STARGATE SG-1: Oceans of Dust (15 page)

As he reached the top there was a hissing, bellowing roar from behind him. He glanced back in time to see an immense fountain of sand vomit upwards from the pit floor.

The sight drew a cry of shock from him — for a moment he thought that some other explosion must have gone off underground, one last, gigantic demolition charge to destroy the Pit of Sorrows and its lethal occupant once and for all. But this was no explosion. Very different forces were at work here.

Another stream of sand powered up, soaring above his head. He could see it clearly because of the light funneling up from below ground, a stark, blue-white glare, flickering in the turmoil and impossibly bright.

“Daniel?” Jack’s voice was all wonder and horror. “What the hell?”

Daniel could only shake his head. The floor of the excavation, along with the crater that had been caused by the shaft’s destruction, was bulging upwards.

Jets of sand hissed and leapt around the bulge as it grew, the light stuttered and flared. Daniel saw the dome of sand crack, slide apart as something dark and angular broke through it, heaving itself up in one vast, birthing surge. It caught the overhang of sandstone as it came up and the rock wall exploded, blasted into razored shards by the impact. Daniel felt a slap above his left eye that turned his head around. A fragment of rock had caught him there.

He staggered, but could not fall. There was still too much to see.

The object was rising. Tons of sand rained from it, slabs of shaft-stone battered down into the huge hole it was leaving as it lifted, embedding themselves in the cold sand, and the sound of it was a tooth-shaking, reverberating drone.

It hovered for a few seconds, shedding desert, rotating slowly above the giant, debris-strewn crater. It was a flattened pyramid of pitted black metal, bigger than a house, covered in panels and pipework and layers of complex systemry. Another pyramid, upturned, capped its base, and this was stretching, splitting into sections that slid and rotated against each other with smooth mechanical precision.

Between each of the sections, blue light flickered, pulsed, increased to an intolerable flare, and then the entire Pit of Sorrows leapt upwards, accelerating with brutal speed. In seconds it was a whirling black square, spilling lightning, then it was a mote, then a star, dimming in the sky until it was completely gone.

All the strength went out of Daniel, then. He fell to his knees, the side of his face soaking with a wet heat. He brought his hand to it, already knowing that it was blood, but the slippery feel of it on his fingers was too much. He sagged, rolled onto his back.

The sky above him was dark and cool, dotted with stars. He lay there, looking up at them, until the helicopter arrived to block them out.

There were medics in the helicopter. One of them cleaned Daniel’s wound and closed it with surgical tape, while the other two strapped Greg Kemp to a pallet and tried to find a vein to connect their saline drips to.

The machine was a big, open-sided Pave Hawk, designed for medical extractions and rescue operations under extreme combat conditions. Daniel, strapped into a seat with his head pounding and mouth dry with sand, wondered if those conditions had ever included the aftermath of an Egyptian tomb leaping out of the ground and flying away.

One of the medics asked him what the glowing object was, that had soared up past the helicopter so quickly, but Daniel could not answer. Even if the Pave Hawk’s crew were security-cleared for that kind of information, he simply didn’t know.

All he did know was that Sam, Teal’c and the awful force that had reduced Anna Andersson to dust and Greg Kemp to a crippled, broken tatter of parchment flesh and corrupted bone were all three locked together within the Pit of Sorrows, whatever it was and wherever it was going.

He was starting to believe that a lack of air was the least of his friends’ problems.

Jack had been at the front of the helicopter, using the radio. He clambered back to where Daniel was sitting and dropped down next to him, not bothering to strap in. The wind of the Pave Hawk’s passage tugged at his clothes. “Can’t reach SGC,” he reported. “Could be their comms are down again.”

“Another message?”

“Wouldn’t be surprised. Daniel, have you ever seen anything like that?”

Daniel shook his head. “The way it changed shape was a lot like —” He stopped himself, glanced about to see if any of the Hawk’s crew were close by. They weren’t, but he decided to play it safe anyway. “It looked like the way our old friends from out of town do things.”

“Yeah, I thought that. The shape’s a giveaway, too.”

“So what now?”

Jack ran a weary hand back through his hair. “I’ve been on to Colonel Parker at the airbase. She’s fuelling up a ride home — it’ll be a hell of a lot quicker than getting here, but I’ll have to drive.”

Daniel closed his eyes. He an idea of what that meant. “We need to track that thing, Jack.”

“Already on it. As soon as SGC get back online Parker will appraise them and tell Hammond to try and contact the Tok’ra. If anyone can get Carter and Teal’c back, it’s them.”

“What if they don’t play ball?”

Jack gave him a dark look, full of pain. “They’d better.”

As Daniel had feared, their ride home was a fast jet, an F-14 Tomcat, sleek and vicious-looking as it squatted on the runway. According to Jack it was perfect for the trip because it had two seats and could do the entire journey in less than five hours, as long as they could refuel regularly on the way.

There was no answer to that. Daniel knew that there was no better way to get back to Stargate Command, even though the thought of being thrown around the sky in such a craft for five hours filled him with dread. But while the F-14 could achieve a speed of mach two, even that seemed slow to someone who was used to stepping between worlds in the blink of an eye.

Both men had to be in flight suits for the trip, so they changed out of the battered and soiled civilian outfits they had been wearing. And then, very carefully, they sealed them inside large Ziploc bags and carried them with them to the jet.

Of all the things that Daniel had not mentally prepared himself for, it was for exhaustion to catch up with him just as the return to Cheyenne Mountain got underway. But the demands that Egypt and Sar’tua had placed on his body required their due, and he could only put off paying that particular tribute for so long. A muzzy wave of fatigue started to wash down through him as he was climbing into the F-14’s cockpit, so hard and heavy that he almost stumbled under its weight.

Thankfully, Jack was already in the pilot seat, and either didn’t notice or chose not to mention it. Daniel was quite pleased about that, until he realized that the colonel had only gotten a couple of hours more sleep than he had, back on the C-130. And while Daniel Jackson’s eyelids had suddenly become stone, Jack was getting ready to punch a fighter jet through the sound barrier. Twice.

He very nearly said as much while an airman was strapping him in, but then it occurred to him that Jack’s system was probably fuelled entirely by a combination of anger, impatience and caffeine right now, and while that was a potent mix, it had its limits. Informing the man of that fact might have unwelcome consequences, Daniel decided — after all, did he really want to remind Jack that he should be exhausted, just as he was taking off?

So he held his tongue. And, as the engines thundered and surged behind him, he also held onto the inside of the aircraft, very tightly indeed.

For all the flight’s terrors, and all the distress and uncertainty and worry coursing around his brain, fatigue finally won the war. Ten kilometers above the curve of the Earth, locked into a fragile skin of aluminum and titanium and sitting just ahead of two engines that were turning air itself into fire, he slept.

It was not a restful sleep; that would have been too much to hope. His surroundings were not conducive to rest, even though Jack was holding the F-14 straight and true. And even if he had been in his own bed, the past few hours still had their hooks in him. Images of his friends, and of what Greg Kemp had been turned into, kept shouting him awake.

So he dozed, fitfully, the flight helmet heavy on his nodding head, while the world turned beneath him. Occasionally the voices in his dreams turned out to be his own, or issuing from the aircraft’s radio. Jack spoke to him once or twice, and he was surprised to be able to answer quite coherently, although after the flight was done he had no recollection at all of what those answers might have been. There was a moment when he awoke to see something vast and dark looming over the plane, and Daniel seemed to remember later the process of having the F-14 refueled in mid-air, but he couldn’t be entirely sure which parts of that event were real and which were conjured from his exhausted imagination. Dream or no dream, his chaotic mental state leant it an unpleasant, violatory quality: something about the questing, oozing tube, wavering back through the air towards him made him want to cover his face, to recoil in his seat. But when he opened his eyes again it was gone, if it had ever been there at all, and there was nothing in front of him but sky.

General Hammond had a lot of news for the two men when they finally got back to the briefing room, but little of it was good.

He got the worst of it out of the way first. “We lost telemetry with the object about an hour after it took off. Looks like it went into hyperspace just outside lunar orbit.”

Daniel had been afraid it would do that. “Any clues as to its course at all?”

“We’re working on that. If it kept the same trajectory in hyperspace as it did when it was flying sub-light, it’s probably heading out of the ecliptic plane.”

“That’s a big ‘if’.” Daniel knew little about the mechanics of superluminal travel, but he was at least aware that a straight line in realspace could be a corkscrew once a ship went FTL. There simply was no direct analogue between the two universes.

“Right now, that’s the best we can do.”

“So what did the Tok’ra say?”

Hammond’s frown deepened. “The Tok’ra have turned us down,” he said flatly.

“Just like that?”

“Pretty much.”

“Did you get in touch with Jacob?” Jack asked him.

“Anise answered our call. She said that there were no resources available. And offered her condolences, of course.”

“Figures.”

The failure of the Tok’ra to come through was a desperate blow, but Daniel could not have said he was surprised. Jacob Carter had probably been kept entirely out of the loop, in fact — if anyone could have convinced the Tok’ra to help, it would have been him. Sam Carter’s father was host to the benign Tok’ra symbiote Selmak: unlike the brain-rape that a Goa’uld perpetrated on its host body, the Tok’ra existed in a partnership that left both entities intact and benefitting from each other.

Selmak was a worthy ally, and Jacob Carter loved his daughter as much as any father, but there was only ever so far he could go. The Tok’ra had a habit of providing help only when it benefitted their own cause, and although they opposed the Goa’uld just as Stargate Command did, they preferred to do things their own way.

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.