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.
Chapter Six
Plunging through the blue twilight corridors, Rodney estimated he had been on the run for about half an hour. He wouldn’t have lasted five minutes, but he had run into another blast door and discovered that, while the lights were out, the main power grid was still functioning. That gave him some options. He had sealed the door behind him and, working quickly, flashlight clutched in his teeth, had reconnected some cabling in the circuit panel to deliver a substantial shock to the next person to touch the door. A Koan shriek muffled by the thick metal was his reward as he bolted away.
Now, using the detector to trace power signatures, he made his way rapidly through a maze of rock-walled passages. About twenty yards ahead of the Koan, he found a maintenance crawlspace roughly carved out of the stone. He managed to cram himself into it and scrambled through and down into another corridor on a lower level. The main lights were still on, which meant that Dorane hadn’t expected any of his visitors to make it down here. Sitting back against the wall, breathing hard, Rodney set the detector to map the power grid around him, which should supply him with a rough idea of the layout of rooms and passages in this area, and watched the alternate screen for life signs.
It would be nice to know what the hell had just happened. Kavanagh is working with the Koan? I knew the man was a jackass, but how the hell does that happen? The whole thing was a nightmare. And speaking of nightmares, if he was the only survivor… Sheppard and Teyla had walked off into a trap, Ford might or might not be alive, the radio was still dead and he had no way to contact the others on the surface for help. Rapidly calculating how much current it would take to blow out the last ZPM in the power grid and wondering how tough it would be to crack this area’s computer system if he could find a working console, he absently thought, Oh yes, dead man sitting here. Very dead. Dead, deader, deadest.
Then he saw two other life signs appear on the edge of the detector’s range, making their way in toward the signs still moving through the upper lab area. Rodney sat up straight, heart pounding with sudden hope. Sheppard and Teyla. The direction was right. Then all the life signs vanished.
They’re dead? Rodney thought, incredulous and horrified. Then he grimaced at himself. Every life sign, even the ones that must be Koan, had disappeared simultaneously. That was the apocryphal Wraith sensor-jammer Dorane mentioned, obviously.