In the abstract, it sounded almost reasonable-but this was far from abstract. There was a woman out on the streets looking for a shooting or bomb victim to drain of life. How was John supposed to rationalize that?
"I can't say I'm wild about the idea, either," admitted Jackson. "Even if it's the reason I'm standing here. Having said that, I believed Hanan when she swore that she only takes the remaining life from people who are in great pain and have no hope of surviving. Aside from informing me of the existence of the two opposing groups, she wasn't too forthcoming with details. Baqir gave me access to this place and promised it would give me answers."
"And has it?" Rebecca asked.
"Oh, you could say that." Jackson returned to the table overflowing with artifacts. "From what I've gathered, the bloodlines are only the beginning. The two sects have very different agendas."
So Rebecca had been right on target with her profile. John glanced over at her and tilted his head in acknowledgement.
"For the sake of clarity, the easiest way to distinguish between the two is to call the predatory group Lilith, which keeps itself in business by running various shipping, airline and travel companies, and the one that wants to protect humans, Ninlil." Rifling through the array of scrolls and tablets, Jackson selected a surprisingly well-preserved parchment. "I haven't yet figured out how the rift occurred or where it fits in with these divergent bloodlines in the general human population, but we'll get to that later. I started out by rereading the intact tablets of Gilgamesh and found that much of the text, including the references to sky gods, had been copied from this earlier set of documents."
He opened the scroll casually, not bothering to handle it with the care often shown to such relics. Before John could question him, Jackson lifted the manuscript for inspection. "This isn't parchment or vellum. It's almost like plastic, except even more durable. And then there's what happens to be written on it."
While John was by no means a language expert, he recognized Ancient when he saw it. "Guess that confirms once and for all just who got this party started."
We need to read it in the context of what we know now." Jackson closed the scroll again. "When Merlin and his group of refugee Lanteans returned to Earth ten thousand years ago, they realized they hadn't come through the Antarctic gate like they'd expected. The continents had drifted, and Antarctica was under a massive layer of ice."
"You'd think they would have planned out where they'd end up before making the trip." John glanced at the building's entrance and wondered how much time they had before their security escort told them it was time to leave.
"Maybe" Jackson rolled up the scroll. "It's going to take me a long time to examine all the texts, but what I've read so far suggests that Atlantis may not have been the only Ancient city in Antarctica. We've wondered for a while why we found an older Stargate and a weapons chair there, since Atlantis has its own chair and gate, and Morgan Le Fay did tell us that some Lanteans made their way to the gate at the southern pole. What if there's a lot more than one outpost buried beneath all that ice?"
John wasn't sure what to make of that idea. "If so, shouldn't we have detected it by now?"
"We went years without detecting the chair," Jackson countered, packing the scrolls in an open crate as he spoke. "Antarctica is almost half again as big as the continental U.S., and the ice that covers it is several miles thick in some places. My point is that the Lanteans left the Pegasus Galaxy for Earth expecting to have access to the same level of facilities that they'd left behind, and instead they encountered a primitive world. They learned from the humans they met that a Goa'uld, Ra, was running the galaxy, and the last thing they wanted was another war with a malevolent alien species. The Lanteans agreed they had to leave the immediate region where the Stargate was located-Egypt-most of them with just one thing in mind."
"Ascension"
Jackson nodded. "They viewed themselves as literally the last of their kind and believed that their only options were Ascension or extinction. Some sought to Ascend through reclusive meditation, but Lilith and others strenuously opposed them, arguing that Ascension through nonscientific means had led to the existence of the On. Lilith further believed that leaving the humans of the galaxy behind was wrong, if for no other reason than they would serve to empower the On. She'd brought along the Wraith genetic material from the experiments on MIM-316 she'd been forced to abandon, which would allow her to reproduce laboratory clones."
"Whoa, hang on." Even though John often mocked Rodney for his paranoia, sometimes a reasonable amount of alarm was justified. "Are you saying she actually created Wraith on Earth?"
"Not Wraith per se." He paused and pursed his lips before glancing through the narrow doorway. "That's as far as I've managed to get. Trouble is, the people who guard these artifacts take their job very seriously. Removing the scrolls or tablets from the building is out of the question. All they'll let me take is this." He withdrew a small rectangular device from beneath a sheet and held it up. John tried to contain his surprise when he saw that it was an Ancient data recorder. "They found it in among some outdated computer parts left in storage since the Gulf War."
The sound of semi-automatic gunfire in the near distance immediately drew everyone's attention. Muffled shouts outside were swallowed up by the sound of a small explosion that John estimated to be just a few blocks away. Time to get the hell out of Dodge.
"We can come back later if we have to follow any leads further." Jackson strode toward the door, paying no mind to the growing commotion outside.
"Come back?" Rebecca gave a short, disbelieving laugh. "We'll just drop by Iraq sometime on the way home from the grocery store? We almost got shot up, and you almost got blown up-actually, there's no `almost' about that one. And apparently it's not over yet. You really want to repeat this grand adventure?"
John was all set to agree with her until Jackson paused, caught his eye, and surreptitiously rubbed the bloodied patch on his sleeve. Following his gaze, John identified the miss ing locator beacon, affixed to one of the crates containing the tablets. Smart move; if they needed this stuff later, they could beam it out as soon as the Odyssey or Daedalus was back in range. Besides, an Ancient recorder held a lot more information than crumbling blocks of clay.
A second explosion, nearer this time, shook the bunker and sent a puff of dust wafting through the entrance. Two Marines and one of the militiamen followed, shouting similar orders. They had to get out of here-now.
"It'll be all right," he told Rebecca simply.
She shot him a doubtful look but pulled her chador back into place. Then she ran ahead of him out onto a street lit by balls of flame and punctuated by streaks of tracer fire.
Chapter twenty
After the sandblasted atmosphere of central Iraq, the interior of the C-20 felt humid by comparison. John had barely found a seat before the crew closed the hatch and started the engine run-up. He settled back, relieved they'd made it here in one piece and grateful to have a few hours with no immediate duties, even if he had to spend them in the cabin of an aircraft he wasn't flying.
Once they'd dodged the minor flare-up outside the bunker, getting out of Ramadi had turned out to be easier than getting in. The potshots taken at their helicopter on the arriving flight had been the prelude to an attack that had moved rapidly toward the heart of the city. Larger but still uncoordinated, the assault hadn't put much of a crimp in flight cps at the small airfield on the outskirts of town. "Just the nightly fireworks show," Captain Baker had called it. As a result, John had been able to get the HH-60 up and out with little difficulty.