Martha Wells: Reliquary

Gritting his teeth, John keyed his radio on and said into the headset, “Dr. Kavanagh, come in, please.”

He heard a distant crackle from the headset, then nothing. Crap. “Kavanagh, come in.”

McKay looked up, frowning. “What? What’s wrong?”

Frustrated, John took a moment to say, “Rodney, is your name Kavanagh? Then shut up.” The others had heard him on the radio and were starting to look around. He called, “Teyla, Ford, did you see where Kavanagh went?”

Ford started across the chamber. “He was right over there, sir, looking at the stuff over in that back — There he is.”

Kavanagh was coming out of the shadowy passage to a side room, his face distracted. John waved Ford off, crossing over to say pointedly, “Uh, Dr. Kavanagh, why didn’t you answer your radio?”

Kavanagh looked up, startled. “Did you call me? I didn’t hear it.” He fumbled his headset off. “It was working earlier.”

“Yeah, I know.” John looked past Kavanagh. The passage the man had come out of led to a room with side areas sectioned off by empty metal panels that had probably once held colored glass. The only thing interesting about it was a round swirly design in the floor. John was pretty sure Corrigan had already filmed anything in here that looked like a decoration or a symbol. “Look, you need to stay in sight at all times. I know this place seems safe—”

Kavanagh blinked, his glasses reflecting the dim light. “Sorry. I was only gone a moment. I thought I heard something, but it must have been my imagination.”

John let out his breath. He had cleared that room himself earlier, something Kavanagh probably knew and was refraining from pointing out. “Right. Just…be careful about that.”

John sent Ford back to the jumper to get another headset for Kavanagh. When that was taken care of and everyone had gone back to work, Ford pulled John aside to say, “Sorry I lost him, sir. I’m used to keeping an eye on Dr. McKay, and Dr. Kavanagh moves faster than he does.”

Rodney, who had a preternatural ability to know when people were talking about him, popped out from under a wrecked console and glared at them.

“It’s okay,” John told Ford. “Just stay sharp.”

Everyone kept working and they expanded their explorations, making their way across much of the ground floor, with cautious forays up into the more stable upper levels. Corrigan confirmed that some of those levels had unfinished sections, where construction had stopped at some point before the bombing had occurred. After a couple of hours they took a break, going back out to the plaza to let the scientists regroup and to refill water bottles and pass out MREs. The day was still warm and pleasant, and they sat down on the steps up to the repository’s outer door. It was a good spot, allowing a view of the beach and the sea, and the distant Stargate.

As they ate, the dust from knocking around inside the ruin was making everybody sniffle, even John, who didn’t normally have allergies. He felt it was probably because he had gotten too used to Atlantis, with its automatic cleaning systems and fresh air.

Poking at her MRE thoughtfully, Kolesnikova said, “Have you boys got any idea yet what this place was for? It can’t be simply a repository. They had more equipment in that one room than in the operations tower at Atlantis, systems that must have supported weapons, communications. Yet the ’gate is well outside the complex. This looks very much like a support or control center for something, but for what?”

Kavanagh’s brow furrowed. “I’m finding a great deal of monitoring systems, possibly meant for the unfinished upper levels of the towers, though with so much damage it’s hard to tell.” He seemed uncharacteristically hesitant, especially for a man who regularly got in Elizabeth Weir’s face about how she was running the expedition and who had nearly as practiced a turn for tearing people’s heads off as Rodney. “I think this facility was meant to include a hospital.”

. “Abandoned hospitals are inherently creepy,” John said. Teyla lifted a puzzled brow, Ford nodded emphatically, and McKay looked at him as though he wanted to ask if John had forgotten to take his lithium or something. Everyone else was too busy considering Kavanagh’s suggestion to notice John’s comment.

“Atlantis wouldn’t need an offsite hospital for its own inhabitants, of course,” Kolesnikova said slowly, thinking it over. “But if they meant this to be a meeting place for many cultures — and that large space in the unfinished section certainly seemed intended to be an auditorium — a hospital may have been part of the services provided. Or if this world is perhaps inhabited — or was inhabited — by another human culture…”

“We didn’t pick up any communications from the puddle-jumper, and neither did the MALP,” Corrigan pointed out. “But if the people of this world have been bombed back to primitive conditions by the Wraith, they might not have recovered enough to have radio traffic yet.”

McKay eyed Kavanagh narrowly but didn’t comment on the hospital theory. The word John had gotten earlier from Ford was that Kavanagh had found some intact control crystals in one of the pieces of equipment near the center shaft and that McKay hadn’t found any; McKay was undoubtedly still constructing his game plan for getting them away from the other scientist. McKay asked Corrigan, “You still think this place is Ancient?”

Everybody stared, even Boerne and Kinjo, who had been having a separate conversation about city duty shifts. Corrigan frowned doubtfully, as if he suspected McKay of setting him up for something. “The writing on the consoles is Ancient, and so is the design of the equipment. The building itself resembles Heliopolis. But…” He shrugged, looking around again.

“It doesn’t look like Atlantis, at least from inside that main control area,” Ford said, glancing at the big doors behind them. “Even in the technical areas, Atlantis is made to look pretty. This is all just mostly functional.”

“I agree,” Teyla said. She had finished her meal first because McKay had talked her out of the brownie and was neatly tucking the remnants back into their foil bag. “This place does not have the same…” She hesitated, looking thoughtful. “The same feel as Atlantis. I do not think the Ancestors were here for very long.”

“Well, part of that could be because the structure is unfinished,” Corrigan told her, “But that triangular archway, the way the walls are put together, the colored material in those skylights — those are Atlantean design. It could be another branch of Ancient culture—”

McKay shook his head. “I doubt that. The technology that created that equipment was inferior. It isn’t integrated with the building’s superstructure in the same way the Ancients would do it. A lot of it was added after construction. And Irina’s right, there’s too much of it for just a repository and meeting area — far more than was recorded in even the brief examination of the original Heliopolis conducted by SG-1.” He sniffed, possibly in disdain, possibly from the dust. “I think this place was taken over before it was completed by scavengers who had access to Ancient technology.”

Kavanagh looked annoyed. “What kind of evidence have you seen for that?”

Kolesnikova shook her head. “I don’t think we’ve seen enough to make that call. Why would a culture advanced enough to understand and use this technology need to scavenge?”

“What do you think, Major?” Ford asked.

“It’s sort of Atlantean. And sort of not,” John admitted.

“Oh, that’s helpful.” Rodney snorted. “I’m glad we have a consensus.” He leaned toward the spaghetti MRE John had been picking at. “Are you going to finish that?”