Then she felt guilty for even thinking it.
It didn’t take long to reach the doorway. Carter couldn’t help looking back towards the column every few moments, but it didn’t seem to be doing anything. Maybe Kemp and the others had gotten closer, she thought.
O’Neill called Daniel again as they reached the shaft. “How’s it going up there?”
“Give me a couple more minutes,”
he replied. His voice sounded a little odd, and Carter realized he must have been working with both hands while he was using the radio. She imagined him jamming the handset between his cheek and his shoulder as he put the sling together, and the mental image almost made her smile.
The sooner she was above ground, the better. She’d had enough of being in the dark and the cold for one night. She felt as though the heat was leeching out of her very bones. The longer she spent down in the structure the colder she seemed to be getting.
No, she realized, with a sudden, crawling unease. She was colder now than she had been a minute ago.
O’Neill and Teal’c still had Kemp between them. Carter moved away from them, warily, back towards the corner, and then aimed her flashlight towards the column.
Smoke was coming out of the top.
“Colonel,” she yelled, bringing the gun up fast. “I think we’ve got a problem here!”
Dark vapor was spilling languidly from the column’s upper edge, like dry ice in negative. But as it inched down the golden sides of the thing it was separating, splitting into myriad hairs and threads that writhed and coiled in the air.
Some of them looked as if they were reaching out towards the beam of her flashlight.
Black stuff
, she thought wildly.
Wanted our heat
.
They had all kept their distance from the golden pillar as much as possible, but the meager warmth of their bodies must have still been enough to arouse its dreadful appetite. Carter dropped to one knee, pulled out the stock of the MP-5 and pressed it back hard into her shoulder. Her finger touched the trigger, stayed there, just a little pressure on it as she squinted along the weapon’s iron sights, the squirming tendrils of shadow spilling out ahead of her.
“Carter,” called O’Neill. “What the hell’s going on back there?”
From the doorway he wouldn’t be able to see the column. “Just get him out,” she called back.
A moment later Teal’c appeared next to her. He saw what was happening and snapped his staff into firing position, triggering the business end to spring open like a lethal flower. “O’Neill, we cannot remain here.”
“Where’s Kemp?” hissed Carter.
“Over O’Neill’s shoulder.”
The thought was awful. Carter was about to answer him when something appeared above the rim of the column.
She tightened her grip on the gun. A pale curve was rising, surrounded and half-obscured by the shadowy feelers, but before Carter could see what it was or squeeze off a shot, the column changed shape.
The upper part of it unfolded into glittering metal leaves, each leaf flipping up and around, interlocking with a complicated metal noise. Carter had heard that sound before, in the armor of the Jaffa and the mutable technologies of the Goa’uld, but she had never seen a machine quite like the one she was watching now. Within moments the entire top section of it had become a fluted, armored cone.
The smoky black wisps fell away as if severed, vanishing in the light of Carter’s flash.
And then the Pit of Sorrows came to life.
A deafening, unearthly gonging echoed out from every wall, the chime of a cracked iron bell beaten with a giant’s hammer, over and over. It made Carter drop the flashlight in an attempt to get a hand free and cover her ears, but the blindness that caused ceased to become a problem a moment later, when the structure lit up.
Angled blocks were hinging out of the walls at floor level, each one pouring a sickly golden light out into the structure.
Carter staggered up, disorientated.
“We must leave.” Teal’c’s voice carried somehow, even past the gonging.
They ran to the shaft together.
O’Neill, she was gratified to see, was most of the way up the chain ladder with Kemp. The ladder itself was swinging wildly around, so she darted forwards and grabbed at the lowest rung, hauling it taut. She saw him look back down.
“Get up here,” he called.
“You first, sir. The ladder won’t hold.”
“Dammit Carter —”
“Colonel, I think that thing’s contained, whatever it was. The column —”
Her next words were lost as an almighty noise issued from the shaft.
It sounded dreadful, the worst noise she could think of: it was the sound of stone splitting. Carter saw dark fragments dropping towards her, and she ducked away as pieces of granite thumped heavily into the dust at her feet.
There was a dry hissing, and a gentle rain of sand sprinkled into her hair.
“Oh no.” She could feel the floor shaking.
A flashlight beam shone down into her eyes. It was Daniel. “Sam, come on! They’re out!”
She got a foot onto the rung. “Teal’c, climb with me. I don’t know how much time we’ve got…”
He didn’t answer, but then he didn’t have to. She found out, before she could even climb another rung that she didn’t have nearly enough.
Looking up, she had a perfect view of the shaft, its surfaces illuminated in the harsh beam of Daniel’s flashlight. She saw the structure of it
ripple
, a wave of motion travel down towards her like a whiplash, and then every panel exploded inwards in sequence. This was no mere structural failure, she realized in that last, terrified second. There were bombs around the shaft, buried in the sand, and something had set every damned one of them off.
Her reflexes kicked in. She jumped back, faster than she could have thought possible, and Teal’c caught her in mid air and swung her away as the shaft erupted down at her.
They hit the floor together, rolled apart, and both scrambled back through the doorway just before the first tons of stone and sand smashed into the base of the shaft.
And then there
was
no shaft. Carter saw, just for a second, a solid mass of rubble crashing down and compacting and filling the narrow space behind the doorframe before a panel of dark metal snapped up from the floor. She’d not even seen the slot it had been concealed in, but the force of its rise was stunning. A meter-long slab of black granite was in its path, and the panel sheared through it without trying.
The severed end of the panel slammed down into the floor next to Carter’s foot.
She got up, put her hands to the panel, but it was massively solid, unmoving. She couldn’t even hear the shaft coming apart behind it.
Makes sense
, she thought darkly. No point having a doorway if you haven’t got a door.
The shaking ceased, and then the gonging stopped, which Carter initially took to be a blessing. She was just going to say so when it was replaced by an even worse noise.
Ra’s voice.
It echoed out around her, as loud as the gong, sneering and sibilant, the voice of a snake in the head of a man. It hissed and snarled for several seconds, then fell silent. Carter waited for it to repeat, but it didn’t. In its wake, there was nothing but silence and her own panicky breathing.
“What did he say?” she gasped finally.
“We are congratulated,” Teal’c replied, his gaze narrow. “On successfully defying the will of a god. Also, it is hoped that we travel with happiness as the Ash Eater returns.”
Carter didn’t like the sound of any of it. “Travel with happiness?”
“I believe a more suitable translation would be:
enjoy your trip
.”
Carter suddenly went very cold. “Returns where?” she said, her voice sounding very small.
Her only answer was a renewed shuddering from the floor. And this time it didn’t stop.
Even
before the shaft had imploded, Daniel Jackson could see that something dreadful was happening below his feet. The entire floor of the excavation was vibrating, the sand bouncing like hard rain spitting back up from the sidewalk, waves of it crossing and intersecting in a vast interference pattern. The sight was terrible and fascinating and almost hypnotic. Jackson had never seen anything like it.
He had tried not to let it slow his efforts to put the rope sling together, but the dancing sands, together with the growing thunder from below ground, must have had an effect on his concentration. In any case, he had only just completed the sling and was rushing it over to the shaft when Jack, and the awful thing he had been carrying, scrambled out.
The man sprawled, momentarily letting the corpse-dry body of Greg Kemp fall away from him. “Teal’c and Carter,” he gasped, struggling to his knees. “Gotta get them up.”
Daniel threw the sling aside and skated the last few meters to the shaft. He aimed his flashlight downwards and saw Sam’s small, white face looking back up at him. She seemed very far away.
“Sam, come on!” he yelled. “They’re out!”
She said something to Teal’c, who must have been behind her, and then the shaft blasted itself apart.
The explosions were deafening, a cascade of hellish detonations that shattered every panel. Daniel saw them go — the entire sequence of blasts so fast that it was done, top to bottom, before he could even fall backwards — and then he was stumbling away, half-deaf, part blinded by the flash. He staggered a few steps in reverse, lost his balance, and thumped down heavily onto his backside.
His flashlight was gone. He’d probably dropped it into the shaft.
In which case, that was the end of it. There
was
no shaft now, just a rapidly expanding cloud of dust and smoke and raining sand. He could feel the solid grinding of massive stones beneath him as the shattered panels hammered down on top of each other, the sand around them collapsing inwards to add to the mess. Under the cloud, a crater was sprawling outwards.
The bass vibration from underground had stopped as suddenly as it had begun. The sand, other than that which was still pouring down into the crater, had ceased to move.
Jack was at his side, dragging him up. “Daniel, what the hell just happened?”
“The shaft… Must have been explosives in the walls.”
“Was Carter in there?”
“No, she was still at the bottom. She’d have had time to get out of the way.”
Jack hauled out his radio and keyed it. “Carter, respond.”
There was only silence, not even static or the hint of a return. Daniel wasn’t surprised by that at all, given just how much solid material must have been between the two handsets. “Try Teal’c,” he said anyway.
The desert was suddenly very quiet. The crater had stopped growing. While Jack shouted at the radio again, Daniel went to see if he could help Kemp. He knelt, willing away his revulsion at the state of the young man’s body. Kemp looked like a broken scarecrow, like something that had been lifted out of a sarcophagus. There seemed to be nothing living about him, until he moved slightly at Daniel’s touch and dragged in a dry, agonized breath.
He did not wake, though. The shock of being moved so violently must have been too much for him, which could only have been a mercy.
There was a hot, sick horror in Daniel’s core. “Jack, tell me Sam and Teal’c aren’t trapped down there with whatever did this.”
“She said something about it being contained,” Jack replied, his voice tight with fury. “Why the hell didn’t I see this coming?”
Daniel got up. “How could anyone have seen that?”
“I’m in charge, Daniel,” snapped Jack. “It’s my job to see
everything
!”
This was no time for an argument. Daniel forced himself calm. “Listen, we can beat ourselves up all we want once we’ve got Teal’c and Sam back, but right now we need some heavy equipment out here, and fast. There’s got to be about a hundred tons of crap between us and them right now, and they’re only gonna have so much air.”
Jack screwed his face up. “Okay, that place was about twenty meters across, ten high, sloped. How much is so much?”
“A day, maybe. Depends.”
“On what?”
Daniel didn’t want to say it, but he did anyway. “Carbon dioxide build-up. Look, we won’t leave them down there that long. Call the airbase, tell them to get a backhoe or something out here. They must have…”
He trailed off. The ground was beginning to shake again.
“Daniel, that doesn’t feel the same as before.”
“I think you’re right.” Daniel found himself backing away from the crater. The vibration was stronger this time, a deep, fast hammer below the sand, and getting worse. There was a clattering impact from the edge of the excavation, where some of the team’s equipment had been stashed, and Daniel looked around to see the whole pile of it sag over into a heap.
Out above the pit, the camouflage tents were fluttering to pieces. “Jack, we need to get the hell out of here right now.”
They hurried over to Kemp, still sprawled inert in the sand. Wincing slightly, Daniel reached down and put one arm under the man’s knees, the other below his arms. He braced himself, stood, and came up far more easily than he was expecting. Kemp was sickeningly light, as though there was barely anything left of him at all. He felt desiccated.
“C’mon, will ya?” Jack was at the ladder out of the excavation, beckoning Daniel to move faster. “This whole place is coming apart.”
“Just get up the ladder and take him.”
Jack climbed quickly up and out of the pit. As Daniel reached the foot of the ladder he passed the stricken man to him, then followed as fast as he could. There was a noise coming from the excavation that he didn’t like the sound of at all; a long, bass moan, as though something vast were being stressed along its whole length.