She supposed it was possible that Carter had tasked more than one expedition member to observe the Ancient for her, but Zelenka would have hardly been Teyla’s first choice for the job. Far more likely that he was here of his own agenda.
Or that of Angelus.
It was a strange thought, but after seeing the two marines acting so inhumanly it was not one she could shake easily. The night’s events had left her feeling unsure, almost disconnected. Even Zelenka, a man she had known for some years and who have never shown her the slightest malice, seemed wrong to her, his very presence alien and malign.
For the moment, Teyla decided, she would remain hidden. Better, in this lonely corner of the city, to be the observer rather than the observed.
Zelenka began to walk towards her. By his stance she could tell that he had not seen her, and it was a simple thing for her to move out of his way and still not be spotted. In fact, he passed within a few meters of her, completely oblivious. All the more reason to think he was not part of Carter’s surveillance plan.
Once he was into the corridor, Teyla peeked around to watch him walking towards the guard station. She saw him pause there, look into the open door. No-one was there to greet him: it appeared that the two marines had indeed deserted their post.
Zelenka stood looking into the station for a few seconds. What was he seeing there?
Abruptly, he backed away, glanced quickly over his shoulder, and then carried on along the corridor. He was moving slowly, trying to be quiet. Teyla watched, just a little amused by his efforts, as he walked up to the entrance to the lab.
When he got there, he stopped. Something inside had caught his attention, but he seemed unwilling to go in. For almost a minute he stood there, a perplexed expression on his face, intent on what he was seeing.
In the deep, night-time silence, all Teyla could hear was the distant rustle of waves and her own hammering heart.
Suddenly, Zelenka turned away from the lab and began to walk quickly back towards her. Teyla moved back from the corridor entrance, hugged the gallery wall and listened to his footsteps get closer. There was a pause in the footfalls, as if he had stopped partway along the corridor, and when they resumed they were faster, more purposeful.
From the other direction, the other end of the gallery, Teyla heard more footsteps. Distant at first, but heavy, slow, perfectly regular. She cursed silently.
Zelenka was hurrying back up the corridor now, his pace increasing. He slowed as he reached the corridor entrance, though, and Teyla watched, perplexed, as the man halted, and then slowly raised his hand to stare at what he held.
It was a pistol. Teyla suppressed a gasp.
Too late. She saw Zelenka tense as he heard her. She snapped a hand out, grabbed the gun and twisted it out of his grip. He yelped in shock, a sound far too loud in the stillness of the gallery, and with the footfalls getting closer one she could not afford to have him repeat. She swung him around, pushed him quite hard against the corridor wall and clamped her free hand over his mouth. “Do not move,” she hissed into his ear. “Please.”
He struggled for a moment, but even with her hand gripping the pistol Teyla was strong enough to keep him in place with her forearm alone. Instead, he mumbled something high and frightened against her hand.
“I am sorry,” she replied, her voice an urgent whisper. “I should have told you not to speak either.”
He opened his mouth again, but Teyla increased the pressure against his chest just enough to make him reconsider. She could have held him there for as long as she wanted, but the machine-regular footfalls along the gallery were getting closer.
She leaned close to him, put her mouth to his ear. “You are going to do exactly what I tell you, yes?” she said.
Zelenka nodded.
“Good. Come on.” She moved away, and pushed him, gently but urgently, towards the lab.
At her prompting, he began to move reluctantly back the way he had come, ducking reflexively into a sort of awkward crouch. Teyla came up alongside him, gesturing with the gun barrel. The footfalls were too close for speech, now. She couldn’t risk the marines hearing her. In a moment they would be at the end of the corridor, and she and Zelenka would be in plain sight.
She grabbed his jacket and pulled him sideways, down behind the guard station, hoping he wouldn’t stumble against it or make some other sound. Thankfully his skills at self-concealment were up to this particular task, and he folded himself into the shadows behind the station without fuss. Teyla squeezed in next to him, keeping her head below the level of the plexiglass, tensed and ready to leap, the gun held white-knuckle tight in her fist.
The footsteps halted. Teyla heard the door to the guard station open, movement from inside, the creak of a folding chair. Then the door was closed, and the second chair protested under weight. After that, silence.
The marines had returned to their guard duty.
As far as Teyla could see, there was only one place that Zelenka could have found a pistol in that corridor, and she didn’t want to be around when the marines noticed it was missing. She turned back to the scientist and gestured again, miming a path low around the guard station. Zelenka, wisely, must have decided that compliance was the most sensible course of action, so when she set off, scampering silently away with her head still below the level of the plexiglass, he followed in kind.
When they were both around the far corner and into the gallery, quite out of sight, she stopped, pulling him to a halt close to the wall. “Radek, what are you doing out here?”
She heard him swallow nervously. “Are you going to put the gun down?”
“No.”
“Teyla, you and I haven’t exactly been the best of friends, but how long have we known each other?”
Her face hardened somewhat. “That remains to be seen. Now, what were you doing?”
“I don’t know!” He was having a hard time keeping his voice low; it kept trying to rise into a nervous squeak. “I swear… Look, I was with Colonel Carter, we were working on something. I thought it might have a connection to Angelus or his lab, but when I looked in he was…” He shrugged helplessly.
“He was what?”
“Acting strangely. I don’t know. But I didn’t want to go in after that. So I came back.”
Teyla lifted the gun, saw him flinch away from it. “And this?”
“It seemed like a good idea at the time…” Zelenka looked embarrassed. “Actually, no, it didn’t. I really have no idea why I took that.”
She narrowed her eyes. “That makes no sense.”
“It doesn’t?”
“No.” She lowered the gun. “But neither does anything else tonight.”
“I’m glad I’m not the only one who thinks that.” He ran a hand nervously back through his hair. “Do you think we should —?”
A scream, high and sudden, cut through his words.
It had come from the lab. Teyla saw Zelenka spin away at the sound of it, a reflex reaction that would have had him running if she’d not grabbed the back of his jacket again and stopped him dead. “You are going the wrong way.”
“That’s a matter of opinion.”
“I know that voice. Come on.” She shoved him back in to the corridor, and followed him in.
She had been right in her assessment of who had screamed: Alexa Cassidy, clad in a white lab coat, was standing in the middle of the corridor. The two marines were standing in front of her, barring her way.
Teyla left Zelenka dawdling and ran up behind them, holding the gun low, out of sight. “What is going on here?”
Cassidy was sobbing in terror, incoherent, trying to speak past great gulps of breath. “Something’s… They tried…”
“Alexa, please calm down. You are safe now.”
“No.” The physicist shook her head. “Not safe. Please let me go.”
The marines were looking back at Teyla. Their eerie synchronous motion was nowhere to be seen now; they moved just as anyone would. Teyla saw one of them — a Lieutenant DeSalle, by his nametag — look past her as Zelenka walked reluctantly up the corridor.
“Please, Ma’am,” he said flatly, “let us handle this,”
The other marine reached out to take Cassidy by the arm, grabbing her as she shrank back. “Doctor, I think you should go back.”
“No,” she moaned. She looked despairingly at Teyla. “Please,” she whispered. “Help me.”
“Lieutenant, let her go.” Teyla took a step closer, getting between the two marines. The one holding Cassidy had the name ‘Kaplan’ sewn above his breast pocket. “There is no need for this.”
“Mr Fallon gave us express orders,” Kaplan replied. “Doctor Cassidy has been assigned.”
“I quit,” said Cassidy quietly.
Teyla reached out to her. “Alexa, come with me. We will sort this out with Colonel Carter.”
“Something’s wrong,” breathed Zelenka. “Teyla…”
“Radek, call the Colonel.”
“I’m trying to, that’s what I meant. There’s no signal.”
“What?” Teyla reached up to her own headset. “Colonel Carter?”
He only answer was static, and a distant, sinister rushing, like breathing. Or chanting. The sound of it was awful, filled with malign intent, and she shut the signal off to avoid hearing more of it.
As she did so, Cassidy dragged herself free from Kaplan’s grip.
Teyla stepped aside to let the woman pass her, and then looked up to see that Kaplan had draw his sidearm. He must have done so terrifically fast; Teyla hadn’t even seen him move. In a split second the pistol had gone from securely holstered to being aimed, one-handed, at Zelenka.
In response, Teyla stepped back and brought her own gun up. “Lieutenant, you may stand down.”
“Give her back,” he said.
“I said stand down!”
There was a blur of movement: DeSalle, brutally quick, had reached out to grab the gun from Teyla. He was faster than she’d ever seen a man move — his entire arm was up and his hand clamped hard over the top of the gun in the exact same time it took Teyla’s trigger finger to twitch.
The gun went off into DeSalle’s face.
Bullets, despite what happened in the movies Sheppard insisted on showing her, do not fling people backwards. Occasionally people fling themselves backwards as the bullet strikes them, but that is only a reaction to the impact, not the impact itself. Teyla had seen enough men shot to know what bullets do.
Bullets kill. And dead men do not hurl themselves about. Dead men fall down.
Lieutenant DeSalle, despite the fact that the bullet had crashed clear through his skull, was not falling down. He was very much upright. His head was tilted back slightly, but as Teyla watched he straightened, and turned his ruined face towards her.
Light shone through the hole where his left eye should have been.
He let go of the gun. Teyla backed up, still aiming, utterly aghast. There was a part of her mind that was waiting for him to fall, waiting for his body to realize that half his brain was gone. Fall, she thought wildly. Fall fall fall…
He stepped back, calmly, his face still turned to her. He did so in perfect unison with Kaplan. Both men, moving as one, backed slowly and deliberately away from her.
They stopped partway up the corridor, and at the moment they stopped walking the floor shook faintly under Teyla’s feet. There was a soft grinding noise, a metallic scraping, as diagonal slabs of metal emerged from the walls just ahead of the two marines. The metal slid inwards, drew close, slammed massively and irrevocably together.
And then all the lights went out.