STARGATE: EXPLORER

by Lady Grey
Alpha/Beta by Jude

July 7

Somewhere in Space

A Ting-sha soldier, splendidly bedecked in golden armor, swept into the anteroom with a snarl that jolted Daniel’s guards into a half-crouch of submission.  “Bring de Yaks’n,” he ordered, his pronunciation of Latin mangled by the lack of oral dexterity of his animal mouth. “Zeus has come.”

The guards hurried to obey him, unlocking the cell door and holding Daniel by each arm. Their grip was painful as their claw-tipped fingers poked into his skin through the tough BDU jacket.

As the group passed by the ‘gate room, Daniel confirmed he’d remembered the way correctly.

He noted numerous Jaffa passing through the corridors and at work in various rooms. All the technologically advanced positions were held by Jaffa; all the guards and military were Ting-sha. There was a distinct air of subservient fear expressed on the faces of the humans, along with distrust and hatred in the eyes of the alien soldiers.

“Go dere,” ordered the Ting-sha officer. It pointed into a luxuriously decorated, spacious room with a high ceiling. At first glance, the chamber reminded Daniel of the throne room on Ra’s space ship, but this place had Roman touches with lots of gaudy gold and crimson velvet.

The guards brought him up to a dais poised before an enormous window looking out into the black of space, ribbons of light passing by that he recognized as the current of hyperspace travel. At the center of the dais was a grand throne with its back to him.

Standing on either side of the chair were Jaffa priests, the mark of Zeus emblazoned on their brows, golden garlands set on their heads. Their white Roman robes were draped with cloaks fastened over one shoulder with gold brooches. One priest held a censer, which he swung slightly to perfume the air; the other had his hands pressed together in prayer. All around them, additional worshipers were stationed near the walls, keeping the area around the dais clear, their voices mingled in a pleasant subtle murmur of praise.

The throne began to turn as Daniel was pushed down to his knees.

One of the priests announced, “All hail Zeus, mightiest of the gods.”

Soft chanting echoed louder in the room, a Latin prayer of adoration to the ancient god.

Daniel’s face was pushed down to the floor, preventing him from getting a look at the Goa’uld. The guards knelt with him, making sure he stayed bent over.

“Well, well, so this is the famous Doctor Daniel Jackson,” called a merry voice above him speaking Latin, like his minions. “Let me have a look, shall we? But keep him on his knees, where he belongs.” A note of malice laced the last phrase.

The guard’s hand moved from the back of Daniel's head and he sat back on his heels, lifting his gaze to finally meet his captor’s.

The being on the throne was a human male. His eyes flashed with the white light of Goa’uld possession, dimming down to reveal pale gray irises. The host was quite handsome, with fair skin and golden blond hair.

“I expected you to be a smaller man,” Zeus quipped. “Softer, perhaps. You don’t quite fit the picture of the academic I have heard so much about.”

Daniel didn’t say anything, biting back the retort that came instantly to mind.

“Not taking the bait, I see.” The Goa’uld smiled coolly. “No matter. We shall get down to business, then. I need a password from you. Something Colonel Carter would use to protect important information.”

“Sorry. If you know so much about me, you know I don’t cooperate with false gods or tyrants.”

“I expected as much.”  Zeus held out a hand to the praying priest, who reached into his cloak and retrieved a small circular gadget.

“This device,” Zeus turned it to display it to Daniel, but brought it no closer, “was once in the possession of Baal,” Zeus explained. “Your Colonel Carter did him the great favor of downloading the Stargate Command database into it for him. Do you remember that?”

Daniel lowered his eyes, embarrassed by the reminder of his teammate’s blunder, an act admittedly committed under duress, with Baal holding SGC personnel hostage and threatening their lives in exchange for the data. At least Daniel had the comfort of knowing she’d managed to password-protect the information so the system lord wouldn’t have easy access to it.

Only Baal didn’t have it anymore. This Zeus character apparently had taken it from him and was now trying to use Daniel to hack into it.

“Sorry, but I don’t know Sam’s passwords.”  He lifted his chin in bold rebellion, giving Zeus a small, defiant smile, showing him just how sorry he wasn’t.  “They’re unique to each individual. We don’t share them with anyone.”

Smirking, Zeus replied, “Ah, but you know Colonel Carter well.  You have worked closely with her for ten of your years. You are both scientists, with like minds.  You can make educated guesses that my people cannot.”

“You’re a god, right?”  Daniel shrugged. “You figure it out.”

The guard at his right reacted instantly to this affront, using his weapon to crack Daniel across the back of his head. He saw stars as he fell to the floor, momentarily breathless from the pain. He sucked in a ragged gasp as soon as he could manage it, not moving until the ocular disturbance began to fade, and his skull settled down to a pounding throb.

“My children do not appreciate your—” Zeus paused, as though searching for the proper phrase, “attempt at humor,” he observed lightly with a small chuckle.

Daniel rolled onto his side, one hand instinctively clutching the back of his head, and made eye contact, watching as the priest tucked the device back into a fold in his white robe.

The Goa’uld’s expression turned angry, gray eyes flashing a warning as he leaned forward on his throne, his elbows on his knees. “I want this information, Doctor Jackson, but I do not need it. You will give it to me, or you will not. I do not care. I have more than one reason for bringing you here, as you shall soon see. Your people would benefit greatly from your cooperation, but the reprieve would only be temporary, I assure you.”

What Zeus was hinting at didn’t make sense.  “I’m not going to help you,” Daniel told him firmly.

The Goa’uld relaxed in his chair and smiled. “Perhaps not today, but eventually…” He clasped his hands over his lap. “Everyone has a breaking point, Doctor. Even you.” He glanced at the Ting-sha officer. “Take him away. Inquire every hour to determine if he has changed his mind.”

The alien inclined his head and gracefully dropped to one knee, then rose and growled an order to the guards, who hustled Daniel back to his cell.

Once again inside his bare prison, Daniel asked, “What is he planning?” He hoped one of the aliens would answer out of reflex; they were loyal to their god, but didn’t seem too bright.

No one answered him.

The energy barrier on his cell door activated with a low-pitched hum, and Daniel settled down to a long, tiring stay in jail.

July 8

P9X-1017

After Colonel Griff surveyed the landscape one last time, he glanced at the smooth, trackless ash surrounding the stargate. He pressed the button on his comm unit, squinting at the rippling event horizon of an active wormhole. “No sign of SG-13 or any of their equipment, General Landry,” he reported. “No tracks, no response on the radio, nothing. It’s as if they were never here.”

“How much territory did you cover, Colonel?”

“We know they would have headed down that road behind me,” Griff replied, wary eyes still shifting to the surrounding territory. The place made him uneasy; he felt as though they were being watched, but all they’d seen around them were a few big bug things hovering around the rocky perimeter. “Given the elapsed time involved, we know they couldn’t have gotten more than halfway to that pyramid, and we went past that point. There’s absolutely nothing here, General -- no evidence of campsites, detours or anything else.  The place gives me the creeps, but we haven’t seen any aliens or anything else that could account for their disappearance.”

“Might have something to do with that pillar, or the corona on the stargate,” Landry told him. “If that’s the case, then we’ll want to be very careful how we approach studying that site. We’ll put it on the list for Odyssey to explore on their way back from Atlantis. Meanwhile, report back to the base, and we’ll discuss how to handle further search and rescue for SG-13.”

“Roger that, sir. We’re on our way back now.” Griff gestured for his team to proceed ahead of him through the event horizon.

He glanced over his shoulder at the empty landscape behind him, watching a giant dragonfly lift off from one of the boulders above the ridge surrounding the ‘gate area.

The place had spooked him, and he couldn’t get out of there fast enough. He turned and stepped through the watery surface of the wormhole, in a hurry to get home.

Whatever had happened to SG-13, he knew it wasn’t good, but he’d be first to volunteer for a return trip to find them, once they had more information. He didn’t want to leave anyone behind in that place; it smelled of death to him, and he didn’t like it.

July 8

Somewhere in Space

Daniel’s knees protested the way he’d been shoved onto them by the Ting-sha soldiers at his sides. He tasted blood from the split lip one of them had given him just before being brought into the audience chamber. It had been a long night, since Daniel hadn’t slept in a couple of days; he’d just started to nod off from exhaustion when the hourly inquiries began.

He glared up at Zeus, who was staring haughtily down at him from his enormous gilded marble throne.  Lack of food and sleep were making Daniel a little confused, and his emotions were set to a hair-trigger by the ordeal, but there was one certainty he still held.  “I won’t tell you a damned thing,” he growled between clenched teeth.

“I grow weary of your resistance to my commands,” said the Goa’uld, his voice unnaturally deep and throaty, “and I warned you of the price you would pay if you refused me.” He lifted his elegantly chiseled chin and smirked at his captive.

“Then why haven’t you killed me already?” demanded Daniel. “I’m never going to help you.” 

“You shall bear witness to my power, Doctor Jackson, and you will learn that it is futile to resist my will,” said the haughty being. “For too long, the Tau’ri have been a thorn in the side of the Goa’uld. I have been patient, waiting as the System Lords made war on each other; as they killed one another off, I absorbed many of their territories. I have watched the Tau’ri destroy them one by one, seen great weapons stolen from their grasp, and at last, it is time to make my presence known.”

“What about the Ori priors, and their armies of converts?” Daniel snapped. “You planning to take them on, too?”

Zeus chuckled. “I have the means,” he assured his prisoner, “as you shall see.” He flicked a hand at his First Prime, giving a silent, pre-arranged command to the Jaffa standing beside the dais. 

The warrior’s hands moved over a control panel on the bridge of the ship, and the white marble wall behind the throne began to divide into two halves, separating to reveal a panoramic view of black, starry space.  In the center of the view screen glowed the jewel-like beauty of a familiar blue-green planet.  Earth.

Zeus’ ship had to have some sort of cloaking device, making it completely undetectable, because instead of any sign of spacecraft rushing to fend off an attack, there was only peaceful, silent space.

Daniel’s heart beat faster, harder; his mouth went dry.

“Behold,” announced Zeus, “the measure of my wrath against the Tau’ri. Your people shall plague me no more.” He stood and placed his hand on a blue crystal sphere set on a podium beside his throne. The sphere lit up, and Daniel could hear and feel an eerily familiar deeply pitched hum vibrating through his body as a weapon charged up somewhere in the ship’s core.

A frisson of alarm nudged him closer to full-fledged panic.  Zeus was going to attack Earth! He was going to destroy it, and no one knew it was coming.

“No!” Daniel cried.  He struggled against his captors as he lurched to his feet and tried to throw his body at Zeus to stop him, but he was too late, his effort too small; there were too many guards keeping him in place. “No, please!  Stop! I’ll do anything you want! Just don’t—“

A bright flash drew his gaze back to the massive window, and as he watched in mind-numbing horror, a brilliant pulse of energy shot out from the ship, directly into the area of the Pacific where the volcanic island chain of Hawaii ought to be. A massive beam of power flowed into the vent through the Earth's crust, exciting the thermal energy inside the active volcano, tunneling into the molten core. The planet fractured along a major fault line and shattered into flaming chunks, and the force of the blast expanded outward, quickly engulfing the moon and demolishing it as well.

In the space between one heartbeat and the next, Daniel’s world was gone, his people utterly destroyed.  Glowing debris left a fiery trail, marking the place where so much life had once flourished.

Daniel stopped struggling.  Still and silent, he stared at the screen, unable to fully process what he’d just seen; it wasn’t possible that Earth had been obliterated. He couldn’t imagine such a thing; he couldn’t wrap his mind around it. Time ceased to tick away for him as that memory replayed over and over until it was seared indelibly into his soul.

Then, there was nothing.

Zeus watched his prisoner’s expression of horror turn to a blank mask dominated by glazed, unseeing eyes. The Goa’uld strolled down the steps of the dais and waved away the guards, reveling in the emptiness he saw in the famous Doctor Jackson’s eyes. He leaned in close to the human’s ear and whispered, “Such is the price to be paid for rejecting the rule of the gods.”

He smiled, his heart filled with contempt and cruel triumph, and pulled away, waiting for a challenging snarl or capitulation, but Jackson didn’t move.

Slowly waving one hand before the human’s eyes, Zeus saw there was no reaction to his remark at all.  Doctor Daniel Jackson seemed to be gone, only the shell of his body remaining behind. Apparently, the shock of seeing his home world destroyed had been too much for the man to bear.

Zeus’ victory was a little hollow now, but still satisfying in its own way.  The Tau’ri would no longer be a constant source of irritation.  The Jaffa nation was still shaky enough in its infancy to be toppled with application of the right force, at the right time, in the most important places. Only Baal stood in Zeus’s way now, and with weapons like this one, combined with his newly acquired toy from Baal, there were few obstacles left to conquer.

There remained, of course, the matter of the Ori incursion, but that was simple enough to solve; any planet that fell to those religious zealots would be destroyed. After losing enough worlds, it would become obvious that the Ori’s attempt to conquer this galaxy was futile; in a few months, it would all belong to Zeus.  His patience had paid off handsomely, and ultimate domination would soon be in his grasp.

He pushed Jackson’s shoulder, watching him wobble and instinctively adjust his balance. Zeus lifted the man’s right arm and moved his supporting hand away, chuckling as the limb remained where he had placed it, floating in mid-air.

“Put that back in its cell,” he ordered with a last scathing stare at his captive. “When the famous Doctor Jackson recovers from his shock, put him to work unlocking the database device. See to it that he survives long enough to fulfill his purpose.”  The Ting-sha guards nodded and hustled Jackson off, dragging him by both arms, his feet barely moving.

Zeus turned away to return to his throne.  He gazed out the portal at the fiery fragments, which were still moving away from the explosion.

He glanced at the priest standing by his throne. “You may accompany me to Olympus through the chaapa’ai,” he announced. Turning to his Jaffa First Prime, he ordered, “Tell the ship’s master to send word to all my high priests when Doctor Jackson has returned to himself. Until then, the ship is to maintain a course to Olympus. A celebration of my victory against the Tau’ri will be held there.”

“The word of Zeus,” said the priest, bowing to his god.

As he strode out of his audience chamber, his personal guard accompanying him as he headed for the stargate room, the Goa’uld laughed softly to himself.  The destruction of Earth was something everyone in the galaxy would be talking about forever.  All would tremble at his name.  The galaxy was his… or soon would be.

It was a good day.

End of Chapter 3

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