Summer Pic-Fic Challenge: The Specimen Strikes Back (Chapter 3)
Originally posted by nacinom at Summer Pic-Fic Challenge: The Specimen Strikes Back (Chapter 3)
Title: The Specimen Strikes Back
Author: nacinom
Rating: PG13
Characters: John Sheppard, Teyla Emmagan, Rodney McKay, Ronon Dex
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, drama
Spoilers: Set during Season 3, soon after "Sunday"
Chapter word count: 2454 (Chapter 3 of 10-ish)
Disclaimer: The SGA world is not mine. I wrote this story for fun not profit.
Summary: The team is split up by difficult circumstances. Her Wraith detector tingling, Teyla wakes up alone in a very strange place. The last thing she remembers was that Sheppard had been with her. Will anything stop her from finding out what the heck is going on?
Acknowledgements: Thanks to coolbreeze1 for the very cool pic prompt and to my super beta editors:
amycat8733 and firedew1.
Written for: The sheppard_hc 2013 Summer Pic-Fic Challenge
---------------------------------------------------------
Chapter 3
Teyla clenched her jaw to stop her teeth from chattering. The slight vibrations she felt under her bare feet supported her hunch she had somehow been spirited away into the bowels of a space vessel-a large and, fortunately for her, sparsely inhabited one. Unfortunately, the vessel’s climate controls were not set at a temperature fit for humans, especially naked ones.
The only good thing about having no clothes that might rustle or boots that might thud was that she needed minimal effort to move silently. While that was a skill she had mastered since early adolescence, now her movements were alarmingly uncoordinated. She had already tripped twice on nothing but her own toes. Maybe her sluggishness was the effect of drugs still lingering in her system or a combination of the cold, sore muscles and multitude of body aches.
She stooped as she walked through the low rectangular passage. It was no wider than the space occupied by the three parallel rail tracks and the narrow corridor that ran between the tracks. The only light came from the hall she had just left and the one she would soon reach.
Fearful of being caught unaware by an approaching container or worse, she periodically glanced behind her shoulder. No signs of danger, so far.
At the end of the passage, she flattened herself against the wall and surveyed the next chamber. It was completely empty.
Similar to the room where she had woken up, this one had no visible doors, but unlike the other much larger room, the walls and ceiling here were lined by mirrored panels and the space was circular. In the middle of the floor the tracks split off in two directions. The two on her right continued straight and the other took a ninety-degree turn to the left.
Teyla mulled over her choices. She could follow the left track that had carried the container that she had escaped from or the two going straight, the direction she must have come from while unconscious. If she followed the left track, she might be able to stop anyone from discovering the broken container and hunting her down. But the passage straight in front of her held the potential for a much greater reward. It might lead her to somewhere in the vicinity of where she had been divested of her clothing and her weapons. Even better, in that direction she might encounter a container holding John. Until she found clear evidence to indicate otherwise, she would not even consider the possibility that he might have already been killed.
With a great sense of urgency, she opted to forge straight ahead. Her clumsiness gone, she moved lightly on the balls of her feet.
As she crossed the room, the sight of her tiny, distorted reflection multiplied to infinity was not as disconcerting as the sudden thought that someone might be watching her. Maybe her captors knew that she had escaped and they were just letting her think that she was free. Or, perhaps, they had such confidence in the devices and drugs they used to control their captives that they had not foreseen the need to outfit the interior of their vessel with surveillance equipment.
She much preferred the latter possibility.
As she traveled through the next passage, she tried to avoid distracting herself with speculations about the identity of the inhabitants of this vessel. Even though she had time for only a cursory examination of her surroundings, she had a strong feeling that they were not humans, Wraith, Ancients or any of the other sentient beings that she had encountered so far in her travels. Whoever they were, they apparently did not have much interest in nurturing friendly relations with other species.
Part of her dreaded meeting them, the other part wanted to kill them.
The next chamber also showed no signs of life. All four walls were occupied by instruments, some with blinking lights, others with monitors displaying colorful graphics of changing shapes and curves. The equipment reminded her a little of Carson Beckett’s or rather now Jennifer Keller’s laboratory. The main difference being the grander scale, vaster number and bolder color scheme of the ones here. The eye-jarring bright pinks, purples and blues were definitely beyond the muted palette that pervaded Atlantis.
In contrast to the eerie silence that she had encountered in the other parts of the ship, this room was filled by a cacophony of clicking, beeping and buzzing noises. Along one wall, formations of pinkie-finger slim, multicolored tubes were neatly lined up in racks that moved along a conveyor belt system until they were individually grabbed by multiple flexible appendages and inserted within the panels of a tall, egg-shaped machine. As each panel slid shut, pulses of green and magenta lights radiated upwards to a large flashing screen that fanned out from the tip of the egg.
Teyla wasted no time trying to make sense of the patterns of colors that advanced from right to left on the screen. Something else drew her attention.
A third of the way into the room, the twin tracks that she had been following vanished from sight within a horizontal, thick-walled, cobalt blue cylinder-its shape reminiscent of the MRI scanner that had been brought over from Earth before the scientists had learned the true versatility of the much more compact Ancient scanners.
The machinery at the rear of two transport containers protruded from the end closest to her. She could not see who lay within them. Her heart filled with the hope that she might have found John.
Even though she had no idea how long she might have to wait, she dismissed the inner voice of experience that shouted at her not stay in any one place for too long. This was a risk worth taking.
She hid behind a nearby array of floor-to-ceiling pipes and set herself to wait until the containers exited the giant scanner. She sat and wrapped her arms around her knees in an attempt to conserve heat.
After a while she had to rub and massage her arms to fight off the numbness. Her nose itched and she already had to snuff several incipient sneezes. At least her finger nails had not turned blue as of yet.
Interminable minutes passed until the lights on what she assumed was the scanner’s control panel flickered and shut off.
She sense Wraith before the containers moved on the rails and its two unconscious captives became visible to her eyes. Despite the disappointment, she was curious at the revelation that while it functioned, the machine had masked the Wraith presence from her senses. She filed that information away for the future.
The containers with the Wraith proceeded on their journey out of the room in the direction where she had come from. Teyla felt no pity for those two-the fewer Wraith, the better.
To avoid inadvertently activating a machine or alarm, she didn’t touch anything as she searched around for something to wear or use as a weapon, preferably both. If this room was the equivalent of a laboratory, there might be protective clothing or laboratory coats like the ones the scientists and medical personnel used in Atlantis. Even a blanket or drape would be nice.
She found nothing useful.
She went through the next passage even more quickly than the previous one. An ominous feeling in her gut was telling her to hurry or she would be too late. For what, she did not know.
Since there was no space between the rail tracks and the walls, she walked between the twin rails of one track. The soles of her feet had gotten used to the chill. Or maybe they had gone numb.
A sudden rush of colder air chilled her naked back. She jumped over to the other set of rails just in time before a container swooshed by. This one moved much faster than the others. She caught a flash of its occupant. It was neither human nor Wraith. She could not be certain, but it looked like one of the large, tree dwelling animals native to the planet her team had been visiting before everything went wrong. Before the four of them had gotten split up, John and Rodney had entertained themselves with obscure jokes about red-bottomed baboons, whatever those were. They had promised to show her and Ronon pictures and then the Wraith had appeared from nowhere.
She felt sorry for the creature, but she had to persevere onward. Her priorities were to find John, then Ronon and Rodney. The rescue of others would have to wait.
While she was definitely thankful that no one awake frequented these areas, the fact that she had yet to encounter a single crew member puzzled her. Did they ever use these passages? How many of the internal functions of this vessel were automated?
This part of the ship had been specifically set up to process captives, for a yet to be determined purpose, until they were disposed of like kitchen refuse. Everything she had seen so far looked like a larger, more automated version of the systems employed by the Hoffan scientists to handle the small animals they experimented on when they were developing their ill-advised drug. Were she and the Wraith supposed to be experimental subjects or food or what?
She again took every precaution to scout out the next chamber before entering it. Unlike the other rooms, this one had a distinguishable doorway. It was shut and it stood in the middle of the wall facing her. Four empty containers were stacked into two racks in the middle of the wide room, obscuring the view of its other half. Evenly spaced in front of each rack, there were two large hip-high oval pedestals. A fifth empty container sat on top of one pedestal; there was nothing on the other one. Each pedestal was flanked by a wheeled cube, similar in size to the utility carts used in the Atlantis infirmary, and a tall cone from whose tip protruded six long appendages.
Teyla did not have a chance to explore the room.
Without making a sound, a bright blue beam of light shot out from an indentation in the ceiling above the unoccupied pedestal. At the same time, she experienced a powerful resurgence of the headache that had persisted as a minor nuisance since she had regained consciousness.
Not knowing what to expect, she huddled behind the other pedestal. She hoped that if someone came they would not notice her immediately, giving her a chance to decide on a course of action.
The blue light spread to cover the entire surface of the pedestal. Then it began to pulse. Even though watching the strobe beam made her feel nauseous, Teyla forced herself to keep her eyes open. Whatever was happening was important.
Three things happened at once: The beam shut off; a familiar cold chill jarred her senses to high alert; and a motionless Wraith appeared sprawled on the pedestal.
What she had just witnessed had to be the result of something akin to Asgard beaming technology. That was how she had been brought into the ship.
In the time it took her to blink at the next sudden flash of blue light, the body disappeared and rematerialized within the container that stood on the pedestal next to her. Startled, she scooted away from it.
Then she saw that all of the Wraith’s clothes and gear had been left behind on the other pedestal, spread out in the same arrangement as they had been when worn by their owner.
No longer worried about staying out of sight of possible surveillance sensors, Teyla surged to her feet and bolted to grab the Wraith stunner. Before she had a chance to take anything else, the robotic arms adjoining each pedestal activated in a swirl of motion. Their clicking sounds reverberated in the otherwise quiet space. One set of tentacles inserted several thin tubes into the body of the newest captive; the other scooped up the Wraith’s uniform and gear, and placed them into a compartment that had opened at the top of the wheeled cart.
The compartment slid shut, its contents safe from Teyla’s reach unless she decided to do something drastic. In truth, she hadn’t been sure that she was desperate enough to wear a Wraith’s garments.
She slid her fingers along the gently curved line of the Wraith gun. She knew how to use it and if it ran out of charge it was the perfect length and weight for use in hand-to-hand combat. She was pleased with the choice she had made.
The cart rolled towards the exit. From a tiny opening in its front, an appendage telescoped out and touched a spot on the left side of doorway. It opened to reveal an empty rectangular space large enough to fit several people and service carts. It reminded Teyla of the transporters in Atlantis.
Having nothing to lose and everything to gain, she stepped into the transporter. The cart’s limber appendage touched the middle of a horizontal row of three buttons set on the transporter wall. In response, the door shut and she felt an upward movement. She adjusted her grip on the gun to get ready for whatever would come next.
A few seconds later the transporter opened its door. No one rushed out to apprehend her.
Instead, the cart rolled out at a leisurely pace into a room more brightly lit than the ones at the lower level. The air also smelled different, less stale but pungently unpleasant-an unrecognizable mix of odors from strong unnatural chemicals. Breathing it made her feel as if her nasal passages were being scoured by a metal bristle-brush. On the positive side, her sinuses immediately dried up despite the lingering chilly temperature.
The cart presented itself to another tentacle-cone machine which emptied it of its cargo and loaded it into a moving row of buckets that fed into a cabinet-sized instrument. Monitors lit up to show columns of scrolling incomprehensible characters. The device chirped and buzzed without revealing anything about its inner workings.
Rodney would surely have been fascinated by it. However, something more mundane drew Teyla’s attention to the first row of shelves that stood on the other side of the mysterious laboratory apparatus.
At one end of a neatly arranged line of Wraith footwear, her boots and John’s sat in plain view. As she stepped forward, she also noticed a bundle of Atlantis-black clothing on the shelf beneath the boots.
Caught in the excitement of her find, she almost did not hear the clacking sounds approaching from the far end of the room.
Go back to C hapter 1.
Title: The Specimen Strikes Back
Author: nacinom
Rating: PG13
Characters: John Sheppard, Teyla Emmagan, Rodney McKay, Ronon Dex
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, drama
Spoilers: Set during Season 3, soon after "Sunday"
Chapter word count: 2454 (Chapter 3 of 10-ish)
Disclaimer: The SGA world is not mine. I wrote this story for fun not profit.
Summary: The team is split up by difficult circumstances. Her Wraith detector tingling, Teyla wakes up alone in a very strange place. The last thing she remembers was that Sheppard had been with her. Will anything stop her from finding out what the heck is going on?
Acknowledgements: Thanks to coolbreeze1 for the very cool pic prompt and to my super beta editors:
amycat8733 and firedew1.
Written for: The sheppard_hc 2013 Summer Pic-Fic Challenge
---------------------------------------------------------
Chapter 3
Teyla clenched her jaw to stop her teeth from chattering. The slight vibrations she felt under her bare feet supported her hunch she had somehow been spirited away into the bowels of a space vessel-a large and, fortunately for her, sparsely inhabited one. Unfortunately, the vessel’s climate controls were not set at a temperature fit for humans, especially naked ones.
The only good thing about having no clothes that might rustle or boots that might thud was that she needed minimal effort to move silently. While that was a skill she had mastered since early adolescence, now her movements were alarmingly uncoordinated. She had already tripped twice on nothing but her own toes. Maybe her sluggishness was the effect of drugs still lingering in her system or a combination of the cold, sore muscles and multitude of body aches.
She stooped as she walked through the low rectangular passage. It was no wider than the space occupied by the three parallel rail tracks and the narrow corridor that ran between the tracks. The only light came from the hall she had just left and the one she would soon reach.
Fearful of being caught unaware by an approaching container or worse, she periodically glanced behind her shoulder. No signs of danger, so far.
At the end of the passage, she flattened herself against the wall and surveyed the next chamber. It was completely empty.
Similar to the room where she had woken up, this one had no visible doors, but unlike the other much larger room, the walls and ceiling here were lined by mirrored panels and the space was circular. In the middle of the floor the tracks split off in two directions. The two on her right continued straight and the other took a ninety-degree turn to the left.
Teyla mulled over her choices. She could follow the left track that had carried the container that she had escaped from or the two going straight, the direction she must have come from while unconscious. If she followed the left track, she might be able to stop anyone from discovering the broken container and hunting her down. But the passage straight in front of her held the potential for a much greater reward. It might lead her to somewhere in the vicinity of where she had been divested of her clothing and her weapons. Even better, in that direction she might encounter a container holding John. Until she found clear evidence to indicate otherwise, she would not even consider the possibility that he might have already been killed.
With a great sense of urgency, she opted to forge straight ahead. Her clumsiness gone, she moved lightly on the balls of her feet.
As she crossed the room, the sight of her tiny, distorted reflection multiplied to infinity was not as disconcerting as the sudden thought that someone might be watching her. Maybe her captors knew that she had escaped and they were just letting her think that she was free. Or, perhaps, they had such confidence in the devices and drugs they used to control their captives that they had not foreseen the need to outfit the interior of their vessel with surveillance equipment.
She much preferred the latter possibility.
As she traveled through the next passage, she tried to avoid distracting herself with speculations about the identity of the inhabitants of this vessel. Even though she had time for only a cursory examination of her surroundings, she had a strong feeling that they were not humans, Wraith, Ancients or any of the other sentient beings that she had encountered so far in her travels. Whoever they were, they apparently did not have much interest in nurturing friendly relations with other species.
Part of her dreaded meeting them, the other part wanted to kill them.
The next chamber also showed no signs of life. All four walls were occupied by instruments, some with blinking lights, others with monitors displaying colorful graphics of changing shapes and curves. The equipment reminded her a little of Carson Beckett’s or rather now Jennifer Keller’s laboratory. The main difference being the grander scale, vaster number and bolder color scheme of the ones here. The eye-jarring bright pinks, purples and blues were definitely beyond the muted palette that pervaded Atlantis.
In contrast to the eerie silence that she had encountered in the other parts of the ship, this room was filled by a cacophony of clicking, beeping and buzzing noises. Along one wall, formations of pinkie-finger slim, multicolored tubes were neatly lined up in racks that moved along a conveyor belt system until they were individually grabbed by multiple flexible appendages and inserted within the panels of a tall, egg-shaped machine. As each panel slid shut, pulses of green and magenta lights radiated upwards to a large flashing screen that fanned out from the tip of the egg.
Teyla wasted no time trying to make sense of the patterns of colors that advanced from right to left on the screen. Something else drew her attention.
A third of the way into the room, the twin tracks that she had been following vanished from sight within a horizontal, thick-walled, cobalt blue cylinder-its shape reminiscent of the MRI scanner that had been brought over from Earth before the scientists had learned the true versatility of the much more compact Ancient scanners.
The machinery at the rear of two transport containers protruded from the end closest to her. She could not see who lay within them. Her heart filled with the hope that she might have found John.
Even though she had no idea how long she might have to wait, she dismissed the inner voice of experience that shouted at her not stay in any one place for too long. This was a risk worth taking.
She hid behind a nearby array of floor-to-ceiling pipes and set herself to wait until the containers exited the giant scanner. She sat and wrapped her arms around her knees in an attempt to conserve heat.
After a while she had to rub and massage her arms to fight off the numbness. Her nose itched and she already had to snuff several incipient sneezes. At least her finger nails had not turned blue as of yet.
Interminable minutes passed until the lights on what she assumed was the scanner’s control panel flickered and shut off.
She sense Wraith before the containers moved on the rails and its two unconscious captives became visible to her eyes. Despite the disappointment, she was curious at the revelation that while it functioned, the machine had masked the Wraith presence from her senses. She filed that information away for the future.
The containers with the Wraith proceeded on their journey out of the room in the direction where she had come from. Teyla felt no pity for those two-the fewer Wraith, the better.
To avoid inadvertently activating a machine or alarm, she didn’t touch anything as she searched around for something to wear or use as a weapon, preferably both. If this room was the equivalent of a laboratory, there might be protective clothing or laboratory coats like the ones the scientists and medical personnel used in Atlantis. Even a blanket or drape would be nice.
She found nothing useful.
She went through the next passage even more quickly than the previous one. An ominous feeling in her gut was telling her to hurry or she would be too late. For what, she did not know.
Since there was no space between the rail tracks and the walls, she walked between the twin rails of one track. The soles of her feet had gotten used to the chill. Or maybe they had gone numb.
A sudden rush of colder air chilled her naked back. She jumped over to the other set of rails just in time before a container swooshed by. This one moved much faster than the others. She caught a flash of its occupant. It was neither human nor Wraith. She could not be certain, but it looked like one of the large, tree dwelling animals native to the planet her team had been visiting before everything went wrong. Before the four of them had gotten split up, John and Rodney had entertained themselves with obscure jokes about red-bottomed baboons, whatever those were. They had promised to show her and Ronon pictures and then the Wraith had appeared from nowhere.
She felt sorry for the creature, but she had to persevere onward. Her priorities were to find John, then Ronon and Rodney. The rescue of others would have to wait.
While she was definitely thankful that no one awake frequented these areas, the fact that she had yet to encounter a single crew member puzzled her. Did they ever use these passages? How many of the internal functions of this vessel were automated?
This part of the ship had been specifically set up to process captives, for a yet to be determined purpose, until they were disposed of like kitchen refuse. Everything she had seen so far looked like a larger, more automated version of the systems employed by the Hoffan scientists to handle the small animals they experimented on when they were developing their ill-advised drug. Were she and the Wraith supposed to be experimental subjects or food or what?
She again took every precaution to scout out the next chamber before entering it. Unlike the other rooms, this one had a distinguishable doorway. It was shut and it stood in the middle of the wall facing her. Four empty containers were stacked into two racks in the middle of the wide room, obscuring the view of its other half. Evenly spaced in front of each rack, there were two large hip-high oval pedestals. A fifth empty container sat on top of one pedestal; there was nothing on the other one. Each pedestal was flanked by a wheeled cube, similar in size to the utility carts used in the Atlantis infirmary, and a tall cone from whose tip protruded six long appendages.
Teyla did not have a chance to explore the room.
Without making a sound, a bright blue beam of light shot out from an indentation in the ceiling above the unoccupied pedestal. At the same time, she experienced a powerful resurgence of the headache that had persisted as a minor nuisance since she had regained consciousness.
Not knowing what to expect, she huddled behind the other pedestal. She hoped that if someone came they would not notice her immediately, giving her a chance to decide on a course of action.
The blue light spread to cover the entire surface of the pedestal. Then it began to pulse. Even though watching the strobe beam made her feel nauseous, Teyla forced herself to keep her eyes open. Whatever was happening was important.
Three things happened at once: The beam shut off; a familiar cold chill jarred her senses to high alert; and a motionless Wraith appeared sprawled on the pedestal.
What she had just witnessed had to be the result of something akin to Asgard beaming technology. That was how she had been brought into the ship.
In the time it took her to blink at the next sudden flash of blue light, the body disappeared and rematerialized within the container that stood on the pedestal next to her. Startled, she scooted away from it.
Then she saw that all of the Wraith’s clothes and gear had been left behind on the other pedestal, spread out in the same arrangement as they had been when worn by their owner.
No longer worried about staying out of sight of possible surveillance sensors, Teyla surged to her feet and bolted to grab the Wraith stunner. Before she had a chance to take anything else, the robotic arms adjoining each pedestal activated in a swirl of motion. Their clicking sounds reverberated in the otherwise quiet space. One set of tentacles inserted several thin tubes into the body of the newest captive; the other scooped up the Wraith’s uniform and gear, and placed them into a compartment that had opened at the top of the wheeled cart.
The compartment slid shut, its contents safe from Teyla’s reach unless she decided to do something drastic. In truth, she hadn’t been sure that she was desperate enough to wear a Wraith’s garments.
She slid her fingers along the gently curved line of the Wraith gun. She knew how to use it and if it ran out of charge it was the perfect length and weight for use in hand-to-hand combat. She was pleased with the choice she had made.
The cart rolled towards the exit. From a tiny opening in its front, an appendage telescoped out and touched a spot on the left side of doorway. It opened to reveal an empty rectangular space large enough to fit several people and service carts. It reminded Teyla of the transporters in Atlantis.
Having nothing to lose and everything to gain, she stepped into the transporter. The cart’s limber appendage touched the middle of a horizontal row of three buttons set on the transporter wall. In response, the door shut and she felt an upward movement. She adjusted her grip on the gun to get ready for whatever would come next.
A few seconds later the transporter opened its door. No one rushed out to apprehend her.
Instead, the cart rolled out at a leisurely pace into a room more brightly lit than the ones at the lower level. The air also smelled different, less stale but pungently unpleasant-an unrecognizable mix of odors from strong unnatural chemicals. Breathing it made her feel as if her nasal passages were being scoured by a metal bristle-brush. On the positive side, her sinuses immediately dried up despite the lingering chilly temperature.
The cart presented itself to another tentacle-cone machine which emptied it of its cargo and loaded it into a moving row of buckets that fed into a cabinet-sized instrument. Monitors lit up to show columns of scrolling incomprehensible characters. The device chirped and buzzed without revealing anything about its inner workings.
Rodney would surely have been fascinated by it. However, something more mundane drew Teyla’s attention to the first row of shelves that stood on the other side of the mysterious laboratory apparatus.
At one end of a neatly arranged line of Wraith footwear, her boots and John’s sat in plain view. As she stepped forward, she also noticed a bundle of Atlantis-black clothing on the shelf beneath the boots.
Caught in the excitement of her find, she almost did not hear the clacking sounds approaching from the far end of the room.
Go back to C hapter 1.