STARGATE SG-1: Oceans of Dust Read Online Free PDF Page B

even further into her uniform, until very little of her was visible at all.
    “The bodies are here?” Teal’c asked. In answer, Bra’tac leaned down to a frost-covered piece of ground, found an edge, and pulled.
    Something came up, a piece of board, or maybe fabric frozen solid. Beneath it was a shallow pit, just large enough for the two corpses it held to lay side by side.
    They were Jaffa, as O’Neill had expected. One wore the elaborate armor of the serpent guard, while the other was wrapped in a long, decorated cloak. O’Neill could see that the clothes beneath were more ceremonial than armored, although they still had the familiar style and cut favored by the Jaffa of Apophis.
    The robed man had a slack, vaguely surprised expression on his frozen face. The other no longer had a face.
    “The vessel’s damping fields must have shut down before the crash,” Bra’tac said quietly. “These Jaffa were subject to the full force of impact.”
    Daniel had gone ever so slightly whiter, and was studying the horizon intently. O’Neill pointed at the robed man. “And you know this guy?”
    “His name was Sephotep. He was one of Apophis’ most trusted and revered scientists.”
    “Which is why you took a closer look at the ship,” Carter ventured.
    “Indeed.”
    “Well,” said O’Neill. “I guess it’s time we had a look at it too.”
     
    The ship had come down on the other side of the complex. As he got closer to it O’Neill could see the great gouge it had taken out of the plateau; a straight furrow ploughed out of the rock and ice, stretching far behind the vessel. It said a lot about the structure of the ship itself that it hadn’t ripped itself to tinfoil on its journey across the mountain.
    That was, presumably, small comfort to its occupants.
    Even when O’Neill was within fifty meters of the thing, it was still quite hard to make out its shape. The crash had thrown up a large amount of debris, shattered stone and gravel, most of which had come back down on the ship’s forward end. The rear of it was hunched up above the level of the plateau, but it was so frosted and scattered with rock dust that it was difficult to see where the ship ended and the mountain began.
    It was Teal’c who identified it first, and did so with no small measure of disappointment.
    “Master Bra’tac. This vessel is of no interest to us.”
    “You think so?” The old Jaffa sounded faintly amused.
    “I do.” Teal’c gestured at the vessel with his staff. “This is merely a Tel’tak. We have seen its like before.”
    O’Neill scowled. “Oh,
great
.”
    While still hugely advanced in relation to Earth technology, Tel’taks were less than special compared to most Goa’uld craft. They were essentially cargo ships — unarmed, unwieldy and looking like some unholy fusion of a pyramid and a turtle. As far as anyone knew, Tel’taks were best suited for ferrying personnel and cargo between locations in the same solar system; perhaps from inhabited worlds to the mighty Goa’uld motherships and back again.
    There were technicians on Earth who could spend their whole careers reverse-engineering the thing, but O’Neill couldn’t work out how they might get the chance. Even if the Tel’tak was working, it would take decades to pilot the vessel back to Earth, and sending people through the gate to do the job was no option either. Apophis would want to know where his scientist had ended up. It was only a matter of time before he sent more ships.
    The trip was a bust. The best option now would probably be to strip the Tel’tak of whatever they could prize free in the next few minutes, then blow it up and get the refugees through the gate before the flying pyramids arrived. “Okay, what now?”
    “Colonel?” Carter was a narrow strip of face between tugged-down cap and pulled-up collar. “This doesn’t make sense.”
    “You think?”
    “No sir, I mean… Well, why would a top Goa’uld scientist be in flying cargo