“Hmmm…” Soft footfalls moved through the darkness. “I was curious. A failing of mine, I know, but I do like to satisfy my urges whenever I can.”
“Let me guess,” said Daniel, warily. “You can see in the dark?”
“Oh, extremely well.”
“Ho boy,” breathed Jack.
“Okay,” Daniel said hurriedly, to cover Jack’s discomfort. “Erica, er…”
“Ericaceae. It was the name of the host-sister. We decided to keep it, since all who saw us would know us both as Hera, and the sound of it pleased us.” There was a smile in her voice, soft and sly. “We keep things that please us, Daniel. There is so little pleasure in the galaxy. It must be sought out, and treasured.”
Twins, thought Daniel. Of course.
And then something touched his hair. He flinched.
“So which are you?” asked Jack. “Hera, or the other one?”
“Does it matter?”
“Well, one of you had your big bull-guys try to deprive me of my arms.”
“The Minotaurs like to destroy pretty things,” she said nonchalantly. “They are bred to be… Dissatisfied.”
Daniel heard Jack give a started yelp. Hera, or Ericaceae, had moved across to him. In the dark, she could do as she wished.
It was not a comforting thought. “So you took twin sisters as hosts, back in Classical Greece, what, two thousand years ago?”
“You are perceptive, Daniel.” She pronounced his name slightly wrong, as Hera had done. Dan-ee-yel. “It was a new start for us. And now we have favored these hosts for, oh two and a half millennia. There were others, before, but in these we have found most worthy vessels. Do you not agree?”
Jack made a noncommittal sound. “I’d have gone with something, I dunno, taller…”
Twin lights flared in the darkness. Her eyes, glowing with a sudden rage. To Daniel’s dark-adapted gaze they seemed intolerably bright.
In a moment, though, the Goa’uld had regained control of her emotions, and he was blind once more.
“Forgive me,” she purred. “I should not become angry at such small things… It is the host, you see. Her emotions ran deep. Some rise to the surface even now, on occasion.”
Her footfalls went quickly across the cell, and when she next spoke she was very close to Daniel’s ear. “Even now, after two and a half thousand of your years, these bodies are still a mystery to us. Still a constant surprise. Others will tell you that we choose humans as our vessels because they are so easily repaired, but do you know the other reason? The real reason we inhabit you thus?”
“I think I’m about to.”
“Because they are fun.”
Daniel stared, at where he thought she was. “Fun?”
“Indeed.” She chuckled, a dark, liquid sound. “No other species we have encountered has given us the sensations that humans can. No other race is built so well, responds so well… Oh Daniel, if only you knew what these bodies are capable of…”
“Lady,” hissed Jack. “That’s not your car you’re driving.”
“I sense disapproval. How disappointing…” She sounded as if she was pouting, and even closer now. “And what of you, Daniel? Do you have a twin?”
“No, no I don’t…”
“A pity. It would be pleasing, if there were two of you.” She drew closer. He felt a tickle. Her lashes, spun gold and impossibly fine, were at his cheek. “For so many, many reasons…”
He closed his eyes. “I really need to get out of here.”
“When I have a use for you.” She drew away. “Farewell, Daniel. It has been a pleasure, seeing you…”
He heard her walk away. For a while it was rather difficult to gather his thoughts, so he didn’t say anything at all.
Eventually Jack spoke, his voice wary. “What was that all about?”
“I, ah…” Daniel swallowed. “I have no idea. Maybe she’s after a new host or something.”
“Seems to kind of like the one she’s got.”
“Yeah.”
There was another silence, longer. And then: “Daniel?”
“Hmm?”
“When are we going to get our clothes back?”
Chapter 17.
Little Black Cloud
Compared to the dark, enclosed spaces of Neheb-Kau’s upper decks, the throneship’s conversion hall was dizzying. Had Carter not already eaten most of the yellow food block Kafra had given her, she wondered if she would have been able to keep upright when she stepped out of the access arch and into the open, beating heart of the vessel.
She was in a chasm, a faceted valley of burnished gold and black glass, standing on a narrow railed bridge above a distant floor. Above her, power converters jutted down from the high ceiling, a row of vertical cylinders the size of railway carriages, and past them, in the hazy distance, something huge turned slowly and inexorably, emitting a searing blue-white glare.
Pipes from the cylinders above her speared down through the bridge to join a sprawl of ducting below, each one surrounded by sturdy consoles and safety railings. The nearest converter was meters away, yet Carter could feel the heat of it from where she stood, the vibration of it, could smell the stink of oil and ozone. The constant thrumming thunder of the reactor beat at her ears, came up through her boots and made her bones ache.
It was a hellish place. The few Jaffa and ch’epta technicians she could see working in the conversion hall must have made themselves desperately unpopular at some point, to have earned such a fate. Little wonder, then, that Neheb-Kau wanted to see Teal’c condemned in the same way.
After he’d been worked over by the ka’epta of surgeries, whoever that might be. Despite Neheb-Kau’s assurances, the thought of Teal’c being in the hands of someone who bore that title was a knot in her gut. “Kafra?”
He tipped his head, to hear her above the noise of the machines. “Speak.”
“Has there been any word on Teal’c?”
“Your shol’va?” His face twisted. “Put such trivialities aside, human. His fate lies elsewhere. Look to your own.”
“But —”
“Speak of this no more,” he hissed. “And make haste. The reactor is still some distance away.”
Carter shook her head. “I don’t think it’ll go there. The reactor’s too well-shielded. It won’t be able to sense the power.”
“You think it will be drawn to the converters?”
“I’m kind of banking on it.” She began to walk along the bridge, peering up between the towering cylinders. Although she hated the idea, in a way Kafra was right. She had to keep a focus — she’d be no help to Teal’c or anyone else if she blundered into the Ash Eater.
Behind her, the two Jaffa who had stayed were carrying the Casket. The devices she had seen used to unlock the device back in the Pit had been stored with it in the Vault, and the men now held the golden cylinder upright using these as handles. Despite its load of superdense Lure, they didn’t seem overly bothered by its mass. Their only concession to the Casket’s bulk was that Kafra was carrying their staff weapons as well as his own, and that was simply because they had no free hands to wield them.
Carter had offered to carry the staffs, but no-one else had thought that was a very good idea.
Together, the group moved warily on. The three Jaffa that had gone on ahead were monitoring the other two canyons — there were three conversion halls, spreading equilaterally from the reactor core — but this one was the closest to the Vault. If Neheb-Kau had been right about the Ash Eater, it was more automaton than living creature, with all the guile and intelligence of an iron filing seeking out a magnet. If it was going to head for a power converter at all, Carter reasoned, it would be here.
The bridge was not crowded. Like many of the ship’s systems, the conversion hall was mainly automated, and the few Jaffa and technicians she encountered paid her no mind as long as she stayed conspicuously close to their First Prime. They seemed too busy dropping to one knee in salute as he passed.
When they were roughly halfway across the bridge, Kafra raised a hand in a signal for them to stop. Carter heard the Casket set heavily down onto the metal flooring behind her. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Shouldn’t we keep going?”
“This tactic is ill-advised,” he growled. “The creature could be emerging behind us. If, indeed, it is not already here. We have no idea how fast it moves.”
“Or even how it moves,” Carter agreed. She looked along the bridge, suddenly aware that Kafra was right. There was no way that the four of them could cover the whole conversion hall between them.
And then the space between two converters flickered and went dark.
Carter swallowed hard. The first of the stricken converters was a dozen meters ahead, towards the reactor. She tipped her head back, and saw that there was an array of illuminated panels set between each cylinder. Those ahead of her had failed.
“Kafra, did you see that?”
He turned to the men behind him. “Make ready. The beast could be near.”
“Could be?”
“The lights might have suffered a technical fault. It is not unknown.”
She moved forwards, gaze fixed upwards. “I don’t think so.”
Far above her, in the gloom between the two converters, a patch of ceiling was changing color.
A pale spot had appeared, oddly luminescent in the gloom. Frost, thought Carter, her heart hammering. The metal up there was cold enough to freeze water in the air.
Fragments of powdered gold began to sift down.
“The Casket,” grated Kafra. Then he raised his staff weapon high in the air. “Jaffa! Ch’epta! Leave the bridge! We do the God’s work!”
There was a murmur of confusion. Carter could see maybe half a dozen people close by, ch’epta and the odd Jaffa guard or two. She saw the nearest of them hesitate, then turn and run. In moments, the rest had followed, beginning a minor exodus from the bridge.
She felt relieved. In other circumstances those Jaffa and their human slaves might be doing their best to kill her, to threaten Earth or carry out some scheme of their Goa’uld masters that would necessitate her taking up arms against them. Today, however, they were no risk to her or her world. They certainly didn’t deserve the Ash Eater’s attentions.
Besides, they would have gotten in the way.
Kafra was guiding his Jaffa to set the Casket down as close to the frosted patch as they dared. As they released it, he threw their staff weapons to them. “Human, are you ready?”
“Sure.” She crouched next to it, sliding open the access panel. The control crystal was still in place, glowing brightly. As soon as she twisted it askew, it would shut down the containment system, opening the top of the Casket and exposing the dreadful Lure.
If Kafra was right about its properties, it would draw the Ash Eater back into the Casket.
She got up. As she did so, a distant glitter caught her attention. She looked down the length of the bridge, cupping a hand over her eyes to shield them from the glare of the reactor.
“Uh-oh,” she said under her breath.
Past the converters, marching in perfect formation, a column of Neheb-Kau’s gold-armored guard was coming right at her.
“Kafra? I think we’ve got company.”
“I see them.” He moved forwards, between the approaching men and the Casket.
They stopped a short distance away. The man at the column’s head took a pace forward, lowering his helm as he did so. He tipped his head in a perfunctory bow. “First Prime.”
“Captain, your men must leave.”
“I am here on direct orders from the Tjaty, Djetec.”
“You take your orders from the God, Neheb-Kau.” Kafra narrowed his eyes. “And then from me.”
“Djetec speaks the work of the God.”
Kafra barked a laugh. “You believe that?”
“Of course. Are you not here, with the God’s possessions, as he predicted?”
Carter shook her head in exasperation. “Sorry, but could you two please compare the size of your helmets some other time?”
The captain glared at her. “Hold your tongue, slave!”
“Human,” Kafra growled. “Leave this to me.”
Carter could hear ugly cracking sounds from above. “We don’t have time for this!”
“I see,” said the captain. He stepped back, lowering his staff to aim it at Kafra. “This human has poisoned your mind, worked her magic upon you as she did on the First Prime of Apophis!”
“There is no magic here, fool! Only death!” Kafra pointed desperately upwards, between the converters. “Do you not see? The demon is loose!”
“I see only one demon here,” the captain snarled. His weapon swung around towards Carter.
His men followed suit. Kafra’s men responded, and for a few seconds the sound of opening staff weapons was loud enough to drown out even the thrum of the reactor.
Above their heads, a meter-wide patch of ceiling simply fell to pieces.
The metal tumbled, disintegrating as it fell. A section of it held cohesion long enough to hit the bridge not a meter away from the guard captain, shattering into dust and splinters.
The man whirled, his staff weapon snapping open. Energy sizzled between its emitters.
“Don’t!” Carter yelled. “If you shoot at it, you’ll just —”
“Silence,” he snarled, half-turning to backhand her viciously. She tried to step away from the blow, but she wasn’t fast enough. His armored hand cracked hard across her face.
She cried out, stumbled, hands clamped over the pain. She saw Kafra raise his own weapon, face a mask of fury, but then all her attention was on the ceiling.
A cloud of living shadow was drooling down from the frost-rimed hole.
It was as she remembered it, from the glimpse she had seen in the Pit. A swarm of pure-black threads, falling slowly through the air like blood through water, constantly moving and writhing. The threads snapped and shifted in the way that sustained arcs of electricity do, but each of these arcs was curved, fluid, not jagged and forking. It was as if a million hair-fine snakes, each an eye-aching black, were continuously biting and striking at the metal shell of the converter.
Carter could feel the chill of it, cold air falling from it down to the bridge. It was utterly silent.
The Royal Guard stared at it, transfixed. “By the Gods,” he breathed.
The cloud was hugging the converter shell. It dropped vertically along its height, leaving a trail of white frost. Carter heard crackling sounds from the metal, a rising electrical whine. The converter was being strained by the Ash Eater’s presence.
She edged backwards, towards the Casket.
The guard captain shouted abruptly, in his own language. He raised his staff weapon to fire. Carter saw his thumb on the trigger, and past him, his men swinging their own weapons up to track the cloud. She opened her mouth to shout again, but it was far too late. The first bolt hammered into the Ash Eater before she could even take a breath.
The effect was immediate and ghastly. The bolt vanished into the swarm of threads, and in response the cloud spurted back down the path of the shot. Black filaments raced to the bridge, lashing at the guard captain. He screamed, a raw howl of pain.
Above him, the Ash Eater emerged from its cloud.
She had seen it before, she remembered, back in the Pit of Sorrows, a pale dome emerging from the rim of the Casket. Mercifully, the creature had been contained before she could see more, but now it was completely exposed, sliding out from its swarm of freezing darkness.
It was small, maybe as tall as Carter’s forearm, curled over on itself. It was a withered thing, dry and papery, gray as dust, hovering down through the air towards the bridge; vestigial limbs twisted at its belly, its great swollen head bent and misshapen. There was a hint of a face there, of closed slits where eyes might once have been, of a ragged mouth, frozen open and lined with black, broken needles.
Once, thought Ca
rter wildly, the Ash Eater might even have looked human. Now it was a floating, mummified fetus, a sickening pallid larva sucked dry of all but hunger and set hovering in the midst of its foul, swarming shroud of blackness.
More staff blasts came up at it, but they never reached it. They struck the cloud and were gone, instantly, scraps of food lost to the Ash Eater’s voracious appetite. Half the cloud was stretched back towards the converter, whipping filaments licking its surface to powder, but the rest was spreading into the crowd of Jaffa.
The guard captain was on his knees. Carter saw what was happening to him and tried to look away, but it was too late. The sight of his face, a mask of ash crumbling off his skull, was in her mind for good. She moaned in horror.
The bridge was in chaos, a cacophony of screams and the snarling roar of staff-blasts. Each man that fired was followed by black threads, each man that was touched shrieked and fell and crumbled. Five were already down, the guard captain and four of his men, their bodies already collapsing into each other as the Ash Eater tore the energy from their cells. It was not a quick death, not a painless end. The men who died did so screaming, emitting dusty howls of lament as they saw their own bodies withering to powder on their bones.
“Cease firing, you fools!” Kafra had launched himself into the midst of the Royal Guard, was tearing the weapons from their hands and flinging them away. “Human, the Casket! Hurry!”
Carter ran towards the golden pillar. Before she reached it a guard stumbled into her path, wreathed in black threads. He sagged, his cries drying in his throat, and crashed heavily backwards into the Casket.
The Pillar teetered, despite its weight.
Carter skated to a halt, and came face to face with the corroding scarecrow that had been a man seconds before. He grabbed at her. His last breath, thick with powdered lung, hissed into her face.
Nauseated, she pushed him aside
He swiveled, falling apart in mid-air, and struck the Casket with all that was left of his weight. The golden pillar, already tilted wildly over, tipped.
It smashed solidly into the metal surface of the bridge, and the control crystal span out of its socket.
STARGATE SG-1: Oceans of Dust Page 25
