--//--
There was a very small pool of red beside Sheppard's left shoe. The blood dripping from his pinkie had dried. Wherever he had been bleeding, the wound had clotted.
Teyla sighed in relief at this though it did not settle her nerves. Confusion and panic threatened to overtake her, yet these emotions were not entirely her own. It had to be Sheppard. Teyla could only reason to herself that it was similar to that of her connection with the Wraith.
"How did he get like this?" Ronon's voice carried Teyla out of her reverie. Shaking her head slightly, she made eye contact with Ronon.
"We do not know. Both Rodney and I were over there." She motioned with her head to a section of wall covered in some kind of greenish black organic material stretching in large strands over a mass of control panels. "We heard Sheppard mutter something, there was a flash of bright light and both Rodney and I were thrown to our feet from a concussive force of air. We saw these threads here and the colonel on the other side. He would not respond to us, nor would he move."
"We gotta do something." Ronon rumbled, eyeing the threads ominously.
Without pause, Ronon backed up, withdrew his blaster and fired off a shot to the side of where he had been standing. Teyla backed away the moment he fired, yelling at him.
"Ronon!"
The threads buzzed like an angry swarm of bees, flickering like the heart of an electrical storm. Teyla and Ronon took a step forward, watching through the threads as Sheppard's form began to quiver.
"Sheppard?" Ronon called for his team leader.
No response. His body stilled just as the threads began to stabilize: their now familiar luminance and silence returning.
The two standing on the other side exchanged curious glances.
--//--
Rodney was sure he had been down this corridor before. The dim lighting here was hardly the strength of candlelight yet he could still see the tracks in the grime of the floor. One set going one way, the other going the opposite. Both were his.
Letting out a sigh of frustration, he reached for his radio. He stopped with his hand halfway when he remembered their radios didn't work down here. He released a groan and rubbed a hand across his face.
He never got lost.
A brief flash of light, just a sliver really, caught his attention at the end of the corridor. Fear began to creep into his veins as he straightened. Curiosty overruled and he found himself walking gingerly forward. The light vanished and he was once more left in dim light and no idea of where the transporter was that had brought them all down there in the first place.
A faint metal clang echoed from ahead. He froze. His heart began to race as his mind thought it pertinent to play tricks on him. Now he was imagining the walls were moving in on him and that he could hear whispers in the deadened atmosphere.
Swallowing harshly, he dared another step forward. There was another glimpse of light, this time very localized, like that of a flashlight.
"H…hello?" His voice cracked. He was unarmed, he didn't have his laptop…he was utterly defenseless. Now was not the time to be wishing he had taken Ronon seriously during their little "sessions" in defense.
His voice sounded hollow against the corridor, almost as if something was sucking away all the life from it.
A whisper, unintelligible, but definitely a voice, carried to his ears. Goose bumps formed and he had the slightest sensation of crawling at the nape of his neck.
"Rodney."
A shriek escaped his lips and he turned at the very real, very close voice just behind him.
Staring at him with just as wide eyes was Zelenka, holding a flashlight and a laptop. Two marines were standing behind him, eyeing Rodney with amused expressions.
"Gees, what the…give a man a heart attack will you?! What the hell are you doing down here?! Wait, don't answer that. Give me your laptop." Rodney rambled, quickly trying to recover from his episode, and grabbed the laptop out of Zelenka's hands. As Rodney fiddled around on the database, calling up Atlantis' schematics, Zelenka peered over his shoulder.
"What are you looking for?"
Rodney looked up, not into Zelenka's face, but off into the distance with a look of impatience.
"Body space, Zelenka." He tapped the screen a few times before continuing. "Sheppard's trapped and we can't figure out how to reach him. The radios aren't working either. There's got to be some kind of interference down here that we missed…."
"Trapped?"
"Yes, trapped, as in incredibly and annoyingly stuck in one spot without so much as a peep to tell us how the hell he got into this mess in the first place. I swear he's doing it on purpose just to get back at me for that time on…hold on…what's this?"
Rodney maneuvered the laptop so that Zelenka could view the screen. It took him a moment to figure out exactly what he was looking at before he turned to Rodney with a frown.
"Sirs?" One of the marines was peering curiously at the screen as well.
Rodney turned the screen so that all of them could see it, save him. A schematic was drawn up looking much like a never-ending maze of corridors. There were thousands and thousands of little dots in the corridors, none of them moving.
"Life signs." Rodney's face was drawn, now that he was beginning to realize their predicament.
"That's impossible. There's nobody down here but us and your team." The other marine shook his head.
A chill ran up Rodney's spine as he saw one of the dots move just as Zelenka took a step away from him. Not only had he just determined which dots they were but he also realized where they were on the schematic, as did the others.
All four glanced up, looking bewildered as they turned around in place, seeing nothing but dim walls, a grimy floor, and eerie darkness beyond. On the screen of the laptop, however, there were hundreds of the life signs surrounding them.
--tbc--