STARGATE SG-1: Oceans of Dust Read online

  It was possible that they really didn’t have the resources at hand. It was equally likely that they simply didn’t believe rescuing a human and a Jaffa from a flying tomb to be an appropriate use of them.

  “General,” said Daniel. “This isn’t really leaving us with a lot of options. Sam and Teal’c have been inside the Pit of Sorrows for…” He checked his watch. “Almost eight hours. Even if that Ash Eater, whatever it is, stays contained, they can’t last more than a day or two without fresh air.”

  “I’m well aware of that, Doctor Jackson,” Hammond said, rather curtly. And then, in a gentler tone: “Believe me, I’m going through every option I can to get them out of there.”

  “How many more do we have?”

  “The Asgard, for one. Our comms took another hit from that second message, but we’re almost back online, and we’ll see what Thor has to say once we can get a hold of him. There’s also the question of Bra’tac and that modified ship.”

  A look of something like hope passed briefly over Jack’s face. “Has he been back in touch?”

  “Not yet. We’ll run a check for GDO codes once the communications are fired up again.”

  Daniel sat back. A feeling was nagging at him, tugging the edges of his mind, but he knew what it was, and refused to give in to it. There was no time for despair now.

  Fighting was hard, though. There was every chance that none of SGC’s tenuous alliances could be of use in time, and Bra’tac had given no indication of how long it would take him to reach Riyagan. It could have been anything from hours to weeks. And with no idea of where the Pit was going, not even a true direction to follow…

  “So what are we supposed to do in the meantime?” said Jack.

  “We keep the faith,” Hammond told him firmly. “Gentlemen, I think you’re forgetting who we’re talking about here. Teal’c’s a Jaffa — he knows Goa’uld machinery as well as you know your own car, and Major Carter is our leading expert in exotechnologies.” He gave them a grim smile. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t have that thing down in our parking lot by tomorrow.”

  It was a comforting fiction, but that was all. Daniel found it hard to believe that the interior of the Pit of Sorrows, a black nightmare of a place that had endured almost unchanged beneath the desert for millennia, would be as easy to hotwire as Sephotep’s experimental spaceship had been.

  He went to the infirmary to find Janet Fraiser. She had collected the Ziploc bags containing the clothes he and Jack had brought with them from Egypt, hoping to gain more information about the Ash Eater by the dust it had left on them. A dust that was the remains of human beings, according to what Jack had told him about the interior of the Pit, and after seeing the extent of Kemp’s injuries he could well believe it.

  Fraiser was Stargate Command’s chief medical officer. It made sense that he would find her in the base infirmary; in fact, he seldom saw her anywhere else. He had met few people who were as hardworking and as dedicated to their role as she, and had once, in a moment of some weakness, told her so. She had favored him a with a rare laugh, and told him that she had little choice. Those who passed through the Stargate on a regular basis had such a talent for getting themselves either injured in new and exciting ways, or infected with exotic alien pathogens, that she had no option to be otherwise.

  Fraiser was in one of the small labs adjoining the infirmary, together with a pair of assistants, and looked to be in the middle of a complex sequence of chemical analyses when he arrived. She didn’t appear to notice him as he came in, but he knew better than that.

  “What’s cooking?” he asked, trying to sound more frivolous than he felt.

  “Hey…” She held a small vial up to the light, shook it. Daniel saw dust particles falling slowly through clear liquid. “Blast.”

  “What?”

  She set the vial down. “Nothing,” she replied. “And by that I don’t mean nothing, I mean nothing. At all. I’m getting no results off this stuff.”

  He raised a hand. “Ah, you do know what this ‘stuff’ is made of, don’t you?”

  “Only because you told me. There is absolutely no chemical signature here, or at least not one that I can read so far.”

  That was odd. “I’m not sure I understand. Surely it must be the same basic compounds as a human body?”

  “Yeah, you’d think…” She picked up another vial, looked at it helplessly, and set it back down. “Okay, pop quiz. What’s the first test you’d do?”

  Daniel was no chemist, and certainly no doctor. He tried desperately to think back to science class. “Um, that paper… Litmus test?”

  Fraiser smiled. “Good answer. It’s the first thing I did, although the equipment’s a little more sophisticated. Thing is, this dust has a pH of zero. Sorry, zero point zero zero zero.”

  “That’s weird.”

  “It’s more than weird. I’ve been running every basic test I have on what you and Colonel O’Neill brought back on you. Radiation, zero. Reaction to acid, zero. Spectroscopics, flat nothing. It’s completely inert. Nothing affects it. It’s just…” She shrugged helplessly. “Dust.”

  Daniel felt at a loss. “I’m really sorry, I guess I must be missing something vital here. But what does that tell us?”

  She spread her hands. “All I’ve got at the moment are theories, and until I’ve had time to get this stuff under the electron microscope that’s all I’ll have. But if I was forced to guess, I’d say that this substance has had all of its energy removed, very fast and very brutally. It’s been robbed of its ability to react to anything, including itself. Ninety percent of its molecular cohesion has just gone.”

  “So if a person was subjected to that…” Daniel looked away. The thought was horrible. “Oh, man…”

  Fraiser was silent for a few moments. Then she put a hand on his arm. “How are you holding up?” she asked, very quietly.

  “Okay.” It was a reflex, and a lie. “No, I’m not. I’m… They’re trapped up there. We can’t track it, we can’t trace it, and every second that passes takes them further out of our reach…”

  She nodded gently. “I know.”

  “And I don’t know what to do.”

  “You will,” she told him, and patted his arm. “You always think of something.”

  He was about to tell her that he wished he had her faith in him when he noticed Hammond standing at the lab door. “General?”

  “Doctor Jackson, I think we need to talk.”

  Later, he found Jack outside the main entrance to the base. The man was standing, still and silent, near the perimeter fence, his arms folded, his head back. He was looking up at the sky.

  It was dark again. The F-14 had taken them back through the time-zones, into the night they had just escaped from. There were fewer stars visible over Colorado than over the open desert, but Daniel had seen enough lights in the sky for one day.

  He walked quickly over to where Jack stood. “Hey.”

  “Daniel.”

  “Hammond was, ah…” He jerked a thumb backwards, at the cavernous entranceway behind them. “We were looking for you.”

  “I was just taking a minute.”

  “Oh.”

  “Trying not to start smoking again.”

  Daniel raised an eyebrow. “Really?”

  “No. What have we got?”

  “Well, some good news. We managed to get in touch with the Asgard. They can’t spare any ships, which is kind of a blow.” Daniel resisted the urge to check his watch again. He’d found he was doing it far too often of late. “Even if they could, the closest ones are three, four days away.”

  “I guess that thing with the Replicators isn’t going too well for them.”

  “Looks that way. But there’s an upside — Thor said they have probes dotted all over hyperspace. Looks like the Pit almost clipped one on the way past. We’ve got a pretty solid idea of its course now.”

  “’Clipped’?” Jack enunciated the word very carefully, as if making sure h
e had it right. Daniel spread his hands.

  “I know. But they’ve given us some good data. I wasn’t going to throw it back in their faces just because it looked a little, you know…”

  “Convenient.”

  “Not the word I was going for, but yeah.” He’d been thinking of suspicious. The idea of one object passing accidentally close to another in open space was ludicrous; the scales were just too vast. In hyperspace the chances of such an occurrence were infinitely smaller. “Gift horse, Jack.”

  “I guess. In fact, that’s the best news I’ve heard all damn day. Can we make any sense of it yet?”

  “Hammond’s got people working on it, looking to see if it’s going to go past any planets with active gates, but it looks like we were right — it’s heading up and out of the galactic plane.”

  “We still need a ride, Daniel.”

  “Yeah, that’s the rest of the good news. It seems like a Tel’tak travelling way faster than it should do has a really distinctive engine note. The Asgard have been watching it for a few hours, wondering what the hell it was. They can send a message to Bra’tac and tell him to divert.”

  “Okay, I take it back. That’s the best news I’ve heard all day.”

  “We’ll meet him on a planet called Amethun. Hammond’s already authorized it. I’ve asked astrogation to download the Asgard telemetry onto a laptop…” He took a deep breath. “Jack? There’s something else.”

  Jack didn’t move. “Go on.”

  “Kemp died. Multiple organ failure.”

  There was a long silence. Then Jack said: “Just a little too late on that one too, huh?”

  “No, you weren’t.” Daniel turned to him. “Jack, they rigged up a phone line for him. He got to say goodbye to his wife. If you hadn’t gone in there he would have died of thirst, alone in the dark and the cold and no-one would have ever known about it.”

  Jack didn’t speak for a while. Then he tipped his head back again. “I can’t lose them, Daniel. Either of them.”

  “We won’t. We’ve got a map and a ride. We’re golden.”

  “Yeah… Daniel?”

  “Hm?”

  “You got a cigarette?”

  He smiled, privately, in the dark. “I don’t smoke, Jack.”

  “Good. Damn things’ll kill ya.”

  Chapter 8.

  White Queen

  Like the core structure of a Ha’tak pyramid ship, the heart of the Hall of Negotiation was a tetrahedron. Its base was a large triangle of burnished gold, as were its walls, and the great table around which the three System Lords sat. It had been designed to offer as little distraction as possible, to concentrate the minds of those within on the task at hand.

  Of the three, the Lady Hera knew this best of all. It was she who had designed it.

  Over the past four days, she had come to regret some elements of this design. While the Hall was extremely portable — Hera had based many of its mechanisms on the mutable armor of the Jaffa, allowing it to be unfolded from a basic chassis into the network of structures she now occupied — it was also just slightly too small. If Anshar and Tsukiyomi had agreed to enter negotiations alone, there would have been no problem, but Tsukiyomi had insisted on four Jaffa warriors at his back throughout the whole process. Lord Anshar had, of course, followed suit, and so for the entire four days of negotiation a dozen people had occupied the core Hall, which was rather too many for Hera’s liking.

  She had herself only taken one Jaffa in with her, but he was a Minotaur, which more than made up for the disparity in numbers.

  The Minotaur had stood behind her throne for the entire negotiation, helm continually raised, his vast arms folded, impassive and silent and still. Hera knew he made the others nervous, which was almost the entire point of him being here. If anything would hurry this tedious process along, other than the events she had already set into motion, it would be that.

  A pity, then, that Anshar and Tsukiyomi were becoming oblivious to his presence. For the past day they had been engaged in an argument of epic proportions, and had barely paid any mind to Hera at all.

  There was little to do but sit and watch them. Hera kept her poise, her composure, but it was far from easy.

  Lord Tsukiyomi had reached the point where, unsurprisingly, he had accused Anshar of attacking a diplomatic convoy commanded by his beloved First Prime, Hashitara. As expected, Anshar was denying it vehemently, while still trying to present himself as the one among them in a position of strength.

  “No ships of yours entered my territory, Tsukiyomi! Had they done, I would have destroyed them without a moment’s thought!”

  “So,” Tsukiyomi snarled, “you admit your treachery!”

  “Treachery? Is that what you call defending my domains from your incursions?” Anshar folded his great arms. “Perhaps we should call it war and be done with this charade!”

  He was a bull of a man, thick-set and powerfully muscled, his face largely obscured by a long and elaborately plaited beard. It was said that he used his sarcophagus as rarely as possible, to spare his host body the worst of its ravages, and instead kept his shell healthy and strong by means of a strict and brutal regime of diet and physical exercise. It was also said that he imposed the same ruthless regimen on the Jaffa in his service, and as such they had gained a near-legendary reputation for their skill and stamina in all the physical arts.

  Had Hera not been involved with such delicate negotiations, she might have found these rumors intriguing, but at present she could not allow herself to be distracted.

  There was already enough playing on her mind.

  “My Lords,” she began, hands raised slightly in a conciliatory gesture. “Such accusations are not the way to —”

  “I have made no incursions into your territory, fool!” Tsukiyomi was out of his throne, leaning across the table at Anshar. “All I have done has been to protect my domains from your piracy!”

  Piracy was a new word, as yet unuttered during the four days of negotiations. Hera put a hand to her forehead, wondering if things were about to go spiraling out of her control. It wouldn’t be the first time.

  “No incursions?” Anshar barked a deep, mirthless laugh. “I beg to differ!”

  “My First Prime entered your territory on a mission of diplomacy.” Tsukiyomi was trying to regain his usual calm, easing back down into his throne. Where Anshar was solid with muscle, the other System Lord was almost ethereally slender and slight. He was taller than Anshar, and pale, with long, jet-black hair down to his waist. While Anshar was layered in laminate armor, Tsukiyomi was robed in the finest silks. They were both Goa’uld, both System Lords of comparable power, but physically they could not have been more different.

  The juxtaposition of the two, and of herself among them, amused Hera somewhat. And there was little enough amusement to be had in this golden coffin, she thought, rather wistfully. Anshar was still blustering, Tsukiyomi still making his snide insinuations, and Hera was sitting at the third side of the table, despising both yet forcing herself to sit still and quiet and not take a sword to the sorry pair of them.

  “Hashitara travelled to your throneworld at your invitation, Anshar.”

  “I offered no such invitation, you effete cretin!”

  “I have it on record.”

  “A fabrication!” Anshar slammed his big fist down onto the tabletop. “As you well know. Your spies should have told you as much!”

  Tsukiyomi spread his hands. “How many times must I repeat the facts to you? I have no spies in your household.”

  “Not any more, you don’t,” Anshar growled. “And I commend you on the quality of your employees, Tsukiyomi. They didn’t betray you, even under the best my interrogators could offer.”

  Hera suppressed a reaction. Anshar was well known for his predilection for torture, and for the centuries of research he had devoted to studying the art. The spies must have suffered beyond imagining before they went past the point from which even a sarcophagus could retu
rn them.

  “I would be flattered,” Tsukiyomi replied calmly, “if I had the slightest idea of what you are talking about.”

  Anshar made a disgusted sound and sat back. Hera was just wondering if she should interject again at this point when she felt a buzzing at her temple. The jeweled diadem she wore at her brow was vibrating, softly enough that only she could sense it.

  She stood. “My Lords, please excuse me. There is an urgent matter to which I must attend.”

  Tsukiyomi frowned. “Are we under attack?”

  Hera gave him a small smile. “No, my Lord, nothing so dramatic. I shall return in a few moments.”

  “Perhaps it would be as well to pause,” Anshar rumbled.

  “As you wish. In the meantime, can I offer you some refreshment?”

  Tsukiyomi bowed. “Thank you.”

  She turned to Anshar, one eyebrow raised. He grinned at her, teeth very white among the thicket of beard. “I’ll accept whatever refreshment you offer me, Lady.”

  Hera tipped her head. “I shall direct slaves to attend you.”

  She left the table, and walked to the door, not too quickly. She didn’t want to appear eager to leave, and she could feel the eyes of both men on her as she moved.

  To say that was no surprise would have been an understatement of cosmic proportions.

  As Hera reached the outer door of the Hall she paused, halted by the sudden transition from dim coolness to dry, white heat.

  The Hall of Negotiation had been set up in the centre of a level field of brown, scorched grass. A few hundred meters away, a sparse line of gnarled shade trees stood in black puddles of shadow, and beyond that rose rocky hills, jagged against the open blue of the sky.

  The sun must have been directly overhead, and it’s light came down on the plain like a hammer. Hera stood for a moment, a hand cupped over her eyes to block out some of the glare, feeling the warmth of the air around her. Even the breeze that came to her across the plain was hot and dry.