SG1-15 The Power Behind the Throne

by Savile, Steven

  “Will he be all right?”

  “I do not know, Daniel Jackson.”

  “I’m just toasty,” Jack grunted. He still hadn’t opened his eyes. “So stop talking about me like I am dead. Now would someone like to tell me where the hell we are?”

  “We’re in some sort of ice cavern, that’s about as much as I’ve been able to work out,” Daniel offered. “There’s evidence that whoever excavated the cavern used explosives, which suggests we’re talking about a society advanced enough to have mastered gunpowder and dynamite.”

  “Great. So let’s hope they don’t want to try out their flash bangs on us, shall we?” Jack struggled to sit up. Teal’c helped support him. “Carter, how are you doing?”

  Sam lay on her side, looking up at them. She did her best to smile. It was a weak effort. “I’ve been better, sir”.

  “Any idea what happened back there?”

  “Something must have interfered with the wormhole,” she suggested. “The gate must have lost its connection and leapt to the nearest possible alternative device, in other words we’re very lucky we didn’t just frazzle out of existence.”

  “Is that even possible?” O’Neill asked. “I mean for the wormhole to jump like that? I thought these things were locked in once a connection was established.”

  “I don’t know, sir, until about ten minutes ago I would have said it couldn’t happen, but that was ten minutes ago. Now I’m not so sure. It’s theoretically possible that something might have interfered with the gate’s link, I suppose. To put it crudely, if you think about the quantum ‘road’ between two gates being like a piece of string, it’s conceivable that it could become tangled or simply twisted off true. That could theoretically have an impact on the quantum traveler, but while that impact would be enough to be measurable the kind of temporal shift would be so miniscule we’d barely notice it without some pretty sensitive equipment.”

  “So we’re not talking about a black hole effect here?” Jack asked.

  “I don’t think so, sir. But…” Sam broke off as the gate closed and left them in darkness. “You might not be so far off there, sir. We know that the immense gravitational pull of a black hole can affect how time is experienced in its vicinity, its appetite is voracious, it’s trying to consume everything around it.”

  “Like a hungry Pac Man,” Jack agreed, nodding.

  Daniel did his best to follow the leaps of logic, but Sam’s understanding of the universe was so utterly alien to him she might as well have been speaking a different language. Of course, she was, in a way. She was talking about the building blocks of creation, using the language of the creator.

  “Exactly. So what if the gravitational pull was so great it could somehow drag the quantum ‘road’ off true, ripping the wormhole away from the gate that originally anchored it?”

  “I don’t like the sound of this,” Daniel said.

  “Teal’c,” Sam said, “could the signal be bounced from one gate to another if the connection is lost?”

  “I have not heard of such a thing, Major Carter.”

  “But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen,” Sam finished, as much for her own benefit as for the others. She was growing more and more animated as the science unfolded for her. “It would take an incredible burst of energy along the quantum ‘road’ to cause the wormhole’s path to deviate. But a strong enough gravitational pull could conceivably wrench the event horizon free of the gate. It would need to be incredible though. “

  “How incredible?”

  “A star going super nova, maybe,” Carter offered.

  “Right, that sort of incredible.”

  “Loose, I would imagine there’s a fraction of time before the energy dissipates completely in which the quantum ‘road’ is lashing about like a garden hose on full power, and that’s the window of opportunity for it to fasten on to another gate. Once the window’s past, it’s gone, the energy swarming down the wormhole loses its bond, and whatever was traveling down the wormhole is little more than dust on the wind.”

  Jack pushed himself up to his feet. He swayed awkwardly for a moment, before Daniel reached out to offer him a steadying hand, and then walked across to the DHD. “Can we get some light in here?”

  Daniel obliged, taking a small mag-lite from his pocket and shining it down on the panel of the DHD. Jack punched in each of the seven co-ordinates to take them back home, but the last one refused to lock down. The gate lay stubbornly dormant. He punched in each of the symbols again. “I suppose that was always going to be too much to ask for,” Jack said with a shrug. He knew it was a long shot that they’d stayed on Vasaveda. Unfortunately he didn’t know where they were, and without the glyph for the point of origin they couldn’t dial out. It was as simple as that. “So, Major Carter, how do we go about finding our way home?”

  “Without the point of origin, we can’t,” she said, putting it succinctly.

  It was like hearing the first nail being driven into their coffins.

  “Then we need to find the point of origin. Simple,” Jack said, knowing it was anything but.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Lost

  In that long sliding moment of terrible emptiness General George Hammond stared at the silent Stargate. He hadn’t raised his voice. He had simply told the team around him to get his people back. It was the easiest thing to say and the hardest thing to do. He ground his teeth, a nervous habit. He could feel the adrenalin pounding in the room but it was deathly silent. That silence was only broken by the flutter of fingers over the keys of the many keyboards or the sudden impact of a fist being hammered off the workstation as a million to one chance went the way of the other nine hundred and ninety nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety nine and came to nothing. Failure was hard to take. The ground crew were stretched emotionally and physically, being pulled every which way by the demands of the machines and the impossibility of the task. It was hopeless and they knew it, but not one of them was prepared to admit it, even to themselves. It was the fundamental truth of the military ethic: no man gets left behind. They were clinging to one slim possibility: that the team hadn’t been in transit when the gate went down. Anything else meant they weren’t lost in any way that they could be found again. They needed to believe that SG-1 were still out there somewhere. That need ensured that there wasn’t a single voice of dissent in the room.

  Hammond watched his people — and they were his people every bit as much as any one of the SG teams — and knew he couldn’t make the call. Not while there was still a chance.

  The irony that the one woman smart enough to figure out what the hell had just happened was on the wrong end of the wormhole wasn’t lost on Hammond.

  He stared through the window at the gate. No matter how hard he willed the unstable vortex to rip out from its center he knew the reality of what that would mean: another incoming signal — and any trace of what was Jack and the others, gone.

  General Hammond had looked at the artifact a thousand thousand times without seeing beyond the unearthly Naqahdah and the iconographic symbols of the Milky Way’s constellations.

  Part of him had always known that this day would come, but that didn’t mean he was ready for it. It was strange; the program had lost men before. But this was different.

  Hammond checked his watch. The iris had been open for a minute under three hours. It was a calculated risk but there had to be a point where risk outweighed reward. There were protocols in place that prevented him from leaving the Stargate open indefinitely, protocols he had every intention of following once the second hand completed its final circuit. They hadn’t been able to re-establish contact and they didn’t dare risk leaving the gate open much longer for fear of what might come through.

  He picked up the intercom relay and stopped himself. He couldn’t give the order.

  He licked his lips. They were parched, rough and sore. It was as though all of the moisture had been sucked out of the air. Right then, at that moment as they h
it the three hour mark, Hammond was engulfed by the overwhelming feeling that closing the iris meant giving up on O’Neill and the others, and he wasn’t prepared to do that.

  Not yet.

  “One more hour,” he said, thinking to hell with the protocols, O’Neill was one resourceful son of a bitch, he’d find a way home. Hammond needed to believe that, but that hour came and past. None of the ground staff had left their positions. None of them had given up hope or stopped trying to carry out that one simple order despite the obvious truth that it was always going to evade them. And it didn’t matter; all of that stubbornness, all of that faith, didn’t amount to a hill of beans. Hammond knew he was going to have to place the calls to next of kin because the threshold between rational risk and irrational hope had been crossed. SG-1 weren’t coming home.

  “Close the iris, soldier,” he said.

  He couldn’t bring himself to watch the heavy metal shield lock into place over the gate. It didn’t matter to him that the iris could be opened again the instant they picked up an incoming signal. Seeing it close was symbolic. It felt like he was giving up on them.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Hope Burns Infernal

  They performed running repairs as they made ready to strike out from the cavern. Jack iced the burns on the back of his leg, using a large chip of ice he had broken away from the run-off. Daniel sat with the Mujina, seemingly captivated by it. Carter couldn’t hear what, if anything, the creature said to him. She didn’t need to. She remembered all too vividly the face it had chosen to show her.

  The sadness in her eyes had been the sadness of a military wife, the warmth in her smile the warmth of a mother. The worst of it was that she knew she was beginning to forget what she looked like — little things at first, details becoming blurred and almost ghostly as she tried to remember them, and then bigger things. If she closed her eyes all sorts of faces blended in her memory, but each belonged to her mother at different points in her life, it was only when they came together that they fused into something that wasn’t quite right. That was the tragedy of time — it healed wounds because it took away the sharpness of memory. Things lost their definition. Faces lost their shape. But there was one constant: her voice. It was almost as though auditory memory was somehow more faithful. Sam remembered exactly how her mother’s voice sounded because it had never changed, never aged. It was the same the first time she heard it as it was the last.

  So when the Mujina had spoken to her in her mother’s voice, it had been exactly as she remembered it. The face had been wrong, mixing the features of the young mother with the more careworn frown of the frustrated soccer mom waiting outside the strip mall for Jacob to come and pick her up. It was like looking at one of those curious morphed pictures of a face through the filter of age, gradually and subtly changing to appear older and older — until it just stopped aging.

  She had cried then.

  She hadn’t been able to stop herself.

  And now the creature was working its distressing magic around Daniel. She understood why the Goa’uld had resorted to such primitive means of silencing it. Sam didn’t know if it was simply the act of silencing its wagging tongue that protected them from the Mujina, or if there was more to it, but she was beginning to understand just what the Tok’ra, Selina Ros, meant when she called the creature a weapon.

  She pushed herself up and walked slowly across to where Daniel sat, and crouched down beside him. There was an emptiness in his expression. No, that wasn’t right, when she looked into his eyes she saw a ferocious need that frightened her. Without realizing what she was doing, Sam put her hands over his eyes and whispered, “Don’t listen to it, Daniel.”

  “Sha’re? Where are you? I can’t feel you anymore. Don’t leave me.” It hurt to hear the desperation in his voice. The yearning. She realized again how lonely he was, and how much that loneliness had defined him of late. She soothed him, gentling her hand against his cheek until he calmed down.

  “Colonel?” she whispered, not wanting to startle Daniel.

  “Yes, Carter?”

  “Sir, I don’t think we can risk bringing the Mujina with us as long as it can alter our perceptions so easily. I’ve had it inside my head, sir. It made me see things that weren’t there; things that I never want to see again. It could compromise us.”

  “Major Carter is right, O’Neill. The creature planted suggestions in my mind as we fled under Goa’uld gunfire. A weaker mind would have succumbed.”

  Carter didn’t want to consider the implications of what Teal’c suggested. That the Mujina could exert some sort of hypnotic suggestion on a susceptible mind was obvious — and there was no telling just how compelling those suggestions might be, nor how far the intended victim of them might go. She looked down at Daniel and shivered. That shiver had nothing to do with the cold of the cavern.

  “Well, I think that answers the question why the Goa’uld chose to use the branks, don’t you? I’m guessing it’s a case of stopping its tongue from working stops it from being able to plant ideas in our heads.”

  “But sir, strapping that thing on a helpless creature’s head… well, doesn’t that just make us torturers?”

  “I’d say it makes us pragmatic, Major. Until I know differently I’m working under the impression that Old Silver Tongue here needs to be able to talk to mess with our minds so keeping him quiet is doing us all a favor.”

  “Maybe we could talk to it?” Carter offered. “Make a deal? We’re talking about an intelligent life form here. Who’s to say it can’t turn the effect on and off?”

  “It’s a deal with the devil,” Daniel said, looking up at the others for the first time since the Mujina let its influence on his mind slide. “Witchcraft. All of it. All of those superstitious things that were called magic and had people burned at the stake for believing them. It offered me my heart’s desire, Jack. Can you imagine how potent that is?”

  Daniel looked at him, and Sam realized how stupid the question was. The colonel had lost his son and blamed himself squarely for his death. Of course he could imagine. They all could. They had all lost things.

  “Why do you think the Ancients wanted to hide the Mujina away from civilization?” Daniel said. “I can’t believe it is capable of turning this thing on or off any more than we can switch off our pheromones. No, this is what the creature is, it’s raison d’être. It doesn’t make this thing happen, it is always happening. It’s a defense mechanism, just like the chameleon’s shifting colors that help it blend into its environment and become invisible. If there is no one around to react to its biology, there are no promises, no magic, if you like. It’s only when you put a third party into the equation that things become dangerous. It’s the way we react to it, rather than the other way round.”

  “And that helps us how?”

  “It doesn’t. But it pretty much guarantees it isn’t the kind of creature that can keep any kind of bargains it makes. It isn’t that kind of magic. And I hate to be a party pooper, but without a point of origin we aren’t getting out of here, so it is all rather academic right now.”

  “You don’t need to tell me,” Jack began to take off his evac suit. “I’m all for getting off this rock, even if it means leaving the gate behind while we go find out where the hell we are. It’s not like its going anywhere. Hey, you, yeah, come on over here,” he called to the Mujina. The creature lay huddled in the corner furthest away from the gate. Sam couldn’t see whether it looked up but it seemed as though the shadows back there shifted slightly. “Give me a hand with this, would you?”

  “Not exactly how I imagined it in my head, sir,” Sam grinned, helping him with the seals that he couldn’t reach by himself.

  “What are you thinking, Jack?” Daniel asked.

  “We dress our new friend here in the full space suit get up, helmet and all, and keep the visor down. Maybe it’ll help. It certainly can’t hurt, can it?”

  Teal’c said nothing. He merely raised an eyebrow at the notion. Hi
s silence spoke volumes.

  He stripped the outer layer of the evac suit quickly. There was a tear behind the knee of his BDUs where the staff blast had smoldered through the fabric and burned into the skin. The wound was a mess. It needed treating or it would fester. Together they helped dress the Mujina. “No offense, pal, but the less people who see your ugly mug the better,” Jack said, securing the helmet in place. He brought the smoky visor down over its face.

  “I am infinite,” the creature said through the helmet’s speaker relay. “I contain multitudinous life. I am you and he and she. I am they and they are I. I am all your dreams. Your hopes. Desires. I am the song of your heart. I am all of these things and more. I am a reflection of you. What you see is what you are.”

  Daniel chuckled. “I think he’s saying that you’re just as ugly, Jack.”

  “Ah, nice, a sense of humor. Thanks Doctor Seuss, you’ll fit right in. Okay, how about we get out of here? Daniel, the torch?” Jack held out his hand for the mag-lite. He spun his wrist, sending the thin beam roving all around the ice cave, high and low. The walls coruscated with an eerie inner glow as the torch’s beam played over them. “This way.”

  They followed Jack as he led them through the darkness toward the surface. At every turn or fork in the subterranean passage he took the one that led upwards. It was a reasonable assumption to work from. Of course there had to be a reason for the gate being hidden away in the deep instead of up there, closer to the heavens. Sam kept the thought to herself.

  It was almost like a game, following the bobbing light — a willow-the-wisp leading them on a merry dance through the dark. She hadn’t quite regressed to the point of worshipping the light yet, but there was something fundamental about her need to see it. “Follow the light and everything will be all right,” she said to herself. They walked in silence, each wrapped up with their own thoughts on their current predicament. Sam couldn’t help but run the probabilities in her head as she walked. There was comfort in numbers. Sometimes she went so far as to dream in calculus, the numbers forging a connection between her and the infinite. Science was her truth. Unfortunately, that also meant she grasped the enormity of the problem they faced if they ever wanted to get home. Not only could they be anywhere in the universe, they could conceivably be anywhen as well.