“We all make mistakes.”
“Indeed.” Nirrti smiled. “Some greater than others.”
His control began to slip. “What do you want?”
“You.”
“Fine.” The answer came too rapidly, flagging up his relief. “You can have me, but you let Daniel and Carter go.”
“You are hardly in a position to make demands, Tauri.” To underline her point, Nirrti forced his head back further. “That is what you told me not so long ago, is it not? Count yourself lucky that I do not hold grudges. I shall grant your wish. Some of it at least.” She abruptly released the Colonel and addressed the Jaffa guarding Daniel. “Take this one back to the shrine and set him free. I have no use for him.”
“No!” Colonel O’Neill tried to get up, but a pair of beefy hands held him in place. “He’s injured and unarmed. It’s a death sentence.”
“It is what you asked for.”
“You damn well know it isn’t. I—”
“Can’t wait to get a bit of fresh air.” Through a bruised and swollen face, Daniel tried to grin. “Hate to tell you, Jack, but you could do with a shower. Don’t get into any trouble while I’m gone. I’ll be back and—”
“Enough! Take him away!”
The Jaffa hauled Daniel to the center of the vault. From the cage of the transporter rings he kept smiling at Sam and the Colonel until he disappeared in a pillar of white light.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Missing Link: Absent member required to complete a developmental chain.
“I am hurrying up!” hissed Maybourne and inserted the fifth skeleton key in as many minutes into the door lock. “Don’t know what he thinks he’s keeping in there. Last time I saw something like this, I was in Leavenworth.”
Probably a hyperbole, but still not exactly encouraging, given the fact that Harry’s lock-picking talent wasn’t what had busted him out of jail. That particular miracle had been wrought by Jack O’Neill calling in a lifetime collection of chits.
Not for the first time tonight George Hammond wished they could have hidden out at Jack’s place. It would have made things easier all round. But Colonel O’Neill very likely headed the NID’s list of People To Be Put Under Surveillance. Hammond sighed and checked over his shoulder. The orange-pop glow of streetlamps bounced off low clouds and trickled into this backyard in suburban Colorado Springs; a timid soul in one of the neighboring houses had left on a nightlight, and three or four yards over a lovesick tomcat yowled his misery. Otherwise everything was quiet. Question was for how long.
“Hurry up,” Hammond whispered. Again.
“For the—” A gentle click cut off the tirade, then the lock gave. Maybourne straightened up and eased a kink from his neck. “See?”
He nudged the crack in the door wider and slipped inside. A fraction of a second later Hammond heard muffled cussing, followed by a series of dull thuds. Damn. “Stand down, Sergeant!”
There was a pause. Next the lights came on and the door flew all the way open. In the frame stood Sergeant Siler, wielding the great-grandmother of all wrenches. If Harry had been given a center parting with that thing, he probably needed a neurosurgeon.
Behind the wire-frame glasses, the sergeant’s eyes were wide as saucers. “General! I… You…” The wrench gave a diffident wiggle that made Hammond want to duck. Siler swallowed. “Uh, sorry, sir. Please, uh… come on in.”
“Thanks.” Hammond stepped into a small, well-appointed kitchen that was twice as clean as his own and outed the unassuming sergeant as either a neat-freak or a hobby cook. A groan from behind the door made him turn.
Maybourne was coming to, gingerly probing what promised to become the goose-egg to end them all. “I’m okay. Thanks for the concern.”
Siler’s eyes went even wider. “Sir, that’s Colonel Maybourne!”
“I noticed. You won’t be needing the wrench, though.”
“Yessir.” Siler closed the door, locked it, and deposited the tool on the kitchen table. “Was it him who kidnapped you?”
Evidently the NID had stuck with the abduction tale, the easier to explain his planned demise, no doubt. Hammond shrugged. “In a manner of speaking.”
“Want me to call the police, sir?”
“No,” said Hammond.
“No!” yelped Maybourne, picking himself up from the linoleum. His gaze arrested on Siler, and his jaw dropped. “On second thought, maybe you should. I’m not sure that’s legal.”
The sergeant’s pajamas displayed scenes from the marital life of Marge and Homer Simpson you didn’t get to see on any television network Hammond had ever heard of. Siler blushed furiously and cleared his throat. “Present from Colonel O’Neill. Sir. He dropped it off last time he put me in the infirmary.”
Taking in the nightwear, Harry Maybourne looked like a man about to weep for joy. “That’s Jack for you. Thoughtful to a fault.”
“Uh, yessir,” the sergeant muttered a little uncertainly. Then he decided it might be safer to opt for a change of topic. “General, it’s not that I’m not pleased to see you, but, with respect, sir, what are you doing here?”
Excellent question—and kind of a long story. Luckily, when he’d set out to elope with a USAF general, Harry had come prepared. For the first time in his life, George Hammond had traveled on a false passport. Harry also had demonstrated how to hotwire a car. Assuming—correctly—that there would be no NID goons posted across the border, they’d evaded several roadblocks, driven from Seattle to Vancouver and flown back to Denver from there. After that they’d hitched a ride down the 1-25 to Colorado Springs. The truck had dropped them off ten minutes’ walk from George Hammond’s house—and a black sedan waiting for them outside. They’d turned around and crept away, desperate for a bolt hole now.
“I apologize for the break-in, Sergeant,” Hammond said. “When we didn’t see a car in the driveway and nobody answered the door I figured you were on night-duty. We had to get off the street before they caught us.”
“Car’s at the workshop. Needs a new transmission,” Technical Sergeant Siler admitted, clearly dismayed about having to resort to the services of a car mechanic. “Who are they?”
“NID.”
“Should have guessed,” muttered the Sergeant. “Cheyenne Mountain’s crawling with them. And Colonel Simmons pretends he’s been put in command of the SGC.”
“Simmons is on my base?”
“Does his arm bother him?” Apparently the blow to head had affected Maybourne’s sense of relevance.
Hammond shot him an angry look. “Since when have they been there?”
“They got there first thing this—yesterday morning. Seems like they’re keeping an eye on everybody. Sir, what’s going on?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out. I need your help, Sergeant.”
“Sure thing.” Siler nodded solemnly, the sentiment somewhat at odds with Homer and Marge’s frolics. “How about I make us some coffee? No offense, but you look like you could use some.”
“Sounds good.” Maybourne craned his neck to sneak a peek into what presumably was a living room. “You got a computer?”
“Yep.” Going by the mulish expression he adopted, Siler was less willing to render assistance to rogue colonels. The precise whereabouts of the machine or permission for Harry to use it weren’t forthcoming.
“It’s alright, Sergeant. He’s playing on our team for a change,” interceded Hammond.
Siler grudgingly pointed at an archway that divided the kitchen from the den. “Through there.”
Nodding his thanks, Maybourne made a beeline for it, George Hammond on his heels. The computer wasn’t quite state-of-the-art, but it would do. Besides, they didn’t exactly have a choice. The usual IT ritual of startup and boot seemed maddeningly slow. Maybourne dropped into a chair, slapped the DVD into the drive, waited for it to load, clicked the first file open.
A video clip started to play, picture fuzzy, sound dull and bubbling with static. The image sho
wed the OR Hammond had seen at St. Christina’s. Only now it was in use. A man—PFC Thomas J Corbett, according to the file label—was strapped to the operating table, intubated, eyes taped shut, his midriff iodine red from disinfectant. Arranged around the table was a group of doctors and nurses, their identities hidden behind green masks. The meticulous choreography of a surgical procedure played out, though what exactly they were doing beat Hammond. Best he could tell, it wasn’t a tonsillectomy.
“We need to show this to Dr. Fraiser. She might—” He cut himself off. They wouldn’t be showing this to his CMO any time soon. Janet Fraiser was missing, so were Major Carter and Teal’c.
“Oh hello,” murmured Maybourne, never glancing up from the screen.
One of the OR team had opened the lid of a sterile container and lifted out a pale, limp sac, riddled with veins and glistening with some sort of clear, moist coating. The surgeon shoved the sac into the incision in the man’s stomach, then began suturing the edges to the peritoneum.
“What on Earth are they doing?”
“Looks to me like they’re making a Jaffa, sir.” Siler had noiselessly padded into the den and was peering over their shoulders at the monitor.
The unexpected reply made Hammond jump; a reaction he resented. “Impossible,” he snapped. “That’s—”
“—precisely what they’re doing. Well spotted, Sergeant.” Maybourne had paused the recording and swiveled the chair around to face them. “Talk about not seeing the wood for the trees. This is nothing new. A few years ago, when I was running Area 51, we were toying with the idea. One of the reasons I was so keen to get my hands on Teal’c.” He made a faintly apologetic noise and dodged Hammond’s glare. “I scrubbed the project. It didn’t work. We had pouch cell cultures harvested from a bunch of injured Jaffa, but we never got beyond testing it in vitro. No matter what we tried—and believe me, we tried everything on the market and a few things the FDA doesn’t even dream of—the human immune reaction was so massive, the cell cultures practically self-destructed.”
“What would you gain by turning people into Jaffa?” Hammond had trouble wrapping his head around a concept so Frankensteinesque.
“Are you kidding, General?” Maybourne snorted. “Vastly improved combat skills—strength, speed, reaction time, stamina, you name it—plus self-healing powers that could reduce casualties by a factor of ten. The strategic advantages are incalculable, and I bet you dollars to donuts that’s why the NID is trying it again.”
“But you already proved that it doesn’t work.”
“Didn’t work. Like I said, it was a few years back. Since then, biogenetics have taken another quantum leap. Those guys”—he jerked his chin at the image on the monitor—“may have got the solution.”
“Not for him, they haven’t.” Staring at the screen, Hammond fought down a bout of nausea. “We found him in one of those morgue drawers.”
“True. How about this: PFC Corbett and the other poor bastards stubbornly insist on biting the dust, whereupon silver-tongued Simmons wheedles his pet Goa’uld into lending a helping hand? Ask yourself. What was Conrad doing at the hospital?”
The million dollar question. And it made perfect sense. Talk about a deal with the devil. They still didn’t have all the pieces of the puzzle, and Hammond still didn’t know how the exercise and the Marine camp on M3D 335 came into it, but he was convinced they were connected somehow. Simmons’ involvement in both, the Marines’ involvement in both, was too much of coincidence. He thought of the corpses in the lab at St. Christina’s. Fine young men, and no doubt they’d volunteered for the job. But with equal certainty they’d never been told the truth about what it really entailed. And what was happening to the dozens of others who’d been sent to Parris Island? What had happened to his own people? For a brief moment he indulged in a fantasy about locking the NID colonel in a room together with Siler and his wrench. It might clear up matters pretty damn quick.
Realizing that his fists were clenched, George Hammond slowly uncurled his fingers and let out a deep breath. It all came back to the moon and what was going on there. They needed intel, simple as that. They also needed an expert, but first things first.
“When are you on duty, Sergeant?” he asked Siler.
The sergeant finally set down a couple of coffee mugs that had stopped steaming quite some time ago. “Zero seven hundred, sir.”
“Good. We can’t risk making phone calls, because the lines probably are bugged, but I want you to find a pretext to talk to Colonel O’Neill. Tell him—”
“Sir?” Siler wore the same ominously puzzled expression Hammond had seen on Major Warren’s face, eons ago or so it seemed. “Colonel O’Neill and Dr. Jackson are on Parris—I mean, M3D 335.”
Maybourne cussed. “When was Jack supposed to come back?”
“Yesterday.” Feeling himself go cold, Hammond asked, “I take it he hasn’t made contact since gating out?”
“No, sir. Not as far as I’m aware,” mumbled Siler, his face falling as he realized what it meant. “Maybe I just didn’t hear about it,” he offered.
And pigs could fly. The sergeant, in his unobtrusive way, managed to be one of the best-informed people at the SGC. Occasionally he seemed to catch the latest news before the base commander did. Hammond found a chair, slumped in it heavily.
“Not your fault, George,” said Maybourne.
“The hell it isn’t! I gave him permission to go. I sent Dr. Jackson along for good measure. Without having a clue about what’s happening on that moon—apart from the fact that three of my people disappeared there. And now two more have vanished, thanks to me.”
“How were you going to find out, unless you sent someone to investigate? And don’t tell me that Jack didn’t give you an earache and a half about going.”
Wrong. George Hammond had been too damn clever for his own good and jumped at the opportunity of getting back his best unit commander. Christ, he’d practically pushed Jack into it! And none of these profound insights was going to change a thing—as Major General Hammond would have been the first to point out to Colonel O’Neill if positions were reversed. He’d find out alright, and then he’d bring Jack and the rest of SG-1 and Dr. Fraiser home.
“Siler!”
Jolted from his contemplation of a mug of coffee, the sergeant flinched. “Yessir.”
“Can you get me into the mountain and through the gate without anyone noticing?”
“Come again, sir?”
“Can you get me—”
“And me,” Harry piped up.
“Out of the question,” Hammond said mechanically. “Apart from anything else, it’s too risky.”
“I knew this gig was dangerous when I signed up for it, General. Same as Jack, I would imagine.” Turning to Siler, Maybourne added, “Anyway, whaddya say, Sergeant? Two men into the mountain and through the gate without anyone noticing?”
Scratching the back of his head, the sergeant muttered, “Maybe. I’m gonna have to figure out a couple things, though.”
Daniel stared up at a strip of sky, which had begun to turn a watery predawn green. Maybe the revolting color scheme was down to his one functioning eye having decided to get its own back. Or maybe it was just the budding migraine. That at least was no great surprise, not if you spent half the night draped head-down over a staircase. He had a vague recollection of being forcefully catapulted over the top of the stairs. The fall must have knocked him out.
A flock of birds barreled from the treetops, screeching but offering no further clues. His legs still pointed uphill, and he studied them briefly. Trying to get the right way up might be a start. It would hurt. Then again, that was fast becoming a habit. Oh yeah. He tentatively wiggled one foot, then the other. It hurt alright, but he didn’t think anything was seriously damaged. Given his track record lately, that alone was reason to break out the champagne. Well, okay, he’d settle for water. Pushing himself up, he looked around for his backpack. Nothing. What the…?
Sudd
enly he remembered. He’d hurled it at some Jaffa who’d been about to break Jack’s back. After that things got a tad hazy. Something to do with a pair of outsize twins pounding him into the floor tiles. Twins’? There’d been six of them, perfect look-alikes. Congratulations, Mrs. Jaffa! It’s identical sextuplets. Probably not what had happened. After all, Jack had identified the guy as one of Norris’ boys… six of Norris’ boys. Jesus!
So what had happened?
Maybe it was better to postpone the problem until his skull had stopped throbbing and he was capable of gathering at least one clear thought. He looked up at the sky again. The sun was rising fast. You could feel it; air temperature and humidity already racing toward another record high. The steps were still cool, though, and so was the wall Daniel used as a prop to push himself to his feet. Shivering a little, he closed his eyes… eye and waited for the world to stop spinning. It did. Eventually.
Fifteen or so steps up was the top of the staircase. He recognized the place. They’d followed Janet up there last night. Just before she’d sold them out to… Nirrti. A bolt of panic knocked the breath from his lungs. Nirrti had Sam. And Jack. And Daniel had been thrown out like a drunken gatecrasher, because she had no use for him. She wanted Jack, that much had been clear.
Why? What made Jack so different? Apart from the obvious, of course.
At this juncture, the answer to that question wouldn’t be of any help. A little wobbly at first, Daniel began to scale the stairs. Halfway up, he stopped. What was he going to do? Return to the shrine, in the hope of finding somebody who’d show him the transporter controls? And then? Storm Nirrti’s stronghold, nibble his way through force shields, bombard Jaffa with backpacks, and single-handedly free his team mates?
Not damn likely.
Nirrti hadn’t sent him back out here from the goodness of her heart. She’d sent him out here to spare herself the trouble of killing him personally.
[Stargate SG-1 07] - Survival of the Fittest Page 22