STARGATE SG-1: Oceans of Dust (5 page)

Which explained the Jaffa’s reaction to SG-1, and Bra’tac’s elaborate display of observing the team when they arrived. He needed to reassure the refugees that they weren’t being attacked again. No wonder they had chosen such a malevolent place to hide.

“They almost fled when the ship crashed,” Bra’tac was saying, “but I was fortunate to have arrived soon after. I was able to calm them.”

O’Neill thought about a group of armed, displaced and nervous Jaffa, convinced that their tyrannical god had returned to finish what had driven them from their homes, and what it must have taken to talk them back down. It wouldn’t have been a task he’d have relished.

“Teal’c’s right, though. They can’t stay.”

“Of course.” Bra’tac stopped, in the lee of one of the structures. O’Neill hadn’t realized they would be at the temple complex so soon, and after Teal’c’s admission about the place, wasn’t all that sure he wanted to stay. Still, he was out of the worst of the wind here.

A few seconds later Carter, Daniel and Teal’c joined them. Daniel was paper-pale, his hands held tightly under his arms, and he was bouncing on his toes to try and keep warm. Carter seemed to have retreated even further into her uniform, until very little of her was visible at all.

“The bodies are here?” Teal’c asked. In answer, Bra’tac leaned down to a frost-covered piece of ground, found an edge, and pulled.

Something came up, a piece of board, or maybe fabric frozen solid. Beneath it was a shallow pit, just large enough for the two corpses it held to lay side by side.

They were Jaffa, as O’Neill had expected. One wore the elaborate armor of the serpent guard, while the other was wrapped in a long, decorated cloak. O’Neill could see that the clothes beneath were more ceremonial than armored, although they still had the familiar style and cut favored by the Jaffa of Apophis.

The robed man had a slack, vaguely surprised expression on his frozen face. The other no longer had a face.

“The vessel’s damping fields must have shut down before the crash,” Bra’tac said quietly. “These Jaffa were subject to the full force of impact.”

Daniel had gone ever so slightly whiter, and was studying the horizon intently. O’Neill pointed at the robed man. “And you know this guy?”

“His name was Sephotep. He was one of Apophis’ most trusted and revered scientists.”

“Which is why you took a closer look at the ship,” Carter ventured.

“Indeed.”

“Well,” said O’Neill. “I guess it’s time we had a look at it too.”

The ship had come down on the other side of the complex. As he got closer to it O’Neill could see the great gouge it had taken out of the plateau; a straight furrow ploughed out of the rock and ice, stretching far behind the vessel. It said a lot about the structure of the ship itself that it hadn’t ripped itself to tinfoil on its journey across the mountain.

That was, presumably, small comfort to its occupants.

Even when O’Neill was within fifty meters of the thing, it was still quite hard to make out its shape. The crash had thrown up a large amount of debris, shattered stone and gravel, most of which had come back down on the ship’s forward end. The rear of it was hunched up above the level of the plateau, but it was so frosted and scattered with rock dust that it was difficult to see where the ship ended and the mountain began.

It was Teal’c who identified it first, and did so with no small measure of disappointment.

“Master Bra’tac. This vessel is of no interest to us.”

“You think so?” The old Jaffa sounded faintly amused.

“I do.” Teal’c gestured at the vessel with his staff. “This is merely a Tel’tak. We have seen its like before.”

O’Neill scowled. “Oh,
great
.”

While still hugely advanced in relation to Earth technology, Tel’taks were less than special compared to most Goa’uld craft. They were essentially cargo ships — unarmed, unwieldy and looking like some unholy fusion of a pyramid and a turtle. As far as anyone knew, Tel’taks were best suited for ferrying personnel and cargo between locations in the same solar system; perhaps from inhabited worlds to the mighty Goa’uld motherships and back again.

There were technicians on Earth who could spend their whole careers reverse-engineering the thing, but O’Neill couldn’t work out how they might get the chance. Even if the Tel’tak was working, it would take decades to pilot the vessel back to Earth, and sending people through the gate to do the job was no option either. Apophis would want to know where his scientist had ended up. It was only a matter of time before he sent more ships.

The trip was a bust. The best option now would probably be to strip the Tel’tak of whatever they could prize free in the next few minutes, then blow it up and get the refugees through the gate before the flying pyramids arrived. “Okay, what now?”

“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.