“My Lady!”
It was Pythia. Hera rolled her eyes. “I am
busy!
”
“A communication.”
“From where?”
“The planet’s surface, Lady.”
“The surface?” Hera stepped back, a look of utter confusion on her face. “How can that be?”
“We told you,” O’Neill replied. “Someone beat you to it.”
She gave him an odd look, frowning, her head slightly tilted. Appraising him. “Pythia?”
There was a flash of scarlet at the corner of O’Neill’s eye. Pythia had swept up to Hera’s side. “He speaks the truth,” she replied. “In part. Wreckage of a Ha’tak class vessel lies under the cloud layer, scattered over a wide area.”
“Wreckage?” O’Neill felt his heart shrink in his chest.
“The particulate nature of the atmosphere makes tracking imprecise. However, the communication is from an active source.”
“So something survived…” Hera put a finger to her lips, thoughtfully. “It has to be Neheb-Kau. The fool regained his demon, yet in doing so flew his ship into the ground. Which surprises me not in the least… Give me a full sensor sweep of the surface. I want to know where the Ha’tak’s core lies. It must be relatively intact for him to signal us.”
“Shall I ready the weapons?”
“Yes, and alert the crew of the Auger. But hold your fire. I want to know exactly where that monster is before I risk an attack.”
“By your will.” Pythia moved away, the scarlet train of her gown fluttering across the stone floor.
Hera straightened, lifted her chin slightly. “Open a communications channel,” she called. Then, briefly, glanced down at O’Neill and Daniel. “And get them out of my way.”
O’Neill was hauled back to his feet, and dragged to the side. Daniel was moved with him. “Jack, what the hell?”
“Search me.”
“Yeah, I think she was about to. The hard way.”
The viewport rippled and changed, turning from a view of open space into a theater-sized picture.
As O’Neill saw it, he shouted.
The scene itself was not what drew the exclamation from him: it was a magnified image of another Goa’uld control deck, one that seemed to be decorated in little more than black with gold trim. The visual feed was fizzing with static, broken and jumping, and the pel’tak looked in even worse repair: O’Neill could see hanging cables, smoke, a length of bent girder crossing the whole screen at an angle.
There was a throne in front of the girder, occupied by a black-robed figure in a golden, pharaoh-style helm. To his left stood an old man, his scowling face narrow and creased by time, and to his right a Jaffa who wore a golden symbol at his forehead. O’Neill noticed, barely, that the man had suffered some kind of dreadful injury, an awful burn that looked as if it had turned half his head to blisters.
But what made O’Neill shout was the fact that Samantha Carter was in the picture too.
She was in the front of the shot, as if kneeling before the throne. She looked exhausted, battered, her civilian clothes torn and stained. Her hair was a random mess, some of it glued to her scalp, the rest sticking up wildly. Her eyes were hollow and dark, and there were bruises on her face.
“Carter!” O’Neill bellowed.
“Colonel?” She grinned tiredly. “Oh, thank god!”
“Sam, you’re looking great! Where’s Teal’c?”
“He’s, ah, around, sir.”
As she spoke, the System Lord raised a hand behind her head. The hand was blackened, withered, and wrapped round by the unmistakable gold banding of a ribbon device. The gem at his palm pulsed once.
Carter cried out, and sank out of shot.
“When spoken to,” said the Goa’uld, quite calmly.
“Carter!” O’Neill called again. “You son of a bitch, what did you do?”
“Human,” snarled Hera, “if you speak again I will have your lips sewn shut.”
“But —”
“Do not test me!”
On the screen, Carter was slowly getting back up, wincing. O’Neill relaxed slightly. However, it was now very obvious that she was not among friends.
Still, she was alive, and free from the Pit of Sorrows. That alone was a relief almost too much to bear.
Hera had returned her attention to the screen. “My Lord Neheb-Kau,” she smiled, tipping her head in a slight bow.
“The Lady Serqet.”
Her smile lessened a fraction. “I have not used that name for a long time.”
“Indeed.” His voice was high and whispery, behind the mask. “I knew that you had taken a new identity. I simply had no idea that the change was so… Radical.”
“I made a new start after Setraxis.”
“I wish I had been afforded the same opportunities.”
Hera’s jaw set a little tighter. O’Neill could see that she was struggling for control. It looked to him as if it was something she had to do on a regular basis. “That was a great deal of time ago, my Lord. Ancient history.”
“For you, perhaps.”
“Your memory of that time is no doubt better than mine. We should meet, and combine our recollections.”
O’Neill saw the older man at Neheb-Kau’s side bend slightly to whisper something. As he did, there was a flicker to one side of the screen, and a strip of hieroglyphs appeared.
“Beware, my Lord,” breathed Daniel, translating on the fly. “She seeks to… Um… A tongue of honey, of poison…”
“Lip-reading software?” said O’Neill. “Oh, she’s good…”
The old man straightened. Neheb-Kau’s golden helm tilted a fraction. “There will be no meeting between us, Lady. You divested yourself of the right to speak to me as an equal after Setraxis.”
Hera stiffened. “I see. In which case, if we cannot be civil, at least let us be honest. You have the Ash Eater.”
“And you fear it.”
“Of course I do. Any sane creature fears it. It must be contained, forever. I have the means to do that.”
“You would rob me of my prize, Hera?” The mask’s eye pulsed a glow of white light. “Again?”
“Neheb-Kau, look around you. Your ship is destroyed. You are trapped on a lifeless world with no hope of escape. Hand over the Ash Eater to me, and I will see you and your crew returned safely to your domains.”
Neheb-Kau hissed out a horrible, powdery laugh. “You would assist
me?
”
“Dude, it’s a good offer,” O’Neill called out. “Seriously, it’s nice up here. They’ve got a pool.”
Hera’s shoulders dipped slightly. “As you can see, I have a slight infestation problem.”
“I too. They get everywhere, do they not?”
“My Lord, abandon the Ash Eater. It will bring only suffering.”
The mask turned, side to side. “No. I know you, Hera. I know your deceptions, your manipulations. I have known for a very long time. And you will not rob me of my prize, not again!”
At that, her control finally gave way. “Fool!” she snapped. “Do you not see you have no choice?”
“Choice? You speak to
me
of choice?” He touched a gem at his chest. His helm separated, became a swarm of leaves and blades that whirled apart, shrank away, settled one on another to stack and fold and collapse into his shoulder armor, leaving his head bare.
“You think I chose
this?
” he snarled.
At the sight, Hera recoiled.
O’Neill sucked in a breath. The man’s face was a ruin; tatters of pulpy, oozing flesh layered haphazardly over pitted bone.
His cloudy, lidless eyes glared out from open sockets, and glowed in fury.
“A thousand hosts, Hera! A thousand, dripping off me, one after the other! Do you think I fear you, after such an existence?”
She pointed a shaking finger. “You condemned
yourself
to that life!”
“
It was your fault, you whore!
”
Hera screamed in rage, a deafening, inhuman screech. “Skull-faced lunatic! Give me the Casket!”
“If you want the Ash Eater, come and take it!”
The screen went blank. Hera balled her fists, her whole small body taut with fury. “Pythia!”
“My Lady?”
“I want ten wings of death gliders at the surface, and another ten on point-defense. Six wings of bombers to follow and vaporize anything other than the core. And mobilize the Spartan Guard for ground assault. No survivors!”
“By your will.” The Oracle turned away.
“Hey!” O’Neill shook himself free of the Jaffa holding him. “Come on, you don’t have to do that!”
“You think so? What choice do I have?”
“Plenty,” said Daniel. “Please, Hera, we have friends on this ship. If you can get us in there…”
“You?” Her eyebrows went up somewhere into her hairline. “I should put the galaxy’s fate in
your
hands?”
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” O’Neill muttered.
“We could get onto that ship, hook up with our people and get the Casket for you,” Daniel insisted. “Look, we’re good at this kind of thing. We made it halfway into the
Clythena
before you even noticed.”
“A mistake I do not intend to repeat.” She raised a hand. “Minotaur!”
“Ah, not those guys again…” O’Neill watched the nearest bull-headed Jaffa striding towards him, the horned head a solid half-meter above his own.
“Human, you test my patience. Repeatedly.” She stepped aside to let the Minotaur past. “Luckily for you, I have an abundance of it. So go now, and quietly. This is out of your hands. And I need you out of my sight.”
Had the Minotaur alone been taking O’Neill and Daniel off the pel’tak, he thought, they probably could have just run away. The modified Jaffa were phenomenally strong — O’Neill had a collection of throbbing shoulder muscles that could attest to that — but he doubted they were built for speed. Also, the Minotaur had to keep ducking to avoid catching its brass horns on the roof braces. In a sprint, O’Neill would lay serious money down that the Jaffa would eventually miss a brace and end up flat on its back.
Regrettably, Hera seemed to be of the same opinion. She sent four hoplites with them.
O’Neill had wondered if he was going to be zatted unconscious again, but that did not happen. Instead, he found himself and Daniel being marched swiftly along one of the ship’s open thoroughfares, with the Minotaur at his back and four hoplites surrounding them. The glowing
faux
sky of the corridor ceiling had, he noticed, turned from its normal glowing blue to a sullen, stormy red, obviously to denote that the ship was at battle stations. “Neat. I think I saw them do that in Vegas.”
Alongside him, Daniel was more jittery than he had seen him in a long time. “Jack, what the hell are we going to do?”
“I’m working on it.”
“Well, can you work faster? I don’t know who the Spartan Guard are, but I can kinda guess restraint isn’t in their training.”
“Look, Sam and Teal’c have made it this far.”
“And I’m glad to know they’re okay too. I mean seriously, you’ve no idea how relieved I am. But they’re going to find themselves in the middle of a war really soon.”
“You think I don’t know that?” O’Neill gave Daniel a hard look, and lowered his voice to a hiss. “And as soon as we can, we’ll get out of here and help them. Okay? I’m just waiting for the right moment.”
There was a shout from behind him. “Jaffa!”
The whole group, Jaffa and humans alike, turned as one.
Bra’tac stood in the centre of the corridor, next to the last junction they had passed. His staff weapon was across his back on a makeshift sling, and he had a zat gun in each hand.
“Surrender!” he bellowed.
The hoplites dropped into a fighting stance, perfectly synchronized. Their left arms came up, shields whirling into being, their spears leveled and snapped open with an electric hiss. At their back, the Minotaur lowered its head, fists clenched and its great horns glinting.
It was an impressive display, O’Neill thought. It would have been even more impressive had he and Daniel not, in the heat of the moment, been completely forgotten.
Maybe Bra’tac was too honorable to attack a man whose back was turned. Jack O’Neill wasn’t. As the old Jaffa fired, the two zat guns snarling out their blue beams in unison, he slammed the heavy sole of his boot into the back of a hoplite’s knee.
The man stumbled. O’Neill grabbed him, threw his weight into him to push him even further off balance, and spun the man into the wall. Next to him, Daniel had his arms around a hoplite’s neck, pulling him backwards.
One of the front two hoplites was already down; Bra’tac had aimed the beam perfectly over the top edge of his shield to catch him in the face. The second beam had caromed wildly off a shield and into the ceiling, but Bra’tac was already firing again, and the man O’Neill had attacked was struck as he staggered back across the corridor. He collapsed, covered in sparks, but his companions were already firing a stream of staff bolts up the corridor. Bra’tac dodged back around the junction, began to fire swiftly and accurately around the corner.
O’Neill put his shoulder down and body-slammed the hoplite Daniel was hanging onto, trying to get him off-balance too, but the man must have been either stronger or better prepared. He whipped around, shrugging Daniel off and slamming his shield into him, crushing him against the wall.
The staff whipped towards O’Neill, the wicked blades at its tip glinting. O’Neill dodged back to avoid being eviscerated, ducked under the next blow and came in past the staff to strike the man hard in the arm with the edge of his hand.
It wasn’t the most effective place he could have struck the Jaffa, but there was a lot of armor to get past. It made the warrior recoil slightly, though, which was all Bra’tac needed to put a zat beam into him.
Daniel was slumping down the wall. O’Neill grabbed his arm and pulled him up. “You okay?”
“Couldn’t be better…”
Massive footfalls were hammering away up the corridor. O’Neill looked up to see the Minotaur charging towards Bra’tac, head down, fists swinging. Watching it, he realized that he had been wrong to think he could have outrun the monster. It was a lot quicker than it looked.