“Yes, but you knew what
Sciath Dé
was,” he said, sitting back in his chair. “And you knew from the start that it wasn’t what we were looking for. You lied to us, Rhionna.”
She flashed him a look, more anger than guilt. “And would you have helped us if I hadn’t? If I’d told you there was nothing here for your people, would you have helped mine?”
“Yes,” he said, then remembered Jack’s reluctance and added, “probably.”
She held his look, then turned away to stare out the window. “I couldn’t risk that. When I realized what you were—where you had come from and what you had found — I couldn’t risk letting you leave. My world is dying, Daniel.
Sciath Dé
may be the only thing that can save us.”
He watched her, stiff-backed and proud, and found that he couldn’t blame her despite the black storm bearing down on them. He might die here, and still he couldn’t blame her. “Look, Rhionna, I understand why you—”
He was interrupted by a clatter of feet as a young Seachráni boy flew, helter-skelter, into the room. “Rhionna,” he said, “Sorcha Caratauc wishes you to contact her on the speaker. The blue star has only minutes and she said to bring
him
.”
Him
, Daniel supposed, was himself. He got to his feet. “The speaker?”
Rhionna was already walking as she replied. “A remnant of Knowledge Faelan discovered here some years ago—it allows Sorcha to talk to us from the Badlands. Perhaps she has news of your friends.”
“Yes.” A beat of adrenaline pumped. “That would be good.”
It would be very good indeed.
* * *
There were soldiers in the Badlands. Although he could not see them, Teal’c could hear the barked orders floating over the rag-and-bone city. From his position, concealed beneath a heap of canvas several meters from the remains of Sorcha Caratauc’s home, he listened and anticipated their approach.
In light of their escape it was likely that this would be the first place to be revisited. But he had gone to great pains to hide the secret doorway beneath the remains of the hearth and did not think the Elect Guard would think it anything but a patch of ash and scorched earth. Nevertheless, discovery was a risk and he was prepared.
The gun he had taken from the prison guard was primitive, akin to the the Tauri’s less sophisticated firearms. He would have felt more at ease with his staff weapon or a
zat’ni’katel
, but it was futile to wish for something he did not have. He would make do; the gun and his own martial skills would be enough.
Time moved on slowly. At a point he judged to be close to midnight, the white glow of the giant screens blinked off and the texture of the darkness changed. Now it was lit only by yellow lamplight. Occasionally lightning flashed inside the clouds, and for a moment they would glow like a nebula. In the distance thunder rumbled.
But the soldiers did not come. Their shouts grew no closer, despite the streets now filling with people returning from the screens. Teal’c watched as they made their way through the darkness, chattering in a dialect and accent he found difficult to understand. They appeared content, however; he detected no anger or restlessness in their talk. Sorcha Caratauc was right, this was not a people poised to revolt, despite the iniquity of their lives.
Had he not seen as much complaisance among the Jaffa, he might have condemned them for it, but his own people were no less complicit in their own enslavement. He understood their reluctance to risk the little they had in exchange for an uncertain future. He understood, even if he did not share that fear. For what was death compared to a life of slavery?
Once the Badlanders had disappeared into their shacks the streets grew quiet. Then the lamplight died too, and there were few stars left to light the sky. But still the soldiers did not come. He could no longer hear them, and far above, on the parched hillside, a slow caterpillar of light weaved its way upward. The soldiers were retreating to the Ark. They must have been recalled before accomplishing their purpose. Teal’c could not help but wonder why.
Out to sea, thunder rumbled again, ominous in the ever-darkening night. A drop of rain splashed onto Teal’c’s upturned face, fat and heavy, and the wind scuttled about his ankles. On the crest of the hill the Ark shone bright, a glittering city beneath its dome.
This, as the clouds finally swallowed the stars, was the only light left in the world.
* * *
The phone rang, making Sam jump. Its shrill bleep wouldn’t have been out of place at home, and it sounded incongruous enough to put her on edge.
Sorcha snatched the device up, held it to her ear, and after a moment nodded and muttered something Sam couldn’t understand. Then she handed over the phone.
Careful not to disturb the delicate wiring, Sam took it. “Hello?”
“Sam?”
The wave of relief she felt at hearing Daniel’s voice was enormous. She grinned. “Daniel, thank God. Are you okay?”
“Yeah. You? Where’s Teal’c?”
“He’s okay, he’s standing guard. We’re at Sorcha’s place—under it, actually. Where are—?”
“Sam, listen. I know what the shield is, and it’s not what we thought.”
“What?” She glanced over at Sorcha who was watching her with sharp eyes. “What do you mean?”
“It protects the planet from the sun, not from the Goa’uld. And they knew that all along. Sorcha lied to us.”
Her jaw tightened. “From the sun?”
Apparently Daniel understood the direction of her thoughts. “
It’s not Goa’uld, Sam. It’s not like P3X-513. This is definitely Iernan technology.
”
His assertion did little to mollify her. Functioning or not, the shield’s very existence had led to an imbalance on this planet, where men and women had assumed a power to which they had no right, just like Jonas.
“Have you found it?” she asked.
“No. Sam—I don’t even know where to start looking. I think this was some kind of research—”
His voice dropped out for a moment, then continued.
“—is stuffed with files I can translate, but can’t understand.”
“Say again, Daniel. I didn’t hear all that.”
“It was a research laboratory, I think, and
—
”
Again, his voice dropped out.
“I’m losing the connection,” she said to Sorcha, resisting the temptation to start walking around in hope of a better reception. She knew exactly what was happening; the satellite was moving out of range.
“—need you to figure out what they were doing here.”
“Daniel,” she said, urgent now. “Listen, forget the shield. You have to get out of there. The storm is going to be really bad. You can’t stay.”
“—know that.”
Daniel’s voice was scratchy and distorted. “
—can still help these people, Sam.”
“No, you have to get out of there. Now.”
“If we can activate the shield—”
“Tell the colonel you have to get out of there.”
“—can’t just abandon—”
Static drowned his words, and after a couple of moments Sam lowered the phone.
“The storm interferes with the star.” Sorcha glanced up at the ceiling. “It will be a matter of luck whether or not we can speak to the Cove again.”
Sam squeezed the bridge of her nose in frustration.
Sorcha sat forward, her gaze intent. “What did your friend say? Did he speak of
Sciath Dé
?”
“He said it’s not what we thought.” She paused, considering how much to tell her. “He said you lied.”
Sorcha didn’t deny it, simply folded her hands into her lap. “You told Ennis Channon that you could make
Sciath Dé
work; he will never permit that. Would you have gone against his wishes if you’d not believed it to be in your interest? Would you have ever left the Ark?”
“Maybe.” She put the phone down and scrambled to her feet, anger rising. “We’ll never know, will we? You lied to us, you used us.”
Sorcha said nothing.
Straightening her shoulders, Sam took a breath. “You should have trusted us, Sorcha.”
“I did not have that luxury,” she said. “Only
Sciath Dé
can save my people, and you are our best hope of discovering it. Would you not do as much to save your people?”
Sam turned away, stomping toward the ladder. Part of her wanted to just walk away, to turn her back on Sorcha and her half-truths. Lies had stung them before, and that wound still smarted. Now Daniel and the colonel were in mortal danger yet again. But her foot stopped on the lowest rung of the ladder. Daniel’s scratchy pleas rang like her conscience in Sam’s ears.
We can still help these people. We can’t just abandon them.
“Because of you,” she said into the silence, “my friends are out there, in the path of that storm. They might die.” Despite the stuffy heat, the truth chilled her bones. “They might die out there, trying to save your people.” She turned her head, studying the old woman half lost in the shadows. “You owed us the truth. We had the right to choose whether to risk our lives for you.”
Sorcha rose and stepped into the light. Thin as she was, she seemed to fill the room. “What’s done is done, Samantha. But you can choose now: will you help us find
Sciath Dé
, or will you leave and let us burn?”
All things considered, there was only one answer Sam could give.
The storm
was on them now, rain thrown against the window by furious gusts, wind wailing through the decaying tower.
Daniel read on.
An Dóchas Deireanach.
The words were written all over the Cove, painted or
scratched into the walls. An ironic twist, Faelan had said—the
Last Hope. That’s what they’d called this place, back when the seas were rising and they’d been working on the shield. It was all in the documents, the mounting urgency clear in every word.
The Southern Archipelago lost.
Bràigh Mhàrr
dam breached, the plains flooding. Refugees. Saline contamination.
Disease. Disaster. Death.
Most of the papers were typed—or printed, probably. Remnants of the Ierna version of PCs dotted the room, similar to those he’d found back at the
Acarsaid Dorch
outpost.
But the later documents were mostly handwritten and on poorer quality paper, which made Daniel suspect power outages. Or supply problems. Both, probably. He guessed this was what it would be like at the end of the world, civilization retreating in increments. From print to ink to scrawls on the wall, and from there a short step to illiteracy.
Two hundred years. Six generations. And a civilization destroyed in a cosmic blink of an eye.
He shivered and kept on reading, searching for something that would pinpoint the shield. His biggest fear, and not an unlikely scenario, was that the device was already drowned somewhere in the bowels of the city. Then again, with flooding being such a risk, wouldn’t they have kept their Last Hope at the top of the tower? On the roof?
It would help if he knew exactly what he was looking for. He soon learned that
Sciath Dé
was not the project’s original title—it seemed to be a colloquialism, he’d seen it mentioned a couple of times as ‘the so-called Shield of the Gods’, but its real name was the more prosaic ‘global deflector’; he envisaged a giant parasol popping up from the roof of the tower.
The problem was, while he could translate the documents readily enough, he wasn’t entirely sure what the translations meant. There were schematics and graphs and data tables, none of which made a hell of a lot of sense to him; he needed Sam. She, of course, was probably knee-deep in her own schematics and graphs and data tables and unable to translate a word.
In short, a profoundly frustrating scenario.
A sharp breeze wormed into the room, ruffling the papers on the desk. He smoothed them down and pulled a new document from the pile. It looked like a memo, hand-written on thin paper. He didn’t need to see the date to know that it must have been written close to the end. It was headed:
Relocation of the global deflector interface to an Dóchas Mhaireann.
A blast of wind screamed into the tower, somewhere a window broke, and a squall whipped into the room. Papers went flying, and Daniel flung his arms over the pages in front of him just as the door slammed shut. The draft subsided, and he heard footsteps.
“Any progress?” Rhionna sounded as weary as he felt, her voice devoid of hope.
He turned around. “Not a lot.”
Her gaze scanned the chaos around him, and she said, “Faelan’s ship has been sighted; he’ll be back within half an hour.”