STARGATE SG-1: Oceans of Dust Page 14

  “The fleet is ready, Lady Hera. They only await your will.”

  Hera turned to her sister, and smiled warmly. “Then let us go. Keeping them waiting would be terribly rude, don’t you think?”

  Chapter 9.

  High and Dry

  Once, many years before the awakening of the Pit of Sorrows, when Samantha Carter was very small, she had travelled with her mother and father and brother Mark to the shores of a great lake.

  This was a rare treat, because Samantha’s father was away so much, and because her mother was often busy. But some combination of circumstance had occurred which allowed the four of them to be together for several days, and so the decision was made that they should have a vacation.

  The lake was beautiful. It was surrounded by trees, and beyond the trees were mountains, and beyond the mountains a very blue, very clear spring sky. There was a jetty stretching out over the lake’s still surface from which Samantha’s father hoped to fish, and on the shore was a little log cabin for the family to stay in.

  Samantha had a room all to herself.

  During the first night, while Samantha lay awake, looking up at the unfamiliar ceiling, the weather had turned bad. A thunderstorm had rolled down from the mountains, and begun battering the lake shore with driving rain and bright white flashes of lightning. The sound and the ferocity of it were terrifying, and Mark had run into their parents’ room for comfort, but Samantha would not do that. Instead she huddled alone in her bed, shivering with fear, the quilt pulled up to block out the lightning and the deep angry bellows of thunder. To her small ears, it sounded as though the whole world were coming to pieces around her.

  At some point the storm must have shouted her into submission, because she awoke to see light on her ceiling. And then her father had appeared next to her, one finger to his smiling lips.

  Together, they had gone outside, Samantha’s bare feet cold on wet ground, into a dream, a wonderland. Morning was bringing a mist up off the lake, lit gold by the low morning sun, so dense that she could not see the water’s far side. The jetty stretched off into mystery, and the shore was utterly quiet. There wasn’t a breath of wind, nor birdsong, nor even the lap of waves against the sand.

  It was as if the world had been reborn during the night, torn apart in the storm’s fury and remade into something new.

  Something wonderful.

  Carter sat up hard, out of the dark and into pale, golden light.

  She was suffocating, her lungs burning from the inside, and there was something covering her mouth. She ripped it away and dragged in a breath, tasting a flat, powdery foulness in the air, and immediately found herself seized by a fit of ragged, agonized coughing. Carter doubled up, trying to control her breathing, but the itch and burning were too deep. All she could do, for a long time, was to sit and cough the pain from her lungs.

  Eventually she managed to still the spasms, although there was an ugly warmth within her ribs that she could only hope would fade soon. She had a pounding headache, and her vision was blurry. When she wiped her eyes, her fingers came down streaked with pale gray.

  There was a memory of darkness, of dreadful noises and brilliant flashes. She squinted around, trying to get her bearings, and as she did so a silent, pale figure appeared beside her.

  She blinked tears away, and saw that it was Teal’c. He was covered in dust, and a piece of cloth covered the lower part of his face.

  “Major Carter,” he said. “You have been unconscious.”

  “How…” Speaking was like chewing glass. She took a steadying breath and tried again. “How long for?”

  “Twenty-seven minutes.”

  “What? Oh, that’s not good.” She tried to get up, but the floor felt as though it were moving. That, along with the pain in her chest, was enough to keep her where she was. “Any longer than a few minutes probably means I’ve got a concussion.”

  “Then you should remain still.”

  “Yeah.” For a moment, it sounded like a good idea. And then she looked around her, at a world remade.

  She was still in the Pit of Sorrows, of course — that much had been obvious even through her soiled tears. The dark outer walls still tilted claustrophobically around her. Behind her, the doorway remained firmly sealed by its slab of golden metal, and the air was bitingly cold.

  But there was a mist in the air, thick and choking, lit by the yellow glow from the wall panels.

  No, she thought, memories falling away from her. This was no mist. The air was full of dust; the fine, ashy powder that was all that remained of human beings, once the black force from the pillar was done with them.

  It was everywhere, clinging to the walls, drifting down from the shadowed ceiling. It was on her clothes, in her hair, coating her skin. It had been in her throat and her lungs.

  Even Teal’c was painted with it. He had tied a strip of cloth tied over his nose and mouth to keep some of the stuff from his lungs; part of his jacket lining. He must have done the same to her, while she lay senseless.

  Carter tried to get up again. The floor still tipped and shifted under her, making her fear, momentarily, for her senses. It didn’t take long for her to realize that the feeling wasn’t illusory. The Pit really was moving.

  “Teal’c? What’s happened?”

  He took her arm and helped her upright. He had his staff weapon in his other hand and was steadying himself with it. “I believe the Pit of Sorrows is in flight,” he said gravely. “There was a period of violent acceleration. It was during this time that you fell and lost consciousness.”

  “Flight?” Ra’s second message came back to her in a rush. “Oh my God, he said ‘Enjoy your trip.’ That’s what he meant… Teal’c, we’ve got to get out of here!”

  “I agree. However, there appears to be no way to exit this structure. Even if there was, at the level of acceleration we experienced, we would have left the Earth’s atmosphere many minutes ago.”

  It took a moment for the implication to sink in. When it did, Carter felt a cold swoop of terror surge up behind her ribs.

  To be locked into the Pit of Sorrows while it lay beneath the desert was nightmare enough, but for the whole awful place to have dragged her and Teal’c up and into the icy vacuum of space… If the Jaffa was right, then the pair of them were entombed in the worst possible way.

  And, she remembered, they were not alone.

  “The pillar,” she gasped. “Teal’c, is that thing still in there?”

  “Our continued survival would suggest so,” he replied. “I have also made regular checks on the pillar’s integrity, and it appears to have survived the takeoff unscathed.”

  “I need to see it,” she told him.

  “I will assist you.”

  “No,” she said, too quickly. Then she gave him a wan smile. “I’ve got it. I think I’ve got it…”

  She paused before moving, though: the floor was slippery with powder, and her vision wasn’t entirely clear. She took a few seconds to bat at her sleeve until most of the dust came up off it, and then used it to wipe her eyes. That helped a lot, bringing her cramped and frightening new world into a sharper focus. Perhaps a little too sharp, even. There was much around her that she would rather not have seen at all.

  She pushed that thought away. Self-delusion was a luxury she could ill-afford — distressing though their predicament was, Carter knew that their only hope of escaping it was to face its horrors square-on.

  Her gun was lying on the floor next to her. She crouched to pick it up, checked that its mechanisms had been undamaged by the acceleration and by the polluted air, then made her way carefully to the nearest corner. From there, through the drifting dust and between two inner walls, she could see the golden cylinder still squatting on its dais.

  Her view of it was partly obscured by rubble. The giant statues had obviously not been built to withstand the Pit’s acceleration, or the violent hammering and shaking that had preceded it. They stood now only as jagged, disembodied pairs
of legs, and as a surreal jumble of broken body parts. Carter eased her way between a beaked head the size of her own torso and a huge, reaching arm, and then climbed up the littered steps towards the pillar.

  Thankfully, it looked undamaged — either the tumbling pieces of the statues had all missed it, or it was built of very tough stuff indeed. The fluted cone at its top was still firmly locked together, reminding Carter subtly of the back of a classic Egyptian headdress, and below it three rings of translucent material set into the body of the cylinder glowed a steady, comforting blue.

  Carter hadn’t noticed those before. When she put her hand near them, she could feel warmth.

  “That’s weird,” she muttered.

  “You refer to the cylinder emitting heat?” Teal’c was standing at the base of the dais.

  “Yeah. You know, I think it’s taking heat from the inside and dumping it into the air. Like a refrigerator.”

  “Gregory Kemp claimed that the Ash Eater was attracted to heat.”

  She stepped back. Her proximity to the pillar was making her skin crawl. “Maybe freezing it keeps it quiet.”

  “Let us hope that it continues to do so.”

  “It’ll be all over for us if it doesn’t. Unless it’s vulnerable to bullets, of course.”

  Teal’c looked momentarily uncomfortable. “I discovered the remnants of a firearm some distance from the doorway. It crumbled before I was able to ascertain if it had been fired.”

  Harlowe. “Given my luck today, I’m guessing yes.” She climbed back down the dais steps, joining Teal’c at floor level. “But let’s assume that the cylinder is going to keep the Ash Eater contained for the moment. That leaves our next problems as air supply, then water, then food.”

  “The air will become unbreathable in approximately twenty-five hours,” Teal’s replied. “Unless other factors are at work.”

  “So I guess that give us a day to get control of this thing and turn it around.” She glanced about, trying to reacquaint herself with the Pit’s strange layout. “Teal’c, this has to be a Goa’uld structure — do you have any idea what kind?”

  “I do not.” The Jaffa frowned. “There are similarities to a teluy’iirac, a structure for the storage of hazardous materials, but those similarities are…” He paused. “Tenuous.”

  “Still, it makes a kind of sense.” She nodded at the cylinder. “That’s pretty hazardous.”

  “Indeed. However, chemical storage facilities are not usually designed to fly.”

  “I think we can safely say that this place has gone through a serious refit.” She moved past him, out between two of the inner walls, until she found herself at the far side of the Pit from the doorway.

  Anna Andersson’s remains were gone. Carter had expected as much, but the thought of the woman’s remains still floating in the air around her was still upsetting in the extreme.

  She had once heard that a cremated body weighed roughly as much as a new-born baby, a piece of cosmic symmetry that Carter had found quite pleasing at the time. It certainly wasn’t as pleasing now, not with what it was suggesting to her about the number of people who might have slid down that terrifying shaft before her.

  More than would have fallen in by accident, that was certain.

  She forced herself to concentrate. “Okay. The writing on that wall near the door mentions Ra, and his voice is recorded here somewhere. So this whole structure must have been built before he lost control of Earth, yes?”

  Teal’c nodded. “And has been abandoned since that time.”

  “Which was…” She shrugged. “Well, even Daniel’s a little hazy on precisely when, but let’s just say a really long time ago. So from that we can say pretty certainly that no-one’s controlling the Pit’s flight in real-time. It must be a pre-programmed course.”

  “Then we —” The Jaffa stopped speaking. He tilted his head upwards. “Major Carter, do you feel that?”

  She was about to tell him no, she couldn’t feel anything, when she became aware of what he had noticed before her. It was subtle at first, but rising rapidly: a thin, high-frequency vibration coming up through the soles of her boots.

  “What is that?” she breathed. “Are we stopping?”

  “No. We are not.”

  The Pit lurched, violently.

  Carter’s vision burred for a moment, and she almost fell. The lurch was awful; not a change in direction, but a motionless whirl, a surge of nausea and disorientation. She had felt it before, although filtered and dampened until it was barely noticeable.

  This, though, was raw. And unmistakable.

  The Pit of Sorrows had just jumped into hyperspace.

  Over the next few hours, Carter became aware of two things. Firstly, the air around her was not becoming noticeably stale, which made her start to ration her water supply fiercely — if some mechanism within the Pit was refreshing the oxygen and keeping the carbon dioxide in check, then thirst was now her most immediate danger.

  And secondly, the Pit of Sorrows was starting to get warm.

  At first, she had thought that this was merely a product of the work she was doing. Teal’c had drawn on his memories of the storage facility he had called a teluy’iirac, and had located the position of a panel which should have allowed them access to some of the facility’s primary systems. But just getting at the panel had been far from easy: the access cavity was concealed beneath a heavy slab of the Pit’s dark stone cladding. And even when Teal’c had shattered that away with massive blows from the club-end of his staff, the panel itself was sealed down with a hard, resinous epoxy. It had taken her and Teal’c two hours of painful labor to get the thing up, chipping at the stuff with their combat knives until they had removed enough to get their fingers underneath a panel edge and drag it free.

  Just as she had hoped, Carter found a bank of control crystals beneath the panel. She sat down to map out their functions while Teal’c went hunting for another panel to smash open. There should, according to his recollections, be several.

  Carter had started to get warm then, or at least to realize that the heat she felt was not simply due to exertion. The air in the Pit was definitely less cold.

  She hesitated, then stripped off her jacket and laid it on the floor next to her. It raised a small cloud of dust as she set it down, but that fell slowly to settle back onto the white fabric and the black stone. Most of the ash in the air had settled, now.

  The access cavity was about a meter across, a strange six-sided shape, like a distorted coffin. Inside, a block of dark metal housed several control crystals, their sockets labeled with Goa’uld hieroglyphs, and alongside that was a bundle of thick conduits.

  Below these was a floor of metal meshwork. Carter could just see a deep space beneath, and a distant flutter of blue-white light.

  “The hyperdrive?” she wondered aloud.

  Teal’c poked his head around a corner. “Major Carter, did you speak?”

  “Just thinking out loud,” she assured him. “There’s something bright down here that might be the hyperdrive. We could try cutting its power, if we could isolate it from the rest of the systems.”

  “That might not be wise,” Teal’c replied. “Cutting power to an active hyperdrive can have unforeseen effects, even in the most well-maintained of vessels.”

  “That’s true.” Carter admitted. She had already caused havoc by letting a decayed crystal break in her hand. There was no telling what might happen if the hyperdrive control suffered a similar malfunction. At best, the Pit of Sorrows could simply break into realspace in an unknown, and possibly interstellar, location. At worst, they could return to the universe as a swiftly moving cloud of high-energy particles.

  Perhaps she should continue her hunt for the navigation system, and leave the drive running unhindered for now.

  There was a solid impact from behind the wall, followed quickly by several more, and then the unmistakable cracking of stone. Carter raised her head. “Have you found another panel?”

>   “I have.” The Jaffa sounded almost disappointed. “It is sealed, much like the first. I shall attempt to free it.”

  “Hold on, I’ll help you.”

  “It would be better if our efforts were divided, Major Carter.”

  “You’re sure?”

  There was a few moments of silence, and then her answer came; the sound of a knife-point chipping at thick, glassy resin.

  Carter did not know how long it took Teal’c to free the second panel. She had been lost in the complexities of the system she was working on and, amazingly, lost all track of time.

  It had been careful work. Several of the crystals displayed the same surface crazing as the one Carter had crushed in the shaft, so she made sure that she didn’t so much as brush those. It was an effect she had not seen before, even in the most ancient of Goa’uld technologies, and she was beginning to wonder whether some other corruption had been at work on the Pit’s interior systems. In fact, some of the crystals looked so decayed that Carter was amazed they worked at all. Presumably there was a lot of redundancy built into the structure.

  The systems she was able to access proved to be of little use. Had Carter wished to switch off the life support, compromise power to the pillar or turn the lights off, there was no doubt she could have done it from where she was sitting. But apart from that, there was nothing. The navigational systems she needed must have been located elsewhere.

  She arrived at that depressing conclusion not long before Teal’c got the second panel up. She had been sitting back and trying to stretch the ache from her shoulders when there was a high metallic noise from behind the wall, a squeal of overstressed paneling that ended in a violent impact. Carter scrambled up, and scampered around the corner. Teal’c? Are you okay?”