STARGATE SG-1: Oceans of Dust (22 page)

“It begins,” whispered Neheb-Kau, his high voice echoing around the chamber. “Oh, Kafra, do you know how long I have waited for this day?”

“I do not,” Kafra lied.

“Many lifetimes, my friend. Many, many lifetimes.”

There was a dry rustle of robes as the God sat down on his throne. Behind him, the blind slaves moved. Kafra could hear the chime of their jewelry; the bands at their wrists and necks, the rings through their empty eyelids. They were lifting Neheb-Kau’s golden pectoral onto his chest, the holy armor onto his shoulders, placing his scepter in what was left of his hands.

Better they were blind, Kafra thought. He could not pity them.

The thought betrayed his body. Despite himself he looked up, and saw the face of his God. He dropped his gaze, quickly, but not quickly enough. Neheb-Kau had seen the reaction.

He had torn the eyes from Jaffa who had done the same in the past, but his mood seemed too good for such excesses today. Instead, he gave a dry chuckle. “Is my appearance really so upsetting, old friend?”

“I… I fear for your wellbeing, my Lord.” Kafra forced his gaze up again. “Your host is failing again. The sarcophagus no longer helps. Please, choose another, and swiftly.”

“Kafra, my loyal First Prime, I have had host after host fall away from me. It is the natural order of things.” Neheb-Kau touched a control on his pectoral. His helm rose like a swarm of blades from the armor at his back, folding to enclose his peeling head in strips of gold and bright lapis lazuli. His mask, glittering and bearded, came up in segments, joining seamlessly to complete his encasement.

The eyes glowed white-gold, just for a moment, as the God tested his power. “I know I must choose a new host soon, but not today. We have a guest, one who demands obeisance.”

Kafra cleared his throat. “On that matter, my Lord…”

The mask tilted towards him. “Yes?”

The word was a warning.

“When we opened the Pit of Sorrows, there were others within.”

“Others.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Do you mock me, Kafra?”

He was close to death. He could feel it in the air between them. It was like seeing water, cold clear water, and suddenly finding himself desperately thirsty.

No. He could not drink, no matter how much he craved. He had a holy duty.

“Never, my Lord. But I speak the truth — there were two survivors within the Pit. They must have been trapped there when the terminal failsafe was activated.”

“Survivors!” Neheb-Kau rose from the throne, his voice liquid with excitement. “These others were
alive?
”

“Alive, and armed. They attacked as we entered. My Jaffa subdued them.”

“Who? Who were these survivors? Tell me quickly!”

“One is a Jaffa — he bears the symbol of the First Prime of Apophis. The other is a human woman. She bore a strange weapon.”

“Apophis, you say?
Really?
” The God raised a ravaged hand to stroke the metal beard of his mask, an affectation that spoke of intense thought. “Now why would that cretin send me his First Prime, hm? As an assassin? A gift? An emissary, perhaps…”

“Give me the order, and I shall cut the answers from him.”

“Perhaps later. For now, we must consider the fact that this First Prime survived many hours in the Pit, apparently unharmed. I believe a proper study of him could be enlightening.” The mask tilted upwards slightly, as though the God were listening to something only he could hear. “Inform Pa’Nakht that his services will be required.”

A cold weight grew inside Kafra. Pa’Nakht was the ka’epta of surgeries, chief of medics aboard the throneship; a technician of prodigious skill and vast experience in the workings of the living body. A pity, then, that the man seemed to possess no moral sense whatsoever. He was just as likely to be found taking a slave apart to see how it worked as he was to be healing its wounds.

If the First Prime of Apophis was fated to be turned over to Pa’Nakht, it would have been better for him had Shenet had been unable to control his grief, and murdered him on their way to the ring dungeon. “I will see to it, my Lord. You will have your answers.”

“I desire many. We have been away for too long, Kafra, and there is much we do not know. This is a most delicate time. We must be open to all things.”

“I understand.”

“And besides…” Neheb-Kau stalked closer, the mask’s gleaming gaze fixed implacably on him. “Oh, to be in such a place, with such a thing… And to have lived… Kafra, can you
imagine
?”

“I cannot, my Lord.” It was another lie. He had imagined worse. “And what of the woman?”

“Bring her to me. And the weapon you took from her. Once she is bathed, of course.”

“My Lord?” Kafra stared. “
Bathed?
”

“Of course. She will have been in the Pit for hours. Days. I have no wish to be near such a foulness. That awful dust… Give her to the slaves. Have her bathed if she is dirty. If she is hungry, feed her…” He waved a hand, dismissively. “Have her prepared for my audience.”

“As you command, my Lord.” Kafra stood up, bowed, and turned.

When he reached the door, he heard an odd sound. He paused, and risked a glance back over his shoulder.

Neheb-Kau was standing by the sarcophagus, watching it fold itself shut again. And he was humming, softly, to himself. An old song.

A lullaby.

Kafra sighed, and headed back to the transporter. Perhaps, this time, it would show mercy and rip him limb from limb.

Daniel
and Jack had spent an hour on Amethun, waiting for Bra’tac to arrive. It was an hour too long, and not only because Amethun wasn’t a very nice place to be. According to the Asgard data, for every minute Daniel Jackson had spent pacing anxiously around the Stargate, the Pit of Sorrows had flown almost five hundred billion kilometers further from Earth.

The figure had astounded him. He had made himself read it again and again, and finally had to bring up a calculator on the laptop and check the figures. But the answer he got matched that measured by the Asgard hyperspace probe. The Pit of Sorrows, a black metal and stone pyramid not much bigger than a large house, was powering through hyperspace at almost thirty thousand times the velocity of light.

The revelation was disheartening. Daniel was no technician, but he knew of little that could match such a speed. A Goa’uld Ha’tak pyramid ship, at the peak of its powers, could outrun the Pit of Sorrows. The modified Tel’tak, even with Sephotep’s upgrades, couldn’t even get close. And by the time Bra’tac arrived to pick Daniel and Jack up from Amethun’s swampy surface, Sam and Teal’c had already been in flight for thirteen hours.

Once the Tel’tak was underway, Bra’tac helped Daniel interface the laptop to Sephotep’s command board. This was only possible because the laptop was a Stargate Command special issue device, and had been modified by Samantha Carter herself to include a crystal interface. Within half an hour, the glassy panels in the command board were displaying the Asgard telemetry, and Daniel was able to shut the laptop down and put it away.

The Pit’s course was plotted on the display as a thin cone. Earth was at the tip, and the cone angled sharply upwards and out of the galactic plane. The graphic defeated Daniel for a while — astrophysics was Sam’s field of expertise — but a few minutes scrolling around the data eventually told him what he was looking at.

When he was certain, he called Jack and Bra’tac over to join him. The Tel’tak could fly itself for a while.

“Okay,” he began, pointing at the cone. “This is where the Pit’s going, according to what the Asgard are telling us. You can see that the cone widens the further they go: the further they are from Earth, the less certain we are of where they’ll be.”

“Makes sense,” said Jack. “The little dots are stars, right?”

“Yeah.” Daniel traced a line along the cone with his fingertip. The panel, sensing his touch, joined the stars he brushed into a thin silver chain. “The closest to Earth is this one here, Ross 248. We’ll stop there, run a sensor sweep, and then move on to the next one if we don’t find them. Rinse and repeat.”

Bra’tac surveyed the slowly turning graphic thoughtfully, stroking his beard. “What evidence do you have that the Pit of Sorrows will end its journey close to a star?”

“It’s more hope than evidence. But Ra’s second message did talk about the Ash Eater ‘returning’, so we have to assume it’s actually going somewhere. Back to where it came from, maybe. I’m sure he wouldn’t have said that if it was just going to fly through space forever.”

“You’re assuming he was telling the truth, too,” said Jack.

Bra’tac gave a mirthless chuckle. “The threats of the System Lords are most often true. Bargain with them at your peril, but when they boast about their plans for you, do not doubt them.”

“That’s what I’m counting on.” Daniel pushed his glasses up and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Working on the data was making his head ache. “On the downside, every time we drop out of hyperspace and run a sweep, the Pit of Sorrows will be moving even further away. It’s travelling nearly twice as fast as we are.”

Jack squinted at the cone. “How many stars have you got?”

“Nine plotted. There’s more…” He sighed. “But if we don’t find them in the ninth system, the cone gets so wide we’ll have to start moving across it. Doubling back on ourselves, even.”

“So we’ll be out of time.”

“We won’t. Teal’c and Sam will be.”

“Then we must find them before the ninth system,” Bra’tac said. “I shall increase power to the naquadah turbines, and we must be ready to reconfigure the Tel’tak’s systems for a sensor sweep as soon as we leave hyperspace.”

Daniel nodded silently. The two giant modules taking up most of the Tel’tak’s cargo space were powerful generators, stores of superdense high-grade naquadah feeding a rotary energy-transfer system. According to what Bra’tac had learned from flying the vessel so far, Sephotep had not simply enhanced the ship’s drive system; he had basically stripped it out entirely and replaced it with something very different.

But how long the turbines could keep running at such a high rate was worrying everyone. Daniel hadn’t been in the Tel’tak for an hour and he was already feeling uncomfortably warm. The units were pumping dry heat into the cargo bay at such a rate that the life support system was having trouble dumping it all. Hot, dry air, thick with static electricity, was wafting forwards through the big open hatch.

He watched Bra’tac and Jack go back to the forward control boards, rather envying them their tasks. Flying the ship or reconfiguring its systems might have taken his mind away from the fact that Teal’c and Samantha Carter could already be dead, or lost, or simply unreachable.

They were soaring through hyperspace in a flying tomb with a monstrous, lethal alien force. He was trying to catch up with them in the galaxy’s fastest cargo scow.

Five hours later, close to the ruddy orb of Ross 248, the picture looked even more bleak. Because by that time, Daniel Jackson was certain something was wrong with the ship.

Ross 248 was a red dwarf star just over ten light-years from Earth. According to the Asgard data — and the best guesses of human astronomers — the little sun had no attendant planets. As a prospect for finding the Pit of Sorrows intact and containing two living members of SG-1, then, it was poor indeed. But it had to be searched, which mean the Tel’tak was forced to put off its headlong chase and return to the universe of men and matter.

Daniel had returned to the command console for the breakout. The Tel’tak, for all its improvements, still possessed only two seats, with the additional board being positioned for Sephotep to use while standing. It gave a clear view through the forward ports, but that paled quickly in the face of severe discomfort, so Daniel had taken to sitting back in the cargo bay with the laptop, idly searching through the Asgard telemetry in an attempt to stop himself thinking about how far ahead of him Teal’c and Sam had to be.

He had been in ships leaving hyperspace before, and was prepared for a slight jolt upon re-entry. Goa’uld damping systems were not quite perfect, and even in the vast bulk of a Ha’tak he had felt the deck tip under him under vector change. He held onto the sides of the board, planted his feet a little more widely on the floor, and waited for the ship to decelerate.

There was a graphical representation of the approaching breakout point on the command board’s display: two rings of light, moving towards each other, intersecting. When the two rings became one, the ship would drop back into normal space.

He resisted the urge to count downwards out loud. Neither Jack nor Bra’tac would have appreciated it, he was sure.

The rings passed over each other and locked into place. Daniel glanced up to see the silver-blue whorl ahead of the viewports part onto darkness. Then the ship bounced under him so hard that he almost bit his tongue in two.

He grabbed wildly at the console to avoid being flung off his feet. There was an awful noise coming from the cargo bay, a stuttering electrical whine, and the heat in the ship had increased dramatically. Daniel half expected to see fires engulfing the turbines, but when he looked back through the hatchway they were as he had last seen them.

A faint ripple showed in the air above the port module, though.

The bouncing slowed, starting to fade out along with the sound. Daniel let go of the console, warily. “What the hell was that?”

The others had felt it too. Jack was on his feet, holding onto the back of the control throne as the vessel trembled back to stillness, but Bra’tac was still busy with the controls. “I am detecting no malfunctions,” the Jaffa called back. “Is there any visible damage?”

“Not from here,” Jack replied. “Daniel?”

“Don’t think so.” The shuddering was gone, now. “I could see a heat haze on one of the modules. We’re pushing them too hard.”