She was no longer capable of wondering why: with the shaft around her she knew nothing except the climb. Even terror would have to wait until she was done.
Abruptly, there was light in her eyes, and a dark face before her. People in long robes and headscarves reaching out towards her. Someone had an open bottle of water, holding it close, urging her to drink.
Beneath her feet, the ground shivered. Every voice stilled. The desert became completely silent. Then sounds issued from the shaft; a scraping, thin and metallic, and the crunching splinter of wooden ladders being scissored apart.
All the strength went out of Miles, then. She slumped to her knees. She felt dry, like a statue, a column of wood and ash, a burned thing.
The bottle of water hovered before her. She reached out to it, with her dead hand.
Plastic touched her fingertips.
And Laura Miles, with no particular surprise, saw her withered hand crumble, the skin and tendons flutter apart from pitted bone and into fine ash that drifted away, a cloud of black dust borne on the warm Egyptian wind.
Chapter 2.
Riders on the Storm
It was cold, up on the mountain. A frigid wind was whipping down off the high peaks, laden with powdered snow and sharp, stinging frost. As soon as Jack O’Neill stepped out onto the Stargate’s dais the wind hit him in the face, making him duck away from it and shield his eyes. The transition from the flat, filtered air of the gate room to this painful scour — with only the subjective tumble through the Stargate itself between them — took the strength from him.
“Whoa,” he gasped, blinking hard.
There was a sharp intake of breath next to him as Daniel Jackson left the gate and got a mouthful of the same jagged air that was battering O’Neill. “Okay, that’s cold.”
“Think it’ll wake you up some?”
Daniel cupped his hands together and blew through them. “Nature’s espresso.”
O’Neill would have preferred the real thing. He was no stranger to early starts, but being rushed through the Stargate in the small hours of the morning wasn’t really how he liked to begin his day. Not that he had any idea what kind of time he had just stepped into: no other world rotated at quite the same rate as Earth, or span at the same distance from its sun. All he could tell was he had left Stargate Command at three in the morning and had walked out of the gate into bright, if cloudy and bitterly cold, daylight.
There was another gasp behind him as Carter arrived on the dais, and then Teal’c followed her through, striding quickly across the platform and down the short set of steps to ground level. If he was surprised by the weather, he didn’t show it, but O’Neill hadn’t expected him to. “We should have sent a MALP,” he griped, starting down the steps.
“There wasn’t time,” Daniel replied. “Anyway, Bra’tac said that the conditions were okay.”
“I think he was lying.”
“’Bracing’,” said Carter. He saw her shrugging unconsciously deeper into her uniform, trying to let her tacvest take the brunt of the weather. “He said the climate would be ‘bracing’.”
“Gotta be a Jaffa thing,” O’Neill felt the wind tug at his cap, and put a hand up to clamp it tighter onto his head. “Teal’c, this feel ‘bracing’ to you?”
“I had not noticed.”
“Figures.” Where the three humans were almost crouched against the wind, Teal’c was standing as upright and unconcerned as though he were indoors; his staff weapon held at vertical rest, his head tilted almost imperceptibly as he scanned the surrounding terrain.
O’Neill heard the grumble of the event horizon rise in pitch, and he glanced back in time to see the rippling mirror behind him fragment and spin away to nothing. The gate became an empty stone ring atop its dais, revealing nothing but gray rock and the pale, roiling sky.
In fact, apart from the sky and the mountain, there was almost nothing to see anywhere. To O’Neill’s right the ground jutted into a cliff, ragged-edged and brutally steep. To the left it fell away into what looked like an uncomfortably sheer drop. The two cliffs joined somewhere behind the gate, and splayed away from each other ahead, forming a narrow, roughly triangular step that curled away out of sight. Broken stone littered the ground, parts of the upper cliff that had shattered away and fallen onto the step, and everything around the Stargate was rimed with slippery frost. It was a monochrome place, lifeless and desolate and utterly dangerous.
Which told O’Neill much about the people who would choose Sar’tua as a place of refuge.
He saw Teal’c lift his head slightly. “What?”
“We are being watched, O’Neill.”
He had thought as much. “Up on the ridge?”
“And from the broken ground behind the Stargate.”
O’Neill resisted the urge to check. “Nice job. Good lines of sight, no chance of crossfire.” In such terms, the placement of the gate made a lot of sense. There wasn’t enough room around it to form a staging area, no space to rank troops or set up equipment. Anyone emerging from it could go neither left, right or to the rear — an invader would always be funneled forwards, while anyone on the cliffs above could rain fire down on them with impunity.
The Stargate had been set up in a killing zone.
Realizing that made O’Neill even more anxious to get out of the cold. “Teal’c, can we hurry this up?”
“Our instructions were to wait and allow ourselves to be observed.”
The wind gusted in a high whistle, spattering O’Neill with sleet. “If we wait much longer they’re going to be observing four popsicles.” He glanced up at the Jaffa’s impassive face. “Three popsicles and, well, you…”
“Very well, O’Neill.” Teal’c took a breath and shouted: the harsh, barking language of the Goa’uld.
An answering voice came from above, up on the cliff edge. O’Neill saw no-one. “What was that?”
“We are required to identify ourselves.” Teal’c called back, a barrage of syllables.
As soon as he had finished, men appeared.
They were Jaffa, that much was obvious. O’Neill counted ten up on the clifftop, their heads and staff weapons suddenly outlined against the scudding clouds, and at the sound of scuffling behind him he turned to see another half-dozen taking up position behind the gate.
All the new arrivals were holding staff weapons. Like Teal’c, however, they were carrying them upright, which O’Neill took as a good sign, just like the fact that none of them were in any kind of uniform. Most were hooded against the cold, some wore long robes that fluttered madly in the wind. He did spot a few items of what he had come to know as typical Jaffa armor and equipment, but on the whole, the men approaching him looked like people who had picked up whatever they could and run for their lives.
The Jaffa on top of the cliff began to descend, running down a set of carved steps so narrow and fractured that O’Neill had thought them just another crack in the stone. Within a few seconds, they had reached level ground and spread out into ragged formation a few meters away. It was all O’Neill could do to keep his MP5 slung and his hands low.
Finally, one of the Jaffa stepped forwards. He shrugged back the hood he had been wearing and raised a hand. “Teal’c!”
In response, Teal’c tipped his head. “Tek ma te.”
The hooded man’s dark skin was roughened by time, and a life in the service of terrible masters. He wore a skullcap, a neat white beard, and on his forehead the golden symbol of Apophis glittered in the meager light.
O’Neill let out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding.
Bra’tac stepped forwards. “Greetings. You are here sooner than I had hoped.”
“Couldn’t keep away.”
“Once we had your message, General Hammond wanted us here as soon as possible,” Daniel explained.
“Yeah…” O’Neill suppressed a shiver. “He was eager. Nice place you’ve got here.”
Bra’tac was perfectly capable of recognizing human sarc
asm, although sometimes he chose to pretend he didn’t. Today, it seemed, he had no time for such games. “It may be harsh, O’Neill, but for the moment it is safe.”
“Perhaps no longer,” Teal’c replied. “If you have indeed found what you describe.”
“Which is why I contacted you as soon as I discovered the bodies.”
That was news. “Bodies?”
“Of course. The significance of the ship was hidden until I saw who had been at the helm.” Bra’tac turned away, into the wind. “Follow me.”
He stalked away. The Jaffa he left in his wake shifted into a kind of expectant line, waiting for O’Neill and his companions to follow. None of them, O’Neill noticed, had acknowledged Teal’c in any way other than suspicious glares, and some looked as if they would have been happier with their staff weapons leveled and open.
Teal’c made no comment on this, and O’Neill decided it would be churlish to bring the subject up. Maybe later, he thought. When things are a little warmer all round.
He set off after Bra’tac, trotting to keep up with the man’s long strides, Carter and Daniel falling in alongside him and Teal’c a few steps behind. A rearguard position. The fact that he thought this necessary made O’Neill feel even less comfortable than before, if that were possible.
Bra’tac reached the bottom of the stone steps and launched himself up them. Watching him, O’Neill winced slightly. “Okay, people. Don’t try this at home.”
“No intention, sir,” muttered Carter.
O’Neill reached the bottom step, hesitated, then planted his boot on it. Immediately he felt it slide fractionally, frost and loose grit on its surface forming a treacherous coating. He sighed, then saw Bra’tac frowning back down at him. “Hurry,” the Jaffa snapped.
“Fine…” O’Neill steadied himself against the rock on either side of the steps, and began to climb.
The ascent was frightening, but not impossible. O’Neill got to the top after only slipping off three steps, but he had done so slowly, one stair at a time. How Bra’tac had scooted up so quickly he could only guess. A combination of Jaffa physiology and alien boots, probably.
When he got to the top, he peered back over the edge. The drop was only about fifteen meters, but it made the Stargate looked small and lonely, like an abandoned toy.
Up on top of the cliff the wind was, if anything, more cutting than before, but there was shelter in sight. A ring of buildings, low and cut from the same drab stone as the cliff, huddled around a domed and circular structure, surprisingly close to the edge. Beyond them the mountain leveled into a jagged, boulder-strewn plateau, and past that, softened into planes of silver by the wintery air, higher peaks rose up and out of sight.
“Is that the temple?” Daniel was asking. “It’s bigger than I thought it would be.”
O’Neill studied the sad cluster of buildings, with their empty windows and cracked walls. “Bigger?”
“It’s in pretty poor repair, sir,” Carter offered. “Looks like it’s been abandoned for a long time.”
“Many decades,” Teal’c replied. “The temple used to be a place of pilgrimage for many Jaffa — to test themselves against the mountain and receive guidance from the clerics.”
“’Used to be’?” Carter repeated. “What made them stop?”
“It was discovered what the clerics were truly worshipping.”
O’Neill opened his mouth to speak, saw the expression on Teal’c’s face, and decided not to. A moment later Bra’tac reappeared, his hood drawn up.
He didn’t look happy. “Tau’ri! Why are you dawdling here?”
Daniel raised his hand. “Bra’tac, what were —”
“You know, Daniel, I think Bra’tac’s right,” O’Neill cut in. The situation was tense enough, without Daniel’s curiosity putting the Jaffa any more on edge. “We should really get going.”
“But —”
O’Neill glared. Daniel’s mouth closed with an audible snap. Carter looked quickly between them, but thankfully said nothing.
“This way,” Bra’tac muttered, and headed off towards the buildings. O’Neill could have sworn that he was shaking his head in quiet disbelief as he walked.
He caught up. “So Bra’tac…”
“O’Neill.”
“Ah, how long have you guys been camping out here?”
The hood turned fractionally towards him, and O’Neill caught a flash of raised eyebrow. “Teal’c did not inform you?”
“Not really. He told us that you were here with some Jaffa refugees who wouldn’t be hostile if we followed your instructions. That was pretty much it.”
The man snorted in amusement. “I see.”
“See what?”
“It is of no importance. And to answer your question, O’Neill, these Jaffa fled here five months ago, after Apophis attacked Chulak.”
O’Neill nodded. That explained a lot. “And you?”
“There are many such groups, scattered between the stars. I visit them as I can, to offer assistance. To make sure they know they have not been abandoned.” The man raised his head, his hood tilted to the writhing clouds. “One day, perhaps, they will join one another as a united force against the Goa’uld. But until then, they are better apart. Their suspicions weaken them.”
Which explained the Jaffa’s reaction to SG-1, and Bra’tac’s elaborate display of observing the team when they arrived. He needed to reassure the refugees that they weren’t being attacked again. No wonder they had chosen such a malevolent place to hide.
“They almost fled when the ship crashed,” Bra’tac was saying, “but I was fortunate to have arrived soon after. I was able to calm them.”
O’Neill thought about a group of armed, displaced and nervous Jaffa, convinced that their tyrannical god had returned to finish what had driven them from their homes, and what it must have taken to talk them back down. It wouldn’t have been a task he’d have relished.
“Teal’c’s right, though. They can’t stay.”
“Of course.” Bra’tac stopped, in the lee of one of the structures. O’Neill hadn’t realized they would be at the temple complex so soon, and after Teal’c’s admission about the place, wasn’t all that sure he wanted to stay. Still, he was out of the worst of the wind here.
A few seconds later Carter, Daniel and Teal’c joined them. Daniel was paper-pale, his hands held tightly under his arms, and he was bouncing on his toes to try and keep warm. Carter seemed to have retreated even further into her uniform, until very little of her was visible at all.
“The bodies are here?” Teal’c asked. In answer, Bra’tac leaned down to a frost-covered piece of ground, found an edge, and pulled.
Something came up, a piece of board, or maybe fabric frozen solid. Beneath it was a shallow pit, just large enough for the two corpses it held to lay side by side.
They were Jaffa, as O’Neill had expected. One wore the elaborate armor of the serpent guard, while the other was wrapped in a long, decorated cloak. O’Neill could see that the clothes beneath were more ceremonial than armored, although they still had the familiar style and cut favored by the Jaffa of Apophis.
The robed man had a slack, vaguely surprised expression on his frozen face. The other no longer had a face.
“The vessel’s damping fields must have shut down before the crash,” Bra’tac said quietly. “These Jaffa were subject to the full force of impact.”
Daniel had gone ever so slightly whiter, and was studying the horizon intently. O’Neill pointed at the robed man. “And you know this guy?”
“His name was Sephotep. He was one of Apophis’ most trusted and revered scientists.”
“Which is why you took a closer look at the ship,” Carter ventured.
“Indeed.”
“Well,” said O’Neill. “I guess it’s time we had a look at it too.”
The ship had come down on the other side of the complex. As he got closer to it O’Neill could see the great gouge it had taken out of the plateau; a st
raight furrow ploughed out of the rock and ice, stretching far behind the vessel. It said a lot about the structure of the ship itself that it hadn’t ripped itself to tinfoil on its journey across the mountain.
That was, presumably, small comfort to its occupants.
Even when O’Neill was within fifty meters of the thing, it was still quite hard to make out its shape. The crash had thrown up a large amount of debris, shattered stone and gravel, most of which had come back down on the ship’s forward end. The rear of it was hunched up above the level of the plateau, but it was so frosted and scattered with rock dust that it was difficult to see where the ship ended and the mountain began.
It was Teal’c who identified it first, and did so with no small measure of disappointment.
“Master Bra’tac. This vessel is of no interest to us.”
“You think so?” The old Jaffa sounded faintly amused.
“I do.” Teal’c gestured at the vessel with his staff. “This is merely a Tel’tak. We have seen its like before.”
O’Neill scowled. “Oh, great.”
While still hugely advanced in relation to Earth technology, Tel’taks were less than special compared to most Goa’uld craft. They were essentially cargo ships — unarmed, unwieldy and looking like some unholy fusion of a pyramid and a turtle. As far as anyone knew, Tel’taks were best suited for ferrying personnel and cargo between locations in the same solar system; perhaps from inhabited worlds to the mighty Goa’uld motherships and back again.
There were technicians on Earth who could spend their whole careers reverse-engineering the thing, but O’Neill couldn’t work out how they might get the chance. Even if the Tel’tak was working, it would take decades to pilot the vessel back to Earth, and sending people through the gate to do the job was no option either. Apophis would want to know where his scientist had ended up. It was only a matter of time before he sent more ships.
The trip was a bust. The best option now would probably be to strip the Tel’tak of whatever they could prize free in the next few minutes, then blow it up and get the refugees through the gate before the flying pyramids arrived. “Okay, what now?”
STARGATE SG-1: Oceans of Dust Page 3