STARGATE SG-1: Oceans of Dust by Peter J. Evans Page B

can count to two.”
    O’Neill rubbed his hands together. “Okay, time to go. Daniel?”
    “Sure.” Daniel stepped up to the DHD and began to press its panels. The weird mechanical clank each icon made as it registered was oddly comforting, especially with the prospect of more Goa’uld ships on the way.
    “I will fly the Tel’tak to Riyagan,” Bra’tac told them. “It is a safe place. The Goa’uld abandoned its people many decades ago.”
    “We’ve been there,” O’Neill said, keeping his voice low. “Haven’t we been there?”
    Daniel leaned sideways to whisper. “P4H-W29. Rainforest. Early Mesoamerican culture. They threw a feast in our honor.”
    “They did? I don’t —”
    “There were bugs in it,” said Carter, in a small voice.
    “Oh, right.
Them
. Gotcha.”
    “If the cloak is effective,” Bra’tac continued, giving O’Neill a rather sour eye, “I will not be followed.”
    “Pretty big ‘if’,” O’Neill muttered. He would much rather the old Jaffa return with them to SGC and go on from there. So far the modified Tel’tak had cost five lives, and he couldn’t bring himself to believe that its advances were worth the price.
    If Bra’tac had heard O’Neill’s comment, he ignored it. “Teal’c, I will send word once I arrive.”
    “Travel well,” Teal’c replied. And with that, Bra’tac ran to the steps and began striding up them, two or three at a time, to the plateau.
    Carter shivered. “How does he
do
that?”
    The gate roared, billowed. O’Neill watched Daniel talking into his radio and started to really look forward to some of Stargate Command’s famously bad coffee. Maybe a shower.
Definitely
a shower. Something to take the sting from his cut hands and bruised ribs and frost-blasted face.
    He wondered, then, if he was filling his mind with such things to avoid thinking about burning children, and a name, whispered up into the still cold air of the temple on a dying man’s last breath.
    The Stargate’s surface was stable, now. Daniel was still talking into the radio. “Say again? SGC, can you repeat that, please?”
    O’Neill trotted over to him. “Problem?”
    Daniel nodded. “I’m getting a lot of interference. I’m not sure, but I think they’re saying they’re not going to open the iris.”
    “What? Give me that!” O’Neill took the radio from Daniel’s hands, a little too quickly. “SCG, come in.”
    Hissing answered him, and then a few guttural sounds that might have been words. He took the radio from his ear, shook it hard, and then tried again. “SGC, respond. It’s cold out here.”
    Carter and Teal’c had moved closer, obviously expecting to be through the gate and away. “Sir?” said Carter, holding out her handset. “Try this.”
    O’Neill gave her a look. “I’ve got my own radio.”
    “Didn’t you fall on yours?”
    “O’Neill,” said Teal’c, suddenly. “We are no longer alone.”
    He was looking up into the sky. O’Neill followed his gaze, and saw that the clouds above him had darkened, as though a great shadow moved above them.
    The radio hissed and spat again. “
Ess gee
,” it said, between bursts of static. “
Firm… Dentit…
”
    O’Neill couldn’t take his eyes off the shadow. He felt as though he were in a small boat on a great ocean, watching something vast and terrible slide past him, slow and ageless and unconcerned. “Stargate Command,” he said flatly. “I confirm my identity as Colonel Jack O’Neill of SG-1, service number six-nine, four, one-four-one, freezing my ass off and about to be vaporized by a Goa’uld mothership, and will you
please
open the goddamned iris and let us come home!”
    The radio issued a series of squawks and whines, and the words: “
Firmed, Colonel. Iris ope
.”
    “Go,” said O’Neill, still staring at the darkening sky. “Everybody through.”
    Daniel was closest to the event horizon, and was gone before the first cannon blasts ripped downwards into the temple.