Grodin hesitated, watching Rodney uncertainly. “What did he do to Sheppard?”
“What did it look like?” Rodney snapped. He was desperately afraid of giving something away, and starting to have flashbacks to the Genii and Kolya’s occupation of the city. Not to mention the sour stomach and a pounding in his left temple that signaled the incipient arrival of a headache from hell.
He finally saw Sheppard and Dorane emerge from the conference room, the Koan and Benson following. The tight pain between Rodney’s shoulderblades eased just a little. He realized he had been waiting for the sound of gunfire.
Sheppard swept the gallery with one tight glance, giving nothing away, then went down toward the center stairwell without glancing back, the two Koan following him like well-trained attack dogs at heel.
Rodney swallowed in a dry throat, craning his neck until Sheppard was out of sight. Great, great, great. I have no clue what we’re doing. Or if Sheppard had a clue what they were doing. In the shadows of the gallery it was impossible to tell if he looked any worse. In the bright sunlight before stepping through the ’gate, he had already looked drawn and obviously ill. Sheppard had always seemed as if he was nothing but bone and muscle, but in the last few hours Rodney was willing to swear the man had actually lost weight.
“You are concerned for him?” Dorane asked, and Rodney realized with a start that he had been watching him. Dorane strolled down the gallery toward him. “He betrayed you.”
“Well, you know, that would really be your fault, wouldn’t it?” Rodney snapped, swiveling around to face him. “And can we just get back to threatening me? Because frankly I’m not comfortable discussing my personal relationships with you, considering how you’re planning to kill everyone I know.”
Dorane dismissed that with a slight shrug. “It will be interesting to see how long he survives.”
Rodney hesitated, knowing he shouldn’t fall for the bait but unable to stop himself. “What do you mean?”
Dorane watched Rodney, his eyes opaque. “The Lantian-descended Thesians I tested that particular strain on only lived for one or two days. But I understand that your people also have some degree of genetic variation from the prototypal Lantian stock, so that estimate may be unrealistic.” His voice hardened. “Now, let’s get started on your naquadah generators.”
Rodney stared at him, trying to tell if that was the truth or just another sick little lie. It was depressing enough to be the truth. His jaw set, he stood up. Dorane would be gauging the time by the rotation of the repository’s planet, and by that measure it had already been a full day since Sheppard was infected.
They didn’t have much time.
John took the central stairs down, ignoring the two Koan for now. Despite this minor victory, he couldn’t shake the feeling that Plan B was still circling the drain. The problem was that Dorane really, really liked playing with people, and he had a tremendous amount of experience at it. John could too readily imagine that Dorane was playing both him and McKay, making them think they were fooling him.
But he obviously wanted that memory core very badly, badly enough to risk letting John run loose around the city to get it.
They had speculated that all the Ancients’ tinkering with the Stargate had been a cat and mouse game to force Dorane to give up something. If all he gave up was information… what’s the point in getting it back? But if there was something else there, something the Ancients might have recorded on the core that Dorane needed, or at least thought he needed, maybe to keep his experiments going… Since he now had a new pool of human DNA to meddle with, he would be all the more anxious to get it.
John paused on the next landing, getting a view down the corridor. There was a room down there that was used for big meetings and science team conferences. It had one door and had always looked as if it would be relatively easy to secure. And yes, there were at least six Koan and four dead-eyed Marines stationed outside it. That had to be where Dorane was keeping the rest of the operations staff and the other expedition members he had managed to capture.
John eyed the corridor, considering it. Dorane had basically tried to hand them a scenario where John would have to kill half the Marines to save the rest of the expedition. But John had no plans to take him up on that one. Though it was really starting to worry him that he hadn’t seen Teyla yet. He had expected to find her guarding the prisoners.
The Koan growled, and John moved on.
The lights were dimmed through every section they passed, the green bubble pillars motionless and silent. A few levels down in an open foyer, another group of Koan were gathered around the sealed door to the medlab corridor. They growled, glaring at John, but apparently they had gotten the word to let him through. He pushed past them, pretending to ignore the claws and bared teeth and the inexpertly held guns. As he reached the door, it slid open without waiting for him to touch the control, invitingly undefended. It revealed the long corridor that accessed most of the labs and work areas on this level, the walls decorated with copper bands enclosing squares of soft metallic grays and blues. The Koan hung back uneasily.
The half-light was like daylight to John’s altered eyes, and he could see there were six dead Koan scattered at various points down the hallway. It was probably lucky that Dorane was using the Koan for cannon fodder so far, obviously meaning to save expedition personnel for experiments.
John took a long step forward and, without glancing back, said, “Bye, guys,” and told the door to close.
It slid shut, leaving the Koan on the other side.
He studied the corridor again, making out a wet area about midway along, and something further down that looked like a car battery that had been blasted to bits with gunfire. John would bet that the car battery object was a decoy; this corridor had been booby-trapped by desperate and frightened men and women, some of whom had been able to build atomic bombs by the time they were twelve. There was no way he was going down there, not even in rubber-soled boots.
Maybe that was the game Dorane was playing; he had sent John down here to be accidentally killed by his own people.
John turned left instead, taking the side corridor toward the outer ring of this section. He knew it would be easier to get to the medlab from the level above through some access passages in the floors, but he didn’t want the Koan to twig to that. Dorane obviously didn’t know about it, or he would have tried it by now.
Even though Dorane had lived here with the Ancients for a time, they had probably never had to send people to crawl around in the floors replacing fried crystal conduit, with Kavanagh and Simpson debating the right procedure and giving contradictory instructions via headset radio, with the added attractions of McKay berating them between bouts of claustrophobia and Miko having to be retrieved from where her pants had gotten caught on a support brace. The Ancients probably had robots or genetically-trained sea monkeys or something to do those little jobs for them.
The next doorway was quarantine-sealed and stubbornly refused to respond to the wall console or ATA coaxing, but John fiddled the crystals the way McKay had shown him. As the door started to slide open, John got the sunglasses on, wincing. Even though the sky was starting to redden into sunset, the glare off the water was still bright enough to blind him.
Outside, his back to Atlantica’s endless sea and the cool evening breeze ruffling his hair, John sized up the expanse of city wall looming above him. There were tiny little ledges and arching girders that formed a decorative roof over all the balconies. The open platform he thought he had remembered was there, up one level and over to the side. It was the “over to the side part” that was going to be tricky. It would have been crazy to try this without the claws; they would give him just enough extra purchase to make it possible. Sort of possible.