by Jamie Duncan
“You would have died in any case,” Teal’c said. “But you died saving them. That is a choice.”
After considering that argument for a few moments, Daniel finally nodded. “Then Aris Boch isn’t as right as he thinks, is he?” He looked past Teal’c to the far side of the hold.
“About what?” Sam asked.
“About us. Even if we do what he wants, we’re not choiceless. Not in the way that counts.”
Sam turned to follow his gaze as he spoke and found the Colonel watching them with dark, unreadable eyes.
One year after Jack O’Neill had rejoined the Stargate program and formed SG-1, General George Hammond’s staff aide had given him a doomsday clock as a gag gift, a gentle poke in the ribs because of the program’s naysayers. It stuck up from his desk like a ticking time bomb, and Hammond had hated it, from the screaming red of the digital display to the way the numbers flashed once a second. Whenever he’d had teams offworld, he found himself staring at the numbers, thinking about casualty reports and the letters he’d written to the families of soldiers he’d sent through the ’gate. It hadn’t been long before the clock went into the drawer and the aide was dismissed.
Even so, Hammond often thought about that clock. Especially when his people were late reporting in.
Hours inside the mountain never seemed to match up with the hours worked in the normal world above, especially when there were several teams offworld operating on the local time of their destination planets. It wasn’t unusual for teams to return in the wee hours of the morning. Hammond carried a list of all the away missions in his head and, as if that bright red alarm were flashing in the back of his brain, he knew when a team was even a few minutes overdue.
This time, it was SG-1.
2300 hours came and went, but he waited a few extra minutes to be sure. “Anything?” he asked Sergeant Harriman, who was haunting the control room with him, two ghosts augmenting the skeleton nightshirt crew.
“No, sir.” Harriman checked his watch against the ’gate system’s internal clock. “Ten minutes overdue.”
Hammond looked through the heavy bulletproof glass at the silent grey mass of the ’gate. “Dial it up,” he said. “There might be a problem on the other end.”
“Yes, sir,” Harriman said. A moment later, the floor shuddered as the ’gate slowly came to life. Even after all these years, they still had those initial tremors during the massive energy draw. The Stargate was a marvel to Hammond. He understood its purpose, its function, but the fact of its existence still provoked wonder in him, from time to time. He watched the wormhole blossom and settle into a calm event horizon.
Harriman wasted no time. “SG-1, Stargate Command. Do you copy?”
They waited. Moments like these, the tension in Hammond’s gut tightened until he felt twisted into knots. He narrowed his eyes against the glare from the event horizon while Harriman tried again. “SG-one-niner, do you copy? Colonel O’Neill, please respond.”
Hammond listened to a few seconds of silence, then said, “Keep trying to raise them, Sergeant. And let me know if you do.”
“Right away, sir.” Harriman glanced up at him. “Should I call in any additional teams?”
“SG-14 is already prepping for their departure in three hours. If need be, we’ll scrub it and move to rescue operations.”
“Understood, sir.” Harriman went back to calling every thirty seconds on the mark. Hammond stood behind him, mentally running down the personnel roster and ticking off available teams. No routine mission was a priority when his people were missing.
It was shaping up to be a long night.
CHAPTER TWO
Aris Boch dropped his ship out of hyperspace beyond the defense perimeter. The planet that floated in the middle of the forward viewscreen was a thin crescent of light, not much bigger than his thumbnail. The orbiting ha’tak was closer, an oblique pentagram, the central pyramid gleaming gold like a tooth. The mothership looked no bigger than Aris’ palm, and he couldn’t help covering it with his hand and closing his fingers into a fist around it. When the voice of the duty officer growled out of the com demanding Aris identify himself, Aris dropped his hand and thought of replying with a few well-placed volleys. But modest little cargo ships like his tel’tak didn’t have weapons, did they? And if they did, the Goa’uld must never know. He dutifully recited his pass-codes while letting his ship drift closer, riding the momentum he’d picked up before jumping to hyperspace above Relos.
As the numbers and letters rolled off his tongue, he let his gaze scan the outer ring of the ha’tak, a familiar game, picking his targets. The mothership seemed worse for wear—although in better shape than its counterpart on the planet’s landing platform—and in a number of places the shielding was patchy and the interior decks were exposed to hard vacuum. He could make out the tiny, insectlike flitting of repair drones swarming around a new breach and snorted out a laugh. One dead-on plasma burst would tear open that whole section and cripple the ship, if anyone wanted to take the planet. But that was just it: nobody did. The ha’tak bristled at nothing, defended the planet from nothing but the galaxy’s indifference. Aris drifted on.
His authorization received, he goosed the sublight engines and vectored toward the planet. For a moment, the ship shuddered and Aris was pushed back in his seat while the inertial dampeners struggled lamely to realign forces. The hyperspace drive gave a hiccup, and a hyperspace window partially formed ahead of the ship only to collapse again, sending a wave of distortion out in all directions.
Over the com, the duty officer barked a query, and Aris grumbled a reply, the last bit about trashy Goa’uld workmanship prudently kept under his breath.
He couldn’t afford to be too picky. After destroying the last one, he’d been lucky to get a ship out of Sebek at all. It was bad enough to have pissed off Sokar by ditching not only his Tok’ra target but the consolation prize—Teal’c—as well. That had been nothing, however, compared to coming home by Stargate empty-handed: no tel’tak, no payment, no useful intel to sell to Sebek, and hoping he wouldn’t be killed the moment he stepped through the ’gate. Two-and-a-half years was long enough to go without transportation, to play nice with a Goa’uld and trade without a position of strength, to have to travel by ’gate and by paying passage or, more often, by stealing transportation offworld lest he lose the independence of his income. But Aris was a patient man, and if the tel’tak he’d been given was barely spaceworthy, well, it was still spaceworthy, and that was enough. He’d had time to build up Sebek’s trust, such as it was, and to pay attention to what was going on in the galaxy.
If all went well, he wouldn’t be forced to serve the Goa’uld much longer.
That thought brought him back to the planet, which was now a half-circle as the tel’tak traced its slow arc dayward. Nightside, there were no lights visible at all—not that he expected any—although he could imagine that, back when that first Goa’uld ha’tak had lunged into orbit from hyperspace, there had been at least a hint, something tantalizing, a glitter of occupation. Now there was only the rumple of cloud cover—and darkness. Today, as usual, a storm was spinning in the southern hemisphere, on the edge of the terminator, its arms outflung across a quarter of the world, its eye blankly staring upward. From here, though, he could smooth it with his thumb. But he kept his hands on the controls and squinted as the sun flared on the curved edge of darkness, flooded the cockpit with hard, white light, and blotted out the stars.
From space, his planet was beautiful again. He could imagine it as it was before the Goa’uld had come, before his people had been slaughtered and the young ones enslaved. The sight of ha’taks settling down to the ground, the screams of terror and the death that surrounded them all, were fresh in his memory. It had been hard to overcome his hatred, to smile and joke and deal with the Goa’uld, to find ways to flatter them and nurture their greed, increasing his value to them. He’d long ago traded his integrity for the sake of his life and the lives of those h
e had a duty to protect. But he hadn’t been able to protect them, in the end, and the life of a hunter was much the same as that of a slave. He had no options, no way out, no true freedom. It was simply a form of servitude more pleasant than the choking death in the bowels of the mines.
Aris adjusted the velocity and let the ship fall into the planet’s gravity well, angling toward the northern hemisphere where the storm’s tattered edges meant wind and rain and numbing cold. The heat shielding held up against reentry, but warnings flared in red on the holographic readout on the viewscreen. Goa’uld script made everything—even good wishes, he suspected—look nasty. He turned off the alarms and hung on while the ship bucked down through the churning atmosphere. The pilot interface translated into mere numbers the hazards of wind sheer and gravity and all kinds of resistance, so his struggle to keep the ship from spinning was more mental than physical. Still, the muscles of his arms tensed anyway, corded with the effort even though his touch remained light and nimble on the controls. Overtaxed, the inertial dampeners went offline, and for a second Aris was pulled in two directions at once when the ship barrel-rolled and the internal gravity fought with the planet’s. He shut the ship’s gravity plating down, got the tel’tak flying straight and upright again, skimming a ceiling of roiling clouds and buffeted by sheets of rain.
There had been a moment in his youth, a day when he’d had to make a choice. The risk had been great when he’d snapped the neck of a faithless Jaffa whose fear of his god was not enough to keep him honest. His prize could have earned him instant death, but it impressed Sokar enough to give him the tools he needed: access to the Stargate, and basic weapons. From there Aris had built his reputation, first with Sokar, and then with other Goa’uld who understood the value of barter for things they couldn’t obtain without drawing too much attention to their activities. He was indiscriminate in the jobs he took. He couldn’t afford a conscience, even when it kept him awake at night.
He leaned forward a little and peered down at familiar territory. From this altitude, the mountain ranges, one for each finger on his right hand, were parallel creases running north to south, divided by bands of snow and, in one vast valley, the black snake of a river. Dayward, there was an angled cage of white and grey, shafts of sunlight spearing between banks of clouds and setting a distant ocean on fire. But the clouds closed ranks and the scintillation of water dulled to steel once he turned the tel’tak inland, gliding downward until it seemed to scrape the bare peaks with its belly. Here, the turbulence was worse, tossing the tel’tak like a die in a cup, so he slipped into the widest of the valleys and followed its curving path into the shelter of the cliffs, lower and lower, until he could make out individual trees on the valley floor and the rubble of the moraine that lay scattered behind the retreating glaciers.
It was a circuitous route, but from down here he didn’t have to see the scars in each of the two valleys on either side, dayward, nightward, where the cities used to be. Now there were only fields of tumbled stone below the mountains, the black scoring of orbital bombardment still visible above the treeline.
At the end of this valley, the glacier hung precariously from the edge of a cliff, spilling itself in a waterfall that, even in the early morning light, was brilliantly turquoise. Aris leveled off at the next plateau and then plummeted again, pulling up at the river’s surface and shooting out the end of the valley, through a notch between sheer rock faces and over the open plain below.
Here, the darkness lay at the feet of the mountains like a panting dog, heavier, dirtier. The cargo ship slipped between layers of smog. Below it the river fell away, blackened and sickly, sliding over the last of the plateaus into the city. There were a few lights here, haloed in the sooty air. Someone was home.
“Home,” he said out loud, with a twisted smile. The word tasted like acid on his tongue. He circled around the golden apex of the pyramid that rose from the black clouds like a parody of the mountains around it, and aimed the ship at a landing pad obscured by banks of steam belching from valley floor.
Inertial dampeners, Jack decided, were overrated, or maybe Aris Boch hadn’t bothered with them when he went for the upgrade package on the tel’tak. Either way, Jack was happy he had a pilot’s stomach, because the ship was bouncing around like a cork on a stormy sea, and the green cast of Daniel’s face meant he was taking the metaphor a little too seriously. After a moment of complete weightlessness the floor rose up under them, only to fall away again. Jack hooked his fingers into the strap of Daniel’s empty holster and yanked him down onto the floor before he could fall on top of Jack and break something important.
Teal’c was braced with one wide hand and one foot on either side of the frame, his shoulders hunched. The ship lurched one way and then overcorrected, throwing Carter into Jack and sandwiching him between her and Daniel. Jack slumped even lower against the wall, gasping against the weight of his own bones.
Once he managed to lift his head a little, he found Teal’c on his knees. “Aris Boch has increased the internal gravity,” Teal’c said between gritted teeth. He collapsed onto the floor and rolled laboriously onto his back.
“No kidding,” Jack managed, before the world telescoped to a bright prick of light and winked out.
When he opened his eyes, he was still on the floor, feeling like his limbs were being held down by sandbags. It took a second for him to register that he was half right. Carter had fallen onto his left leg and still lay draped face-down over him, her spiky blond hair hiding part of his boot.
“Heavy,” Daniel said and after a beat drawled, “Man.”
“Very funny,” Jack replied with a grimace as he got his elbows under himself and levered himself up. The weight was easing a little now. Daniel’s face started to go green again. “Don’t you dare,” Jack warned him and wiggled his foot next to Carter’s head. “C’mon, Major. My leg’s asleep.”
With a groan she managed to get to her hands and knees.
“What the hell was that?” Jack demanded. He pulled his leg out from under her and circled his ankle. Pins and needles stabbed all the way to his hip. He flipped open his watch. Twenty minutes.
“Maybe malfunction in the gravity plates, sir,” she suggested to the floor. “Or maybe a black hole too close to the hyperspace window—”
“Or maybe I like to see you flopping around like brentle fish, all disoriented and easy to handle,” Aris Boch said from the doorway. With a swift kick, he deflected Teal’c’s off-balanced lunge and, slamming him into the deck, stood on his spine and rammed the muzzle of his gun into the back of Teal’c’s neck. “Stand up,” he ordered, jerking his head toward the door. “Play nice and I won’t kill anybody. Yet.”
Daniel heaved himself to his feet and, steadying himself against the wall, said in a low, steady tone, “I’m not going to help you if you hurt them.”
“I’m going to hurt them if you don’t help me,” Aris replied, mimicking Daniel exactly.
“Oh, please,” Jack growled. The two men—Aris broad-shouldered in his armor, Daniel in rumpled BDUs—stood on opposite sides of the cargo bay and stared each other down. Jack resisted whistling the opening bars of Rawhide. All they needed was some blowing tumbleweed and a lurid sunset to give them dramatic shadows. Jack shifted his weight impatiently. After a day of sitting on his ass, it was time to move. “Can we take the standoff outside? This place is giving me a headache.”
And it was. Whatever Aris had done to the gravity plates, being on the ground wasn’t helping, and Jack still felt like there were lead weights around his ankles. When they filed out ahead of Aris and his gun, Jack was pretty disappointed to discover that the problem wasn’t with the ship but with the planet.
“Oh great,” he muttered. “One of those.”
Carter stumbled across the threshold into the grey light and said, “Gravity’s substantially higher than Earth’s.”
“Yeah, got that.” Jack tried not to drag his feet. It was undignified.
“Welcome to
Atropos,” Aris said, and swung his free arm expansively to take in the whole landscape.
Suddenly, the gaudy golden interior of the tel’tak didn’t look so bad.
Atropos wasn’t exactly a pretty planet. Once upon a time it might have been a lovely vacation spot; Jack could see the appeal of the sweeping mountains and waterfalls. But now even the water seemed depressed by the place and fell with sluggish oiliness, made heavy by silt. The sun was a bleary eye peering between two peaks, and the mountains cast cold shadows into the valley beneath them. From their vantage point on the landing above the valley, Jack followed the biggest of the rivers as it made its tortured way between its banks and into the city below. Its black gleam was visible between the tumbled angles of buildings designed, it seemed, after the school of ramshackle. There were a few crooked spires still standing. One tower in particular curved up above the rest like the fin of a shark and glowed dully, silver edged with sunrise-red. Jack wondered what kind of sea monster was cruising under the chop. The rest of the city, though, looked like it had been kicked over by a bratty kid on the beach, whole sections flattened around the familiar footprints of orbital bombardment. The craters’ edges were probably still black, their bottoms still crackling glass, but it was hard to tell because the city had sort of scabbed over, and a motley collection of tents and lean-tos and makeshift structures encrusted the blasted spaces.
On its landing platform in the middle of the city, dwarfing even the shark’s fin tower, the mothership caught the light, honey and red, the only patch of real color in the valley. It could only be described as smug. Pretentious. Jewelled. Squatting in the rubble of a civilization. In short: Goa’uld.
Jack took stock. Pretty as it looked at first glance, the ha’tak, in his estimation, was actually not in great shape. There was some serious scoring on the central pyramid, and there was a lot of heavy equipment hunkered down at the edge of the platform. He couldn’t make out much detail, but there was definitely a sizable hole in the outer ring. He filed all this away. Sebek: discount bin Goa’uld.
