CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

 

 

The chatter and cackle in the canopy, its natural rhythm restored now that Nirrti’s transmitter no longer disrupted the animals’ instincts, ebbed at their passing and resumed behind them, telling him that there was no imminent danger. This might change before long, Teal’c reminded himself. Returning to the glade by the temple was a calculated risk, but the options seemed worse. Even Major Carter had agreed and, out of all of them, she had most reason to fear the beasts.

The only other landing site suitable for a tel’tac would have been the large square just inside the city gate, which almost certainly had been devoured by the fungus. Besides, should the tel’tac fail to arrive—a possibility, given that Nirrti’s ha’tak had been in orbit and perhaps still was—they at least would be in the immediate vicinity of the Stargate and could resume their search for the DHD.

“Teal’c?”

The voice was soft and breathless, but it startled him nonetheless. Since he carried her, Dr. Fraiser had drifted in and out of consciousness, but the only time she had spoken was to refuse the medication that O’Neill needed more urgently.

“O’Neill is well, Dr. Fraiser. Do not trouble yourself.”

“I wouldn’t call it well,” she whispered. “And it’s not what I was going to say. I’m so sorry, Teal’c. I—”

“You are not to blame.”

“I almost killed you!”

“No. You stopped yourself from killing me. It took exceptional strength of will to resist Nirrti’s command. You should be proud of yourself.”

“Sure. I’ll work on it.” She made a bleak little sound, not quite a laugh, then she asked, “Is that what it’s like to be taken host?”

“No. If you had been taken host, you would have watched from within your body as Nirrti killed me, powerless to prevent it.”

“I don’t know what’s worse,” Dr. Fraiser murmured after a while.

“I wanted to please her.”

“I do know what is worse. However, my opinion may be biased. I am, after all, still alive.” Teal’c smiled. “Please, do not concern yourself any further, Janet.”

Perhaps it was the uncustomary use of her given name, perhaps her guilt had been allayed somewhat. She fell silent again.

The trees were thinning now, and past them Teal’c could see the dark gray walls of a building. It had to be the temple, as yet unaffected by the fungus—if the blight would indeed reach this far. His vigilance increased, and he found himself listening and looking for any sign of the beasts.

Ahead, O’Neill’s fist flew up to signal a halt. Hesitating a moment, Teal’c passed the others to be by his brother’s side. They had stopped barely within the edge of the trees. Beyond lay the clearing at last, watched over by the giant stone face that contained the Stargate—itself a dark, still hole to match the emptiness and quiet below. But it was not all empty and quiet. Someone was there; Teal’c could sense it. Suddenly a figure appeared from the trees opposite, and a soft call sounded over the glade.

“Jaffa! Kree!”

Instinctively, O’Neill raised and primed his purloined staff weapon, but Bra’tac was quicker, stepping between hunter and prey. “They are my men. Do not shoot them.” He turned to face out across the clearing and answered the call. “Cha’hai, Jaffa!”

A second man slid from the shadows and, behind him, six others.

O’Neill gave a low whistle. “You bring an army or something?”

“I did not. Those”—Bra’tac indicated the six men—“are not mine.”

“Then whose are—”

Above the churned earth of the glade, the air began to roil and stretch, distorting the figures behind until they abruptly vanished altogether, blotted out by the uncloaked bulk of the tel’tac.

“Sweet,” O’Neill remarked to General Hammond. “I think we should get ourselves at least five of those, sir. They do eighty light-years to the gallon, and the”—his fingers fluttered in search of a description—“super-stealthy camouflage doodad comes as an optional extra.”

The hatch slid open, spilling warm, inviting light into the night and outlining the silhouette of a warrior.

“Tek ma te Bra’tac. You are late!” he shouted, and Teal’c recognized the voice. It belonged to Tabal, an apprentice of Bra’tac’s. “Come quickly. We have to pass Nirrti’s ha’tak. The longer we tarry, the greater the risk of discovery.”

“Or of waking Carter’s wee beasties,” muttered O’Neill. Aloud he said, “You heard the man. Let’s go home, folks!”

They arrived in the golden pool of light outside the hatch at the same time as the eight men from the opposite side of the clearing. It seemed that the six new arrivals were Marines who had surrendered to Bra’tac’s Jaffa in the city. As he took in the assembly waiting to board, Tabal’s eyes widened and his lips began to move silently. He was performing a headcount, and Teal’c knew the verdict before Tabal pronounced it.

“There are too many of them, Master Bra’tac.” He shook his head for emphasis. “I can take twenty, twenty-two at the most. We already have the four prisoners aboard, and even if we left them here, two of you still would have to remain behind.”

“That’d be the drawback of the model,” O’Neill observed quietly. “Troop capacity’s a little on the stingy side.”

“Do the math! Just leave those guys here.” Colonel Maybourne cocked a thumb at the Marines who had surrendered.

“Oh yeah?” snapped O’Neill. “And call it what? A blue-on-blue incident? They’re coming.”

“For God’s sake! Jack, their orders were to kill you and your team! What’s the bleeding heart say now?”

“They’re still coming. We don’t execute men who give themselves up.”

“So what do you suggest we do?” Their difference in heights made Colonel Maybourne look like a pugnacious terrier squaring up to a tiger. “Draw straws?”

“No. That’d put Daniel at a disadvantage. He usually ends up with the short one.” O’Neill exchanged a quick look with Daniel Jackson, then pointed at the temple behind them. “There’s still the gate. All I have to do is find the DHD.”

“You? Dammit, Jack, you can barely stand up straight!”

On this point Colonel Maybourne was exaggerating. Either the fresh air or the medication had helped. O’Neill seemed considerably better, and his mind was set. Changing it—if at all possible—would devour an amount of time and energy none of them had. So Teal’c chose the next best option available to him; he returned Dr. Fraiser into the care of the Marines and retrieved his staff weapon. “You may require some help searching, O’Neill,” he said.

“Teal’c—”

“As a matter of fact, you’ll need an expert,” stated Daniel Jackson, joining them.

O’Neill gave a soft snort of resignation. “Do we have one who can actually see what he’s doing?”

“I can, sir.” Major Carter was grinning.

“Great!” snarled Colonel Maybourne. “One invalid and three wise monkeys. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. I’ve got news for you, Jack; evil’s out there, and it’s gonna have your butt for breakfast. You’re in no shape to—” He cut himself off and whirled around. “General! Do something!”

“I fully intend to, Colonel,” General Hammond said placidly. “I’m staying, too.”

“As am I,” announced Bra’tac.

“That makes six,” said O’Neill, turning to Tabal. “Load up and get out of here before that ha’tak starts taking potshots.”

Too fast for anyone to intervene, Colonel Maybourne had drawn his sidearm and pressed the muzzle to O’Neill’s head. “You owe me, Jack,” he said, almost gently. “And you’ve got to be alive for me to cash in. So do me a favor and get your ass on that ship and go home. ’Cos, so help me, I’ll blow your brains out if you don’t. You go, I stay.”

In truth, part of Teal’c wished O’Neill would submit. It was a futile hope, of course.

Standing perfectly still, O’Neill remarked, “I didn’t know you cared, Harry. But the argument’s a little self-defeating, wouldn’t you say?”

Colonel Maybourne shrugged. “I don’t—” The rest of the sentence fell victim to an elbow rammed into his midriff.

O’Neill spun around and followed up the blow with a right hook straight to the tip of the chin. Colonel Maybourne sent him an accusing glance and collapsed.

Shaking the sting from bruised knuckles, O’Neill murmured, “Like you said, I owe you, Harry.” He looked up, taking in the crowd still gathered outside the tel’tac. “What the hell’re you waiting for? Show’s over. Get going!”

“Colonel O’Neill!” One of the six newcomers stepped forward. “The DHD? It’s inside the temple. Good luck, and thank you, sir.”

 

“Your powers of persuasion never cease to amaze me, son,” Hammond said as they watched the tel’tac lift off and cloak in thin air.

The sight made Jack feel almost as vulnerable as he’d felt that night in Iraq—though that had been worse. Much worse. He’d been alone then. Besides, Tabal had promised to return if they hadn’t made it back by the time the tel’tac group arrived on Earth. Of course, if they didn’t make it back, there might be nothing left for Tabal to find. Aside from green gunk, that was. Jack filed the thought away under “P” for “pointless” and slapped on a grin for Hammond.

“What else was I supposed to do, sir? And, let’s face it, we’ve both wanted to clean Harry’s clock for years.”

“Speak for yourself.” Hammond chuckled.

And here was hoping he would never realize just why Colonel O’Neill had been so damn keen on getting Colonel Maybourne onto that tel’tac or what he’d discussed with Tabal just before the hatch had closed. Jack did owe Harry, and he always paid his debts.

“Sir? I’m guessing you’ll want one of these?” Carter was holding out one of the two GM-94 grenade launchers she’d retrieved from Bra’tac’s Jaffa, stock unfolded and ready to use.

Jack stared at it briefly, then shook his head. “I’d rather stick with the staff weapon. All yours, General.”

“Been a while since I handled one of those,” Hammond muttered, testing the launcher’s weight and balance.

“It’s got one grenade chambered and three in the magazine. Pump action reload,” explained Carter and flashed an encouraging smile. “Think shotgun, sir.”

“Can’t promise I’ll hit anything.”

“Caliber forty-three? You won’t be able to miss, General.”

The sky had taken on a faint greenish tinge. Jack, whose sense of time seemed to have eroded under Nirrti’s ministrations, was unable to tell whether this was what passed for dawn on the planet or whether it was the sheen of the fungus-riddled city.

“Jack!” Daniel, Teal’c, and Bra’tac were headed across the clearing, returning from their foray along the temple walls. Going by Daniel’s face it had been less than successful. “No joy,” he growled. “Your friend, the reformed Marine Jaffa, said when they were sent back to ’335 they got into the temple through a tunnel, but that’s long gone. Fungus is gobbling up the foundations. No side entrances, either, so it’ll have to be the front door, I suppose. Preferably before it belches and snaps shut.”

Front door—the maw of the stone face on the temple, home of the beasties; hell, if Carter was to be believed. Eighteen-inch teeth backlit by goop glow, it looked the part. Thirty feet above, a dark hole opened in the forehead of the face—the Stargate, which they hoped to reach from the inside. Jack cast a quick glance over his shoulder to see if everybody was present and correct. Carter, right behind him; Daniel, squinting at the shadows flitting behind the teeth; General Hammond, launcher raised and ready to give the nearest hog a bad case of heartburn; Teal’c, unruffled as usual; and finally Bra’tac, who seemed to be having the time of his life. Jack couldn’t think of anyone he’d rather have watching his team’s back.

“Bra’tac?”

“What is it, human?”

“Thanks!”

The reply was a grunt, and it sounded embarrassed—Jack would have to ask Teal’c if Jaffa got embarrassed. Not now, though. “Stay together and stay behind me. You got that, Daniel?”

“Just go, Jack!”

The stone tongue lolling out onto the clearing was already striated with fungus, and Jack carefully tested its stability. It dipped a little under his weight, and he hurriedly persuaded his body that this was no reason to futz out on him again. His body seemed willing to reserve judgment, which was about as good as it got. From inside the mouth came faint grunts and snuffling noises. Staff weapon primed, he crept up the tongue… ramp… reached that hump just above the teeth. One step further, and he’d trigger a gag reflex on the thing.

Get a grip, O’Neill!

At that moment the stench hit him, putrid and old and thick enough to feel solid. “Holy crap!”

“What?” Carter, a barely perceptible edge of fear in her voice.

“Stone guy’s got the worst case of halitosis I’ve ever come across in my life.”

“Yes, there must be another ramp inside,” she replied. Evidently her hearing hadn’t recovered quite as much as advertised.

“An ulcer, more like,” Jack muttered to himself. “Unless it’s a perforated ramp.”

He crouched and sneaked deeper into that hellish bouquet of feces, stale blood, and decay that somehow went with the giant teeth rearing either side of him. And then he was inside the temple. Carter’s hearing might not be all there, but she’d been right about the ramp. Not as artistic as the tongue outside but a lot steeper. Its lower end was patrolled by a Volkswagen Beetle with bristles, one of more than twenty similar models, and they didn’t like the fungus either.

“Crap,” he whispered again. It wasn’t that he hadn’t believed Carter about the hogs; he just hadn’t expected her description of their size to be accurate. After all, she’d had a fever at the time.

“Uh-oh.” Daniel had crept alongside him. “This doesn’t look good. I think.”

“Yeah, that’s what they’re thinking, too.”

Below lay an enormous stone-hemmed pit, its floor pulsing green. At the bottom of the pit milled Carter’s hell hogs, snorting and squealing at the squishiness under their trotters and clearly agitated by the whole affair. Directly opposite a narrow set of stairs ran up to a gallery—Jack had had enough of those to last him a lifetime—that circled the room at about thirty feet height and hopefully led to the DHD.

He scanned the temple for an alternative route, came up empty and gritted his teeth. Through the pit it was. God knew how the hell hogs would react if you threw six people into the equation. Badly was a fair guess.

Beside him, Carter rose and aimed her grenade launcher. Jack’s hand shot up, pulled down the barrel. “Easy, Major! Let’s not upset the applecart. Right now they’re busy figuring out the fungus. Maybe they’re preoccupied enough for us to get past them.”

And they also can fly, carrying little olive sprigs in their snouts!

The point was, though, they couldn’t kill all of the hogs at once. One of those grenades could take out a lightly armored vehicle—close enough where it came to the hogs, though Jack wasn’t too sure about the lightly part. They had eight grenades, a kill each if they were lucky, which still left the question of what the surviving dozen or so hogs would do.

Carter seemed to have arrived at a similar assessment and gave a terse nod. Fear lurked in her eyes; nothing concrete and directed, but a purely atavistic terror he’d never seen in her before.

“When you and Teal’c and Fraiser met them, Nirrti was running the show, Carter. For all we know, they might be perfectly harmless in real life.”

Okay, so they didn’t look harmless, but Jack didn’t feel that needed pointing out.

Another nod. “I’m fine, sir. Whenever you’re ready.”

Never?

Jack got to his feet and slowly started down the ramp. Herbie downstairs grunted and squealed and backed up a couple steps, its little red eyes ogling each move they made. Two more steps down the ramp for Jack and his team; two more steps back from Herbie. Kinda like tango. If they didn’t get their feet mixed up, they might just be okay. The final few meters of the ramp were coated in fungus, and Jack slipped a few times. Each time, Herbie snarled and hissed.

And then they’d reached the bottom of the pit, carefully turned toward the stairs opposite—and all hell broke loose. Screeching, Herbie planted its bulk between them and the access to the ramp; its pals started circling, closer with each revolution, forcing them toward the center of the pit. The room rang with squeals and grunts.

“Great! Pack behavior,” observed Daniel, a little shakily.

Trodden into the green slime lay countless cracked bones, hunks of rotting flesh, and scraps of olive drab material. Marine BDUs. Jack winced. “I think they want us to join them in the dining area.”

“O’Neill?” Teal’c’s face beaded with sweat, and he was wound as tight as a spring. Staff weapon lowered, he followed every motion of the lead animal, Herbie’s momma, by the looks of her, easily the size of a station wagon.

“Not yet, Teal’c.”

Momma had planted her broad hindquarters in front of the staircase to hiss at them. If they brought her down where she was, they’d never get past the funeral banquet her grieving relatives were likely to throw. Somebody would have to draw her off.

“General, Carter, blow her to Kingdom Come as soon as she’s cleared the stairs! And then you and everybody else run like hell!”

“O’Neill—”

“We do this my way, Bra’tac!”

Blanking out everything except Momma, Jack broke left, slipping and sliding in the gunk and tripping over bones. The hogs gave a universal snarl of surprise, then a delegation of three galloped across the pit, separating him from his team. A split-second before they could obstruct his line of fire, he loosed a staff blast that struck Momma squarely in the rump, with about the same effect a peashooter would have on him; she was pissed. Real pissed. An ear-piercing shriek, then she shot from her post and toward him with the brio of a freight train.

“Now!” he shouted, barely able to hear himself over the noise of the hogs.

Two grenades hit home, and Momma was knocked off her feet, skidding sideways. An instant later she literally flew apart, showering him in blood and hog entrails and raising a cacophony of squeals and grunts that drowned out the roar of the explosion. The three animals that tried to drive him off stopped dead in their tracks, whirled around and made a beeline for her carcass, oblivious to the human roadblock. The rest of them also converged on Momma, and Jack hit the gunk, rolling and crawling and trying to stay out from under their feet. For a fleeting instant and between a pair of churning trotters, he spotted Daniel, Teal’c, Hammond racing for the stairs, then they were gone again, and he was scrabbling on hands and knees to get away from the heaving, stinking, bristling bodies and finally flinging himself into the clear.

Everyone else was up on the gallery, staring back down, shouting.

At him? And where the hell was—

Carter stood frozen at the center of the pit, ashen-faced, eyes wide, lips moving. Even from where Jack lay, he could see that she was shaking like a leaf.

“Go, Carter! Go!”

No use. She stared past him, not taking in anything except the feeding frenzy that now buried Momma. Swearing, he shoved himself up, staggered toward her, terrified by the glazed look in her eyes.

“Dammit, Major!” he bellowed. “That’s exactly why they shouldn’t allow women in frontline units! You just freeze when the going gets tough!” Okay, he was trying to snap her out of it, but maybe he’d overdone it a little.

“No, you son of a bitch! No!” Her face contorted in absolute fury, she fired the launcher.

Missing Jack by a finely judged hair, the grenade slammed into a hog that had come after the colonel hors d’oeuvres. The detonation propelled Jack forward in a mad shuffle to stay on his feet, and his chest felt way too tight to breathe again. He ignored it, grabbed her arm. “Carter?”

Still pale but focused now, she whispered, “They were eating him, sir. They were eating him, and I shot him.”

Jack had no idea what she was talking about. It would keep. It would have to. “Go, Sam!” he yelped. “Go!”

At that moment the entire temple shuddered and erupted into a crash that silenced even the hogs.

 

Go with Carter! Find the DHD!

Jack’s gasp of an order drove Daniel along the gallery, though he’d hardly needed a reminder. Either the fungus had mutated into a more ravenous strain—did fungi have strains?—or it found the temple tastier than the fortress and city. The foundations had crumbled, and the stone maw had indeed belched and snapped shut. Their only way out now was the gate.

In the pit below, the animals had forgotten about dinner and raced around in mad circles to avoid chunks of masonry thundering down on them. The gallery floor under Daniel’s feet began to shimmer green. He ran faster.

Ahead, Sam had come to a halt directly in front of the giant round window that was the Stargate. Through it he could see a pale morning sky and the black silhouettes of trees. Suddenly Sam darted toward a niche to the left of the gate.

“I’ve got it!” she shouted.

Which had to be the first bit of unequivocally good news he’d heard in a long time. Daniel reached her a few seconds later, almost sliding past her in the gunk. Crouched before the console, Sam had opened the maintenance hatch.

“What are you doing? We don’t have time for this.” The moment it was out, he realized he’d sounded like Jack in the kind of situation where Daniel Jackson liked Jack O’Neill least. “Sorry.”

“Bra’tac told me the crystals in the DHD on ’335 had been swapped,” she explained. “We dialed Earth alright, but the gate read something else.”

“Which would explain it,” Daniel said slowly.

“Uhuh.” Sam slammed the hatch shut. “This one seems to be okay. I haven’t got the tools for a full diagnostic and, as you say, we don’t have time.”

He heard the slight tremor in her voice and knew she had noticed it too. Around the DHD, the floor had turned a poisonous green and the device seemed to be melting. “The floor’s going, Sam! Dial!”

“Earth or the Alpha site?”

“Earth. We need to get Jack to the infirmary.”

Sam’s hand flew over the symbols, dialing in Earth. When she slapped the activation crystal at the center of the console, the DHD groaned and tilted. “Oh God, no!”

Her outcry was overlaid by reassuring clunking and grinding as the inner ring of the gate spun to life. Barely in time. The DHD’s console was flush with the floor.

“Nice,” came a gasp from behind Daniel.

He turned, saw Jack, dragged rather than guided along the gallery by General Hammond and Teal’c. Bra’tac was watching their collective six.

“Reminds me of Ernest’s planet,” Jack wheezed with a worried glance at the DHD. “How’d you feel about dialing in manually, Teal’c?”

“I don’t think we’ll have to, sir.” Sam’s smile broadened. “Look!”

The seventh chevron had locked. The event horizon filled the gate with a glorious surge of blue, seemed to hold its breath for a moment, and exploded—away from them, across the clearing outside.

“That’s… different,” murmured Daniel, futilely battling the desperation that spread through his gut like ice water.

“Now what?” Going by the expression on General Hammond’s face, he was a hair away from kicking the gate. “Major Carter? Any ideas?”

“How about we just try it backwards?” Jack piped up again, though where he took the air from was anybody’s guess. “Just because we’ve never done it before doesn’t mean it won’t—”

“I once knew a man who thought the same as O’Neill,” Bra’tac reminisced dryly. “His death was most unpleasant.”

“Thanks for clearing that one up, Bra’tac. What do we do? Carter?”

“Sir, I—” She was cut off by another burst of grinding noise. “What…?”

The Stargate itself was swiveling around its vertical axis, ponderous and much too slow for Daniel’s liking, but swivel it did. He risked a small grin. “Now, that’s really different.”

His grin died when the whole machinery gave a scream of metal on stone and jammed to a stop, some sixty degrees shy of a full one-eighty.

“It’s shifted!” Sam cried. “The subsidence must have—”

“So what?” Jack had unhitched himself from Hammond and Teal’c and came stumbling toward the gate. “It’s not straight, but it’ll still work, and we can get to the right side now. Right?”

This time Bra’tac had no cautionary tales to offer.

“Right. Teal’c, you still have your IDC transmitter. Hit it!”

Teal’c stepped forward, already keying the ID code into the device on his wrist. Sam watched, breath bated, but there was no indication that the gate wasn’t functioning normally.

Finally she released a sigh. “Let’s go home.”