Grimly resigned, he took a moment to get the infrared night-vision goggles out of his pack, Ford doing the same. They would rely on the flashlights since the scientists’ field packs didn’t include the goggles, but John wanted to be ready in case something attacked them and they needed to kill the lights. Everybody else used the time to check their handlight batteries. When everyone was ready, John looked them over. He knew McKay had too much awareness of his own mortality to wander off in the dark, and Kolesnikova, uneasy but game, would stay as close to Ford or Teyla as she could without actually holding hands with one of them. “Now everybody stick together. Do not go off on your own, under any circumstances. Do not stop to examine anything without letting me know. And yes, I’m mainly talking to you, Dr. Kavanagh.”
John went first, testing the stairs cautiously with each step, the P-90’s light revealing a passage larger than the one above, high-ceilinged, with a jumble of the large opaque pipes branching down. The pipes joined up with another set and ran off along the far wall. The sinuous shapes were almost organic, their material gleaming faintly in his light; John was uncomfortably reminded of movies where aliens exploded out of people’s chests. The smell, which he had been trying to ignore, was distinctly worse. “What the hell are those pipes, did we ever figure that out?” he asked, exasperated. “It’s like the damn Nostromo down here.”
Kavanagh, just stepping off the stairs and pausing to give Kolesnikova a hand, said, “It’s part of the air system, Major.” His tone was laconic but still managed to have an element of
are you stupid? in it.
The others made their way down, and John leaned over to look as McKay consulted the detector again.
“It’s stronger now. This way,” McKay said, jerking his chin toward the other end of the large passage. “Back toward the center portion of the building.”
“That makes sense,” John said. McKay threw a look at him that he couldn’t quite read in the reflected glow of the detector. “What? The power source would be under the main part of the complex.”
“It makes as much sense as anything does,” Kolesnikova answered for him. “This signal is strong, you should have picked it up yesterday.”
Kavanagh shook his head, watching his own detector. “We must have activated something. Like the lights and the other systems that came online when we first arrived in Atlantis. It just took some time to power up.”
“That’s what I thought,” Ford pointed out.
John had to admit it was reasonable, but it didn’t make him feel any less uneasy. Still studying his detector, McKay grimaced suddenly and said, “I think the floor above us is shielded. And there seems to be some electromagnetic field activity — Check your radios.”
John tried his headset and got nothing but static. From what he could hear from the others, he wasn’t the only one. He swore. “Oh, that’s all we need.” The detectors were Ancient technology and wouldn’t be affected, but their communications equipment was all good old-fashioned Earth-manufacture.
He took the lead with McKay to guide them with the detector, and put both Ford and Teyla to watch their six. Ford was leaving route markers with a reflective spray paint to keep them from mistaking the way. Their lights seemed to make the shadows even darker, and the detector led them into one branching corridor, then another. The giant pipes veered up the walls and over the ceiling, and they caught sight of more piles of wreckage.
The uselessness of the radios was making John’s nerves jump. As they moved through the large dark space he had to suppress the impulse to make everybody choose a buddy and hold hands. If they lost somebody down here, if someone fell in a hole, got lost, wandered off… And the more ground they covered, the worse that odor got.
Finally, after they had been threading their way through this giant maze for about twenty minutes, he couldn’t ignore it anymore. He said, plaintively, to McKay, “Look, seriously, are you sure you don’t smell that?”
“No.” McKay threw another opaque look at him. “I have a theory about that.”
“Oh, right, that theory. I’m really beginning to resent the implication that I have schizophrenia. I—”
“I did not say you had schizophrenia. I said—” McKay stopped abruptly, staring at the detector. “Hold that thought, I think we’re here.”
“Where?” Kolesnikova asked anxiously.
“There.” McKay flashed his light on a section of wall and John made out the shape of a large blast door. The pipes that ran along the walls swooped in from across the passage and above to end in the wall around the door.
“A bunker within a bunker,” John said. “That’s…vaguely disquieting.” He steadied his light on the door as McKay’s flash flicked around wildly for a moment, then settled on a panel to one side.
“Vaguely?” Kolesnikova questioned softly.
“It makes perfect sense,” Kavanagh said, his voice tense with suppressed excitement. “Extra shielding for their power source. We should have expected that.”
McKay had already pried the panel open, holding his pocket flashlight in his mouth so he could see. John didn’t see any control crystals, just a mass of dark wiring and circuits. McKay threw Kavanagh a hard look, taking the light out of his mouth so he could talk. “This panel is the only intact piece of equipment we’ve found so far.”
“Hold it.” John stepped closer so he could see Rodney’s expression. “Are you saying we shouldn’t open this?”
John ignored Kavanagh’s “Of course we should! Are you out of your mind?” Rodney took a breath, his mouth twisted. He looked distinctly uncomfortable. “There aren’t any life signs, just the energy signatures, and Teyla’s not sensing any Wraith. Of course, that means there could be anything in there from evil cybernetic guards to people-eating nanites. But the chances that there’s a ZPM inside — We have to open it.”
Sounding more frustrated than anything else, Kavanagh said, “I don’t understand why you two think there’s something wrong here. It’s an abandoned wreck of an Ancient facility. That’s all.”
John didn’t understand either, which was what worried him. But Rodney was right, they didn’t have a choice. And maybe it was just something to do with the electromagnetic fields or damaged technology trying to broadcast to the Ancient gene that was making his skin creep. Fooling his brain into thinking he could smell rotting corpses when there was nothing left of the dead but dry bones. He had a sudden image of trying to explain this to Elizabeth and Bates and Grodin and the others, that he had had a weird feeling and so they had left a possible ZPM cache behind after wasting a day and a half searching for it. He took a breath to tell Rodney to open the door, when Rodney glanced at the detector again, did a double-take and said, “Oh, no.”
John recognized that tone. “What?” He grabbed Rodney’s wrist, angling the device so he could see the display. It was reading life signs, a bunch of them. John did a quick mental calculation to translate the distance reading and realized the blips were only about a hundred yards behind them, somewhere in the maze of dark corridors they had just passed through. The blips were all in a tight clump, and there were too many of them; it certainly wasn’t Boerne, Kinjo, and Corrigan following them down here for some reason. And they were moving steadily closer.
Rodney said urgently, “Major, there’s a ravening horde of something approaching.”
“Thank you, Rodney, I got that already.” John was already shining the P-90’s light down the corridor, Ford and Teyla moving to flank him.
All their lights revealed was the slick blackness of the walls and conduits, but Teyla said softly, “Listen. Can you hear them?”