Hydra

by Stargate

  The most pressing issue now, though, was the absence of the Teal’c robot, who had taken off at a run, Beretta drawn. Easier to get up close and personal with hostages, Jack figured. He hoped his Carter and Teal’c were paying attention because, if not, this was going to get ugly pretty quick.

  He put that thought aside and focused on the problem at hand, which meant he divided his attention between the entrance and the three robots over by the empty mirror with its blackened stone frame. From this angle, he couldn’t see much more than a narrow band of white stone and green sky and the occasional shadow of rising or sinking hills visible through the scored surface of the walls. And of course the ghosts: the robots intermittently multiplying, their reflections extending into infinity like they were trapped between mirrors and, always, the fleeing crowds, forever in the process of turning into the flying shrapnel of broken glass. It was them, he figured, who had pitted the clear surface of the silo, the slivers of their transformed bodies driven outward by the waves of destruction, blasting the silo to a smoky translucency. And the ones not lucky enough to be atomized drifted out there, screaming. What a miserable way to go.

  Jackson was watching him full-on again, and Jack figured the robot could probably come up with at least a few worse ways to die. Jack wasn’t too keen on learning what they were. His unblinking stare was getting on Jack’s nerves.

  “You know,” Jack said, “what you need is an evil goatee. The hippie academic look is all wrong for you.” Okay, so maybe that made Jack feel a little better but on the whole it was a bad move. Now it looked like Jackson had decided to abandon the ongoing quest to break the universe into itty-bitty sparky pieces and return to the more amusing game of whittling Jack into a personal artistic statement.

  Thanks to the latest wave of doom from the machine, Jack got to watch Jackson slide his knife out of its sheath about twenty times like some sort of ballet of evil intent. This time, though, Jack was actually conscious, and he planned to demonstrate why it was a bad idea to zip tie someone’s hands in front of them instead of behind. Assuming, of course, he didn’t pass out in the process. Lightning crackled out from his broken ribs as he tensed, and he practically bit his tongue off. Fighting was going to be heaps of fun. But that’s what adrenaline was for. Jackson took another step, adjusting his grip on the knife, and Jack let the pain in his ribs sharpen his attention as he narrowed his focus. He was pretty disappointed when the robot stopped and turned instead toward the door.

  Theta Carter snarled something unintelligible when O’Neill dropped whatever delicate and important thing he was holding and stood up with a grin on his face to meet theta Teal’c as he ushered his two prisoners into the silo. At least Jack assumed that was theta Teal’c, since he had a gun pressed to the base of the real Carter’s skull.

  “Hi, kids!” O’Neill shouted and jumped down from the mirror platform. “Find the place okay? Traffic was good?”

  Ignoring him, Carter and Daniel looked around for their own Jack. He leaned out a bit so they could see him better. “Got the jump on ya, huh?” Jack said, smiling bitterly at them. Carter returned his smile with a sheepish, uneasy half-grimace. He lifted his own bound hands and waggled his fingers at them. “Ah, well, it happens to the best of us.” He glanced from one to the other. “So, I’m guessing getting captured was all part of the cunning plan?”

  Carter lifted her chin in that defiant way she had. “Got ‘em right where we want ‘em, sir.”

  O’Neill acknowledged that with a smirk and nodded toward the entrance. “So, Teal’c. Where’s your twin?”

  “He was incapacitated.” The robot Teal’c had Carter’s P90 slung over his shoulder and Daniel’s Beretta tucked into his holster. No sign of the real Teal’c’s staff weapon.

  O’Neill’s smirk widened to an appreciative smile. “Good.” He sidled over to Carter and stood very close so that he could look down his nose at her. “So.” She met his eyes with a glare Jack was sure she’d love to use on her CO some days, but her resolve faltered a little when O’Neill wrapped his hand around her bicep and squeezed hard. Her mouth fell open, but she didn’t make a sound. “Samantha. Sam.” Another squeeze. “Sammy. You have something of mine.” This time, when he tightened his grip, Carter did wince. Jack’s hand curled into a fist.

  “You don’t have to hurt anybody,” Daniel said as he stepped forward, but he didn’t get to explain why. Theta Teal’c spun him around by the arm and clocked him across the jaw with the Beretta. Daniel went down like a bag of hammers at his feet and stayed there.

  “Ooh,” Jackson said with an elaborate wince. “That’s gonna leave a mark.” He checked Jack’s lunge forward by raising his knife and aiming its point at Jack’s left eye. “I don’t think that’s a very good idea, do you?” He pushed Jack backward. Jack landed against the wall with a bone-jarring thump, and he warded off the blinding pain with a grunt.

  By that time, O’Neill was working his way through the pockets of Carter’s vest, taking rather more time fumbling around than Jack figured was strictly necessary. Carter struggled, but Teal’c gripped her hard by the throat and yanked her close to his chest, the muzzle of the Beretta pressed to her temple. Over by the mirror, theta Carter let loose a string of profanity that would’ve made a marine blush and then disappeared almost up to her shoulders into the opening at the mirror’s base. A new wave of distortion expanded, doubling and tripling the population of the silo. Jack kept his eyes on his own Carter and waited it out while his teeth ground each other to nubs.

  “Dammit,” theta Carter snarled from inside the machine. She poked her head out and directed her frustration at O’Neill. “I need the damn control device. I’ve got the mirror on line but I can’t stabilize the energy from this side of the mirror. I’ve got to go through and do it over there.”

  Another wave rolled through the silo so that a dozen O’Neills smiled a dozen ugly smiles at the real Carter as he finally pulled the device out of her inside pocket and tossed it to the theta. “Since you asked so nicely.”

  Clawing at theta Teal’c’s hand, Carter shouted, “No! Don’t do it!” He yanked her back again, but that didn’t stop her. “The energy can’t be stabilized. It never could. The distortion waves will spread through subspace and hundreds of worlds will end up like this one. Please! I know you’ve seen it, too.”

  The robot ignored her and concentrated on slotting the control device into place in the low console beside the mirror. The floor under Jack’s knees started to shudder.

  “You’ve been talking to the old man, I see.” O’Neill said with a sneer. “You gonna believe him? He’s got to be about a million years old.”

  “Or ten,” Jackson said. The tip of the knife was steady at a quarter-inch from Jack’s eyeball.

  “Or that. Who are you going to trust, some senile ten-year-old or the six million dollar version of yourself?” O’Neill hooked a thumb over his shoulder at theta Carter. “Anything you can do she can do better.”

  The floor was shaking constantly now, and on the mirror intermittent flashes of light and color chased themselves around and around inside the frame.

  “She’s wrong,” Carter said.

  “I’m not wrong,” theta Carter replied in the exact same tone and that, Jack thought, was just weird, like listening to Carter hold a debate with her inner demon.

  “Well, if she is,” Jackson said, “we won’t be around to see it. Either we’ll be dead or we’ll be through there.” He angled his head toward the mirror, which was now gleaming like molten silver. “She says there’s an infinite number of universes. At least one of them’ll have all we need. And with the power pouring through there we’ll have all the time we need to find it.”

  “And what about this universe?”

  O’Neill scowled at her. “Who cares? From where we’re standing, your universe sucks.”

  “Maybe, but it’s ours,” Jack said. “We’d like to keep it.”

  As the mirror powered up, the ghosts thronging past the si
lo became more substantial. Jack was sure he could hear them screaming now, and not just in his head. With a blue-white flare, the mirror’s surface seemed to solidify, and inside it was not the reflected image of the silo that Jack expected but an open plain of white stone. The sky wasn’t green, either, but dark and studded with stars. The star field rippled as waves of distortion chased each other through both universes. In this one, a groaning sound from outside was followed by a crash as one of the silo’s twisted girders came down across the entrance like a redwood under the ax.

  O’Neill left Carter with her guard and stepped up onto the platform. He didn’t look happy. In fact, Jack noted, he was moving pretty slow. “Doesn’t look too welcoming,” O’Neill said, squinting at the scene in the mirror.

  “If I can get this thing stabilized enough to recharge our power supplies and punch through to somewhere better, we won’t have to be there long.” Theta Carter stood and tweaked the control device. She was leaning heavily on the console.

  “Good,” O’Neill said and jerked his head toward the mirror. “Get it done.” As she was reaching out to touch the surface of the mirror, he added, “And don’t get any bright ideas about ditching us.”

  Her smile wasn’t quite enough to instill confidence, but she followed it up with a not entirely sarcastic “No, sir,” and stroked the mirror. One bright flash later, she was on the other side. She didn’t even pause to wave before hunkering down to start working on the guts of the thing.

  Whatever she was doing, the effects were immediate. Around the silo, the crowds surged, and over their muffled screams there was a hissing, pinging sound like sand on glass. History replaying itself in surround-sound-feel-o-vision, Jack figured. Without having to move his head too much and thereby get himself lobotomized by Jackson’s knife, he could see a sliver of the sky outside the silo. The green cloud cover that was really a force field was flickering like a fluorescent bulb getting ready to fry.

  “If the force field goes down, there’ll be nothing to contain the flux,” his Carter said in a strangled voice, still struggling against the theta Teal’c’s grip on her throat. “We’ll never find the gate.”

  At her feet, Daniel twitched and sat up abruptly, putting his hand over the bruise blooming on his jaw. One glance up at Carter and Teal’c answered his unspoken question. He started to push himself to his knees but fell back on his butt again when Teal’c’s foot connected with the middle of his chest. “Okay!” he said, hands up in momentary surrender. “I’m fine here on the floor.”

  Another squealing groan and Jack could see the shadow of another girder peeling off the outside of the silo. A crack jerked out from under the wall. It crept and then ran across the floor to the base of the mirror platform. Half the floor heaved upward.

  Jackson shifted to keep his balance and momentarily lost his bead on Jack’s eye. Jack coiled for another lunge, but another wave hit and everyone multiplied, this time not in the endless reflections of facing mirrors but in a bewildering geometry of angled planes. Jack had another chance to get a look at the back of his own head. O’Neill was intent on watching his Carter through the mirror, and Jackson had his eyes on Jack, probably calculating how much force from a knife thrust would cause blindness without actually killing him. Jack’s head was splitting, and he entertained the fleeting thought that a lobotomy couldn’t be worse than having his brains minced by the universe at large. But, he was able to keep his eyes on his own Carter and Daniel to orient himself.

  And while he was doing that he caught a glimpse of the real Teal’c. The distortions shifted and he lost sight of the Jaffa, only to see him flicker into view in the fun house maze of mirror reflections, moving carefully, eyes intense. Jack did his best not to let his eyes track him, and he willed himself not to react when he confirmed that, yes, one of these Teal’cs was not like the others. In fact, the one he was trying hard not to look at too intently had a wicked welt on the side of his head and a supremely pissed-off expression on his face. Daniel must’ve seen him too, because, with a shout, he twisted around on the floor, grabbed the duplicate Teal’c’s leg, and held on, drawing the robot’s attention. By the time the wave passed, the real Teal’c had edged into position. He’d used Daniel’s diversion to slip the Beretta out of theta Teal’c’s holster and had it tucked in nice and neat at the base of the robot’s skull.

  He fired.

  The gun was angled upward so that the shot took off the back of the robot’s head. Gray goo exploded, and the robot made a shrieking sound that was not even a little human. With Carter still in his grip, he toppled stiffly forward on top of her and Daniel.

  Beyond that moment, Jack didn’t have much of a chance to follow the action since he was busy trying to keep Jackson from making sushi out of him. He managed to catch the downward slice of the knife on the zip ties that bound his hands, but the blade went through them and into his thigh. The floor heaved again, and Jackson stumbled backward, taking the knife with him. The arc of blood that followed the blade out of Jack’s leg hung in the air for far too long before it fell. As time jerked into motion again, Jack’s body went white-hot with pain. When the static cleared, he caught a glimpse of Daniel — first frozen in midair as a distortion wave caught him and then diving behind the mirror platform just ahead of the small eruptions of bullets tearing into the stone after him. O’Neill was still on his feet guarding the console while theta Carter was on the other side of the mirror, working fast, no doubt, to bring the whole universe crashing down on their heads. O’Neill’s aim was off, and a few more bursts sent the real Carter and Teal’c sprinting back toward the entrance but scored no hits. O’Neill was flagging, running on fumes. Jack had half a second to grin when Teal’c got off a shot that caught O’Neill in the shoulder, but the damn robot didn’t go down.

  Jackson turned to look in the direction of O’Neill’s shout. With a roar that was at least as much rage as pain, Jack launched himself toward him. Even slowed by draining energy, the robot was fast and got a foot up to block the tackle, catching Jack on the collarbone and knocking him sideways. Jack managed to hook the leg with his arm as he fell, taking Jackson with him. The robot got hold of Jack’s fingers and twisted them back, breaking out of Jack’s grip to plant his knee in Jack’s gut. Now flat on his back with Jackson above him, Jack dodged another swipe of the knife and a second that rang into the stone right beside his ear. He grabbed for Jackson’s wrist, but it was like trying to bend rebar with his bare hands. As they struggled, the floor canted upward and they rolled in a tangle of limbs to crash together into the mirror platform.

  Not having a huge gaping wound in his leg, Jackson got his bearings first and ended up behind Jack with his knife against Jack’s windpipe. He yanked Jack up onto his feet — only one of which Jack could feel anymore — and started to drag him over the lip of the platform toward the mirror. Close to the mirror, O’Neill was strafing the floor with short bursts of P90 fire. Low on ammo, Jack figured with grim satisfaction. If only the universe wouldn’t implode before the ammo ran out and somebody could put a bullet in his duplicate’s central processor. Jack’s vision whited out each time Jackson gave him another yank, but he could still get glimpses of his Carter and Teal’c hunkered down behind a fallen girder.

  “Cover me!” Jackson shouted at O’Neill.

  Unfortunately for Jackson, his human shield wasn’t cooperating. Even more unfortunately, his robot friend wasn’t cooperating either.

  The P90 fire stopped. O’Neill said, “Sorry, Danny-boy. You’re on your own.”

  As Jackson twisted around, hauling Jack along with him, Jack caught sight of O’Neill just before the flash took him to the other side of the mirror. Once there, O’Neill raised his hand and waggled his fingers.

  “Oh, crap,” Jackson said faintly, and started to scramble backward with Jack, trying to keep his hostage between himself and Carter and Teal’c. He made sure his head was as close to Jack’s as possible as he shouted, “You think you can make the shot, Sam? I don’t.�
�� He had them fully on the platform now and dragged Jack backward toward the mirror. They were close; another step and Jack would be down the rabbit hole for real. He didn’t even know if there was air over there.

  Jack met Carter’s eyes. “Oh, I think she can,” he said.

  She raised the Beretta and took the shot.

  The bullet caught the robot in the eye. Jerking with the impact, Jackson then went stiff and began to fall backward, his arm still around Jack’s neck and the knife still poised to take his head off. Straining against the pull, Jack worked his hand up between his neck and Jackson’s fist wrapped around the hilt. The momentum of Jackson’s fall carried Jack backward on top of him, unable to get free, and they bounced off of the console and onto the stone of the dais. The mirror’s surface gleamed inches away from Jack’s face. Way too close for comfort.

  “A little help here, guys!” he growled and kicked at the stone with his good leg, trying to get some leverage against the defunct robot’s grip.

  It took both Teal’c and Daniel to finally pull the arm far enough away for Jack to wriggle out. He managed to get to his feet but one step proved that he wasn’t going to be running any races on that leg anytime soon. It didn’t look like he was going to have the luxury of waiting for a better day, though. He let Daniel ease him to the platform and sat staring into another world through the mirror while Daniel pulled a pressure bandage out of his vest and wrapped it tightly around his thigh.