SG1-15 The Power Behind the Throne (16 page)

“Ah, I think the planet’s called Kumara by the locals,” Daniel offered.

“Great. Teal’c, ring any bells?”

The big man shook his head. “I do not believe so. Once, perhaps, before I took the ritual of prim’tah and was apprenticed to Bra’tac, but the memory may not be my own so I cannot say with any certainty, O’Neill. One must surely question what is real and what the creature has manipulated. Though, I confess, I do not know why you would wish to know if I have ever rung a bell in this situation.”

“Ah, not literal, a metaphorical bell, my friend, but thanks, you answered my question.”

“I have never encountered a metaphorical bell, O’Neill. I can state with certainty that I have not rung one.”

Sometimes there was a level of absurdity that accompanied a conversation with his team that beggared belief, but for all that he wouldn’t change any one of them. Not now, not ever. Not willingly. They were his people. He trusted them with his life as readily as they trusted him. “So the mission’s the same: we still need to identify the glyph that corresponds to Kumara on the Stargate.”

The truth was the last half an hour had shaken him, but he wasn’t about to let on. As far as he could tell, these people were out here looking for proof that, way back when, evolution had diverged, just as it had on earth with Neanderthal and Homo Sapiens. Only here, Neanderthal man had neither died out nor been assimilated into the second species, but rather co-existed.

He’d seen the same rationale applied to other races back home, seen the injustices of racism and prejudice first hand. It left a bitter taste in his mouth, but there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.

They were here. They had to get home. The equation really was that simple. His responsibility was to his team, to the SGC, and to Earth, not to faceless thousands on an alien world. It was tough, but so was the damned universe.

And, hell, who knew how this was going to play out? Maybe the good guys — whoever they were — would win out in the end?

It didn’t have to be the case of one species exterminating the other.

Unless…

Even from the little Jahamat had told him he knew it was only going to end one way if they discovered the Stargate. If ever there was proof to be had, the gate was it. The idea that these Corvani might have traveled the stars to arrive on this ice cube could only serve to reinforce the whole Master Race bullshit. So he’d lied to Jahamat when evasion wasn’t enough to side-step the issue of where they’d come from. The man was no fool, but O’Neill knew he couldn’t let them find the Stargate. Some things were better left hidden.

Outside, the bugle sounded again.

The blare masked a deeper rumbling. O’Neill felt it rather than heard it; the ice shivered beneath his feet. It was a peculiar sensation. The very stability of the ground was undermined by the pitch and yaw of the icequake. Moments later a second noise, less a rumble and more of a crack, echoed down through the ice and the entire ground tilted crazily beneath them. Jack reacted instinctively, pushing the others toward the mouth of the skin-lined tunnel while he threw himself at the brig door.

There was no way he was about to leave anyone locked up in there and he didn’t care how much it might piss off the righteous ‘Superior Race’.

“Go!” he barked, throwing back the top bolt. The lower one was blocked by a two-inch thick jag of ice that had been torn up from the ground with the heaving of the quake. He wrapped his hands around it and heaved but it wasn’t giving an inch. He didn’t have time or means to melt it, which meant he had to break it. He drew his Beretta M9 and squeezed off a single round into the center of the ice. It powdered beneath the impact, giving him plenty of room to reach the lower bolt. He drew it back and threw open the door. “Out! Come on!”

He turned and started to run back out through the hidebound tunnels, chasing the sting of the cold on his face even as another, deeper crack tore through the ice beneath him. He didn’t look to see if the others were following him. He had to trust that they were.

A sudden seismic shift threw him sideways. O’Neill lost his footing as part of the ceiling came down, spilling snow into the passage. Light and the sudden bite of freezing air offered him another way out.

He took it.

He slipped and slid as he scrambled up out of the collapsing tunnel. Around him people were yelling. The bugle blared again. This time he understood; a watchman had seen the first fissure opening in the ice and had sounded the alarm. Even though he hadn’t understood what it meant, the bugler had probably saved his life. O’Neill stumbled away from the ruin, dusting himself off. The Mujina emerged behind him, carrying the wizened husk of the other prisoner. O’Neill had no desire to see the abuse that had been inflicted upon the man but he couldn’t in good conscience look away. Seeing it brought the evils home to him. He had no idea what the man’s crime was, but whatever he had done, he didn’t deserve to be starved to death. Not in any civilized world.

The Mujina laid its burden down by O’Neill’s feet. He stayed there, crouched, head cocked slightly to one side as though hearing something O’Neill couldn’t, and then he sprang. The creature bolted, haring over the unsteady ground, arms pumping furiously as it chased something Jack could neither see nor hear.

And then the ground opened up beneath its feet.

One moment it was there the next it was gone, swallowed by the ravine torn through the ice by the pressures being exerted from left and right.

The encampment exploded in panic. Soldiers ran toward the ravine while others ran away from it. Jack stopped running and became the one fixed point in the chaos as fear swirled all around him. He saw Carter and Daniel Jackson. There was no sign of Teal’c in the hysteria.

Another huge crack resonated through the ice. This time it was followed by an almost silken rush as the land pitched violently. It took O’Neill a moment to understand what he was seeing, so irrational was the sight of one of the igloos sliding toward the edge and then coming apart block by block as it disappeared into the ravine. Snow and screams swirled up into the air.

The first rescuers worked the edge, relaying back orders, demanding ropes and cages and anything else that could be used to bring survivors back up from the bottom of the fissure. The bravery of the men was obvious as they moved with incredible surety, traversing the jagged spurs of ice, making them safe.

And then came the horror.

With six of them working the ice face the edge broke away. They stood there for a sickening moment, betrayed by the ground beneath their feet, and then they fell.

O’Neill stared in mute denial.

He had just watched six men die in a heartbeat. It refused to register in his brain. He’d seen a lot of horrors in his life but this was somehow different. There was something elemental about it, something that took it out of the hands of the victims. There was nothing they could do about it. They couldn’t fight back. They couldn’t have done anything other than die. The brutality of it was grotesque. But soldiers died, it was their curse.

His initial impression of blind panic was wrong. The soldiers were moving with purpose, and what appeared to be hysteria was organized chaos as they swarmed quickly to limit the damage. It obviously wasn’t the first time the ice had broken. Quickly, a second wave of men came toward the edge, working with brisk efficiency to lay down belay pins and anchor the rope that bound them together. This time there were three of them. They approached the edge cautiously, feeling out its stability with the teeth of the ice axes they swung. If one went over, they all went over, but hopefully the rope would save them from the fall.

Shouts chased down the line of workers, orders given and received.

The front man held up his hand. The others stopped. O’Neill found himself holding his breath along with the rest of the soldiers, and letting it out in a rush as the front man called back, “My God, he’s climbing back up the side!”

O’Neill moved forward, compelled to see the drama unfold. He couldn’t imagine how any of the men who had fallen could possibly have survived the drop, let alone have the strength left to claw their way back up the sheer side of ice. And yet another of the rescue workers at the edge confirmed it, “Come on, man, you can do it!”

He left the prisoner lying on a snow-laden animal skin; he was shivering but he was as safe as O’Neill could possibly make him. Others needed his help more.

“Carter! Daniel! Teal’c!” He yelled, cutting across the top of the frantic hubbub, waving them forward. He saw Carter nod her understanding and set off for the edge.

Before he made it half way Jack saw the hand come reaching up over the top.

The bloated fingers of the white gloves were shredded from where they had clung to the scars in the ice, and stained red with blood where it had opened up the flesh beneath. The second hand was followed by the Mujina’s grimly determined face; the helmet had obviously been torn off in the fall, or taken off during the climb. The creature was not alone. One of the rescue workers that had gone over the edge clung grimly to its neck. The Mujina dragged itself up as far as it could, and even as its arms began to weaken and buckle two of the roped men pulled it up the rest of the way. A ragged cheer went up as people came forward to help the wounded man. His leg was in a bad way; the broken bone pierced through the skin and cloth. He had lost a lot of blood but thanks to the Mujina he now had a chance. Down at the bottom of the fissure his only hope had been to die quickly rather than slowly.

The Mujina stood, stretched, seeming to work out the kinks and twists in its bones from where the fall had battered its body, and before anyone could stop it, stepped off the edge in a dive.

An air of shocked silence swallowed every other sound until the
tick, tick, tick
of the stresses undermining the ice turned into a wrenching grumble. This time they heeded the warning. By the time the basso profundo
crack
of the landslide boomed out every one of the rescue workers was back fifty feet from the edge. Three more of the igloos were torn free by the collapse. They plunged into the ravine trailing animal skins like wings. O’Neill didn’t move. His mind ran through the permutations and calculations and hit the same conclusion again and again — the Mujina was at the bottom of that lot, buried alive. But not for long. He felt an unexpected pang of loss, the last echo of Charlie’s voice there at the back of his mind. It wasn’t quite like losing his son all over again, but like everyone else staring down into the chasm he had just witnessed an incredible act of heroism snuffed out by the suddenness of the second landslide. Life once again made no sense.

“Nothing could have survived that.” Daniel gave voice to what everyone else was thinking. Saying it made it all the more real. He was right. Nothing could have survived the crushing weight of the ice. It was almost funny that it should end like this, this so-called terrifying weapon crushed to death because, when it came down to it, the creature harbored a deep-seated need to be everyone’s hero, even people it didn’t know. That, O’Neill reasoned, was almost certainly the other side of the telescope — people might well see what they so desperately needed in the creature, but it needed to live up to those unreasonable expectations. It was a double-edged gift, for sure.

Jack saw Teal’c come striding out of the wreckage of one of the ice structures, a wounded man in his arms. With the wind kicking up the snow around him, O’Neill was struck by the similarity between the Jaffa and the fallen Mujina. But then it was hardly surprising that he would see the parallels, Teal’c was as close as he had ever come to meeting a genuine archetypal hero; the square-jawed comic book superhero figure capable of facing down any foe and walking away victorious through sheer unconquerable might. Right from that first moment he had turned his staff weapon on the guards inside the compound on Chulak he had embodied the very essence of his own name, Teal’c, strength.

Another soldier ran to his side to gather their injured brother. Teal’c refused to surrender his burden. Instead he carried the unconscious man to the makeshift first aid post the rescuers had begun setting up. He laid the man down on a bed of animal furs and walked back toward one of the collapsed buildings, pulling blocks of ice aside as he fought to find a way back into the screaming men inside. O’Neill joined him. Together they heaved aside the huge chunks of ice, moving with a sense of urgency as the cherry red sun began to slip from the sky.

For the next hour the survivors set about making the camp safe. Their position as prisoners was quickly forgotten as they labored side by side with the soldiers. Jack threw himself into the toil, going where he was most needed. The cold had the sweat freezing on his body. Exhausted and thirsty, he wandered across to where some of Jahamat’s men had set up a refreshment station. A small fire burned beneath a metal vat, keeping the water from icing over. Jack joined the line. When it was his turn, he took a small metal cup and ladled a scoop of warm water into it. The metal pulled at his lip as he drank. “Anyone got some ice to go with this?”

One of the men beside him laughed. The sound was strained but it was the first glimpse of humanity any of them had shown since the Mujina had come up out of the ravine carrying their friend.

“Performing one night only, catch me while you can.”

The laughing man said something but Jack missed it. Over beyond the broken ice houses he saw Jahamat giving orders. There was an economy about every movement the man made. Each hand gesture was crisp and precise. O’Neill followed the direction of his hand. It didn’t take a genius to realize what Jahamat was planning. He was taking advantage of the turmoil to send a small squad back up the hill to investigate the tunnels from which they’d emerged. There wasn’t a lot he could do to stop them. Carter came up beside him. She wiped the cold sweat from her brow and held her face over the steaming mug she cupped in her hands. Corkscrews of steam coiled up lazily from the metal mug. He nodded toward where Jahamat was giving instructions. “I can’t say I like the look of that.”