White-lipped, Teyla clutched the edge of her seat, but she never said a word. She could hear those energy blasts coming as clearly as Ronon saw them, and probably thought the glider's erratic behavior was due to evasive maneuvering. No point in bursting that bubble.
Teeth clenched, Ronon fiddled with the controls, unsure of whether or not it would help or cause a crash. He could count the occasions on which he'd piloted one of these things on the fingers of one hand. Suddenly the drive stopped its dissatisfied whine, changed pitch to an altogether more reassuring growl, and the glider began to respond to the controls. Ronon forced it into a steep climb, banked and sped for the corner of the building and out of the range of the STs weapons.
As they soared over the roof, the full extent of the devastation leaped into view. Below, the government district and the city stood in flames and what wasn't burning had been pulverized by the barrage. Ronon sucked in a sharp breath. The scene reminded him of nothing so much as the images of Sateda that probe had transmitted back to Atlantis. Amid the ruin, survivors scrambled for the spurious safety of the buildings. By the looks of it, even a bunker wouldn't protect them.
Teyla had heard his gasp. "It's bad," she said. It wasn't a question.
"Worse," he murmured.
And the meteors kept coming. He swung the glider into a sharp turn to avoid one heading directly for them and then set it back on an easterly course toward the fringes of the government district and the military base.
"Where are we going?" This time it was a question.
"To steal a spaceship"
Chapter fourteen
The climb had been over slick, jagged rock, complete with water cascading toward them, and Elizabeth was soaked to her skin. The hem of her skirt was slapping around her calves, feeling colder and soggier with every slap.
"Be careful not to get caught up here." Torch in one hand, Major Sheppard crouched in the narrow cleft at the top of the incline. "It's a pretty tight squeeze, and the rocks are sharp."
Yeah. Elizabeth's fingers had the cuts to prove it. No need to remind her.
"Do you want a hand?" he asked.
"No. I'm fine. Just get out of the way there
Even to her own ears her voice sounded dull, weighed down by the thousands of tons of mountain above their heads. Which was not the best of thoughts to hang on to. With a grunt she pulled herself up another two feet, then another, clamped her hand over the edge of the drop, wiggled and kicked her way up into the cleft, crawled through, and finally tumbled out into yet another rock chamber. She'd long lost any sense of how many hours they'd been on the move. Somehow time had become submerged in an endless sea of misery-aches, fatigue, cold, wetness-together with the quickly fading memory of the last rest they'd taken.
Same as the sight of daylight for that matter. Her best guess was that they were no nearer the surface than they had been in the chamber where John had woken up at last-if indeed they were even that close. Though several of the passages they'd come to had led uphill initially, virtually all of them had dipped sooner or later, and she had a distinct sense of being deeper inside the mountain than ever before. So far they'd been spared the flashfloods — perhaps the hail hadn't melted yet? — but on more than one occasion they'd been wading hip-deep in ice water. Compared to that, the little trickle down the rock wall was hardly worth writing home about.
Elizabeth pushed herself to all fours and rolled sideways into a sit. The others obviously felt the same as she; they sat slumped against the walls, eyes closed, and there seemed to be a tacit agreement that, for the next fifteen years at least, nobody would walk another step. With a sigh that fell just short of contentment, she tucked her legs tighter to her body and wrapped her arms around her knees for warmth. Besides, the chamber really was too small for four people; if she tried to stretch her legs, she'd kick John, though it was questionable whether he'd even notice. He looked half dead, and perhaps, she thought grimly, he actually was. For a while now she'd been worrying whether he'd sustained something worse than a mere concussion; a skull fracture, for instance. Not that there was a damn thing any of them could do about it…
The thought, disheartening as it was, gradually morphed into some kind of warm fluffiness. Vaguely noting that, at some point, she must have shut her eyes, Elizabeth let herself drift toward that happy place. After all, she'd deserved some fluffiness. She'd just-
"Don't fall asleep!" John might be half dead, but he still could rap out an order if he had to. Somehow he'd even managed to hone that edge of command back into his voice.
Elizabeth's eyes shot open, and she squinted at him. "I wasn't going to-"
"Don't fall asleep," he said more gently. "None of us can afford to. We've got to keep moving as long as we've still got light."
He cast a meaningful glance at the torch, which had burned down to a small stub. It was a minor miracle that it had lasted this far, but sooner or later that small stub would be gone, too, and they had nothing on them that was anywhere near dry enough to use as fuel.
"I'm hungry," the alternate Elizabeth offered and added with a surprising pinch of irony, "You promised me a dinner party."
"It got cancelled." Wincing in pain, Major Sheppard mas saged his leg. "The hostess was spaced out."
Hungry. Or ravenous more like. For some unfathomable reason, Elizabeth had omitted starvation from her list of selfish little miseries. It should have come right at the top, because she was just about ready to start chewing on her toes.
"Okay. Let's move out." Heavily leaning against the wall, John groped his way back to his feet. He gave a smile that was as fake as a thirty dollar note. "The sooner we get to the surface, the sooner we can go forage."
Never' sprang to mind… Elizabeth nixed that thought as defeatist. If the Johns could go on in the state they were in, so could she. Hell, even her alternate, who was at least twenty years her senior and decidedly not compos mentis, wasn't complaining. Much. She rose awkwardly, trying to shrink away from her wet clothes. No longer protected, that moderately warm part between her chest and knees was cooling down rapidly, so getting on the move again probably wasn't such a terrible thing.
John had let Major Sheppard take point, followed by Elizabeth's double. "Go on," he said, waiting for her to squeeze past.
"No way." Elizabeth shook her head for emphasis. "We've been through this already. You're not bringing up the rear. I'd like to be in a position to catch you when you pass out."
"Elizabeth-"
"That's an order, John." In the disappearing light from the torch, she saw him stare at her in disbelief and grinned. "Go on, or we'll lose them."
His only answer was a brief, reluctant nod, then he turned and followed the two alternates.
The passage continued to lead uphill. Elizabeth filed it away as a bit of random information, at the same time refusing to get her hopes up. You could be forgiven for thinking the entire tunnel system was like one of those drawings by M.C. Escher, where staircases went up and down simultaneously. Maybe the whole thing was just a giant optical illusion, and-
Yeah, sure. No raving, Elizabeth. Not yet, at any rate.
Up ahead that dim, increasingly reddish glow from the torch in Major Sheppard's hand came to a halt and seemed to be sucked up by something vast and dark beyond comprehension. As soon as she arrived at his side, she understood, and despite cold and hunger and exhaustion the sight left her breathless with awe. They were standing in the middle of a rock cathedral. It was impossible to tell how far beyond the reach of their torch the ceiling vaulted, but somehow the shroud of shadows overhead managed to convey an impression of absolute enormity. Stone pillars soared toward it, organic things without pattern or regularity, their tops lost in darkness. Throughout the entire chamber, the rock showed crystalline inclusions that threw back the meager torchlight and sparkled like diamonds.