STARGATE SG-1: Oceans of Dust Read online

  “Colonel?” Carter was a narrow strip of face between tugged-down cap and pulled-up collar. “This doesn’t make sense.”

  “You think?”

  “No sir, I mean… Well, why would a top Goa’uld scientist be in flying cargo ship? And why here?”

  “And why alone?” said Daniel. “You’ve got to admit, something doesn’t add up.”

  “Tau’ri!” Bra’tac snapped. “And Teal’c, have you spent too long among humans? Why would I bring you here for a hasshaki cargo scow?”

  “That was going to be my next question,” O’Neill felt slightly embarrassed. “So…”

  “Most Goa’uld starships are based on the designs of Ptah.” Teal’c’s voice was thoughtful. “Perhaps Sephotep was trying to improve on his works.”

  “A test flight?”

  “The fact that this vessel crashed so far from assistance would suggest that its range has been increased.”

  It was a possibility. If true, it made the downed vessel considerably more valuable, and not just to Earth. “Carter, how much do you know about Tel’taks?”

  “Enough to know if it’s been modified.”

  “Great. Let’s go have a look-see.” He began trudging towards the ship, head low against the wind, trying not to imagine vast machines drifting down towards him through the icy sky.

  As it turned out, O’Neill didn’t need Carter’s expertise to tell him that the Tel’tak had been altered. The outside of the vessel was very much like those he had seen before, although in somewhat poorer repair, but the interior structure had been heavily and obviously modified. The cockpit’s central instrumentation block had been fitted with a large, intricate control board that overlooked the two original consoles, and further inspection revealed that almost a quarter of the vessel’s cargo space was taken up by two massive equipment modules.

  The changes seemed very much a work in progress, with open panels and patched cables everywhere. Had the ship possessed any power at all, its interior would have been a riot of exposed and glowing systemry. At present, however, it was utterly inert, and with the forward viewports covered with rock and ice, Carter had to begin working by flashlight.

  With Daniel helping her, she quickly started pulling panels up and tugging at crystals. O’Neill watched the pair of them for a few minutes, trying not to waste too much time asking questions about what they were doing. After the initial search of the ship Teal’c had gone outside to talk privately to Bra’tac; although they could easily have slipped into pure Goa’uld, the two men must have decided that would be disrespectful to the Tau’ri, and just stepped back into the icy wind.

  O’Neill wondered if they really were immune to the freezing temperatures, or just much better at hiding its effects.

  After a while, he started to feel uncomfortably superfluous. He was no fool when it came to machinery: had the Tel’tak been an Earth machine, he could probably have stripped its engines down and rebuilt them in an afternoon. But Goa’uld technology was a very different matter, based around a system of crystalline control elements that looked, to O’Neill, like so much colored glass. Sam Carter was picking crystals out of their sockets, turning them, studying them, checking with Daniel on the exact translations of warning cartouches or identifying hieroglyphs, and gradually sorting out the Tel’tak’s wiring in her head. O’Neill might as well have been watching her sort Christmas baubles.

  He went outside, ducking through the ship’s open hatch and back out onto the plateau. Brat’tac had gone. Only Teal’c remained, standing like a dark statue against the pale, skittering sky.

  “Hey Teal’c.”

  “O’Neill.”

  “Where’s Bra’tac?”

  “He has returned to the refugees, to prepare them for the coming journey.”

  “I guess they’re not going to be too happy about having to pack up and leave again, huh.”

  “They will have expected it. Even before this vessel fell. A Jaffa who rebels against his gods is never at rest.”

  There wasn’t much O’Neill could say to that.

  A silence fell across the two men. Past the whine and whoop of the wind, O’Neill heard small stones rattling across the surface the plateau, the hiss of grit and frost blown by the gale. Far away, along the next range of mountains, he saw a fine blue spark connect the clouds and the tallest peak. A moment later, another.

  Thunder crackled, muted almost to nothing by the distance. “Storm’s coming.”

  Teal’c said nothing.

  Another silence. He tried again. “So how many are there?”

  “Eighteen Jaffa warriors, along with their women and children.”

  O’Neill blinked at him. “There are children here?”

  “Would you have expected them to be left behind?”

  “No, I just… I didn’t hear them.”

  “Silence in the presence of danger is one of the first skills a Jaffa child learns.”

  He thought about children being in this blighted place, frozen, hungry, made mute by what they had seen happen on Chulak, what they might see again. The thought lodged in his throat like a fishbone.

  “Son of a bitch,” he muttered.

  Thunder pealed again, closer this time. It sounded like cloth ripping.

  After a time, Teal’c said: “The position of this vessel troubles me.”

  “How so?”

  “The scar it created during the crash leads directly away from the temple complex.”

  O’Neill frowned, checked quickly left and right to confirm his friend’s words. The plateau was far from level, and with so many rock formations and jagged boulders littering the area it was hard to see exactly where anything lay in relation to anything else. But now that he knew what to look for, he realized that Teal’c was right: the grim, huddled wheel of buildings making the up the temple complex was right in front of the Tel’tak’s buried nose. If the ship hadn’t crashed, it would have flown directly over the central dome.

  Or into it. “What was he trying to do, ram the place?”

  “Perhaps he was trying to land close by.”

  “Nah, he was coming in fast. How do these things handle in atmosphere, anyway?”

  “Badly.”

  “Sir?” Carter was standing in the hatch, hanging onto the side frame with one hand to avoid being dragged out by the wind.

  “Find something?” O’Neill asked.

  “I think so.”

  He followed her in, Teal’c close behind. At first he could see nothing different to when he had left, until Carter walked over to where Daniel was crouching. “Here, sir.”

  A small panel had been removed from the floor, and beneath it, a fist-sized cluster of crystals was pulsing a soft, amber glow.

  “Sam thinks it’s a phase relay,” said Daniel, looking up. “Kind of like a circuit breaker.”

  O’Neill raised an eyebrow. “Circuit breaker?”

  “Yeah, you know. Or a fuse. To protect the power in your house if there’s a surge, or-“

  “Daniel, I know what a circuit breaker is.”

  The man nodded, his glasses reflecting the golden light. “Yeah, sorry. Anyway, I think Sephotep managed to trip this one.”

  “He blew the fuse? Come on…”

  Carter knelt down next to the open panel. “Colonel, this relay is at a critical junction between the ship’s power plant and the rest of the systems. I missed it at first because there are so many new elements tapped into it, but I think this is a fail-safe. When it cut out it deactivated the whole ship, but the naquadah generator is still intact.”

  “Can you fix it?”

  “If I’m right, it’s just a matter of resetting it and restarting the plant.”

  That seemed too easy. Jack O’Neill knew better than to trust the offer of a free lunch. “So why didn’t Sephotep do that?”

  “He did not have time,” said Teal’c quietly. “The vessel was already close to the plateau. The crash must have occurred almost instantly.”

  �
�They probably never knew what hit them,” Carter added.

  O’Neill made a face. He understood exactly what Carter was proposing, but it still left too many unanswered questions for his liking. He couldn’t explain why a Goa’uld scientist was flying a customized cargo ship directly at a temple full of refugees, for a start. Or how he’d managed to blow the ship’s main fuse at the last moment.

  Still, there was no telling how long any of them had before Apophis came looking for his missing technician. And reactivating the ship might be the only way of answering those questions in time.

  He sighed. “Okay, plug it in.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah. Just try not to blow us up, okay?”

  “I’ll do my best,” Carter said absently. She was already reaching down into the relay, twisting two of the crystals, pressing a third back down into its socket…

  There was a jolt, and a soft whine that faded away to nothing. The light from the relay changed from pulsing amber to a calm, steady green.

  O’Neill looked around. The rest of the ship was still dark. “That was… Unsatisfying.”

  “Hm,” said Carter, and twisted another crystal.

  The cockpit lit up.

  The change was enough to make O’Neill start, but almost instantly he saw that the vessel was far from repaired. The light that had appeared when Carter had triggered that final crystal wasn’t coming from the ceiling, but instead was a dim, ruddy glow issuing from small panels near the floor. Several of the exposed sets of crystals were blinking fitfully, though, and smaller lights were winking on the three control boards. Something had worked, if only partially.

  Daniel was standing up, peering about. “What is this, emergency power?”

  “Maybe there’s another relay,” said Carter. She got up and went over to the centre board. O’Neill watched her press several controls in sequence.

  A wide panel in the centre of the console changed from being golden metal into a slab of what looked like illuminated glass.

  “Whoah,” said O’Neill. “Carter, what did you just do?”

  “I think this board is Sephotep’s test panel. Patch feeds come off a lot of the new systems and filter through data crystals to here, so I’m guessing…” She trailed off, then grinned. “Got it!”

  He joined her at the console. The panel was alive with graphics; animated diagrams and graphs in sharp blue-white vector, streams of Goa’uld hieroglyphs rolling down like tickertape. “Can you read this?”

  “I’m just looking at the pictures. Teal’c?”

  O’Neill stepped aside to let the Jaffa get close to the panel. He kept his silence as the big man studied the graphics for several seconds.

  “You are correct, Major Carter,” Teal’c said finally. “The panel monitors the systems data for this entire vessel. I believe Sephotep was recording this information continually before the power failed.”

  “Does it say why the power failed?”

  “The error was Sephotep’s. This vessel has many extra systems — an enhanced hyperdrive, sensors, weapons. Sephotep was attempting to activate too many at once.”

  “Guys?” said Daniel.

  “Wait.” Teal’c was scowling down at the panel, tracing a line of moving hieroglyphs with a fingertip. “Sephotep was readying the weapons to fire.”

  “Holy…” O’Neill glanced reflexively towards the front of the ship, to where the temple would be if he’d been able to see though half a ton of loose rock. “He was lining up to fire on the refugees!”

  “A strafing run,” Teal’c agreed. He straightened. “However, he could not have relayed that information back to Apophis.”

  “Yeah, he’d be here already.”

  “Ah, guys?” said Daniel again. He was near one of the forward boards, pointing down at the metal panels there. “I think this might be important…”

  Teal’c darted forwards, startlingly fast. “A locator beacon.”

  Carter ran over to join him. “Daniel? How long was this —”

  “I noticed it blinking as soon as I looked over here.”

  “Well switch it the hell off!” O’Neill poked his head through hatchway. The clouds above him were heavy, sluggish, and bluish sparks flickered from one to another. Lightning, he hoped.

  “I cannot,” Teal’c replied. “Major Carter, disengage the phase relay.”

  “Already trying…” There was a tight note to her voice that O’Neill didn’t like at all.

  He ducked back in. “What?”

  “No go, sir. It’s not built to be tripped manually.”

  “Can’t you just pull some of those crystals out?”

  She shook her head. “They lock when there’s power going through them.”

  “Well, smash them or something!”

  Carter stared at him. “I think that would be a really good way to detonate the generator.”

  “O’Neill,” said Teal’c. “We must warn the refugees.”

  “Next on my list.” He went for the hatch, stopped momentarily on the threshold. “Teal’c, you’re with me. Carter, find a way to kill the signal. If you have to, drop a grenade into that relay and run.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  He jumped out of the hatch, his boots crunching onto the plateau’s frosty surface. The wind had picked up, whipping at his uniform and stinging his face with sleet. “Next time, arctic gear,” he growled to himself. “Regardless.”

  The temple was several hundred meters away, almost hidden behind boulders and jagged, broken ground. The clearest route to it was close to the edge of the cliff, which O’Neill didn’t like at all, not with the storm almost on top of him. Probably better than clambering through the boulders, though. “What do you think, Teal’c? This way?”

  The man didn’t answer, just set off past O’Neill at a fast jog.

  “I’ll take that as a ‘yes’.” O’Neill took a second to tighten the sling on his MP5, then began to follow the Jaffa.

  It wasn’t easy. Teal’c didn’t seem to notice the weather at all, but O’Neill was being buffeted by the wind with every step. Having to squint against the sleet made things even more difficult. It was all he could do to keep up the pace.

  There wasn’t any other option, though. The refugees needed to get through the gate now.

  O’Neill forced his attention down to the stone beneath his boots, jogging forwards as fast as he could, only raising his head every few meters to gauge his progress. Teal’c was still ahead of him, already out of shouting distance. If that wasn’t bad enough, the gale must have been whistling through some rock formation close by, giving forth a rising whine that O’Neill was finding quite painful.

  There was another sound, more familiar: the crackle of his radio demanding attention. He lowered his head to it. “Carter?”

  Static hissed out at him for a moment, before wind-noise he had been hearing rose suddenly into a rippling shriek.

  He’d heard that sound before.

  There wasn’t even time to spin and face what was coming. O’Neill hurled himself forwards as the ground where he had been standing turned into a cloud of fire and shattered stone, a brutal explosion that sent him whirling through the air and straight towards the edge of the cliff.

  Chapter 3.

  Goodnight, Travel Well

  If Jack O’Neill hadn’t have jumped when he did, the shockwave from that blast would have pulverized him, shattered his insides. But in doing so he had given his body enough lift to be spun, by the blast and the freezing wind, to the cliff-edge and its frightening drop onto the killing ground below.

  For one dreadful, airborne moment, all he could see in his future was a long dive and a messy impact, but then the hard edge of the cliff whirled up towards him and smashed heavily into his face and chest. The breath went out of him in a guttural whoop as his ribs compressed, then he was sliding wildly, grabbing at the rocks around him, feeling them slice his skin even through the deadening cold.

  He managed to stop himself
just before he ran out of plateau.

  A second went past while he tried to remember how to breathe, how to think. He had fetched up on his belly, head and shoulders in mid air, and spent a short time staring down at the Stargate while pieces of cliff rained down past him. Then, when he had regained control of his lungs, he scrambled back a short distance and flipped himself over.

  His gun had gone flying in the blast. He reached over to grab it, but then noticed that the magazine was gone, ejected or broken off. He threw the useless thing aside.

  Teal’c appeared above him, reaching down to haul him upright. “Are you harmed?”

  “I’m fine,” he croaked. “What the hell hit us?”

  The Jaffa pointed, towards the temple. O’Neill saw a tiny sliver of dark metal in the sky, turning, executing a tight curve under the cloud layer. The screaming sound had faded, but he knew that respite was only temporary.

  He keyed his radio. “Carter?”

  “— on out there? Colonel O’Neill, where —”

  “Calm down, Major. I’m right here.”

  “Where’s ‘here’, sir?”

  “Out in the damned open, that’s where.” He and Teal’c had made it almost all the way to the buildings before the attack came; when he glanced back to the Tel’tak, it seemed very far away. The ship that had attacked him was already several kilometers beyond the temple, but racing closer with every second. Neither direction seemed a good choice.

  Then he remembered who was in the buildings between him and the onrushing fighter, and started running again, Teal’c in close pursuit.

  “What’s out there?” That was Daniel. There was a staccato timbre to his voice that spoke of furious activity. “We just heard shots, we didn’t —”

  “Death glider.” It was close enough now to be unmistakable; a glossy crescent howling down out of the sky towards him. As soon as he had spoken the machine unleashed its energies a second time; O’Neill saw gouts of fire spitting from its cannons.

  He dived for cover, throwing himself behind a boulder.

  There was a whiplash impact as a shot hit the rock, an ear-splitting din of frozen stone superheating and exploding away in lethal shards, and bolts of fire were ripping past as the glider fired over and over into the plateau. O’Neill felt the punch of each blast through his boots, through his bleeding hands as he crouched.