Read Online SG1-15 The Power Behind the Throne by Steven Savile - Free Book Online Page A

sounds, sir. There are going to be by-products in the fecal matter that our scanners could pick up.”
    “You’re kidding me.”
    “On the contrary, O’Neill,” Teal’c observed.
    “Don’t go there, big guy.”
    “Okay, quick recap. Daniel, what do we know about the creature?”
    Daniel’s shrug was lost in the bulk of his suit. “Not much really. If I understand things properly, the Mujina has no real identity of its own, it’s a blank canvas that draws its form from those it encounters like some sort of doppelganger. It feeds off what they need, reflecting it back to them, and in turn they provide what it needs. It’s self-sustaining in nature, really, and quite remarkable.”
    “But what that all means is that it must be a social creature, surely? Without someone to mirror it’’s empty.”
    “It’s reasonable to assume so,” Daniel said. “What are you driving at, Sam?”
    “If you were a social creature and they stranded you here, what would you crave more than anything?”
    “Contact,” Daniel said.
    Sam nodded again. “That being the case it’s going to try to take shelter close to the gate. It’s the one place it’s encountered other life since its exile, the one place where it’s made the kind of contact it craves. It isn’t going to hide itself away. It wants to be found.” It made a certain kind of sense but Sam was still unsure of her reasoning. “The surface is too hot, so I am thinking underground lakes, a cave network, anything that takes us beneath the surface and out of the hostile air. I’m thinking Robinson Crusoe here,” she said, “when he was marooned the first thing he did was make a basic shelter, but the longer he stayed the more elaborate his construction became, not because he needed it but because it gave him something physical to do to ward off the madness. I think we’re looking for an elaborate construction, something that sticks out like a sore thumb.”
    “Makes sense,” Jack agreed, “You’re thinking this might account for the old man’s eyes?”
    “I’m hoping it is more figurative than literal,” Sam said. She pulled back the Velcro seal on one of the suit’s pockets and fumbled about inside for the small handheld scanner. The fat fingers and thumbs of the suit’s insulated gloves made it almost impossible to operate the device’s finer controls. Twice the touch-screen responded with the wrong protocols because her touch overlapped with another command but eventually she succeeded in launching the geo-phys module. Flame reflected off the scanner’s screen, and then the roiling patterns faded and the scanner came back with a string of geological data breaking down the component parts of the surrounding terrain, vegetable and mineral. None of the facts held her eye; Sam was looking at the sky. The fire had burned out. It was incredible to see, as though the night’s black ate through the red, the flames rolling back toward their point of origin and snuffing out. It took a matter of seconds for the entire expanse of sky to clear. Suddenly they were gazing up at the stars.
    “Kinda makes you wish we’d held off on launching that drone for, oh, five minutes, doesn’t it?” Jack said.
    The shift in temperature was immediate and surprising. The scanner read a concurrent drop of twenty-seven degrees within the next forty seconds. Still the temperature continued to fall, at almost a degree a second, and showed no sign of leveling out. A crystalline web of frost began to form across Sam’s visor. Spiders of white splintered in front of her eyes, a Mandelbrot Set of rime.
    “What’s happening?” Jack’s voice sounded terse in her ear.
    “It’s an extreme temperature shift, sir. When the fire burned out, the surface temperature returned to its natural level—”
    “Which just happens to be damned freezing,” Jack said.
    “Actually ten degrees below, sir. The moisture in the air has rimed into a frost, that’s all.”
    “So we’re