“Kafra, this is insane,” Carter whispered. “Please, help me stop this.”
“I cannot. He is my God.”
“You know that’s not true.” Around her, pilots were climbing into the lift platforms of their fighters, being drawn up and swallowed by the insectile hulls. “All your men will die.”
“Then that is their destiny.”
“To hell with destiny!”
“What would you have me do?” he snarled. “To rebel against my God, as your Teal’c did? I am dying, human. Allow me to do so with some scrap of honor!”
The Jaffa flight leader was being lifted into his ship. Carter stared helplessly upwards as his fighter sealed itself, the scythed wings rising to lock into position.
“There’s no honor in this,” she told him. “He’s taken even that away from you.”
She turned away from him. If he answered her, his words were lost to the rising din of the gliders above her head. The second flight, with the Ash Eater’s Casket peeking incongruously over one cockpit rim like a stunted, golden pilot, detached from their racks and swung away.
There had to be a way to prevent the Ash Eater from attacking Hera’s fleet. Carter had no preference for one Goa’uld over another — in her eyes, they were all a stain on the galaxy. But Hera held O’Neill and Daniel. There had to be a way to protect them from its appetites.
The Lure, she thought suddenly. If she could get back to the vault, draw off more of that vile toxin and get it aboard a ship, perhaps the Ash Eater could be led back to Neheb-Kau like a dog to its own vomit.
It wasn’t much of a plan, she was painfully aware of that. But she had done more audacious things, in her time. As long as she acted swiftly, there was a chance.
The decision was made, there and then. She bolted.
There was a shout behind her, Kafra or one of the Royal Guard, but she was nimble, and already halfway to the access arch before the alarm had gone up. As she pounded along the mesh towards it she was already working out how to short the controls from the other side, to jam the door locked so she could have at least a few minutes to find a ring transporter and get to the Vault.
There would have been casualties among the Jaffa, during the crash. She might even find a discarded weapon.
As the thought struck her, the hatch began to slide open. She caught a glimpse of golden armor beyond it, and tried to stop in time, but the mesh was slippery with grease and smoke from the fires. She skated, almost fell, and slammed sideways into the wall as another Royal Guard stepped through to grab her upper arm.
“Hold her,” called Djetec, hurrying along the gantry.
The guard tilted his helm down to her, the double serpent head swiveling. “Be ready,” he said.
Carter stared at him. “You have got to be kidding!”
“No humor is intended, Major Carter,” Teal’c replied. “There is a zat gun attached to my belt.”
She saw it, snatched it up and spun around, letting Djetec have the first shot right in the face.
He was running fast, for an old man. He hit the ground horizontally and still moving.
Teal’c leveled the staff he was carrying and loosed off three shots in blurring succession. The first struck a guard in the chest, flinging him back into his fellows. The next two blasted into the gantry just ahead of them, shattering the mesh and sending up a cloud of fragments.
Plasma bolts sang back towards Carter, shrieking off the walls. She ducked back, firing the zat wildly towards the Royal Guard, taking one down by pure chance.
“Major Carter, we must retreat.”
“No argument there.” She tried to head for the access arch, but he pulled her back, pointed along the next section of gantry. “This way.”
“What’s down there?”
“A means of escape.”
She ducked as another blast ripped through the air next to her, spattering molten metal from the wall. “Okay, I’m right behind you!”
They ran a few meters on, until they reached a support brace. Teal’c stepped behind it, took advantage of the cover it provided to aim his staff carefully, and then fired several times back the way they had come. Carter saw the shots go low, under the gantry, hitting two of the angled supports that held it level.
The supports flashed apart, and the gantry sagged. The gold-clad warriors there staggered to a halt, and began to edge back.
Their pursuit might have been halted, but their ability to shoot was not. Staff blasts were screaming through the glider bay in almost unbroken streams. Carter edged back a little behind the brace. “Which way?”
“To those stairs, and then down.”
“Got it.”
And they ran again.
Teal’c’s preferred means of escape was one of the Khepesh scouts, a glossy machine that looked like a bulked-up death glider with an elongated cockpit and narrow, backward-swept wings. Teal’c went in first, retracting his helm as he did so, and Carter followed, locking the hatch behind her.
“It’s good to see you, Teal’c,” she grinned. The scout had two flight seats, set one behind the other. The Jaffa was already climbing into the front, and Carter dropped into what she assumed was the co-pilot’s position, set behind and above under an angular canopy. “Again.”
“It is good to see you also.” He put his left hand on a red orb that took up most of the scout’s control board, and gripped a curving flight stick with his right. There was a bass, throaty rumble from the back of the vessel. ”Are you secured?”
“Good to go.” The seat had locked restraints around her when she had sat down, and the control board in front of her had activated, streams of hieroglyphs rolling down illuminated panels. If the vessel was a scout ship, Carter reasoned, she was probably looking at the sensor feeds and recording equipment.
She decided not to touch anything quite yet. “Ah, you can fly one of these, right?”
“I do not know. I have never tried.”
Half the grin slipped off her face. “That’s a joke, isn’t it?”
“No.”
The Khepesh leapt forwards.
Carter was slammed back into the seat by the acceleration. She saw gantries and metal walls and broken death gliders whipping past the viewports on either side, a few plasma bolts cutting bright trails through the air ahead of her, and then the launch tube was a solid rectangle of flat black expanding to swallow her up.
The walls of the tube flickered past her, and then they were soaring out over the Ash Eater’s homeworld.
Carter grimaced. The scene around her was utterly hellish.
She was racing over an endless sea of black dust under a roiling, thunderous sky. The air was thick with ash, blasting against the viewports so fast and so continuously that it looked like static on a screen, and great heaps and dunes of the stuff rose wherever she looked. There was nothing solid below her at all, nothing jagged or edged, just mounds and dunes and huge, shallow craters.
Above that mournful landscape, the battle between Hera’s fleet and Neheb-Kau’s few pitiful wings of fighters was at its height. Death gliders were ripping through the dust-laden air in screaming curves, spitting cannon fire at each other while great Al’kesh bombers raced below them, raising vast roostertails of ash. Explosions chased the bombers along the ground, fountains of dust and smoke, flashing detonations as pieces of Neheb-Kau’s broken Ha’tak were found and atomized where they lay.
Teal’c turned the ship, sent it arcing away from the destruction, between two mounded hills and over one of those vast craters. Her sensor boards lit up as she went over, and although she couldn’t read the glyphs, the graphics showed, just briefly, a wireframe representation of the feature.
The crater was bizarre; a shallow cone maybe three kilometers across with a deep hole at its heart, according to the graphic. It was a strange sight, unsettling in its regularity. Looking out over that appalling landscape, she could see that the planet was pocked with them.
Her first thought was volcanism, but that
must have been a very long time ago.
“The range of this vessel is short,” Teal’c was saying. “But it will enable us to reach the nearest Stargate.”
“That’s great, but we’ve got to pick up the Colonel and Daniel first.”
He glanced back. “They are here?”
“They’re with a Goa’uld called Hera. I think they hitched a ride.”
“Hera…” Teal’c’s voice displayed little emotion. “A minor System Lord, whose domains lie far from Earth. A manipulator and a seductress. What is your plan to rescue O’Neill and Daniel Jackson?”
“I’m still working on that part.”
The scout began to rise. Carter felt it angle back, saw the ground tip away, the thick soup of cloud above surge down at her. Teal’c was taking them up and out of the atmosphere, accelerating as he did so, leaving the dead world and its shroud of ash in their wake. The clouds battered at them as they punched through, dragging at the Khepesh with thick ropes of fog, but the ship was moving too fast to be held back. Seconds later, they were in an altogether cleaner kind of darkness.
The pure blackness of space surrounded her, dusted with stars.
Carter saw an immense wheel turning slowly above her: Hera’s fleet, in perfect circular formation. At the centre was a huge square of complex white machinery, the base of her mountainous flagship, and orbiting it the far smaller discs of the Ha’tak motherships. Even in the meager light from the system’s ravaged star, the vessels gleamed like polished bone, like fine china saucers set whirling against the pure, crisp blackness of deep space.
Around one of the marble-white Ha’taks, motes of metal whirled and burned around each other like embers above a fire. It was a dogfight, as fast and vicious above the clouds as below. The Ha’tak had already taken damage, with dark pocks marring its hull, and Carter saw one of the great towers at its circumference blossom abruptly into an expanding cloud of flame and debris. “My God. Teal’c, did you see that?”
“Indeed.”
Carter gaped, watching the remains of the tower begin to tilt away, falling from the vessel towards the planet, trailing burning air. “Their shields must be down.”
“Death gliders alone would not have been able to bring down the shields. Either the vessel has suffered a systems failure, or the Ash Eater is feeding from it.”
“Oh no…” A horrible image had appeared in her mind’s eye: the Ash Eater, hovering in the blinding heart of the ship’s reactor, gulping energy while the power distribution network ripped itself apart trying to compensate…
Fire stitched a line across the Ha’tak’s hull, spitting a glittering dust of fragmented metal, and the viewports in that part of the ship went out. A moment later there was a larger, more concentrated explosion, a capacitor bank or secondary generator failing under the overload and flashing apart. The Ha’tak seemed to wheel around one of its own edges, and began to slide downwards.
The ships were already dropping close to the cloud layer. The stricken vessel, if its crew failed to restart the drives in the next few minutes, was going to come down even faster and harder that Neheb-Kau’s throneship.
There was a faint chirruping from Teal’c’s control board. “We are being hailed,” he reported.
“Maybe it’s the Colonel.”
“I do not believe so.”
“Let’s see it anyway.”
One of the screens in front of her changed. Carter wasn’t exactly surprised to see the shining mask of Neheb-Kau appear on it.
“Human, you have abused my hospitality and stolen my property.” He settled back on what appeared to be a throne, and stroked the metal beard of his mask. “Again. I will find it difficult to let this go unpunished.”
“Try.” Carter tapped at the board’s icons. A small, globe-shaped control rose from within the metal, and a secondary screen turned from glyph-strewn blue to pure black.
There were stars on it.
“You are valuable to me, human. Your expertise in restoring the Casket was instrumental in the glorious destruction of Hera’s army.”
“Oh, I can’t take all the credit for that.” Carter twisted the globe, the view on her screen swung about, to show the damaged Ha’tak racing past, trailing fire. “Besides, she seems to have quite a bit in reserve.”
“The Ash Eater is still growing in power.”
That was probably true, Carter thought grimly. When she had encountered it, a few drops of five thousand year-old Lure had been enough to keep it trapped in an open Casket, and to draw its attention from human meals only meters away. Now it was stripping the power from entire starships.
If it continued to feed, just how powerful would it grow?
“It was stopped once. It will be again.”
“By who? You? Hera, the great deceiver?” He laughed. “Human, return to my side. It is the only chance you have for survival.”
Carter rotated the view again, pointing the pickup directly aft. She stifled a curse. Four death gliders were pacing the Khepesh, surrounding a broad arrowhead of dull silver metal. The God’s private vessel.
“Sorry, Neheb-Kau. I’d rather take my chances with the Ash Eater.” She pondered for a moment. “Actually, I’d rather kiss the Ash Eater.”
Neheb-Kau’s mask tilted slightly. “In which case, I bid you farewell.”
The screen went blank. There was a moment of silence.
“He’s not just going to go away, is he,” said Carter finally.
“No,” Teal’c replied. “He is not.”
Weapons fire slammed into the scout’s hull. On the screen, the arrowhead was emitting streams of plasma bolts, and Carter could see them ripping past the cockpit, twin rivers of energy.
Teal’c hauled on the controls. Carter felt the scout drop away under her, clamped her stomach muscles tight to counter the acceleration effects. Behind her, the four gliders raced in close pursuit, sending out flaring bolts from their staff cannons.
The Khepesh shook again. It felt as though someone was kicking Carter’s control seat, hard, every time a bolt struck the hull. “Are they faster than us?”
“Considerably.”
The clouds rose up and wiped choking billows across the cockpit. Carter felt the ship swerve violently to starboard, as Teal’c took advantage of the visual cover to try and throw the gliders off track.
She looked at the screen. The ruse wasn’t working. “I think they can still see us!”
Another impact, this one sending up a sheet of sparks from behind the seats. Outside the cockpit, the clouds thinned and vanished, leaving the pocked surface of the Ash Eater’s world spreading in every direction.
A great shadow, flickering with light, thundered down through the clouds to Carter’s left, keeping pace with the scout. Debris was falling from it in a steady rain, burning and twisting away in long, random arcs.
Teal’c suddenly dragged the controls sideways, sending the scout heeling violently to port. Carter saw the shadow loom close, its ragged edge tearing out through the clouds, and realized that it was the Ha’tak
The gliders were a few hundred meters behind, twisting and jinking and gouting streams of plasma from their wing cannons. There was another hit, and another. “Teal’c, I think we’re in serious trouble.”
“I agree.” He shoved the controls forwards, pointing the scout at the ground.
Carter saw black hills hurtling up at her, then she was being jammed back into her seat as the ship pulled up at the last second. She glanced down at the rear view, saw nothing but a racing cloud of dust. Then a brief flash of yellow fire, fading instantly into the distance. “One didn’t pull up in time.”
Above them, the Ha’tak was spinning down through the ashy air like a burning tornado. It was huge, terrifying. Carter could feel the heat of its fires through the cockpit transparency.
The scout leapt forwards, some kind of emergency thrust, then swung ahead of the tumbling ruin. Carter watched the death gliders follow, one misjudging its altitude and shattering ag
ainst the dusty ground, another swept to oblivion by the falling wreck. Then a blast of plasma fire spattered the scout from wing to cockpit, and it flipped over.
The black ground whirled towards her. There was a massive, sickening impact as the ship struck the edge of a crater, flipped up again in time for her to see the vast, burning edge of the Ha’tak bearing inexorably down on them, and then everything went dark.
Utter blackness had closed around her like a fist. “What? Teal’c, what happened?”
He didn’t answer. On Carter’s screen, a wireframe cylinder was expanding, ring after ring.
There was a shaft at the base of the crater, a vertical tunnel a hundred meters across. Teal’c had managed to guide the scout into it at the last second, and now they were flying straight down into the planet’s crust.
According to her sensor board, the shaft was perfectly regular, perfectly vertical. Not a volcano, then.
Without warning, the rings of light on her board vanished. “What the hell?”
The sensor feed was still pointing aft. The picture was mainly black, but there was a disc of brightening gold at its centre. For a moment the perspective was too confusing. Carter simply couldn’t work out what she was looking at.
Then the view flipped in her head. The circle was the shaft, and the ship was still flying straight downwards. “It’s opened out! We’re in a cavern… Teal’c, level up, fast!
The entire roof of the cavern erupted inwards, a titan explosion of rock and metal, of flame and dust.
The Ha’tak had slammed with unimaginable force into the surface, so hard and so fast that it had erupted clear through the kilometers of rock surrounding the tunnel entrance. Carter saw an immense wheel of shattering white metal and fire crashing over her, spinning and splintering and shedding tons of burning armor as it fell.
The inferno whirled past, tipping over and over, the unbearable brightness of it lighting up the inside of the cavern for kilometers in every direction. Great shards of rock spun in its wake, curving fragments of eggshell stone tumbling in every direction like black comets with tails of ash and smoke. Teal’c was flinging the Khepesh around to avoid the more massive pieces, but tons of the stuff were still coming down, boulders battering the scout’s hull with terrifying, drumbeat impacts.
STARGATE SG-1: Oceans of Dust Page 30
