“That cannot be,” Teal’c said. “They have no queens left, so logically none of them could become Egeria.”
“Unless they were lying,” Cam said. “Which, you’ve got to admit, is not all that unlikely.”
“Indeed no,” Teal’c said. “Certainly either Anise or the Tok’ra Council lied to us.”
“Right now, I’m going to bet it was Anise,” Cam said.
“She had more cause,” Teal’c agreed.
“And that brings me back to my question,” Cam said. “O’Neill and the others, they’re sure this is Egeria. But that’s what they want to believe, because Aset was going to die if she didn’t get a symbiote to heal her. And the symbiote was going to die if it didn’t take a host, because O’Neill was planning to kill it. But I can’t help wondering if the little snake could have somehow figured out that claiming to be Egeria was the one thing that would get it a host.”
“You are asking if my counterpart’s prim’tah would have sufficient awareness to have deduced Egeria’s role, and to claim it when it was threatened,” Teal’c said.
“Yeah. Pretty much.” Cam leaned against the bricks, grateful for the shade. “Would it?”
“I do not know,” Teal’c said slowly. “I never carried a prim’tah for so long, to a point past maturity. However…”
There was a long silence, Teal’c staring across the sun-baked courtyard, his face even more neutral than usual. Cam had learned to wait out those silences, and at last the Jaffa blinked, focusing again.
“When Shaul’nac tried to save Tanith,” he said. “You were not there, Colonel Mitchell, but —”
“I’ve read the mission report,” Cam said. An ugly business, another time the Tok’ra had betrayed them, and it had cost the life of a woman Teal’c had loved.
“Yes.” Teal’c might have looked relieved. “Shaul’nac always said that she spoke to the symbiote who was Tanith only in the depths of kelnorim, but it seems to me that Tanith might have learned some things without her realizing it, either by somehow tapping into her consciousness, or by somehow observing — overhearing, perhaps — while he was still in her pouch. He had an excellent understanding of Tok’ra politics, as well as of the tensions between the Tok’ra and the Tau’ri, that I suspect may have come from such observation.”
Cam carefully didn’t look at Teal’c’s stomach, even though he knew perfectly well there was no symbiote there. “Is that possible? For a larva to hear? Or to pick somebody’s brain like that?”
“For an immature prim’tah, I do not believe it is,” Teal’c answered. “But one at maturity, ready to take a host, and perhaps even a little younger? I could not discount the possibility.”
“I was really hoping you’d say I was just looking for trouble,” Cam said.
“I, too, would prefer to believe that,” Teal’c said. “But — I believed Shaul’nac, against all my training and everything I had been taught. Against the evidence of the prim’tah I carried then, even. And my other self loves Aset.”
“Yeah.” O’Neill wasn’t going to want to hear any doubts — he’d made that perfectly clear when he was talking to the Pharaoh. And Cam couldn’t blame him. Aset was clearly family, and it had been O’Neill that made the call to let the symbiote take her as a host. But that didn’t mean that “Egeria” was telling the truth. He straightened slowly. “Let’s just keep the possibilities in mind, right?”
Teal’c nodded. “Indeed.”
Mitchell sidled up to Carter in the storeroom where she was switching clips for her pistol out of her backpack and into her pockets. She stopped, stretching a hair band out one handed and redoing her long pony tail. “Have we got a plan here?” Mitchell asked quietly.
Carter nodded. “I’m going with Jack and Daniel — their Jack and Daniel, not ours — into the palace. You and Vala and Carolyn need to go to Saqqara to get the other jumper. If that’s cool with you?” Her eyes searched his face belatedly, conscious once more that she might be stepping on his toes. SG-1 was his, and this wasn’t Atlantis.
“That’s cool,” Cam said. It was always a good thing to have Vala for backup.
“And the other me,” Carter said. “She knows where the jumper is.” She gave him a flat little stressed smile that he’d first seen on the drill field when he was eighteen years old, the first time cadet Carter had drilled the flight and marched him straight into a rhododendron bush. Right turn and column right are not at all the same thing.
Cam dropped his voice. “That’s got to be weird.”
“It’s not the first time I’ve seen an alternate me.” Carter bent over her pack again, shuffling things around inside.
“Yeah, but.” The other hims he’d met were all pretty much him. Same Air Force, same haircut. Of course some of the alternate teams they’d encountered that time didn’t have a Cameron Mitchell with them. The ones of him who’d made choices that led him in a different direction didn’t come walking through the Stargate. Nor did the ones of him who were dead. There must be a bunch of him who’d never made it out of Antarctica, who’d had a full military funeral instead of SG-1. “It’s gotta be weird, you know?”
Carter shrugged and didn’t look up. “Yeah.”
She was two years older than he was. It had been twenty years since they’d stood on that field together, assigned to the same flight in 1988, when he was a freshman and she was a junior. Carter was forty. The clock was running for her in a way it wasn’t for him. Cam figured he’d get married someday. There wasn’t any hurry. Sooner or later it would happen, and the right woman was worth waiting for. There would be kids on down the line, but that wouldn’t screw him over any more than it had screwed over his dad or Carter’s dad. Lots of guys had kids. It wouldn’t end his career, like it would for Carter. If she stepped back to have a baby she was never going to get back to the front of the line.
“She’s named for my mother,” Carter said. “Eleanor. She was killed in a wreck when I was twelve.” Carter didn’t look up from the interior of her backpack. “Except that she wasn’t. In that other reality she died of cancer five years ago, when she was sixty one. She smoked all the time, the other me said. She never quit. It caught up to her eventually.” Carter shuffled more things around. “My mom quit when she was pregnant with Mark, because they knew then that you shouldn’t smoke when you’re pregnant. She smoked with me of course, but I don’t see it did any damage. I just remember her smoking, the way she’d sit on that avocado gabardine couch in base housing with her legs crossed and her hair in a big beehive with a cocktail glass in one hand.” She looked at Cam sideways. “Your parents do the gabardine couch too?”
“Oh yeah.” Cam grinned. “We had shag carpets, man! And some wild parties, let me tell you. They went to some crazy ones. My mom bought my dad a keychain with a lucky rabbit’s foot on it so she could tell which one was his.”
“What?”
Cam grinned bigger. “Key parties. Don’t you remember that whole big scandal about Air Force wife swapping? The key parties where all the guys would put their car keys in a punch bowl and then the women would draw one to go home with? My mom didn’t want to swap but she liked the parties, so she made sure she could always figure out which one was dad.”
“I cannot see my dad doing key parties,” Carter said, but she was smiling back. And that was a good thing, the whole point of this little segue into obscure Air Force history. “I really can’t.”
“Mine didn’t swap. At least I don’t think so. But there was some pretty heavy drinking going on. It wasn’t all canasta in the good old days.” Cam picked up his pack.
“It’s not all canasta now,” she said.
“Don’t I know it?” Cam grinned back. “You know, six of one and half dozen of the other. But what we’ve got’s not bad, right?”
“Not a bit,” she said. She zipped up her pack looking a lot more cheerful. “Not at all. Have a good trip to Saqqara.”
“Will do,” Cam said.
Chapter Twenty-two
<
br /> Cam settled himself in the stern of the little reed boat, thankful that for this mission at least he got to wear his own clothes. The sun was halfway up the sky, and it was hot and humid on the river, in the eighties and rising he’d guess. Clouds of gnats circled over the water, the surface broken occasionally by the tell tale bubble of a fish nabbing the unwary one. It looked like the lazy rivers of Cam’s childhood, hot summer days spent with his grandfather out on the water. “Good fishing here,” he commented.
Sam — the other one — stepped into the boat just ahead of him, surprisingly nimble in her print sundress. “That’s what Jack says.” She looked at him sideways. “He does bring home some big ones sometimes.”
Cam stood up as Carolyn and Vala came down the path, stepping out of the boat and offering a hand for them to step past him. “Keep low,” he said. “Just crouch down and stay in the middle of the boat and go on forward. Sam’s going to take the front oar.” She was already settling in at the bow, the oar across her lap. “Just like a canoe,” he said. “You guys are in the middle, and Sam and I get to row.”
“I’ll be the queen of the Nile,” Vala said, lifting her chin as she let Carolyn go ahead of her. “You do the work, Cameron.”
“Do you know how to row?” Cam asked. “Because if you do, it’s all yours.”
“Actually I don’t,” Vala said cheerfully.
“I thought not.” He looked with approval at the way Carolyn wasn’t tipping the small boat at all, moving into position in a crouch. “Good job there.”
“Summer camp,” Carolyn said, with the first smile he’d seen since they rescued her. She looked worn, as she ought to after what she’d no doubt been through, but like she was holding it all together. Carolyn was probably tougher than she looked. Lots of doctors were.
“Try not to tip the boat over,” Cam said, handing Vala in. “Please.”
“I have no desire to be muddy and wet,” she said.
“There are enormous crocodiles,” Sam said. “Really big ones. That eat people.”
Vala looked nonplussed. “I said I’d be careful.”
Cam pushed off and jumped in as he did, not getting more than one foot wet in the process. The little boat wallowed about six inches above the water, but it seemed stable enough. Enormous crocodiles. Fun times.
“How far is it to Saqqara?” he called up the boat.
“About eight miles.” Sam put the paddle to the water, and he dipped his neatly on the other side. “It’s not far. But it’s upstream. The current’s not bad this time of year, not like it is during the flood. And the prevailing winds are upstream, which is nice.”
Cam could already see that. Out toward the middle of the river larger boats with single lanteen sails were heading upriver, transports probably. One was about forty feet long and seemed to have four or five cows on deck, chewing placidly on a pile of straw. Wouldn’t want them to start moving around, he thought. There was a lot of river traffic. They were pretty unremarkable.
The sun rose higher and the temperature climbed. The sun was warm on his forearms.
“Crocodile,” Sam said, pointing. One about four feet long was lying on the muddy riverbank, looking sleepily at the passing traffic. “That’s one of the little guys.”
“How big do they get?” Carolyn asked.
“Eight, nine feet.” Sam shrugged. “Supposedly bigger, but that’s the biggest I’ve seen.”
“Cool,” Cam said. “No swimming.”
“Pretty much,” Sam said. “Actually, we pipe the water off and filter the sediment out. And the sewage, of course.”
“Right.”
“We’ve got a basic charcoal filtration system for drinking water. Don’t worry. It doesn’t change the timeline. We know that the Egyptians knew how to filter water through several layers of sand, coarser and then finer and then finest, to get safe drinking water. Otherwise everybody would be dead of cholera. We just add a little activated charcoal.”
“The Egyptians knew that?” Carolyn sounded dubious. Cam was too.
Sam didn’t stop rowing. “This is actually a very sophisticated society. Remember, these guys built the pyramids.”
“I thought the Goa’uld built the pyramids,” Cam said.
“Actually, Danyel has a theory that they learned from us,” Sam said. “The Goa’uld don’t really create technology. They just borrow it from anybody they encounter. In this case, they learned a lot from humans. That’s why they’ve been kidnapping people off this planet for a couple of thousand years.”
“A couple of thousand years?” Vala sat up straighter.
Sam glanced over her shoulder, then back to the river. “Danyel says that we realized after we started using the gate in your timeline that all of the humans we encountered in the Milky Way were descendants of people seeded from Earth. Well, here we are while they’re doing the seeding. It amounts to Ra kidnapping people and selling them as slaves to the other system lords. And it sucks.”
“Yeah,” Cam said. “Oh yeah.”
“Of course sometimes it doesn’t go their way. We found a bunch of documents the first time we beat Ra that were basically one of the other system lords giving him hell because they’d paid Ra for permission to round up a bunch of people in what we’re guessing is Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan. Only it didn’t work out and the locals kicked the system lord’s butt. So the system lord complained to Ra. Ra blamed it all on the interference of mysterious Ancients.”
“Do you think that’s possible?” Carolyn asked interestedly.
Sam shrugged, her back to them. “I don’t know. Danyel says that there is a cluster of the ATA gene there five thousand years on. Whether that means that there are Ancients there now — your guess is as good as mine. We’ve been trying NOT to alter the timeline, which means not using the puddle jumper to jet all over the world and visit Japan!”
“Right.” Carolyn sounded vaguely disappointed.
“But the big deal here is that Ra thinks that there are Ancients on Earth who are interfering,” Cam said. “That’s our in. We convince him that the Ancients have a bunch of puddle jumpers and weapons, and he gives up and goes home.”
“Exactly,” Sam said. “His ships are no match for Ancient technology. Only we don’t actually have anything except the puddle jumper.”
“Two puddle jumpers,” Carolyn said. She squared her shoulders. “OK.”
“You’re not going to have to do any tactical flying,” Cam said reassuringly. “O’Neill’s going to do that. We’ll just back him up and make it look like we’ve got a fleet.”
“An invisible fleet,” Vala said. “Which is a nice thing.”
“Yeah.” Cam couldn’t help but wish for a 302. Now that would be a nice thing.
“I can’t wear that,” Carter said, scowling at the plain boatneck dress Daniel held up to her. “Where am I supposed to put my pistol?”
“A towel and flip-flops,” Daniel quoted. Carter supposed this was fair payback for her remark about Mitchell’s pantslessness.
“Actually, the pattern of her tan is going to be a problem,” the other Daniel said. “Try this one.”
He held up a tunic with short sleeves that fell low enough to hide the line where her T-shirt sleeves had been. “Sorry about the pistol, but pockets aren’t an option.”
Carter sighed and took the dress.
“She’ll look like a servant,” Daniel said.
“Which isn’t exactly a problem,” Danyel said. “We’re supposed to blend in with the palace servants, remember?”
“That’s not my point.” Daniel glared at his other self.
Carter had spent enough time among the Goa’uld to know exactly what Daniel meant. “Any human is vulnerable,” she said. “Not just servants.”
“We’re all servants as far as Ra’s concerned,” Jack said. He had given up his boxers for the sort of kilt the other men were wearing, and a pair of beaded sandals. “Which is why I intend to stay well out of sight.”
&nb
sp; “Yes, about that,” Danyel said. “Ra’s just been reminded of your existence. Don’t you think it might be better to let me go alone —”
“Nope,” Jack said, with enough good-humored force that both the Daniels stopped short. Carter cleared her throat.
“He has a point, sir.”
“We are not going to spend any time where Ra can see us,” Jack said. “We’re going to get in, check out where the queen’s being held, and get out. Discreet reconnaissance, with an emphasis on discretion.”
Carter had never believed that when her Jack said it, either, but she’d never found a good way to argue with him. “Yes, sir,” she said, and went to change.
It was a long hot walk back to the palace compound, sand sliding uncomfortably in her sandals. Neither the heat nor the sand seemed to bother Jack and Danyel, though after a bit Danyel did deploy a painted parasol. Sunshade, she corrected herself. At least that sounded a little more dignified. There wasn’t a lot of traffic on the road, not heading toward the palace, and she touched the ripped seam of her dress that gave her access to her pistol.
“Do we actually have a plan for getting in?” she asked.
Danyel grinned. “Well, I could be a palace official, and you could be my servants.”
Jack rolled his eyes. “You should have shaved your head if you wanted to play it that way.”
“There’s a wig in Carter’s basket,” Danyel said. The thought of Danyel, any version of him, in one of the heavy horse-hair pageboys she’d seen on Hor-Aha’s officials — it was calculated to make her giggle almost as much as Mitchell losing his pants again.
“If you tell them you’re an official, you’ll probably have to talk to Ra’s First Prime,” Jack said. “And that would be a bad idea.”
“OK,” Danyel said. “So what’s your plan?”
“Let’s see if we can’t find someone who’s on their way to sell goods to the palace,” Jack said, “and take their place.”
“Assuming there is someone,” Danyel said. “If that’s what you wanted, why didn’t we just bring supplies from home?”
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