magibrain

Title: Beneath A Beating Sun ch.03: Deus
Chapter Summary: The shoe drops.
Index post: [Fic] Beneath a Beating Sun - Index

For three days the ha'taks scoped the system, abortive runs toward the planet ending in slow retreats. The base personnel felt more and more as if they were stuck in a rabbit hole, staring up at a hawk – safe as long as they held their breath, didn't move. The fact that they could return home, out of at least that danger, was irrelevant. The walls seemed smaller every hour, trapped as they were beneath a brutal sky.

The base had reached a consensus: something had to be going on. No Goa'uld, Anubis or not, dispatched two ha'taks to sit in a system and twiddle their thumbs. Ha'taks were too valuable, too necessary in Goa'uld's eternal feud. But no one knew what Anubis could be planning, and the combination of suspicion and ignorance wound through the air like an inaudible siren. Base operations continued as normally as possible, but no one could relax.

Daniel had only a vague idea why SG-1 was still on the planet. He suspected it had to do more with loyalty than anything else – he knew Jack felt useless, but as long as Carter stayed to help, SG-1 would back her up. They hadn't come to check in on her just to say "Oh, in trouble? That's a shame. See you around!" Which left them here.

Jack was restless, which wasn't unusual except as a matter of degree. Sam was holed up in a room with her science corps, which wasn't unusual except for the grim air hanging over them. Teal'c... had pragmatically decided that if a catastrophe was bound to occur it wouldn't change plans on account of fuss, and had become the one calm spot in the eddies of unease. And if anything, that unnerved Daniel more. At least with the slow-boil tension, he could relate.

Even if it was enough to make his head explode.

A restless Jack, on duty, had a half-life of about five hours before degrading into an irritated and snappish Jack, and he and Edwards had been squaring off about everything from evacuation protocol to base fortification. And while on a good day an unsolvable problem excited rather than frustrated Sam, having to solve the unsolvable on a deadline frayed her nerves faster than anything. The atmosphere around her turned sharp and charged, and the fact that she hadn't blown up at anyone made it worse. If he thought about it for long, Daniel found it increasingly hard to breathe.

His concentration slipped for the umpteenth time when Major Lorne approached him. "Dr. Jackson," he said. "I'm sorry, you were off radio. Lt. Yanacek and Sgt. Faraday wanted your help with something."

"Oh!" He wrestled his brain back onto track. "Yeah. Of course. Sorry. What?"

"Alien instruction manual," Lorne said. "This way."

Daniel was only too happy to follow.

Jack, stepping out of the gate closet, didn't have the luxury of distraction. He'd been walking about the facility until he wasn't sure what was worse, the worry or the monotony. Edwards hadn't been the only target of his minor explosions – when he swung through the far labs he'd found himself dressing down a tech for lack of focus, diving into it before he realized he was probably yelling at himself.

From time to time an insidious voice appeared in the back of his mind. Get your people out of here, it said. If you don't know it's safe, get your team out. They won't be running this base anyway. Let the people assigned to these jobs handle the problems.

He shook his head to dispel it. This was an SGC project. Their jobs weren't to be safe. Their jobs were to learn what they could and protect Earth's assets. No one would run away to leave others to take the fall; that wasn't how things worked.

He wanted to send Carter and Daniel home, at least – in the event of an evacuation he and Teal'c would be the ones to help Edwards oversee it anyway. But they were the most likely to be able to help, and if either of them could, neither of them would leave. Not for such a nebulous concern. And within his own duties, there was no way he could ask them to.

He'd reported to Hammond, and Hammond hadn't given an order one way or another. Hammond was waiting for their analysis. They had the experts here, and the experts were as stumped as the laymen. It drove him mad.

His radio clicked.

"Colonel, we've got more hyperspace distortions heading our way," Carter said. "We don't know how many ships or of what kind yet, but they're about two hours out. One is coming in on a separate approach, ETA two-six minutes."

Great. More anticipation. "I'll be there," he said, despite the fact he couldn't help. (You'll see. Carter will figure it all out and we can fix whatever's wrong. If anything is wrong. Dammit.)

It would be a long half hour.

The comm room hadn't emptied – techs and scientists, including Carter, still moved from console to console, trading notes and theories. But most had left to their usual labs, leaving a skeleton crew here. To let the base's operations implode would be letting Anubis win. A shroud of normalcy had been imposed, even if it proved transparent.

In the tall screen at the center of the room, three blips in a false-3D diagram showed the position of the enemy ships. The newcomer fell into place, forming a wide triangle with its brethren. Only a faint shimmer at the diagram's edge indicated the path of approach of the remaining ships, coming in at an angle directly through the triangle's center. (It's some kind of tactic,) Jack thought. (Damned if I know what.)

"What now?" he asked.

"Well, now Anubis has a two ha'taks and an al'kesh camped on the outskirts of the system," Sam said. "None of them have made any attempt to approach the planet for a while, but to be frank, sir, they've got me a little unnerved."

(But just a little.) "They've got everyone a little unnerved, Carter. Take a look around."

The complex lights and panels hummed, every display keeping some tab or other on the warships. The personnel interspersed among them frowned, conversing in hushed rushed tones. People held themselves as if expecting the sky to rain down any minute. If Anubis' presence was meant to throw the outpost off-kilter, he'd succeeded.

"We're pulling all the data we can from these ships," Sam said. "I guess this is really an opportunity. We haven't had the chance to scan Anubis' ha'taks in detail before, and these sensors are amazingly powerful." Her voice fell flat. "Still. I'd like to know what they're doing."

"If there's anything I can do," Jack offered.

Carter shook her head. "If you have any theories at all, tell me. Otherwise there's not much anyone can do."

(Theories? He's psyching us out. Asserting his presence. Playing stationary Chicken.) He still couldn't see what would go wrong, though it felt like it was already going. He shrugged and left the lab.

At least the scientists could do something. Read charts, make diagrams, argue probabilities and possibilities. Even if it wouldn't take their minds from the situation, it gave them the illusion of power over it. Some faint measure of control. Even Daniel, who wasn't an astrophysicist by any stretch of the word, had work to occupy him – last he'd heard a couple of techs had dragged him off to map out one of the scanner interfaces, hoping that somewhere they'd find the instructions to hit the button that turned on the system that gave them the data that solved their problem. (That chased the cat that killed the rat that lived in the base that Jack built. Anubis is either at a loss or ten steps ahead of us, and none of us know which.) All Jack could do was check with Edwards for the forth time or check the gun mounts for the tenth.

He passed Teal'c on the way to the gateroom. Teal'c stood in the center of one transparent hall, looking out the window at the unbroken gloom. He nodded to Jack in a friendly dismissal – Jack took the hint, and went on his way. Maybe Teal'c would think of something if the rest of them failed. And maybe Anubis would leave them alone, and maybe the Asgard would choose today to sweep through the galaxy and rid them of the Goa'uld once and for all, and maybe Apophis would come back from the dead and Earth's two nemeses would destroy each other in a battle the likes of which they showed on Showtime Extreme. Or maybe he'd just keep walking.

Teal'c watched the pulsar, not quite hypnotized, not quite meditating. He was no scientist. For that he gladly deferred to Major Carter and Daniel Jackson. He was not disinterested in the physics behind the star, but he didn't seek out the knowledge. He'd listened to what Major Carter had to say until it seemed she no longer had use for his presence, and then he'd come out here. At the moment, there was no specific task he could perform to alleviate the situation. What he could do was think.

When he was a young boy, his father – a veteran of many battles and many campaigns – had taken him out to see the stars above Maccos. He'd told him that the sun was also a star, that some of the stars in the sky were brighter than the sun. That they appeared dim only because they were very far away, just as the lanterns in the next village looked dimmer than candles or shimmers in the sand. That had been Teal'c's introduction to astronomy and astrophysics, but not the reason he cherished the memory – his father had picked out the brightest star he knew of, and told Teal'c it was his. Such a deliberate, fanciful act of affection was rare among Jaffa. Rarer still within his own family.

Of course, he'd never learned the star's name, and when his mother took him and fled to Chulak he'd lost the star in any case. He had made one journey to Maccos since, sowing the seeds of rebellion in Chronis' Jaffa after the System Lord's death. Despite the fact that the season was wrong, he'd tried to find the star again: one point of average brightness when seen from his birthplace, hidden among multitudes of others, often vanishing behind one of the three satellites in high orbits. A star brighter than the sun.

And here on '542 was a sun as dim as a moon. No moon hung in the sky, which made sense. If the system had been constructed, and if this planet had been placed specifically here to gather energy for whatever race of people came before, a moon would be extraneous and even detrimental. A moon could cause an eclipse.

He frowned. An eclipse...

Major Carter had asked everyone on the base to brainstorm, yet another Tau'ri idiom he'd stumbled over many a time. It represented just the kind of frenetic approach he still distanced himself from. Specifically, she'd asked for anything that could compromise their security, no matter how unlikely it seemed. A satellite could cast a safe shadow from the radiation.

He nodded to the star and walked into the comm room, silent until Major Carter finished whatever urgent task occupied her. "Teal'c," she greeted. "What's up?"

"Have you considered the possibility of an eclipse?" he asked.

The look on her face told him she hadn't. Major Carter was a competent scientist – brilliant, in fact, as O'Neill often pointed out. But she herself had said that the simplest explanations often eluded her. "An artificial eclipse," she said, studying the readouts. "...no; with this much radiation, that would take a stellar body much larger than this hyperspace distortion. And I doubt even Anubis is capable of fine navigation at sublight with a moon in tow."

"What about an asteroid?" one of the techs put in. "He launched one at Earth."

Sam shook her head. "The distortion is still too small, and we have too many bogeys. Only a ha'tak could haul an asteroid this far."

Teal'c bowed slightly and stepped toward the door. That his theory hadn't been borne out didn't disappoint him, but he wouldn't take more time than was necessary.

"Wait – Teal'c."

He turned back, raising an eyebrow in query.

"What's your gut feeling on all of this?" Major Carter asked.

Gut feeling. Another Tau'ri turn of phrase. For longer than his human friends had lived, his 'gut feeling' had literally been a Goa'uld larva growing to maturity within him. He knew what they meant, but Goa'uld had a far different word for it. Kalash-ju. Soul-sight. Instinct.

Of course, his literal gut feeling had often helped – he drew insight not only from having served the Goa'uld, but hearing the subconscious thoughts of his larva as well. But now Junior, as O'Neill had named it, was dead, and Teal'c couldn't bring himself to miss it. Besides, Anubis was so far removed from the average Goa'uld that it was unlikely Junior could have given him insight beyond what he already knew.

"Anubis covets this world," Teal'c said. "Perhaps because it offers him some advantage, perhaps because it is something which he does not already possess. If he has a plan to take it, it is likely already in motion. If not, his ships may still remain here for some time seeking one."

It had been one of the reasons he'd turned from Apophis – how could the Goa'uld be gods when they were so much like children? Worse, in fact, because every Jaffa child was taught to go without. The Goa'uld would covet and scheme and plot to take, and when something eluded their grasp they would sink into sulks or fly into rages. From a distance, scheming and sulking looked similar. Even he couldn't divine which behavior Anubis displayed.

Whatever reassurance Major Carter had looked for in his reply, she didn't find it. "Thanks," she said, and Teal'c took himself out.

(I swear, the next requisition I put in for this place is going to include twelve chess sets, three checker boards and a small library. This is beyond ridiculous.)

Jack had exhausted almost every means of occupying himself he knew. The crowning absurdity had (to its credit) taken him most of an hour – setting up the much-neglected kitchenette, relying on the scrawled (often cryptic) notes left by the techs who had scouted the place to find running water and waste disposal. He'd just finished jotting his own signs ("Kitchen this way!", "Follow these signs for coffee!"), leaving him with nothing to do. Again. He hit his radio. "Carter, O'Neill. Can you give me an update on the ships?"

Silence. Then, "We still don't know how many. Definitely not ha'taks, though – we think several ships of al'kesh size or smaller. ETA four-seven minutes."

He tapped in the time on his watch. "Four-seven minutes. Copy."

(Watch,) he said to himself. (It will be three more al'kesh because Anubis thinks he can blockade the planet. Because he thinks he can scare us into leaving. Because he's going to lure some other Goa'uld here to get rid of them in the sun. He can't touch us. We're safe here.)

He wandered it down to three-eight. Grabbing a map, memorizing paths to labs and out of them, scrutinizing every escape route, lasted him until two-four. He wandered until ten and found himself at the edge of the city – one of the near edges, but an edge nonetheless. Outside the window '542's horizon disappeared into its eternal night; the stars fell down to its edge and vanished. Beyond the light cast by the city and its safeguards lay nothing, hard and barren. A place where nothing survived.

He walked back into the base.

Navigating by the maps he had studied, he found himself in a transparent hall. From this vantage the landscape was intercut with towers and sealed tunnels. He wondered how many of them he'd covered on his stroll.

"Hey," said a voice from behind him.

He turned to see Daniel, hands in pockets, drawing up to his side. "What are you doing out here? I thought you had a free pass to the science table," Jack said.

"Couldn't concentrate," Daniel said. "They kept looking at me like I could help. I don't have any idea what's going on."

Jack chuckled dryly. "And here I didn't think anything could tear you away from those records."

"You have no idea how hard it is to work in there." He pulled a hand out, scratching the back of his neck. "You look distracted."

"Oh." Jack shrugged. "That's maybe because I am."

"We still don't know what those new ships are, do we?" Daniel asked.

"Nope."

They stood in silence.

"Sam's on the job," Daniel said at length.

"Sam's on the job," Jack repeated.

Silence again.

"So what are you thinking?"

Jack shrugged. "Wondering how many of these observation halls there are."

"Observation halls?"

"Good a name as any."

"Yeah, I guess." Daniel racked his brain. "Just from walking around, I think I've run into three or four. But it's easy to get lost in this place."

"Yeah, no kidding." Jack checked his watch. "We've got about two minutes before whatever happens... happens."

"Any bets?"

"Ba'al will win at curling," Jack joked, absently. "Anubis will make a good run at football but get taken down in the forth quarter on a penalty, leaving us to take the bowl."

"What?" Daniel asked.

Jack looked over. "What?"

The hallway chittered.

Jack turned to one of the panels. Lights and symbols flashed across the screen, scrolling in the universal pace of urgency. Above, outside the long window, a cluster of glowing points streaked toward them.

"The hell...?" he muttered – just as the first streak slammed into the far section of the base, tearing through the installation and shaking the ground around it. "Get down!" he heard himself yell, grabbing Daniel's collar and dragging him to the ground.

More quakes followed, punctuated by the pulsar's light and searing gold explosions. A terrible modulation screamed through the intercom, just as familiar Earth sirens keened to life and drowned the air in symphony.

"What's going on?" Daniel asked, staring up out of the window with unhidden fear in his eyes.

"Get to the 'gate," Jack said, pushing himself off. "Evac."

"Jack–"

"Move it!" Jack yelled, sprinting down the hall. Behind him he could hear Daniel take off the opposite way, toward the gateroom and the labs. "Carter!"

He found her dashing through the control room, snapping orders left and right to the handful of techs gathered there. If anything, the cacophony was worse here – the native klaxon and the Earth sirens joined a range of auxiliary alarms, screaming into the chaos.

"Major, what the hell was that?"

Carter shook her head, thrusting one hand out toward the safeguard towers and yelling to be heard. "A wing of tel'taks, we think maybe ten or thirteen, came out of hyperspace near the planet's surface and continued on momentum into the complex."

"Anubis is having his Jaffa make kamikaze runs?"

"Yes, sir. Now, two of our safeguards are down and it's only a matter of minutes before the third fails. We have to evacuate, but we don't have time."

"Suggestions?"

"The old shield system," Carter said. "The shield can be reactivated if we re-route power. We haven't because it means shutting down life support and we don't know how long it will last in any case, but it might buy us the time we need."

"Might?"

Sam shook her head. "It's the only safeguard we could get up in time."

"Do it," Jack ordered.

Carter nodded. "Sir, one more thing–"

"What?"

"The only working safeguard is about to fail, and we have no idea how long the shield will last if it can be reactivated at all. If all the safeguards fail, we'll have less than four seconds to notice and react."

"I know, Major–"

"Everyone, and I mean everyone, has to go through the 'Gate at the earliest possible opportunity and evacuate the Gateroom as soon as they're through," she said. "If the safeguards fail while the 'gate is connected to Earth, a wave of radiation could follow us."

"Got it," Jack said.

"The Stargate has to be shut down the instant the last person is through, or as soon as the last safeguard fails," Sam said.

"Major, I get it! Move!"

Carter ran.

Jack hit his radio. "This is Colonel O'Neill," he snapped. "Evacuate immediately. I'll say again, evacuate immediately – that's an order. Sound off if you're on radio."

Scared voices checked in, one after another. He held himself still against all instinct, counting. Four members of SG-1, three of SG-3... half of the scientists and techs. He cursed and ran for the labs – away from the 'gate. Damn scientists didn't have the sense to stay on radio, who knew what they'd do in the alarm. Take their sweet time, most likely.

(No one gets left behind.)

He met Edwards and Lorne in a hallway, pounding toward the outskirts. "Lorne, basement labs!" he snapped without thinking. "Edwards, 1F, I've got 2F!"

"Nine minutes to evac," Edwards yelled.

"These safeguards won't last five!" Lorne yelled back.

"Carter's on it," Jack said. "Get who you can out now. Tell them to drop everything!"

They scattered through the base as the sirens screamed around them.

Sam ran.

Pouring every bit of force into pushing herself forward, she ran fast enough to shift the pitch of the sirens around her.

(Idiot!) It had been something so simple, so obvious that she'd never seen it coming. Anubis didn't need to come within firing range – all he need to do was learn 542's orbit. She'd made the mistake of thinking that because the distortion wasn't large enough for an asteroid, it wouldn't be a ballistic. Surgical tel'tak attack. It would be funny if it wasn't so grim.

Anubis wanted the outpost intact enough to take, so he'd damaged it enough to drive them off – no more. He'd sent his Jaffa to die in tel'taks because they presented so little threat. And she'd stared at them in hyperspace for two hours without figuring out what it could mean.

The anger shot through her to the beat of her footsteps. (Idiot!Idiot!Idiot!)

She checked her speed enough to not crash into the door to the shield generator. She had it open in moments, dashing to the console before the lights powered on, finding her way in the light pulsing through the high windows ('kay. Take down life support – reroute power through those conduits – god! Boot up!)

The console flashed to life, already displaying graphs and meters. (This sequence starts the command line, and then these – I think these are power distribution...)

She scanned over the symbols, entering them as quickly as memory allowed. She hadn't had time to study these, not in depth. (Please, let me know what I'm doing. Please don't let me screw this up.)

The fold shield fluctuated wildly, appearing and dispersing, and the radiometer danced with it. The installation had the shielding to withstand the ambient radiation, but nowhere near enough to fend off a pulse – blind chance was the only thing that kept it up when the pulses hit.

(Ten more seconds just last ten more seconds–) She hit the final command, and half of the lights blinked out. A rising whirr sounded, accompanied by the whine of flowing power.

A diffuse white shell appeared against the sky.

She allowed herself a moment of triumph, double-checked the systems as rapidly as she could, and turned for the door as the fold failed completely. For an instant something outside caught her eye – the transmitter they had set to contact the pulsar. (It's broadcasting,) she realized. (It's broadcasting and if there's anything up there, maybe it can hear us.)

Not that there was time for that now.

"Sam, we're about two minutes away from getting everyone out," Daniel called. "Where are you?"

Sam launched into the hallway, tapping her radio. "Heading home," she said, and then poured everything into her mad dash along the corridor. Five minutes at a hard sprint would get her to the Stargate, and a miracle would give her that. She took the turns on instinct – no time to check the signs – and reduced the world to a blur around her. After three sections her vision tunneled, her hearing narrowed down to the sound of her footsteps and the omnipresent alarms.

Two weeks in this place. She felt as familiar with its corridors as if she'd spent a year, though they'd never told her their secrets, and now they wouldn't get to. Anubis couldn't have the installation, so he'd settled for taking it from them, and she didn't have time to hate him for it. Lungs and legs burning, she only had time for running away.

The lights flickered.

(Oh, no.)

Her radio fuzzed.

She risked a glance up as she entered a long transparent hall. The shield was weaker now, highly translucent, with interference shimmering along it. And when the pulsar spun–

A blue glow flashed about her, inundating her senses. Particles in the air ionizing with the strength of the radiation. This was the famed blue flash of criticality accidents, one of the last things Daghlian and Slotin and even Daniel had seen before they died.

She slowed, and stopped. Another blue flash passed above her, and the shield dimmed – now it was nothing more than a thin film across the heavens.

She wanted to keep running. She wanted to make a mad dash to the Stargate, to make every effort to get out. But her logic got to her legs before hope did; without thinking through the odds, she knew there was no way to make it.

She looked up as the star spun back. Odd, she thought, how four seconds could be so long, while still being all too short. At least it was a novel way to go. At least it was a fitting way to go, that the astrophysicist should meet her death beneath one of the most incredible stars in space.

For a fraction of an instant as the shield fell, she looked straight at the brightening sun. And for the moment before the radiation hit her, washing over her faster than nerves could register pain, it felt for all the world like looking on the face of God.

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