by Stargate
Comms practically shivered with Jackson’s amusement, and his chuckle followed in real time as he sat down in a chair and shoved himself away from the table and over to the computer. Teal’c blinked slowly at O’Neill and kept on standing not quite at attention at the alpha Teal’c’s head, ready to act if it turned out the alpha was playing possum. Whatever Teal’c was thinking didn’t make the slightest ruffle in comms, but he was thinking. No doubt about it. O’Neill could see it there in the eyes. Something. Something different from the emptiness strapped to the table. The captured Teal’c was definitely dim inside, if not 100 percent defunct. Out of gas. Nothing left but engine knock.
He was listening for that metallic ping, a scrap of sense memory, and wondering if the other O’Neill ever got the timing checked on his truck, when Carter bent down into his peripheral vision on the other side of the table and said, “Sir?”
“What?”
“We don’t have much time. He’s almost gone. If we’re going to do this, it’s got to be now.” She had her toolbox open in a puddle of grey goo that had leaked out of the alpha to drip viscously over edge of the table beside the alpha’s hip. The alien doodad — their pump-primer — was perched like a fist-sized cockroach on the top tray, trailing wires with stripped ends, ready for the patch-in.
O’Neill nodded, and she placed the doodad carefully on the alpha’s chest so she could rummage in the box. Theta Teal’c watched with a minutely raised eyebrow that meant he was on the edge of his seat. Over at the computer, where windows were flashing open every few seconds as the buffer caught up with Jackson’s commands, Jackson pushed the headphones off one ear and swiveled to join the audience.
“I’m still not clear why we need to use him,” Jackson said, waving a hand toward the alpha. “Why not just interface the device with one of us? Better control that way.”
Instead of answering, Carter held up a screwdriver. Then she leaned down and worked it into the corner of the alpha’s eye. With a twist of her wrist, she popped the eyeball out of its socket. Trailing a tassel of filaments and a slippery goober of blue data-transfer fluid, it arced through the air and landed on O’Neill’s shirt.
“Gah!” he said and batted it off with the side of his hand.
After one squelching rebound off the back of the computer console, it rolled up against Teal’c’s boot and sat there, squat and oozing, staring up at him. Teal’c returned the look for a second and then raised his head, unperturbed.
“Oh,” Jackson said faintly. “Okay. Never mind.”
“Yuck,” O’Neill muttered and tried to flick the blue goo off his hand, settling for scraping it against the side of the table. He thought of gears and wires, gears and wires, and carefully avoided the eyeball’s accusing gaze.
For her part, Carter was already three knuckles deep in the alpha’s brain, her own gaze blank as she felt around for the right connections. O’Neill wasn’t sure how she was going to know when she hit it, but got the answer when, even with his compromised circuits, he felt comms go live and wild with a rapid fugue of images and data. Half a dozen alerts flared through yellow to strident red as the alpha’s system log tried to dump a report to anyone listening. Involuntarily, O’Neill clasped his hands to his own side to cover the imaginary staff blast hole as the black box replayed the alpha Teal’c’s last couple of moments before he went dark. It was a phantom pain, the alpha’s pain. O’Neill’s fingers slid across the brittle surface of plasticized data fluid that had soaked his shirt when he’d slung the alpha up to drag him to the gate and back here to Outpost Hawaii. He forced his hands away to hang at his sides but couldn’t help rubbing his fingers and thumb together, crumbling the drying fluid to dust. A quick glance at Jackson showed him in a similar pained posture, with hunched shoulders and one hand pressed against a wound that didn’t exist. Teal’c showed nothing except a deepened scowl. Carter was too absorbed in the joy of discovery to pay much attention to the rest of them.
Bending forward in his chair, Jackson said, “Ow.” He looked up at Carter. “Any way to dial that down a bit?”
Carter shook her head sharply. “Sorry. This isn’t an exact science.” She frowned. “Well, it is, but not here. If you want to do this the nice way, we have to go back to Perseus and get the schematics. Unless you have a supercomputer in your pocket.” She grinned and waited. “I didn’t think so.” Again with the blank look as her fingers did the walking.
Gears and wires, gears and wires, O’Neill chanted silently under the broken drone of the black box report. Failure, failure, failure, the alerts flashed as the dimming brain itemized the alpha’s corrupted systems. Meanwhile, Carter narrated intermittently as she worked. “Lucky for us, our brains — well his, in this case — are sophisticated enough — that is, if there’s enough of him left to — ” She winced and cocked her head like she was listening for that telltale engine knock. “I’m trying to get him to query the device, get it talking so that he can process the data.”
There was a bright flare across O’Neill’s visual field as the march of stats cut out. A moment of static and then, as Carter swore softly to herself — a buzz of irritation in comms — another cascade of sensory data. A groundhog’s-eye view of the gate backed by those dear old Von Trapp mountains, another SG-1 hesitating against the blue event horizon, and a weird jittering O’Neill recognized as excitement translated into zeros and ones, Teal’c’s emotion robot-style. Jackson’s Witness, the Real SG-1, in the flesh rose up like a narration on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, a remnant of comms traffic in the alpha’s memory. There was a moment of disorientation when the alpha Jackson’s “voice” was overlaid by a murmur from the theta Jackson about embodied experience and consciousness and the implications of equating the real and the flesh, and then a bitter swath of pity for the poor alpha Jackson still dreaming of being a real boy. That gem was followed by some yak-yak from Carter about the uncertainty principle and mapping matrices.
While the deteriorating brain of the alpha Teal’c carried them in a series of disjointed vignettes through the ensuing pitched battle on Eshet with the Von Trapps and some familiar, pissed-off Jaffa, O’Neill tracked the scattered time signatures and put the time line together: this had happened after the thetas’ own visit to the planet (hence the pissed-off Jaffa), which meant that the alphas had been pretty close on their tails. Meanwhile, back at Outpost Hawaii in real time Jackson was pulling out the old ineffable stuff of being argument, and Carter was countering with a smear of equations dedicated to reducing — or elevating, she interjected testily — god to a prime number. O’Neill blocked out the peanut gallery and focused on sorting out the scattered images he was getting, alternately cursing his damaged comms and wishing it were even more damaged as the debate between Philosophy and Science escalated at the periphery of his attention.
Through the alpha Teal’c’s eyes, he watched the battle go from bad to FUBAR through a fragmented and looping series of data bursts one after another. “Hel-lo,” he said and whistled a low whistle that got the attention of the debating team. The SGC personnel were retreating up the steps and through to safety, taking with them in the crowd one Daniel Jackson who gave off no heat signature at all. This one paused on the steps, and O’Neill caught a burst of...something...in comms. Good-bye and good luck, he figured, and was glad that the wave of hollowness that washed through him wasn’t his own. Then the alpha Jackson was gone, gulped up by the gate and already being reassembled on the other side.
“Nice gambit,” O’Neill said. “The alphas got a man inside. Substituted for the real Jackson. Walked him right through the front door.”
“I object to the use of the word real,” Jackson said, his train of thought, as usual, running at an angle to the main line.
Whatever, O’Neill said, following that up by raising his fingers in a “W” sign.
Deciding not to push it, Jackson tapped his headset to indicate the NID chatter he was monitoring with the part of his brain not engaged in existential crisis.
“A bit of news if you’re interested,” he said. “The SGC managed to get Our Ladies of Blindness on Dunamis to give up the other half of our beetle.”
“Crap,” O’Neill said. “Carter?”
“Almost there, sir. Even with it, they can’t get very far. We have the pump primer. They can’t access the power source without our piece.”
“And we cannot access it without theirs,” Teal’c reminded them.
“Access, yes. Control, not so much,” she answered distantly. “If we want to convert the energy into anything we can use, we need their piece. Unless — hang on.”
Carter was still fiddling inside the alpha’s eyeball, but she stopped suddenly and stood up straight, eyes wide, as the alpha shot out another burst of data. Even attenuated by his comms filters, the intensity of the burst made O’Neill’s jaw snap shut with a crack. He groped for the edge of the table to anchor himself as it roared through him. Grief. Enough to take a guy out at the knees — if the knees in question weren’t state-of-the-art trinium alloy. A rapid-fire series of images, askew and lanced through with alerts: alpha Carter turning, her hair across her eyes, her mouth open, a shout doubled by a red shriek of warning over the comms — theta Teal’c leveling his staff at his alpha double — alerts, alerts, more alerts as the second blast tore through the alpha Teal’c’s side — theta Teal’c spinning, the staff moving in an arc that left a livid smear across the visual field — the blast that lifted the alpha Carter off her feet and threw her into the trees, the saplings snapping and falling, and the alpha Teal’c’s grief a howl in comm space whiting out everything, even O’Neill’s own face looming into the alpha’s field of vision, O’Neill’s narrowed, assessing gaze, his grin of triumph —
Nothing.
A low thrumming of something unidentifiable across comms. Carter snatched her fingers out of the alpha’s brain, and the thrumming resolved into Holy Hannah.
O’Neill caught her arm as she was backpedaling away from the alpha. He waited until her wide eyes focused on him before giving her a shake and pulling her back, guiding her hand to the gaping hole in the alpha’s head, the wires snaking from his brain to the device still sitting inert and silent on his chest. “Time waits for no robot,” he said.
A jerky nod and she stepped up again. But before she worked her fingers back into the eye socket, she shot Teal’c a look that was a painful combination of venom and wonder.
“It was not I,” Teal’c answered. “She was not you.”
Another jerky nod. “I know. I know that.” Bending low again, Carter worked at the connections, this time getting a hesitant trickle of data as the alpha’s brain finally started to make small talk with the device. “Of course I know that,” she said to herself, and her stream of comms went pointedly blank.
Jackson, who had remained uncharacteristically silent, pushed forward again as the device opened up and started blabbing. His eyes flicked back and forth just like they did when he was reading incised letters with his fingers drifting across ancient stone, translating touch into knowledge. “Huh,” he said.
“Huh?” O’Neill repeated when Jackson didn’t elaborate.
Jackson held up his finger, and O’Neill pressed his lips together. The data — mostly curlicues and slippery gleams like plants growing in fast-motion — meant nothing to O’Neill, but Jackson’s lips were curling up on the edges, and his knee was starting to bounce, which were both good signs. “Hmm,” he said.
O’Neill pressed his lips tighter.
“There,” Carter said and the data ungrew and started again, tendrils winding outward.
“Yep,” Jackson agreed.
“There what? Yep what?” O’Neill hissed through clenched teeth.
The two of them looked up together and said in unison, “Gate address.”
O’Neill raised his eyebrows at them in polite invitation to explain what the hell they were grinning about.
“That,” Jackson said, pointing into the air in front of him and meaning, O’Neill supposed, the squiggles currently making pretty in comms, “is a marker embedded in the system info for the device. Basically, it’s the device’s return address.”
“Which means we can go there,” Carter added. “And I can access all the power we need.”
“Access. Control, not so much,” O’Neill reminded her.
She shrugged. “I’m pretty sure that if we can get there, I can figure it out. How hard can it be with a brain the size of a planet?”
Always happy to spoil a nice moment with pragmatism, Teal’c said, “We must retrieve the control device in the possession of the SGC.” He completely ignored Carter’s affronted expression and her finger pointing emphatically at her giant brain.
“Right.” O’Neill scrubbed at his hair. “Good plan, Teal’c. Thanks.” He swung back around to Jackson, who was still grinning. “What?”
Again Jackson held up a finger and with the other hand cupped the earpiece of the headphones. “I think I have an idea.” He dropped his hand and said, “Guess who just contacted our boy Piper?”
“Santa Claus?”
“Try alpha Jackson. And guess what he’s got to trade?”
“Rookie cards?”
“Try a certain beetle-shaped control device.” Jackson folded his arms and grinned some more. “And you said the alphas lacked loyalty to their own kind.”
The swirls and curlicues of alien data faded in comms to be replaced by what, according to the ID code, seemed to be a direct visual feed from alpha Jackson. There was a monitor with the familiar schematic of the dialing computer on it, and through the SGC’s wide observation window, a gate with chevrons lighting up one after another. On the console itself was what looked like an unconscious tech — O’Neill’s favorite kind. The gate erupted and settled and the alpha was on the move. In the gate-room, though, he was met with resistance — marines he toppled easily and, on the ramp, none other than Classic Jack O’Neill. The alpha punched him in the face, and the warm glow of satisfaction suffused comm space. The feed cut out as the gate disassembled the alpha. He sizzled back to coherence again to show them one lovely sight: the control device held up in the alpha’s hand. With that, the visual cut out and the alpha said: Hello thetas. You know, it took awhile, but I finally see what you’ve seen all along: we mean even less to the SGC than we did to the NID. I’m tired of being expendable, and I’m tired of living for them, any of them. I think we can make a deal. There was a thrum of dark amusement. Robot to robot. This important little lump of technology for a share in whatever power supply you can get with it. I’m waiting here, but not for long. A gate address followed and the feed ended.
O’Neill cocked his jaw. “Right,” he said. “Anybody who thinks this is an act of loyalty to robot kind raise your hand.” Nobody did. Now he grinned, just a little.
After a thoughtful pause, Jackson said, “Can we afford not to go?”
They all knew the answer to that.
Clipping his P90 to its strap, O’Neill said, “Okay, kids. Time for a plan.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Hendek (P2V-861), rendezvous site
October 31, 2002
The second the thetas crossed the event horizon, they were ramped up to battle readiness, all sensors wide awake and singing. For O’Neill, it was disorienting, for a nanosecond or two, as the data flooded in after so many hours of damped awareness. It was like trying to drink from a fire hose. Energy sparked through him and he found himself grinning even though each second of heightened presence took him closer to the dry bottom of the well. They had to make this fast, or they’d have nothing left to carry them through to the last phase of their plan.
The gate was in a clearing. No cover. If there was a sun, it was hidden behind the roiling cloud banks, and most of the light came from the nearly constant discharges of lightning that crackled and forked in all quarters of the sky. The mostly bare trees that hemmed in the clearing on all sides stood out, first black against the white flare of sheet lightning and then as whit
e as jumbled bones scattered on the deep blue-green of the storm. The grass in the clearing hissed and the trees bent away from the force of the wind that ran ahead of the rain. O’Neill could feel it coming, the slipperiness of negative ions and the smell of ozone. Good choice on the SGC’s part, O’Neill admitted to himself. If he’d been human, he’d have been momentarily blinded by the light when he stepped through the event horizon, while any soldiers hidden in the trees would have a clear view, clear line of fire.
But O’Neill wasn’t human. Move, he said to his team, and they did. Carter and Teal’c went left, Jackson straight ahead into the trees, streaks of motion against the dark forest and the convulsing sky.
Only one and a half seconds had elapsed since the event horizon had formed, and already the gate platform was empty.
As he darted sideways, easily avoiding the gunfire that pocked the dry earth behind him, O’Neill did a quick sweep on infrared. In the constant flicker and flare of the light, it wasn’t as effective as he’d like, but he was still able to pick out ten hostiles. Teal’c confirmed. Alpha Jackson was ahead of O’Neill, a dull blue shadow next to a crouching figure glowing in yellow and red with a bright white core. Between O’Neill and his target were at least four hostiles, big ones. Grinning again, he swung his P90 up and took out the marine behind the nearest tree. His vision washing out with each flash of lightning, O’Neill parsed the noise around him carefully instead, separating out the immediately threatening from the distant. Behind him, the forest was echoing with gunfire. Teal’c, Jackson, and Carter were doing their best to keep the soldiers busy and out of his hair. Almost lost in the low rumble of thunder, a scrape of a boot on stone to his left — two shots sent the marine ducking back into the cover of a decaying stump, but not before a delicate spray of red in the air confirmed a hit and the marine’s heartbeat went from a steady, rapid thudding to a tripping staccato. O’Neill turned and headed around the stump, coming up behind the fallen soldier and finishing him off with ruthless efficiency. He crouched for long enough to help himself to the marine’s ammo and tracked the advance of the other two hostiles toward him: one from the front, the other one flanking, their breathing resolving out of the whisper of shifting leaves and pinning them in the landscape as clearly as their body heat did. About twenty meters away, the alpha was now almost hidden by a tree, and the glowing signature of his companion was still in the same position, hunched over something O’Neill couldn’t make out. There were two more glowing blobs a few meters away in covering positions.