HUGE thank you to Tazmy for kindly beta-ing this chapter and for helping to fix some problems with the previous chapter (which has been re-uploaded). Any remaining problems are mine and mine alone! Please go and read Tazmy's stories; they're very good! I recommend Pi Day especially.

And wow ... I'm very flattered that so many people have this story on their alerts! Thank you all for the reviews. I do try to reply as much as possible but I don't always get every reviewer every time, and I think I missed a slew of people this time around. I do appreciate each and every review.

I had considering switching the order of this and the previous chapter ... that is, having this as Chapter 8 and the other one as Chapter 9. Decided the emotional impact of the last chapter would be more powerful if we did them in this order. Anyway, it's the moment you've all been waiting for ...

Chapter Nine: The Halls of the Ancestors

He hadn't thought to shut his eyes, so the flash of light nearly blinded him. "Idiot Ancients, should've had a warning sign; not that they ever worry about little things like consumer warnings on packaging ... Not to be taken internally, no user serviceable parts inside, may blow up and destroy solar system ..."

Rodney blinked his eyes to clear the spots and continued muttering to himself -- well aware that he should probably shut up, too nervous to do anything about it -- while he looked warily around the room in which he now found himself.

Of course it had been a teleporter. He'd known immediately upon taking one look at the thing. It was an early design style that he'd seen referenced in the Ancient database, and to confirm it, he was well aware that no technology, no matter how advanced, could possibly reduce a human being to such a tiny amount of ash; anyone who knew anything about physics could see that. Since everything on this world was so damn dusty, the "ash" must be dust as well, displaced from the other side of the connection -- therefore, the connection went somewhere, and probably somewhere with a circulating atmosphere or it wouldn't be that dusty. Naturally he would never have stepped into it if he'd thought for a moment that he'd be incinerated. Although looking like a hero in the others' eyes wasn't particularly a bad thing, either, particularly these days. The look on Sheppard's face had been especially gratifying. Kick him off the team, ha! He'd just see about that!

Incinerators. Honestly. He could see a primitive people jumping to that conclusion, but he was quite disappointed in his teammates. Didn't they have the slightest idea how much energy the human body contained? Or, as the case may be, didn't contain. Lord, he'd hated The Matrix for that very reason ... human beings are a dumb-ass power supply. The amount of energy it takes to raise and feed them far exceeds anything you can get from them. No way the Ancients were stupid enough to power their facility on people, even assuming that they'd ever done anything that Machiavellian in the history of their entire civilization. When they got back to Atlantis, he was going to recommend to Weir that his entire team have some mandatory sessions with the Atlantis database. Ancient Tech 101 had just become a priority.

He hadn't had to fake his fear, though. He had, after all, been testing an unknown Ancient device on himself. Even though he was nearly 100 sure that he knew what it did, there were still a vast array of unknowns. What if it was never intended for transporting living beings? What if it took him somewhere with an unbreathable atmosphere, or no power for a return journey?

There was also the most pressing question of why the other "sacrifices" never returned home, which he would really prefer not to learn the hard way.

However, at the moment, he was free -- well, for the most part -- and the locals thought he was dead ... an excellent position from which to begin a rescue. Rodney rubbed his hands together and stepped out of the transporter.

It wasn't dark. He'd been worried about that, transporting himself into some sort of cold, dark, dusty, claustrophobia-inducing pit, but instead, the room was gently lit by a tasteful stripe of lights along the wall. The room itself was clearly of Ancient design, hexagonal-shaped with a bank of equipment along one wall. Colored lights flashed quietly in standby mode. There was no sign of any living being.

Dead ones, on the other hand ...

He was so intrigued by the unfamiliar machines that it took him a good thirty seconds to notice the dead bodies on the floor.

Rodney's first instinct was to stumble backwards, covering his mouth with his sleeve in the wild hope that a few inches of military-issue fabric could protect him from airborne pathogens. Stupid. He lowered his wrist, and scientific curiosity began to take over. The bodies -- two of them -- were clearly long dead, mummified in fact. One of them was sitting against the wall, its legs straight out in front of it. The other, which appeared to have once been female, lay curled up on its side as if sleeping. They wore the same style of clothing as the other inhabitants of the world.

The sacrifices. Well, two of the sacrifices. He had a deeply unpleasant suspicion that they weren't the first bodies he was going to see as he explored this place.

Giving the bodies a wide berth, he wandered around the edges of the room. When he touched the dark consoles, they sprang into life and light under his hands. Another piece of the mystery clicked into place: the reason why the Cletans had jumped to the conclusion that the "incinerator" was powering the facility. The computers must have brought up a brief surge of power every time someone came through the transporter, responding to human presence by preparing the equipment for being used and, incidentally, brightening the lights back in the catacombs. No doubt the effect would have faded as the power-saving measures came back on line. From what Karmath had told them, it happened more quickly each time, probably meaning that the power supply was nearly depleted.

Three doors opened off the room. He spot-checked by glancing through the open doorways. The first and second were more rooms full of equipment -- definitely a priority, but not the number one priority, which was figuring the lay of the land and also determining whether or not this place was likely to kill him anytime soon. To that end, the third door, which opened onto a hallway, seemed to be his best bet.

More bodies in the hallway, lots of them. The place was a damned charnel house. How many people had the Cletans sent through over the years? He shuddered to think of it. And not one of them seemed to have managed to get back to town after they'd been teleported up here ... a fact which he was trying not to think too hard about. Although most of the bodies were long mummified in the cool dry air, a sweetish stench of decay hung over them, and Rodney tried to breathe through his mouth.

The hall was long, dim and featureless. It soared high above him, illuminated by flat panel lights some ten meters off the floor. There seemed to be no doors opening to either side, just a featureless expanse of rock. He wondered what its function had been ... other than presently serving as a place to store bodies.

He found out by accident when he brushed his hand against the wall in the process of detouring around a particularly fresh corpse. The wall flickered and vanished. Rodney gasped, recoiling as suddenly he found himself looking down the side of a mountain. Heights didn't normally bother him, but the quick change in perspective gave him a surge of vertigo. The mountainside dropped away beneath his feet, plunging a kilometer or two into the river valley where they'd come through the Stargate. He couldn't see the Stargate, or the town, but if this view could be believed, he suspected that he was currently located on, or more accurately in, one of the mountains that towered over the valley around the town.

He could see a strong wind kicking up snow and dust outside, but could feel nothing, and the air temperature remained just on the cool side of comfortable. Rodney reached out a finger cautiously and his fingertips touched the chill, smooth surface of the wall. The whole thing was just a large display screen, which meant that he could be seeing the actual view on the other side of the wall, or he could just as easily be deep underground or on another planet entirely.

Looking along the hallway, he discovered that this was definitely how it was intended to be seen. Where before it had appeared as a dim and gloomy corridor, now it was an open, airy gallery on the side of a mountain. Natural light flooded through it, making the corpses look all the more macabre and out of place.

The epiphany hit him then. If the people in the hallway had been able to see out this window, surely they would have clawed their fingers bloody trying to escape. He knew he might, if he was dying of starvation and thirst with an apparent escape mere meters away. Even if they were more stoic than he gave them credit for, then at the very least they wouldn't be sitting propped up against the window as if it was a wall -- and some of them were doing exactly that, which created a very disturbing effect as the cadavers appeared to lean against thin air.

No. The other sacrifices, Rodney realized, had died here because they didn't have the ATA gene. They couldn't use any of the equipment. The facility would probably have powered up its basic functions expectantly at their arrival, and clearly some of the equipment worked without the gene, because the Cletans under the town had been able to use the food dispensers ... but most of the non-basic stuff had probably been beyond their reach.

Karmath had said they hadn't understood the function of the "incinerator" until somebody accidentally turned it on. Somebody with a weak form of the gene, perhaps? It wasn't impossible. Who knew how much of the equipment that unknown person had turned on by accident ... and how much he or she hadn't managed to touch before being -- what? Sent here, surrounded by the equipment to escape and the gene to use it, but without the knowledge of how to do it? Or killed back in the town, some other way? No way to know now. One thing was for sure, though: most of the Cletans didn't have the gene, but Rodney did, and he sure as hell wasn't staying here until he looked like the rest of the mummies.

The wall flickered; for an instant the mountainside vanished, then it returned. This reminded Rodney that his power was most likely extremely limited, and might be all that was providing him with breathable air at the moment. He touched the wall, thought "Deactivate" at it, and was rewarded when it blinked back to smooth rock again.

Feeling a little more cheerful, if still uncomfortably crowded by reminders of his own mortality, he picked his way through the corpses to the other end of the hall. Looking back at them, he felt a severe twinge. Somebody should bury them, or at least arrange them. He saw that some had been laid out nicely and covered, probably by still-living sacrifices with nothing else better to do, but it bothered him to see the rest just sitting or lying there. These had, after all, been someone's family once -- mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers. It wasn't right. Not like he could do anything about it at the moment ... but maybe later, when he got back and explained to the Cletans what the "incinerator" actually did ...

Yeah, at which point they would most likely shoot him. Possibly worship him as a god, a Lazarus come back to life, but more likely, considering his luck, just shoot him. He needed a better plan.

The door at the end of the hallway was closed. He placed his palm against it and it swooshed open. The room on the other side contained no bodies, and as the door closed behind him, it mercifully took the smell of death with it. Well, that confirmed his theory, then. No ATA gene, no way out. Which really sucked for them, but gave him renewed hope of being able to get out of here soon.

He couldn't immediately identify the function of this room. Foyer maybe? It was small and closet-like, and contained only one other door, somewhat different looking from the rest -- very large and sturdy. Rodney placed his palm against it. A small voice in the back of his head was screaming that it would be a very good idea at this point to go back and start looking through their documentation, figure out where he was, at least determine if he was still on P2R-517 or had transported himself to some airless asteroid somewhere -- but right now, he was so desperate to find a way out of this place of death that he was willing to give it a try. Just to prove to himself that he wasn't going to end up like those poor shmoes back there, dying of thirst while the way out remained elusively beyond his reach. Besides, the Ancients had built so many failsafes into most of their equipment that he doubted the door would just blithely open onto molten lava.

Doranda, his brain supplied helpfully. He told it to shut up.

The door slid open and a freezing, dust-laden wind smacked him in the face, tearing back his hair and scouring his face with grit. Rodney shielded his face with his arm and opened tearing eyes to see that he was, indeed, standing on a mountaintop, looking down into the valley. The door had opened onto a balcony that seemed to hang over the abyss, giving a stunning view of the patchy brown hills and the twisting silver ribbon of the river far below. Ten thousand years ago, maybe this had been a nice little vacation spot, with refreshing breezes and eagles drifting on the air. Today, it was like standing in a freezing cold sandblaster.

After eyeballing the floor integrity of the balcony -- rock; it didn't get much sturdier than that -- Rodney dashed out to the edge, just to reach out a hand and make sure that this was real, not an illusion. Waving his hand in the air confirmed it. Already starting to shiver in the subzero temperatures, he ran back to the door and shut it behind him.

Okay. Still on P2R-517. And he would be able to get out this way if he really had to, although he didn't relish hiking down those mountains.

All right. Time to examine his options. First, he took a quick inventory of his supplies. He'd noticed that Sheppard and Teyla had been stripped of nearly everything they carried, but he and Ronon had been subjected to a much less thorough going-over, maybe because the only one of the Cletans who had any idea of how to treat prisoners was that Karmath guy and he hadn't been involved in their capture. The Cletans had taken their guns and radios, but left everything else, including his laptop and even his Swiss army knife, which they had perhaps not recognized as a knife. The one thing he really missed was his scanner, lost in the fall, but he still had his tools. He could fix things if he had to. He had powerbars, an MRE and a canteen mostly full of water. He wouldn't starve soon. He could get out of here.

Bracing himself, Rodney opened the door to the hallway and picked his way among the bodies once again, covering his nose with one hand to shield the worst of the smell. He remembered Karmath saying that they'd sent sick people into the "incinerator" as well. Great, just great. He wondered if they had plague on this world. Wasn't that carried by rats? Probably not, then. But there could be all kinds of wonderful new influenzas and other fun germs. What he wouldn't give for one of those horrid hazmat suits right now ...

The door between the transporter room and the hallway had been open when he arrived, but that didn't necessarily mean that it wouldn't close, and he quickly discovered that it did, indeed, close, shutting off the sight and smell of most of the bodies. There were still the two in the transporter room, and he didn't really want to touch them to move them, so he just tried to ignore the corpses as he pulled out his laptop and hooked up the power converter.

He lost his grip on the power cable and jumped nearly a foot in the air at a soft, very alive sound from somewhere off to his right. A low, hoarse cough ... like the sound a predator might make right before it attacked. It was followed by a faint rustling or slithering.

Damn it, oh damn it all to hell. He'd assumed all these people died of starvation, but what if something else killed them first?

The only thing in that direction was a doorway leading to one of the other rooms. Rodney retreated to the far side of the room, staring at the doorway and straining his ears for more sounds. Now that he was paying attention, he thought he could hear something breathing. He wished desperately that he had his gun ... or, better yet, Sheppard with a P-90.

"H-hello?" Rodney called, trying to keep the tremor out of his voice. "Is someone there?"

No reply, just another of those coughing sounds. Rodney looked around desperately for anything that could be used for a weapon and finally settled on what appeared to be some sort of Ancient coat-rack by the door. It was as tall as himself and made of a heavy black metal. He picked it up, brandishing it like a sword. Or rather, like a big coat-rack pretending to be a sword.

"Hello?"

Oh, where the hell was a Marine when you needed one. Holding the coat-rack in front of him, he attempted to do one of those cool crouch-and-roll-through-the-doorway things that Sheppard was so good at. All he managed to do was whack his head on the doorframe (ouch!), crack his coat-rack neatly in half on the other side of the doorframe and nearly fall on his butt. With any luck, the predator was laughing itself to death right now. Rodney looked nervously around the room, brandishing his much shorter coat-rack and hoping that he looked intimidating, like an action hero instead of a slightly out-of-shape geek.

The room, like all the other rooms, was empty of anything except for some mostly-dark consoles and a handful of desiccated plants in earth-toned pots.

"Come out," Rodney ordered, gripping the coat-rack so tightly that his fingers went numb. "I'm armed and I know how to use this!"

Yeah, he knew how to use it ... to hang coats on. Fighting monsters was a whole different barrel of flying monkeys.

Rodney stalked around the edges of the room, resisting an urge to take a hand off his makeshift weapon to rub at the bruise that he was sure must be forming on his temple. Coming around the end of one of the consoles, he froze.

Another mummy. A tiny one. A dead kid, he thought, appalled. Just as he was coming to terms with this new horror, it moved.

Rodney recoiled backwards, collided with the console and added two new bruises to his collection, one across the back of his thigh and the other on his hip.

The child wiggled and managed to turn onto its side, curling into a ball. The coat-rack slowly slipped from Rodney's fingers and fell to the floor with a loud clatter that he didn't notice.

It wasn't a zombie child or a mummy child; it was a dying child, and its face had turned towards him, its sunken eyes opening and staring vaguely in his direction. It made the sound that he had heard in the other room -- a faint, barking cough. He couldn't tell its age or gender, but it was so small that it must only be a few years old, and it had long hair falling into its glassy eyes.

Sick? Plague? Rodney backed away, again raising his hand to cover his mouth. The child continued to stare at him and then its eyes closed, and he slowly lowered his hand, feeling weak and cowardly and stupid, and loathing himself and this situation.

He didn't like kids, and he hated sick people, and here he was, trapped in a room with a child who might be dying of any number of horrendous and contagious diseases. But, given the evidence, the most likely thing was that it was dying of thirst. The kid had probably come through the transporter and, like the dead adults in the other room, had been unable to find its way out.

And here was Rodney McKay, genius, standing like a coat-rack himself with a full canteen at his hip, unable to make himself get any closer for fear of germs.

God, sometimes he hated himself.

What would Sheppard do? No ... he didn't even need to ask.

"Hey there," he said quietly, unstrapping the canteen and opening it. "Want some water?"

The child's eyes flickered open, then closed again. Swallowing, Rodney approached cautiously, ready to flee at a moment's notice if it sneezed or threw up or did anything ... contagious. But it didn't. It just lay there, its thin chest rising and falling, and Rodney thought that it might be a girl, maybe. It looked like a girl; he didn't think a boy would be so tiny and delicate, or have such long hair.

He decided to think of it as a girl, and sat down next to it ... to her. When she didn't respond, he reached out and lightly prodded at her shoulder. Her skin was rough and dry and very cold. Her eyes blinked open again -- though glassy and shadowed, they were very blue, as blue as his own. There was no recognition in them; she seemed to look through him, and he wondered again why he was doing this, or if there was even any point. Her slight chest rattled when she breathed. She looked pretty far gone.

"Hey. Can you drink?"

No response. Trying not to touch her any more than he had to, Rodney carefully got a hand under her arm and lifted her, terrified that he'd hurt her -- she looked as if she'd snap like a dry twig -- and equally terrified that he was signing his own death warrant by touching her. But, damn it, he couldn't just sit there and watch her die. No matter what anyone thought of him, he wasn't that much of an ass.

"Here. Water." He put it to her cracked lips, tilted it a little and let some trickle into her mouth.

The head jerked up; the kid began coughing, a wispy rasping sound that seemed to tear deep into her chest. He hoped he hadn't killed her. But she sucked in deep breaths, calming the spasms, and then her eyes opened wider, and he thought she was actually looking at him for the first time. She raised a skinny arm and groped for the canteen.

"Oh no. Just a little. Small sips." He did know that much first aid ... that you weren't supposed to give dehydrated people a lot of water. And he'd never seen anybody who looked so dehydrated.

She took more sips, and then her little body contorted, and he held onto her -- resisting the urge to fling her as far away from him as possible -- as she coughed up what little water she'd swallowed. Grimacing and taking a deep breath, Rodney brought the canteen back to her lips.

"Okay. Let's try this again, shall we, and keep it down this time, hmm?"

He hated kids and sick people, hated playing nursemaid ... hated the way that she couldn't get her lips to hold onto the canteen, letting the precious liquid slide down her cheek (which might be the difference between his life and death too, come to think of it, if he had to walk down the mountain); hated the short choking sound of her swallows as she finally managed to get the hang of it; hated the way her eyes fastened on him as a drowning man stares into the face of his savior -- and hated, even more, the way that her eyes slid closed soon after, and her hot dry forehead dropped down to rest against the front of his uniform ... as if she was just going to die, right now, after he gave her his water and everything.

Kids. No gratitude. No wonder he couldn't stand the little buggers.

Carefully, trying not to disturb her too much, McKay wormed out of his jacket and wrapped it around her. All she was wearing was some sort of loose undershirt-type thing, and her skin was so very cold. But her breathing sounded a little better; the rattle in her chest had calmed a little. She no longer sounded as if she was going to drop dead at any moment. Kind of looked like it, but didn't sound like it. He wished Carson was here.

He wondered how long she'd been here, alone, slowly dying of hunger and thirst with no one for company but the dead adults in the other room.

Something clicked in his memory. Karmath's four-year-old daughter. He'd said that she had been sent through ... how long ago? A few days. The time worked out correctly. He tried to recall how long a person could survive without water. No wonder she looked so awful ... kids could be more resilient about things like that than adults, but she still must be just about dead.

He laid her gently on the floor and stood up, but stayed for a moment, staring down at the small, still body. Now he had even more incentive to get out of here quickly. The kid needed medical attention.

Sometimes he wished that he was really as much of a jerk as most people thought he was. It would make life a lot easier.

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tbc

Comments and criticism, as always, are gratefully accepted.