A shadow crossed him, viciously quick, as the glider hammered through the air over his head, and he heard the electric whoop of a staff weapon as Teal’c sent darts of energy lashing up into the sky. A shot connected, spattered uselessly off a wing.
The glider flew level for a second or two, then rose into a smooth, almost vertical climb, accelerated into a blur. In a heartbeat it was lost to the clouds.
“Damn,” muttered O’Neill, getting up. He was starting to hurt all over. “That turned up fast.”
Teal’c had been down on one knee, trying to get a better aim at the fighter. He rose, slowly, eyes on the churning whorl of cloud the machine had left in its wake. “If the glider arrived in response to the distress beacon, it must have already been close to this world. It is likely that a mothership is in this system, searching for the Tel’tak.”
“And now they’ve found it. Thanks to us.”
“Gliders may have been searching every nearby world. O’Neill, we do not have much time.”
“No kidding.” He turned away, towards the temple, and saw greasy smoke twisting into the air. “Dammit! Teal’c!”
He could hear voices, now that the death glider and its banshee screeching was gone from the sky. Even through the biting wind, shouts drifted across the plateau. He couldn’t make out words; the gale was robbing the sounds of all but raw emotion. But that was enough. There was suffering in those voices. There was anger, and distress, and pain.
There was screaming. High, thin shrieks of agony came to him through the storm.
O’Neill and Teal’c were inside the complex within half a minute, and when they ran past the outer ring of buildings the source of the voices became instantly plain. As soon as O’Neill saw the tableau, his heart shrank in his chest.
No matter how much tragedy he had seen in his life, the universe always seemed intent on furnishing him with more.
One of the structures, a small two-story building just outside the temple dome, had been blasted apart by the death glider. Every remaining opening vomited thick smoke, and Jaffa were desperately trying to extinguish the fire with great urns and jugs of water. A couple were trying to fight their way in through the debris, but the flames were too intense, the smoke too dark and choking. There was no hope, O’Neill could see that before he even reached the place, but the cries from within the structure were pitiful.
Several other Jaffa were clustered around a figure that twisted on the hard ground.
He skated to a halt next to them, while Teal’c ran to the burning house. Bra’tac was there, along with some of the Jaffa he had seen earlier, their hands on the figure that shuddered on the cold stone. They looked as if they were trying to hold the man down, to restrict his writhing, but their efforts were becoming more redundant with every second. The Jaffa’s strength was ebbing away into the air.
If O’Neill had seen this stricken warrior before, he couldn’t have recognized him now. Fire, and the electric energies of the death glider’s weapons had seen to that.
“What can I do?” he asked dully, his stomach a knot. “Morphine?”
Bra’tac shook his head. “His symbiote would have suppressed the pain,” he said quietly. “Had it lived.”
He spoke to the men with him, gesturing into the temple. Between them, they lifted the dying Jaffa and carried him into the darkness. O’Neill watched them go, then stumbled back towards the smaller building.
The screaming had ceased. The fires inside the structure were lessening, but wet smoke was still pouring from the openings. There was a vile reek to it. The Jaffa who had been throwing water were standing at the windows, looking in, silent and still. Teal’c was with them, as unmoving as the rest.
“Nothing could be done for them,” he said, as O’Neill approached.
“Them?”
“The woman and the child.”
O’Neill closed his eyes for second. “God,” he breathed, in spite of himself.
He felt Teal’c move past him. “There are no gods here.”
Not yet, O’Neill thought.
He followed Teal’c into the temple. As he went in he could see that the outer walls of the place were massively thick, which would have given him some hope if he’d thought for a second that death gliders were the only things on their way. The staff cannons carried by the Goa’uld fighters would be hard pressed to penetrate that weight of solid stone, it was true, but one good run by an Al’kesh bomber and the temple would simply fly to dust, along with all who sheltered there.
Which, judging by the number of people crowding within, must have been almost everyone on Sar’tua.
The interior of the temple was dark, the shadows broken only by a few flickering lanterns. O’Neill glanced quickly about as he walked inside, trying to gauge his surroundings, but most of the space was lost to him. There were a lot of pillars, he could see that, and a circular dais at the centre, but most of what he saw were people; ragged, nervous Jaffa warriors, a few women, some stoic, hard-eyed kids. Many of them carried pathetic bundles of possessions, wrapped and bound remnants of whatever lives they had left behind on Chulak.
O’Neill wondered how long he’d last in this unforgiving place, with just a ragged cloak to keep out the cold and whatever he might have grabbed while fleeing a burning city. Not long, he decided. In fact, what were these people eating? He’d not seen a scrap of plant or animal life since he’d got here.
The burned Jaffa had been set down on a rough table. Bra’tac had taken up position at one end of it, and had the man’s scorched head in his hands. If the feeling of carbonized tissue and bone under his fingertips caused him any distress he didn’t show it. Instead he was soothing the stricken Jaffa with soft words and reassuring, if upside-down, smiles.
It looked like it was working, although O’Neill had an ugly feeling that the injured man’s calm was more likely due to the loss of most of his nerve endings and lung tissue. He’d be unable to feel much pain by now, and the lack of oxygen in his blood would be causing him to slip into a coma. The death of his symbiote, at this stage, could only have been a blessing.
As O’Neill watched, the man spoke a few words, haltingly, his voice a dry rasp. Bra’tac answered, and with that the man nodded, very slightly, and did something with his mouth that might once have been a smile.
“What was that?” O’Neill whispered. Teal’c brought his head a little closer.
“He asked if his wife and son were safe.”
“I guess Bra’tac lied.”
“He did not. He told him that they would be reunited soon.”
O’Neill’s knotted stomach twisted just a little tighter. “We can’t stay,” he said.
“I am aware of that, O’Neill.” Bra’tac hadn’t looked up. He was still holding the man’s head. “We all are.”
“So…”
“A moment.”
The man on the table opened one eye. It was all he had left. “Fre’tauc,” he breathed — a name, O’Neill could tell — but the breath didn’t reverse, just kept coming out, a thin, pale vapor in the cold, out, and out, until there was nothing more to come.
The eye didn’t close, and there was no other change in the man. He simply became fractionally more still.
Bra’tac bowed his head lower, just for a moment, then took his hands away and stood straight. “Jaffa!” he snapped. “Ya’isid ma’gue!”
O’Neill didn’t need a translation of that. “About time,” he muttered, and turned for the door. As he did so, he caught a glimpse of the sky outside.
“Aw, crap,” he sighed.
Dark scythes of metal, three of them, small but growing with horrible speed, were diving down out of the clouds to swoop in low over the plateau. O’Neill saw them race over the humped shape of the downed Tel’tak.
Sparks of fire appeared under their wings.
“Incoming!” he yelled. “Get down!”
As soon as he had shouted he knew he’d wasted his breath. The people around him were warriors, almost from bi
rth, and had probably forgotten more about death gliders and their ways than he would ever know. They scattered, those with staff weapons forming up at the doorway and the temple’s open windows, while the unarmed clustered low around the walls, children hustled instantly into the centre of each protective group. O’Neill heard the sizzle and click of weapons being readied, Teal’c’s among them, and then the gliders were over his head, their shrieks battering his ears.
Outside, buildings were flashing apart in deafening, sledgehammer detonations, their walls hammered into gravel and burning shards.
Bra’tac was at one of the windows. He’d picked up a staff weapon from somewhere, and its business end was smoking hot. The man must have loosed as many blasts at the gliders as the staff was capable of firing, and then a few.
A puzzled frown was creasing his dark face. “O’Neill, where is the Tel’tak?”
“Say what?” O’Neill joined him at the window, staring out over the plateau. The window wasn’t all that far away from the door he’d been looking out of. He should have been able to see Sephotep’s doomed experiment from here.
The Tel’tak was gone. The plateau was empty.
“The hell? It was there a second ago!”
“Was it destroyed?”
He might have missed the sound of the ship exploding in the attack, but there was no wreckage, no fire. The cargo ship was simply gone.
“The gliders are on their return pass,” growled Teal’c.
“Should we get to the other side?”
“No,” Bra’tac replied, holding his aim. “We must weather the storm and wait for them to pass — it is sometimes possible to bring down a glider with a shot to the stern.”
The rising scream of glider engines was making it difficult to think — the temple was ringed with glassless windows, and it echoed. “How possible?”
“Not very.”
O’Neill grimaced in frustration, wishing there was a spare staff weapon, or that his MP5 had proved more resilient, but there was nothing for him to fire. All he had was his radio. He keyed it on, dipped his head to it, and then energy bolts burst out across the plateau.
The shots lashed out from nowhere, from empty sky, so fast and so bright that they were almost a solid line of ravening power, ripping the air above the temple with a series of high-pitched, reverberating whines.
The high sound of them was answered with bass, thumping impacts as they struck their targets.
O’Neill saw a death glider whirl into view from over the temple roof, two scythed wings and a ball of white flame where the body of the fighter should have been. The second glider shot over his head in a cloud of fragments. The last ship must have dodged the initial barrage, but as it accelerated the invisible weapon spoke again, and sheared one of the fighter’s wings away. The rest of it spun upwards, flipped over and drove itself solidly into the plateau.
The first glider, a winged comet of fire, was still flying, arcing towards the distant mountains. O’Neill watched it go for a while, before realizing that his mouth was open. He closed it.
Above the plateau, an irregular patch of smoky air wavered, solidified, and became a rather battered Tel’tak cargo ship.
O’Neill’s radio hissed into life. “Colonel? What’s your status?”
“Status is cold, banged-up and really, really peed off. Major?”
“Sir?”
“I thought I ordered you to shut that ship down.”
There was a slight pause. “We had some technical issues. Thought we’d take a different tack.”
“Technical issues,” repeated O’Neill, dully. He switched the radio off. “They had technical issues.”
Outside, amid the smoke and the flame, Sephotep’s grand experiment dropped hesitantly through the air, slowed, then fell the last couple of meters to crunch unceremoniously onto the cold flat stone of the plateau.
The Jaffa took their fallen with them, even those who had been inside the burned house. O’Neill watched the procession of the living and the dead move quickly up the short ramp and through the Stargate, each man and woman and silent child striding without hesitation into the rippling mirror of the event horizon, its liquid surface closing behind them as if they had never been.
The bodies were draped in robes and blankets. “We leave nothing for Apophis,” explained Bra’tac. “Rites will be said for them on the other side, when there is time.”
“This planet they’re going to,” said Daniel. “Is it, you know…” He gestured at the monochrome landscape around them. “Better?”
“It is called Tryea,” Bra’tac replied. “And yes, Doctor Jackson, it is better. There are more Jaffa there.”
“From Chulak?”
“Indeed.”
Almost all the Jaffa were through. The last man through was the only one to pause. He stopped at the top of the ramp, and turned. When his eyes found Teal’c’s, he nodded curtly.
Teal’c dipped his head, and kept it lowered until the man was gone.
O’Neill watched the gate’s mirror break into a whorl of foam and spin to nothing. “Bra’tac, are you sure about this?”
“I am.” The old man smiled. “Sephotep’s creation may be flawed, but it should not fall back into the hands of Apophis.”
“Flawed?” O’Neill’s eyebrows went up. “Kind of an understatement. It doesn’t work.”
“Sir, it’ll work fine as long as Bra’tac doesn’t try to use more than two upgrades at a time.” That was Carter, or at least what little of her that O’Neill could see. She had only been out of the Tel’tak for a few minutes, enough time for the Jaffa to get organized and dial the gate to Tryea, but she was already looking frozen. “Just don’t use the weapons and the main drive if you have the cloak up, or —”
“Thank you, Major Carter,” Bra’tac cut in. “I believe I can count to two.”
O’Neill rubbed his hands together. “Okay, time to go. Daniel?”
“Sure.” Daniel stepped up to the DHD and began to press its panels. The weird mechanical clank each icon made as it registered was oddly comforting, especially with the prospect of more Goa’uld ships on the way.
“I will fly the Tel’tak to Riyagan,” Bra’tac told them. “It is a safe place. The Goa’uld abandoned its people many decades ago.”
“We’ve been there,” O’Neill said, keeping his voice low. “Haven’t we been there?”
Daniel leaned sideways to whisper. “P4H-W29. Rainforest. Early Mesoamerican culture. They threw a feast in our honor.”
“They did? I don’t —”
“There were bugs in it,” said Carter, in a small voice.
“Oh, right. Them. Gotcha.”
“If the cloak is effective,” Bra’tac continued, giving O’Neill a rather sour eye, “I will not be followed.”
“Pretty big ‘if’,” O’Neill muttered. He would much rather the old Jaffa return with them to SGC and go on from there. So far the modified Tel’tak had cost five lives, and he couldn’t bring himself to believe that its advances were worth the price.
If Bra’tac had heard O’Neill’s comment, he ignored it. “Teal’c, I will send word once I arrive.”
“Travel well,” Teal’c replied. And with that, Bra’tac ran to the steps and began striding up them, two or three at a time, to the plateau.
Carter shivered. “How does he do that?”
The gate roared, billowed. O’Neill watched Daniel talking into his radio and started to really look forward to some of Stargate Command’s famously bad coffee. Maybe a shower. Definitely a shower. Something to take the sting from his cut hands and bruised ribs and frost-blasted face.
He wondered, then, if he was filling his mind with such things to avoid thinking about burning children, and a name, whispered up into the still cold air of the temple on a dying man’s last breath.
The Stargate’s surface was stable, now. Daniel was still talking into the radio. “Say again? SGC, can you repeat that, please?”
O’Neill trotted over to
him. “Problem?”
Daniel nodded. “I’m getting a lot of interference. I’m not sure, but I think they’re saying they’re not going to open the iris.”
“What? Give me that!” O’Neill took the radio from Daniel’s hands, a little too quickly. “SCG, come in.”
Hissing answered him, and then a few guttural sounds that might have been words. He took the radio from his ear, shook it hard, and then tried again. “SGC, respond. It’s cold out here.”
Carter and Teal’c had moved closer, obviously expecting to be through the gate and away. “Sir?” said Carter, holding out her handset. “Try this.”
O’Neill gave her a look. “I’ve got my own radio.”
“Didn’t you fall on yours?”
“O’Neill,” said Teal’c, suddenly. “We are no longer alone.”
He was looking up into the sky. O’Neill followed his gaze, and saw that the clouds above him had darkened, as though a great shadow moved above them.
The radio hissed and spat again. “Ess gee,” it said, between bursts of static. “Firm… Dentit…”
O’Neill couldn’t take his eyes off the shadow. He felt as though he were in a small boat on a great ocean, watching something vast and terrible slide past him, slow and ageless and unconcerned. “Stargate Command,” he said flatly. “I confirm my identity as Colonel Jack O’Neill of SG-1, service number six-nine, four, one-four-one, freezing my ass off and about to be vaporized by a Goa’uld mothership, and will you please open the goddamned iris and let us come home!”
The radio issued a series of squawks and whines, and the words: “Firmed, Colonel. Iris ope.”
“Go,” said O’Neill, still staring at the darkening sky. “Everybody through.”
Daniel was closest to the event horizon, and was gone before the first cannon blasts ripped downwards into the temple. Carter ducked through as the entire building erupted upwards into a vast geyser of burning stone. Teal’c was just behind her, the liquid mirror closing around him as a humped shape lifted from the plateau, accelerated cleanly past the rising fountain of debris and vanished in a shimmer like heat-haze. O’Neill saw the clouds part as the cloaked ship made its escape, and then he too stepped through the gate, backwards, the radio still in his hand.
STARGATE SG-1: Oceans of Dust Page 5
