STARGATE SG-1: Oceans of Dust Page 15

  “I am uninjured.” He was standing with a distorted hexagon of sheet metal still in one hand. He hurled it aside. “The panel proved less resilient than the resin.”

  “I can see that…” Carter could see a ragged strip of gleaming silver along one edge of the cavity Teal’c had exposed — he had literally ripped a chunk of the panel off. But a moment later all her attention was on the cavity itself.

  She dropped to her haunches in front of what he had found. “My God,” she whispered.

  Where the previous cavity had been a shallow depression, this was a cylindrical hole in the Pit’s structure, long and wide enough to accommodate a large man. It was angled downwards and towards the centre of the structure, and set down the length of it were a series of metal rings, each a fat, complicated torus of gold and wound cable and solid-looking blocks of silvery mineral. Long probes speared from the inner edges of the rings, while arm-thick conduits circled the outer wall, dividing and dividing again to fill the cavity with a sprawl of wiring and control crystals.

  The crystals were all unlit, quiescent, but small tubes in the walls of the cavity emitted a pulsing golden glow, and Carter could feel a dry heat coming off it, a flat electrical warmth that spoke of a recent and massive release of energy.

  It was an unearthly contraption, complex and unfathomable and oddly disturbing.

  “Teal’c, have you seen anything like this before?”

  “I have not.” The Jaffa leaned past her to study it. “Could it be part of the hyperdrive?”

  “I don’t think so.” Goa’uld propulsion technology had been one of Carter’s research projects for a while now, and this tube full of glass and metal looked nothing like the devices she had so far been able to study.

  Still, even though the cavity’s contents were puzzling, there was something about its layout that she almost recognized. Carter looked again, trying to see past the complexity of the thing, to ignore the exposed conduits and overlaid paneling, the jagged, fang-like crystals arranged in their rings like some kind of arcane instrument of torture…

  “Hold on,” she said suddenly, and not entirely to Teal’c. “Those rings… They’ve each got seven segments.”

  “They are reminiscent of the Chappa’ai.”

  “Seven probes on each ring, seven functional chevrons around the Stargate… Teal’c, I think this is where Ra’s message came from.”

  “This is like no communications device I have seen.”

  “I know, but the message came through the gate. I thought that another gate must have been used to dial through to us, but what if this did it?” She pointed into the cavity. “What if one end of the wormhole is formed here?”

  Teal’c shook his head. “I cannot see how a device this small could create a functional wormhole.”

  “Oh, I know the rings aren’t nearly big enough to form a proper event horizon, and the probes inside them would be destroyed if they did. But I’ve been working on a theory that it might be possible to create a one-dimensional wormhole with far less energy than it takes to power a Stargate.”

  He frowned. “I do not understand.”

  “Well, the Stargate creates a wormhole that is effectively two-dimensional — it has height and width, so we can walk through it, but no measurable length. It’s like a flat sheet, although each side of the sheet can be separated by light-years.”

  Teal’c tipped his head slightly. “Of course.”

  Carter got to her feet. “But a one-dimension wormhole would have… Well, looking at this set-up, I’d say just length. It would be like a hair running down the centre of the cavity.”

  “Nothing could pass into such a wormhole.” The Jaffa narrowed his eyes, deep in thought. “Except energy.”

  “That’s right — there would be no mechanism for translating objects into the high-energy signature that traverses our gates. But you could send a signal through it.” She ran a hand back through her hair, trying not to notice how dusty her fingers were when she brought them down. “Like I said, it’s only a theory, and working out how the wormhole can be one-dimension here and still cause a gate to form a two-dimensional event horizon at the other end makes my head hurt.”

  Teal’c leaned back down to the cavity. “Major Carter,” he said quietly, not taking his eyes from the softly glowing machinery within. “If this device was used to send the voice of Ra to Stargate Command, could we not send our own message?”

  “If we could isolate the control matrix, I don’t see why not. It must already be tuned to our gate… But wait, that’s the Antarctica gate. Why would it send to that?”

  “Perhaps we must also consider the number of rings in this cavity.”

  She looked up at him. “How so?”

  “If the wormhole extends through all rings at once, the messages might have been sent to multiple Stargates.”

  She stared. “Is that even possible?”

  “I do not know. But we must take great care, Major Carter. The voice of Ra might have been heard on more worlds than Earth.”

  There were no other panels.

  Teal’c searched for a long time, while Carter lay with her head and shoulders inside the cylindrical cavity, trying to find the part of the communications system that contained Ra’s recorded voice. She could hear him battering at the stone flooring with his staff, shattering the floor wherever his memory of the storage facility’s design told him he should find access, but each time he broke through the cladding, only bare, seamless metal was revealed.

  Eventually, he gave up and went back to help Carter.

  As he approached, she extricated herself and sat up, her back against the wall next to the opening. Her head was pounding, worse than ever, and her throat was parched, her lips cracked and caked with dust. She was exhausted, aching all over. She refused to look at her watch, but she knew the pair of them must have been in the Pit of Sorrows for many hours.

  Her water was gone. The last drops had dribbled from her canteen long before.

  “I can’t find it,” she said eventually. The sound of her own voice frightened her. It sounded whispery and fragile, as though she were already becoming dust, like the Ash Eater’s victims. “There’s a recording matrix in here somewhere, but I can’t isolate it.”

  “I too can only report failure.” Teal’c sat down in front of her, cross-legged. He looked quite calm, but the dust on his skin made him seem ghostly. He took the canteen from his belt and offered it to Carter. She shook her head at first, but his hand didn’t move. She knew it wouldn’t until she drank, so she took it from him.

  Half full. She sipped, just a little, and handed it back. “Even if we could send a message, they wouldn’t know where it was coming from.”

  “Perhaps it would be heard by our allies.”

  “Perhaps.” Carter knew the chances of that were microscopic. “I was hoping we could get to the navigation system, but I think that’s down in the drive itself. We can’t reach it.”

  “This structure was not designed to be easily compromised.”

  She nodded. “We just triggered a five-thousand year old failsafe. No-one else heard that message, Teal’c. Nobody knows where we are or where we’re going. Everyone that did is dead.”

  He must have heard the ragged edges of despair in her voice. “Major Carter, you are exhausted.”

  She couldn’t help but smile. “You think?”

  “Perhaps you should sleep.”

  Carter blinked at him. “You’re kidding.”

  “I am not.” He smiled back at her, gently, his dust-pale lips curved almost imperceptibly. “I can survive on very little water. You will require less while asleep. Once you are rested, we can continue searching for a solution to our predicament.”

  “Sleep,” she breathed. She shut her eyes.

  It was tempting, to give herself over to oblivion. She was ferociously tired, her body quaking with fatigue, and the thirst was awful. Had she not taken in so much of the dust she would not be so dehydrated, she was sure,
but everything about the Pit was conspiring to make her feel as bad as possible. Teal’c too, she guessed, although he would never show it.

  If she rested for an hour, maybe two, perhaps she would wake feeling better. More alert. The correct combination of crystals would become clear to her, once she had slept.

  She was fooling herself, of course.

  If she slept now, she would never wake.

  Carter opened her eyes. “I can’t. I’m sorry, Teal’c, but I can’t stop. Not now.”

  “I do not believe you will be able to remain functional for long.”

  “Yeah?” It sounded like a challenge. She grinned, even though it hurt her lips to do so. “Bet you twenty I last longer than you do.”

  “Fifty would be a greater incentive.”

  At the words, her heart surged within her. She knew that he had been doing what was needed to spur her on. He had shown her the alternative, the easy way, knowing she would never take it.

  Only someone who knew her as well, as deeply as he did would have ever taken such a risk.

  “You’re on,” Carter smiled. And she clambered back into the cavity again, disgusted with herself for even considering giving up. You can sleep when you’re dead, Sam.

  She would go on, and work on getting them both home, until there was not a breath left in her.

  Finally, after she and Teal’c had been inside the Pit of Sorrows for almost twenty hours, Carter found the voice of Ra.

  She lifted it carefully from its socket, mindful of the breakage that had dropped her into the Pit in the first place, and held it up. It was a faceted, yellow-green crystal no bigger than her index finger. “What do you think?”

  Teal’c leaned close to study what she had found. “That is a data storage crystal,” he agreed. “Vocal recordings are commonly held in such devices.”

  “That’s what I was hoping.” She set the crystal down, very carefully, onto her jacket, and settled back onto her heels. She had been kneeling next to the cavity for so long her legs felt like lead pipes, heavy and utterly without feeling. “It was in one of the conduit junctions. I’m guessing Ra would have used a separate device to record his messages — somehow I can’t see him with his head inside here.”

  “It does not seem likely. Can you modify what we have to record a transmission of our own?”

  “I think so. It looks like there’s a simple loop-store function in the other cavity, for recording power spikes. I should be able to modify that. At the very least, we can get Morse code out of it.”

  Teal’c handed her the canteen. She sipped a little of the flat, warm water in celebration, feeling her throat cracking as she swallowed. She ignored it.

  “We should begin,” he said, taking the canteen back. “I grow weary of this structure.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I was just starting to find myself.” She started to rise, putting a hand flat on the floor to push herself up. She didn’t trust her numb legs to provide much support.

  As she touched the cold floor, the hyperdrive shut down.

  There was no warning. The vibration of the drive simply faded, died. Carter felt it through the bones of her wrist, her knees and her backside, and a moment later there was an awful, sickening twist of sensation that almost made her cry out. She clenched her teeth over a sudden rush of nausea.

  They were back in realspace.

  Carter hauled herself upright. Whatever had been simulating gravity during the journey was still functioning, but there was no other sensation of movement. “Floor’s steady,” she gasped. “We’re not altering vector.”

  “The Pit is coasting in space,” Teal’c replied.

  “This could either be very good, or very bad.” The cold numbness in her legs was turning into a buzzing sting as the circulation returned. “If we stay in open space, it could make us easier to find. But if there’s a gravity well out there…”

  “Then our wager could be void.”

  “You don’t get out of paying that easily.” She picked up the crystal, and started to walk towards the first access cavity.

  Something brushed the outside of the Pit.

  Carter felt the impact of it, and then a subtle change of direction. She froze. An object had struck the Pit’s exterior, hard enough to feel through all the metal and the stone, hard enough to set the place rotating slowly.

  Teal’c was on his feet too. He reached down and retrieved his staff weapon. Carter slipped the crystal into her pocket and staggered over to the communications cavity, where she had left her MP-5. She picked it up. It felt very heavy.

  “What do you think?” she hissed.

  “Perhaps nothing. Some piece of debris. A small asteroid.”

  “Then why are we holding guns?”

  “In case I am wrong.”

  There was another impact, solid this time. The Pit shivered. There was a scraping sound, a series of clatters. Carter looked up as the sounds seemed to move above her, across the ceiling. “That’s no asteroid,” she breathed.

  More sounds, then a heavy jolting that almost had Carter off her feet. She steadied herself against the wall, grabbing at the corner as an even more violent jolt shook the Pit.

  There were a few seconds when the floor seemed to see-saw under her, then a final, massive impact, followed by a stillness so complete and so sudden that Carter could only think of it as being grabbed, and held still.

  All the lights went out.

  She gasped. The Pit had become completely dark in an instant. “Teal’c?”

  “I am here, Major Carter.”

  “Something’s caught us. A ship, or something… We’re being held, aren’t we?”

  “Indeed.”

  A rush of unreasoning relief went through her. She knew, on a purely intellectual level, that it was a foolish thing to feel, that the chances of the Pit encountering a friendly starship were vanishingly small. But on a far baser level, she needed to be free of the place.

  One way or another, Carter knew she was going to leave the Pit of Sorrows soon. And she could not view that prospect with anything but joy.

  There was a grinding noise, heavy and metallic, and a sliver of light knifed towards her. The door was opening.

  As soon as Carter saw it start to move she turned and stumbled away, around the nearest inner wall. Teal’c darted past, taking up position just behind her.

  She raised the gun, blinking away the blurriness in her vision as she aimed down the barrel, hunching around the corner to watch the doorway with one eye. The slab was coming back down, quite quickly, and letting in a swiftly expanding band of light. To Carter’s eyes, adapted to the dim golden glow of the Pit’s internal lighting, it seemed intolerably bright.

  The door slid entirely away, and a figure stepped from the light.

  Glare distorted it, robbed it of mass and outline. For a second it seemed impossibly thin, skeletal, and Carter wondered unbelievingly if they had been discovered by the Asgard. But the hope was short-lived — as the figure moved into the Pit, it bulked out, became tall and strong and solid.

  It was holding a staff weapon. Carter realized she was aiming her gun at a fully armored Jaffa.

  The man walked carefully into the Pit of Sorrows, his staff held at high port. The mechanical head atop his shoulder armor swiveled left and right: it was strange, oddly bifurcated, two narrow serpent heads fixed side by side. Four eyes glowed a dull red into the Pit’s gloom.

  “Neheb-Kau,” Teal’c breathed. “It cannot be…”

  The serpent-headed Jaffa halted, and then barked a command. Behind him, two more warriors entered to join him, their double-helms turning warily.

  Then more men came. These were not warriors — they wore robes, not armor, and their shaved heads were bare. Each carried a device, a strange block of golden metal the length of a man’s arm, and studded with pipes and handles.

  Technicians, thought Carter, as the men stopped in a ragged huddle, looking cowed and nervous. As she waited, the lead Jaffa pointed towards the ce
ntre of the Pit, and snarled out another order. The technicians started to move forwards.

  Three of them went straight for the nearest corner. The last of them must have decided to take a different route, around the far side of the wall, because he almost walked right into Carter before he saw her.

  Their eyes met. “Hi,” she said, helplessly.

  The man shrieked, a thin, high scream of pure terror.

  She watched as he scrambled back, the golden machine tumbling heavily from his hands, and then the interior of the Pit erupted into a cacophony of yells and bellows. The technicians were scattering, the warriors barking out panicked commands. Carter ducked slightly out from the wall to see what was happening and a staff-blast ripped past her, scaldingly close. The lead Jaffa had fired, brutally fast — if his aim had been better in the darkness the plasma bolt would have carbonized her skull.

  Instead it detonated against the wall behind her, throwing her forwards. Teal’c stepped out over her, firing his own staff, and Carter got the MP-5 up one-handed and loosed off a clattering stream of bullets. She wasn’t exactly aiming, but the bullets ripped into the wall next to the lead warrior, peppering him with jagged shards of stone, and his next shot went wildly into the ceiling.

  Molten stone rained down, hissing in the dust.

  All three warriors were firing now, their blasts howling out into the Pit. Teal’c fired again, striking one of the snake-headed men full in the chest, the blast tearing through his armor. He fired as he fell, and the staff loosed its energies at a wild angle.

  The bolt sizzled through the Pit and screamed off the golden cylinder.

  Carter saw the impact, the sudden ripple of energy that coursed over its surface, and then, in utter horror, watched the illuminated strips start to flicker. If the container failed…

  She threw her gun down and dropped to her knees. “We surrender!” she yelled.

  Teal’c was staring at her. “Major Carter!”

  “The cylinder,” she hissed. “If it gets hit again we’re all dust!”

  He looked back at the pillar, his jaw set hard, then back at the Jaffa ahead of him. He lowered his staff. “Hol mel!”