City of the Gods

by Stargate

  Sam opened a gluey eye. Thirty feet away another bolt of lightning struck with the explosive impact of a mortar shell, sending rocks and gravel tumbling down the slope. Slope?

  "What gods - apart from the usual ones," O'Neill groused, lifting her over his shoulder and scrambling upwards, "have I so royally pissed off- no puns or cliches intended - to deserve this?"

  Did his shoulder have to dig into her stomach? Any second now he'd be wearing the last of her lunch down his back. And why was she so agonizingly cold when they should have died in the boiling waters of the lake? The wind was hurling fistfuls of icy needles through her wet clothing.

  Abruptly, the wind stopped. Vague images floated in and out of focus. She'd clung to the webbing of the FRED just before the wave hit. Her arms had been almost wrenched from their sockets, but she would not let go; the vehicles and their supply containers were waterproofed and designed to float. Pounding, violent motion, filthy, acidic water in her mouth and eyes, gulping air. The pain in the back of her head told her that something - the FRED perhaps - had knocked her unconscious.

  The Colonel lowered her to the ground, saying something about a cave, and going back for containers.

  Cold. Want to sleep.

  "Fight it, Carter, stay awake!"

  Why was it so hard to open her eyes? Ice? She rubbed ineffectually at her face but her hands were numb and useless.

  Time passed. The noise outside grew louder and the light behind her closed eyelids grew darker. Her head pounded, her foot, throat and sinuses ached, and her mouth tasted foul. Someone was shuffling about nearby, panting hard. Then he was talking. Too much noise; leave me alone and let me sleep.

  "Carter! Dammit Major, stay awake. That's an order!"

  Insistent hands tugged at her feet, then at her wet clothes. Why was he taking off all of her clothes? She whimpered and batted her clubby hands at him. How could cold be so agonizing? "Please, sir!" He was roughly pulling something up her legs. What was it he wanted her to do with her arms? She felt the texture of soft dry material over her head and shoulders, and maybe, just maybe, the bitter, killing cold was less painful. Then she heard a zipper. Sleeping bag, thermal blankets?

  "Don't get any ideas, Carter," he muttered.

  Sam felt him curl around her, his warm breath hard on her neck, miserly conserving every joule of what little heat they could generate. The bitter, knife-edged cold gradually subsided to mere misery, and the creeping shadow of death reluctantly slunk away.

  Sore, cold, filthy, hungry and nauseous. Situation normal.

  "We're gonna get out of this. Okay?"

  She almost believed him.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  aking up was not a pleasant experience. Sam felt as if her body had been used as a punching bag and her head as an ice hockey puck. Her eyeballs hurt. Hell, her hair hurt!

  Something warm and yielding with a slight sandpapery texture, something vaguely familiar that she associated with safety, pulsed against her nose and mouth. There was movement beneath her. Breathing? She jerked back when she realized her nose was buried in the Colonel's neck. Why was that?

  Rubbing her gritty eyes, Sam looked around. A diffuse green light illuminated the interior of what looked like an ice cave. Well, this was familiar. She concentrated on recalling what had happened. There'd been a flash of shockingly bright lightning followed by a deep rumble. She'd been thrown to the ground, and then the FRED was over her, rocking dangerously. A fetid gust of wind, redolent with eu de Vulcan, had whipped snow and ash into her face. She remembered looking up, and staring at death. The Colonel should have gone through the `gate, but he'd refused to abandon her. The last time she had seen that look on his face...

  No, that memory triggered inconvenient truths, ones that should have remained buried.

  Beneath her, he stirred.

  "Colonel?" Her throat was dry and raspy. She couldn't remember throwing up but the acrid aftertaste was evident.

  "You were expecting someone else?"

  Sam carefully rolled off him. He fumbled around inside his sleeping bag, pulled out a canteen and handed it to her. "Drink as much as you can," he said. "I'll fill it with snow again."

  Taking the bottle, she sipped some of the not too cold water, gratefully washing the taste out of her mouth, and, more importantly, getting some fluid into her. "You should have gone, sir," she whispered, handing it back to him.

  "What, and miss a winter vacation in a theme park for volcanologists?" He swallowed some of the water. "The entire goddamned lake must have come down on us. I figured we'd be broiled, not frozen."

  Recalling Dabruzzi's grousing about tepid coffee and lukewarm MREs, Sam said, "The air here is much thinner than on Earth; water boils at maybe fifteen degrees lower than normal. The ambient air temperature and permafrost ground must have further cooled the water before it reached us." She paused, then added, "Sir, what happened to the `gate?"

  He shook his head. "Couldn't see through the steam. The whole place was doing a good imitation of a Turkish bath. Nothing was being sucked into the center, though."

  Sam pulled the sleeping bag over her shoulders, sat up more, and looked around. In the growing light she could make out the shapes of containers. The Colonel must have unloaded the FRED during the night. "The SGC should have been able to close the iris within seconds, but probably not before the water messed with the electronics. Could take them days to get the `gate operational again."

  "I didn't think water went through a wormhole."

  "Standing water won't, but that had a lot of momentum." In the eerie light she saw him get up and shuffle into a darker part of the cave. "Sir, are you injured?"

  "For once I'm in better shape than you."

  "Then why are you shuffling?"

  "They're called sleeping bags, Carter, not walking bags. Gimme a minute to find some pants."

  Grunting, she tenderly massaged the lump on her head. "Dry sleeping bags."

  "And clothes." O'Neill walked into view again dragging a case labeled 'Sgt AKing'.

  Sam rubbed her eyes and stared at him. He was wearing a pair of purple ski pants and a day-glow orange ski jacket. On his head was a ridiculous multicolored beanie - complete with fuzzy pink pom-pom - that only a vengeful grandmother could have knitted. Definitely not military issue.

  Fragmented images came into focus and coalesced. She should have died, would have died unless... Sam ran her hands over her chest and legs. Instead of BDUs she was dressed in an over-large polo neck and fleecy track pants. She glanced up. In the dim light, O'Neill's gaze was carefully masked. "Thanks, sir."

  "Good move, Major, keeping hold of the FRED. For once we lucked out; it had their personal gear." He sat on another container labeled `Maj RAnders'.

  Offering him a pallid smile, Sam carefully checked her ankle. It was tender, but there was no pain when she rotated it. "All the comforts of home."

  He pulled out the field-cooking unit and looked around with an appraising eye. "You can shop for drapes after breakfast, but I get to choose where the plasma screen TV goes."

  An hour later, Jack had changed into Anders' uniform and was walking to the entrance of the cave, idly eating an RCW - the cold weather equivalent of an MRE. The air was so damned thin and cold that the stuff was freezing before he'd even gotten it into his mouth. He scowled at the gunk on the spoon. On the upside, having lost its taste, it was marginally less unpalatable.

  Ander's uniform was a little snug around the shoulders but it was a lot better than Dabruzzi's taste in winter wear. Not that he'd been complaining last night. He'd opened the first case he had found, half expecting to see rocks

  At the entrance of the cavern Jack stopped and looked out. The blizzard had passed and the scenery was much as it had been when they'd come through the `gate. Except for the trees, the mountains were still lifeless and morbid. The volcano glowered, perhaps a little more than yesterday, and the clouds had that roiling, turgid look, the one that made the food curdle in his stomach. The only
real difference was that the valley floor was about thirty feet higher and lumpier, and all of the scraggly bushes and SG-10's huts had vanished along with the dam. And, oh yeah, so had the Stargate. Sort of. In the center of the newly formed ice lake was a rounded bulge where the top of the `gate poked through the ice.

  Jack wasn't entirely sure why he hadn't drowned in the flood; it had felt like being shoved into a washing machine on spin cycle. Not that he'd ever been in a washing machine on any cycle, but hey, you grabbed your metaphors where you could. Finding Carter barely alive, and then getting her into the cave had been no picnic either, but aside from some spectacular bruising where the wheels had pinned her leg, she seemed okay. He'd had no qualms about stripping off her wet clothes. They'd had to do some pretty intimate things for one another over the years. Hell, they'd been captured, tortured and subjected to appalling personal indignities, but he'd never once heard her complain - except for that time on Simarka when she'd had to wear that little blue number. In fact it had looked pretty darned good on her. Even better had been the expressions on Teal'c and Daniel's faces.

  "Acapulco, huh?"

  Jack snorted softly and turned around. Sergeant King's uniform fitted Carter about as well as Anders' fitted him. Still, it was a whole lot better than their clothes, which stank like hell - literally - despite being frozen solid. "Warm sandy beach, blue Pacific waters, pina coladas." He gestured with his spoon to the icy lake. "Look on the bright side, Carter. We scored a room with a view. They're probably in some dive overlooking an alley full of trashcans. I bet Teal'c's in a deep state of kelno'reem right now, while Daniel's poring over musty old documents."

  "Wow!" Carter took a few steps outside and stared at the lake.

  "I've taken bearings." Jack eyed the clouds, thick with the promise of another blizzard. "The next storm will probably bury the `gate entirely."

  "Water from the thermal lake must have stopped feeding into this one. You see that slight depression?" She pointed just in front of where the `gate was buried.

  "The one about the same size and shape as the kawoosh?"

  Carter turned to face him. Her nose and cheeks were bright pink from the cold, and a few wisps of blond hair curled out from beneath her black watch cap. It gave her a somewhat elfin appearance. "They must have gotten the `gate working faster than I thought," she said. "The ice has reformed, but the snow hasn't filled the depression. That means they dialed out during the night." She stared at her radio and frowned.

  "I checked. Battery's fine, but all I get from any of them is static."

  "Between the `gate being underwater, a blizzard and the electromagnetic interference from the volcano it's not surprising."

  "Carter, what part of Dabruzzi's `the water will just flow straight past and out the other end' lecture did I miss?"

  "Debris from the collapsed dam must have plugged the moraine at the southern end of the valley. If it hadn't been so cold last night, most of it probably would have drained out by now. When the SGC dialed out, and we didn't respond - "

  "They'll have assumed we were killed.

  Her eyes took on their familiar determined look. "General Hammond won't assume that, sir."

  "That doesn't get us back."

  "Once the ice is thick enough to walk on we can cut a hole over the DHD, and then use one of the geologist's telescopic survey poles to punch in the address. The backwash from the vortex will disintegrate any ice in front of the `gate, just like it did when the SGC dialed up during the night. Standing water won't flow through, however that doesn't stop us from swimming through."

  "Carter, that water is freezing!"

  "We'll only be immersed for a few seconds. Sir, the mid-winter Polar Plunge at McMurdo takes place in minus forty degrees."

  "That's where they run out of the hut, jump in a hole cut in the ice over Antarctic water, and then run back into the hut, right?"

  "Naked."

  "Naked. Carter, you know how I feel about singing soprano." He patted her shoulder. "Okay. Senior officer gets the hot showers first."

  Her eyebrows did a confused dance across her forehead. One of these days she'd figure out that his occasional doses of pessimism were designed to trigger her extraordinary Getting Them Out Of Trouble skills. That was the day she would be ready to lead her own SG team. He missed her already. "How's the leg?"

  She flexed her foot. "The ice pack you put on it seems to have worked."

  "I didn't put -" Jack stared at her poker face. "Don't tell me, you and Teal'c have been practicing jokes on one other. C'mon." He lifted his balaclava up over his mouth. "We need to get the FRED up here."

  A lump that looked like a large, half-finished snowman sat about thirty feet away on the edge of the ice lake. Carter pulled King's borrowed ski mask and goggles on while Jack tied one end of a guide rope around a nearby sapling. Although they would be well within sight of the cave, the sudden onset of a whiteout could be fatal. He checked the air temperature. It was hovering around minus thirty; much colder than last night. The barometer was also falling again. Winter set in fast around here.

  Leaving Carter to work on the FRED, Jack used a collapsible field shovel to clear a path to the cave's entrance. Normally a tedious job, it was made doubly hard in the ratified atmosphere. When he finally finished, he refastened the straps on the FRED that he'd hastily removed the night before - and noticed a familiar shape in the cargo. "Their naquadah reactor's here. Can you use it to get the engine going?" The vehicle hummed to life. "Or not."

  Pulling on her outer gloves, Carter stood. "No, but I can rig it to give us heat and light."

  "The cave goes back a ways. It doesn't get any darker, but it feels warmer."

  Carter looked up at the cliff face. "Caves, even ice caves normally maintain a constant temperature year round. It's probably a lava tunnel. Could even be thermally heated. After all, the whole moon is tectonically active."

  The volcano ejected a particularly large cloud of ash. "Like I could forget," Jack mumbled. Fifteen seconds later, a deep, throaty roar rolled across the valley, along with a stench that, despite the balaclava, tore through his sinuses and lodged in the back of his throat. "Does the damned thing have to be so flatulent?"

  He could have sworn he heard Carter chuckling, but then it turned into a choking cough. "What's the matter, Major? Can't take a little brimstone scouring your lungs?"

  Inside the cave, they loaded the FRED with the things he'd brought up the night before, and then continued along the downward sloping tunnel. It was definitely getting warmer. Jack pushed back the hood of his parka and tugged his balaclava down. He scratched his chin and wondered if Anders' shaving kit was in one of the boxes. On second thought, if they ended up stuck here for any length of time the sooner he grew a beard the better.

  Weird looking patches on the walls bathed the tunnel in an eerie green glow. "Any idea what that is, Carter?"

  She touched one of the areas and examined her gloved hand. "Looks like some kind of bioluminescent organism."

  "Great. Glow bugs." Hopefully they would prove less deadly than the assorted glow bugs they'd encountered on the last couple of moons.

  About a hundred feet along, the tunnel ended in an area a little smaller than the `gate room. The temperature hovered around freezing, considerably warmer than the entrance. He looked around. "Home sweet home."

  It wouldn't be a whole lot of fun, but they'd been in far worse situations. And for once, neither of them was more than superficially injured. Carter's ideas generally worked, so with any luck they'd be home in a few days. Meanwhile, they'd inventory their supplies, then collect firewood and anything else useful they could find. If the weather held after the next storm, they also needed to check the hut where Peterson and MacDougall had been.

  Jack was unloading the FRED when a warm tendril of air touched his face. He looked up and around. "You feel that?"

  "Over here, Colonel," Carter called from behind a rock fall. "The tunnel keeps going."

  He walked a
cross and looked in. "See if you can get the reactor working while I check it out."

  The FRED wouldn't be able to negotiate the narrow tunnel and rock-fall, but he and Carter could carry what they needed inside. The warmer they could stay, the fewer calories they would have to consume. In the unlikely event that Carter's plan didn't work, their rations would last longer. Equally importantly, while the survey team hadn't encountered any large predators, he needed to make certain there were none holed up in the tunnel. He didn't fancy sharing living space with this moon's version of a Grizzly.

  The tunnel continued to slope down, and grow warmer. Fifty feet along, more rock falls partially obscured a side passage. He looked inside and caught a glimpse of something. Cool. Or in this case...

  Back where they'd parked the FRED, Carter was crouched in front of the naquadah reactor, doing something creative with the wiring. He bent down and whispered in her ear, "What would you give for a hot bath?"

  "Funny, Sir." She glared up at him, lifted her bare hands to her mouth, and blew warm air into them.

  "I'm serious, Carter," he added with a smug grin.

  Cocking an eyebrow at him she said, "Don't be cruel, Colonel. I'm wearing at least ten pounds of frozen ash and grit, and the container full of RCWs? They're all vegetarian."

  Jack uttered an expletive. Then he remembered the case he'd retrieved from beneath Dabruzzi's bed. His grin returned when he saw it on the FRED. Patting the box, he said, "It's full of candy bars. Chocolate, Major, after a warm bath." Then he motioned with his finger for her to follow.

  With a look of disbelief, she went after him. "You are serious; you found a hot spring?"

  Inordinately pleased with himself, Jack all but rocked on his heels as he stood at the entrance of the side passage. Offering her a bow that would have done Teal'c proud, he said, "Ladies first."

  Carter crawled through, then stepped into the huge cavern. A cry of primal terror echoed through the tunnel.

  "That's the situation, I'm afraid," said General Hammond. "We haven't been able to use the `gate since the flood. Although almost everything was backed up in the mainframe, I doubt we'll get the primary dialing computer operational and systems tested for at least another six hours."