by Stargate
“Nice work, Teal’c,” Jack said, breaking off to growl at Daniel who said, “Sorry,” but didn’t slow down or go any more gently. Daniel was careful to keep his gaze from straying to his duplicate, who sprawled beside them staring upward with one eye. A smoking black circle was all that was left of the right eye socket, and the back of his head was a mess of gray goo and shattered components. Jack followed Daniel’s lead and looked away, lifting his chin at Teal’c instead. “What’s the situation out there?”
Teal’c looked briefly over his shoulder, where the force field was dancing with arcs of power and the stony plain was crowded with an endless stream of running people. “Very deteriorated,” he answered. “Lieutenant Booker holds her ground as ordered but reports a riot on the plain.”
“Ghosts,” Daniel interjected as he offered Jack three tablets for the pain.
Teal’c nodded. “Yes. The distortions increase in frequency, and she has lost visual on this structure. I believe it will be difficult to find the Stargate if we do not go soon.”
“We can’t. Not yet,” Carter said. She was crouching at the console working at the device. On the other side of the mirror, her reflection was doing the same. It was the big-brain grudge match of the century. “We’ve got to close the mirror. If we don’t — ”
The rest of the sentence was lost in a howl of noise, and the entire floor of the silo rose up and fell again with a crash. By reflex, Jack made a grab for Daniel as Daniel was thrown off the edge of the dais. Bad idea. Jack’s broken ribs shrieked at him, and he twisted his hand in Teal’c’s sleeve.
“M’okay,” Daniel called from the floor below the platform. His voice was repeated over and over again as the space inside the silo splintered.
Between the planes and angles, first the boy stood watching them, and then the old man. His mouth was open, but no sound could be heard over the rushing stutter of glass shards peppering the silo and screams from outside on the plain.
Carter’s “Oh, no,” carried clearly.
Jack twisted back to the mirror to see theta Carter sit up with a triumphant expression on her face. The silo went completely silent. As if he’d been leaning heavily against the wall of constant noise, Jack felt a moment of vertigo when it was suddenly gone.
“I don’t believe it,” Carter said.
Standing beside theta Carter, O’Neill said something Jack couldn’t decipher and, when the duplicate Carter turned and nodded happily at him, O’Neill lifted the P90 with a lightning-fast motion and blew a hole in her head. On the mirror platform, the human Carter jumped back, collided with Jack and started away again like he was red-hot. “Oh, my God.”
“What has happened?” Teal’c asked, his voice echoing in the still, empty space.
Carter blinked at him. “He killed her.”
“What happened to the machine,” Jack clarified, pointing at the console and away from the body slumped on the other side of the mirror.
It took only a second for Carter to recover from seeing herself murdered in cold... well, whatever. She gathered herself and knelt back down at the opening under the console. “She did it. Stabilized the power fluctuation.”
In the mirror, O’Neill kicked the defunct Carter out of the way and sat down on his haunches. He was working on something.
Jack watched. “I thought you said it couldn’t be stabilized.”
“It can’t.”
“But it is.”
“Well, I know that, but...”
Grabbing Teal’c’s arm again, Jack heaved himself up onto his good leg. “If we shut this thing down, can he come back through?”
Carter bobbed her head. “I suppose so.” She ran her fingers over their control device still slotted into the console. “If he’s got a control device on the other side. Which — ” She pointed at O’Neill and the familiar beetle of stone the robot was now holding in his hand. He held it up to make sure they could get a good look at it and smiled his smug bastard smile. “ — he does.”
Jack sighed. “Am I gonna have to go through there and kill him?”
O’Neill stopped smiling. He stepped beyond the frame of the mirror for a moment, and when he stepped back, there were two of him. Then three. Then ten.
“Fools,” the old man said, his voice like dry leaves.
From down on the floor where he was watching through the fence of their legs, Daniel said, “Uh oh,” just as the wave hit and the world broke into pieces. In the alternate universe, O’Neill was just reaching toward the mirror when the blue-white flare lit up his side. They all threw their arms up to shield their eyes. Then, when the flare died, there was nothing. The plain on the other side of the mirror was empty. Silence like an indrawn breath.
“Guys,” Daniel said slowly, his eyes wide and roaming the silo. “I think we should run now.”
“Daniel,” Jack said, “for once today I agree with you. Carter, let’s go.”
She looked up at him but went right back to work and in the motion splintered into a dozen pieces, each one moving just slightly slower than the one before. “The control device,” she said, and her words seemed to stutter too. “Have to shut it down.”
Everything was shaking now, and another girder squealed as it tore away from the silo. Cracks started at the floor and chased each other up the silo’s walls.
“We gotta go!” Jack shouted over the rising howl of wind. Awkwardly striding over to her, he grabbed her arm and pulled her out of the way, then turned to Teal’c. “Burn it!”
The staff blast turned the control device and half of the console to slag. The mirror flickered and then flared again, blue-white with a light that Jack could feel like a physical force. A shove from an invisible hand propelled him backward off the platform and into Daniel. He managed to untangle himself and get to his feet as the mirror went dark.
But it was too late. The blue-white light was filling the silo.
He might’ve shouted at the team to run, but he couldn’t hear his voice. It was as if the light itself was noise. Teal’c practically lifted him off his feet as they all turned and ran, scrambling over the fallen girder across the entrance — Teal’c pushing him from one side and Carter and Daniel pulling on the other — and burst headlong into the fleeing crowd. None of the refugees was substantial enough to disturb the debris cloud, but every shard that Teal’c batted away from them as he led the way, half-dragging and half-carrying Jack with one arm, shattered and howled in agony. Jack ducked his head and kept moving. He looked at the ground immediately in front of them and not at the panicked people running with him. There was no way to know how far the gate was from the silo, or even if it would still be where they left it, so they followed the flow of the stampede. Daniel panted behind him with Carter on their six. At one point Teal’c lost his grip, and Jack did a face plant. Daniel and Carter picked him up, Daniel slinging one of Jack’s arms over his shoulder and Carter taking the other. Every step sent flares of red across his vision, and every breath ground his ribs together.
Above them, the sky was convulsing and the force field was a maelstrom of livid colors.
“Not much time,” Carter said. “The field is collapsing.”
Ahead of them, the gate loomed up, at first only a few steps away, and then just a pinprick on a distant horizon.
A burst of static from Teal’c’s radio, and Booker shouted, “We see you, Colonel! We’re right here at twelve o’clock!”
“Wait for it,” Carter breathed, her eyes wide. “Just wait.”
They stood swaying with Jack’s almost dead weight between them as wave after wave of distortion crashed over them. Finally, the gate was there again. Right there. Booker and the rest of SG-3 were on the steps, almost lost in the crowds swarming up to and through a ghostly event horizon. The ghosts trampled each other, shoved each other away, and climbed over the fallen bodies.
Carter stumbled over to meet Booker at the DHD and stabbed at the glyphs. The event horizon — a real one this time — exploded outward just as the
world went dark.
“Force field’s down,” Carter said in the sudden silence.
There were no stars.
A strong gust of wind buffeted them from behind as Daniel and Teal’c helped Jack up the steps. At the event horizon, they turned to see the sphere of energy expanding from the silo, almost invisible against the black sky except for a gaslight-blue nimbus that marked its leading edge. The last thing Jack saw before Daniel dragged him backward through the gate was the boy in his oversized uniform, alone on the empty plain.
PART SIX
horror vacui
fear of empty places
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
SGC
November 5, 2002
Daniel walked down the wide SGC corridors behind Jack and tried not to hold his hands out like he was ready to catch him. When Jack shot him an irritated look over his shoulder, Daniel stuffed his hands in his pockets and raised his eyebrows. “What?”
“Quit hovering, Daniel. I’ve been walking on my own since I was a year old.” As if to prove it, Jack lengthened his stride and the limp smoothed out. At the same time, the muscles in his neck seemed to wind tighter with the effort of looking relaxed.
Daniel didn’t blame him for playing it tough if it meant getting out of the infirmary. Three days flat on his back had made Jack a very unhappy boy, and an unhappy Jack meant an unhappy Fraiser. So maybe she’d protested a little less than she might have when Jack staged a not-so-clandestine escape from captivity.
“Fine!” Fraiser had thrown up her hands in resignation. But as Daniel passed by her in pursuit of his CO, she’d pressed a bottle of blue pills into his hand. “Just make sure he takes them, okay? And bring him back before you leave to get the dressings changed.” He’d nodded, but she’d caught his sleeve before he could bolt. “And by leave I mean go home, not off-world.”
Daniel had fully intended to drive Jack back to his place and barricade him inside his house, but six hours and four blue pills later, when they were finally on the way to the locker room to change, the klaxon had started its howling. Harriman had announced an unscheduled off-world activation and so much for good intentions. For a guy who’d been stabbed in the leg a few days ago, Jack was pretty quick on the about-face back toward the elevator. Daniel didn’t even bother pointing out that the locker room was thataway or that Fraiser was possibly as scary as Jack and more likely to kick him in the ass for violation of orders. No point. They were already in the elevator. Jack had already thumbed the button for level 28 and was staring at the closed doors, still looking ever so relaxed. Except for the deep notch between his eyebrows that told an entirely different story.
Daniel leaned on the rail on the side of the elevator, folded his arms, and contemplated the bandage across the side and back of Jack’s neck. He was going to ask the question, even if it did mean taking his life into his hands. He wanted to see the marks, to know what the theta Jackson had written there. Curiosity was his thing so, if Jack wasn’t feeling generous, at least Daniel would go out being true to his nature.
Daniel opened his mouth. Jack’s right eye twitched. Daniel closed his mouth.
On the upside, Daniel figured that with the broken ribs and the hinky leg, Jack wouldn’t be able to catch him if Daniel hit the corridor at a dead run, so he waited until they passed level 26 and asked, “Did Janet figure out what the marks were, once she got them cleaned up?”
Jack’s jaw set. “Latin,” he said. He didn’t look at Daniel, but took his tablet and scribbled something. He handed the pad back as the doors opened and stepped off the elevator without looking back.
Daniel glanced down at the phrase, mentally supplying the letters the theta hadn’t had time to carve. Cave canem: beware of the dog. His stomach twisted at the implication, the message straight from his inner id — a repudiation of the friendship and trust Daniel had worked so hard and so long to build with Jack, a slur against Jack’s character, most of all. One Daniel didn’t believe, not even when he disagreed with Jack’s methods. He hated to think Jack might wonder if he thought it privately,
But he knew they’d never talk about this particular message, or any of the things it might mean. Talking wasn’t how Jack dealt with things.
He scratched the words out and caught up to Jack at the stairs to the control room, wanting to offer some indication he understood. What came out was, “Janet said they shouldn’t scar.”
Jack’s thin smile had no humor in it. “Aren’t I lucky.”
Sam tipped her head back to offer Daniel a quick smile and then sobered as General Hammond came down the stairs from his office, Major Davis on his heels.
“Data burst only, sir, from the Tok’ra,” Harriman reported. “No travelers.”
Teal’c was standing at ease behind Harriman — who, Daniel noted, hunched his shoulders a little under that shadow — and watched with his usual placid interest as the response teams moved into place and then, at Hammond’s command, broke formation and filed out again. Daniel wondered how many holes Teal’c was counting in their defenses. And that made him wonder, as he often did, how Teal’c organized his view of the world, if it was as single-minded as Daniel thought it was. Then he wondered if Teal’c ever daydreamed. And that led him back — as most trains of thought did these days — to the duplicates.
“What?” Jack said, nudging him with an elbow. “You have that look.”
“What look?”
“The look that makes me nervous.”
“Oh.” Daniel licked his lips. “I was thinking about daydreaming.”
Jack’s soft snort didn’t come off half as disdainful as he probably meant it to be, and he was smiling a little as he shook his head. “Only you could think about daydreaming, Daniel.” They watched Sam unpacking the data from the burst on her monitor. There was a lot of stuff there. Jack waited for another minute. Apparently this was going to take a while. “What about daydreaming?”
“I just wondered if they — the duplicates — if they daydreamed.”
“What would be the purpose?” Teal’c asked.
“I don’t know.” Daniel thought about it while Hammond ordered Sam and Harriman to contact him when they’d finished unpacking. He and Davis headed back up the stairs to wait for the report. “But,” Daniel went on, “there had to be a reason the original designer of the duplicating technology preserved the more messy human functions, like dreaming or emotions, when it would be more efficient to edit them out.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe fuzzy thinking is what makes us better than machines.”
“I’ll try to remember that when you’re making your fifth circuit around the mulberry bush in your next briefing,” Jack said and started up the stairs to the conference room. “Give us a shout, Carter,” he said as he disappeared around the bend, only the slightest hitch in his step and a barely perceptible tightness in his voice.
“Perhaps,” Teal’c said after a thoughtful silence, “there is something more than efficiency and function to be considered.” He went back to gazing at the now empty gate-room and the closed iris. “This is the difference between a man and a slave.”
An hour later, they were still waiting for Sam to crunch the data from the Tok’ra report. Hammond and Davis were still behind closed doors working out the details of the mop-up operation, and Daniel was sitting across from Jack at the conference table. He’d filled two pages of a legal pad with questions he wanted to forward to the brains over at Area 51 regarding the duplicates, should any of the outstanding robots be recovered. He didn’t figure any of his questions would get more than a token response from the usual suspects, but there was at least one researcher, Dr. Levine, who could probably be coaxed into entertaining a discussion of the more philosophical side of the duplicate issue.
Jack had his sore leg propped up on a chair and was leaning sideways in his own, concentrating very hard on inventing the best paper airplane ever. He’d already commandeered most of Daniel’s notepad and if it came to it, Daniel was considering enlisting Teal�
�c’s help in defending the last few precious sheets. Of course, Jack could pull rank, so Daniel would have to come up with something more compelling than habitual obedience to the chain of command to win Teal’c to his side. For his part, Teal’c was at the observation window, doing what Teal’c did, which was to wait in perfect stillness with no protest whatsoever.
Daniel hunched over his notepad protectively and filled another page with questions he’d probably never get answers for. The gate activated once for a scheduled return — all of SG-12 upright, walking and accounted for, Teal’c reported — and once for some kind of communication, no travelers either way. The fourteenth most perfect airplane ever had just spiraled across the table and bounced off the top of Daniel’s head when General Hammond and Major Davis came out of the general’s office and met Sam as she came up the stairs. Jack scrambled to gather up the evidence of his aeronautical underperformance as everyone got settled, and Sam dimmed the lights and activated the view screen.
“We’re going to have to spend a fair amount of time analyzing the data from the Tok’ra’s burst, but we’ve got a preliminary report,” Sam said, pulling up an image of a star field marked with a grid in glowing green. “As they promised, the Tok’ra diverted one of their ships to the vicinity of the planet of He-They. We’ve designated it P49-181, or Gauss.” A small smile surfaced, giving her dimples. “After one of the inventors of non-Euclidian geometry.” When nobody seemed to be particularly moved by the wit of geeks, she made a little, very familiar shrug of resignation and got on with the briefing. “That’s the planet where the theta team activated the quantum mirror and a device we think was designed to harness energy from the collision between nearby universes. Between branes, as they’re called in M-theory.”
Jack made a show of trying to get his leg into a more comfortable position. Sam smiled an acknowledgment of the not-so-subtle warning, left behind the finer points of theory, and stepped up to the screen. Her body was marked out in squares by the projected grid as she circled a finger around a conspicuously blank space. “These are the coordinates of the planet.”