Lorne supposed he shouldn't have been surprised by what he saw, but he was.
It was a room much like the cave ruins, minus the crimson flowered creepers. Here, the paint had faded but not been washed away, and it was now obvious that the blue spiral on the plinth didn't just appear to glow. It genuinely did glow. It was from this plinth that the thrum issued forth.
The sound was like thunder in his head, so loud and all-pervasive that he was half-convinced this was the only true sound that had ever existed. A sound that spoke of a long-dead species, one that did not want his kind around, had created this place specifically to ensure his race and theirs spent as little time in contact as possible. Lorne understood now, standing and staring into the room, that his instinctive aversion to the place was intentional on the part of those who had built it.
It was nothing overt. There were no pictures drawn on the walls, no blood stains on the columns, no indication of any awareness from the plinth, not even proof it was any kind of mechanical device at all. It was lifeless as stone, because it was stone… and yet, jarring, arrythmic thunder came from it that shuddered through him. Even from across the room, he felt it pushing against him, physically repelling him with nothing but sound and light, telling him that he was not welcome. It did not want him here. To it, he was the enemy, or a descendant thereof. Even as Atlantis had recognized her own and welcomed them, this room saw what he was in his genes, and rejected him with everything that it was.
He felt the threat of it, the same way he could normally feel the energy flowing through the conduits of a puddle jumper. With the mental element to Ancient technology, you could just feel how to activate it, and sense it responding to you. The sense wasn't strong enough to automatically know all the functions and limits of every device the Ancients had left in Atlantis, but it was there nonetheless.
This was just like that, but in the opposite direction. It resented his presence, his very existence. If a more or less inanimate object could hate, this plinth hated him. And he sensed it would do something about it, in the same way that Atlantis had come to life and turned on the lights the moment the members of the Expedition in possession of the ATA gene started walking around. Even now, he could sense an energy building, the rumble of thunder deepening. It was gathering itself to respond to his presence, had been since this morning at least.
It wanted him dead, and Lorne had the uneasy sense that it had the power to accomplish just that. What worried him, though, was that it didn't feel inclined to stop with him. Once it was done with him, it would move on to taking care of the rest of his people. And that meant he had to stop it before it finished what it was doing, before it could kill the team whose lives he was responsible for protecting. As he was sure it hated him, so he was equally certain it possessed the capability of killing him. If that was going to happen, he had every intention of taking this thing with him. He wasn't sure if he could actually do that, but he was certainly going to take a fair shot at it.
Sudden brilliant light poured in through the view port, half-blinding Rodney's darkness adjusted eyes. Zelenka cried in some surprise and possibly even pain. Not only was Zelenka's eyesight poor, his eyes adjusted badly to sudden changes in lighting, something Rodney had discovered the hard way.
"Focus," Rodney reminded both himself and Zelenka, not looking up from his work, "It just wants to distract us, because it knows we're winning."
Zelenka responded with a string of Czech Rodney didn't understand or care about, likely well aware that Rodney wouldn't hear a word he said regardless of the language. The light outside began to flash off and on like a strobe, but more erratic, and Zelenka swore at it extensively. Wind, undoubtedly scorching hot, buffeted the side of the jumper, and Rodney absently hoped Ronon and Teyla had gotten out of the bay before things heated up too badly outside.
And then shrieking laughter was in his ear again. It took Rodney a moment to figure out where it was coming from, because he wore the earwig all day, every day. Putting it on was just part of getting up in the morning and he seldom even gave it a conscious thought anymore. As the volume and pitch went up, he shook his head irritably, then realized where the noise was coming from and knocked the earwig off impatiently with one hand, not even looking to see where it went.
Moments later, he heard a ping near the floor that indicated Zelenka had likewise discarded his earwig, and with about as much care as Rodney had. Faintly, the shrieking continued, sounded like the cries of the damned in some horror movie. But the earwig had a limit on the volume it could achieve, and the spectrum of sound frequency it could handle, and the louder and higher the laughter went, the more it sounded like a badly recorded playback of a mediocre sound effect. Eventually, the laughter cut out entirely and turned into crackling static.
Clearly, the imp was hurling everything it had at the two men in the jumper. It could have done much more harm had it been in control of the jumper, but reactivating the jumper, even under these circumstances, went against everything in its program. The imp simply could not do that. That limitation, Rodney suspected, was the only reason they were still alive.
Rodney didn't want to admit it, but the imp was getting to him. He hated small spaces, and he hated unpredictability. He hated being inside things that shook. Hated the sound of high winds and the flash of strobe lights. The hissing of static from the earwigs was too reminiscent of scary movies he should have known better than to watch in his younger years. He wanted out. Every instinct screamed at him to get out, to flee, or to just shut down entirely until the situation became more tolerable.
He hadn't realized how much he'd come to rely on having Sheppard to push back against, to argue with, to help him keep fear at bay with frustration and annoyance. What he wouldn't give to have Sheppard nagging him right now, a solid reassuring presence, a steady protector against the unknown, and against his own internal demons threatening to tear him asunder. He was actually almost to the point of being willing to admit out loud that he couldn't cope with this.
Then Zelenka started muttering under his breath, which served as a slight distraction. Rodney was willing to latch onto anything to help him ride out the gathering terror. After a moment, he realized there was a tune to the mutterings which, while poorly carried, was faintly recognizable. Zelenka was talking his way through a song, probably to keep his attention off all the rest of it. It sounded vaguely familiar, but Rodney couldn't pin it down.
"What is that?" Rodney asked, using the distraction itself to push back against his own panic.
"Christmas song," Zelenka replied, "Helps me focus."
"Christmas song?" it didn't sound that familiar, "What Christmas song?"
Rodney had endured any number of Christmas songs over the years, particularly from Jeannie, who had often spent Christmas finding more and more obscure Christmas songs to torment him with over the holiday season, playing them loud and frequently. But this wasn't one of those. Either that or Zelenka's tune carrying was worse than Rodney had guessed.
Zelenka replied in Czech, then paused, "I believe the English title is Wish Upon a Star."
"What?" now Rodney was distracted not only from the imp's antics but his own work, "That's not a Christmas song!" in fact, Rodney remembered only too clearly that it was from a Disney movie where the main characters got eaten by a whale; a film which had only served to worsen his whale-related nightmares.
"It is!" Zelenka retorted irritably, "My sister's favorite, if you must know."
"But it doesn't have anything to do with Christmas," Rodney objected.
"Neither does Jingle Bells," Zelenka pointed out coldly, "That does not seem to stop anyone in America from singing it at Christmas."
Rodney had to concede that point. He remembered Jeannie going on about Jingle Bells and My Favorite Things not being Christmas songs and how What Child is This? had been set to the tune of a song called Greensleeves. Rodney had heard about that last one several times from his piano teacher as well before she advised him to give up his dream of becoming a concert pianist as he played with no real feeling or sense of the art. Knowing this, What Child is This? had become one of Jeannie's favorites to play, along with Greensleeves. It had seemed to Rodney that she did it just to annoy him and remind him of his failings, but she claimed that she just really liked it and he was being a paranoid, self-centered brat thinking everything she did was about him somehow.
Zelenka resumed his non-singing, and Rodney went back to work. Though only a few minutes had passed since the imp had begun attacking the jumper, it felt like an eternity, and Zelenka's under-the-breath, barely audible talk-singing wasn't making the time pass any quicker. But it did give Rodney something to be irritated about, which was a better focus point than thinking about how scared he was.
The confined space with its lack of ventilation and surrounding heat was getting more and more difficult to tolerate, and Rodney had a sudden, vivid image of asphyxiating and then being slow-roasted in this space craft. With Zelenka of all people. The thought terrified him, but it also served to make him angry. That was not how he wanted to die, and he certainly had no intention of letting the equivalent of a computer virus be the thing that finally did him in. There were so many other ways to die, and he'd become closely acquainted with several of them over the last year and a half.
Besides, if he was going out, it was not going to be while listening to someone mumble the lyrics to a song written for a cartoon insect in a top hat. Nobody should have to die that way.
"Ready?" Rodney asked finally, and at Zelenka's grunt of assent, he said, "Go now."
Less than two seconds later, Rodney had linked his rigged tablet into the network, and Zelenka had injected power into the DHD portion of the jumper controls, saying as he did so, "Hotovo."
Rodney took that to mean something hopeful or good, but he didn't really know. Learning to read Ancient texts was enough of a chore for him, and he figured Zelenka was most tolerable to him because he couldn't understand the man's nastier insults, which were invariably delivered in his native tongue.
The wind died down almost immediately, and the strobing lights stopped. The tablet screen turned off. The bay went dark. The interior of the jumper plunged into absolute blackness.
As Lorne stepped into the room, a creature suddenly came charging around from behind the plinth, snarling at him in evident rage. Grotesque in appearance, low and long-bodied, black as ink, it advanced with an oddly shuffling four-legged gait that suggested it would've been more comfortable upright. Hell seemed to glow from its coal dark eyes, death glistened on the tips of its slashing fangs.
Reflexively, Lorne raised raised his P90, "That's far enough!"
He didn't expect the creature to understand his words, but maybe his tone.
To his surprise, it stopped, cocking its ugly and misshapen head to regard him with hostile curiosity. Now he had a problem. Was this a sentient creature? Perhaps the creator of this device? A descendant of whatever had lived here before, and hated the Ancients so profoundly? Or was it some sort of wild animal nesting here? It certainly didn't look particularly impressive, almost comical in its irate ugliness. But the hatred that burned in its eyes… they reflected the sense the room itself had given Lorne the moment he stepped into it. The creature did not want him here. In fact, it wanted him dead.
With a sudden shriek, it leaped for him. Lorne fired a shot straight to its head, but it didn't seem to care about that a great deal, and instead continued its bounding run. Lorne backed up quickly, not wanting in the least to find out what the creature might do if it caught him with its talon-like claws. He backed right out of the room and banged gracelessly against the wall of the outer passage.
At the doorway, the creature stopped, lashing a hook-ended tail and snapping its mouthful of irregular, jagged teeth. Shrieking, it reached out with its front limbs, clawing at the air, acting like a chained dog, unable to come forward another step. Its fury was boundless, but ultimately impotent.
"Not allowed to leave the room, huh?" Lorne said, "Well that makes my life much easier."
He knelt down and unclipped his pack, keeping an eye on the creature, which continued to rage at the threshold but advanced no further. Pulling his pack around in front of him, he opened the side compartment where he always kept a supply of a surprisingly often needed piece of equipment: C4. He was glad he'd carried it this time, having suspected all along that dealing with the device would come down to this, since they didn't have a techie with them.
"Just so you know," Lorne said, "This wasn't my first choice. In fact, this is probably going to end very badly for me. But… I have a feeling that putting this off for a day and a half isn't going to fly. For one thing, you may decide to go on an adventure beyond the confines of your little house there. For another… I don't think your big glowing rock likes me."
He didn't know what the goblin creature or the plinth could do to him, but he also didn't want to find out. After all, he had already seen (and felt) what it could do to a puddle jumper.
Though Lorne had shied away from too many assumptions earlier, this one he felt deeply. It was something he knew beyond hesitation or doubt, almost within his soul. That thing, whatever it was, had to be destroyed, before it took action to destroy him… or his team.
Maybe C4 wouldn't do it, just like a bullet seemed not to have affected its guardian, but it was the most powerful weapon at his disposal, and the only one he could stick a timer to that would give him time to get back up the stairs, and hopefully beyond the reach of the blast.
Lorne hadn't forgotten the unstable feeling of the room above, but he had chosen to go with completely unwarranted optimism rather than despair, and to recognize that this had to be done, not just for his sake, but for the team up top and anyone who might attempt to come to their rescue.
Major Lorne had every intention and hope of survival, despite the less than ideal circumstances, and the fantastic danger of setting off explosives in unstable tunnels. But if he didn't survive, at least he could die giving his team a chance at life. That reward was well worth the risk. In the back of his mind, he remembered a quote:
"He will deliver us out of thine hand, O king. But if not..."