"The folly of man you labor beneath; away with you, leave this in peace."
Rodney barely glanced up from his work to favor the imp with a baleful glare. With the liquid slithering motion of a weasel, the imp repositioned itself from the back of the jumper's control chair and scampered onto the jumper's DHD. There it sat, watching intently.
It had changed forms again, and was no longer as large as Sheppard had described, likely because it wouldn't have been able to fit believably into the space it was occupying otherwise. The ears were decidedly pointed and aimed backward. In front of each ear curved a small horn. The face was almost human, but unnaturally pointed in all its aspects, and the glittering black eyes were unchanged aside from their rim of red. Its pelt was so scant as to be hardly noticeable, the ash-black skin had a reddish tinge. The front paws were spindly hands with talon-like claws, the back paws were unmistakably humanoid feet. From its back sprouted a pair of absurdly small, ragged black wings. It no longer resembled a possum or a monkey, but had fully committed itself to the demonically impish look.
So far, it had been popping up suddenly to startle Rodney, cackling abruptly just behind him, and spouting nonsense riddles that were progressively less cryptic and more direct as Rodney and Zelenka continued to work. It had not only told him that he was wrong, it had also told him that he would be killed. It had described, in visceral detail, the nature of the death it would visit upon him.
But, as expected, it had been unable to actually prevent him and Zelenka from implementing their plan.
It was a simple notion, really. Instead of trying to power the jumper, they ran some bypasses and hooked a power supply directly to the DHD of the jumper. The fact was they didn't need the Ancient craft to function at all, only the DHD, which would in turn communicate with the Stargate. The jumper's DHD could activate a Stargate all on its own, without communicating with the city computers at all. The imp would have to come back to this jumper to disable it.
Rodney knew there was a bit of a gamble to this, which was the assumption that the imp could not affect the Stargate itself. But telling a Stargate to do anything other than perform its basic designed function took powerful forces. Like… the power of the sun, for example. The second portion of the gamble was the assumption that the imp couldn't resist the imperative to shut down the DHD.
The actually difficult portion of the operation was figuring out how to design a containment unit that would catch and hold the imp as it transferred from the Atlantis mainframe to the smaller jumper module. The problem being that this wasn't a physical entity they were trying to catch. It was more like trying to capture an email message between the sending box and the receiving box. Or, perhaps more accurately, data being sent from the server to another computer in the network.
"You're sure you understand the plan?" Rodney asked for the half-dozenth time.
Zelenka, frustrated at being asked yet again, "Yes, of course. I am not stupid, Rodney."
"Sometimes I wonder," Rodney grunted, then seemingly changed the subject without actually changing it at all, "You don't have the ATA gene."
"What is your point?" Zelenka wanted to know.
"How would this thing know the difference between the Ancients and the invading army? How would it ensure that it only harassed and trapped the Ancients and nobody else?" Rodney asked.
"I see your point," Zelenka replied.
They had both done more than enough programming to realize that the simplest way to program the imp was to give it the ATA gene as its target, and have it practically ignore everyone else. At the time it was designed, everyone in Atlantis would've been an Ancient. Much easier to give the imp only the target gene, rather than also programming it with recognition of a specifically friendly gene.
"Wrong, wrong!" screeched the little demon, "Always wrong, all day long!"
"Now you're just being juvenile," Rodney snapped, though he knew it was useless to address the imp, and in fact doing so only slowed him down, which was exactly what it wanted.
Rodney knew the program might not actually be that simple, but the fact that Zelenka and his team had been working on the jumpers all along but Zelenka himself was never targeted whereas Rodney had been suggested that the imp could distract and annoy other people (such as Elizabeth in her office), but its primary focus and attempt to kill program was confined to people with the ATA gene. And that meant, if it had another trick up its sleeve Rodney hadn't anticipated, it would probably be coming for him, and Zelenka might have to finish the project alone.
That was why it was so important that Zelenka understood the plan.
"We are nearly there," Zelenka said a few minutes later.
Rodney looked up to acknowledge him, noticing as he did so the narrowed eyes of the imp perched on the DHD just a few inches away from where Zelenka was working. Its tail lashed angrily, and Rodney had the sudden vivid image of it springing suddenly upon them and ripping them to shreds with those hideous teeth and claws. He shook his head, fending off his treacherous imagination.
"Right," he answered Zelenka, and then went and stuck his head out the back of the jumper, addressing Ronon and Teyla "One of you go tell Elizabeth we're about there so she can give us a go on launching this thing."
Teyla, more willing to overlook Rodney's brusque and bossy manner in order to get the job done than Ronon was, started for the stairs.
And that was when the lights went out, plunging them into absolute blackness. A hideous and disembodied, downright ghoulish cackling filled the air, along with a feather light brush of what felt like a hot wind, and Rodney wondered if he had perhaps underestimated this thing after all.
Where is your God now, Evan?
Lorne opened his eyes slowly, and found himself gazing dizzily up at a small, too distant circle of light. He'd fallen a long way into darkness, and blacked out at least briefly when he hit the rough stone. Everything hurt. He felt bruised inside and out, breath came and went painfully as his lungs and ribs protested any disturbance, and spread their discontent to the rest of his body.
He continued to gaze upward without moving for some time, absorbing only two relevant facts from looking up at that circle of light: he'd fallen much too far for his team to be able to reach him with the equipment they had, and he had no immediately visible means of trying to climb out.
Somehow, he couldn't help but feel like this was a direct consequence of having lost his temper with Souci, even though he didn't strictly believe that cause and effect worked like that.
"Major!" Coughlin's voice was urgent in his ear, "Major Lorne!"
Lorne keyed his earwig, "I'm here, Lieutenant."
"Are you okay, sir?" Coughlin asked, calming quickly now he'd achieved a response.
"Well I would've preferred taking the elevator," Lorne said with forced cheerfulness, "But I'm fine."
He sat up stiffly, and the jolts of pain going up and down his spine gave lie to his statement. But he was pretty sure nothing was broken. He looked up again, and realized he had a lot to be grateful for. It was a long way to fall onto hard rock and not break anything. Where had he landed anyway?
"What happened?" Helton's voice pitched in on the radio.
"I'm no expert, but from the looks of things, I'd say I fell in a hole," Lorne answered, though it took everything in him not to laugh at the patently stupid question.
Lorne turned on his flashlight, and blinked as his eyes reluctantly started to adjust. He'd thought he'd had a headache before, but he had just gained a new appreciation for what that word really meant. The light from the flash sent sparks through his vision and he winced.
"Dr. Armstrong says the whole area is probably unstable, just like the cliffs," Coughlin reported.
It wandered across Lorne's mind that the team above ground would have moved away from the hole quickly, just in case the nearby ground wanted to cave in too. Which explained why they had been yelling at him via the earwig instead of shouting into the hole.
"Well it's nice to get an expert opinion," Lorne said, knowing that Coughlin was actually just trying to keep him talking, as the coherency and ease of Lorne's speech was the only diagnostic tool available to those above insofar as judging his health was concerned.
The floor was a lot smoother than Lorne considered likely to have occurred naturally. The walls too, well they didn't look all that much like limestone at all. They looked an awful lot like the plinth. In fact, when Lorne got unsteadily to his feet and went for a closer look, he could see traces of the same blue paint. Lorne turned his light up, and realized that it mostly hadn't been limestone that broke out from under him either: it was the ceiling of an artificially built chamber.
"Coughlin," Lorne said, pausing for a beat to try and find his words, "I… I think I... fell into some kind of... basement?"
"I didn't quite catch that, Major. Did you say 'basement'?"
"Affirmative, Lieutenant," Lorne said, "This isn't a cave or tunnel. It looks like… maybe some kind of storage room. There's nothing in here, that is aside from me and the piles of dust," the latter of which were probably there because the structure surrounding him was in an advanced state of decay, but he didn't want to consider that, or the fact that the whole thing might fall down around his head any second. And he certainly didn't want to say as much aloud.
"Exits?" Coughlin asked hopefully, and Lorne couldn't help but think the man really didn't appreciate being left alone up top with the inexperienced Wilson and civilians that Lorne had just finished riling up before he landed down here.
"None so far, but it's a big space. I can't see all of it from here. I'll let you know what I find."
Lorne was most interested in finding a way out, though he too clearly remembered those stairs to nowhere they'd found in the plinth cave. There had undoubtedly been a way out of here once, but whether that still existed or not was another matter entirely.
However, Lorne also had a secondary thought in mind. The ruins above had offered no promise of anything useful. But sometimes when you had something important, say a device for protecting your planet from alien forces, you put it somewhere underground. Deep underground, perhaps even the middle of a mountain, like the Stargate back on Earth.
"Better to be optimistic than despairing," Lorne's sister would always say, particularly when she and her husband were having a tough time of things and the outcome looked especially bleak.
Not infrequently during his deployment to P3X-403, Lorne had wondered what she would have had to say if she'd known how his attempts to be optimistic had led to disappointment after crushing disappointment while he was stationed off-world.
He knew better now, at least on his good days, which were characterized not so much by what happened to him, as how he managed to cope or deal with the situations that arose. Even if hope led to disappointment, it was still better to have had hope and lost it than not to have had it at all. In some ways, the entire war with the Goa'uld in the Milky Way had been based on that, because the sheer power of the Goa'uld indicated that the Tau'ri had no chance of winning. Hope, and the belief that they were doing the right thing, had kept them all going. In the end, the alliance on P3X-403 might have been one of the key moments in turning the tide against the Goa'uld once and for all. But it sure hadn't seemed like it was going to turn out that way for awhile.
Lorne walked the edges of the room, finding that it was an irregular shape, perhaps built to conform to the natural form of a cave that had already been present. Or maybe whoever had built it had no respect for the usual rules of structuring a building. Lorne found several corners and a couple of support columns, a few doors (some of which crumbled to dust when he touched them) into small rooms that didn't go anywhere, or that led to hallways that had caved in. Each time he found one of the latter, he had to take a breath, tell himself that probably hadn't been the way out anyway, and keep going.
Back at the jumper, there were ropes and other emergency rescue equipment, but with an unstable area, the team could wind up in more trouble than it was already in just trying to get Lorne out. Besides, if there was anything important down here, Lorne didn't want to leave before he found it.
And, finally, he found was he was looking for. Kind of. What he'd actually found was a tight spiral stone staircase leading down. Not exactly the direction he wanted to head in, but at least it was somewhere to go. In fact, it was the only available direction. Lorne radioed what he'd found to the others, and told them he was going to investigate further.
"Be careful, Major," Coughlin admonished.
"Just go get the climbing gear and get me outta here, okay?" Lorne replied, having accepted that there was only one possible way out of this particular spot.
The answer was prompt, but reluctant,"Yes sir."
Lorne wasn't the least bit keen to go down those time-decayed and crumbling steps and into the deeper, blacker darkness that awaited him below, darkness which even his flashlight couldn't fully penetrate, and which seemed to be reaching out for him.
But he didn't really have a choice. He'd come all this way, and there was nowhere else to go. His team was stranded on this planet, another team might already be in trouble too. This could be their only way home. If death lay in wait for him, so be it. To save his team, he would go.
This was, after all, what he'd volunteered for, wasn't it? To protect his world. To fight because he could, which made it his duty to do so for those who could not. That's why he'd joined the Air Force, the Stargate Program, and finally the Atlantis Expedition.
But it was so much easier to have conviction when it was unchallenged. He stayed where he was for a few minutes, pretending he was waiting to see if Coughlin would attempt to contact him again for some reason, but actually gathering his courage.
And then, cautiously, Lorne made his descent.