Next priority: locator beacons. Rodney returned to the copilot's seat and initialized the sensors while Lorne banked the craft toward the southeast and Jumper One's position. They skimmed over a mountain range whose entire side seemed to be ablaze, long fiery trails snaking all the way down to the coast. The magnitude of it all was astounding. "How the hell does something like this happen?" Rodney had to ask.
"According to that Army captain, State Emergency Services says the northern fires were caused by lightning strikes," Lome answered, his focus straight ahead. "The way these other small ones started and spread, though… it didn't look natural to him, and I tend to agree. These new outbreaks started miles upwind of the first fires."
If the Lilith were aware the SGC force was there, this might have been the ideal opportunity for them. Flush out the jumper teams, and generate the maximum amount of confusion in the area to divert attention away from their activities. Rodney just wished he knew what their activities might be.
A beep from the sensor screen drew his attention. "Got a signal. It's Sheppard."
"Overlay it on the HUD." When the dot appeared, Lorne narrowed his eyes. "Crap."
Rodney shifted his gaze from the HUD to the scene beyond the windshield and found it hard to believe what he saw. Flames were leaping from treetop to treetop, even crossing rivers and highways with no sign of slowing down. At the rate it was spreading, there wasn't a creature on the planet that could have outpaced it on foot.
"Damn," muttered Lome. "Here goes nothing." He lowered the jumper over the road where the locator signal beeped steadily.
Despite being insulated from the heat, Rodney cringed away from the seething curtains of fire that lined the blistering asphalt. The jumper was buffeted by violent updrafts that strained the inertial dampeners. "We have the shield enabled, right?" he asked.
"Do I look that stupid?" The Major guided Jumper Two over the edge of the road and into a ravine, where the distorted wreckage of a Land Cruiser lay-
A fireball erupted, engulfing Rodney's entire field of vision. On instinct, he threw up a hand to shield his face.
From somewhere behind him, he heard Lee murmur, "Oh, no.
"Gas tank must have exploded." Looking shell-shocked, Lome didn't voice the obvious conclusion. Rodney's brain supplied the details anyway. Even if Sheppard hadn't been within the immediate range of that blast, the air temperature in the whole area had risen far beyond a survivable level.
As Rodney watched, perversely unable to tear his gaze away, the small dot that represented his friend and team leader winked out.
"All right," Lome said quietly. "Find me Jackson and Ronon."
Rodney reset the search parameters, struggling against a crushing sense of anguish. What good was all the brilliance in the universe if it couldn't keep good people from dying?
His face now schooled into an impassive mask, Lome spoke into his radio. "Teyla, have you heard anything from your team?"
"Not since we closed the hatch." Teyla's voice held the same frustration and remorse that Rodney felt. "I believe it has become too loud outside for our calls to be heard."
Two signals appeared, less than a hundred meters apart, and Rodney wasted no time in transferring them to the HUD. "Come left nom." Ronon and Jackson could still be saved, if the jumper could just get over this ridge and-
At almost the same moment, both signals flickered and vanished.
Chapter thirty
Through a gray haze of hypoxia, John felt something grab him by the shoulders and haul him up. The change in pressure re-expanded the air in his lungs, and soon he broke the surface of the water, gasping and choking on his first clean breath in what felt like hours.
"That…" He gagged and spat out a mouthful of water, gulping another huge breath. "You're telling me that was only sixty meters?"
Climbing up onto a rock ledge, Anata gave him a smile that blended apology with approval. "Sixty meters just to the bottom," she amended. "You nearly made it all the way here before starting to black out. Without fins or weights, that was rather impressive, for a human."
She reached down to help him, and he dragged himself out of the water on shaky arms. Shivering in the chill of the underground air, he curled up and waited for his breathing to even out. She'd expected him to die, or at least skirt the ragged edge of drowning. It hadn't mattered, of course, because she'd known she could bring him back if necessary. What a radically different mindset, to be able to risk lives without fear of consequences.
He pushed himself up to his knees and looked around. The pool that had been their entrance was really more of a shallow river, winding through a large cavern. He couldn't tell what was providing the light source, but the place was illuminated much better than the average tourist-traveled cave. The ledge they occupied was a massive piece of flowstone that led up to a relatively flat area, where one of the cambion held a hand over Rebecca's chest-and he wasn't performing CPR.
John got to his feet, instinctively moving toward the profiler's unconscious form. She would have gone without oxygen longer than he had during the swim…
"She'll be fine," Anata assured him, pulling off her soaked jacket as she matched his stride.
When John neared the wider part of the cavern, he was startled to see row after row of automatic weapons and minor artillery pieces. These folks were better equipped than the Atlantis armory. He raised his eyebrows. "Expecting a war?"
The cambion who'd gone ahead of them had now congregated near a group of shelves and were stripping off their wet clothes without a trace of embarrassment. One of them, the big guy who'd carried Rebecca, tossed John a towel and a set of dry clothes: nondescript olive-drab fatigues, probably surplus from one military or another.
"As a matter of fact, yes." Anata wriggled out of her clinging shirt. "But not with the Ori."
Because she seemed as comfortable out of her clothes as in them, John didn't bother to avert his eyes as he pulled his own shirt, ripped and bloodied, over his head. Like the others, Anata's skin was pallid almost to the point of albinism, though not tinted with the sickly teal of a Wraith. Her limbs were exceptionally long and thin-gangly, he might have said had she not moved with such grace. While they honestly did need to get into drier clothes, he nevertheless suspected that this display was a demonstration of sorts; evidence that Anata and her children could pass-outwardly, anyway-as human.
His focus shifted to Rebecca again, and he recalled their conversation in Iraq. Being human now seemed to be more of a sliding scale than an absolute.
"What's going to happen to her?" he asked, nodding in Rebecca's direction. Two women, whose arrival he'd somehow missed, began to rid her of her wet clothes as well. He turned back to Anata and finished dressing.
The smile the succubus wore was warm and genuine. "She will sleep a while longer, and when she wakes she will know that she is the one."
Phrases like that tended to make John nervous. "I don't mean to sound ungrateful for the way you saved us, but just what is she supposed to be `the one' of?"
Tugging on a soft-looking sweater and freeing her long hair from its collar, Anata met his gaze squarely. "You already have most of the information you need. I felt it in you when I fed you. Come on. We both could use some energy, and there should be hot chocolate brewing." She shot him a disarming grin that almost made him forget how incredibly old she must be. "There's nothing better than chocolate after a cave dive."