Colonel Jack O’Neill staked out his vantage point beside the meeting hall and eased down onto a strategically located bench. The village nearest P43-912’s Stargate was pretty enough, with lots of tidy homes and flower gardens, and friendly folks everywhere. So far, this had been a completely uneventful mission: meet, greet, smile, exchange pleasantries, ignore the Relosians’ awed and frightened stares at Teal’c, send Major Samantha Carter off in search of valuable things like trinium and technology, and let Dr. Daniel Jackson get busy with the negotiating.
In fact, it was always like this lately. A new planet, peaceful exploration, mundane trade stuff, and then SG-1 was on its way to the next mission. It was all so…routine. Which explained why Jack was bored out of his skull. This struck him as being pretty ironic, given the fact that many times in the past year, he’d wanted nothing more than a few hours of down time for a hot shower and a nap. But even so, a spectacularly loud explosion or a few firing matches with Jaffa wouldn’t be completely unwelcome.
There were days he didn’t mind the slow pace— days when they sat around drinking homemade barley wine, eating stews full of unidentified meat and vegetables, and accepting the gratitude of people they’d actually been able to help. On those days, Jack could forget that everything had changed around him while he was standing still and that his equilibrium was not yet restored. Daniel’s return from the ascended state had removed that awkward off-kilter feeling he’d had the entire time Jonas had been with them, and now they were finding their old rhythm again as a team. The thought made Jack smile; their rhythm was a combination of staccato call-and-response, with a dash of shout-and-pointed-silence. It worked for them.
The missions were coming faster now that Daniel was back to his old self— almost at the pace of the second year the team had been together, after they’d figured out enough destinations to keep everyone busy and still have some left over. Jack reminded himself that he had the universe for a workplace. A little boredom was a small price to pay for that.
“Sir, there’s enough trinium here to justify setting up a mining operation. Not a huge amount, but my preliminary guess would be two deposits, maybe three.” Carter sat down on the bench next to him and handed him a hunk of unrefined ore. Her face was smeared with dirt, as though she’d been down there clawing it up with her own hands. He wouldn’t put it past her. “It’s a quality vein, extending about one mile beneath the surface.”
Jack took the rock and tossed it in the air a few times, like a lumpy baseball. It was so light it might as well have been hollow. “Daniel thinks they’ll give this to us for free.”
“Really?” Carter snatched the rock mid-toss and began waving a scanner over it. “Maybe they’ve got no use for it.”
“Or any interest in why it’s useful to us.” Jack tilted his head and watched Daniel in animated conversation with two of the Relosians, whose purple robes shimmered in the sunlight. They were wearing some of the craziest headgear Jack had ever seen, puffy red towers with rows of shiny beads dangling off the ends. Daniel accepted yet another ceremonial cup full of what passed for beer in the village. It wasn’t bad stuff, although it made Jack’s eyeballs burn whenever he inhaled too close to the cup. “Doesn’t that seem odd?”
“Not really. They’re pre-industrial, so it wouldn’t occur to them that we plan to make weapons with this.”
“Lucky us.” Jack flipped open his chronometer and glanced at the time. Teal’c had left for the ‘gate to report in to Hammond half an hour ago, and it was less than a ten minute walk. “Carter, did you pass Teal’c on your way in from the quarry?”
“No, sir.” She stopped fiddling with the rock.
Wrapping his fingers around the watch, Jack tapped the wristband a couple of times. He had seven years of experience with this team, and Teal’c always reported back to him when he returned from completing a task.
Unless something was wrong.
Jack keyed the radio. “Teal’c.” A short burst of static, then silence. “Teal’c, do you read me?” After a moment, he nodded to Carter, who gave it a try on her own radio. Still nothing. Jack straightened and shifted the weight of his vest around, to make it sit more comfortably on his shoulders. “I’m going to take a walk,” he said quietly. “Stay here with Daniel.”
“You think something has happened to Teal’c?”
He looked out toward the forest, then back at the cluster of huts near the center of the village. “Just keep an eye out.”
“Yes, sir,” she answered, as one hand came up to cover her P90.
Jack rose from the bench and moved off toward Daniel, who was surrounded by a group of elders and two pretty young women serving drinks. They were still talking. Amazingly, Daniel never seemed to run out of alien conversation starters. Sometimes Jack could barely think of subjects for small talk with people of his own planet; he supposed Daniel’s fluency was a gift. Or a curse, for the person on the receiving end of all that curiosity.
“Jack!” Daniel gestured to the Relosians, some kind of interstellar sign language for ‘hang on a second,’ and said, “I’ve made some progress. They want to trade us for these beans.”
“Beans?” Jack looked down at the shriveled grey things Daniel was holding in the palm of his hand.
“Not just any beans, Jack.” Daniel curled his hand closed to protect his prize. “These are sacred ancestral beans, handed down by their forefathers. Each year at planting, these are buried in the first row plowed.”
“And then a beanstalk grows, and they live happily ever after.”
Daniel narrowed his eyes. “Jack, be serious. They are offering these to us as a gesture of lasting friendship.”
“Right,” Jack said. “Of course they are.” He fluttered three fingers at the Relosians, a halfhearted ‘be right with you’ wave. They nodded their approval and turned to each other, their conversation escalating in a wave of excited chatter as their red-beaded hats clattered with movement. “Wrap it up, then.”
“There’s still some points to work out, and I don’t—”
“SG-9 can do the detail work, like always.”
Daniel nodded, though a troubled frown briefly appeared on his face. Jack knew this was one of those moments— the missing details of Daniel’s life that were hiding in the cracks of his post-descension memory, rising to the surface one by one. SG-9 would come in to clean up the offworld bargains and treaties; as a member of Stargate Command’s flagship team, Daniel wouldn’t have the time to spend weeks hammering out interstellar trade agreements. Now that he’d been reminded, he wouldn’t forget again. Jack was never sure whether these kinds of details were recovered memories or something learned all over again. It didn’t really matter, since Daniel was a quick learner.
“Start packing,” he said, watching as Carter took up a position near the head of the trail. Without waiting for Daniel to pepper him with questions, Jack turned and set out toward the valley path.
The village sat atop a small green hill overlooking the forested valley below. The Stargate was hidden deep in the forest and invisible from the settlement. Jack followed the trail to the edge of the cultivated gardens and stood in the middle of the path, his gaze tracing its faint edges down the hill, across a short stretch of open plain, and right to the forest perimeter. He pulled open his front jacket pocket and withdrew field binoculars, then enhanced the focus and scanned quickly over the area. No sign of Teal’c.
After a moment, he lowered the binoculars, but his sense of alarm notched up a peg. He reached for his radio, and after a moment’s hesitation, he keyed it. “Daniel, Carter.”
“Yes, sir,” Carter said, followed by Daniel’s static-overlaid, “Go ahead, Jack.”
“Gather up anything you don’t want to leave behind— day packs only— and meet me on the trail.”
“Jack, I need to—”
“Daniel, that’s an order. Do it now.”
“Trouble, sir?”
“Not yet,” Jack said. There was no reply from Daniel; Jack knew Daniel’s thousand-yard glare was currently burning a hole in the back of his vest, but he also knew Daniel was already three-quarters packed. There were some things Daniel didn’t question— very few, but a direct order was one of them. That, at least, hadn’t changed at all.
It took less than a minute for Carter and Daniel to make their way up the hill. Daniel was stuffing items into his pack as they approached, but he stopped long enough to hoist it on. Carter fastened the straps for him. “Did you say our goodbyes?” Jack asked Daniel over his shoulder.
“Not exactly, no. But I gave the beans back, until we could seal the agreement. Are we leaving?” Daniel asked.
“Maybe. Keep your eyes on the trail,” Jack said. Carter raised her weapon in tandem with his own.
“I don’t think these people are any threat to us,” Daniel protested.
“Teal’c is late,” Jack said, and that was all he needed to say; Daniel cut the commentary.
The canopy of trees shielded an unsettling kind of gloom, broken randomly by shafts of sunlight shooting through the thick overgrowth of leaves and moss. Too much contrast, and the light seemed as impenetrable as the darkness. It made Jack wary; too many ghosts in his peripheral vision, which wasn’t quite as sharp or discerning as it used to be. He reached out with one hand and signaled quickly— fan out, keep a watchful eye forward, quiet. Carter and Daniel immediately dropped behind him to obey. With a distance of only a few paces between them, they continued moving down the faint trail.
Jack listened to the sounds around them, even as his gaze swept across the trail looking for shapes, dark masses, things that were out of place. They could have used Teal’c’s tracking skills. His own couldn’t compare. Anyway, it was possible he was wrong, that nothing had happened, that Teal’c had simply encountered a friendly local and—
“Ouch,” Daniel said behind him.
Jack whipped around, his P90 leveled in the direction of that mild complaint. Daniel was holding his nose with one hand, looking pissed off, and Carter’s face registered sharp wariness. Daniel reached out with one finger and touched the air in front of him. It shimmered red for a moment before the color died away.
“Force field,” Carter said. She moved to the side, testing the boundaries; Jack moved with her, a mirror image. It took six paces for him to reach a firm barrier, but Carter continued on past that point. Carter met his eyes. “You’re inside, sir; we’re outside.”
“I gathered that,” Jack said tightly. All around him, the forest was alive with sound. He turned slowly, tracking stray noises he couldn’t identify, and asked, “Doesn’t this feel a little familiar?”
“Déjà vu,” Daniel murmured, rubbing his nose. “We’ve seen this before.”
“Several times,” Sam said, poking experimentally at it. “Goa’uld design.”
“Last time we saw it in a forest, though…” Daniel met Jack’s eyes. “It was because of Aris Boch.”
Jack’s face twisted into a grimace. Four years had passed since their last encounter, but for Jack, the capture of his entire team by the bounty hunter, Aris Boch, had been a memorable event. All the details were fresh in his mind, from the force field Boch initially used to contain them, to the shield-penetrating weapons, to the way he’d held them all hostage to ensure each would cooperate for fear he’d harm the others.
Can you take him? Jack had asked Teal’c, because he really wasn’t sure himself, and because he’d needed to know if they had a chance of rescuing Carter by force.
I can. Teal’c had seemed certain. Maybe he’d been wrong.
Jack backed away from the force field. Carter and Daniel didn’t even need to be told what was coming next. They crouched and waited out of the line of fire as he raised his weapon and loosed a few experimental, useless bursts toward the shield. He didn’t want to assume anything— some version of force field technology was available on half the planets they’d explored to date. That didn’t mean Aris Boch was behind it. What were the odds?
The voice came from the edge of the woods, to Jack’s left. “I see you’ve learned nothing since the last time we met. The mighty SG-1, trapped by the greatest hunter in the galaxy.” A pause, and then, as if he couldn’t resist pointing it out: “Again.”
With a sigh, Jack turned and faced Aris Boch. It really was déjà vu— same armor, if a bit more battle-scarred than the last time they’d seen it; same nasty-looking weapon, like the mother of all pistols, heavy, deadly and looking like it was a part of him as he casually aimed it in their direction. Cocky bastard. Although he knew it wouldn’t work, Jack leveled his weapon at Aris, who only smirked at him, hazel eyes sparkling with self-satisfied amusement in the rugged face. Bad enough to be caught by a bounty hunter, but twice by the same bounty hunter was…well…
As if Aris could read his thoughts, he smiled broadly and said, “Embarrassing, isn’t it? Don’t feel too bad, Colonel. I’ve tricked aliens with brains twice the size of yours.”
“Yes, that makes me feel much better,” Jack said testily. “Where’s Teal’c?”
Aris moved his free hand to his wrist. Teal’c’s suddenly winked into view, sprawled unconscious in the middle of the path and proving that Aris wasn’t aiming at the dirt. On instinct, Jack moved toward Teal’c and with a muttered curse jerked back from the forgotten force field.
Aris looked down at Teal’c and prodded him with the toe of his boot. “He’s fine. You should already know I’m not in the business of damaging valuable merchandise,” he said, adding after a beat, “If I don’t have to.” Teal’c stirred, but didn’t wake. “If I had known he would be this easy, I would have gone for hand-to-hand.”
Jack sighed. When Teal’c was on his feet, this was going to be ammunition for weeks’ worth of ribbing. If they lived that long. Jack asked, “How did you find us? And what the hell do you want?”
“Good questions, Colonel. They’re the questions I would ask, if I were in your place.” Aris looked over at Daniel, then at Carter, his smile widening in response to their identical frowns. After a moment, he put his foot squarely on Teal’c’s chest and pushed. Teal’c’s eyes flew open, and Aris stepped back in a smooth motion, out of reach of Teal’c’s long arms. “As for how I found you— blame your Relosian friends for that. One of them was only too happy to sell you out. But I’m afraid you won’t get an answer to the second question yet.”
Jack yanked his cap down, frustrated. Of course the Relosians had sold them out. The planet was too peaceful. Nothing that looked this peaceful was ever as good beneath the pretty painted surface. He should know by now not to trust people who wore fancy hats. Jack leveled the P90 at Aris’s chest again— never mind that it wouldn’t do any good; it made him feel better— then asked Teal’c, “You okay?”
“I am uninjured.” Teal’c’s murderous scowl indicated only his pride was bruised. Aris pointed his weapon directly at Teal’c’s head. Teal’c pushed up off the ground to stand beside Daniel.
Jack gave Teal’c a long look. Wordless understanding passed between them. His team was outside the shield, and Jack was inside, effectively cut off from them.
“How touching. Everyone all together again.” Aris smiled his cynical smile. “Especially you, Dr Jackson. The last anyone heard about you, you were…” He raised his eyebrows and circled a finger above his head. “A glowing cloud.”
“Your intelligence really isn’t that reliable, is it?” Daniel said mildly.
Carter stepped forward, drawing Aris’s attention. “Look, we should be past playing games. We know what you do, and how you operate, so— just tell us what you want.”
“Very bold, Major!” Aris squinted at her, his expression amused. “You’ve been getting used to taking charge, haven’t you? Getting ready to lead a team of your own, perhaps?” When Carter didn’t answer, Aris chuckled and went on, “What I want, Major, is for you and Dr Jackson to come with me. I need your expertise. And of course, I’ll need the Colonel here and Teal’c as bargaining chips.”
“We won’t go with you,” Daniel said immediately. Jack stepped as close to the force field as he dared while avoiding another jolt. His fists clenched; he forced them to relax. Daniel could say the words, but without some way of breaking through Jack couldn’t stop Aris from taking them and he couldn’t help Teal’c.
“Now, now. Dr Jackson, haven’t we been through this already? I tell you what you’re going to do, and you do it.”
“Or…not,” Jack said with more bravado than he could back up.
Aris regarded him pensively. “Colonel, I really don’t have time to play nice. And I don’t think you want me to force them, do you?”
“What kind of expertise do you need?” Daniel said. Jack watched him; Daniel was in full negotiation mode, all sensors on. Good for Daniel. “Because there’s no reason you need all of us.”
Uh-oh. Wrong turn. “Daniel,” Jack said sharply.
Aris looked over at Jack, a smile twisting his face. There was a new scar on his forehead, curving angrily down past the corner of his left eye, which drooped a bit. “That may be true, Doctor. Why don’t we ask the Colonel here how he feels about that?”
Jack set his jaw. There was no right answer, though it didn’t matter what he said; Aris wasn’t stupid, and there was no way he’d leave either Jack or Teal’c behind as long as he held two of their teammates prisoner. He wouldn’t want them on his trail. “Looks like we’re all taking a ride.”
“Sir,” Carter began, but Jack cut her off with a look.
Aris watched the exchange, then said, “Colonel O’Neill, I’m wounded that you don’t trust me with the safety of your people.”
“Trust?” Jack echoed. His finger twitched on the trigger of the P90, itching for a viable target. “You’ve never given us a reason to trust you.”
“How quickly your people forget.” Aris pointed at Teal’c. “I let a Tok’ra go, and I saved his life.”
“I have not forgotten,” Teal’c said, in a low growl. “But this is a new day.”
A fleeting look of remorse crossed Aris’s face. “Sorry about the knock on the head, Teal’c. It’s business. Nothing personal.”
Teal’c inclined his head in that stiff way that told Jack he was going to get his payback, eventually.
“Anyway,” Jack said impatiently, “you didn’t do it for Teal’c. You did it because you hate the Goa’uld.”
“You know, that’s right,” Aris said as if it had just occurred to him. He smiled again. “It’s irrelevant, though. Right now, you don’t have a choice. You are, in fact— say it with me, now— choiceless.”
“I hate that word,” Jack muttered.
“Sorry to cut short the small talk, but now you’re all going to march to my ship like good, obedient little soldiers,” Aris said. Although he still had his weapon trained on Teal’c, Jack knew he could as easily point it at any one of them and ensure compliance. “Drop your gear here— I’ll ring it up later.” A few feet from Jack’s face, a shimmer of red as the shield dissolved and fell in front of them. Aris stood patiently by, waiting.
Starting with Daniel and ending with Teal’c, Jack met the eyes of each of his team in turn as they stripped off their weapons and gear. No way in hell were they boarding that ship. Once they were inside the hold, there was no guarantee they’d be able to make it out again before it was too late. Besides, they still had no idea what the bounty hunter wanted them for, and all of Jack’s instincts screamed that this was a disaster in the making. He motioned to Carter and Daniel to move out, then followed with Teal’c at his side. Aris was behind them, not too close, but close enough.
He couldn’t shoot them both in time.
Jack and Teal’c moved apart a few steps. At Jack’s unspoken signal, they made their move. A turn and a leap…and Jack found his nerve endings on fire. All his limbs stopped cooperating; he sprawled on the ground, shaking and twitching. It was ten times worse than being zatted. He gasped and gritted his teeth, trying to ride out the pain.
Somewhere nearby rose the muffled thud of a body hitting a personal shield— that would be Teal’c, Jack’s brain helpfully supplied— and then Teal’c was on the ground next to him, flat on his back. Jack’s hands and arms spasmed, and his spine was melting. After a moment, the white fire racing around his body died down to intermittent sparking, and he took a deep breath. So much for the brilliant escape.
“Teal’c. I’m disappointed in you,” Aris said, leaning over him.
“It is, as you say, business,” Teal’c replied. He sat up and reached out to Jack, who waved away his concern.
“I’m all right,” Jack breathed, though his muscles were still trembling.
Aris leaned in and wagged the point of his blaster at Jack. “Just so you know, I’m trading you first.”
Jack lay on his back on the floor and looked up at the ceiling. He drummed his fingers against his chest, tapping out the opening bars of ‘Smoke on the Water.’ “Slo-ow motion Wa-alter,” he sang under his breath. The ceiling looked familiar. Just like the ceilings of all the tel’taks in his life, swirly brushed metal and random intersecting arcs. He pretty much hated tel’taks, he decided, slapped his hands down on the floor beside him and ended with a loud, “That fire engine gu-uy!”
Daniel’s head jerked up from his chest. Teal’c raised an eyebrow. Carter glanced over her shoulder and went back to futzing with the door controls.
After unhooking his glasses from the collar of his shirt, Daniel slipped them on one-handed and peered at him. “Who?”
“Slow motion Walter,” Jack answered. Lifting his head, he waved a hand. “You know, the fire engine guy.” When Daniel’s lips pursed and his eyes narrowed, Jack sighed and let his head fall back against the floor. “Are you telling me you never listened to Deep Purple?”
“Smoke on the water,” Teal’c said. “Fire in the sky.”
Jack rolled his head to look at Daniel and aimed a finger at Teal’c. “See? The alien knows Deep Purple.”
A self-satisfied expression crept over Teal’c’s features as he closed his eyes and went back to being a statue.
Carter’s yelp and a shower of sparks cut off whatever Daniel had been about to say. “Damnit!” she hissed and sucked the ends of her fingers while she walked in a tight circle, ending up back at the door panel.
“You okay?” Jack craned his neck to look at her.
She took her fingers out of her mouth long enough to say “Yes, sir,” and went back to glaring at the panel.
Through the door they could hear Aris Boch laughing. The intercom switched on with a click, and Aris’s laughter was in the aft cargo space with them. “You break it, you’re going to owe me. These things aren’t cheap, you know.”
“If you open the door and let us hit you on the head with something heavy, we won’t have to break anything at all,” Jack pointed out reasonably.
“Except his head,” Daniel corrected him.
“Yeah, except that.”
After a pause, Aris gave a rumbling chuckle. “You aren’t going to get through the door until I let you, and the only other way out of there is the rings. You’ll want to hold your breath, though, if you go that route.”
“You first,” Carter grumbled as she leaned close to the open panel again and started pulling out crystals and putting them in her pockets for safe-keeping.
“I heard that,” Aris responded, sounding wounded. “And you’d better put those crystals back like you found them. Since I am going to have to let you out of there eventually.”
Jack rolled to his feet, looking in the general direction of Aris’s voice. “And why is that? What the hell do you want with us this time?”
“With you? Nothing. But Dr. Jackson there is going to be useful. As is Major Carter.”
Jack leaned closer to the com panel and said, “Nobody’s doing squat for you, so forget it.”
“Maybe,” Aris conceded. “Or maybe…” This time his pause lasted so long that, by the time he took up the thought again, they were all looking at the ceiling and the hidden intercom speaker, waiting. “Maybe I’ll appeal to your nobility.” Somehow he made the word sound nasty. “You like to be heroes, right?” When none of them bothered to answer, he snorted, half-amused, half-disgusted. “Or maybe I’ll shoot off your fingers or something, Colonel, until Dr. Jackson does his job. Either way, I’m going to get what I need.”
With a frown, Daniel got slowly to his feet. He chewed his lip for a moment, staring at the floor. His hands found their way into his pockets as he assumed the casual, thinky pose that invariably made Jack nervous, and said, “What, exactly, do you need?”
“Daniel,” Jack warned.
“Just tell me,” Daniel said, holding up a hand to silence Jack.
Jack wasn’t sure, but he thought he heard Aris sigh. “Nothing much. Do some reading. Keep the Goa’uld from killing everybody.”
“Oh,” Daniel said, ducking his head and then looking up at Jack, a little grin giving him crinkles around his eyes. “That again.”
Carter smiled, not quite showing teeth.
Jack sat down next to Teal’c and laced his fingers over his knees. “You remember how to do it?” he asked Daniel.
Daniel shrugged. “Like riding a bike, right?”
“A little, only usually with more—”
“Gunfire,” Teal’c said.
“And yelling,” Carter added.
“And insolence,” Jack said. “You remember your insolence?”
Daniel patted his pockets. “I know I’ve got it here somewhere.”
“You are all very amusing.” Aris didn’t sound all that amused. “Sebek is going to laugh the whole time he’s killing you.”
“Sebek?” Jack looked the question at Daniel, whose face had already lit with puzzled recognition.
Daniel shook his head. “According to Tok’ra intelligence, Sebek— also known as Sobek— is dead. Bastet and Kali the Destroyer allied against him and killed him. Bastet took his head as her trophy.”
“Or not,” Jack said.
“No, that was reliable intelligence,” Daniel said. “In fact, other Goa’uld believed it to be true. Yu didn’t contradict me, when I mentioned it.”
“While you were his slave?” Jack raised his eyebrows. “You and Yu had a lot of these little conversations?”
“A few,” Daniel said, raising his eyebrows back. “Sebek was never one of the big players, I don’t think. But I could be wrong. There’s still stuff—” He fluttered his fingers next to his temple. “—missing.”
“That’s inconvenient,” Jack observed and, ignoring Daniel’s half-pained, half-pissed expression, turned to Teal’c. “T? You heard of this one?”
“There are many minor Goa’uld in service to the system lords, and many planets to be administered.”
“Administered.” Aris’s voice crackled over the intercom, brittle with irony and anger. “Right. That’s what he’s doing, administering.” The intercom clicked off.
Slumping down next to Jack, Daniel leaned his head back against the wall and stared into the middle distance. The brain was working. Jack could practically see him feel around the edges of the gaps in his memory. He looked away.
More sparks showered out of the control panel, and Carter jumped back and did a few more tight circles before shifting crystals around again.
Teal’c closed his eyes and was quiet, resting while somehow remaining alert, waiting for opportunities to present themselves. Not for the first time, he reminded Jack of fire, banked low and hot in the centre.
Jack drummed on his knees. “Slo-ow motion Wa-alter,” he sang under his breath. “That fire engine gu-uy.”
By Sam’s watch, they’d been in the cargo hold for a little over eighteen hours. The Colonel and Daniel had ‘I-spied’ every single item in the room— which wasn’t much, besides a couple of empty storage cases and themselves— but when Daniel had started with “I spy with my little eye something that means ‘gift of the Nile,’” the Colonel had gotten testy and made a new rule outlawing the hieroglyphics in Goa’uld tel’tak wallpaper. After that, the game had deteriorated into an argument regarding the relative cultural value of Hammurabi’s Code and The Simpsons, and she exchanged a quick glance with Teal’c to make sure he’d be ready to move if they had to intervene and wrestle the two of them to their separate corners. Eventually a remarkable detente was forged over the structural similarities of strip comics and petroglyphs, and Sam dropped her head against Teal’c’s shoulder and let herself slip into a shallow doze. In her dream, the stars were stretched in long, solid bars, rainbowed as their light passed through the prism of hyperspace, and the tel’tak rode along those rails toward some distant point of blackness.
Falling into the gravity well, she woke with a jerk. Daniel was watching her.
“Bad dream?”
She shook her head, then rolled her shoulders, wincing as her spine crackled. Beside her, Teal’c was asleep sitting up. The Colonel was over next to Daniel, on his back, his cap over his eyes.
She braced a hand against the wall and levered herself up. One step over Daniel’s legs took her to the tiny bathroom— at least Aris had left them with facilities, and she even had some water in her canteen. Their kits and all of their gear, including the rest of the water and the MREs, were in the forward compartment with him. The toilet had no tank and used some kind of chemicals in any case, and there was no sink in there, either. No use in thinking about their out-of-reach canteens, so she returned to the cargo hold and, with a pat on Daniel’s shoulder, went back to fiddling with the door control panel.
After a few minutes, Daniel came and stood next to Sam, arms folded across his chest. He leaned forward to look around the panel door. “Not making much progress here,” he observed quietly.
“Actually, I think he’s got the system completely cut off from this side,” she said.
“But the sparks—”
“Mostly for show, to string me along.” She switched a blue crystal for a red one with the same lack of results she got the last time she’d tried that. “And to tick me off.”
“If you know he’s got it rigged so it can’t be accessed at all from in here, why have you spent the last day working on it?”
With another shrug, she pulled out the red chip and replaced it with a clear one. “Because if he rigged it, he must have rigged it somehow, and if I can figure that out, maybe I can get around it.” A little more fruitless twiddling, and she added, “And besides—”
“It gives you something to do.”
“I never was good at ‘I Spy.’”
“Nor was I,” Teal’c said softly. He rose and rolled his shoulders. Then he stepped to the middle of the room and began to work his way through the fluid poses of a training exercise, loosening muscles stiff with waiting. Sam paused in her work for a little while to watch him and marveled at how deadliness could look so beautiful. Daniel watched, too, his face falling into lines of concentration, his eyes becoming more and more distant, as though Teal’c’s orderly gestures were a part Daniel’s own mental exercise, a physical mantra that led Daniel inward. Sam watched him watch Teal’c and resisted the urge to smooth the frown from his forehead.
Finally, as Teal’c came to the end of the sequence and began again, she turned back to the crystals with a sigh. Blue, clear, red, green. If she had a screwdriver she could pull the whole housing out of the wall, and then she’d be getting somewhere, maybe. Over the hum of the hyperspace engines, she could hear Teal’c’s measured breathing. Blue, clear, red, green. The Colonel slept, rationing resources. Daniel explored the inside of his head, on the trail of details about Sebek, things he’d known in another life. The cargo hold seemed charged with potential energy, stored up, going nowhere. Or somewhere.
When Daniel spoke, his soft voice made her jump. “You know,” he ventured tentatively, “we could let him take us where he wants and maybe see if we actually can help.”
“Go where Aris Boch wants us to go? I don’t think that will sit well with the Colonel.”
“Aris said that there are people in danger. Keeping the Goa’uld from killing people isn’t such a bad thing.”
“You’re assuming we can believe a single thing he says.” She was tempted to start prying at the housing again, but her fingertips were still a little numb from the last time, so she settled for glaring at the panel. “I’m not sure I want to stake my life on it.”
He looked at his boots, his jaw set. “We know his people are oppressed.”
“Most of the galaxy is oppressed.”
“That’s the tricky part, isn’t it?”
She fumbled the crystal she was holding and caught it against her stomach. In the center of the room, Teal’c stopped moving and became an attentive stroke of darker space at the fringes of her vision.
Daniel went on, “How do you decide what…who…is worth dying for?”
“You tell me,” she demanded before she could stop herself. Sam felt a sudden anger expanding inside her chest, making her throat burn.
Daniel’s wince put the fire out fast. More than a little appalled at herself, she closed her eyes and tried not to think of First Minister Dreylock and her denial of Kelownan culpability in the accident that had taken Daniel’s life. Dreylock had made Daniel into a criminal. And that was a crime.
As if he were the rebellious voice in her head, Teal’c said, “Some neither appreciate nor seem to deserve such sacrifice.”
Daniel looked at him, and, after a moment of consideration, straightened from the wall. “People are people. Appreciation isn’t the point. You don’t ask for the appreciation of the Jaffa when you fight for them. You don’t ignore their oppression because they’re undeserving. You believe in their freedom, even if some of them don’t.”
Sam looked from Teal’c to Daniel and back again. Teal’c had a point; the smaller, meaner part of her came back to Dreylock, her insufferable, arrogant self-righteousness as she’d accepted Daniel’s gift while simultaneously insisting it was valueless. The anger flared again. The Colonel had fought until the moment of Daniel’s death to prove that his sacrifice meant something. The thought of Aris selling that kind of sacrifice for his own gain made her sick. But Daniel was right, too; even Teal’c acknowledged it. The conflict between the two positions made an irritating noise in her brain, like the grinding of gears that failed to mesh. She rubbed her temple with her knuckles as if she could get in there and fix that. Now, Sam tried not to see Daniel in the infirmary bed, held together by bandages, dissolving into light. Gone. Instead, she looked at him standing two feet away from her, miraculously remade, completely new, still himself. All the same, anger glowed under the ashes.
She plucked at his sleeve to make him look at her. “Sorry,” she said earnestly. She could see him reading her thoughts in her expression. “I’m not blaming you. I don’t.”
“Yes you do,” he said with a brief smile that held no irony, only affection. “It’s okay. I get it.” He gave his own original question serious consideration. “On Kelowna, I don’t think I actually made a choice. I think circumstances made the choice for me.”
“You would have died in any case,” Teal’c said. “But you died saving them. That is a choice.”
After considering that argument for a few moments, Daniel finally nodded. “Then Aris Boch isn’t as right as he thinks, is he?” He looked past Teal’c to the far side of the hold.
“About what?” Sam asked.
“About us. Even if we do what he wants, we’re not choiceless. Not in the way that counts.”
Sam turned to follow his gaze as he spoke and found the Colonel watching them with dark, unreadable eyes.
One year after Jack O’Neill had rejoined the Stargate program and formed SG-1, General George Hammond’s staff aide had given him a doomsday clock as a gag gift, a gentle poke in the ribs because of the program’s naysayers. It stuck up from his desk like a ticking time bomb, and Hammond had hated it, from the screaming red of the digital display to the way the numbers flashed once a second. Whenever he’d had teams offworld, he found himself staring at the numbers, thinking about casualty reports and the letters he’d written to the families of soldiers he’d sent through the ‘gate. It hadn’t been long before the clock went into the drawer and the aide was dismissed.
Even so, Hammond often thought about that clock. Especially when his people were late reporting in.
Hours inside the mountain never seemed to match up with the hours worked in the normal world above, especially when there were several teams offworld operating on the local time of their destination planets. It wasn’t unusual for teams to return in the wee hours of the morning. Hammond carried a list of all the away missions in his head and, as if that bright red alarm were flashing in the back of his brain, he knew when a team was even a few minutes overdue.
This time, it was SG-1.
2300 hours came and went, but he waited a few extra minutes to be sure. “Anything?” he asked Sergeant Harriman, who was haunting the control room with him, two ghosts augmenting the skeleton nightshift crew.
“No, sir.” Harriman checked his watch against the ‘gate system’s internal clock. “Ten minutes overdue.”
Hammond looked through the heavy bulletproof glass at the silent grey mass of the ‘gate. “Dial it up,” he said. “There might be a problem on the other end.”
“Yes, sir,” Harriman said. A moment later, the floor shuddered as the ‘gate slowly came to life. Even after all these years, they still had those initial tremors during the massive energy draw. The Stargate was a marvel to Hammond. He understood its purpose, its function, but the fact of its existence still provoked wonder in him, from time to time. He watched the wormhole blossom and settle into a calm event horizon.
Harriman wasted no time. “SG-1, Stargate Command. Do you copy?”
They waited. Moments like these, the tension in Hammond’s gut tightened until he felt twisted into knots. He narrowed his eyes against the glare from the event horizon while Harriman tried again. “SG-one-niner, do you copy? Colonel O’Neill, please respond.”
Hammond listened to a few seconds of silence, then said, “Keep trying to raise them, Sergeant. And let me know if you do.”
“Right away, sir.” Harriman glanced up at him. “Should I call in any additional teams?”
“SG-14 is already prepping for their departure in three hours. If need be, we’ll scrub it and move to rescue operations.”
“Understood, sir.” Harriman went back to calling every thirty seconds on the mark. Hammond stood behind him, mentally running down the personnel roster and ticking off available teams. No routine mission was a priority when his people were missing.
It was shaping up to be a long night.