02 - Reliquary (10 page)

McKay interposed worriedly, “We thought you might have been in stasis because
you had a communicable illness, like, oh, some kind of plague, for example. You
don’t, do you?”

“What?” Dorane rubbed his eyes, as if he were having trouble focusing. “Oh,
no. I placed myself in stasis, when the athenaeum—I was hoping my people
would—” He tried to push himself off the platform and faltered, his legs
refusing to support him.

John and McKay both started forward, but John let McKay catch the man’s arm and hold him up, just on the off chance that it had been
a ploy to get near his weapon. Kavanagh lunged over to help, shouldering the
man’s other arm and saying, “We have so many questions—”

“Let us wait on that for a moment,” Kolesnikova interrupted quickly. “Give
him some time to recover.”

“There is a room, just down the next passage,” Dorane said, his voice
strained. “Please take me there.”

While the others helped Dorane, John sent Ford back to the gallery, to stand
guard where he could keep an eye on the outer blast door. They found the other
room a short distance down the cave-like passage that led off the doorway next
to the stasis chamber. It was a little smaller, with a low couch built into the
wall, padded with some slick blue-gray material. McKay and Kavanagh helped
Dorane sit down.

John stood back in the doorway; he couldn’t figure this. Everything they had
seen in this area was intact, though he couldn’t see why whoever had destroyed
the rest of the place had left it behind. Surely that one blast door hadn’t been
enough to keep them out.

Teyla had paused beside him, and he asked, low-voiced, “Any thoughts?”

Kolesnikova sat next to Dorane, handing him her water bottle, and McKay
retreated to join John and Teyla. “If that man is an Ancestor,” Teyla said,
watching Dorane uncertainly, “this could be far better than finding any number
of ZPMs.”

After taking a long drink, Dorane handed the bottle back and looked up at
them all. His face already seemed less pale and strained. He smiled a little in
confusion and asked, “Who are you, how did you come here?”

“We’re peaceful explorers,” John said.
Who are also looking for ZPMs and
anything else we can haul back home to protect us from the Wraith,
he
thought, but he wasn’t going to say that aloud. Not just yet. “From a place
called Atlantis. I’m guessing you’ve heard of it.”

Dorane’s brows drew together and he said uncertainly, “Atlantis? But I thought…the city was abandoned.”

Great, now he’s suspicious of us.
John looked pointedly at McKay, passing
the diplomatic duties over to him. McKay gave John a mild glare, but faced
Dorane squarely. “Ah, yes. Atlantis was abandoned. We come from a planet now
called Earth, which is where the Ancients returned to when they left Atlantis.
As you may know.” Teyla cleared her throat, and he added, “Teyla there is
Athosian, we met her people after we got here. We came to this galaxy through
the Stargate to search for Atlantis. And we found it.”

John added, “The Ancients were driven out by the Wraith.”

“Hey, I’m doing this,” McKay objected, frowning at him impatiently.

“You’re doing it slowly.” Then it belatedly occurred to John that maybe he
should have broken that a little more gently. He said to Dorane, “You know about
the Wraith, right? Because I’m starting to feel like we may be dumping a lot of
bad news on you all at once.”

Dorane made an absent gesture. “Yes, yes, it was the Wraith who attacked this
place.” He shifted on the couch, wincing. “It must have been a long time. I have
few supplies left here, so I must remain in stasis almost continually. I set the
container to open periodically, and I check the emergency communications systems
to see if my people have tried to contact me, if anyone has returned. But I
haven’t been good at keeping track of the passage of years, the last few times I
woke.”

“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 life 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.”

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.”