Hydra

by Stargate

  “Hello,” Daniel said.

  The kid said nothing.

  “I’m Daniel. Who are you?”

  At that, the kid laughed, a high, clear sound of amusement. It went on for a long time, even after the boy had stopped and was looking at the zat again. Before Daniel could say anything else, the kid broke into a dozen slivers, just like a mirror cracking and with a similar sound. Each sliver held a boy who was laughing the same laugh; there seemed to be a whole crowd of them. As the laughter went on, it grew deeper and more hoarse and rasping. Finally, the fragments seemed to fuse again and instead of a boy there was a man, bowed and wrinkled and almost translucent with extreme age. His bony hand fumbled toward Sam’s vest, and she took a step backward, bringing the P90 up level with the old man’s chest, making him laugh again. It sounded like dried leaves driven along the ground by a cold wind.

  “You have the kei,” he said at last.

  It wasn’t a question, so Sam didn’t bother denying it. “We don’t want to hurt you. We’re looking for others who came here. They look like us. They’re dangerous.”

  Again the hand groped toward her vest. “The kei is dangerous.” His shrunken mouth turned down in a frown of sadness, and he turned his hand palm upward to indicate the space around them and then the temple itself. “You should not have brought it here. It has done terrible things here.”

  The voice echoed from behind them, and Daniel started a little when he turned and saw the same man on the next rise making the same gesture. As that hill seemed to collapse and another rose beyond it, there was another man, and another. Grief and impotent anger repeated in both directions to infinity.

  “Who are you?” Daniel aimed the question at the man nearest them and stepped away himself when the man slivered as the boy had done, the sound of breaking glass receding away from them as each iteration broke, until the whole landscape was littered with sparkling, upright fragments.

  “We are,” the voice said, a fugue of repetition.

  Daniel put one hand over his ear and tried to focus on the splinter beside him. It was difficult because, like the pillar of blankness in the cave on Dunamis, the surface of the splinter seemed to repel his gaze. He could feel a vast emptiness inside it, behind it, like it was a window onto nothing at all. “He-They,” he said. “You sent the kei to another world, to protect it.”

  Again the laughter rose up, multiplied, and coalesced as the slivers resolved into a boy again. “I didn’t send it. It was ripped from me. I don’t know where. And everything went quiet and strange. There was a woman, and she came and looked at me through the fault, and she sang and we talked sometimes.” The pale eyes filled with tears. “I miss her. I miss everybody.”

  “Yagwen.”

  The boy nodded and then he was gone, and the man said, “Yes. Yagwen.” The tears, though, were the same. “Is she well?”

  Daniel exchanged a quick glance with Sam. “The one we saw was fine. She’s on Dunamis. That’s where the kei went. She and her acolytes have been guarding it.”

  A smile brightened the deeply lined face, and Daniel could almost see a younger man there, a ghost inside the unstable form flickering between childhood and age, someone who might’ve earned the medals gleaming dully on his uniform. “I’m afraid that the cataclysm damaged Yagwen’s people somehow. But it damaged everything, didn’t it?” He looked beyond Daniel at the empty world. “Foolishness. We were such fools.” His voice hardened. “And now you bring the kei here to do it again.” This time when he shattered, the word “Fools” trailed off to the sibilant hiss of a hundred snakes.

  Sam raised her voice and aimed her question at all the fragments within hearing distance. “We want to stop it, if we can. But we need to know what this device does. We need to know what happened here.”

  The little boy’s laugh sparkled around them. “We thought we could control it all — space and time, space and time, space and time,” he sang. “We thought we could reach between the branes and siphon out the light.” The old man added, “Fools.” Around them, the fragments glittered in the green, undersea light. “Most died, some fled through the gate. I was caught in the flux — slipped out of time, between space — alone. But for Yagwen, who saw me through the fault and spoke to me sometimes.” He pointed at the device in Sam’s vest again. “The kei controls the mirror, focuses the raw energy. They will have to step through the mirror to activate the siphon. They will kill him for it.”

  As he spoke these last words, the old man coalesced in a bright shard. When the glow died, Jack was there in his place, on his knees. Daniel pushed his glasses up again and stepped closer. Jack’s neck bore a fine hatching of lines. Through the blood, Daniel could almost read them. Almost. Jack lifted his head and said to them in the boy’s voice, “They’ll kill us all. Everyone. Everything. Everywhere.”

  Unthinking, Daniel reached toward him. Before Teal’c could stop him, Daniel had touched Jack’s shoulder, just the barest contact of fingers against glass.

  When he touched the fragment of the man, he touched nothing — no hot or cold, nothing solid, no emptiness.

  Only howling.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Gauss (P49-181)

  November 1, 2002

  “Daniel? Daniel!”

  He could hear Sam’s voice, but he couldn’t see her. The press of the escaping crowd drove him backward a few steps before he anchored himself again. He stood his ground as the people flowed around him and — disturbingly — through him. There was a momentary chill at their touch, and he wrapped his arms protectively around himself. They were human or at least humanoid. Some men and women were in uniforms like the old man’s only deep blue and bright yellow; others were in civilian clothes, some carrying bags and awkward armloads of possessions he couldn’t identify. Their mouths were open. As they ran, disbelief and terror tore their voices out of them in screams or prayers. Their eyes were wild. The mayhem was oddly unified by the headlong drive toward the gate, and even the cacophony was like a chorus, millions of voices singing the same litany of loss and fear.

  Daniel swayed in the current and tried to get his bearings. His fingertips were still numb where they’d made contact with Jack. But it wasn’t Jack, was it? Glass. He knew that was just an approximation, his brain trying to put a word to something that didn’t exist. He could make out the tip of Teal’c’s staff weapon, and over the noise he could hear Sam shouting his name. In front of him a woman stumbled, and the collection of glass cubes she carried scattered as she pitched forward toward him. He reached out to break her fall, but his arms passed right through her and she hit the ground hard. Passersby kicked the cubes away in their rush. She curled up with her hands around her head, no protection against the running, trampling feet. Daniel tried to help her up, but she was insubstantial, a ghost, and around her the cubes glowed softly, each one containing a floating image, a smiling face, a family. He found himself transfixed by the one nearest to him — children ranged from shortest to tallest — but it was crushed by the stampede.

  When he straightened up, Jack was there as before, only a few feet away and watching him steadily as though there was no crowd shoving and crying all around him. “Everything,” he said, as the shock wave hit. It came from behind the crowd, from the temple that, Daniel could now see, wasn’t a temple at all, but a glass silo. It was blooming — fire so impossibly blue that it burned his eyes to look at it — the wave expanding from it, pushing air ahead of it so that the hot wind ripped the screams from the people’s mouths.

  “Daniel!” Sam shouted into the sudden silence that followed the wave. But it was only a pause, a brief intake of breath before the real wave hit, blue fire expanding in a sphere, and everywhere it touched there was...nothing. Daniel threw his arms up in front of his face, but he could still see the wave and the people running before it shattering into shrapnel, a glittering haze of remains that were almost, terribly, beautiful.

  After the wave passed there was no one, nothing at all. The scoured
plain of white stone extended forever in all directions. Only the gate glowed for a moment under the glistening iridescence of its protecting force field and then, with no travelers to swallow, the event horizon winked out. Silence.

  “Everywhere,” Jack said in the old man’s voice. “Everyone.”

  Daniel’s knees gave out. He sat heavily on the lifeless stone and clasped his hands over the back of his neck. “Oh, God,” he said. He felt Sam’s hand on his shoulder and heard her gasp, and he knew she could see it too. Behind his closed eyelids he watched the fractures crackling — ”Subspace,” Sam gasped — crazing the universe, time twisting as the eruptions tore space on world after world after world, past, present, future — a vast forest curling and blackened as if its teeming life had been sucked out of it; a moon once green and blue now glowing an arid, deathly white against the stars; a gossamer flock of some vast and semi-sentient beings drifting on the solar winds but now reduced to component particles and dispersed to nowhere. On a green world a familiar shape — the tusked head and shaggy, elephantine bulk of a mammoth — turned, lumbering away from the fissure that opened its ragged maw and coughed darkness across the sky. In a few short breaths that Daniel knew counted eons, the Earth was closed in a fist of ice. On another world millennia later, in a ravine crowned by silver-leaved picket trees, a young woman watched the universe convulse and her eyes burned white at the sight of it.

  “Yagwen,” the boy said. Daniel opened his eyes to see him standing in the empty world, his hands hidden in the long sleeves of his uniform jacket, his old man’s eyes blurred with tears. “We contained it, those of us who survived,” he explained in his rasping old man’s voice. He poked a finger out of his sleeve to point at the force field overhead. “But it will not withstand another event.” His finger slipped past Daniel’s forehead as though he was going to touch him, and Daniel flinched away and closed his eyes. In his head, the cataclysm expanded, attenuating as it spread. Seeing to the edges of the universe wasn’t helping his headache at all. The boy’s laughter danced across the sparking vision in Daniel’s mind, multiplied and dwindled and died.

  “Are you injured, Daniel Jackson?”

  Daniel looked toward the sound of Teal’c’s voice. He was standing behind Sam, who was on her knees with her hands raised. He pressed the muzzle of the Beretta to the back of her head. A little ways away, Teal’c — the real Teal’c, Daniel realized as the penny dropped with a painful clatter — was lying on his back, his eyes closed.

  “No,” Daniel said, raising his hands too. “I’m fine. Thanks for asking. Theta Teal’c, I presume?”

  “Such designations are no longer necessary.” Theta Teal’c cast a significant glance at his prostrate double. Then he yanked Sam to her feet and, with one foot, deftly hooked the real Teal’c’s staff weapon and hitched it up so he could catch it in his free hand. Without shifting his aim on Sam, he swung the staff and let it go so that it spun end over end through the fractured air, seemed to break into fragments, and disappeared. He motioned to Daniel to get up and precede them. “This way.”

  Dizziness tipped the world sideways as Daniel stood, and he had to wait for things to even out a bit, relatively speaking, before he could risk walking. “We were heading that way anyway,” he said. In his peripheral vision, translucent refugees fled toward the gate, afterimages burned into his mind, and multiple Sams and Daniels and Teal’cs trudged against the current, heading toward the silo. He lifted his hand and all the Daniels he could see lifted theirs. “I really, really don’t like this place,” he muttered as they left one real Teal’c and all his ghosts behind.

  As they got closer to the silo, Daniel realized that what he’d assumed earlier were columns were in fact the girders of the silo’s external structure, twisted like licorice sticks and melted at their tops where they bent outward. The portico was the remains of the silo’s roof, heat-ravaged and torn open from the inside by the forces that had escaped it. The building’s once-transparent glassy surface seemed smoky. Daniel couldn’t get much of a sense of what was going on behind it. It was like the walls had been sandblasted. Weirdest, though, was a cloud of debris they encountered about fifty meters from the dark slash of the partly collapsed entrance. Like the girders whose tortured forms traced the contours of the ancient explosion, the debris from the blast persisted as a haze of floating, glittering fragments angled away from the blast zone as though caught in a freeze-frame. Daniel did his best to avoid the larger pieces, ducking and leaning around them as theta Teal’c pushed them forward. Those that he couldn’t avoid drifted away from his touch, tumbling into others so that the little procession of captor and captives set out a wave of disturbance like a spreading wake as they passed. To his ears, the displaced fragments chimed softly, but with each point of contact he heard a scream of pain inside his head. The smaller pieces, tiny arrows of light, peppered his clothes and his skin as he moved through them, and these registered to his mind only as a barely-there keening like the singing of a champagne flute rubbed by a wet finger.

  “They’re people,” Sam said behind him, and he stumbled a bit at the realization. “Or what’s left of them.”

  He craned his neck over his shoulder to see her walking backward so she could look at theta Teal’c, her hands clasped behind her neck. “Can you hear them?” she asked. Her voice was equal parts curiosity and accusation. “They’re screaming. They’ve been screaming for thousands of years.”

  Theta Teal’c looked pointedly away from her along their path and gestured with the Beretta for her to turn around. “I also hear them. I suggest you keep walking.”

  “If you activate the device, this kind of damage is going to spread,” Sam said. “You get that, don’t you? The force field won’t contain it. It didn’t contain it last time. The old man showed us. We saw it.”

  “As did we on our approach to this place.”

  Maybe the robot was going to elaborate, but a wave of distortion rippled toward them from the silo and, as it passed, the landscape seemed to split into a thousand sharply angled planes of glass, like facets on a jewel or mirrors in a maze. In each was a frozen reflection of themselves seen from a different vantage point. After a second or two, the wave passed, the images released, and the reflections became animate. With this fugue of motion the sharp-edged, polished surfaces faded until there were only ghosts moving off in different directions toward a dozen identical silos. Daniel risked another look back over his shoulder and was met with hazy double-vision versions of Sam and the theta.

  “It’s like being stuck inside a prism,” he muttered, and turned his attention back to the silo directly in front of him. He actually felt like his brain was breaking and the pieces were drifting away. He couldn’t help wondering if the robot felt like that too, and if so, what it meant and how they could take advantage of it. Of course, that was going to be tricky given that it was all Daniel could do to keep track of his own two feet and, maybe while he was at it, not go completely insane. A fragment grazed his shoulder and he winced against its howl of anguish. “If we get out of this, I’m never looking in a mirror again.”

  “If you comply with our demands, you may yet survive this day,” the theta said.

  Sam asked, “How many more won’t?” but got no reply.

  Around them, the drifting remnants of a civilization hung glittering in the air.

  Jack spread his feet a little wider and pressed his back against the girder behind him, as if somehow a more stable stance might actually make a difference when the space-time continuum finally came apart right under his ass. Which was numb, by the way, from sitting on the cold stone floor. Closing his eyes didn’t help with the discomfort, either, because the seesawing and splitting of the distortions that rippled pretty much constantly through the silo felt as bad as they looked. Each new wave that rolled from the machine in the center of the room offered new and exciting variations on freakish and nauseating. He was reminded of one very bad night in college, a bathtub full of something made of gr
ape Kool-Aid and what had to be jet fuel. He’d had two man-sized shots and wound up hanging onto his bed like it was the teacup ride at Disneyland. After that he’d sworn he’d never drink something that toxic again, and so far he’d actually done a good job of sticking to it, that ritual toast on Abydos years ago notwithstanding. After today, he told himself, he was going to make a similar rule about visiting planets that were in the process of falling through the cracks in space and time. He didn’t have the stomach for it anymore.

  Or the bones. Shifting a little to find a smoother section of the girder to take his weight, he clamped his teeth shut against a groan. Ribs were stupid, he decided. What Homo sapiens really needed was an exoskeleton that could withstand repeated kicking. And no amount of probing the cuts on his neck explained what the hell robo-Jackson was carving into his skin with such careful attention. Probably “Jackson was here.”

  For the moment, though, the Jackson duplicate seemed happy enough to keep one eye and a zat on him while he watched the other two poking around at the Armageddon machine. They didn’t say much out loud — that comms thing was a real advantage — but they were definitely talking. At one point the O’Neill robot turned to Jackson with a look that would’ve stopped the heart of a human being. Interesting.

  But heart attacks were never going to be their problem, obviously. Jack could still feel the momentum of the fleeing crowds pulling at him. From his forced march through the shrapnel cloud beyond the silo, the exposed skin of his arms and face was flecked with what had to be tiny points of frostbite or the freaky alien equivalent. That was nothing, though, compared to the wailing that still echoed in his head. It was hard to tell if the robots got that enlightening little show. If they saw it and felt what Jack had, they really were cold-hearted hunks of high-tech junk. Not one of them showed any sign that they were moved to shed a crystalline tear over any of it. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. The Carter duplicate seemed pretty morose about coming all this way only to find out that the device was a bust from the get-go, but that didn’t stop her from getting elbows-deep inside the damn thing and yanking bits out of it like she was Mr. Wizard. Apparently they’d doubled the ego circuits when they’d pulled out the ethics chip. Another promise to himself: get back to Earth, find the first NID guy he could lay his hands on, and kick his ass up and down the street. Twice.