It was hard to believe outside the temperature was several degrees below freezing. Here in the caves, buried in the guts of a DHD, sweat was dripping down her nose. Her furs had long been discarded to the floor next to her snow shoes and as she wiped away a bead of perspiration she left an oily smear on her forehead.
Her head snapped round at a noise, apparently emanating from the cave wall to her right. Her hand moved unbidden to grasp the handle of a metal chisel that had, as yet, served no useful purpose. It might be about to prove its worth. She hefted in her hand, weighing it thoughtfully.
The noise became steadily louder and less muffled with every passing moment. It sounded very much like someone pickaxing their way through solid rock.
It transpired to be exactly that. The sharp edge of a metal tool suddenly came through the wall, preceded by a column of rolling dust.
"Hello?" Carter called as the pickaxe struck again, causing a crumbling hole to appear in the tunnel wall.
"Adrada! Adrada!" someone called from the other side. Other voices joined in. The hole was widened by another blow from the pickaxe and through it stepped a man, naked from the waist up and wielding the pick axe.
"Hey there," Carter said, smiling. "Guess you guys took a wrong turn somewhere..." She backed away slightly, keeping behind the DHD. Perhaps sensing her discomfort, the miner put down the pick axe, saying something in a language she could not understand. His companions, another shirtless man of about the same stature and a much younger boy wearing a headscarf of some description followed him into the cave. All of them were streaked with dirt and they all tried to speak at once in an alien language.
"I can't understand you," Carter said shaking her head. The youngest miner was staring at the plate that contained her as yet uneaten lunch, brought to her nearly two hours ago and forgotten in her drive to fix a particular crystal in the DHD.
Skin and bone, Carter thought and nodded to him as he gingerly picked up the wedge of bread and cheese as if it might explode.
He took a bite and gave a yell of pleasure, shouting to his companions who jabbered excitedly. He tore chunks off the bread to share with them and they gobbled them hungrily.
"Adas, adas!" they said, after they had eaten, taking her hand and speaking fervently.
"Glad you like it," she said.
The youngest miner pointed to the tunnel mouth and said something to his companions, whose looks of rapturous joy faded suddenly. They spoke tersely amongst themselves for a moment, their nervousness palpable in their glances and even more rapid speech.
"What's spooked you guys?" she asked, knowing it was pointless.
They merely stared at her for a moment before continuing their conversation.
A sudden rumbling, one which Carter was quite used to now after working in the tunnels for a few months, shook the cave and more motes of dust streamed earthwards.
The miners shouted and screamed, clearly terrified. "Adas! Adas! Hirunja ne Podani!"
They ran for the tunnel they had dug, calling over their shoulders. Carter knew the rumbling was caused by the movement of the worms and remained unperturbed. The booming stopped and she returned to work until the sound of mis-matched approaching footsteps made her look again.
It was her one-legged guide who often bought her lunch or came to check on her progress, the man who informed her always when her hours of work were completed.
"You must come with me," he said, face and voice unusually taut.
"Why?" she asked, confused, putting down her tools, "I-"
"You MUST come with me,"he repeated, more sharply.
"Okay, okay..." She moved to gather her furs.
"Leave them."
He led her away from the broken Stargate and to the Palace, through a maze of corridors she had never walked before. A door opened before them and she was guided to a chair. The doors snapped shut behind her guide with an ominous clang and she was alone in a small room.
Opposite her was a worn wooden desk, cluttered with scraps of parchment and a small, black box. Unmarked, the only distinctive feature on its obsidian surface was a single metal switch. There was a worn leather chair behind the desk, pulled back as if someone had only recently stood to leave the room and had forgotten to push it back under.
She shifted uncomfortably in her own seat, wondering who or what she was waiting for, what transgression she had committed to wind up here. Presumably it had something to do with the miners, but she could not imagine what.
Her stomach lurched sickly as she realised suddenly her chair had leather thongs wrapped around the arms and back, presumably to restrain the person seated. Every nerve tingling with suppressed fear she jumped, heart climbing into her mouth, as the doors opened again behind her.
She turned to see who had entered and her arms were grabbed by two burly men, dressed in the green uniforms she herself wore. Someone seized her hair and roughly jerked her head back. She bit her lip in an effort not to scream out loud and felt the leather thongs slide over her forehead, wrists and ankles.
The men stepped away as soon as their task was completed, dismissed by a third man, the hair-puller. He was dressed entirely in slightly shabby robes of faded black. His close cropped hair and general attire reminded her strongly of the man who had first come to visit herself and O'Neill when they had arrived on this planet.
This man was younger however, his face unlined and the stubbly hair on his head was a muddy brown. He sat at the desk.
"Major Carter. I believe that's what most people call you in these sort of situations? " He didn't wait for conformation. "I expect you're wondering why you're here. You have, we have observed, a mind full of questions; hidden under a veneer of learned obedience. I'm going to answer some of those questions because the Masters wish you to be productive, I think I should make it quite clear that were it left to me you would have been sentenced to death upon arrival. Your curiosity and intellect are dangerous, not to mention disturbing to the repose of our Masters when you work in their tunnels. However, it has been judged that your ultimate purpose outweighs the risks of keeping you here, and that in order for you to work to a maximum capacity you insatiable curiosity has to be curbed."
He was obviously used to hearing the sound of his own voice, his tone bored and almost disinterested.
"As you have no doubt guessed the arrival of those miners is the indirect reason for our... little talk. Put them out of your mind for a moment. Ask some of the questions I know plague you."
Carter regarded him stonily for a moment, sitting cross legged and gazing at her sternly over steepled fingers. Her eyes flickered briefly towards the box as he shifted slightly in his seat. He read her glance correctly.
"Ah. You want to know what the box does. Allow me to demonstrate."
There was a savage sort of smile playing around his lips as he spoke. He flicked the gleaming switch.
Pain seemed to burst in Carter's head, flooding along every nerve and she screamed aloud. She surged forward, the restraints keeping her firmly fixed in the chair.
The ashrak! The ashrak was killing her, the pain beyond endurance! Every fibre of her body screamed for an end, for her to black out, die even and sto-
The man flicked the switch back over and through a haze of tears Carter saw him once more, the memory replaced by her current surroundings.
"This device establishes neural contact just like the mind of our Masters. It seeks memories repressed for some reason, inevitably ones of pain, torture. Negative emotions. Ask me a question, or I shall use it again."
Carter, fighting to hold onto the contents of her stomach made no sound, sagging against her restraints.
The man shuffled some parchment. "I am a bureaucrat. The bureaucracy is the organisational body of this planet. You have been wondering, so the Masters have read in your mind, about some of the paradoxes in our society. Why, for example is there such excellent medical care when housing, sanitation and crop production is so basic? Why, when on the transport ship you came here aboard there numbered hundreds of captives, have you never seen more than approximately three hundred people at a time?"
Carter nodded.
"The bureaucracy have meticulously calculated the needs of every human on this planet and have tailored our entire environment to fit. The housing is the minimal required to maintain a healthy population, and also well within the abilities of our construction workers to build. They require a specific amount of material we can afford to spare. Every paradox is explainable in this manner."
"The houses aren't fit to live in. They're draughty, cold and miserable," Carter spat, the rage burning inside her aching body bubbling out.
The bureaucrat laughed. "The materials are available to you to improve your home. You and your co-habitant have the necessary skills to make it more habitable. Yet you persist in thinking of it as a temporary home; a cell. You refuse to begin the process of making it your own, imprinting your frankly unstable personality onto the walls."
"Go to Hell," Carter muttered, electing another braying laugh from the man.
"You still persist in thinking you can escape from a labour camp that has been in operation for hundreds of years. I find your arrogance laughable. This planet has been operating under the rule of the bureaucracy for time out of mind."
"If you've got me here to answer my questions than answer them," Carter returned quietly, voice full of a cold hate, "Where do you draw your population base from? Why bother?"
"We draw our population from three planets. One is in terms of soil fertility and materials available extremely similar to our own. Its' inhabitants possess the necessary skills to cultivate the land to a degree where the feeding of our population is possible, with aid from manual workers. Not all of those harvested are suitable for the role of farmer. Some become minor members of the bureaucracy. They are aware of our presence, which is more than most of this planet's inhabitants ever achieve, and they perform minor organisational tasks. At such a level truly regimented control of resources is lacking, but supplies are plentiful due to our careful planning and a certain degree of leniency is allowable when it comes to not exceeding particular quotas.
"The second planet is far more technically advanced. Its' inhabitants have sophisticated defence and evacuation procedures and our harvest here is not bountiful. The few we do manage to capture serve more technical roles in our society. Engineering, calculating, improving our starship designs. Some become bureaucrats.
"The third planet is nothing more than a wasteland inhabited by primitive tribes of witless, wandering nomads. The many people we draw from there serve as miners of raw materials for the construction of buildings like this Palace, or the starships. Some tend to the egg-beds of our masters. They are quite literally worked to death. A steady supply of such workers is required."
"Worked to death? Surely that's counter-productive?"
"Contrarily, it is far easier and cheaper in resources to pilot a ship to the required destination and capture them than it is to feed, clothe and house them adequately enough to allow a breeding colony of suitable size."
"Is that why you have bought me here? Because I have learnt of their existence?"
"No. It was inevitable you would. Your crime is far more simple. You allowed them your food."
"That boy was starving!" she hissed through clenched teeth.
"Yes. But the food those men receive is laced with a drug that represses their emotional responses and sexual drive. It increases their productivity during their short life-spans. Yours however, is not. Those who work above ground are free to breed as they choose and are generally able to perform their tasks to the necessary degree without the need for such measures. Conditions such as pregnancy do not hinder your far less physical work."
"So basically you've bought me here to tell me that every little anomaly I spot is due your higher order design for the people of this planet, amongst whom few know you even exist, who's lives you have planned out in almost every detail? And you've told me this because you think it'll make me work harder?" she said, incredulous.
"Yes."
"Why do you bother?"
"It is the will of the Masters."
"But you control everything. I'm presuming the egg-beds are their breeding colonies. If you even maintain their young then what stops you from rising up against them?"
"Why would I wish to?" he replied, for the first time seeming genuinely surprised at her response. "I have everything I desire for the simple task of some statistical interpretation and organisation. Even if we rose against the Masters and won, despite the terrible bloodshed they would cause, what would I have? Nothing more than I have now. Maybe less."
"You mean the resource rules don't apply to you and you would rather sit in comfort and condemn thousands of people to death and slavery," Carter snarled.
"That's a negative way of looking at it," he scoffed.
Carter pulled against her restraints violently. "Let me out of here, I've heard all I need to. And you mere presence is nauseating."
The bureaucrat laughed again. "Let you out? You might tell others of the bureaucracy. And there is the matter of punishment for your crime."
Carter's blood ran cold. "I-"
He flicked the switch. Above her agonised screams he spoke, calmly and with no trace of the pleasure palpable in his eyes. "You will not speak of this to anyone other than your co-habitant. It will save me the irritation of repeating this process."
He switched the machine off again as Carter retched. "Alright," she managed, voice thick with pain and spitting blood onto the floor, from where she had bitten her tongue. "I will."
"Not yet. You have not received the pre-determined duration of punishment for your crime."
Carter gave a choked sob. "How-?" she half spoke-half mouthed.
"How long?" he said, smiling now his face full of malice . "It matters not. Only to you will it seem like an eternity."
He flicked the switch.