SG1-15 The Power Behind the Throne (12 page)

And a moment later the Stargate reformed it and he stepped out into darkness. Physically sick and reeling, Daniel fell to his knees and clutched at his stomach, retching. Without thinking he released the clasps sealing his helmet and barely managed to throw it aside before he dry heaved.

Sam came through a moment later, managed three awkward steps and collapsed at the bottom of the Stargate. He crawled over to where she lay and saw her clawing at her helmet. He helped work the clasps loose and pulled it off. She tried to speak but couldn’t. Her mouth moved but she choked on the breath and the words, not managing either in her need to do both.

“It’s all right,” Daniel said, trying to calm her. “We’re all right.”

Sam stared up at him, wild-eyed. “What happened?” she managed before a brutal coughing fit wracked her body.

“I was going to ask you,” Daniel said.

“Where are we?” Sam asked when she finally stopped coughing.

“That was another one I was kinda banking on you answering,” Daniel said, looking around them. There wasn’t a lot to see. Wherever they were, it wasn’t Kansas — or Colorado Springs for that matter. Before she could answer, the Mujina came through the gate. It faired no better, managing four steps forward before it lurched off violently to the right, stumbled and fell. A pitiful whine escaped its lips as it lay there.

The gate provided the only source of light; it was enough to see the sheen of ice frosting the bare stone walls of the cavern. The walls were rough-hewn, blasted out of the ground with explosives — he could see the long thin drill lines where they had been planted. There were thirteen identical lines, each perfectly smooth, that seemed to be carved into the rock while all around them the stone was jagged from where it had been broken away by the blast. It suggested a basic level of technological development not dissimilar to Earth’s, give or take a century or so. Daniel’s breath misted in front of his face. Already the blonde tips of Sam’s hair had whitened as the frost thickened. The ghostly blue light of the gate only served to make it feel colder still.

Teal’c was the last through the Stargate, carrying O’Neill in his arms. He walked resolutely forward, placing each footstep with exaggerated care, and then knelt to lay O’Neill down before he buckled and slumped against the wall. None of them said anything for the longest time. The confines of the chamber echoed with the sounds of their ragged breathing. O’Neill groaned but didn’t move.

“This is not Stargate Command,” Teal’c said, removing the clasps that fastened his helmet. He put it aside.

“What happened?” Daniel asked, crawling over to be beside O’Neill.

“The damage from the Goa’uld weapon tore open O’Neill’s suit, exposing him to the worst of the sun’s radiation and heat of the burning sky.”

“Will he be all right?”

“I do not know, Daniel Jackson.”

“I’m just toasty,” Jack grunted. He still hadn’t opened his eyes. “So stop talking about me like I am dead. Now would someone like to tell me where the hell we are?”

“We’re in some sort of ice cavern, that’s about as much as I’ve been able to work out,” Daniel offered. “There’s evidence that whoever excavated the cavern used explosives, which suggests we’re talking about a society advanced enough to have mastered gunpowder and dynamite.”

“Great. So let’s hope they don’t want to try out their flash bangs on us, shall we?” Jack struggled to sit up. Teal’c helped support him. “Carter, how are you doing?”

Sam lay on her side, looking up at them. She did her best to smile. It was a weak effort. “I’ve been better, sir”.

“Any idea what happened back there?”

“Something must have interfered with the wormhole,” she suggested. “The gate must have lost its connection and leapt to the nearest possible alternative device, in other words we’re very lucky we didn’t just frazzle out of existence.”

“Is that even possible?” O’Neill asked. “I mean for the wormhole to jump like that? I thought these things were locked in once a connection was established.”

“I don’t know, sir, until about ten minutes ago I would have said it couldn’t happen, but that was ten minutes ago. Now I’m not so sure. It’s theoretically possible that something might have interfered with the gate’s link, I suppose. To put it crudely, if you think about the quantum ‘road’ between two gates being like a piece of string, it’s conceivable that it could become tangled or simply twisted off true. That could theoretically have an impact on the quantum traveler, but while that impact would be enough to be measurable the kind of temporal shift would be so miniscule we’d barely notice it without some pretty sensitive equipment.”

“So we’re not talking about a black hole effect here?” Jack asked.

“I don’t think so, sir. But…” Sam broke off as the gate closed and left them in darkness. “You might not be so far off there, sir. We know that the immense gravitational pull of a black hole can affect how time is experienced in its vicinity, its appetite is voracious, it’s trying to consume everything around it.”

“Like a hungry Pac Man,” Jack agreed, nodding.

Daniel did his best to follow the leaps of logic, but Sam’s understanding of the universe was so utterly alien to him she might as well have been speaking a different language. Of course, she was, in a way. She was talking about the building blocks of creation, using the language of the creator.

“Exactly. So what if the gravitational pull was so great it could somehow drag the quantum ‘road’ off true, ripping the wormhole away from the gate that originally anchored it?”

“I don’t like the sound of this,” Daniel said.

“Teal’c,” Sam said, “could the signal be bounced from one gate to another if the connection is lost?”

“I have not heard of such a thing, Major Carter.”

“But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen,” Sam finished, as much for her own benefit as for the others. She was growing more and more animated as the science unfolded for her. “It would take an incredible burst of energy along the quantum ‘road’ to cause the wormhole’s path to deviate. But a strong enough gravitational pull could conceivably wrench the event horizon free of the gate. It would need to be incredible though. “

“How incredible?”

“A star going super nova, maybe,” Carter offered.

“Right, that sort of incredible.”

“Loose, I would imagine there’s a fraction of time before the energy dissipates completely in which the quantum ‘road’ is lashing about like a garden hose on full power, and that’s the window of opportunity for it to fasten on to another gate. Once the window’s past, it’s gone, the energy swarming down the wormhole loses its bond, and whatever was traveling down the wormhole is little more than dust on the wind.”

Jack pushed himself up to his feet. He swayed awkwardly for a moment, before Daniel reached out to offer him a steadying hand, and then walked across to the DHD. “Can we get some light in here?”

Daniel obliged, taking a small mag-lite from his pocket and shining it down on the panel of the DHD. Jack punched in each of the seven co-ordinates to take them back home, but the last one refused to lock down. The gate lay stubbornly dormant. He punched in each of the symbols again. “I suppose that was always going to be too much to ask for,” Jack said with a shrug. He knew it was a long shot that they’d stayed on Vasaveda. Unfortunately he didn’t know where they were, and without the glyph for the point of origin they couldn’t dial out. It was as simple as that. “So, Major Carter, how do we go about finding our way home?”

“Without the point of origin, we can’t,” she said, putting it succinctly.

It was like hearing the first nail being driven into their coffins.

“Then we need to find the point of origin. Simple,” Jack said, knowing it was anything but.

In that long sliding moment of terrible emptiness General George Hammond stared at the silent Stargate. He hadn’t raised his voice. He had simply told the team around him to get his people back. It was the easiest thing to say and the hardest thing to do. He ground his teeth, a nervous habit. He could feel the adrenalin pounding in the room but it was deathly silent. That silence was only broken by the flutter of fingers over the keys of the many keyboards or the sudden impact of a fist being hammered off the workstation as a million to one chance went the way of the other nine hundred and ninety nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety nine and came to nothing. Failure was hard to take. The ground crew were stretched emotionally and physically, being pulled every which way by the demands of the machines and the impossibility of the task. It was hopeless and they knew it, but not one of them was prepared to admit it, even to themselves. It was the fundamental truth of the military ethic: no man gets left behind. They were clinging to one slim possibility: that the team hadn’t been in transit when the gate went down. Anything else meant they weren’t lost in any way that they could be found again. They needed to believe that SG-1 were still out there somewhere. That need ensured that there wasn’t a single voice of dissent in the room.

Hammond watched his people — and they were his people every bit as much as any one of the SG teams — and knew he couldn’t make the call. Not while there was still a chance.

The irony that the one woman smart enough to figure out what the hell had just happened was on the wrong end of the wormhole wasn’t lost on Hammond.

He stared through the window at the gate. No matter how hard he willed the unstable vortex to rip out from its center he knew the reality of what that would mean: another incoming signal — and any trace of what was Jack and the others, gone.

General Hammond had looked at the artifact a thousand thousand times without seeing beyond the unearthly Naqahdah and the iconographic symbols of the Milky Way’s constellations.

Part of him had always known that this day would come, but that didn’t mean he was ready for it. It was strange; the program had lost men before. But this was different.

Hammond checked his watch. The iris had been open for a minute under three hours. It was a calculated risk but there had to be a point where risk outweighed reward. There were protocols in place that prevented him from leaving the Stargate open indefinitely, protocols he had every intention of following once the second hand completed its final circuit. They hadn’t been able to re-establish contact and they didn’t dare risk leaving the gate open much longer for fear of what might come through.

He picked up the intercom relay and stopped himself. He couldn’t give the order.

He licked his lips. They were parched, rough and sore. It was as though all of the moisture had been sucked out of the air. Right then, at that moment as they hit the three hour mark, Hammond was engulfed by the overwhelming feeling that closing the iris meant giving up on O’Neill and the others, and he wasn’t prepared to do that.

Not yet.

“One more hour,” he said, thinking to hell with the protocols, O’Neill was one resourceful son of a bitch, he’d find a way home. Hammond needed to believe that, but that hour came and past. None of the ground staff had left their positions. None of them had given up hope or stopped trying to carry out that one simple order despite the obvious truth that it was always going to evade them. And it didn’t matter; all of that stubbornness, all of that faith, didn’t amount to a hill of beans. Hammond knew he was going to have to place the calls to next of kin because the threshold between rational risk and irrational hope had been crossed. SG-1 weren’t coming home.

“Close the iris, soldier,” he said.

He couldn’t bring himself to watch the heavy metal shield lock into place over the gate. It didn’t matter to him that the iris could be opened again the instant they picked up an incoming signal. Seeing it close was symbolic. It felt like he was giving up on them.

They performed running repairs as they made ready to strike out from the cavern. Jack iced the burns on the back of his leg, using a large chip of ice he had broken away from the run-off. Daniel sat with the Mujina, seemingly captivated by it. Carter couldn’t hear what, if anything, the creature said to him. She didn’t need to. She remembered all too vividly the face it had chosen to show her.

The sadness in her eyes had been the sadness of a military wife, the warmth in her smile the warmth of a mother. The worst of it was that she knew she was beginning to forget what she looked like — little things at first, details becoming blurred and almost ghostly as she tried to remember them, and then bigger things. If she closed her eyes all sorts of faces blended in her memory, but each belonged to her mother at different points in her life, it was only when they came together that they fused into something that wasn’t quite right. That was the tragedy of time — it healed wounds because it took away the sharpness of memory. Things lost their definition. Faces lost their shape. But there was one constant: her voice. It was almost as though auditory memory was somehow more faithful. Sam remembered exactly how her mother’s voice sounded because it had never changed, never aged. It was the same the first time she heard it as it was the last.

So when the Mujina had spoken to her in her mother’s voice,
it had been exactly as she remembered it. The face had been wrong, mixing the features of the young mother with the more careworn frown of the frustrated soccer mom waiting outside the strip mall for Jacob to come and pick her up. It was like looking at one of those curious morphed pictures of a face through the filter of age, gradually and subtly changing to appear older and older — until it just stopped aging.