“Is that so?” Sheppard put the glasses back on. “Keep him there. I’ll be right over.” He nodded to Lorne. “I think its time we moved to a more proactive form of intelligence gathering, don’t you?”
Lorne gave a cold smile in return. “Oh, yes sir.”
“These corridors seem to go on for miles,” said Teyla quietly, “and I have yet to see a single window.”
Ronon nodded, hesitating at an intersection. “We could be in some kind of bunker complex, maybe deep underground.” He glanced at her. “You saw the landscape when we arrived. All that scrubland, the hills in the distance. Plenty of space to hide all this and more. For all we know, we could be right underneath that tree-settlement.”
She considered that for a moment. “You believe these people are like the Genii?”
“A high-tech culture hiding underneath a low-tech one? It’s good camouflage. But I haven’t seen any locals around here yet.”
Teyla had to agree. “Those humanoids bare little resemblance to the natives. I find it hard to believe they are a related species.” The aliens were nightmarish things, with bodies like corpse flesh and expressionless faces with the eyes of some deep-ocean predator. There was something unnatural, something unnerving about them that the Athosian couldn’t quite define.
Ronon paused at an open panel in the wall. “Look. Another one,” he noted. “How many does that make?”
As they moved through the corridors, here and there the two of them had come across places where the featureless metal had been peeled back or cut away, revealing incredibly complex layers of mesh, a weave of strange glowing filaments that formed a dense lattice pulsing with energy. In some places, the lattice appeared to be damaged, parts of it removed or in the process of being patched. Repair work, she guessed, but left unfinished. Down some of the corridors that radiated off this one, they saw areas where the overhead lighting was inactive, and some that were sealed off behind the faint blue glimmer of a force-field.
“Perhaps the complex is still under construction,” Teyla wondered aloud.
Ronon’s more martial instincts led him to a different conclusion. “No. This place has seen combat.” He ran a finger along a torn edge. “This is battle damage.”
But from a battle with what? she wondered.
“Company!” hissed the Satedan. He beckoned her sharply, into the shadow of an archway.
Teyla and Ronon pressed into the pool of darkness beyond the reach of the corridor’s illumination and waited. A pair of aliens passed by them, intent on some mission that they could only guess at. It was the fourth time they had hidden from the creatures; so far their luck was holding.
She watched them go, disappearing around a corner. “Strange…” Teyla mused. “You see that they do not communicate with each other. There is no…” She struggled to find the right word. “No informality between them.” There was no evidence of connectivity between the creatures at all; even a species that had evolved beyond the need for vocal speech, telepaths perhaps, even they would exhibit some form of outward awareness.
Ronon nodded. “They’re like machines. Even the most tightly-drilled combat soldiers will speak among themselves. The Wraith are more talkative than these things.”
The mention of the word Wraith made something in Teyla’s thoughts twist; she grimaced and pushed the sensation away.
The Satedan was rolling the glass egg in his hand. “And this thing. I’m not even sure what it does.” He held it up between his thumb and forefinger. “No buttons, no dials, nothing to manipulate. What good’s a weapon you can’t fire?”
He tossed it and Teyla caught it with a flick of her wrist. “This object seems to share more in common with the devices created by the Ancients than it does with human or Wraith technology.”
“Those creatures can’t be Ancients, not unless the stories McKay told me about them are way off.”
“No,” she shook her head. “They are something else…” Her voice trailed away. There was a tingling sensation along the nerves of her arm, reaching up toward her shoulders, the back of her neck. It was getting worse by the moment.
“Teyla?” Ronon stepped closer, seeing the look on her face. “Talk to me.”
An unpleasant and horribly familiar awareness gathered in her thoughts, a sickening feeling like spiders crawling inside her skull. She was moving before she realized it, drawn toward one of the dozens of featureless metal doors that appeared at regular intervals along the corridors. “Over here…”
“A way out?” he asked.
Teyla wasn’t listening to him; she was caught, part of her wanting to stretch out and hear, another part desperately wanting nothing but silence. “Those creatures,” she said, giving voice to her thoughts, “they are not Wraith…”
“Yeah, got that already.”
She moved closer, gesturing with the device. The door whispered open, revealing another corridor beyond, this one rising upwards in a gentle slope. A chilling certainty settled on her, and she suppressed a shiver.
Teyla hesitated on the threshold, and sucked in a breath. “But I can sense them now. Yes. Close by.”
Ronon’s manner hardened. “There are Wraith down here with us?” He grabbed her arm, his jaw set “You’re certain?”
Teyla’s mouth was suddenly dry. She nodded once. “This way.”
“I’ll take it from here, Sergeant,” said Sheppard, not waiting for Rush to give him an explanation. The marines from Atlantis stood in a wary line, their P90s and G36 assault rifles off the straps and ready, pointing at the ground but ready to snap up to firing position at a moment’s notice. For their part, the Heruuni men milled around, kneading the grips of their spindly weapons. The guns they carried didn’t look too impressive — tubular things like a collection of plumbing supplies connected to floppy bandoliers of ammunition — but Sheppard wasn’t going to take any chances. The last thing he wanted was someone with an itchy trigger finger on either side.
Elder Aaren stood among them, squinting out from under a sun parasol held by one of his flunkies. He had a resentful glower on his face, maybe from having to come all the way out here in the heat of the day. Sheppard’s lip curled. The colonel was feeling very short on sympathy right now.
Aaren didn’t waste time with any lengthy preamble. “Elder Takkol sent me to express his most grave concerns, Colonel Sheppard.” He gestured at Lorne and Rush and the other men. “We understand your concern for your friends, but you have brought an army on to our soil and —”
Sheppard cut him off with a shake of the head. “This isn’t an army, Aaren. Believe me, if we’d brought an army, you’d know about it. What we have here is a rather pissed-off search party.” Maybe it was the heat, but his tolerance was already wearing thin. He found himself wondering how the Heruuni would have reacted to a Puddle Jumper buzzing their tree-top village. Maybe that’s what we need to get some co-operation, show a little ‘shock and awe’. Sheppard frowned and dismissed the thought.
“With respect, colonel, Takkol asks that you send your soldiers back through the Gateway.”
“Not gonna happen. Two more of my people have been taken, Keller and McKay. I’m going to do what I have to do to get them back.”
A look of genuine shock flashed across Aaren’s face. “That cannot be… The Aegis does not come in the daylight.”
“The voyagers were taken away by Soonir’s men,” Laaro offered, hovering by Lorne’s side. “They came to my mother’s lodge and forced them to go with them.”
Aaren’s expression went from surprise to annoyance and back again. Sheppard saw the moment and took it. “So who is this Soonir guy, then? And what is he doing with my team?” The colonel aimed a finger at the elder. “You say Teyla and Ronon were taken by this Aegis thing, and you had nothing to do with it. Maybe that’s so, but McKay and Keller were captured by one of your people, and that makes it Takkol’s responsibility.”