SGA - 14 - Death Game (23 page)

Chapter Twenty-Five

“Well, this is nice,” John said. The corridor sloped down, the walls not squared now but shaped like natural rock, the floor not entirely even. Ahead, there was the sound of rushing water. The torches were further and further apart, so it was necessary to go slower, checking the floor ahead constantly. John took the point, followed by Suua where he could keep an eye on him, followed by Jitrine and Nevin, with Teyla bringing up the rear.

Before him the corridor opened out into a large chamber, the sound of the water louder yet. Taking the nearest torch from the wall, John held it up to take a look. “Oh man,” he said.

The corridor opened into a cave, the ceiling some twenty feet above their heads. Through the middle of it ran a swift stream, white water rushing quickly past in a steep bed. Two pillars stood at the edge, and an identical pair stood on the other side. From the ones on the other side dangled the remains of a rope bridge. The main ropes had been cut, however, leaving the rest dangling in the stream.

The others crowded out onto the ledge over the water with him.

Suua blinked. “The guys I was with who got ahead? They must have gone across and cut the ropes so nobody else could follow.”

John swore.

Jitrine shook her head, looking down into the stream bed. “The water flows underground again before long, just there. Who knows where it goes?”

“It does not matter,” Teyla said, kneeling down and reaching toward the water below, spreading her fingers to the spray that rose from the whitewater. “It is bitterly cold.”

“And running like a fire hydrant,” John said. “There’s no way that’s natural here. They’ve got this under pressure.”

“Very probably,” Teyla said. “But if the bridge were still intact, it would not be difficult. It is only about twenty feet across.”

“And if the ropes weren’t all on the other side,” John said.

“Too far to jump,” Suua said thoughtfully.

“I could swim across,” John said. “And then throw the ropes back. If we tied the ropes back to the post on our side, we could all get across.”

Teyla stood up, her hands on her hips. “Colonel, I should be the one to do it. You are injured.”

Colonel, he thought. We’re back to Colonel instead of John. With the addition of Nevin and Suua, this had turned into a large enough group to warrant formality. Or perhaps it was the addition of people she didn’t trust.

John shook his head. “Not with your shoulder. My head’s not as bad as that, and you know you can’t climb up the other side with your shoulder messed up.” On the other side, the ropes hung down into the water about ten feet from the pillars they were attached to. Ten feet of wet, slimy jumbled stones making a dangerous slippery surface. Whoever swam across would have to climb up the ropes, and there was no way Teyla could do it with her torn up shoulder. She hadn’t been able to get up a dry stone wall the day before without help.

Teyla opened her mouth and then shut it again, her lips pursed together. “The current is very strong,” she said. She didn’t argue. She had more sense than to claim she could do things she couldn’t.

“I know.” John looked at it. “But the thing’s not that wide. Twelve, fifteen feet across the actual water. If I start upstream of where the bridge was, it’s a couple of good strokes and the water will carry me down to the ropes.”

“And if you miss you will be swept away,” Jitrine observed.

“I’m a good swimmer and it’s not that far,” John said, taking off his jacket and handing it to Teyla. “It’s cold, but I’m only going to be in the water for a minute. It won’t be bad.”

He walked around the pillars, checking out the steepness of the bank upstream. It wasn’t as steep as he’d feared. The stones were broken and there were good hand and foot holds. Carefully, with Teyla holding the torch above, John started climbing down.

The spray was icy. Definitely under pressure, he thought. And definitely chilled. It might be cool here, but this temperature was too low not to be artificial. Just above the surface of the water he stopped, taking a good look across. There were probably rocks just beneath the surface. The water couldn’t be more than a few feet deep. Shallow water was more dangerous than deep water. This current could throw you against rocks hard enough to break bones. He’d broken his foot that way, whitewater rafting on the Snake River when he was sixteen.

So he wouldn’t dive. He’d just try to paddle across as quickly as possible. A couple of good strokes, maybe only one if he kicked off from the wall hard enough.

John lowered himself the rest of the way down, up to his hips in the icy water. The torch wavered as Teyla bent over, a worried look on her face.

“It’ll just take a second,” John said. Damn, this was cold!

With one last glance at the other side, he let go and pushed off strongly.

The water shocked him, and all he could see was white foam. The current buffeted him, half rolling him on his back. Don’t panic. Keep going across the current. One stroke. Two. Three. Where was the other bank? The stream wasn’t this wide.

John flung his arm out in a fourth stroke, and cracked it hard against rocks, grabbed onto the stones with all his strength, pulling his head out of the water. He scrambled forward, barking his shin, then got a foot up on that rock and pushed.

He took a long breath and shook his hair out of his eyes.

He was on the other side just below where the ropes from the broken bridge dangled down. To his right, it was only a dozen feet before the torrent went underground again, into a camouflaged drain opening.

“It’s ok,” John called back. “I’m good.”

He hauled himself back a few feet against the current, then pulled himself out with the ropes. His teeth were chattering by the time he reached the top, and he stomped around to warm himself. The water was very cold. Good thing he’d only been in it about thirty seconds.

“Are you all right?” Teyla called across.

“Just cold.” John started hauling the ropes up. There was a tangle of them tied to a few boards which must have once served as a footpath across the stream. “Not a problem.”

Jitrine screamed.

“Look out!” Teyla shouted.

John spun around just quickly enough to catch movement out of the corner of his eye. Then something heavy and flat hit him in the back, hard and solid, pitching him forward into the raging water.

***

“There you are,” Carson said. “Tucked in there nice and snug.”

The jumper made a long, low altitude pass over what was clearly a heavily populated island. In the courtyard of a large building, screened on every side by porticos of white stone, was a Wraith cruiser. It was essentially parked indoors. Other than from a vantage directly above it, it could not be seen from the ground. And since presumably it was the only aircraft on this world, it was effectively invisible.

Lorne nodded over the sensor readings. “Powered all the way down, all systems in standby mode. They weren’t planning on going anywhere soon.”

“So shoot it,” Rodney said. The idea of leaving a Wraith cruiser alone didn’t sit well with him.

Carson frowned. “It’s smack in the middle of a building full of humans, Rodney! If I hit the cruiser with a drone, it will blow up half this city. In case you haven’t bothered to read the sensor report, there are fifty thousand human beings on this island! The collateral damage from air to surface missiles here, and the resulting fires, would be in the thousands! You’re essentially asking me to bomb a city full of helpless people.”

“Fine.” Rodney said shortly. “So what are we supposed to do? Ignore the Wraith? Is that a better plan?”

“Chances are we’d also be bombing our own people,” Lorne said quietly.

Rodney looked at him. “How do you get to that?”

Lorne met his eyes frankly. “Look, we’ve had no luck reaching them by radio. They probably don’t have access to the radios anymore. Which means there’s a good bet they’re prisoners. And where do you think the Wraith would hold them?”

“On the cruiser or in the complex around it,” Rodney said reluctantly. “I hear you.”

“So let’s find out if our people are on the cruiser before we blow it up,” Lorne said.

Carson’s brow furrowed. “Let me have a look around and see if I can find a place to set down. Can’t you scan for our people?”

“For the forty-ninth time, Carson!” Rodney snapped. “I have no way to tell our people apart from any of the other fifty thousand people on the island!”

“We’re going to have to do this the hard way,” Lorne said. He looked toward the Marines in the back. “Cadman, issue out the P90s.”

***

There was dark and there was water. It turned him over and over, his hands scrabbling for purchase on the smooth curved surface above.

A drain, John thought, fighting not to breathe. A round plastic drain. The water was rushing through pipes, filling them completely. There was no distance between the surface of the water and the pipe. He was going to drown in here.

No sooner had he thought that than the pressure of the water eased as it spread, opening up. His hand broke the surface and he struggled up. His legs hit something solid, then his chest. John dragged himself up in pitch darkness, his hands encountering stone instead of plastic, his greedy chest sucking in breath.

There was a splashing and coughing, and he flailed out, grabbing for whatever it was and getting a handful of soggy cold cloth.

Coughing. That was Teyla’s cough. “Teyla?” And the cloth he had was the leg of her BDUs. He pulled her out of the rushing water onto the ledge he perched on. “Teyla? What the hell happened?”

She coughed again. “One of the other men, the ones who had gone ahead, was waiting. He hit you with one of the bridge planks and knocked you back in the water.”

John took a deep breath. “But you were on the other side of the stream from him. What are you doing here?”

Teyla sounded almost amused. “Well, I had to go after you, did I not? Would you expect that I would just say, ‘Too bad that Sheppard is swept away?’ I thought that perhaps we could climb back up.”

“What about Jitrine and the others?” he asked.

“I told them to wait on the same side of the stream,” Teyla replied. “We did not have much time to talk. I had to act quickly.”

“Yeah, I see that.” There was not the slightest glimmer of light. So there probably wasn’t a camera to give themselves away to either. And the handful of pants he’d grabbed a moment earlier gave him an idea. “Do you still have that flashlight buttoned up in your pocket?”

“I have not taken it out,” she said. He heard movement, and then was almost blinded by the pure white light of the LED lighting.

Teyla played the light over the water and the chamber around them. It was not big enough for them to stand up, perhaps four feet in height above the water and little more than ten feet in length, a crevasse carved out of natural rock. Perhaps it was a fissure that had widened when the Wraith put in their drains, blasted out or fractured further by the rushing water. There was no way out except the water where it flowed through, filling the smaller entrance tunnel and leaving perhaps five or six inches of space at the top of the exit drain.

John swore again. “This is so not good.”

“The water is freezing,” Teyla said.

He looked at the inrushing water. “We can’t climb back up that,” he said. “The current’s too fast and there isn’t anything to hold onto. It’s plastic, not stone. It’s totally smooth.”

“I know,” she said. “I had expected stone, like the stream bed.”

“It’s just a set,” John said. “Anything that isn’t going to show they didn’t bother to make look natural.”

Teyla glanced around the small cave. “And of course there are no vents here.”

John nodded. “Which means we’ve got air for what? Maybe fifteen or twenty minutes in a space this big?”

“Possibly,” Teyla said, shining the light around again. There were some tiny cracks, but none large enough to even get a hand through, much less to provide a means of escape. She flashed the light over the water. “We are going to have to go down.”

John nodded slowly. He was cold from the water, though in the enclosed space their bodies’ warmth took off the chill. “The drains have to go out somewhere. As fast as the water’s moving, there’s a pump. So it has to go into a pool to recycle. With plastic drains instead of rocks, there’s less chance we’re going to break bones on the way down.”

Teyla took a deep breath. It was clear she did not care for the freezing water any more than he did. “I see no other way,” she said, glancing the light around again, as if hoping some other way out had magically appeared. “I will turn it off and button it back in my pocket,” she said, “So that we do not lose it.”

“Right.” John looked at the water, a last look before the light switched off and left them again in utter blackness. He heard the sound of wet cloth as she put the flashlight away.

In the dark, Teyla took his hand. “Ready?” she asked.

“Ready,” John said. “Three deep breaths and then we go.”

“All right.”

One. Two. Three.

They plunged into the frigid water and were swept away.

Chapter Twenty-Six

“Get back!” Ronon whispered.

Though he was already pressed tightly to the stone wall, Radek attempted to make himself even smaller. He could see very little ahead of them through the bulk that was Ronon, but Radek could hear the others.

There were voices coming down the corridor that their corridor branched off from, three or four men’s voices raised in argument.

“I said we should have gone that way.”

“Shut up, twerp. Unless you’d like to take me on, ok?”

There were heavy footsteps. Radek could see Ronon’s shoulders tensed, his stun pistol at the ready. If the strangers turned into their corridor they would get a surprise.

“How about that way?”

The footsteps paused and they considered.

“No, this way!”

It seemed that they decided to stick with the main corridor. They went past, the sounds of their passage loud in the dim light.

When the last noises had faded away, Ronon moved, holstering his pistol again with a grin. “Not so bright. Any enemy would hear them a mile away.”

Radek let out a deep breath. “They would be the first contestants, it seems. We are beginning to reach the part of the maze where the games are being played.”

“Or they’re beginning to reach us,” Ronon said. “These are the guys in front. They’re probably the most dangerous because they probably screwed over plenty of other people to get here, and they’ll turn on each other before the end.” He straightened. “Ok. Let’s get back in the main corridor and keep following the cables.”

Radek looked up. “They are bundled now,” he said. “See how they are tied and painted over? We must be getting close.” He set off down the corridor, in a hurry to reach the control room.

Ronon grabbed his shoulder. “Stop!” he said. “Watch where you’re going!”

Just ahead of Radek the floor disappeared. Instead of smooth corridor floor there was a drop of seven or eight feet to a second floor lined with spikes of bright steel cut in sharp snowflake points. And on them…

Radek looked away, swallowing hard.

“One of those guys was careless,” Ronon said. “We can’t be.”

Radek very deliberately looked over at the floor on the opposite side, not glancing down at all. “How can we get across?” Ronon could probably jump, fit as he was, but Radek harbored no illusions about his ability to jump across the pit without the same unfortunate consequences as the contestant below.

Ronon grinned wolfishly. “You know that movie Sheppard had us watching last weekend on DVD? The really good one?”

“I do not,” Radek said. He tended to avoid movie night unless something he particularly liked was playing, as two hours of watching cars blow up bored him senseless.

“Where the guy says, ‘Never toss a dwarf’ and the other guy just picks him up and flings him?”

“Oh, that movie,” Radek said with a sinking heart. “You are not seriously considering…”

“No problem,” Ronon said, picking him up under the arms. “Easy peasy, as Beckett says.”

“Put me down! Put me down right now!” Radek shouted. “Do not…”

And then he was flying through the air, then smacking face down on the floor on the other side, his arms flung out to protect his glasses. The wind knocked out of him, Radek lay on the floor trying to catch a breath. Behind him he heard a scuffle, and Ronon knelt down beside him.

“Sorry. Maybe I threw you a little too hard.”

Radek rolled over, hoping that no bones were broken. “That was not funny.”

“It got you across, didn’t it?” Ronon offered a hand to help him up.

Radek gingerly uncurled. His legs seemed to work. He glared at Ronon over the top of his glasses. “Do not ever do that again.”

“You could jump,” Ronon said.

“I cannot.”

“Then don’t complain,” Ronon said. “You’re across, aren’t you?”

He hauled Radek to his feet. “Come on. We’re following cables, right?”

“Yes.”

Unfortunately, the body in the pit was not the last one they found. A little further along they found a man who had been hit over the head with something large and heavy. Perhaps, in the infirmary in Atlantis, he might have been saved, but here his breath had already stopped.

“This game is not so much fun,” Radek said grimly.

“Neither is being a Runner,” Ronon said. “Unless it’s fun for the Wraith.” He ranged ahead, checking the floor and walls for more traps. Radek sincerely hoped he found them without tripping them. But perhaps the men who had already passed this way had tripped any booby traps that had been set.

There were cameras, of course, and now it was impossible to avoid them entirely in the main corridor. Hopefully, the Wraith would conclude they were just regular contestants in the confusion of criss-crossing corridors. Still, they moved swiftly and tried to stay out of the light.

“Stop,” Radek directed. “I need to have a look at this.” Along the ceiling the mass of cables ran into a small box and then exited on the other side. They ran a few feet further along, then disappeared in a small hole in the side wall at ceiling level.

“What is it?” Ronon asked.

“That is what I am trying to ascertain,” Radek said. He craned his neck to see better. “The cables disappear into a solid stone wall? That does not make sense. Why would they go to such trouble? Drilling through stone is very difficult, and they have just fastened the cables to the ceiling elsewhere.”

Ronon came back. “Are we out of the cameras?”

Radek glanced down the hall. “Just barely. I do not think that one can see us.” He put his hands to the wall as far up as he could reach beneath the drilled hole. Yes. As he thought. “Ronon, put your hand to this wall and tell me what you feel.”

“Nothing,” Ronon said, running his hands over the uneven surface. “What am I supposed to feel?”

Radek took his other hand and put it to the wall three feet away, smiling. “Do you see?”

Ronon nodded cautiously, looking at the section of wall in front of him. “It’s not cold. The stone is cool over here.”

“Stone does not heat easily,” Radek said. “In fact, the temperature in most deep caves stays around ten degrees Celsius year around. It does not vary much, away from the surface. It does not get much colder unless it is in a very intemperate climate, nor much warmer. But this section of wall…” He ran his hands along it beneath the cables. “This section of wall is warmer. It is not made of stone.”

Ronon ran his hands over the surface. “Plaster painted to look like stone?”

“We have found our door,” Radek said. “This is a false surface. What is beyond it I do not know, but something has been hidden.”

“The control room?”

“Possibly. Or a technical closet, which would be nearly as good.” Radek looked at it speculatively. “If it is a server closet or one where the camera cables attach to a power source, we are in business.”

“If it’s the control room there could be Wraith in there,” Ronon said, drawing his pistol. “You get back around the corner.”

“What are you going to do?” Radek asked.

“If it’s just plaster I’m going to blast through it,” Ronon said. “So get back.”

***

The water tossed Teyla, throwing her around and around like a leaf in a stream. She had thought that she could hold onto John, but that proved impossible. The strength of the water ripped their hands apart in seconds.

She had no idea how long she was underwater. It seemed forever, but it could hardly have been long, as her lungs had not yet begun to burn with the need to breathe. Suddenly there was nothing beneath her, no sides to the drain, and for a second there was the sickening feeling of falling. From how far up, she wondered? How far down?

And then she smacked the water full on her back, came up struggling. She kicked for the surface and gulped in a huge breath. Just one. And then John landed right on top of her.

She had a moment’s panic, pressed beneath him, the shallow bottom of the pool scraping along her arm, pinned beneath his weight beneath the surface. Then he twisted, and she bounced up like a cork, the spray from the incoming freshet in her face.

“What a ride!” John said, and he was grinning as he tossed the water out of his eyes. Teyla had the momentary urge to slap him.

“We did not do this for fun,” Teyla snapped.

“I take my fun where I can get it,” he said.

She did not need to tread water. The pool only came up to the middle of her chest. Teyla looked around.

About five feet above her head the drain poured from the wall in a torrent of white water. Two other drains did the same to her right, one larger and one smaller than the one they had descended, presumably feeding from traps and settings in other parts of the maze. The pool they stood in was broad and shallow, with a grate covering a drain at the far end from which came mechanical sounds that were loud even over the flowing water—presumably the pump which recycled the water through the system. The ceiling was high, perhaps thirty feet above, of natural stone. Dim emergency lights hung on cables, illuminating the room with fitful low fluorescents.

“I do not see anything that looks like a terminal or a workstation,” Teyla said, frowning.

He looked around too. “Me neither,” he said.

There were no banks of lights or panels, no screens or anything that looked like heavy equipment, just the drains in and out, and the loud sound of the pump that recirculated the water.

John pushed his sodden hair back out of his face and started wading toward the edge of the pool. The water wasn’t as cold as it was further up, but it was still quite uncomfortable. “It must be controlled from somewhere else,” he said. “After all, contestants must wash up in here occasionally still alive.” He gave her a shrug replete with gallows humor.

“We are alive,” she said, clambering out of the pool as well. The air was cool but not chilled—a little warmer perhaps than the caves above, but still far from comfortable when one was soaked and cold. “And we need not fear we will suffocate here.”

“That’s true,” John said, looking up at the vents in the wall far above. This room was lit and ventilated, even if it was rarely used.

Teyla sat down on the stone and tried to wring out her pants. The leg pocket had a soggy copy of Watership Down in it, and she hated that she had probably ruined it. He had brought it to her from Earth aboard the Daedalus only a few weeks ago, and said it was a story of his people that he had loved and thought she would enjoy. Perhaps it would dry. Perhaps all the pages would not stick together and the ink run as so many of the books she had seen did.

John paced around. “Here’s a door,” he said. Instead of the ordinary wooden ones they had encountered in the maze, this was a metal power door with no visible hardware on it, obviously meant to open electronically. John waved his hand over it and around it, but nothing happened.

“Perhaps it is locked,” Teyla said.

“No kidding!” John grinned to take the sting out of it. “Why don’t you come over here and see if your Wraith gene opens doors the way the ATA gene does for me?”

“It never has before,” Teyla said, but she came and tried anyway. The door remained stubbornly closed. “No lock mechanism,” she said, examining the sides of the door. “Perhaps this is meant to be opened from the outside.”

“If this is just a water treatment trap, probably,” John said.

“And now it is a trap for us,” she said. “I do not see any other way out.” The vents were small and high in the wall, and no doubt the drain was only the cover on the pump that recycled the water. It would not actually lead anywhere.

“We can’t climb back up,” John said thoughtfully. “But there’s got to be a way to get this door open.”

While he considered the wall beside the door, Teyla walked around the edge of the pool. The larger of the other two drains that fed it was not entirely full to the top of the pipe, and the water was not running as hard. It flowed rather than erupted in the bubbles of white water under pressure. But she could not get a better look without getting back in the frigid pool.

Casting a glance at John still examining the door, she waded into the water. It was very cold. Knee deep. Waist deep. From there she could see up the pipe, even though it turned. There was a strange blue light, as though it were not far to a chamber lit electrically with colored lights, and she thought she could even see the end of the tunnel perhaps fifteen feet ahead at a gentle slope.

“John!” Teyla called. “Come look at this!”

He waded out to join her. “What?”

“Do you think that could be a way out?”

Wincing at the cold, he waded over to the end of the pipe. It ended just about at the level of his shoulders, definitely a curved pipe with a low gradient. The water splashed over his whole body as he put his hands on the pipe and pulled himself up, looking. It made her colder just looking at it.

“I think you’ve got something,” he said. “It looks like there’s a pool that’s draining down this pipe, and the drain is in the side of the pool, not the bottom. I don’t see a cover on it either.”

“Perhaps they are just as happy to let all the bodies aggregate in one place,” Teyla said grimly.

John nodded. “Probably. It would be a pain in the neck to have to hunt for them all over this place, even if they can turn the water off and drain the pools.” He let himself back down. “I think we can get up there. It’s not too steep to climb.”

“Then we had best do it,” Teyla said. “This cold water saps our strength. The sooner we are done with it, the better.”

“I’ll boost you,” he said, and put out his knee for her to climb on, his hands on her waist. With that it was easy to get up in the end of the pipe, though crawling forward through the water sent stabs of pain through her shoulder. Even on all fours her shoulder would not easily take her weight.

The pipe gave a little as John came up, his head just behind her buttocks in the tight space. “Need a push?” he said.

“I think I can manage,” Teyla said. The pipe was a gentle curve, and it was only the flowing water that made it difficult to climb. Her hands were numb with cold before she reached the top, and it was an effort to haul herself out of the pool onto the ledge just above the drain. She sat there, rubbing her chilled hands together, while John pulled himself up beside her.