“And you, Egeria,” Ra continued. “You will join me.”
Egeria dipped her head. “I am honored —”
“Your pardon, Lord.” That was Ra’s First Prime, standing impassive in the doorway. “There is a message from our scouts.”
Ra waved his hand. “Later.”
“Forgive me, Lord,” the First Prime said. “I fear the matter is urgent.”
For a moment, Teal’c thought the System Lord was going to lose his temper, but then Ra sighed. “We must postpone our discussion, then, Egeria. Nean’tac, I trust this will merit my attention —”
He swept out, still talking, the Jaffa coming to attention around him, and Egeria drew herself up. “Jaffa! I wish escort to my quarters, a decent meal — and has anyone found my servants?”
“At once, Lady,” a Jaffa said, bowing, and the senior officer remaining shook his head.
“No, Lady, there has been no sign of them.”
“Then I will require staff from among the humans here,” she said firmly. “See to it. Come, Teal’c.”
He bowed, impassive, and followed her from the throne room. At the door of the queen’s quarters, she dismissed the escort, and stalked into the bedroom without a backward glance. Teal’c remained in the outer room long enough to be sure no one lingered, then came to join her. Egeria was huddled on the bed, her head in her hands, and when she looked up there were tears on her cheeks, leaving tracks of kohl on her skin.
“I don’t know if I’ve made things better or worse,” Aset said. “What if I’ve only made it harder for Jack and the others?”
Teal’c wrapped his arms around her. She was trembling with reaction, and he tightened his hold, kissed her hair. “It would have been worse to let Ra take them to the mothership,” he said. “And we will find a way to warn O’Neill.”
“We must,” Egeria said. “Or they will be walking into a trap I have set for them.”
Sam woke at mid afternoon with the muzzy feeling of someone who had been up all night and then slept during the day, her breasts aching with the need to nurse. The whole house was sleeping, visitors sprawled on mats and curled up in corners wherever they could, the best bedroom given over to Pharaoh and his mother, who had presumably taken the opportunity to nap while they could. But Ellie…Ellie wouldn’t be asleep at this time of day.
She wasn’t. The other Teal’c, the Teal’c from the future that wasn’t hers, was playing with her in the courtyard, one eye always on the road. A shadow moved in the entrance to the gatehouse, Colonel Carter keeping watch in the shade, her camo uniform blending with the colors of the mud brick.
“Here is your mother,” Teal’c said to the baby quietly. He looked up at Sam and she could swear she saw his mouth quirk in a smile. “I believe she is growing hungry.”
“Well,” Sam said scooping her up. “Some bread and some me. Thank you for watching her.”
“I do not mind,” Teal’c said. He put his large hand on the baby’s head for a moment as he released her. “I like children.”
“Do you have children…” Sam began and stopped, worried that she was stepping on a sore subject.
“I have a son named Ry’ac,” Teal’c said, and this time he actually did smile. “He has grown into a fine young man and has recently married.”
“Oh.” Sam hauled Ellie up on her shoulder as Ellie flailed around with pudgy bare feet. “That’s wonderful.”
Teal’c nodded. “Perhaps he has grown well despite my choices rather than because of them, but I am very proud of him.”
“Isn’t that the way it works?” Sam sat down. Ellie wanted to nurse now, and she was going to flail until she did. The next thing would be a piercing scream, and it seemed cruel to wake everybody up, as tired as they all were.
“Perhaps,” Teal’c said. He glanced down at Ellie with a smile, not looking away from her as most of the rest of his team did, like they’d never heard of breastfeeding before. Maybe the Jaffa were a little more sensible about these things than people from her own culture had been.
Sam settled Ellie on the left, brushing an errant strand of brown hair back from her face, soft and fine against her baby cheek. A thought occurred to her. “Daniel said that the other me knew my father.”
“That is correct.” Teal’c nodded slowly. “As did I. General Jacob Carter was a fine man. It was an honor to know him. I owed him my life.”
“Oh.” Sam looked over at him, then away. “I didn’t. He died in December 1969, before I was two years old.” Teal’c didn’t say anything, so she went on. “He was killed in action over Vietnam. His plane was shot down and he tried to bail out, but his parachute didn’t open.” Sam had told this story so many times that her voice was even, and after all she didn’t remember any of it. “His wingman, George Hammond, tracked where he fell and his body was recovered. I think he blamed himself somehow.”
Teal’c nodded again, his eyes rising to the endless azure sky. “George Hammond. Lieutenant George Hammond.”
“Yes.”
“We met him,” Teal’c said. “A few months before that time. It must have been shortly before he was sent to battle.”
“How…”
“It is a very long story involving temporal physics.” The corner of Teal’c’s mouth twitched. “If you would like a technical explanation you had better ask Colonel Carter. But the result was that we were transported into the past, to the summer of 1969, and there you gave Lieutenant George Hammond a note from his future self, asking him to help us return to our own time. Which he did.”
“Oh.” Sam felt a frisson down her spine, the touch of the fascinating and marvelous. “Time travel.”
“Indeed. I did not consider greatly at the time that you were, of course, already there.”
Sam nodded. “In the summer of 1969 I was learning to walk. We were at Pope Air Force base in North Carolina. My dad got sent to Vietnam in the fall. It was his second tour.”
“General Jacob Carter said that his life was saved by George Hammond, and in that battle he won the Distinguished Flying Cross and then returned home to his wife and daughter. Your brother, Mark, was born two years later.”
Sam blinked. The pieces fit together, beautifully and perfectly as they always did once you understood. “You changed it,” she said. “That’s why I’m so different from your me. She changed it when she gave George Hammond the note from himself. He knew he couldn’t be killed in Vietnam because he was going to live to be an old man and send the note! He couldn’t be killed! So he took risks that he otherwise wouldn’t have, and one of them saved my father’s life.” She met Teal’c’s eyes. “George Hammond was always guilty. He always said to my mother that he felt responsible for my father’s death because he should have done something heroic and insanely brave to prevent it. And in your world he did.”
“In my world he did,” Teal’c said gravely. “George Hammond and Jacob Carter were lifelong friends. He died nearly four years ago after his symbiote, Selmak, died.”
“Symbiote?”
“Your father chose to become a Tok’ra host like Aset,” Teal’c said. “He had contracted a fatal disease. I believe you called it lymphoma. Selmak’s host was dying of old age, and Selmak offered to become one with your father and save his life if your father would share that life with him.”
“Cancer,” Sam said. “An incurable cancer?”
“He chose to become the host of the Tok’ra Selmak who healed him of the disease. Together they were a powerful force in the war against the Goa’uld.” Teal’c leaned back against the wall. “He himself rescued me and General O’Neill in a ha’tak when our glider malfunctioned and left us adrift in space.”
“My father flew a space ship.” Sam shook her head. She could still see the color picture that had been beside her mother’s bed, that young man a decade younger than she was now, stiff and formal in his uniform, posed in front of the flag like everybody else. She’d looked at it a million times, wondered what he would say if he could talk, won
dered what he would have wanted. Wondered what it would have been like to know him. Well, now she knew that.
“He flew it exceedingly well,” Teal’c said.
She shook her head. “And so that’s the right future? That’s the good future and I’m some kind of mistake?”
“I do not believe so,” Teal’c said. His eyes rested on Ellie. “I do not believe that either of you are a mistake. You are different, products of different lives and different experiences, and hence you have made different choices. But I do not believe that either of you are wrong or have failed.” He leaned back against the wall, stretching his long legs out before him. “Perhaps you wonder if you should be her. And yet she wonders if she should be you.”
Sam blinked. “Why?”
“You have what she does not, just as she has what you do not. And you are as valued here — king’s architect, builder of a new world — as she is in her place. It is no little thing, what you do, and you do not seem unhappy.”
“I’m not,” Sam said. “Actually, I’m really happy. I like my work and I like my family and…”
“And you would not return to the future if you could?”
Sam shifted Ellie, switching her to the other side. That was the operative question, and they hadn’t had time to talk about it. “No,” she said quietly. “I don’t think so.”
Teal’c nodded again. “Then it is as it is. Perhaps given all the worlds there may be, each of us plays all parts somewhere. I do not know.”
“Neither do I,” she said. “But you have to start somewhere.”
Jack stuck his head out the door. “Sam? We need you for a minute for a logistics thing. Hor-Aha wants you.”
“Coming,” Sam said, getting to her feet, and Teal’c smiled.
“As I said,” he said.
Chapter Twenty-one
Sam handed Ellie off to Tamit, and she and Teal’c made their way through the crowded halls to the main room. Hor-Aha was already holding court, and Jack hoped he’d managed to get a decent night’s sleep somewhere along the way. The Queen Mother was missing, but SG-1 was huddled in a corner, finishing the last of their breakfast. Jack lifted a hand in greeting, intending to talk to Mitchell, but Hor-Aha looked up at their entrance.
“O’Neill! A word with you.”
“Of course, sir.” Jack moved to join him, nodding to the chamberlain Irer and an officer with heavy gold bracelets, a commander of a hundred spears whose name Jack couldn’t remember.
“We are discussing the best way to get the grain ration to our people,” Hor-Aha said, “and it has occurred to me that you might be able to circumvent the river journey with your invisible machine.”
“Bring supplies in the jumper?” Jack blinked. “Yeah, that could work. It depends on how much it will lift — hey, Mitchell!”
“Sir?” Mitchell set his bowl aside and came to join them.
“Do you have any idea what the carrying capacity of a puddle jumper actually is?”
“I don’t know that we’ve ever found its limits,” Mitchell answered. “Several hundred tons, with the inertial dampeners adjusted right, and probably more than that.”
“Thanks.” Jack looked back at Pharaoh. “Colonel Mitchell says it’s possible. But now that we’re talking about the jumper, I had another idea about them.”
Hor-Aha waved his hand. “Say on.”
“We actually have two jumpers now,” Jack said. “The one we just took from Ra, and the one that we — Sam and Danyel and I — left at Saqqara. I believe that we can use them to attack Ra’s mothership, and in the process make him believe that we have not two, but a whole fleet of jumpers, and that they are manned by the Ancients who long opposed the Goa’uld.” Quickly, he outlined his plan, then repeated it in English for Mitchell’s benefit.
“That could work,” Mitchell said. “But Dr. Lam’s going to have to be the one who flies it.”
“Sam told me,” Jack said. “I figured I could do any fancy flying that was required.”
“This is very promising,” Hor-Aha said.
“And if Pharaoh pleases,” Irer said, “while O’Neill brings the jumper from Saqqara, perhaps the other one could fetch the grain.”
Jack nodded. “That would work —”
“My lord!” One of his men was striding toward them.
Hor-Aha turned sharply, a flash of fear in his eyes before he had himself under control.
“My lord, there is word from the palace.”
“Say on.” Hor-Aha’s voice was steady, but Jack could guess the effort it took to seem unmoved.
A stocky man in a common shenti shouldered his way past his escort, dust still clinging to his feet and his sweating chest. He bowed his shaved head, and only then did Jack recognize him by the gesture: Ankhmerwer, another of the senior chamberlains. Jack didn’t think he’d ever seen him without the collar of his office and a massively fashionable wig.
“Pharaoh. I bring news of the queen — good news, for now,” he added hastily, and Jack saw Hor-Aha’s shoulders relax just a fraction.
“I listen gladly,” Hor-Aha said.
“I have spoken with Aset and Teal’c,” Ankhmerwer said, “and they are safe and well. The queen and the princes are likewise unharmed.”
Hor-Aha’s eyes flickered closed for an instant. “Thank all the gods.”
“They are being held in the overseer’s house beside the granary,” Ankhmerwer said. “I have seen with my own eyes that they are there and treated fairly. And, my lord, they are not well guarded.”
“We must act, then,” the commander said, and Hor-Aha cocked his head.
“And yet?”
“Aset claims it is a trap.” Ankhmerwer paused. “I saw no sign of it, lord. There are guards enough, but they are distracted — Ra calls for them at all hours, and his household is in constant upheaval. And they do not yet know the palace, or their servants. That will not last forever.”
“But Aset says it’s a trap,” Jack said.
“Yes, O’Neill.” Ankhmerwer took a breath. “Forgive me that I raise a painful matter. But Aset is a Goa’uld now. She lives as one of the gods, and Ra has given over to her the queen’s quarters and the queen’s jewels. Perhaps she has cause to dissuade us from a rescue.”
“Not Aset,” Sam said firmly.
“No. What does Teal’c say?”
“Very little,” Ankhmerwer answered. “And again I beg your pardon, O’Neill, but it must be said. He loves Aset. And he is Jaffa.”
“Oh, for —” Jack glowered at the chamberlain, who met his gaze squarely.
“It must be considered, O’Neill.”
“What’s going on?” Mitchell asked quietly.
Jack ignored him, saw out of the corner of his eye that their Daniel had arrived to translate, and focused on Hor-Aha instead. “This is Teal’c we’re talking about,” he said. “He gave up everything to fight the Goa’uld.”
“He loves Aset,” the commander said. “We cannot pretend it isn’t so.”
“And Aset fought the Goa’uld with us,” Sam said. “She was with us at Saqqara, and when Ra fled — she was as brave as anyone when it looked like Ra was going to take our last outpost.”
“That is so, Sa-Mantha,” Hor-Aha said. “And yet. She hosts a Goa’uld.”
“A Tok’ra.” Danyel had joined them. “The mother of the Tok’ra.”
“And you tell me they will change the course of history,” Hor-Aha said. “Though not yet.”
“Yes,” Danyel said, a little too firmly.
Jack said hastily, “One way or another, we have to get the queen out of there. OK, this may be a trap — me, I think that if Aset says it’s a trap, it’s definitely a trap. But Ankhmerwer is right that this may be our best chance, to get in there while Ra’s people are still disorganized.”
“What are you proposing, O’Neill?” Hor-Aha asked.
“Let me take a scout party in,” Jack said. “Me and Danyel, maybe, just to take a look around. We can check out this trap, may
be even make contact with Teal’c and Aset, but, either way, we’ll have a better idea of what we’re up against. And in the meantime, Colonel Mitchell and his team can go get the other jumper so we won’t be losing any time.”
Hor-Aha was silent, considering, but finally gave a slow nod. “We must — if they can be reached, we must save them, O’Neill, for I do not know if I can bear to see them used against me.” He stopped abruptly, and Jack winced in sympathy. If it was Ellie — but that didn’t bear thinking of.
“Go, then,” Hor-Aha said. He had control of his voice again, and his face was like a statue’s, stiff and unflinching. “See if this trap can be drawn.”
Cam listened to O’Neill outline his plan, and nodded reluctantly. Whatever else they did, they could definitely use the second jumper, and he could see that it was important to find out for certain what was going on at the palace. It was just… He lengthened his stride as they left the main room of the house, caught up with Teal’c.
“I’ve got a question for you,” he said, and glanced quickly over his shoulder to be sure that none of the alternate thems were anywhere in earshot.
Teal’c gave him a look that might have been wary. “I will answer if I can.”
“Egeria,” Cam said.
“Ah.” Teal’c looked over his shoulder, too, then stepped deliberately into the shadow of one of the outbuildings.
“It’s not that I have anything against Aset,” Cam said, following him. The mud brick walls were thick enough that they couldn’t be overheard from inside, and they’d be able to see anyone approaching. “And it’s not that I don’t trust your other self. It’s just that whenever there are Tok’ra involved, everything seems to go south really quickly.”
“Indeed,” Teal’c said. “We have seen that too often. But if this is Egeria, she must be allowed to create the Tok’ra, or the time line will be damaged far more than it was before.”
“If,” Cam said. “What about Anise’s idea that one of the others, one of Marik’s people, was carrying the Tok’ra that becomes Egeria?”
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