Ronon looked back at John again, and she saw his almost imperceptible nod. John rocked forward on the balls of his feet, ready to go. Ronon lunged for the doorway, John a step behind, going for the frame as Ronon threw himself flat just inside, laying down a thick barrage.
Teyla moved, left and forward again, coming to the edge of the doorframe under the cover of Ronon’s shots. So close to the Wraith. She barely even had to try to get a sense of them. She could hear them speaking mind to mind as though they were shouting.
Fall back! Fall back to the entrance and pick them off when they come out!
The Wraith Lord who commanded them had better sense than to get into a situation where his men must rush out of a narrow entrance against defenders. Better to turn it around. There was one exit from the maze. Sooner or later they would have to chance it. They would have to rush from a doorway against five or six times their number armed with energy weapons. There were no other options.
Or they might wait, stalemated. But even then sooner or later they would have to do something. There was no food in the labyrinth, though there was water aplenty. Sooner or later, the people in the maze would have to try to break out, and they would be waiting for them.
“Ronon!” Teyla shouted. “They are backing off!”
Ronon rolled out of the doorway, landing almost against her foot and getting swiftly to his feet. “How do you know?”
“I hear them,” she said.
He looked skeptical. Of course. Ronon did not entirely believe in her Gift, had not really seen her use it.
“John! The Wraith are withdrawing!” she yelled. Even on the other side, he should hear her.
He looked at her and nodded once, keeping up the occasional shot into the doorway.
The incoming fire from the Wraith dwindled, then finally ceased.
Teyla closed her eyes. A moment, a touch… She could risk so much. She would not have to go deep or far. They had pulled back to the entrance, one hapless spectator outside chosen to be fed upon so that a wounded man might regain his strength. She could feel the outside wind on her face, the bright sun cutting at last through scudding clouds…
“Teyla?” John was beside her, his hand on her sleeve. “Are you ok?”
She opened her eyes. He looked concerned and unshaven, but at least he was not wobbling on his feet. “They have pulled back outside, to the doorway. They know we have to come out that way, and then we will be emerging from a small space into a wide field of fire. They have us. This is not the first time someone has rebelled in the maze, though this is the first time anyone has reached the control room. They are uneasy. They do not know why this has happened, how someone could have known what to do.”
Beyond John, Radek looked decidedly self-satisfied.
John scratched his ear contemplatively, while Ronon cast glances through the door. He didn’t seem entirely confident in Teyla’s pronouncement of what the Wraith were doing.
John glanced over at Radek. “You’re absolutely positive there’s no way they can turn the traps back on?”
“Positive,” the scientist nodded.
“Do they know you turned everything off?”
Radek put his head to the side. “Almost certainly not. They would not have been able to see anything except this room on the cameras after I began. I did this room first, as you were in here, and then did the cameras before I moved on to the other systems. They would have lost the cameras first, and unless there is some sort of entirely independent secondary internal sensor system, which I doubt, they would have no way of getting any information from inside the labyrinth.”
John nodded slowly. “So they can’t see us or what we’re doing, track us, or tell what the status of their traps is.”
“Essentially, yes,” Radek said. “They may be able to reset some of the traps manually, like the pump for the water, but I think they would have to get to the pump room and do it from there. I have fragged the interfaces, as you would say.”
Ronon looked back at him. “What’s the plan?”
John nodded to the hallway. “We can’t go that way. They’re waiting for us, and we can’t get out through that kind of fire with three stunners. So we need to go another way.”
“What other way?”
Jitrine broke into a wide smile. “The door we came in!”
“Exactly,” John said. “It ought to be easy to go back up, with all the traps disabled and the lights on. We go back up to the courtyard of the palace, rush that door, and go for the cruiser.”
“That’s a plan,” Ronon said. “You know the way?”
John winced. “Teyla and I got here…kind of a roundabout way. Jitrine? Suua? Do you guys know how to get back up there?”
Suua nodded gravely. “We can retrace our steps.”
“I remember,” Nevin piped up. “I remember exactly.”
“Ok.” John picked up one of the fallen sticks and handed it to Suua. “Let’s go. Teyla?”
“I know. On six.” She couldn’t help but smile. Yes, they were still trapped in the labyrinth, but things were decidedly looking up.
Chapter Thirty
The puddlejumper came to rest on the roof of the palace, Carson carefully letting it come down easy, just in case the roof wasn’t strong enough to hold it. At the first sign of buckling or damage he could lift again. But the stone pillars seemed sturdy, possibly stronger in terms of loadbearing than most modern architecture on Earth allowed, and the jumper settled without problems at all.
“Still cloaked?” Major Lorne asked.
“Still cloaked,” Carson confirmed. “They shouldn’t be able to see us or otherwise detect an EM signature.” He eyed the radio in Lorne’s hand. “Unless you start using that radio. The cloak isn’t going to hide an outgoing signal.”
“I know,” Lorne said. “But my team needs radios to keep in contact. You stay with the jumper, doc.” He looked around. “Dr. McKay? This is your call. If you’d like to stay with Dr. Beckett…”
“I’m going,” Rodney said. He swallowed hard. “You’ll probably need me.”
“Yeah, probably,” Lorne agreed. “Ok, we’re on then.” He hit the release on the rear door and led the way out.
The maze looked different with the lights on. Nevin and Jitrine came just behind John up the passages, showing him how they had gotten there. Overhead lights in the ceiling rendered them about as spooky as any hallway anywhere, which was to say not so much. At one point they passed through a gallery high above what had been the waterfall room. Now, lit by bright fluorescent lights dangling from the ceiling, with the waterfall silenced, it was just a big room with a very shallow pool at the bottom, three feet or so below the level of the drain. Anybody could wade across it.
“Not so impressive now,” John said.
Jitrine nodded. “It was beautiful and eerie both. I do not know why the waterfall glowed as it did.”
John pointed down, showing her. “See those blue and green things just below the water? They’re spotlights and they shine up the sheet of the falls. It was a pretty impressive effect, but they’re just lights with colored covers on them.”
“Like silk screens placed before lamps in the theater,” Jitrine said. She shook her head. “Nothing but theatrical effects.”
“Pretty much,” John said.
Radek had fallen back beside Teyla. “What is the matter with your arm?”
“I dislocated my shoulder in the jumper crash,” Teyla said quietly. “When Colonel Sheppard hit his head.”
“You crashed the jumper?” Radek sounded incredulous. “Again?”
“The Wraith cruiser attacked us,” Teyla said. “They outgunned us considerably. The Colonel lost them, but we had taken such damage that he could not keep it in the air. We crashed in the desert. Fortunately, we were not more seriously injured.”