Makes sense, she thought darkly. No point having a doorway if you haven’t got a door.
The shaking ceased, and then the gonging stopped, which Carter initially took to be a blessing. She was just going to say so when it was replaced by an even worse noise.
Ra’s voice.
It echoed out around her, as loud as the gong, sneering and sibilant, the voice of a snake in the head of a man. It hissed and snarled for several seconds, then fell silent. Carter waited for it to repeat, but it didn’t. In its wake, there was nothing but silence and her own panicky breathing.
“What did he say?” she gasped finally.
“We are congratulated,” Teal’c replied, his gaze narrow. “On successfully defying the will of a god. Also, it is hoped that we travel with happiness as the Ash Eater returns.”
Carter didn’t like the sound of any of it. “Travel with happiness?”
“I believe a more suitable translation would be: enjoy your trip.”
Carter suddenly went very cold. “Returns where?” she said, her voice sounding very small.
Her only answer was a renewed shuddering from the floor. And this time it didn’t stop.
Chapter 7.
Learning to Fly
Even before the shaft had imploded, Daniel Jackson could see that something dreadful was happening below his feet. The entire floor of the excavation was vibrating, the sand bouncing like hard rain spitting back up from the sidewalk, waves of it crossing and intersecting in a vast interference pattern. The sight was terrible and fascinating and almost hypnotic. Jackson had never seen anything like it.
He had tried not to let it slow his efforts to put the rope sling together, but the dancing sands, together with the growing thunder from below ground, must have had an effect on his concentration. In any case, he had only just completed the sling and was rushing it over to the shaft when Jack, and the awful thing he had been carrying, scrambled out.
The man sprawled, momentarily letting the corpse-dry body of Greg Kemp fall away from him. “Teal’c and Carter,” he gasped, struggling to his knees. “Gotta get them up.”
Daniel threw the sling aside and skated the last few meters to the shaft. He aimed his flashlight downwards and saw Sam’s small, white face looking back up at him. She seemed very far away.
“Sam, come on!” he yelled. “They’re out!”
She said something to Teal’c, who must have been behind her, and then the shaft blasted itself apart.
The explosions were deafening, a cascade of hellish detonations that shattered every panel. Daniel saw them go — the entire sequence of blasts so fast that it was done, top to bottom, before he could even fall backwards — and then he was stumbling away, half-deaf, part blinded by the flash. He staggered a few steps in reverse, lost his balance, and thumped down heavily onto his backside.
His flashlight was gone. He’d probably dropped it into the shaft.
In which case, that was the end of it. There was no shaft now, just a rapidly expanding cloud of dust and smoke and raining sand. He could feel the solid grinding of massive stones beneath him as the shattered panels hammered down on top of each other, the sand around them collapsing inwards to add to the mess. Under the cloud, a crater was sprawling outwards.
The bass vibration from underground had stopped as suddenly as it had begun. The sand, other than that which was still pouring down into the crater, had ceased to move.
Jack was at his side, dragging him up. “Daniel, what the hell just happened?”
“The shaft… Must have been explosives in the walls.”
“Was Carter in there?”
“No, she was still at the bottom. She’d have had time to get out of the way.”
Jack hauled out his radio and keyed it. “Carter, respond.”
There was only silence, not even static or the hint of a return. Daniel wasn’t surprised by that at all, given just how much solid material must have been between the two handsets. “Try Teal’c,” he said anyway.
The desert was suddenly very quiet. The crater had stopped growing. While Jack shouted at the radio again, Daniel went to see if he could help Kemp. He knelt, willing away his revulsion at the state of the young man’s body. Kemp looked like a broken scarecrow, like something that had been lifted out of a sarcophagus. There seemed to be nothing living about him, until he moved slightly at Daniel’s touch and dragged in a dry, agonized breath.
He did not wake, though. The shock of being moved so violently must have been too much for him, which could only have been a mercy.
There was a hot, sick horror in Daniel’s core. “Jack, tell me Sam and Teal’c aren’t trapped down there with whatever did this.”
“She said something about it being contained,” Jack replied, his voice tight with fury. “Why the hell didn’t I see this coming?”
Daniel got up. “How could anyone have seen that?”
“I’m in charge, Daniel,” snapped Jack. “It’s my job to see everything!”
This was no time for an argument. Daniel forced himself calm. “Listen, we can beat ourselves up all we want once we’ve got Teal’c and Sam back, but right now we need some heavy equipment out here, and fast. There’s got to be about a hundred tons of crap between us and them right now, and they’re only gonna have so much air.”
Jack screwed his face up. “Okay, that place was about twenty meters across, ten high, sloped. How much is so much?”
“A day, maybe. Depends.”
“On what?”
Daniel didn’t want to say it, but he did anyway. “Carbon dioxide build-up. Look, we won’t leave them down there that long. Call the airbase, tell them to get a backhoe or something out here. They must have…”
He trailed off. The ground was beginning to shake again.
“Daniel, that doesn’t feel the same as before.”
“I think you’re right.” Daniel found himself backing away from the crater. The vibration was stronger this time, a deep, fast hammer below the sand, and getting worse. There was a clattering impact from the edge of the excavation, where some of the team’s equipment had been stashed, and Daniel looked around to see the whole pile of it sag over into a heap.
Out above the pit, the camouflage tents were fluttering to pieces. “Jack, we need to get the hell out of here right now.”
They hurried over to Kemp, still sprawled inert in the sand. Wincing slightly, Daniel reached down and put one arm under the man’s knees, the other below his arms. He braced himself, stood, and came up far more easily than he was expecting. Kemp was sickeningly light, as though there was barely anything left of him at all. He felt desiccated.
“C’mon, will ya?” Jack was at the ladder out of the excavation, beckoning Daniel to move faster. “This whole place is coming apart.”
“Just get up the ladder and take him.”
Jack climbed quickly up and out of the pit. As Daniel reached the foot of the ladder he passed the stricken man to him, then followed as fast as he could. There was a noise coming from the excavation that he didn’t like the sound of at all; a long, bass moan, as though something vast were being stressed along its whole length.
As he reached the top there was a hissing, bellowing roar from behind him. He glanced back in time to see an immense fountain of sand vomit upwards from the pit floor.
The sight drew a cry of shock from him — for a moment he thought that some other explosion must have gone off underground, one last, gigantic demolition charge to destroy the Pit of Sorrows and its lethal occupant once and for all. But this was no explosion. Very different forces were at work here.
Another stream of sand powered up, soaring above his head. He could see it clearly because of the light funneling up from below ground, a stark, blue-white glare, flickering in the turmoil and impossibly bright.
“Daniel?” Jack’s voice was all wonder and horror. “What the hell?”
Daniel could only shake his head. The floor of the excavation, along with the crater that had been c
aused by the shaft’s destruction, was bulging upwards.
Jets of sand hissed and leapt around the bulge as it grew, the light stuttered and flared. Daniel saw the dome of sand crack, slide apart as something dark and angular broke through it, heaving itself up in one vast, birthing surge. It caught the overhang of sandstone as it came up and the rock wall exploded, blasted into razored shards by the impact. Daniel felt a slap above his left eye that turned his head around. A fragment of rock had caught him there.
He staggered, but could not fall. There was still too much to see.
The object was rising. Tons of sand rained from it, slabs of shaft-stone battered down into the huge hole it was leaving as it lifted, embedding themselves in the cold sand, and the sound of it was a tooth-shaking, reverberating drone.
It hovered for a few seconds, shedding desert, rotating slowly above the giant, debris-strewn crater. It was a flattened pyramid of pitted black metal, bigger than a house, covered in panels and pipework and layers of complex systemry. Another pyramid, upturned, capped its base, and this was stretching, splitting into sections that slid and rotated against each other with smooth mechanical precision.
Between each of the sections, blue light flickered, pulsed, increased to an intolerable flare, and then the entire Pit of Sorrows leapt upwards, accelerating with brutal speed. In seconds it was a whirling black square, spilling lightning, then it was a mote, then a star, dimming in the sky until it was completely gone.
All the strength went out of Daniel, then. He fell to his knees, the side of his face soaking with a wet heat. He brought his hand to it, already knowing that it was blood, but the slippery feel of it on his fingers was too much. He sagged, rolled onto his back.
The sky above him was dark and cool, dotted with stars. He lay there, looking up at them, until the helicopter arrived to block them out.
There were medics in the helicopter. One of them cleaned Daniel’s wound and closed it with surgical tape, while the other two strapped Greg Kemp to a pallet and tried to find a vein to connect their saline drips to.
The machine was a big, open-sided Pave Hawk, designed for medical extractions and rescue operations under extreme combat conditions. Daniel, strapped into a seat with his head pounding and mouth dry with sand, wondered if those conditions had ever included the aftermath of an Egyptian tomb leaping out of the ground and flying away.
One of the medics asked him what the glowing object was, that had soared up past the helicopter so quickly, but Daniel could not answer. Even if the Pave Hawk’s crew were security-cleared for that kind of information, he simply didn’t know.
All he did know was that Sam, Teal’c and the awful force that had reduced Anna Andersson to dust and Greg Kemp to a crippled, broken tatter of parchment flesh and corrupted bone were all three locked together within the Pit of Sorrows, whatever it was and wherever it was going.
He was starting to believe that a lack of air was the least of his friends’ problems.
Jack had been at the front of the helicopter, using the radio. He clambered back to where Daniel was sitting and dropped down next to him, not bothering to strap in. The wind of the Pave Hawk’s passage tugged at his clothes. “Can’t reach SGC,” he reported. “Could be their comms are down again.”
“Another message?”
“Wouldn’t be surprised. Daniel, have you ever seen anything like that?”
Daniel shook his head. “The way it changed shape was a lot like —” He stopped himself, glanced about to see if any of the Hawk’s crew were close by. They weren’t, but he decided to play it safe anyway. “It looked like the way our old friends from out of town do things.”
“Yeah, I thought that. The shape’s a giveaway, too.”
“So what now?”
Jack ran a weary hand back through his hair. “I’ve been on to Colonel Parker at the airbase. She’s fuelling up a ride home — it’ll be a hell of a lot quicker than getting here, but I’ll have to drive.”
Daniel closed his eyes. He an idea of what that meant. “We need to track that thing, Jack.”
“Already on it. As soon as SGC get back online Parker will appraise them and tell Hammond to try and contact the Tok’ra. If anyone can get Carter and Teal’c back, it’s them.”
“What if they don’t play ball?”
Jack gave him a dark look, full of pain. “They’d better.”
As Daniel had feared, their ride home was a fast jet, an F-14 Tomcat, sleek and vicious-looking as it squatted on the runway. According to Jack it was perfect for the trip because it had two seats and could do the entire journey in less than five hours, as long as they could refuel regularly on the way.
There was no answer to that. Daniel knew that there was no better way to get back to Stargate Command, even though the thought of being thrown around the sky in such a craft for five hours filled him with dread. But while the F-14 could achieve a speed of mach two, even that seemed slow to someone who was used to stepping between worlds in the blink of an eye.
Both men had to be in flight suits for the trip, so they changed out of the battered and soiled civilian outfits they had been wearing. And then, very carefully, they sealed them inside large Ziploc bags and carried them with them to the jet.
Of all the things that Daniel had not mentally prepared himself for, it was for exhaustion to catch up with him just as the return to Cheyenne Mountain got underway. But the demands that Egypt and Sar’tua had placed on his body required their due, and he could only put off paying that particular tribute for so long. A muzzy wave of fatigue started to wash down through him as he was climbing into the F-14’s cockpit, so hard and heavy that he almost stumbled under its weight.
Thankfully, Jack was already in the pilot seat, and either didn’t notice or chose not to mention it. Daniel was quite pleased about that, until he realized that the colonel had only gotten a couple of hours more sleep than he had, back on the C-130. And while Daniel Jackson’s eyelids had suddenly become stone, Jack was getting ready to punch a fighter jet through the sound barrier. Twice.
He very nearly said as much while an airman was strapping him in, but then it occurred to him that Jack’s system was probably fuelled entirely by a combination of anger, impatience and caffeine right now, and while that was a potent mix, it had its limits. Informing the man of that fact might have unwelcome consequences, Daniel decided — after all, did he really want to remind Jack that he should be exhausted, just as he was taking off?
So he held his tongue. And, as the engines thundered and surged behind him, he also held onto the inside of the aircraft, very tightly indeed.
For all the flight’s terrors, and all the distress and uncertainty and worry coursing around his brain, fatigue finally won the war. Ten kilometers above the curve of the Earth, locked into a fragile skin of aluminum and titanium and sitting just ahead of two engines that were turning air itself into fire, he slept.
It was not a restful sleep; that would have been too much to hope. His surroundings were not conducive to rest, even though Jack was holding the F-14 straight and true. And even if he had been in his own bed, the past few hours still had their hooks in him. Images of his friends, and of what Greg Kemp had been turned into, kept shouting him awake.
So he dozed, fitfully, the flight helmet heavy on his nodding head, while the world turned beneath him. Occasionally the voices in his dreams turned out to be his own, or issuing from the aircraft’s radio. Jack spoke to him once or twice, and he was surprised to be able to answer quite coherently, although after the flight was done he had no recollection at all of what those answers might have been. There was a moment when he awoke to see something vast and dark looming over the plane, and Daniel seemed to remember later the process of having the F-14 refueled in mid-air, but he couldn’t be entirely sure which parts of that event were real and which were conjured from his exhausted imagination. Dream or no dream, his chaotic mental state leant it an unpleasant, violatory quality: something about the questing, oozing tube, w
avering back through the air towards him made him want to cover his face, to recoil in his seat. But when he opened his eyes again it was gone, if it had ever been there at all, and there was nothing in front of him but sky.
General Hammond had a lot of news for the two men when they finally got back to the briefing room, but little of it was good.
He got the worst of it out of the way first. “We lost telemetry with the object about an hour after it took off. Looks like it went into hyperspace just outside lunar orbit.”
Daniel had been afraid it would do that. “Any clues as to its course at all?”
“We’re working on that. If it kept the same trajectory in hyperspace as it did when it was flying sub-light, it’s probably heading out of the ecliptic plane.”
“That’s a big ‘if’.” Daniel knew little about the mechanics of superluminal travel, but he was at least aware that a straight line in realspace could be a corkscrew once a ship went FTL. There simply was no direct analogue between the two universes.
“Right now, that’s the best we can do.”
“So what did the Tok’ra say?”
Hammond’s frown deepened. “The Tok’ra have turned us down,” he said flatly.
“Just like that?”
“Pretty much.”
“Did you get in touch with Jacob?” Jack asked him.
“Anise answered our call. She said that there were no resources available. And offered her condolences, of course.”
“Figures.”
The failure of the Tok’ra to come through was a desperate blow, but Daniel could not have said he was surprised. Jacob Carter had probably been kept entirely out of the loop, in fact — if anyone could have convinced the Tok’ra to help, it would have been him. Sam Carter’s father was host to the benign Tok’ra symbiote Selmak: unlike the brain-rape that a Goa’uld perpetrated on its host body, the Tok’ra existed in a partnership that left both entities intact and benefitting from each other.
Selmak was a worthy ally, and Jacob Carter loved his daughter as much as any father, but there was only ever so far he could go. The Tok’ra had a habit of providing help only when it benefitted their own cause, and although they opposed the Goa’uld just as Stargate Command did, they preferred to do things their own way.
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