“I fear I have lingered here too long already,” Dorane said. He sounded serene, as if the prospect of destroying Atlantis and its inhabitants had put him into a weird state of peaceful satisfaction. “Once my condition is triggered by leaving the athenaeum, it advances swiftly. I am dying, even as you are.”
“You know, I really wish the Ancients had done a better job of getting rid of you.” John didn’t think Five was responding to him at all; the low ambient light in the jumper seemed to be getting even dimmer. Maybe he could get One to launch a drone, to blow Five up. It would probably take out this wall of the operations tower, but surely the heat would be enough to destroy whatever was in the box. He hoped. Into the radio, he said, “Bates, fall back to the corridor and close the blast door.”
“That won’t do any good,” Dorane told him, still eerily calm. He added, “The Lantians didn’t want to get rid of me. They wanted to punish me.”
“Oh yeah, that was so unreasonable of them.” Why hasn’t he opened it yet? John thought. Then he looked at Dorane’s hands again. Those hooked claws were too big to be retractable. “You can’t open that container.”
Dorane smiled, his teeth gleaming in the fading light. “Don’t excite yourself, it’s on a timed release. I really did think of every possibility, including the one that I might be incapable of opening it when the time came.”
It didn’t sound like a lie. The ATA was pressing painfully in on John’s head, and something was changing inside the jumper, but he couldn’t tell what it was. “And I’m guessing I won’t just be able to seal the jumper’s hatch.”
“It will react rapidly with oxygen, becoming corrosive. The ship’s shielding won’t hold it in for long.”
Shielding, John thought. It was still getting darker in here.
Darker because the aquamarine glow of the personal shield device was fading. The shield needed an Ancient gene to work, but Dorane’s genetics were changing as the retrovirus altered his body; the shield must be losing its connection to him. When the shield shut down, the little device would fall off Dorane’s chest. John shifted the P-90 to go for a headshot; he couldn’t afford to hit the explosive.
Dorane blinked suddenly, staring at John. He must have felt the shield giving way or read it off John’s expression. Before the glow faded and the shield device fell, he was moving, moving fast. John managed to fire one burst, then he was slammed back onto the jumper floor, Dorane clawing for his throat.
John grabbed his wrists, barely holding him off, thinking, He’s really fast, and he’s really strong. He knew he had hit Dorane in the chest, but the bullets weren’t even slowing him down. And the explosive still lay on the floor in the jumper’s cockpit. He yelled desperately, “Jumper Five, now would be a good time! Launch!”
This time, responding to his urgency, Five’s interior lights flashed on and the console powered up.
Dorane tried to tear away from him, but John dug in with his own claws and held on. He pushed and rolled, and they tumbled backward out of the hatch.
They hit the ramp, then the walkway, and rolled off, slamming into the bay floor. John landed on top, which probably saved him a broken back, but he was winded and dazed.
Above his head, Five slid out of its rack and glided out to hover over the jumper bay’s launch door, open to the ’gate room directly below. It stopped, and John realized the ramp was still open, that the safeties weren’t going to let the jumper drop into launch position. He shouted, “Ramp close, come on, ramp close!”
Dorane threw him off, pushed to his feet, and bolted for the open ramp. It slid shut, sealing itself for launch with a faint puff of air. Dorane tried to stop on the bare edge of the drop, arms flung up. Then he fell.
John heard the thump and the startled shouts from below. Crap, that might not be enough to kill him. The man wasn’t human anymore. Then, still on automatic, the jumper dropped into the ’gate room to take its launch position.
From below, John heard someone exclaim in horror. Yeah, he thought, that probably did it. The jumper would hover a few feet off the embarkation floor, but the forcefield it was using to support itself… John rolled over and shoved himself up, took a couple of staggering steps to the edge of the opening, leaning out and craning his neck to see. Bates ran up to stand beside him.
Squinting against the glare of the brighter light in the ’gate room, John saw McKay, Peter Grodin, and several others standing on the gallery steps, staring at the jumper floating in front of the ’gate. There was a spreading stain leaking out from under it as it still hovered serenely, waiting for a destination. John fumbled for his headset, but Dorane had torn it off in the fight. He told Bates, “Tell McKay to find a destination — a planet with no atmosphere.”
Bates relayed it, and McKay hurried back to lean over the dialing console. It only took him a few moments to pull an address out of the database, but John was watching the jumper’s port. He saw a bright flash from inside.
Bates swore. “The shielding—”
Watching intently, John shook his head. “He said it was corrosive.” He hadn’t said how fast it was. If they just had a minute for the ’gate to dial… He noticed he and Bates were both dripping blood onto the bay floor, Bates from a bullet wound in the arm, and John from the long scratches Dorane’s claws had left on his shoulders.
Then McKay turned to the dialing console and started to hit the symbols, and John felt like something was squeezing his skull from the inside. For a horrified moment, he thought it was the bioweapon, that it had eaten its way through the jumper. Then he realized it was the ’gate. Uh oh. He thought the automated sequence would take care of it, but just in case, he thought at the jumper, launch. When the wormhole opens, launch.
Then the wormhole initiated with a blast of glassy blue energy, the jumper surged forward, and the world turned to white-hot pain.
Chapter Twelve
John had a last moment of awareness, enough to realize he was lying on the jumper bay floor. The light was blinding, but he knew it was Rodney and Teyla who were leaning over him, and he thought it was Carson Beckett standing next to his head, yelling orders at someone. He grabbed Rodney’s arm and tried to ask about the jumper, but he couldn’t get the words out.
Rodney must have understood anyway. “It’s gone, it went through the gate,” he said, his voice thick and barely recognizable. Then he looked up at Beckett and shouted, “My God, Carson, will you get off your fat ass and do something!”
John decided that was a good time to let go.
John really expected to be dead, but being dead felt a lot like being in the hospital. Antiseptic odors, tubes and needles in places that tubes and needles should not be, too-bright lights, quiet serious voices with intermittent flurries of frantic activity and arguing. At some point he knew it was McKay standing over him, snapping his fingers at somebody and demanding to see John’s chart, and Beckett telling him, “I would like to remind you, Rodney, that you are not a medical doctor.” Teyla’s anxious face leaning over him, then Ford’s, then a distinct memory of Elizabeth, sitting nearby, her feet propped up on a stool while she read from a laptop.
He remembered all that as he came to gradually in the half-lit gloom of a medical bay. He was lying on his side on one of the narrow beds in the recovery area, a blanket tangled around his waist. He had loose gauzy bandages on his hands, and his left arm was secured to a rail with a light band, but that was probably to keep him from dislodging the several IVs that were stuck in it. Except for that, he felt mostly okay;
the intrusive tubes were thankfully gone, though there was a lingering ache in his throat. He had had a bath at some point and was wearing clean surgical scrubs. He could see into the next bay, where a couple of the medical techs and Dr. Beckett were working at a table spread with open notebooks, data pads, coffee cups, and laptops.