by Martha Wells
Beckett nodded sharply. “Right. Don’t worry about us.” He shook his head suddenly, running a hand through his hair in frustration. “Look, just don’t—Don’t give up. Give me a chance to fight this. I’ll have my headset on. As soon as you can call us back, do it.”
That was the sympathy thing again. John just nodded, and followed the others down into the access.
When John strolled up the central stairs, he found the large group of Koan waiting at the door to the medlab corridor. “So where have you guys been?” John asked them. “I was looking all over the place for you.” He was starting to feel warm, though he wasn’t sweating. He knew it was him; he could tell the circulation system in this section was still running, drawing in cool outside air.
Before leading him to Dorane, the Koan searched him again, making him glad for resisting the temptation to take a side trip with Bates to the armory for some grenades. Explosives were one thing that might be effective against the personal shield, since they didn’t have to work against the body inside the forcefield, just the structural integrity of whatever building that person was standing in. But despite the difficulty of smuggling any kind of weapon into the same room with Dorane, the man would be too close to the naquadah generators, and the naquadah generators were too close to the operations tower and the Stargate, which was made from naquadah, and from what John understood, that could add up to losing a much larger chunk of the city than he was willing to part with. But if it came down to it… He would rather lie down in an open field on a Wraith planet with a “get it here” sign than let Dorane take any people back to the repository. And John didn’t think Dorane was the type to cut his losses and make a run for the Stargate before the last possible moment. If he couldn’t take the expedition members back with him, he would kill as many as he could.
The door to the generator room was open, and the Koan led John inside. Dorane was standing with several Koan, Ford, and two Marines. Dorane looked even worse than he had in the ’gate room; his eyes were yellow and bloodshot and his skin was gray. Maybe when he said the atmosphere of Atlantis was inimical to him, he hadn’t been exaggerating.
McKay, crouched on the floor beside the generator, looked up warily. He was surrounded by open access panels and disconnected crystal conduit. Kavanagh, his expression blank, stood nearby holding a toolkit. “I’m back,” John announced unnecessarily. He was listening hard for a faint thread of discord among Atlantis’ whispery harmonics, and the ATA was relatively quiet in here. The naquadah generator was Earth manufacture, not Ancient, and the only other tech he could hear was the door control panels and Dorane’s personal shield. So where the hell is he keeping this thing? It had to be nearby. Even if it didn’t have to be physically close to work, John figured Dorane was too cautious to let it out of his control. Unless he has it on him somewhere, and the shield is just so loud it’s covering up any noise from the control device.
“You didn’t go to the sealed area through the main corridor,” Dorane said, watching him carefully.
“Well, no, since I’d be dead if I had. I knew another way in.” John lifted a brow. “Isn’t that what you were counting on?”
Dorane didn’t bother to answer. “But you found the memory core.”
John fished the stick out of his pocket and held it out. McKay stared, winced, and ducked behind the generator. John knew the stick probably didn’t hold a tenth of what the actual Ancient core held, but Dorane wouldn’t know that. He just hoped it didn’t occur to the man to ask Kavanagh.
Dorane’s expression was impossible to read. He didn’t reach out to take the stick. “What is that?”
“It’s a data storage device for our computers,” John told him. “I couldn’t get the core itself.”
Dorane looked at Kavanagh, who put the toolkit down and came forward. Kavanagh took the memory stick from John, glanced at it briefly, and held it out to Dorane, saying, “That’s correct, it’s a data storage device.”
John knew Dorane was still wearing the personal shield. But he really doesn’t trust me, and it obviously occurred to him that I might hand him something that would blow up or even short out the shield. Too bad John didn’t have anything like that. But Dorane obviously knew nothing about their technology; maybe he had seen just enough to realize there were elements of it he didn’t understand.
Dorane finally took the stick from Kavanagh, his lips thin with distaste. “And I assume this will only display on one of your devices. Which one of you will have to operate for me.”
John shrugged, as if he didn’t care. “I guess.” He took a couple of distracted paces to the left, so his back was to the Koan, Kavanagh, Ford, and the others.
Dorane watched him, eyes narrowing. “Surely you know.”
“He doesn’t know,” McKay sneered, looking up from where he was crouched beside the generator. He had obviously reached the overly aggressive stage of his blood sugar crash. “He can barely check his email.”
Dorane turned to regard him, probably with a great deal of skepticism. Rodney glared up at him, and John took the opportunity to mouth the words “big distraction, soon”.
Rodney twitched in alarm, but he looked so flustered and annoyed, it would have been hard for someone who didn’t know him to tell. He told Dorane, “You’ll need a laptop to read it. That’s one of the computers in the silver cases.”
Dorane turned back toward Kavanagh, who said, “Yes, that’s true.” Something in the way Dorane was holding the memory stick suggested a great deal of frustration. Whatever was on the memory core, Dorane didn’t want anyone else to see it, apparently not even one of the people he had under control.
John made an idle circuit of the room, still listening hard for the control device. He was fairly certain now it wasn’t on Dorane, but surely it was nearby. If it was up in the ’gate room… No, it had to be closer than that. If it isn’t, we may be seriously screwed. But would Dorane just stick it on a shelf somewhere and leave it? The naquadah generators were spaced out widely over the center portion of the city; did this thing have the kind of range that it could… Or he gave it to someone else to carry.
“Is there one of these laptops nearby?” Dorane was asking Kavanagh.
Kavanagh shook his head; his attention was on Dorane and not what Rodney was doing with the generator. “I don’t know. They would be in the ’gate room, the labs, the living quarters and offices—”
John wandered past Kavanagh, the two Marines, Ford, and caught the first hint of a tiny disruption in the ATA’s ongoing cacophony. It wasn’t insistent enough to be coming from one of them. The nearest Koan growled nervously as John went to the wall and leaned back against it. Dorane, still questioning Kavanagh about nearby labs, threw him a cold look, but he obviously wasn’t much interested in however John wanted to occupy his last moments. John closed his eyes, tipped his head back against the metal, and tried to shut everything else out.
And there it was, somewhere on the other side of this wall, a thread of discordant sound, moving away. Yeah, he gave it to someone who’s been following-him around the city. And I bet I know who.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
John opened his eyes to see McKay crouched by the generator, fiddling with the last connection, watching him anxiously. And here we go. John lifted a brow, giving him a “what are you waiting for” look.
McKay glared at him, then took a filament-thin loop of clear cable out of the floor access and did something with it inside the generator’s panel.
John felt the shudder travel through the wall before he heard the explosion. The abrupt blast came from the south, from the outer part of this section, and it wasn’t at all distant. Oh, crap, John thought, aghast, what the hell did he do?
His expression of stunned dismay bought them an extra few seconds as Dorane looked first at him, then at McKay, who was staring at the generator as if he had never seen it before. “What was that?” Dorane demanded.
Still looking at the generator, Rodney shook his head, as if rea
lly baffled. Then he grimaced in relief and said, “Oh, there it goes.” He shoved himself back just as silvery sparks fountained from the access, shooting up toward the ceiling.
Even under low power, the ATA didn’t so much switch on as burst to life inside the walls. John was suddenly aware of circuits threaded in the metal behind him, felt something whoosh through piping as if the room was drawing a breath; he knew exactly what was about to happen. Ducking around the bewildered Koan, he winced away from the sparking generator. The emergency lights flickered, a wailing Atlantean klaxon sounded, and all four doors shot open. John slammed Ford out of his way, feeling the first blast of something that wasn’t air. McKay was on his feet and John tackled him, sending them both out the nearest door and into the corridor. They landed hard and John thought close, close, come on, close at the door. Somebody got off a burst from a P-90 and bullets bounced off the silver wall panel right above their heads, just before the door slid shut.
Rodney was glaring up at him. “Oh fine, you just broke half my ribs.”
John rolled off him, asking, “What about Ford and the others?” He shoved unsteadily to his feet, dragging McKay with him. He had gotten a lungful of the gas released by the emergency system and his throat felt raw. He could hear Koan howling and pounding on the door behind them, but it refused to budge.
McKay was red-faced and breathing hard, and he had to steady himself against the wall. But he said, “They’re fine. The system will sense that there’s no fire and flush the room with outside air.”
That was a relief, at least. “God, Rodney, I said ‘diversion’ not ‘blow up half the city’!” John started down the corridor, coughing. “And what was that stuff, halon?”
McKay hurried after him. “It’s similar. And I’m fairly confident that the Ancients wouldn’t use a fire suppressant that was poisonous to humans. That sparking was just a harmless light show, and the explosion was just the grounding station in this wing—”
“Oh, was that all? A harmless naquadah light show? And don’t we need that station for grounding electricity?” John took the next corridor intersection. The lights were a little dimmer, and he couldn’t sense any Koan moving towards them. But he could hear the control device heading rapidly away from the direction of the blast, trying to get back to Dorane, looking for a way around the sealed doors now blocking the direct path.
McKay waved his hands like John was being unreasonable. “That wasn’t actually naquadah, that was just electricity, and this section can do fine without a discharger—for a while, unless there’s a storm, or a buildup of static—Anyway, I created a small power surge in the generator that started a feedback loop between it and the grounding station. With Dorane shutting down most of the city systems, I wasn’t sure the fire-control was still online. It probably helped that your Ancient gene panicked and set off the protocols.” Rodney stopped at a wall console at the end of the corridor and tapped a rapid sequence into it. “Now that the fire-control is active I can tell it to block access to the generator room, which should seal off all the doors in this section.”
“Dorane will have to get the doors to open individually.” John was starting to feel a little better about the whole “let’s blow important and dangerous stuff up as a distraction” plan.
“So will we, but I’ll be faster at it than he is.” McKay finished keying in the sequence and the panel beeped quietly, displaying a series of Ancient characters. “Right, that should do it.”
“Good. Now come on.” John started down the corridor to the outer portion of the wing. The device was moving fast and he didn’t want to lose it.
McKay jogged to catch up with him, but protested, “Why are we going this way? We should go—”
“Beckett and Zelenka thought Dorane had to have some kind of device that’s helping him control our people. I think I saw him with it back at the repository, I just didn’t know what it was. It’s using his version of the ATA, and I can hear where it is.” John barely paused at the next intersection, knowing his quarry was already about two corridors ahead. The emergency lighting was growing dimmer; this roundabout route took them into a part of the wing that had been damaged in the flooding just before the city rose from the sea bottom. The ATA was just a low background whisper, blending with the distant sound of the sea outside the walls, making the sour thread of the controller device much easier to follow. “Any reason he’d give it to someone else to carry?”
McKay gestured erratically. “Lots of reasons. That personal shield might interfere with any device emitting a signal. Or the device might interfere with the shield. We have no idea how compatible his version of the gene is with the real thing, and those shields are highly attuned to whoever’s wearing them.” He added in exasperation, “And just where is everybody? Didn’t you go down there to get the Wraith stunners—”
“Yes. Bates is getting our people out of—”
“What about me? Us? We need to be rescued too!”
“You need to wait your turn, Rodney.” The air was getting dank, and it was laced with the odor of stale seawater. Somewhere off in the dark corridors there were doors that were permanently sealed, deep shafts jammed with sand and sea wrack, rooms full of strange equipment that no longer operated. John knew this section fairly well; they weren’t far from the passage out to the grounding station McKay had blown up. He didn’t think Teyla had been through here before, and the way she kept trying to take direct routes suggested that Dorane was giving her instructions instead of simply commanding her to return to him and letting her find her own way. Hopefully that was because she was still trying to resist him.
McKay caught John’s arm, saying, “About the waiting thing.” He sounded worried and deeply uncomfortable. “That drug Dorane gave you, he said—He’s probably lying, but he said—”
John pulled free and kept walking. “Rodney, I know, Beckett scanned me. And if Dorane said how long it would be, don’t tell me, all right? I don’t want to be looking at a clock while I’m doing this.”
“Wait, wait!” Rodney caught up, staring at him incredulously. “Carson knows about this and he didn’t do anything?”
“Like what? He didn’t have any time.”
“I can’t believe that! He’s supposed to be so damn brilliant and he just let you walk out of there—”
“Rodney, for God’s sake, shut up about it!” After a short curve the corridor opened into a walkway over a larger chamber. “And shut up, period. You want her to hear you?” The few working emergency lights made the big space look as if it was etched in black and silver, and John could see it was empty. He paused before stepping out onto the walkway, trying to get his bearings. Teyla was past this point, down and to the right somewhere in the other corridor that led off the lower level of this room.
“Who? I don’t even know what we’re doing!” McKay whispered furiously.
“We’re looking for Teyla.” John thought he had said that already, but even in panic mode, McKay wouldn’t have forgotten or misheard a piece of information as vital as that. It scared John the way nothing else had so far; they didn’t have much time to pull this off, and he couldn’t afford to lose his concentration. He started across the walkway, not wanting McKay to notice the moment of uncertainty. “I think Dorane gave her the device.”
Fortunately, McKay had too many other things to panic about to notice. “How are we going to get it away from her? You don’t even have a gun.”
“That part’s a little fuzzy,” John admitted.
“Oh, God. This is a woman who puts on a dress to beat the crap out of you in that stupid stick fighting, and now you’re dying, how are you going to—”
“Rodney, can we go, I don’t know, maybe a minute without you reminding me that I’m dying? And you really need to shut up.” John found the stairway down to the lower level of the room and started down it. He stopped abruptly and McKay bumped into him from behind. “She’s coming back.” There were two doors in that lower corridor that he distinctly rememb
ered were wedged open, the metal around them buckled when the pressure from the sea had hit this section. After that he thought the corridor led back into the powered portion of the wing, but the fire-control must have blocked her path again.
John turned, and McKay scrambled back up the stairs.
John pushed him in the direction of the sheltered corridor access, and McKay hurried back along the walkway in the dark. He stopped at the doorway, flattening himself against the wall, and John crouched down where he was, at the head of the stairs, trying to fold in on himself and blend in with the darkness and the silvery material of the walkway.
He felt ridiculously exposed, and it was hard to remember that for Teyla and McKay, the emergency lighting was barely existent and the room was almost as dark as a moonless night. An instant later he heard her footsteps, the light tread of her boots on the metal. She wasn’t bothering to be quiet; Dorane probably hadn’t thought to give that order.
John stopped breathing when he heard her come up through the doorway below. She started up the stairs, and he grimaced. He had been hoping she would cross the room on the lower level and he could drop down on her from above.
She reached the top of the stairs and started to turn back toward the corridor access. John launched himself at her the same instant she must have sensed his presence. She was turning toward him, lifting her P-90 when he slammed into her. They hit the walkway, John on top, flattening the gun to her chest. The device was right there pressed between them, in the lower right hand pocket of her tac vest, the bastardized ATA sending a jolt of pain right through John’s head. He felt her fingers scrabbling for the P-90’s trigger and used his claws to rip through the cord holding it around her neck. He jerked it out of her grasp and lifted up just enough to fling it off the balcony.