“No, no, it’s nothing like that. I’m not physically ill,” he assured her so readily that Teyla believed him. “It’s just…” He gestured helplessly. “I’m not sure what it is. Just restlessness, I suppose.”
Teyla could understand that. She felt restless herself. “Do you truly think… I cannot believe that the Ancestors would use this place to experiment on humans, even if they meant to find a way to destroy the Wraith.”
Kavanagh didn’t hesitate. “They wouldn’t. McKay’s an ass, but he’s right about that. Frankly, they wouldn’t need to. Their science was so advanced, they could run their experiments as simulations on artificially created genetic material. They wouldn’t have needed human test subjects at all, much less unwilling ones.”
Teyla nodded, feeling a flash of relief. It was just one other learned man’s opinion, but from what she knew of him, Kavanagh was a very unsentimental person. She thought that he didn’t romanticize the Ancestors the way her people and many of the expedition members did.
He took a deep breath, putting his hands in his pants pockets. “There’s some other factor here. Something we aren’t quite understanding, or interpreting correctly. You know, I thought I had it earlier today, but now I’m not so sure.” He shook his head, started to turn away back toward their shelter.
Teyla heard stone click and slide, and reached out to steady him as his boot slipped. He caught her arm, leaning heavily on it for a moment, then found his footing. “Sorry,” he said. He lifted a hand to his head, saying a little vaguely, “Maybe I’m more tired than I thought.”
“You should go back and rest,” Teyla urged him. Like McKay, like all the scientists, Kavanagh would work himself to exhaustion if allowed to. “We have another long day tomorrow.”
“I will,” he said, still sounding distracted. “Good night, Teyla.”
“Good night, Dr. Kavanagh.” Absently scratching her arm, she watched him make his way back toward their shelter, just a dark shape in the shadows. He had spoken of “another factor” and she thought he was right. There was something here they just didn’t understand yet.
Chapter Four
“This is odd.” Rodney crouched near the lip of the shaft, frowning at the life sign detector.
John, checking the safety rope for today’s descent, looked up sharply. “What?”
Rodney gave him that look. “Again, I point out that if I had seen indications of a ravening horde of something, I would have said, ‘My God, Major, run!’ rather than, ‘This is odd.’”
John rolled his eyes and deliberately turned his attention back to the safety rope. “Fine, then. Golly gee whiz, Dr. McKay, what’s so odd on this lovely morning?”
So he was still jumpy. Last night hadn’t helped. John was used to Marines and airmen, who slept when it was time to sleep. Scientists who got up every five minutes and wandered around, he would never get used to. McKay’s ability to function on little or no sleep for long periods of time was great when lives were in danger, irritating when he was standing on the edge of your sleeping bag chewing loudly on a power bar and contemplating the meaning of life and time or whatever the hell he was doing in the middle of the fricking night. What made it intolerable this time was that Kavanagh and Kolesnikova shared this bizarre behavior. John had stopped asking people where the hell they were going when Kolesnikova had replied with some annoyance, “I’m going to pee, Major, and I didn’t think you all would like it if I did it in here.”
And it also didn’t help that it was a lousy morning. The sky was dark and overcast and the white-capped sea like dull pewter. The forest on the other side of the Stargate’s platform was a brighter green against the purple-gray clouds, and the wind blew sand through the ruins and across the plaza. John had taken the jumper up into the atmosphere to look around and check the long range sensors, making sure this coast wasn’t about to be hit by a hurricane or a tropical storm. All he had found were ordinary rain clouds, and he had landed again feeling inexplicable disappointment.
Kolesnikova had told him earlier that she had seen all there was to see in the repository’s command center and wanted to tackle the lower levels with them. He hadn’t argued with her, having the feeling that she thought she had let them down by not going yesterday. Corrigan was actually gleaning far more information in the city’s ruins, and wanted another day out there. John was leaving Boerne and Kinjo up top again, to keep watch and back up Corrigan. Ford had been chafing at the inactivity yesterday and he wasn’t needed on the surface, so John was adding him to the belowground group. Hopefully more searchers meant faster progress. And maybe with Kolesnikova’s engineering background, she would see something that McKay and Kavanagh had missed.
“I’m getting more pronounced energy readings,” McKay said, finally answering the question.
That got Kavanagh’s attention. He nearly dropped the pack he had been sorting through and strode to the shaft, pulling out his own detector. McKay lifted his brows and sat back on the floor, making a production out of waiting for Kavanagh’s assessment.
Fortunately for team harmony and John’s already depleted supply of patience, Kavanagh didn’t notice. “You’re right,” he said, also failing to notice when McKay took an ironic half-bow. “This is markedly different from the readings we took yesterday.”
“Thus the choice of the word ‘odd’ in my original statement,” McKay added. He pushed to his feet. “Something changed down there.”
“Maybe you guys tripped something without knowing it,” Ford said, leaning out to peer down into the shaft. “Set off something that increased the emergency power, or activated some other stuff.”
“But there appeared to be no changes.” Teyla shook her head. “We took readings throughout our search, and before we left, and there was no increase in power at that time.”
“What she said,” McKay added.
Ford shook his head, gesturing helplessly. “Maybe it took a while to get going.”
For some reason, everybody then looked at John. He shrugged, pretending this new development didn’t make him uneasy. “We’re not going to figure it out up here.”
Once they had gotten down to the bottom of the shaft, the readings were stronger. “This way.” His eyes glued to the detector, McKay pointed them toward a corridor John knew they had tried yesterday. They hadn’t found any cells along it, just debris from laboratories smashed so thoroughly that McKay and Kavanagh had only been able to make guesses as to what their original purpose had been.
The blue emergency lighting glittered off the wreckage of twisted metal and the unidentifiable stains on the stone walls on either side of the broad walkway. John had a bad feeling about this; he remembered what else they had found down this corridor and he had a strong suspicion of where the detector was going to lead them.
McKay dug out the PDA with the map he had made yesterday and wordlessly shoved it at Kavanagh. Bringing up the map, Kavanagh scanned the screen hurriedly. “Damn,” he muttered, obviously coming to the same conclusion John had just drawn. “I wouldn’t have expected that. Our suppositions about the layout of the active power conduits must have been—”
“Wrong.” McKay’s voice was grim. He stopped next to a round opening in the walkway, where metal stairs curved down into a dark well. They hadn’t bothered to search down there or in any of the other dark areas yesterday, believing the power source would be where the active power grid lay. McKay let out his breath, looking up and shaking his head in exasperation. “Well, this is just fantastic. It’s pitch dark down there.”
John stepped to the lip of the well, shining the P-90’s light into the depths. Teyla moved up next to him, leaning over to peer downward. He estimated the stairs descended about forty feet; the light reflected off a metallic floor. If he had a choice of where to lead their little group, a dark hole in a ruined bunker was about the last place he would pick.