“When I stand here, I am reminded of the mountains of Bengal.”
“The Himalayas. They’re a lot taller.”
Kali turned to stare at Jackson. “True, but memories are now all I have.”
“My heart bleeds.” Jackson’s contempt had returned.
“In any event, Dr. Jackson, I was content to remain out of the affairs of the other Goa’uld until you killed Ra. The chaos that ensued was overwhelming, and within a shockingly small time I found myself elevated to the rank of System Lord.”
Jackson frowned. “Wait, you weren’t a System Lord before?”
Kali shook her head. “No. Ra gave me Shiva’s lands, but not his place on the council of the System Lords. That remained so until their ranks were so depleted that new blood was necessary. Cronus’s death in particular prompted several of the System Lords to nominate other Goa’uld to fill out the ranks: Bastet, Olokun, myself, and others.”
Jackson grabbed his mug of water. “Yeah, well, as interesting as this is, I’m kinda confused about something.”
“And what is that?”
“Honestly, I’m not really sure what you hope to accomplish here.”
“Peace.”
At that, he spat the water onto the table. “Seriously?”
Tightly, Kali said, “I did not tell you of my history in order to weave a pretty tale for you, Dr. Jackson.”
That was, strictly speaking, not true, as she had rather enjoyed telling it. It had been quite some time since she had told the stories of her rule to others. Long ago, she had done so regularly for the Kula, particularly in the days after abandoning Earth. But over the centuries, that habit had fallen by the wayside, and she hadn’t realized how much she’d missed it until she started telling the tale to Jackson.
However, there had also been a more direct purpose to her doing so. “I have always prided myself on working with humans. I joined my human host in an act of compassion, and it is out of a sense of compassion that I wish to sue for peace with the Reetou. It is a large galaxy, and I see no reason why we cannot coexist.”
“Wow,” Jackson said with what sounded like amazement. “You’re incredible.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“First of all, there’s every reason why you can’t coexist. In fact, you literally can’t coexist — that’s why you need me to be your voice in these negotiations in the first place. Secondly, if the point of telling me those stories was to show me how compassionate you are, you kinda need to work on your storytelling.”
Kali walked up to Jackson and stood over him, raising her left hand. “You will explain yourself.”
Defiantly, Jackson said, “Or what, you’ll zap my brain? Been there, done that.” He rose to his feet and stood face to face with Kali, an act of impudence that the Goa’uld found impressive and insulting. “But sure, I’ll explain why I think you’re nuts. Compassion? You just told me that you’re a killer, starting with that poor woman you’ve taken as a host.”
“I saved her life!”
“Really? So I can talk to her, then?”
Kali shook her head. “Nothing of the host remains.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard that line before. I argued against it when Zipacna defended Klorel on Tollana, and I won. Oh, and Skaara’s living a happy, Goa’uld-free life on Abydos even as we speak. We won’t even mention the Tok’ra. You say you’re compassionate, you call yourself the Mother Goddess, but you’re personally responsible for the continued enslavement of humans to the Goa’uld as hosts, and now you’re trying to sue for peace by blackmailing me and my team into helping you by threatening the very followers you claim to be protecting and loving. You’re still the Destroyer.”
For a moment, Kali considered killing Jackson where he stood. She had eliminated humans for far less of an insult than he had delivered.
But she did need him to speak for her with the Reetou, and this very passion and ability to counterargue was what would be needed.
Besides, killing him would just prove his point.
So instead she smiled. “Excellent, Dr. Jackson. That rhetorical skill will prove very useful in your negotiations with the Reetou. And do recall that the threat you mentioned still exists. Finish preparing your presentation, doctor — the Reetou will arrive soon.”
A Jaffa appeared at the doorway to the study and stood respectfully, waiting for Kali to acknowledge him.
Turning away from Jackson, unable to bear the sight of his sanctimonious face any longer, Kali looked at the Jaffa. “Yes?”
“Forgive the intrusion, Mother Goddess, but the chappa’ai has been raised from the water and put back in place. We have dialed the address provided by the Reetou, and they have confirmed that they will arrive within four hours.”
“Excellent.” She turned back to Jackson. “You have four hours, Dr. Jackson. If there is anything you need, please ask Aparna.”
“A ride home would be nice.”
“All in good time, Dr. Jackson — all in good time.” She turned and left the study.
Jackson would never believe it, but Kali truly did want peace. She had no need for conquest or to expand her empire. Indeed, the borders of her domain had hardly changed since the Goa’uld left Earth. She had severed ties with Ra not long after she killed Shiva for him, and he had let her be as long as she returned the favor. She had not given him the same insolence as Shiva, nor had she challenged his rule.
What changes there had been to her domains were due entirely to external threats, which she dealt with as necessary. Reluctantly, she allied herself with Bastet, whose territory was small, but whose Jaffa were dedicated and powerful — and clever. It was Bastet’s impressive intelligence network that revealed Sobek’s treachery, which in turn led to Kali and Bastet killing him.
But she preferred her Jaffa to be protecting the Kula, not fighting pointless wars against other Goa’uld. Surely the galaxy was large enough for them all? That was why she had voted to allow Anubis back in — the alternative was to suffer yet still more skirmishes with his forces. She was hoping that she could have the same mutual distance-keeping arrangement with Anubis that she’d had with Ra.
Two hours later, another Jaffa came to her with the news that the Tau’ri scientist had an update.
She moved quickly to the laboratory. While she preferred peace, she also preferred to have an advantage over a foe.
Upon entering, she saw several things at once: O’Neill holding an eradication rod and pointing it at a table containing the Reetou corpse her Jaffa had salvaged; Carter making adjustments to a device that looked as if it was cobbled together from several items that were never meant to be attached to one another; and one of her Jaffa standing guard.
“You have made progress,” she said without preamble.
“Yes,” Carter said. “It was the Reetou cadaver that actually gave me the breakthrough.” She walked away from the device she had constructed and approached the Reetou. “We always assumed that the Reetou are a hundred and eighty degrees out of phase with our reality — but it turns out that it’s more complicated than that. Based on my analysis, each of their individual cells are moving in and out of phase, at varying rates and speeds. That’s why weapons fire can affect them sometimes — they’re not insubstantial, because they’re not completely out of phase, but it turns out that they’re not always a full one eighty out, either. Now, the T.E.R.s work because they expose matter at any degree of phase, and the weapon component works on matter in any degree of phase as well. But they’re still out of phase.”
Kali shook her head. “Congratulations, Major Carter, you have learned more about the Reetou in a single day than all my top scientists managed to glean in weeks of work. I would kill them myself for their incompetence, except the Reetou have already completed that task for me.” She looked up at Carter. “What I do not understand is why, if the Reetou is still out of phase, it ceases to affect my species after they’re dead.”
“No idea, I’m afraid,” Carter said.
That surprised Kali. “You were able to learn the one thing but not the other?”
“That’s a biology question.” Carter shrugged. “I’m an astrophysicist. Matter going in and out of phase, I can tell you about. Why cells do that, and why it affects symbiotes, I couldn’t tell you. If I had to guess, I’d say that when they’re alive, they move in and out of phase at a much faster rate, and it’s the speed of moving in different rates of phase that affects your symbiotes. But even if I’m right about that, I have no idea why you’re affected by it, or how to fix it.”
Kali was disappointed, but that concern was secondary. “While this is interesting, I was told you were going to demonstrate your progress.”
“Yes.” Carter walked back to the device she had made, moving past O’Neill, who was still holding the eradication rod.
“You are uncharacteristically quiet, Colonel.”
O’Neill smirked. “Carter’s in science mode. Better to just let her keep going. If I interrupt, she’ll just take longer to finish with the technobabble.”
“I’ll try to keep it to a minimum, sir.”
“No worries, Carter.” O’Neill gave Kali a withering expression. “We’re the prisoners here, after all.”
Kali regarded O’Neill with contempt. She had respect for Carter and Jackson, for all that the latter was impudent. O’Neill had no such mitigating factor to his own impudence, and she was tempted to have her Jaffa shoot him again, just on general principle. She settled for saying, “Yes, Colonel, you are,” matching his withering tone.
Carter pressed a button and the device started to hum, several pieces of it lighting up. “Once I realized that the cells went out of phase at differing rates, I realized that we needed to focus on getting them all in phase at the same time. This way, any weapon would work on them.”
“Excellent.”
“I’m hoping,” Carter said after looking over various readouts on the device, “that this will do the trick. Basically, this device should create a field that pulls all matter into the same phase.”
“Permanently?” Kali asked, very much wanting the answer to be yes.
Carter winced. “I’m afraid not. The power requirements to maintain the field are enormous, and get exponentially more so the bigger the field needs to be. Right now, I’ve limited the settings so that it will only affect this room. Even a naquadah generator would burn out after about an hour or two, and that would be shortened even further for a bigger field. But it’s something.”
Kali nodded. “For a single day’s progress, Major, I have no complaints. I am sure that you could solve this power-consumption problem given enough time.”
“Well, I also don’t know what the effect would be on the fabric of local space, either. They — ”
Holding up a hand, Kali said, “Enough! I was promised progress, and your spouting of theories is not that. I wish to see this device demonstrated.”
“You bet.” Carter gave one last glance at the various displays on the device, and then pressed a red button it its base.
PAIN! Agony like nothing Kali had ever suffered sliced through her, white-hot knives cutting through her abdomen. She doubled over, having never felt anything this horrible, this mind-numbingly awful in millennia of existence. Even the agony of having the rock slam into the chest of her former Unas host was as nothing compared to this. Her brain was barely able to form any kind of coherent thought as she found herself writhing on the floor of the lab, screaming.
Dimly, she registered that the Reetou on the table was visible. However, whatever it was the Reetou did to her kind, this device did it several orders of magnitude worse.
Summoning every ounce of strength, Kali forced herself to put one hand in front of the other to crawl her way across the floor. While she’d made others crawl before her on many occasions, this was the first time she herself had had to engage in this oh-so-demeaning activity since the rockslide that led to her taking this particular host body.
The pain overwhelmed the embarrassment as she screamed and crawled, making agonizingly slow progress toward the device.
After an eternity of spectacularly painful crawling, Kali finally reached the base of the table. She managed to raise her arm and then dropped it heavily onto the red button Carter had pushed.
And then, just like that, the pain was gone.
Snarling, Kali leapt to her feet to find that the only other person in the room was her Jaffa, also writhing on the floor in agony. There was no sign of Carter, or O’Neill — or of the Jaffa’s ma’tok or zat’ni’katel.
The Jaffa scrambled to his feet, and Kali screamed at him. “Find them! Now!”
Nodding quickly, the Jaffa ran out of the room.
She called out after him, “And double the guard on Dr. Jackson!”
I am a fool, Kali thought. I used the Tau’ri because of their accomplishments, because of their skills, and still I underestimated them.
She stared at the device, then looked over at the table to see that the Reetou was invisible again. The eradication rod was also missing, and Kali supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised that O’Neill had hung onto it.
At the very least, the device worked. She supposed that was something.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Aizawl
CAPTAIN Patel really hated the idea of walking through the Stargate in shackles.
The fact that they were trick shackles provided by Sergeant Siler that she could break out of with a flick of her wrist was only small comfort. She and Teal’c were walking onto a Goa’uld-controlled world. True, she had her P90 and a Beretta and a knife and several grenades and a mess of C-4. But all of that was hidden in her backpack, so they were not readily accessible should things go sideways on this planet ruled by Kali.
On the one hand, she was the one who rescued the Thakka, so she really had nobody to blame but herself for being put in this position. And he really was their best bet for getting to Imphal to rescue SG-1.
On the other hand, she was still walking through the Stargate into enemy territory. In fact, they weren’t even a hundred percent sure that they were gating to Aizawl. The coordinates the Thakka provided matched those of a set of adjusted coordinates from the Abydos cartouche, but it wasn’t scheduled to be checked by an SG team for another year. For all they knew, it was to Bhopal, Kali’s homeworld, and Kali herself would be waiting for them with a dozen Jaffa pointing staff weapons at their heads.
The latter turned out not to be the case, at least. Patel exited the Stargate to find only two Jaffa pointing staff weapons at her head. They both had the circular black tattoo on their foreheads, and wore the robes-and-sash-over-armor that Kali’s Jaffa seemed to favor. The gate itself was in a huge stone chamber covered in red curtains and gold beading. The room was incredibly chilly, so much so that it raised goosebumps on Patel’s arms.
That alone concerned her, as she was wearing desert camo, having been told by the Thakka that Aizawl was a hot and humid world.
Behind her, the gate closed with a whoosh, and the two Jaffa lowered their weapons at the sight of their First Prime. The Thakka was back in his armor, covered by his gold robes and red shoulder sash, and holding an inactive staff weapon. Of course, even without the ability to fire nasty blasts of energy, the weapon was modified with the word staff for a reason. Back when she first joined SG-7, she’d seen Teal’c sparring with Major Lagdamen using bo staffs. Lagdamen was a third-degree black belt in some martial arts style or other that was heavy on staffs and sais and swords. Teal’c had actually taught the major a thing or two about how to use a staff, and Patel had to assume that the Thakka had similar training.
The two Jaffa stood at attention and bowed their heads, putting their weapons back to an upright position. “Thakka. We had thought you lost on Imphal.”
“No, though I must return there as soon as possible. I was diverted to another world, where I was able to capture these two prisoners, but when I attempted to return to Imphal, the chappa’ai d
id not engage.”
The other Jaffa said, “The Mother Goddess has travelled to Imphal. We — ”
The Thakka snapped, “I am aware that she is there, fool, why do you think I am going there instead of Bhopal?”
Patel swallowed. They in fact weren’t at all aware that Kali had gone to Imphal, which reduced SG-1’s survival prospects considerably. But the Thakka’s improvised bluff that he knew all along indicated that he was still on their side, at least for the moment.
The Thakka continued. “I have captured Apophis’s shol’va, along with one of his Tau’ri allies, and the Mother Goddess wishes to interrogate them personally. Especially him.” Pushing Teal’c with his free hand, he added, “Move!”
Teal’c turned and gave the Thakka a murderous look, and then walked down the stairs from the Stargate. Patel followed.
As he led the two of them toward the room’s exit, the Thakka said, “I will require a tel’tak with a cloak.”
One Jaffa said, “There is one in the landing bay that was damaged in the battle with Anubis’s forces. The maintenance crew cleared it for use yesterday.”
“Excellent.”
The other Jaffa frowned. “Why a cloak?”
Whirling around, the Thakka pointed his staff weapon directly at the Jaffa. “Who trained you, Jaffa? I wish to know the name of the incompetent who neglected to remind you not to question your superiors.”
Bowing his head, the Jaffa said, “My apologies, Thakka, I was simply curious.”
“A Jaffa’s place is to obey, not to be curious.” The Thakka raised his weapon, and then continued to walk them out the huge double doors, which led directly outside.
It was like hitting a wall of humidity, and Patel actually gasped as they exited. The structure that housed the gate was apparently climate controlled. But now they were walking a paved pathway that was being baked by a rather intense sun. Within seconds, sweat was beading on Patel’s brow. This was the worst heat she’d felt since her best friend from high school had insisted on an outdoor wedding in the Chavez Ravine Arboretum in the middle of August.
STARGATE SG-1: Kali's Wrath (SG1-28) Page 12
