SG1-15 The Power Behind the Throne (2 page)

“Now!” Neryn Var yelled, feinting a wild lunge. Even though the creature still lay there immobile, the First Prime bought her lie and lashed around, anticipating with perfection the strike that wasn’t coming. For a heartbeat he was off balance. In the space between it and the next, Neryn Var hurled the crystal at the wall. It exploded on impact, showering a kaleidoscope of color, shards of rock and light as it bit into the cavern wall.

She didn’t wait to see where the tunnel would finish. She ran.

She saw the crimson light of the burning sky ahead of her. She tasted the fire of the air on her tongue and deep in the back of her throat as she forced herself to run faster.

Neryn Var dared chance a backwards glance, just once: she couldn’t see the Mujina. She could only pray it had fled and not been captured.

She ran for the Stargate.

There was a sharp sound, like a fly against neon, and the artificial lights failed. The ticking of the hot bulbs filled the silence. In that moment between the lights going out and the back-up generator kicking in darkness ruled the bunker beneath Cheyenne Mountain.
Tick. Tick.
The strip lights flickered throwing a sudden flare of light across the landscape of shadow and failed again, once, twice, three times as the generator struggled to feed enough power through the base to feed all of the vital systems.
Tick. Tick.

Then there was light.

The reserve lighting was considerably less stark than the normal fluorescents, giving the shadows somewhere to play.

O’Neill dragged back his chair and pushed aside the plate, “That
can’t
be good.”

“When is it ever?” Carter agreed. The softer light took the edge from the wind-swept spikes of her fringe. It did nothing for the dark smears around her eyes. She caught herself yawning and knuckled the sleep out of her eyes. “Come on then, let’s go check it out.”

The familiar sirens of the gate room blared before they were half way through the door. With a quick glance behind him, O’Neill was running hard before the klaxon’s first wail had finished. He moved fast, without having to think because the layout of the complex was ingrained on his mind. O’Neill hit the stairwell’s security door, pushing it open, and took the stairs three and four at a time. The sound of his footsteps pounded back up toward the surface. He didn’t need to check if the others were with him. Not only could he hear them, he could feel them.
That
was the kind of bond they had.

The emergency lighting painted a chiaroscuro of grays the length of the corridor with darkness waiting down at the bottom by the door into the gate room. The metal stanchions bracing the tunnel stood out stark and black like the ribs of some great beast. A natural extension of that analogy would make the gate room the beating heart and the wailing siren the first seizures of a heart attack. It didn’t bear thinking about. O’Neill sidestepped a worried-looking sentry, and went through the door. Alice in all of her adventures in Wonderland and behind the Looking Glass never stepped through a door quite like it. There were no Mad Hatter’s or March Hares, no Queen of Hearts, flamingo croquet mallets or little-big potions, only General Hammond’s furrowed brow as he glared through the glass of the control room at the treacherous Stargate, and row upon row of muzzles pointed up at the iris as the first chevron popped and clamped into place with a flare of red. A disembodied voice echoed “
Unauthorized Off-World activation
.” The central dial rotated frantically, the urgency of its movement transferring to everyone in the gate room. It hit the second mark.

“Chevron two locked!”

The words sent a palpable chill down the ladder of Jack O’Neill’s spine, bone by bone. He stared at the central dial as it hit the third co-ordinate and the chevron locked in place. Something felt wrong about this. He looked back up at the men in the control room and shrugged — the gesture was worth a thousand words. Hammond shook his head; there were no units scheduled to return and no one up there had any more of an idea what was happening than he did. It wasn’t a reassuring exchange. He turned back to the gate as the forth co-ordinate locked in place.

“Chevron five locked!”

The guns came up, muscles tense. Safeties clicked off as
rounds were chambered. O’Neill walked toward the steel ramp.
Airmen flanked him on either side. He didn’t need a weapon; if need be they would open fire on any hostiles that stepped out through the wormhole. Still, he felt naked without one. Teal’c moved up to stand beside him. His face betrayed nothing, not even the slightest trace of curiosity. O’Neill had to smile. The big man was an enigma wrapped in a conundrum and tied off neatly with a big bow of mystery. Teal’c noted his scrutiny with a raised eyebrow. He held his staff weapon at ease but there was nothing nonchalant about the pose. In a split second it could be transformed into a tool of brutality and deliver deadly force. More than all of the rifles the sight of Teal’c with his staff weapon at his side put O’Neill at ease. Daniel and Carter stood two steps behind the Jaffa, their eyes fixed on the gate, expressions equally unreadable.

The disembodied voice continued its countdown, “Chevron six locked!”

“Open the iris,” Hammond’s order was met by the duel
hiss-grate
of the heavy-metal iris disengaging. “Jack, we’re receiving a Tok’ra signature. It’s a distress signal. Brace yourself people, there’s no telling what’s about to step through!” The tight concentric circle of impenetrable naqahdah recessed into the gate’s frame as the final chevron locked. A glassy film of quicksilver appeared to puddle across the eye of the Stargate, the crystal blue surface agitated as the event horizon of the wormhole established itself at the destination. The surface agitation increased exponentially, the ripples surging and bulging outward as though the inner ring of the gate wrestled to contain the raw energy of the wormhole. In the space between heartbeats the quicksilver exploded outwards in an unstable vortex, a tidal surge erupting from the eye only to be sucked back in to the churning surface. Even after so long it was an awe-inspiring sight: so much pent up energy, the raw frisson of it, barely caged by the Stargate. It was elemental. O’Neill let out a slow, deeply held breath and stepped forward.

“Incoming traveler!”

The surface of the event horizon buckled, looking for a moment as though it might fail, and then someone began to emerge, one foot stepping down onto the ramp. A hideous ripping sound tore through the gate room. One of the riflemen squeezed off a single shot before he could stop himself. The report was lost beneath the screams of the traveler. The sound was terrible to hear.

“Something is wrong,” Teal’c said, beside him. He shifted his position, bringing the staff weapon up.

He was right.

O’Neill watched as a trembling hand pressed against the skin of the event horizon, barely managing to break through. The gate room was gripped with the sudden chill of the tomb, the temperature dropping ten degrees in as many milliseconds. The rest of the poor soul failed to re-integrate. Their body remained, a shadow burned into the rippling skin of the wormhole, and then it was gone, as thoroughly and completely as that. The traveler ceased to be. Jack had seen wormholes fail before, and witnessed the catastrophic effects such a failure had upon the human body, but the wormhole hadn’t failed — its skin still rippled, full of life. Without thinking, O’Neill ran up the ramp. Part of the man’s hand remained, the wounds where it had been severed smoking, cauterized by the intense heat of the failed re-integration.

Charred shreds of ruined clothing smoldered at the foot of the Stargate. There was nothing else left of the man who had tried to step through.

“Carter, get up here, now!” O’Neill barked. “What the hell just happened here?”

“I don’t know, sir,” she said, visibly shaken. She knelt beside him, reluctant to look any more closely at the charred clothing. “Whoever it was didn’t survive the re-integration process. I can’t begin to guess why without seeing transcripts of the matter transferral. Anything might have happened.”

“Anything?”

“I don’t want to guess.”

It took him a moment to realize why: a Tok’ra distress signal, an unidentifiable corpse. Sam was putting two and two together and leaping to the worst possible conclusion. He couldn’t blame her, it was a soldier’s mentality: expect the worst, hope for the nothing.

“It isn’t Jacob,” he promised her. It was one of those stupid rash promises he couldn’t possibly keep but he made it just the same.

She looked up at him then, her eyes filled with fear and the need to believe him. She nodded once. “Close the iris,” she told him, “we don’t want whatever was chasing them to come through.”

The iris spiraled shut, breaking the link with whatever world the unfortunate traveler had come from.

For a long moment the gate room was eerily calm, everyone caught looking down at the severed hand and the peculiar dust it lay in. It was an ugly epitaph.

“Okay, enough standing around, people,” Jack said, “Daniel, take the hand down to the medical bay, Jacob’s files are still a matter of military record. Two minutes to run a match on his prints and you’ll know for sure. No point getting worked up over nothing.” He said it brusquely as though he wasn’t even remotely willing to entertain the notion of it being Sam’s father.

“With respect, sir, I’d like to be the one to take it down,” Carter said.

“You sure?”

She nodded.

“Okay, Daniel, maybe you want to go down there anyway, keep Major Carter company. The rest of you, we’re working on the assumption this isn’t Jacob.” He turned to Hammond. “General, we need to contact the Tok’ra. I would hope they’d know if one of their merry band are missing. Maybe they can shed some light on exactly what the hell is going on here. It’d make a pleasant change.”

Hammond nodded.

“Colonel O’Neill, if I might suggest something,” Teal’c said.

“Shoot…”

“Perhaps it would be wise to trace the point of origin before the wormhole is allowed to disengage. The Tok’ra have infiltrated many Goa´uld strongholds. Even knowing as little as the planet of origin will greatly reduce the likelihood of exposing other agents unnecessarily.”

“Can we do that?”

Teal’c said nothing. His silence spoke volumes.

“Don’t you ever listen during the briefings?” Daniel Jackson said, shaking his head. Jack couldn’t tell if he was pulling his leg or not, so opted for the former.

“To be honest, when you guys start going on, it all kind of blurs together. What can I say? I have a short attention span. And you guys can
talk
. Why don’t you just give me the edited highlights: can we do it, yes or no?”

“Yes.”

“See, that’s all I needed to know. You know what to do, so everyone get to it. Chop chop.”

He followed the General up to the control room. Daniel went with Sam down to the medical bay. For a moment it crossed Jack’s mind that they got their roles reversed and he should have been there for Carter if the wrong results came back. She would have been there for him. He knew that without even having to think about it. But Daniel would look after her. “He won’t need to,” O’Neill said, not realizing he had said it out loud. The declaration earned him a furrowed brow from Teal’c. “Talking to myself. First sign of madness.”

“Indeed.”

The steel steps clanged dully as the three of them ascended. The air had that curious subterranean quality to it; it was cold, and harder to breathe with a vaguely metallic tang, almost as though, despite the struggling air-conditioning, it was starved of oxygen.

Hammond opened the door.

The control room was a hive of frantic activity. Fingers rattled across keyboards searching for the protocols and routines that would track back the incoming co-ordinates. The cramped confines were humid and rank with male perspiration. Schematics and blue-lines were spread out across every available surface, piled two and three deep. O’Neill went straight across to the computer. Thousands upon thousands of co-ordinates scrolled across the screen too quickly to read. The first identifier caught, drawn out of the array by the tracer program. By itself it told them nothing. It was almost a full thirty seconds before the second identifier was isolated. Before the third could lock down the screen went black and the airman at the controls slammed the flat of his hand off the side of the monitor’s casing. They had lost the connection. With the wormhole disengaged there was no way to trace it.

“Lost it, sir.”

“Okay, airman, I want you to treat me like I am a moron. How does this thing work? I don’t want the techno babble, keep it simple, I am a moron, remember. Isn’t it like the ‘net? Does it have a history or something? A buffer that records every dial-in and dial-out? Seems to me a piece of kit like this ought to be advanced enough to save the most recent incoming co-ordinates. Doesn’t that seem logical to you?”

“Something like that, sir. The buffer holds data from the last dialed connection, but as soon as another connection is established it’s overwritten,” the young airman explained. It was all Jack needed to know.