SGA: Hell, Rising From a Thousand Thrones (PG-13) 1/2
Title: Hell, Rising From a Thousand Thrones
Author: mad_maudlin
Fandom: SGA/SG1/Cthulhu Mythos mashup (thus very AU)
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Through "Grace Under Pressure" with a small one for "Enemy at the Gates."
Warnings: Disturbing imagery. See "fandom" above.
Summary: That is not dead which can eternal lie.
A/N: Endless thanks to marginaliana for beta-reading this ride. This is an AU that technically diverges after "Grace Under Pressure," though I'm also assuming that "Critical Mass" and some of the events of SG-1's "Heroes" did not happen, while other episodes are...different. The title is a quote from Edgar Alan Poe's "The City By the Sea;" there is also a quote from T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in here, woefully out of context. All the stuff that's hard to say comes courtesy of the R'lyehian word list at CthulhuWiki. All the other hard stuff came from Wikipedia. Finally, thanks to La Chatte Noir, whose Shadow over Atlantis series provided the initial inspiration for this fic, though as you'll see I've gone a very different direction with it.
Hell, Rising From a Thousand Thrones
By Mad Maudlin
It is a perennial weakness of humans not to think in three full dimensions. Even pilots are prone to those blind spots; even sailors are liable to take for granted the deck beneath their feet. It is a legacy of evolution that the children of apes rarely look higher than they can climb, except perhaps to gaze at the movable stars. And more rarely still does it occur to them to ever look down.
It was, in hindsight, foolish to look for lost Atlantis and then be surprised to find her underwater. Within their fragile shield they struggled to survive, but when the city rose they began to think in two dimensions again, to concern themselves with the gates and jumpers and attacks from above. They never thought twice about what else might've been on the ocean floor with them for those strange aeons. What else besides the water the shield was keeping out.
-\--\--\-
John dreamed of the ocean and woke up in the air. Hammocks were not kind to restless sleepers, and it took him more than a few moments to extract himself from his tangled blanket without just flopping out onto the gently sloping floor. The sky was barely lightened, and none of the other men in the barracks were awake yet; their own hammocks hung still and silent in the stuffy indoor air. Good. He slipped between the cocooned ranks and out of the room to put on his shoes, then carefully mounted the stairs to the tower's roof.
It was a good tower, one of the few really tall ones that was also particularly wide; it had a two-tiered top, kind of like the Sears Tower, only the lower tier was easily the size of a football field all by itself. John stretched and started jogging, building himself up to a run lap by lap as he thought with vague nostalgia of the wide corridors and endless galleries below. He kept his eyes on the ground ahead and ran until his legs ached and his lungs burned and he was drenched in good warm human sweat. He ran even though-and ran because-there wasn't really anywhere to go.
Fifteen feet below the sheer edge of the roof, the ocean rippled over balconies to lap at the ancient walls.
-\--\--\-
Perhaps the storm should have been their first warning, but neither Kate nor Carson had ever spoken of the rise in sleep disturbances and headaches in the days before and after, not until it was too late. There was doctor-patient confidentiality to consider. And anyway, all eyes were still skyward, concerned with Wraith and wind and waves.
When they did get to the outer piers to assess the structural damage, Rodney made a note to have an anthropologist examine the strange carvings and statuettes they found in pools of seawater-driftwood, coral, heavy yellow gold, a fortune in treasure for anyone who could bear to look at them for more than a few minutes. "Send all creepy stuff to soft science," was the actual text of the note, but by the time the nanovirus was neutralized, he had forgotten all about it, and the box ended up on a shelf in someone else's lab, perhaps forever.
-\--\--\-
After breakfast, John crossed the plank bridge to the medical unit. They'd put it in the highest tower after the central spire, as far above water as they could get, despite the resulting hours of schlepping food and water and laundry up and down the tilting stairs. Carson was taking his tea with one eye on the calm waters, now ashy gray under the clouds. "Morning, Doc."
"Colonel." Carson rubbed at his eyes and managed a weak smile. "No change, I'm afraid."
"Didn't expect one." He studied the dark rings until Carson's eyes. "Rough night?
"Is there any other?" Carson said, then winced. "Sorry. Yes. It was…yes."
"You don't have to apologize."
Carson gave John a piercing look in return. "And you? Is it getting any worse?"
He forced a weak smile. "Still here, right?"
"Aye." Carson looked back out on the water and the tops of Atlantean towers that broke its surface. "Still here."
John walked past the empty beds and one or two people getting over pneumonia to their improvised isolation room, a windowless space hung with uneven curtains that emphasized the angle of the floor. He'd kind of hoped that Elizabeth would be asleep, because those visits were always easier, but he'd had less and less luck recently. Maybe she no longer needed to sleep.
"Jooo-ooohn," she whispered even before he pushed the curtains aside. "Where were you, John?"
"Sorry," he said as he dropped onto the stool at her bedside. "I had to go pick up supplies on the mainland yesterday."
She laughed, harsh and dry, and moved under her damp sheets. "Last night, John," she said. "Where did you go? What deep houses did you visit?"
It was easier when she was asleep. It was easier when he could talk and create answers from the Elizabeth in his head, the one who still looked and acted like a normal human being. The old Elizabeth they'd plucked from the stasis chamber had been thoroughly crazy, but of course no one was supposed to stay in stasis for ten thousand years, so they hadn't paid attention when her ramblings went from time travel and ZPMs to eyes in the water. The stars are wrong, Old Elizabeth had told them. How much longer must he dream in the deeps? He waits and waits, but the stars have all gone wrong.
She'd been crazy, of course. But even at her fantastic age, she'd been human. Not this Elizabeth. Not anymore.
"The Athosians are doing okay," he said, determined to ignore how she squirmed against her restraints, how water from the sheets dripped onto the floor. "The tuttle is coming in, and the tava should be ready to harvest in a couple weeks. Zelenka fixed the generator thing, the one they asked about last week. Sounds like he and Lorne are both a little sweet on Marta, you know, the one with the-"
With a keening sound, Elizabeth jackknifed her whole body, rattling the bed frame and nearly tearing out her IV lines. "Please," she said, sounding almost normal for a moment. "Please, John, let me go. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
He very deliberately spread his hands and let them rest palm-down on his thighs. "Elizabeth, we talked about this. You gave me an order."
"Pleeeaaase," she asked. "I'm dying. I can feel it. Let me go before I die."
"You're not dying, Elizabeth."
Her eyes rolled and bulged. "Can't you hear it, John?" she whispered. "The singing, the calling…I know you can hear it. I know how deep you swim." She tossed her head and grinned angelically, horribly, as he fought the urge to curl his hands into fists. "He's calling us home, John. Why won't you let me go?"
"Colonel!"
He was off the stool with the call, maybe even before it. Carson and a nurse were leaning against the window with wide eyes, hands splayed against the glass. It was a few moments before John realized what they were watching for, but when he saw it he was briefly speechless, too.
An F-302 skimmed high against the bellies of the clouds.
-\--\--\-
Ford, at least, should have been adequate warning. They should have believed him. He'd been in the water, after all, and his eye-
They should have listened.
But with so much enzyme in his veins, he gave them excuses not to listen. Twitching, squirming, lashing out at shadows. "I heard it," he said, trying to warn them. "I still hear it. It's down there, in the dark, and it's waiting for us. If we don't do something soon, we won't have to worry about Wraith." And when they tried to tell him that there was nothing under Atlantis to fear, his eyes went narrow, and he looked on them like something less than human.
They should have listened.
Later, when he had captured John's team, he'd sworn that the enzyme was medicinal while he forced it into Rodney's veins, Teyla's, Ronon's. "I can smell it on you," Ford had said, one white eye rolling and bulging like an independent thing, flaring pearly like a cat's whenever the light hit the triangular pupil just right. "It's in the city now. But you don't have to worry, Major, 'cause I'm gonna fix it. I'm gonna burn it off of you with fire and air and then we'll take Atlantis back, and the first thing we do is drop a nuke straight down those bent black halls. Once we got enough enzyme, I'm gonna save you all."
Ford was crazy, of course. Ford was delusional. Ford died on a burning Hive ship so John didn't have to, and reminded him with his last words that the city had to be purged.
They should have listened.
-\--\--\-
The top of the central spire still gaped open to the air, but it was the only place the George Hammond could get a transporter lock. "Must be something in the water," John said, but nobody laughed.
Instead Cadman and Stackhouse helped them maneuver the rubber raft off the end of the balcony, and they held it steady while he and Carson climbed in. "You don't have to go alone, sir," Stackhouse said, passing the stubby plastic paddles over the railing.
"Or at all," Cadman added. "Sir."
John settled himself in the raft and tried not to flinch at the feeling of seawater seeping through his pants. "What are they gonna do, ferry people down in the 302s?" he asked. "Maybe they'll bring some kind of booster, let 'em get a lock on one of the other towers."
Cadman fidgeted with the frayed edge of her sleeve for a brief moment while Stackhouse passed over the tool kit. "Sir, if you don't come back…"
John used the oar to push off. "We're coming back, Lieutenant. Miller's in charge until then. Regular radio contact."
"Yes, sir," she said with a little frown, and gave a little wave that Carson did not return.
There was something filmy on the surface of the water, that was obvious; John wanted to ask if it was pollutants from inside the city, or maybe some kind of algae bloom encouraged by relative warmth of the water here, but Carson was kneeling with his eyes screwed shut like he might be sick if he actually tried to speak. So they rowed together, navigating around the other towers, the spires, the rooftops just beneath the surface that could've shredded their little raft if they ran aground. (Or would it be a-building?) The sky above was a uniform gray, matching the water below, and if there were lights below the surface John could tell himself they were chemical leaks, bioluminescent algae, exotic fish. Natural causes.
It took almost forty-five minutes to row around to a convenient balcony on the side of the spire. John clambered out, carefully, and helped Carson over the rail with the tool kit, and together they hauled the raft up out of the water and propped it against the wall, well away from the water's edge. Not that there were any tides or waves to snatch at it.
John was already opening the tool kit when Carson prodded the door controls, and surprisingly the doors slid open with only the slightest grinding noise. "Must be some residual power in the control crystals," John said.
"Aye," Carson said uneasily. "Residual power."
John pounded wedges into the place to jam the doors open, just in case, and then handed Carson the extra flashlight from the tool kit. The stairs began about fifty yards from the balcony doors, and seemed even more tilted than the ones John had grown used to climbing in the other towers. Going down, they vanished almost immediately into brackish water that smelled faintly of fish; dim red lights rippled up from some lower level to throw moving patterns on the walls.
"Residual power," John said again, then shouldered the tool kit as he and Carson headed up.
-\--\--\-
Old Elizabeth may have been stasis-crazy. Ford may have been addled by enzyme. But those weren't the only warnings they missed. They had watched the recording that explained why the Ancients had evacuated, but somehow never thought to ask why those Ancients chose to leave a city with a ten-thousand-year shield. A city with gardens and greenhouses enough to feed millions. A city that should have been safe in the sea.
They didn’t ask why Carson's gene therapy worked so well, nearly 100% effective and so safe that almost everyone volunteered to take it.
They didn't ask why, when the siege was lifted, the people who spent two months in Colorado and one in deep space dreamed nightly of the ocean and inhuman voices raised in song.
They didn't ask why John wasn't affected by the retrovirus that turned Elia into a monster. Why his wounds healed so quickly and without scars.
Then Rodney's jumper crashed into the Lantean ocean. John and Radek spent hours searching in a modified jumper, wiring a naqadah generator into the back when the shield depleted their power cells too quickly on the first try. They combed the ocean floor with a magnetic grapple and a modified sensor and a vague idea of where he should've gone down, coupled with the knowledge of how little time Rodney had to survive at that depth, in the pressure and cold.
"No life signs," Radek said when they finally zeroed in on the jumper's location, over two thousand feet down, on a ledge overlooking the endless black of the abyssal plain.
"You sure it's not just the shield messing with us?" John asked dully.
"No, I mean no life signs at all," Radek said. "No fish, no cephalopods…the only things large enough to register near the jumper are some deep-water corals."
John tightened his fists on the jumper controls. "So maybe the sensors are screwed up. Failing to catch the larger life signs."
"Colonel," Radek said softly, "the jumper is without power. Both compartments are completely flooded."
John still insisted on recovering the bodies. They extended the shield and walked across the squelching mud to the other jumper's rear hatch, and John groped for some method of manual release while Radek tried to tap its computer from without. C'mon, McKay, he thought. Pull one more miracle out of your ass. Don't let us down now.
Something thumped against the hatch from the inside. Radek was so started he dropped his stylus into the mud. "Life signs?" John demanded.
"None," Radek said. "No power."
"Sheppard to McKay," John barked into his radio.
"Colonel, there is no power-"
John went back to their jumper for a cutting torch. He had just hooked up the fuel tank, and was standing directly beneath the hatch, when it suddenly fell open. Icy seawater cascaded over him, stinging his eyes, while a powerful smell like fish filled their little bubble of air. He staggered back, coughing and choking, while the hatch sank into the mud. The first sound to be audible over the rush of water was a gurgling laugh, and then Radek's whimper as he pointed a flashlight into the depths of the jumper. John looked, and stared, as his brain refused to recognize the pallid thing in the shadows-a laughing, moving thing that didn't give off a life sign as it climbed to its ungainly feet-a slimy thing that wore a familiar uniform and spoke his name in a phlegmy whine. "Sheppard. Sheppard. Look at me, Sheppard."
That was when they started asking questions.
-\--\--\-
There was a puddle on the floor of the gate room, two inches deep against the stairs and coated with scum, but the water wasn't salty and John decided they'd just have to deal with it. He and Carson cleared the weathered debris from the floor as best they could and hit the radio. "Hammond, this is Atlantis. Ready when you are."
"Beaming now, Atlantis.
Five shapes flared and blossomed on the dirty deck, surrounded by backpacks and boxes. They were all wearing hazardous environment suits with fully self-contained respiration units, but the faceplates were clear enough for John to see them all flinch at him and Carson standing by. He knew why, even if he didn't look in the mirror much these days; they might not be as far gone as Elizabeth, but all the same, they were getting what the Athosians politely called the Atlantis Look.
"Welcome to Atlantis," John said, and held out a hand, mostly to show that it wasn't yet webbed. "I'm Lieutenant Colonel Sheppard, this is Dr. Beckett. Sorry the place is a mess, we've just been so busy lately…."
"Thanks for letting us in," one of the figures said, shaking with him through her heavy gloves. "Honestly, we weren't expecting to find any survivors."
He smiled, thinly. "We're tougher than we look."
"I'm Colonel Samantha Carter, commander of the Hammond," she continued. "These are the members of SG-1; the SGC sent them here on an information-gathering mission. Lieutenant Colonel Mitchell, Major Dr. Frasier, Dr. Jackson-I'm sure you met before the expedition left-and Teal'c."
"Dr. Frasier, it's been a long time," Carson said warmly. "I wish the circumstances were different."
The smallest of the HEV suits took a step forward. "Believe me, so do I."
"Wanna take this up to the briefing room, Colonel?" John asked. "We can fill you in on what we've learned since the IOA tried to kill us all."
That caused another round of flinching even though John had kept his tone mild. "Colonel Caldwell wasn't acting on the IOA's orders, Colonel Sheppard." Carter said. "He was possessed by a Goa'uld and working with an organization called the Trust. The attack here was their work; he originally reported back to us that Atlantis had initiated hostilities."
Carson's eyebrows rose. "When did you figure out the truth?"
"Not soon enough, unfortunately," Mitchell said darkly.
"Is that why it took you three years to come see if we're still alive?" John asked.
There was an awkward silence, before Carter said, "I can never apologize for what happened here, Colonel, but you know as well as I do that we can only move as fast as the IOA allows. We've been a bit busy back in the Milky Way ourselves, and we were not optimistic about survivors. Now, you said something about a briefing room?"
John turned away, splashing his way to the stairs without waiting to see if they followed.
-\--\--\-
When they brought what was left of Rodney to the city they were all slapped into quarantine, and by the time John got out he expected some kind of answers. Instead he found Carson and Elizabeth observing the isolation room and the huge Plexiglass tank of water they'd assembled inside.
"So what is it?" John asked.
Carson sighed and rubbed his eyes. "Genetically speaking, Colonel, that is Rodney McKay-for the most part."
"You said a retrovirus did this?" Elizabeth asked.
"I said it was like a retrovirus." Carson brought up some beautiful and incomprehensible diagrams on a laptop. "Something has made wholesale changes in Rodney's DNA that affect nearly every bone, muscle and organ in his body-is continuing to make changes, from what we can tell. But there isn't any evidence of a retrovirus in his bloodwork-not now and not in the last samples we took before the accident. Nor any sign that the colonel or Radek were exposed to anything unusual."
"So he just happened to grow gills while he was trapped down there," John said.
Carson just shook his head. Elizabeth, scratching idly at one arm, stared at the figure idly backstroking through the tank. "Can you do anything to reverse this?" she asked. "Engineer a counter-virus, maybe?"
"Aye, because that worked so well with Elia," Carson said gloomily. "I'm sorry, Elizabeth, but without knowing more about the foreign elements being inserted into his DNA there's damn little I can do to remove them, and even then I can't make any guarantees."
"So we learn more," John said. "I'll take the shielded jumper back down and we'll get some samples. Search the area around the crash site. There's got to be something down there that explains this."
Elizabeth slowly nodded, but said, "Not you, John. I don't want to risk the entire senior staff being compromised by this…whatever it is. Send another pilot and a marine biology team and make certain they use the highest-level quarantine protocols." She scratched her arm more fiercely than before.
While John relayed the orders, Carson asked Elizabeth, "Is there anything I can do for you?"
"No, no," she said. "I've already talked to Dr. Cole about it. Just a rash."
"If you're sure…"
"Captain Johanson and Dr. Angell are taking the jumper down," John informed them. "I told them we'd brief them in fifteen. But I got one more question first."
"That being?" Elizabeth asked.
John looked down on the figure in the dim water. "Anybody tried asking McKay what happened?"
-\--\--\-
"The reaction, whatever it is, seems to be catalyzed or accelerated by exposure to salt water," Carson said once they'd settled in the briefing room and forced open the doors for light. "It's an inconsistent connection, but the closest thing to causation we've yet to find. The initial symptoms are vivid, recurring dreams, followed by certain changes in bone structure and fat distribution, particularly in the head and neck region. In some cases hair loss or a skin condition similar to plaque psoriasis appears in the first stage, but otherwise it's largely benign. Some of us have carried on in this stage for years without any further progression."
SG-1 passed around the few photographs they had, and the sketches made by a couple of the more talented medical staff. "In the last report you filed, you indicated the condition progressed fairly rapidly once the patient entered a delusional state," Frasier commented.
Carson nodded. "There's actually a sharp drop in core body temperature that comes before the…psychological symptoms, but it's true that the second stage takes weeks to days-in a few extreme cases, mere hours. There's no particular sequence to the subsequent changes that I've been able to determine, but after a certain point it becomes difficult to keep the patient hydrated-except for the ganoid scales on the back and arms, their skin is thin and quite permeable. We simply haven't got the means to detain a large number of combative amphibians, so when the time comes we typically allow them to…take to the water."
Carter straightened in her seat. "You mean you release them into the wild?"
"Would you rather we build a giant aquarium?" John asked. "They're strong as a Wraith and as smart as they ever were. We work hard enough just staying alive out here; I'm not gonna waste resources keeping prisoners."
Mitchell cleared his throat. "I hate to put it this way, Sheppard, but why don't you just eliminate the threat?"
John's hands bunched into fists, but Carson answered for him. "I haven't yet given up hope on determining a cause or a cure, Colonel Mitchell. These people were our friends, our neighbors, our co-workers, once, and if you'd read Dr. Heightmeyer's report you'd know that whatever their mental state, much of their old identity persists. Killing them means we're giving up hope of bringing them back."
"We've got a suicide rate of about one in six as it is," John added, "and Dr. Weir and I have given standing orders that we're not allowed to leave the surface, but otherwise there isn't much point. It's not like they're going real far, anyway."
"You know where they're going?" Jackson asked warily.
Carson laid out a hand-drawn map on the table. "Almost all of the ones who've taken to water still have their subcutaneous transmitters. We can't track them very well in the depths, obviously, but we've picked up intermittent readings from the abyssal plain structure that suggest some of them congregate there, at least part-time. A few others we've spotted on the shelf, near the barrier islands."
"And the rest?"
"Downstairs," John said, and when he met blank looks he clarified. "They're still in Atlantis."
-\--\--\-
They put on the cameras and the microphones and the sensors. John entered the isolation room and said, "Rodney."
The thing in the tank didn't move at first, and John found himself irrationally hoping that it couldn't hear him, wouldn't react. Or maybe it was dead, like the sensors seemed to think. But then the lidless eyes turned to look at him, and the mouth curled into a grin even while it gulped water through its gills. In a motion that made it seem weightless, it flipped its body and rose smoothly to the surface. "Sheppard," it said. "Been waiting for you to come back."
It still looked like Rodney. Kind of. John couldn't decide if he resented that or not. "Been a bit busy since we got back to the city," John said, and tried to sit on a stool without twisting his containment suit around. "How're you feeling?"
It giggled again, a thin, almost squealing sound, and flopped back on its back. "Feeling. Feeee-ling. That's not what you really want to ask, Sheppard."
"I want to know what happened in the jumper," he said.
It suddenly flipped again and pressed close to the side of the tank, making wet noises where its pale, flabby body slid against the glass. John didn't look away; John had evacuated battlefield casualties and never looked away. "You want to know what happened to me," it said. "You want to know if I'm still human, and if I'm still Rodney McKay, and if you can change me back." It punctuated each point with a dramatic slap of its paw. "And those are the wrong questions."
"So what are the right ones?" John asked it.
That grin again, so horribly wide. "Who else, and how soon?" it asked, and then sank beneath the water once again.
-\--\--\-
"We think this may have happened on Earth," Jackson said, and that changed everything.
"You mean it spread?" Carson asked incredulously. "But we followed quarantine procedures-"
Carter held up her hand. "What Daniel means is that we've found evidence of an isolated outbreak, a long time ago, very similar to this."
"Two outbreaks, actually," Jackson corrected.
"You think," Mitchell added.
"Let the man talk," John said, and Mitchell backed down.
Jackson took a deep breath that rattled the little microphone in his suit. "It turns out that in 1928 the Treasury Department raided a small town in eastern Massachusetts called Innsmouth. Officially they were breaking up a very profitable bootlegging ring, but they ended up arresting basically the entire population, and afterwards all the records were sealed. It turns out that the 'bootleggers' were members of a cult who claimed to worship an avatar of the Phoenician fish god Dagon, which is actually how the information came to us-someone suspected it might've been Goa'uld-related."
"Most of the adult cultists showed the same first-stage physical symptoms as members of the Atlantis expedition," Frasier said. "A few bodies were recovered that showed signs of ongoing second-stage transformations as well-autopsies conducted at Miskatonic Univeristy found the same changes in blood chemistry, the altered eye anatomy, the retracted genitalia and the fat pockets in the skull-we think that allows the jawbone to transmit low-frequency sound waves to the inner ear."
"We had the same conclusion," Carson said, still dull with surprise. "Dolphins have a similar adaptation."
What John wanted to know was, "How is that possible?"
"The cult members claimed," Jackson said slowly, "that they learned about Dagon from an amphibious humanoid species they called the 'Deep Ones.' These Deep Ones supposedly brought the town gold artifacts and particularly rich fishing in exchange for human sacrifices." He paused. "Cult members also claimed to have interbred with Deep Ones, which is how they explained their physical states."
Carson shook his head. "There's no indication that the altered patients would still be interfertile with normal humans."
"But it would sure be a great chance to pass along an infection," John pointed out, causing more than one person to make a face.
Jackson seemed to wave that mental image with one hand. "The point is," he said, "there were certain key words mentioned in the Innsmouth files that stuck out to me. The cult members claimed that the Deep Ones lived in an offshore colony-which was dynamited back to the Stone Age without any investigation, apparently-but that they originated in the South Pacific in an underwater city inhabited by some kind of sleeping god even more powerful than Dagon.
"Now, if you allow for a little variation in spelling," and here he gave a sidelong look at Mitchell that the other man missed, "the same city and the same powerful entity are also mentioned in a few Ancient inscriptions we've found around the Milky Way, and in the Asgard database-warnings about planets that should never be visited, technology that should never be used, a devastating war that took place even before the Ancients were on the scene. The names that recur in the Innsmouth files are...well, the Ancient names are 'Relex' and 'Ctalul,' but the Massachusetts investigators transcribed them as 'Rilyah' and 'Kuthluhluh.'"
The hair on the back of John's neck stood up. The words sounded wrong in Jackson's mouth, too open and flat, but still somehow horribly familiar. "Cthulhu," he corrected almost automatically.
Jackson blinked at him. "I'm sorry?"
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn," John said slowly, and when he shut his eyes against a wave of vertigo he saw the ocean, the velvet black of the deeps, the silver halls of sunken Atlantis and some place much, much darker. He could hear those words echo back to him, not just from his dreams but from Carson's mouth-still not quite right, not the same, but closer than anyone above the water line was going to manage. Except maybe Elizabeth.
The words were met with silence, and when John dared open his eyes he found five shocked faces staring out from behind their faceplates. Even Teal'c's eyes had gone slightly wide. Mitchell coughed noisily and squirmed in his chair. "Okay," he said, "so Daniel is maybe onto something there."
-\--\--\-
The marine biology team went down in the shielded jumper, and Zelenka had the idea to string a radio repeater to that thousand-foot cable. "It won't increase the range greatly, but it certainly cannot hurt," he pointed out. "We can fix a, a sort of balloon to it, so it stays pointed to the surface. They'll still be out of range when they arrive at the crash site-"
"What if there's a second jumper?" John asked. "They could park it at nine hundred feet, and relay the signal to us until the shielded one hits…what, three thousand feet total?"
"Less that that," Zelenka admitted, but the wreckage was at two thousand five, so John gave the orders.
"We're approaching the wreck," they reported. "No abnormal energy readings. Biomass seems normal for this depth-just spotted one hell of a swordfish! I guess whatever scared the wildlife off earlier is, uh, well, for all we know it's back in Atlantis…sorry, not funny, I know. We're taking a water sample and moving on."
"Okay, we're over the continental rise," they said. "Four thousand feet of water below us, but the sensors are picking up a mass on the abyssal plain. Funny, it falls on a straight line between the wreck and Atlantis. Uhm…hard to tell from this depth, but I'd guess the mass isn't naturally-occurring…there's something about the shape that seems man-made. Could be wreckage from the first Wraith war, could be an Ancient facility…preparing to go deeper."
"Request permission to go deeper, Atlantis," they announced. "The structure on the sea floor is definitely…well, not natural. Legrasse here seems to think it's some kind of nautilus shell, but if it is it's the size of an aircraft carrier. Sensors aren't making any sense from up here, so we'd like to head down and take a closer look…as long as the shielding holds out, of course."
Two hours later, the support jumper picked up a deep-sea explosion and a databurst from the radio repeater. Not long after, it picked up the repeater, and four hundred feet of cable sheared off at one end. It took twenty-four hours more to extract anything usable from the burst, by which point, of course, it was already too late.
"Approaching the structure…power levels stable for now. Holy Hannah, that's…ugh…that's not possible. The sensor data doesn't make any sense. It's like looking into an M. C. Escher print. How is this possible? At least we're not in visual yet…water's awful cloudy. Maybe some kind of turbidity current-
"-thousand feet and holding. My god. You could sink Atlantis here and forget where you parked. What? Oh, yes…scanning…no energy readings, no life signs. You'd think something this big would have life signs, even this deep-"
"-shut up already, just looking at the place gives me a headache-"
"-these carvings, send 'em up to Anthro. Maybe we found the Furlings, heh? …nah, don't really think so either. Something about this place feels…different. That's all I'm saying, diff-"
"-that? No, seriously, what was that? Fuck the sensors, I know what I saw! Can't you turn up the headlamps on this thing--?"
"-oh god oh god oh god-"
"-dozens of them! Where the hell are the life signs? Why don't they have life signs?"
"-at's it, firing the drones-"
"-rist, what is that thing? What've we do-"
"-riffin?"
"-into a bomb, and we're gonna fly right up that thing's cloaca, and if anybody on Atlantis hears this I'm sorry, so goddamn sorry-"
"-oh, god, it's still alive-"
-\--\--\-
Carter returned to her ship, eventually, and Carson went with Frasier and Mitchell to start collecting their samples-air and water, skin and blood. That left John to lead Jackson and Teal'c back down the winding stairs to the hologram room. "I hadn't realized the city sank so low," Jackson commented as they negotiated a particularly tilted flight of stairs that ended in stagnant water.
"It didn't, at first," John explained with one eye on a scanner. "We fetched up on the edge of the continental shelf, and we've been sliding off by a couple inches a year ever since."
"That's…wow," Jackson said weakly. "How long before you end up in the ocean floor?"
He shrugged. "Geology and Oceanography have been fighting over that for a while now. Maybe next week, maybe another century or two."
"Can the city survive such an event?" Teal'c asked.
John just shrugged again. They'd calculated during the siege that multiple nukes wouldn't vaporize the city, but he didn't think they could tumble another mile or so into the ocean without a scratch, either. (Part of him feared it would destroy Atlantis. Another part feared that it wouldn't.)
-\--\--\-
There was something wrong with Chuck. John hadn't noticed it before, or maybe he'd noticed it and managed to blame it on the gateroom lighting or a different haircut or his own tired eyes. But while Elizabeth and Landry argued about quarantining the city, John kept his eyes on Chuck, who kept rubbing his pale face with pale hands, rubbing his eyes.
"How can you quarantine against something that doesn't actually exist?" Landry was asking.
"We have no way of knowing that Dr. McKay wasn't exposed inside the city before the crash," Elizabeth said. "We have no way of knowing who else might've been exposed in the same period or since his recovery. And we still don't know what, if anything, that mass on the sea floor has to do with all of this. Until we can answer those questions, we can't take the risk of exposing anyone else."
"The Daedalus is going to need to take on supplies when it arrives," Landry reminded them.
"And the Athosians need supplies now," Elizabeth said. "And we've got six off-world teams waiting at the Alpha Site indefinitely. I know what I'm doing, Hank."
"I hope so, for the sake of your job, Dr. Weir. I'll see if we can notify Colonel Caldwell before he leaves the galaxy."
"Thank you, General." Elizabeth barely glanced at Chuck as the video link fritzed out. "Shut it down."
Chuck remained still at his post, rubbing his eyes.
"Sergeant Campbell," John said more firmly. "Shut down the gate."
Chuck started. "Oh! Sorry, sir. Ma'am."
John watched him enter the commands. Was he paler than normal? Had he put on weight? "Everything okay, Sergeant?" he asked quietly.
"Yes, sir," Chuck said. "Just feeling a little...off, sir."
And when he looked up at John, his eyes caught the light, and there was a pearly glow from inside his right pupil, like a cat in the darkness. Just the right side. Just when he held his head the right way. John swallowed. "You're relieved of duty, Sergeant."
"Sir?" Chuck asked, frowning.
"Go get yourself checked out by Dr. Beckett," he said. "That's an order."
Elizabeth turned away from Zelenka to watch Chuck leave the control room. "Something the matter?" she asked John.
He found he couldn't look her in the eye. "Maybe."
Part Two
Author: mad_maudlin
Fandom: SGA/SG1/Cthulhu Mythos mashup (thus very AU)
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Through "Grace Under Pressure" with a small one for "Enemy at the Gates."
Warnings: Disturbing imagery. See "fandom" above.
Summary: That is not dead which can eternal lie.
A/N: Endless thanks to marginaliana for beta-reading this ride. This is an AU that technically diverges after "Grace Under Pressure," though I'm also assuming that "Critical Mass" and some of the events of SG-1's "Heroes" did not happen, while other episodes are...different. The title is a quote from Edgar Alan Poe's "The City By the Sea;" there is also a quote from T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in here, woefully out of context. All the stuff that's hard to say comes courtesy of the R'lyehian word list at CthulhuWiki. All the other hard stuff came from Wikipedia. Finally, thanks to La Chatte Noir, whose Shadow over Atlantis series provided the initial inspiration for this fic, though as you'll see I've gone a very different direction with it.
Hell, Rising From a Thousand Thrones
By Mad Maudlin
It is a perennial weakness of humans not to think in three full dimensions. Even pilots are prone to those blind spots; even sailors are liable to take for granted the deck beneath their feet. It is a legacy of evolution that the children of apes rarely look higher than they can climb, except perhaps to gaze at the movable stars. And more rarely still does it occur to them to ever look down.
It was, in hindsight, foolish to look for lost Atlantis and then be surprised to find her underwater. Within their fragile shield they struggled to survive, but when the city rose they began to think in two dimensions again, to concern themselves with the gates and jumpers and attacks from above. They never thought twice about what else might've been on the ocean floor with them for those strange aeons. What else besides the water the shield was keeping out.
-\--\--\-
John dreamed of the ocean and woke up in the air. Hammocks were not kind to restless sleepers, and it took him more than a few moments to extract himself from his tangled blanket without just flopping out onto the gently sloping floor. The sky was barely lightened, and none of the other men in the barracks were awake yet; their own hammocks hung still and silent in the stuffy indoor air. Good. He slipped between the cocooned ranks and out of the room to put on his shoes, then carefully mounted the stairs to the tower's roof.
It was a good tower, one of the few really tall ones that was also particularly wide; it had a two-tiered top, kind of like the Sears Tower, only the lower tier was easily the size of a football field all by itself. John stretched and started jogging, building himself up to a run lap by lap as he thought with vague nostalgia of the wide corridors and endless galleries below. He kept his eyes on the ground ahead and ran until his legs ached and his lungs burned and he was drenched in good warm human sweat. He ran even though-and ran because-there wasn't really anywhere to go.
Fifteen feet below the sheer edge of the roof, the ocean rippled over balconies to lap at the ancient walls.
-\--\--\-
Perhaps the storm should have been their first warning, but neither Kate nor Carson had ever spoken of the rise in sleep disturbances and headaches in the days before and after, not until it was too late. There was doctor-patient confidentiality to consider. And anyway, all eyes were still skyward, concerned with Wraith and wind and waves.
When they did get to the outer piers to assess the structural damage, Rodney made a note to have an anthropologist examine the strange carvings and statuettes they found in pools of seawater-driftwood, coral, heavy yellow gold, a fortune in treasure for anyone who could bear to look at them for more than a few minutes. "Send all creepy stuff to soft science," was the actual text of the note, but by the time the nanovirus was neutralized, he had forgotten all about it, and the box ended up on a shelf in someone else's lab, perhaps forever.
-\--\--\-
After breakfast, John crossed the plank bridge to the medical unit. They'd put it in the highest tower after the central spire, as far above water as they could get, despite the resulting hours of schlepping food and water and laundry up and down the tilting stairs. Carson was taking his tea with one eye on the calm waters, now ashy gray under the clouds. "Morning, Doc."
"Colonel." Carson rubbed at his eyes and managed a weak smile. "No change, I'm afraid."
"Didn't expect one." He studied the dark rings until Carson's eyes. "Rough night?
"Is there any other?" Carson said, then winced. "Sorry. Yes. It was…yes."
"You don't have to apologize."
Carson gave John a piercing look in return. "And you? Is it getting any worse?"
He forced a weak smile. "Still here, right?"
"Aye." Carson looked back out on the water and the tops of Atlantean towers that broke its surface. "Still here."
John walked past the empty beds and one or two people getting over pneumonia to their improvised isolation room, a windowless space hung with uneven curtains that emphasized the angle of the floor. He'd kind of hoped that Elizabeth would be asleep, because those visits were always easier, but he'd had less and less luck recently. Maybe she no longer needed to sleep.
"Jooo-ooohn," she whispered even before he pushed the curtains aside. "Where were you, John?"
"Sorry," he said as he dropped onto the stool at her bedside. "I had to go pick up supplies on the mainland yesterday."
She laughed, harsh and dry, and moved under her damp sheets. "Last night, John," she said. "Where did you go? What deep houses did you visit?"
It was easier when she was asleep. It was easier when he could talk and create answers from the Elizabeth in his head, the one who still looked and acted like a normal human being. The old Elizabeth they'd plucked from the stasis chamber had been thoroughly crazy, but of course no one was supposed to stay in stasis for ten thousand years, so they hadn't paid attention when her ramblings went from time travel and ZPMs to eyes in the water. The stars are wrong, Old Elizabeth had told them. How much longer must he dream in the deeps? He waits and waits, but the stars have all gone wrong.
She'd been crazy, of course. But even at her fantastic age, she'd been human. Not this Elizabeth. Not anymore.
"The Athosians are doing okay," he said, determined to ignore how she squirmed against her restraints, how water from the sheets dripped onto the floor. "The tuttle is coming in, and the tava should be ready to harvest in a couple weeks. Zelenka fixed the generator thing, the one they asked about last week. Sounds like he and Lorne are both a little sweet on Marta, you know, the one with the-"
With a keening sound, Elizabeth jackknifed her whole body, rattling the bed frame and nearly tearing out her IV lines. "Please," she said, sounding almost normal for a moment. "Please, John, let me go. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
He very deliberately spread his hands and let them rest palm-down on his thighs. "Elizabeth, we talked about this. You gave me an order."
"Pleeeaaase," she asked. "I'm dying. I can feel it. Let me go before I die."
"You're not dying, Elizabeth."
Her eyes rolled and bulged. "Can't you hear it, John?" she whispered. "The singing, the calling…I know you can hear it. I know how deep you swim." She tossed her head and grinned angelically, horribly, as he fought the urge to curl his hands into fists. "He's calling us home, John. Why won't you let me go?"
"Colonel!"
He was off the stool with the call, maybe even before it. Carson and a nurse were leaning against the window with wide eyes, hands splayed against the glass. It was a few moments before John realized what they were watching for, but when he saw it he was briefly speechless, too.
An F-302 skimmed high against the bellies of the clouds.
-\--\--\-
Ford, at least, should have been adequate warning. They should have believed him. He'd been in the water, after all, and his eye-
They should have listened.
But with so much enzyme in his veins, he gave them excuses not to listen. Twitching, squirming, lashing out at shadows. "I heard it," he said, trying to warn them. "I still hear it. It's down there, in the dark, and it's waiting for us. If we don't do something soon, we won't have to worry about Wraith." And when they tried to tell him that there was nothing under Atlantis to fear, his eyes went narrow, and he looked on them like something less than human.
They should have listened.
Later, when he had captured John's team, he'd sworn that the enzyme was medicinal while he forced it into Rodney's veins, Teyla's, Ronon's. "I can smell it on you," Ford had said, one white eye rolling and bulging like an independent thing, flaring pearly like a cat's whenever the light hit the triangular pupil just right. "It's in the city now. But you don't have to worry, Major, 'cause I'm gonna fix it. I'm gonna burn it off of you with fire and air and then we'll take Atlantis back, and the first thing we do is drop a nuke straight down those bent black halls. Once we got enough enzyme, I'm gonna save you all."
Ford was crazy, of course. Ford was delusional. Ford died on a burning Hive ship so John didn't have to, and reminded him with his last words that the city had to be purged.
They should have listened.
-\--\--\-
The top of the central spire still gaped open to the air, but it was the only place the George Hammond could get a transporter lock. "Must be something in the water," John said, but nobody laughed.
Instead Cadman and Stackhouse helped them maneuver the rubber raft off the end of the balcony, and they held it steady while he and Carson climbed in. "You don't have to go alone, sir," Stackhouse said, passing the stubby plastic paddles over the railing.
"Or at all," Cadman added. "Sir."
John settled himself in the raft and tried not to flinch at the feeling of seawater seeping through his pants. "What are they gonna do, ferry people down in the 302s?" he asked. "Maybe they'll bring some kind of booster, let 'em get a lock on one of the other towers."
Cadman fidgeted with the frayed edge of her sleeve for a brief moment while Stackhouse passed over the tool kit. "Sir, if you don't come back…"
John used the oar to push off. "We're coming back, Lieutenant. Miller's in charge until then. Regular radio contact."
"Yes, sir," she said with a little frown, and gave a little wave that Carson did not return.
There was something filmy on the surface of the water, that was obvious; John wanted to ask if it was pollutants from inside the city, or maybe some kind of algae bloom encouraged by relative warmth of the water here, but Carson was kneeling with his eyes screwed shut like he might be sick if he actually tried to speak. So they rowed together, navigating around the other towers, the spires, the rooftops just beneath the surface that could've shredded their little raft if they ran aground. (Or would it be a-building?) The sky above was a uniform gray, matching the water below, and if there were lights below the surface John could tell himself they were chemical leaks, bioluminescent algae, exotic fish. Natural causes.
It took almost forty-five minutes to row around to a convenient balcony on the side of the spire. John clambered out, carefully, and helped Carson over the rail with the tool kit, and together they hauled the raft up out of the water and propped it against the wall, well away from the water's edge. Not that there were any tides or waves to snatch at it.
John was already opening the tool kit when Carson prodded the door controls, and surprisingly the doors slid open with only the slightest grinding noise. "Must be some residual power in the control crystals," John said.
"Aye," Carson said uneasily. "Residual power."
John pounded wedges into the place to jam the doors open, just in case, and then handed Carson the extra flashlight from the tool kit. The stairs began about fifty yards from the balcony doors, and seemed even more tilted than the ones John had grown used to climbing in the other towers. Going down, they vanished almost immediately into brackish water that smelled faintly of fish; dim red lights rippled up from some lower level to throw moving patterns on the walls.
"Residual power," John said again, then shouldered the tool kit as he and Carson headed up.
-\--\--\-
Old Elizabeth may have been stasis-crazy. Ford may have been addled by enzyme. But those weren't the only warnings they missed. They had watched the recording that explained why the Ancients had evacuated, but somehow never thought to ask why those Ancients chose to leave a city with a ten-thousand-year shield. A city with gardens and greenhouses enough to feed millions. A city that should have been safe in the sea.
They didn’t ask why Carson's gene therapy worked so well, nearly 100% effective and so safe that almost everyone volunteered to take it.
They didn't ask why, when the siege was lifted, the people who spent two months in Colorado and one in deep space dreamed nightly of the ocean and inhuman voices raised in song.
They didn't ask why John wasn't affected by the retrovirus that turned Elia into a monster. Why his wounds healed so quickly and without scars.
Then Rodney's jumper crashed into the Lantean ocean. John and Radek spent hours searching in a modified jumper, wiring a naqadah generator into the back when the shield depleted their power cells too quickly on the first try. They combed the ocean floor with a magnetic grapple and a modified sensor and a vague idea of where he should've gone down, coupled with the knowledge of how little time Rodney had to survive at that depth, in the pressure and cold.
"No life signs," Radek said when they finally zeroed in on the jumper's location, over two thousand feet down, on a ledge overlooking the endless black of the abyssal plain.
"You sure it's not just the shield messing with us?" John asked dully.
"No, I mean no life signs at all," Radek said. "No fish, no cephalopods…the only things large enough to register near the jumper are some deep-water corals."
John tightened his fists on the jumper controls. "So maybe the sensors are screwed up. Failing to catch the larger life signs."
"Colonel," Radek said softly, "the jumper is without power. Both compartments are completely flooded."
John still insisted on recovering the bodies. They extended the shield and walked across the squelching mud to the other jumper's rear hatch, and John groped for some method of manual release while Radek tried to tap its computer from without. C'mon, McKay, he thought. Pull one more miracle out of your ass. Don't let us down now.
Something thumped against the hatch from the inside. Radek was so started he dropped his stylus into the mud. "Life signs?" John demanded.
"None," Radek said. "No power."
"Sheppard to McKay," John barked into his radio.
"Colonel, there is no power-"
John went back to their jumper for a cutting torch. He had just hooked up the fuel tank, and was standing directly beneath the hatch, when it suddenly fell open. Icy seawater cascaded over him, stinging his eyes, while a powerful smell like fish filled their little bubble of air. He staggered back, coughing and choking, while the hatch sank into the mud. The first sound to be audible over the rush of water was a gurgling laugh, and then Radek's whimper as he pointed a flashlight into the depths of the jumper. John looked, and stared, as his brain refused to recognize the pallid thing in the shadows-a laughing, moving thing that didn't give off a life sign as it climbed to its ungainly feet-a slimy thing that wore a familiar uniform and spoke his name in a phlegmy whine. "Sheppard. Sheppard. Look at me, Sheppard."
That was when they started asking questions.
-\--\--\-
There was a puddle on the floor of the gate room, two inches deep against the stairs and coated with scum, but the water wasn't salty and John decided they'd just have to deal with it. He and Carson cleared the weathered debris from the floor as best they could and hit the radio. "Hammond, this is Atlantis. Ready when you are."
"Beaming now, Atlantis.
Five shapes flared and blossomed on the dirty deck, surrounded by backpacks and boxes. They were all wearing hazardous environment suits with fully self-contained respiration units, but the faceplates were clear enough for John to see them all flinch at him and Carson standing by. He knew why, even if he didn't look in the mirror much these days; they might not be as far gone as Elizabeth, but all the same, they were getting what the Athosians politely called the Atlantis Look.
"Welcome to Atlantis," John said, and held out a hand, mostly to show that it wasn't yet webbed. "I'm Lieutenant Colonel Sheppard, this is Dr. Beckett. Sorry the place is a mess, we've just been so busy lately…."
"Thanks for letting us in," one of the figures said, shaking with him through her heavy gloves. "Honestly, we weren't expecting to find any survivors."
He smiled, thinly. "We're tougher than we look."
"I'm Colonel Samantha Carter, commander of the Hammond," she continued. "These are the members of SG-1; the SGC sent them here on an information-gathering mission. Lieutenant Colonel Mitchell, Major Dr. Frasier, Dr. Jackson-I'm sure you met before the expedition left-and Teal'c."
"Dr. Frasier, it's been a long time," Carson said warmly. "I wish the circumstances were different."
The smallest of the HEV suits took a step forward. "Believe me, so do I."
"Wanna take this up to the briefing room, Colonel?" John asked. "We can fill you in on what we've learned since the IOA tried to kill us all."
That caused another round of flinching even though John had kept his tone mild. "Colonel Caldwell wasn't acting on the IOA's orders, Colonel Sheppard." Carter said. "He was possessed by a Goa'uld and working with an organization called the Trust. The attack here was their work; he originally reported back to us that Atlantis had initiated hostilities."
Carson's eyebrows rose. "When did you figure out the truth?"
"Not soon enough, unfortunately," Mitchell said darkly.
"Is that why it took you three years to come see if we're still alive?" John asked.
There was an awkward silence, before Carter said, "I can never apologize for what happened here, Colonel, but you know as well as I do that we can only move as fast as the IOA allows. We've been a bit busy back in the Milky Way ourselves, and we were not optimistic about survivors. Now, you said something about a briefing room?"
John turned away, splashing his way to the stairs without waiting to see if they followed.
-\--\--\-
When they brought what was left of Rodney to the city they were all slapped into quarantine, and by the time John got out he expected some kind of answers. Instead he found Carson and Elizabeth observing the isolation room and the huge Plexiglass tank of water they'd assembled inside.
"So what is it?" John asked.
Carson sighed and rubbed his eyes. "Genetically speaking, Colonel, that is Rodney McKay-for the most part."
"You said a retrovirus did this?" Elizabeth asked.
"I said it was like a retrovirus." Carson brought up some beautiful and incomprehensible diagrams on a laptop. "Something has made wholesale changes in Rodney's DNA that affect nearly every bone, muscle and organ in his body-is continuing to make changes, from what we can tell. But there isn't any evidence of a retrovirus in his bloodwork-not now and not in the last samples we took before the accident. Nor any sign that the colonel or Radek were exposed to anything unusual."
"So he just happened to grow gills while he was trapped down there," John said.
Carson just shook his head. Elizabeth, scratching idly at one arm, stared at the figure idly backstroking through the tank. "Can you do anything to reverse this?" she asked. "Engineer a counter-virus, maybe?"
"Aye, because that worked so well with Elia," Carson said gloomily. "I'm sorry, Elizabeth, but without knowing more about the foreign elements being inserted into his DNA there's damn little I can do to remove them, and even then I can't make any guarantees."
"So we learn more," John said. "I'll take the shielded jumper back down and we'll get some samples. Search the area around the crash site. There's got to be something down there that explains this."
Elizabeth slowly nodded, but said, "Not you, John. I don't want to risk the entire senior staff being compromised by this…whatever it is. Send another pilot and a marine biology team and make certain they use the highest-level quarantine protocols." She scratched her arm more fiercely than before.
While John relayed the orders, Carson asked Elizabeth, "Is there anything I can do for you?"
"No, no," she said. "I've already talked to Dr. Cole about it. Just a rash."
"If you're sure…"
"Captain Johanson and Dr. Angell are taking the jumper down," John informed them. "I told them we'd brief them in fifteen. But I got one more question first."
"That being?" Elizabeth asked.
John looked down on the figure in the dim water. "Anybody tried asking McKay what happened?"
-\--\--\-
"The reaction, whatever it is, seems to be catalyzed or accelerated by exposure to salt water," Carson said once they'd settled in the briefing room and forced open the doors for light. "It's an inconsistent connection, but the closest thing to causation we've yet to find. The initial symptoms are vivid, recurring dreams, followed by certain changes in bone structure and fat distribution, particularly in the head and neck region. In some cases hair loss or a skin condition similar to plaque psoriasis appears in the first stage, but otherwise it's largely benign. Some of us have carried on in this stage for years without any further progression."
SG-1 passed around the few photographs they had, and the sketches made by a couple of the more talented medical staff. "In the last report you filed, you indicated the condition progressed fairly rapidly once the patient entered a delusional state," Frasier commented.
Carson nodded. "There's actually a sharp drop in core body temperature that comes before the…psychological symptoms, but it's true that the second stage takes weeks to days-in a few extreme cases, mere hours. There's no particular sequence to the subsequent changes that I've been able to determine, but after a certain point it becomes difficult to keep the patient hydrated-except for the ganoid scales on the back and arms, their skin is thin and quite permeable. We simply haven't got the means to detain a large number of combative amphibians, so when the time comes we typically allow them to…take to the water."
Carter straightened in her seat. "You mean you release them into the wild?"
"Would you rather we build a giant aquarium?" John asked. "They're strong as a Wraith and as smart as they ever were. We work hard enough just staying alive out here; I'm not gonna waste resources keeping prisoners."
Mitchell cleared his throat. "I hate to put it this way, Sheppard, but why don't you just eliminate the threat?"
John's hands bunched into fists, but Carson answered for him. "I haven't yet given up hope on determining a cause or a cure, Colonel Mitchell. These people were our friends, our neighbors, our co-workers, once, and if you'd read Dr. Heightmeyer's report you'd know that whatever their mental state, much of their old identity persists. Killing them means we're giving up hope of bringing them back."
"We've got a suicide rate of about one in six as it is," John added, "and Dr. Weir and I have given standing orders that we're not allowed to leave the surface, but otherwise there isn't much point. It's not like they're going real far, anyway."
"You know where they're going?" Jackson asked warily.
Carson laid out a hand-drawn map on the table. "Almost all of the ones who've taken to water still have their subcutaneous transmitters. We can't track them very well in the depths, obviously, but we've picked up intermittent readings from the abyssal plain structure that suggest some of them congregate there, at least part-time. A few others we've spotted on the shelf, near the barrier islands."
"And the rest?"
"Downstairs," John said, and when he met blank looks he clarified. "They're still in Atlantis."
-\--\--\-
They put on the cameras and the microphones and the sensors. John entered the isolation room and said, "Rodney."
The thing in the tank didn't move at first, and John found himself irrationally hoping that it couldn't hear him, wouldn't react. Or maybe it was dead, like the sensors seemed to think. But then the lidless eyes turned to look at him, and the mouth curled into a grin even while it gulped water through its gills. In a motion that made it seem weightless, it flipped its body and rose smoothly to the surface. "Sheppard," it said. "Been waiting for you to come back."
It still looked like Rodney. Kind of. John couldn't decide if he resented that or not. "Been a bit busy since we got back to the city," John said, and tried to sit on a stool without twisting his containment suit around. "How're you feeling?"
It giggled again, a thin, almost squealing sound, and flopped back on its back. "Feeling. Feeee-ling. That's not what you really want to ask, Sheppard."
"I want to know what happened in the jumper," he said.
It suddenly flipped again and pressed close to the side of the tank, making wet noises where its pale, flabby body slid against the glass. John didn't look away; John had evacuated battlefield casualties and never looked away. "You want to know what happened to me," it said. "You want to know if I'm still human, and if I'm still Rodney McKay, and if you can change me back." It punctuated each point with a dramatic slap of its paw. "And those are the wrong questions."
"So what are the right ones?" John asked it.
That grin again, so horribly wide. "Who else, and how soon?" it asked, and then sank beneath the water once again.
-\--\--\-
"We think this may have happened on Earth," Jackson said, and that changed everything.
"You mean it spread?" Carson asked incredulously. "But we followed quarantine procedures-"
Carter held up her hand. "What Daniel means is that we've found evidence of an isolated outbreak, a long time ago, very similar to this."
"Two outbreaks, actually," Jackson corrected.
"You think," Mitchell added.
"Let the man talk," John said, and Mitchell backed down.
Jackson took a deep breath that rattled the little microphone in his suit. "It turns out that in 1928 the Treasury Department raided a small town in eastern Massachusetts called Innsmouth. Officially they were breaking up a very profitable bootlegging ring, but they ended up arresting basically the entire population, and afterwards all the records were sealed. It turns out that the 'bootleggers' were members of a cult who claimed to worship an avatar of the Phoenician fish god Dagon, which is actually how the information came to us-someone suspected it might've been Goa'uld-related."
"Most of the adult cultists showed the same first-stage physical symptoms as members of the Atlantis expedition," Frasier said. "A few bodies were recovered that showed signs of ongoing second-stage transformations as well-autopsies conducted at Miskatonic Univeristy found the same changes in blood chemistry, the altered eye anatomy, the retracted genitalia and the fat pockets in the skull-we think that allows the jawbone to transmit low-frequency sound waves to the inner ear."
"We had the same conclusion," Carson said, still dull with surprise. "Dolphins have a similar adaptation."
What John wanted to know was, "How is that possible?"
"The cult members claimed," Jackson said slowly, "that they learned about Dagon from an amphibious humanoid species they called the 'Deep Ones.' These Deep Ones supposedly brought the town gold artifacts and particularly rich fishing in exchange for human sacrifices." He paused. "Cult members also claimed to have interbred with Deep Ones, which is how they explained their physical states."
Carson shook his head. "There's no indication that the altered patients would still be interfertile with normal humans."
"But it would sure be a great chance to pass along an infection," John pointed out, causing more than one person to make a face.
Jackson seemed to wave that mental image with one hand. "The point is," he said, "there were certain key words mentioned in the Innsmouth files that stuck out to me. The cult members claimed that the Deep Ones lived in an offshore colony-which was dynamited back to the Stone Age without any investigation, apparently-but that they originated in the South Pacific in an underwater city inhabited by some kind of sleeping god even more powerful than Dagon.
"Now, if you allow for a little variation in spelling," and here he gave a sidelong look at Mitchell that the other man missed, "the same city and the same powerful entity are also mentioned in a few Ancient inscriptions we've found around the Milky Way, and in the Asgard database-warnings about planets that should never be visited, technology that should never be used, a devastating war that took place even before the Ancients were on the scene. The names that recur in the Innsmouth files are...well, the Ancient names are 'Relex' and 'Ctalul,' but the Massachusetts investigators transcribed them as 'Rilyah' and 'Kuthluhluh.'"
The hair on the back of John's neck stood up. The words sounded wrong in Jackson's mouth, too open and flat, but still somehow horribly familiar. "Cthulhu," he corrected almost automatically.
Jackson blinked at him. "I'm sorry?"
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn," John said slowly, and when he shut his eyes against a wave of vertigo he saw the ocean, the velvet black of the deeps, the silver halls of sunken Atlantis and some place much, much darker. He could hear those words echo back to him, not just from his dreams but from Carson's mouth-still not quite right, not the same, but closer than anyone above the water line was going to manage. Except maybe Elizabeth.
The words were met with silence, and when John dared open his eyes he found five shocked faces staring out from behind their faceplates. Even Teal'c's eyes had gone slightly wide. Mitchell coughed noisily and squirmed in his chair. "Okay," he said, "so Daniel is maybe onto something there."
-\--\--\-
The marine biology team went down in the shielded jumper, and Zelenka had the idea to string a radio repeater to that thousand-foot cable. "It won't increase the range greatly, but it certainly cannot hurt," he pointed out. "We can fix a, a sort of balloon to it, so it stays pointed to the surface. They'll still be out of range when they arrive at the crash site-"
"What if there's a second jumper?" John asked. "They could park it at nine hundred feet, and relay the signal to us until the shielded one hits…what, three thousand feet total?"
"Less that that," Zelenka admitted, but the wreckage was at two thousand five, so John gave the orders.
"We're approaching the wreck," they reported. "No abnormal energy readings. Biomass seems normal for this depth-just spotted one hell of a swordfish! I guess whatever scared the wildlife off earlier is, uh, well, for all we know it's back in Atlantis…sorry, not funny, I know. We're taking a water sample and moving on."
"Okay, we're over the continental rise," they said. "Four thousand feet of water below us, but the sensors are picking up a mass on the abyssal plain. Funny, it falls on a straight line between the wreck and Atlantis. Uhm…hard to tell from this depth, but I'd guess the mass isn't naturally-occurring…there's something about the shape that seems man-made. Could be wreckage from the first Wraith war, could be an Ancient facility…preparing to go deeper."
"Request permission to go deeper, Atlantis," they announced. "The structure on the sea floor is definitely…well, not natural. Legrasse here seems to think it's some kind of nautilus shell, but if it is it's the size of an aircraft carrier. Sensors aren't making any sense from up here, so we'd like to head down and take a closer look…as long as the shielding holds out, of course."
Two hours later, the support jumper picked up a deep-sea explosion and a databurst from the radio repeater. Not long after, it picked up the repeater, and four hundred feet of cable sheared off at one end. It took twenty-four hours more to extract anything usable from the burst, by which point, of course, it was already too late.
"Approaching the structure…power levels stable for now. Holy Hannah, that's…ugh…that's not possible. The sensor data doesn't make any sense. It's like looking into an M. C. Escher print. How is this possible? At least we're not in visual yet…water's awful cloudy. Maybe some kind of turbidity current-
"-thousand feet and holding. My god. You could sink Atlantis here and forget where you parked. What? Oh, yes…scanning…no energy readings, no life signs. You'd think something this big would have life signs, even this deep-"
"-shut up already, just looking at the place gives me a headache-"
"-these carvings, send 'em up to Anthro. Maybe we found the Furlings, heh? …nah, don't really think so either. Something about this place feels…different. That's all I'm saying, diff-"
"-that? No, seriously, what was that? Fuck the sensors, I know what I saw! Can't you turn up the headlamps on this thing--?"
"-oh god oh god oh god-"
"-dozens of them! Where the hell are the life signs? Why don't they have life signs?"
"-at's it, firing the drones-"
"-rist, what is that thing? What've we do-"
"-riffin?"
"-into a bomb, and we're gonna fly right up that thing's cloaca, and if anybody on Atlantis hears this I'm sorry, so goddamn sorry-"
"-oh, god, it's still alive-"
-\--\--\-
Carter returned to her ship, eventually, and Carson went with Frasier and Mitchell to start collecting their samples-air and water, skin and blood. That left John to lead Jackson and Teal'c back down the winding stairs to the hologram room. "I hadn't realized the city sank so low," Jackson commented as they negotiated a particularly tilted flight of stairs that ended in stagnant water.
"It didn't, at first," John explained with one eye on a scanner. "We fetched up on the edge of the continental shelf, and we've been sliding off by a couple inches a year ever since."
"That's…wow," Jackson said weakly. "How long before you end up in the ocean floor?"
He shrugged. "Geology and Oceanography have been fighting over that for a while now. Maybe next week, maybe another century or two."
"Can the city survive such an event?" Teal'c asked.
John just shrugged again. They'd calculated during the siege that multiple nukes wouldn't vaporize the city, but he didn't think they could tumble another mile or so into the ocean without a scratch, either. (Part of him feared it would destroy Atlantis. Another part feared that it wouldn't.)
-\--\--\-
There was something wrong with Chuck. John hadn't noticed it before, or maybe he'd noticed it and managed to blame it on the gateroom lighting or a different haircut or his own tired eyes. But while Elizabeth and Landry argued about quarantining the city, John kept his eyes on Chuck, who kept rubbing his pale face with pale hands, rubbing his eyes.
"How can you quarantine against something that doesn't actually exist?" Landry was asking.
"We have no way of knowing that Dr. McKay wasn't exposed inside the city before the crash," Elizabeth said. "We have no way of knowing who else might've been exposed in the same period or since his recovery. And we still don't know what, if anything, that mass on the sea floor has to do with all of this. Until we can answer those questions, we can't take the risk of exposing anyone else."
"The Daedalus is going to need to take on supplies when it arrives," Landry reminded them.
"And the Athosians need supplies now," Elizabeth said. "And we've got six off-world teams waiting at the Alpha Site indefinitely. I know what I'm doing, Hank."
"I hope so, for the sake of your job, Dr. Weir. I'll see if we can notify Colonel Caldwell before he leaves the galaxy."
"Thank you, General." Elizabeth barely glanced at Chuck as the video link fritzed out. "Shut it down."
Chuck remained still at his post, rubbing his eyes.
"Sergeant Campbell," John said more firmly. "Shut down the gate."
Chuck started. "Oh! Sorry, sir. Ma'am."
John watched him enter the commands. Was he paler than normal? Had he put on weight? "Everything okay, Sergeant?" he asked quietly.
"Yes, sir," Chuck said. "Just feeling a little...off, sir."
And when he looked up at John, his eyes caught the light, and there was a pearly glow from inside his right pupil, like a cat in the darkness. Just the right side. Just when he held his head the right way. John swallowed. "You're relieved of duty, Sergeant."
"Sir?" Chuck asked, frowning.
"Go get yourself checked out by Dr. Beckett," he said. "That's an order."
Elizabeth turned away from Zelenka to watch Chuck leave the control room. "Something the matter?" she asked John.
He found he couldn't look her in the eye. "Maybe."
Part Two