SG1-15 The Power Behind the Throne (8 page)

“Nice place,” she said.

Fissures ran red through the black earth where the rock beneath had smelted down to its core components.

“Okay, let’s try and do this quickly. Send the drone up, let’s see if we can find the needle in this flaming haystack.”

It was easier said than done; the drone went up but even before it had climbed a dozen feet above their heads the fire wormed its way through the cracks in its shell, undermining its integrity. It began to smoke as its internal wirings melted, and by the time it was one hundred feet above them it was a ball of flame.

Sam shook her head. “Nothing. The drone burned up before it registered any signs of life.”

“See the world through the old man’s eyes,” Daniel said.

“What?”

“It was something Selina Ros said:
see the world through the old man’s eyes
. She said she hoped it would make sense to us when we came through the gate. Nyren Var’s last transmission suggested she had located the Mujina in a subterranean grotto. I’m guessing that looking through the old man’s eyes is how we’re going to find our way down into the caves.”

“Makes sense,” Jack said. Then a moment later, “No, really, it does. I’d have preferred a GPS reference, but turn left at the old man’s nose works for me. So can anyone see an old man?”

Sam scanned the horizon. There was nothing, no one. She had been doing nothing but look for the few minutes since they stepped through the gate. It was unlike any place she had visited. The reader from the drone registered nothing, not a single sign of life beyond their own biometrics. There was no way anything could survive in this place. It wasn’t a prison. It was an execution chamber. The Ancients had banished the Mujina here knowing full well it could not possibly survive for any length of time — they had as good as murdered the creature but without getting their hands dirty. Yet it had survived, which meant there had to be signs — it needed food, water, shelter, and it left behind feces and other waste. Nothing could exist without leaving a trace, a sign that it had been there, so that was what they had to be looking for: signs.

“So much for that idea,” Jack said. “Anyone else?”

She looked back at the gate and then down the steps toward the DHD. There had to be some sort of clue. The Tok’ra agent had found the creature, of that they were certain. There was no other reasonable explanation why she’d been forced to flee the planet. She had found the Mujina and the Goa’uld had in turn found her. Question was, had the Goa’uld found the creature or was it still hiding amid the fire and brimstone?

Sam shook her head. It took her a moment to realize that the gesture couldn’t be seen through the tinted visor. “Maybe,” she said over the comms channel.

“Good, because I don’t need to work on my tan.”

“If we were trapped here what’s the first thing we’d have to do?” she asked Jack.

“Find shelter, somewhere out of the heat,” Daniel said.

Sam nodded again. “Exactly. Now, let’s extrapolate that onto a longer scale. Let’s assume the creature has a similar basic physiognomy its going to have some fundamental needs, like water, food and a toilet.”

Jack looked at her then, “Don’t tell me you want to do a scan for crap?”

“It’s not as stupid as it sounds, sir. There are going to be by-products in the fecal matter that our scanners could pick up.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“On the contrary, O’Neill,” Teal’c observed.

“Don’t go there, big guy.”

“Okay, quick recap. Daniel, what do we know about the creature?”

Daniel’s shrug was lost in the bulk of his suit. “Not much really. If I understand things properly, the Mujina has no real identity of its own, it’s a blank canvas that draws its form from those it encounters like some sort of doppelganger. It feeds off what they need, reflecting it back to them, and in turn they provide what it needs. It’s self-sustaining in nature, really, and quite remarkable.”

“But what that all means is that it must be a social creature, surely? Without someone to mirror it’’s empty.”

“It’s reasonable to assume so,” Daniel said. “What are you driving at, Sam?”

“If you were a social creature and they stranded you here, what would you crave more than anything?”

“Contact,” Daniel said.

Sam nodded again. “That being the case it’s going to try to take shelter close to the gate. It’s the one place it’s encountered other life since its exile, the one place where it’s made the kind of contact it craves. It isn’t going to hide itself away. It wants to be found.” It made a certain kind of sense but Sam was still unsure of her reasoning. “The surface is too hot, so I am thinking underground lakes, a cave network, anything that takes us beneath the surface and out of the hostile air. I’m thinking Robinson Crusoe here,” she said, “when he was marooned the first thing he did was make a basic shelter, but the longer he stayed the more elaborate his construction became, not because he needed it but because it gave him something physical to do to ward off the madness. I think we’re looking for an elaborate construction, something that sticks out like a sore thumb.”

“Makes sense,” Jack agreed, “You’re thinking this might account for the old man’s eyes?”

“I’m hoping it is more figurative than literal,” Sam said. She pulled back the Velcro seal on one of the suit’s pockets and fumbled about inside for the small handheld scanner. The fat fingers and thumbs of the suit’s insulated gloves made it almost impossible to operate the device’s finer controls. Twice the touch-screen responded with the wrong protocols because her touch overlapped with another command but eventually she succeeded in launching the geo-phys module. Flame reflected off the scanner’s screen, and then the roiling patterns faded and the scanner came back with a string of geological data breaking down the component parts of the surrounding terrain, vegetable and mineral. None of the facts held her eye; Sam was looking at the sky. The fire had burned out. It was incredible to see, as though the night’s black ate through the red, the flames rolling back toward their point of origin and snuffing out. It took a matter of seconds for the entire expanse of sky to clear. Suddenly they were gazing up at the stars.

“Kinda makes you wish we’d held off on launching that drone for, oh, five minutes, doesn’t it?” Jack said.

The shift in temperature was immediate and surprising. The scanner read a concurrent drop of twenty-seven degrees within the next forty seconds. Still the temperature continued to fall, at almost a degree a second, and showed no sign of leveling out. A crystalline web of frost began to form across Sam’s visor. Spiders of white splintered in front of her eyes, a Mandelbrot Set of rime.

“What’s happening?” Jack’s voice sounded terse in her ear.

“It’s an extreme temperature shift, sir. When the fire burned out, the surface temperature returned to its natural level—”

“Which just happens to be damned freezing,” Jack said.

“Actually ten degrees below, sir. The moisture in the air has rimed into a frost, that’s all.”

“So we’re good”

“Yes, sir,” she assured him. The suits were designed to cope with hostile environments. Minus ten was well within acceptable thresholds. Minus thirty would have been comfortable. Her vision began to clear as the temperature settled. The frost evaporated slowly, leaving only the ghosts of its lines on her visor.

“Well that makes a change. So, ignoring Mister Frosty, what have we got?”

Sam studied the scanner results. They weren’t what she had expected. She shook the scanner, as though that would fix what she was reading. It took her a moment to realize what was wrong with the numbers. She looked up from the handheld as though to contradict what the device was telling her; there was nothing out there but blasted terrain and scoured earth. The fact that the scanner had returned any vegetative results was curious to the point of being downright wrong.

She narrowed the range of the search. Again the device returned its curious numbers.

“This doesn’t make sense.”

“Which means precisely?”

“The scanner’s returning various chemical composites which, taken at face value, would suggest plant life, but look around you, sir...”

“Did the heat fry the scanner?”

“I don’t think so. Which means there’s enough vegetation to sustain life here, we just can’t see it.”

“Which means we’re back to looking for the ‘old man’s eyes’,” O’Neill said.

“And the only way we’re going to find them is to go for a walk, so eenie, meanie, miney or good old moe?” Jack pointed out the cardinals, north, south, east, west, and raised an eyebrow. “Which way do you want to go?”

“Hey Moe,” Sam said, pointing what she assumed was west. There was a natural declivity cut into the ground that ran parallel to the distant mountains, as though a river had once run through it. Perhaps it had, before the sky started to burn and choked the life out of the planet.

They shouldered their equipment and headed off along the dry riverbed, looking for the old man’s eyes. There were signs everywhere that this place hadn’t always been hell. The further along the dry gulch they walked the more relics of civilization they noticed. At first they were limited to a few warped metal girders sprouting out of the dirt like grotesque wild flowers. Sam scuffed her feet through the dusting of sand that had settled over the ground, half-expecting to find a layer of black asphalt beneath from the road they were walking along. The few reminders quickly became more as they moved away from the gate. Some of the stones had broken away to reveal the steel rebar in their guts.

“Daniel,” she said.

“I see it.”

What looked like a needle of stone grew like an outcropping from the side of the valley. It was the lowest level of a building. The steel and glass had melted beneath the flaming sky but enough of the structure remained to betray its original purpose. It told them all they needed to know about the fall of Vasaveda. They were walking through a ruin where a town once stood. Sam closed her eyes, imagining for a moment that the circuits of her suit could somehow capture the residual energies of the long dead inhabitants. What would the dead say? Would they scream, aware of their downfall, or would they jibber and yammer on about the mundane stuff of the life that was no longer theirs? Or, worse, would their last words be locked on their lips? She shivered at the thought.

“O’Neill,” Teal’c called out. Unlike the others, he had turned away from the detritus of civilization and was looking off to the south, seemingly fascinated by something he saw in the peaks of the black hills.

“What is it, Teal’c?”

“I do not believe the old man lies in this direction.”

“And what makes you think that?”

“There is much we cannot see from this angle, meaning that the old man is hidden from us, but if we stand there,” he gestured toward a slightly raised pedestal of red rock, “the rock formation presents itself quite differently. Do you see him now?” Teal’c pointed. Sam tried to follow the direction of his gaze. It wasn’t until she came back to stand beside him that she could make out the curious rock formation he had seen. Through a trick of perspective it did indeed look like a crook-backed old man carved into the rock-face. He was huge, but like a geo-glyph could only be seen from certain vantage points, otherwise it looked just like any other pile of rocks.

“That’s it,” Sam said, squinting up at the shadowy face. She couldn’t see any hollows that might have been eyes. “It’s got to be.”

“How far up do you think the old guy is?” Jack asked.

“It’s hard to tell from here,” Sam said. She tried to use the landscape to give her a sense of perspective but without any landmarks it was almost impossible. “A couple of hundred feet, maybe.”

“And you say that like it’s a good thing.”

A rough stone
stair had been hewn into the mountain — and it was a mountain, Jack thought to himself, not a hill. Each stair was uncomfortably high, as though made for a man almost twice his height. It made the climb difficult but not impossible. The suit made him clumsy. He found himself clutching at the flaking rock, his gloves sliding across the surface as he struggled to get any kind of purchase.

“Remind me why we’re doing this?” Jack grunted.

“We must pass through the eyes of the old man if we hope to find the home of the creature we seek,” Teal’c’s voice echoed in his ears. “We do not wish it to fall into the hands of the Goa’uld.”

“You’ve got a nice way with the understatement, my compadre.”

“If that is your way of saying thank you, O’Neill, you are most welcome.”

Jack leaned out, craning his neck to peer upwards. The higher they climbed the more the center of the giant’s steps had been worn smooth by the elements, making them progressively more treacherous. The wind whipped around him, blustering in his ears. The helmet amplified the noise, which only served to make it all the more disorientating. His foot slid out from beneath him. Grit grated and fell, spilling down into the faces of the others beneath him. Hand over hand, Jack hauled himself up. His world was reduced to finding the next handhold.

He didn’t look down.