Jack whistled softly. “Well, that’s the end of that.”
The port module’s casing had burst, blown itself open along its entire length. Smoking debris littered the cargo bay, some of it still glowing a dull red, and the interior of the casing was a tangle of shafts and cable and fragments of shattered crystal.
The beam moved, and stopped again at the edge of the hatchway. A serrated metal disc was imbedded horizontally in the frame, roughly at neck height.
“Looks like you’re up, Daniel.”
“What?”
“You saw Sam reset the relay. We’ve lost the drives, but if we can’t get the cloak back up we’re sitting ducks.”
“No pressure, then.” Daniel staggered to his feet. He’d been dreading this moment.
“The panel is here,” Bra’tac said. He was crouching in the dark, close to a patch of floor that was pulsing a soft amber, the miniscule primer feed tapped directly from the naquadah generators in the stern.
“I only saw her do this once, okay?” He knelt down next to the panel. Inside it, below floor level, a cylindrical complex of gold filigree and multicolored control crystals glowed softly, lit from beneath. The crystals themselves were dull and lifeless without power. In his memory, they had been alight. And there had been less of them.
He sighed. Closed his eyes, tried to think back to Sar’tua. The cold wind, biting into his skin. The dull thump of death glider weapons fire, blasting at the plateau. A dead Jaffa, frozen, the front of his skull a mass of frosted meat…
Daniel winced, and opened his eyes. He reached down, twisted a crystal around in its socket, counted four anticlockwise, and twisted a second.
“Nothing’s happening,” said Jack, his voice soft but his tone a warning.
Daniel didn’t answer. His memory was phenomenal, but not eidetic. He was a good study, he knew that: he’d had to be. But this was different, there had been no time, and there hadn’t been a fleet of Goa’uld vessels turning their myriad electronic eyes to seek him out.
His fingers darted to a third crystal and pushed at it. He felt it resist, then slide downwards and lock.
The light from the relay went green, and there was a faint electrical whine.
“One more,” he said. The red, two clockwise on the centre ring. He moved it around in its socket, and the cockpit lit up with a dull crimson glow. “Yes!”
“Nice work.” Jack switched off the taclight. “Can we get the cloak up now?”
“Not yet. This is only stage one, emergency power. Now we’ve got to —”
Alien words, harsh and imperious, echoed through the Tel’tak.
Daniel stared at Jack, then at Bra’tac. Neither of them had spoken. “What was that?”
“The communications system has restarted.” Bra’tac got to his feet. “I do not believe visual transfer will be possible, but to be safe, remain here and keep silent.”
He crossed the deck and sat down at the controls. Daniel saw him touch several icons, then lean closer to the board. As he did so, the message sounded again.
The dialect was different from what Daniel knew of the Goa’uld language, and the first time he had heard the words their meaning had escaped him. He picked it up on the second time around: “
Unidentified cargo vessel, speak or be destroyed!”
“
Jaffa, hold your fire
,” said Bra’tac, in much the same inflection. He was mimicking the accent of the caller.
“
Identify yourself, fool!
”
“
There is no time for your petty bureaucracy! We have suffered a major power failure. All our primary systems are down, and we require assistance immediately!
”
Jack gave Daniel an exaggeratedly bemused expression:
What?
“They’re asking who we are. Bra’tac’s told them we need help.”
“That’s crazy!”
Daniel hushed him. The Jaffa was speaking again.
In fact, he had laughed; a mirthless bark. “
You are not the first this day, pilot. Nor will
you be the last. Our Goddess demands much.
”
“
We live to serve her
.”
“
Indeed. Sit tight, my friend. I have you guidance-locked
.
You will be taken aboard the
Clythena
and reassigned
.”
There was a click and crackle as the communications system shut off, and then the ship lurched.
Daniel got up. Outside the viewports, the sideways motion of the fleet was slowing. He felt the vessel accelerate, although not quickly: if the main drive system was damaged, all the ship would have to move itself would be its maneuvering thrusters.
“They’ve taken control of the ship,” he told Jack, as the man rose and paced back to the cockpit. “They’re going to take us on board a ship called the
Clythena
— I think that’s our flying mountain.”
“Great. The bigger the better.”
“You’re being sarcastic, right? Because you know, sometimes I still can’t tell…”
“I do not believe so,” Bra’tac smiled. “The larger the vessel, the greater our chances of losing ourselves within it.”
“And of picking up a new ride.” Jack reached under the control throne; he had stashed his daypack there. “Come on, we’ll need to rig the other turbine with C4. Whoever this new guy is —”
“It’s a woman.”
“Whatever. I don’t want her getting anything useful out of this prototype. And the more havoc we can cause when we’re on board, the better.”
When Daniel and Jack had finished placing charges around the Tel’tak, they headed back to the cockpit in time to see the
Clythena
looming above them.
It was an awesome sight. Unlike the tetrahedral cores of the Ha’taks, the flying mountain had a square base. It was a true pyramid, but scaled up to insane levels: the vessel could have landed atop a small town, and covered it entirely.
While the ship’s flanks gleamed like smooth white marble, the underside of it was less prepossessing, a maze of thruster bells, docking ports, kilometers of exposed pipework. It reminded Daniel of a gigantic foundry, hundreds of pits of glowing metal connected by vast tubes and gantries and factory buildings, turned upside-down and moving slowly over his head.
“There have got to be tens of thousands of Jaffa in there,” he breathed.
“Maybe less than you think.” Jack was sitting on the deck, checking his weapons and equipment — an MP5 with multiple spare magazines, a sidearm, a zat gun, grenades and more C4. “Every time we’ve been inside one of those pyramids we’ve see a lot of empty space.”
“It is true,” Bra’tac agreed. “Goa’uld vessels are vast in order to terrify those who might oppose them. Within, there will be many unused areas, unless an army is being transported. This ship, for all its size, will be crewed by a few thousand, no more.”
“That’s still not very comforting.”
“Daniel, we can do this.” Jack got up, his MP5 slung, the rest of his gear stashed efficiently in his tactical vest and daypack. “They don’t know anything’s wrong, so they won’t be on alert. Bra’tac can find us something sporty, while we go hunt down the navigation system and cripple it. We’ll fly out and be in hyperspace before they even know why they can’t steer.”
Daniel just looked at him. There were so many things he could have said, so many flaws in the plan, so many dangers and logical gaps and leaps of faith. The idea of sauntering into the vastness of that spaceborne Everest as if it were a local shopping mall was simply insane. It was true that the ship was not on alert now, but they only needed to be spotted once, and all hands would be against them. The fleet might enter hyperspace while they were still inside, dragging them untold light-years off course. It was a terrible plan. It was suicide. Madness.
It was as likely to work as any other option, frankly. And in the face of such nightmarish odds, perhaps audacity was the thing that would see them through.
“Let’s do it,” he replied.
“Humans,” said Bra’tac. “Observe.”
He was standing at the viewports, looking up at the endless base of the
Clythena
. Past him, Daniel could see a huge shape gliding upwards, glittering white and silver. Another starship, as long as a Ha’tak was tall, was docking vertically with the mountain’s underside.
It was only when he got closer to the ports that he realized his mistake. The object was not a ship. It was being towed into place by dozens of smaller vessels; stubby tenders with spidery manipulator arms, Tel’taks with crane-like winch gear bolted to their flanks. The object itself was a series of flattened saucers, joined by a complicated series of radial tubes set around a vast central barrel. It was rising, with infinite care, into a huge central shaft drilled into
Clythena
’s base; an obscene mechanical mating.
“It looks like a gun,” he said, wonder turning his words to a whisper. “Bra’tac, is that a weapon?”
The Jaffa shook his head slowly. “I have not seen its like before. But I can only assume its purpose is destruction.”
“Wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end,” agreed Jack.
Above the Tel’tak, a great disc of metal split into teeth, gaped like the maw of some fanged worm, vomiting light. Daniel felt the ship jerk to a halt, then begin to rise.
They were going in.
Almost
as soon as Teal’c had been marched out into the high cool air of the Ha’tak’s glider bay, he had begun formulating his escape plan.
There was a very slight delay, however: he had allowed himself a moment of relief upon leaving the Pit. It was a weakness, of that he was well aware, and under normal circumstances he would have denied himself such feelings. But his time in the structure had been difficult, not least because of the suffering the place had inflicted on Major Carter. Teal’c hadn’t enjoyed watching that at all.
The feeling had been his celebration, and it had only lasted a second or two. Anything beyond that was a self-indulgence, a luxury he could ill afford, so he stored it away. When he and Carter were on safer ground, he would, perhaps, allow himself to revisit it.
But not now. Not until he was very far from the Pit of Sorrows and its mysterious occupant.
A bridge had been extended to the Pit’s doorway. It was narrow, only just wide enough to allow two men to walk side by side, but it spread slightly where it touched the pit. Four Jaffa, clad in the armor of Neheb-Kau, stood there, two at either side, covering him with staff weapons as he and Carter were ushered outside. He half expected one or more of them to speak as he passed, to spit an insult or a curse, to call him
shol’va
, traitor against the Gods. But none of the Jaffa uttered a sound — if anything, their attitude spoke of silent respect. As soon as he and the surviving snake-guard from the Pit went past them they simply fell into formation behind him.
The First Prime of Neheb-Kau stayed behind.
Carter walked in front, coated with the Pit’s foul dust. The stuff was in her hair and on her skin, aging her. Perhaps that was why the Jaffa had not cursed him, Teal’c surmised. He was disguised by dust. That could work to his advantage.
On the other hand, the reason might lie in the fact that to his knowledge no Jaffa had seen nor heard from Neheb-Kau in hundreds of years. And if the Goa’uld had been cut off from the other System Lords, either by accident or design, it was entirely possible that no-one here knew that Teal’c was anyone other than the First Prime of Apophis. This, too, could work in his favor.
Gather your advantages like seeds,
Master Bra’tac had once told him.
Tend them well, and when the time is right they will flower into victory.
There could be no wiser teacher. The lesson had been learned, and learned well: Teal’c never let such a seed fall from his grasp.
The bridge clattered and moved beneath his feet as he walked. It was not well-made; he could see fractures in its flooring panels, spots of corrosion on the handrails. The supports that suspended it from the ceiling were ill-matched, as though built from scavenged materials. That was unexpected, and Teal’c thought for a moment about the possibility of using the structure’s poor state of repair to his advantage. He quickly dismissed the notion, however. It was already obvious to him that there could be no escape from the bridge itself.
He calculated his chances of overpowering the Jaffa around him without significant injury to himself or Carter, and decided that those chances were, at present, so small as to b
e effectively dismissed. Instead Teal’c eyed the far edge of the bridge, where it met an access platform and joined the vast triangle of gantry that edged the bay. There were two more Jaffa there, weapons trained on him. And even from this distance he coul
d see that their armor was stained and patched, hastily repaired.
Teal’c decided that his next action would depend on how well-trained these two were. If their tactics were as poor as their equipment, and they remained still as he and Carter approached, then their line of fire would cross the Jaffa behind him. If they moved…
When he was still ten meters away, the two guards spread out, triangulating their aim with that of the five at his back. It seemed that, at least, their First Prime had trained them well.