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.