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rattling across the surface the plateau, the hiss of grit and frost blown by the gale. Far away, along the next range of mountains, he saw a fine blue spark connect the clouds and the tallest peak. A moment later, another.
    Thunder crackled, muted almost to nothing by the distance. “Storm’s coming.”
    Teal’c said nothing.
    Another silence. He tried again. “So how many are there?”
    “Eighteen Jaffa warriors, along with their women and children.”
    O’Neill blinked at him. “There are children here?”
    “Would you have expected them to be left behind?”
    “No, I just… I didn’t hear them.”
    “Silence in the presence of danger is one of the first skills a Jaffa child learns.”
    He thought about children being in this blighted place, frozen, hungry, made mute by what they had seen happen on Chulak, what they might see again. The thought lodged in his throat like a fishbone.
    “Son of a bitch,” he muttered.
    Thunder pealed again, closer this time. It sounded like cloth ripping.
    After a time, Teal’c said: “The position of this vessel troubles me.”
    “How so?”
    “The scar it created during the crash leads directly away from the temple complex.”
    O’Neill frowned, checked quickly left and right to confirm his friend’s words. The plateau was far from level, and with so many rock formations and jagged boulders littering the area it was hard to see exactly where anything lay in relation to anything else. But now that he knew what to look for, he realized that Teal’c was right: the grim, huddled wheel of buildings making the up the temple complex was right in front of the Tel’tak’s buried nose. If the ship hadn’t crashed, it would have flown directly over the central dome.
    Or into it. “What was he trying to do, ram the place?”
    “Perhaps he was trying to land close by.”
    “Nah, he was coming in fast. How do these things handle in atmosphere, anyway?”
    “Badly.”
    “Sir?” Carter was standing in the hatch, hanging onto the side frame with one hand to avoid being dragged out by the wind.
    “Find something?” O’Neill asked.
    “I think so.”
    He followed her in, Teal’c close behind. At first he could see nothing different to when he had left, until Carter walked over to where Daniel was crouching. “Here, sir.”
    A small panel had been removed from the floor, and beneath it, a fist-sized cluster of crystals was pulsing a soft, amber glow.
    “Sam thinks it’s a phase relay,” said Daniel, looking up. “Kind of like a circuit breaker.”
    O’Neill raised an eyebrow. “Circuit breaker?”
    “Yeah, you know. Or a fuse. To protect the power in your house if there’s a surge, or-“
    “Daniel, I know what a circuit breaker is.”
    The man nodded, his glasses reflecting the golden light. “Yeah, sorry. Anyway, I think Sephotep managed to trip this one.”
    “He blew the fuse? Come on…”
    Carter knelt down next to the open panel. “Colonel, this relay is at a critical junction between the ship’s power plant and the rest of the systems. I missed it at first because there are so many new elements tapped into it, but I think this is a fail-safe. When it cut out it deactivated the whole ship, but the naquadah generator is still intact.”
    “Can you fix it?”
    “If I’m right, it’s just a matter of resetting it and restarting the plant.”
    That seemed too easy. Jack O’Neill knew better than to trust the offer of a free lunch. “So why didn’t Sephotep do that?”
    “He did not have time,” said Teal’c quietly. “The vessel was already close to the plateau. The crash must have occurred almost instantly.”
    “They probably never knew what hit them,” Carter added.
    O’Neill made a face. He understood exactly what Carter was proposing, but it still left too many unanswered questions for his liking. He couldn’t explain why a Goa’uld scientist was flying a customized cargo ship directly at a temple full of refugees, for a start. Or how he’d