Ad Noctum: The Meadow

The captain is a wound in the dusk. The not-quite-gold streak in his dark coat catches firelight and starlight alike.

Chapter warnings: Stressors of all kinds. Violence. Injuries. Torture. Abduction. Anxiety. Panic. Purposefully insensitive discussion of mental health issues. Loss of agency. Thought control. Boundary problems. Manipulation. Gaslighting. References to suicide. Drug use. Death wishes. Indirect references to sexual assault. Blood. Grief. Self harm.

Text iteration: Witching hour.

Additional notes:  I’m delighted to be here, finally writing this one.

The Meadow

A tel’tak, shorn of its electronic fleece, leaps into a hyperspace window and vanishes.

The only shots fired are the zat blasts that stun Olan and his team. Dale and Ginn drag them into the sterile halls of Kiva’s ha’tak, then seal the airlock, transmit their security codes to the green officer monitoring short range sensors, and spark up the engines.

Five years of followed orders and vaulted secrets have cracked Ginn a narrow space where boreal light thaws old ice. Each action allows the next until freedom flows under her skin, cold and new. 

Dale, planted in the copilot’s chair, hums a tune as he reviews the course Ginn has set. 

On the threshold of the bridge, Rush leaks blood like snowmelt and watches them fly.

~~~

Dale’s naquadria planet falls in the Lineal Domain of Osiris. They search the surface, but find no signs of civilization, only sandstone ruins that cap subterranean veins of naquadria. The ruins are old, built maybe before Osiris’s first and most meaningful death, before his reassembly, his madness, his service to Anubis. A temple of rough peach stone rises from a field of green-stemmed grass. Flowers grow in patches, white and gold. A steady west wind blows off the unseen ocean. A forest surrounds the meadow. Trees cluster close and their leaves are fine needles with purple at their tips.

The air tastes plant-wet and woody when Ginn steps out of the open cargo bay. She looks to the sky and sees the faint shine of the galactic core behind a dome of clean blue.

Dale sighs over the tall white flowers crushed beneath the tel’tak’s wing.

Mendelssohn plants his paws on the familiar metal of the cargo bay door.

Rush steps into the tall grass. Its tips brush the hem of his dark coat and he stalks toward the temple like a shade bringing death back to land long free of it.

When they find the gate in the inner chamber of the sandstone temple, it won’t turn.

Ginn kneels, studying angles, examining the quality of the mount. 

Dale takes the gate in, hands on hips. Light filters from above and dapples his hair. “So this is a stargate, huh?”

Rush lays a hand on the shadowy naquadah curve. “Did y’miss the gate on Lucia?”

“No, man. But this one’s right here.” Dale raps his knuckles on the dead gate. “Pre-tty cool.”

~~~

Ginn worries about pursuit, but Dale tells her the computer he gave Kiva was full of red herrings, which means poisoned data named for deceitful Tau’ri fish that lead pursuers astray. Dale’s fish will need to be fast and strong and swim widely because Kiva is a hunter full of rage and capability and all the dark honor of the Sixth House.

But the handful of free hours Ginn has already tasted are worth double her whole life.

Dale names the planet Brigadoon. It’s a Tau’ri word for an enchanted village that comes into and falls out of phase with the world where it sits. The Tau’ri have songs about Brigadoon. He sings the ones he remembers: “There But for You Go I,” and “Almost Like Being in Love.” His voice sounds like the morning, fresh and wonderful.

“Stop,” Rush says, the first time he hears it.

Light from openings far overhead warms the peach stone of the temple walls. 

“Aw come on.” Dale perches on a spar of sandstone mounted next to the stuck stargate like a service tower. “I’ve been cooped up in that coffin for weeks, man. We made it! There’s gotta be something I can sing that you don’t hate. Opera?” He takes a breath. In a language Ginn doesn’t know, he sings, “Là ci darem la mano, là mi dirai di sì,” like he’s trying to get Rush to fall in love.

A swoop fills Ginn’s chest like a diving bird. But—

“No.” Rush presses a hand to his throat, where clear fluid might seep from a days-old wound.

Dale stops. 

Ginn bends over an open panel at the base of the gate to hide her disappointment.

“What about Weezer?” Dale sings again, and it’s even more lovely this time. “I’m a lot like you, so please, hello, I’m here, I’m waaaaaaaaaa-aaaiating.” The stone acoustics lift his voice and it rises through the temple to the sky beyond.

Rush turns and walks down the column-lined entry hall and toward the small peristyle court.

“Aw come on,” Dale calls after him, straddling a sandstone spar. “You can give us Weezer, man.”

Rush doesn’t answer. Or stop.

“I’ll go,” Ginn tells Dale.

Dale says they shouldn’t leave Rush alone because he’s not sure Rush can govern his mind. Ginn doesn’t like leaving Rush alone because he looks dead, and if she lets him out of her sight, maybe he’ll be dead, when she finds him.

Ginn follows at a distance down the avenue of abandoned, towering sandstone, passing through the hall and court with its columns of carved papyrus, down the dromos, and past the pylon gate.

Rush, ahead, boosts himself onto the short fin of the tel’tak and sits on the sun-warmed metal next to the curl of Dale’s sleepy cat.

Ginn hesitates.

Then she, too, climbs the wing.

The head of the Lost House looks spectral even under strong sun.

“What’s my status?” Ginn can’t say what she’s hoping for with the question.

Rush shades his eyes against the swaying grass and meadow flowers. “Graduate student?”

“This is a low status?” Ginn clarifies.

He looks at her, sharp and mismatched with the blue-green day. “No.”

“What is ‘graduate student’ in the Lucian Alliance?”

“Never followed their ranks all that closely, if I’m honest.” He squints like the light hurts him. “A ‘lieutenant,’ I’d think?”

“But that’s Kiva,” Ginn says.

“Yes,” Rush replies. “That’s right.”

“No,” Ginn says, because that’s not right.

Rush slips a silver lighter from his pocket, spins it through his fingers, flicks it open, snaps it closed. His skin is bone-white, his nails a dusty blue. Even his conjured flame pales in the wash of day.

“But we are a House?” Ginn presses.

“Yes.” Rush replies with the speed and certainty of chemically imposed faith. “We are the spacefaring, scientifically-minded, Lost House of the Lucian Alliance.”

Ginn cups the idea in her mind like a little cherished bird. Her whole life, it’s all she ever dreamed of: becoming lost. Falling through a crack in the world and into a second chance at its bottom. “And when we go, we’re going home,” Ginn decides.

Rush smiles, small and real, like she or the world has touched him. “If you like.”

The fields here are so green. The sky is so wide.

“What do you know about it?” Ginn asks. “Where we’re going?”

Rush flicks his lighter closed. “I believe it’s a ship.”

“Ancestral?” Ginn asks.

“Yes.”

Ginn shuts her eyes so that the fountain of her own happiness will turn inside its own catchment and not escape. A ship of the Ancestors, sailing into darkness. And they’re going. As soon as the gate will spin, they’re going home to a ship built by beings of light and wisdom and powers beyond understanding. She’s heard they sowed songs in the ground of their machines. High Chants of Light that—

Her eyes snap open. “Your crystals. They’re for our ship?”

“They’re for our ship,” Rush echoes. From nothing, he produces a flake of milky red, small enough to have come from a door control or a handheld device. He offers it to her.

She lifts it to the light, showing it the sun.

“Keep it in your pocket.” Rush flexes blue-tipped fingers. “When my hands don’t hurt so much, I’ll sew it into your coat.”

Ginn cradles the crystal in her palm. She studies its shine and tiny imperfections that encode its quantum states.

The wind sweeps Rush’s hair out of his eyes. “They’re no different than you,” he says. “They want to go home.”

She looks up, startled. “The crystals?”

“Yes.”

Ginn makes a wet sound in the back of her throat. “If I’d known,” she says, “I’d have helped you take more from Kiva’s ha’tak.”

Rush shrugs with wistful grief for all the broken-off splinters of light that won’t come home with the Lost House of the Lucian Alliance.

“There are crystals here,” Ginn offers. “On Brigadoon. They’re in door controls, there are redundant circuits in the DHD—the stellar cartography update system could come with us. Every spar in the tel’tak’s drive core, all the pyramidal terminations in life support, the chips in the doors.”

“This is the Lineal Domain of Osiris, Lord of Silence.” Rush gives her an annoyed look. “Not bloody ‘Brigadoon,’ which translates directly from Scots as ‘fuckin’ offensive American rot,’ if y’want to know?” He sweeps a hand through his hair.

“What?”

“Never mind. I take your point. I’d always planned t’strip the tel’tak. As for the temple, I’ve already gotten most of the doors.” He plunges into an inner pocket and comes up with a fistful of bright shards that he showers into Ginn’s open hands like a broken rainbow.

They sit heavy and bright. She holds them like they’re alive, not sure what to do.

“Keep them,” Rush says.

“Me?”

“Y’know how fuckin’ heavy this coat has turned?” Rush flaps a lapel. “I’ve got neck pain.”

Ginn splits the gems into balanced handfuls and pockets them.

Mendelssohn rolls and spreads the pink pearls of his toes. There’s brine on the breeze, and white flowers ride green grass like foam. 

Ginn wants more anchor than pockets full of crystal provide. “We need a hierarchy.”

“Oh.” Rush’s attention runs out like the tide. “You’re one of those.”

Ginn doesn’t understand why he’s mentally leaving, how he can do it without going anywhere. “You’ll add people to your House, won’t you?”

“I understand that’s how Houses work.” Rush is already distant.

“To function as a House, we’ll need to know our roles.” She pauses. “If our home is a ship, you’ll be its captain?”

He is captured: ashen and wan, all his color lost to the bright sea of the meadow’s blown grass. “I’m already its captain. I’ve just not arrived yet.”

Rush is so prepared to sail alone that she decides she’ll follow him.

“Dale and I are your first lieutenants?” Ginn asks.

“Lieutenants?” The captain shakes his head. “We’re not a martial organization.”

“But you said we’d deracinate the mindless worship of false gods,” Ginn reminds him.

“Not primarily by the sword?” The captain is mostly philosophical, but there’s an eerie gleam in his eye. He flicks a dusky blue fingernail against Ginn’s Alliance-issued energy weapon. “Or with whatever the fuck this is supposed to be?”

“It’s a gun,” Ginn tells him.

The captain laughs, quiet and charming. “Noted. Thanks.”

“You knew it was a gun,” Ginn realizes.

Still smiling, he admits, “I did.”

~~~

The sparkling scatter of the galactic core means the night never gets truly dark. Starlight turns the forest purple and licks the white and gold flowers of the field. The stream where they bathe is choppy with shine. Dale studies the sky with a practiced eye, like he can read signs in the starspill.

Ginn and the captain clear a patch of meadow behind the tel’tak’s open cargo bay. The captain lights a fire. 

They eat vy’ta and drink purified water from the stream. Mendelssohn comes over to Ginn and tips his head up in the way that means he wants to be scratched under the chin.

Respectful and slow, Ginn extends a finger for him to sniff. Her hair falls into her face. It already smells like woodsmoke.

Dale speaks over the crackle of flames. “We thought up titles.”

“What?” the captain asks.

“You don’t want the Lost House to be a military thing, which I support, by the way. So. Ginn and I gave ourselves titles. You want to hear them?”

The captain is a wound in the dusk. The not-quite-gold streak in his dark coat catches firelight and starlight alike.

Ginn makes contact with the soft fur of Mendelssohn’s jaw and scratches. The cat purrs and leans into her.

“I’m serious.” Dale’s voice softens with strange apology. “I think it’s cool.”

The captain grips his own shoulder and stares, unhappy, into the twilit grass.

“Mine’s boring,” Dale presses ahead. “I’ll stay the Squire of the Lost House of the Lucian Alliance. I’d like to eventually be considered for Cavalier? But we can run that by the Goddess next time we see her.”

The captain looks to Ginn.

“I’ll be your Scientist,” she tells him.

The captain nods.

The never-dark bar of stars floats overhead like an orbiting spear. 

Mendelssohn pricks his ears, and pounces on a glimmering night insect.

“Don’t eat the fireflies, buddy,” Dale says.

~~~

On the third day, the captain wanders alone through the temple in search of lost crystals. Dale decides this is “probably okay.” Ginn doesn’t want a single crystal left behind so she allows it as well. 

In the shaded sandstone temple, she and Dale repair the gate.

Ginn, wrist-deep in the ring, traces fingertips over hair-fine filaments of naquadah.

Dale, mounted on his sandstone spar, manually rotates the inner track. “Which one do you want to learn?” he asks.

“The beautiful one,” Ginn says.

“‘Là ci darem la mano’?” Dale asks.

“No,” Ginn says. “The other one. ‘El Scorcho’.”

Dale laughs. “Good choice. We can do that, but there’s a lot of Tau’ri stuff to explain in that one.”

“That’s good.” Ginn’s fingertips check the integrity of fine wires as the gate rotates.

“Okay,” Dale says, “we’ll start with the chorus.” And then, with his voice like the morning, he sings: “I’m a lot like you.” He grins down at her. “Now you try.”

Ginn tries to copy him, but her voice is shockingly quiet and weak. She remembers her mother singing, long ago, but softly. Never with the power of a bell in a temple of stone.

The wheel spins slowly.

“Not a lot of singing in the Sixth House?” Dale asks.

Her face hot, Ginn shakes her head.

“That’s okay. The Lost House sings, I’m pretty sure. Let’s do it together. Try and match.” He begins, slowing the words, holding the notes long enough for her to find them. “I’m a lot like you…”

They sing together, over and over, Ginn’s voice turning stronger as she learns to make it rise and fall and hold a note. When she’s confident in the words and the tune, Dale sings different notes while Ginn sings the same ones. Two tones together sound ethereal and lovely. The sound fits the quiet pink stone and the light that filters from above and the silver threads of naquadah she traces.

“Oh yeah,” Dale says, when they take a break to rest their voices. “The Lost House definitely sings.” 

Over hours, Ginn finds tiny corroded spots in circuits, heats naquadah filaments, coaxes them gossamer fine, and repairs conductive gaps. As they work, they sing, moving from the first to the second verse:

“Watching Grunge leg-drop New Jack through a press table,” Ginn sings, matching Dale’s falsetto.

“Yes!” Dale makes a fist and thrusts it into the air.

“And then my heart stopped,” they sing together, “listening to Cio-Cio-San fall in love all over again.”

“Nailed it!” Dale shouts.

“The fuck have you done to her?” The captain stands on the threshold of the temple’s inner sanctuary. There’s dust smudged over his coat and powdering his hair. His pale brown eyes shine like he’s exerted himself, but there’s no flush to his cheeks.

“I’m teaching our scientist about essential Earth culture,” Dale informs their captain. “Including but not limited to: hot sauce, Japan, orchestral instruments, Jello, Green Day, personal diaries, professional wrestling, press tables, and Puccini. You’ve been gone for hours, man. You okay? You look like you crawled out of a crypt.”

Ginn snaps a panel into place.

“Yes. Something like that.” The captain dusts off his coat, then plunges a scavenger’s hand down the front of his System Lord vest. He draws out a flat, pale crystal, perfectly round and rimmed with naquadah. “The Eye of Osiris.” He displays it, pleased. “It’s a rebranded Ancient power source, actually. Should come in handy.”

Ginn and Dale stare at him.

“Dang,” Dale says. “That was just—what—lying around in the basement?”

The captain brushes fine dust off his sleeves, then shakes it from his hair. “Osiris had real plans for this planet. Alas, he was chopped into pieces that were separated for too long before reintegration. Have y’fixed the gate yet?”

“Um,” Dale replies. “No.”

~~~

Just after sunset, glowing insects skim over and through the long grass. The coming night smells like dew and cooling earth, tastes like pollen.

“Captain,” Ginn says.

The captain huffs. He crouches over the fire and feeds its small flames. “I mean, y’can call me Nick.”

Ginn stares out over the twilit fields. The sky glows with the remains of the day and the kindling of the galactic center. “When we dial, will the core of this world turn unstable?”

The captain shifts his weight and looks up at her. This is rare, when he’s building a fire. “It’s likely. Yes.”

“Can we dial in a way that doesn’t kill the world?” Ginn asks.

Dale drops the lid of the vy’ta crate, three silver packets in hand. “If we destroy the planet in the dial,” he points out, “Kiva won’t be able to follow us.”

The fireflies visit white flowers. 

“This world’s core was poisoned by Osiris.” The captain offers it like a defense. “Centuries before our arrival.”

“Yes,” Ginn agrees. “But there are flowers here. Trees. Insects. There could be animals.” She looks at Dale. “Like cats.”

Dale sighs at Mendelssohn, stalking insects at the border between flattened and tall grass.

The captain balances on the balls of his feet and his fingertips, watching the fire grow. “It’ll take time.”

“How much?” Dale asks.

“We’ll need to create a granular map of the naquadria deposits,” the captain says. “The dialing window will be shorter and the vein draw-downs more complex. There will be some risk to me, and a small fraction of our total available crystal will need to be sacrificed.”

The cost seems too steep, but—

“Won’t it matter how we go?” Ginn asks. “What we do to get there? The Tau’ri killed a barren world. But this world isn’t barren.”

The captain, fatigued, presses two pale fingers to the space between his closed eyes. There’s a curve in his back and a hunch in his shoulders, like he’s dipping a stick into himself to mark the level of his own vital forces.

Dale looks down at Rush. His eyes are the color of a twilit sea. “So we save the planet?”

“We preserve the architecture of the core, yes,” the captain agrees.

~~~

Ginn’s thighs and hands ache. She’s digging without a shovel, just a bent piece of metal that’s hard to grip. Her hair clings to her face and neck in damp tendrils. Her hands ache. She’s thrown her leather coat aside, and sweat runs down her back under the warm sun.

“He doesn’t care what I think.” Dale’s curls are damp and his skin glistens. “He doesn’t care what anyone thinks. He’s crazy. It’s a mostly likable crazy, but crazy all the same.”

Ginn drives the bent metal point down, then turns it to scoop away another clump of earth and small rock. “He’s our captain.”

“I mean, is he? He’s a UC Berkeley Department Chair who got kidnapped. Something happened with Anubis—”

“It wasn’t Anubis,” Ginn shovels away more dirt. “Anubis is gone.”

Dale crouches down next to the hole Ginn is digging. “Do you know what the LA did to him?”

“Yes,” Ginn wipes the sweat off her brow.

“Tell me everything you know,” Dale says.

So Ginn relates the tale of a lab built by Anubis to study ascension, containing a sarcophagus with an electroconductive biological agent meant to modify DNA, to lift its aperiodic crystal into elevated configurations, ones that might permit the perception and manipulation of EM fields and the conversion of matter to energy. A step along the pathway to ascension. She tells him how Telford stole Rush from an American school, how desperately the Air Force had looked for him, how they tracked the Alliance to Anubis’s lab, how the Air Force attacked while Rush had been in stasis inside the device, how the LA had won the battle at huge cost, how everyone had thought Nicholas Rush had died.

For twenty-seven days.

How David Telford had retrieved him and returned a hero, sailing into Kiva’s good graces with a living candidate on the road to ascension.

“So he was never a host,” Dale says, his head in his hands.

“No,” Ginn replies, “but that device wasn’t built for humans. It was built by Anubis for use on his own clones.”

“So he was submerged in a bioactive substance tailor-made by Anubis for Anubis. And he was left in there for twenty-seven days.”

Ginn nods.

“I don’t know how this is gonna go, Ginn,” Dale says softly. “We’re fine here and now. But there are a bunch of Air Force personnel on this supposed ‘ship’ he’s decided we’re headed for, and I don’t think they’re gonna take too kindly to his—message. And demeanor. And, uh, personal style.”

Ginn heaves her bent metal into the dirt, turns it, and scoops out another clot of earth.

“Ginn.” Dale says her name like an apology.

Ginn heaves her bent metal into the dirt, turns it, and scoops.

She understands what Dale is trying to tell her. She does. Just because she grew up without jokes and songs and irony and hot sauce doesn’t mean she can’t understand that there’s something wrong with the captain. She knows there’s something wrong with him. She knows there are lots of things wrong with him. He looks like he died a week ago and he cries about stones and needs to set a fire per day.

Ginn heaves her bent metal into the dirt, turns it, and scoops.

The captain hadn’t belonged in the Sixth House. He was too Goa’uld because they’d made him that way and they didn’t like looking at what they’d done so when Kiva would see him she would lock him up and interrogate him too hard. And, apparently, the Air Force won’t like him either for the same reasons. Because he can’t shed the marks of everything that went wrong for him.

Ginn heaves her bent metal into the dirt, turns it, and scoops.

The only thing she’s ever wanted her whole life long—she has. Right now. In this meadow. She’s digging up the field outside an oppressor’s abandoned temple to find a vein of poison he left. She’ll drop a control crystal where its lode rises and tracks to the stargate. She’s the Scientist of the Lost. That’s her status. No one is threatening her with the Faith if she says the wrong thing or has too many ideas or turns too valuable. No one is telling her she can’t save the fireflies and the grass and the trees beside the riverbank where they take turns bathing as the sun sinks.

Ginn heaves her bent metal into the dirt, turns it, and scoops.

She loves Dale’s kindness and his songs and his Tau’ri stories and his astrophysics facts. But he’s worried, he’s skeptical, he thinks everything they’re doing is necessary but wrong. They’re only dialing the nine-chevron address because that’s the only place to go where Kiva won’t hunt them. They’re following the captain and doing what he says because he’s “crazy.”

Ginn heaves her bent metal into the dirt, turns it, and scoops.

“I’m sorry,” Dale says. “Just—tell me what I said?”

Ginn heaves her bent metal into the dirt, turns it, scoops. “I understand,” she says, “that you don’t think the Lost House is real.”

Dale looks down at her, and sometimes the kindness on his face can be so intense that it becomes cruel. She understands now that it must strike the captain that way, at times.

“You want it to be real.” He understands the problem.

A lifetime of dead hopes collapse, hyperdense, then supernova into certainty. “It is real.” Ginn heaves her bent metal into the dirt, turns it, scoops.

“Ginn,” Dale says, full of pity.

“No,” Ginn snaps back, refusing his unkind kindness. “We’re digging holes to plant control crystals near massive veins of naquadria so the captain can regulate the energy draw from the core of a planet.”

“Yeah,” Dale agrees.

“I don’t care what the Air Force thinks.” Ginn’s arms burn with exertion. The sun beats down, heating her skin and hair. “It doesn’t matter to me.”

“Yeah.”

“He’s my captain,” Ginn says.

~~~

The sky never gets completely dark this close to the galactic center. Brigadoon is nearer to the whirling heart of the galaxy than Rolan. So even the depths of the night have the dusky glow of millions of clustered stars.

Ginn keeps watch.

She’s better at it than either Tau’ri scientist. Days of hard labor under full sun make Dale fall asleep on almost every shift. When the captain is on watch, he snap-lights his little flame, which keeps everyone awake, or worse, he wanders away and they only find out he’s gone when the morning comes and the fire is banked.

When she sleeps, Ginn dreams of being taken from her family at gunpoint. Her older sister has a precious gem that must be hidden at all costs. Her mother has buried writings of the Ancestors in a field behind their home, full of golden flowers. Ginn plunges her hand into superheated naquadah and closes her disintegrating fingers around a cold key.

If the captain is on watch, sometimes he wakes her before her hand is gone.

The night after they dig the ninth hole and plant the last of the control crystals, the captain has a nightmare. It’s the sort of dream that would get him exiled from the Sixth House, or, if it happened on a mission, shot, because he screams. It’s Kiva’s belief that they’re ruined, the people who scream like that in their sleep.

Dale wakes, eyes wild reflecting the perpetual twilight of the galactic core, like he’s forgotten where he is.

Ginn creeps closer to the captain. There’s more owed here than the loyalty she’s already sworn. She hadn’t placed him in that gelatinous sepulcher, but she’d been there when it happened. Fought and won the battle to defend the lab of a false god where he lay. And she’d left him in the tomb of a Death God, surrounded by bodies of the slain. There was no curse in it, Kiva had told them. There couldn’t be. Anubis was gone.

Rush screams like something is trying to pull him under the ground.

Ginn touches his arm.

He’s climbing a thrown rope, he clamps a hand to her wrist, the other to her shoulder, pulls himself up, and drives a knife at her neck.

“No!” Dale shouts, too far away to help.

The blade ghosts against her skin, cold and sharp, then withdraws. The captain shoves her away, into the crushed grass. He stands over her, his expression terrible. The combined light of the fire and the galactic core give him an ashen, otherworldly aspect and the stories of the Ak’sha flood into her mind, and the gifts they offer before they end the world. But the captain’s clothes aren’t laced with light. They’re laced with the dark.

“I’m sorry,” Ginn offers.

The captain’s pale fingers reach into his charcoal coat. He withdraws his glasses and slides them into place. “Don’t do that again.”

“Rush,” Dale says.

But the captain walks into the long grass and doesn’t return that night.

~~~

Dismantling the tel’tak’s electronics to save its crystal is the hinge of all their effort. Once it’s done, they’ll have no long range sensors. Before beginning, Ginn and Dale take the ship up one last time, for a final set of low orbits, looking for signs of civilization. Polar, equatorial, and inclined orbits yield nothing but wide seas, forests of green and purple, and sandstone monuments, worn down by the wind.

The false gods used to tell stories of Kheb, a frightening world protected by an Ancestral spirit. She thinks it must have felt something like this. She wonders what Osiris had been working on, here. Of all the false gods, he had been the wisest and most loved. Before his fall to madness.

After their last flight, they pass through the papyrus-like columns and enter the sandstone hall. The sun filters from above. The captain sits at the base of the gate, his glasses in his hands, looking up at the empty air as though someone is standing there. His expression is mutinous.

“An’ do you want to tell them y’recommend the murder of a sparkle of fireflies?” the captain asks the air. “Because I fuckin’ don’t.”

“Whoa,” Dale says, loud and friendly. “Who’s murdering fireflies?”

“No one.” The captain slides his glasses into place. “Can we pick up the pace? We’ve got a bloody window, apparently, and it’s closing.”

~~~

“December twenty-fourth, nine PM,” Ginn and Dale sing together, their voices echoing pleasantly off the confines of the bridge. “Eastern Standard Time, from here on in, I shoot without a script.”

“See if anything comes of it,” Ginn sings, high and clear as Dale drops out.

Dale finishes the line: “Instead of my old shit.”

Together they sing, “First shot, Roger: tuning the Fender guitar he hasn’t played in a year.”

They wait.

“Rush, that’s your line,” Dale says. “You’re Roger, remember?”

Instead of, I’ll fuckin’ kill you, or I burned your lives down, which is the captain’s usual contribution, they get nothing.

Ginn and Dale duck out from under the pilot’s console.

The captain isn’t at the third station anymore.

“Ugh,” Dale stretches and his back cracks audibly. “Let’s both go. We could use a break.”

They don’t have to go far to find him. He’s sitting in the engine room on a short stack of textbooks. A small roll of leather is unfurled on the floor beside his hip and he has Ginn’s coat spread over his lap. As they watch, he slices a small cut in the coat’s hem with a narrow blade, inserts a deep blue crystal, and then sews it shut.

Dale watches the captain, hands on hips. “You’re supposed to ask before you put GPS crystal in someone’s clothes, you know.”

“Maybe if you’d not been corrupting her mind with American Musical Theater, I would have.” The captain drives a needle through the thick leather, winces, and shakes out his pallid hand.

“So,” Dale continues undeterred, “are these trackers, or, like distributed computation?”

“Logic gates,” the captain says, like a correction.

“Thank you,” Ginn says softly.

“You’re quite welcome,” the captain replies.

~~~

After dismantling the tel’tak’s electronics, the captain’s quantum computer, and stripping every non-essential stone, spar, and flake from Osiris’s Temple of the Dawn, they have six crates of crystal, packed to the brim and so heavy that it takes two people to lift them, if one of those people is Dale. Otherwise, it takes three people. They stack the crystal beside the gate.

They pack all their food, electronics, weapons, medical supplies, cat food, cat litter, customized adaptors, spare wire, spare clothes, blankets, and the captain’s two textbooks. With respect and precision, Ginn disconnects the liquid naquadah drive core from their tel’tak, and they crate that as well, wrapping in Dale’s Tau’ri shirts and the captain’s Department Chair coat. Tau’ri clothing is so flimsy that it wraps well around the core. Ginn adds a few blankets and the thin pillows from the ship’s cot to cushion it further. 

Packing, then moving supplies into the temple of Osiris takes a day of hard physical labor. That night, they double their vy’ta ration and drink heated water so Dale and the captain can pretend it’s tea. 

“So when we walk through that gate,” Dale says, “with seven hundred and fifty pounds of crystal and a cat…we’re pretty sure the Air Force will already be there?”

The captain nods with a small smirk.

“Can I make a suggestion?” Dale glances from Ginn to the captain and back.

The captain sweeps his hair out of his eyes. “No one’s stopping you.”

Ginn takes tiny sips of her hot water, her whole body aching from a day of carting boxes.

“I don’t think we should say we’re from the Lucian Alliance when we get there,” Dale says carefully. “Maybe we keep our Lost House talk just between the three of us? At least at first?”

Ginn frowns. Their clothes and weapons and manner will all mark them as Alliance. And the Lost House is nothing to be ashamed of. One day, on Alliance Worlds, they’ll tell fire stories about her and her disappearing house. She studies the steam rising from the cup in her hands and waits to see what the captain will say.

“Very reasonable.” The captain is polite and magnanimous.

“Great,” Dale says, like the captain has agreed.

Ginn isn’t so sure he has.

“And maybe we should tell Ginn about Everett?” Dale suggests. “So she’s not surprised?”

The captain sighs. He turns to Ginn, and, in a matter-of-fact tone, he says, “Everett is a Tau’ri military commander and my fated cosmic lover.”

“Oh,” Ginn says.

No one speaks.

The captain hooks a pale hand over his shoulder and digs blue-tipped fingers into sore muscle.

“How do you know?” Ginn asks.

“Unanswerable,” the captain replies.

“So,” Dale begins with cheerful aggression, “um, I hear that sometimes when you want a romantic relationship with someone, it’s best to play it cool at first?”

The captain sighs, like he’s besieged by fools. “I don’t ‘want’ a romantic relationship with him,” he says, slow and overenunciated, like he’s teaching Dale a new language. “I ‘have’ one.”

“Riiiight,” Dale presses, “but does he know that?”

“I think I’ve made it quite clear.”

“What do you like about him?” Ginn asks.

The captain digs harder into his shoulder. “Nothing.”

“Don’t claw your gunshot wound open, buddy,” Dale says.

“Fuck off.”

“He’s handsome.” Dale answers Ginn’s question. “Dark, curly hair. Built like a bull. Seems pretty brave. Not sure how smart he is. We’ll find out, I guess.”

“Will Everett have status within the Lost House?” Ginn asks.

Before the captain can answer, Dale jumps in. “That’s, like, a perfect example of the kind of thing I’m suggesting we don’t mention to him? I don’t think he likes the Lucian Alliance all that much.”

“But we’re part of the Alliance,” Ginn points out. “We share their commitment to battling false gods and dismantling oppressive power structures.”

“Correct,” the captain confirms, crisp and clean.

Dale rubs a hand over the straw-colored stubble on his cheeks. He looks worried.

Ginn, too, feels uneasy. She understands Dale’s implication: the Air Force occupy the captain’s ship in significant numbers. If they don’t offer his ship to him—it will be difficult for three scientists and a cat to take it by force.

“I just want you to think about starting things off on the right foot with Everett,” Dale says. “Like maybe we all sit down and we explain what happened, and why we didn’t let him rescue us, and what Telford—” Dale trails off, swallows, restarts, “—did? Just a hi, how are you, we’re glad to be here, is there a place we can put our stuff, and then maybe a conference room where we can all sit down? Do some introductions? And then, after that, when they’re ready, we can talk about how we can help each other.”

“You’ve thought this through, I see.” The captain snap-lights a small flame and stares into its heart.

~~~

The Temple of Osiris is especially beautiful at dawn, when the galactic core still shines bright, but the light of day sends fingers of rose-gold above and behind its pale stone.

Dale offers the captain a silver laptop.

The captain refuses it. He steps to the crystal-stripped DHD and studies it for a moment, head angled. Mendelssohn presses his face against the captain’s shell-stamped boot. He picks up the cat and hands him to Dale.

“This is it, I guess?” Dale holds Mendelssohn to his chest, tucking the cat inside the leather of his coat.

“This is it.” The captain steps to the DHD and rests his fingers against its edges.

For a moment, nothing happens.

At the edge of Ginn’s hearing, tone builds. Low at first, almost imperceptible. Then, a pure chord rises, overrun with yearning. Growing louder.

Dale’s face is full of wonder. It matches Ginn’s heart. 

Mendelssohn shifts beneath the flap of Dale’s coat.

The sound rises like a wall of water, looming over their heads, vibrating the stone, pressuring her eardrums. The red gem at the heart of the DHD shatters into tiny fragments and explodes in an impossible shockwave vectored away from the captain and away from Ginn and Dale, who flank him. White light shines from the center of the DHD.

The heavy metal cage of a dead false god falls away, revealing the true structure of the dialing device. Slender silver struts link tiny carven crystals to a central power source. Each crystal petal glows.

The captain, his hair lit with the dawn, harvests tiny stone flowers with his quick, dead hands. All but nine.

Ginn looks to Dale, her question on her face. Do you see? The Lost House is real. It has to be, if it starts this way.

Dale shakes his head, and Ginn isn’t sure if it’s awe or alarm on his face.

Their captain positions his hands over the last nine crystals. The ethereal chord, its shattering work done, fades from the air. Without being touched, the first of the nine lights up, shining pale in the dawn. At the same time, the gate glows, locks a chevron, and begins to spin. One by one, the little carven symbols kindle under the captain’s hands. The gate turns, stops, locks, changes direction.

When all nine are aglow, the planet shakes beneath their feet.

Ginn staggers and widens her stance.

Dale wraps both arms around Mendelssohn, trapping the cat in his coat to prevent him from leaping away.

The captain throws his head back, like his back and shoulders have contracted in the presence of running current. He grimaces. A muscle in his cheek begins to twitch.

With a subterranean rumble and a flash of blue light, the gate activates, throws its vortex, stabilizes, and stills. The blue puddle shines in the sandstone hall.

The captain opens his eyes, blinks, straightens. Joy and disbelief war on his face.

The ground rumbles again, and the sandstone blocks above shift, releasing small showers of dust.

“Y’know,” Dale says, still struggling to hold onto Mendelssohn. “We thought a lot about the structural integrity of the planetary core—” he begins.

“—but less about the temple,” the captain finishes. “Yes well.” He pitches Mendelssohn’s cat food through first, then his food and water bowl. “No time like the present, eh?”

Ginn picks a crate of crystal, crouches, braces her wrists against it, and drives for the gate, pumping her thighs in a knee-punishing crouch. She shoves the crate through, then darts back for the next.

Dale hands Mendelssohn off to the captain with a stern, “Do NOT put him down,” and starts helping Ginn. As they shove crate after crate through the gate, the captain dips a booted toe into the event horizon. He looks up at the ceiling and stone dust showers him like snow. “Prioritize the crystal and drive core,” he says.

“You gotta call it,” Dale shouts, shoving another crate of crystal over stone and into the gleaming portal of light.

“Yes yes,” the captain says, studying the ceiling.

Ginn dives for another crate of crystal, her heart aching at the idea of leaving any of them behind. Her thighs burn. Her breath comes hard. The air fills with the stone taste of dust, and she coughs. There’s a loud crack. She looks behind her.

A papyrus column crumbles, bringing a section of roof down with it.

As though he can sense when the last crate of crystal crosses the event horizon, the captain says, “Right then.” He grins at them, chancy and brash. “Come on.”

He vanishes through the gate, carrying the cat.

Ginn and Dale follow.