Chapter 18, part 2.
Both of the Vareans bowed again and ushered them out of the room. They didn't go back, though; instead, they led them through the corridor for a few hundred yards, until they came up to another elevator. They went further down still—in fact, Alice was pretty sure they were now beneath the lowest level that they had seen from the terrace. She wondered just how far down this complex went? Clearly, it was much bigger than she had initially thought—or what the Vareans were willing to show them.
Krona and Sathi led them out of the elevator and alongside another corridor. It looked different here, though; it wasn't as nice as the ones above them, with gray walls and simple lighting, and no decorations or plants. Finally, they came to a door that led to a small room, divided in half by thick metal bars. There was a plain bed on the other side, a chair and a small table, and not much else. A man sat on the bed, looking into space with empty eyes. Alice recognized that expression immediately.
"That's one of Jareth's soldiers!" She breathed to Lorne, but the Vareans heard her.
"Do you know this man?" Krona asked sharply, though still with his eyes peeled away.
"No, not as such," Alice replied, approaching the bars to have a closer look. "But I recognize the symptoms. Who is he?"
"His name is Pura," Sathi replied. "He is one of our traders. He and his party witnessed a Wraith attack on a planet we buy ore from. They hid from the Wraith, but Pura tried to help some of the villagers, and he was caught with them. This was many months ago. We had been trying to track him down ever since—we were scared he could give up our location…"
"How did you find him?" Lorne asked quickly. Alice turned around to look at Sathi—it was allowed when one wasn't speaking.
"It was an accident," Sathi admitted. "A group of other traders spotted him on another planet. They notified Adviser Krona and he sent a team through." She gestured at the man.
"Pura wasn't alone," he picked up the story. "There was a Wraith and at least a dozen other people with him."
"What were they doing there?" Lorne wanted to know.
"We don't know. Our people caught them on their way back to the Ancestral Ring. There was a fight… Pura fought against his own people. Almost killed one of them." Krona paused, looked up at the man behind bars, shook his head, and then looked back down before starting to speak again. "We managed to capture him, but the Wraith and the rest of his men fled through the Ring. We—"
"Did you see the symbols?" Alice interrupted him eagerly, and then remembered that it was considered a high offense. "I'm sorry!" She hurried to say but fell silent under Lorne's significant stare.
Krona grimaced, but seemed to shake it off. "We initially thought that Pura was made into a Wraith worshipper, but when we brought him home, he exhibited no normal symptoms. And he isn't getting any better."
"When you told me about this Wraith you call Jareth and how his victims acted, I recognized it immediately," Sathi added. "Can you help him?"
Alice looked at Lorne. He nodded.
"Yes," she answered. "We can bring him back. Though you have to understand that it will not be instantaneous—it's different for everyone, we've observed that it can take anywhere from two weeks to two months. But we've seen no adverse effects until now. All the victims are 100% back to their previous selves." She shot a quick glance at Lorne and he smiled crookedly at her.
Now the two Vareans exchanged looks.
"Yes," Sathi said, finally responding to Alice's rushed question. "Our people did see the symbols."
"Sounds like we have our first deal!" Lorne announced excitedly, and then bowed to their hosts, who returned the gesture immediately. "We'll need to take Pura back to our place, won't we, Captain?"
Alice nodded. "Just for the initial part. After all the nanites are out of his system, he can come home to continue the process here. It's easier with friends and family around," she explained. "It shouldn't take more than two to three days."
"Excellent." Krona bowed again, this time to Alice. "Then that's when you will learn the combination of symbols we found."
But Alice was shaking her head.
"That's not good enough for you?" Sathi sounded a little offended again.
"You have to understand, we've been after Jareth for months," Alice reasoned. "He still has one of our people. And, if he's still there, each day, in fact each hour we lose, we risk him moving on somewhere else. And if he's not there, we need to take apart the DHD, this will give us the fifty last used addresses—we can send troops out to look for him, but the longer we wait, the less chance we'll have to actually find him."
"You can do that? Find out what symbols were used last?" Now Sathi seemed impressed.
"Not in any kind of order, so it's of limited help when tracking someone. And Jareth is smart, he might be using multiple Gates to get wherever he wants to go… at any rate, we cannot wait."
"He's not just a threat to us," Lorne noted. "If Pura was with him for months, Jareth already knows everything there is to know about Vare. We want to stop him."
"We don't know you," huffed Krona.
"How about one of you comes back with us and Pura?" Alice proposed. "That way you will know our secret as much as we know yours. And you will see that we really intend to help Pura. We'd do it even if you didn't have anything to trade," she added confidently, to Lorne's nods. "It's just who we are."
"This is… acceptable," Krona allowed. "But we need to consult with Chancellor Mittal."
"Of course. But in the meantime, can you give orders to prep Pura for transport?" Lorne asked. "Just so we don't lose any time later."
"It shall be done." Another deep bow followed this statement, to which Lorne and Alice responded in kind. After that, they were escorted back to the room where the rest of their teams awaited eagerly. They had barely time to explain everything when Sathi was back to tell them that Mittal agreed to the proposition. It was decided that Lorne, his team and Cooper would stay on Vare to continue the talks, while Alice and Perrault were to take Pura and Sathi back to Atlantis.
Before stepping through the Gate, Perrault radioed ahead that they were bringing guests and received official permission from Woolsey. The expedition leader was already waiting on the other side, along with Sheppard and Keller with her medical staff. Pura was immediately wheeled off to the infirmary so that Keller could do some preliminary checkups on him, and Sathi was invited to Woolsey's office for a talk. Meanwhile, Alice and Perrault apprised Sheppard of what had happened; he was adequately excited at the possibility to finally get Jareth—they had exactly zero leads for a very long time. Then the three of them joined Sathi and Woolsey and walked to the infirmary to talk to Keller.
"Well, it's definitely Jareth's doing," she told them while her staff was prepping the isolation room—they were always taking extreme precautions where nanites were involved, even now when they knew the treatment was completely safe. "He's got the same artificial synaptic structure as all our people had."
"So you will be able to help him?" Sathi asked. She looked a little shell-shocked—what little of Atlantis she had already seen was more than she could've imagined in her wildest dreams. She also had to face a cultural shock—here, aside from Perrault and Alice, nobody knew about Vareans' customs, and everyone was looking her in the eye while talking to her, smiling, shaking hands instead of bowing. Alice hoped she wouldn't misconstrue that as lack of respect—Sathi was smart, though. After all, she was the Technology Adviser, she should be more forward-thinking than her colleagues, right?
"Yes, certainly," Keller replied, her usual warm smile playing on her lips. "I've also taken the liberty of doing some other tests—nothing invasive, just the usual screening. He has a significant vitamin D deficiency, but I suspect all your people will have that, since you live mostly underground. Other than that, he seems to be perfectly healthy."
"What exactly will you do to him?" Sathi walked up to the window, through which they could see the isolation room on the lower level, where the medics were just strapping Pura to a bed.
"We'll inject a dose of nanites that will travel into his brain and deposit a specific protein marker in the artificial synapses created by Jareth, and then go back to the bloodstream and deactivate," Keller explained, but, seeing Sathi's confused expression, she added: "Nanites are like teeny tiny robots that will just… jumpstart some natural processes that will take care of what Jareth did to him."
"We'll keep him here until the nanites have left him completely, just to be sure," Alice added, though of course Sathi didn't comprehend the inherent danger of using them.
They watched as a nurse brought out a syringe and made the injection, and then observed on the scanner's screen as the nanite swarm traveled up Pura's body to his brain, crowded there for a moment, and soon enough—started going back down.
"That's it," Keller announced, checking other vitals on different screens. "Went without a hitch. He's stable. Now only to wait until his body gets rid of the nanites, and he should start getting better soon."
"It was that easy?" Sathi's voice was surprised.
"Trust me, that was not as easy as it seemed," Keller laughed. "It took us a while to even find out what was wrong, and how to do it… Alice came up with the idea." She pointed at the captain, who rolled her eyes and smiled.
"It was a team effort," she said, and then turned around to Sathi, bowed to her and, looking down, asked: "Is this enough?"
Sathi replicated the gesture. "Yes, thank you. You have delivered your promise. Now it is our turn." And she pulled a piece of paper from a pocket in her robe and handed it to Alice.
"Thank you." Alice looked at the symbols, but didn't recognize them. She passed the address to Sheppard, who examined it and then gave it to Woolsey.
"Okay, then. Go get him," he said simply.
"Perrault, Boyd, I want you with us. Grab your gear and be in the Jumper Bay in fifteen minutes. We'll take two Jumpers."
"Yes, sir!" Alice replied and Perrault nodded. Without another word, all three of them left to get ready.
Sheppard and his team were already waiting when Alice entered the Jumper Bay only ten minutes later. Perrault arrived right after her, and then they were joined by a third team—Lieutenant Moors', Jake included.
"I would've preferred not pairing up siblings but they're the only ones available at this moment," Sheppard told Alice.
"It's okay, sir, we'll try to behave ourselves," Alice quipped lightly and got an eye-roll and a smirk in return.
"Alright people," Sheppard addressed all of them. "This is a planet we haven't visited yet, so we're not sure what we'll find there. According to the Ancient database, it was uninhabited, but that info is a little old, so keep your wits about you. We'll go first and if it's safe we'll radio you to come through. You're to act as a backup, do not engage or show yourselves until I say so, alright?"
"Yes, sir," Perrault answered for them.
"Let's go get our boy back, then!"
They went to their respective Jumpers. Alice took the pilot seat, with Perrault on her right and Moors and Jake behind her. The other two people in Jake's unit, Macnamara and Ruiz, sat in the aft compartment.
They waited until Sheppard's Jumper got through and followed only when the colonel radioed that it was safe. Alice cloaked them as soon as they were on the other side.
The planet looked very similar to what they knew was the norm for the Pegasus: lots of trees interspersed with wide open fields and a line of massive mountains on the horizon, their highest peaks shrouded in mist and clouds. There didn't seem to be any human settlements, or in fact any life at all, and Alice understood why when she looked at the readouts from the HUD.
"The atmosphere is toxic," she told her crew. "Not enough to kill you right away, but enough to make it uninhabitable. If we land at any point, we'll need to wear breathing masks."
For now, however, they hovered near the Gate, waiting for Sheppard to come back from a survey of the area. It didn't take long.
"Looks like we're alone," the colonel said through the comms a little while later. "I can't see anything anywhere nearby. Think it was just a stop on his way?"
"Maybe," Alice allowed. "Jareth's very clever. Do you mind if I take a leap myself, sir?"
"Why?" Sheppard sounded amused. "Don't trust my skills, do you?"
Alice rolled her eyes, though of course he wouldn't see that. "It's just that I don't think Jareth would keep his new base of operations anywhere near the Gate. If I was to venture a guess, I'd say he's somewhere up these mountains."
"How do you figure?"
"They're defensible. And they might be naturally jamming any signals he might be producing. It's a hunch," she added as a way of explanation.
"Okay, Captain. Let's go there together."
And so both of them directed their Jumpers towards the faraway mountain range; once there, they flew in opposite directions, Sheppard east and Alice—west. They passed over deep shadowy valleys and high passes, skirting around the tallest peaks, sometimes floating through the clouds that clung to them like puffs of smoke or long strips of cotton candy, and other times slipping to the bright world full of sunlight above. Alice was actually enjoying the ride, though she never stopped monitoring the readouts on the HUD, but to her chagrin, there was nothing. As luck would have it, it was Sheppard who came up on something.
"Damn, you're good, Boyd," he said through the intercom. "Check our position and come here quick as you can, but careful. We've found something."
Alice wheeled them around and up, speeding to catch up with the colonel's Jumper, which was many miles away east of them. "What is it, sir?"
"It's some kind of a structure… looks a bit like a Wraith cloning facility, except not exactly. But it's definitely a dome of some kind. We'll have to land and reach it on foot."
"Oh, joy," Alice breathed, already knowing that it would be difficult; they were really high up and the mountains above them were almost bare rocks. "Make sure you all wear breathing masks, sir, the air..."
"...is toxic, I know, McKay noticed it too," Sheppard finished her sentence. "Plus at this altitude breathing would be near to impossible. This place, whatever it is, must have its own life support system."
"Or artificial atmosphere..." Alice added; they have just arrived above the structure. "Sir, I think it's a Wraith Hive… or used to be, anyway."
"It doesn't look like one," Sheppard protested, but then McKay interrupted him:
"No, she's right. Hives are organic, they can be grown in many different ways. This is definitely a Hive that someone landed and expanded to look more like a dome or whatever..."
"It's not going to fly anywhere anytime soon, but it's quite an ingenious way to get a base of operations in a remote area quickly," Alice said, trying—and failing—to not sound impressed.
"How is he coming and going from the Gate?" Perrault asked from his seat next to Alice.
"A Dart, maybe?" Alice mused. "Or he's just using that Jumper he fled in."
"That means there's probably an entrance big enough for us to fly into somewhere," Sheppard noted.
"If that's a retroffited Hive, maybe it's using the Dart bay?" Moors suggested from behind Perrault.
"And in that case, Doctor McKay's IFF spoofer should allow us to enter." Alice nodded. "Good thinking, Lieutenant."
"Well, then, let's hope they're not looking at a computer anywhere," Sheppard muttered, though loudly enough for them to hear through the ship's comms system. "Let's go in together, then, we'll minimize the chances of being spotted. When we land, stay in your Jumper and wait for my signal, okay?"
"Yes, sir," Perrault confirmed.
"Alright, here goes nothing."
Alice noted the signal on her HUD and then they all saw part of the dome shift, the wall retracting, admitting them inside. Alice allowed Sheppard to enter first and then quickly followed him before the bay door began to close.
The hangar looked identical to the ones they had seen previously in different Hives, except for one thing: there were no Darts parked anywhere. Instead, a single Jumper sat on a ramp halfway up the bay's considerable height; other than that, the place was empty.
"Alright, looks good," Sheppard said through the intercom. "I'll set us down below, Boyd you go up one level. We go in quiet, look for a console—if you find one, download the schematics and any other data you can find and send it our way, we'll do the same. When we know what's where, we'll regroup and think what's the next step." Then he paused, and added quietly: "Remember—stunners only. These people don't know what they're doing and can't help it."
"Yes, sir."
Alice landed the Jumper delicately, with barely any sound at all. Then, without words, the two teams took their gear—exchanging their normal P90s or G36Ks for Wraith handblasters—and left the spacecraft, moving quickly towards the closest door. Once past it, Perrault took point, with Alice on his right and Moors on his left, and Jake, Macnamara and Ruiz a few steps behind them. Alice had the Jumper's life signs detector in her hand. For now, however, it showed none but their own dots, right in the center. It did double as energy and radiation scanner, but the readings were pretty inconsistent aboard the ship, even if it was currently dormant.
It was Sheppard and his party that first discovered a console. McKay managed to download the Hive's schematics and sent them to Alice's tablet. Their entire team gathered around it to have a look at the maze of corridors and rooms.
"Jareth's probably occupying the central chamber right here," Alice said, pointing at the map; she had her mic on so the others could listen in. "This is where the cells are, he might have someone there, if he can't break a person immediately, he likes to soften them up in isolation…" Her voice trailed at the end, but then she cleared her throat and continued: "This whole block here seems like more labs—I don't doubt he's taken up his research again, even if he had to start from scratch. Notice how everything is within this circular range? I bet that's his defensive perimeter."
"It's small," Perrault objected. "This ship is 'uge, why wouldn't he spread further than that?"
"When we took his castle, we probably took away much of his force. He's built it back up again, we've seen that on that blue-haired Queen's Hive ship, but he actually lost some people that day, and there weren't that many of them to begin with. He's not overly concerned with the lives of his victims," Alice added with bitterness. "And remember that these are humans—they need to eat and drink, and he only has this one Jumper to bring along resources. Plus, does he really need more space? I don't rightly know what's his endgame, but clearly he's more interested in his experiments than fighting the other Wraith, for now at least. From what we've seen so far, he's betting on secrecy more than on overwhelming force." Alice shook her head. "No, I am certain that he won't have a large contingent, and it makes more tactical sense for him to guard only that much space as he needs."
"We certainly haven't come up any resistance yet," Sheppard agreed. "Alright. We'll go search for Jareth in his central chamber. You start with the labs and then move on to the cells. And if you see anyone… shoot first, ask questions later. We cannot give him a single chance to play his mind tricks on us."
"Yes, sir." Perrault acquiesced for their entire team and they went off radio. "You heard the man. Let's go. Boyd, you take point with that scanner of yours."
"Yes, sir." Alice nodded and started off towards the center of the Hive again, this time leading the group. The good news was that they only expected Jareth to have his human henchmen, and they were bound to be always visible on the life signs detector; with Wraith one never knew, for it didn't show them when they were hibernating.
Thanks to this, they were able to approach the central ring quickly, and as they did, Alice's predictions proved true: the scanner revealed a row of dots strung across all the corridors and intersections, beginning at almost exactly the place Alice had pointed to. They formed a wall of people the Atlantians would have to go through to get closer to their respective objectives.
"How many?" Perrault asked in a hushed voice when Alice stopped them with a hand gesture and indicated that there were bandits ahead.
"Twelve that I can see so far, but only four on our direct path, two up close and two more a few paces away," she whispered back. The commandant nodded and they started again, the stunners at the ready. They paused only for a few seconds before bounding the corner.
Alice was first to take a shot; the energy burst from her handblaster crackled through the air and found a mark, dropping the first man to the ground. The other one was taken out by Perrault before he managed to make a sound, but the two in the back were looking in their direction and they started raising their guns—Genii-style ones, Alice noted—but then Moors and Jake both fired from behind Alice, and their aim was true.
Without speaking, Moors' team passed them to take away the downed guys' weapons and zip tie their hands. Coerced or not, these men were loyal to Jareth right now, and they couldn't be allowed to wake up and come up at them from behind. Alice checked the area ahead of them on the life signs detector. Their route appeared clear at the moment, but some of the dots on the little screen were moving here and there.
"They have patrols out," she warned Perrault in an undertone. He nodded back and gestured at her to take point once more. They set off again.
Now, meandering between the stationary sentinels and patrolling guards was becoming more difficult. They went quickly through corridors, only to stop at intersections and wait for a few moments until danger passed. Of course, they could take out any opposition, but the more they interfered now, the bigger was the risk that someone managed to alert Jareth to their presence. Plus, leaving unconscious, tied up people behind, while tactically the best option at the moment, was kind of a dead giveaway.
Finally, after only fifteen minutes—though to Alice it seemed much longer than that—they reached the corridor where Alice thought the labs were. It was empty for now, but there were two patrols going that way, still quite far away, but they needed to be quick nonetheless.
"Anything?" Perrault asked her, pointing at the scanner with his head.
"Last room on the left, two people inside," Alice replied quietly, wondering if that could be Jareth and another one of his victims, mid-experiment. "And some fairly interesting energy readings from over there." She indicated a door just to their right.
"Alright, Moors and Macnamara, with me, the rest of you check out that energy readings," Perrault ordered. They split up, and Alice led her group to the door. As she had expected, it opened without any problems—Jareth still didn't believe in locks too much. They were inside within seconds.
"Close it behind us," she told Ruiz and the young corporal went back to do so, while Alice and Jake looked around the room. It reminded Alice of the place where Jareth had performed his examinations of her back in the castle: it was full of different equipment, some of it classically Wraith, other looking like a combination of Ancient, Genii and other advanced races' technology. The energy was coming off from one of the latter ones.
"Any idea what it is?" Jake asked in a hushed voice as they approached to take a closer look. It was cylindrical in shape, made from a glossy material akin to metal, though warm to the touch. It emitted a low hum and seemed to be glowing almost imperceptibly.
"None whatsoever," Alice admitted, walking around it, trying to see if there was any writing on it—or in fact any control panel at all, but it seemed bare. She squatted down next to it, handed the scanner to Jake and instead took out her tablet. She fixed her multimeter pointer to it and started examining the thing closely.
"Seems like the good guys prevailed," Jake commented a few moments later. "They're coming here." But he didn't seem willing to trust the scanner too much, for he nodded at Ruiz and they positioned themselves on both sides of the door, stunners at the ready. It turned out to be unnecessary, though; it was Perrault, Moors and Macnamara after all.
"Jareth?" Alice asked before they had a chance to properly enter the room. She was now on her knees next to the cylindrical machine, the tablet in her hand.
Perrault shook his head. "Just two more of his men. What's this?"
"I'm not sure." She shook her head. "Best I can tell is, it emits the kind of energy that is particularly conductive to Hive growth. But it's not Wraith technology, so either I'm mistaken, or this energy emission is just a by-product and the device is meant to be doing something else."
"Is it dangerous to humans?"
"No, not at all. As far as I can tell," she amended. There was always the possibility that she was wrong, of course. But she didn't think she was, not this time. "My guess would be that Jareth has found it somewhere, noticed the same thing I did, and brought it here to study. He's a scavenger, he collects other civilizations' equipment, weapons, even genes. And he's a scientist, so it would make sense. Or perhaps he knows what it does and I'm completely off-target here." She shrugged. "Either way, I don't think we should spend time on it right now."
"Alright, let's get a move on, then," Perrault agreed. "We should—"
But he didn't get to finish his sentence, for they all heard something that made them freeze for a moment: distant, but clear sound of gunfire.
"Colonel, do you need assistance?" Perrault radioed, but there was no reply. He looked around at Alice—who was still kneeling on the ground by the humming machine—and gestured at her to get up. "I'll take Moors and Macnamara to check on them, you lot go on to the cell block."
Alice nodded. "Okay, but take the life signs detector with you. It'll be of more use to you, we can go slower and more carefully." And she handed the scanner to Moors—Perrault didn't have the gene required to operate it.
Without further discussion, the two groups left the room and Perrault led his one way, while Alice, Jake and Ruiz took the other. Alice remembered that there was a patrol heading their way, and so they walked quietly and carefully; and indeed, soon enough, they heard footsteps coming towards them. They just managed to hide in one of the labs when the guards marched into the corridor. Alice had her ear to the door, listening intently and only allowed them out when she was sure the patrol was gone.
They started off again, but this time, without the scanner, the road was more difficult; they had to approach each intersection and corner with great caution to make sure there were no surprises waiting for them. A couple times they came close to being discovered, and once they had no choice but to stun two sentinels who stood on their way, but finally they made it to the cell block.
There weren't as many cells as there had been in the castle dungeons, and the doors weren't solid, but rather built of thick bar-like tendrils that crisscrossed to create an effective barricade. But similarly to how it had been done in the castle, here the cells were occupied by a single person each—and the prisoners looked just as wretchedly as Alice expected Jareth's victims to be. There was no one guarding them, though.
They walked up to the first of the cells and Alice looked inside. There was a man inside, lying on the floor, his clothing so dirty that Alice couldn't quite tell what was its original color. He was unconscious, which was probably a blessing, because his entire body looked like one huge bruise—there wasn't a healthy inch of skin on him. What was Jareth testing on him—how much of a beating humans could endure?
Before they moved on, there was a grunt from the cell next to that one, and then a very weak voice spoke up to them.
"Who's there?" And then, even more faintly: "Help, please…"
It was a young woman, almost a girl; she had fiery orange hair, very similar to Alice's before she had cut it off, and big emerald green eyes that looked out at them from a small, gaunt face with gut-wrenching despair. Alice looked at her for a moment, her mind quite blank.
"Allie," Jake breathed from behind her. "She looks like you!"
It wasn't entirely true. They had distinctly different features—Alice's face wasn't quite as round, her nose was sort of pointed upwards, and her cheeks a bit higher—but the big ticket items were all the same: almost identical shade of hair and eye color, small frame, and pale skin.
"Help," the girl mouthed at them again. She was on her knees, her hands wrapped around the bars to the cell, and she looked extremely haggard and exhausted.
"What do you want to do, sis?" Jake asked quietly. Alice turned her gaze away from her lookalike and peered at him around the shoulder. He was staring at the girl with an expression that was half-spooked, half-pitying. "We could let them go now, but…"
Alice shook her head. "It could give us away." She turned back to the prisoner and squatted down, her eyes now level with the girl's. "We'll come back for you," she promised. "We have to get the Wraith first, but I swear to you, we will come back for you. Just hang on." She then dug into her tactical vest and brought out a canteen with water. "Drink this."
The girl took the canteen, looked at it for a moment with uncomprehending eyes, and then she uncorked it and tried to down it all in one huge swig—but she choked and started coughing.
"Not so fast," Alice told her, but she didn't make a move to take it away. She remembered all too well what real thirst felt like and was not about to make this girl endure it another second. "When you're done, hide it somewhere. We've gotta go. We will be back," she repeated. She wasn't sure if the girl understood, but there was no time to waste. She stood up and took one step away from the cell when their radios went alive again.
"We're blown," came Sheppard's voice, words rushed and his breath heavy, as if he was running. "Jareth gave us a slip, he's headed towards the Dart bay. He cannot be allowed to escape!"
Alice pivoted around on her heel and tapped her mic. "We're on it." And then, without a single word passing between them, Alice, Jake and Ruiz all started running back the way they came. Now it was no longer necessary to hide and avoid the guards; they had only done that to prevent them alerting Jareth. Thus, they took a more direct route, expecting to have to fight their way through—but the sentries were no longer at their posts. They must have had some communication from Jareth and fled towards the bay, too, Alice deduced.
What had taken them over half an hour to walk, only took ten minutes now, as they ran through the empty corridors without stopping once. It wasn't until they made it to the passage leading directly to where the entrance to the hangar was that they finally met some opposition and had to halt to defend themselves.
"We're at the bay door, and we've got hostiles," Alice reported as soon as they cleared the initial onslaught of Jareth's men—six of them now lay on the floor, all stunned.
"We're still in pursuit," Sheppard replied. "Get to his Jumper if you can, he's just ahead of us!"
"We'll do our best." Alice nodded at the other two to follow her and, pausing for a second before opening it to take a deep breath, she went through the door, the stunner raised and ready to fire.
As soon as they stepped over the threshold, a rain of bullets came onto them, forcing them back into the corridor.
"That's no good," Alice told Jake and Ruiz, speaking over the noise of the gunfire. "You two tie 'em up here, don't let anyone through, I'll go up one level and try to take them out from there."
"Be careful," Jake said, but he didn't protest. Alice smiled at him encouragingly—she hoped—and left them to climb the nearby stairs that led to the next floor—the one their own Jumper was parked on. There were two people guarding the door there, but she dispatched them quickly, taking them by surprise, and then entered the bay.
What they called levels were actually just narrow bridges connecting opposite sides of the hangar, with wider platforms near the entrances; the actual Darts were stored inside holes in the walls which gave the bay a distinct honeycomb-like look. Their Jumper was parked near the entrance, and so was Jareth's, but on a platform connected to a bridge below. If Alice would want to, she could have jumped on the lower platform—but she didn't fancy it very much, as it was almost a thirty-foot drop. She'd probably break her legs at the very least. Nevertheless, she could clearly see everything down there, including the eight men, currently engaged in a fight with Jake and Ruiz, whom she could just make out as they appeared in the doorway to fire once or twice and hide again before they could be hit themselves.
She lay on the floor at the edge of her bridge and turned her stunner down. She got off five successful shots before Jareth's guards realized that the fire was now coming from above them, and as they turned on her, Jake and Ruiz were able to join in and finally take them down.
"Good job, sis!" Jake called to her from below as he entered the hangar and she grinned at him, but then the smile froze on her lips. Someone had just walked onto the platform through the door behind Jake and Ruiz: Jareth, accompanied by four men. Alice couldn't help but notice that Karim was among them.
"Behind you!" She called to her brother and his teammate, and turned her own stunner onto Jareth. Her warning served Jake and Ruiz well, as they managed to get down before the bullets started flying, but it also identified her to the enemy. Jareth looked up and she thought he grimaced at her, but then she had to roll back onto the bridge to hide from his people's fire. Karim's shooting at me again! She had the time to think, annoyed, before she got back onto her stomach and leaned out carefully.
Ruiz was lying on the ground, but she couldn't tell if he was dead or merely incapacitated; Jake was hiding behind the Jumper, shooting from around its corner, while Jareth and his companions strode towards him. Alice aimed her stunner at the Wraith again and actually managed to pull the trigger before Karim fired at her again. She saw Jareth get hit—he stumbled, but kept going, and she had to lean back to avoid a bullet to the head. When she looked back, he was almost at the Jumper. Jake had managed to stun two hostiles, but he was now in trouble. They were almost upon him—and they had to go through him to get to the Jumper.
Alice fired the handblaster again, stunning the third of the men, leaving only Jareth and Karim. They were about to disappear on the Jumper's farther side—out of Alice's view. Jake could get around on the nearer side and avoid them—but they would manage to get to the Jumper's entrance aft. With only seconds to spare, she only had one shot. She took aim—and, at the last moment, moved her hand half an inch and fired. The blast reached its target, but the Wraith vanished behind the Jumper. With her heart beating very fast, she watched helplessly as the Jumper rear door closed and it rose into the air. At the same time, Sheppard, Ronon, and Teyla burst through the door. They fired at the Jumper, but the stunners had no effect, and all of them could only look on as it flew away.
Alice jumped up to her feet and ran to her own Jumper, which sat cloaked on the platform only a few yards away, she knew. She had her hands on the control panel before she sat down properly, and the little ship was rising as the aft door was still closing. The hangar door was open—Jareth had just flew out through it—and Alice followed him. She didn't have him on the radar, but she assumed he must have gone for the Stargate, so she turned that way and, figuratively speaking, put the pedal to the metal, speeding over the mountains before turning on the comms.
"I'm in pursuit," she breathed; her voice was hoarse. "I'm after Jareth's Jumper, but I don't have him on the radar."
"What do you mean?" Sheppard asked sharply. "Jumpers always see each other."
"I don't know." She was straining her eyes, too; he hadn't cloaked when leaving, so there was a chance she could spot him ahead of her. "Probably he messed with the system?"
She heard the colonel swear, but he didn't respond further. A minute later, she was over the Gate—and Jareth was still nowhere to be seen.
"He's not here," she reported, unable to mask the tone of surprise. "And the Gate is not active, either. I don't…" And then suddenly a thought occurred to her. "Motherfucker!" She exclaimed and redirected her Jumper straight up. "He must have a working Hive above the planet!" There really wasn't another explanation. If he had indented to go through the Gate, he would have had to slow down to retract the pods—and Alice would've caught up to him, or at least seen him go. She hadn't and that meant that he had to have gone somewhere else—but where else was there to go on an empty planet but up?
"I'll try to get him…" But she knew even before she finally broke the atmosphere and saw the Hive that it was hopeless. The ship looked enormous compared to her small Jumper, and it was already flying away. In another minute, a bright blue light tore out a hole in the blackness of space, and the Hive disappeared inside it.
She swore again, feeling the bitter taste of disappointment on her tongue. "He got away," she said in a tired voice, turning back down towards the planet at a more reasonable speed now. "Boarded a Hive and they jumped into the hyperspace. I'm coming back."
It took them four hours and six trips of their two Jumpers to fully "clear" the stationary Hive. At first, when Alice landed after getting back, they loaded Ruiz—who was badly wounded, but alive—and the stunned people in the Dart bay into her aft compartment and she took them immediately back to Atlantis through the Gate. After the medical staff took care of them, she went back to help ferrying the others, while the AR-1 and AR-6 (plus Perrault) combed through Jareth's base of operations to ensure they had everyone. Alice herself went back to the holding cells, unlocked them, and helped carry the prisoners back to the hangar to be transported back to Atlantis, too. The girl who looked like her seemed disbelieving that Alice actually kept her promise.
"What's your name?" She asked her as she helped her up from the cell floor.
"Keana," she replied with difficulty.
"My name's Alice. Can you walk, Keana? If not, that's okay, we'll wait for Jake and Macnamara to get back with the gurney." They had gone ahead with the first prisoner, the beat-up one.
"I can, I think." She stood swaying slightly, but Alice wrapped her hand around her back and helped her along. They walked slowly and stopped often, Alice waiting patiently for the girl to recover each time.
"How long have you been here?" Alice inquired about halfway there.
"I'm not sure," Keana answered. "I lost track of time… days, maybe weeks. I don't know."
Alice wanted to ask what Jareth was doing to her, but held her tongue. She remembered all too well how weak she had been after her time in solitary confinement in the dungeon.
"We'll take you to our place for now," she told the girl. "Our doctors will get you back up on your feet, and when you feel better, you can go home."
"Home," Keana repeated, tasting the word as if it was something unfamiliar. "Home…"
"Yeah. You'll be alright," Alice promised, and they continued their walk in silence after that. In the Jumper, Alice deposited Keana on a seat in the cockpit, to make more room in the rear compartment for the unconscious people. The girl was positively exhausted from all the walking, and she drifted off as soon as she sat down. Alice thought it was probably a good thing.
Once they transported everyone up to Atlantis—Jareth's prisoners and guards alike—they went back to go through his equipment, trying to gather more information on his research, what he planned to do next, his whereabouts, potential alliances—anything that could help them find him again. They did find a lot of information about his experiments again—at least it proved that he had to start from scratch after losing the results of those he had been conducting in the castle—but not much other than that. Eventually, after downloading all the data, they decided to wipe the memory banks and destroy the machines completely wherever it was impossible. The only remaining device that they weren't sure what to do with was the humming, glowing device that Alice had found previously.
"Okay, so we know what it does: emits energy," McKay summed up after a good half an hour of working on it with Alice. "But we still have no idea what's its purpose. It can't possibly be to grow Hive ships, it's not of Wraith design!"
"But that's probably why Jareth had it installed here, though," Alice mused aloud. "Even if originally it was intended for something completely different. Fact is, we'll need days or weeks to study it properly."
"Is it dangerous to humans?" Sheppard asked, echoing Perrault's earlier question.
"Don't be ridiculous, of course not!" McKay waved his hand dismissively.
"Alright, then why don't we take it back with us to Atlantis? You can study it there," Sheppard proposed.
McKay's face changed. "Well, I don't know, I mean…" He stuttered, his voice suddenly unsure. "You can't expect us to be absolutely positive about what it does!"
"You just said you were!"
"I said no such thing!"
Alice rolled her eyes and wondered if she should get into the argument, but decided not to, for the time being. Instead, she continued examining the device while McKay and Sheppard quarreled.
"I think I can turn it off," she said after a moment. The two men fell silent and looked at her; she was down on her knees again, half-hidden behind the machine. "We could transport it to Atlantis then, and only turn it on in a sheltered lab, maybe with a force shield just to be sure. Although I agree, I don't think it's harmful to humans, but we can't be sure what it will do to the Ancient systems."
"Alright, that's what I call productive contribution!" Sheppard exclaimed, looking straight at McKay, who threw his hands up in the air and protested:
"I am productive!"
But the colonel wasn't listening to him anymore. "Turn it off, then, Boyd, and let's get the hell outta here. This place gives me the creeps."
Alice couldn't blame him. The overgrown Hive ship, now completely empty besides the Atlantians, seemed even more eerie than before. Or maybe she just hadn't been paying attention—her mind had been otherwise occupied.
The device turned off, they needed six guys to carry it to the Jumper—Jake, Macnamara, Moors, Ronon, Perrault and Sheppard, and even then they walked slowly and teetered under the burden. Eventually though, they managed to deposit it on the Jumper floor and Sheppard ordered all of them to board their respective spacecrafts and they finally went back home.
Home, Alice thought as she lowered the little ship onto its platform in the Jumper bay. When did it become home? It was so gradual she could not pinpoint a single moment when it went from base she served at to home. But it was true nonetheless; somehow, Atlantis had become her home and everybody in the expedition—family. People she depended on; people she would sacrifice her life for; people she belonged to. The place was only one puzzle—it was the people who really made it a home. She thought back to the beginning of her career in the Stargate Program, back when she was an F-302 driver on the Prometheus. Nearly seven years had passed since then, but she still remembered the feeling of inadequacy that accompanied her all throughout that first part of her service. Always too young and inexperienced to be treated as an equal, she hadn't mingled with the other fighter pilots. The only exceptions had been her two friends—Archer and Spinner. But Spinner was gone, dead at the bottom of the Lantean ocean, and she only saw Archer once per month or so, when the Daedalus happened to be in Atlantis for a day or two before it went back to its duties. Still, she considered him a friend; but the Atlantians were her family. Not just Jake, but Karim, Cooper and Perrault, Keller and Beckett, Banks and Porter, Sheppard, Teyla, and Ronon, and, yes, even McKay and Zelenka. They had all become close to her—some in more intimate ways than others, true, but still… all of them. And the others, too—the science teams, Lorne and his people, the medical staff, the Athosians, even Mr. Woolsey. She belonged to them and they belonged to her, and she couldn't imagine being anywhere else. And the work was fascinating, too—dangerous, true, but never boring. Finally, she understood why Sheppard and everyone else were so keen on getting back to the Pegasus while they had been stuck on Earth after Atlantis had been damaged in the fight with the Super-Hive. This was their place. And now it was hers, too.