By the time they got there, Sheppard was soaked through. “You know something? I am really not looking forward to being locked up with this smell all the way back to Atlantis.”
“Be glad it’s only half a day,” Dex growled. His dreadlocks were soaked onto his head. “But I swear, if McKay’s got his numbers wrong again and we end up stranded, having to breathe this stink until we’re rescued?”
“Don’t think about it,” Sheppard advised him. “Really, it’s best not to.”
They had reached the foot of a low hill. On any other world it might have been impressive, soaring, but Chunky Monkey’s incessant rain had beaten it low; its hunched peaks were almost invisible through the wet air, the shattered, powdery margins of its slopes shelving messily into the ground until it was almost impossible to see where it began.
Dex had been right about the weapons fire, though. From close up, Sheppard could see where the shale had been scooped away by blast effects in a dozen places along the slope. The weather had disguised much of the damage — in such a naturally broken landscape it was difficult to tell which craters were the result of erosion and which of explosion. Like a hurried murderer, though, the rain hadn’t covered everything. There was evidence enough of some bloody crime, here.
Sheppard stooped to pick up a chunk of shale. It had another piece fused onto it, the two rocks welded into one by the intense heat of some violent energy discharge. He showed it to Dex, who nodded silently, then threw it away.
The rock clattered eerily as it struck ground, the vibration of it sending rivulets of jagged pebbles rustling and skittering down the slope. It must have startled McKay, because he popped up a few meters down-slope, clutching a PDA in one hand and the P90 in the other. “What was that?”
“Nothing,” Sheppard called back to him. “Found anything?”
“Yeah. This way.” He turned away and began trudged along the edge of the slope. Sheppard swore under his breath and began to follow him, picking his way as quickly as he could on the treacherous ground.
A few minutes later, he stopped. McKay was standing near a bulge in the hillside, a ragged swelling that emerged from the slope like a blister. “It’s here,” he said. “Can you see that?”
“See what?”
“That shape!” McKay pointed at the blister.
Sheppard covered his eyes again, blinked rain from his lashes and tried to see what McKay was talking about. For a moment it eluded him, but then he saw an edge — fractured and crumbled, half covered by broken rock and rivulets of streaming water, but unmistakably an edge.
Once he had seen that, the outline emerged from his confusion like the solution to a puzzle. Seconds later, he couldn’t understand why he hadn’t been able to see it.
There was a structure emerging from the side of the hill. A broad shape, flat and faceted, maybe thirty meters across, ten high. It had been clad in the same gray, sodden stone as the rest of the landscape, but here and there parts of the covering had fallen away, revealing a dark smoothness beneath.
Large parts of it had been blasted open, too. The violence Sheppard had noticed further along the hill must have been concentrated here.
“Rodney? You getting any residuals off these blast patterns?”
“I kind of wish you hadn’t asked that.”
“Why?”
“Because then I wouldn’t have had to tell you this was done by Replicator weapons.”
Sheppard snapped the P90’s fire control selector down from safe to semi-automatic. Behind him, he heard Ronon’s blaster charge with a thin whine. “Any idea what this place is?”
“Not a clue.”
“I was afraid of that. Okay, let’s start looking for a way in.”
“Hm?” McKay gave him a quizzical look, still squinting against the rain. “Oh, I’ve already found one of those.” He stumbled a few steps closer to the structure, and pointed. “See?”
Past a jumble of broken rock and twisted metal, an uninviting wedge of gloom. An explosion had opened up a rift in the structure’s wall, a piercing wound that went deeper than Sheppard could see, and wide enough to crawl through.
The prospect was far from enticing. “Well,” he muttered, mostly to himself. “It’ll be out of the rain.”
He stepped towards the wound and leaned inside. He heard water, a cacophony of echoing drips and rushes, and he could smell metal and something burnt.
There was no light. He reached into one of his vest pouches and took out a tactical light, flicked it on and shone the beam inside. The light caught water first — streams of fat droplets cascading from the fractured, leaking ceiling, and filling the floor ankle-deep. Past the initial meter or two of rubble Sheppard could see that the wound opened up into some kind of tunnel or corridor, walled with repeating slabs of grayish metal. What little he could see looked functional, utilitarian.
It also looked oddly familiar.
“Okay, it widens out in there. We’re going to get our feet wet, though.”
“My feet are already wet,” McKay griped. “See anything else?”
“No.” Sheppard gripped the edges of the wound and pulled himself up, putting his boots in first and lowering himself past the opening. He had to slither down an incline of debris, and carefully. Not all of it was rock — twisted spars of metal, their edges ragged, poked through the mess in several places.
Finally, he splashed down into the corridor. He froze as soon as he was able to stand, letting the echoes of his entry die away, keeping the beam of the taclight focused on the end of the corridor.
Nothing. The darkness ahead of him stayed as impenetrable as before, and the tunnel noiseless save the constant pat and splatter of water. “Clear,” he called back. “And watch your way in. There’s sharp stuff.”
McKay followed next, rather more quickly than he would have expected, and with several choice curses. It took Sheppard a moment to realize that Dex had probably picked him up and dropped him through the opening. The Satedan followed close behind, and within a few seconds the three of them were standing up to their ankles in warm, moving water.
Dex flicked his own flashlight on, and scanned it around. “See the walls?”
McKay had taken a plastic headband from his pack, and settled it down over his hair. Sheppard saw him tighten it, then switch on two tiny halogen lamps, one at either temple. It looked slightly ridiculous, but the light wasn’t much less than that from a standard-issue taclight and it left his hands free.
He looked around, the twin beams following his gaze. “Oh yeah. Carbon scoring.”
“There was a firefight in here,” said Sheppard. “Energy weapons, lots of ’em.” He clipped the tactical light to the Picatinny rail on the P90’s receiver, then set off down the corridor, moving his boots slowly through the water. “Looks like somebody had to fight their way in.”
“You want to know what else is weird about the walls?” McKay splashed up behind him.
“Well, they look kind of familiar.”
“Oh, you noticed too.”
They moved on without speaking for a few meters. The leaks in the ceiling lessened as they made their way further into the hill, the sound of water dropping away behind them. Sheppard welcomed that: the splattering had been random, like static. It made listening difficult.
Ahead, so far, was only silence.
Abruptly, the corridor ended. There was no door, just a dark expanse of open space behind it. Sheppard noticed that the water was getting shallower as he neared the end, and looked down to see it spiraling down into vents in the floor. As he walked into the open space, he left the last of it behind.