SG1-15 The Power Behind the Throne

by Savile, Steven

The blare masked a deeper rumbling. O’Neill felt it rather than heard it; the ice shivered beneath his feet. It was a peculiar sensation. The very stability of the ground was undermined by the pitch and yaw of the icequake. Moments later a second noise, less a rumble and more of a crack, echoed down through the ice and the entire ground tilted crazily beneath them. Jack reacted instinctively, pushing the others toward the mouth of the skin-lined tunnel while he threw himself at the brig door.

  There was no way he was about to leave anyone locked up in there and he didn’t care how much it might piss off the righteous ‘Superior Race’.

  “Go!” he barked, throwing back the top bolt. The lower one was blocked by a two-inch thick jag of ice that had been torn up from the ground with the heaving of the quake. He wrapped his hands around it and heaved but it wasn’t giving an inch. He didn’t have time or means to melt it, which meant he had to break it. He drew his Beretta M9 and squeezed off a single round into the center of the ice. It powdered beneath the impact, giving him plenty of room to reach the lower bolt. He drew it back and threw open the door. “Out! Come on!”

  He turned and started to run back out through the hidebound tunnels, chasing the sting of the cold on his face even as another, deeper crack tore through the ice beneath him. He didn’t look to see if the others were following him. He had to trust that they were.

  A sudden seismic shift threw him sideways. O’Neill lost his footing as part of the ceiling came down, spilling snow into the passage. Light and the sudden bite of freezing air offered him another way out.

  He took it.

  He slipped and slid as he scrambled up out of the collapsing tunnel. Around him people were yelling. The bugle blared again. This time he understood; a watchman had seen the first fissure opening in the ice and had sounded the alarm. Even though he hadn’t understood what it meant, the bugler had probably saved his life. O’Neill stumbled away from the ruin, dusting himself off. The Mujina emerged behind him, carrying the wizened husk of the other prisoner. O’Neill had no desire to see the abuse that had been inflicted upon the man but he couldn’t in good conscience look away. Seeing it brought the evils home to him. He had no idea what the man’s crime was, but whatever he had done, he didn’t deserve to be starved to death. Not in any civilized world.

  The Mujina laid its burden down by O’Neill’s feet. He stayed there, crouched, head cocked slightly to one side as though hearing something O’Neill couldn’t, and then he sprang. The creature bolted, haring over the unsteady ground, arms pumping furiously as it chased something Jack could neither see nor hear.

  And then the ground opened up beneath its feet.

  One moment it was there the next it was gone, swallowed by the ravine torn through the ice by the pressures being exerted from left and right.

  The encampment exploded in panic. Soldiers ran toward the ravine while others ran away from it. Jack stopped running and became the one fixed point in the chaos as fear swirled all around him. He saw Carter and Daniel Jackson. There was no sign of Teal’c in the hysteria.

  Another huge crack resonated through the ice. This time it was followed by an almost silken rush as the land pitched violently. It took O’Neill a moment to understand what he was seeing, so irrational was the sight of one of the igloos sliding toward the edge and then coming apart block by block as it disappeared into the ravine. Snow and screams swirled up into the air.

  The first rescuers worked the edge, relaying back orders, demanding ropes and cages and anything else that could be used to bring survivors back up from the bottom of the fissure. The bravery of the men was obvious as they moved with incredible surety, traversing the jagged spurs of ice, making them safe.

  And then came the horror.

  With six of them working the ice face the edge broke away. They stood there for a sickening moment, betrayed by the ground beneath their feet, and then they fell.

  O’Neill stared in mute denial.

  He had just watched six men die in a heartbeat. It refused to register in his brain. He’d seen a lot of horrors in his life but this was somehow different. There was something elemental about it, something that took it out of the hands of the victims. There was nothing they could do about it. They couldn’t fight back. They couldn’t have done anything other than die. The brutality of it was grotesque. But soldiers died, it was their curse.

  His initial impression of blind panic was wrong. The soldiers were moving with purpose, and what appeared to be hysteria was organized chaos as they swarmed quickly to limit the damage. It obviously wasn’t the first time the ice had broken. Quickly, a second wave of men came toward the edge, working with brisk efficiency to lay down belay pins and anchor the rope that bound them together. This time there were three of them. They approached the edge cautiously, feeling out its stability with the teeth of the ice axes they swung. If one went over, they all went over, but hopefully the rope would save them from the fall.

  Shouts chased down the line of workers, orders given and received.

  The front man held up his hand. The others stopped. O’Neill found himself holding his breath along with the rest of the soldiers, and letting it out in a rush as the front man called back, “My God, he’s climbing back up the side!”

  O’Neill moved forward, compelled to see the drama unfold. He couldn’t imagine how any of the men who had fallen could possibly have survived the drop, let alone have the strength left to claw their way back up the sheer side of ice. And yet another of the rescue workers at the edge confirmed it, “Come on, man, you can do it!”

  He left the prisoner lying on a snow-laden animal skin; he was shivering but he was as safe as O’Neill could possibly make him. Others needed his help more.

  “Carter! Daniel! Teal’c!” He yelled, cutting across the top of the frantic hubbub, waving them forward. He saw Carter nod her understanding and set off for the edge.

  Before he made it half way Jack saw the hand come reaching up over the top.

  The bloated fingers of the white gloves were shredded from where they had clung to the scars in the ice, and stained red with blood where it had opened up the flesh beneath. The second hand was followed by the Mujina’s grimly determined face; the helmet had obviously been torn off in the fall, or taken off during the climb. The creature was not alone. One of the rescue workers that had gone over the edge clung grimly to its neck. The Mujina dragged itself up as far as it could, and even as its arms began to weaken and buckle two of the roped men pulled it up the rest of the way. A ragged cheer went up as people came forward to help the wounded man. His leg was in a bad way; the broken bone pierced through the skin and cloth. He had lost a lot of blood but thanks to the Mujina he now had a chance. Down at the bottom of the fissure his only hope had been to die quickly rather than slowly.

  The Mujina stood, stretched, seeming to work out the kinks and twists in its bones from where the fall had battered its body, and before anyone could stop it, stepped off the edge in a dive.

  An air of shocked silence swallowed every other sound until the tick, tick, tick of the stresses undermining the ice turned into a wrenching grumble. This time they heeded the warning. By the time the basso profundo crack of the landslide boomed out every one of the rescue workers was back fifty feet from the edge. Three more of the igloos were torn free by the collapse. They plunged into the ravine trailing animal skins like wings. O’Neill didn’t move. His mind ran through the permutations and calculations and hit the same conclusion again and again — the Mujina was at the bottom of that lot, buried alive. But not for long. He felt an unexpected pang of loss, the last echo of Charlie’s voice there at the back of his mind. It wasn’t quite like losing his son all over again, but like everyone else staring down into the chasm he had just witnessed an incredible act of heroism snuffed out by the suddenness of the second landslide. Life once again made no sense.

  “Nothing could have survived that.” Daniel gave voice to what everyone else was thinking. Saying it made it all the more real. He was righ
t. Nothing could have survived the crushing weight of the ice. It was almost funny that it should end like this, this so-called terrifying weapon crushed to death because, when it came down to it, the creature harbored a deep-seated need to be everyone’s hero, even people it didn’t know. That, O’Neill reasoned, was almost certainly the other side of the telescope — people might well see what they so desperately needed in the creature, but it needed to live up to those unreasonable expectations. It was a double-edged gift, for sure.

  Jack saw Teal’c come striding out of the wreckage of one of the ice structures, a wounded man in his arms. With the wind kicking up the snow around him, O’Neill was struck by the similarity between the Jaffa and the fallen Mujina. But then it was hardly surprising that he would see the parallels, Teal’c was as close as he had ever come to meeting a genuine archetypal hero; the square-jawed comic book superhero figure capable of facing down any foe and walking away victorious through sheer unconquerable might. Right from that first moment he had turned his staff weapon on the guards inside the compound on Chulak he had embodied the very essence of his own name, Teal’c, strength.

  Another soldier ran to his side to gather their injured brother. Teal’c refused to surrender his burden. Instead he carried the unconscious man to the makeshift first aid post the rescuers had begun setting up. He laid the man down on a bed of animal furs and walked back toward one of the collapsed buildings, pulling blocks of ice aside as he fought to find a way back into the screaming men inside. O’Neill joined him. Together they heaved aside the huge chunks of ice, moving with a sense of urgency as the cherry red sun began to slip from the sky.

  For the next hour the survivors set about making the camp safe. Their position as prisoners was quickly forgotten as they labored side by side with the soldiers. Jack threw himself into the toil, going where he was most needed. The cold had the sweat freezing on his body. Exhausted and thirsty, he wandered across to where some of Jahamat’s men had set up a refreshment station. A small fire burned beneath a metal vat, keeping the water from icing over. Jack joined the line. When it was his turn, he took a small metal cup and ladled a scoop of warm water into it. The metal pulled at his lip as he drank. “Anyone got some ice to go with this?”

  One of the men beside him laughed. The sound was strained but it was the first glimpse of humanity any of them had shown since the Mujina had come up out of the ravine carrying their friend.

  “Performing one night only, catch me while you can.”

  The laughing man said something but Jack missed it. Over beyond the broken ice houses he saw Jahamat giving orders. There was an economy about every movement the man made. Each hand gesture was crisp and precise. O’Neill followed the direction of his hand. It didn’t take a genius to realize what Jahamat was planning. He was taking advantage of the turmoil to send a small squad back up the hill to investigate the tunnels from which they’d emerged. There wasn’t a lot he could do to stop them. Carter came up beside him. She wiped the cold sweat from her brow and held her face over the steaming mug she cupped in her hands. Corkscrews of steam coiled up lazily from the metal mug. He nodded toward where Jahamat was giving instructions. “I can’t say I like the look of that.”

  Carter looked up from the steam. The clash of hot and cold brought out the startling blue of her eyes. She started to say something when a cry of alarm cut her short. O’Neill turned to see what all the commotion was about. Over by the jagged edge of the fissure the battered and bloody shape of the Mujina crawled hand over fist across the ice. The creature slumped forward, spilling its burden beside it. It took O’Neill a heartbeat to realize that not only had the creature clawed its way up through the debris of the landslide, somehow it had dragged another man up with it. “Well I’ll be damned.”

  “Is that…?”

  “Yep. That’s one resourceful little bastard, that’s for sure.”

  O’Neill finished off his warm water with one long swallow and wiped the wetness from his lips with the back of his hand. He put the metal cup down. “Come on, Carter. Let’s go join the homecoming committee.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  True Colors

  Jahamat was the first to the Mujina’s side.

  The leader of the Corvani expedition hunkered down beside the creature. When others tried to approach he waved them back. The creature spoke to him. He had to lean in so close that he could feel the warmth of the Mujina’s shallow breath prickle his inner ear.

  “I can help you,” the creature whispered, so faint the words might have been nothing more than the promise of the arctic wind.

  “How?” Jahamat asked. He felt something stirring in his blood. He laid a hand on the creature’s heaving chest and felt a palpable thrill surge up through his fingers. He licked at his lips. “Tell me.”

  “I can show you the way to the stars… I can open up worlds to you… I can give you what you crave.”

  The words were in his head. He could see them with his mind.

  “You? You can barely lift your head from the ice.”

  The creature moved then, with surprising strength. It came around beneath him, wriggling around on its back so that it looked up into his eyes. “All is not as it seems, Jahamat. The eyes see what they want to. The mind interprets what it is shown, but the mind is influenced just as easily as the eye. It is all down to expectation.”

  It wasn’t just the words that were inside his head; the creature was. He could feel its invasive presence rooting deeper and deeper, touching memories and emotions long since buried as it sought something else, something more profound. He understood then. The creature was hunting for his essence, the thing that made him him.

  Jahamat knew fear then. Deep. Instinctive. Primal.

  He looked down into the eyes of the creature and saw a blazing intelligence that shocked him, and in that moment of realization something of the creature’s mask slipped and he saw the nothingness beneath. There was a flat plane where it ought to have worn a face. It had a ragged sucking hole for a mouth and black pits eyes. The folds of skin flapped as it breathed. And then, almost as quickly as it had been revealed, the truth slipped away behind another mask of need and he found himself looking down at the almond eyes of a woman.

  “I can be anything you want me to be,” she said. It said. Jahamat found himself thinking of the woman in his arms as an ‘it’ not a ‘he’ or a ‘she’; a sexless thing, despite its haunting beauty.

  “I name you ‘Monster of the Anima’,” he breathed.

  “Isn’t that where all monsters are born?” the woman’s smile was beguiling.

  “Get out of my head, demon. Get out of my head now or I will cut your throat while you lie there crooning your sweet deceits.”

  His hand trembled against the Mujina’s skin. He looked up. They were all looking at him. He saw the confusion in their faces. They were only party to half the conversation and the part they heard made no earthly sense.

  “Don’t tell me you would walk away from the stars? I know you better than you know yourself, Jahamat. You question, you doubt but you would no more walk away than you would surrender me to my captors. Oh, yes, the people that brought me here are no friends of mine. They would snare me and chain me and parade me around as though I were a trophy they had claimed. They ripped me away from my homeworld and seek to use me, to transform me into a weapon to conquer galaxies. And I am that, Jahamat. I am an army. I am death, eater of worlds. I am hope, breaker of dreams. I am everything, from the beginning, the alpha, the zero point, rushing through time to the end of days. I am it and it is I. How can I bring you the stars? How? Because I am made of the stars. Their dust hardens my veins. I do not bleed, I crack and flake. I do not weep, I calcify. I am not of this place. You know that to be true, don’t you, Jahamat? You can feel the alienness in my touch. Your blood sings with the thrill of it. You understand even if you do not understand. And you believe me.”

  The words rushed around inside him. What they said, what they promised, was so h
eady he did not dare believe, and he wanted to deny it. He wanted to say: “I believe no such thing.” But it was a lie. He did. He believed. Instead, ensnared, he breathed, “The stars? Truly? You can deliver the heavens? How? Show me?”

  “There is a gate, beneath the ice. It opens to everywhere you can imagine.”

  “Show me,” Jahamat said. He had been mistaken. The woman’s eyes weren’t almond, they were hazel. Her skin wasn’t the flawless pale porcelain he had thought but rough and pitted with the scars of acne and the first gray of stubble. A man looked up at him now. A man with the face of a fighter.

  “Tell me you want it. I need to hear the words.”

  “I want the world,” he said. And he meant it.

  “More,” the creature goaded.

  “I want the heavens. I want the stars. I want it all.”

  “And I can help you, my hungry warrior,” the Mujina promised.

  He liked the sound of that: the hungry warrior. That was exactly what he was. He tasted the rightness of it in his mind. “I don’t even know what to call you.”

  “Oh, but you do. You already named me. But before the world you may call me Mujina.”

  “Come then, Mujina,” Jahamat said. “Show me this gate between worlds.”

  “Patience, my hungry warrior. Patience.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Broken Circles

  A hard sun beat down on the ice.

  As the day wore into dusk a shallow film of melt still clung stubbornly to the surface. It would freeze again before the sun was out of the sky. The residual heat was never going to be enough to thaw the glacial mound beneath the camp, not all at once.

  It had taken the better part of the day, but the camp was gradually beginning to show signs of returning to normal. What surprised Daniel was the seeming disregard for what had happened. It wasn’t that the soldiers were untouched by the loss, but rather that they viewed it as just part of life. The human animal was remarkable like that; it was all part of that extraordinary resilience and tenacity that had allowed it to spread throughout the galaxy.