Death Game

Chapter Twenty-Five

Well, this is nice, John said. The corridor sloped down, the walls not squared now but shaped like natural rock, the floor not entirely even. Ahead, there was the sound of rushing water. The torches were further and further apart, so it was necessary to go slower, checking the floor ahead constantly. John took the point, followed by Suua where he could keep an eye on him, followed by Jitrine and Nevin, with Teyla bringing up the rear.

Before him the corridor opened out into a large chamber, the sound of the water louder yet. Taking the nearest torch from the wall, John held it up to take a look. Oh man, he said.

The corridor opened into a cave, the ceiling some twenty feet above their heads. Through the middle of it ran a swift stream, white water rushing quickly past in a steep bed. Two pillars stood at the edge, and an identical pair stood on the other side. From the ones on the other side dangled the remains of a rope bridge. The main ropes had been cut, however, leaving the rest dangling in the stream.

The others crowded out onto the ledge over the water with him.

Suua blinked. The guys I was with who got ahead? They must have gone across and cut the ropes so nobody else could follow.”

John swore.

Jitrine shook her head, looking down into the stream bed. “The water flows underground again before long, just there. Who knows where it goes?”

“It does not matter,” Teyla said, kneeling down and reaching toward the water below, spreading her fingers to the spray that rose from the whitewater. “It is bitterly cold.”

“And running like a fire hydrant,” John said. “There’s no way that’s natural here. They’ve got this under pressure.”

“Very probably,” Teyla said. “But if the bridge were still intact, it would not be difficult. It is only about twenty feet across.”

“And if the ropes weren’t all on the other side,” John said.

“Too far to jump,” Suua said thoughtfully.

“I could swim across,” John said. “And then throw the ropes back. If we tied the ropes back to the post on our side, we could all get across.”

Teyla stood up, her hands on her hips. “Colonel, I should be the one to do it. You are injured.”

Colonel, he thought. We’re back to Colonel instead of John. With the addition of Nevin and Suua, this had turned into a large enough group to warrant formality. Or perhaps it was the addition of people she didn’t trust.

John shook his head. “Not with your shoulder. My head’s not as bad as that, and you know you can’t climb up the other side with your shoulder messed up.” On the other side, the ropes hung down into the water about ten feet from the pillars they were attached to. Ten feet of wet, slimy jumbled stones making a dangerous slippery surface. Whoever swam across would have to climb up the ropes, and there was no way Teyla could do it with her torn up shoulder. She hadn’t been able to get up a dry stone wall the day before without help.

Teyla opened her mouth and then shut it again, her lips pursed together. “The current is very strong,” she said. She didn’t argue. She had more sense than to claim she could do things she couldn’t.

“I know.” John looked at it. “But the thing’s not that wide. Twelve, fifteen feet across the actual water. If I start upstream of where the bridge was, it’s a couple of good strokes and the water will carry me down to the ropes.”

“And if you miss you will be swept away,” Jitrine observed.

“I’m a good swimmer and it’s not that far,” John said, taking off his jacket and handing it to Teyla. “It’s cold, but I’m only going to be in the water for a minute. It won’t be bad.”

He walked around the pillars, checking out the steepness of the bank upstream. It wasn’t as steep as he’d feared. The stones were broken and there were good hand and foot holds. Carefully, with Teyla holding the torch above, John started climbing down.

The spray was icy. Definitely under pressure, he thought. And definitely chilled. It might be cool here, but this temperature was too low not to be artificial. Just above the surface of the water he stopped, taking a good look across. There were probably rocks just beneath the surface. The water couldn’t be more than a few feet deep. Shallow water was more dangerous than deep water. This current could throw you against rocks hard enough to break bones. He’d broken his foot that way, whitewater rafting on the Snake River when he was sixteen.

So he wouldn’t dive. He’d just try to paddle across as quickly as possible. A couple of good strokes, maybe only one if he kicked off from the wall hard enough.

John lowered himself the rest of the way down, up to his hips in the icy water. The torch wavered as Teyla bent over, a worried look on her face.

“It’ll just take a second,” John said. Damn, this was cold!

With one last glance at the other side, he let go and pushed off strongly.

The water shocked him, and all he could see was white foam. The current buffeted him, half rolling him on his back. Don’t panic. Keep going across the current. One stroke. Two. Three. Where was the other bank? The stream wasn’t this wide.

John flung his arm out in a fourth stroke, and cracked it hard against rocks, grabbed onto the stones with all his strength, pulling his head out of the water. He scrambled forward, barking his shin, then got a foot up on that rock and pushed.

He took a long breath and shook his hair out of his eyes.

He was on the other side just below where the ropes from the broken bridge dangled down. To his right, it was only a dozen feet before the torrent went underground again, into a camouflaged drain opening.

“It’s ok,” John called back. “I’m good.”

He hauled himself back a few feet against the current, then pulled himself out with the ropes. His teeth were chattering by the time he reached the top, and he stomped around to warm himself. The water was very cold. Good thing he’d only been in it about thirty seconds.

“Are you all right?” Teyla called across.

“Just cold.” John started hauling the ropes up. There was a tangle of them tied to a few boards which must have once served as a footpath across the stream. “Not a problem.”

Jitrine screamed.

“Look out!” Teyla shouted.

John spun around just quickly enough to catch movement out of the corner of his eye. Then something heavy and flat hit him in the back, hard and solid, pitching him forward into the raging water.

“There you are,” Carson said. “Tucked in there nice and snug.”

The jumper made a long, low altitude pass over what was clearly a heavily populated island. In the courtyard of a large building, screened on every side by porticos of white stone, was a Wraith cruiser. It was essentially parked indoors. Other than from a vantage directly above it, it could not be seen from the ground. And since presumably it was the only aircraft on this world, it was effectively invisible.

Lorne nodded over the sensor readings. “Powered all the way down, all systems in standby mode. They weren’t planning on going anywhere soon.”

“So shoot it,” Rodney said. The idea of leaving a Wraith cruiser alone didn’t sit well with him.

Carson frowned. “It’s smack in the middle of a building full of humans, Rodney! If I hit the cruiser with a drone, it will blow up half this city. In case you haven’t bothered to read the sensor report, there are fifty thousand human beings on this island! The collateral damage from air to surface missiles here, and the resulting fires, would be in the thousands! You’re essentially asking me to bomb a city full of helpless people.”

“Fine.” Rodney said shortly. “So what are we supposed to do? Ignore the Wraith? Is that a better plan?”

“Chances are we’d also be bombing our own people,” Lorne said quietly.

Rodney looked at him. “How do you get to that?”

Lorne met his eyes frankly. “Look, we’ve had no luck reaching them by radio. They probably don’t have access to the radios anymore. Which means there’s a good bet they’re prisoners. And where do you think the Wraith would hold them?”

“On the cruiser or in the complex around it,” Rodney said reluctantly. “I hear you.”

“So let’s find out if our people are on the cruiser before we blow it up,” Lorne said.

Carson’s brow furrowed. “Let me have a look around and see if I can find a place to set down. Can’t you scan for our people?”

“For the forty-ninth time, Carson!” Rodney snapped. “I have no way to tell our people apart from any of the other fifty thousand people on the island!”

“We’re going to have to do this the hard way,” Lorne said. He looked toward the Marines in the back. “Cadman, issue out the P90s.”

There was dark and there was water. It turned him over and over, his hands scrabbling for purchase on the smooth curved surface above.

A drain, John thought, fighting not to breathe. A round plastic drain. The water was rushing through pipes, filling them completely. There was no distance between the surface of the water and the pipe. He was going to drown in here.

No sooner had he thought that than the pressure of the water eased as it spread, opening up. His hand broke the surface and he struggled up. His legs hit something solid, then his chest. John dragged himself up in pitch darkness, his hands encountering stone instead of plastic, his greedy chest sucking in breath.

There was a splashing and coughing, and he flailed out, grabbing for whatever it was and getting a handful of soggy cold cloth.

Coughing. That was Teyla’s cough. “Teyla?” And the cloth he had was the leg of her BDUs. He pulled her out of the rushing water onto the ledge he perched on. “Teyla? What the hell happened?”

She coughed again. “One of the other men, the ones who had gone ahead, was waiting. He hit you with one of the bridge planks and knocked you back in the water.”

John took a deep breath. “But you were on the other side of the stream from him. What are you doing here?”

Teyla sounded almost amused. “Well, I had to go after you, did I not? Would you expect that I would just say, ‘Too bad that Sheppard is swept away?’ I thought that perhaps we could climb back up.”

“What about Jitrine and the others?” he asked.

“I told them to wait on the same side of the stream,” Teyla replied. “We did not have much time to talk. I had to act quickly.”

“Yeah, I see that.” There was not the slightest glimmer of light. So there probably wasn’t a camera to give themselves away to either. And the handful of pants he’d grabbed a moment earlier gave him an idea. “Do you still have that flashlight buttoned up in your pocket?”

“I have not taken it out,” she said. He heard movement, and then was almost blinded by the pure white light of the LED lighting.

Teyla played the light over the water and the chamber around them. It was not big enough for them to stand up, perhaps four feet in height above the water and little more than ten feet in length, a crevasse carved out of natural rock. Perhaps it was a fissure that had widened when the Wraith put in their drains, blasted out or fractured further by the rushing water. There was no way out except the water where it flowed through, filling the smaller entrance tunnel and leaving perhaps five or six inches of space at the top of the exit drain.

John swore again. “This is so not good.”

“The water is freezing,” Teyla said.

He looked at the inrushing water. “We can’t climb back up that,” he said. “The current’s too fast and there isn’t anything to hold onto. It’s plastic, not stone. It’s totally smooth.”

“I know,” she said. “I had expected stone, like the stream bed.”

“It’s just a set,” John said. “Anything that isn’t going to show they didn’t bother to make look natural.”

Teyla glanced around the small cave. “And of course there are no vents here.”

John nodded. “Which means we’ve got air for what? Maybe fifteen or twenty minutes in a space this big?”

“Possibly,” Teyla said, shining the light around again. There were some tiny cracks, but none large enough to even get a hand through, much less to provide a means of escape. She flashed the light over the water. “We are going to have to go down.”

John nodded slowly. He was cold from the water, though in the enclosed space their bodies’ warmth took off the chill. “The drains have to go out somewhere. As fast as the water’s moving, there’s a pump. So it has to go into a pool to recycle. With plastic drains instead of rocks, there’s less chance we’re going to break bones on the way down.”

Teyla took a deep breath. It was clear she did not care for the freezing water any more than he did. “I see no other way,” she said, glancing the light around again, as if hoping some other way out had magically appeared. “I will turn it off and button it back in my pocket,” she said, “So that we do not lose it.”

“Right.” John looked at the water, a last look before the light switched off and left them again in utter blackness. He heard the sound of wet cloth as she put the flashlight away.

In the dark, Teyla took his hand. “Ready?” she asked.

“Ready,” John said. “Three deep breaths and then we go.”

“All right.”

One. Two. Three.

They plunged into the frigid water and were swept away.