“Something still works,” Ronon said in the rear. “The power source. Let’s find it.”
“Straight in, then,” William said, checking his scanner. “And down. Perhaps there are stairs.”
Laura’s light flicked over flaking blue stripes painted on the floor. “This looks like a hanger,” she said.
“There are many reasons you might mark symbols on the floor,” William began. He stopped short as his light played ahead. “Or it might be a hangar,” he concluded. The beam of his light danced over a familiar stubby shape.
“It’s a puddle jumper,” Eva said.
“A wrecked one,” Ronon added. Even from here it was obvious the jumper was in bad shape. The left drive pod was extended, the casing blackened by fire, corroded machinery dangling from it. The hull was scorched above the drive pod, the outer ablative coating peeling back from the metal beneath. As they walked around it, the windscreen was darkened, rendered opaque by fire or time.
“That’s too bad,” Laura said. “It would be nice to find another one. But I suppose Dr. Zelenka will want to take a look anyhow.”
“He can always use parts,” Ronon said. “We can’t make a bunch of stuff. There might be some parts he can scavenge here. We can bring back a team later to do that.”
“Maybe there are more jumpers in here,” Eva said hopefully.
Unfortunately, it looked like she was wrong. They checked out the entire hangar bay, a space big enough to have held a dozen jumpers, but it was empty.
“Not even any fire suppression equipment,” Ronon said, his eyes examining the corners sharply. “Somebody stripped this place.”
“It appears that they left voluntarily and with sufficient time to remove anything of value,” William said. “Perhaps they simply closed the base down.”
“Maybe so.” Ronon shone his light along the far wall. There were two metal doors. He frowned. “Those are pressure doors, the kind we have in Atlantis in the areas that are underwater.”
“Maybe this place flooded sometimes?” Laura asked.
“I can’t imagine how, from the geological work we did,” William replied. “We’re far above sea level, and it seems likely it would have been even further away 10,000 years ago.”
“Bad weather?” Eva suggested. “It does get really cold here, right?”
“It does,” William conceded. “Perhaps that was the reason.”
“We should see what’s on the other side,” Laura said.
It took three of them to pry the doors open with Eva holding the light so the others could work, Ronon on one side and William and Laura on the other.
“Perfectly ordinary hallway,” William said. He looked at Eva. “Can you try the lights?”
Frowning, she put her hand to the wall. Lights, she thought really hard.
“That’s something,” William said, and she opened her eyes. A few dim emergency lights had flickered to life here and there, providing some illumination.
There still wasn’t anything to see. It looked like an underground version of one of Atlantis’ maintenance corridors, just utilitarian metal and stone. Ordinary doors marked its length for perhaps a hundred feet, where it dead ended in a T intersection.
“Let’s start trying doors,” Laura said.
The air was cool but stale. Ventilation was working somewhere, and Eva said as much.
William nodded, his light playing around the third empty room Laura had opened. “Not uncommon in Ancient facilities. But I must say, this is one of the planer ones I’ve ever examined, even the much older ones in the Milky Way. No ornamentation, no script… The Ancients liked to make functional things beautiful and elegant. Here it seems they just didn’t bother.”
Ronon opened the door across the hall. Six niches filled the other three walls, each roughly seven feet long and four feet wide, stacked one on top of the other. “Barracks,” he said. “This looks like the crew quarters in the undersea drilling station we found on Lantea.”
William nodded, for all that was Greek to Eva, a reference to some mission she’d never heard of. Presumably William had gotten much more classified material to review than she had. “That follows.”
“Only here they took the mattresses and lamps with them,” Ronon said, looking around. “Didn’t leave a thing. They didn’t desert this place in a hurry. They shut it down.”
“I’d be inclined to agree,” William said, backing out into the hall again.
Laura looked out of the door of the room across the hall. “Bathroom,” she said. “No frills, just the basics.”
“Some kind of military base?” Eva wondered aloud.
“It seems likely,” William said. “Just a hypothesis, of course. But this far out in the rim it may have been abandoned early in the war. This is far from all known population centers, and there seems to have been no strategic material here to defend.” He shrugged. “Perhaps simply not worth keeping as the Ancients became overextended.”
“It’s kind of creepy,” Laura said.
“It’s just a ruin,” William said. There was a slightly exasperated tone in his voice. “And not a particularly interesting one at that.”
“It’ll be interesting if it has a ZPM,” Ronon said. “How about we skip all these rooms and go straight for the energy source?”
“Just a quick look,” William promised, though by the tenth room even he was beginning to sound frustrated. “Maybe a kitchen,” he said of a long room stripped of everything except for some heavy stone sinks.
“Kitchens, barracks, bathrooms, storerooms,” Eva said as she opened the next door. “I wonder what it was all for?”
“A military outpost does seem likely,” William began.
Laura looked in. “Or a research facility,” she said. “This is more like it.”
Banks of metal shelves lined the walls, wires dangling where pieces of equipment had been pulled. A central pedestal held a stripped terminal, empty slots clearly showing where viewscreens had once been installed. Along the opposite wall of the room one way glass partitions separated out two isolation chambers, entirely empty except for a few overhead lighting fixtures, though small holes in the walls here and there suggested where other equipment might have gone.
William ran his hands over the remaining terminal almost lovingly. “This still has power,” he said.
“The lights do,” Eva replied. “Want me to initialize it?”
Ronon shook his head. “No. Lynn, you just get video, ok? We have no idea what this stuff does, and I’ve seen McKay nearly blow himself up way too many times turning on Ancient stuff he didn’t know anything about. Get some video, and when we bring Zelenka back here he can have a look at it.”
“It seems to have operative systems,” William said. “I could just…”
“Leave it alone,” Ronon said patiently. “Find the ZPM, if there is one. Zelenka can have a look at this stuff and see what it does.”
“It might be a weapon,” William argued.
“It might be just the environmental controls,” Eva said sensibly. “It looks like they took everything else except the lights and the ventilation systems. It’s probably the terminal that controls them.”
Ronon gave her an approving look. “Right. So let’s find the power source.”
Laura had been looking at the isolation chambers, trying to find the way to open them. Now she stopped, her head going up. “Ronon,” she said, “I don’t think this was a lab.”
He came to see what she was looking at, Eva and William at his shoulder. One of the walls was scratched, long gouges in groups of nine, a tenth hash mark across each group tying them together.
“No,” he said grimly. “It was a prison.”
They went on, down metal stairs that creaked alarmingly from corrosion and stressed joints, past more conventional cells set into the walls, bars drawn back across empty space. There were twenty of them. Eva counted. Twenty, and each had held a single person? Or each had held a dozen prisoners? There was no knowing. Everything was dark and silent, empty and clean, leaving no clues to the original occupants.