SG1-15 The Power Behind the Throne

by Savile, Steven

  “Indeed.”

  The steel steps clanged dully as the three of them ascended. The air had that curious subterranean quality to it; it was cold, and harder to breathe with a vaguely metallic tang, almost as though, despite the struggling air-conditioning, it was starved of oxygen.

  Hammond opened the door.

  The control room was a hive of frantic activity. Fingers rattled across keyboards searching for the protocols and routines that would track back the incoming co-ordinates. The cramped confines were humid and rank with male perspiration. Schematics and blue-lines were spread out across every available surface, piled two and three deep. O’Neill went straight across to the computer. Thousands upon thousands of co-ordinates scrolled across the screen too quickly to read. The first identifier caught, drawn out of the array by the tracer program. By itself it told them nothing. It was almost a full thirty seconds before the second identifier was isolated. Before the third could lock down the screen went black and the airman at the controls slammed the flat of his hand off the side of the monitor’s casing. They had lost the connection. With the wormhole disengaged there was no way to trace it.

  “Lost it, sir.”

  “Okay, airman, I want you to treat me like I am a moron. How does this thing work? I don’t want the techno babble, keep it simple, I am a moron, remember. Isn’t it like the ‘net? Does it have a history or something? A buffer that records every dial-in and dial-out? Seems to me a piece of kit like this ought to be advanced enough to save the most recent incoming co-ordinates. Doesn’t that seem logical to you?”

  “Something like that, sir. The buffer holds data from the last dialed connection, but as soon as another connection is established it’s overwritten,” the young airman explained. It was all Jack needed to know.

  “So we take the gate off-line and nothing can dial in. Then transmit a message through to the Tok’ra. This is their mess, they can fix it.”

  “Yes, sir. The Tok’ra can send any response via the wormhole without having to dial-in to our gate. It should preserve any data in the buffer if they’re not able to provide the answers we are looking for, sir.”

  “Good man. What do you think, General?”

  “It’s your call, Colonel. What do you think?”

  O’Neill shook his head. “At times like these I like to ask myself one simple question, ‘what would Tyler Durden do?’”

  Hammond glared at him.

  “Sorry, General. What happens in the Fight Club stays in the Fight Club and all that.”

  “All right, Jack, I am just going to assume you know what in the blue blazes you are talking about.”

  “Sometimes, General. Let’s send the call out to our friends in deep space. It strikes me they’re the riddle at the heart of things, as usual. If anyone can tell us what’s going on odds are it is them. Who else is off-world right now?”

  “SG-3 and 7 are visiting the Vengari. They’re attending a summit at the Library of Silence. They aren’t due to report in for thirty-six hours.”

  “Good, that gives us a very definite workable window. We’ve got thirty-six hours to find out who our mystery visitor was, and more importantly, what they were running from.”

  “Or who,” the airman offered.

  “In my experience when it comes to running from aliens I think it’s safer to think of them as a ‘what’. Get a message encoded and sent out to the Tok’ra. We need to talk. Keep it simple but make sure they understand it is important. We need to know if they have lost an operative, and if they have, just what sort of trouble they could have brought to our door.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  * * *

  “It’s not Jacob’s hand,” Janet Frasier said. She hadn’t run a single test. She did not need to. It wasn’t an old man’s hand. It wasn’t a man’s hand at all, come to that. “Unless he’s undergone some major reconstructive surgery, and a major lifestyle choice, that is.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s a woman’s hand, Sam. Young, heavy-set, but very definitely female. Trust me.”

  Samantha Carter didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The surge of relief she felt was overwhelming. In a few minutes her emotions had swung through every extreme from the ridiculous all the way to the sublime — and then the moment of realization that her good news was someone else’s bad news and all the guilt that came with it. She thought of Jolinar and the gap she had left in her mate Lantash’s life. There was no easy relief, good people were dying in this war with the Goa’uld, and the human cost was extortionate. Would any of them have willingly paid it if they had known what uncovering the gate at Giza really meant to the world? Part of her, the part that didn’t dream of space and all of its wonders, sincerely doubted that they would. It was a faith-shaking confession, especially for the rational thinker inside her: Einstein had said that God didn’t play dice with the universe. The Christians of the world took that as evidence of a supernatural entity controlling all things. Sam had long since come around to the Einsteinian way of thinking, her own personal god not some magical maker who answered prayers, but rather the very details of the world, the microcosm, the genius of nature and the random coalition of necessities that laid out the blueprint for life, and yet carrying the hand down to the lab she had said a prayer, bargained even with the faith-based God she did not believe in. That was the strength of fear. All it took was a single moment for it to root its way down into the psyche and all of the rationality could be undone.

  “So who was she?”

  “Well we can run the surviving prints and take a DNA sample, obviously,” Fraiser said, “but barring a miracle that isn’t going to tell us anything. Sorry, Sam.”

  “Don’t be, you just gave me my dad back.”

  And took away someone else’s wife or daughter in the process.

  She felt Daniel squeeze her shoulder. She had completely forgotten he was there.

  “Let’s go and find Jack.”

  Chapter Four

  Losing My Religion

  The grave robber ghosted across the deserted Square.

  It was midnight.

  The twin moons of Krace and Banak hung traitorously in the sky, casting shadows across the cobbled streets. There was a chill to the night that bit bone deep. The man pulled his thick woolen cloak up around his throat. He clutched a hastily wrapped bundle to his chest, cradling it protectively. His breath wreathed up in corkscrews of steam in front of his face. The regular tink of the metal rim hammered into his boot heels meant that his footsteps were the only sound he heard until he reached the fountain.

  In truth it wasn’t much of a fountain. The water barely bubbled six inches high while the pump wheezed asthmatically. Blind windows looked down from all around. The buildings in this district were some of the oldest in the city, baroque and gothic monstrosities with intricate façades and leering gargoyles aplenty. None of them were in their prime; the cracks had begun to spread, undermining the foundations of the buildings and ruining their beauty. They were the perfect metaphor for Kumaran society. In the moonlight the sneers from the stone creatures stretched across the buildings they haunted.

  The little thief cast a furtive look over his shoulder as he lingered by the fountain. He couldn’t tell if he was being followed. Anxiety prickled the nape of his neck. He felt something. It’s just paranoia, he told himself, and that was the truth — or part of it. That there was more than one truth was the nature of the game he played.

  He looked up at the clock face of the Talon Tower as the huge hands juddered into place on the hour. The clock chimed the first stroke of thirteen. All was far from well. There was a satisfying solidity to the movement that set the puppeted dance into motion. On the left side of the old ceramic face hand-crafted devils crawled up a twisting pole while on the right distinctly human angels fell. On the third stroke, the old blackbird of Death emerged from the midnight window, and with one flap of its razor-sharp wings scythed through the immortal chain that tethered the angels to hea
ven, cutting them free to fall. The bell tolled twice more during the entire scene, those few seconds encapsulating so much of his people’s fall from grace. It was the gift of the artists; they had a way of investing so much meaning in their art. No wonder Corvus Keen had declared their kind undesirable. Art was disgusting. It led to thought, and thought led to dissatisfaction, which in turn led to rebellion. That was the power of pretty pictures and sharp words. There would be no more art.

  Of course, the Kelani were no angels, not in the sense of wings and scripture. But they were his people. The grave robber was under no delusions about that. His world was divided, and divided it would fall.

  What price peace?

  That was the question he had to come to terms with.

  What was the value of a single life? The bullet that took it, the lifeless flesh it left behind, or the sum of all the acts that one life would never complete? What value did he place on his heritage? Was it worth clinging to, or best buried away and forgotten? Subservience was not enough, not any more. But neither was rebellion. He could stand in front of the wheels of Corvus Keen’s tanks and be crushed as an example of how deviance was dealt with by the regime, or he could use his head and work a more subtle rebellion.

  He had taken that road; the road more subtle.

  But now his feet were well and truly set down on it, the doubts crowded in. What he was doing might damn millions. He had to believe that in the end it would save millions more. He needed to believe even though he knew the truth: he couldn’t save anybody. He was damning himself to exile, shunned and vilified as a blood traitor.

  It did not matter that he wasn’t alone in his treachery.

  Others like him had turned traitor in the hope of bringing about a lasting peace for the Kelani people. They wore the black crow of Corvus on their sleeve. That emblem that had come to signify so much suffering. It marked them as different from their own. The black crow told the world that they were loyal to Corvus Keen, the man who had inflicted peace on the various continents of Kumara. His own people were playing a long and ultimately tragic game: to end the slaughter they needed to get close to Corvus Keen and ingratiate themselves into the dictator’s good graces. That meant becoming his soldiers and scientists, his assassins and thieves, his secret police and his relic hunters. That was the rationalization he clung to. Still, it was hard betraying his blood.

  The first fat flakes of snow began to fall. For a moment they hung there in the dark sky like fallout ash, and then the wind spun them away.

  He looked over his shoulder.

  No one followed.

  At least none that he could see.

  That did not mean that he was alone. For every blind eye the city streets possessed there were a dozen more all-seeing ones in the forms of surveillance cameras. There were eyes everywhere. There could be no secrets in Corvus Keen’s capital. Someone somewhere would be watching his passage from shadow to shadow across the old town, making a note of times and places, recording his journey for evidence that could and would be used as evidence against him should his treasure disappoint.

  But it would not.

  Not this time.

  He was sure of that.

  He felt the warmth of the stone tablet through the bundle of rags. It was impossibly hot against his chest. It was as though the stone were aware of his purpose and its role as betrayer of an entire species — and the notion excited it. He shook off the grim pessimism that settled with the snow. The paranoia engendered by this not so brave new world was akin to madness. He had borne the stone for hundreds of miles, never stopping, never daring to share his burden, for in his hands he clutched proof conclusive that the Corvani, Corvus Keen’s elite, were everything the dictator demanded them to be.

  They were the master race.

  In one line of text carved deep into the bedrock everything he and his people held dear was undermined. His first instinct was to hide it. Its potential for pain was that great, but it was everything he needed to get close to Keen. He would have one chance to kill the dictator. One. He had carved away the stone and carried it all the way from Klozel, bearing it for over eight hundred miles. It was a treasure unlike any other. The dictator had bid the twelve of them to go, find him proof conclusive of divergent evolution.

  He couldn’t have known what he would find when he cracked the seal on the ancient tomb and heaved the funeral stone back. There had been nothing to mark it out as significant; it was just one of a thousand such tombs in the valley. Some were the final resting place of merchants and priests; others appeared to house petty princes and minor royalty, but this one, this miraculous place, was empty — well not quite empty — while there were no mummified corpses, no piles of rotten grave goods and tarnished treasures — there was another kind of treasure inside the tomb. And that was what made it so remarkable. A living history of the Kelani had been carved into the walls. He had found the final resting place of the Keepers.

  He hadn’t dared believe it at first; the Keepers were as much the stuff of legend as the secrets they protected.

  Secrets worth murdering for, he knew now.

  There had not been a Keeper for two hundred years.

  Now he knew why: the last had been murdered even before the great tomb of knowledge could be completed, his precious wisdom spilled out with his blood before he could carve it into the stone. The murderer had almost certainly come before the Keeper could take an apprentice, meaning that there had been no one for him to school in the old ways of the Kelani, no one for him to entrust with the old stories and the even older truths.

  The grave robber could only imagine the secrets that had been lost.

  So now he came, a thief in the night running across the deserted town square as the snow fell, clutching one of those lost truths to his chest, ready to hand it over to the enemy. He made the sign of the Raven across his chest as one of the black birds ghosted through the silhouettes of both moons.

  He forced himself to stop running, to regulate his breathing and simply be calm as he approached the ruin of the old cathedral. Once it might have been an awe-inspiring building but now it bled sadness and decay out into the night streets. The grave robber drew his cloak up tighter around his throat and shuffled up toward the door.

  It was ajar.

  With one lingering backward glance, he stepped through into the dusty interior. The acoustics of his footsteps changed immediately. Outside they had been solid, very much a part of the ground. In here each footstep echoed up into the fusty air, folding in on the next. The sound was as majestic as it was empty. The old cathedral was a relic to the age of the Redeemer, a better, vanished time. Beneath the vaulted dome it was easy to believe in divinity. It was ironic that Corvus Keen’s man had chosen to make his home in the crypts. The grave robber walked down the aisle, eyes darting furtively left and right as he clutched his treasure to his chest. The huge ceiling cast a ripple of shadows over the lines of wooden pews. Blind statues stood sentinel, their faces turned away from the injustices of the world. Each one was a work of art. The craftsmanship that went into the sculpting was sublime but their beauty was marred where chisels had broken away the profile of noses and gouged into cheeks and eyes. That had been the first crime of the new regime — writing itself over the treasures of the old one. The thief shuddered, hurrying down the aisle toward the stairs that curved down into the crypts.

  The oak on the handrail had silvered with age. The center of each step had been worn smooth by the passage of thousands of shuffling feet over the years. He went down. In the seconds before he knocked on the door his heavy breathing was the only sound in the place.

  “Who is it?” the voice came from behind the door.

  “Kelkus,” the grave robber said. “I have brought you something.”

  “A treasure?” the old man said, opening the door a crack. Withered skin and the sharp angles of a nose peered through the narrow opening.

  He nodded eagerly. “From the tomb of the Keepers,” he said, still
clutching the bundle to his chest possessively.

  The nose twitched. “The Keepers, you say? Now that might be something worth disturbing my studies for. Come, show me this treasure of yours.”

  The huge door groaned inwards to reveal a crypt stripped of sarcophagi and the trappings of death. There was nothing holy or restful about the chamber. Where there ought to have been coffins stood a series of workbenches and crystal beakers bubbling on low flames. The grave robber had no notion what distillation was in the works; the various colors in the bell jars and beakers meant nothing to him. He was, after all, a historian, not an alchemist. He looked around the room, drinking it all in greedily. There was so much to see. Every angle and surface offered some peculiar delight or revulsion. It was impossible to take it all in at once, though he tried.

  The chamber itself was big, stretching into the shadows where the eye could no longer see any details and everything was reduced to smudges of gray and darker gray. It was cold and poorly lit. Being subterranean, there was no natural light source. Instead, the chamber was illuminated by a dozen smaller ones, oil lamps and candles that guttered now in the draught that came through the open door. No single light lit more than a few square feet around it. Some overlapped, others didn’t, leaving large dark patches. There was a row of metal footlockers that looked decidedly militaristic and functional, and very out of place lining the crypt wall, and bookshelves weighed down with manila folders stuffed to bursting with papers, some old and yellowed others still fresh and crisp white. On one of the tabletops he could see what looked to be a blue-line drawing of some description, but the inking was far too intricate for him to decipher without being able to study it properly. Glass-fronted display cabinets were crammed full of relics and treasures, some genuine, more fake. He had an eye for fraudulent bric-a-brac and Kelkus had hoarded a world’s worth of it down here. There were broken fragments of weapons strewn haphazardly among the secular trophies from both the Corvani and Kelani heritage. The chamber was crammed with thousands of things the eye couldn’t possibly comprehend in a moment’s glance. Hundreds of thousands of things.