STARGATE SG-1: Oceans of Dust

by Peter J Evans

  The mothership was past them now, falling away, still spinning like a great blazing wheel. Carter held her breath, waiting for it to hit the cavern floor. She couldn’t believe the size of the space they had flown into: the Ha’tak was covering kilometers every second as it fell, and still it had not struck ground.

  When the light of it shrank to a whorl of yellow flame no bigger than her fist, Carter finally grasped the truth, and a sickening wave of vertigo washed up from her feet to her gut, to her head. She grabbed the seat arms hard, so hard her knuckles flared in pain.

  There was no floor. The scout hung over a drop of unthinkable proportions. “Teal’c, where the hell are we?”

  Above her, great sections of the planet’s crust were still breaking away, tumbling down from the ragged, glowing edges of a hole the size of a small town. A fragment thumped down onto the scout’s viewport, and Carter caught a glimpse of it as it slid away. A curl of gray stone, trailing something that looked like a thick, papery length of rope.

  “Oh no,” she breathed. Then: “Teal’c, can you hover this thing? I need to see the cavern roof.”

  “I do not believe we are in a cavern, Major Carter.”

  Neither did she, not anymore, but she didn’t want to say what she was thinking. She couldn’t, not yet. “Please, Teal’c.”

  The scout rose, slowly, the engines throttled back until they were idling. Teal’c touched a control, and an oval of light appeared in the distance. He’d activated a searchlight, and it was touching the roof of the place.

  It grew as the ship rose, brightened, solidified. Carter watched it, her heart hammering, watched it picking out rounded edges, curls of pale rock, an inverted forest of drifting, tethered forms.

  “Major Carter? What have you seen?”

  “Teal’c, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry…” Her voice was very small, out here in the endless dark. “But I don’t think we can go home just yet.”

  Neheb-Kau was wrong. He had been wrong about almost everything. Carter almost wished the Goa’uld was still around, so she could tell him just how catastrophically wrong he was.

  Not that it would have made her feel any better. But it might have made him feel worse, if he was capable of feeling anything at all.

  The Khepesh was flying under the roof. She could no longer think of the space she was in as a cavern, but somehow it was difficult to come up with another term that fitted the facts. If she thought too hard about where she and Teal’c actually were, it set her exhausted mind whirling in her skull, fascination and terror and sheer vertigo battling for supremacy within her. The concept of the fragile roof above her, and the endless tumbling darkness below, were almost too much to grasp.

  She had no choice, though. The facts were indisputable — she was inside a hollow world, an eggshell-thin crust of rock over a sphere of pure vacuum as big as the Earth, and letting her mind slip away from that was doing her no good at all.

  “Major Carter,” Teal’c warned. “We are approaching the tower.”

  “Great. Slow down when you get within a hundred meters, and I’ll get some more detailed readings.”

  At first, Carter had found the very concept of a hollow world ridiculous. The shaft had only been two kilometers deep at most, and the most basic knowledge of physics told her that a planet-sized shell that thin would shatter instantly into gravel under its own forces. Its rotation would spin it apart, the gravity of the sun would tear it to pieces. It was impossible, despite what her eyes told her.

  But the further they had travelled, the more she had learned. For a start, the crust was only that thin around the entry tunnels, which were spaced regularly over the planet’s surface. At other points it was almost a hundred kilometers thick, and the intervening spaces were braced by vast spars and bridges of rock, like the internal structure of a bone. This shell of a world, she had realized, was no accident. It had been designed, carefully and expertly, to hold itself in stable equilibrium for tens of thousands of years.

  She felt the scout pull back slightly, deceleration tugging at her as Teal’c throttled back the drives even more. The tower her initial scans had detected was just ahead, rising like a mountain from the inside of the crust, pointing towards the centre of the hollow world. It was unthinkably vast, as wide at its base as a small country, so long that it could not possibly have supported its own weight in any other environment than this.

  The Khepesh leveled out over the pitted surface of the tower and began to fly along its length. It was too huge to be seen as a cylinder. It was a flat road, an endless metal plateau, stretching away into darkness on either side.

  “There,” Carter said, pointing past Teal’c’s seat and through the cockpit viewports. “You see that?”

  In the far distance, something sparkled with a faint, silver-blue light.

  “Indeed,” Teal’c replied. “Is that the singularity?”

  “I think so.”

  “So your theories are confirmed.”

  Carter rubbed the back of her neck. The muscles there were locked, almost numb from tension. “Pretty much. I’ll run some scans of the suppression field once we reach a thinner part of the tower, but I don’t think there’s any doubt now. The clock’s ticking.”

  “How long do we have?”

  “Hours.” Then, she thought, the wreckage of the Ha’tak would reach the singularity, be crushed into an infinitesimal speck and join the mass of the black hole that hovered, glittering with Hawking radiation, at the heart of the hollow world. When that happened, the energy from that collision, and from the untold tons of rock that had fallen from the crust and followed it down, would release a brutal flash of radiation.

  It would not be nearly as much as the final demise of the black hole would cause, when it finally evaporated. But it would be enough. The sea of papery, mummified fetuses tethered over the inner surface of the crust, million upon million of them, would detect it.

  And the Ash Eaters would start to wake up.

  Chapter 21.

  Feeling Gravity’s Pull

  The troop carriers were like great covered triremes of marble and bronze, their prows raised and decorated with opthalmoi. Looking down at them, Daniel could see rank after rank of Spartan Guard filing up their loading ramps, cloaked in scarlet, armored head to foot in shining gold. They carried longer, heavier versions of the hoplite staff weapons, and tall crests on their enclosed helms. They looked strong and fast and utterly ruthless.

  And there were a lot of them. A hundred or more in each transport.

  He sighed, and turned away from the viewport. “Anything?”

  On the other side of the chamber, Bra’tac was hunched over a communications board, his hand resting on an indented block of silvery metal, a look of furious concentration on his face. “When I hear anything of interest, Doctor Jackson, be assured I will let you know.”

  Daniel nodded. And, not for the first time, felt very helpless indeed.

  The chamber was part of a monitoring station, one of many overlooking one of the Clythena’s great hangar decks. The original plan was for the three of them to steal a ship and escape the vessel, somehow tracking down Sam and Teal’c before the Spartan guard reached Neheb-Kau’s fallen starship. But that had proved impossible, given that the flagship had been put on full alert almost immediately after they had fought their way to freedom.

  Maybe, Daniel surmised later, a more well-planned escape might have led to a faster exit. Perhaps doing something to conceal the injured and unconscious hoplites they had left strewn around the corridor would have delayed the alarms, and in turn led to fewer patrols and roaming pairs of Minotaurs between them and the flagship’s glider bays. At the time, though, he was simply relieved that Bra’tac had turned up when he had. Daniel could have foreseen a long stay in a dark place had the old Jaffa not been tracking them.

  Still, it had to be said, the escape was a mess. Hardly SG-1’s finest hour. And by the time they had discovered the monitoring chamber, the first stage of Hera’s as
sault on Neheb-Kau was already reaching its end.

  There had been two hoplites manning the chamber. Both had fallen prey to Jack’s accuracy with a zat gun before they could raise an alarm, and were now slumped in a side locker. Daniel had heard them start to awaken once already, and been forced to open the locker just enough to stun the pair again. He wondered how many more times he would have to do it before the way was clear enough for them to leave.

  Still, the diversion had not been completely without its uses. Although all three of them would rather have been flying down to find Sam and Teal’c themselves, Bra’tac had suggested using the communications board to search for any mention of them on Hera’s comms network.

  It was probably the most sensible thing to do, although it still wrenched at Daniel to not be in a ship and racing to find his friends. They were so close, he thought. After so many light-years, after almost giving up hope so many times, they were only an orbit away.

  And yet, for now, it was a distance that he couldn’t possibly cross.

  Jack was at the hatch, watching the corridor. “Come on, Bra’tac. There’s got to be something.”

  “There is much, O’Neill. Hera’s communication system has access to more channels than any I have ever known. The accursed woman listens to everything!”

  “It’s probably one of the ways she keeps power,” said Daniel. “Most Goa’uld are all about brute strength, terror tactics. Rule by fear, you know.” He sat down at the control board, next to Bra’tac. “I think Hera rules by leverage.”

  “She is legendary for it,” replied the Jaffa. “It is said that while Apophis will stab a man in the heart and laugh, Hera will convince him to stab himself and laugh!”

  “She’s a sneaky minx, all right.” Jack glanced back. “Anything yet?”

  Daniel saw Bra’tac’s expression darken. “Hey,” he said quickly. “Maybe I could try.”

  Bra’tac took his hand from the metal block. “The process requires great concentration.”

  “I can do concentration.”

  “There are many separate channels. Focusing on any one can induce fatigue, or great pain.”

  “Okay…” Daniel held his hand nervously over the block.

  “Occasionally death.”

  “Maybe I should leave it to the expert.” He moved his hand away, but Bra’tac reached out, faster than he could follow, and grabbed his wrist.

  “Death is a rare result,” he smiled, and put Daniel’s hand onto the metal.

  Instantly, his head was full of voices.

  Daniel could hear dozens of separate speakers, so many layered one over the other that he could barely follow any of them; Jaffa voices, using the fluid, part-Greek tongue of Hera and her subjects.

  Many of the voices were shouting. Some of them cursed. A few screamed, although those didn’t tend to last very long. And occasionally he would hear the voice of Hera herself, deep and clipped and honeyed, exhorting her pilots and berating her enemies.

  It was an insane sea of radio chatter, filling his skull, the living essence of the battle raging below them. It was the sound of people dying, in the cold and the dark.

  How anyone could stand to listen to it was a mystery to Daniel: already it had set his head spinning. He lifted his hand, letting silence wash into him. “Oh my God… That’s…”

  Jack was looking at him from across the chamber. “You okay?”

  “I think so.” He shook himself. “Sorry. Just a bit intense, that’s all…”

  He got up. As he did so, an edge of memory caught at him, like a fragment of dream. In amongst all that babble, a word that made no sense. “Why would they be talking about swords?”

  “Swords?” Bra’tac shrugged. “I do not know.”

  “Do Jaffa use swords?”

  “Some do, in close combat. It is an old skill, mostly forgotten.”

  “Okay.” Daniel went back to the viewport. The first transport was taking off, the air beneath it rippling with heat distortion as the slablike vessel slid towards its launch chute. “One of the voices was talking about a khepesh, that’s all.”

  “That’s a sword, right?”

  He glanced across the chamber at Jack. “Egyptian, yeah. Kind of like…” He drew in their air, an elongated G. “I guess the word means something in Goa’uld, too.”

  “Indeed it does,” said Bra’tac. “Be silent, both of you.”

  He placed his hand back onto the slab, and closed his eyes. A few seconds later he opened them again and smiled widely. “There have been reports of a Goa’uld fast yacht in combat above the planet’s surface, only minutes ago. Apparently, it was pursuing a Khepesh before it broke off and allowed its escort of death gliders to take over.”

  “Hold on…” Jack checked the corridor again, then ducked back through the hatch and closed it. “A yacht chasing a sword?”

  “Yacht as in private starship. Could be Neheb-Kau,” said Daniel. “Which means he’s making a break for it and leaving his crew to take the heat.”

  “Figures.”

  “The Khepesh… Is that a class of ship, as well?”

  Bra’tac nodded. “A short-range reconnaissance vessel. Fast, but fragile.”

  “Doesn’t ring any bells,” said Jack.

  “They are outmoded, and seldom used,” Bra’tac replied. “I do not believe Hera’s fleet contains such craft. And if Neheb-Kau was attacking one of his own fleet, does it not suggest the vessel was stolen?”

  Daniel grinned. “That sounds like Sam, all right. Can you find it?”

  “Not directly. But I can set a communications channel to access only that class of vessel.” He took his hand from the slab and began pressing glyphs on the control board. A few moments later, the angular metal frame above it filled with light, a flat panel of holographic data.

  Hieroglyphs and Greek characters coursed down it. A holding pattern. “Can you hail them?” Daniel asked.

  “I am attempting to. There is some interference…”

  “What if it’s not them?” said Jack. “Just say ‘Sorry, wrong number’ and hang up?”

  “In essence,” Bra’tac replied.

  He touched a glyph, and Teal’c’s wide, golden face filled the panel.

  Jack’s face split in a huge grin. “Teal’c, you son of a gun! We’ve been looking all over for ya!”

  “It is good to see you, O’Neill.”

  “Likewise! Is Carter there?”

  “Indeed. Daniel Jackson, Master Bra’tac.” He tipped his head. “I am pleased that you are here also.”

  “We kept your room just how you left it,” said Daniel, smiling. “So where are you?”

  “That is rather difficult to explain.”

  “Well, give it a shot!” Jack glanced back over his shoulder. “We’re using someone else’s phone, and she’s gonna get cranky if we run up too much of a charge…”

  “Major Carter can tell you better than I.” A smile played over his lips. “I have already mentioned how pleased I am to see you all, have I not?”

  “You have,” said Daniel. “But trust me, we’re not going to get tired of hearing it.”

  The screen blinked, and Sam’s face appeared. “Hey,” she said.

  She looked frighteningly tired, and there was something in her eyes Daniel didn’t like at all. A haunted, hunted expression. His smile faded. “Sam? Where are you?”

  “In the planet,” she replied. As she said it, she looked back over her shoulder, above her head, as if keeping watch for enemies.

  Jack squinted at the screen. “Ah, don’t you mean ‘on’?”

  “No sir. We’re under the surface.”

  “You’re buried?”

  “No… We can fly out any time, sir.”

  “Then put your foot down and get the hell out of Dodge.”

  She shook her head. “Colonel, I’m sorry, but we’ve got a new problem. What we found down here changes everything…”

  “Sam,” Daniel said warily. “You’re, ah, scaring us a little he
re… What have you found?”

  “Well, to put it simply…” She took a deep breath. “This isn’t really a planet. It’s an egg, and it’s going to hatch into about a billion Ash Eaters.”

  It took several minutes for Sam to explain exactly what she had found under the nameless planet’s surface. Even when she had shown them some of the data she had captured using the scout’s reconnaissance systems, it was hard to grasp.

  All that was really clear was that something had to be done about it.

  At first, Jack had been unable to see the urgency. “Carter, I hear you. Hollow planet, lots of Ash Eaters, black hole. I get it. But seriously, what’s to stop us bugging out and leaving them in peace?”

  “Sir, I don’t think you quite understand. The singularity isn’t there just to give the planet gravity. It’s been evaporating slowly over tens of thousands of years. The Ash Eaters have been dormant inside the planet for all that time, just ticking over on the Hawking radiation it gives off as it shrinks.”

  “So?”

  “So, they knew it was going to evaporate at a measureable rate. Sir, Neheb-Kau did get something right. He told me that the Ash Eaters were once a highly advanced race, and the evidence is right here. But they didn’t eat their own civilization and then each other until there was only one left. They retreated, voluntarily, into this giant egg, and then went into a dormant state.”

  “I guess they must have left one outside.” Daniel rubbed the bridge of his nose. He felt as though his spectacles had been on his face for a year, grinding through to the bone. He wondered if the others were as tired as he was. “You know, it’s not often we come across one of these ancient legends that isn’t true. Normally they pan out, you know?”

  “Maybe the Ash Eaters set up the lie themselves.”

  “Okay, Carter.” Jack spread his hands. “Simple answer: what happens if we just leave?”

  “Simple answer? Worst case scenario is that the gamma radiation released when the Ha’tak reaches the singularity wakes the Ash Eaters, or even just some of them. A lot of rock went down with it, and the surface is unstable now. There’s a kind of suppression field running through the crust to keep the atmosphere from falling into the planet, but that’s being stressed too, and it could fail any time.”