“Ah, Jack,” Daniel said. “What are the chances that the President would give the order to nuke New York?”
Carter groaned, which was really something Jack would have preferred not to hear right now. “What?” he demanded.
“I explained to General Royall at the Pentagon that the attack was coming through the Stargate. We lost the radio connection before I saw the Al'kesh. Sir,” she turned to face him. Although he couldn't read her expression behind the Jaffa helmet, she was practically bouncing from one foot to the other. “The Pentagon is under the impression that Roswell was attacked, but the invading ships appear virtually indestructible. If I were a military advisor I'd read that to mean—”
“We wanted to grab the nukes prior to the main invasion, because they're the only thing that could damage us.”
“Crap,” Mitchell turned quickly to leave. “A low yield nuke detonated on the outside won't penetrate the force field we've set up, but it'll piss off Ra. He'll hightail it out of here—but not before ordering Qetesh to raze the planet.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
It was probably the running up ten flights of steps dressed in Jaffa armor and carrying a case of naquadah that had done it, but right now, the intense pain ripping through Daniel's leg, and the damp, burgundy patch on his pants, was the least of his concerns.
“Y'know,” he yelled to Jack, “this is one time that I wish the Air Force wasn't so...determined*.” They both ducked when a second bomb impacted the corner of—actually, Daniel no longer had any idea exactly where they were hitting because this entire area of Manhattan Central Park was currently the target of every ace bombardier who'd survived the skies over Europe and the South Pacific.
“At least it wasn't a nuke,” Jack replied, running in a crouch that Daniel knew must be playing havoc on his knees.
As far as they had been able to determine, the force field around the Metropolitan Museum of Arts encompassed an area bordered by West 70th and West 85th Streets, Park Avenue, and about half the baseball diamonds west of Park Drive North, which is where most of the Jaffa encampments had been set up. The bombers were flying in a south to north pattern, and the first payload began hitting somewhere around East 65th. That had extended well into Central Park pond.
The scream of the first bombs had come well before they'd impacted. For the first time, Daniel gained an appreciation of the unique form of terror that particular noise must have inflicted on a generation of people across the world. The long, high pitched whine as the bomb was released, the sense of anticipation and dread as it changed pitch, and a bizarre and selfish, almost guilty sense of relief when the shocking impact tore other buildings and lives to shreds and somehow, this time left you untouched...until the next screaming banshee descended.
Years of countless battles, artillery fire and aerial bombardment should have hardened him to noise and fear and relentless pounding; the sense that any second now could be his last. The insane randomness of who lived and who died, had—in Daniel's mind—been typified most poignantly when Janet Fraiser been lost. He'd also been at the wrong end of friendly fire, seen cities destroyed and civilizations in ruin. But this was New York, not a planet with an alphanumeric designation that Jack couldn't even remember.
And one of the dive-bombers had just taken out the nearby Museum of Natural History, a place that held unique and very personal memories for Daniel.
They ran from the front of the building back inside to where the jumper was still parked, vulnerable now that all of its systems were down while Sam and An installed the naquadah.
“Carter!” Jack called, ducking a section of collapsing ceiling and bolting in through the hatch.
Another piercing whine warned Daniel the next impact was going to be close. He followed Jack into the jumper, jostling for space between Commander Beckett and Teal'c just as a massive explosion tore a nearby building apart, sending masonry and twisted metal girders straight toward them. He slammed his hand on the hatch control mechanism, hoping to keep the sandblasting grit out, but the jumper's systems were still offline.
“Thirty seconds, sir!”
Daniel glanced forward to see Sam slamming shut one of the control panels, Jack easing himself into the pilot's seat and An working on something behind the portside passenger chair. Then a wave of dust hit him.
The sound of coughing drew Daniel's attention to Bennett. He was almost surprised to see that the commander had, as promised, remained behind with An while the rest of them had been getting themselves captured by Cam's Jaffa. It seemed Bennett had no family to speak of, at least not in New York. Despite his initial shock, the Naval officer had also rapidly adjusted to the idea that SG-1 offered the one hope that the world currently had against a Goa'uld invasion.
Daniel wondered if he'd be quite so amenable when he discovered Cam was planning to vaporize New York as part of the solution.
“Now, sir!” Carter shouted above an almost constant background noise of explosions and one eerily drawn out whine of a descending bomb.
Daniel couldn't hear the low level hum of the jumper, but he could feel the ship come to life. The hatch closed, cutting off a deafening explosion that sent the jumper tumbling backward. The inertial dampeners and gravity had already kicked in, along with the force field, because he felt no sense of movement as the juniper abruptly shot clear of the collapsing building.
Life support must have been functioning, too, because the air inside the jumper rapidly cleared.
Outside, it was a different story.
Jack brought the jumper around so they could see the devastation around Central Park. It looked like most of Manhattan was now on fire. Elsewhere, in dozens, maybe hundreds of places around the city, fires were still blazing out of control. Oil storage depots would, Daniel knew, burn for days if not weeks...
Except of course if Cam was successful in detonating a nuke.
The skies above New York were also in flames, with death gliders and US military fighters in unremitting aerial combat. Al'kesh were following bombers as they headed north and then banked west, blasting them out of the sky one by one.
“Can't you do something?” Bennett cried, his voice cracking in desperation.
There'd been no time to explain to him or An what they now planned, but it was crucial they not draw attention to themselves. And that meant doing absolutely nothing to help the bombers and fighters being methodically obliterated.
Daniel saw the tension in Jack's shoulders as he angled the jumper north. “Not yet,” he replied, his words clipped and harsh.
“Don't you have any weapons? Can't you at least... I don't know! Do something!”
“Their sacrifice will not be forgotten, Commander Bennett.” Teal'c's calm tone sliced through the tension on the jumper. “Of that you can be assured. However, now is not the time.”
Bennett spun around to face him, his face screwed up in despair. “Then when?”
The radio in Daniel's ear abruptly switched on. He was about to reply when he realized that it was Cam. The words were almost incomprehensible, but he recognized the boom box Goa'uld voice in the background as belonging to Vala— or rather, Qetesh.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Qetesh didn't sound happy. The ranting continued for several minutes, during which time the General flew them to a sub-orbital position. Cloaked, with shields activated now that they had full power, they were safer at this altitude than anywhere in the skies over the United States.
“What...what's going on?” Bennett called from the rear of the jumper. “The sky...it's getting darker!”
“We are leaving the planet's atmosphere,” Teal'c replied.
“You mean this is also a...a spaceship?”
“The transmission isn't coming from the ground, sir,” Sam said, instigating a range of checks on the jumper's systems, and switching the transmission to the speakers so they could all hear. “It's coming from an Al'kesh in geosynchronous orbit above. Cam must have ringed aboard Qetesh's ship. He's jammed t
he transmit button on, I think.”
The voices coming over the loudspeakers offered them a strange, if somewhat disjointed idea, of what must be happening on board Qetesh's ship. By the sound of it, Qetesh's rage resulted from her inability to acquire more than one nuclear bomb from Roswell. Cam's voice came through the radio muffled. “It requires only a single device to destroy Ra's ship.”
“That is not the point,” Qetesh snapped. “I want every one of those weapons. I intend to destroy all System Lords who do not immediately swear their allegiance to me once Ra is dead. And the pathetic miserable creatures who inhabit this planet must not be allowed to retain such weapons. Where have the humans taken the other bombs?”
The sound of footsteps followed before Cam replied, “In my time all fifteen remained at Roswell—”
He let out a muffled grunt of pain before Qetesh screamed, considerably closer this time, “You're hiding something from me--what?”
The level of pain from a Goa'uld hand device was excruciating to the point of debilitating, but of more concern was that while Cam was undoubtedly strong enough to hide the truth from Qetesh, the Goa'uld would know instantly he was hiding something.
Sam figured that Cam must have trained his mind to deal with the hand device using the same skills that she, indeed, all of them, had been trained to employ when subjected to various drugs like Scopolamine. He gave Qetesh a truth, an answer that bought them all sometime. “I...was going to say...could have taken them to White Sands... Maybe runway at Wright Field or Nellis...long enough.”
A grunt and a few deep breaths were the only indication that Cam had been released from the control of the beam. Sam also began breathing again, unaware that she'd stopped. She glanced at O'Neill. His expression acknowledged her sense of relief. No training in the world could harden you against the knowledge that a teammate was being tortured, particularly when they were withholding information to protect you. While that information was also crucial to the mission, it didn't make the situation any easier to stomach.
“The humans received advance warning from the Asgard,” Qetesh spat. “Weak, puny things that they are. They had no right to interfere with this world!”
There was another delay, during which Sam overhead Teal'c explaining the situation to Bennett. She focused on the readouts currently appearing on her laptop. She had had complete confidence the naquadah would function as a viable energy source, and it was a relief to know that they now had all systems operational. “We have full power, sir, including weapons.”
Which mean that they could use the Antarctic 'gate and retrieve the time machine enabled jumper on Maybourne's planet. Except...
Sam couldn't shake off a sense of responsibility toward this timeline. Whether it continued to exist or not once they rectified the past was something she couldn't entirely say for certain. But one thing she did know, her older self had come back in time with the hand DHD device, not via a temporally-enhanced jumper. As with the Asgard food cubes, she read that as a signal.
“Here,” Cam's voice came through stronger this time. I Presumably he was pointing to a map because he added, “This is Nellis, White Sands, and up here is Wright Field. It's possible that once the Army thought they were under attack from the Asgard, they removed the bombs to alternate facilities. Their aircraft couldn't have gone far because it takes a considerable amount of time to load one of those bombs, the only planes capable of carrying that payload are the B-29 Superfortresses, and there's only a handful of runways that can accommodate a Superfortress with a nuke aboard. Plus the US government wouldn't have wanted to let them out of the country.”
Sam realized that Cam was talking to her as much as Qetesh, because he added, “Thing is, if you go looking for the rest of the bombs, now, Ra's going to get suspicious, but if we can locate that Asgard escape pod they recovered at Roswell, the transport—”
His next words were unclear, but it was so obvious that Sam couldn't understand why she hadn't thought of it sooner. The General must have also understood what Cam was getting at because an insert display appeared on the HUD.
“Scan for uranium-235 and plutonium-239,” she told O'Neill.
“...weak fools were stupid enough to have lost the Asgard and his escape pod.” Qetesh's voice was clearer and louder, presumably she was now standing beside Cam. “You will have the weapon that I acquired prepared by tomorrow morning. Ra has the dialing device and is bringing it to the Chappa'ai as we speak. Once it is installed...”
Sam could barely make out of the next few words, but it sounded like Qetesh was planning on having the nuke ringed to Ra's ship when he was taking a new host.
“Son of a bitch,” the General said, shaking his head.
“What's wrong now?” Bennett demanded from the back of the jumper, belatedly adding, “Sir.”
Daniel answered. “Qetesh wants Ra nuked when he's taking her son—”
“It's not Qetesh's son,” O'Neill abruptly reminded them. “It's Vala's.”
Bennett's face screwed up in confusion, but there was no time to explain the bizarre reproductive dichotomies of hosts and symbiotes. “Why wait until then?” Sam wondered.
“She fears Ra.” Teal'c said simply. “And she is a Goa'uld.”
Suddenly, Sam understood. Ra had survived countless attempts on his life by preemptively moving against treacherous offspring. Fearing Ra would smell a trap even before she'd ringed the nuke aboard, Qetesh was capitalizing on the one instance when she could be absolutely certain he was vulnerable.
And she was deliberately using Vala's son to do it. The stark reality of Cam's reminder, that Qetesh allowed Vala's consciousness to witness her atrocities, drove home to Sam exactly why he wanted an end to this. It was a living nightmare that Sam, who'd had the unwelcome experience of some of Jolinar's more horrific memories, could barely comprehend. Insanity would have been merciful, but based on what Cam had told them, Vala had tenaciously clung to one hope: that SG-1 would go back in time and undo this horror.
Bennett looked around at them, as if their facial expressions alone would provide him with an answer. “Taking? What do you mean taking?”
While they'd briefed Bennett on several points, their explanation of the world of the future hadn't gotten has far as Goa'uld physiology. “As a host,” Sam explained through gritted teeth. “The Goa'uld are a parasitic race that infect human brains and take complete control of their minds and bodies.”
'“But not their souls,” Daniel said quietly. “Never that. We can't let Qetesh take over from Ra, Jack,” His tone became impassioned. “I didn't think it was possible, but she's worse—far worse. If we fail to get back, we can't unleash that...thing on the galaxy.”
Sam glanced at O'Neill, who was staring intently—too intently—at the HUD. He hadn't answered Daniel, but she knew, just by looking at him, that he was in total agreement. “Asgard transport?” he asked.
“Fully operational,” An replied.
“Carter?”
The General was thinking the same thing as Sam, because two signals, quite close together, flickered on the screen. She studied the HUD for a moment before pointing to one and glancing over her shoulder at An. “Can you get a lock on these signals and beam one of them out of there?”
“Yes,” An replied, blinking. “Which one?”
Sam gave him the frequency of Cam's subcutaneous locator implant.
“Sam?” Daniel asked. “You planning on beaming out Cam?”
“And the nukes, in,” O'Neill finished.
“What about the hand DHD?”
“With Ra and Qetesh dead,” Teal'c said, “Colonel Mitchell will readily take control of the Stargate and the Jaffa.”
On the HUD the image had altered and was now displaying several separate sources of uranium-235 and plutonium-239, including Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where the uranium was enriched, Wright, Fort Worth, White Sands and Alaska. “Take your pick, Colonel,” O'Neill said.
Cam's voice, flat and lacking any emotion whatsoev
er, came through the radio. “If you're getting any of this, General, I'm currently alone inside the transport bay of Qetesh's Ha'tak, and from what I can tell, I'm standing in front of 'Little Boy's' twin brother. Qetesh managed to get only one nuke. I'm kinda hoping you might be able to scrounge up one more.”
The possibilities began running through Sam's mind as she recalled exactly how the bomb was configured.
Stargate SG1 - Roswell Page 32