Chapter 8
The corridors continued on, stretching away into the dark, relieved only by an occasional surviving lamp set into one or other of the walls that shed dim, blue tinged light across the silt covered corridor. The corridors were on a smaller scale than they were familiar with, lacking the bright airiness of their counterparts in the City above. Instead of clean geometric lines, the corridors this deep looked more organic in their architecture. As they walked onwards, they vaguely noted that any control panel or decoration they came across was an intertwined series of baroque curls, all now stained and blackened by the pervasive mud, and all dark and dead.
Hours passed. Their pace slowed as McKay's hobble became more and more pronounced and he found himself increasingly having to use the wall for support. More than once as they came across stairs or hallways, he had to reluctantly lean on Sheppard for assistance but each time struggling to put as little weight as he could on a friend he knew to be more badly hurt than he would admit. But finally they found what they had been searching for: a large circular room with a high domed roof lit by dim blue light. In the centre of it, standing on a platform that raised it out of the worst of the mud was a Chair; larger and more ornately decorated than the others they had seen, but very definitely a Control Chair.
With a glance at his watch, Sheppard cautiously shucked his pack and handed the Naquada generator over to McKay who set it down next to the Chair. He took his own pack off, removed the box of tools he had brought with him and favouring his ankle he settled down next to the Chair and got to work.
"How long?" Sheppard asked, his breath frosting in the chill air.
McKay made to answer, but any word were lost as he broke into coughing, a horrible racking sound, but he managed to master his voice long enough to whisper: "not long," and he started connecting cables from the generator to the platform at the back of Chair.
A few minutes later he levered himself to his feet and stepped back. "Okay, try it now, Major," he suggested, waving him over.
Sheppard carefully eased himself into the Chair, leaned back and concentrated. The only other time he had tried this and McKay asked him to imagine their location in the galaxy, he had barely needed to think about it to cause the map to appear. "Nothing's happening, Rodney," he ground out, an unmistakeable edge of urgency in his voice.
"Not really too surprising. No one's used this thing in thousands of years," McKay rasped, coughing painfully in the foul, leaden air, the exhalation condensing into billowing clouds in damp bone-numbing chill. "And God alone knows how much of that time it's been underwater," he muttered almost as an afterthought.
Sheppard remained where he was, laid back in the reclined throne-like Chair, his hands resting on the wide arms, just as he had done once before – admittedly by accident on that occasion – back in Antarctica. This time however, the Chair was most definitely not co-operating. Even through the BDUs he wore, he could feel the cold of whatever metal the Chair was made from leeching away the scant warmth in his body. A loud clang coming from behind and to one side of the chair's bulk startled him and he twisted around abruptly, only to find McKay had dropped the panel he had pulled away to gain access to the interior in an attempt to discover what was stopping it from working.
The latter fumbled for a few minutes, blowing on cold numbed hands in an effort to get some feeling back into them, then paused and peered about abruptly from where he was crouched, the partially teased out tangle of cables and crystalline blocks running to the chair temporarily forgotten. "What was that?" he whispered urgently, scoping out the room as if he had not seen it properly before. The sudden movement nudged the headache he had been nursing to new levels. "Major? I told you before. There's definitely something down here."
He reached down to the Beretta holstered at his hip, heard the nearby click of a P-90's safety being disengaged, and felt rather than saw Sheppard's gaze tracking his own, checking out the room then staring back down the dank corridor they had emerged from only minutes before. The vestigial blue tinged lighting that had survived the ages in the domed room did little to dispel the pervasive murk. "I don't see anything," Sheppard admitted quietly.
"You sure?" The doubt in his tone was clear. "It's probably hiding… waiting to leap out on us when we least expect it. God! I'm talking like we're in one of those appalling teen slasher movies: dim lighting, a couple of poor brainless idiots wandering around with flashlights, something slimy with huge teeth lurking in the dark…" McKay's brittle laughter did little to reassure his team-mate.
Sheppard levered himself upward, ruthlessly choking back the pained gasp the movement caused and peered again into the darkness. Like spokes of a wheel spreading out from the hub, the empty corridors stretched away. In the dark, beyond the range of their flashlights he could just make out the faint shimmers of phosphorescence that outlined their own footprints along the corridor they had come down tracking through the stinking ankle deep mud. The only sounds were the almost imperceptible drone of the Naquada generator they brought with them on standby and the slow, unending drip… drip… drip… echoing from far off.
They could not even hear the warble of the City's alarm any more. The absence left a strange gap after its being part of the soundscape for so long, but they were too deep now.
Time crawled by as they watched and waited. "There's nothing out there," Sheppard finally decided and carefully settled back into the chair, only too aware of the stabbing ache in his side.
McKay harrumphed, gave one last, dubious, look down the corridor but trusting the Major's conclusion he knelt to return his attention to the task at hand, too preoccupied to notice when Sheppard's gaze was drawn inexorably back to the surrounding corridors or the worried frown that slowly crept over his face.
"Dammit, Major, listen to me! You're not even tr--!" It was all McKay managed to say before his words were taken over by what had over the past few hours become to Sheppard a now increasingly familiar bout of dry, wheezing coughs. Getting half drowned had taken its toll.
From his place in the chair he opened his eyes a slit to sneak a concerned sidelong glance to where his companion was standing, watching him. He had known the physicist was pale – intellectually he knew the effects of exhaustion, cold and blood loss – but had not noticed earlier just how truly ashen he was. The ambient dimly flickering blue-tinged light lent his features a corpse-like pallor. And that blood stained excuse for a bandage wrapped around his head doesn't help, Sheppard grimly admitted, berating himself once again for not doing his job better. I'm supposed to be able to keep the scientific side of the expedition safe. Great job of it I've done so far today…
McKay fought a few moments to catch his breath, all the while holding up a hand in a mute request for patience before finally managing to gasp, "just one minute more… There's something else I can try," and ducked down to continue tweaking the jury rigged connections he had made in the pile of silvery white spaghetti so recently wrenched from the innards of the chair. Heavier wires snaked from deep within the Chair's platform to attach to the Naquada generator. He paused awhile, unable to stop his mind drifting as he noted how the faint white luminescence of the cables looked so oddly pristine amongst the layers of dark, fetid silt that covered almost everything else in the room.
"Any time now, Rodney…" reminded a dry voice.
Sheppard's words nudged him from the fugue he had too easily slid into and wearily he dragged his attention back to the present to remake another connection. A momentary crackle of power echoed by a startled yelp from the physicist was followed by a wisp of smoke and yet more coughing that had Sheppard trying to lever himself out of the chair to check on McKay when a triumphant, if hoarse, voice halted him. "Ha! Got it! Try it now…" he said and flicked the switch on the generator.
Sheppard barely had time to settle himself back in the Chair when a ripple of something… something huge, utterly implacable and impossibly ancient slammed into his mind. He tried to fight, to object, even to hide, but in the merest fraction of a second knew he might as well have tried to turn back the sea. The mote that was John Sheppard was swept away in the tide.
And Rodney McKay could only watch in horrified disbelief as his friend's form arched in the chair, hands clenching and unclenching, mouth open in a silent rictus of agony as skeins of angry blue-white energy danced across his skin.
"Oh no…" he whispered as he lunged for the tangle of cables.
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