by Stargate
Piper’s voice was husky with intensity, but the robot’s face showed none of that. Based on the robot’s aping of Piper’s laugh, Jack got the feeling he could suit his expression to the voice if he wanted to. It seemed, though, that he was choosing instead to play the role of relay or translator. The disjunction was a little unnerving.
Still, even through the weirdness of the relay, the tension was unmistakable. Piper, whoever he was, was taking a leap here, a big one he might not survive. Jack imagined Piper in some bunker somewhere, the evac siren wailing and his internal scaffolding collapsing, trying to make something out of the rubble. He didn’t envy him one bit. “We follow you,” he said.
“Okay.” Somehow, even though the robot didn’t move at all, Piper seemed to dismiss Jack and turn his attention to Dan. “What’s the status of the rest of your team?”
The robot’s controlled expression crumpled and he ducked his head so Jack couldn’t see his face. It didn’t matter; on the other side of Dan’s chair, Daniel was making the same expression of pain. “They’re dead,” Dan said flatly. “All of them.”
A long pause. “Damn, Daniel. I’m sorry.”
If the robot replied to this, he did it internally. Jack let that go.
“The thetas?” Piper asked finally.
“Yes.”
“Son of a bitch.”
“Yeah.”
“I got a list of asses to be kicked, you know?”
The faint smile came back. “Yeah. Me too.”
“Maybe your new friends there can do something useful for once and help us out with that.”
“Maybe. Which is why I’m calling, actually. We need you to pass along a message. I’m sending the first part now, coded, so don’t waste your time trying to work it out, okay? The less you know, the safer you’ll be.”
“Got it. Theta channel, I presume?”
“Yeah.”
“They weren’t born yesterday.” Piper seemed to catch himself. “I mean, not quite yesterday.”
Dan flicked his gaze to Jack and grinned. “Give me a few minutes and I’ll send you some footage that should at least pique their curiosity.”
“I hope you know what you’re doing, Daniel.” Again, the robot lifted his eyes to meet Jack’s as Piper said, “You guys better bring the big guns. The thetas aren’t going to go down easy.” Another pause. “O’Neill — I guess you know you have a leaky boat, intel-wise, huh? If I were you, I’d be looking for the guy who’s scared to go home, maybe bought a last-minute ticket to Outer Mongolia. My bosses are going to be doing some housecleaning — I’m talking real wet work — and dimes to dollars the mole knows he’s getting mopped, and soon. Like, today.” There was another brief silence, and Jack could picture him looking over his shoulder. When Piper came back, his words were even more rushed. “Oh, and here’s a little bonus for you. Ask him about the switch. Good-bye, Daniel, and don’t let them eat your soul. Piper out.”
Dan cocked his head and looked like he was reading the inside of his eyeballs.
“What’s the ‘switch’?” Jack asked, making air quotes with his fingers.
Frowning, the robot shook his head. “I have no idea. But he sent me a secure subspace frequency. Maybe you should ask the boss.”
Carlos stood in the small square of empty space in the cargo hold and glared at the two remaining gammas. Her mouth tight and her chin raised, Carter gazed into the middle space just like a good soldier. The gamma Daniel watched him with slightly narrowed eyes, like he was doing the math — and probably was, although who knew what kind? — and for once was silent. They were compliant enough in the restraint nets, but Carlos kept his distance anyway. Not so much because he was afraid of them, he admitted to himself, as because he might not be able to keep himself from kicking their shins in sheer frustration. He had at least a couple remnants of dignity left though, and he didn’t mean to lose them by giving in to his inner five-year-old, who was currently pitching a temper tantrum between his ears.
Six months and eight teams and this is what he had left: two missing gammas, two cranky gammas, a set of more than mildly brain-damaged zetas in cold storage, a Goa’uld cargo ship and all the equipment they could cram into the hold, four military bulldogs, and Peterson, who looked like he was exactly two beats away from a heart attack. Carlos didn’t kick anything, but he did growl a little.
“I’m sorry?” The gamma Daniel raised his eyebrows in mock interest. “I didn’t quite get that.”
In the corner of his eye, Carlos could see gamma Carter smirking, all dimples and lowered lashes, but when he turned his head she was back to parade-ground neutral.
With a glance in the direction of Peterson, who was slumped on a crate with his head in his hands, Carlos made a mental note to get the tech to edit out the smugness code on the next iteration. He took a hand out of his pocket, unclenched it, and used it to smooth his tie. He liked this tie. A gift. His mother had a thing for stripes. Suddenly it occurred to him that maybe stripes were all wrong for outer space, and he wished he were at home in his folks’ kitchen, drinking homemade beer out of juice glasses with his dad. The wry smile that image brought with it grew a little dangerous as he put the clenched fist back in his pocket. “It’s a long trip, Jackson. Maybe you should go to sleep or something. Reserve your energy. Who knows when we’ll get the power units hooked up again?”
The gamma took the hint well enough. Smart robot.
Carlos scanned the crates in the hold, wondering which one held his stash of aspirin.
He was just about to start opening them at random when Kutrell stuck his bullet-shaped head in through the cargo hold doorway. “Sir?” He had a voice like a storm caught in a well, which made sense, since the guy was roughly the size of a mountain.
Carlos turned his back on the gammas, who weren’t looking at each other but were clearly communicating about something. He resisted the urge to shout a few choice words at them about bad manners and instead redirected his energy to bark at the mountain, “What?”
Kutrell actually flinched a little, which made Carlos feel better and worse. “Unauthorized, unencrypted communiqué on the secure frequency, sir. You’d better come.”
Instead of slouching into a sigh, Carlos straightened his spine and arranged his tie, then wove his way along the narrow path of clear floor between the stacked crates. Peterson stayed where he was, wheezing a little. In the cockpit, Kutrell and the other three mountains were crammed in with the overflow from the cargo hold like grown-ups in a dollhouse. The two who didn’t have seats shuffled around to get out of his way. Siebert got up and gave him her place at the console.
In response to his mouthed “Who?” she shook her head. “No ID code, sir.”
Carlos fell heavily into the chair and keyed the comms. “This is a secure channel. How the hell — ?”
“Let’s just say that the SGC isn’t the only boat with a leak.”
Carlos closed his eyes for a second and watched the distorted starscape of hyperspace streak across the darkness behind his lids. “O’Neill.”
“In the flesh.” Even across several thousand light years, there was no mistaking the ire underlining the airy tone O’Neill used to deliver that cliché.
Carlos used the pause to feel around in the inside pocket of his jacket, where he found one slightly crumbled and linty ibuprofen tablet. He flipped it into his mouth and swallowed it dry.
“So what should I call you?” O’Neill was asking. “Shady NID Guy is a bit of a mouthful.”
“What do you want, O’Neill?”
“Okay, ‘Mendez’ it is. And what I want is to clean up this mess you and your shady NID friends have made, starting with something called theta team. You’ve heard of them? Look something like us, only they don’t mind kicking puppies and killing people.”
“That situation is under control.”
Carlos figured the silence marked a certain incredulity on O’Neill’s part. Which, Carlos had to concede, wasn’t entirely misplaced.
“I think our definitions of ‘under control’ differ a little bit,” O’Neill said. “Listen, unlike you guys, we actually have a plan and it would be in everybody’s best interest if you would tell me — please tell me so I don’t have to actually believe you’re as dumb as you seem — that you’ve got some kind of edge on these things. Like, oh, I dunno, maybe a switch?”
Subspace hissed gently while Carlos swore in three languages under his breath. After he’d worked through his repertoire, he leaned forward. “Why would I tell you anything?”
“Because I presume you actually want to survive this, and you know that if the thetas get what they want, the very next thing on their to-do list is to come after you. You want to know how I know that?”
Carlos could see O’Neill’s humorless smile — he’d been looking at multiple versions of it for months. He was very glad that there was a galaxy of space between himself and that smile right now. Rubbing a hand across his mouth — he needed a decent shave — he ignored the needling attention of the soldiers and worked his options, which weren’t great in any direction. Then he twisted around in his chair and shouted toward the cargo hold, “Peterson! Quit dying for five minutes and get your ass in here!”
Kutrell and Siebert exchanged glances, but said nothing.
“Okay, O’Neill. I’ll throw you one bone. One. There is a kill switch, a series of commands for each of the thetas. Not field tested on those units yet. The code shuts them down by stages — sensors, motor control, and so on — to preserve core memory. But you don’t want to preserve them, O’Neill. If you have any brains at all, you’ll blow them into as many little bits as you can manage.” He got up and made room for Peterson. “Give them what they need,” he ordered, and stalked back to the cargo hold to find the aspirin.
Dan floated in darkness.
In his power-down mode, he didn’t dream — that was too simple an explanation for what he experienced — but he did remember. He knew he was processing information, packets of data, but details pushed through his consciousness like sharp splinters, ugly and painfully deep: Jack, torn apart, and the look in his eyes when he died; Sam dead; Teal’c missing. He tried not to look because he wanted to remember them alive, but it was difficult to partition off the data that way. If he tried, he felt less than human, not in touch with what made him essential, and he’d had enough of that to last a hundred lifetimes.
Besides, his lifetime had almost reached its natural end, if the word “natural” could be correctly applied.
Sometimes he had the sense he could feel Sam calling to him, her tattered voice circling around him like a soft wind, touches he could feel in some part of himself where he hadn’t completely lost what he was, who he had been.
He supposed when he ended, he would just go dark, be over. He’d never thought much about the afterlife. Ironic, considering how much time he’d spent studying other cultures’ interpretations of it. The real Daniel probably had come to some conclusions by now, but then again he might have a soul to worry about. Cosmic questions, and Dan had little time left to ponder any of them, but they were all he had to occupy himself. So he followed the threads, logic overlapping emotion until the two were fused.
Any minute now, the real Jack would be along to give him a lecture and ask him one last time if he was sure he could handle his part of the plan. Infinitely predictable, Jack was, in any incarnation, although this one tended to equate all his Daniels with the one he’d known for six years, and failed to take the variations into account. Dan supposed he was guilty of the same generalizations.
It was hard to look at Jack now and not remember the light going out of his Jack’s eyes. Hard to stand next to him and not mourn for everything he’d never had — as well as for the few precious things he’d had and lost. Jack couldn’t understand. He’d never think of any of the duplicates as living beings, and it made him as guilty as Mendez and the others. Dan wanted to forgive him that, but with his Jack in cold storage waiting to be picked over by technicians like buzzards stripping flesh from a corpse, it was pretty damn hard to do.
Footsteps approached in the corridor leading to the locker room. Because the length of stride and the meter of the heartbeat indicated his visitor was Jack O’Neill, Dan didn’t bother to sit up. Every bit of energy he had left would be required to get through the simple plan Jack and Sam had cooked up. He opened his eyes when the door opened and turned his head.
“You ready?” Jack said, as the door swung closed behind him.
“Yes.” Now Dan sat up. The new gear felt odd, unfamiliar against his body. New vest, new weapons. Very strange. He shrugged his shoulders, and the vest fell into place.
Jack shoved his hands into his pockets. “You’re sure you’re up for this?” he asked.
Dan leveled his best scornful look at Jack, the one that never failed to get a reaction, and was rewarded with pursed lips and a frown. “Jack, I’m really not the Daniel you’re used to. I assure you, I can take them. Any of them.” He had a momentary flashback to the first time Jack had taken Daniel to the range and sussed out his capability with weapons. He’d always had a sure aim. The hand-to-hand stuff had come more slowly, but then again, Daniel hadn’t been especially motivated to learn it.
That was before he’d become a robot, and his expert teacher had insisted strength alone wouldn’t cut it. One lesson was all that was required.
“All right,” Jack said. He fell quiet and looked around the locker room, as if unsure how he’d found himself alone with Dan in the first place. Jack had apparently been abandoned by Carter; she was somewhere else, setting up the sting probably. Jack cleared his throat. “Listen, I’m…I was…your team…” He pulled himself up and bit the bullet. There was less emotion in the voice then, but Daniel knew how Jack dealt with things and how to read that turn. “I’m sorry.”
“I know,” Dan said. He would have liked to give some reassurance since he was quite sure the image of him bending over Jack’s double was fresh in Jack’s mind. But the bitter taste of his treatment by the SGC wouldn’t allow it. “Thank you.”
“Give it a few minutes,” Jack said. “The control room will be cleared out by 2130.”
“Understood.”
“And look.” Again, another hesitation and regrouping. “You’re in your rights to want to clock me good, but go easy. I’ve still got work to do today.” A crooked smile almost made him look friendly. “Glass jaw, y’know?”
Dan offered him a little smile. “I promise not to screw it up, Jack.”
Jack squared his shoulders, standing straighter against the suggestion of familiarity, and pointed at Dan’s head. “It’s the hair,” he said. “Throws me every time.”
“I wasn’t so different, when you first knew me,” Dan said, but he grimaced. The whole pronoun thing was just creepy. For them both probably, although Jack would only give him that grudgingly. Dan threw a khaki bandana over his hair and tied it tight.
“You don’t have much longer left, do you?” Jack asked.
Dan picked up his standard-issue Beretta, holstered it, and sat down on the bench, hands resting on his knees. “We should hurry.”
NID Secondary Outpost “Hawaii” (P7A-025)
October 31, 2002
“Home sweet — er, not-sweet hopefully temporary not-home,” Jackson said as he kicked at the dead technician, whose glasses were askew over her blindly staring eyes, to move her out of the way so that O’Neill and Teal’c could get into the base control room more easily.
On the monitor behind him, the gas giant had rolled across the sky and rotated to show the ugly puke-coloured vortex of a violent storm churning in its upper atmosphere. O’Neill avoided looking at it and focused on helping Teal’c manage their burden. Outpost Hawaii was just as bleak and boring as it had been when they’d left it. But, if Carter’s little plan worked, the thetas wouldn’t have to be there long. She pushed past them and went to start clearing her work table.
“You know — ” O’Neill stop
ped talking so that he could concentrate on helping Teal’c get the prisoner onto the table. It wasn’t like it was hard labor or anything — he had the strength of ten men, yadda yadda — but there was something about the whole scenario that made Teal’c’s alpha counterpart seem heavier and harder to handle than he should be. There was a jitter in comm space as Jackson made some observation about the weight of conscience. Fortunately, O’Neill’s semi-fried comms unit didn’t pick up on the nuances of that. Still, O’Neill shot back a blast of static, and Jackson’s comms went silent for half a blissful second. While Teal’c heaved the prisoner’s stiff legs up and onto the table, O’Neill ducked out from under the prisoner’s arm and eased him down. Carter clucked and fluttered, getting her gear out of the way.
“ — I’d’ve thought he’d have a little more loyalty to his own kind,” O’Neill continued as he pulled out some zip ties and secured the thick wrists to the table legs. Just in case. Carter was pretty sure she’d managed to trash his motor control, but you never knew. Not that the ties would do anything more than slow the prisoner down if he woke up, but even a second would be enough warning. He hoped. O’Neill shot a glance at theta Teal’c. “That would be us, by the way. His own kind.” Side benefits notwithstanding, O’Neill’s own trashed comms meant he couldn’t get a good read on whether the captured alpha was still active. He leaned over to look closely at the glassy eyes. No sign that the alpha Teal’c could see out at all. But then again, they all had glassy eyes, didn’t they?
Lifting his gaze again to his own Teal’c, O’Neill compared the two. The one standing was watching him back, expressionless, but there was something there behind the synthetic eyeballs. O’Neill wasn’t going to name it, though, and he sent another burst of static Jackson’s way when he offered up, Someone. That would be a person in there, Jack, in answer to O’Neill’s mostly unintentional query ping into the ether. If O’Neill was going to wax philosophical, the last voice he wanted to hear from on high was Daniel Jackson’s.