Dorane finally took the stick from Kavanagh, his lips thin with distaste. “And I assume this will only display on one of your devices. Which one of you will have to operate for me.”
John shrugged, as if he didn’t care. “I guess.” He took a couple of distracted paces to the left, so his back was to the Koan, Kavanagh, Ford, and the others.
Dorane watched him, eyes narrowing. “Surely you know.”
“He doesn’t know,” McKay sneered, looking up from where he was crouched beside the generator. He had obviously reached the overly aggressive stage of his blood sugar crash. “He can barely check his email.”
Dorane turned to regard him, probably with a great deal of skepticism. Rodney glared up at him, and John took the opportunity to mouth the words “big distraction, soon”.
Rodney twitched in alarm, but he looked so flustered and annoyed, it would have been hard for someone who didn’t know him to tell. He told Dorane, “You’ll need a laptop to read it. That’s one of the computers in the silver cases.”
Dorane turned back toward Kavanagh, who said, “Yes, that’s true.” Something in the way Dorane was holding the memory stick suggested a great deal of frustration. Whatever was on the memory core, Dorane didn’t want anyone else to see it, apparently not even one of the people he had under control.
John made an idle circuit of the room, still listening hard for the control device. He was fairly certain now it wasn’t on Dorane, but surely it was nearby. If it was up in the ’gate room… No, it had to be closer than that. If it isn’t, we may be seriously screwed. But would Dorane just stick it on a shelf somewhere and leave it? The naquadah generators were spaced out widely over the center portion of the city; did this thing have the kind of range that it could… Or he gave it to someone else to carry.
“Is there one of these laptops nearby?” Dorane was asking Kavanagh.
Kavanagh shook his head; his attention was on Dorane and not what Rodney was doing with the generator. “I don’t know. They would be in the ’gate room, the labs, the living quarters and offices—”
John wandered past Kavanagh, the two Marines, Ford, and caught the first hint of a tiny disruption in the ATA’s ongoing cacophony. It wasn’t insistent enough to be coming from one of them. The nearest Koan growled nervously as John went to the wall and leaned back against it. Dorane, still questioning Kavanagh about nearby labs, threw him a cold look, but he obviously wasn’t much interested in however John wanted to occupy his last moments. John closed his eyes, tipped his head back against the metal, and tried to shut everything else out.
And there it was, somewhere on the other side of this wall, a thread of discordant sound, moving away. Yeah, he gave it to someone who’s been following-him around the city. And I bet I know who.
Chapter Eleven
John opened his eyes to see McKay crouched by the generator, fiddling with the last connection, watching him anxiously. And here we go. John lifted a brow, giving him a “what are you waiting for” look.
McKay glared at him, then took a filament-thin loop of clear cable out of the floor access and did something with it inside the generator’s panel.
John felt the shudder travel through the wall before he heard the explosion. The abrupt blast came from the south, from the outer part of this section, and it wasn’t at all distant. Oh, crap, John thought, aghast, what the hell did he do?
His expression of stunned dismay bought them an extra few seconds as Dorane looked first at him, then at McKay, who was staring at the generator as if he had never seen it before. “What was that?” Dorane demanded.
Still looking at the generator, Rodney shook his head, as if really baffled. Then he grimaced in relief and said, “Oh, there it goes.” He shoved himself back just as silvery sparks fountained from the access, shooting up toward the ceiling.
Even under low power, the ATA didn’t so much switch on as burst to life inside the walls. John was suddenly aware of circuits threaded in the metal behind him, felt something whoosh through piping as if the room was drawing a breath; he knew exactly what was about to happen. Ducking around the bewildered Koan, he winced away from the sparking generator. The emergency lights flickered, a wailing Atlantean klaxon sounded, and all four doors shot open. John slammed Ford out of his way, feeling the first blast of something that wasn’t air. McKay was on his feet and John tackled him, sending them both out the nearest door and into the corridor. They landed hard and John thought close, close, come on, close at the door. Somebody got off a burst from a P-90 and bullets bounced off the silver wall panel right above their heads, just before the door slid shut.
Rodney was glaring up at him. “Oh fine, you just broke half my ribs.”
John rolled off him, asking, “What about Ford and the others?” He shoved unsteadily to his feet, dragging McKay with him. He had gotten a lungful of the gas released by the emergency system and his throat felt raw. He could hear Koan howling and pounding on the door behind them, but it refused to budge.
McKay was red-faced and breathing hard, and he had to steady himself against the wall. But he said, “They’re fine. The system will sense that there’s no fire and flush the room with outside air.”
That was a relief, at least. “God, Rodney, I said ‘diversion’ not ‘blow up half the city’!” John started down the corridor, coughing. “And what was that stuff, halon?”
McKay hurried after him. “It’s similar. And I’m fairly confident that the Ancients wouldn’t use a fire suppressant that was poisonous to humans. That sparking was just a harmless light show, and the explosion was just the grounding station in this wing—”
“Oh, was that all? A harmless naquadah light show? And don’t we need that station for grounding electricity?” John took the next corridor intersection. The lights were a little dimmer, and he couldn’t sense any Koan moving towards them. But he could hear the control device heading rapidly away from the direction of the blast, trying to get back to Dorane, looking for a way around the sealed doors now blocking the direct path.
McKay waved his hands like John was being unreasonable. “That wasn’t actually naquadah, that was just electricity, and this section can do fine without a discharger — for a while, unless there’s a storm, or a buildup of static — Anyway, I created a small power surge in the generator that started a feedback loop between it and the grounding station. With Dorane shutting down most of the city systems, I wasn’t sure the fire-control was still online. It probably helped that your Ancient gene panicked and set off the protocols.” Rodney stopped at a wall console at the end of the corridor and tapped a rapid sequence into it. “Now that the fire-control is active I can tell it to block access to the generator room, which should seal off all the doors in this section.”
“Dorane will have to get the doors to open individually.” John was starting to feel a little better about the whole “let’s blow important and dangerous stuff up as a distraction” plan.
“So will we, but I’ll be faster at it than he is.” McKay finished keying in the sequence and the panel beeped quietly, displaying a series of Ancient characters. “Right, that should do it.”
“Good. Now come on.” John started down the corridor to the outer portion of the wing. The device was moving fast and he didn’t want to lose it.
McKay jogged to catch up with him, but protested, “Why are we going this way? We should go—”
“Beckett and Zelenka thought Dorane had to have some kind of device that’s helping him control our people. I think I saw him with it back at the repository, I just didn’t know what it was. It’s using his version of the ATA, and I can hear where it is.” John barely paused at the next intersection, knowing his quarry was already about two corridors ahead. The emergency lighting was growing dimmer; this roundabout route took them into a part of the wing that had been damaged in the flooding just before the city rose from the sea bottom. The ATA was just a low background whisper, blending with the distant sound of the sea outside the walls, making the sour thread of the controller device much easier to follow. “Any reason he’d give it to someone else to carry?”