Hydra

by Stargate

  “We could remove the power source, take it with us,” Jackson said.

  Carter’s shrug was repeated about a dozen times as the latest distortion broke her into identical slivers and pieced her back together again, like the planet was emphasizing the doubtfulness of that elegant solution. From outside the silo, the hissing sound like sand driven before a stiff wind added its own derisive commentary. In the light that filtered in through the silo’s walls, Jack’s face looked pale and he squinted back at O’Neill, clearly feeling not good at all. If he’d been feeling a little more generous, O’Neill might’ve empathized with his human counterpart. As it was, the further narrowing of his senses as power reserves drained toward critical just made him cranky. He took a mental jab at yet another alert message. Too much more of that squawking in his head and he was going to feel downright happy to go gently into that good night if it meant he could get a little peace and quiet.

  “We may escape through the mirror,” Teal’c said.

  For a moment, O’Neill had the surreal impression that there was a rabbit hole and they were all falling through it, and then he blinked it away. “Into another reality,” he said. “With no way of knowing what’s over there?”

  “Nothing good,” Jack said with a little cough. O’Neill looked down at him. Jackson got a handful of his shirt collar and hauled him to his feet. Wincing, Jack swayed, then added, “In every reality we’ve found, the Earth is devastated, the universe in chaos.”

  “So?” Jackson gave him an impatient shake. “That’s your problem. All we need is a place to set up a home base, and our lifespan is infinite.” He let him go and hopped up onto the dais to crouch beside Carter.

  Infinite. O’Neill liked the sound of it. The lack of responsibility to an Earth that wasn’t theirs was an attractive prospect. An entire universe to make their way through at their own pace. “Can you make it happen?” he asked Carter.

  “Maybe. Probably.”

  Jack was watching him with a bland expression, but O’Neill knew just how many years he’d practiced that look, so it pinged annoyance down deep in that human-remembrance place. “What?” he said. “Get it off your chest.”

  With the back of one hand, Jack wiped blood from his lip, then touched his neck. Blood smeared and dribbled toward his collar. “You have a purpose,” he said. “And you have a duty to honor.”

  “Good old Jack. Predictable to the pathetic end,” Jackson said. He turned away in disgust and nudged Carter, shouldering in beside her to help with the work.

  O’Neill looked at Jack’s hair for a long moment. The brown was shot through with gray now, probably as a result of all that purpose and duty. “Easy for you to say. You have choices. Wonderful things, choices. Make life worth living. Not that I’d know much about that, in my present condition.” He rubbed at his sleeve. Some of Jack’s blood had seeped into the fabric, black on grey. Funny how much he missed color, how flat and depthless the world seemed without it. “I have choices now, though. Who I’ll save.” He met Jack’s eyes. “Who I’ll kill.”

  Jack lifted a hand to rest it against his ribs. “You aren’t getting the control device.”

  O’Neill shrugged. From behind him, Carter chimed in. “Sam will bring it because she knows she needs it. She knows space-time is ripping. There’s no question they’ll have it with them.”

  “They will be arrogant enough to assume they can overcome us,” Teal’c said, still as a statue on the steps.

  “So then we’ll take what we want. Or let them give it to us.” O’Neill stepped closer to Jack, drove his fist into Jack’s injured ribs. Jack crumpled like a wet rag, folding down to lie curled on the ground without a sound. It was disappointing. O’Neill had counted on a good cry of pain to go with that fantastically satisfying grimace. Not like it was in the old days, when Jack hung a lantern on the whole honor thing every time he inflicted pain on someone else and told himself it was all about duty. O’Neill wondered how it must be for Jack, knowing that he didn’t have a single private thought in his head that O’Neill couldn’t think before he got around to it.

  O’Neill crouched down and patted Jack’s shoulder. He tilted his head and pointed to Jackson. In a conspiratorial whisper, he said, “Maybe I’ll kill Jackson for you later. What do you think? A little payback.” Jackson didn’t break momentum, though O’Neill knew he was listening. “If he doesn’t kill you first,” O’Neill added. “So try to last, would you? I never get to have any fun.”

  While the gate cycled, Sam took the control device from Daniel and zipped it into her vest.

  “Would it not be wise to leave the device behind?” Teal’c asked.

  Sam shook her head. “If they really have managed to use the interface and activate the power source, we might need this to shut it down.”

  “But not to negotiate for Jack,” Daniel said.

  Sam met his eyes with an expression that said about a hundred contradictory things. “We have our orders.”

  The gate bloomed open and Hammond’s voice came over the intercom, giving them the go. “Bring him home, SG-1,” he said, just before the gate swallowed them.

  For a long moment Daniel thought the gate had put them back together again upside down. He lay on his back and looked up at the flat, green clouds while the last sparkling, impossible memory of a very rocky ride ricocheted around inside his skull and disintegrated into a million shards of pain. “Ow,” he said. His arms and legs seemed to be missing. No, okay. There they were, muscles shaking and nerves sparking like he’d been zatted.

  Maybe he had been zatted.

  That thought made him roll over and clumsily lever himself onto his knees. He got a hand on his sidearm and tried at the same time to get a grip on his hammering heart. After two seconds looking out across the slowly undulating plain, he wished he were on his back again. The sky, although it was sickly and creepy, was at least still. He managed to keep from squeezing his eyes shut, which was a minor accomplishment. Instead he focused on the immediate objective, the gate platform — reassuringly solid stone — and his team. Sam was on one knee beside the MALP, sighting along her P90 at the building in the distance. Blood smeared her lower lip. She must’ve bitten down on it when they tumbled — careened — through the gate. In the wan light, the blood looked black against her pale skin. Unmarked except for dust on the back of his vest, Teal’c scanned the horizon, his zat powered up and ready. Behind them, three of their four marine escorts were taking up positions flanking the gate. The fourth was on his knees on the other side of the MALP, apparently learning a full stomach was a liability on planets like this.

  “I see no sign of the boy,” Teal’c said.

  “Who could live here?” Daniel was starting to think maybe the boy had been some kind of shared hallucination. But Jack...that had seemed real. Finally managing to get unsteadily to his feet, Daniel drew his Beretta and did a slow 360 himself. The images the MALP had sent back seemed to be pretty accurate. There were no trees, nothing like vegetation. The land around the gate seemed to be slowly drifting and changing. Hills loomed up as he watched and then flattened out again, so that the area seemed by turns claustrophobic and vastly empty. Through the circle of the gate he could see the shadowy angles of a distant mountain range, but a moment later it was gone. All of this happened in complete, unnerving silence. And that morgue freezer smell, arid and antiseptic and dead, that he’d noticed in the cavern of He-They was here too. The whole place gave his brain a slippery feeling, like the land was on the verge of not being there at all, and if he stopped concentrating, he’d come unmoored completely. He cast around for something to focus on and found it on the horizon. The only thing that didn’t seem to change was the building with its columns and portico. No matter how the land wavered and shifted, the building was always clearly in sight. “That can’t be right, can it?” he asked, mostly to himself.

  “What can’t?” Sam asked. She was on her feet now and was testing the ground beyond the stone gate platform with the toe of
her boot. After a couple of tentative taps, she stomped hard and, apparently satisfied that the ground would hold her weight despite looking like stretching taffy, she stepped out onto the incised stone.

  Daniel waved a hand in the direction of the building. “Should we be able to see it if there are hills in the way?” As if on cue, hills rose up between them and the building, but Daniel could still see it. He poked his finger and thumb under his glasses to rub at his eyes. The hills definitely blocked the sightline. He was sure of that. But there it was, the building, clear as day. His head was splitting from trying to reconcile two contradictory realities.

  “It is indeed strange.” Teal’c scowled toward the building. “The land is very unstable.”

  “Not land,” Sam said. “Space.” She looked over her shoulder at them. “It’s bent.” She licked at the blood on her lip and looked up, as if into the big space inside her brain where everything was laid out in a way that made perfect sense. Daniel could see her trying and discarding explanations. “Space isn’t flat — well, it sort of is, in our universe...maybe. The point is, theoretically, other universes have different physical properties. Some of them have positive curvature where parallel lines cross and triangles have angles greater than 180 degrees. Some of them have negative curvature...” Daniel tried to make his expression less blank but had no luck. Sam sighed. “Sometimes you can see around corners,” she finished. She turned back to lift her chin at the building. “Whatever that device did or is doing, it’s screwed up space here. Light. Time. It’s not the land that’s changing. It’s space.”

  “O-okay,” Daniel said. “So what happens if we — ” He waggled an outstretched finger, this time at the world in general. “ — you know, go there?” He had a weird mental image of himself stretched out or squashed like a not-very-fun fun-house mirror reflection. That didn’t have much appeal.

  “Do we have a choice?”

  Teal’c pointed at the building with his staff weapon. “The path is clear. This temple is the only place the duplicates could have taken O’Neill, and it is the only landmark we can be sure of.” He stepped off the platform onto the white stone. “We do not appear to be physically debilitated.”

  The marching band conducting maneuvers in Daniel’s head seemed to contradict that theory.

  Sam considered for a moment. “You know, the path is clear. All of these distortions, and the only constant is that building and the sight line from the gate.” She traced the path with the muzzle of the P90.

  Stepping out onto the white stone himself, Daniel said, “Not a coincidence, then?”

  Sam shrugged. “Something must be maintaining a reasonable level of stability along this path.” She tilted her head back and squinted at the clouds. “Maybe the force field has something to do with that.”

  “Force field?” Daniel put a hand on his boonie to keep it from sliding off and followed her gaze upward. Now he could see it. The uniform cloud cover with its creepy green glow was actually a lot closer than he’d first thought, and it shimmered, faintly iridescent, as if its outer surface were being stroked by rain. “Oh. That force field.”

  To the marines of SG-3, Sam said, “Stay here and hold the gate. They don’t get through under any circumstances. If you get your chance, shoot to kill.” She waited for Booker and Kzinsky to get their infrared goggles into place. At least they’d be able to tell a human from a duplicate by their heat signatures.

  With the marines situated, Sam headed off toward the temple on the horizon. Daniel followed, with Teal’c taking up his position on their six. It was impossible to tell how far away the temple was. It could be one klick or ten, but Daniel was betting for something on the closer side. Around them, the land — space — kept doing whatever it was doing, but Daniel found that if he kept his gaze on either the temple or Sam’s back the ground seemed to remain level under his feet, even if his peripheral vision was telling him he was walking uphill or downhill. It didn’t take long before he was feeling decidedly motion-sick. He looked over his shoulder at the gate in an attempt to orient himself, then groped a hand out to catch Sam’s vest. “Sam?”

  She stopped and turned to him. “What?”

  “Where’s the gate?”

  She stepped to the side to get a better line of sight, but it didn’t matter. The gate, if it was still there, was invisible. She keyed her radio. “Booker, what’s your twenty?”

  “Still on the gate, Major,” was the immediate reply.

  “Do you have eyes on us?”

  This time the pause was longer. “Sometimes, ma’am.” Her voice was stretched thin and seemed to warble a little with interference. “We can still see the structure, though, plain as day.” Another pause while the radio hissed. “ — to rendezvous?”

  Sam peered at the structure in the distance and then back toward the gate. “Negative. Hold your position.” She started walking again. “No point getting everybody lost. Somebody’s got to have a bead on the gate.”

  Daniel knew without hearing her say it: there was no chance they were heading home without doing their damnedest to find Jack.

  They hadn’t gone much farther when Sam raised her fist, and they all dropped to a crouch. Over her shoulder, Daniel could see three familiar figures in green fatigues about twenty-five meters away, turned away from them and also crouching. Teal’c shifted up beside him and murmured “Duplicates,” as the Teal’c ahead of them moved beside the other Daniel.

  “Hmm,” Sam said. “Just a second.” A bit of one-handed fumbling and she had her infrared goggles in place. “Nope. There’s a heat signature. Not robots.” Keeping her eye on them, she stuffed her goggles back into her vest, shuffled over behind Daniel and rummaged around in his pack until she came up with the hard case for his glasses. She turned it over in her hands and then straightened up with her arm cocked back, ready to throw. The other Sam, still looking away, did the same.

  “What are they looking at?” Daniel asked.

  “Nothing,” Sam answered, and threw the case as hard as she could.

  Daniel ducked reflexively as some kind of projectile zinged over his head from behind. Teal’c swung around and fired his zat, just as Sam shouted “No!” and the world went suddenly white-hot and sparkly. Daniel flopped over onto his face and twitched as the zat charge crackled through his nervous system. After awhile, someone rolled him over and gently slapped his cheek. He opened his eyes to see Sam leaning over him.

  “Ow,” he said.

  “I apologize, Daniel Jackson.”

  Daniel blinked stars out of his eyes and, once he found his hands — strangely enough, at the end of the numb sticks that were ostensibly his arms — he pointed an accusing finger at Teal’c. “You zatted me.” Then he thought about it and the hand dropped to his chest. He wrinkled his brow. “How did you zat me?” He got his glasses settled again and, with Sam’s help, struggled up to a sitting position. Sam offered him his glasses case, but he waved it away. “No, thanks. You can keep that.”

  He followed her line of sight, first in one direction — where another Sam and another Teal’c were kneeling beside a Daniel who was looking away — and then the other — where there was, yes, another Sam and Teal’c and Daniel, only that Daniel was looking away, too. “O-okay,” he said. He waved his hand at the doubles behind them. His double waved at someone behind him. “Who? How?”

  After getting to her feet, Sam took his still absently waving hand and leaned back to leverage him up. “It’s us.”

  “Like, in a mirror?”

  Her smile seemed just a little pitying. “You can think of it that way if it helps, but no. It’s actually us. Remember what I said before, about space being bent?” She made a cylinder with her hands to illustrate space folding back on itself. “There is here, here is there. It explains why Booker can’t see us right now. You see?” When he nodded and then shook his head, she sighed and closed her eyes for a second. “Just don’t shoot at them, okay?” she said to Teal’c. “Not those ones, anyway.”
<
br />   Teal’c scowled at the back of his own head, then turned and scowled at the back of his own head in the opposite direction. “It will be difficult to discern an appropriate target if we come under fire. How are we to defend ourselves in this environment?”

  “Good question,” Sam answered as she moved away, back on the path to the temple.

  As they walked forward, instinctively going abreast instead of in a line so that they could all see their doubles clearly, the distance between themselves and the doubles ahead of them shrank. A glance over his shoulder showed Daniel that the same was true behind them, and those doubles — with a Daniel looking over his shoulder — were closer than before. The farther they went, the shorter the gap until, unnervingly, the doubles were pacing just a few steps away. They drew closer and closer, until Daniel found himself tucking in his chin and turning his head away as if anticipating a collision. Then, because Jack was right and Daniel really did have to put his fingers in everything, he reached out in spite of his better judgment and tapped himself on the back of the head.

  “Gah!” As he felt his own finger connect with his skull, he jumped forward, colliding — merging, fusing, whatevering — with his other self. With a jolt and a snap, there was just one of him again. He stopped walking, closed his eyes and clenched his boonie with both hands for a second. “I don’t like it here,” he said.

  “Me neither,” a very young-sounding voice said.

  He opened his eyes. In front of him was the boy they’d seen on the monitor. Both Teal’c and Sam had him in their sights. He looked about ten years old. He was wearing what looked like an adult’s uniform jacket — epaulettes and what could have been medals of service across the breast — over pants that were long and tattered at the cuffs he’d obviously been treading on for a long time. Everything about him was a sort of antique white, so that he seemed to blend in with the undulating landscape. While he waited for Daniel to get his mouth working again, he looked through his shaggy bangs without much interest at Teal’c’s zat.