STARGATE SG-1: Oceans of Dust (23 page)

“Perhaps we will reduce power on the next leg of the journey,” said Bra’tac, his seamed face grim. “Maintaining this speed means running the turbines at maximum output. They may be starting to fail.”

“Whoah,” said Jack, putting his hands up. “C’mon, guys. My old Pinto used to sound worse than that, and I kept her running all the way through Basic.”

“At eighteen-thousand Cee?”

“I used to push her, yeah.”

“We have no time for this,” Bra’tac muttered, hands working the controls. “I engaged the stealth cloak shortly before leaving hyperspace, but in order to effect a sensor sweep I must reconfigure the power system.”

“How long will that take?” said Jack.

“Several minutes.”

“So just run the sweep.”

“We’d blow the phase relay,” Daniel cut in. “Resetting the whole system would take a lot longer, believe me. Even if we could. I only saw Sam do it once.”

“Right, I remember.” Jack stretched. Rubbed the small of his back. “Damn, they don’t build these things for comfort, do they?”

“No,” replied Bra’tac, curtly. “They do not,”

When Bra’tac ran the sweep, it did throw up one surprise. The astronomers had been wrong — Ross 248 did have two tiny worlds, little more than scorched rocks tumbling around in orbital periods of six weeks and nine years respectively. Other than that, the Tel’tak’s sensors gave exactly the results everyone had been expecting, which was nothing. There was no residual hyperdrive signature, no vented particles of spent naquadah, none of the subtle, but detectable, gravitic disturbances that proved the recent activation of a Goa’uld reactionless drive, other than those caused by the Tel’tak itself. And so, after thirty minutes of searching, Bra’tac disengaged the cloak and the long-range sensors and engaged the hyperdrive once more.

Daniel took the laptop back into the cargo compartment. The sight of hyperspace racing past the viewports was making him feel a little queasy, and he no longer wanted to be reminded of motion. He felt as though he had not been still for days. He wanted, suddenly, to lie down and stop, to let the universe rush on without him for a while.

Immediately the desire entered his head, he forced it angrily away. Sam and Teal’c probably wished they could stop moving too, and Daniel’s perpetual motion might be their only hope. He couldn’t afford to be still for a minute, for a second. Every delay extended their nightmare.

He found a place on the cargo bay floor that was free from trailing cables, and which wasn’t too close to the heat of the turbines, and sat there, his back against the golden wall and the laptop propped against his knees.

Around him, the ship murmured and clicked. He could feel the faint vibration of it through his back, could feel the subtle rocking as it powered through hyperspace. The air smelled of hot metal and machine oil and something like spices.

The heat coming off the turbines was really starting to prey on his mind.

They were pushing the ship far too hard, he knew. It had never been built for prolonged use — it was a prototype, a test-bed. There was no way it could last.

There was a footfall beside him, and he looked up to see Jack there. “Something wrong?”

“Nah. Bra’tac says the next system is about two hours away. I thought I’d, you know, mingle…”

“Kruger 60,” Daniel replied, absently. “Jack, I’ve got to ask you —”

“Don’t.”

“But —”

“Daniel, we’ve been over it. I
know
, okay? Chances are slim. But you know damn well they’d never give up on us if we were in the same situation.” He leaned against the wall and folded his arms. “Just let’s do this for now. Once we get past nine systems we’ll maybe start thinking about the alternatives.”

There was a rather awkward silence. Then Daniel said: “I, ah, wasn’t actually gonna ask that.”

“You weren’t?”

“No. I was going to ask if you’ve worked out what we’ll do when we actually catch up with them?”

“Get ‘em out and head for the nearest gate.”

“Yeah, it’s the
getting them out
part I’m still a little hazy on. If the Pit’s still in space, we’ll need some way of docking with it. And there’s the door to get through.”

“That part’s easy,” said Jack. “I’ve brought enough C4 for everybody. As for docking, let’s cross that one when we get to it.” He got up, patting Daniel on the shoulder as he did so. “This is a cargo ship. There’s got to be ways of getting awkward stuff onto it.”

“What’s it worth not to tell Sam you called her awkward?”

“Not as much as you think.” Jack stood up. “I’ll go talk to Bra’tac about docking.”

“Have fun.” Daniel watched him go, then returned his attention the laptop.

Two hours
, he thought. Almost seven light years.

Ross 248 was a red dwarf star. Kruger 60 was
two
red dwarf stars, a binary system, each sun about a quarter the mass of Sol and orbiting one another at a distance of nine AUs. Kruger 60 B was a flare star, a variable entity that randomly flashed out lethal solar storms. Once again, a less than likely destination for the Pit of Sorrows.

By the time Bra’tac started to engage the stealth cloak, the port turbine had been whistling steadily for almost an hour, and it was getting louder. Daniel no longer trusted it. He had taken to standing alongside the command board rather than behind it, to keep his back out of line with the hatchway. It made reading the display more difficult, since the strings of Goa’uld hieroglyphs on it scrolled rapidly upwards as data came through to the board. Daniel had started to notice that many of the symbols were now in red, rather than their usual yellow-gold.

He couldn’t take that as a good sign. “Bra’tac? How are things looking up there?”

“As they should be, Doctor Jackson.”

“Oh good.” Daniel swallowed. The air was getting very dry, and he was getting static shocks whenever he touched metal. “Just checking.”

The two rings shivered towards each other. Their outlines wavered, writhing like the waveform of a plucked string.

“How long?” called Jack. Was he having to shout over the whistling?

“About twenty seconds.” He reached up, slowly so as not to draw attention to the act, and gripped the edges of the console very hard.

“Fifteen.”

“Daniel, don’t do that.”

“Sorry.”
Twelve
, he thought.

The rings lurched together.

The deck jerked, shivered, and then began to hammer hard up into the soles of his boots. From the corner of his eye he saw a dot of blackness appear in the racing azure nothingness of hyperspace, expand, surge towards the ship and swallow it whole. As the ports went dark, the whistling rose to a painful shriek.

“Shut it down!” yelled Jack. “It’s gonna rip itself apart!”

“I cannot!” snapped Bra’tac. “To do so would leave us powerless!”

“We’ll be worse than powerless when the ship blows up!”

Whatever Bra’tac was doing, it was starting to work. Daniel could already feel the vibration lessening, and the screaming from the turbine was becoming less piercing. “I think we’re going to be okay,” he called, trying to release his grip on the command board. His fingers were locked more tightly around it than he had thought, and it took an effort to let go.

He pulled himself free and stepped back. Outside the ship, velvet blackness had replaced sliver-blue light. There were stars everywhere, large and bright and crystalline. Oddly, they were moving sideways across the viewports, slow but steady. The ship had come out of hyperspace turning on its axis.

The naquadah turbines throttled back to a low growl and fell silent.

Daniel puffed out a breath. “I think this prototype needs work,” he croaked.

“Jesus…” Jack got up from the control throne and walked around to where Daniel was standing. “Another one of those and we’ll be in pieces. We’ll be lucky if this rustbucket even gets out of the system.”

“Maybe it’s something we can fix.”

“Fix? Us?”

“Yeah…” He found himself looking away from Jack and back out of the viewports. Bra’tac was doing the same, half out of his seat to stare and the inky night outside. “Oil, or something…”

“Doctor Jackson,” said Bra’tac. “Why are the stars golden?”

“Because they aren’t stars,” Jack breathed. “Oh crap. What the hell have just walked into?”

What Daniel had first thought were the crystal points of distant suns were nothing of the sort. They were too big, too close. They were the wrong color.

Space around Kruger 60 A was full of Goa’uld craft.

Most of the stars Daniel had spotted earlier were small ships, far off — death gliders and Tel’taks, Al’kesh bombers and a swarm of other vessels he could not immediately identify. But as the ship turned slowly around, he saw vaster forms slide into view. A Ha’tak pyramid ship loomed out of the night, surrounded by smaller craft like a hive by bees. Behind it, another. And yet another.

When he had counted six of them, Daniel gave up keeping track.

“It’s a fleet.” Jack’s voice was dull, subdued. It was one shock too many. “Goddamn snakehead battlefleet.”

There was an odd quality to the vessels. All the pyramid ships Daniel had seen before tended towards the same color and design; a golden tetrahedron at the core, surrounded by a dark, complex outer disc containing the primary power and weapons systems. It was said that the core pyramid could operate free of the disc, but he had never seen the two apart. Only Ra’s ship, back on Abydos, had been a lone pyramid, and that had been unlike any other. It was probably a personal vessel for the supreme System Lord alone.

These ships, however, did not follow precisely the same pattern. The shape was similar, although the outer discs were sleeker, and set around their edges with tall, curving projections that reminded him of something he couldn’t quite remember. Their coloration, too, was different. The pyramids gleamed white in the raw sunlight, and their discs were gold and bronze and bright blood red.

One of the Ha’taks moved, turned to change vector, and Daniel saw that the curved projections arcing up from its disc had vast eyes painted onto either side of its root. “
Opthalmoi
,” he gasped.

“Op-what-oy?”

“Eyes painted on the bows of ships — pretty standard practice in Classical Greece. They called them
Opthalmoi
.” The huge curving spine was looking more and more like the raised prow of a trireme. “What, you never saw
Jason and the Argonauts
?”

“Thought the skeletons were cool.”

“Everyone does.”

“So, a Greek Goa’uld, huh… Cronus?”

“Maybe. In any case, we’ve got to get out of here.”

“We are still cloaked,” said Bra’tac. “At present, we have not been detected. Our hyperspace deceleration must have gone unnoticed among such a large number of vessels. However, if we engage the drives, we will be spotted.”

“Can we use maneuvering thrusters? Just edge ourselves away?”

“I am endeavoring to do that,” the Jaffa replied. “We shall drift out of the fleet, and jump back into hyperspace when we are a safe distance.”

“I’m starting to think that might be quite a long way.”

Something else had moved into view. At first Daniel thought that it was simply closer than the rest of the ships, that perhaps the Tel’tak was in danger of colliding with a Ha’tak, but then one of the pyramid ships passed
in front
of the new sight, and he realized that he was looking at a mountain.

It was vast, kilometers from end to end; a great stepped pyramid gleaming like white marble, tier upon tier soaring upwards towards a golden Parthenon at its tip. The tiers were set with columns, thousands of them, and it wasn’t until an Al’kesh raced along one of the colonnades that Daniel saw that it was flying past ranks of slender pillars the size of skyscrapers.

“It’s Mount Olympus,” he muttered, shaking his head slightly. “Somebody’s flying Mount Olympus through space…”

“Probably powered by raw ego,” said Jack. “Bra’tac? How long before we can get away?”

“Many minutes, Colonel O’Neill. We must be patient if we are to…”

He stopped mid-sentence, frowning down at his control board. “That must be an error,” he growled.

“What are you seeing?”

“An imbalance, between the two turbines.”

Daniel glanced back into the cargo bay. “I thought you’d shut them down.”

“I had.”

“I’ll go check.” He trotted back towards the hatch and stepped through. Sure enough, the port turbine was whirring softly, too faintly to hear from the cockpit, and the air around it rippled with heat. “Yeah, we’ve got a problem all right.”

Jack appeared next to him. “What do you think? Switch it off and on again?”

“Works with everything else.” He turned back to the cockpit. “Hey Bra’tac? Can you try —”

The turbine blew up.

Daniel didn’t see it go, because he was looking the wrong way. All he heard was one single, brutal, hellish sound, a scream and an impact and a howl of tearing metal all in one, and then he was off his feet, skating forwards across the Tel’tak’s deck in utter darkness.

The sound died into a shuddering, stuttering clatter.

Daniel rolled over, groaning. He couldn’t see anything, and his ears were ringing from the sound of the explosion. He could just about hear Jack asking if he was okay.

He sat up, slowly. “I’m blind.”

“You’re not blind. It’s dark. The relay tripped.”

“This vessel is without power,” said Bra’tac quickly. “If we do not restore it, we will be destroyed.”

A hand came down on Daniel’s shoulder, and there was a sudden light. Jack’s face appeared in front of him, lit by the beam from a tactical flashlight. Then the beam swung aft, across the sloping, golden bulkhead separating the command section from the cargo bay, and through the hatch.