Daniel stood with his hands raised, with Jack and Bra’tac just behind him. Jack had demanded to stand at the group’s head at first, but Daniel had reminded him that, for whatever reason, many of Hera’s flirtations had been directed towards him. Besides, if the message failed, and the hoplites did start firing, it really wouldn’t make any difference who was in front.
So he stood, very still, trying not to look at the lethal energies coursing between those glittering spear-blades.
After a few seconds, Pythia entered, her scarlet gown rustling in the silence. She gazed wordlessly at Daniel, then at the screen. “You are Samantha Carter.”
Sam still had the channel open. “I am.”
“You will present your data to me. If I determine it to be unsatisfactory, you will watch your friends die, in this room. There will be no appeal and no delay. Do you understand?”
“I’ll patch it through,” Sam replied, very quietly.
Her face vanished from the screen, replaced by the data she had collected.
The Oracle watched it in silence. When she reached the end of the sequence, she simply said “Again.”
After the second time, she made her way to a chair and sat down.
“It’s real,” Daniel began.
“Be silent.”
“Pythia, there may not be much time —”
“Be
silent!
” She covered her face with one hand, just for a moment, a brief weakness that she shook away almost instantly. “The rest of the data. The shell’s full structure, fracture points, analysis of the suppression field. Do you have this?”
“I do,” Sam confirmed.
“Send it through.”
“No.”
Pythia turned to the screen. “Send it to me or your friends —”
“What part of ‘No’ don’t you quite grasp, Pythia?” Sam’s face was set hard. “You’ll allow us safe passage onto your ship. I’ll be carrying the data with me. You’ll get it when we meet.”
Jack stepped past Daniel. “C’mon, lady, what do you think we’re trying to do here?”
“The Goddess will not allow this.”
“She will,” Daniel said gently. “Pythia, if this works, it’s the end of her nightmare.”
“And if it does not?”
“Then I guess it won’t matter, will it?”
The woman held his gaze for a moment, then looked back to the screen. “Very well. Bring your craft to within fifty kilometers of the
Cly
thena
. We will take control from there and bring you aboard.” She reached out to a control, and the screen went dead. “And Daniel?”
“Uh, yeah?”
“If this plan of yours kills us all, the Lady Hera will be
very
displeased.”
They watched the Khepesh come in, up through the shielded floor of the same hangar deck the troop transports had left from. Daniel thought back to when he and his shipmates had been remotely piloted into the
Clythena
in much the same way. It seemed like an eternity ago, although it probably hadn’t been more than a few hours.
Jack gave a low whistle when they saw the state of the scout ship. “Bra’tac? I thought you said that thing was fragile?”
“With any less a pilot at the helm, it would be.”
Far below them, on the landing gantry, the Khepesh was settling itself into a clamp. A hatch opened in its flank and two figures clambered out — one small and clad in a stained white cotton shirt and jeans, the other larger and dressed mainly in black. Both paused for a moment, obviously surprised by the dozens of scorch marks and craters melted into the hull of their vessel, and then carried on up the gantry towards the squad of hoplite waiting for them.
“Those are your friends,” said Pythia quietly.
“That’s them.” Daniel watched her from the corner of his eye.
She lifted a hand to the transparency. “You travelled far for them.”
“It’s what friends do.”
“I know. For Hera, I would…” She trailed off, and then straightened, suddenly all business. “We must go. Soon it will not be safe here.”
Alarm klaxons began to sound as they reached the corridor that lead to the pel’tak, the dull ringing of some huge and distant bell. “What’s that?” Daniel asked, a knot of worry forming under his ribs.
“The lower decks are being cleared,” Pythia told him. “The Auger releases terrible energies as it is fired.”
“You can control it from the pel’tak?”
“Of course. There is a shielded control module within the Auger itself, but anyone outside of that would be fatally irradiated.”
“That doesn’t sound good,” said Sam, emerging from the junction.
Teal’c was at her side, and a dozen hoplites at their back. Daniel grinned. “Hey guys.”
“Hey.” She was smiling, but he could see that she was just a wisp of herself. The journey had been long and hard for all of them, but only Sam and Teal’c had spent a day shut away with the Ash Eater, locked into a flying tomb and surrounded by the dust of unnumbered corpses. For all Hera’s seductive menace, Daniel couldn’t help feeling that he’d had by far the easier time of things.
He reached out to her.
“Save your displays of affection,” Pythia snapped. “The Goddess awaits us.”
Sam gave the other woman a sour look. “Well, we wouldn’t want to keep her waiting, would we?”
Pythia stalked off, and opened the hatch that lead onto the pel’tak.
Hera was waiting for them, up on her throne. Her face was pale, unsmiling. Pythia had reported back to her from the monitoring chamber, while they had waited for the Khepesh to be brought aboard, and the news had obviously affected her.
Four Spartan Guard had joined her pel’tak crew, and stood grimly to either side of her throne. A Minotaur was directly behind her, massive arms folded, brass horns lowered.
“Well,” she said, as they filed in. “I see you have some new friends, Pythia.”
The Oracle dropped to her knees before Hera. “My Lady.”
Hera got up, and walked slowly down the steps of her podium. “Daniel,” she purred. “Of course you could not stay away. Still looking for someone to scratch that itch?”
“Well, you do have
something
I want.”
“So I have heard.” She moved past him, to where Teal’c and Bra’tac stood. “The First Prime of Apophis,” she said, looking up at Teal’c. “And
a
nother
First Prime of Apophis. I wonder if he makes wiser choices now?”
“No choice Apophis makes is wise,” growled Teal’c.
“I shall be sure to inform him of that. And you,” she said to Bra’tac. “You evaded capture aboard my flagship for many hours.”
“It was not difficult.” The old Jaffa kept his gaze fixed, looking clear over the top of her head. “Your vessel is large, and your men are ill-trained.”
“I shall be taking that into account, I assure you.” She tilted her head quizzically at him. “Perhaps, if you were to train them in place of my
Lokhago
s…”
“I no longer serve false gods.”
“He said that too, at first.” She turned away from him. “Daniel, you do keep most remarkable company.”
“I like to think so.” He rubbed his neck, ever so slightly embarrassed. “Hera, I don’t know how much time we have —”
“Indeed. There is a time for slow examination, and a time for haste. You strike me as a man who knows the difference. Which of you has the data?”
Sam put a hand up. “I have.”
“The woman. Of course.” Hera held out her hand. “Why am I not surprised?”
Everything Sam had collected was stored in a small, green crystal. Daniel watched her place it carefully into Hera’s palm.
The Goa’uld took it, moved to a nearby console, and leaned across its operator to slot the crystal into a gold cylinder. “Decode this,” she whispered.
“My Lady.” The operator’s hands roamed over his control board. Hera stood back, watching him, until the viewport at the front of the pel’tak faded from the black of space into a pale blue screen, coursing with data.
For the next few minutes Hera stood in silence, watching what Pythia had watched: the inside of the hollow world, the singularity at its heart, the forests of Ash Eaters, curled like dusty maggots tethered to the interior of their gnawed-out world and drifting slowly on their umbilicals, their backs to their ticking black hole. Dormant, dead, utterly inert, but awaiting the first flash of radiation which would awaken them, send them out, mindless and voracious, to strip the galaxy of energy just as Ra’s demon had stripped Greg Kemp and Laura Miles and all the countless victims of the Pit of Sorrows.
“One was enough,” Hera breathed. “Just one, enough to strip a world…”
“Setraxis?” Sam asked.
“Yes. Ra had called a summit of the System Lords. I was at his side. Neheb-Kau unleashed the Ash Eater on us…” She turned to look back at Daniel, her expression haunted, horrified. “It was like a storm. He loosed a storm on us.”
“Ra got it into the Pit of Sorrows, though, didn’t he?” he asked. “Couldn’t we use the same method he did?”
“There was no method.” Her voice was bitter. “It was caught in a transport beam, by sheer fluke. Ra used a Ha’tak’s weight in naquadah merely to keep it there, while Neheb-Kau’s ka’epta were tortured into building the Pit for him.”
“Hera,” Sam said, moving over to the console. “That one must have gone into the singularity with the ship it destroyed. But the others will wake unless we send them there too.”
“Yes…” The Goa’uld nodded. “Show me.”
Sam studied the console for a moment, then pressed an icon. The image on the screen changed to that of a sphere, its surface split into triangles. “Each of these apexes marks one of the gravity tethers. The system is in equilibrium now, but if we hit the three I’ve highlighted, the planetary crust will collapse into the singularity.”
“Why those specifically?”
“Because as the tethers shear, there’ll be a gravitational torsion, like a rubber band being snapped back.”
“I know what gravitational torsion is, human,” Hera frowned. “But a ‘rubber band’?”
“Carter?” That was Jack. “I get the ‘rubber band’ part…”
Sam made an exasperated noise. “Look, if we do this right, the planet will start to shift out of its orbit as the singularity and the crust try to move against each other. If the right tethers are cut, the whole mess will eventually wind up crashing into the sun, too. Which will then collapse and make the singularity even bigger.”
“And the bigger it is, the longer it lasts?”
“Bingo.”
“I hate your language,” Hera muttered. “I really do. Operator? Upload this information to Auger control. Tell them to initiate charging immediately.”
“By your will.”
“Pythia?”
The Oracle stood. “My Lady.”
“Go to my sister. Make sure she is safe, and ready. With the lower decks evacuated,
Clythena
will not be able to flee should this plan fail.”
“Sorry, what?” Daniel stared at her. “What do you mean?”
She smirked at him. “Forgive me, Daniel, did you not realize?
Clythena
is no Ha’tak. It cannot be operated purely by the pel’tak crew — if the hyperdrives and primary thrusters are not continually manned, they cannot function.”
“So if anything goes wrong, we’re stuck here.”
“Yes.” She touched Pythia on the arm, then watched the red-clad woman hurry away. “But you believe your plans to be flawless, do you not?”
“No plan is flawless,” Teal’c intoned.
“No mortal plan, perhaps.” Hera trotted back up to her throne, and settled into it. “Operator?”
“Your will is in motion, Lady. The Auger is charging, and the targeting co-ordinates set.”
There was a shiver in the deck, a faint vibration. Daniel felt the flagship start to turn around him. “We’re moving.”
“The Auger has taken control of Clythena’s maneuvering thrusters,” said Hera. “We are being positioned over the first target point. In eleven of your minutes, the Auger will fire its first pulse.”
He turned to the others. “So I guess we just kick back until then.”
There was a sound from behind him, a whistling scrape of blade on blade. He turned to see the ceiling iris open and the transport rings drop. “What the hell?”
Hera was on her feet too. “Guards! Unauthorized transport on the pel’tak!”
Light flared down into the rings, solidified into the shape of a man. Daniel peered through the cage and saw that the man was holding something.
He opened his mouth to shout a warning, but never got to utter it. A hellish, impossible explosion hammered out from the transporter, flooding the pel’tak with intolerable light and unimaginable sound.
The force of it drove Daniel to his knees. Distantly he could hear screams and shouts around him, but he couldn’t see. His brain felt as if it was on fire, every neuron screaming. He was dimly aware that he had his hands clamped over his ears, his eyes squeezed shut, trying to block the sensations out, but they were flooding in through the skin.
A few more beats of his leaping heart, and the light faded.
Daniel tried to scramble to his feet, but the assault had deadened his nerves. He looked up, squinting through watering eyes, to the podium.
Hera was standing to one side of the throne. There was a man next to her, robed in black, old and hook-nosed, his left arm wrapped brutally around her head. He was holding what looked like a black metal cobra in his right hand, the tail of it coiled around his forearm, the fanged head at Hera’s throat.
“Stay on your knees, scum! Or your Goddess dies!”
“It’s Djetec,” grated Sam. “Neheb-Kau’s vizier.”
“Friend of yours?”
“What’s the word that’s the exact opposite of ‘friend’, again?”
“Silence!” The man dragged Hera back a few paces. His grip on her looked agonizing, and there was fear mixed with the fury in her gray eyes. “The asp holds toxin. Attack me and she will be dead in seconds. Do not test my resolve!”