There was a glossiness to the floor in front of him that had nothing to do with water, a greenish tint to the walls he knew but couldn’t immediately place. The room he now stood in was oddly shaped, all angles, set with several doorways and tall, glassy panels that would probably have supplied light if there had been power in the building.
There were no curves anywhere. He was in a world of straight, hard lines. “Rodney,” he said slowly. “Tell me I’m wrong.”
McKay had his PDA up, the light from its screen a hazy block on his face. “Trinium, refined titanium, superdense polymers… Oh man.”
“What?” said Dex.
“You don’t want to know.”
The Satedan raised an eyebrow. “I think I do.”
“Yeah, well, you’ll wish you hadn’t asked,” Sheppard told him. He gestured ahead with the barrel of the P90. “This is Asuran technology.”
“Replicators?”
“Uh-huh. We’ve walked right into the goddamn lion’s den.”
Chapter Thirteen
Immortal Remains
In some ways, the revelation made perfect sense. In others, none at all.
Now that he knew what he was looking at, Sheppard could see the work of the Asurans everywhere. The structure wasn’t a direct copy of any Replicator buildings he had seen, but its design aesthetic was identical. The doorways, although gaping open in the darkness, were of the same proportions as those on Asuras and in Atlantis, each with the same tubular activation sensor set alongside. The walls had the same repetition of form, the angles at which they met suggested the interior of some great prism rather than a conventional building. With knowledge as well as torchlight to illuminate him, he could see it quite clearly now. McKay was right.
But by the same token, McKay couldn’t be right.
Ronon Dex obviously had the same idea. “That’s crazy,” he growled. “You said the weapons fire was from Replicators.”
“It is.”
“Replicators don’t shoot each other, Rodney.” Sheppard scanned the P90 around, letting the taclight beam come to rest on a nearby doorway. “They’re part of a collective, remember?”
“I know that! I didn’t say I could explain it.”
Sheppard walked over to the doorway. There was something there, something reflective, sending his light back out in a complex interplay of overlapping beams. He drew closer, peered inside, and for an awful second saw a face looking back out at him. But it was only his own reflection, and he recovered from the start quickly enough for the others not to notice.
As he stepped through the doorway, he heard Dex ask McKay if he could hear ticking.
He was in a small chamber, maybe a couple of meters across, perfectly hexagonal. One of the six walls was open, the doorway at his back, but the others were set with transparent panels, and behind the panels were narrow spaces, cells, the back wall of each a slab of incomprehensible technology.
Sheppard moved close to one of the cells, touched the panel with his fingertips. It wasn’t cold, more a neutral temperature. Maybe a kind of plastic, then, rather than glass.
He scanned the taclight up, and saw nothing. Then he scanned it back down, and with a start of raw horror saw what was tangled in the bottom of the cell.
A curse ripped its way out of him.
The corpse was naked, its limbs pale sticks, its skin white and papery in the beam of the flashlight. It was crumpled up and facing the wall, and for that Sheppard was grateful. The back of it, that shriveled rack of ribs and spine with their covering of withered skin, was quite enough for him. He had no desire to see its face.
Its head had been shaved.
Not wanting to, knowing he had to, he moved the flashlight around. And as he had feared, each cell was occupied.
There were three men in the chamber with him. There was a woman. There was a child. All were naked, shaved, crumpled like driftwood in the floors of their cells. Some had turned away from the glass as death overtook them, but not all. One of the men had died trying to get out. His face, a shrunken nightmare, was pressed against the cell door.
The transparency in each compartment was smeared with long, bloody marks. The fingertips of each corpse were worn down to the bone.
McKay must have heard him shout. “Did you say something? Ronon says he can hear —”
He stopped in the doorway. Sheppard heard him swallow hard. “What the hell?”
“They were trying to get out,” Sheppard said flatly. “They tried to break the glass, but it’s not glass and they couldn’t break it…”
“Sheppard —”
“There’s a goddam kid in there, Rodney!”
“I know, I can see.” McKay put a hand on his shoulder, pulled him gently away from the cells, towards the door. “You can’t do anything for them.”
Sheppard turned, and pushed past him. As he stepped out into the open room, Dex emerged from another doorway. His face was dark with rage.
“More?”
“Bodies?” The Satedan nodded. “Yeah. Locked in and left to die.”
McKay joined them. “Look, there’s two more chambers I can see from here. We don’t need to go into them all.”
“I guess not. Whatever happened here, we missed it.”
“Right. But that energy trace is still active, and Ronon can hear something coming from that corridor over there.” He pointed. “Much as I’d really like to head back to the jumper right now, I think we’ve got to check this out.”
Sheppard looked back into the chamber doorway once more, trying not to imagine how long the occupants of those unbreakable cells had pounded and scraped at the not-glass. How long can a human survive without water?
Too long, sometimes.
He walked away, over to the corridor McKay had indicated. “In here?”
“Yeah.” McKay fell into step alongside him, and he heard Dex’s catlike tread following behind.
“Have you seen anything like this before?”
“From Replicators? No.” McKay shook his head, the beams from his halogens dancing wildly. “If anyone was going to wall people up it should be the Wraith, and they, well…”
“Eat them?” Dex chimed in helpfully. McKay grimaced.
“Okay, I wasn’t actually going to go there, but yes.”
The new corridor was as dark as the rest of the structure. From its position, Sheppard guessed he was now some distance under the hill itself. The thought made him want to stoop, to duck under the weight of rain-sodden rock scant meters above his head. He wasn’t usually claustrophobic, but the fate of the people in the cells had sparked a horror in him that only open sky could dispel.
But he couldn’t go back. Not yet. He needed to know what had happened here. If he left without an answer, if the reason those wretches had died their dry, lonely death remained a mystery, then their withered eyes would haunt his dreams.
He had to go on. Besides, now he was in the corridor he could hear ticking too.
It wasn’t regular. It was staccato, random, like the clicking of a bug on its back. Faint, but unmistakably mechanical. McKay’s power source was here, and something connected to it was moving.
“This place smells,” said Dex.
“Oh God,” muttered McKay thickly. “Oh no, I just got a sniff of that. Something’s died in here too, hasn’t it.”
The corridor ended in a corner. Sheppard rounded it, and put a hand to his mouth on reflex. The stench of rot, suddenly, was sickening.
There was a room in front of him, narrow, widening towards the far wall. A long structure, flat and waist-high, dominated the center of the chamber, while the walls were lined with what looked like murky fishtanks.
A fitful light, bluish and dull, fluttered under the surface of the long structure, a sputtering electrical glow. “I guess that’s your power source.”
“No, I don’t think so.” McKay was studying the screen of his PDA. “Whatever’s in here is just trace energy, some kind of backup battery. The main source is somewhere else.”