STARGATE SG-1: Oceans of Dust

by Peter J Evans

  He knew the best way to destroy such a vessel from without and from within.

  Or at least, he thought he did. It was only when he and Carter had been taken out of the bay that he realized the Ha’tak was not precisely as it should be.

  Instead of a narrow accessway from the glider bay to the staging areas, the gantry instead opened into a broad, high chamber, roughly hexagonal in shape. A balcony around it looked as though it could be reconfigured to accommodate either cargo manipulators or an effective guard duty, and it was at present sporting the latter. Teal’c looked up to see at least twenty Jaffa glaring back down at him, and each of the balcony’s three long sides was fitted with a remote staff-cannon aiming into the chamber.

  The attention was almost flattering until he remembered the Ash Eater. The guards were not here for him and Carter at all.

  The hatchway he had just passed through was replicated twice more in the chamber, leading him to think that he was probably in a central area between three glider bays, spaced equally around the triangular layout of the Ha’tak core. Teal’c felt one of his advantages wither and die. The vessel must have been extensively modified, and so it was unlikely that he could rely on his knowledge of its layout. Not until he had seen more of it, in any case.

  How much of the ship he would get a chance to see, he knew, depended very much on what happened in the next few moments.

  He had reached the centre of the chamber. There was a broad disc of pale stone set into the flooring there, and as he walked onto it there was a sudden hiss and click of staff weapons. He glanced back, over his shoulder, and saw the five Jaffa guarding him had spread out. All were aiming their weapons at him and Carter. Above them, the blunt snouts of the three staff cannon snapped open, too.

  He stopped, in the centre of the circle. Carter had already paused there, at the sound of the guns.

  “Teal’c?” Her voice was still weak and dry.

  “Remain calm,” he told her. “And ready.”

  Behind him, there was a series of whisper-faint clicks and whirrs as the leader of the five retracted his helm. Teal’c turned to watch the mechanism slide back into his collar, and was interested to note that the process was not smooth. Several of the leaves seemed to snag on each other, briefly.

  That was telling. A Jaffa’s armor was not only his protection in battle, but a mark of pride. To see it maintained so badly spoke of a significant lack of resources.

  For a System Lord’s throneship, the Ha’tak and its occupants seemed to be in puzzlingly poor repair.

  The lead Jaffa stepped forwards. His face, exposed, was fine-featured and dark with rage.

  “What is your intention?” Teal’c asked him, in English. At the sound of the words, the other man’s lip curled, and he took a step forwards.

  “My intention is to gut you like a fish, First Prime,” he spat. “You killed the best of us today.”

  Teal’c raised an eyebrow. “If he was the best, it does not speak highly of those he leaves behind.”

  He was trying to goad the man into coming forwards again, to draw close enough for Teal’c to grab his weapon. It almost worked — he saw the man tense forwards, as if to attack. But then the Jaffa took a breath, visibly centered himself.

  “My intentions take second place to those of the God,” the man growled. “So I spare you. For now.”

  “Your God is false.”

  The Jaffa’s reaction was surprising. He shrugged.

  “False, true… It is of no importance.” The Jaffa lowered his staff, and instead pressed a jeweled control on his right wrist. “All I know is this: in the hours to come, you will wish I had not followed his orders so well.”

  I already do, thought Teal’c, but light was spilling down from above. A transporter aperture was grinding open, the fangs of its cover sliding quickly away and allowing a series of rings to drop around him and Carter.

  The light grew blinding, all-encompassing. When it faded, he was elsewhere.

  He heard Carter stumble slightly. The transporter was fractionally out of phase, and had imparted a very slight torque to the pair of them upon reintegration. More evidence that the Ha’tak was not only heavily modified, but also in need of mechanical attention.

  When the rings darted up and into their ceiling cavity, they left Teal’c and Carter standing in a tall, cylindrical shaft.

  “What is this?” Carter asked, looking wildly about. “Teal’c, where have they put us?”

  “A dungeon.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “One of most effective design. The only entrance is via the transporter. Unless that is activated, there is no way to escape.”

  “Great.” Carter sat down heavily, and folded her arms. She raised a small cloud of dust as she did so. “Out of a tomb and into a prison cell.”

  “Do not despair, Major Carter.”

  “I’m not despairing. I’m thinking.”

  “What are your thoughts?”

  She coughed weakly. “That I’m glad we’re not still in the Pit of Sorrows.”

  Teal’c smiled slightly. “As am I.”

  He took a moment to study the place more closely. It was, as he had told Carter, a very well-designed prison. The curving metal wall sloped slightly inwards, making it impossible to climb. There was just enough light to be demoralizing, and the only concession to a prisoner’s physical needs was a bare hole in the centre of the floor. Somewhere above there would be a means of surveillance, but Teal’c could not see it from where he stood.

  There were normally holding cells in a Ha’tak — there would always be prisoners to interrogate, after all — but Teal’c had never seen one built in quite such a way before. It told him much about Neheb-Kau, that he would require such facilities.

  Teal’c sat down, slowly, in the lotus position.

  “So,” Carter asked him. “This Neheb-Kau. Do you know him?”

  “I do not. His name has been no more than legend for as long as I have been alive. I believed him long dead.”

  “Can you tell me anything about him?”

  “There is little to tell. Rumors of a terrible crime committed against the other System Lords, perhaps even against Ra himself. Nothing more.”

  “That’s not very helpful,” Carter sighed. “Still, if he’s no friend of the other Goa’uld, maybe he won’t be immediately hostile to us.”

  “We may be of no interest to him at all.” Teal’c regarded her, across the dungeon floor. She was a pale form in the gloom, like a ghost. “Neheb-Kau’s primary concern will be the Ash Eater.”

  “So that grab in the glider bay isn’t standard issue.”

  “It is not. In fact, nothing I have seen of this vessel so far has conformed to accepted design.”

  Carter smiled. “So we know one more thing about this guy. He tinkers.”

  “Indeed.”

  A silence fell between them.

  In a way, the utterly sealed nature of the dungeon was a blessing: the Pit of Sorrows, for all its horrors, had at least offered a chance of escape, if one could overcome its defenses. Here, there was not even that slim hope. Which made it easier for Teal’c to accept that he should not try.

  After a while, in fact, Teal’c heard a soft, rhythmic sound. It was snoring. Carter had fallen asleep.

  Teal’c allowed himself a small, fond smile, and closed his own eyes. Sleep, in the human sense, was beyond him, and in this situation he could not even allow himself to enter kel’no’reem and renew his connection with the symbiote. There were, however, shallower levels of meditation that would serve him as well as Carter’s slumber served her, and from which he could rouse himself instantly should the need arise.

  He straightened his spine, took a long, slow breath, and retreated within himself.

  Teal’c’s eyes snapped open.

  There had been a sound, faint, at the edges of his perception. Something metallic, as though a mechanism in the dungeon’s structure had been activated. After close to two hours in dark iron s
pace, it had roused him instantly.

  Carter was still asleep. She had slumped forwards, her head resting on her knees. Teal’c reached out to her. “Major Carter.”

  “Mhwphmr,” she said.

  “Major Carter, you must wake.”

  Her head came up, her eyes blinking rapidly. “Are we there yet?”

  There was no time. He took her arm and pulled her up with him as he stood.

  She shook her head vigorously, as if trying to clear the fuzziness from her mind. The grogginess humans experienced upon waking was something Teal’c wanted no part of. There had been times when his survival had depended on becoming very quickly alert.

  He hoped this was not one of them.

  There was a faint click to his right, and a squeal of rusted machinery. He saw a small panel unfold at chest height, hinging sideways to reveal the opening of a dark metal tube.

  It was a weapon. He darted sideways, shoved Carter hard out of the tube’s line of fire.

  The tube shook, rattled, and then began to spit an arcing stream of clear liquid into the central drain. Carter stared at it for a few moments, then reached out to it.

  “Major Carter,” Teal’c warned, but she already had some in her cupped hand. She brought it to her face, sniffed it.

  “It’s water.” She took a sip.

  Under normal circumstances she would have been more wary. But the thirst and the weakness had robbed her of care — before he could stop her, she was under the stream, letting it fall directly into her mouth, swallowing gulp after gulp.

  A few seconds later she must have realized what she was doing, and stepped aside with a rather guilty look on her face. “It’s fine,” she told him. “You should drink too.”

  Now that the water was there, he realized how dry he was. Despite himself, he reached out to the stream.

  The water stopped, and the panel began to close.

  “Hey. Hey!” Carter leaned back to glare up at the ceiling. “We’re not finished!”

  “I do not require it,” he told her, but she ignored him.

  “Come on,” she called. “I know you’re listening up there! Please, we need more water!”

  There was a mechanical clatter far above them. Teal’c saw Carter frown in puzzlement.

  And the water she had asked for crashed down onto her face.

  Freezing jets blasted down at them from above, a hundred powerful sprays that pounded down onto the dungeon floor. Teal’c heard Carter give out a startled yelp, and then all he could hear was the thunder of the jets. It was like being under a waterfall.

  It had to be some kind of cleaning mechanism — Teal’c could see how the jets were designed to arc slightly outwards so that every part of the structure was sluiced — but its operators obviously did not consider heating the water to be an effective use of energy. Instead, it was icy. Carter had folded herself under its pressure, and it was battering at her so hard Teal’c could barely see her outline. He stepped towards her, hoping to shelter her somehow, but she was staggering away towards the wall. There was no escaping the deluge, though. The cleaning system had been designed too well. Every part of the dungeon was a cascade.

  It went on until it had beaten Carter to her knees, then stopped.

  Teal’c waited, feeling the last fine spray of it coming down to spatter him. He was ankle-deep, but the water was already spiraling away into the central drain.

  Carter started to rise, and Teal’c reached down to help her. She was utterly saturated, shivering with cold and shock. Her sandy hair was plastered to her scalp, and she was blinking furiously, wiping her hands down over her face to try and get the water out of her eyes.

  “What,” she muttered, her voice tight with fury, “the hell was that for?”

  “I believe we have been cleansed,” Teal’c replied.

  “Cleansed?”

  “It is possible we are being made ready to face Neheb-Kau. His Jaffa might have considered us unclean, since we still bore traces of the Pit of Sorrows.”

  “Are you saying they just gave us a bath?”

  He did not answer. Above his head, the dungeon ceiling clattered, then began to split into a narrow star of white light. The transporter was being activated. Teal’c waited, looking up into the cavity as the cover retracted in eight triangular sections, and then the rings were dropping down around them.

  There was a rushing, an instant of blinding glare, and then the transporter was lifting away from them once again, ring after ring vanishing up into the ceiling maw.

  Thankfully, the gloom of the dungeon was gone. He and Carter had reintegrated in a very different space.

  They stood at one end of a long, wide hallway. The floor beneath their feet was of smooth, black marble, inlaid with strange designs, while the two long walls were lined with pillars of bright gold. The ceiling, claustrophobically low above his head, was set with illuminated panels that gave the hallway an opulent glow, and lanterns stood on tall metal stands, their open flames setting the hall’s shadows jumping weirdly.

  Between each of the pillars stood a Jaffa guard, heads obscured by the sinister double-serpent helm of Neheb-Kau. Their armor was golden, and in far better repair than that of the other warriors he had seen. The God’s personal guard, Teal’c guessed. In fact, this entire chamber was as polished and well-maintained as Teal’c would have expected a System Lord’s property to be. He and Carter must be close to Neheb-Kau.

  It told him much about the Goa’uld that he apparently chose to decorate the interior of his vessel as one might design a tomb.

  The golden warriors remained motionless, but Teal’c was certain that if he so much as moved, their weapons would be on him. So he stood, mirroring their stillness, while water dripped from his skin and his ragged civilian clothes and pattered onto the gleaming floor.

  Beside him, Carter shivered uncomfortably.

  A hatch opened somewhere behind them. Teal’c listened, counted five Jaffa approaching him. One of them had a stride he recognized, a weight to his footfalls that he remembered from the Pit of Sorrows. Four of the warriors took up guard positions at his back, but the First Prime of Neheb-Kau continued walking, slow and unconcerned, until he was facing Teal’c and Carter.

  His lined face creased in a grim smile. “Better,” he said in Goa’uld. “At least now, the slaves will not fear that specters walk amongst them.”

  “Your hospitality is most…” Teal’c searched for the best word. “Refreshing.”

  The Jaffa’s lip curled. “The least I could do.”

  “Now that we are bathed, are we to meet Neheb-Kau?”

  “The woman will. You cannot share her honor.”

  “I see no honor in bowing to a false God.”

  “And I see no intellect in insulting those who hold your life in their hands. I suppose that makes us even.” The Jaffa raised a hand, gestured to the guards behind Teal’c. “Take her.”

  He heard the men move forwards. Perhaps these were different warriors than those he had encountered on the bridge, and not so well-trained, or maybe their closeness to Neheb-Kau was making them nervous. Whatever the reason, one of them stepped just a little too close to Teal’c as he moved towards Carter.

  Teal’c whirled. He snapped his right arm back, his elbow hitting the First Prime hard in the chest, and then hammered his first forwards into the other man’s neck armor. The control for his helm was there: not only did the blow stagger the warrior, but it also set his serpent-head retracting.

  The First Prime snarled in anger, recovering instantly from the blow Teal’c had given him and whirling his staff weapon around in a hissing arc at head-height. Teal’c ducked under the weapon, using his momentum to kick out and sweep another Jaffa’s legs from under him, then launched himself up again and barreled into a third.

  Behind him, the man whose helm he had caused to retract stepped away, completely disregarding Carter. Teal’c heard a brutal impact of bone on bone — her elbow, he guessed, slamming with stunning force into the
man’s temple. As he swung around to dodge another staff blow he saw the Jaffa she had struck stumble, clutching the side of his skull.

  He kicked out again, into the man’s thigh, and as the Jaffa howled and fell Teal’c snatched the staff weapon from him. He whipped it about towards the First Prime, thumbing the activation stud, and caught a zat beam clean in the chest.

  In an instant, the world was a coruscating storm of lightning and pain. Dimly, he felt the black marble floor hit him in the knees, but sensation was already fleeing him. He reached out, clawing at the air, pure anger keeping him conscious long seconds after his wits should have fled him, but holding on to them took more strength than he possessed.

  The last thing he heard, before he tumbled headlong into darkness, was Carter shouting his name.

  Chapter 13.

  A Dustland Fairytale

  The output of the Goa’uld zat’nik’tel pistol was not wholly electrical. Samantha Carter had subjected several captured weapons to rigorous experimentation months before, and had determined that the energy pulse they fired was more akin to a tuned resonance of the central nervous system than it was to raw voltage. Nevertheless, once the pulse had struck a target, it did tend to propagate very much as lightning would.

  The clothes Carter was wearing when Teal’c had been shot were still saturated with water from the dungeon, and she was standing close by him. When the beam struck him, it had her off her feet too.