by Karen Miller
“We are fighting the Goa’uld on many fronts, Colonel!” Aldwin said, provoked for once into showing some heat. “Perhaps if my ship and crew had not been lost saving your people we might not be in this predicament!”
“Colonel.”
Biting back a searing response to Aldwin, he turned. “O’Connell?”
Bridget O’Connell considered him with calm and serious gray eyes. “If I might make a suggestion, sir? Why don’t two of my team stay at the gate and keep a series of wormholes open to the SGC until we’re done? It’ll keep some of the Jaffa at home and speed up our getaway.”
“Ah — in theory that sounds like a great idea,” Daniel chimed in. “Trouble is, every dial-up puts a strain on the DHD and we have no idea how old this one is. Or whether it’s ever been serviced. If we blow even one control crystal we’ll be trapped here.”
“Yeah,” O’Neill said. “And that’s not part of the plan.”
He chewed his bottom lip, staring at Bridget O’Connell. She stared back, patient and still entirely unintimidated. She’d only been leading SG-7 for five months, but she carried herself like a seasoned pro. He had no qualms leaving her and her team to hold down the fort.
“Okay,” he said at last. “Here’s what we’re going to do. O’Connell, SG-7 guards the gate. Griff, our teams are going to split into pairs. Once we hit the village we spread out and search until we find every last damned b’tac’nesh crystal. Dixon and I’ll use Tomic’s map to go straight for the deposit teams Six and Nine found. It means we redistribute our gizmos and b’tac’nesh boxes but there should be just enough to go around. Aldwin —” With an effort he buried all his resurfaced Tok’ra resentments. “Obviously I can’t order you to join in, but I think this is the best use of our time and resources.”
Aldwin hesitated, then nodded. “Agreed.”
Well, hallelujah. He looked at his people. Saw confidence and determination. “Okay, campers,” he said, once each pair was properly equipped, and settled his cap in place. “Let’s get this show on the road. O’Connell, keep your eyes peeled. First whiff of Jaffa, you raise holy hell.”
“You can bet on it, Colonel,” she said, with a small, grim smile. “Happy hunting.”
Without waiting for comment from Aldwin or his uptight Tok’ra friends, O’Neill headed down the overgrown, rock-strewn path that led from the Stargate to the deserted village. Dixon fell into step beside him, leaving Daniel to walk with Teal’c behind them. He heard Griff politely urge the Tok’ra ahead, which left him and his team to bring up the rear, guarding their six. Good man.
“Y’know,” Dixon said, conversational, “no disrespect intended, Jack, but your guy’s map is pretty crappy.”
He scowled. “Give me a break, Dave. You heard Fraiser. Tomic was concussed seven different ways from Sunday when he drew it.”
“I’m not knocking his guts,” Dixon protested. “Hell, I’d sponsor him for a medal in a heartbeat. But you said it yourself, he couldn’t remember which direction they were heading when they found the b’tac’nesh.”
“We’ll manage.”
“’Course we will,” Dixon said cheerfully. “I don’t know about you, but I was an Eagle Scout. I’ve got mad skills.”
“Wonderful,” he said, rolling his eyes. “I feel better already.”
The breeze picked up, and with it the foul, gusting smell of decomp. No way of knowing what season they’d walked into, but the sky was a warm, milky blue, the solo sun had some heat in it, and the scrubby landscape was dotted with small yellow and orange flowers. So, late spring or early summer, most likely. Beneath his black tee-shirt he could feel sweat start to pop and trickle. Beneath his thin layer of skin, the knot and ache of tense muscle. The sudden urge to shove at Dave Dixon, to shout him back to where he came from, rose in his chest like a tidal wave. Dixon shouldn’t be here. He wanted Carter. Needed Carter. Her absence was like an amputation.
Hammond should’ve called her back. She should be here. This is wrong.
An itch between his shoulder blades. He could feel Daniel, staring. He glanced over his shoulder. “What?”
“Nothing,” Daniel said hastily. “Never mind.”
Twenty minutes later they hit the edge of the sprawling village. It looked like a ghost town from the Old West: crude wooden doors hanging drunkenly from leather strap-hinges; sun-bleached leather curtains flapping in open windows; homespun shirts and skirts abandoned on the dirt road, as though their owners didn’t care for the loss, or had been too afraid to turn back and pick them up; a child’s leather sandal, kicked off in terrified flight. The breeze-blown stink of decomp, stronger than ever, had them all gagging, even the Tok’ra.
“There,” Daniel choked, and pointed. “Dead cows.”
Four of them, bloated to bursting, tumbled and tangled on a patch of open ground between two mud-brick cottages. Keeping his breathing shallow, O’Neill scanned the corpses and the nearby cottages’ wattle-and-daub rooftops.
“No carrion birds. No birds of any kind.”
“Bet they know something we don’t,” Dixon muttered.
“Okay, let’s do this,” he said, ignoring Dixon, then swept his people, and the Tok’ra, with a cool, steady look. “Spread out, width of the village. We want to keep the comms clear, so I’ll check in with you. Unless you hit pay dirt, in which case raise the roof.” He toggled his radio. “O’Connell, you copy?”
“O’Connell here. All quiet, sir.”
“We’re starting the search. Soon as we find something we’ll let you know.”
“Yes, sir.”
His P90 was a familiar, comfortable weight, slung over his shoulder. Fishing out his Tok’ra gizmo from his fatigues leg pocket, he held it out to Dixon. “Here you go, Dave. Since you’re the one with the mad skills, and all.” One final look at the expectant faces turned towards him. A nod for Griff. A quirk of his lips for Daniel and Teal’c. “Let’s go. Last one to the b’tac’nesh is a rotten egg.”
As the others sorted themselves into pairs and started to spread across the search front, he slid out Mads Tomic’s painfully scribbled map from inside his vest. Unfolded it. Stared. Damn, Dixon was right. This was a seriously crappy piece of cartography.
“We’re here,” he said after a moment, jabbing a pointed finger. “Where the path from the gate morphs into what I’ll laughingly call the main street. Which means we head that way —” He pointed ahead of them. “— until we see the cottage with the sapling growing out of its roof. You got the gizmo working?”
Dixon grinned. “You bet. Me and my opposable thumbs. And of course my —”
“Don’t say it,” he growled.
The Tok’ra gizmo clicked quietly, like a deathwatch beetle in the wall. O’Neill flicked it a resentful glance, then allowed himself one last check of Daniel and Teal’c. Griff and his team. They were good. They’d be fine. And then, because he couldn’t help himself, he stared at the sky. Thankfully it was empty of anything more threatening than a few puffy white clouds.
Yeah. Okay. But for how long?
“No borrowing trouble, Jack,” said Dixon. “It’s bad ju-ju.” One of Frank’s pithy little sayings. But the how the hell did Dixon know what he was thinking?
He sees too much, remember? Watch your step.
Dixon nudged him. “Come on. If those damn Tok’ra find the b’tac’nesh before we do you’ll never hear the end of it.”
Good point. They started walking again, Dixon an easy pace-and-a-half to his right. The dry, rutted dirt street led them between two wavering lines of squat cottages, all abandoned, all creepy. The stinking, fitful breeze rattled and scraped spindly tree branches against crumbling mud walls. Dried out his nose and mouth with that pervasive stench of death. Every twenty paces Dixon stopped, swung the gizmo in a slow, steady circle, but its steady clicking continued.
No b’tac’nesh, dammit.
Roughly a quarter klick from where they’d started, the crude street petered out, becoming little more than a goat track. After that the cottages seemed to spring up from the thinly grassed soil haphazard, like mushrooms. Clumped like mushrooms too, huddling eave-to-eave as though whispering secrets. O’Neill’s fingers itched to radio the Tok’ra, get their location, but that might give the impression he was nervous without them looking over his shoulder, when what he really felt was mistrust. Nothing was the same with them since Martouf’s death. Not even Jacob could bridge the widening gap.
“So,” Dixon said, adjusting the b’tac’nesh box clipped to his belt. “You think Aldwin and his chums might try and renege on the deal? Hang on to all the b’tac’nesh for themselves?”
He allowed himself a brief, unamused smile. “Crossed my mind.”
“Yeah. With friends like that, etcetera, etcetera.”
They kept on walking, past more deserted cottages and the detritus of panicked flight. Past six hastily dug graves, two of them distressingly small, and more dead and bloated livestock. Goats, this time. The eerie silence persisted, discouraging casual conversation.
“Hey,” Dixon said. “Up ahead.”
The cottage with the sapling. Reaching it, they halted and consulted Tomic’s map again.
“Here we go left, kind of,” O’Neill said. “Until we hit the abandoned well. Then things get interesting.”
Dixon tapped the Tok’ra gizmo, just to make sure it was still working, then gestured with a flourish. “Lead on, Columbus.”
As they changed direction, feeling the sun shift across his face, he toggled his radio. “Teal’c? What’s your status?”
“Nothing yet, O’Neill.”
“But no sign of any Jaffa, either,” Daniel added. “So there’s that.”
“Okay. Aldwin?”
A crackle of static. “No readings, Colonel O’Neill. You?”
“No joy.”
“Continue your search, Colonel.”
Dixon laughed. “Man, he’s a charmer, ain’t he?”
“Trust me, when it comes to the Tok’ra I’ve met worse,” he said, and toggled his radio again. “Griff? Status.”
“Nothing, Colonel.”
“O’Connell?”
“All quiet here, sir. Plus Kramer’s taking readings in the gate vicinity. No luck yet.”
“Good thinking. Just don’t go too far.”
“Copy that.”
“She seems like good people,” Dixon said casually, methodically swinging the Tok’ra gizmo in a wide arc as they walked along the narrow, sunbaked track that seemed to be heading out of the deserted village. “I was impressed with how she handled the situation on P8X-904. You know. That run-in with those Goa’uld sympathizing —”
“Hey,” he said. “I know. Silver-haired, not senile. And yes. O’Connell’s got the right stuff.”
“Speaking of which…”
Crap. He knew Dixon wouldn’t leave well enough alone. Forget the airy-fairy casual tone. The man was fishing. Question was, how much did he already know?
Easy answer. Too much for comfort. Damn the Pentagon strike team security clearances.
“If you’re talking about Carter, she’s in Hawaii,” he said, just as casual. “She said she was going surfing, but dollars to donuts she’s geeking out at the Mauna Kea observatories.”
“On the Big Island?” Dixon sounded impressed. “Cool. But I thought they were all privately run.”
“Like that’s going to stop her.”
“True,” Dixon said, grinning again. Then he slowed, and pointed. “Hey. Call me crazy, but I think that’s the well.”
Shading his eyes, O’Neill stared. “You’re crazy.”
“And right,” Dixon said. “Hot damn. Didn’t I tell you? Mad skills.”
They jogged the rutted track carefully, mindful of tussocked grass and loose rocks. Reached the well, to find its circular mud-brick wall tumbledown, crumbling and overgrown with weeds. A stone dropped into its depths yielded barely a muffled, miserly splash… and released an unwholesome whiff of fetid swamp.
“Which explains why the villagers stopped using it,” Dixon said, fanning his face. “Damn. That smells worse than one of Matilda’s diapers.”
O’Neill shook his head. “I still can’t believe you called your kid Matilda.”
“Yeah.” Dixon half-smiled. “But it could’ve been worse. I could’ve pulled Lainie’s maternal grandmother’s name out of the hat, instead of my father’s mother.”
“Let me guess,” he said, retrieving Tomic’s map for another look. “Gertrude?”
“Pretty close. Gladys.”
“That’s not so bad.”
Dixon stared. “You’re kidding, right?”
“No,” he said earnestly. “Gladys Knight and the Pips.”
For a moment Dixon actually considered it. But only for a moment. “Then we’d have ended up calling her Pipsqueak. Nah. Matilda’s good. It suits her.” He tugged the map closer so he could see it. “Damn. This might as well be one of Elliott’s finger paintings, for all the good it’s gonna do us.”
O’Neill grimaced, wishing he could argue that, for Tomic’s sake. But at some point honesty had to trump loyalty. The wavering scribble beside Mads’ uncertain picture of the well made no more sense than Carter’s astrophyiscs shorthand.
Bet if she was here she could translate. Angry with himself, he smothered another unwelcome stab of longing. She’s not here. Get over it.
“Right,” Dixon said. “Where to now, Kemosabe?”
Good question. He took off his cap, scrubbed his fingers through his hair, then took a slow three-sixty look around them. Two fields, planted once but long ago left to die, a scattering of dried grain stalks the only remainder. Five cottages, two roofless, all of them in poor repair like the well. Beyond them, no more village. Just open ground covered by straggling woodland, which grew denser as it stretched away towards a distant, gently rising range of hills. Some of the trees were lightning-blasted. Scorched and twisted and dead. At some point in the past, heavy rains had eroded the sparsely vegetated soil into potentially lethal potholes and gullies.
“I think a spiral search pattern is our best bet,” Dixon said, after his own assessment of the landscape. “We can’t be too far off the mark by now.”
He’d been about to say the same thing. “Yeah.” He pulled his cap back on. Shoved Tomic’s redundant map inside his vest. “Take another reading of the area before we start.”
As Dixon scanned their surroundings with the sleepily clicking gizmo, he let slip a sideways look. “I guess Carter got a pretty raw deal in that entity crisis. She doing okay?”
Crap. O’Neill felt his mouth suck dry at the reminder. Felt the treacherous sweat of remembered fear. The gut-churning nausea of unquenchable guilt.
I shot her twice. I shot her.
“Fine,” he said, and hoped Dixon wouldn’t notice the hairline tremor he could feel in his voice. “You know Carter. Nothing keeps her down.”
“And you, Jack? How are you doing?”
“I’m peachy, Dave.”
“Yeah? Because Jack, I got the shudders just reading the bare bones of what happened. If you guys hadn’t stopped that thing in its tracks you’d have had no choice but to blow the —”
“I know!” he snapped. “I was there!”
“Which is how I know you’re not peachy,” Dixon retorted. “Nobody could be. Not after that.”
The unclouded alien sun had some heat in it, but suddenly he was cold like Antarctica. Damn that pushy, interfering — “What the hell did Fraiser tell you?”
“Don’t blame Janet,” Dixon said, glaring. “All she did was —”
“Colon
el O’Neill! Sir, we’ve hit pay dirt!”
Griff’s excited shout jolted him from rage to surprised relief. Griff never got excited. Turning his back to Dixon, because the compassion he saw there was more than he could handle, he toggled his radio. “Details, Major.”
“Sir, our Tok’ra Geiger counter’s gone crazy,” Griff said, excitement suppressed now. “I’d say we’re practically standing on top of the —”
“Major Griff, do nothing! I am coming to join you! Stay where you are and do not touch a thing!”
And that was Aldwin, shoving his oar in uninvited. O’Neill scowled at the empty blue sky. “Aldwin —”
“Dr. Jackson, you and Teal’c must continue searching!” Aldwin commanded. “You too, Colonel! You must locate that other deposit of —”
“Aldwin, I know what to do!” O’Neill said, savage. “We’re at the well now, which means we’re on target. Save your breath for collecting Griff’s b’tac’nesh. Major Griff, radio me when you’re done. O’Neill out.”
“Man,” Dixon said, starting to move away from the well. “And I thought Denworth was a pissant.”
This time he scowled at Dixon. He didn’t know Denworth. He didn’t want to know Denworth. He wanted to find the friggin’ b’tac’nesh and get the hell out of Dodge. “Can we just do this, Dixon?”
“Sure,” Dixon said, infuriatingly unruffled. “One spiral search pattern, coming up.”
After that they walked their carefully expanding spiral search in a blessed silence broken only by the sound of their boots on the dry ground, the rattle and rustle of the breeze in dry branches, and the monotonous clicking of the Tok’ra Geiger counter.
A crackle of static on his open radio. “Jack, it’s Daniel. Look, we’ve reached the far side of the village and found zilch. What do you want us to do? Come help you and Dixon?”
Tempting thought. One meaningful look from Teal’c and even Dixon would shut up about Carter. But — “No, we’re good. Go and give Aldwin a hand with —”