"You are injured, O'Neill."
Before Jack could tell him to stick it, Teal'c was out the door and moving fluidly across the open ground, staff weapon held ready to fire. Jack got the MP5 to his shoulder and waited tensely, well aware that accurate fire under these conditions was going to be just about impossible, then breathed out a sigh of relief when Teal'c put his staff back to safe position and crouched down in the shadows.
"T?" Jack keyed the radio in his vest and kept his eyes on the Jaffa as he did.
"It is a man," Teal'c said. "I will bring him inside."
"Wait... is he sick?"
"No, O'Neill. He is injured."
"Okay. Go."
Jack shuffled back from the door as Teal'c ducked inside, carrying a limp body as easily as if it was a blanket. Daniel sat up, glasses still askew. Carter went from peaceful sleep to an instantly alert position, fluid and graceful; her MP5 swung into firing position.
"Easy," Jack barked. "Stand down, Captain."
Her eyes cleared, and she let the weapon drop back out of line. "Sorry, sir. What's happening?"
"We're about to find out." Jack flicked on his penlight; the harsh white light made them all wince, first because of the glare, second because of the red glaze of blood that glittered on the body Teal'c laid down next to the camp stove.
The stranger didn't look familiar. Jack looked at Daniel silently, but the other man shook his head; not one of Alsiros's party, then. If the numbers held true from one tribute party to the next, there would be at least thirty running around they hadn't yet met.
Carter moved forward, MP5 slung over her shoulder, and folded back the black draperies of the man's outer robe. Under it, he was wearing a pale yellow tunic, ripped and soaked with blood. Jack felt his face tighten, and some fragment of a nightmare came back to him.
Running, always running. He looked suddenly at the man's feet. His sandals were gone, and his feet were battered and bloody, scraped raw.
"Carter?" he asked. She shook her blonde head silently and used her knife to slice open the tunic to the man's waist, folded it back to reveal a bloody mess. She pushed on his shoulder to roll him up on his side and then eased him back down.
"He's going, sir. There are stab wounds all over him, including his back. He's just about bled out."
The victim opened his eyes at the sound of her voice, saw the knife in her hand, and panicked. He reached out and grabbed Carter's wrist in both hands, trying to hold the knife away from him. She tried to jerk back, but he had the strength of terror. Blood oozed from the corner of his milk-pale mouth, and panic shone silver in his eyes.
"Carter!" Jack said sharply. "Drop it."
She looked up at him, and for a bare instant he thought he saw a flash of something strange in her eyes, but then she let go, and the knife bounced away on the stone floor. Daniel wrangled it, holding it at his side, watching.
The victim didn't relax. He was a middle-aged man, gray in his curling hair; in normal life he might have looked plump and happy, but this wasn't anything like normal life. Or a normal death.
"Who did this to you?" Jack asked him, and reached down to raise his head and shoulders. The man was drowning in his own blood. "Can you hear me? Who did this?"
The lips moved, and he whispered, "Wolves... Dark... Company..." He choked on another arterial-bright gush of blood. Carter was right, the man was done for. Jack held him up anyway, took his hand and held tight as the man gripped hard, searching Jack's face frantically for something. Rescue, probably. Safety.
Those eyes focused somewhere below Jack's chin, on the cold weight of metal around his neck. The man let go of Jack's hand to reach up and brush fingertips across the stone on the collar, then looked over at Carter, crouched across on the other side. He pointed at her collar with trembling insistence.
For a second, Jack couldn't see why, and then it clicked.
The dying man's collar stone was pure milky-white, like the moon. Carter's had a flaw in it of some kind, a streak of black on the right side occluding part of the disc.
The man lying between them rattled in one last breath, or tried to, and his body went into death spasms. Jack held his hand tightly until it went limp, then folded it carefully over the bloody chest. On the other side, Carter did the same.
"Jack?" Daniel cleared his throat. "What should we do... "
"Best we can do is leave him here and move out," Jack said. "Carter? Use an extra blanket, wrap him up and tie it off. Everybody, watch your backs."
She nodded and turned away to pull one of their thin thermal insulation blankets out of the field pack. Daniel, without being asked, helped her spread it out on the floor and rolled the body onto it, then took over the task of tying it into a makeshift mummy wrapping. He'd probably had practice, back on Abydos, Jack thought. He seemed to take it as a solemn duty, fastening the knots carefully and smoothing them in place.
"O'Neill," Teal'c said quietly. He was standing in the doorway; Jack hadn't even seen him leave, but here he was, back again. "I have followed the trail of his blood. He crawled for several streets. I believe he was attacked earlier in the night. Captain Carter and I heard a scream."
"Any sign who attacked him?"
Teal'c held out a bronze dagger, triangular in shape, with a ram's head handle. It was smeared with blood. "One of the other tribute sacrifices," he said. "Perhaps some of them have formed hunting parties."
Jack felt dizzy for a second, because he recognized that knife. Deja vu. He'd seen it in his dreams, only... only it had been killing Teal'c.
"Jack!" Daniel's sharp, urgent call. They all turned to look.
He held up a silvery mesh collar, loose and unfastened, with a white moonstone. Not his own; his was still around his neck. "It came off," he said, and indicated the dead man. "I heard a click, and it just slid apart."
"What did you do?"
"Nothing."
"Okay, what did you touch?"
"Nothing, Jack. I'd tell you if I had." Daniel sounded as frustrated and irritable as Jack felt. "I was tying off the blanket at his feet. I looked up when I heard the sound. Nobody touched the collar."
"Let me have it," Carter said, and reached out. Daniel dropped the heavy weight of it into her open hand. "Maybe I can open it up, see how it works."
Nobody had any better ideas. She set to work with tools.
Dawn came, bringing a pale blue wash of light but leaving a significant chill in the air. Jack thought longingly about the brand-new standard-issue jackets he'd refused in the Quartermaster's office back at the SGC. Hypothermia was a concern; best to keep everybody moving until the weak sunlight warmed up enough to be useful.
Carter, despite using every trick she had in the bags, including Teal'c's brute strength, hadn't been able to make a dent in the unlocked collar. Jack could tell it was driving her crazy. Carter didn't like to be thwarted, especially by something mechanical. "I should be able to open this," she said finally, and tossed her toolkit off to the side to rub her forehead. "Dammit. I don't know this metal, but it's as tough as the stuff the Stargate's made of."
"Maybe the same stuff?" Daniel asked.
"Without a full lab, I can't determine that. Nothing I have here will scratch it, and I haven't found any kind of pressure point or catch or fastening. However these things work, I'm not going to figure it out any time soon."
"Bag it," Jack said. "Let's move. I don't feel too comfortable staying over. Let's get moving."
"Are we still making for the temple as Alsiros suggested, O'Neill?" Teal'c asked.
"Unless you've got a better plan, in which case, hey, toss it out." Teal'c shook his head. "Then we keep moving until we spot something we can use."
"Shouldn't we... I don't know, say something?" Daniel asked, as Carter shouldered her field pack and prepared to move out. He was looking down at the body left behind, wrapped for the afterworld. Jack and Teal'c paused in the doorway to watch.
"Sure," Carter said, and let the pack slide off. "What
do you want to say?"
"I don't know." Daniel was frowning in concentration, staring down. After a short pause, he said, "I'm sorry you came such a long way to die, and I'm sorry we couldn't help you. I hope you left someone behind who remembers you."
It had something personal in it, Jack thought, and remembered Daniel leaving on that first mission to Abydos - homeless, friendless, joining up with a bunch of hard-assed military guys who didn't have much respect for a trunk full of books.
I hope you left someone behind who remembers you.
"Amen," he said quietly, and limped away before Daniel could look at him. Outside, he slid on his sunglasses, checked his compass, and left a black-ops style mark on the wall, right around knee level. At least he'd be able to tell if they went in a circle. Not that the dead guy inside wouldn't give it away.
"O'Neill," Teal'c said, and caught up to him in two strides. "I have taken a sighting from the top of that wall." He pointed to one that looked really, really high. "There is an Acropolis in the center of the city, as Alsiros said. It is many miles to get there, and there appear to be no streets that travel in a straight line."
"Who builds a street that doesn't... never mind. What you're saying is that this place is a maze, right?"
"Almost certainly, it was built with that intention," Teal'c agreed. "Perhaps it was meant to foil invasion."
"Whatever it is, it's a total pain in the ankle." Jack grimaced, to let Teal'c know it was a joke, only not really. "Take point, and keep your eyes open. If somebody's running around dispatching new arrivals, let's stay off their dance card"
Teal'c's eyes were wide, suddenly. "Is there a possibility of dancing, O'Neill?"
"Figure of speech. It means, let's don't get killed."
"Indeed"
Daniel came out of the night shelter, and stopped, blinking in the bright sun; Carter's hand closed over his shoulder and more or less gently steered him out of the way. "Colonel?" she asked, in that way that reminded him it was time to get moving.
"Waiting on you slackers," he shot back. Carter looked up, a flash of bright blue eyes that were surprisingly cold. She'd taken it personally. Odd, he usually had pretty good radar for who he could needle, but hey, bad night, dead guy, he could see how it might screw up a generally good attitude. Daniel, on the other hand, shrugged it off, as Daniel typically would.
Time to mend fences. Jack quirked his eyebrows at Carter and said, "I'll take rear today. Keep Teal'c company."
She nodded, a bare quick movement, and moved around him to fall in behind the big Jaffa. Jack made an after you to Daniel, who gave him a doubtful look but set off after Carter. The ankle wasn't so bad today - rest and anti-inflammatories had cut the pain by about fifty percent. He wasn't up to sprinting, but he could hobble along at a brisk clip. Jack kept his MP5 in a comfortable two-handed position, ready to bring it up with a snap if a situation presented, but the moming seemed quiet. Even the wind had let up, and the place smelled of nothing but dust and a faint, universal aroma of decay.
He caught a flash of something, just a dark shadow, moving fast, and turned to bring his weapon to bear. Nothing - no. There'd been something. Maybe human.
We're being tracked.
Jack checked their six at regular intervals, but there were no shadows behind them that he caught sight of. Night seemed a long way off, left behind, and as the sun warmed the air the place seemed a little more inviting.
Particularly, of course, to Daniel, who slowed down at every new comer, in front of every piece of rubble or carved stone. He got into the habit of darting up even with Carter, detouring into a likely pile of rubble and doing what Jack could only think of as hit-and-run archaeology - shoving aside piles of stone and rubble, looking for artifacts. The third time, he came up with something that looked like pieces of broken pottery; he jotted down notes and sketches on the move, dropped the pieces into a padded bag and stowed it in his pack. There were lines of stress around his eyes and mouth, a kind of wildness in him Jack didn't understand, until he looked at it from Daniel's perspective. After all, not only were they in a ruin - which was enough to make the man salivate like Pavlov's dog - but a ruin with a mystery.
Jack hobbled up next to him, sometime about an hour in, and peered over the man's shoulder at a scribbled notebook covered with stuff that might as well have been hieroglyphics, so far as Jack was concerned. Okay, it probably was hieroglyphics. "How's it going?" he asked. It was an innocent enough question.
It opened the floodgates. "This is so frustratingf' It burst out of Daniel, steam under pressure. "Jack, this place is a treasure trove, who knows what's in here, my God, it stretches for miles and there are probably artifacts in every one of these rooms - all these carvings, all these statues - " He gestured helplessly at it all. "I'll never get it all. I couldn't get it all if we spent a year here. This needs a team, a full-scale archaeological - "
"Probably a good time to mention that if we die, you don't get any of it."
"I know." Daniel frowned ferociously at his notebook, sighed, and flipped it closed. "It's just - I never expected to see anything like this. It's beyond my experience. Like Abydos and Chulak, only times ten. Times a hundred. All these rooms... "
Jack put a hand on his shoulder, aware of the flinch that ran through Daniel's body; not antipathy, just gut-deep reaction. It probably said a lot about Daniel's childhood, now that he thought about it. Sha're was the only person Jack had ever seen touch him without causing that defensive reaction. "Daniel," he said. "We could be walking into anything. You know that, right?"
"I know. I'm trying not to slow you down, and I'm watching out, really. I am." Daniel looked up ahead, to where Carter was standing at the next comer, watching them with a tilted head. She beckoned for them to get a move on, then stepped out of sight. "She seems... different today."
"Bad night," Jack said. Daniel started walking, without any protest; Jack fell into stride next to him, with frequent glances back over his shoulder.
"Jack, did you dream?" Daniel asked.
Jack nearly missed a step, covered, and was grateful for his sunglasses and hat to hide most of his expression. "Hope."
"I did," Daniel said.
Jack waited for more, but that was it. Daniel lengthened his stride, sprinted on up ahead to grab hold of a broken hand-sized statue and examine it avidly, stroking his hands over it like a lover's body.
Jack shook his head, checked their six, and wished alternately that the place wasn't so damn deserted, and that it would stay that way.
Something weird happened, when Jack called a rest period. Well, not weird weird, but definitely out of the ordinary.
He had just eased himself to a half-reclining position against a handy fallen piece of masonry when he saw Daniel take his M9 out of its holster. If it had been Carter, Teal'c - hell, anybody else related to the SGC, up to and including the dourAirman Collins on the chow line - he wouldn't have taken much notice, but Daniel didn't handle guns. He wore one, reluctantly, but it was a necessary evil; he didn't exactly bond with them.
Have to work on that.
He watched as Daniel looked at the weapon, tilted it curiously this way and that in the sun, and smoothly slid the magazine out and then back in. Fast, fluid motions worthy of a trained military man.
Which Daniel wasn't.
And Daniel didn't holster his sidearm; he held it at his side, close to his trouser seam, and walked over to Carter. She was sipping water; he bent over and asked her something, and she smiled and nodded.
"What's that about?" Jack asked. Teal'c, sitting next to him, looked in the direction Jack pointed.
"I do not know."
Daniel cleared the M9 clip, pocketed it, and ejected the shell from the port to make it safe. He showed it to Carter, who nodded, and then he slapped it all back together again. She watched critically, made a couple of corrections, and had him do it again.
"Huh," Jack said. "Okay, now, I really think we're not in Kansas anymore. Since when does
Daniel actually train? Without anybody making him?"
"He has had little instruction from your warrior-teachers," Teal'c said. "Is it not natural that he wish to continue to expand his knowledge of the weapon?"
No. Not Daniel.
Carter came over to squat next to him. "Colonel, Daniel wants to do some target practice. What do you think?"
"I think that stealth and gunfire are mutually exclusive." Jack watched Daniel sight down the pistol and dry fire it. "Why?"
"Sir?"
"Why does our peacenik archaeologist suddenly want to shoot bottles off of rocks?"
"Might have something to do with the dead bodies back there." She shrugged fluidly. "Not to mention the man who died this moming... Sir, I just think it's better if he gets some practice in. He might need it before too long. You never know - "
She wasn't wrong, although it still gave Jack an itch between the shoulder blades. "One clip."
She flashed him one of those luminous grins and went back to Daniel. Jack leaned his head back against the wall and watched through slitted eyes as she put Daniel into firing stance and walked a full circle around him, correcting him with touches and small shoves.
Then she moved in behind him and gave him the signal to fire. Crack. She ordered a halt and checked the target.
"O'Neill," Teal'c said. "This morning, you asked if I dreamed of running in the night."
"Yeah. You said Jaffa don't dream."
"We do not. What I experienced was not a dream."
Teal'c's face was closed and still as he studied Carter, who moved to Daniel to give him some correction in his stance. She stepped up behind him, front to his back, and reached under his arms to lift them up and lean him into the stance. Very intimate. Well, that's probably against regs, Jack thought, not to mention going to make him flinch like a mother...
Only it didn't. Daniel didn't pull away. Well, look at that.
Crack Two shots down. Crack, crack, crack. Five.
Teal'c had said something important, Jack realized, and he scrambled to catch up. "What exactly did you experience?"
Stargate SG-1: Sacrifice Moon Page 9