"I've managed to get some additional information," Landry told the remaining members of SG-1 as he set his laptop on the conference table and plugged in a video cable, "but I'm afraid none of it's good."
"What happened?" Cam asked him.
General Landry settled into his chair, his expression solemn. "Korolev's distress call said it was disabled – that its engines were offline. The engineers on the Apollo believe both ships were caught in the gravity well of the black hole and were too badly damaged to free themselves."
"Can Apollo not rescue them?" Teal'c pressed. "Retrieve the ship or beam the crew aboard?"
"There's… nothing left to transport, Mister Teal'c." Sympathy dripped through the words and made them worse. "Most of the wreckage from the Korolev has already been pulled beyond the event horizon. Apollo tried to contact the enemy ship before they crossed over, but the time distortion from the black hole has made that impossible."
"How much of the wreckage?"
All three men around the table glanced at Cam, but it was Landry who asked, "What?"
"You said most of the wreckage is already gone. I'm sorry, but that's a little too clean," SG-1's leader argued, leaning over the table for emphasis. "Sucked into a black hole? No evidence? Really?"
With a grim sigh, the General tapped a few commands on his laptop and got to his feet as an image projected across the room. The field of debris there was distinctively funneled, shifting red until it disappeared into the event horizon. "I realize this is difficult to see; even more so on a computer screen, but Colonel Ellis pointed a few things out to me. This is the enemy ship," he explained, pointing to a large clump that had probably once been beige but was deep orange-brown close to the center of the black hole. Spreading his fingers to point to two smaller dots, he told them, "And these are F-302s."
That was damning, and Daniel had to swallow hard to speak. "From the Korolev. You're, uh…. You're sure."
"I don't know where else they would have come from, Doctor Jackson. They've managed to identify two hatch covers with Air Force designations as well as some cargo containers and medical supplies. It would appear Korolev's hull was badly breached." He needed a breath to continue. "There are bodies in the debris field, as well, though they haven't been able to identify them."
The room was quiet a moment before Daniel pressed desperately, "They must have tried for the escape pods. Have… have launched the other F-302s. Something. There must be something."
"If the 302s couldn't escape the gravity well, there's no way the escape pods did," Cam told him grimly.
Landry returned to his seat and shut the image down. "Apollo is still searching, but they've come up empty so far. The planets nearest the black hole aren't inhabitable, and they haven't received any communications. But they're searching."
No one answered. There was nothing to say.
"The Russians are scheduling a memorial service next week. We'll have one as well, likely at Area 51. There were sixty-four Americans up there."
And over a hundred Russians. It was a devastating loss to the entire program. "I'll have the leave requests on your desk as soon as we have a date, sir," Mitchell said.
Somehow, Landry had already known that.