Nobody had to say anything. They were in a mess. If the skeletons charged, they had a snowball's chance in hell of breaking out. All that had kept them from already having been overwhelmed by sheer numbers was their gruesome enemy's refusal to approach or fire into the circle of stones.
Jonas sat on a large stone in the center of the circle while Carter got his boot off and checked his ankle. "It doesn't seem to be broken. I'll tape it but I don't know how it'll hold if you have to run for it."
"Believe me, Major, I'll be glad to hop back to the stargate on one foot if the gods in their mercy get us out of this!"
O'Neill said, "Son, I've been up against everyone from VC to drug lords to snakes to replicators. A bunch of escapees from a horror movie set are so not taking us down. Teal'c, do you know anything about skeletons who don't know they're supposed to be dead?"
The Jaffa replied, "There are tales of the unmourned dead walking, seeking revenge on those who failed to send them properly to Kheb. I never thought them any more than fanciful tales."
"So what do you do to get rid of them, give them a decent burial?"
"In some of the tales, it is so, if the name of the restless spirit is known. Otherwise, as you have seen they may be destroyed by force of arms, and they supposedly fear fire above all else."
O'Neill had one incendiary grenade. He weighed their chances to use it to blast a hole in their lines and fight their way through before the skeletons could get their act together. Not very likely, he decided, not with Jonas unable to run on that ankle.
Jonas felt something give under him and gave the big rock that he had been sitting on a closer look. It had weathered over the centuries, but when he shined his mag light on it, he began to see the remains of carvings in the stone. "Hey, this is some kind of an altar or something. I just felt it move. Help me check it out. Maybe the top comes off or something."
O'Neill found a catch and the top moved half an inch or so. "'S jammed. Give me a hand here, T."
With both of them putting their backs into it they slid the top back to reveal an arrangement of crystals. Carter said, "Ring transporter controls!"
"I wonder where they go?"
"Who the hell cares? Any port in a storm," O'Neill said. Teal'c had already started kicking away dirt and weeds to reveal the rings' location. He and Carter joined in.
When they had uncovered enough of it to be sure they would be safely inside when the rings descended, Carter activated the mechanism and prayed.
When the rings deposited them in their destination and disappeared, they were plunged into an icy blackness. The air was stale and everything was as quiet as a tomb. In fact, O'Neill would have given better than even odds that it was a tomb. He switched on his flashlight.
"OK, now this I recognize!" His light fell on a familiar gold-leafed wall of hieroglyphs. The others turned their lights on, until Carter located and activated the room lights.
"Some kind of lab," she observed, walking over to check out the nearest table, her P-90 at the ready in case something was lurking behind it.
"Jonas, Teal'c, see if you can make any sense out of all that on the walls," O'Neill ordered, as he began to search for a door.
Carter said, "Whatever happened, whoever was running this place left in a hurry. It looks like a lot of these experiments have just been abandoned uncompleted."
"Yeah, what kind of experiments?"
She glanced at rows of lab cages, each containing a pitiful little mouse skeleton, going about its mousey business with no apparent idea that it was long dead. "I don't know, sir."
Jonas said, "This is Nirrti's symbol."
Carter replied, "That's just wonderful."
O'Neill looked around. "Let's just sit tight. Maybe the skeletons will give it up and we can make a run for the gate in the morning."
Teal'c said, "Indeed. I do not see the ring controls."
That started a more frantic search that turned up nothing. O'Neill said, "She must've had some kind of remote control and took it with her when she ran out of here."
Carter scowled. "Guess I'll have to hot-wire it."
Jonas called, "Here, what's this? Colonel, I think I found a door control."
O'Neill brought his weapon up. "Open it."
Jonas obeyed. A door-shaped panel receded and slid open to reveal a long corridor with pairs of doors at regular intervals. It was a cell block.
Exploring cautiously, he wasn't surprised to find a skeleton or two in each of the spartan cells. They animated before his eyes and reached out through the bars at him. He was safe in the center of the corridor, but if O'Neill had ever seen a place that made him want to turn around and run like hell, this was it.
"Carter, you and Jonas look for a lab journal or something to tell us what was going on down here." He and Teal'c walked the skeletal gauntlet and checked out the door at the end of the hall.
It opened into a scene out of O'Neill's nightmares, a place that might have been a hospital operating room but clearly wasn't. A sinister machine of uncertain purpose stood over a table designed to restrain a human experimental subject in a spead-eagle position. There were still powdery streaks of long since dried blood leading down the sides of the table to a floor drain.
O'Neill forced his eyes away from the machine and started checking the storage areas in the walls and the laboratory tables around the perimeter of the room for anything resembling a journal.
Teal'c pointed to several scarab glyphs. "It appears that Nirrti was continuing her search for immortality."
"Yeah, if you call that immortality," O'Neill replied, pointing his thumb back over his shoulder at the cells.
"I would call it damnation," the Jaffa said. "But then, I am not Nirrti. A fact for which I am eternally grateful."
"You and me both, buddy." O'Neill continued his search of the lab.
Jonas and Carter hurried down the center of the hallway, pointedly avoiding looking from side to side. Jonas stopped when he saw the evil-looking contraption in the middle of the room, and gulped hard. "Colonel, I may have found something. According to this data pad, whatever Nirrti was doing down here, probably this...thing...was just an experimental model. Somewhere there's a full-size prototype and she was getting ready to fire it up. We can't get to the rest of the journal without the page-turning device, but it doesn't seem to be here."
Carter added, "We found another door out of the other room, too."
"OK, let's get back there." O'Neill's eyes wandered once more to the device looming in the center of the room, and he repressed a shudder.
Things seemed marginally better when they had returned to the ring room and closed off the cell block.
Carter asked, "Should we recon the rest of this place?"
"Not yet, we aren't in any shape right now to take on anything that we might find in there," he decided. "Rest and chow first. How's your arm doing?"
"Hurts some. Probably ought to change the bandages."
"You should've had stitches in that before now."
"I know, sir, can't be helped."
O'Neill wasn't happy with the look of the bites, although he tried to keep his reaction to himself. It looked like "hurts some" was probably the understatement of the year. He gave her another antibiotic shot, and this time insisted that she take something for pain, and let it work before he finished tending the injury.
After some discussion they agreed that there probably was enough air circulation to risk lighting a can of sterno. They had a hot meal of MREs, then settled in to get a few hours of sleep, or at least to try to sleep.
The next morning, another hot meal and a pot of coffee had them all back in the game. Jonas was limping on his ankle a little more than yesterday. Carter taped it again and he laced his boot as tight as he could stand.
"Carter, how's the arm?"
"Better, sir." While she had the first aid kit open, she gave herself another injection of antibiotics.
Carter pried up a floor panel by the ring transporter and said, "Good, this one's the hub. There are three other stations besides this one."
"One of them is the hilltop," O'Neill said. "I wonder if one of the others is near the stargate."
Teal'c said, "Perhaps, that would be the usual arrangement."
Jonas said, "There might be some answers in the rest of this place."
"Where did you say you found that other door?" O'Neill asked.
"Over there near the corner."
O'Neill glanced around to be sure everyone was ready, then nodded to the Kelownan to open the door.
This corridor led into the living area of the installation, and it seemed to be completely deserted. They found rooms that had been quarters for ten or twelve Jaffa, and beyond that a main sitting room. Nirrti's private quarters opened off that, once opulent hangings and floor pillows now in tatters. They found nothing of interest there.
A spiral ramp opened into the "parlor." They began to climb.
After some distance, the spiral ended in a door, which gave way onto a terrace overlooking a desolate view of the moors. A cold wind heavy with an approaching rain chilled them right through their BDUs. Something overhead moved with a ponderous, continual grating of metal on metal that set their teeth on edge.
At the other end of the terrace, a stairway led to the roof.
O'Neill climbed slowly, clearing each level as he came to it, and he was glad he had. Something human-sized with batlike wings that spread fifteen or twenty feet launched itself off the roof at him. He ducked a set of long, dirty, sharp claws on its feet, and opened fire. It fell to a rocky hillside far below and lay still.
On the roof, a much larger version of the machine in the abattoir below revolved slowly on a creaking turntable. A huge blue crystal on top of it glowed softly.
"Carter, how far are we from the stargate that this didn't show up in the UAV pictures?"
She surveyed the desolate landscape. "The terrain looks the same. I doubt it's too far."
"But we've got no clue which direction. I guess we're gonna have to take potluck with the ring transporter. Hope we end up somewhere we recognize, that isn't crawling with skeletons."
"That's about it, sir. I wish I knew what that thing does, but since Nirrti had something to do with it, I'm about half convinced we should blow it up on general principles."
O'Neill nodded, figuring out exactly where he'd put the C4 to do just that. "Leave it for now. Blowing it up might do more that we know about. We've got some of those page-turner doohickies back at the SGC, don't we?"
"Yes, and if that doesn't work I think I can extract the information from the data pad to our computers."
They were headed back inside when O'Neill barely heard a noise behind him and whirled. Another of the bat-winged creatures slammed into him with all the force of a steep dive. The impact knocked him to the terrace and drove its talons deep into his body.
Carter and Quinn both opened up on it instantly. It was dead before it started to fall, before Teal'c could even turn around. The last thing O'Neill saw was its blood fountaining from a dozen bullet holes. Then a second later its talons ripped out of him and he felt his own blood flowing over him as he fell away into blackness, away from his team's frantic shouts, away from Carter's desperate attempts to stop the bleeding.