Free 02 - Reliquary by Martha Wells - (ebook by Undead) Page B

reflected off a metallic floor.
If he had a choice of where to lead their little group, a dark hole in a ruined
bunker was about the last place he would pick.
    Grimly resigned, he took a moment to get the infrared night-vision goggles
out of his pack, Ford doing the same. They would rely on the flashlights since
the scientists’ field packs didn’t include the goggles, but John wanted to be
ready in case something attacked them and they needed to kill the lights.
Everybody else used the time to check their handlight batteries. When everyone
was ready, John looked them over. He knew McKay had too much awareness of his
own mortality to wander off in the dark, and Kolesnikova, uneasy but game, would
stay as close to Ford or Teyla as she could without actually holding hands with
one of them. “Now everybody stick together. Do not go off on your own, under any
circumstances. Do not stop to examine anything without letting me know. And yes,
I’m mainly talking to you, Dr. Kavanagh.”
    John went first, testing the stairs cautiously with each step, the P-90’s
light revealing a passage larger than the one above, high-ceilinged, with a
jumble of the large opaque pipes branching down. The pipes joined up with
another set and ran off along the far wall. The sinuous shapes were almost
organic, their material gleaming faintly in his light; John was uncomfortably
reminded of movies where aliens exploded out of people’s chests. The smell,
which he had been trying to ignore, was distinctly worse. “What the hell are
those pipes, did we ever figure that out?” he asked, exasperated. “It’s like the
damn Nostromo down here.”
    Kavanagh, just stepping off the stairs and pausing to give Kolesnikova a
hand, said, “It’s part of the air system, Major.” His tone was laconic but still
managed to have an element of
    are you stupid? in it.
    The others made their way down, and John leaned over to look as McKay
consulted the detector again.
    “It’s stronger now. This way,” McKay said, jerking his chin toward the other
end of the large passage. “Back toward the center portion of the building.”
    “That makes sense,” John said. McKay threw a look at him that he couldn’t
quite read in the reflected glow of the detector. “What? The power source would
be under the main part of the complex.”
    “It makes as much sense as anything does,” Kolesnikova answered for him.
“This signal is strong, you should have picked it up yesterday.”
    Kavanagh shook his head, watching his own detector. “We must have activated
something. Like the lights and the other systems that came online when we first
arrived in Atlantis. It just took some time to power up.”
    “That’s what I thought,” Ford pointed out.
    John had to admit it was reasonable, but it didn’t make him feel any less
uneasy. Still studying his detector, McKay grimaced suddenly and said, “I think
the floor above us is shielded. And there seems to be some electromagnetic field
activity—Check your radios.”
    John tried his headset and got nothing but static. From what he could hear
from the others, he wasn’t the only one. He swore. “Oh, that’s all we need.” The
detectors were Ancient technology and wouldn’t be affected, but their
communications equipment was all good old-fashioned Earth-manufacture.
    He took the lead with McKay to guide them with the detector, and put both
Ford and Teyla to watch their six. Ford was leaving route markers with a
reflective spray paint to keep them from mistaking the way. Their lights seemed
to make the shadows even darker, and the detector led them into one branching
corridor, then another. The giant pipes veered up the walls and over the
ceiling, and they caught sight of more piles of wreckage.
    The uselessness of the radios was making John’s nerves jump. As they moved
through the large dark space he had to suppress the impulse to make everybody
choose a buddy and hold hands. If they lost