Once again, it's seasonal SGA fic!
Okay, it's not last year's zombies, but it's definitely got the feel of my favorite holiday. Many thanks, as always, to the housemate, otterwort, and signeh, for making this make more sense than it otherwise would have.
Crossposted to Wraithbait.
Title: A Kindness Of Engines
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis
Summary: The graveyard was alien, ancient, and apparently endless. But not abandoned. Not quite.
Spoilers: None; generic second/third season.
Disclaimer: Stargate: Atlantis is the property of Stargate (II) Productions, Double Secret Productions, Gekko Productions, Showtime/Viacom, MGM/UA, and the Sci-Fi Channel; characters, situations, etc. of Stargate: Atlantis are included in this work under the principle of Fair Use, and no infringement of copyright is intended. All other components of this work are © 28 October 2008 Liz A. Vogel. Title is modified from a line in "Claire" by Matt Pond PA.
A Kindness Of Engines
by Liz A. Vogel
It was a planet of the dead.
They'd been walking for over an hour, and had yet to find anything alive above the level of plant life. There was only the moss-like ground cover, and row upon row of the circular markers, wedged upright into the ground like two-foot-tall coins. McKay had identified the material as a sophisticated alloy indicative of an advanced civilization, but even so, the markings inset into each disk were weathered into illegibility. The ones nearest to the stargate were crumbling badly.
Just last week, all the gate teams and Marine back-up units had been through a series of lectures from the folks in Archaeology. In addition to Artifact Handling 101 and How Not To Screw Up A Dig Site, there'd been a lot of emphasis on evaluating ancient -- or Ancient -- remains in their own context, and not judging them by your own cultural standards. That last had mostly been aimed at the Earth military types, but even the Athosians and Ronon had been cautioned about making assumptions.
It was all fine and good to talk about not applying your own culture to alien artifacts, but looking around at this place, none of Sheppard's team had any doubt that they were looking at graves, as far as the eye could see.
The sky was grey, the air cool but humid, a soggy soup that sat thickly in the lungs and made hiking among endless ranks of dead whatevers even less appealing. The silence was broken only by the squish of their footsteps. Sheppard turned a full 360, still seeing only more of the same. "Is anybody else getting seriously creeped out by this place?"
Ronon, who hadn't holstered his weapon since their arrival, gave a heartfelt, "Yeah."
"It is most disconcerting," Teyla agreed.
"Rodney, are you any closer to finding whatever it is we're looking for, or can we wrap this one up?"
"There is an energy reading," the scientist protested, turning slowly in a circle. "...That way?"
"McKay," Sheppard drawled, "we just came from there!"
"I know!" McKay swung the scanner back and forth, glaring at it. "It's like it keeps moving around."
Ronon became even more alert. "Tracking us?"
"No, I don't-- do you think so?"
Sheppard pulled the life-signs detector from his vest for at least the fifth time. "Still nobody home," he reported after a minute.
"Could they be shielded?" Teyla speculated.
"Why shield the people and not the energy?" McKay mumbled, more than half his attention still on the scanner.
"To hide from the Wraith?" said Sheppard.
Ronon shook his head. "If it's powerful enough to be worth investigating, the Wraith would want to know who made it."
"Well, maybe that's why there's nobody here anymore to ask."
They followed McKay's shifting energy signal through a couple more changes of direction, growing less and less enthused about the planet as they did so. A dank drizzle started, not so much rain as excess humidity falling out of the oversaturated air. "All right, I'm calling this one," Sheppard said in disgust. "Rodney, note the last direction on this thing, then pack up your toys and let's go home." He took three steps, and stopped. "Rodney?"
No protesting, no bitching, no snark. He looked around.
No Rodney.
The three remaining team members snapped into position, back to back to back. "McKay!" Sheppard yelled; his voice rolled past the markers and disappeared into the wisps of low-lying fog. "Ronon, see if you can track him."
They spread out a little, Sheppard and Teyla scanning their unvarying surroundings while Ronon took point. Footprints faded surprisingly quickly on the soft ground, and the Satedan had to cast back and forth several times before he could even pick up their recent steps. They backtracked cautiously to a point shortly after where Sheppard last remembered hearing McKay swear at his scanner. "There's something here," Ronon said, sounding puzzled. "But it just stops--"
This time there was a scuffle, and Sheppard turned in time to see Ronon's foot disappearing down a hole. He and Teyla both ran to the spot, but by the time they got there, the hole had disappeared, too. There was just the markers, and the squishy grey-green moss, unmarked as though it had lain undisturbed for centuries.
Sheppard dropped to his knees and started hacking at the ground cover with his service knife, while Teyla stood over him, scanning the unprepossessing landscape with her P-90 at the ready. The moss was a lot tougher than it looked; he could practically feel the blade dulling as he sawed at it. He tried to peel a layer of it away, but it slid wetly out of his hand. "Dammit...." He mentally rummaged through the contents of his tac vest even as he kept cutting. C4? No, no telling how far below ground his people were. Ditto for letting loose with the P-90s. He yanked a magnesium fire-starter from a pocket and struck it; a white-hot flare of light sliced through the murky air. The moss steamed and smoked; the patch nearest the tablet began to dry and curl. As soon as he could get in there without burning his fingers off, Sheppard went after it with the knife again; the moss was still resistant, but at least it didn't seem to reseal itself behind his blade. He managed to gouge away a ragged chunk, exposing the metal edge of some kind of access panel, set flush into the ground
"Gimme a hand with this." Teyla knelt and drew her own knife. Now that they had a starting point, they were able to uncover the rest of the hatch: a slab of the same alloy as the markers, perhaps three feet square. Teyla wedged her knife under the edge and pried, gaining a small gap; Sheppard forced his fingers in, and heaved. The slab was surprisingly light, and hinged upward silently.
The lights on their P-90s revealed a short drop to a corridor running beneath their feet, lined in more of the alloy. The space was about as tall as a man, a fraction narrower at the top than at the bottom, and quite empty. Sheppard looked at Teyla briefly, saw that she had no better ideas either, then handed her his P-90 and bent to lower himself in.
*
Oh god oh god oh god oh god.
The space around him was absolutely black and terrifyingly still. He could touch the sides, feel the smooth, unbroken surface all around him. Much, much too close around him.
If this wasn't a coffin, it was doing entirely too good an imitation of one.
McKay choked on a whimper, and forced himself not to flail. Pounding and kicking against the walls would only waste oxygen, and besides, he'd already tried it. Whatever his tiny, little, very very small, don't think about that, prison was made out of, it was much too hard for him to bash his way out of. He slid his fingers into the rounded corners again, searching for a seam, desperately trying not to notice that the air was getting staler.
There was no gap, no crack, not a hint of imperfection for him to wedge a fingernail into. It was as featureless as the heart of a black hole. The world ended an inch beyond his toes and an inch above his head, and he could bang both elbows on the sides without stretching. And the air was definitely getting stuffier.
Screaming was only going to waste oxygen too, but Rodney McKay was past caring.
*
Ronon wrenched against the metal clamped around his arm, and nearly tore his own shoulder. The machines carried on oblivious, transporting him through the underground passage without so much as a wobble. Restrained at arms and legs, he couldn't reach a weapon, couldn't kick or punch. He thrashed harder; this time he did feel something tear in his shoulder, but neither the machine behind his head nor the machine leading the way at his feet seemed to take any notice.
Finally he subsided, realizing he was only wasting his strength. Better to wait his chance. The machines trundled on, only the faintest hum in the darkness revealing their motion. Ronon couldn't see a thing, could feel no movement in the flat, stale air. He had no idea how far they'd come; the most he could feel was a slight twisting in his body when the machines took him around a corner.
"Sheppard!" he yelled. "Teyla!" His voice rang oddly in the close confines of the corridor, the echoes fading all too soon. He yelled again anyway. The machines either couldn't hear or didn't care.
At the next turn, he torqued his body sideways, trying to jam himself up in the corner. They dragged him on like so much meat, the machine in back squishing him ahead while the one in front tugged him straight. The corner itself felt perfectly smooth, slightly rounded, without any hint of edge or seam to catch against.
"Sheppard! Teyla!" he tried again. The blackness seemed to swallow his words as they left his mouth. He alternated struggling against his captors with calling for his teammates. Neither made any difference at all.
*
The dank grey light from the access hatch failed only a few steps away. Sheppard swung his P-90 from side to side, the flashlight's beam revealing brief patches of featureless walls before being eaten by the unyielding dark. Their footsteps seemed oddly muffled, as though the thick air smothered sound down here as it did breathing above.
Teyla paced behind and slightly to one side of him, the passage being too narrow for them to walk abreast. "I do not like this," she breathed.
"Yeah, no kidding." It was like walking into a claustrophobe's nightmare, complete with potential monsters lurking just out of sight.
They came to a four-way intersection, and paused. "See anything?" Sheppard asked softly, fighting the inclination to whisper.
"No." There were no marks on floor or walls, nothing to indicate which way Ronon might have been taken, or McKay before him -- if McKay was even down here, but Sheppard wasn't willing to entertain two different kinds of mysterious disappearance, not yet. He strained his eyes, trying to see any reason to pick one way over another.
"Look out!" Teyla yelled, and shoved him forward. Something snagged at his sleeve from the side corridor, missing its grab but spinning him around as he fell. His light swung wildly across a dark surface barely distinguishable from the walls; he had a split-second impression of a blocky trapezoidal shape with spindly, reaching arms and circular claws like some 1950s movie robot. Teyla got off a shot as she fell back into the opposite side corridor, and he heard the ping of it ricocheting off the thing and away into the darkness. By the time he got his own weapon back on target, whatever it was was through the intersection and down Teyla's hallway after her. "John!" Teyla yelled, and then he heard her footsteps running at top speed. He scrambled up and headed after her, following the barely-visible glow from her flashlight, the silhouette of her pursuer vaguely outlined between them.
*
It was the softest of noises, more a brush than a clang, and if he hadn't just gasped for breath between screams McKay would have missed it. "Sheppard?" he called out, hating the patheticness in his voice but willing to sound a lot worse if it meant rescue. "Teyla? Ronon? Sheppard!" No one answered.
There was no further sound, no passage of air, but McKay's inner ear told him his prison was moving. He flung himself against the side, hoping to jar his container (not a coffin, not a coffin, notacoffin) loose and maybe break it against something. There was what might have been a slight wobble, if he wasn't just imagining it in his hypoxic light-headedness, but nothing productive.
The sensation of movement stopped, started again, and shifted slightly. Were his feet raised up a little now, or was the rush of blood to his head just an incipient stroke?
He tried flinging himself against the side again, despite its lack of effect, and again and again. He pounded and kicked as well, his hands slipping wetly against the impervious surface. With a spine-wrenching flop, he managed to bang his feet against one side and his head against the other.
This time there was a clank, followed by a brief, muffled grinding noise. The sense of motion halted. His head spinning from the impact, McKay nonetheless felt a surge of victory. He'd done it! He'd jammed up the works, whatever the works were out there, and now someone would have to come investigate, and he could get out of here.
Eventually.
Sooner or later.
...wouldn't they?
He was stuck, still in his -- not a coffin, oh god oh god ohgodpleasenotacoffin -- tilted at an increasingly uncomfortable angle, wedged in what must be some kind of automated processing unit with no operator or attendant or monitors. He'd thought that there couldn't be anything worse than ending up wherever it was taking him, but there was -- not ending up there. Or anywhere else. Stuck in limbo like a malfunctioning vending machine. Forever.
It was hard to tell for certain, because it wasn't any blacker with his eyes closed than open, but he was pretty sure his vision was darkening from lack of oxygen.
*
Teyla gasped, trying to blink the sweat from her eyes as she ran. She didn't dare take her hand off her P-90 long enough to wipe her face. The machine behind her, whatever it was for, was fast, much faster than she would have guessed from its nearly silent operation and the brief glimpse she'd had of it. It was all she could do to stay out of its reach, and reaching it still was. And evidently it didn't get tired.
At first she'd heard the Colonel's steps behind her, but they'd soon faded. She didn't know if he was still back there, the sound of his pursuit smothered in the blackness, or if he'd been lost somewhere in this endless maze of corridors. She didn't dare turn to check; the one time she'd tried, the machine's grasping claw had brushed her cheek, and caught in her hair before she'd jerked free. The sweat stung in her abraded scalp.
Her legs were burning, and the miserable dank air filled her lungs like dead weight. Her throat ached from dragging it in. The light from her P-90 pierced only a few feet ahead of her, giving very little warning when the corridor changed direction. She'd wrenched her knee some ways back when surprised by a T-junction, and without a chance to rest it the pain was stabbing worse with every step. But every time she slowed or stumbled, she felt the machine at her heels, implacable, inexhaustible, and inexplicable.
She would have given almost anything to stop, even just for a few minutes. Instead she forced her feet to maintain top speed, and tried not to think about what would happen when she could do so no longer.
*
Sheppard came to a T-junction and stopped, swearing violently if breathlessly. He'd lost sight of Teyla some time ago, and had been following based on what he wanted to think was instinct, but was probably just guesswork. He was out of guesses now, and finally had to admit that he had no clue at all which way she'd gone.
He was pretty clueless about the way back out, too, but that wouldn't matter until he had his team back.
He couldn't flip a coin; even if he'd had one, it was too damn dark to see the result. He turned left more or less at random, pushing himself back to a corridor-eating lope. He tried to run quietly, in case he might hear something to give him a lead -- or something might hear him. So far, he hadn't seen any more of those robot-things, but given the way the corridors were just the right shape and size for them, he suspected there were more of them around.
He ran on, turning corner after corner. At first he thought he was just going whichever way felt right at the time, but eventually he realized he was doing Fibonacci numbers in his head, turning left on odds and right on evens. He started to curse his subconscious, then reflected that it wasn't any worse than any other method at his disposal.
Or maybe he was starting to crack up, all alone in the dark and the silence and these blasted corridors that all looked the same....
*
Ronon lashed out with a foot, catching the machine just above one of its spindly arms. It didn't even slow down, just carried on alternately twitching at his clothing and pinning him down on the table. He'd fought plenty of things physically stronger than he was, and killed most of them, but he couldn't even make these mechanical monstrosities take notice.
He got an arm free, and punched the other machine right in what would have been its face, if it'd had one. He heard as much as felt a knuckle shatter; the machine merely pushed his arm back down, as if he'd only raised it to scratch his nose. He was pinned helplessly, though that didn't stop him from trying to fight.
As far as he could tell in the inexorable blackness, they weren't taking anything; his clothing, even his weapons were still with him. They just kept fussing at him, arranging everything just so and tugging it back into place when his struggles disarrayed it again. Those clamp-like hands, stronger than any restraint he'd ever known, picked with eerie delicacy over his body. It made his skin crawl.
With a hum as faint as a predator's footstep, something slid into place beside him on the table. The machines lifted him again, utterly unmoved by his best efforts to break free, and settled him into some kind of shell. He surged upward; they pressed him back down. He realized what they were doing moments before the lid came down, and tried to get a knife or even a hand into the gap; they tucked him back in like a babe in a cradle, and sealed him in with a tiny electronic piff.
It was as close as a Wraith cocoon, as still as a grave. Ronon felt for the seam, couldn't find it, and went at the inner surface with his knife anyway. He felt the tip snap, but kept hacking. He'd give that five minutes, he decided, and then he was trying his pulse pistol, even if he would have to shoot through his own foot.
*
Sheppard came to a four-way intersection, and sagged to a stop. He didn't have a numeric type for straight ahead, and just for an instant, didn't have the fortitude to make a choice without his mathematical crutch.
Wait -- was that a smell?
He staggered a few feet down one corridor, then backtracked and tried another. Yes, it was stronger this way. Still just a faint whiff, but -- overheating circuits? Well, it was something, anyway, some change in this eternal subterranean sameness. It was worth checking out.
He tracked it, sniff by sniff, to a room maybe three times as wide as the corridors. That alone was a change, and a welcome one; he felt his lungs expand even though the clammy air wasn't improved by the tang of abused machinery. His light picked out a low bench, then a contraption that at first stumped him. He shone the light up it as far as he could, then back down.
It had neither belt nor buckets, but eventually he realized it was an alien equivalent of a conveyor belt.
He shone the light back up its length again, and his breath caught. At the limit of the light's range, there was an object, smooth-surfaced and ovoid, wedged at an angle and jamming the conveyor. And alien context or not, there were only two things it could be.
One was a bomb. The other.... It was just the right shape and size to hold a person.
Sheppard freaked out just a little then, and started scrambling up the conveyor. Fortunately it wasn't a steep slope, because there was no way he was letting go of his P-90, even if he didn't need its light. The... canister was seamless, with no outside markings or controls that he could see.
He swallowed hard, climbed half-over the object to get an arm around it, and heaved it loose.
The conveyor immediately groaned into action, and Sheppard nearly fell. He grabbed hold of the canister, and it slid down at him a little. That way, sort of taking turns falling, he managed to get it and himself back down the slow-moving conveyor and onto the bench.
He wasn't sure whether to be delighted or pass out from terror when he heard, very faintly, a knock coming from inside the container.
As soon as he started breathing again, he reached out and gave the surface a couple of sharp taps. A flurry of muffled knocking answered him. He checked again, but still found no seams or controls. He aimed his light frantically around the room, looking for tools, and spotted something that looked like a large, recessed button in the ceiling. He poked it with the muzzle of his P-90.
Some kind of energy beam hummed down from the ceiling, and the top and bottom halves of the object parted slightly, with a faint hydraulic puff.
In the creepy darkness, with alien robots and who knew what around every corner, the sound that came from the container at first almost made Sheppard bolt. He got control of himself before his foot more than twitched, carefully got a grip on the edge, and heaved.
Like the hatch up top, the cover was lighter than it looked. It flipped right off, and Rodney McKay lay, eyes streaming in the light from the P-90, staring up in uncomprehending panic.
"Rodney!" Sheppard grabbed his arm and pulled him to a sitting position. McKay flinched away at the touch, then suddenly grabbed Sheppard's arm with both hands, so tightly Sheppard could hear his own bones creak.
"Sheppard?" McKay said, in such a breathless, high-pitched whimper that Sheppard had to swallow a couple of times before he could speak again.
"It's okay, buddy. I'm here, it's okay. Let's get you out of there."
With Sheppard's help, McKay half-climbed, half-fell out of the container. Sheppard caught him to keep him on his feet, and McKay clutched at him. The scientist took a huge breath, then another, until Sheppard was afraid he'd burst something.
"Easy, Rodney, you're hyperventilating. It's okay now."
"Okay?! I was -- it was -- dark -- trapped -- buried alive --" The babble streamed on, almost incoherent, but all on that same theme. McKay was shaking so hard he couldn't stand, and Sheppard was too tired to do more than get him to the floor in a controlled manner.
Sheppard perforce sat too, since McKay wouldn't let go of his arm, and got his first good look at the man. McKay was a mess: bruised, bloody, his hands like raw meat, eyes rolling whitely, tears streaming down his face either from the light or the fear. Sheppard didn't blame him; he must have been trying to break out of that thing for most of the time he'd been missing, and even without McKay's oft-cited claustrophobia, that was a pretty good definition of Hell. He let McKay cling, and babble, and maybe he clung back a little too, because it was good to not be alone in the dark anymore.
Eventually, though, he had to put a stop to it. "Rodney. Rodney, listen to me." It took a bit to get through McKay's babble, but eventually he gulped back the endless verbiage and sat there, still hyperventilating. "Listen. Ronon and Teyla are missing. I need you to pull it together so we can go find them. Do you think you can walk?"
McKay nodded, still wide-eyed as though he was afraid to blink. Sheppard got to his feet, and McKay followed -- still shaky, but he made it. He kept a grip on Sheppard's arm, though, and Sheppard didn't have the heart to make him stop. They edged cautiously out into the corridor.
No robots whispered up at them out of the dark. After a few awkward minutes, Sheppard transferred McKay's grip to one of the straps on his tac vest, just so he could walk in the narrow space. McKay let himself be towed along. It was still awkward, and McKay bumped into the wall a few times -- then nearly fell, as a solid piece of wall turned out to be a door, sliding silently aside on contact.
Sheppard swung the light around. It was another room much like the one he'd found McKay in, minus the conveyor, but with another of those smooth ovoid containers lying on a wide table. Feeling a little queasy, he led the way over to it. A very faint whine came from the object, reminiscent of Ronon's energy pistol powering up, and Sheppard hastily rapped on the smooth surface.
An answering bang sounded, and Sheppard looked wildly around for another release button. Finding it, again, in the ceiling, he poked it with the P-90, and the lid of the container hissed open. Before he could reach for it, it was smashed upward from inside, flying across the room as Ronon surged out. The business end of his pistol was practically at Sheppard's nose before he recognized his rescuer.
"Easy!" Sheppard cautioned, and very carefully nudged the pistol's muzzle away from his face.
Ronon flung himself away from the table and looked wildly around in the darkness for something to shoot. "Where are they?" he growled.
"Those robot things? Not here, and we should leave before they come back. Come on." Sheppard led the way back out to the corridor, vaguely relieved that Ronon wasn't hanging on to his vest, too. They shuffled through still more of the clammy blackness. "Now we just need to find Teyla, and a way out."
"Second part's easy," Ronon said, and pointed his pistol at the ceiling.
"Are you sure that's--" Sheppard began, but Ronon wasn't listening. He fired, and the energy pulse struck the ceiling and bounced off like a rubber ball, rebounding down the corridor and out of sight.
McKay yelped. "Good thing you didn't aim straight up," Sheppard remarked with what he felt was admirable calm, under the circumstances.
"Yeah," Ronon agreed, and even he sounded a little shaken. Sheppard wondered if he too was thinking about the effect of firing that weapon inside the -- oh hell, just call it a coffin, already -- and decided he probably was.
"Ronon?" a ragged voice called from somewhere in the darkness.
"That's Teyla. Teyla!" Sheppard yelled. "Over here!"
They heard rapid footsteps, then she burst into view from a cross-corridor. "Run!" she gasped, stumbling in the light from Sheppard's P-90. "Behind me -- two --"
"This way!" Sheppard bolted back the way they'd come, trying to keep enough light aimed behind them for Teyla to follow, and praying he remembered the route. Either he did or their luck was finally turning, for the room where he'd found McKay loomed up out of the dark. They raced in, Sheppard hanging back at the doorway to wave Teyla through.
"There's no door!" McKay wailed.
He was right, and there was nothing that could be used as a barricade, either. They were trapped, unless.... "Up that!" Sheppard pointed at the conveyor. Rodney made a small sound of protest, but Ronon was already scrambling up the moderate incline. "Go, go," Sheppard waved the other two ahead, hurrying right on their heels. He felt a wisp of breeze at his ankle as one of the machines just missed grabbing him, and tried to crawl faster.
If nothing else, the conveyor was too narrow for the robots to follow. Somehow, none of the group took this as a cue to slow down, although Teyla was slipping with fatigue. Sheppard caught her as she half-fell on him, and boosted her up behind McKay. Ahead, Ronon moved sideways and disappeared; Sheppard hurried the others after him only to find an even narrower crawlspace, just barely wide enough for a man -- or a coffin. McKay moaned in terror, and even Teyla made a wordless sound of dismay. Sheppard aimed his light in, but couldn't see much past Ronon's feet. "How far does it go?" he called.
"Can't tell," Ronon's voice barely carried back, sounding rather squashed.
Sheppard looked around, but no better options presented themselves. They were all crowded up at the top of the conveyor, bracing precariously against the sides. "We'll have to chance it," he said.
"No way," McKay balked. "I am not going in there." His eyes rolled whitely in the beam from Sheppard's flashlight.
"Rodney--" Sheppard began, but was interrupted by a rumble and clang from below. The conveyor hummed to life -- in reverse.
"Shit! Go!" Sheppard yelled, scrabbling to stay in place. McKay babbled protests, but he moved while he did it. Teyla slid, caught the edge of the opening, and dragged herself halfway in; Sheppard gave her another boost, nearly lost his own battle against the conveyor, and grabbed the edge and heaved himself in.
They had to wriggle forward on their bellies, for the space was too tight to allow even a crawl. The darkness pressed in all around them, close as a second skin, barely touched by the puny beams of their flashlights. Sheppard could scarcely get room to inhale; Ronon, in the lead, had to be in agony. McKay's non-stop mumbling was taking on an increasingly hysterical tinge, and even Teyla was struggling to make any progress.
There was a thump, a curse, and a squawk from up ahead, and then Sheppard ran headfirst into Teyla's boots. "Dead end," Ronon called back.
"Bad choice of words," McKay gasped.
Something dribbled down onto Sheppard's head; with a twist that nearly dislocated his arm, he managed to work his hand back to check it. "Dirt?" he marvelled. There was dirt in his hair. The universe was not composed entirely of smooth-walled corridors, after all. It took him a moment to realize the significance. "Ronon, can you dig up?" he called ahead.
Scrabbling, scraping sounds; a whimper from McKay as more dirt rained down on all of them. A meaty thunk, as of a Satedan fist punching stubborn soil. Then the whine of the pulse pistol again; Sheppard's yell of "Not in here, dammit!" was blotted out by the blast, along with the rest of reality for a few seconds. But the concussion faded, and then the dirt was showering down in earnest as Ronon tore up through the still-smoldering hole, ripping at the horrible mat of moss from underneath, and burst through into the beautiful, blinding glare of the damp grey daylight.
They all raced after him, as much as one could race when crawling like a worm, and hauled themselves out. For a few minutes they just stood, bent and gasping, revelling in being able to see and breathe and move.
"Gate?" Sheppard finally asked, straightening up to scan the horizon. Endless ranks of round-markered graves still stretched in all directions.
"There." Teyla's legs might be barely holding her up, but her eyes were still sharp. She pointed to the Ancient ring, just visible in the humidity-hazed distance.
"Let's get out of here," said Sheppard, and no one objected. They trudged toward the gate, footsteps squishing on the grey-green moss. The faint damp squelches only emphasized the utter silence around them.
It was the faintest of noises, more feeling than sound, that prompted Sheppard to glance back over his shoulder -- and then leap forward, nearly knocking Teyla over. "Run for it!" he shouted, as a long spindly mechanical arm reached out from the hatch he'd just crossed. All around them, hatches were flipping open, robotic claws slithering out to snatch at their legs. They zigged and dodged through the grave markers, slipping on the moss. The machines didn't come up above ground, but the hatches were everywhere, springing up without warning. Ronon actually landed on one; it didn't damage the machine's arm, though it slammed closed with a satisfying clang. McKay barked his shin on a grave marker, swerving to avoid it, but didn't even complain, just stumbled and kept running.
Ronon reached the DHD first, practically falling on it as he slapped in the address. Sheppard fumbled to send the IDC as he ran. A tug at his leg caught him unawares, and he sprawled face-down on the mossy ground. The exhausted Teyla grabbed his outflung arm and yanked; there was a startlingly loud rip, and she hauled him to his feet, leaving the machine clutching a scrap of his pantleg. They leaned on each other as they staggered through the gate.
*
They made quite an entrance as they stumbled into the gateroom: Teyla limping, drenched in sweat and ready to drop; Ronon holding one arm to his chest with his other hand, which was bruised, swollen, and scorched; McKay pale, sweating, and shaking, smeared with blood from his battered hands and his eyes still wide and wild. Weir had taken one look at them and called for a medical team; Sheppard had heard her muttering something about just having Carson set up a gurney in the gateroom every time his team went off-world.
For all Carson's tsking, though, he prescribed nothing worse than bandages and rest, and they'd all been released from the infirmary fairly quickly. Sheppard had gone to his room like a good boy, but despite his exhaustion, sleep just wasn't happening.
He found McKay on the balcony overlooking the west pier, the one with the best view of the sun's final glow disappearing into the star-sparkled vastness of the ocean. "Hey," he greeted, and dropped down beside the scientist.
"Hey," McKay said back, but held a finger to his lips. He nodded toward a dark shape against the wall. Sheppard squinted, and it resolved into Teyla. He could just make out the red patch at the nape of her neck, where the hair had been torn out. She was curled up like a kitten, sound asleep.
He and McKay looked out at the water for a while in silence. Eventually he said quietly, "Elizabeth agreed to lock out that address. Permanently."
"Good." McKay shuddered slightly, and stared fixedly out at the evening sky.
"Yeah." He'd been working up to a full-force rant when she had agreed, abruptly deflating him. He'd heard that Jones in Archeology had pitched a fit, but he really didn't care. Nobody was setting foot on that planet of short-circuiting mortuary machines while Sheppard had anything to say about it.
A sound behind them made both McKay and Sheppard jump. "Hey," said Ronon, stepping out into the open air as-if-casually.
"Hey." Sheppard patted the floor beside him, and after a second's hesitation, Ronon sat down in a single fluid motion. They all looked out across the water, not speaking, not needing to.
The night was quiet, so quiet that Sheppard could hear the faint, almost delicate sound of Teyla snoring slightly behind them. The waves shushed gently against the pier far below. Overhead, the sky stretched forever, cradling the ocean in a darkness filled with wide open space.
Crossposted to Wraithbait.
Title: A Kindness Of Engines
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis
Summary: The graveyard was alien, ancient, and apparently endless. But not abandoned. Not quite.
Spoilers: None; generic second/third season.
Disclaimer: Stargate: Atlantis is the property of Stargate (II) Productions, Double Secret Productions, Gekko Productions, Showtime/Viacom, MGM/UA, and the Sci-Fi Channel; characters, situations, etc. of Stargate: Atlantis are included in this work under the principle of Fair Use, and no infringement of copyright is intended. All other components of this work are © 28 October 2008 Liz A. Vogel. Title is modified from a line in "Claire" by Matt Pond PA.
A Kindness Of Engines
by Liz A. Vogel
It was a planet of the dead.
They'd been walking for over an hour, and had yet to find anything alive above the level of plant life. There was only the moss-like ground cover, and row upon row of the circular markers, wedged upright into the ground like two-foot-tall coins. McKay had identified the material as a sophisticated alloy indicative of an advanced civilization, but even so, the markings inset into each disk were weathered into illegibility. The ones nearest to the stargate were crumbling badly.
Just last week, all the gate teams and Marine back-up units had been through a series of lectures from the folks in Archaeology. In addition to Artifact Handling 101 and How Not To Screw Up A Dig Site, there'd been a lot of emphasis on evaluating ancient -- or Ancient -- remains in their own context, and not judging them by your own cultural standards. That last had mostly been aimed at the Earth military types, but even the Athosians and Ronon had been cautioned about making assumptions.
It was all fine and good to talk about not applying your own culture to alien artifacts, but looking around at this place, none of Sheppard's team had any doubt that they were looking at graves, as far as the eye could see.
The sky was grey, the air cool but humid, a soggy soup that sat thickly in the lungs and made hiking among endless ranks of dead whatevers even less appealing. The silence was broken only by the squish of their footsteps. Sheppard turned a full 360, still seeing only more of the same. "Is anybody else getting seriously creeped out by this place?"
Ronon, who hadn't holstered his weapon since their arrival, gave a heartfelt, "Yeah."
"It is most disconcerting," Teyla agreed.
"Rodney, are you any closer to finding whatever it is we're looking for, or can we wrap this one up?"
"There is an energy reading," the scientist protested, turning slowly in a circle. "...That way?"
"McKay," Sheppard drawled, "we just came from there!"
"I know!" McKay swung the scanner back and forth, glaring at it. "It's like it keeps moving around."
Ronon became even more alert. "Tracking us?"
"No, I don't-- do you think so?"
Sheppard pulled the life-signs detector from his vest for at least the fifth time. "Still nobody home," he reported after a minute.
"Could they be shielded?" Teyla speculated.
"Why shield the people and not the energy?" McKay mumbled, more than half his attention still on the scanner.
"To hide from the Wraith?" said Sheppard.
Ronon shook his head. "If it's powerful enough to be worth investigating, the Wraith would want to know who made it."
"Well, maybe that's why there's nobody here anymore to ask."
They followed McKay's shifting energy signal through a couple more changes of direction, growing less and less enthused about the planet as they did so. A dank drizzle started, not so much rain as excess humidity falling out of the oversaturated air. "All right, I'm calling this one," Sheppard said in disgust. "Rodney, note the last direction on this thing, then pack up your toys and let's go home." He took three steps, and stopped. "Rodney?"
No protesting, no bitching, no snark. He looked around.
No Rodney.
The three remaining team members snapped into position, back to back to back. "McKay!" Sheppard yelled; his voice rolled past the markers and disappeared into the wisps of low-lying fog. "Ronon, see if you can track him."
They spread out a little, Sheppard and Teyla scanning their unvarying surroundings while Ronon took point. Footprints faded surprisingly quickly on the soft ground, and the Satedan had to cast back and forth several times before he could even pick up their recent steps. They backtracked cautiously to a point shortly after where Sheppard last remembered hearing McKay swear at his scanner. "There's something here," Ronon said, sounding puzzled. "But it just stops--"
This time there was a scuffle, and Sheppard turned in time to see Ronon's foot disappearing down a hole. He and Teyla both ran to the spot, but by the time they got there, the hole had disappeared, too. There was just the markers, and the squishy grey-green moss, unmarked as though it had lain undisturbed for centuries.
Sheppard dropped to his knees and started hacking at the ground cover with his service knife, while Teyla stood over him, scanning the unprepossessing landscape with her P-90 at the ready. The moss was a lot tougher than it looked; he could practically feel the blade dulling as he sawed at it. He tried to peel a layer of it away, but it slid wetly out of his hand. "Dammit...." He mentally rummaged through the contents of his tac vest even as he kept cutting. C4? No, no telling how far below ground his people were. Ditto for letting loose with the P-90s. He yanked a magnesium fire-starter from a pocket and struck it; a white-hot flare of light sliced through the murky air. The moss steamed and smoked; the patch nearest the tablet began to dry and curl. As soon as he could get in there without burning his fingers off, Sheppard went after it with the knife again; the moss was still resistant, but at least it didn't seem to reseal itself behind his blade. He managed to gouge away a ragged chunk, exposing the metal edge of some kind of access panel, set flush into the ground
"Gimme a hand with this." Teyla knelt and drew her own knife. Now that they had a starting point, they were able to uncover the rest of the hatch: a slab of the same alloy as the markers, perhaps three feet square. Teyla wedged her knife under the edge and pried, gaining a small gap; Sheppard forced his fingers in, and heaved. The slab was surprisingly light, and hinged upward silently.
The lights on their P-90s revealed a short drop to a corridor running beneath their feet, lined in more of the alloy. The space was about as tall as a man, a fraction narrower at the top than at the bottom, and quite empty. Sheppard looked at Teyla briefly, saw that she had no better ideas either, then handed her his P-90 and bent to lower himself in.
*
Oh god oh god oh god oh god.
The space around him was absolutely black and terrifyingly still. He could touch the sides, feel the smooth, unbroken surface all around him. Much, much too close around him.
If this wasn't a coffin, it was doing entirely too good an imitation of one.
McKay choked on a whimper, and forced himself not to flail. Pounding and kicking against the walls would only waste oxygen, and besides, he'd already tried it. Whatever his tiny, little, very very small, don't think about that, prison was made out of, it was much too hard for him to bash his way out of. He slid his fingers into the rounded corners again, searching for a seam, desperately trying not to notice that the air was getting staler.
There was no gap, no crack, not a hint of imperfection for him to wedge a fingernail into. It was as featureless as the heart of a black hole. The world ended an inch beyond his toes and an inch above his head, and he could bang both elbows on the sides without stretching. And the air was definitely getting stuffier.
Screaming was only going to waste oxygen too, but Rodney McKay was past caring.
*
Ronon wrenched against the metal clamped around his arm, and nearly tore his own shoulder. The machines carried on oblivious, transporting him through the underground passage without so much as a wobble. Restrained at arms and legs, he couldn't reach a weapon, couldn't kick or punch. He thrashed harder; this time he did feel something tear in his shoulder, but neither the machine behind his head nor the machine leading the way at his feet seemed to take any notice.
Finally he subsided, realizing he was only wasting his strength. Better to wait his chance. The machines trundled on, only the faintest hum in the darkness revealing their motion. Ronon couldn't see a thing, could feel no movement in the flat, stale air. He had no idea how far they'd come; the most he could feel was a slight twisting in his body when the machines took him around a corner.
"Sheppard!" he yelled. "Teyla!" His voice rang oddly in the close confines of the corridor, the echoes fading all too soon. He yelled again anyway. The machines either couldn't hear or didn't care.
At the next turn, he torqued his body sideways, trying to jam himself up in the corner. They dragged him on like so much meat, the machine in back squishing him ahead while the one in front tugged him straight. The corner itself felt perfectly smooth, slightly rounded, without any hint of edge or seam to catch against.
"Sheppard! Teyla!" he tried again. The blackness seemed to swallow his words as they left his mouth. He alternated struggling against his captors with calling for his teammates. Neither made any difference at all.
*
The dank grey light from the access hatch failed only a few steps away. Sheppard swung his P-90 from side to side, the flashlight's beam revealing brief patches of featureless walls before being eaten by the unyielding dark. Their footsteps seemed oddly muffled, as though the thick air smothered sound down here as it did breathing above.
Teyla paced behind and slightly to one side of him, the passage being too narrow for them to walk abreast. "I do not like this," she breathed.
"Yeah, no kidding." It was like walking into a claustrophobe's nightmare, complete with potential monsters lurking just out of sight.
They came to a four-way intersection, and paused. "See anything?" Sheppard asked softly, fighting the inclination to whisper.
"No." There were no marks on floor or walls, nothing to indicate which way Ronon might have been taken, or McKay before him -- if McKay was even down here, but Sheppard wasn't willing to entertain two different kinds of mysterious disappearance, not yet. He strained his eyes, trying to see any reason to pick one way over another.
"Look out!" Teyla yelled, and shoved him forward. Something snagged at his sleeve from the side corridor, missing its grab but spinning him around as he fell. His light swung wildly across a dark surface barely distinguishable from the walls; he had a split-second impression of a blocky trapezoidal shape with spindly, reaching arms and circular claws like some 1950s movie robot. Teyla got off a shot as she fell back into the opposite side corridor, and he heard the ping of it ricocheting off the thing and away into the darkness. By the time he got his own weapon back on target, whatever it was was through the intersection and down Teyla's hallway after her. "John!" Teyla yelled, and then he heard her footsteps running at top speed. He scrambled up and headed after her, following the barely-visible glow from her flashlight, the silhouette of her pursuer vaguely outlined between them.
*
It was the softest of noises, more a brush than a clang, and if he hadn't just gasped for breath between screams McKay would have missed it. "Sheppard?" he called out, hating the patheticness in his voice but willing to sound a lot worse if it meant rescue. "Teyla? Ronon? Sheppard!" No one answered.
There was no further sound, no passage of air, but McKay's inner ear told him his prison was moving. He flung himself against the side, hoping to jar his container (not a coffin, not a coffin, notacoffin) loose and maybe break it against something. There was what might have been a slight wobble, if he wasn't just imagining it in his hypoxic light-headedness, but nothing productive.
The sensation of movement stopped, started again, and shifted slightly. Were his feet raised up a little now, or was the rush of blood to his head just an incipient stroke?
He tried flinging himself against the side again, despite its lack of effect, and again and again. He pounded and kicked as well, his hands slipping wetly against the impervious surface. With a spine-wrenching flop, he managed to bang his feet against one side and his head against the other.
This time there was a clank, followed by a brief, muffled grinding noise. The sense of motion halted. His head spinning from the impact, McKay nonetheless felt a surge of victory. He'd done it! He'd jammed up the works, whatever the works were out there, and now someone would have to come investigate, and he could get out of here.
Eventually.
Sooner or later.
...wouldn't they?
He was stuck, still in his -- not a coffin, oh god oh god ohgodpleasenotacoffin -- tilted at an increasingly uncomfortable angle, wedged in what must be some kind of automated processing unit with no operator or attendant or monitors. He'd thought that there couldn't be anything worse than ending up wherever it was taking him, but there was -- not ending up there. Or anywhere else. Stuck in limbo like a malfunctioning vending machine. Forever.
It was hard to tell for certain, because it wasn't any blacker with his eyes closed than open, but he was pretty sure his vision was darkening from lack of oxygen.
*
Teyla gasped, trying to blink the sweat from her eyes as she ran. She didn't dare take her hand off her P-90 long enough to wipe her face. The machine behind her, whatever it was for, was fast, much faster than she would have guessed from its nearly silent operation and the brief glimpse she'd had of it. It was all she could do to stay out of its reach, and reaching it still was. And evidently it didn't get tired.
At first she'd heard the Colonel's steps behind her, but they'd soon faded. She didn't know if he was still back there, the sound of his pursuit smothered in the blackness, or if he'd been lost somewhere in this endless maze of corridors. She didn't dare turn to check; the one time she'd tried, the machine's grasping claw had brushed her cheek, and caught in her hair before she'd jerked free. The sweat stung in her abraded scalp.
Her legs were burning, and the miserable dank air filled her lungs like dead weight. Her throat ached from dragging it in. The light from her P-90 pierced only a few feet ahead of her, giving very little warning when the corridor changed direction. She'd wrenched her knee some ways back when surprised by a T-junction, and without a chance to rest it the pain was stabbing worse with every step. But every time she slowed or stumbled, she felt the machine at her heels, implacable, inexhaustible, and inexplicable.
She would have given almost anything to stop, even just for a few minutes. Instead she forced her feet to maintain top speed, and tried not to think about what would happen when she could do so no longer.
*
Sheppard came to a T-junction and stopped, swearing violently if breathlessly. He'd lost sight of Teyla some time ago, and had been following based on what he wanted to think was instinct, but was probably just guesswork. He was out of guesses now, and finally had to admit that he had no clue at all which way she'd gone.
He was pretty clueless about the way back out, too, but that wouldn't matter until he had his team back.
He couldn't flip a coin; even if he'd had one, it was too damn dark to see the result. He turned left more or less at random, pushing himself back to a corridor-eating lope. He tried to run quietly, in case he might hear something to give him a lead -- or something might hear him. So far, he hadn't seen any more of those robot-things, but given the way the corridors were just the right shape and size for them, he suspected there were more of them around.
He ran on, turning corner after corner. At first he thought he was just going whichever way felt right at the time, but eventually he realized he was doing Fibonacci numbers in his head, turning left on odds and right on evens. He started to curse his subconscious, then reflected that it wasn't any worse than any other method at his disposal.
Or maybe he was starting to crack up, all alone in the dark and the silence and these blasted corridors that all looked the same....
*
Ronon lashed out with a foot, catching the machine just above one of its spindly arms. It didn't even slow down, just carried on alternately twitching at his clothing and pinning him down on the table. He'd fought plenty of things physically stronger than he was, and killed most of them, but he couldn't even make these mechanical monstrosities take notice.
He got an arm free, and punched the other machine right in what would have been its face, if it'd had one. He heard as much as felt a knuckle shatter; the machine merely pushed his arm back down, as if he'd only raised it to scratch his nose. He was pinned helplessly, though that didn't stop him from trying to fight.
As far as he could tell in the inexorable blackness, they weren't taking anything; his clothing, even his weapons were still with him. They just kept fussing at him, arranging everything just so and tugging it back into place when his struggles disarrayed it again. Those clamp-like hands, stronger than any restraint he'd ever known, picked with eerie delicacy over his body. It made his skin crawl.
With a hum as faint as a predator's footstep, something slid into place beside him on the table. The machines lifted him again, utterly unmoved by his best efforts to break free, and settled him into some kind of shell. He surged upward; they pressed him back down. He realized what they were doing moments before the lid came down, and tried to get a knife or even a hand into the gap; they tucked him back in like a babe in a cradle, and sealed him in with a tiny electronic piff.
It was as close as a Wraith cocoon, as still as a grave. Ronon felt for the seam, couldn't find it, and went at the inner surface with his knife anyway. He felt the tip snap, but kept hacking. He'd give that five minutes, he decided, and then he was trying his pulse pistol, even if he would have to shoot through his own foot.
*
Sheppard came to a four-way intersection, and sagged to a stop. He didn't have a numeric type for straight ahead, and just for an instant, didn't have the fortitude to make a choice without his mathematical crutch.
Wait -- was that a smell?
He staggered a few feet down one corridor, then backtracked and tried another. Yes, it was stronger this way. Still just a faint whiff, but -- overheating circuits? Well, it was something, anyway, some change in this eternal subterranean sameness. It was worth checking out.
He tracked it, sniff by sniff, to a room maybe three times as wide as the corridors. That alone was a change, and a welcome one; he felt his lungs expand even though the clammy air wasn't improved by the tang of abused machinery. His light picked out a low bench, then a contraption that at first stumped him. He shone the light up it as far as he could, then back down.
It had neither belt nor buckets, but eventually he realized it was an alien equivalent of a conveyor belt.
He shone the light back up its length again, and his breath caught. At the limit of the light's range, there was an object, smooth-surfaced and ovoid, wedged at an angle and jamming the conveyor. And alien context or not, there were only two things it could be.
One was a bomb. The other.... It was just the right shape and size to hold a person.
Sheppard freaked out just a little then, and started scrambling up the conveyor. Fortunately it wasn't a steep slope, because there was no way he was letting go of his P-90, even if he didn't need its light. The... canister was seamless, with no outside markings or controls that he could see.
He swallowed hard, climbed half-over the object to get an arm around it, and heaved it loose.
The conveyor immediately groaned into action, and Sheppard nearly fell. He grabbed hold of the canister, and it slid down at him a little. That way, sort of taking turns falling, he managed to get it and himself back down the slow-moving conveyor and onto the bench.
He wasn't sure whether to be delighted or pass out from terror when he heard, very faintly, a knock coming from inside the container.
As soon as he started breathing again, he reached out and gave the surface a couple of sharp taps. A flurry of muffled knocking answered him. He checked again, but still found no seams or controls. He aimed his light frantically around the room, looking for tools, and spotted something that looked like a large, recessed button in the ceiling. He poked it with the muzzle of his P-90.
Some kind of energy beam hummed down from the ceiling, and the top and bottom halves of the object parted slightly, with a faint hydraulic puff.
In the creepy darkness, with alien robots and who knew what around every corner, the sound that came from the container at first almost made Sheppard bolt. He got control of himself before his foot more than twitched, carefully got a grip on the edge, and heaved.
Like the hatch up top, the cover was lighter than it looked. It flipped right off, and Rodney McKay lay, eyes streaming in the light from the P-90, staring up in uncomprehending panic.
"Rodney!" Sheppard grabbed his arm and pulled him to a sitting position. McKay flinched away at the touch, then suddenly grabbed Sheppard's arm with both hands, so tightly Sheppard could hear his own bones creak.
"Sheppard?" McKay said, in such a breathless, high-pitched whimper that Sheppard had to swallow a couple of times before he could speak again.
"It's okay, buddy. I'm here, it's okay. Let's get you out of there."
With Sheppard's help, McKay half-climbed, half-fell out of the container. Sheppard caught him to keep him on his feet, and McKay clutched at him. The scientist took a huge breath, then another, until Sheppard was afraid he'd burst something.
"Easy, Rodney, you're hyperventilating. It's okay now."
"Okay?! I was -- it was -- dark -- trapped -- buried alive --" The babble streamed on, almost incoherent, but all on that same theme. McKay was shaking so hard he couldn't stand, and Sheppard was too tired to do more than get him to the floor in a controlled manner.
Sheppard perforce sat too, since McKay wouldn't let go of his arm, and got his first good look at the man. McKay was a mess: bruised, bloody, his hands like raw meat, eyes rolling whitely, tears streaming down his face either from the light or the fear. Sheppard didn't blame him; he must have been trying to break out of that thing for most of the time he'd been missing, and even without McKay's oft-cited claustrophobia, that was a pretty good definition of Hell. He let McKay cling, and babble, and maybe he clung back a little too, because it was good to not be alone in the dark anymore.
Eventually, though, he had to put a stop to it. "Rodney. Rodney, listen to me." It took a bit to get through McKay's babble, but eventually he gulped back the endless verbiage and sat there, still hyperventilating. "Listen. Ronon and Teyla are missing. I need you to pull it together so we can go find them. Do you think you can walk?"
McKay nodded, still wide-eyed as though he was afraid to blink. Sheppard got to his feet, and McKay followed -- still shaky, but he made it. He kept a grip on Sheppard's arm, though, and Sheppard didn't have the heart to make him stop. They edged cautiously out into the corridor.
No robots whispered up at them out of the dark. After a few awkward minutes, Sheppard transferred McKay's grip to one of the straps on his tac vest, just so he could walk in the narrow space. McKay let himself be towed along. It was still awkward, and McKay bumped into the wall a few times -- then nearly fell, as a solid piece of wall turned out to be a door, sliding silently aside on contact.
Sheppard swung the light around. It was another room much like the one he'd found McKay in, minus the conveyor, but with another of those smooth ovoid containers lying on a wide table. Feeling a little queasy, he led the way over to it. A very faint whine came from the object, reminiscent of Ronon's energy pistol powering up, and Sheppard hastily rapped on the smooth surface.
An answering bang sounded, and Sheppard looked wildly around for another release button. Finding it, again, in the ceiling, he poked it with the P-90, and the lid of the container hissed open. Before he could reach for it, it was smashed upward from inside, flying across the room as Ronon surged out. The business end of his pistol was practically at Sheppard's nose before he recognized his rescuer.
"Easy!" Sheppard cautioned, and very carefully nudged the pistol's muzzle away from his face.
Ronon flung himself away from the table and looked wildly around in the darkness for something to shoot. "Where are they?" he growled.
"Those robot things? Not here, and we should leave before they come back. Come on." Sheppard led the way back out to the corridor, vaguely relieved that Ronon wasn't hanging on to his vest, too. They shuffled through still more of the clammy blackness. "Now we just need to find Teyla, and a way out."
"Second part's easy," Ronon said, and pointed his pistol at the ceiling.
"Are you sure that's--" Sheppard began, but Ronon wasn't listening. He fired, and the energy pulse struck the ceiling and bounced off like a rubber ball, rebounding down the corridor and out of sight.
McKay yelped. "Good thing you didn't aim straight up," Sheppard remarked with what he felt was admirable calm, under the circumstances.
"Yeah," Ronon agreed, and even he sounded a little shaken. Sheppard wondered if he too was thinking about the effect of firing that weapon inside the -- oh hell, just call it a coffin, already -- and decided he probably was.
"Ronon?" a ragged voice called from somewhere in the darkness.
"That's Teyla. Teyla!" Sheppard yelled. "Over here!"
They heard rapid footsteps, then she burst into view from a cross-corridor. "Run!" she gasped, stumbling in the light from Sheppard's P-90. "Behind me -- two --"
"This way!" Sheppard bolted back the way they'd come, trying to keep enough light aimed behind them for Teyla to follow, and praying he remembered the route. Either he did or their luck was finally turning, for the room where he'd found McKay loomed up out of the dark. They raced in, Sheppard hanging back at the doorway to wave Teyla through.
"There's no door!" McKay wailed.
He was right, and there was nothing that could be used as a barricade, either. They were trapped, unless.... "Up that!" Sheppard pointed at the conveyor. Rodney made a small sound of protest, but Ronon was already scrambling up the moderate incline. "Go, go," Sheppard waved the other two ahead, hurrying right on their heels. He felt a wisp of breeze at his ankle as one of the machines just missed grabbing him, and tried to crawl faster.
If nothing else, the conveyor was too narrow for the robots to follow. Somehow, none of the group took this as a cue to slow down, although Teyla was slipping with fatigue. Sheppard caught her as she half-fell on him, and boosted her up behind McKay. Ahead, Ronon moved sideways and disappeared; Sheppard hurried the others after him only to find an even narrower crawlspace, just barely wide enough for a man -- or a coffin. McKay moaned in terror, and even Teyla made a wordless sound of dismay. Sheppard aimed his light in, but couldn't see much past Ronon's feet. "How far does it go?" he called.
"Can't tell," Ronon's voice barely carried back, sounding rather squashed.
Sheppard looked around, but no better options presented themselves. They were all crowded up at the top of the conveyor, bracing precariously against the sides. "We'll have to chance it," he said.
"No way," McKay balked. "I am not going in there." His eyes rolled whitely in the beam from Sheppard's flashlight.
"Rodney--" Sheppard began, but was interrupted by a rumble and clang from below. The conveyor hummed to life -- in reverse.
"Shit! Go!" Sheppard yelled, scrabbling to stay in place. McKay babbled protests, but he moved while he did it. Teyla slid, caught the edge of the opening, and dragged herself halfway in; Sheppard gave her another boost, nearly lost his own battle against the conveyor, and grabbed the edge and heaved himself in.
They had to wriggle forward on their bellies, for the space was too tight to allow even a crawl. The darkness pressed in all around them, close as a second skin, barely touched by the puny beams of their flashlights. Sheppard could scarcely get room to inhale; Ronon, in the lead, had to be in agony. McKay's non-stop mumbling was taking on an increasingly hysterical tinge, and even Teyla was struggling to make any progress.
There was a thump, a curse, and a squawk from up ahead, and then Sheppard ran headfirst into Teyla's boots. "Dead end," Ronon called back.
"Bad choice of words," McKay gasped.
Something dribbled down onto Sheppard's head; with a twist that nearly dislocated his arm, he managed to work his hand back to check it. "Dirt?" he marvelled. There was dirt in his hair. The universe was not composed entirely of smooth-walled corridors, after all. It took him a moment to realize the significance. "Ronon, can you dig up?" he called ahead.
Scrabbling, scraping sounds; a whimper from McKay as more dirt rained down on all of them. A meaty thunk, as of a Satedan fist punching stubborn soil. Then the whine of the pulse pistol again; Sheppard's yell of "Not in here, dammit!" was blotted out by the blast, along with the rest of reality for a few seconds. But the concussion faded, and then the dirt was showering down in earnest as Ronon tore up through the still-smoldering hole, ripping at the horrible mat of moss from underneath, and burst through into the beautiful, blinding glare of the damp grey daylight.
They all raced after him, as much as one could race when crawling like a worm, and hauled themselves out. For a few minutes they just stood, bent and gasping, revelling in being able to see and breathe and move.
"Gate?" Sheppard finally asked, straightening up to scan the horizon. Endless ranks of round-markered graves still stretched in all directions.
"There." Teyla's legs might be barely holding her up, but her eyes were still sharp. She pointed to the Ancient ring, just visible in the humidity-hazed distance.
"Let's get out of here," said Sheppard, and no one objected. They trudged toward the gate, footsteps squishing on the grey-green moss. The faint damp squelches only emphasized the utter silence around them.
It was the faintest of noises, more feeling than sound, that prompted Sheppard to glance back over his shoulder -- and then leap forward, nearly knocking Teyla over. "Run for it!" he shouted, as a long spindly mechanical arm reached out from the hatch he'd just crossed. All around them, hatches were flipping open, robotic claws slithering out to snatch at their legs. They zigged and dodged through the grave markers, slipping on the moss. The machines didn't come up above ground, but the hatches were everywhere, springing up without warning. Ronon actually landed on one; it didn't damage the machine's arm, though it slammed closed with a satisfying clang. McKay barked his shin on a grave marker, swerving to avoid it, but didn't even complain, just stumbled and kept running.
Ronon reached the DHD first, practically falling on it as he slapped in the address. Sheppard fumbled to send the IDC as he ran. A tug at his leg caught him unawares, and he sprawled face-down on the mossy ground. The exhausted Teyla grabbed his outflung arm and yanked; there was a startlingly loud rip, and she hauled him to his feet, leaving the machine clutching a scrap of his pantleg. They leaned on each other as they staggered through the gate.
*
They made quite an entrance as they stumbled into the gateroom: Teyla limping, drenched in sweat and ready to drop; Ronon holding one arm to his chest with his other hand, which was bruised, swollen, and scorched; McKay pale, sweating, and shaking, smeared with blood from his battered hands and his eyes still wide and wild. Weir had taken one look at them and called for a medical team; Sheppard had heard her muttering something about just having Carson set up a gurney in the gateroom every time his team went off-world.
For all Carson's tsking, though, he prescribed nothing worse than bandages and rest, and they'd all been released from the infirmary fairly quickly. Sheppard had gone to his room like a good boy, but despite his exhaustion, sleep just wasn't happening.
He found McKay on the balcony overlooking the west pier, the one with the best view of the sun's final glow disappearing into the star-sparkled vastness of the ocean. "Hey," he greeted, and dropped down beside the scientist.
"Hey," McKay said back, but held a finger to his lips. He nodded toward a dark shape against the wall. Sheppard squinted, and it resolved into Teyla. He could just make out the red patch at the nape of her neck, where the hair had been torn out. She was curled up like a kitten, sound asleep.
He and McKay looked out at the water for a while in silence. Eventually he said quietly, "Elizabeth agreed to lock out that address. Permanently."
"Good." McKay shuddered slightly, and stared fixedly out at the evening sky.
"Yeah." He'd been working up to a full-force rant when she had agreed, abruptly deflating him. He'd heard that Jones in Archeology had pitched a fit, but he really didn't care. Nobody was setting foot on that planet of short-circuiting mortuary machines while Sheppard had anything to say about it.
A sound behind them made both McKay and Sheppard jump. "Hey," said Ronon, stepping out into the open air as-if-casually.
"Hey." Sheppard patted the floor beside him, and after a second's hesitation, Ronon sat down in a single fluid motion. They all looked out across the water, not speaking, not needing to.
The night was quiet, so quiet that Sheppard could hear the faint, almost delicate sound of Teyla snoring slightly behind them. The waves shushed gently against the pier far below. Overhead, the sky stretched forever, cradling the ocean in a darkness filled with wide open space.