The man stumbled. O’Neill grabbed him, threw his weight into him to push him even further off balance, and spun the man into the wall. Next to him, Daniel had his arms around a hoplite’s neck, pulling him backwards.
One of the front two hoplites was already down; Bra’tac had aimed the beam perfectly over the top edge of his shield to catch him in the face. The second beam had caromed wildly off a shield and into the ceiling, but Bra’tac was already firing again, and the man O’Neill had attacked was struck as he staggered back across the corridor. He collapsed, covered in sparks, but his companions were already firing a stream of staff bolts up the corridor. Bra’tac dodged back around the junction, began to fire swiftly and accurately around the corner.
O’Neill put his shoulder down and body-slammed the hoplite Daniel was hanging onto, trying to get him off-balance too, but the man must have been either stronger or better prepared. He whipped around, shrugging Daniel off and slamming his shield into him, crushing him against the wall.
The staff whipped towards O’Neill, the wicked blades at its tip glinting. O’Neill dodged back to avoid being eviscerated, ducked under the next blow and came in past the staff to strike the man hard in the arm with the edge of his hand.
It wasn’t the most effective place he could have struck the Jaffa, but there was a lot of armor to get past. It made the warrior recoil slightly, though, which was all Bra’tac needed to put a zat beam into him.
Daniel was slumping down the wall. O’Neill grabbed his arm and pulled him up. “You okay?”
“Couldn’t be better…”
Massive footfalls were hammering away up the corridor. O’Neill looked up to see the Minotaur charging towards Bra’tac, head down, fists swinging. Watching it, he realized that he had been wrong to think he could have outrun the monster. It was a lot quicker than it looked.
Bra’tac had just found that out. He had tried to duck under the Minotaur’s reach, but instead it had grabbed him and flung him bodily across the corridor.
The zat guns flew from his grip. O’Neill saw them skittering across the floor, and then the last hoplite was trying to take his head off. He dived to one side, the bladed end of the staff parting the air across his shoulders, and rolled.
The spear jammed hard down into the floor next to his head.
He scrambled up, ramming the hoplite with his shoulder. In a straight fight, he knew he was outclassed. Even though none of these warriors could match Teal’c’s physical prowess, they were still far stronger and more resilient than O’Neill. He had to get another advantage.
In this case, it turned out to be Daniel Jackson. As the hoplite readied himself to strike, Daniel reached to his shoulder armor and triggered his helm control.
The man snapped around, fumbling at his neck armor as his helm split apart and retracted. O’Neill stooped, picked up the staff weapon of one of the fallen men and swung it as hard as he could into the back of the hoplite’s skull.
There was a dull thud of alien metal on bone. The warrior sank to his knees, then toppled.
From the junction, there was the heavy, complicated sound of a fully armored Jaffa being flung into a corridor wall. O’Neill ran towards it, Daniel at his side, and as one they stooped to pick up the fallen zat guns.
“Hey!” O’Neill yelled. “Big feller!”
The Minotaur whirled, horribly fast for something so huge, and began racing towards him.
He fired, catching the Jaffa clean in the chest. The Minotaur thundered, a booming metallic moan, but didn’t stop.
O’Neill fired again, another hit, and then a fist the size of his own head came out and slammed into his ribs.
The corridor whirled past him, spinning. The floor came up and hit him in the back. He lay, his entire torso a cage of pain, trying to draw breath, while a shadow crossed him to block out the ruddy light from the ceiling. It was the Minotaur.
Voltage crawled over it. It was swaying, like a tree.
O’Neill rolled, as fast and hard as he could, and the Minotaur crashed down right next to him.
Hands gripped his arms and pulled him up. For a few seconds all he could do was to sag in their grip, then he got his lungs to work and sucked in a long, very painful breath.
“Ow,” he managed.
“Jack?”
“I’m fine.”
Daniel nodded. “Look, this ‘right moment’? When it happens, you’ll let me know, okay?”
“Humans, ready yourselves!” Bra’tac had recovered quickly from the Minotaur’s attack, and was striding up the corridor towards them. “We must go to the glider bays.”
“You found a ship?”
“I have found and lost several, while you were here consorting with the witch Hera!”
O’Neill frowned. “I didn’t consort. Daniel, did you consort?”
“Well, there was that time in the holding cell. Does that count as consorting?”
“It was dark, I couldn’t see if you consorted or not.”
Bra’tac gave them both a very sour glare. “Are you done?”
“Yeah.” O’Neill had enough breath to run, now. “Yeah, we’re done.”
Chapter 20.
Vertigo
As soon as he had cut the communications to Hera’s flagship, Neheb-Kau had risen from his throne. “It is time,” he said. “We shall retire to the glider bays.”
Carter got warily to her feet. Although she had been ordered to kneel during the communication, the Goa’uld made no move to keep her there. Even Djetec paid her no heed.
As she rose, Neheb-Kau moved into her line of sight, and her first sight of his face — coupled with the pounding headache she had gained from her brush with the ribbon device — almost had her back on her knees again. She swayed, closing her eyes so she didn’t have to look at the Goa’uld’s rotting, destroyed features any more.
Kafra must have seen her reaction, because he stepped quickly towards her and steadied her, at the same time putting himself between her and Neheb-Kau. “My Lord. I will go to the garrison levels.”
“For what purpose?”
“To marshal our defenses.”
“There are to be no defenses. Come, Kafra, your place is at my side.” The Goa’uld moved closer, past him, and his lidless eyes rolled towards Carter. “You too, human.”
“I don’t understand,” she replied weakly. “When Hera sends her forces —”
“We will be where she least expects us,” Djetec cuts in. “Do you doubt the God’s plan? His mastery of the situation?”
Neheb-Kau’s face did something, a stretching of the exposed tendons to either side of his broken mouth. A smile, Carter realized. “I knew the Lady Hera when she was still Serqet, before she became the consort of Ra. She fancies herself a master manipulator, but in turn she is surprisingly easy to manipulate.”
“You provoked her,” said Carter, suddenly feeling rather stupid. Her exhaustion must have been affecting her more than she had thought. “To draw her attention here deliberately.”
“Of course.” Neheb-Kau raised a stick-like arm to one of the Royal Guard who had survived the crash. “You.”
The man approached, limping. Although the pel’tak had been protected by damping fields, the repeated impacts of the crash had been catastrophic. No-one, save for Neheb-Kau and Djetec, had gone unscathed.
“What is your will, my Lord?”
“Use the transporter. Go to the secondary glider bay, and return to me with a report on its status.”
The guard bowed, then headed for the transporter platform towards the rear of the pel’tak, ducking under the broken girder to get there. Neheb-Kau watched him go, his cloudy eyes following him like the glass orbs of a broken doll.
“Do you think he will return?”
Djetec made a noncommittal gesture. “The glider bay is intact. I have seen it on the remote monitors. As long as the transporter link still functions, he will return.”
“The transporter is what I am testing, my friend.” Neheb-Kau
smiled again. “Perhaps I should have made myself clear. Do you think he will return intact?”
During the crash, which had lasted for quite a long time, Carter’s worst fear had not been that the ship would explode. She did not find herself concerned that the pel’tak’s forward viewport would shatter and expose them all to the lifeless, choking atmosphere beyond. She had not even worried overmuch about the damping fields failing, even though the memory of what had happened to Sephotep and his co-pilot in the absence of such a field was still far too fresh in her memory.
No, what had really caused her heart to hammer and her guts to roil was the thought of the Casket shutting down and releasing the Ash Eater again.
Thankfully, this hadn’t happened, due in no small part to the two Royal Guard who had knelt on either side of the awful thing and wrapped their arms around it, holding it steady while the ship began its whirling descent to the planet’s surface. The endless sledgehammer impacts as the ship battered down through the atmosphere had failed to dislodge them, and even the crash itself, when the vessel had slammed sideways into a black mountain of ash and skidded, shuddering and spinning and shedding great chunks of hull, for kilometer after kilometer across that blighted landscape, had somehow failed to break their hold.
Huddled on the pel’tak, watching through the open viewports, Carter had seen the whole crash happen, from the first cherry-red glows of atmospheric friction against the hull to the final rain of black dust over the core’s broken body. She still couldn’t quite believe she had survived it.
In fact, given the ruin which the Ash Eater’s hunger had wrought on the ship’s systems, it was something of a miracle that anyone aboard was alive at all. If the monstrous little fetus had found its way directly to the reactor, the whole power distribution network would have shut down at once. The backup systems would have been overloaded and failed, and there would not have been enough stored energy to sustain the damping fields.
As it was, the ship had died in stages, as the converters fell one by one.
Any joy she might have taken in her continued survival had vanished upon discovering that Neheb-Kau and Djetec were still alive as well. When Carter had reached the pel’tak neither had been in sight, and she had been fantasizing about the pair of them being trapped on some other, less well-protected area of the ship.
But, when the fires were out and the debris stopped falling, they had re-appeared, having ridden out the destruction in some kind of stasis antechamber.
If there was any hope for her to cling onto now, it was the fact that, somehow, Colonel O’Neill and Daniel Jackson had followed the Pit of Sorrows across space to find her. Although their own journey did not seem to have been without its trials — they had fallen into the power of a System Lord who was not only an old enemy of Neheb-Kau, but who also had once been consort to the supreme System Lord himself, Ra.
The very Ra that O’Neill and Daniel had destroyed with a tactical nuclear weapon over Abydos.
Carter resolved to stay quiet about that fact. Things were complicated enough as it was.
The glider bays were at the base of the throneship’s core. As with almost all the ship’s systems, the bays had been heavily modified, split into three identical hangars with flight tubes exiting all sides of the hull. As far as Carter could tell, looking around the chaotic ruin of the secondary bay, some of the tubes might still be useable as long as not too much of the planet’s surface dust had piled against them, but it would be almost impossible for any ship to make the return journey. Access to the throneship was usually through shielded openings in its base.
The vessel was standing like a forgotten, tilted building on the surface of the Ash Eater’s homeworld, and it would never fly again.
A small backup reactor and a few undamaged storage capacitors were all that provided its power now, and they wouldn’t last more than a few hours. But if Neheb-Kau cared about that, he didn’t show it. He had, it seemed, other fish to fry.
He stood on one of the intact gantries, immobile and impassive as Jaffa pilots hurried to ready their vessels. His helm was once again in place, sparing Carter the sight of his deathly face, but in a way that was worse. All she could think of, when she looked at that perfect golden mask, was the corruption beneath.
A corruption that went far beyond the physical.
She had been given no chance to make her escape, even in the chaos after the crash. Both Djetec and Neheb-Kau seemed to be keeping her very carefully in sight, and there were still enough of their fiercely loyal guard with them to make sure she was always in reach. Neheb-Kau, she had decided, had plans for her.
What they might entail, she hardly dared guess. Especially since he had ordered the Casket carried down to the glider bay as well.
Kafra had been assembling the pilots, and now he turned from the rail he had been leaning on to stand, twisted in pain, before his God. “My Lord, thirty death gliders are ready to fly, in this and the other bays. There are also two Khepesh scouts, four freighters and your personal craft.”
So the Goa’uld had his own ship, Carter thought. Probably some kind of fast yacht. He was going to load the Casket onto it and take off, leaving his crew to die on this dust-choked nightmare of a world while Hera’s fleet rained fire down on it from heaven.
That was when Carter realized her place in Neheb-Kau’s design: she would be required to tend the casket aboard that yacht, all the way to wherever he was going. She was going to be trapped in a ship, for the length of an unknowable journey, with the two most loathsome creatures she had ever encountered.
The thought was horrifying. She edged slightly away from the group of Jaffa assembling on the gantry, wondering if she could somehow get them between her and the Royal Guard.
“What of the Al’kesh bombers?” Djetec was asking.
“They were stationed in the same bay as the Pit of Sorrows, Tjaty. It fell on them.”
“A pity.”
“It is of no consequence,” declared Neheb-Kau. “What we have is more than sufficient.” He gestured at the waiting fighters, hanging above on their curving launch racks. “Have the Casket loaded aboard one of the gliders, and slave its controls to that of the flight leader.”
Carter stared. A fighter?
Kafra stepped towards him. “My Lord, slave controls are used only for training. The flight leader’s vessel will be too slow to fight.”
The mask’s eye glowed. “Do you question me, Kafra?”
“I… I merely urge caution. Our situation is desperate.”
One of the Jaffa pilots stepped forwards, and bowed. “First Prime, it is my honor. I shall fly two ships into battle, and emerge victorious!”
“Victorious?” Carter blurted. “It’s suicide! There are dozens of ships out there. You’re going up against them with thirty fighters?”
“Human,” Kafra warned. His voice was weak, but still had the edge of command to it. “It is my place to advise the God. It is yours to sustain the Casket until it is aboard the glider. Do not forget that.”
“Oh dear God.” Her eyes widened. “He wants this. He wants them to die up there.”
“Their sacrifice will be a glorious one,” Djetec replied. “They will lead our greatest weapon into battle, and when Hera’s own weapons unleash the Ash Eater, it will destroy her.”
“And then what? You’ll have lost the Casket, remember?”
“I have other Caskets,” said Neheb-Kau airily. “Once Hera is no more, I shall draw it back to them with the Lure.”
“And all those who oppose us will fall,” said Djetec. “One after another, until my master is revenged upon them.”
At the other end of the gantry, five death gliders dropped from their racks, turned in the smoke-laden air, and accelerated smoothly away towards the launch tubes.
Carter gaped, her mind spinning with the full realization of just how deranged the Goa’uld in front of her truly was. She had known, for a long time, that he was obsessed to the point of monomania, but the she
er scale of his madness was overwhelming.
From what she had learned aboard the throneship, Neheb-Kau had gained his place in the hierarchy of the System Lords purely by his willingness to search the galaxy for terrible artifacts, to seek out their secrets and then to use them where he could to poison and destroy. It must have been a dreadful climb to power, slow and hateful, cumulating with his greatest discovery, here on this black, dust-choked planet. The Ash Eater had become his ultimate goal, his holy grail. He had even exposed himself to the Lure in order to take control of it.
Then, on a world called Setraxis, something had happened, and he had lost the Ash Eater to Ra.
Neheb-Kau had no fleet, only this one battered ship. He spoke of his domains, but they were far away. He must have lost everything after what happened on Setraxis. Whether it was his obsession with the Ash Eater that had reduced him to an outcast, a hated, shunned wanderer, or something worse Carter did not know. Teal’c had mentioned rumors of a terrible crime committed against other System Lords. Had he set the Ash Eater among them?
Whatever had happened, Neheb-Kau had come out of it badly. And he had spent the next five thousand years doing little except modify his ship and mourn the loss of his pet monster. He flew a tomb in its memory.
And now, he had his prize back, and all he could think of was revenge.
He didn’t want control. He didn’t want power. He didn’t want an empire. He was going to let his ship be destroyed and his Jaffa be killed and everything he had ever worked for blasted into ash and dust just so he could settle the grudges he’d carried with him for five thousand years.
The gantry trembled. A distant rumble sounded through the bay, and then another, louder.
“It begins,” said Kafra. “Hera’s ships are upon us.”
Two Royal Guard had lifted the Casket into a glider’s lift. Carter saw the platform rise, hoisted up into the glider’s belly on sliding rails, until it locked seamlessly into the hull. The glider spread its wings, and there was a dull, rising screech as its engines fired.
STARGATE SG-1: Oceans of Dust Page 29
