Carter saw the containment system fail, the emitter rings grow dark as the angular cover separated into a hundred metal blades and retracted back into the rolling column. She heard Kafra shout a warning and ducked back away from it, saw a sickly, reddish radiance spilling from its open end.
Threads of shadow lashed down to it.
The Ash Eater was hovering mid-way between the ravaged converter and the bridge, its cloud stretched from one to the other. As Carter watched, more and more of the filaments snapped back from their victims to connect to the open end of the Casket, the Lure enticing the monster inwards with its promise of unspeakable energies.
But it wasn’t enough. The mummified horror still hung, motionless, in the air.
Carter began to edge towards the fallen pillar. She saw Kafra move towards her. “Human, are you insane?”
“We’ve got to get it upright!” she hissed. “Something’s wrong, the Lure’s slopped out of place, maybe.”
“You do not have the strength.” He ran to her, keeping low, and from behind her one of his Jaffa scuttled forwards to help. Carter glanced back, to see if the third was on the way, and saw that he was sprawled on his back, his chest opened by a staff-blast.
The Jaffa gripped the Casket, and began to tilt it up. “Beware, human,” he growled, his voice strained. “Its weight is shifting.”
As she had surmised, the dense, semi-liquid Lure was moving within the Casket.
She backed away, picking up the control crystal. Kafra moved in past her, wrapping his arms around the pillar and tilting it back towards the vertical. “Be ready,” he told her.
“I will.”
There was a sudden, deafening screech from the converter. Carter ducked at the sound of it, turned back to see livid tongues of voltage darting out from a rent in its flank.
The Ash Eater began to rise.
Kafra snarled, hauled at the Casket. It slipped suddenly from his grasp, tilted back the other way, dragging black threads with it. The other Jaffa grabbed wildly at it, lost his grip, and half fell into the ruddy glow of the Lure.
He gave a choked scream, and staggered back, clutching at himself. Kafra suddenly found himself trying to steady the pillar on his own. Carter ran towards him, put her shoulder to the golden cylinder and shoved hard, trying not to think about the red radiation flowing out over her head, the Ash Eater’s lethal feeding cloud whipping a meter from her back.
The Casket thumped heavily upright. The Ash Eater’s cloud came with it. Kafra jerked back from the threads, and for an awful instant the red light of the Lure surged up into his face.
He twisted away, supernaturally fast. Carter looked up, saw the Ash Eater flowing down towards her, and jammed the control crystal back into its socket. The emitter rings stuttered into life.
Metal leaves whirled up from nowhere, wrapped themselves around the dry fetal bulk of the Ash Eater, and drew it down.
Carter sagged back, shivering from shock and the hammering cold. “Kafra?”
“I am here.” He half-rose, slumped back down again. Carter wrenched herself towards him, trying to help him up, but he was too heavy, too weak.
One side of his face was a mass of blisters.
“It’s over,” Carter told him, kneeling beside him. “We did it.”
“No,” he mumbled. He shook his head. “Not over.”
And light, ice-white and intolerably harsh, seared out from above her.
The power converter was vomiting energy. Its shell had ruptured, peeled back as the banks of storage capacitors inside vented their power in vast, gouting arcs. As Carter watched a huge tongue of lightning arced brutally out to the side of the canyon, sending up sheets of sparks, then snapped upwards and hit the next converter in line.
The cylinder resisted the attack for a second or two, blue serpents of voltage slithering over its surface, then it too erupted.
The bridge shook. Carter scrambled up, hauling Kafra with her, allowing fear to lend her strength.
“You two,” she called, shouting over the noise of the disintegrating machines. She pointed at the nearest surviving guards. “You need to take the Casket.”
“That?” The man took a step away from it. “You are insane, human!”
“If it’s in here when the rest of the these converters go up, the Ash Eater will get free again! Do you really want that?”
Perhaps, if the next cylinder in line had not blasted itself into shrapnel and billowing flame in that very instant, the guard might not have obeyed her, but the sound and the raw heat of the explosion was all the argument she needed.
Kafra took some of own weight from her. He was horribly injured, she could tell, but he was forcing himself upright.
Partway along the bridge, the Jaffa who had taken the full brunt of the Lure was completely still. Carter tried not to look too closely at what was happening to his body, but what she did see gave her some very unpleasant notions about what Neheb-Kau might look like under his mask.
“We must leave,” Kafra snarled, as if enraged by his own pain. “Now.”
“I hear you.” She began to stagger forwards, still bearing him up, trying to be as gentle as she could.
“Faster, human!”
“You’re not well enough —”
“A matter of little importance. If we are not gone from this place before the destruction reaches the reactor, all our lives are forfeit!”
“The reactor?” Carter twisted under his weight, looking back along the bridge
Lightning was connecting every converter in the chasm. It was a chain reaction, a cascade of destruction, a river of released energies, gathering pace and speed and power.
Death was leaping from cylinder to cylinder, racing like a flood towards the throneship’s heart.
Chapter 18.
Hurt
Teal’c awoke to see a strange metal face looking right at him.
It was a Goa’uld armor-mask, he could see that at once, but he had not seen its like before. It was narrow, close-fitting to the head beneath, and formed from leaves of a dark, glossy bronze. There was very little decoration to it, and not even the suggestion of a mouth; the helm merely stretched and thinned into a featureless extension where the chin should be.
It was a haunting sight. Teal’c thought that it was probably meant to be.
He was restrained, of course. He could tell without looking that he was suspended above the floor at an angle, his head pulled up and back and his arms held out to either side. The bonds were well-designed, tight, and strong; self-adjusting electromagnetic bands of solid, unbreakable metal. Teal’c tested his strength against them for several seconds, but quickly realized that he couldn’t move at all.
The mask watched him, impassively, as he did so.
When he stilled, it nodded, very slightly, and moved away. Teal’c’s view was limited, but he could see that the man who wore it was dressed in simple attire of much the same dark bronze as his mask; a long sleeveless tunic over a jacket and robe. There was armor at his shoulders, to support the mask, and encasing both his forearms, but even that was functional and utilitarian.
The room around Teal’c, or what little of it he could see, was white, strongly-lit, and gleaming. Teal’c couldn’t see any corners, and the wall ahead of him was slightly curved. He guessed that he was suspended from some kind of framework in the centre of a drum-shaped chamber, a situation he could find no comfort in.
“Release me,” he said, largely as an experiment.
“No,” the masked man replied, his voice utterly without malice. “Now that we have that out of the way, I am Pa’Nakht, ka’epta of surgeries. And you are Teal’c, First Prime of Apophis.”
“I no longer serve Apophis.”
“He cast you aside?”
“I cast him aside.”
“Ah, I see.” Pa’Nakht moved out of his field of view. “A First Prime who has deserted his God.”
“The Goa’uld are not gods.”
Teal’c heard faint c
licks and chirrups, the sounds of machinery being operated. A few seconds later, Pa’Nakht returned. He was holding a small, shining instrument of glass and bright metal. “The depends entirely,” he murmured, “on your definition of a god.”
He held the device near to Teal’c’s face. A section of it unfolded, and a long, silver needle slid from within.
Teal’c set his jaw, waiting for the inevitable pain. The needle was thick, wickedly sharp. Pa’Nakht moved the device out of his view, but he could feel the cold touch of the needle at his temple. There was a scratch at his skin, a pressure…
The device chimed softly. Pa’Nakht drew it away, and Teal’c could see that the glass section of it was glowing a faint blue.
He let out the breath he had been holding, slowly and silently, as the ka’epta of surgeries moved beyond his sight once more. He heard the device being set down on a hard surface, and then a rapid series of faint clicks. Pa’Nakht was entering data into some kind of recorder.
Teal’c felt as though he were suspended in a sea of mystery. The device that had been used on him was unlike any he had seen before, and it was strange indeed for the servants of a System Lord to indulge in radical innovation. The Goa’uld were, for the most part, a race that relied on familiar, proven technologies. Once they knew something worked, they tended to use it, almost without change, for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
Too much of what he had seen on the throneship was abnormal, unknown. He was lost here. Teal’c knew that he could not prevail if the ship and its occupants remained a mystery to him. He needed more information, if he were to learn Neheb-Kau’s weaknesses.
Luckily for him, this oddly-masked technician seemed to be a talkative sort. “What purpose did that serve, torturer?”
“Torture? Hm.” There were more machine noises. “If this is how you define torture, I would suggest you have lead rather a sheltered life.” Pa’Nakht walked back in front of him, holding the device. “You spent many hours in proximity to the Ash Eater. I am attempting to catalogue the physical changes this will have caused you.”
“The Ash Eater was contained.”
“Obviously, in as much as the creature could ever be truly contained. However, even when entirely dormant it has a corrupting influence on physical matter. My master is intrigued by the strength of this effect.” He lifted another device, a fist-sized sphere of dull iron, and raised it to Teal’c’s forehead. “This may cause you some discomfort.”
A moment later, raw agony coursed through Teal’c’s frame. The shock of it, the scything pain that tore out of the iron sphere and into his bones, into his very core, ripped a cry from him. He clamped his jaw shut over any further exclamation, determined to give the masked man no further satisfaction, but the pain was getting worse, increasing with every second. His vision was a shuddering blur of blood and white light, his ears were filled with a screaming, sawing din that drove into every nerve in his body. His lungs were on fire. His heart was jolting in his chest, a leaping misfire that added a new flood of agony to the pain he already felt.
Abruptly, the torment ceased. Teal’c sagged in his bonds. Every muscle in his body had been tugged taut by the pain. Now, had he not been held aloft by Pa’Nakht’s restraints, he would have collapsed into a heap.
“Neural response is within tolerance,” the masked man said, seemingly without surprise.
“What,” gasped Teal’c, “have you done? What are these devices?”
“The acquisitions of my master.” Pa’Nakht held up the iron sphere. “Interesting toys, are they not? Neheb-Kau discovered this in the Cineran Halo. It causes resonances with the central nervous system.”
“For what purpose?”
“I cannot surmise as to its original purpose, First Prime. The species that developed it were unlike you and I in every way, or so their remains would suggest. Their civilization was dust long before the first Goa’uld.”
He set the sphere down, out of sight, and lifted another object into Teal’c’s view. It was a sculpture of greenish, iridescent stone, a half-melted hourglass pierced by a jagged blade. “This was buried under a city of crystal spires, on a world orbiting a neutron star. It causes dreams.”
“That is no great feat.”
“These dreams are… Different.”
Teal’c’s gazed warily at the device. “They are terrible?”
“They are beautiful. So beautiful that those who experience them cannot face life without them, even for a moment. I watched the System Lord Lei Gong tear out his own eyes and tongue, so that his senses would not besmirch the memory of them.”
So the awful legends of Lei Gong’s final madness were true. “Your master has many such acquisitions?”
“Indeed. It is his obsession. Over the centuries he has travelled to hundreds of worlds, tracking down the most strange and wonderful devices. It is how he first gained his place among the System Lords.”
“I see.” At last, Teal’c felt that at least a part of the mystery of this ship and its master was close to being solved. Neheb-Kau was a collector of alien technologies, the products of long-dead civilizations. He roamed the galaxy in search of these forbidden trinkets, and when he had acquired them he used them to his advantage in any way he could. Such a practice would have been viewed with suspicion, even fear, by many of the Goa’uld, but Neheb-Kau would not have let the disapproval of his peers stall his rise to power. He had even modified his ship to better store and use his devices.
Who knew what alien horrors had been fitted to this vessel?
“And the Ash Eater is his newest toy.”
“Newest? Oh no… You have merely returned to him what was lost.”
“Lost or stolen?”
“Ah, First Prime. You are an inquisitive soul. I feel that you and I would get on well, under different conditions.” Pa’Nakht must have operated a control, because a moment later Teal’c felt the frame that held him aloft shiver a fraction, then begin to turn. “But we can no longer be distracted by such talk.”
The rotation was not fast. It took several seconds for him to turn ninety degrees, away from where Pa’Nakht was keeping his devices. The ka’epta of surgeries walked with him, slowly pacing back into his field of view just as the frame swiveled him around to face what could only have been the pride of Pa’Nakht’s collection.
As soon as Teal’c saw it, he knew that things had taken a turn for the worse. The devices Pa’Nakht had shown him, had used on him, were disturbing enough, but this creation was more awful than anything he had yet seen on the throneship. It hung before him on a jointed gantry, an insane tangle of limbs, like a great insect or spider cast from chrome and gold and black glass.
Every one of its limbs was different in size and form, and each was tipped with some nightmarish cluster of needles or blades or gleaming probes. As Teal’c watched, horrified, the machine quivered slightly, as if waking.
Even that slight motion was livid with malign intent.
“I cannot tell you how my master acquired this device,” Pa’Nakht told him. The masked man’s voice, for the first time, had changed. It seemed a little somber, now, as if he were feeling just a hint of regret. “The circumstances are too disturbing. Even I have tried to forget them.”
“What is it?”
“It has no name. As for its purpose…” The mask tilted a fraction, and the eyes in that blank metal face gleamed with strange desire. “Wait a while. You will see.”
As he spoke, the jointed gantry began to unfold, hinging open in complex, inhuman geometries.
Teal’c tugged at his bonds, heaved desperately at the restraints holding his arms, his ankles. If there was any structural weakness there he had to find it, to bring his strength to bear on it in these final few seconds. To get even one limb free could be his salvation.
But there were no weaknesses. The frame held firm, as the machine spread its metal arms to welcome him, bright needles and mirrored blades sparking in the chamber’s harsh light.
As
the instruments came close, a scalpel passed close enough to Teal’c for him to see his reflection in it, his own dark eye staring back at him. A second later, the razors touched him. He could feel how cold they were. How sharp.
“Do not struggle,” Pa’Nakht told him, his voice strangely gentle. “The machine will compensate, and move with you. This, in turn, will cause you more pain.”
“Your concern is touching.”
“Hush, First Prime, and be still. It begins.”
The chamber shivered.
At first, Teal’c thought that the machine had touched the frame he hung on, that some part of its mechanics had struck the restraint gantry hard enough to shake him. But then he heard a faint rattle from behind. The vibration had caused some of Pa’Nakht’s devices to move against one another.
The machine must have felt it too. It retracted its arms a fraction and held itself motionless, as if waiting to see what was going to happen. Teal’c felt the blades and the needles leave his skin.
It was true, then. The ship had shaken.
The force required to move several thousand tons of starship was not inconsiderable, and Teal’c knew the gut-deep lurch of an entry into hyperspace too well to mistake the shiver for that. No, the ship had been moved by some external force. An attack, or a collision.
As the thought struck him, another shudder coursed through the frame, and the chamber lights flickered. Teal’c felt the slightest shift in the position of his bonds, and readied himself.
The machine shrank away from him. Its motions were so fluid, so lifelike that he found himself wondering if there were some sort of mind within its metal shell. Then he realized that, if there were, he had no desire to know anything about it.
Behind him, he heard Pa’Nakht cross the chamber. There was the sound of a door sliding open. “Jaffa,” the ka’epta said urgently. “To me, quickly.”
Teal’c tensed his right arm, exerted leverage in a very specific manner. The restraint around his wrist, its electrical connection to the frame reset during the power fluctuation, shifted.
He pulled, then put all his strength into his right shoulder. There was a soft cracking of fractured metal, and the restraint came away.
STARGATE SG-1: Oceans of Dust Page 26