Hydra

by Stargate

  “Fifteen minutes, tops,” Jack said. Optimist, he added, without giving voice to it. Daniel rolled his eyes at the way Jack said it, as though it was a dirty word.

  “Get out of my head,” Daniel answered, though he didn’t bother to turn off his comms or say it via the channel. He supposed all the mind-picking Jack did to him now was payback for the annoyances of a previous life. So to speak.

  Jack sat up and brushed grass off his T-shirt, then eyed Daniel. “Aiming for a tan, there, Daniel?”

  “Skip all the out of uniform jokes, would you? Come up with something new.” Daniel glanced toward the rise of the hill. “Besides, someone’s coming.”

  “Mendez,” Jack informed him. He lowered his sunglasses and lay back down, hands on his belly, fingers laced casually across the black T-shirt, though Daniel knew he was battle-ready.

  They hadn’t been able to figure much out about Mendez. He was relatively young, maybe thirty-five on the outside, and sharp as a whittled tack, as Jack liked to say. They had an idea he wasn’t the mastermind of the operation, but it was difficult to tell. He definitely had taken charge of things and didn’t have much compassion for them. He treated them like soldiers, which was irksome for Daniel, since the guy wore man-in-black suits and didn’t even have the decency to skulk about in them. He walked like he owned the place, which Daniel supposed he did, from a certain perspective.

  Mendez certainly had an agenda, but beyond procurement, Daniel really had no idea what it might be.

  He had enough time to slide on his shirt before Mendez showed, though he left it trailing out of his pants, messy and completely unmilitary, just to piss Jack off if he should happen to notice. Mendez crested the hill, sweaty and fully suited but alone, and stopped dead when he saw them. “Well,” he said, scratching behind his left ear with two fingers. It was a peculiarly familiar gesture, like he was puzzled and amused all at once.

  “Didn’t think we’d stop once we got going?” Daniel asked.

  Mendez smiled. “Knew you’d have to. There’s nowhere to go.” He squinted up at the sun, his charcoal-colored tie flapping sideways in the breeze, gold threads catching the light. “How’d you get out?”

  “Dug a hole with a spoon,” Jack said. He swatted lazily at the air beside his face, though there wasn’t much chance any insect would take a bite of what Jack had to offer.

  Mendez loosened his tie but didn’t rise to the bait. “What I’m curious about is why you left the complex at all, since I’m sure you had to know there was no way out.”

  Daniel sighed, more from reflex than any particular need to do it at all, and noted that Teal’c and Sam were up and edging closer. “Sunshine,” he said, jabbing a finger skyward. “Blue sky. Haven’t seen these ones in, um…”

  “Ever,” Jack said, still without moving a proverbial muscle.

  “Fair enough.” Mendez hesitated, like conflicting impulses controlled him, and then sat down in the grass at Jack’s feet. Daniel raised his eyebrows. Mendez didn’t speak, just sat there in the breeze and looked out at the horizon. By now, Teal’c was close enough to snap his neck with one lunge. Just like Daniel and Jack had been all along. But it wouldn’t serve any purpose.

  “You wanted something?” Daniel said. The surreal quality of the conversation wasn’t lost on him. The whole thing seemed like some demented fever dream he might have had in college, drunk and under the influence of something offhand and random he’d been passed, while his brain ran uphill a mile a minute.

  “I know you’re up to something,” Mendez said. He didn’t look at Daniel. Instead he wrapped his arms around his knees and clasped his hands, a conspicuously out-of-place visitor at their picnic. “I want you to tell me what it is.”

  Daniel picked at a blade of grass, rubbed at it for a while, and watched it disintegrate between his fingers. Everything impermanent, except the thing encasing whatever passed for his consciousness. That apparently would go on forever, until something ended it violently. Beside him, Jack was so still he might as well be dead. Which was probably how Jack looked at it.

  They all sat in silence for a while, until it became apparent Mendez wasn’t going to get an answer to his question. Daniel listened to Mendez’s soft breathing, the thump of his heartbeat. If he listened carefully enough, he could probably hear the grass growing underneath them. It was a blessing and a curse. Mostly a curse.

  Mendez said, “When I started out in this business, everything seemed pretty clear-cut. Good, evil — ”

  “Could you spare us the lesson on morality?” Jack pulled his cap down over his face, then added, muffled behind the fabric, “It ruins the mood.”

  Daniel studied Mendez’s clenched jaw, the tight set of his shoulders. His pulse was slow, steady. No indicators of deception. “You know, don’t you, that at the end of the day, I’ll have to choose Earth over any of you.”

  “Should have been doing that all along. You pretty much suck at your job.” Jack pulled the cap down further, like he couldn’t stand to be bothered by the conversation any longer. Daniel put his face down into his sleeve to hide his smile.

  When he raised his head, Mendez hadn’t moved. “No one likes being lied to,” Daniel said softly.

  Shut up, Daniel, Jack said on comms, his annoyance carrying through. Don’t give away the farm. So Daniel only met Mendez’s steady stare and offered no further commentary.

  “We have reliable intelligence on the whereabouts of the rogue team.” Mendez shifted uncomfortably on the ground, then shrugged and lay back in the grass, shiny dress shoes sparkling in the sun. “One of our operatives discovered their back-up power station and destroyed it. We’ve not heard from him since. We’re pretty sure they’re going to hit a world called Eshet, try to acquire some technology there. It was on their roster already, so they’ve got the gate address.”

  Sam moved up. She cast a shadow over Mendez’s face. “Which doesn’t explain what they’re doing, or why we have to go after them,” she said. “Some information might be helpful.”

  “The team is unstable. Their behavior is erratic. It can’t be controlled.”

  “Which is somehow your fault, I’m sure.” Jack didn’t even bother to remove the cap from his face. “Why should we clean up your mess?”

  “Because, left unchecked, we’re not certain what their objective will be. But I can certainly tell you it has nothing to do with protecting Earth.” Mendez smiled a smile that reminded Daniel in a really horrible way of Jack at his meanest. “And that’s the one thing we all have in common, isn’t it?”

  “I do not think we share any common goals.” Teal’c loomed over them now as well, casting Mendez totally into shadow.

  “Well, we do now.” Mendez opened one eye and looked up at Teal’c. “You’re blocking my sun.”

  Sam rolled her eyes and sat down, and Daniel took a moment to appreciate how bizarre this was. Somewhere in the places where circuitry overruled emotion, his electronic brain was preparing a little flowchart for him, all the possibilities for why the team went rogue, what they were after. If they were really bad. If whatever had happened to them would happen to his team too.

  Sam beat him to the punch. “You tampered with them, didn’t you? Did you tamper with us too? Are we next?”

  “Yes, and yes. But no. You’re not. We tampered with all of you. You didn’t really think we needed perfect SG-1 clones, did you?” Mendez sat up and fixed Daniel with a stare, as if Sam wasn’t sitting right there. “What do you think this is? Some kind of cakewalk? Prance around to the music, come back with trinkets? We programmed you to be what we needed.”

  “Which was what, exactly?” Jack shoved the cap back with the heel of his hand and sat up, brushing grass off his shirt. “Robots gone wild? Film at eleven?”

  “Soldiers in service to one cause only: defending Earth. I won’t apologize for that.” Mendez rose smoothly to his feet and sidestepped Teal’c neatly, without really giving him an inch. “You are what we made you. This is the life you�
�ve got. I would think you’d want to use it as well as you could, since really, we’re only asking you to do a variation of what your real selves did.”

  Do, Daniel wanted to say, but his team were practically hissing at him to shut up, and he did know the value of strategic silence, so he exercised some restraint. “So now you want us to go hunting for ourselves,” he said instead. “Because you say they’re dangerous.”

  “Don’t take my word for it,” Mendez said. “There’s some footage waiting for you back at the complex. Have a look. Make up your own mind.” He pulled his tie back into its perfectly straight lines. “And then do exactly what I’ve told you to do.”

  “We still have free will,” Daniel said. He squinted into the sun as he looked up at Mendez.

  “No,” Mendez said. “You really don’t.”

  He turned and walked back down the hill, breezy as if he’d just been called in to dinner. Daniel watched him go, all sorts of cute phrases about choice and self-determination just itching to be shouted after him, but there wasn’t any point.

  Jack lay back down. “Wake me when it’s time to go kill our doppelgangers,” he said.

  Mendez was just a dot on the landscape now, moving away at a steady pace, his shadow growing longer across the grass.

  Eshet

  October 29, 2002

  The minute they stepped through the gate, Jack knew everything was FUBAR. Just the look on the faces of the folks scattered around the gate platform told them everything they needed to know — the only time he’d seen that look was in the wake of violence he’d done with his own hands. Down-slope from the gate, smoke twisted up into the thin blue of the early morning sky, obscuring the choppy teeth of the mountains in that direction. The village, which, he guessed, had once been a collection of Swiss postcard chalets, smoldered against the dark forest. The alphas were too late. The thetas had already done their damage. Cover, people, he said through comms, and scattered into the woods with the rest of his team. Daniel disappeared into the underbrush, Carter close on his heels, and Teal’c dived for cover with Jack.

  Well, this is cozy, Jack sent. He had dirt up to his eyeballs, and he’d pulled half a bush over him. Good thing he had no need to breathe.

  What the hell? Amazing how well Daniel’s tone transmitted without actual spoken words. They looked at us like they wanted to murder us.

  Think the intelligence Mendez gave us was a little behind the curve, Carter transmitted.

  Jack peered out from the base of the bush. In the distance he could hear something like a cross between a dog and a bear. At least he could be grateful that he didn’t have human scents to track. Though maybe the dogs would pick up on forty-weight oil and chassis lube, who could say. Think we’re stuck here, kids. Get comfy.

  Comfy, of course, did not equate to hours of being sniffed and licked by various woodland creatures and the occasional dog while villagers trampled the ground all around them. On one memorable occasion, Carter whined about being peed on by a groundhog-looking thing, which Jack might have found funny if he had had even one iota of his sense of humor left. Teal’c had apparently burrowed down into the ground and was waiting for some indication he needed to come back up again.

  Jack was so, so bored, and he would never admit it to Daniel or Carter, not even if the sun went supernova and he was incinerated for refusal to tell, but he started doing mathematical equations in his head to pass the time. Not that it was difficult. He hadn’t had a difficult “thought” since the day he woke up.

  The gate opened once, and a lone Jaffa — an older guy with a silver skullcap — strode down the hill to the village where he was met by the whole congregation. Jack could pick up the general thrum of agitated voices at this distance, but not the words. No matter. He knew what they were talking about. A little while later the gate coughed open again, and the Jaffa left. Jack pitied whoever it was he was going to see. After that there was a steady litany of lamentation from the village, voices weeping and singing, the sound seeping across the cold earth like spilled ink. He considered adjusting his hearing to block it out, but knew it wouldn’t help. In front of the gate, Jaffa paced. No exit.

  An hour later, Carter’s ping got his attention. You’re not going to believe this, sir.

  Between the stubby spines of the creepy bush, Jack watched his mirror image stepping down the platform stairs. He took an inventory — heartbeat, respiration, brain wave function, human body temperature fluctuations — and as he alerted the others, they were shouting at him on comms as well, one joyful cacophony of It’s them and Holy Hannah, our luck is incredible and I believe our opportunity has come. Jack crawled out from the dirt, his hands braced in the earth, and looked for Daniel, aware it was the last time he’d see Daniel alive, if everything went according to plan.

  A young girl was shrieking and running away, leaving a very human Daniel standing with his mouth gaping and his hands held out in a familiar, conciliating gesture. And then came the angry Jaffa and the angry men with axes, and SG-1 and the marines took cover, and the whole carnival was up and spinning, fireworks and all.

  Daniel smiled at him, and then they were all running, heaving themselves toward the only worthwhile cause they had left to embrace. The only one that mattered.

  PART FOUR

  inter spem et metem

  between hope and fear

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  SGC

  October 31, 2002

  “There’s no guarantee he’ll talk to me.” The robot watched the gate spin and the last chevron engage. He tried to shake the hair out of his eyes but had to raise his bound hands to brush it aside with the back of his wrists before he looked up at Jack. “Since I’m technically — ” He stopped and his brow furrowed. “I was going to say ‘persona non grata,’ but I guess that’s what I was before, in a way.” The blooming event horizon filled the control room with the familiar blue light, and it reflected exactly the same way in the duplicate’s eyes that it did in Daniel’s, behind the glasses.

  Jack winced and shifted his attention to Carter at her console. “Anything?”

  “No radio traffic.” She tapped keys. “Nothing on subspace.” Her eyes on her screen, she asked, “Is Piper at this location?”

  Jack watched the robot’s reflection in the window. The hair fell back over the robot’s eye as he shook his head. “No. This is just a relay. I can access the subspace transmitter remotely. I’m sending the code now.”

  “Where is Piper?” Teal’c asked.

  “I have no idea. He was on Perseus, but who knows if they’ve abandoned that facility yet. If they have, he could be at one of the off-site stations, or at the beta site.” The robot started to raise his hands to point at the sky beyond the weight of the mountain but let them fall again. “Could be anywhere. Could be here on Earth, for all I know.” He kept looking up as though he could see through concrete and stone. “Is it night time? I remember — I mean, I have a schematic of constellations. Orion should be visible now, right? “ A brief smile revealed teeth as he shifted to flash a glance in Daniel’s direction. “I wonder sometimes what they let me keep and what they — hang on. He’s responding.” He fell silent.

  After a few seconds, Jack took a step forward and poked him in the arm. “Hey. Out loud, if you don’t mind.”

  Without a pause, the robot opened his mouth and started talking, only not in his own voice. “ — hairy back at the barn, Daniel. I don’t know how long I’m going to have access to this channel. What’s your status?” The voice was a little reedy, a bit breathless, words running into each other like the speaker was trying to cram as much as possible into a small space.

  Carter caught Jack’s eye and mouthed, “Piper?”

  Jack gave her a little shivery shrug. It was weird enough listening to Daniel’s voice coming out of the robot; hearing him playing both sides of a conversation was two steps at least beyond that.

  The robot switched back to Daniel’s voice. “I’m okay. Running low on power, obvious
ly. Oh, and I’m in the custody of the SGC.” This time when he stopped talking, Jack got the feeling there wasn’t any kind of silent communication going on. After a pause Dan said, “Piper? Do you read me?” He quirked his eyebrows at Jack and followed that up with a little shrug of his own. “Hello-oo.”

  Jack took the opportunity to poke the robot again. “How do we know this isn’t just you playing ventriloquist?”

  The weary look the robot gave him was all Daniel. “Either you trust me or you don’t. But I’m dying to help you, literally, so maybe that counts for something.”

  Jack avoided Daniel’s gaze and instead traded scowls with Teal’c. “Okay, we’ll play,” he conceded. “If, that is, your friend ever decides to — ”

  “Okay, sorry,” Piper responded. “Uh, I just...it seems someone ‘accidentally’ tripped the evac siren.” He sounded pretty proud of himself. “My staunch brothers-in-arms are currently engaged in running and leaving my ass to fry.” The chuckle was nothing like Daniel. “Losers. They’ll be back once the all clear goes, so I gotta talk fast. I assume we got an audience, right?”

  Dan looked up at Jack. “Piper can hear you, if you want to say anything.”

  Jack shook his head.

  “Yeah, the gang’s all here,” the robot answered Piper.

  A long pause, and then: “I want you guys to understand something, okay?” Piper — or the robot — took a deep breath. “I’m not doing this for the SGC, right? As far as I’m concerned, you guys have screwed some stuff up royally. But I’ve seen things — ” He broke off and Jack’s brain supplied all kinds of images from his own life to fill the gap. “Things I — well, I didn’t sign up for that. Not that. I’m here because I want to protect people. But these...this organization, it’s got a really narrow idea of who gets to be protected and who gets to be people. And I’m not just talking about robots. You follow me?”