Whoever it was, was speaking literally, as if he was under hypnosis, but the effect of it was to make the incident sound less like a mercy killing and more like a murder. Feeling this just might work, John snarled, “Hey! Are you going to drop the force shield, or should I just kill McKay?” The Stargate’s bass harmonic was turning impatient as it counted down its thirty-eight minute window. He shouted, “Come on, the Star-gate’s getting pissed off!”
Dorane looked into the video monitor for another long moment. Then he smiled. “I’ll drop the shield. Come through.”
John cut the transmission, made sure the light on the MALP’s camera was out. “We’re clear.”
McKay shoved himself into a sitting position and glared at him. “Ow,” he said pointedly.
“That didn’t hurt.” John gave him an arm up. “I could see Grodin in the monitor. He looked okay, and I think he bought the act.”
“Who knew Peter was that big an idiot.” McKay took a deep breath. “It occurs to me that if you don’t take Dorane out in the first minute, I’m going to be tortured to death and you’re going to be dissected, and everybody else will still die.”
“Yeah, Plan B sucks, but considering that Plan C was hanging ourselves—” The Stargate informed John that the shield on the receiving gate was down and they were clear for entry, so go already. He picked up the 9mm and made sure it was ready, then grabbed McKay’s arm. They stepped through the wormhole.
Chapter Nine
After the heat of the plain, the cool air of Atlantis was a mild shock. They walked into a ’gate room that was lit only by low-level emergency lights and the wormhole’s watery blue glow, the late afternoon sun muted by the colored window insets. The Stargate was playing a loud surrealist concert in John’s head, and he hadn’t stepped into a darkened ’gate room since they had first found Atlantis resting on the bottom of its alien ocean, just before the city had come alive to welcome him and the others who had the Ancient gene. The large space would be oppressively dim to normal human eyes, but John could see and recognize the figures standing on the gallery level.
There were a dozen or more Koan up there, as well as Ford, Benson, Kinjo, Parker, and Yamato, all with P-90s, all of whom must be under Dorane’s control. That really wasn’t good. But Dorane still stood beside the dialing console, and he couldn’t control anybody if he was dead. John pulled off the sunglasses, meaning to disguise the motion of raising the pistol; he stopped just in time.
Though he couldn’t see it, there was a little harmonic of active Ancient technology, announcing its presence right in the center of Dorane’s chest. Oh, crap, John thought, sick, his hand tightening on the pistol’s grip. Apparently Plan B was worse than we thought. He kept the pistol at his side.
Managing to talk without moving his lips, Rodney said, “Why aren’t you shooting him?”
Teeth gritted, John replied the same way. “Because he’s wearing a personal shield.”
“Oh, God,” Rodney said aloud.
“Shut up,” John snarled at him, making it loud enough to hear up in the gallery. All they had between them and being shot by their own people was convincing Dorane. And John had just recalled that McKay, like most people with minimal filtering between brain and mouth, was kind of a lousy liar. “Seriously,” he added, hoping McKay got it. McKay looked righteously offended, so John could only hope he had.
John heard the Stargate make a low bass groan right before it shut down. The wormhole popped out of existence, plunging the ’gate room into another level of shadow. In its absence John could hear whispers and echoes in the crystals and conduits, murmurs under the floor, in the walls, stretching up into the sealed jumper bay above the room. It didn’t hurt, it wasn’t intrusive, but it made his skin crawl like a constant low-level electric charge. In a way, it was a relief. If Atlantis’ ATA had sounded anything like the repository’s screaming and dissonance, John would have been out of his head before he got ten feet away from the Stargate. But still, he had the feeling this wasn’t right. I really, really don’t think the ATA gene is supposed to work this way.
Dorane was coming down the steps from the gallery, dressed now in a loose gray jacket and pants. It might just be John’s altered eyesight, but he looked different. The flesh around his eyes was sunken and his cheeks were hollow, as if he had aged another decade in the past day. It might be some kind of delayed effect of the stasis container.
John could see Peter Grodin up at the dialing console, watching anxiously. It was Ford who was covering Grodin with a P-90, and that was just weird. Ford’s face was blank, his eyes on Grodin. He hadn’t looked down at the Stargate, at John and McKay standing on the embarkation floor. It suddenly occurred to John that they had been assuming the people who were infected with the mind control would get over it, either with help or on their own, and they had no guarantee of that. The empty expression on Ford’s face made John wonder what it did to your mind, your brain, if there was permanent damage.
Dorane stopped at the base of the stairs, watching them with that thoughtful absence of emotion. Carson Beckett probably felt more in common with his lab mice than Dorane did with his experimental subjects; he certainly treated them better. “I’m surprised you trusted me to open the force shield,” Dorane said. He made no signal, but several Koan followed him down from the gallery, moving fluidly in the half-light. Most of them were armed now with pistols or P-90s. John wondered what their learning curve was, how many of them had accidentally or on purpose shot each other so far.
“I didn’t have to trust you,” John told him, “The Stargate said it was open.” Dorane must know John could hear the bastard version of the ATA gene that the repository was saturated with; John just wasn’t sure if he knew about the side effect on the real ATA gene. And it was easier to sound crazy if he could just stick with the truth and not have to make things up.
Dorane’s gaze flicked to the Stargate, but he didn’t argue. He said, “Then demonstrate trust by giving up your weapon.”
John could see from here that the personal shield, a small crystal device that rested on the chest, was concealed by a fold of Dorane’s jacket. If John hadn’t had the new sensitivity to the Ancient technology, he wouldn’t have known it was there and would have blown what little cover they had. So giving me a clear shot at him was a test. Maybe Dorane really did need them here for some reason, which seemed to indicate they might survive longer than the five minutes that was John’s original estimate. He grabbed McKay’s arm, dragging him forward, while McKay helped by saying, “Ow,” a lot and trying to look more beat up than he actually was.
The Koan shifted forward, blocking the way, their dark eyes alert and steady. They looked far less twitchy, and somehow even more dangerous here than they had in the tunnels under the repository. John would have thought being removed from the place might have made them less susceptible to Dorane’s control, but it just seemed to have solidified it.
John said, “Hi, guys. Miss me?” He ejected the clip and laid both it and the 9mm on the floor. It wasn’t like the gun was going to do them any good anyway. The shield made Dorane invulnerable, creating an impervious body-hugging force field. He must have brought it with him; they had only found one in Atlantis, which had initialized to McKay so no one else could use it. Then the Darkness creature had sucked the energy out of it when McKay was trying to get it out through the ’gate, and the shield had never worked since.
Dorane’s expression was impenetrable. “Search them.”
John submitted to being awkwardly patted down by the Koan, though the one doing him growled the entire time, making it clear it would much rather be disemboweling him. When they stepped back, empty-handed, Dorane said, “Very good,” and didn’t order anybody to shoot. He turned away, starting back up the steps to the control gallery. The Koan gestured with their weapons and John and McKay followed.