Planet of the Damned
by Rebecca Ratliff
EMAIL: rmratliff@adelphia.net
DATE: May 2003
ARCHIVE: If I haven't submitted to your archive, please ask. (I'll say yes, I just like to know where it is.)
CATEGORY: Action/adventure, supernatural
RATING: PG-13, language, violence
SPOILERS: Small ones up through the end of season 6.
SEASON/SEQUEL INFO: Between season 6 and 7. "Gates of War" Series sequence: Abyss Novelization, Sirikat, Fields of Gold, A Nice Quiet Week in the Country, Brothers in Arms, Shadows on the Moon, Parada, Light Duty, Snowbound, Planet of the Damned
SUMMARY: A routine mission to explore the ruins of an extinct civilization becomes anything but routine when things begin to go bump in the night.
DISCLAIMER: All Stargate SG-1 characters are the property of Stargate SG-1 Productions (II) Inc., MGM Worldwide Television Productions Inc., Double Secret Productions, Gekko Film Corp and Showtime Networks Inc. No infringement of those rights is intended. This story is for entertainment purposes only and no money exchanged hands. No copyright infringement is intended. Anybody that you don't recognize is probably mine, so if you borrow them please send me an email to let me know where they are and have them home by midnight. :)
AUTHOR'S NOTES: Thanks to Mama Beast for the beta.
FEEDBACK: Much appreciated.
Carter watched the mist curl through a gap in the low stone wall surrounding the ruined building where SG-1 had made camp for the night. The heavy dampness was a perfect complement to the chill. It seeped through their BDUs and into their sleeping bags, making it impossible to get warm.
The mission wasn't a complete wash. They had found some stone tablets, similar to the Ancients tablet from Abydos, that had been packed for return to the SGC with them. Other than that, they had found burnt-out bronze age ruins, unlikely to be useful in their war against the Goa'uld.
They had decided to camp here for the night and check two other locations that the UAV had found on their way back to the gate tomorrow.
Carter thought she saw movement. Rifle at the ready, she checked it out.
Something big and hairy was hiding behind the wall. She scrambled back and opened fire as it jumped at her throat. To her horror, the bullets were completely ineffective. She warded it away from her throat but its fangs sank into her arm.
O'Neill grabbed the animal off her and wrung its neck. He flung its carcass back over the wall. Jonas and Teal'c looked around for more and thankfully didn't find any.
The initial shock of Carter's injury was starting to wear off and O'Neill had to force her arm away from her body so he could assess the damage. Her arm was a mess of jagged triangular gashes and he could see bone in several places. There wasn't any severe arterial bleeding, by some miracle, and her arm wasn't broken. "I hope Janet likes to embroider because you're gonna have a whole lot of stitches before she gets done with you."
"What the hell was that thing? Colonel, I let it have a full burst at point blank range. There's no way I missed!"
He indicated a neat round pattern of bullet holes in a wall. "I don't think you did."
"It must stay out of phase until it closes to attack. If I'd waited to fire, I might have hit it."
"Now we know," he told her.
Jonas had built the fire up. There was no question of moving before dawn. There were twenty miles of desolate moors and bogs between them and the gate. It would be suicidal to risk another encounter with these things, possibly with multiple creatures at once, in the dark.
Carter refused a morphine shot. The last thing she wanted was to be all doped up if more of those things came out of the night. After an hour or so, the pain subsided to a dull ache on its own. She fixed a pot of coffee.
Dawn had never been more welcome, no matter gray and anemic the light filtering through the heavy cloud cover might be. They broke camp and got moving.
When they topped a low hill, O'Neill paused for a long look around. He asked Teal'c, "How many do you figure?"
"I do not know, O'Neill. I have seen but one. There are certainly more."
Jonas asked, "How do you know?"
"They've been around. I saw their eyes in the dark outside camp last night," O'Neill said casually.
"Oh."
He laughed. "Don't look at the campfire, it messes up your night vision every time you do. That's why you couldn't see anything out there."
Jonas filed that bit of information under important things to know. He wondered if the creatures would attack by daylight, or if they would wait until dark. With ten hours of day to fourteen hours of night, they were going to have to push hard to get to the gate before sunset. Nobody was a bit reluctant to do that, not even Carter. After a quick breakfast of coffee and ration bars, they headed for home.
O'Neill would have preferred to stick to the high ground circling the moors. It was very difficult to tell a bog from solid ground, and anyone who fell in could easily disappear without a trace. But avoiding the moors would have required spending another night out here.
He toed a soft spot and looked for solid ground.
Jonas warned, "Watch out, there's water on both sides."
O'Neill hoped they wouldn't have to waste time backtracking. Carter wisecracked, "We should have left a trail of bread crumbs."
"Your critters would've eaten them," he replied, just to hear her laugh.
A crow-like swamp bird hopped from plant to plant just out of reach, occasionally darting forward to capture some unfortunate bug. From somewhere in the weeds, a bullfrog croaked. Mud squelched under their boots as they walked.
Lunch was more energy bars and water. Carter had just finished hers and stuck the wrapper in her pocket when she realized something was wrong. It was too quiet. The crow was gone. Even the bugs had stopped making noise.
Teal'c confirmed her suspicions. "They attack!"
Three of them rushed O'Neill and Teal'c. They were about four feet long, with heavy, matted fur and plenty of claws and teeth.
O'Neill tried zatting one, ineffectively. Dropping the zat, he held his ground until the animal was right on top of him and fired a three-round burst, killing the creature. Teal'c knocked one down and dispatched it with his staff. The third jumped O'Neill from the side, hanging on his backpack and trying to snap at the back of his neck. Jonas scruffed it and hauled it far enough off to shoot it with his Beretta without worrying about a blowthrough hitting O'Neill.
The creature's death struggles threw them both off balance. With a yell, Jonas fell in the bog, dragging the carcass with him.
He kicked desperately for the surface, weighed down by his gear. Something grabbed his ankle. He brought his other boot down solidly on something twice before it let go. He shot to the surface and yelled, "Get me out, there's something down there!"
O'Neill obliged. "Are you okay?"
"Yes, but s-something grabbed my foot."
"You probably just got tangled up with that thing's corpse," O'Neill replied.
Teal'c said, "I think not, O'Neill."
They followed his glance. Half a skeletal hand clung to Jonas' boot. The bones were bound together by a few scraps of rotting skin and sinew. Yelling, he kicked it off with the other foot.
"Shit!" O'Neill exclaimed. He looked around for the zat he had dropped. "Let's get the hell out of Dodge."
Nobody had to be told twice. Once they got to high ground on the other side of the moors, they paused only long enough for Jonas to pull on a dry uniform and field strip his weapons. Jonas was thankful now for all the hours he had spent practicing that. He had resented the boredom and blisters at the time, but now it was a physical skill that he could perform quickly and competently while still paying attention to what was going on around him.
Carter rationalized, "When people lived here, that guy must have fallen in and drowned. His hand got caught on your boot, that's all."
Jonas nodded. "That makes sense...."
O'Neill was less interested in finding logical explanations than in getting home in one piece. After they had caught their breath from their flight through the moors, they got moving again. As hard as they had been pushing, it still looked like the sun would go down behind the distant mountains before they reached the stargate.
Suddenly Teal'c stopped, scanning their back trail over his staff weapon. O'Neill readied his P-90, watching and listening. After a good sixty seconds, he asked, "What is it, T?"
"I do not know. Perhaps I am jumping at shadows."
The Jaffa didn't sound convinced, but nothing was moving now.
They hadn't signed on for things that went bump in the night. Teal'c wasn't the only one who was spooked and a little jumpy. In fact, as usual he hid it better than the rest of them. O'Neill said, "Yeah, lotta that going around. Let's keep moving."
Fifteen minutes later, Carter asked suddenly, "What the hell was that?"
"I don't know, Carter, what did it sound like?"
She shook her head. "Something rattled. The wind in the branches, I guess."
Jonas' eyes fixed on something about a hundred yards back that looked...off. Something white, maybe the size of a basketball or a little smaller. Then it stood up and he figured out what it was. He yelled at the top of his lungs and fired at a walking skeleton carrying a corroded bronze sword. The skull exploded but the body kept coming.
A blast from Teal'c's staff shattered it into bone fragments.
O'Neill spotted more coming out of the underbrush closer to them. He fired two shots into the nearest one's midsection, severing its spinal column. It went down in a clatter of bones, but the upper section continued to claw its way forward. Carter sprayed it with bullets until it quit moving, while O'Neill and Teal'c took out four more.
Jonas shouted, "There's more of them coming! Good gods, are those really walking skeletons?"
"I don't care what the hell they are! Keep moving!" O'Neill snapped. He and Teal'c brought up the rear, dealing with any of their horrifying pursuers that got too close.
An arrow whistled by her ear. Carter spotted more skeletons, armed with bows this time, and threw a grenade into a briar patch where they had been hiding in ambush. "Sir, they're herding us into a trap! We've got guys with bows up here!"
O'Neill swore and looked around. They were in a hilly area, the slopes covered mostly with tall grasses and occasionally dotted with clumps of brush and small stands of stunted trees. It was just enough cover for the skeletons to lie in wait.
On top of the next hill was a circle of huge standing stones. The gaps between them were fairly narrow. It was the best cover they were going to get. "Make for those rocks up there!"
Covering one another, they headed up the hill. Jonas turned to shoot a club-weilding skeleton that popped up from behind a rock not ten feet away. This close, he could see red glowing energy flickering in the thing's hollow eye sockets.
Even as he opened fire on the monster, Jonas stepped on a loose stone and wrenched his ankle and swore. He stumbled, but caught his balance and kept going for all he was worth. Lances of red-hot pain shot up his leg with every step.
For some reason known only to them, the skeletons wouldn't follow them into the stones. They formed a solid ring about sixty yards out. Teal'c blasted several of them but more stepped up to fill the gaps.