by Stargate
“We could take a ship,” Jack said. “The Tok’ra must have a couple spare ha’taks laying around.”
“Unlikely,” Teal’c said. “It would take several weeks to reach this world by ship.”
“If that’s all we’ve got, then that’s what we do,” Jack answered, but Daniel was shaking his head in that infuriating, invalidating way he had.
“The situation is too urgent. We have to take action now — we have no idea what they’ll do if they become autonomous or how many others they’ll kill to get there.”
“Why do we not simply wait for them to exhaust their power?” Teal’c asked. “If in fact they have only a limited supply to work from.”
“Because Dan thinks theta Sam might have rigged up some kind of temporary portable supply, or maybe they’ve already found some technology to solve the problem, at least partially,” Daniel answered.
Jack stared at him. “Dan? You’re giving it nicknames now?”
Daniel stared back. “I have to call him something.”
“It’s not a him, Daniel. It’s an it.”
“It’s not an it, Jack. He’s exactly like me. How am I supposed to treat him any differently than I’d want to be treated? Do you think I don’t know what he’s going through? How I’d feel is how he feels.” Daniel’s voice was steadily rising with the full force of his passion behind every syllable.
“I get it,” Jack said. “I just don’t want to get it. It’s a mistake to start thinking about them as being the same as us. They’re not, Daniel.”
“Enough,” Hammond said. “Let’s get this back on track, please.” He waited a beat. Jack didn’t break gaze with Daniel, who seemed bound and determined to stick to this until he had Jack convinced. Which, as everyone except Daniel seemed to realize, wasn’t ever going to happen. Hammond broke the deadlock by asking, “Dr. Jackson, what do we know about the technology used to create the robots?”
“Not much,” Daniel said. “We have no idea how the duplicates are made or what they’re made of. Some components are trinium. Beyond that — ” He raised his shoulders in a shrug and looked to Sam who simply nodded in agreement. “We know they aren’t indestructible, obviously, and they’re much stronger, and are impervious to pain to some degree, though they clearly feel it. But we don’t know how they’re powered. If they’re seeking a permanent power source, it might be helpful to know what they need.”
“The place to find such information would be with its original source,” Teal’c said. “Perhaps a visit to Harlan’s world.”
“Excellent idea, Teal’c.” Hammond flipped open the folder Daniel had placed in front of him. “Dr. Solja’s report on Harlan’s original robots, and the Daniel Jackson currently in custody, shows some small but significant changes to the operational model. Major Carter, you have additional information on this?”
“Yes, sir.” She opened her own folder and revealed copious notes scribbled there. To Jack it looked like a bunch of hash marks and doodles, which is more or less how he thought of the inside of Carter’s brain — very bright, brilliant doodles that he had little to no chance of ever comprehending. “There have been adaptations to the core mechanisms. I haven’t had time to go over it in detail, but based on comparisons to the scans of the duplicates we housed on base several years ago, I can tell their programming has been changed.”
“Changed how?” Jack said.
“Based on my conversation with Dan, I’d say they’re being changed to be more compliant with orders, more ruthless in pursuit of goals,” Daniel said. “I’d guess that the changes are being perfected with each team created.”
“The perfect obedient soldier,” Jack said. “One more way they aren’t like us.”
“Truer words were never spoken,” Hammond said with a small smile. “Very well. We need more information, and it would appear we don’t have much time. Gear up and pay a visit to Harlan’s world. Perhaps you can obtain information on power sources for these duplicates. That’s one place to start.”
“Yes, sir.” Jack nodded. The prospect of seeing Harlan again gave him the creeps. “Assuming the place is still there.” He remembered the anguish on Harlan’s face, the imminent demise of his world without anyone to help him save it.
“There’s only one way to find out,” Hammond said.
Before he could give the order, though, Harriman trotted up the stairs and handed him a slip of paper. “This call just came in, sir. He was particular about the wording.”
Hammond pulled at his lip while he read it, then handed it to Jack. “I think this message is for you.” While Jack looked it over, Hammond asked Harriman, “Did you get a trace?”
“Tried, sir, but he bounced the call through half a dozen links. No joy.”
Jack lifted the paper and read aloud. “Starsky: Ever feel like one of you is just not enough? Buy a guy a hot dog and maybe you’ll learn something. Hutch.”
Jack closed his eyes and let his head fall against his seat back. After a cleansing breath, he opened his eyes and looked up through the mountain at the sky, where there seemed to be an evil god looking down at him, pointing and laughing. “Just when you think the day can’t get any more fun.” He sat up and slid the paper back to Hammond. “Permission to go meet Maybourne and punch him in the face, sir?”
“Granted. Take Teal’c with you.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Major, you and Dr. Jackson take some backup and make that trip to Altair.”
“Sir.” Daniel didn’t get up when the rest of them stood with the general. “Maybe we could bring Dan with us. If there is a power source still on Altair, it could — ”
Hammond started shaking his head before Daniel had even gotten to his second sentence. “I’m sorry, Dr. Jackson,” he said, not unkindly. “Until we know more, the duplicate will have to stay here. If the situation warrants it, we’ll revisit your suggestion.”
Daniel opened his mouth to protest, but Jack’s glare shut it again. Instead, he nodded and gathered his notes.
Hammond headed for his office. “Maybe Harlan will be forthcoming. We don’t have a lot of time, people. Make it count.”
Carter was getting the short end of the stick. Thank God. Anything to avoid dealing with Harlan, even if that meant having to look Maybourne in his beady eyes. “Have fun, kids,” Jack said.
Daniel was giving Teal’c a wary glance. Fun was all in the definition.
PART TWO
et sequentia
and those that follow
CHAPTER FOUR
NID Primary “Hydra” Project Site, Perseus (P66-421)
July, 2002; three months prior to invasion of Eshet
The sudden blaring of the alarm made Piper drop his breakfast tray on the desk. Not that he was on edge or anything. Cursing, he looked around for a napkin and ended up snatching a few blank requisition forms out of the middle drawer to dab at the spilled oatmeal. What he couldn’t blot up with form QY-041-D, he wiped up with the sleeve of his BDUs. He pressed his headset to his ear and listened in, but nobody was calling for him. Lab accident, probably. Maybe those guys would learn not to turn weird alien gizmos on until they had some clue whether or not they’d tune you in to Intergalactic Easy Listening or burn your face off. He went back to his oatmeal-sticky specs, but the sound of running feet and gunfire got him to his feet.
Out in the hallway, he had to jump backward to avoid a pile driver in the form of an ex-marine with a skull and crossbones shaved into his hair, and then two more running jarheads spun him in the other direction. Opting to exercise self-preservation, he backed up against the wall. “What’s going — ?” he asked the lab coat that blew by him, and then, “Where’s the — ?” as another dashed after the first. At that point he realized he was looking an awful lot like Bugs Bunny, and lowered his hand and its pointing finger. “Never mind,” he muttered, and set off at a jog. “Go back to your specs,” he told himself, but his feet kept going in the direction of the crisis, whatever it was.
&n
bsp; He rounded the corner into the lab section and stopped short — barely — of plowing into Mendez from behind. For a moment, all he could see was the boss’s impeccably pressed navy blue suit jacket. Gunfire from further down the hall made Mendez jump sideways toward the wall, so Piper had a real nice view of the troops herding the beta team down the corridor. Piper had his mouth open to ask the obvious question, but his teeth snapped down into his tongue when Mendez grabbed him by the back of his shirt and yanked him into the shelter of Siebert’s muscled back.
Siebert shot Piper a grin full of teeth and went back to sighting along her P90 down the corridor. “Stand back, little man,” she ordered and squeezed off a short burst of fire.
“Damn it,” Mendez said gruffly.
“What happened?” Piper asked. And why didn’t anybody tell him? If there was a loop he should be in, this was it.
From his spot around the corner, Peterson said, “It looks like the introduction of the Goa’uld code has produced some unintended results.”
“No kidding.” Piper edged forward a bit so that he could get a view of the action. “Aw, crap.”
The betas had a hostage. Karen. Karen something. Mechanical engineer. Piper tried to remember more about her, but the wild look of terror on her face — Jeez, he could actually see the whites of her eyes from way down here — blotted out anything he’d ever known about her. Her boots kicked frantically back against the beta Teal’c’s shins as he lifted her up by her waist and retreated with the rest of the betas through the blast doors into the development lab. Karen’s scream was abruptly cut off when the doors slammed shut, but it kept ringing in Piper’s head.
He followed Mendez out of their shelter and into the hall. Two marines were lying on the concrete, one in a slowly spreading pool of red, the other on his back, his neck obviously broken. Piper mouthed a silent ouch. “Some unintended results,” he said.
Mendez snorted in disgusted agreement. “Get the medics,” he ordered softly as he knelt to feel for a pulse on the fallen marines. The one who was shot was still hanging on. For the one with the broken neck, the gesture was a formality. “They’ve disabled the security cameras. Get me eyes in that room.”
Siebert nodded curtly and headed back toward main control, barking orders into her headset mike as she went.
Half an hour later, the medics were rolling the bandaged marine onto a gurney. The dead one was covered by Mendez’s jacket. Piper followed Mendez around the corner to watch Siebert working a fiber-optic cable through the ventilation system. Peterson was perched on a chair he’d dragged from one of the offices. A clipboard on his lap, he was scribbling furiously and muttering to himself. Piper knelt on the floor to help Siebert hook up the feed from the camera. As Piper tapped keys on Siebert’s laptop to bring the images up on the screen, Mendez put his hand to his headset.
“What!? Oh, sorry, sir. No, not good. Three dead so far. Yes, so far.” He started off toward main control but turned on his heel to jab a finger in Siebert’s direction. “I want a solution by the time I get back.”
“Sir,” Siebert said. She took the laptop from Piper and worked the trackball to pan the camera across the room. “Piece of cake,” she said grimly. “Not.”
The fiber-optic with its camera had snaked along the vent shaft and was now poking down through the grating near the ceiling. Below the grating, so that they could only see a shadow, beta Teal’c was pacing. Further into the room, Carter and Daniel stood over Karen and three other techs who were on their knees with their hands laced behind their heads. O’Neill was over by the door. There was no other exit. The betas didn’t say a word out loud, but that didn’t mean they weren’t talking.
As Siebert adjusted the focus, beta Carter reached down, grabbed the hand of the closest tech, and twisted hard. The tech — a young guy named Jameson — let out a howl and fell over, cradling his broken wrist. When Karen leaned down to him, beta Daniel clipped her a good one on the chin with the heel of his boot. She sprawled on her back with her hands over her face. No one made a move to help her. Piper looked away with a hiss of sympathy. Peterson glanced up at the sound and then went back to scribbling.
“This is not going to end well,” Siebert said.
If the knot in Piper’s chest was any indication, he agreed with her, no matter what his more optimistic side might be hoping. “We have to get those people out of there.”
Piper looked sidelong at the feed. Karen was still laid out. Unconscious or maybe just playing dead. As if he could feel Piper looking, beta O’Neill stepped around the hostages and glared up at the camera. After a moment of consideration, he moved out of the frame. When he came back, he must’ve been standing on something because his face filled the entire screen. The expression he wore, the utter coldness of his eyes, made Piper shudder. Then O’Neill’s fingers loomed close and adjusted the angle of the camera so that the hostages were right in the middle of the frame. Piper wasn’t able to close his eyes fast enough, and the lurid afterimage of beta Carter shooting Jameson floated and doubled behind his lids. When he opened his eyes again, the feed was dead.
“Son of a bitch,” he breathed.
“We open those doors,” Siebert said with flat conviction, “we are all going to die.”
“That’s why we’re going to burn it.” Mendez’s voice came from right behind them.
Although Siebert’s hesitation was barely noticeable, it spoke volumes. But she shifted the laptop over to Piper, rose smoothly to her feet and snapped a salute. “Yes, sir.”
Piper was less graceful, and the laptop clattered to the floor as he clambered upright and steadied himself with a hand on the wall. “Wait a minute! Wait just — there must be something — there’s got to be — ” He let go of the wall and pointed through it at the lab. “There’s people in there. We could negotiate.”
“We tried negotiation,” Mendez answered. “They killed two techs in the clean room.”
“But there must be something we can bargain with.”
Grabbing him by the front of his shirt, Mendez put his face about an inch from Piper’s and growled, “They don’t want anything. They want to kill, starting with everyone in this facility.”
“How — how do you know?”
“Because they told me.” Mendez’s voice was hoarse, but behind the anger in his eyes was something else, something close to horror. “They’re wrong inside. They’re broken.”
“Gee, I wonder why.”
For a second, Piper thought Mendez was going to put a fist through his face, but instead he let him go and stepped back. Then he was classic Mendez again, slick as ice. “I have my orders,” he said stonily, and shifted his gaze to Siebert. “And you have yours.”
Mendez stepped out of the way so that Siebert could bring in the charges. Behind her, Kutrell was setting the timer.
“Move it, Piper,” she said when he stood his ground under the vent opening. Her voice hardened when she repeated the order. She added, “I can have you in the brig in ten seconds flat.” She handed the charges to Kutrell.
Piper tried to stare her down for about half a second, but he wasn’t much of a match for her steely blues, which seemed likely to bore a couple of holes through his forehead. “This is so messed up,” he said.
“Clearly, we’ll need to introduce the Goa’uld code in stages,” Peterson said to no one in particular. “Yes, that’s it. Next iteration, if we introduce it in stages we can...” He trailed off, and for a long moment there was just the sound of his pen scratching on his clipboard and of Kutrell taping the charges to a remote-controlled robot small enough to track through the vent.
Piper gasped out an disbelieving laugh. “Next iteration?”
“Move it, Piper.”
Siebert took a step toward him, and he held up his hands in surrender. “Fine.” He edged sideways along the wall until he came to the corner and followed it around into the main corridor. In front of the closed lab doors, the concrete was stained with an almost perfect circle of dar
k blood. Red boot prints led away toward the infirmary alongside the double tracks made by the gurney wheels. The dead marine was still there, under Mendez’s coat. Two more marines were at the door, welding it shut. Piper slid down and rested his elbows on his raised knees, pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Next iteration. You gotta be kiddin’ me.” The sparks from the welding danced around in Piper’s brain.
Piper dropped his hands and stared at Mendez’s shoes when they stopped in front of him in the hallway. Nice shoes. Italian, probably. The pair of sneakers that followed them were Peterson’s. Piper rested his chin on his folded arms and listened.
“Don’t try to lose me in the technobabble, Peterson. Just get it done.” Mendez’s voice was tight. Piper could picture the tendons standing out in his neck above his starched collar.
“It’s not so easy as you seem to think, sir,” Peterson answered. He sounded a little bit breathless. Piper let his gaze climb up past the wrinkled lab coat to the round face, the perma-creases in the brow above the washed-out eyes.
“I want an off switch, a way to shut them down. How can that be hard?”
“Because.” Peterson pulled a tissue out of his pocket and dabbed at his forehead. “It’s because of the primary technology. The duplicating system is predicated on two basic principles: survival and autonomy. Those principles inform the process at every step.”
“So bypass them.”
Peterson poked his fingers and thumb up behind his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. “We could do that.” Maybe it was exhaustion, or maybe he just had some kind of death wish, because his tone was just a hair shy of patronizing. “But then you’ve eliminated the very qualities that make the units useful. It’s the point of the project.”
“I know the point of the project,” Mendez said acidly.