Reliquary

Chapter Five

Rodney had a lot of questions he wanted to ask, and he needed to nudge the conversation toward ZPMs. But he kept getting put off, which irritated the hell out of him. First Dorane had seemed unsteady on his feet, so Rodney and Kolesnikova had helped him back to the main part of the lab area. Once there, Kavanagh had stepped out of the communications alcove to help Dorane sit down, and the alcove sealed itself up again. Rodney had objected, telling Kavanagh that they should be monitoring it in case Sheppard tried to contact them, but Kavanagh — now the team’s Ancient communications expert because he had touched the damn thing once — had replied irritably that he had set it to monitor itself, and that it would alert them when Sheppard called in. Then Kavanagh had taken up more important question-asking time by apologizing for Rodney and Sheppard’s behavior. Rodney had snorted derisively, but before he could comment on Kavanagh’s behavior, Kolesnikova frowned at him and said in a whisper, “You and the Major talk to each other as if you are badly-raised eight year olds. Not everyone finds that attractive.”

Rodney allowed himself a restrained sneer. “The fact that our professional communications function on a level that Kavanagh doesn’t comprehend is not my problem.” Focusing his annoyance on Kavanagh made it easier to pretend he wasn’t worried.

Rodney had always hated relying on other people, who were inevitably fallible and wrong and usually stupid, but once they had arrived in Atlantis it had startled him how quickly he had come to rely on Sheppard. It had occasionally been difficult to reconcile the fact that the surfer/pretty boy type who qualified for MENSA but couldn’t be bothered to join was the same person who had stalked and killed Genii in the city’s corridors like they were cockroaches, could snap a man’s neck, and was crazy enough to attack a super-Wraith with a belt knife. But Rodney was over that now.

“What is this part of the facility for, exactly?” Rodney asked, once he could get a word in. “This whole underground section doesn’t look like it was part of the original design of the repository, athenaeum, whatever.”

“We believed it was a hospital and medical research facility,” Kavanagh told Dorane, and Rodney swore mentally. He wanted Dorane’s version, in his words, uncluttered by any of their suppositions and suspicions.

“You are correct, the underground levels were a hospital, also a facility for biological research,” Dorane told him, glancing up. He was seated on the couch again and still looked a little pale, sweat standing out on his forehead. “The settlement on this planet suffered from a sickness, originally created by the Wraith, in their experiments on their human livestock.” He gestured around a little helplessly. “We were making some slow progress in defeating it when the Wraith attacked again.”

McKay frowned. That wasn’t a strategy they had heard of the Wraith using before. “Didn’t you have shields, like those on Atlantis?”

“We did, but—” Dorane looked up, brow furrowed in thought. “How long have you been here?”

“A little more than a day,” Kolesnikova answered, watching him thoughtfully. “Why did the stasis chamber wake you now?”

“I had set the controls to wake me if any of my own people opened the blast door and entered the upper chamber.” Dorane smiled around at them all. “You are our descendants indeed. Atlantis’ children.”

“Yes, yes, whatever, but what happened with the shields?” Rodney persisted. For some reason, Kavanagh glared at him. Rodney glared back. Oh please, like you don’t want to know too.

“The Wraith used the Koan to infiltrate the outpost from within, and shut down the shields and other defenses,” Dorane explained. He looked a little confused, as if he wondered what was so urgent about the question.

“Oh. So the shield generators could still function?” Rodney prodded. “We could turn them back on, protect this place from Wraith attack? Once we got rid of the Koan, that is.” He wasn’t personally fond of this place, but if something happened to Atlantis, it was essential to have a safe point to retreat to. Or if they couldn’t turn the repository into a secure Alpha Site, they could cannibalize the working systems to shore up Atlantis’ failing power grid.

Dorane shook his head. “Unfortunately, they were destroyed by the Wraith deliberately during the attack. But I have never needed the shields. The Wraith believe this planet to be uninhabited, and have never returned here, that I know of. I am safe enough, if isolated.”

Kavanagh said earnestly, “You can’t mean to stay here. You must come back to Atlantis with us. There’s still much we don’t understand.”

“You could help us a great deal,” Kolesnikova added. “And you would be returning to your home.”

Dorane smiled at her. “Why yes, I would be happy to accompany you.”

This was what Rodney had been waiting for. He added, “Hey, since you’re coming with us, you can bring your ZPM. Your Zero Point Module? The subspace power source?”

Dorane gestured absently, as if it didn’t matter. “If you like. I’m not sure how much power it has left.” With a rueful expression, he added, “It has been working a long time.”

Oh, hell. Rodney had nearly been able to smell that ZPM since they had first seen this place on the MALP’s fuzzy transmission. He couldn’t wait; he needed to find out now. “I need to take some more readings.” He snapped his fingers impatiently at Kavanagh. “Give me your detector.”

Kavanagh snorted in annoyance, but retrieved the device from his vest pocket and handed it over.

Rodney ducked out, following the short passage back to the stairwell. He got a base reading and found the nearest power conduit, then started across the room. From the gallery, Ford asked, “Dr. McKay, what are you doing?”

Rodney barely glanced up. “I’m going to check out his ZPM.”

Ford started down the stairs, whispering urgently, “You’re not going to steal it!”

“Of course I’m not going to steal it!” Rodney rounded on him, glaring. “He’s coming back to Atlantis with us, I presume he’ll want to bring it with him since it would be criminally stupid to leave it.” You take one ZPM that looks like it’s just there for no reason, and suddenly everyone thinks you’re the mad ZPM bandit of the Pegasus Galaxy.

“Oh.” Ford stopped, shifting his weapon in a somewhat chastened way. “So why are you going to check it out?”

“To see if it’s the only power source. It would be nice to be able to have lights on the way out. Hey, and you’re supposed to be guarding, so guard.”

“Okay, okay. I was just asking.” Ford held up a placating hand, retreating back to the gallery.

Still huffy, Rodney followed the power conduits, tracing them back through the big room. He didn’t know how useful Dorane was going to be; the man seemed a little off, a little confused, and Rodney thought the isolation here might have driven him over the edge.

Rodney had had nightmares that involved being the last one left alive in Atlantis after a Wraith attack, and they weren’t pleasant.

It didn’t help that it wasn’t all that far beyond the bounds of possibility; Sheppard, Ford, Teyla, and the other military personnel would be on the front line, the operations team not far behind them, while Rodney, Zelenka, and the other scientists would be deep inside the city nursing the power grid or trying to get that damn weapons chair activated. Rodney didn’t expect that witnessing the actual effect on someone unlucky enough to be a lone survivor would change any of his nightmare scenarios. He made a mental note to run some calculations on the possibility of placing triggers for the self-destruct sequence at multiple locations around the city, to see if it justified the risks involved.

He came to a landing with a short set of stairs leading down into an open bay with several hatch-like doors. Rodney followed the detector to the nearest, and tapped its control pad. It slid upward, revealing a small power room filled with bundles of what looked like jury-rigged conduit. Two Zero Point Modules lay in open metal cases on a low bench, and a third was seated in the round unit that tied it in with the power system. “Oh, oh, oh,” Rodney whispered. “Oh, yes.”

But after a few moments of examining them, he grimaced in disappointment. Dorane hadn’t exaggerated the problem. The two ZPMs in cases were at maximum entropy and dead. The third one, still powering the system, was drained to only a partial charge. That’s a hell of a lot of power, Rodney thought, studying the detector. Especially for a facility that had been drawing minimal power for ten thousand years or so. Atlantis’ ZPMs had been in a similar state, but they had been maintaining systems that had held Atlantis stable on the bottom of an ocean, keeping the city intact and pressurized by tremendously powerful force fields. Even if most of this facility’s power had been expended trying to defend against the Wraith… Except he said the Koan shut down the shields before the attack started; that eliminates the major power drain. All these ZPMs had been doing since then was running one stasis container and waking Dorane occasionally to putter around and check his com system, plus maintaining the minimal lights and air movement. This…doesn’t add up. Literally. He started to take more readings, running some mental calculations.

The tunnel led out from the complex to the south, and the going was fairly easy. The floor was metal grating, the walls weren’t overly dank, and the blue lights were set every twenty or so paces. Other passages branched off, curving away into darkness, but Dorane had said the surface shaft would be at the end of the main passage.

“I have never heard of a race called the Koan, or of the Wraith using another species to attack a human settlement,” Teyla said, throwing John an uneasy glance, her face shadowed by the blue light. “I hope that is a trick they have forgotten.”

“Maybe it was a one-shot deal,” John said, though he didn’t think that was too likely. The Wraith they had run into didn’t tend to vary their methods of attack. Being at the top of the food chain didn’t encourage innovation. “Maybe they ran out of Koan, ten thousand years ago. And maybe Dorane hasn’t told us everything that happened yet.” That sounded a little grim, so he added, “He seemed a little confused.”

“I do not think he is…well. Despite his protestations. I could not live without knowing my people’s fate, even if it meant giving up all hope that they had survived.”

“Yeah,” John admitted, “I didn’t get that either.” He hadn’t gotten the impression that the Ancients had been that…distant. Atlantis was example enough that, as a people, they had liked color and light and life. But everybody was different.

After a short time the ground turned to uneven dirt and rock, though they still kept passing branching passages. John kept trying to reach Boerne and the others on the radio, but all he got was static.

Teyla said slowly, “I am beginning to wonder… When you saw Dorane, did you not feel any sense of recognition?”

“No.” John checked the life sign detector again and saw the area around them was still clear. But with the Koan possibly having some kind of Wraith jamming device, that didn’t mean much. He threw Teyla an odd look. “Why? Did you?”

“I felt something, as if I had seen him before, though that is impossible. And…it was not what I would have expected.” She bit her lip, looking troubled, and asked, “Do you not think that you would recognize an Ancestor if you saw one? You have the Ancestor’s gene from birth, not through Dr. Beckett’s therapy, as the others do.”

“I don’t think so.” Considering it seriously, John glanced down at her. “It’s not like I’m psychic or anything. I just have a gene that lets me control the jumpers and turn on the lights and initialize the systems and stuff just by thinking about it.” He considered that for an instant. “Okay, I know that didn’t sound like it supported the argument I was trying to make, but you know what I mean. And you said ‘if I saw an Ancestor’.” He stopped, regarding her seriously. “You don’t think he is one?”

Teyla shook her head, then got what John could only describe as a very weird expression, as if something disturbingly strange had just occurred to her. But she said, “I–I cannot say.”

“You cannot say? Huh? Teyla—”

She was a few steps ahead of him as they passed another intersecting passage, so John had a heartbeat’s warning when the Koan dropped out of the shadows onto her shoulders.

With a yell, John surged forward. Teyla staggered but managed to flip the struggling Koan off her back. It snarled, clawed hands snatching at her as she kicked it in the chest. John fired up into the dark space above her, the P-90’s flash catching another Koan just leaping out of concealment. He spun to cover the rest of the ceiling but the next Koan slammed right down on top of him.

Half-expecting it, John twisted to land on his back, getting the breath knocked out of him but still managing to slam the creature in the head with the gun’s butt. It reared back, and he pulled the P-90 down and triggered it, catching the Koan nearly point blank in the chest. It toppled back, and he shoved it off his legs, rolling to his feet. God, these things smell foul. Teyla was already firing down one cross-passage, and John turned to fire down the other just as a dozen dark shapes charged toward him. The first three fell. The others yelped and scrambled back.

John caught movement out of the corner of his eye and ducked. A heavy metal rod split the air right where his head had been. He got off a three-shot burst as the Koan lifted the rod for another blow; one bullet caught the creature in the upper thigh. It bellowed and flung the rod at John’s head.

John fell backward, deflecting it with his shoulder. He lifted his weapon but his light showed the Koan was already fleeing back up the cross passage with a kind of limping gallop, the others in full retreat ahead of it. He decided not to waste the ammo. It looked like the Koan had changed their minds about the ambush.

Teyla had shot her first attacker and was covering the other two passages. “Are you all right, Major?” she asked a little breathlessly. Her arms had long shallow scratches from the creature’s claws, but she wasn’t bleeding too badly.

John took a long look around. There was no movement in the shadows down the corridors. His shoulder hurt, but nothing was broken. “Yeah, you?”

“I feel badly in need of a bath,” she admitted. “The Koan do not believe in basic hygiene, apparently.”

It was pretty rank in here now. John stepped past her to where the first Koan lay sprawled against the rock wall. In life, the creature hadn’t cared for itself well. The gray and silver splotched skin looked like it was molting, and the white hair was ragged and lank. There were white and silver spines through the hair and bristling from its ears, but John saw for the first time how human its facial features actually were, scrunched up in pain from the wounds in its chest. It looked fairly young, about Ford’s age.

It wasn’t wearing anything like clothing, but it had a cord around its neck with a small handheld data pad attached.

John picked it up, staring at it incredulously. The case looked like it had been scavenged from something else, like a puddlejumper remote or maybe a handheld sensor of some kind. An Ancient control crystal that was a little too big for the case had been crammed into it. The rest of the insides, even from John’s limited experience, looked makeshift. Teyla recovered the life sign detector from where John had dropped it and held it out, showing him the screen. She said softly, “It does not even show us, now.”

“Yeah. This is the jammer, all right. But it wasn’t built by the Wraith.” John felt cold, the adrenaline rush of the fight giving way to grim realization. It was just believable that the original Wraith sensor-jammers might be lying around here after ten thousand years, still functional. They had certainly gotten bitten in the ass by other lost pieces of Wraith technology that had lasted at least that long. That the Koan would know what the jammers were and remember them as a thing to take with them when they hunted humans was vaguely possible too. But that they could be living like this and figure out a way to build one from scratch, from scavenged Ancient technology? I don’t think so.

John used his knife to cut the cord, then pushed to his feet, controlling a surge of homicidal fury. The immediate thing was that he no longer thought it was Corrigan, Boerne, and Kinjo who were in danger. He tucked the jammer into a vest pocket and said deliberately, “Let’s go surprise somebody.”

Rodney hurried back through the passages, checking the life sign detector to make sure Dorane was still down in the other room with Kavanagh and Kolesnikova.

Ford watched his approach from the gallery, brows drawing together. “What’s up?”

Rodney motioned urgently for him to come closer and met him halfway up the stairs. “I think something’s wrong. Dorane is lying to us about the timing.”

Ford shook his head slightly. “What do you mean?”

Intent, Rodney explained, “This facility was powered by three ZPMs, with two now at maximum entropy and one at minimal power. From the readings I’m getting, the draining had to have occurred at least fifty years before the Ancients left Atlantis for Earth.”

Ford stared. “That doesn’t make sense. Why didn’t they come here to look for survivors, then? Why couldn’t he contact them through the Stargate?”

“My point exactly.”

“Are you sure?” Ford demanded. He touched his radio headset, then grimaced, obviously recalling that Sheppard was out of reach.

“Of course I’m sure.” Rodney gestured impatiently. “Look, I need to examine that stasis container. I want to see how long he was actually in that thing. I need you to keep an eye out and make sure I don’t get caught at it.”

Ford nodded, his mouth set in a grim line. “Yeah, let’s do that.”

Rodney started back down into the stasis chamber area, Ford behind him, moving quickly and quietly. This whole thing was making Rodney’s skin creep. It would be nice if Dorane was confused, his memory a little scrambled by putting himself in and out of stasis. If the trauma of the repository’s destruction had so unhinged him that he couldn’t remember the exact sequence of events.

It would be nice. But according to Rodney’s experience in the Pegasus Galaxy, things were never nice.

Rodney crossed the foyer into the stasis chamber lab. Behind him, Ford took up a position in the archway, where he could watch the passage to the communications room.

The stasis container had closed itself up again, looking like a glass coffin on a metal plinth, as if it was meant for a postmodern Snow White. Rodney knelt beside the control console at the foot end, tapping the pads, trying to get it to bring up a diagnostic. The container, like the ZPMs, was definitely Atlantean technology, no question about that. The controls were similar, and the displays used the Ancient language. But there was a haphazard quality to the way it was tied into the other systems and the power conduits, that weirdly awkward air flow system with the pipes. He recognized that quality from his own attempts to mesh Earth-built components with Ancient systems.

After several minutes of struggle and coaxing, he got the panel to run a diagnostic. He ran a finger down the crystalline display, muttering under his breath as he translated the Ancient figures, rapidly calculating the power outputs and shutdown sequences, translating the time markers into hours and minutes.

The answer was worse than he thought. “Three days.” Rodney sat back on his heels, appalled. The container had been powered down a little more than three days ago, immediately after the MALP had come through the Stargate. “He knew we were here all along.” The system was configured to automatically cycle down and release the occupant when an external sensor suite recorded a power surge from the direction of the Stargate. The diagnostic showed that it hadn’t been powered up again until roughly six hours ago. When I started picking up intermittent power signatures. The intermittent power signatures that lured us down here.

Rodney pushed to his feet and headed for the door. So if it’s a trap, and obviously, it’s a trap, why did he let Sheppard and Teyla go up to the surface? He answered himself, Obviously, he didn’t. Ford was still in the foyer, warily watching the doorways and stairwell. “Lieutenant,” Rodney whispered harshly. “We need to go after the Major and Teyla. They—” The lights went out. “That wasn’t a coincidence!” He swung his pack around, frantically digging for his flashlight.

The light on Ford’s P-90 snapped on, and he said, “Listen.”

Rodney froze. The silence seemed complete. He fumbled out the detector and showed Ford the screen. “There’s nothing,” he whispered. “Wait. Oh, no.”

Ford’s eyes widened as the screen suddenly came alive with blinking dots. Twenty, thirty, more, filling the level just above them. Ford swore and ran for the stairs.

His light flashed across the doorway, giving Rodney a good view as the first Koan crowded in. The silver-mottled skins, the wild spiny hair glinted in the light. They spotted Ford and howled.

Ford halted on the steps and fired up through the doorway, driving the first surge back with a spray of three-shot bursts. “Get the others!” he shouted. “We need to fall back.”

“Right!” Rodney dashed for the passage down to the com room, bumping off the rocky wall in the dark.

“Hey, there’s—” He froze in the doorway. His flashlight revealed an empty room. Empty except for Kolesnikova, sprawled facedown on the floor. Rodney swore, jolting forward, dropping to his knees beside her. He grabbed her shoulders, rolling her over. “Irina—”

There was a stain on her chest just above her tac vest, dark against her blue uniform shirt. Her eyes were open. Rodney automatically felt for a pulse in her neck, even as part of his mind cataloged the fact that he was kneeling in a pool of blood, that it was minutes too late.

He choked down a sudden rush of nausea and shoved to his feet. “Oh, God,” he breathed. Where the hell was Kavanagh?

Rodney turned back for the passage, shouting, “Ford!” over the staccato bursts of gunfire. He reached the foyer again and saw Ford braced against the railing, firing up at the Koan. In the muzzle Hashes Rodney could see more of them crowding around the doorway, ducking in, forcing Ford to shoot to keep them back, pinning him down in the stairwell. Rodney tucked the flashlight under his arm and dragged out his sidearm, fumbling for the safety. “Ford, Kolesnikova’s been killed! Something’s — Someone’s—” Distracted, Rodney stared as his light caught another figure, running across the dark chamber toward Ford. It was Kavanagh. “Kavanagh,” he shouted, anger and relief that at least the bastard was still alive temporarily overriding fear. “Where the hell were you? What happened to—”

Ford threw a glance over his shoulder and spotted Kavanagh. He turned back to face the Koan, starting to back away from the stairs. “McKay, fall back to that second passage, try to—”

Kavanagh came up behind Ford and Rodney saw his arm lift. He didn’t see the gun in Kavanagh’s hand until he cracked Ford across the head with it. Rodney stared in shock, his mouth hanging open, as Ford jerked forward and fell across the steps. The Koan howled and poured through the upper doorway. Then Kavanagh, his face blank and preoccupied, swung toward Rodney, lifting the pistol, aiming it at him.

Rodney’s brain lurched back into gear, and he clicked off his light, throwing himself sideways. The shot went off but missed him completely. Thinking, Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no, Rodney fired into the dark shapes of the Koan, scattering them, even as he scrambled for the open passage behind him. He pushed to his feet, fired two more shots, then bolted off into the dark, the Koan howling after him.

John half expected the door at the end of the passage to be locked, but it started to slide open when he touched the controls.

Confirming the bad feeling he had about this whole situation, he saw as it started to lift up that the room beyond was now dark. Oh yeah, John thought, now I’m really pissed off. He braced against one wall, Teyla against the other.

The door opened fully, and their lights revealed no movement. A few of the blue emergency lights were on, but none of the brighter overheads. John flicked the P-90’s light off and eased out into the room cautiously, saying, low-voiced, “Teyla, I think somebody played a little trick on us.”

“I do not understand this,” she whispered harshly, following his lead. “Surely, even if he was lying about being an Ancestor, he would want to be rescued from this place.”

“Well, you know, maybe he didn’t.” John checked the detector; the sensor-jammer had been jury-rigged, which meant there might only be one of them. He grimaced. “Oh, here we go.” There were life signs, about twenty of them, in the direction of the area with the stasis chamber. Where they had left Rodney and the others. Coldly angry, John thought, If he’s touched one of them—He handed off the detector to Teyla, then switched on the Koan’s handy sensor-jammer. “Let’s find him and ask him if he wants to be rescued.”

John and Teyla found an alternate route through the maze of passages, coming out into the big room with the support pillars. The room was lit only by the blue lights, but John could easily see Dorane standing in the center. He was holding something that looked like an Ancient life sign detector, frowning at its screen. A couple of Koan stood near him, their silver-gray skins tinged blue by the light, the spines in their wild hair glittering. It looked as if they were waiting for orders. The blast door out into the corridor was open and more Koan hovered near it, with still more loitering out in the corridor. There was no sign of Rodney, Ford, or the others.

John glanced at Teyla, got a grim nod in response, and stepped out of cover into the room. “Hi. Somehow I get the idea you’re not really an Ancient.”

Dorane turned, startled.

“Put whatever that is down,” John instructed, watching him narrowly. “Or I’ll blow it out of your hand. And, you know, your hand’ll have to go too.”

Dorane stared at him for a moment, his face expressionless. He didn’t make the mistake of underestimating John’s sincerity and carefully lowered the device to the floor. As he straightened up, John thought incredulously, Is he taller? He must have been slumping a little earlier, making himself look less threatening. Dorane said lightly, “You used the jammer. How astute.”

“Yeah, well, I catch on pretty quick when I’m attacked. What did you do with my people?”

Dorane folded his arms, and weirdly it reminded John of one of the older and calmer science team members explaining a theory. “There is nothing to fear. I locked them in the laboratory where my stasis container is.”

“Okay.” He’s lying, John’s instinct said. His worst fear added, he’s killed them. He pushed the thought aside. The detector hadn’t shown them, but then with all this shielding they might have been out of range. But if Dorane had locked McKay, Kavanagh, and Kolesnikova in a lab, of all places, with tools and power, John couldn’t believe they would be in there for more than five minutes. And he knew damn well that Ford was carrying extra ordnance in his pack. John would reserve shooting bits off of Dorane for a last resort, though at the moment it was his first choice for getting accurate information. “Let’s go get them out.”

Dorane said easily, “Very well.” He smiled. It wasn’t the evil smile John had been half expecting. There was a quality to it he couldn’t quite define. “This way.”

John didn’t move. “Tell your friends there to back up, right out through that doorway.”

Dorane turned back to him, lifting a brow. “They aren’t my friends, they are my people.” He touched the iridescent shoulder of one of the Koan. It twitched away from him with a growl, edging back.

John’s brows lifted. “What?”

“Oh, we were like you once,” Dorane assured him. “Human, or so genetically similar that any difference was immaterial. We knew the Lantians, the people you call the Ancients, your honored ancestors. They shared their technology with us, in dribs and drabs, built the Stargates. And antagonized the Wraith into destroying us.”

The last was said in almost the same even tone. Almost. “Antagonizing the Wraith isn’t that hard to do,” John felt compelled to point out. “Now tell them to leave, or I’ll kill every one of them. This gun holds a lot of bullets. Their buddies in the tunnel found that out.”

Dorane’s expression turned a little colder, but the Koan, in response to some invisible signal, backed away, muttering uneasily among themselves. They moved out through the doorway into the corridor, and when they were clear John flicked a look at Teyla, a jerk of his head telling her to seal the door. She moved over to it, sparing a hand from her weapon to hit the controls. As the door slid closed, John caught a glimpse of her in the light. She didn’t look so good, her face paling enough that her eyes seemed enormous. Her bangs were matted with sweat, though it wasn’t that warm. He remembered she had been acting oddly right before the Koan attack; oh great, maybe there is an airborne disease down here. They had to find the others and get this over with fast.

He told Dorane, “Now move.”

Dorane turned reluctantly, starting across the chamber. He said, “I was not lying when I said my people were attacked by the Wraith. We tried to use biological and chemical weapons to fight them, but the Lantians would not help us. We believed our biological weapons would only affect the Wraith; we didn’t realize they would affect us as well. Our weapons drove the Wraith away — temporarily — but they also caused terrible genetic changes in our own people.” He paused to look back at John. “I went to the Lantians to beg for help, and they allowed me to stay with them for a time, working in their laboratories. They pretended to help me.”

“Pretended, yeah, uh huh, keep moving,” John echoed skeptically. He didn’t get it. The Koan didn’t act like any kind of people, genetically altered or not; there was something wrong with their minds, not just their bodies.

Dorane’s eyes narrowed. He was obviously angry that John wasn’t paying attention to his little story. “They betrayed me. The attempts they made to stabilize the damage only made the situation worse, and my people were destroyed.”

John said pointedly, “They weren’t gods, they were just people. Technologically advanced people. They couldn’t fix everything or they would have destroyed the Wraith.” He squeezed off a three-shot burst, scarring the floor about two inches from Dorane’s feet. “Now keep moving, or the next time I’ll shoot your kneecaps, and drag you.”

Dorane hadn’t flinched, but his face had gone still. He turned, leading the way toward the stairwell on the far side of the room. He said, “The Lantians obviously gifted your people, their favored descendents, with the gene, but they withheld it from us.” Dorane gestured like a man who was only being reasonable. “It would have helped us recover, but of course it would also have given us access to all their technology, all their secrets. I begged, but they refused to share it.”

John pressed his lips together. He doubted Dorane was giving him an accurate account of what had happened. The Ancients probably had tried to help the Koan, but it could have been too late to do anything for them. The Ancients hadn’t been able to stop the plague that had driven them to the Pegasus Galaxy in the first place, either. “But you’ve got the gene. We saw you activate the com system, or was that another trick?”

Dorane reached the stairwell, looking back at John with an almost noncommittal shrug. “They would not share it, so I created my own. I developed a drug — You would perhaps not understand the details.”

“We call it a retrovirus.” The big room was too dark to see much, but a door now closed off the archway into the stasis chamber. There was a trap here, John could practically taste it, but he couldn’t see where it was coming from. Maybe more Koan hiding in the stasis lab? “Keep moving.”

Dorane started down the stairs. “Yes. I knew your people must have an artificial way to give yourselves the gene. Even in crossbred human-Lantian populations it is rare. Of your companions who had it, I could tell you were the only one born with it. I could smell it on you.” While John thought, oh, that wasn’t creepy. He sounds like a Goddamn Wraith, Dorane continued, “The Lantians were so confident in their superiority that they let me do what I wished in their great city. I could go where I wanted, copy what I wanted. I stole the secret of a great many of their precious devices, completed my work on my alternate gene serum, and escaped back to my world. But it was too late. Most of my people were dead. I brought a group of survivors here to this planet, to where the Thesians were building this place to the Lantians’ direction. Here I could continue my experiments and try to reverse the physical and mental damage the survivors had suffered.”

They reached the bottom of the stairs. “It looks like you didn’t do so great at that.” John was enjoying pretending lack of interest in a sick kind of way, but he couldn’t help asking, “What happened to the Thesians? Were they locked up in those little cells?”

“I needed a baseline human population to test my attempts to cure the other Koan. I told them I was a Lantian, that I had come to help them finish the repository and to use it to defeat the Wraith.”

“Yeah. That works every time,” John said. They had reached the doorway of the stasis lab. “Open the door.”

“Of course it does. It certainly worked when the Lantians tried it on us,” Dorane agreed. He faced John calmly. “I’ll have to turn the power back on.”

“I hope you can do it from here, for the sake of your kneecaps.”

Dorane nodded toward the stairs. “There is a routing control over there, in the wall.”

“Okay, you know the drill, do it with your mind.”

Dorane snorted amusement. “It’s not that kind of technology,” John said over his shoulder, “Teyla, see if you can get the power turned on. If that’s a trick,” he added to Dorane, “you’re going to get really, really hurt.”

“I didn’t expect you back alive.” Dorane shrugged slightly. “There was no time for more tricks.”

John kept part of his attention on Teyla, as she moved around under the stairs searching for the control with the P-90’s light. Dorane continued, “But the Lantians discovered me. They invaded through the Stargate, destroyed my defenses, took away all my subjects… They left me here, meaning this place to be my prison. Their last act was to leave an explosive device on the Stargate’s dialing apparatus.”

“They must have been really pissed off. Like me.” Finding their repository turned into some kind of nightmare genetics lab and the people they had chosen as builders and custodians for it being used as guinea pigs, the Ancients must have gone completely berserk. Or maybe John was just projecting. Then he remembered the bomb craters outside, and thought maybe not.

“Here it is, Major,” Teyla said, her voice cracking with effort. Crap, something’s wrong, I have got to get her out of here, John thought. The overhead lights flickered and he heard a low-power hum.

Dorane put his hand on the door control, as if waiting for the power to come completely online. He said, “Supplies were very low, so I put myself and the remaining members of the Koan in the stasis containers I had used to secure subjects with particularly interesting results. I set my container to wake me periodically so I could continue the experiments. I did not mean to let the Lantians stop me.” Dorane’s face changed, a look of weary relief passing over his features. “Finally. Your companion is strong. Almost too strong.”

The blow came from behind.