Chapter 2 – The Vault
"McKay! Get round here and get this door open!"
"What've you got yourself into now, Sheppard?" came the answer.
"Come on, McKay!"
"I'm here!" panted Rodney, through the radio. "Don't say I never come running!" There was a pause. "This might take a while. It's locked itself."
"Dr McKay?" came Martinez' voice. "There's data scrolling over these monitors."
"Sheppard, I'm going back up to the control room," said Rodney. "The door might open from up there and I need to take a look at that data."
"OK, we'll see if we can get out the other way," replied Sheppard.
So, here was the adventure Shanice had been looking for - trapped in an unexplored part of the city with her CO. Sheppard looked at her and gestured forward with his weapon. "Slowly!" he warned.
They started towards the far door and had not moved more than a couple of cautious steps before there was a flurry of whirring sounds from either side and they both felt a myriad of tiny darts penetrate their clothes and skin. The darts rebounded from their tac vests, but went through everything else.
"Pull them out!" Sheppard urgently began plucking out the darts. Shanice pulled out as many of her own as she could and then Sheppard said, "turn around!" and pulled out the darts she couldn't reach. She did the same for him and then they both stood, watching each other, waiting for a reaction.
"You feel OK?" asked Sheppard, who had had previous experience with poisoned darts.
She nodded. "Just a bit sore, Sir. Kind of itchy." She looked down at her arm. The darts had left tiny marks, not even bleeding, just slightly red.
"Hmm. Me too." He began examining the walls. "I can't even see where they came from. Still OK?"
"Yes, Sir!"
"Sheppard, what's happening down there?" came Rodney's voice.
"Poison darts, but without the poison," Sheppard replied.
"What?"
"Darts - they came out of the walls. You find a way to get the door open?"
"Not yet," Rodney responded. "What's with the darts? Could it be some kind of vault - protecting something valuable?"
"I don't know, McKay, sounds a bit Indiana Jones to me. I want you to call Colonel Carter, let her know what's happening, and get Ronon and Teyla down here, see what they can find." Sheppard began moving towards the far door again, "we'll carry on trying to find a way out."
As they moved closer, the door slid open smoothly, revealing a narrow corridor, with another door at the far end.
"This doesn't make any sense," Shanice commented. "Why would the doors ahead of us open if this is a protected vault?"
"I don't like it either," said Sheppard uneasily. "I think we'll stay here, maybe try some C4 on that door."
As he spoke, they both became aware of a humming sound, which seemed to come from the walls. The humming built into a whine and electricity began to crackle along the walls, discharging arcs like mini lightning strikes out into the room.
"Move!" yelled Sheppard. They hurled themselves through the doorway, which, like the one before, closed itself firmly behind them.
"You get the feeling we're being herded?" said Sheppard.
Shanice nodded, "Feels like it, Sir"
"Drop the sir - I think we're going to be stuck in this together for quite a while. You OK?"
She nodded again, beginning to smile. "I was bored before, so at least this is different!"
"I like your attitude, Private Williams." Sheppard reached into a pocket in his tac vest and took out two power bars. He offered one to Shanice. "Here. Eat while you can."
He unwrapped his bar and began to eat. "We'll wait here for now. I don't think anything good's going to happen if we go through that door."
In the lab, Rodney was studying the monitors closely, muttering to himself. He had told Martinez to keep watch outside and sent Phillips down the stairs to patrol between the two doors.
The muttering stopped. Rodney abruptly sat back in his chair, a frozen expression on his face. He tapped his earpiece and spoke, urgently.
"Teyla? Ronon?"
"We are coming, Rodney," replied Teyla.
"Stop by the infirmary and get Keller," Rodney said abruptly.
"Is somebody hurt?"
"No! I mean, not yet," said Rodney nervously. "Bring her. I need her."
"We will be there soon, Rodney," Teyla said.
Rodney tapped his earpiece again: "Sheppard, what's happening down there?"
"Nothing, at the moment," came the reply. "We had to move out of that room into a corridor or we would've got fried."
"Fried?"
"Well, electrocuted. It started coming from the walls."
"Oh, this is bad, this is very bad!" Rodney began tapping at his laptop again, eyes flicking worriedly from one screen to another.
"McKay? What's going on?"
"Erm... I'm not sure, well not totally sure, I'll let you know." Rodney carried on working, searching the ever-changing screens with increasingly worried eyes.
Sheppard and Private Williams had waited for nearly twenty minutes, taking the opportunity to rest and drink from their canteens, when the humming began to come from the corridor walls. They knew what would come next, so they hurriedly got up and made their way to the far door. It opened, predictably, and they reluctantly stepped through, scanning the surrounding walls nervously. The room was the same as the first; long, high-ceilinged, with another door at the far end. The door behind them slid shut and then there was silence.
"I'm not good at waiting," said Sheppard.
He didn't have to wait long. The only warning they had was a subtle hiss. And slowly, steadily a pale green vapour began to issue from the walls, gradually filling the room.
"Gas!" they both cried, and sprinted for the far door, hoping it would open as readily as the previous three. It stayed uncompromisingly shut. The gas cloud rose from floor level, higher and higher and they began to smell it, a pungent, bitter scent, which caught at the back of the throat.
Sheppard and Williams looked at each other, knowing there was nothing they could do.
"McKay!" Sheppard called into his radio. "There's gas down here! We need you to get us out!"
"Gas?" came the frantic reply. "I can't... I don't... Sheppard I don't know how to get you out!"
The gas was nearly up around their heads and Shanice took a deep breath of cleaner air and tried to hold it as long as she could. She could hear Colonel Sheppard coughing but her sight of him was obscured by the green mist.
She was beginning to feel dizzy, her vision going fuzzy, when she felt a hand on her arm and heard a voice: "Breathe. Just breathe, Williams. It's OK." She gasped and took a breath. It tasted bitter and made her cough but she took another breath and another.
"It's not poisonous," came Sheppard's voice through the mist. She could vaguely see his shoulders shrugging in confusion.
"Sheppard!" came Rodney's voice. "Sheppard, can you hear me?"
"We're OK, Rodney," replied Sheppard. "It's OK, we can breath. Now, please tell me what's going on!"
Ronon, Teyla and Jennifer Keller, carrying her medical kit, had arrived in the lab. Rodney opened the comm-link to Sheppard and began to explain what he had found.
"This is a testing facility. A giant version of lab rats in a maze, except so far there haven't been any choices; you're just forced to keep going forwards. These," he gestured at the console and screens, are designed to monitor the health of the test subjects." Keller moved forward and began studying the screens. "It took me a while to interpret, but you can see here there are two distinct sets of data, so one from Sheppard and one from Private Walters."
"Williams," Sheppard interrupted.
"Whatever," continued Rodney. "So, the question I asked myself is this: who would the Ancients have been putting through a series of ordeals in order to study their effect?"
"Wraith," grunted Ronon, succinctly.
"That's why the darts and gas didn't work on us," came Sheppard's voice.
"Precisely," confirmed Rodney. "Because they carry toxins specific to Wraith."
At this point the door out of the gas filled room opened. Sheppard said, "We've got another passageway open ahead of us here. We're going to move forward before the frying starts."
"It looks like you get ten minutes in each of the rooms," Rodney said, "and then twenty in the linking corridors, presumably for the scientists to study the effects and for a certain measure of recovery time."
"Recovery time. Great," groaned Sheppard. "Can't you just turn it off from up there, release all the door locks or something?"
"I've tried, but it's some kind of security feature - once the process has started, it's locked into the system until you come out the other end."
"But this is for Wraith, McKay! Great, big, almost-impossible-to-kill Wraith!" Sheppard stopped, took a deep breath and said with determined calm: "What happens when we get to something they can take but we can't? We've been lucky so far. What if the next room is 'let's see how many high-speed projectiles a Wraith can take and still survive?"
Ronon suddenly released a suppressed roar, ran through the door and down the stairs, pushed past a startled Private Phillips and aimed blast after blast from his energy weapon at the door through which Sheppard and Williams had gone.
Rodney and Teyla waited. The blasting stopped and Ronon came sullenly back up the stairs.
"No effect," he said.
"Well, it's had some effect," snapped Rodney, angrily. "Well done, Conan, you've just set off the security system and now all the doors into this area of the pier have sealed themselves. Now we're all trapped!"