THE ELEDGIAS
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: NAVIGATING THROUGH THE WALL OF THORNS
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Rodney reached the entrance to the underground eledgias with all the grace of an ancient steam train rolling into a stop—wheezing, gasping and making so much noise he'd frightened away all the birds. He was barely able to keep his doddery balance as he stared down the dark, slimy stairs leading into the blackness below, the sprint from the jumper having taken just that much out of him. Leaning forward, he pressed his hands to his knees and gasped for air, trying to get his breath back. After a moment, he was looking up, still red faced and panting, but trying to see if he could see anything in the darkness yawning below.
His head had given up on classical music. It was the running's fault. Some horrible heavy metal band was in there now, bashing away at his skull, and they were about as musical as the hideous old Buick rust-bucket his sister had had when they were in high school.
With a groan, he straightened and flipped on his flashlight, stuttering a little on his feet as a touch of light-headedness hit him. Pointing it down, he saw no immediate obstructions, which gave him hope that he had been right. That this was the way the android had gotten out. If it had crawled out of the ground somehow, he would have been really screwed.
Raising up his scanner, he swallowed a few big gulps of saliva, trying to wet his now dry throat, and looked for anything emitting a power signature—namely any functioning motion detectors. Truthfully, it was what he should have been doing when he'd explored the other entrance with Teyla, but he didn't know how dangerous the temple was before.
He caught something small and minute emanating out of a wall about four steps down. There it is...
He keyed a few commands into his scanner, found the right frequency, and…smiled when the motion detector shut off.
Smiling smugly, he started down the steps, taking care of any other booby traps on the way in the same manner.
Fairly soon, he was walking slowly and cautiously down a slimy, flagstone lined corridor. No lights turned on to greet him, nothing even reacted to his presence, which, seeing as he'd disabled all those sensors, was his intention. Still, it also made the place phenomenally creepy—not to mention, pitch black. It was like walking into a haunted house, except this wasn't for fun.
He stopped walking when it was obvious that the corridor had come to an end and opened up into a big room—it was a deeper shade of black. Swallowing thickly, he finally keyed some commands into his scanner that would turn the lights on…if they were still working.
The whole place burst into light, so bright after the near pitch blackness of before, that, for a moment, he was blinded. Swearing softly, he peered out from between his fingers (he'd covered his eyes with his free hand) then slowly lowered it away from his face.
His mouth fell open in amazement.
He was in an oval room, and standing along the walls in recesses were five androids.
Mouth still gaping, he walked slowly forward, trying not to be creeped out by the faceless, almost formless machines. He swallowed back the irrational fear that they would suddenly turn on and attack him, like something out of a horribly predictable but still incredibly terrifying B horror movie.
He stopped moving again when he saw that one of the recesses was empty.
His mouth closed, the jaw tensing in anger. Shaking off any residual curiosity or smugness at being proved right, and smothering the sense of foreboding, he focused his mind on the matter at hand. He was here to find Teyla.
When he hit the center of the room, he lifted his datapad. Calling up the blueprints, he studied them for a moment to get his bearings, then turned to compare them to the room he was in. There were three sets of doorways leading off of this oval room. Making a guess as to where Teyla might be if she were in one of the rooms on his blueprint, he headed for the one on his right.
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Beckett had been unable to land the jumper in the same place as Rodney, as the clearing was too small, so they were forced to a point about a couple of miles further out, because the ground was just too thickly forested. Once down, the android got him out of the jumper and jogging towards the entrance—it being, obviously, the only unblocked entrance to the facility, now that the earthquake had destroyed the main.
Around them, the sky began to darken, and the forest was taking on a shadowy, more eerie feel. As he jogged, knowing that the android was still behind him, her gun at his back, Beckett couldn't repress a dark shudder.
He felt like he was running towards his death.
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Two puddle jumpers skidded across the now dark blue, almost black ocean, headed unerringly along the same trajectories as the first two jumpers. The men and women inside them were surprisingly quiet, tension visible in their frames.
Sheppard scratched at his left hand under his cast, staring out the front window of Jumper Two from the co-pilot's seat, looking like he was a million miles away.
Lorne sat to his left, guiding the jumper in a straight line, never blinking.
Ronon watched the back of the jumper, where Corporal Johnson was checking the gun magazines with Sergeant Sanchez, the older man nodding at whatever Johnson was whispering. In the back, hands clasped behind her, Corporal Recillos stood straight-backed and fierce, looking like a taut, coiled spring about to jump, her long black hair tied tightly back behind her head. She stared ahead, out the front of the jumper. Ronon looked away—Recillos reminded him too much of Teyla.
No one dared speak normally—the atmosphere was too charged.
The only break came from when Sheppard radioed Halling, and asked him to meet them in the locations where they believed the first two jumpers to be. Halling had sounded surprised by the request, but when he questioned, Sheppard cut him off. He didn't want to alert the thing controlling Teyla that they were on to her if she still had her radio.
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Lights continued to turn on as Rodney explored the quiet underground chambers, moving from room to room without meeting any further obstructions. The rooms were in the same style as all Ancient structures, and the way this place seemed to be waking from a deep sleep reminded him of when they had first stepped through the Gate into Atlantis. Still, he was moving cautiously. The City had welcomed them. He already knew that this eledgias was not as open minded.
What was truly amazing was that, despite all the devastation above and the cave-ins blocking most of the entrances, this interior was practically untouched. A very well preserved tomb, built to withstand both time and war. Occasionally, a soft breeze would waft through the halls to caress his flushed face and tickle his hair, like a ghostly touch of a woman's hand.
As he walked, he briefly examined some of the consoles he passed, but only to check on power distribution levels in the facility. They seemed steady but on a sort of low standby. He wondered if they had even been on at all before he and Teyla had triggered a response by their presence yesterday morning. Probably not. He also surmised that the earthquake had been triggered by the sudden surge in power when the systems here powered up. For all its appearance of being intact, the Wraith had hit the exposed parts of this place hard—it had to have done some damage.
Which meant a potentially dangerous AI instead of a protective one.
His breathing had evened out now, and it was the only noise in this place besides the soft step of his feet along the granite-like floors. The part of him that was naturally attuned to machinery also heard the low hum of power. It was not so much a noise, though, as a sensation.
He also felt like he was being watched.
By more than one person.
He checked his blueprints again, then looked up as he walked through a larger doorway and into a room about the size of a large conference room. It was one of a series of identical rooms, this being the first in a line that he planned to explore looking for...
His feet stopped almost of their own accord, his jaw dropping in wonder.
Lying in the center of the room atop a stone dais on a soft looking, satin-sheeted bed was Teyla. She was bathed in a white light, looking incredibly at rest as she slept away her existence.
"Sleeping Beauty," the scientist muttered, unable to help himself. The only thing that marred the picture was the bulky vest and the P90 resting across her stomach.
A wry smile quirked on McKay's expressive face. No, he thought to himself, it didn't mar the picture, it just made it more true. It meant he had really found Teyla.
Shaking himself out of the stupor he was in, he moved to the nearest console and started to set up his equipment. This was clearly a major room in the complex—he counted no less than three consoles and two control panels on the wall. He should be able to connect to and do all of his work from here, which was good, because he didn't want to leave her again.
He had just finished setting up when a sound to his right had him whipping around, to look at the door he'd just come through, every nerve on edge.
The unmanly shriek echoed through the empty halls of the underground tomb...then faded.
And was replaced by a soft, slightly hysterical laughter.
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It was perhaps fifteen minutes later that Beckett was staring down at the dark stairs in dismay. They looked like a plaintiff lawyer's wet dream, slick enough to get a large settlement from and retire to Hawaii.
The android pushed him forward, and he sighed. Unlike Rodney, he actually enjoyed jogging and did it most mornings around the halls of Atlantis, but he was still panting slightly as he took his first cautious step down into the gray depths. The lights were on somewhere inside, shedding a half-light out into the night that only seemed to accentuate the slipperiness of the steps. Above them, the sky was a dark indigo, early evening stars emerging to twinkle in the distance.
The smells emerging from the underground corridor before him were horrible—mold, decay, age, and rot. It smelled like a tomb.
"One more question," he said, twisting in place to look up at the android following him down, its gun still pointed at his back.
"What?" it asked.
"What is this place?"
"It's an eledgias."
"An eledgias? You mean...that isn't it's name?"
The android seemed confused by that, then, suddenly, the eyes cleared. Beckett swallowed thickly, suddenly realizing that it must be mining information directly from Teyla's brain, wherever she was. That was probably also where it was getting a lot of its "human expressions" from. The idea made him feel sick to his stomach.
"Ah, I see," the android nodded. "You do not have that word in your vocabulary. An eledgias is an underground cemetery, or a catacomb or crypt. It is a series of burial chambers, like an extended mausoleum, or a grand tomb or sepulcher." It tilted its head, smiling a little. "It is interesting—you appear to have a lot of names for places where you place your dead."
Beckett's eyebrows lifted, and he stared down into the dark corridor yawning before him.
"A tomb?" he repeated, swallowing even more thickly as a new and highly irrational fear suddenly flared across his chest, nearly choking him. "That explains," he swallowed again, this time to get the squeak out of his voice, "...not much really, but it does succeed in terrifying me even more. Thanks for that." He gave a tiny, humorless smile, and stared once more into the gray, depthless corridor. His body shivered involuntarily. "Aw crap," he moaned.
The android gave a very Teyla like smile, and pressed the gun into his back to remind him of what was the real terror. Before him was a sepulcher, Beckett thought, closing his eyes for a second, and a whited sepulcher was forcing him down into it. It was almost fitting.
"Keep moving, Doctor Beckett," the android hissed in his ear.
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The two jumpers scanned the now nearly black forest for a landing site large enough to fit a jumper. McKay and Beckett had taken up the two closest.
Sheppard nodded agreement to Lorne when the major pointed to a possible one five miles out, rubbing at the arm inside the sling and watching with a dark expression as the life signs detector on the Jumper's screen showed three life signs on the ground, in three different locations. Only one was moving.
No one said a word about what that might mean.
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TBC...sorry, just one for tonight (but it was a long one!). Tomorrow's will make up for it, trust me...