City of the Gods

by Stargate

  Teal'c, well, he had left little behind. Just a few candles and six billion people, give or take, who owed their existence to his inviolable sense of honor.

  Sam's fingers caressed the framed picture of the four of them. Teal'c with his crazy cowboy hat, Daniel looking like a startled chipmunk, and the Colonel with his quirky grin, in need of a haircut, or something.

  Second hand memories they might have been, but her blending with Jolinar had taught Sam what it was like to be the recipient of a deep and abiding love. The blending had also given her an insight into emotions that she might otherwise never have understood, certainly not based on her limited romantic relationships. Narim and Orlan had not loved her; they had loved a concept embodied by her. And before them, Jonas had loved only what he could take from her.

  The framed picture went in her box. Emotions were indeterminate traits, unfathomable and untamable. The shifting worlds of quantum mechanics were so much more comprehensible.

  General George Hammond stood at the door, watching silently as Major Carter wandered aimlessly around her lab, oblivious to his presence. He'd known closely-knit teams in the past, but what SG-1 had been through together was unprecedented.

  Back in 1969, as a young lieutenant, he'd followed his instincts and done something that might otherwise have been considered a traitorous act. Twenty-eight years later he'd met Jack O'Neill again - although for Jack it was, of course, their first meeting. A bluff called, dominance asserted, and an understanding that had developed into a friendship. No matter how bad things had gotten during those first eighteen months at the SGC, George Hammond had always rested a little easier knowing that the Stargate program would survive and SG-1 would prevail. Then, when SG-1 left for 1969, that time loop had closed, for he no longer had any assurances of a future. Now, only one thing was certain.

  Carter looked up. "Sorry, sir. I didn't see you."

  Hammond walked in and glanced at the contents of the box. A single framed photo. He picked it up and smiled fondly.

  "I just wish I could shut it off, just for a little while," she said.

  Placing the photograph back in the box, he looked kindly at her. "I can't say the pain goes away, Major, because it doesn't. But you learn to live with it."

  "But not today." She folded her arms across her chest. It was a protective gesture, containing her fragility.

  "No, not today," he replied. "But tomorrow will be a little better. And each day after that until one day you'll be able to remember them without grief"

  "Yes, sir." She nodded and bit her lip, desperate to hold back the tears, although he suspected that she could see he was having his own problems in that regard. Looking around the lab, she added, "I really should leave all of this here. My replacement will need it."

  "Major, in many ways your career, your life, is just beginning. The SGC was a stepping-stone to a much larger universe, one you're now going to explore through a technology that would never have existed without SG-1. For Jack O'Neill, being here was, in a way, a form of resolution, something he needed to come back and finish. I think I knew him well enough to say that he would have preferred this to being holed up in some nursing home, whining about the food and how his knees were giving him hell."

  An unwilling smile materialized, and then just as abruptly vanished back into grief. "And Daniel and Teal'c?"

  He inclined his head. "Each of them was searching for something. I believe each of them found a measure of peace and resolution in the knowledge that they've made a difference."

  The sound of klaxons was followed by the familiar, "Unauthorized off-world activation."

  She went to hurry out, but Hammond held up his hand and said, as gently as he could, "Time to let go, Major."

  For a brief moment Carter looked as if he'd struck her. Her shoulders sagged and she nodded in resignation. "Yes, sir. I'll just go and say goodbye to White-owl, Two-water and Heart-eater. I'll report to your office before I leave."

  Hammond had lost people before, and, although he dearly wished it otherwise, he would probably lose people again. Life, and the daily problems of the SGC would go on, and he would deal with them. But as he entered the control room he also knew that the time was fast approaching when he, too, would need to let it go.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  One week earlier

  he sky rained ash and scoria and the heat of a hundred blast furnaces singed his eyebrows. Jack stared in disbelief at the devastation. For a full ten seconds he tried to convince himself that it was a different valley, but self-deception had never been his strong point. It wasn't like a scene from Judgment Day, it was Judgment Day, and he had a ringside seat.

  Below him was a river straight from Hell. Here and there darker scabs momentarily congealed into a black crust of rock before being churned under by the most relentless force in nature. The entire valley floor was awash with lava - there wasn't even a blip where the Stargate had once been. And beyond that, the mountains, the land itself was ruptured and torn and bleeding in a dozen places as magma forced its way to the surface through every fault and crack.

  Edging further out onto the cliff-face, he looked down. The landscape danced and jiggled in the scorching heat. Sweat ploughed rivulets through the ash on his face then fell onto his feather cape like black tears. Two hundred feet below, just above the edge of the lava, he could see a purple light blinking frantically. It was the radio beacon he'd set up the second night, before taking the kids home to Xalo. The lava oozed up with obscene relentlessness, and swallowed it.

  That's when he knew.

  Jack sank to his knees. He thought he'd become desensitized to the bitter pain of loss. But the full realization of what had happened drove a shaft of agony through his self-control. No. Not again. He could not do this again!

  Long buried images replayed in his mind. The sound of the gunshot from Charlie's room, the sick dread and the frantic run upstairs, his son's life already going from his eyes; the desperate, numbing ride to the hospital. Then shutting down, closing off that part of himself that persistently betrayed him - his emotions. How many times did he have to relive this singular horror? How many deaths did he have to witness until it was his turn? Was there a way to castrate his feelings? Take a knife and tear them out?

  He sucked in a deep breath, almost scalding his lungs. Powerful hands pulled him back behind the relative cool of the ridge. Which was strange, because he shouldn't have been able to feel anything, certainly not the monstrous tangle of grief and loss that engulfed him. He didn't feel; that was the way things were, that was the only way you could go on.

  "O'Neill!"

  Teal'c's voice. Teal'c and Daniel, and the kids. Carter and Two-water and White-owl and most of their kids were gone, but he had to focus on the others, the ones Atlatl had sacrificed his family to save. Jack turned to Teal'c and saw the desolation reflected in his eyes. And something more, understanding. He ran a hand across his face, smearing the ash and sweat around. Survival now depended on one thing. "Back to plan A."

  "Jack! What are you doing, why aren't you..." Daniel stopped in his tracks and stared at him. His low voice was filled with apprehension. "Why is it so hot up here?"

  Dabruzzi ran past them without pausing. Jack coughed, then coughed again, clinging to the pain searing his throat, an anchor against a different pain, one he could never articulate.

  Something wriggled inside his cape. He glanced down at the miniature dog, Spiffy. They hadn't been able to find the tunnel to the surface until it had jumped out of the cape and scampered up behind a rock fall. The animal had saved them, but it might have only delayed the inevitable. Jack reached in, unconsciously reassuring it with a gentle pat, feeling its warm life against his hand. "Our friendly neighborhood volcano decided to erupt all over the Stargate." He swallowed the grit in his mouth and stood.

  Daniel's eyes opened wide in disbelief. "What about Sam and the other kids?"

  "They're dead." His voice was as cracked and brittle as the cinders that covered th
e ground. "They're all dead." Jack pushed past him.

  "What?" Daniel shook his head in desperate denial. "How can you be so sure, maybe she found a side tunnel, maybe - ?"

  "Maybe she what?" Jack snarled. Daniel's eyes widened and he actually recoiled. "Built a raft and rode out of there like some latter-day Hardwigg? We damned near died in those tunnels after only three hours. What hasn't collapsed is flooded with magma!" He stood for long seconds, breathing hard, trying to regain a measure of self-control. Finally, he added in a flat, emotionless voice, "Go see for yourself. Our only way off this rock is to go back to the city, get the skulls Wodeski has and find ourselves a cave, a rotunda, something that'll work. And so help me, to whatever pernicious scum-sucking god is listening, I'll tear that son of a bitch's heart out myself if he even thinks about not giving `em to me."

  Daniel stared at Jack's departing back, still not believing. But his face... Echoes of pain lingered when Jack talked about his son, but this was different. This was raw, immediate, and shockingly intimate.

  His own loss of Sha're had come in pieces. That had made the burden no less agonizing, but he, at least, had had time to love Sha're, to see her once more and say goodbye, and to know that one day he would see her again. It wasn't something he could fully comprehend, much less explain, yet it allowed him to go on. But what he saw in Jack... beyond the pain was a dark and shattered emptiness.

  Dabruzzi was crouched low behind the ridgeline. Daniel clambered up to him, and almost fell back as a ferocious blast of heat sucked the moisture from his eyes and lungs, crackling his skin and singeing his hair. Jack was right. He'd needed to see for himself. And when he did, a sense of profound horror welled inside of him. Sam, the kids, all of them would have been in the tun nel with magma behind them and lava in front, with absolutely no way out. There was little consolation in knowing they would probably have succumbed to the heat long before being burned alive. To be trapped like that, knowing what was coming...

  The big volcanologist turned to him with an expression of awe, fear, and inevitability. "The view is to die for."

  "You're sounding more and more like Jack." Sam is dead. It kept cycling in his mind. They had risked life and limb on a daily basis, but this time, Sam is dead!

  Dabruzzi snorted and began to make himself comfortable.

  "What are you doing?" Daniel demanded. "It's a three-hour trek back to the city; we have to leave now." Sam is dead!

  "Why?" Dabruzzi batted at the ash accumulating in his beard.

  "You can't just sit here and wait for the end, not while there's still a chance we can get off this planet." Sam is dead. There is no escape for her

  "Moon."

  "What?"

  "It's a moon, not a planet. A planet orbits the sun, a moon orbits - "

  "I don't care!" shouted Daniel, pulling the volcanologist to his feet. "We've gotten out of situations as bad as this before." Because we've always had Sam.

  They puffed their way down the ridge, across a narrow cutting and up the next hill. "Worse than this, huh?" Dabruzzi said when they looked down into the caldera.

  When they'd emerged from the tunnel into the hills, it had been to a scene of destruction. Everything, every one of the magnificent trees that once inhabited the slopes, was gone. One of the jaguar warriors with them had laughed a little manically. His brother, he'd said, had been executed for cutting down just one tree. Now the gods had slaughtered thousands.

  With over a hundred children and as many adults - mostly warriors who believed Quetzalcoatl would lead them to Omeyocan through the Chappa'ai - they had made their way up through the lifeless hills of slag. Daniel hadn't wasted time looking back, but now he was beginning to wonder if there was any point at all in returning to the city.

  The caldera was coming to life once more, bringing with it death. It looked like Netu on a bad day. Incandescent rock sprayed upwards from long cracks and vents. Everywhere Daniel looked, bright bloody entrails oozed across the surface. Lit by a roseate glow from below and an eerie green and violet lightning storm from above, there was no longer any doubt that the gods had grown angry and turned their backs on this world.

  Surprisingly, the stone structures in Teotihuacan appeared relatively intact, although it was only a question of time until the rivers coalesced into lakes and a sea of lava flooded the ancient city.

  When they reached Jack and Teal'c, Atlatl was explaining to the crowds that while Chalchiuhtlicue and the children were now safe, they had arrived too late for Quetzalcoatl to stop Mictlantecuhtli from devouring the Chappa'ai. Daniel deliberately composed his face. Propagating the fiction that the others were alive gave the refugees hope that Quetzalcoatl's ex cathedra status would yet save them. Revoke that belief, and most of them would sit down, here, now and wait for the end.

  But not Jack; he would save these people through sheer force of will. Or die trying.

  When Atlatl ordered his warriors to move out, Jack said, "Teal'c take point."

  Around them, jaguar warriors began picking up the younger children and swinging them onto their shoulders. Dabruzzi shot Daniel a doubtful look.

  He removed his glasses and used the apron of his maxtiati to rearrange the filth on the lenses. "We've gotten out of tighter spots." Really. Except that this time, Sam is dead.

  Sometime during the walk, the sun must have set and Meztli risen, but only the blood of Xalotcan and the ceaseless lightning storms lit the violently tormented world. Still, they made good time. It was mostly downhill and, unlike the walk up, the ripping sounds that tore through the ground no longer resulted in people throwing themselves down and crying out in terror. They were becoming desensitized to the cataclysm.

  The snowflake-sized ash fall was only mildly bothersome; the jaguar warriors took turns clearing a path so there was no need to plough through the stuff. Surprisingly, no rocks or lava bombs rained down on them, although Dabruzzi assured them that it would be inevitable. If they were lucky, poisonous gasses would kill them first. Daniel popped his remaining allergy tablet, figuring it would last just long enough until... whatever.

  Other than muttering something about being sick and tired of deja vu, Jack remained as monosyllabic as Teal'c.

  By the time they reached the outskirts of the city, thousands more refugees had joined them, blindly trusting in Quetzalcoatl to save them. Jack motioned for everyone to wait while he and Teal'c climbed to the top of the last ridge. A minute or so later, he signaled Daniel to join them.

  "What is it?" Daniel coughed and spat out a mouthful of ash.

  "You tell me." Jack handed him the binoculars.

  Daniel focused the lenses and looked over the city. It was all but surrounded by rivers and fountains of lava. "The Pyramid of the Sun has gone." He panned the glasses to the Pyramid of the Moon. "No magma is coming out. The collapsed tunnels must be holding it back." A fire priest was dancing wildly on the apex. When he raised his arms, Daniel saw that an additional hand dangled from each wrist, while extra feet flopped beside his ankles. "Oh." Readjusting the focus to be certain, he marveled at his capacity to still feel shock and sick horror. As he watched, the priest wearing the human skin lifted a severed head to the sky in supplication. "Wodeski." Daniel dropped his forehead onto the ash-covered ground in defeat.

  "That's what I thought." Jack's voice was flat.

  Bringing the field glasses to his eyes again, Daniel croaked, "They sent him home."

  "What?"

  Handing the binoculars to Jack, Daniel rolled onto his back. He stared at the kaleidoscopic patterns behind his closed eyes, hoping they would blot out the memory of what he had just seen. He doubted it. "Wodeski played the human incarnation of Tzcatlipoca. They think that Quetzalcoatl defeated Tzcatlipoca because both of you were in human form. By killing Tzcatlipoca's mortal body, the fire priests believe they sent him back to Omeyocan so that he can return in spiritual form. That's why there are so many people on the pyramid. They're all but ripping their own hearts out in an effort to `feed' th
e divine form of Tzcatlipoca with sufficient life to defeat you."

  "And postpone the end of the world, by, oh, say, an hour or so?"

  "I believe it may be working," said Teal'c.

  "What?" Daniel rolled over.

  "Holy - " Jack's words were cut off as a bolt of energy shot from the sky and tore into the far side of the caldera.

  Daniel tried to see through the savage, turbulent clouds to the source of the energy beam.

  "That was not Goa'uld weaponry," declared Teal'c.

  A second, then third bolt impacted the caldera in the same place, sending white-hot balls of molten earth into the twilight sky.

  "Someone's attacking the capital, Xalo!" yelled Dabruzzi as he scrambled up the slope to join them.

  Jack's eyes narrowed, and he brought the binoculars to his eyes. "Yeah, I think you're right. So who's doing the shooting?"

  "The other guys," said Daniel looking up. More bolts, definitely Goa'uld weaponry this time, lanced towards the source of the energy weapons.

  "Other guys?" cried Dabruzzi.

  "Eh...maybe we need to rethink the Omeyocan thing," said Daniel. "Look up, to the south east."

  A boiling white tumescence burst downward from the inky sky, surging across the heavens like a breaking wave seen from underwater. The whiteness blossomed towards them in a malig nant, ghostly storm. Terrified refugees began to scream. Seconds later, dozens of people scurried either side of them and over the ridge, racing ineffectually ahead of the advancing cloud. "Quet- zalcoati, Quetzalcoatl comes!" they shrieked.

  The fact that Jack was currently lying right beside Daniel, covering his face against the tide of humanity now trying to trample them into the ground, was irrelevant. Jack was Quetzalcoatl manifested in human form. The god Quetzalcoatl was supposed to arrive in a great white `cloud ship' from the east. No mistake this time. And no mistaking the rage. Teal'c was right. If the Omeyocan weren't alive, they were sure acting like it.