by Stargate
“I don’t see any planet,” Jack said.
“Neither do the Tok’ra sensors.”
“So, what? It blew up?”
Sam shook her head. “There’s no debris of any kind. In fact there’s nothing there. And I mean nothing. Nothing at all.”
“That’s space for ya.”
“I don’t think you understand, sir. Even the emptiest space you can find in our universe has something in it. Radiation, at least. This — ” She poked the blankness in the centre of the grid with the end of her remote. “ — this is absolutely, completely empty. There are no readings at all.”
Davis glanced around the table and opened his hands with a brief, confused grin. “So... it’s just been erased?”
“I don’t know,” Sam said. She hit a button on her remote and the star field shifted its orientation, bringing another nearby star system into focus. “The Tok’ra released a probe and almost immediately lost all telemetry. However, a few hours later they picked up the subspace signal and followed it here, to a planet in a system just slightly less than fifteen light years away.” The magnification jumped and jumped again, and a bright moon came into view around the curve of a green-and-blue planet. Sam clicked through a few more similar views until she came to a ground-level shot. A phosphorescent sea stretched all the way to the horizon, where the moon hung, round and heavy, in a gap between silvery clouds. “A minor Goa’uld did a general survey of this area of space a few years ago looking for planets suitable for settlement of human and Jaffa populations. This one was flagged but eventually rejected because the surface conditions weren’t optimal. The Tok’ra have access to that Goa’uld’s database. They sent this image.”
“Pretty,” Jack said flatly, like he knew what was coming.
“This is the planet where the Tok’ra found the probe. It was a planet with an oxygen atmosphere and surface water, bacterial life forms, some algae, which accounts for the green.” She clicked her remote again, and the image shifted back into space where the same moon and planet glowed against the black, only this time both bodies reflected the distant sunlight away from their barren, stony surfaces. “This is the planet now. The Tok’ra located the probe inside a mountain. There is no life there now at all. Nothing.”
She left the image on the screen and sat down at the table next to Teal’c.
“You think the events on 181 did this?” Hammond asked.
“We can’t say for sure, sir, but it can’t be coincidence that the probe sent into the phenomenon ended up there.”
“So, it’s like a wormhole?” Daniel asked, groping mentally for all the things he’d absorbed about wormhole theory listening to Sam over the years. “It transported the probe.”
“Initially, we considered the notion it might be a something like that, maybe an intermittently stable connection left when the planet collapsed. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. Although we say that nothing escapes the event horizon of a black hole, that’s not entirely true. Even though the singularity itself is invisible because its enormous gravity traps everything, even light, we can tell it’s there because of the way its gravity deforms the space around it. Plus, the uncertainty principle means that quantum particles will leak out past the event horizon, not to mention the radiation shed by matter being pulled into the singularity. If there was a singularity there, we should be able to detect at least the ambient effects on the space around it. But there’s nothing. Whatever this is, it’s not space, at least not any kind we’re familiar with.”
Daniel picked up his pen again and clicked the point in and out as he thought it through. “If what the old man — or whatever he was — showed us on the planet is true, the first cataclysm had pretty far-flung effects.”
Sam nodded. “And the effects may not be synchronic. If space is distorted, time likely is too. We saw that on the planet, the way that the past events were folded into the present. We may never know the scope of the damage. We may be looking at the effects right now and not be able to trace them back to the origin there, either to the first or the second event a few days ago. If in fact there were two, and we didn’t just fall into the first one.”
“Gah,” Jack said and pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. “I hate time travel paradoxes.” He dropped his hands heavily to the table and scowled at Sam like tying knots in time was a personal hobby of hers. “No more time travel paradoxes. That’s it. Nada. Got it?”
“Yes, sir.” She waited for him to get more comfortable before bringing up another image, this one familiar: a scored plain of white stone. “However, we do know of one planet that had a direct link to 181.”
“Dunamis,” Teal’c said. “Yagwen’s and Asha’s planet.”
The pen dropped out of Daniel’s hand onto his note pad. “That’s Yagwen’s planet?”
“Yes. After we got the burst from the Tok’ra, we opened the gate to try to download some telemetry from the MALP we left to monitor the fault in the cave there. The MALP was mostly fried, but we managed to get the camera up and running again, and it sent this footage.” The MALP’s camera panned across the empty plain. At the far right they could still make out the gate and the forest beyond it, looking like autumn had come early but otherwise still standing. “The cave, the ravine, and the surrounding trees are all gone, but as you can see, the damage isn’t nearly as extensive.”
“Extensive enough,” Major Davis said, looking appalled.
Sam nodded her agreement. “The upside is that this suggests that the effects might be attenuated, that every point of contact won’t face the same degree of disturbance. But look here.” She fast-forwarded to a reverse shot of the plain. There in the middle of the frame was a woman in white robes, slumped on her knees and almost invisible against the stone. The beads still screened her eyes. Beyond her, the rest of the acolytes were huddled together, vulnerable-looking. The MALP’s microphone was damaged, but Daniel didn’t need it to imagine the sound of their keening voices.
“It’s Asha,” he said.
Hammond took a deep breath, considering. “Take a med team,” he ordered.
The villagers on Asha’s planet weren’t taking any chances this time. The few who had been near the gate when it opened scattered before the event horizon even disengaged. Daniel closed his mouth and swallowed his greeting and declarations of peace and interplanetary love.
Jack watched the people rabbiting into the sparse cover of the trees and muttered, “This is getting so old.” He turned to the medical team and their marine escort. “Just stay by the gate until we get a read on the situation.” Before he turned away to lead his team off the platform, he added for Fraiser’s benefit, “And don’t worry, doc, if there’s any running or jumping to be done, I’ll get Teal’c to do it for me.”
The scene was pretty much as the MALP had shown them. To the west, the forest of aspenlike picket trees was as it was before, only the silvery leaves seemed to have tarnished to a brittle gray. Daniel could hear the rustle and rattle of the dry foliage shifting in the wind. Above the trees, the sky was still bright with the setting sun, but overhead it was deepening to evening. Their shadows rippled across the grass, pointing in the direction of the village and what had been the ravine. Now there was nothing in that direction but white stone, as if the land had been scraped clean, a knife on bone. The village itself was gone. He hoped that the people had seen it coming, that they’d been warned, that they’d fled. He also hoped there were many more of them hiding in the trees than he’d seen when they arrived.
In his mind, the blue corona of the shock wave expanded against the black sky. For a second, ghosts pressed against him. He blinked hard and turned to Teal’c. “Did you — ?” But Teal’c only tilted his head, curious. “Never mind,” Daniel said. “Just my imagination.” Still, he felt the pull of exodus dragging against him like an undertow.
By unspoken agreement, they stopped where the grass gave way abruptly to stone. At the seam, the grass was burned black. About a hundred yards head
of them, burnished a little by the angled late-day light, the MALP squatted on the stone. It was listing drunkenly to one side.
Sam said, “Seems pretty stable,” and pulled out her binoculars to sweep the horizon. “And the forest starts up again on the perimeter. I’d say we’re looking at a disturbance zone about twenty-five klicks square. A pass with a UAV can give us a more accurate picture.”
“A local apocalypse then,” Jack said. “How nice for them.” He stepped off the grass and paused, waiting. When nothing weird happened, he set off again.
It was getting dark — the sun behind them was balanced on the pointed tops of the trees — but there was more to it than that. Daniel thought of the starless sky on 181 and tipped his head to look upward. It was just a sky like a hundred others he’d seen. He lifted his hand and turned it in the slanting rays of sunset. Plain as day. So maybe it was his imagination too, the sense that he was groping his way through a lightless place.
Jack’s voice prodded him into a jog. “Get the lead out, Daniel. It’s getting dark.”
Or maybe not just his imagination.
Maybe it was because of the encroaching darkness — real or illusory — that they almost tripped over Asha before they saw her. On the empty plain, she and her acolytes should have been conspicuous, but Daniel had to peer closely, following Teal’c’s pointing arm to make them out. As the team got closer, the women, about a dozen of them, seemed to coalesce out of the stone itself, their heads turning toward the sound of SG-1’s arrival like the figures of a frieze coming to life. They were bleached, all of them, a dead, antique white — clothing, hair, even the bead veils that hung before their eyes.
“Who’s there?” Asha called, rising to face them obliquely.
“It’s okay. It’s just us,” Daniel answered.
Her head jerked in the direction of his voice. “Who?”
“Um.” Daniel turned to Sam and her frown was a reflection of his own. He stepped closer to Asha but at the sound of his boots scraping the stone she lifted her hands warily to ward him off. “It’s okay. It’s me, Daniel Jackson. You remember?”
Her hands fell from their defensive posture and she straightened to her full height. “Yes. I remember.” She began to twist the sleeve of her robe tightly around her fingers. “The others. They are here, too?”
Daniel nodded and then, realizing his mistake, said aloud, “Yes, we’re all here.” He waved the rest of his team forward and whispered to them, “Say something so she knows where you are.”
After they’d each said an awkward hello and Asha had turned her head toward them, as if pinning them in the landscape by their voices, she nodded. “You all survived, then, the danger you spoke of.”
“Yes, we’re mostly in one piece. Asha, what happened h — ”
“Yagwen is dead.” When Daniel didn’t answer she turned in his general direction and said it again. This time, the words seemed to draw all the energy from her, and she slumped to her knees before Daniel could catch her. He knelt beside her on the stone. “She broke into a thousand pieces.” With that, she held up her arms and the sleeves of her robe fell back to her elbows. Her skin was flecked with the same marks, points of frostbite, that Daniel and the rest of them had brought back from 181. “I felt her shatter.” She let her hands fall to her lap and sat staring blindly. “He-They called her, and she went to him. And…” Behind her, the other acolytes cried together softly as her silence grew, and Daniel’s memory filled it with an expanding sphere of nothing, limned in blue. “We see nothing now. There is nothing,” Asha finished, her voice a fine, colorless thread stretched taut, almost inaudible in the stillness.
Jack stepped away and keyed his radio. “SG-one-niner to evac unit.”
Over the murmur of his exchange with Fraiser, Teal’c asked Asha, “Why remain in this desolate place? If you have been blinded, why do you not seek assistance?”
She lifted her face to him and the veil of beads parted to reveal the opaque whiteness of her eyes. “They fear us. Our people. They will not let us leave this place.” She bowed her head again and, after a long moment, whispered, “We are very thirsty.”
“There’s help on the way,” Sam told her as she dropped her pack and detached her canteen.
Fraiser and her team were visible, silhouettes against the livid sky.
When Daniel tried to guide Asha’s hands to the canteen, she pulled away. “We do not want your help.”
“I know,” Daniel said, his own hands falling to his knees. “But you need it.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
NID Beta Site (P4H-268)
November 8, 2002
“Mendez,” Siebert said, drawing Carlos’s attention without so much as a hint of deference. “We’re in orbit.”
Carlos sat up on the floor, where he was wedged between two stacks of cartons, trying and failing to sleep. Maybe Siebert’s usual drummed-in military deference was a casualty of the evacuation, or maybe it was just because they were all irritable and annoyed after their little jaunt across the cosmos in a ship barely big enough to contain them and all their junk. Didn’t matter much. He stretched, popped his neck, and rose easily to his feet. At the back of the hold, the two gamma robots were watching him, tracking his movements with their eyes like some kind of creepy living sculptures.
He moved closer to the cockpit, glanced out at the planet the NID had chosen to house its secondary site. Shimmering clouds drifted across the broad continents. “Set us down between the gate and the facility.”
Siebert nodded and placed her hands around the controls. Within a minute, they had broken through the atmosphere. Clouds streaked by and gave way to sky, and the half-constructed backup facility with its generator sheds, skeletons of buildings, and Quonset huts peeked up from the lone cleared area among thickets of trees and winding streams. They hadn’t planned on needing it so soon. Carlos had hoped never to need it at all, but here they were.
“Sir.” Kutrell stirred from his perch on the only crate big enough to hold his large frame comfortably. “Will replacement personnel be arriving once we’ve cleared the perimeter here?”
Carlos glanced back at the gamma Carter and Jackson, his free labor for the next little while, until the facility was ready to house personnel. “Looking for a vacation, Kutrell?” he asked, one corner of his mouth curling up in a smile.
Kutrell flashed an easy grin. “No, sir. This job suits me fine.”
“I’ll bet it does.” Carlos dug a finger in under his loosened collar and rubbed an itch. “Good thing, because you’re it, for now.”
“Yes, sir.” Satisfied, Kutrell adjusted his weapon across his lap and pulled a leg up beneath him, looking for all the world like he was ready to eat someone for breakfast. Carlos was just about that hungry himself. But there were supplies at the site, enough to tide them over until they could reestablish communications and arrange for a delivery.
He’d be able to feed some power to the gamma duplicates, too. Their preservation had become important to the survival of the few personnel he had left, so that had to be a priority.
The minute Siebert set the ship down, Carlos sent his ex-marines into the open to clear the gate and their temporary shelters. Peterson lingered near Carlos, pacing nervously around the ship as if he expected to be scared back onto it at any moment. “Shouldn’t you start unpacking?” Carlos asked him finally, eyebrows raised. Peterson shot him a grateful look and clambered back on the ship.
“All clear, sir,” Siebert said, coming up to his left, the others trailing behind her. “Looks like there’s nothing here but us and some birds.”
“Good.” Carlos nodded to Kutrell, who was coming around the corner, bringing up the rear. “Gate in good order?”
“Appears to be. DHD looks fine.”
“Siebert, set up communications and gate-dialing protocols. Make it your priority.” She nodded and climbed into the ship. “McDonald, Pitchner, Kutrell, use the duplicates to help you set up their power source. Get the generat
or online and get us some power.”
“Will do.” Kutrell crooked a hand at the others. They followed him on board, then streamed back out again a moment later with boxes in their arms. A few seconds later, the duplicates emerged, carrying heavy pieces of machinery twice as big as their torsos as if they were made of fluff. They gave him an appraising look as they passed by, but neither of them spoke.
Carlos climbed back into the ship, where Peterson was wielding his familiar clipboard, having apparently pulled it out from where he’d stashed it. “It’ll only take me a few minutes to get power up,” he said, and it took Carlos a second to realize he was speaking of the duplicates, not the facility.
“You should get on that then.” He gestured to the pilot’s chair. “I’m going to grab some quick shut-eye. You can find me here if you need me.”
Peterson nodded, absorbed with whatever scribbles he was making on the clipboard.
Carlos eased into the chair and blinked slowly. His eyes were gritty, as if ten pounds of sand had settled in his eyelids. From the front viewport he could see the stream defining the far edge of the new compound. Probably cold, but he was betting it’d be the best bath he’d ever had. He’d get to that. Right after his nap.
It seemed he’d barely closed his eyes when a familiar sound wrenched him fully awake: chevrons engaging, a Stargate spinning to life. He shoved up from his chair, stumbling to the back of the ship to shout, “Siebert! Kutrell!”
No one answered.
His Beretta was secured underneath his suit jacket, which was in a rumpled heap in the far corner of the hold. He retrieved it and made his way in a low, loping run to the corner of the main building, a perfect vantage point to see the gate — a gate without an iris, since this was not yet a fully functional base. Which, clearly, was turning out to be a liability. The Carter duplicate was standing in front of the DHD, Jackson behind her, watching as the wormhole opened.