[Stargate SG-1 01] - Stargate SG-1 Read online

  STARGATE SG-1

  Stargate SG-1 - 01

  Ashley McConnell

  (An Undead Scan v1.5)

  CHAPTER ONE

  The room was twenty-eight stories deep in the guts of a mountain, and it was damned cold.

  Cold, dark, and sitrep boring.

  The world over, the military does things like that: hiding important installations under tons of granite, hoping nothing and no one can find them, and if someone does happen to trip over the sensors and razor wire, and then get past all the armed guards, that the enemy will somehow still be prevented from getting in by the sheer weight of all that granite.

  Sometimes the military buries things in mountains that they don’t want getting out.

  Either way, the room buried in the mountain, the reason for all the security and all the burrows and rooms around it, was huge: three stories tall. It swallowed light, as if concrete and steel absorbed the radiation somehow and reflected nothing back. The room was filled with equipment, consoles and dumb terminals, but they were all shrouded in tarps and plastic to protect them against dust.

  At one end of the room a huge shape, flat and round like a pancake set on end, focused the eye; at the other, an observation-room window took up most of the wall. A shallow steel-grid ramp led up to the tarp-covered disk. Ramp and disk were set off from the rest of the room by a wide-painted border of yellow and black stripes alternating with the legend KEEP CLEAR.

  Looking up, through the window of the observation deck, one could see all the ghostly, shrouded shapes of a briefing room, table, chairs, overhead projector, videoconferencing setup. There was even an automatic whiteboard, one of those with a magic button to press so a scanning bar passing over its surface would transfer any written information to a piece of glossy paper extruding from one side. But they were only shapes covered with translucent plastic, abandoned. No one had held a briefing there in quite some time.

  The only sounds in the room were the whining of a dying fluorescent light and the voices, not enough to fill so much cubic space.

  The folding table set up at the foot of the ramp overlapped the painted border, as if its warning had lost its meaning over time. The five human beings sitting around a folding table not far from the foot of the ramp were highly trained professional military security personnel, one woman and four men with squeaky-clean backgrounds and the most specialized security clearances in-depth investigations could give them. They were veterans. Experienced. Sharp.

  Bored.

  Playing poker.

  Their weapons, military-issue semiautomatic rifles, were piled up along the wall, near the exit, out of reach. The guards, twenty-eight stories deep inside a mountain, where not even a thermonuclear bomb could reach them, propped their feet on the table and chewed cigars. They’d been on this tour too long, and there was money on the table. They’d been doing this forever.

  Except one: the woman. Sergeant Carol Ketering, young, blonde, still gung-ho. She was new to this assignment, and uneasy about the looming circle of drapes at the top of the ramp. She kept looking around, waiting for someone to comment about how quiet it was. Too quiet.

  But then you didn’t get much noise down this far. The guts of a mountain rarely gurgle.

  Sergeant Keithley, unconcerned, slapped a final round of cards around the table. Even his voice was bored.

  “Everybody anted up? Seven to the deuce, nothing there. Eight, nothing happening. King gets a queen—possible straight. Eight on the eight. And jack gets a boss. Eights open.” Keithley flicked a glance at the new kid, then went back to the cards.

  She wasn’t really paying attention to the game, which meant she’d get cleaned out sooner rather than later. But Ketering was the kind with more sense than to bet her last dollar. Lots of good sense. So why was she spooked?

  Ketering was getting even more nervous, as if the room was too big. She jerked her head around, as if trying to catch sight of something too quick to see.

  “Aren’t you guys afraid of an officer coming down here or something?” She tried hard to sound insouciant. A couple of players exchanged smiles. She really wanted to be one of the guys, didn’t she?

  “Trust me, nobody ever comes down here but us,” one of the others responded.

  She wasn’t reassured, somehow. The disk, beneath the tarps, was… vibrating? The tarps seemed to billow, as if stirred by some breeze.

  “Does that thing always do that?” she demanded, her voice high and sharp.

  “Do what?” Keithley was getting annoyed. Ketering was interrupting the game, and the only interesting thing about this damned duty was the poker game. There was certainly nothing interesting about the big disk.

  “Whatever that thing is under the tarp. I just saw it move or do something…”

  “Probably the only thing it ever did was cost money,” Airman Liverakos observed sourly, swiveling a cigar around the words.

  Keithley, examining his cards, grunted derisively. “Looks like they ran out. They’ve been shipping personnel out of here for months.” Maybe once this place was shut down for good they’d be assigned someplace interesting.

  “Whatever.” Liverakos shrugged. “You in or out?” he asked Ketering.

  The dust in the air, a sign of poorly maintained air filters, danced in the dim light. Trembled.

  “I’m telling you, it looks like it’s moving.”

  The guards laughed. Trust a woman’s vivid imagination! But her fancies were still interrupting the game, and Liverakos added, “If you don’t have the straight, just fold.”

  Ketering was no longer pretending to pay attention to the game. Rising from her chair, she started up the ramp slowly, hesitantly. Her combat boots rang hollowly on the metal grid.

  The other four squad members watched her curiously.

  “Can we take that as a fold?” Liverakos asked.

  At the top of the ramp she paused. There was a distinct fluttering sound now as the tarp draped over the disk rippled against the ropes keeping it in place.

  By this time Ketering and the disk had the full attention of the other four guards; the money and cards on the table were almost forgotten.

  “Whoa!” Keithley yelled as the ashtrays on the table began stuttering to the edge, to the concrete floor. One crashed into a million splinters.

  The vibration was real and it was loud. The guards rose to their feet as the rumble increased, staring at the huge cloth-covered shape at the top of the ramp. The splinters danced.

  Abruptly the sitrep changed: DEFCON ONE.

  The tarps ripped away from the disk as if blown off in a hurricane. The cloth slapped into the walls, but the guards ignored it, fascinated by the hidden disk finally revealed and by the monstrous storm contained in its—empty?—center.

  Supported by side buttresses, the disk looked like two concentric stone circles, divided into sections, each section engraved with its own enigmatic symbol. But unlike any stone monument any of them had ever seen, this one seemed alive. The inner ring was moving, like the circle of a combination lock. Acting according to its own mysterious logic, it spun back and forth. Each time it stopped, a V-shaped section of the outer ring seemed to snap into place, and the strange symbol under the locked section glowed.

  The guards, dazed but professional, scrambled for the neglected weapons. As Ketering dived to join them, she commented breathlessly, “I take it this never happened before….”

  Liverakos lunged for a red phone on the wall. The whole room, three stories high, was shaking. The noise of the vibration kept getting louder, louder than jet engines, than earthquakes. The bones of the mountain were grinding together. The soldiers crou
ched, armed, staring at the artifact that had suddenly developed a mind of its own, had come alive before their very eyes. This was much less boring than the poker game. Their breath came short, shallow; their eyes were wide, fingers damp on their rifles.

  And then, with a roar even louder than the vibrating mountain, something bright, something between light and water and yet both at once, gushed out from the center of the circles, a funnel like a horizontal whirlpool lancing through the air over their heads, taller than any of them at its origin. They scattered, belly down; Liverakos, shouting into the red phone, abandoned it, hitting the deck with the rest of them. The funnel of shaped light ignored them, snapping back into the disk, shimmering over the previously empty surface like sunlight on lake water.

  And then there was silence.

  The absence of noise was almost painful.

  “Anybody got any ideas?” Keithley said, his voice shaking. The rest of them cowered, remembering the first law of the military: Never volunteer. Especially not for something like this.

  But Ketering was too young perhaps, too new to know that law. As the others watched, appalled, she got up, staring at the vertical pool of light as if entranced, and walked slowly up the ramp again, her rifle in her hand.

  “What the hell are you doing?” someone yelled, not unreasonably.

  Fascinated, she lifted a hand to touch the glittering surface.

  As if in response, a metal sphere the size of a softball bounced out of the opaque light. Startled, Ketering stepped back, and then stooped to pick it up, turning it around in her hands.

  “What’re you doing!”

  “Don’t touch it!”

  As if the sphere were a flashlight her touch had activated, a cone of light sprang out of it and drenched her face in a pink glow.

  “It’s beautiful…” she murmured, and turned to the other guards, as if inviting them to share something precious—

  And the Monster jumped out and grabbed her.

  Or at least so it seemed to the stunned guards, as a figure at least seven feet tall stepped through the shimmering curtain, disarming Ketering and using her as a shield with what seemed to be one smooth motion. The figure had the head of a gray king cobra, hood flared; it looked like the giant economy size of the uraeus, the snake symbol on the crowns of ancient Egypt. The figure wore heavy boots, a tunic that looked like chain mail covered by a broad, flat collar, and a skirt that looked like a kilt. It carried a six-foot thick-headed staff, holding it by a grip in the middle. The staff had a broad, thick, flat leaf shape on one end.

  The guards barely had time to register that the “head” of the serpent thing was actually a helmet, with broad overlapping “neck” plates where a human being’s face would be, when it was followed by five more, who immediately deployed in a narrow semicircle on the metal ramp. The human guards were aiming at what was clearly a line of defense for the next to come through the disk, their leader. They held their staffs at the ready, as if they were weapons.

  He too was wearing a serpent helmet, this one in gold, its eyes bright red jewels. His collar was even broader and encrusted with turquoise, amethyst, onyx, rubies. He was of medium height, not as tall as his escort or as heavily muscled, but he was the focus of all attention. As he stepped clear of the curtain, it disappeared, as if shutting down, and finally there was a long moment of pure silence in the room as the golden serpent’s head swiveled back and forth.

  And then the serpent’s head flipped upward, as the neck plates folded into themselves, into the golden collar, and the Air Force guards could see the human face of the intruder. And human it was, dark, young, the smooth, clear face of a man who had never known an imperfection, never suffered a flaw. His skull was covered by a tightly fitting gold cap. His expression was cold, impassive. His eyes were dark, heavily lined with kohl. He saw the woman, still held by his chief bodyguard.

  His eyes were hot.

  Glowing, like a furnace.

  “Jaafa! Kree!”

  The words were commands to his escort, the squad could tell. The gray serpent head of the one immediately next to him flipped up as well, the overlapping scales of the neck plates sliding into one another, until the guards could see his face. He looked human too, African perhaps or African-American, a large, solid man. On his forehead was a golden symbol, an oval lying on its side containing a serpentine line, the whole nearly encircled by yet another line. His strong features were emphasized by the closely fitting skullcap he wore, a duller gray version of the one worn by the leader.

  “Teal’c! Kree!” his commander repeated, clearly impatient. This time it was addressed directly to the one who held Ketering. For an instant the black man looked at the golden one, as if wondering at the command. He looked curiously for a moment at her M-16 and then at the similar weapons aimed at him by her squad mates. It was clear that he had never seen a rifle before. It was equally clear that he recognized the threat.

  Still, the order registered, and the bodyguard tossed the weapon aside as if it were nothing but a toy, and pushed the struggling woman into the other’s arms.

  “Get your hands off…” Ketering gasped, still fighting, but her struggles availed her nothing. The leader placed his open hand on her forehead. The alien’s forearm was wrapped in a metallic ribbon, curling around the wrist, webbing over the palm, terminating in rings on each finger and sheaths for each fingertip. The ribbon bound red stones to both the back of the hand and the palm.

  The palm stone glowed red. Pulses of visible energy flowed through the ribbon. She sagged, her resistance overcome even though her eyes were still open.

  “Let her go!” Keithley yelled.

  The golden alien brushed over the scene with contempt. “Jaafa! Mol kek!”

  In response, his bodyguard pointed their staffs at the squad. The thick, bulbous leaf heads of the staffs split lengthwise like the gaping jaws of alligators, hummed savagely, and flung bolts of energy that turned a section of concrete wall into dust.

  The squad dived for what cover there was and returned fire, but their bullets had no effect. The golden leader studied his passive captive, his perfect face widening into an evil smile, as if the deadly rifle fire ricocheting around him was of no more importance than a refreshing mist. His fingertips brushed her cheek, lifted a lock of her blond hair. Ketering stared up at him, as if dreaming.

  Liverakos fell back and used a shrouded console as cover to get to the red emergency phone, yelling into it, “This is Area C! We’re under heavy fire down here! Area C! Need—”

  A bolt from another alien staff caught him squarely in the chest, and a clean hole a foot in diameter appeared beneath the arch of his ribs. He slid to the floor, mouth still working, dead before he knew what hit him. The phone dangled from the wall, a tinny voice squawking out of the receiver.

  Keithley cursed and stood, firing steadily until another bolt of energy sheared him in half.

  Teal’c, the chief bodyguard, watched, letting the others do the fighting; his job, clearly, was to protect the golden one. His leader handed him Ketering to carry, as if she were a doll, weightless.

  The two remaining members of the human squad continued firing, retreating behind consoles and desks. As if they had rehearsed the tactic, they concentrated their fire on the two bodyguards in the front, nearest them. Pieces of the alien armor were chipped away by bullets even as the walls and the shelter the humans used were blasted in return. But eventually the focused fire reached alien flesh, and the first two serpent-headed aliens fell.

  The two men wasted no time in cries of triumph; they focused on the next two serpent-headed guards, unable to get a clear shot at the leader and unwilling to aim for the one who held Ketering.

  The fall of two of his escorts finally pulled the attention of the leader from his captive. This was not, obviously, according to expectation. Enraged, the golden one finally realized that these humans he viewed with such contempt actually presented a real threat. “Kreeka! Jaafa!” he cried.

&n
bsp; As he did so, the disk behind him began to rumble once again, as the strange power energized it.

  The remaining bodyguards opened fire. One man died instantly under the lashing flares of energy bolts. The last man left free and alive scrabbled desperately for the door to the room, attempting to open the locks. He had no cover, no shield from the converging flares of power. He was dead before he saw them hit.

  Only Carol Ketering was left to be human witness as the stomach plates in the armor of the two dead aliens opened, as white, foot-long creatures snaked their way out into the air. She was the only human witness, but what she saw did not register in her face or in her eyes. Helpless in the grip of the chief bodyguard, she saw without seeing.

  The two white worms launched themselves through the air to the hands of the golden leader, who welcomed them with open arms and coos of sympathy. As he soothed them, he reached down and recovered the sphere that had been the first object through the disk. He paid no attention at all to the abandoned bodies of his slain escort.

  Finished with their slaughter, the remaining serpent-headed guards began to pass back through the shimmering opening.

  Only the leader, the bodyguard, and their captive were left when the rescue party burst through the now unlocked door. Twenty soldiers fanned out, weapons ready, followed by a man in a general’s uniform.

  The general’s face registered the horror of the battleground, the golden lord, his companion, and his helpless captive. He snapped a command to hold fire.

  The golden one merely looked at him. As he did so, the whites of his eyes began to glow like white fire, turning the dark irises into pits from hell. Sneering, he turned away and stepped through the shimmer of the gate, his escort behind him. As soon as they did, the shimmer vanished, and the disk was silent and empty.

  The human military looked around the room, seeing their dead, seeing the alien dead. Pools of fire still crackled where energy bolts had hit. The poker table, flipped over, its legs vulnerable in the air, had a gaping hole in the center where someone had tried and failed to use it as a shield.