She pushed that thought away. Self-delusion was a luxury she could ill-afford — distressing though their predicament was, Carter knew that their only hope of escaping it was to face its horrors square-on.
Her gun was lying on the floor next to her. She crouched to pick it up, checked that its mechanisms had been undamaged by the acceleration and by the polluted air, then made her way carefully to the nearest corner. From there, through the drifting dust and between two inner walls, she could see the golden cylinder still squatting on its dais.
Her view of it was partly obscured by rubble. The giant statues had obviously not been built to withstand the Pit’s acceleration, or the violent hammering and shaking that had preceded it. They stood now only as jagged, disembodied pairs of legs, and as a surreal jumble of broken body parts. Carter eased her way between a beaked head the size of her own torso and a huge, reaching arm, and then climbed up the littered steps towards the pillar.
Thankfully, it looked undamaged — either the tumbling pieces of the statues had all missed it, or it was built of very tough stuff indeed. The fluted cone at its top was still firmly locked together, reminding Carter subtly of the back of a classic Egyptian headdress, and below it three rings of translucent material set into the body of the cylinder glowed a steady, comforting blue.
Carter hadn’t noticed those before. When she put her hand near them, she could feel warmth.
“That’s weird,” she muttered.
“You refer to the cylinder emitting heat?” Teal’c was standing at the base of the dais.
“Yeah. You know, I think it’s taking heat from the inside and dumping it into the air. Like a refrigerator.”
“Gregory Kemp claimed that the Ash Eater was attracted to heat.”
She stepped back. Her proximity to the pillar was making her skin crawl. “Maybe freezing it keeps it quiet.”
“Let us hope that it continues to do so.”
“It’ll be all over for us if it doesn’t. Unless it’s vulnerable to bullets, of course.”
Teal’c looked momentarily uncomfortable. “I discovered the remnants of a firearm some distance from the doorway. It crumbled before I was able to ascertain if it had been fired.”
Harlowe.
“Given my luck today, I’m guessing yes.” She climbed back down the dais steps, joining Teal’c at floor level. “But let’s assume that the cylinder is going to keep the Ash Eater contained for the moment. That leaves our next problems as air supply, then water, then food.”
“The air will become unbreathable in approximately twenty-five hours,” Teal’s replied. “Unless other factors are at work.”
“So I guess that give us a day to get control of this thing and turn it around.” She glanced about, trying to reacquaint herself with the Pit’s strange layout. “Teal’c, this has to be a Goa’uld structure — do you have any idea what kind?”
“I do not.” The Jaffa frowned. “There are similarities to a
teluy’iirac
, a structure for the storage of hazardous materials, but those similarities are…” He paused. “Tenuous.”
“Still, it makes a kind of sense.” She nodded at the cylinder. “That’s pretty hazardous.”
“Indeed. However, chemical storage facilities are not usually designed to fly.”
“I think we can safely say that this place has gone through a serious refit.” She moved past him, out between two of the inner walls, until she found herself at the far side of the Pit from the doorway.
Anna Andersson’s remains were gone. Carter had expected as much, but the thought of the woman’s remains still floating in the air around her was still upsetting in the extreme.
She had once heard that a cremated body weighed roughly as much as a new-born baby, a piece of cosmic symmetry that Carter had found quite pleasing at the time. It certainly wasn’t as pleasing now, not with what it was suggesting to her about the number of people who might have slid down that terrifying shaft before her.
More than would have fallen in by accident, that was certain.
She forced herself to concentrate. “Okay. The writing on that wall near the door mentions Ra, and his voice is recorded here somewhere. So this whole structure must have been built before he lost control of Earth, yes?”
Teal’c nodded. “And has been abandoned since that time.”
“Which was…” She shrugged. “Well, even Daniel’s a little hazy on precisely when, but let’s just say a really long time ago. So from that we can say pretty certainly that no-one’s controlling the Pit’s flight in real-time. It must be a pre-programmed course.”
“Then we —” The Jaffa stopped speaking. He tilted his head upwards. “Major Carter, do you feel that?”
She was about to tell him no, she couldn’t feel anything, when she became aware of what he had noticed before her. It was subtle at first, but rising rapidly: a thin, high-frequency vibration coming up through the soles of her boots.
“What is that?” she breathed. “Are we stopping?”
“No. We are not.”
The Pit lurched, violently.
Carter’s vision burred for a moment, and she almost fell. The lurch was awful; not a change in direction, but a motionless whirl, a surge of nausea and disorientation. She had felt it before, although filtered and dampened until it was barely noticeable.
This, though, was raw. And unmistakable.
The Pit of Sorrows had just jumped into hyperspace.
Over the next few hours, Carter became aware of two things. Firstly, the air around her was not becoming noticeably stale, which made her start to ration her water supply fiercely — if some mechanism within the Pit was refreshing the oxygen and keeping the carbon dioxide in check, then thirst was now her most immediate danger.
And secondly, the Pit of Sorrows was starting to get warm.
At first, she had thought that this was merely a product of the work she was doing. Teal’c had drawn on his memories of the storage facility he had called a
teluy’iirac
, and had located the position of a panel which should have allowed them access to some of the facility’s primary systems. But just getting at the panel had been far from easy: the access cavity was concealed beneath a heavy slab of the Pit’s dark stone cladding. And even when Teal’c had shattered that away with massive blows from the club-end of his staff, the panel itself was sealed down with a hard, resinous epoxy. It had taken her and Teal’c two hours of painful labor to get the thing up, chipping at the stuff with their combat knives until they had removed enough to get their fingers underneath a panel edge and drag it free.
Just as she had hoped, Carter found a bank of control crystals beneath the panel. She sat down to map out their functions while Teal’c went hunting for another panel to smash open. There should, according to his recollections, be several.
Carter had started to get warm then, or at least to realize that the heat she felt was not simply due to exertion. The air in the Pit was definitely less cold.
She hesitated, then stripped off her jacket and laid it on the floor next to her. It raised a small cloud of dust as she set it down, but that fell slowly to settle back onto the white fabric and the black stone. Most of the ash in the air had settled, now.
The access cavity was about a meter across, a strange six-sided shape, like a distorted coffin. Inside, a block of dark metal housed several control crystals, their sockets labeled with Goa’uld hieroglyphs, and alongside that was a bundle of thick conduits.
Below these was a floor of metal meshwork. Carter could just see a deep space beneath, and a distant flutter of blue-white light.
“The hyperdrive?” she wondered aloud.
Teal’c poked his head around a corner. “Major Carter, did you speak?”
“Just thinking out loud,” she assured him. “There’s something bright down here that might be the hyperdrive. We could try cutting its power, if we could isolate it from the rest of the systems.”
“That might not be wise,” Teal’c replied. “Cutting power to an active hyperdrive can have unforeseen effects, even in the most well-maintained of vessels.”
“That’s true.” Carter admitted. She had already caused havoc by letting a decayed crystal break in her hand. There was no telling what might happen if the hyperdrive control suffered a similar malfunction. At best, the Pit of Sorrows could simply break into realspace in an unknown, and possibly interstellar, location. At worst, they could return to the universe as a swiftly moving cloud of high-energy particles.
Perhaps she should continue her hunt for the navigation system, and leave the drive running unhindered for now.
There was a solid impact from behind the wall, followed quickly by several more, and then the unmistakable cracking of stone. Carter raised her head. “Have you found another panel?”
“I have.” The Jaffa sounded almost disappointed. “It is sealed, much like the first. I shall attempt to free it.”
“Hold on, I’ll help you.”
“It would be better if our efforts were divided, Major Carter.”
“You’re sure?”
There was a few moments of silence, and then her answer came; the sound of a knife-point chipping at thick, glassy resin.
Carter did not know how long it took Teal’c to free the second panel. She had been lost in the complexities of the system she was working on and, amazingly, lost all track of time.
It had been careful work. Several of the crystals displayed the same surface crazing as the one Carter had crushed in the shaft, so she made sure that she didn’t so much as brush those. It was an effect she had not seen before, even in the most ancient of Goa’uld technologies, and she was beginning to wonder whether some other corruption had been at work on the Pit’s interior systems. In fact, some of the crystals looked so decayed that Carter was amazed they worked at all. Presumably there was a lot of redundancy built into the structure.
The systems she was able to access proved to be of little use. Had Carter wished to switch off the life support, compromise power to the pillar or turn the lights off, there was no doubt she could have done it from where she was sitting. But apart from that, there was nothing. The navigational systems she needed must have been located elsewhere.
She arrived at that depressing conclusion not long before Teal’c got the second panel up. She had been sitting back and trying to stretch the ache from her shoulders when there was a high metallic noise from behind the wall, a squeal of overstressed paneling that ended in a violent impact. Carter scrambled up, and scampered around the corner. Teal’c? Are you okay?”
“I am uninjured.” He was standing with a distorted hexagon of sheet metal still in one hand. He hurled it aside. “The panel proved less resilient than the resin.”
“I can see that…” Carter could see a ragged strip of gleaming silver along one edge of the cavity Teal’c had exposed — he had literally ripped a chunk of the panel off. But a moment later all her attention was on the cavity itself.
She dropped to her haunches in front of what he had found. “My God,” she whispered.
Where the previous cavity had been a shallow depression, this was a cylindrical hole in the Pit’s structure, long and wide enough to accommodate a large man. It was angled downwards and towards the centre of the structure, and set down the length of it were a series of metal rings, each a fat, complicated torus of gold and wound cable and solid-looking blocks of silvery mineral. Long probes speared from the inner edges of the rings, while arm-thick conduits circled the outer wall, dividing and dividing again to fill the cavity with a sprawl of wiring and control crystals.
The crystals were all unlit, quiescent, but small tubes in the walls of the cavity emitted a pulsing golden glow, and Carter could feel a dry heat coming off it, a flat electrical warmth that spoke of a recent and massive release of energy.
It was an unearthly contraption, complex and unfathomable and oddly disturbing.
“Teal’c, have you seen anything like this before?”
“I have not.” The Jaffa leaned past her to study it. “Could it be part of the hyperdrive?”
“I don’t think so.” Goa’uld propulsion technology had been one of Carter’s research projects for a while now, and this tube full of glass and metal looked nothing like the devices she had so far been able to study.
Still, even though the cavity’s contents were puzzling, there was something about its layout that she almost recognized. Carter looked again, trying to see past the complexity of the thing, to ignore the exposed conduits and overlaid paneling, the jagged, fang-like crystals arranged in their rings like some kind of arcane instrument of torture…
“Hold on,” she said suddenly, and not entirely to Teal’c. “Those rings… They’ve each got seven segments.”
“They are reminiscent of the Chappa’ai.”
“Seven probes on each ring, seven functional chevrons around the Stargate… Teal’c, I think this is where Ra’s message came from.”
“This is like no communications device I have seen.”
“I know, but the message came through the gate. I thought that another gate must have been used to dial through to us, but what if this did it?” She pointed into the cavity. “What if one end of the wormhole is formed here?”
Teal’c shook his head. “I cannot see how a device this small could create a functional wormhole.”
“Oh, I know the rings aren’t nearly big enough to form a proper event horizon, and the probes inside them would be destroyed if they did. But I’ve been working on a theory that it might be possible to create a one-dimensional wormhole with far less energy than it takes to power a Stargate.”