Aset was still sleeping, Teal’c sitting at her bedside. Her color was improving, and Jack knew that if he lifted the bandage, he would see signs of impossible healing. Already the chief priest had his suspicions about this miracle, and Jack wasn’t looking forward to explaining this to Hor-Aha. Well, you see, this one is actually a good Goa’uld, and her descendants are going to bring down Ra and the rest of the System Lords in about five thousand years. If he were Pharaoh, he wouldn’t buy it, either.
“O’Neill!” One of the young officers came dashing in, his eyes wide. “You must come at once! Travelers have come through the gate!”
“What?” Jack shook his head. “How?” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Sam hand Ellie to Tamit, and hurry to join him.
The young officer looked at his sandals. “Apparently we did not secure the gate, O’Neill.”
“Damn it,” Jack began, and stopped himself. “Is it secure now?”
“Yes, O’Neill.”
“What kind of travelers?” That was Danyel, rubbing his eyes, zat unfolded in his other hand.
“Not Goa’uld,” the young man said. “But — strange. Sergeant Basa has them under guard.”
“On my way,” Jack said, and the young officer dashed out. Jack paused long enough to collect a staff weapon, and stalked toward the temple steps. He checked at the top, his eyes sweeping across the group waiting for him. His men were drawn up in careful order, zats and staff weapons pointed at a group in what were unmistakably Air Force uniforms. Five of them, and three were hardly strangers: Teal’c — Teal’c with hair, which was unexpectedly weird, and the gold First Prime’s tattoo still in place, looking indefinably older; and Danyel, looking younger; and Sam. Sam with long hair in a pony tail and what looked like a colonel’s eagles on her collar and the same incredulous recognition on her face.
“Holy crap,” he said, and looked at Basa.
“O’Neill.” The sergeant raised his hand in salute. “These came through the gate — very like what happened before, when you, the other you, arrived. They swear they are no friends of Ra —”
“Well, they would, wouldn’t they?” Jack said.
“Perhaps so,” Basa agreed. “But you were not his friend, and these — are they not more of you?”
“Not me,” Jack said. That seemed important, somehow. “But, yeah, a couple of them do look vaguely familiar.”
This Daniel grinned at that, almost in spite of himself, and the tall good-looking one took a half step forward.
“General O’Neill?”
“Boy, have you got that wrong,” Jack said, in English. “It’s Colonel O’Neill. And I’m retired. Very, very retired.”
“Not so much,” Daniel said, with a pointed look at the soldiers.
The pretty, dark-haired woman was looking at him curiously, and then her eyes widened. “Oh,” she said.
The woman who looked like Sam — who probably was Sam Carter, in some weird twist of time and physics that was going to make his head hurt just to think about it — made an odd strangled noise, and valiantly looked away. Jack glanced over his shoulder to see Sam and Danyel descending the steps. The other Sam, the colonel said, “Uh, sir?”
“Not sir,” Jack said. “I’m retired.”
“They — I’m guessing they must be us from the original timeline.” That was his Sam, her eyes bright. “Or something very like it.”
“I knew this would give me a headache,” Jack muttered. He said, more loudly, “OK, kids, this is — weird. What are you doing here?”
“We’re here because the timeline is in danger,” the good-looking one said. He really did look like a recruiting poster, Jack thought. “Again.”
“You people seem pretty careless about it,” he said.
“I’m guessing this has something to do with a videotape we found in a First Dynasty canopic jar,” the younger-looking Daniel said.
“That damn videotape,” Danyel said. He shook his head. “It seemed like such a good idea at the time.”
“General O’Neill,” the good-looking one said. He’d gotten a grip on himself, looked as though he was determined to get a word in before things got any stranger. “I’m Lieutenant Colonel Cameron Mitchell, this is Vala Mal Doran, and I’m thinking you know Colonel Carter, Dr. Jackson, and Teal’c.”
“Colonel,” Jack said, and shook his head. “And I’m a colonel. Was a colonel. Not a general.” He looked at Basa. “They’re friends. Or at the very least, they’re enemies of our enemies.”
“Unless they are evil ka,” Basa said. “Sent to deceive us.”
“I suppose that’s possible,” Jack said. “But I don’t think so. Those two —” He pointed to Mitchell and Carter. “They serve the same government I used to, and I’m sure they wouldn’t ally with Ra or any other Goa’uld.”
Basa gave a reluctant nod. “As you say, O’Neill.”
“Come on in,” Jack said, in English, and motioned for them to follow up him up the long stairs. “We probably need to talk.”
The temple servants found them stools and cushions and brought jars of beer and a plate of dates and almonds into the room outside the area where Aset slept. Teal’c, his Teal’c, came reluctantly to join them, his eyebrows rising as he saw the other Jaffa. Jack busied himself getting the beer handed round, got everyone served in time to hear Danyel — his Danyel — say, “OK, this is the part that you don’t know about because it didn’t actually happen.”
Jack took a long drink of his beer, and saw Mitchell do the same. Their eyes met, and Jack thought he recognized the look. Probably anyone who dealt with Daniel Jackson — either one of them — developed it after a while. Sam and the other Sam — Carter, he was going to call her Carter, just like he would any other Air Force officer — were both listening with rapt attention, even though Sam, his Sam, had heard the story before.
“We really needed a ZPM,” Danyel said. “So I had this — well, not-so-bright idea, as it turned out. We knew from tomb paintings that Ra had one, but didn’t know what it was, so I thought we could use the time-traveling puddle jumper we found on Maybourne’s planet to go back and get it.” He paused. “You still have the jumper, right?”
Both Daniel and Carter had odd looks on their faces, and the dark woman, Vala, looked even more innocent. Mitchell said, firmly, “Yes.”
“Good,” Danyel said. “Though, of course, we still have ours —”
“Danyel,” Jack said. “Focus?”
“Yes, sorry.” Danyel frowned. “So, anyway, we got into trouble, and couldn’t get back to our own time, so we made that videotape to try to insure against changing the timeline.”
“And it worked,” Sam interjected.
“Which was good,” Danyel said, “because we did change the timeline. Jack —”
“Not me,” Jack put in.
“Right, our Jack, the Jack from my original team — he decided that we might as well lead a rebellion because it was going to happen anyway, only he and Sam and Teal’c were all killed.” The ghost of something bleak and bitter crossed Danyel’s face. “And Ra took the Stargate. But, like Sam said, we’d left that videotape, and sure enough it was found, and the Air Force dredged up Sam and, well, me, the me from that new timeline, and dragged Jack out of retirement, and sent them off in the puddle jumper to fix things. After first collecting Teal’c, who was still Apophis’s First Prime.”
“Indeed,” the two Teal’cs said, in almost the same moment.
“Does your head hurt?” Jack said, to Mitchell. “Because mine does.”
“I’m wondering what you put in this beer,” Mitchell said.
“The other me got killed on Chulak,” Danyel went on. “But I was still here, trying to run a rebellion, and we ended up saving the Stargate and driving Ra out. And presumably fixed the timeline, though I am wondering how much stayed the same, given that she’s apparently on the team.” He nodded to Vala.
“You’re not still holding that against me,” Vala said, with what Jack thought was a distinctly sharp smile.
“Yes,” Danyel said, and Daniel said, “Maybe.”
They looked at each other, and then Daniel shrugged. “She grows on you.”
Vala pouted, and Sam and Carter stifled identical grins. His Teal’c tipped his head to one side, and the other Teal’c said, “Indeed.”
“Be that as it may,” Jack said, perhaps more loudly than was strictly required. “What are you doing here?”
“Yeah,” Mitchell said. “About that puddle jumper. It was stolen by a trio of rogue Tok’ra — who kidnapped Carolyn Lam to fly it, before you ask, you still need an ATA gene to fly it —”
“Who’s Carolyn Lam?” Sam asked.
“General Landry’s daughter,” Danyel said. “Our — their — commanding officer. I assume?”
Carter nodded.
Mitchell raised his voice just a little. “These Tok’ra are trying to go back in time to find Egeria so that she can restore the Tok’ra as a species.”
“What?” Jack sat up straight, almost spilling his beer.
“I thought the Tok’ra were on our side,” Sam said.
“That’s infinitely debatable,” Daniel said.
“But Egeria is here.” Teal’c’s voice cut through the confusion. He looked at his other self as though willing him to understand. “My symbiote was nearly mature. I could not risk it taking a host, though O’Neill and Danyel and Sam were willing to open the Stargate to find me a new prim’tah. I descended deep into kelnorim to persuade it to delay, and learned its name and its — different — nature. It has taken a host, a willing host, to save her life. Egeria lies within, in the body of Aset.”
“What?” Mitchell began.
His Teal’c gave a slow smile. “This does allow us greater freedom of action, Colonel Mitchell.”
“We can’t just shoot them,” Mitchell said, though he sounded like he didn’t want to say it. “The Tok’ra are our allies.”
“That might be precisely what we need to do, to save the timeline,” Vala said. “But we need to find them first.”
“But if you lost the puddle jumper,” Sam said, “how did you get here?”
“We found this device of Ba’al’s,” Carter said. “It linked up Stargates and solar flares in such a way that the wormhole could be diverted into the past. In a controlled fashion.”
“That would require an awful lot of power,” Sam said. “And computing capacity. And how do you know that the receiving gate is available?”
Jack realized abruptly that having two Sams was going to be a lot more — geeky — than he’d expected. “Kids,” he said. “Can we stay on-topic?”
“So we’ve found Egeria,” Mitchell said. He shrugged. “I suppose we could just wait for the Tok’ra to show up. Unless they already have?”
“Not as far as I know,” Jack answered.
“Or we have the puddle jumper,” Daniel said. “Their puddle jumper. The records here may well tell us where we should look.”
“OK,” Jack began, and stopped as Basa appeared in the doorway.
“Your pardon, O’Neill,” the sergeant said. “But Pharaoh wishes to speak with you. At once.”
Carter watched Jack get up to answer Pharaoh’s summons exactly the same way he always did when someone important called. Well, not exactly the same. This Jack was thinner than her Jack, but he moved more stiffly. No ibuprofen, no supplements for joint health, no knee replacement… Well, and he was wearing his underwear. Her Jack didn’t usually run around town wearing a pair of boxer shorts and nothing else except a couple of gold chains around his neck like an aging hippie.
She had to admit that this Daniel and Teal’c looked good in their little white kilts, but she couldn’t even look at the other her. Of course it wasn’t the first alternate her she’d encountered. There’d been one particularly weird time where she’d wound up with fourteen of her. Of other her. And then there was Quantum Her, which had been the first strange time she’d run into herself from an alternate reality. But this her… Her hair was more or less pixie cut like Carter’s used to be, though Carter’s had grown out into a long ponytail while she was in Atlantis, and she looked distinctly… buxom. Carter could feel a furious blush rising in her face. The other her didn’t look like she blushed much. She was tan and confident.
A teenaged girl had come to the door and now came in holding a fretting baby, saying something to other her as she crossed the room. Other her took the baby with expert hands and popped her on. Just…popped her on to nurse, all the while talking about temporal physics with the Daniels. Carter blinked.
Daniel looked at Carter, an ironic smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “The road less traveled,” he said.
Vala blinked, and then her smirk grew into a wide grin. “I never knew you’d look so good with a shaved chest,” she said. “And shaved legs. You have such pretty legs when they’re nice and clean.” She beamed at other Daniel appreciatively. “You know, I think he’s better looking than you.”
Jack figured he knew what this was about, and he wasn’t wrong. The Fighting Hawk, Hor-Aha, was pacing his outer receiving room and turned with a snap when Jack entered. “You may go,” he said to the guards, and Jack stood up straighter. Hor-Aha looked at him directly. “O’Neill, you said that the Stargate was secure and that there was no danger in this adventure of yours. Now I hear that other travelers have come through the ring.”
“Yes,” Jack said, “I take full responsibility for that. It was one of my men who did not secure the gate.”
“It is secure now?”
“It is,” Jack said. You’ve got to face the music when one of your guys screws up. That’s how it goes. “It won’t happen again.”
“These other travelers,” Hor-Aha said, pacing around the back of the room, around the brazier that stood there to give warmth against the chill of the desert night that came in through the skylight, “They are not Goa’uld?”
“No.” Jack swallowed. This was going to be fun to explain. “They seem to be from the same future that we came from, or at least that Danyel came from. Several of them are people I’ve never met before, but some of them are, well, us.”
Hor-Aha’s eyebrows rose. “You?”
“Not me, me. But another Danyel, Sam and Teal’c. And two other people,” he added.
“Another Danyel, Sam and Teal’c.” Hor-Aha shook his head. “This is deep water for me, my friend.”
The ‘my friend’ was a good sign. “It’s pretty deep for me too,” Jack said.
Pharaoh looked at him keenly. “So what have they come seeking? Or is it that they come to our aid in the face of some new crisis that we have not yet seen?”
Jack took a deep breath. This was going to involve some heavy explaining. “I don’t know about another crisis,” he said, “but Danyel says that in his time the defeat of the Goa’uld was accomplished with the aid of the Tok’ra, a band of Goa’uld who had rebelled against Ra and who had pledged themselves to be friends of humanity. We did not believe them at first, but they were as good as their word, and many of them died beside us in the fight against the System Lords. One of them even joined with Jacob Carter, Sam’s father, who was a willing bridge between our peoples. The new Daniel says that the first Tok’ra, Egeria, began her life on Earth in this period…”
Hor-Aha interrupted. “Is this true? Do you know this?”
Jack winced inwardly. “We know she’s here. She was Teal’c’s symbiote.”
“Was?” Of course he caught that word.
“She’s joined with Aset to save her life.”
Hor-Aha slammed his hand down on his desk hard enough to make a roll of papyrus jump off onto the floor. “O’Neill! You let a Goa’uld join with Aset?”
“If she is the mother of the Tok’ra, she must not be allowed to die,” Jack said. “Or the defeat of the Goa’uld in the future may not happen.”
“And if she is not?” Hor-Aha snapped. “If she lies?”
“Teal’c will kill her with his own hand,” Jack said.
Hor-Aha looked at him keenly. “Will he? When she is one with Aset, whom he loves?”
Jack didn’t look away. “If Teal’c can’t do it, I will. I give you my word.”
“At the slightest hint of treachery,” Hor-Aha said. “You will slay her. Or I must do so now. Do you not understand that the safety of my people must come first? We have already taken an incredible risk for Teal’c, and you say no harm has come of it. But this must end. The next time you make a decision such as this joining without my order you will be dismissed from my service and stripped of your rank. Do you understand?”
“I do,” Jack said. It was about what he’d expected.
Hor-Aha held his gaze for a moment, then turned away. He might be young, but he’d learned how to command. Once a reprimand was taken, it was time to let it drop. “What do these strangers want from Egeria?”
“I don’t…” Jack began, but he stopped as Hor-Aha’s head turned sharply. There was shouting in the antechamber, panicked voices raised in supplication and alarm.
An unearthly glow was growing at the skylight, a white blue light that should not, could not, have been there, could not have any good reason on this planet to exist.
“Oh crap,” Jack said as Hor-Aha dashed out the door to see what was going on. He shaded his eyes, looking up through the skylight instead as the lights grew brighter, the blinding landing lights of a Goa’uld mothership.