STARGATE SG-1: Oceans of Dust

by Peter J Evans

  Chapter 11.

  Overdrive

  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.”

  “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 br
ight 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.