“These lights should have been on.” Kafra lowered his staff weapon from the vertical and stepped into the chamber. “The Vault’s sensors keep them lit, as long as there is life within.”
Carter went through just after him. The First Prime glanced back, and raised an eyebrow. He’d not been expecting her to be so eager, she thought. But then he didn’t know her very well.
With the others behind her, she followed Kafra into the Vault.
There was little to see. The Vault was roughly the size of the throne room, and its décor was not much different from the other chambers Neheb-Kau frequented, with dark, inward-sloping walls and a floor of glossy black marble. Armored hatches ranged along each side wall, and at the end of the chamber, raised on a stepped dais and lit by a ring of powerful beams, stood a squat golden pillar,
“The Casket,” she said. “He must have had a place set up for it, way before he got here.”
“My master has sought the Ash Eater for many lifetimes, human.” Kafra was pacing carefully forwards, his staff at the ready. “The empty space he kept for it reminded him of its loss.”
“Many lifetimes,” Carter repeated, under her breath. It was a vast understatement. Neheb-Kau had mentioned Ra keeping the Ash Eater as a pet, and Ra had been driven off Earth five thousand years earlier. Which meant that Neheb-Kau had been pining for his lost monster all that time, at least.
She could easily believe it. The Goa’uld were often single-minded to the point of mania, and with their host bodies continually maintained by their sarcophagi, or simply discarded in favor of new and prettier models, time didn’t have the same meaning for them as it did for humans. They simply continued, as they had always done; ageless and unchanging and utterly obsessive.
From what Carter could gather Neheb-Kau had found the Ash Eater on its lifeless homeworld, lost it to Ra somehow, and then spent five thousand years plotting to recover it. And now, thanks to a stray staff-blast, there was every chance he had just lost it again.
No wonder Kafra didn’t want him to find out.
The Casket was open; the cup at its top exposed, the cover retracted. “It’s gone.”
“Human…” Kafra was aiming his staff weapon at one of the side hatches, the last door on the left.
It was open.
Carter swallowed, and edged forwards. She reached out, put her hand into the open door, and spread her fingers.
“The air’s not cold. It’s not here.”
“You would feel it?”
“Oh yeah.” She remembered the chill of the Pit, suppressed a shudder, and then leaned into the doorway. As soon as she did so, she saw what lay on the chamber floor, and froze. “Kafra?”
“What do you see?”
“Could you come in here?” She glanced back outside, at the Jaffa waiting, staffs aimed, behind their First Prime. “Just you.”
As he entered, she stepped aside to let him see what she had spotted. On the floor, partially concealed around a corner, lay the withered, desiccated corpse of a man.
She stood for a few seconds, looking silently down at the body, then dropped slowly to crouch next to it. The man had been curled up when he had died, hands over his head. He lay on his left side. His back was against the wall.
The Ash Eater had reduced him to a papery, withered tatter, a stick-figure of powder and crumbling bone.
“One of the ch’epta,” said Kafra. He tapped the exposed skull with the toe of one boot, and the part he had touched sloughed and collapsed, a small cloud of dust rising from it. Carter got up, stepping back to avoid having the stuff on her skin again. She had borne too many dead already.
“How many were there?”
“Three.” Kafra was examining the door frame. “This mechanism has been destroyed. The ch’epta must have tried to seek refuge here.”
“So if it came through here after them, where did it go?” Carter moved past the corpse, around the corner and into the chamber beyond.
“Oh no,” she breathed. “Oh God, no…”
The chamber must have been a store for Neheb-Kau’s other treasures. Square columns of smooth black stone stood against the walls, waist-high, some bearing gleaming objects inside transparent cases. Several columns had been pulled to the floor, their contents dashed apart. Carter’s boots crunched on broken glass as she made her way forwards.
The other two ch’epta must have pulled everything they could down in front of the Ash Eater. It hadn’t done them any good. They were sprawled at the far end of the chamber, dark twists of sticks and powder and gaping, collapsing skulls.
Past them, light was spilling in from a hole in the thick metal wall, ragged and powdery and dripping dust and fragments. It looked like the Ash Eater had chewed its way clear through to the mechanical crawlspace, filled with ducts and crystalline conduits and the sickly blue glow of safety lighting.
“It must have stripped the energy from the molecules of the wall,” Carter whispered. “That’s incredible. I didn’t know it could do that.”
“There are lights in the crawlspace. Why are they not destroyed, as the door and the sensors were stripped of their power?”
“That’s what scares me. Kafra, these mechanical spaces — are all the decks connected by them?”
“Indeed.”
“Then we’re in really serious trouble. Neheb-Kau said that the Ash Eater is mindless, it’s a corpse. The only reason it wouldn’t take power from the lights here is if it sensed a bigger meal elsewhere. How far from here to the reactors?”
“Not far enough.” Kafra turned away from the light. “What can we do?”
“The Casket,” she replied. “Somehow, we’ve got to get it back in there.”
“The Casket no longer functions.”
“I know.” She moved past him, and out through the open hatch. “But maybe we can fix it.”
She headed back towards the dais. Behind her, Kafra emerged from the chamber. “Jaffa!” he called.
Carter crouched down next to the pillar’s base. There was a dark patch on its gleaming flank, rough and carbonized. The impact of the staff-blast. She ran her hands over it, felt a slight imperfection in the metal, and pressed. A panel slid aside, revealing a bank of glowing crystals.
Several of them were darkened, their surfaces crazed.
The other Jaffa had gathered around their First Prime. “You two,” he said, “will remain here. The rest will make their way to the reactor chamber, and watch for the demon’s arrival.”
“My Lord Kafra?” Carter recognized the voice of the youngest Jaffa. “What does the creature look like?”
“Like a black cloud,” she called back, over her shoulder. “When I saw it, that’s what it was like. And if you see it, don’t get anywhere near it. I think it’s got a long reach.”
She heard the man hurrying away, two of his fellows in tow. The other two must have been looking rather too nervous for Kafra’s liking. “Lower your helms, fools,” he snapped. The demon is far from here.”
“Then why do we remain?”
“You will bear the Casket, of course.” She heard his footsteps, and then he was at her side. “Well?”
She pointed at the darkened crystals. “I saw this in the Pit. Some of the control crystals there exhibited the same damage. The staff blast must have been the last straw. Kafra, this was always going to break down. Shooting at it just accelerated the process.”
“Forgive me if I find that small comfort. Can you repair this damage?”
“No.” There was no way she could replace the crystals, not quickly. But behind them, flexible crystalline waveguides bunched like glowing wire. Several were dark and fractured. Carter began to tug at them, freeing them from their sockets at one end. “But what I can do is run a bypass.”
“Explain.”
She pointed at the three rings of radiant material beneath the cup. “When the Ash Eater was contained, these glowed. I thought they must have been taking heat from the inside and dumping it into the air, but I thi
nk it must have been every kind of energy. Starving the Ash Eater to keep it quiet.”
Carter swapped out one of the broken waveguides with an intact one from another part of the Casket. “When I’m done, only two of the emitters will work, so it’s a temporary fix, but at least we’ll be able to trap the Ash Eater in here for a while.”
“Succeed, and the God will look kindly on you.”
“I’ll bear that in mind.” She swapped the last waveguide, stripped out the damaged ones and dropped them onto the dais. “What I don’t understand is, if the Ash Eater can just eat its way through solid metal, why did it stay in the Pit of Sorrows all that time? It was only covered by stone and sand.”
“The Lure,” said Kafra.
“The what?”
“A poison, of the vilest kind. To the Ash Eater it is irresistible. To all other life…” He shook his head. “My master encountered it when he first located the Ash Eater, on the dead world below us. He tells me that he was exposed to its effects for a few seconds, at most. Now he spends twenty hours of every day in his sarcophagus, and hosts still drip off him like spoiled fruit.”
Carter froze. “Sorry, are you saying there’s some of that in here?”
“Very little. Enough to induce it to return, should no greater source of energy be present.”
“That’s not going to help us much. Not if there’s a naquadah buffet on offer instead.”
“Indeed.”
He left her to make his way down the steps, to an open area in front of the dais. Carter watched him for a moment, then returned her attention to the Casket, trying not to think about the hideous toxicity it might contain. Or about what the sarcophagus was doing to Neheb-Kau. Continued use of the healing devices was addictive, corrosive. It was even surmised that the reason most of that species were megalomaniac sociopaths was due entirely to their use of sarcophagi.
If Neheb-Kau was spending all his time in one, Carter thought, no wonder he was unstable.
There was a trigger crystal inside the panel, and as she twisted it the containment cover unfolded from around the cup, enclosing empty air.
Beneath it, two of the emitter rings fluttered into fitful, glowing life.
Carter reset the crystal, and left the panel open. She might need to reach it again in a hurry. She got up, in time to see him touch a control gem on his wrist armor, one of several adorning its surface. The gem glowed softly, and a part of the floor began to lift.
Carter watched as a square column rose, soundlessly, from the marble. The first part of it was featureless, polished to a fine gloss, and she was disconcerted to see her own reflection skating over its surface. Then, when a meter of mirrored black stone was exposed to the air, an opening appeared. A cylinder had been cut through the column, and floating unsupported in the space it made hovered a gleaming silver sphere.
The column came up another meter or so, and then stopped.
Carter drew closer. From a depression in the column’s side Kafra took a long metal cylinder. He held it up, and then twisted a section of it. A needle as long as Carter’s hand whispered out of the far end.
Very carefully, he brought the needle to the side of the sphere, found a specific point, and eased it all the way in.
“That’s the Lure,” said Carter. She forced herself not to move away from it.
“Your perception does you credit.” He touched a control on the cylinder. Carter heard a soft whine, and lights began to expand along the side. “I will insert a sizeable amount into the Casket. Is the containment system repaired?”
“Yeah…”
“Do not fear, human. My master has informed me as to the function of the Casket.” He drew the needle out, and held the cylinder upright. It looked heavy now, as if it contained something incredibly dense. “It is shielded. But do not be tempted to look into its open end, unless you wish to spend the rest of your days masked.”
Chapter 16.
The Bad Touch
When Hera had ordered Daniel and Jack into the dark, she was not speaking figuratively. The holding cell was utterly lightless.
It was also cold, and rather damp. Daniel could feel the solid chill of the wall behind him, the greasy wetness of it against his skin. It was starting to drag the heat inexorably out of his body. Had he been able, he would have dearly liked to move away from the wall, to sit down, to rest the throbbing muscles of his shoulders. But the manacles around his wrists and ankles had been drawn tightly back to the wall, by some magnetic force or gravitational manipulation, and he could barely move at all. He could only stand, arms stretched out horizontal at shoulder height, with his back to the cold wall, and wait.
He had been waiting for quite some time. He had no idea at all how much. Nor did he know how long he had been unconscious before that: after Hera had ordered his detention, one of her hoplites had shot him with something that looked like a sculpted bone, but had turned out to be a zat gun in disguise. When he had awoken, he was against the wall.
There had been an awkward silence between him and Jack for a while, now. The colonel had spent his time in the darkness going through a range of emotions; defiance, at first, then rage, and now he was sliding dangerously close to despondency. It was not a pattern that would do either of them any good. Daniel couldn’t be certain, but he had a strange feeling that Hera was not going to leave the pair of them locked away in the dark forever. And when they finally emerged into the light, he needed Jack to be at his best.
Daniel could not simply wait and let the man brood.
“You know,” he said, after a time. “In a way this is kind of encouraging.”
For a few moments there was no answer. Then Jack’s voice echoed from the far side of the cell. “Ah, Daniel?”
“Hm?”
“I appreciate the positive attitude and all. I really do. But you want to try and explain to me just which part of being glued to a wall in a Goa’uld’s flying mountain is ‘encouraging’?”
“I didn’t mean for us. I meant for Sam and Teal’c.”
“Right. So being dropped down a shaft and buried is a good thing, now.”
Daniel sighed into the darkness. “Jack, think about it. We heard Ra’s message through our Stargate. Hera must have heard it through one of hers. There’s no telling how many other gates that message came through.”
“All at once?”
“Maybe. I’ve not heard of it before, but I guess it could be possible. Or maybe there was some mechanism to dial one after another. It doesn’t really matter.” He tipped his head back until it touched the wall. With his arms pulled back so tight, it was hard to keep his head up, and his neck felt terrible. “The thing is, if Hera knew that the Pit was just going to crash on some nameless planet and be forgotten, she wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble to bury it.”
“Got to admit, that was a big drill.”
“I think it’s safe to say she really doesn’t want anyone else getting their hands on it.”
“So if the Ash Eater’s still a hot property, then any number of Goa’uld could be on their way to pick it up.” Daniel heard him shift against the wall, trying to loosen his own stiffening muscles. “Still not sure if that really counts as ‘encouraging’.
“They’ve got to open the Pit first. That’s got to be good for Sam and Teal’c hasn’t it?”
“Better than being trapped inside it, I’ll give you that.” A slight pause, then: “So now all we’ve got to do is stop Hera getting there first.”
“Yeah…”
A faint rattling as Jack tested his bonds. “I think we can both see the flaw in that plan.”
“Oh, we’ve still got an ace or two up our sleeve.” Daniel cleared his throat. “Figuratively speaking.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Daniel,” said Jack pointedly.
Daniel grinned. He was certain that they were being monitored, and so there was no way he was going to even mention Bra’tac. Their ship was gone, and the remote detonator for the explosives
they had set up had been taken with the rest of their equipment. But as far as Daniel could tell, Bra’tac was still free, and roaming the interior of the Clythena.
Hera might have liked to boast of her infallibility, he had decided, but in the most part it was typical Goa’uld braggadocio. There was no way she would have let them board the flagship had she known their ship was not of her fleet, and doubtless the Jaffa who had let them aboard without security checks was, at the very least, experiencing his own period of darkness right now. Neither would Hera have let them go into the navigation room, and risked them doing catastrophic damage to the flagship’s systems.
She had herded them into her clutches after that point, but before then she had been as ignorant of their presence as she was about Bra’tac’s.
“Just trying to make Hera paranoid,” he replied.
“You’re too late. She’s a Goa’uld. She’s about as paranoid as it’s possible to get.” Jack’s voice sounded light, but Daniel knew him well enough to hear the edge it had, when he said that. “And what’s with the double, anyway?”
“It’s not unheard of for rulers to have body-doubles.” Daniel shrugged, although the gesture didn’t get far. “Political decoys go way back… Hitler, Stalin; hell, even Henry Kissinger had a double in China.”
“What, all the time?”
“Probably not. But who’d know? Anyway, I guess she’s just taken the practice to extremes.”
“Some kind of clone?”
“Not sure. What did she call her sister, back up there?”
“Erica something.”
Daniel frowned. “That doesn’t make a lot of sense. Hera’s sisters were Demeter and Hestia. She was Zeus’ sister, too. Then she married him, which makes things a little complicated, but still.”
“Married her brother,” said Jack, flatly.
“Yeah… You know, those wacky Greek gods… But I don’t know where Erica-something came from.”
“It was Chalcis.”
Daniel froze. The voice was female; deep-toned and precise, with a honeyed lilt. It was Hera.
“Hey,” said Jack. “Kinda hoping you’d stop by.”
STARGATE SG-1: Oceans of Dust Page 24
