It was so cold down here. Daniel was shivering. He desperately wanted to get to the ground floor again, to the hot and humid air of the rainforest, but they still had the stairs to climb, and he had to admit he didn't think he could make it.
Both his sides were aching now, from all the coughing and who knew what else. He had started coughing up stuff when they had been on the run. He didn't know if it was just phlegm, or something worse. Like blood. He wasn't sure if he really wanted to know, either. Jack had probably not noticed it at all in the darkness.
Daniel slumped to the floor as soon as they were inside the illuminated room, feeling too spent to even think anymore, just fighting all he could to get air in. Panic quickly grabbed hold of him when he realized it was no good.
He couldn't breathe, no matter how hard he tried. As if there was no air left in the room. He was drowning on dry land.
Jack got to him instantly, propping him up against his chest. Sitting up had helped before, at least a bit. It did help a bit now, too, but it didn't feel like it was enough. His vision was starting to fade.
Jack's voice sounded as if it came from somewhere far away. He was shouting, telling Daniel to "Keep breathing, dammit, fight, come on!"
He wanted to, of course he did, he had absolutely no intention of dying here, not when they were so close to the way out. But he just couldn't.
He plunged into the darkness. Back to the cold, gloomy tunnels.
Teal'c was beginning to grow truly impatient. He and Captain Carter had soon searched through what he took to be nearly half of the second floor, the entire area over the halls they had seen on the ground floor, and the area that might possibly have been over the part where Colonel O'Neill and Daniel Jackson had been. They had seen no signs of any sort of access to the lower level.
They had received the communication from the SGC as expected. Of course, they had not had much news to give. Captain Carter had suggested, though, that if the SGC could afford it, backup might be a good idea. Perhaps even a medical team, as a precaution. It seemed clear now that these ruins were indeed the great rectangular structure they had seen in the UAV feed, so they were quite far removed from the gate. It would take time for any help to reach them, and they knew O'Neill and Jackson were injured.
Teal'c found it odd that the distance between the ruins and the gate should be so great, and that there had been no signs of any structures, not even a road or a path, in the rainforest between them. Then again, these ruins were obviously very old. Perhaps they had been abandoned thousands of years ago. The story of the dinosaurian Goa'uld's had to date at least five thousand years back, since it took place before the time of human hosts.
They had been walking around for some time after the call from the SGC, when a voice came through their radios again.
"Carter, Teal'c, come in, please!" Colonel O'Neill called, sounding distressed.
"Sir! Are you all right? What happened?" Carter replied instantly.
"Long story, and no, we're not. Daniel's out, and looking pretty bad. And I can't walk. We seriously need a hand here. What's up with you guys?"
"We communicated with the Stargate Command a quarter of an hour ago, requesting assistance," Teal'c informed him. "Currently we are exploring the second floor and attempting to find a way to access your side of the complex."
"That's good. Keep trying. See, we got stuck in the basement, but found our way out. We're at this staircase leading up now... We walked in a straight line, directly away from where we first were. So we might be near to the far end of the ruins looking from there. If that helps you at all."
"This information is very useful to us. We shall do our best to find you, Colonel O'Neill."
"I know you will, Teal'c. Just hurry, will ya."
Daniel woke up to the excruciating pain tearing through his right side, and the sound of Jack swearing right next to his ear.
It took him a while to realize that he was breathing. He wasn't dead.
He opened his eyes and did his best to figure out what was going on. He was in a really awkward, odd position, hanging on Jack's back, his hands pulled over Jack's shoulders. And having his right hand stretched out like that was what made his bruised side feel like it was being torn apart.
Jack was crawling up the stairs, cursing and grunting, actually carrying Daniel on his back. Daniel could only imagine the effort it took--Jack's breathing didn't sound that light, now, either.
Daniel wanted to shift, to do something to help Jack and ease the sting in his side, but it wasn't easy. He ended up grasping his left hand tightly around Jack's neck as he tried to let go with his right.
"Jeez, Daniel, trying to strangle me?" Jack grunted, and stopped. Daniel let go of him and sagged to sit on the stairs. He had the weirdest feeling that they were swaying under him, like the deck of a ship.
"How's it going?" Jack asked him cautiously.
"Not dead?" Daniel answered, feeling a bit uncertain about that.
He'd been suffocating, hadn't he? Now he felt like he was breathing through a thick cloth or something, and pain blazed through his chest with each breath, but that was better than no air at all. A lot better. He was still cold, though. It should've been warmer already, if they were any closer to the surface.
"Definitely not dead. No way I'd let you. No, you just passed out and scared the hell out of me. Don't do that to me again. Ever."
Passed out? Well, he'd clearly done that, since there was a blank, dark space in his mind between the moment when he'd been about to stop breathing, and the one where he woke up dangling on Jack's back.
The cough was still there, too, Daniel noted absently, when it gripped him again. He didn't even try to fight it. If the dino hadn't left them alone already, it'd probably find them anyway. He spat the stuff that came up on the stair next to him. It looked reddish against the light gray stone.
Jack shifted on the stairs, reaching a hand towards him. He rested his fingers on the side of Daniel's neck, and then, a hand on his cheek. It felt cool against his skin.
"Daniel--didn't I make it clear enough that catching pneumonia was right on top of the list of very big no-no's?"
O'Neill would not have needed to tell them to make haste. They would have done it anyway. Teal'c had a good idea of where they were in the ruins--as far as possible from each other. And even if they reached the corresponding location on this floor, it might not help. They might have no way down, no way to reach the others.
He did not wait for Captain Carter to speak up as he began running towards the direction that he took to be the correct one. She followed silently.
He knew their thoughts were likely to be very similar--worry and wonder over what might have happened to the others.
Now that they were in a hurry and were headed in a certain direction, they were advancing fast. Still, it took them much longer than Teal'c would have wished. As large as the ruins were, half a mile was not a great distance to cross, but they kept running into dead ends, which left them unsure of which doorway to choose.
Finally, they had traversed the entire ruins, reaching a corner room that Teal'c estimated to be directly above O'Neill's and Daniel's current whereabouts. There were no stairs there, and they had not seen any on their way towards this room, either.
"No, this just doesn't make any sense! There's got to be some way we can get to them!" Carter complained.
Teal'c agreed with her frustration, although he was beginning to find it more and more likely that these ruins were simply of a very curious build, and indeed had parts that were completely sealed and inaccessible from each other.
"This hall is not large enough to stretch through the entire width of the building. There must be other rooms at this end, next to it. We should inspect them as well," he suggested, if only to give them some hope and something more to do.
They had some trouble finding a doorway that would lead to a room adjacent to the corner hall. No rooms close by had doorways opening to the correct direction, so they were forced to wander around again. They kept running.
When they finally found a suitable doorway, approached it and gazed in through it, they saw that they'd found what they had been looking for all the time. The room only had a small area of level floor, and then it began to fall steeply in a stairway leading down.
"Thank God," Carter uttered.
Teal'c did not rejoice as much as she did. He still had doubts. They could not be certain that these stairs would help them at all. If the ruins were symmetric, the stairs might only take them back to the ground floor, so that they could come across yet another wall separating them from O'Neill and Daniel.
They leaped through the doorway and started descending the stairs. The moment Teal'c looked ahead, down along the stairway, he saw that his worst doubts had been too pessimistic.
The staircase was long, clearly longer than the one they had climbed earlier, and had a large landing in the middle. That landing, Teal'c reasoned, was at the ground level. The stairs continued downwards from it, towards some lower floor. Halfway between the landing and the dimly lit bottom of the stairs sat two figures clad in green uniforms.
From such a distance, Teal'c could not tell for sure what their situation was, how badly hurt they were, and whether he and Captain Carter had reached them in time.