Relativity Read online

  Relativity

  James Swallow

  An original publication of Fandemonium Ltd, produced under license from MGM Consumer Products.

  Fandemonium Books

  PO Box 795A

  Surbiton

  Surrey KT5 8YB

  United Kingdom

  Visit our website: www.stargatenovels.com

  METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER Presents

  RICHARD DEAN ANDERSON

  in

  STARGATE SG-1™

  AMANDA TAPPING CHRISTOPHER JUDGE DON S. DAVIS

  and MICHAEL SHANKS as Daniel Jackson

  Executive Producers ROBERT C. COOPER MICHAEL GREENBURG

  RICHARD DEAN ANDERSON

  Developed for Television by BRAD WRIGHT &

  JONATHAN GLASSNER

  STARGATE SG-1 © 1997-2011 MGM Television Entertainment Inc. and MGM Global Holdings Inc. STARGATE: SG-1 is a trademark of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. All rights reserved.

  METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER TM & © 2011 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. All Rights Reserved.

  Photography and cover art: Copyright © 2011 MGM Television Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. All rights reserved.

  WWW.MGM.COM

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written consent of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  Acknowledgements:

  Special thanks once again to Keith Topping, to Jo Walton and Steve Riley for friendship and l33t skills (Steve Riley is indestructible; you are not. Do not try to imitate him) and to Rachel Cooper for her generosity and enthusiasm.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Author’s note:

  The events depicted in Relativity take place toward the end of the seventh season of Stargate SG-1.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The glittering flash came without warning, creating a watery glow in its wake that shimmered around the floor and the walls of the canyon. It caught fragments of crystalline mica and made them twinkle. In the dreary light of the day, the deep reds and burnt umber of the rocks were dulled, diluted by the sheen of fine, persistent rain. The glowing puddle of radiance set into the sheer side of the tallest rock face shone like a mirror made of ripples, held in place by a steel-gray hoop studded at regular intervals with luminous orange arrowheads.

  Presently, a boxy mechanism on whining motorized wheels ventured through the circle, took the steps below it with robotic care and paused on the threshold. It offered telescopic arms to the sky, casting around with a stubby head equipped with digital abstractions of human senses. After a while it fell dormant and waited patiently, its job done.

  The mirror flexed once again and figures in green followed the path of the machine. Four people, moving in a way that might have seemed casual to someone who did not know them.

  She turned and flashed a grin as she stepped down the shallow stairs from the Stargate. “Well. No trees. That means you owe me lunch, sir.”

  Jack O’Neill grimaced as he took in the sparse landscape. “Yeah, okay. Fine. Easy bet. Just don’t gloat, Carter. It’s unseemly.”

  At his side, Daniel Jackson raised an eyebrow. “Unseemly?” he repeated.

  “What?” O’Neill asked. “I’m reading a book on improving my word power. Don’t take that from me as well.”

  From behind him, Teal’c came to his commander’s rescue. “I would doubt that this valley has ever seen vegetation of any kind, Colonel.”

  “Right now, I’d settle for some better weather.” O’Neill took his sunglasses off the lanyard around his neck and peevishly put them inside an inner pocket of his gear vest. “Or maybe an umbrella.”

  “It’s not that bad.” Jackson adjusted the boonie hat on his head. “A brave man likes the feel of nature on his face, right Teal’c?”

  “Indeed,” replied the Jaffa, “but a wise man has the sense to get in out of the rain.”

  O’Neill pointed and nodded. “That’s what I’m talking about.” He stepped down to where Carter was studying the hooded monitor panel built into the back of the MALP remote explorer. There was a rushing whoop of air as the gateway’s energy folded in on itself and vanished. Jack looked over his shoulder at the now-dormant Stargate. Most of the ones they found were free-standing but this one had been set into rock, almost like it had been embedded there. O’Neill was reminded of a fossil, fused into the stone.

  He didn’t have to look to know that Teal’c was already scouting the perimeter of the gate, or that Jackson was giving the dialing podium a once-over. They had been a part of SG-1 for so long now that they worked in easy lockstep, in a kind of team-player single-mindedness. Jack liked that; it was comforting, like a pair of good, worn-in boots. That sort of dynamic was what kept them together, kept them alive in even the strangest and most dangerous of situations. It was also the reason why, after nearly seven years, the members of the team had remained relatively unchanged while other SG squads had come and gone. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

  Carter glanced at him. “I’m going to go ahead and deploy the MP-UAV, sir.”

  “A-OK,” he replied. “Go ahead, major, knock yourself out.”

  From the cargo compartment of the MALP rover, Carter recovered what looked like a cross between a laptop and the controller from a videogame. In moments, she had it booted up and running. A cylindrical container on the MALP’s flatbed flapped open and something inside rattled into life with a noise like a swarm of wasps inside a tin can. She toggled a control and a fat torus painted in dark green leapt out of the canister and slowed to a trembling hover a few feet over their heads.

  “What is that? Sounds like a lawnmower.” Jackson frowned.

  “It’s a man-portable unmanned aerial vehicle,” explained Carter. “Like the regular fixed-wing UAVs we use, but smaller. It’s got a ducted rotor blade in there, cameras and sensors, solar-chargeable batteries. The army’s been testing them for their Advanced Warfighter program, and I got a couple on loan.”

  “Looks like a flying donut,” said Daniel.

  “Mmm. Donut.” O’Neill nodded sagely.

  “I’ll send it out to the end of the ravine.” Carter worked the controls and the drone’s motor changed pitch as it raced away. Over her shoulder, Jack watched the relay from the UAV’s cameras to the monitor screen on the control unit. Sam clipped it to a brace on her webbing vest so she could walk around with the thing.

  “Neat,” he opined, and moved forward, his gaze ranging about to take in the whole of the box canyon where the Stargate was situated. In the distance, in the direction the UAV had flown, he could see odd shapes like shallow hills, and overhead nothing but slow-moving, heavy clouds, black with rain. “The army always gets the cool kit. How come we don’t have anything like that?”

  “We do have spaceships, Colonel,” noted Carter dryly, “and ray guns and interplanetary wormhole travel.”

  “I mean besides those.” He sighed. “Still. Better than being in the navy. All they have is that song.”

  Teal’c approached him. “I find no tracks in the immediate area, O’Neill. This gate does not appear to be in regular use.”

  “The rain could have wiped out any trails,” off
ered Carter. “See the shaping of the rocks, the smoothing? That’s from water flow. My guess is that this place sees a lot of precipitation.”

  “Should have packed our slickers,” Jack retorted. “Okay, let’s do the exploring thing, then.”

  The team advanced along the canyon, with Daniel a few steps to the rear, panning about with his video camera. He gave an arch sniff. “Whose idea was it to come here?”

  “Dixon,” explained O’Neill. “He came back from that ice planet with a lead from the locals to this gate address, something about alien gizmos…” He threw a look at Jackson. “And ruins. I know how much you like ruins.”

  “I remember that part,” Daniel nodded, missing the sarcasm.

  “Why didn’t Major Dixon take this mission then, sir?” Carter glanced up from the screen.

  “His wife’s having another baby. He’s a good airman, but he’s a glutton for punishment…” The colonel broke off as a diffuse flash of lightning flared overhead, followed rapidly by a low rumble of thunder. The tempo of the rain stepped up. “Why do we always have to walk everywhere, anyhow? I should get Hammond to get us some little jeeps. Maybe like those moon-buggies they used to have on The Banana Splits.”

  Carter’s console chimed and she manipulated the controls. “Huh. That’s peculiar.”

  “Got something?”

  “The UAV has a short range ground-penetrating radar, the army use it for detecting buried landmines… I’m getting intermittent returns from the area up ahead, where the canyon opens out. It looks like it might just be metal strata in the rocks.”

  O’Neill frowned again. “Given our track record, let’s not stray too close, huh?”

  Carter nodded. “Yes sir. We should head this way, then.”

  The rain gave everything a fresh chill, but there was little wind. The walls of the narrow arroyo gradually sank down to reveal a large open plain formed from the same kind of porous, silicate-laced stone that surrounded the gate. Daniel took a couple of steps forward and stopped, blinking. From a distance, he had thought he was looking at regular hillocks, maybe tomb mounds of some kind; but as the canyon floor sloped a little, he saw the full dimension of what the objects were. “Spheres,” he said aloud. “Whoa.”

  Scattered across the plain in what seemed to be a random pattern were dozens of huge stone balls of uniform size, easily forty, maybe fifty feet across. It was like an ant’s eye-view of a pool table.

  “This is a new one,” noted Jack. “Did some giant kid leave his marbles behind?”

  Carter squinted at the screen, wiping off a few stray droplets of water. The thin droning of the UAV’s rotors carried down to them from where it orbited overhead. “There’s a lot of them out here.”

  “Can you take that thing up higher, get a look down on them?” Jackson jerked a thumb at the dull sky. “There might be a pattern we can’t see from the ground, like the lines at Nazca on Earth.”

  “I’ll try,” she said, “but the cloud base is pretty low.”

  “T,” called the colonel, “You ever see anything like this?”

  “I have not,” replied the Jaffa, terse and to the point as ever.

  Daniel was already leaving them behind, briskly marching toward the closest of the orbs. “Not Goa’uld in design,” he said aloud, partly to voice his thoughts and partly to narrate the recording he was making. “They never stray from that pyramid look. Not Asgard either…”

  “Daniel, wait up.” O’Neill came with him, the P90 submachine gun strapped to his shoulder cocked and ready. “Let’s not be too eager. This is a just a recon, remember? We take a look-see and then gate back.”

  “Yeah,” Daniel wasn’t really paying attention. Close up, he could see that the spheres were polished smooth and made from some kind of marble. He was willing to hazard a guess they weren’t carved from any local rock, and they were too big to have come through the Stargate. There were lines of writing, little more than a couple of inches tall, layered in strings around the circumference. He ran his hand across the surface and felt a smile pull at the edges of his lips. There it was; the thrill. So often these days, Jackson found himself buried in databases and aged records as he raced against the clock to search for answers to some immediate threat, some deadly danger to life and liberty. Too many times, when he could step back and take a breath, he realized that he was turning into a reactive scientist, only making discoveries when events forced him to find solutions to problems, instead of learning for the sheer joy of it. He had wanted to become part of the Stargate program not because of the things he knew, but because of the new things it could show him; and with all the fighting and surviving in recent years, Daniel felt as if he’d lost sight of that.

  But this… These orbs. They were unknown to him. He knew it immediately. He was going to want to come back here with a lot more hardware and a lot more time. “The writing on these things, if they’re all covered with it…” He traced a line of text. “If there are hundreds of these spheres, it could be more text than the books in the Library of Congress…” The thrill of discovery; it tingled in the tips of his fingers. “These carvings are ancient…” Off in the distance, another flash-rumble of lightning and thunder rolled away.

  O’Neill eyed him. “Is that capital-A weird alien Ancient or little-a just-kinda-old ancient?”

  Jackson paused. “The second one. It’s a runic design that shares a lot of characteristics with an early British and Irish written language called Ogham that features etchings or marks in pattern over a central median line, sometimes made with sticks or cut into stones—”

  “Daniel,” Jack halted him in mid-flow with a raised hand. “Remember that conversation we had a while back about the difference between what counts as mission-critical information and stuff that only Jackson thinks is cool? Which is this?”

  “It is cool,” retorted the archaeologist, a bit too defensively. “And it might be critical later.”

  “You say that every time.”

  “How often am I right?” Jackson grinned a little.

  “Occasionally,” admitted O’Neill. He scowled and walked away. “You know,” he threw over his shoulder, “you weren’t this smug before you died.”

  Daniel set up his camera and began to film some of the lines of writing. “What can I say? I’ve picked up your bad habits.”

  “Wiseass,” murmured the colonel, as Teal’c came closer.

  The Jaffa gestured with his staff weapon. “The other spheres appear to be of similar form and design. Perhaps they are memorials.”

  “Like a graveyard?” O’Neill grimaced and looked at the wet sands beneath their boots. “I hope not. I have a thing about walking on dead folks.”

  “I have found no tracks around the canyon,” Teal’c continued, “however…”

  “Don’t give me that arched eyebrow look,” demanded O’Neill. “However what?”

  Teal’c dropped to a crouch, examining the ground. “I considered Major Carter’s comment about the rock strata. If she is indeed correct about the action of the rainfall on the landscape, then there should be no evidence of motion in the sands.”

  “What are you saying, that someone’s been digging the ground up around here?”

  He nodded. “There are signs, albeit very vague, of movement.”

  “We don’t know anything about the tectonics of this place,” called the major, catching their conversation. “What you saw might just be displacement patterns from heavy storm activity.”

  O’Neill’s eyes narrowed. The man had a warrior’s sense for the untoward that Teal’c found worthy of great respect, and he recognized it at work on the Tau’ri’s face. “Carter,” snapped O’Neill, “forget what I said earlier. Get your flyin’ donut back here, close to the dirt. Give that underground radar a workout. Let’s be sure what’s down there before we go any further.”

  “Roger that, sir.” Carter worked the controls on the remote console, and from the dreary sky the drone flyer swooped in, buzzing over Teal’c’s hea
d.

  “There,” he pointed, blinking as another flash of lightning lit the clouds from beneath.

  “Got it.” The major deftly steered the UAV into a low, swift pass over the area of the sands Teal’c had indicated. “I’m tuning the system to full gain… Reading those metallic clusters again…”

  The Jaffa felt the faintest of vibrations through the soles of his combat boots, and threw a glance at O’Neill.

  “That feel like thunder to you?”

  Teal’c staff weapon spun around in an arc as he brought it into a two-handed grip. “No.”

  On the monitor screen, the blobs of color from the radar return refused to form into anything that looked like a coherent shape. Sam chewed her lip; she wasn’t a geologist, this wasn’t her specialty. As far as she could tell, there were big chunks of metal ore beneath the sands, in lumps the size of a Toyota. Inert and lifeless; at least until one of them moved.

  Sensor glitch. The rational, detached part of her mind immediately supplied an explanation. Check it again. Nothing to be alarmed about. But that wasn’t the part of Samantha Carter that she was listening too; there was the other element of her, the veteran of hundreds of off-world missions, the bit that knew the taint of danger in the air from too much first-hand experience.

  She felt the shift in the sand beneath her feet and the rush of icy adrenaline through her veins. “Colonel—” she began.

  The flash of light was so close and so harsh that it made her wince in pain, and Carter turned her head away, screwing her eyes tight shut. She saw only the purple after-image of it, seared on to her retinas. A streak of energy connecting the sandy earth with the torus of the UAV. She blinked the pain away and heard the coughing crash as the small drone exploded, scattering pieces of itself in a shower of plastic and steel fragments. The monitor screen in front of her showed the words Loss of Signal in angry red letters, and once again that rational bit of her was wondering how annoyed the US Army were going to be that she had lost one of their new toys.