02 - Reliquary (6 page)

“Color me surprised.” John tapped his headset. “Ford, can you hear me?” No
answer. “Crap.” He moved back into the shaft, into the fall of light from above.
Kavanagh was nearly down, and Teyla was starting her climb, moving lightly and
easily down the awkward ladder. “Ford?” he tried again.

The radio responded immediately, “Here, Major.”

“It looks like the shielding up there is interfering with our communications.
We’ll come back here and check in on the hour.”

“Yes, sir. Be careful down there.”

McKay picked a corridor before Kavanagh could dispute the selection. John led
the way, putting Teyla at their six. “The construction is more primitive down
here than on the upper levels,” Kavanagh pointed out, as John moved his light
over the walls and ceiling.

“More support for my theory.” McKay said this in a little singsong,
calculated to drive Kavanagh insane.

It worked. “Your theory is crap,” Kavanagh snapped, his eyes on his own
detector. “It could have been built later, when their resources started to
fail.”

“Kids, don’t make me separate you,” John said, keeping his attention on the
corridor ahead. “Or beat you unconscious.” Privately, he thought Rodney was
right. The blue light gave everything a spooky glow, but their flashlights
showed that the metallic material in the walls was rougher, with rivets and
seams. There were gray-green patches that might be some kind of mold, creeping
in wherever the metal met stone.

“It is very odd,” Teyla said from behind them. “There is just something that
is not…”

Something that’s not right,
John finished.
Yeah, that too.
He found himself straining to listen, but all he could hear were their own
movements and the whisper of air in ancient vents.

About twenty paces down the corridor the walls widened into a large circular
chamber, with the walkway forming a bridge across a lower level. The platform
held a couple of big work stations, the screens shattered and the metal melted
from a blast by an energy weapon. Warily, John flashed the P-90’s light across
the level below, but all he could see were closed metal doors, three on each
side.

Kavanagh immediately went to the first console, wrenching the top off and
asking Teyla to hold a light for him. “Don’t touch anything without gloves,” he
told them.

“No, really?” McKay said, playing his flashlight over the rubble. “I’ll try
to resist the urge to lick the debris.”

John looked down into the well, at the nearest door. Something about this
setup gave him a bad feeling. Maybe it was for storage. Volatile materials,
something else that needed to be monitored. He looked at Kavanagh, intent on the
damaged equipment, Teyla holding the light but still surveying the room warily,
and Rodney, who was balancing his flashlight with the detector. The blue light
washed out color and bleached skin, making them all look like they had drowned
in cold water. John said, “Let’s check this out.”

Rodney just nodded grimly.

The metal steps creaked as they climbed down. John picked a door at random,
standing back ready to fire, waiting for McKay to open it. But the circular
handle was too stiff for McKay to wrench open on his own. John still felt uneasy
about taking both hands off his weapon to help, even with no life signs on
McKay’s detector. He was glad Teyla was up on the gallery above them, keeping
watch.

John had to put his shoulder to the handle, with McKay hauling from the other
side before it squeaked hesitantly into motion. “I saw this in a movie once,”
Rodney said through gritted teeth. “Everybody died.”

“I saw this in fifty movies, and it’s never a great idea,” John told him, his
voice grating as he struggled with the wheel. He felt the click as it finally
gave way and the heavy door shifted a little.

McKay backed away as John swung the P-90 up and pulled the door open. He
flashed the light on a little cell, maybe ten by ten, bare stone walls streaked
with mold.

The air was dead and stale inside, but it had been so many years the odor of
rot was just a ghost, barely enough to make John wince. He was pretty sure he
knew what the crumpled little bundle in the corner was.

He stepped inside reluctantly, pausing to note there was no mechanism to open
the door, no handle, button, or lever, from the inside. Moving closer he saw the
skull and the rib bones, lying in a pile of residue that was all that was left
of the rest of the body, flesh and clothing rotted together. “Don’t touch it, or
get too close,” Rodney cautioned him from the door, low-voiced. “Sometimes
there’s still bacteria, even after years of being sealed in like this. You could
get a fungus.”

John had seen enough, anyway. It was human, or close enough to make no
difference. He stepped back out and pulled the door shut again. The blue
emergency lights showed him Rodney’s expression, his mouth twisted down, his
eyes grim. Rodney said, “This was not a hospital.”

Kavanagh was leaning over the gallery rail above, demanding, “What did you
find?”

They found corridors, and rooms with more broken equipment and blasted
consoles, floors littered with glass and broken ceramics, giant pipes emerging
from the ceilings and disappearing into the floors, sealed chambers filled with
empty racks for little containers, other rooms that might have been frozen
storage. There were also what looked like living quarters, or at least rooms
with the stark remnants of metal furniture and no locks on the doors. And there
were lots of little cells with monitoring equipment outside; after the first
few, they stopped checking for bodies. As Rodney pointed out, it wasn’t like
they were going to find anybody alive and waiting to be rescued. The ones they
saw that were empty, the doors standing open, were a relief. Imagining what was behind the closed doors was
in some ways worse than actually seeing it. “We should be finding bones out in
these corridors, too,” Kavanagh had said at one point, “But there’s nothing.
That’s anomalous.”

“Everybody who wasn’t in a cell could have escaped,” John had suggested. “Or
the people who were locked up were already dead when the attack started. Like
the World War II concentration camps, where they’d start trying to gas the
prisoners faster when the Allies—”

“Yes, I’m aware of that practice, Major, and thanks so much for the image.”
McKay had glared at him. “Why don’t you just hold the flashlight up under your
chin and make spooky noises while you’re at it?”

And Kavanagh had said sharply that they didn’t know these were cells, they
could have been quarantine rooms for plague victims, and Teyla had said “World
War
two
!” in an appalled and incredulous voice, and the discussion had
veered off into unproductive areas.

They had also found stairwells leading down to even lower levels, telling
John that the place was far more complex than they had hoped. The first hour
stretched into four, then six, then eight, and John returned to the shaft
periodically to check in and let the others know they were still alive. He could
tell from Ford’s voice that the younger man no longer regretted being left
behind.

That intermittent odor of rot and decay was starting to get on John’s nerves,
especially since, in the few cells they had opened, the remains had been too
desiccated to have much of an odor at all. It made him wonder just what the hell
they hadn’t found yet. John had firmly banished all thoughts of zombie movies,
and McKay didn’t bring the subject up either. Kavanagh was too intent on the
search, and just didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would have been into cheap
horror flicks. Teyla was culturally immune. Though she admitted that she would
rather be doing just about anything else, including helping Hailing and the other Athosians build latrines in their new village
on Atlantica’s mainland.

Now she and Kavanagh were checking out the lower part of a large room full of
equipment that looked like it was for synthesizing something. John and McKay,
having finished their section, waited on the gallery above.

Groaning under his breath, McKay sat down on the metal floor to consult his
PDA. He was making a map as they went along, trying to deduce where the main
power generator, whatever it was, might be. McKay and Kavanagh had told each
other at least ten times that nothing except a big naquadah generator array or a
ZPM could have kept these emergency lights powered for so many years. They had
been trying to identify main power conduits, testing them to see which were
still hot, and trying to figure out where the cables were coming from. It
allowed them to mostly skip the areas where the emergency lights weren’t
working, except when one of their flashlights caught something Kavanagh or McKay
found fascinating and they just had to go explore.

John sat on his heels beside McKay, rolling his head to ease the tension in
his neck. The air still wasn’t stale, but the smell was getting steadily worse.
It made him wonder how many people had been down here when the surface bombing
started, if the shielding had protected them or just delayed the inevitable.
From the peculiar taint in the air, he figured it was the latter. Of course,
considering what they could have been doing to the people in those locked cells,
that might have been no loss.

And your imagination is out of control,
John told himself grimly, trying
to shake off his mood. He was beginning to think it was time to call it a night.
According to his watch, it should be getting dark up on the surface. The MALP’s
telemetry data had told them that it was summer in this hemisphere and that the
night should only last about seven hours. Besides, his stomach was starting to
grumble, and McKay, who had hypoglycemia, had bummed the last power bar a half-hour ago.

McKay put the PDA away in his pack and sat back with a sigh, looking at the
others below. “Kavanagh might just get a gold star for working and playing well
with others today after all.”

John eyed Kavanagh. Once they had gotten down here, the man had settled down
and concentrated on the task. At the moment he was examining something deep
inside the remains of a dead work station, addressing an occasional remark to
Teyla, who was holding the light for him. They seemed to be getting on well
enough, probably because Teyla didn’t fall into any of the normal categories of
military, civilian scientist, or technical support personnel that Kavanagh was
used to dealing with. He treated her like a respected professional in another
field. “He gives Elizabeth enough trouble.”

“Yes, that, of course, but he’s usually very cautious when it comes to
risking lives,” Rodney said. “His own, true, but also everyone else’s.
Especially stupid unnecessary risks, like climbing down that ladder without a
safety rope. And triggering that power surge that opened the shaft. He had no
idea what that was. Never mind the possibility of electrocution, he didn’t know
what it was going to do. It could have been an intruder destruction sequence.
Elizabeth could be sending somebody with a bag to collect what was left of us
right now.”

John pretended to consider it. “I don’t think they’d use a bag. I think
they’d be more respectful than that.”

Rodney gave him a withering look. John relented and added seriously, “Maybe
he’s overcompensating. From what Grodin said, Elizabeth did practically hand him
his ass.” John and Rodney hadn’t been there to see it. That had been during the
infamous bug-neck incident, when their puddlejumper had been stuck halfway
through a Stargate and they had only had the thirty-eight minute duration of the
active wormhole to figure out a solution. Kavanagh had thought the jumper would
explode, and the force would be transferred through the wormhole and take out the ’gate room. Somehow, in all the tension of the
moment, this had led to a public dressing down from Weir.

Whatever Kavanagh had been on about, John didn’t think Elizabeth should have
lowered the boom in public. John had had more than his share of public dressing
downs, and it wasn’t a command style he preferred. It was only going to cause
more problems, but when it had happened Elizabeth must have been feeling the
time pressure intensely. Apparently she had been stiff with Hailing about
something too, and he was easy-going to a fault.

But whatever had happened, John wasn’t sure he felt comfortable pointing
fingers about it. He wasn’t exactly the sterling example of good
chain-of-command relationships at the best of times, and he had made more than
his share of mistakes. Big mistakes. “You know Kavanagh’s still chafing. He’s
just going to have to get over it.”

Rodney was frowning thoughtfully. “Yes. But the man did a stint in the SGC, I
can’t believe he never had his ass handed to him before. That place is
practically the ass-handing capital of the world.”

“I got that impression.” Ford and many of the others had been part of the
SGC, but John had first found out about the Stargate program in Antarctica,
about fifteen minutes after nearly crashing a helicopter with General O’Neill as
a passenger while being chased by a stray energy drone accidentally launched
from the Earth Atlantis outpost. His military career had been fraught enough
that he really hadn’t been all that surprised by it. He also thought the SGC
needed a sign outside that said
You don’t have to be crazy to work here, but
it helps.
Of course, as someone who was for the moment permanently stationed
in Atlantis, he wasn’t in any position to criticize.

Below, Kavanagh finally extracted himself from the tangle of wrecked
equipment. John pushed to his feet to call down, “Hey, we need to pack it in for
tonight. It’s getting dark up top.”

Kavanagh stared up at him for a moment, squinting in the dim blue light, his
expression blank. Then he said, “Oh, yes, of course.”

They made camp outside the repository, in a half-ruined structure facing the
plaza where the cloaked puddlejumper rested. It was made out of cut stone
blocks, its roof one big still-stable slab. There was a little crumbling around
where the door had originally been, but otherwise it was mostly intact.