STARGATE SG-1: Oceans of Dust (40 page)

“Try.” Carter tapped at the board’s icons. A small, globe-shaped control rose from within the metal, and a secondary screen turned from glyph-strewn blue to pure black.

There were stars on it.

“You are valuable to me, human. Your expertise in restoring the Casket was instrumental in the glorious destruction of Hera’s army.”

“Oh, I can’t take all the credit for that.” Carter twisted the globe, the view on her screen swung about, to show the damaged Ha’tak racing past, trailing fire. “Besides, she seems to have quite a bit in reserve.”

“The Ash Eater is still growing in power.”

That was probably true, Carter thought grimly. When she had encountered it, a few drops of five thousand year-old Lure had been enough to keep it trapped in an open Casket, and to draw its attention from human meals only meters away. Now it was stripping the power from entire starships.

If it continued to feed, just how powerful would it grow?

“It was stopped once. It will be again.”

“By who? You? Hera, the great deceiver?” He laughed. “Human, return to my side. It is the only chance you have for survival.”

Carter rotated the view again, pointing the pickup directly aft. She stifled a curse. Four death gliders were pacing the Khepesh, surrounding a broad arrowhead of dull silver metal. The God’s private vessel.

“Sorry, Neheb-Kau. I’d rather take my chances with the Ash Eater.” She pondered for a moment. “Actually, I’d rather
kiss
the Ash Eater.”

Neheb-Kau’s mask tilted slightly. “In which case, I bid you farewell.”

The screen went blank. There was a moment of silence.

“He’s not just going to go away, is he,” said Carter finally.

“No,” Teal’c replied. “He is not.”

Weapons fire slammed into the scout’s hull. On the screen, the arrowhead was emitting streams of plasma bolts, and Carter could see them ripping past the cockpit, twin rivers of energy.

Teal’c hauled on the controls. Carter felt the scout drop away under her, clamped her stomach muscles tight to counter the acceleration effects. Behind her, the four gliders raced in close pursuit, sending out flaring bolts from their staff cannons.

The Khepesh shook again. It felt as though someone was kicking Carter’s control seat, hard, every time a bolt struck the hull. “Are they faster than us?”

“Considerably.”

The clouds rose up and wiped choking billows across the cockpit. Carter felt the ship swerve violently to starboard, as Teal’c took advantage of the visual cover to try and throw the gliders off track.

She looked at the screen. The ruse wasn’t working. “I think they can still see us!”

Another impact, this one sending up a sheet of sparks from behind the seats. Outside the cockpit, the clouds thinned and vanished, leaving the pocked surface of the Ash Eater’s world spreading in every direction.

A great shadow, flickering with light, thundered down through the clouds to Carter’s left, keeping pace with the scout. Debris was falling from it in a steady rain, burning and twisting away in long, random arcs.

Teal’c suddenly dragged the controls sideways, sending the scout heeling violently to port. Carter saw the shadow loom close, its ragged edge tearing out through the clouds, and realized that it was the Ha’tak

The gliders were a few hundred meters behind, twisting and jinking and gouting streams of plasma from their wing cannons. There was another hit, and another. “Teal’c, I think we’re in serious trouble.”

“I agree.” He shoved the controls forwards, pointing the scout at the ground.

Carter saw black hills hurtling up at her, then she was being jammed back into her seat as the ship pulled up at the last second. She glanced down at the rear view, saw nothing but a racing cloud of dust. Then a brief flash of yellow fire, fading instantly into the distance. “One didn’t pull up in time.”

Above them, the Ha’tak was spinning down through the ashy air like a burning tornado. It was huge, terrifying. Carter could feel the heat of its fires through the cockpit transparency.

The scout leapt forwards, some kind of emergency thrust, then swung ahead of the tumbling ruin. Carter watched the death gliders follow, one misjudging its altitude and shattering against the dusty ground, another swept to oblivion by the falling wreck. Then a blast of plasma fire spattered the scout from wing to cockpit, and it flipped over.

The black ground whirled towards her. There was a massive, sickening impact as the ship struck the edge of a crater, flipped up again in time for her to see the vast, burning edge of the Ha’tak bearing inexorably down on them, and then everything went dark.

Utter blackness had closed around her like a fist. “What? Teal’c, what happened?”

He didn’t answer. On Carter’s screen, a wireframe cylinder was expanding, ring after ring.

There was a shaft at the base of the crater, a vertical tunnel a hundred meters across. Teal’c had managed to guide the scout into it at the last second, and now they were flying straight down into the planet’s crust.

According to her sensor board, the shaft was perfectly regular, perfectly vertical.
Not a volcano, then.

Without warning, the rings of light on her board vanished. “What the hell?”

The sensor feed was still pointing aft. The picture was mainly black, but there was a disc of brightening gold at its centre. For a moment the perspective was too confusing. Carter simply couldn’t work out what she was looking at.

Then the view flipped in her head. The circle was the shaft, and the ship was still flying straight downwards. “It’s opened out! We’re in a cavern… Teal’c, level up, fast!

The entire roof of the cavern erupted inwards, a titan explosion of rock and metal, of flame and dust.

The Ha’tak had slammed with unimaginable force into the surface, so hard and so fast that it had erupted clear through the kilometers of rock surrounding the tunnel entrance. Carter saw an immense wheel of shattering white metal and fire crashing over her, spinning and splintering and shedding tons of burning armor as it fell.

The inferno whirled past, tipping over and over, the unbearable brightness of it lighting up the inside of the cavern for kilometers in every direction. Great shards of rock spun in its wake, curving fragments of eggshell stone tumbling in every direction like black comets with tails of ash and smoke. Teal’c was flinging the Khepesh around to avoid the more massive pieces, but tons of the stuff were still coming down, boulders battering the scout’s hull with terrifying, drumbeat impacts.

The mothership was past them now, falling away, still spinning like a great blazing wheel. Carter held her breath, waiting for it to hit the cavern floor. She couldn’t believe the size of the space they had flown into: the Ha’tak was covering kilometers every second as it fell, and still it had not struck ground.

When the light of it shrank to a whorl of yellow flame no bigger than her fist, Carter finally grasped the truth, and a sickening wave of vertigo washed up from her feet to her gut, to her head. She grabbed the seat arms hard, so hard her knuckles flared in pain.

There was no floor. The scout hung over a drop of unthinkable proportions. “Teal’c, where the hell are we?”

Above her, great sections of the planet’s crust were still breaking away, tumbling down from the ragged, glowing edges of a hole the size of a small town. A fragment thumped down onto the scout’s viewport, and Carter caught a glimpse of it as it slid away. A curl of gray stone, trailing something that looked like a thick, papery length of rope.

“Oh no,” she breathed. Then: “Teal’c, can you hover this thing? I need to see the cavern roof.”

“I do not believe we are in a cavern, Major Carter.”

Neither did she, not anymore, but she didn’t want to say what she was thinking. She couldn’t, not yet. “Please, Teal’c.”

The scout rose, slowly, the engines throttled back until they were idling. Teal’c touched a control, and an oval of light appeared in the distance. He’d activated a searchlight, and it was touching the roof of the place.

It grew as the ship rose, brightened, solidified. Carter watched it, her heart hammering, watched it picking out rounded edges, curls of pale rock, an inverted forest of drifting, tethered forms.

“Major Carter? What have you seen?”

“Teal’c, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry…” Her voice was very small, out here in the endless dark. “But I don’t think we can go home just yet.”

Neheb-Kau was wrong. He had been wrong about almost everything. Carter almost wished the Goa’uld was still around, so she could tell him just how catastrophically wrong he was.

Not that it would have made her feel any better. But it might have made him feel worse, if he was capable of feeling anything at all.

The Khepesh was flying under the roof. She could no longer think of the space she was in as a cavern, but somehow it was difficult to come up with another term that fitted the facts. If she thought too hard about where she and Teal’c actually were, it set her exhausted mind whirling in her skull, fascination and terror and sheer vertigo battling for supremacy within her. The concept of the fragile roof above her, and the endless tumbling darkness below, were almost too much to grasp.

She had no choice, though. The facts were indisputable — she
was inside a hollow world, an eggshell-thin crust of rock over a sphere of pure vacuum as big as the Earth, and letting her mind slip away from that was doing her no good at all.

“Major Carter,” Teal’c warned. “We are approaching the tower.”

“Great. Slow down when you get within a hundred meters, and I’ll get some more detailed readings.”

At first, Carter had found the very concept of a hollow world ridiculous. The shaft had only been two kilometers deep at most, and the most basic knowledge of physics told her that a planet-sized shell that thin would shatter instantly into gravel under its own forces. Its rotation would spin it apart, the gravity of the sun would tear it to pieces. It was impossible, despite what her eyes told her.

But the further they had travelled, the more she had learned. For a start, the crust was only that thin around the entry tunnels, which were spaced regularly over the planet’s surface. At other points it was almost a hundred kilometers thick, and the intervening spaces were braced by vast spars and bridges of rock, like the internal structure of a bone. This shell of a world, she had realized, was no accident. It had been designed, carefully and expertly, to hold itself in stable equilibrium for tens of thousands of years.

She felt the scout pull back slightly, deceleration tugging at her as Teal’c throttled back the drives even more. The tower her initial scans had detected was just ahead, rising like a mountain from the inside of the crust, pointing towards the centre of the hollow world. It was unthinkably vast, as wide at its base as a small country, so long that it could not possibly have supported its own weight in any other environment than this.

The Khepesh leveled out over the pitted surface of the tower and began to fly along its length. It was too huge to be seen as a cylinder. It was a flat road, an endless metal plateau, stretching away into darkness on either side.

“There,” Carter said, pointing past Teal’c’s seat and through the cockpit viewports. “You see that?”

In the far distance, something sparkled with a faint, silver-blue light.

“Indeed,” Teal’c replied. “Is that the singularity?”

“I think so.”

“So your theories are confirmed.”

Carter rubbed the back of her neck. The muscles there were locked, almost numb from tension. “Pretty much. I’ll run some scans of the suppression field once we reach a thinner part of the tower, but I don’t think there’s any doubt now. The clock’s ticking.”

“How long do we have?”

“Hours.” Then, she thought, the wreckage of the Ha’tak would reach the singularity, be crushed into an infinitesimal speck and join the mass of the black hole that hovered, glittering with Hawking radiation, at the heart of the hollow world. When that happened, the energy from that collision, and from the untold tons of rock that had fallen from the crust and followed it down, would release a brutal flash of radiation.

It would not be nearly as much as the final demise of the black hole would cause, when it finally evaporated. But it would be enough. The sea of papery, mummified fetuses tethered over the inner surface of the crust, million upon million of them, would detect it.

And the Ash Eaters would start to wake up.

The
troop carriers were like great covered triremes of marble and bronze, their prows raised and decorated with
opthalmoi
. Looking down at them, Daniel could see rank after rank of Spartan Guard filing up their loading ramps, cloaked in scarlet, armored head to foot in shining gold. They carried longer, heavier versions of the hoplite staff weapons, and tall crests on their enclosed helms. They looked strong and fast and utterly ruthless.

And there were a
lot
of them. A hundred or more in each transport.

He sighed, and turned away from the viewport. “Anything?”

On the other side of the chamber, Bra’tac was hunched over a communications board, his hand resting on an indented block of silvery metal, a look of furious concentration on his face. “When I hear anything of interest, Doctor Jackson, be assured I will let you know.”

Daniel nodded. And, not for the first time, felt very helpless indeed.

The chamber was part of a monitoring station, one of many overlooking one of the
Clythena
’s great hangar decks. The original plan was for the three of them to steal a ship and escape the vessel, somehow tracking down Sam and Teal’c before the Spartan guard reached Neheb-Kau’s fallen starship. But that had proved impossible, given that the flagship had been put on full alert almost immediately after they had fought their way to freedom.