Hydra

by Stargate

  Hendek (P2V-861)

  October 31, 2002

  No one needed to issue the command. Sam, Daniel, and Teal’c flung themselves toward the open wormhole, but they were too late. Only Teal’c was there in time to make a leap for it, but the thing winked out right in front of his face, and Daniel winced as Teal’c fell hard to the ground on the other side.

  “Dammit!” Sam said, shoving her P90 to the side. Daniel swiveled around and stared at the DHD. The glyphs were lit for another fraction of a second before they went cold and dark. “Daniel! Did you catch it?”

  He squeezed his eyes shut and forced the picture of them back into his mind’s eye. With one hand, he fished a pencil and paper out of his vest pocket and flipped open the notebook. “I think so. Most of it.” Quickly he scrawled the glyphs down. He had five, but he wasn’t sure of the last two. He hadn’t had a good enough look at them. But he recognized all five of the glyphs: they were the same as the tattoos on the necks of the acolytes of He-They. He sketched the last two glyphs in and held it up to Sam.

  “One way to find out,” Sam said grimly.

  “There is no strategic advantage to following too closely,” Teal’c said, holding out a hand. “You know as well as I that we cannot deliver the device into their hands.”

  “No,” Sam said. “But there’s no guarantee they won’t find a way to keep going as they are.”

  “Not much chance of that.” They all turned to look at Dan, who staggered sideways, doubled over, and fell stiffly. By the time Daniel reached him, he’d rolled on his side and was staring at Sam. “The power usage rate is constant. Unless they know something I don’t…”

  “They did make a stop on Altair,” Daniel said, the sickening sense that he was watching some version of his own future too hard to ignore. He dropped down on his knees and rested a hand on Dan’s elbow, helped him to roll onto his back. “Maybe they got a boost from that.”

  “It’s possible,” Sam said. She crouched beside Daniel and spared him a long look, one that screamed “we don’t have time” and a hundred other things Daniel already knew. She glanced at Dan as if she wanted to ask more questions, but Daniel put a hand out, stopping her.

  “Dan,” he said softly. “Is there anything we can do?”

  “Don’t…don’t tell them,” he said, blinking slowly at Daniel.

  “Tell…what?” Daniel had no idea how to comfort him. He felt like he was being flayed apart, all the hidden parts of him flung into the open for Sam and Teal’c to see.

  “About Sha’re,” Dan whispered. “Don’t…tell them she’s dead. Let them go on…hoping.”

  Them. The other Daniels. Sam’s hand was on his shoulder. Daniel swallowed hard. He’d bound Dan to him in mutual misery, and that hadn’t been his intention. The truth had seemed so much more important. “I’m sorry,” he said, aware suddenly of all their similarities, all the feelings he’d been considering in the abstract, made real.

  “Better way to go…than the alternative,” Dan said, barely audible. When his eyes closed and he went still, Daniel exhaled a held breath.

  Sam patted him awkwardly, a hasty pat, the kind that was meant to hurry him along. He knew she didn’t mean it that way, but he had just as much at stake as she did, and he reached for the notebook. “This is the planet the device came from. I think. The glyphs are the same as the tattoos on the acolytes of He-They.”

  Sam shook her head and looked first at her boots and then at the gate. “The distortions we saw in the cave on Dunamis are probably a fraction of what we’re looking at on the planet of the device’s origin, if what Asha said was even halfway true.” Sam looked over at Teal’c. “Strategy isn’t going to matter a damn if that’s the world they’ve retreated to.”

  “Wildfire and howling,” Daniel said. He stood, his face tipped up into the thin rain. Dan’s arm lay limp over the toe of Daniel’s boot.

  “Well, that certainly looks like the place,” Daniel said.

  On the monitor over his head, the picture wavered, snowed out, and cleared again as the MALP’s camera swept the scene in a slow, jerky arc. Clearly the distortions they’d experienced near the cavern on Asha’s planet weren’t just perceptual, unless the MALP was having some kind of mental breakdown too. That left the ripping universe theory. His stomach did a slow roll as he tried to make sense of what he was seeing. The landscape was...Daniel groped mentally for the right word. Indeterminate. Askew. Slippery. He pushed his glasses up his nose and squinted at the monitor as though he could force the image into some kind of coherence.

  Low rolling hills receded from the gate platform like swells on an ocean. These hills were marked by flowing, parallel lines of shadow and highlight that could have been made by silvery grass lying flat before a stiff wind or by grooves incised in stone. He’d just decided on stone when the lines seemed to writhe and change their orientation, shadows shifting as though the sun had suddenly slipped to another quadrant of the sky. He thought of the turning shadows between his hands when he’d fallen to the forest floor outside the cavern of He-They, and remembered feeling like time itself was sluicing away too fast, like he’d been caught in a current, an undertow. He closed his eyes for a moment, making a point of feeling his own booted feet firm on the floor of the control room before casting a glance at the general.

  Hammond contemplated the image on the monitor, assessing. With a barely audible huff of frustration, he turned to Sam, who was busy reading the scene in columns of data and cryptic, sinuous graph lines on her own monitor. “Major?”

  She tilted her head in a slight shrug and tapped a few keys before answering. “According to the MALP, conditions on the planet are nominal. Atmosphere, temperature, gravity, all within acceptable parameters.”

  Hammond raised his eyes to the monitor again and said with low-key emphasis, “I’m not sure I’d call this ‘nominal,’ Major.”

  On the screen, the land seemed to be changing again, the incised lines on the ground rippling like water — flowing uphill. The clouds above were low and heavy, lit from within by an aimless, diffuse green glow, barely intense enough to cast shadows of any kind, let alone to account for the shifting contours of the land.

  “No, sir,” Sam said. As Hammond’s expression darkened, she added, “But habitable, at least in the short term. Long enough to get the colonel out of there.”

  Daniel’s headache was back, throbbing in his temples. The tightness around Sam’s mouth and eyes suggested she was feeling it too. Just looking at the place through the lens of a camera was screwing with his head; he didn’t want to think too hard about what it would be like to actually be there. Of course, it was Hammond’s job to think about it.

  The general was opening his mouth, no doubt to say something about being reluctant to risk more personnel, when Sam got up from her station and came to stand between Teal’c and Daniel. United front. “Sir, we know that the thetas will kill the colonel if they don’t get what they want. And if they do get what they want — ” She spread her hands.

  “Wildfire and howling,” Teal’c said, looking askance at the screen.

  “Which means what?” Hammond asked.

  “We don’t know for sure, sir,” Sam answered. “But we do know from what Asha told us that the device on that planet is dangerous. The people who made it couldn’t get it to work correctly, and I doubt the thetas will do any better.” Her gaze flicked to the monitor. The hills were almost gone now, and the new plain stretched off toward an angle of shadow on the horizon. A building, maybe. “The distortion field on Asha’s planet is growing. Eventually it will expand beyond the ravine, swallow up the village, the gate. And it’s only a residual effect of whatever that is.” She lifted her chin at the image on the screen.

  Hammond mulled that over for a brief moment, then aimed a piercing gaze at each of them in turn. “We’ve lost people here today. You reported that the duplicates can’t make the device work without our piece, and we know that they’re about to run out of power. We could just
wait and go in after they’ve shut down.”

  Sam shook her head. “Maybe, sir. But if the thetas attempt to jerry-rig the device — and I’m pretty sure they will, because I know I would — the consequences could reach far beyond that planet.”

  “They will not leave O’Neill alive,” Teal’c said.

  “We don’t know that,” Hammond said, but Daniel could tell that he was running this by the numbers, making sure he’d covered all the bases. He knew what they all knew: no one gets left behind. Unless there was no alternative.

  Daniel stepped up. “I agree with Teal’c, sir. They’re desperate, and from what little I saw of them, and from what Dan told me, they’re not just free of conscience. They hate what’s been done to them, and they’ll take it out on whoever they can. Don’t look for mercy or hesitation there.” He paused to watch the flowing land on the monitor. In the distance, the angled shadow had resolved into the definite shape of a building, columns and a portico blurred by what could have been heat distortion. Down in the gate-room, the techs were strapping Dan to a gurney so he could be crated up and shipped off. Cargo. “General, I know that you think of the duplicates as nothing but robots, but they made a conscious decision to risk their lives to expose the NID operation. Dan came here knowing we wouldn’t — couldn’t — save him, but he helped us anyway because he believed in the same things we do. We have to try. We owe it to them to see this through.”

  “And if they beat the clock and activate that device…Sir, we can’t risk the potential consequences.” Sam squared her shoulders.

  Hammond was about to respond, but Teal’c interrupted him. “Daniel Jackson.”

  Daniel followed Teal’c’s gaze back up to the monitor. “What is it?”

  Teal’c didn’t answer, but raised his arm to point. After a few seconds he said, “There.”

  If he’d blinked, Daniel would’ve missed it, and at first he thought it was a trick of the light. A couple of seconds later it was there again: a boy standing straight and still on the new crest of a hill, barefoot, with white, roughly cropped hair that hung over his wide, colorless eyes. Another blink and he was gone. And then where he stood, Jack, their Jack, slumped to his knees. His face was turned away from the MALP’s camera. His neck was smeared with blood. Then the light or the land shifted again, and he was gone.

  Without taking his eyes off the image on the screen, Hammond said, “Major, you have a go.” As they started to move toward the stairs, he stopped her with a hand on her arm. “You are not authorized to make the trade. This is a rescue, not a negotiation. Take SG-3 for backup.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  PART FIVE

  inter vivos

  between the living

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Gauss(P49-181), the planet of He-They

  November 1, 2002

  “You should take better care of your toys.” O’Neill leaned back against the smooth, solid wall — the one action that didn’t induce a feeling like airsickness and the bends all rolled into one — and watched as Jackson sat back on his haunches next to Jack, who was sprawled across the stone floor where O’Neill had dropped him.

  “Very funny,” Jackson said. He wiped the blade of his knife on Jack’s shirt, smearing it with Jack’s blood. “If I break this one I don’t get another?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Except for how I’m pretty sure I could get another one any time I like.” Jackson eyed him, drilling the point into him, and looked back down at his plaything. “But you’re right. There’s only one original.” Jackson stood up and nudged at Jack with the toe of his boot. “Get up,” he said.

  It would have been hard for O’Neill to miss the amount of vicious disdain Jackson poured into his wholehearted torture of the human wearing O’Neill’s face. O’Neill hadn’t seen Jackson show this much enthusiasm in the entire time they’d been conquering worlds together, but then he suspected Jackson was a little bit afraid of him. He was right to be. Maybe it was easier to take out all that anger on something that was too weak to make it a real fight.

  Jack stirred, twitching away from Jackson’s boot where it dug into his side. Broken ribs, probably. A sliver of memory: the stab of jagged bone spearing into places it shouldn’t go, pain the real O’Neill was intimately familiar with. “Bet that hurts,” he said, one corner of his mouth curling into a smile.

  “I could use some help,” Carter said, tossing a handful of corroded, weird-looking components on the ground. “If you can tear yourself away.”

  O’Neill climbed up onto the raised dais and went to look at the thing Carter was taking apart. The stone surface of the console was waist-high, but Carter was on her knees poking around in the space underneath it. She’d managed to get their own gizmo slotted into its socket quite easily, but the pump was refusing to be primed. Tinkering and jerry-rigging were on the agenda, and while she rummaged around inside the console, time sluiced away, their energy supplies with it.

  Beside the console, a stone trapezoid a couple centimeters shorter than O’Neill framed a dull, blank surface. He brushed his fingers across it but got no readings from it at all, not even temperature. Mostly that was because the mirror’s surface was about ten kinds of weird. But that wasn’t the only reason. Inside his head, queries were pinging and his brain was still looping through the useless diagnostic. The sensors weren’t coming back, and his energy levels were so low he felt like he was moving through mud. Around him, the silo rose up, lit by the shifting glow that seeped in through the translucent walls from all directions so that there were no shadows and the place seemed oddly groundless, in spite of the solid squares of polished white stone that made up the floor. Through the gap torn in the domed roof over the partly collapsed entrance corridor, he could see a swath of sky. Without functioning sensors he couldn’t even tell what color it was — blue, green, maybe purple, even — but it looked wrong, no matter what color it might be. As he watched, a distortion wave rippled out from the dais and the roof and the hole in it and the sky beyond it seemed to fragment like the surface of a broken mirror, becoming a kaleidoscope of turning slivers that took way too long to coalesce again. Looking at it set off a stutter of confused alerts. It made him feel dizzy, the way touching the inert surface of the quantum mirror made him feel like he was falling. As the end-point of a heroic quest, this place was not living up to the dream. He found himself feeling nostalgic for the dank blandness of Outpost Hawaii. With an irritated jerk of his head, he looked away from the creepy sky, stepped back from the mirror and its weirdness, and put his hands in his pockets. “What is it exactly you think I’m going to be able to do?”

  “Whatever I tell you to,” Carter answered, her head all the way inside a diamond-shaped hole under the console. There was a snort of laughter from behind him, and O’Neill looked back to see Jack’s face turned toward him, a bruise blooming over his eye but a smirk on his face.

  “Interesting version of Carter,” Jack said, pushing up to a sitting position. If his ribs were broken, he was doing a proficient job of hiding it. For a moment, as O’Neill looked at him, Jack split into perfect double vision, like uncorrected astigmatism, one Jack up and to the right, one below and to the left. And then he resolved, leaving something in O’Neill’s cyberbrain freaking out at about a hundred decibels.

  “Can’t you shut that off?” he asked Carter irritably as he dropped down from the dais to resume his spot against the wall.

  “What?”

  “That warning…thing…whatever, that’s telling us we’re not right in the head.”

  “I’m a little busy,” she said, every word stiff with ice. “Pretty sure you can do it yourself.”

  O’Neill scowled. He just wasn’t in the mood for all the complicated calculations and the power-down and the internal search of his systems and all that crap that reminded him of being sick. He hated being sick. Even the robot version of sick.

  The section of the wall he was leaning on seemed to fade suddenly, and he scr
ambled to catch his balance, only to find that the wall was still there, solid behind him. “This is getting old,” he muttered.

  “Be glad you’re not human,” Jackson said, nodding at Jack, who had his eyes squeezed shut tightly against the wacky and ever-changing landscape. “They can’t compensate.”

  “One more thing to be glad about,” O’Neill said cheerfully. He squatted down next to his human counterpart, noting the latticework of glyphs Jackson was carving into his neck. “What’s that say?”

  “Just a little memento of our time together,” Jackson said.

  “If they are to bring the control device, it must be soon,” Teal’c said to Carter from his spot on the floor beside the platform. He heaved himself up and tested his weight on his damaged leg. Even with the damped sensors, O’Neill could hear the whine of stressed components. After a few experimental steps, though, the mechanism seemed to settle a little. At least Teal’c didn’t sound so much like he needed an oil can. The pressure bandage he’d wrapped securely around his thigh was already soaked and gleaming with stiffening fluid. “The instability of this place is increasing.”

  “I know,” Carter replied. “Every component I fix or replace is having an adverse effect.”

  “The closer we get to making it work, the more this place falls apart,” Jackson said.

  “Exactly.”

  “We’re not leaving here until it’s done.” O’Neill stared at the back of Carter’s neck and sent her a series of images on comms, likely scenarios of their grisly deaths if she didn’t get the damn thing working.

  “That’s not the problem,” she said, shaking her shoulders like she could shrug off the implications. “Assuming SG-1 shows up and we get the control device, I can get this thing running. But then what? The place is coming apart at the seams. There’s a space-time — ”

  O’Neill cut a hand at her. “Spare me the explanation. I already know.”