind Kavanagh to get a look at the board.
“No, I thought I’d just try a random frequency.” Kavanagh glared. “Of course I’m on the right one.”
“Crap,” John muttered. He told Kavanagh, “Keep trying,” then asked Dorane, “Is there another way out that doesn’t involve going through that blast door into the tunnels? I need to get back up to the surface and warn our people.”
“Yes, yes. This way.” Dorane pushed himself up, accepting a helping hand from Kolesnikova, and started out of the room.
John headed after him with Teyla, Kolesnikova, and McKay following while Kavanagh stayed on the com system. John was going to take Teyla with him, and let the others stay behind to work on Dorane. Though the man seemed glad enough to see them, John thought Dorane was still a little confused, and probably suspicious of their motives. John didn’t want to screw this up; if they wanted Dorane’s help, they needed to make it clear they were intending to rescue him, not drag him off against his will.
John stopped to briefly update Ford on the situation, and when he caught up with the others again McKay was asking, “Just what are these Koan? Do they live down here in the tunnels? They showed up rather abruptly.”
“They are an alien species, barely sentient, but clever, and they can be vicious,” Dorane said, as he led them down a passage behind the stasis chamber, under more of the giant pipes, to where a metal wall met rough rock. He stumbled, and took the arm Teyla offered him with a grateful glance. “They were brought here from their world by the Wraith, to infiltrate our defenses from underground.” He shook his head in exasperation. “I thought they would have died out by now. The last few times I went out to explore, there was no sign of them. I used this passage, so it should be safe. The access shaft is straight down it, at the very end.”
Dorane stopped at a metal door, set deep in the stone. Mold and damp had crept in around the edges. As Dorane touched the control and the door slowly started to slide upward, John asked, “Do you have any idea how they managed to appear out of nowhere?”
Dorane shook his head. “They did the same to us, when they first attacked. I think the Wraith must have given them something to jam our scanning equipment, but surely the device cannot still exist.”
McKay, in the act of handing the l
ife sign detector to John, paused and they exchanged a weary look. “Oh, that’s just great,” McKay said, “Take it anyway—if the others are away from the jumper—”
“Yeah.” John stuffed the detector into a vest pocket. There was no point in further speculation until they got to the surface. He gave Rodney a narrow-eyed look. They needed to talk Dorane into coming back to Atlantis with them, and bringing all his stuff, including any stray ZPMs he might have around. Rodney would know he should be taking care of that while John was gone, and hopefully he knew enough to let Kolesnikova and Kavanagh mostly handle it, and just kick them back into play if they got distracted by any other interesting Ancient technology. He just said, “Ford’s in charge.”
Rodney rolled his eyes. “Oh, no kidding. I’ll try not to stage a coup while you’re gone.”
“Just play nice, Rodney.”
Teyla was waiting beside the open door, and John stepped inside, flashing the P-90’s light to give him a view of a long narrow corridor, dark and dank.
McKay watched them from the doorway, his face etched with worry. “Be careful.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Rodney had a lot of questions he wanted to ask, and he needed to nudge the conversation toward ZPMs. But he kept getting put off, which irritated the hell out of him. First Dorane had seemed unsteady on his feet, so Rodney and Kolesnikova had helped him back to the main part of the lab area. Once there, Kavanagh had stepped out of the communications alcove to help Dorane sit down, and the alcove sealed itself up again. Rodney had objected, telling Kavanagh that they should be monitoring it in case Sheppard tried to contact them, but Kavanagh—now the team’s Ancient communications expert because he had touched the damn thing once—had replied irritably that he had set it to monitor itself, and that it would alert them when Sheppard called in. Then Kavanagh had taken up more important question-asking time by apologizing for Rodney and Sheppard’s behavior. Rodney had snorted derisively, but before he could comment on Kavanagh’s behavior, Kolesnikova frowned at him and said in a whisper, “You and the Major talk to each other as if you are badly-raised eight year olds. Not everyone finds that attractive.”
Rodney allowed himself a restrained sneer. “The fact that our professional communications function on a level that Kavanagh doesn’t comprehend is not my problem.” Focusing his annoyance on Kavanagh made it easier to pretend he wasn’t worried.
Rodney had always hated relying on other people, who were inevitably fallible and wrong and usually stupid, but once they had arrived in Atlantis it had startled him how quickly he had come to rely on Sheppard. It had occasionally been difficult to reconcile the fact that the surfer/pretty boy type who qualified for MENSA but couldn’t be bothered to join was the same person who had stalked and killed Genii in the city’s corridors like they were cockroaches, could snap a man’s neck, and was crazy enough to attack a super-Wraith with a belt knife. But Rodney was over that now.
“What is this part of the facility for, exactly?” Rodney asked, once he could get a word in. “This whole underground section doesn’t look like it was part of the original design of the repository, athenaeum, whatever.”
“We believed it was a hospital and medical research facility,” Kavanagh told Dorane, and Rodney swore mentally. He wanted Dorane’s version, in his words, uncluttered by any of their suppositions and suspicions.
“You are correct, the underground levels were a hospital, also a facility for biological research,” Dorane told him, glancing up. He was seated on the couch again and still looked a little pale, sweat standing out on his forehead. “The settlement on this planet suffered from a sickness, originally created by the Wraith, in their experiments on their human livestock.” He gestured around a little helplessly. “We were making some slow progress in defeating it when the Wraith attacked again.”
McKay frowned. That wasn’t a strategy they had heard of the Wraith using before. “Didn’t you have shields, like those on Atlantis?”
“We did, but—” Dorane looked up, brow furrowed in thought. “How long have you been here?”
“A little more than a day,” Kolesnikova answered, watching him thoughtfully. “Why did the stasis chamber wake you now?”
“I had set the controls to wake me if any of my own people opened the blast door and entered the upper chamber.” Dorane smiled around at them all. “You are our descendants indeed. Atlantis’ children.”
“Yes, yes, whatever, but what happened with the shields?” Rodney persisted. For some reason, Kavanagh glared at him. Rodney glared back. Oh please, like you don’t want to know too.
“The Wraith used the Koan to infiltrate the outpost from within, and shut down the shields and other defenses,” Dorane explained. He looked a little confused, as if he wondered what was so urgent about the question.
“Oh. So the shield generators could still function?” Rodney prodded. “We could turn them back on, protect this place from Wraith attack? Once we got rid of the Koan, that is.” He wasn’t personally fond of this place, but if something happened to Atlantis, it was essential to have a safe point to retreat to. Or if they couldn’t turn the repository into a secure Alpha Site, they could cannibalize the working systems to shore up Atlantis’ failing power grid.
Dorane shook his head. “Unfortunately, they were destroyed by the Wraith deliberately during the attack. But I have never needed the shields. The Wraith believe this planet to be uninhabited, and have never returned here, that I know of. I am safe enough, if isolated.”
Kavanagh said earnestly, “You can’t mean to stay here. You must come back to Atlantis with us. There’s still much we don’t understand.”
“You could help us a great deal,” Kolesnikova added. “And you would be returning to your home.”
Dorane smiled at her. “Why yes, I would be happy to accompany you.”
This was what Rodney had been waiting for. He added, “Hey, since you’re coming with us, you can bring your ZPM. Your Zero Point Module? The subspace power source?”
Dorane gestured absently, as if it didn’t matter. “If you like. I’m not sure how much power it has left.” With a rueful expression, he added, “It has been working a long time.”
Oh, hell. Rodney had nearly been able to smell that ZPM since they had first seen this place on the MALP’s fuzzy transmission. He couldn’t wait; he needed to find out now. “I need to take some more readings.” He snapped his fingers impatiently at Kavanagh. “Give me your detector.”
Kavanagh snorted in annoyance, but retrieved the device from his vest pocket and handed it over.
Rodney ducked out, following the short passage back to the stairwell. He got a base reading and found the nearest power conduit, then started across the room. From the gallery, Ford asked, “Dr. McKay, what are you doing?”
Rodney barely glanced up. “I’m going to check out his ZPM.”
Ford started down the stairs, whispering urgently, “You’re not going to steal it!”
“Of course I’m not going to steal it!” Rodney rounded on him, glaring. “He’s coming back to Atlantis with us, I presume he’ll want to bring it with him since it would be criminally stupid to leave it.” You take one ZPM that looks like it’s just there for no reason, and suddenly everyone thinks you’re the mad ZPM bandit of the Pegasus Galaxy.
“Oh.” Ford stopped, shifting his weapon in a somewhat chastened way. “So why are you going to check it out?”
“To see if it’s the only power source. It would be nice to be able to have lights on the way out. Hey, and you’re supposed to be guarding, so guard.”
“Okay, okay. I was just asking.” Ford held up a placating hand, retreating back to the gallery.
Still huffy, Rodney followed the power conduits, tracing them back through the big room. He didn’t know how useful Dorane was going to be; the man seemed a little off, a little confused, and Rodney thought the isolation here might have driven him over the edge.
Rodney had had nightmares that involved being the las
t one left alive in Atlantis after a Wraith attack, and they weren’t pleasant.
It didn’t help that it wasn’t all that far beyond the bounds of possibility; Sheppard, Ford, Teyla, and the other military personnel would be on the front line, the operations team not far behind them, while Rodney, Zelenka, and the other scientists would be deep inside the city nursing the power grid or trying to get that damn weapons chair activated. Rodney didn’t expect that witnessing the actual effect on someone unlucky enough to be a lone survivor would change any of his nightmare scenarios. He made a mental note to run some calculations on the possibility of placing triggers for the self-destruct sequence at multiple locations around the city, to see if it justified the risks involved.
He came to a landing with a short set of stairs leading down into an open bay with several hatch-like doors. Rodney followed the detector to the nearest, and tapped its control pad. It slid upward, revealing a small power room filled with bundles of what looked like jury-rigged conduit. Two Zero Point Modules lay in open metal cases on a low bench, and a third was seated in the round unit that tied it in with the power system. “Oh, oh, oh,” Rodney whispered. “Oh, yes.”
But after a few moments of examining them, he grimaced in disappointment. Dorane hadn’t exaggerated the problem. The two ZPMs in cases were at maximum entropy and dead. The third one, still powering the system, was drained to only a partial charge. That’s a hell of a lot of power, Rodney thought, studying the detector. Especially for a facility that had been drawing minimal power for ten thousand years or so. Atlantis’ ZPMs had been in a similar state, but they had been maintaining systems that had held Atlantis stable on the bottom of an ocean, keeping the city intact and pressurized by tremendously powerful force fields. Even if most of this facility’s power had been expended trying to defend against the Wraith… Except he said the Koan shut down the shields before the attack started; that eliminates the major power drain. All these ZPMs had been doing since then was running one stasis container and waking Dorane occasionally to putter around and check his com system, plus maintaining the minimal lights and air movement. This…doesn’t add up. Literally. He started to take more readings, running some mental calculations.