[Stargate SG-1 03] - The First Amendment

by Ashley McConnell - (ebook by Undead)

  He had no idea how long he fell. After a while it reminded him of a cartoon a colleague had had posted on her computer: three men falling, screaming, labeled “Bottomless Pit.” The second panel, labeled “Twenty Years Later,” was the same three men, still falling. But now they were casually examining their fingernails, kicking back on nothingness.

  He was reasonably sure it wasn’t actually twenty years before he fell out of cold eternity and into somewhere else, and he knew for certain he hadn’t gotten blasé about it.

  He was thumping and rolling across some very, very hard ground, completely disoriented and out of breath. He was no longer in an artificially illuminated cave in the guts of Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado; he was outside, under bright sunlight, and definitely somewhere else.

  “What the hell—” he began as soon as he could get words out. But as he picked himself up he saw O’Neill and Carter already on their feet, Jackson stepping away from a Stargate identical to the one in Cheyenne Mountain, and Teal’C leaping gracefully out of the blue energy field, not one whit fazed by the experience. Almost immediately afterward came the transport, following Teal’C like a large mechanical puppy.

  “Where—” he said before he could stop himself, and then he did stop, open-mouthed. No matter where—it wasn’t Earth. It couldn’t be.

  The air smelled funny. Like pecans and walnuts and Brazil nuts. He had the sensation he was looking through rose-colored lenses; everything seemed to be tinted pink.

  He felt groggy, heavier somehow.

  There were three moons in the sunlit sky.

  At first it didn’t register; he saw three roundish pockmarked circles up above him and didn’t know what they were. Then he looked at them again, his head snapping around so hard he almost gave himself whiplash. Those were moons. Moons. Three of them. Three. In shades of pink, from deep rose to delicate pearl. And it was daytime.

  The last time he’d seen three moons in a single sky, George Lucas was responsible. But this was not a movie theater, or if it was, someone forgot to clean up all the rocks he’d bounced over.

  And they were huge, too. The darkest one took up a good sixteenth of the sky and seemed almost within arm’s reach. He reached up to try to touch it and staggered, losing his balance and falling in a heap.

  “You cannot touch the satellite,” Teal’C informed him gravely.

  “I thought it was a moon,” he sputtered.

  “It is,” Jackson responded. Jackson was checking over the gear draped all over the mechanical puppy. The others had barely given the sky a glance, and were paying no attention at all to the wonder overhead.

  For the first time, it really sank in. He’d been awake all night thinking about it, but never really believing it in his bones until this moment: He was somewhere else. Somewhere with three moons, a place that smelled like a Planter’s processing plant.

  “As I said,” Teal’C added. His characteristic frown deepened minutely. “You should get up.”

  Teal’C specialized in unnecessary advice, Kinsey decided. He got up again, trying to get used to weighing about thirty-five pounds more than he did five minutes ago.

  “Wow.” It was a totally inadequate remark, but he felt he had to say something. “One giant step” had already been taken. Besides, it was more like one giant thud in this case. He rotated one arm experimentally, making sure it was still in its socket.

  A roar like thunder echoed to the—west? Instantly, the team was on the alert, scanning the horizon.

  “What was that?”

  But O’Neill was waving them over to a small copse nearby and didn’t look like he was ready to act as a tour guide. The other three team members took off at a businesslike jog, the cart trundling behind, and Kinsey had to scramble to keep up.

  “What was that?” he repeated as they ducked into cover.

  He could have sworn that Carter glared at him. O’Neill made an abrupt downward motion with his hand, and Kinsey opened his mouth again, determined to get an answer.

  “Shut up,” Jackson whispered harshly. “That was weapons fire.”

  Well, at least he had an answer. He looked around at the—no, they weren’t really trees; they were more like upright vines, with tendrils snaking out to each other for support. Wherever light hit the vine, it pulsed outward like a beating heart, broadening its absorbent surface area. Distracted, he held one hand over one of the broad areas and watched fascinated as it shrank in the shadow.

  The thunder rumbled again, and he looked up to see O’Neill studying him. The colonel looked as if he was beginning to regret the whole idea of bringing Kinsey along.

  His next words supported that perception.

  “Carter, I want you to go back to the Gate and shove our friend here back home,” he said.

  “Yes sir.” The blonde major responded promptly and without the least sign of reluctance. Kinsey could have sworn that if anything, she was happy about the order.

  “Wait! You can’t. I haven’t, haven’t seen anything yet. I mean, where’s the fire, Colonel? Where’s the crowded room?” He was babbling, wild to stay. There were aliens out there, and he wanted to see!

  O’Neill wasn’t impressed, and Carter was on her feet, waiting, rifle in hand.

  “All you’ve done so far is show me that we’ve got space travel. I thought you were trying to keep my mouth shut about it. Besides, I’ve been under fire before. I won’t get in your way.”

  “Uh, Jack—” Jackson interrupted, at almost the same instant that Teal’C said sharply, “O’Neill!”

  Kinsey turned to see what the other two were looking at and nearly choked. Standing in the little plain that separated their copse of vine-trees from the round Gate stood… something.

  Aliens he wanted; aliens he got.

  “Hasn’t anybody told this world about the inverse square law?” O’Neill inquired plaintively.

  The thing’s body stood about twelve feet tall at what Kinsey couldn’t help but identify as a shoulder, with a shiny black carapace and a triangular head that looked like nothing so much as a praying mantis. It balanced on six impossibly slender legs. Its body was almost a perfect cylinder, with a long, flexible tube at one end that terminated in the triangular head. The smooth hardness of its carapace blended into a wrinkled, leathery skin on the neck. If the alien stuck its head straight up in the air—which it didn’t do often, preferring to keep it slightly above body height—the neck added another six feet of height.

  In its arms it cradled something that was probably a weapon. It too was long and roughly cylindrical, catching the sunlight as metal did. It reminded him of nothing so much as the rifle that Carter, beside him, carried at the ready. It was slung onto a harness woven around the thing’s legs and body, not quite clothing but definitely manufactured.

  Three more, similarly attired and armed, entered the clearing behind it. The tubular necks were snaking in all directions, wrapping around each other briefly as if in greeting and then twisting to scan the horizon. Two of the things stalked over to the Gate, examining it and the DHD as if they had never seen it before, sticking necks through and curving them around to look at themselves as if locking their necks through a hoop.

  “Uh, sir—” Carter said hesitantly.

  “Belay that order. Dammit,” O’Neill directed, and sighed. Without taking his eyes off the aliens, he went on, “Okay, Kinsey, you wanted space travel and alien worlds, you got it. Let’s see what you think the man on the street on Earth ought to know about it.

  “Dave Morley didn’t say anything about tubenecks on P7X-924. He was supposed to rescue one of our teams on this world from the Goa’uld. Teal’C, what are those things?”

  “Those aren’t Gold?”

  “Goa’uld,” Jackson corrected. “There’s a glottal stop in the middle of the word.” The younger man was staring intently through the camcorder as it ran quietly, taking data.

  “Not the time for a linguistics lesson, Daniel. Teal’C?”

  “I do not know,”
the answer came. “I have never seen these people before, and I have never heard them described. They appear to have been attracted by the activation of the Gate.”

  “I agree, and I don’t like it,” O’Neill muttered.

  “They don’t seem to be familiar with the Gate,” Daniel remarked, still filming. “And that pattern of digitation—I wonder if they’re from here at all. Maybe they got here in ships.” He kept on talking softly, providing a running commentary for the film. “That neck-twining thing looks like a giraffe mating dance. Appears to be related to communication, although these people do vocalize.”

  People? Kinsey wondered, unable to tear his eyes away from the creatures now directly between the little party of humans and their only means of escape. The creatures were making a chirruping sound as they spread out in the fashion of recon teams from time immemorial. Both Jackson and Carter were running their camcorders. Kinsey’s hands itched for a camera.

  “They look like something out of a Heinlein novel,” Carter remarked as she changed out tapes. “Starship Troopers, maybe. Or Tunnel in the Sky.” .

  “Yeah, well, the good guys always won in his books, but we don’t have any such guarantees.” O’Neill was on one knee, his rifle rested butt-down on the ground, shielding himself behind a low-hanging vine. “I wonder if this is what Dave really saw. If it is, then they’re responsible for his breakdown, too, which means we probably don’t want to walk up and introduce ourselves. What we’re gonna do is sneak the hell around them and try to get to the city again and see if we can figure out what happened.”

  “There are cities, too?” Kinsey said, unable to keep the rapture out of his voice.

  O’Neill glared at him. “Your job is to keep out of our way and to stay alive, in that order, Kinsey. I’m not going to lose one of my people because of a journalist. Understand?”

  “I’ve been in combat,” the journalist retorted with an injured look. “I know the drill.”

  “I’ve got news for you, mister. Out here there aren’t any drills, because it’s different every time. We owe you nothing, you understand? But if I give you an order you’re going to follow it, right now, no questions. Got that?” O’Neill’s voice was low, his words rapid-fire.

  All four of them were looking at him now, their faces expressionless. This is a team, Kinsey realized, a real team, not just four people thrown together for an assignment. He had seen this before in tightly bonded military units, and he knew O’Neill meant exactly what he said. His own life was his responsibility. They took care of each other first.

  From the clearing behind them came a gentle hissing sound from the triangular heads. It sent a cold chill down his back. Kinsey swallowed twice. “I got it.”

  The hissing sound increased exponentially, and SG-1 and their unwanted guest snapped their attention back to the clearing, flattening themselves even closer to the ground. The tubenecks were becoming agitated, their triangular heads swinging back and forth.

  “They’re looking for something,” Carter whispered.

  “And I think they found it,” O’Neill responded in a low voice. “Seven o’clock.”

  Kinsey traced the imaginary line. The four tube-necks had converged in front of the Gate, their necks twisting together like courting giraffes. A flickering speck at seven o’clock was rapidly becoming larger.

  The speck became a dot, a blotch against the sky, splitting and coming together again.

  “It’s a moth!” Carter sputtered. “A giant moth!”

  And it was: a giant moth with extra legs—arms?—folded up close to its thorax. Unlike the tubenecks, it didn’t seem to be carrying anything. Its wingspan stretched at least fifteen feet across, in three sections, the largest on top, a smaller wing segment in the middle, with the third segment midway between the other two in size. It was brown, with white and black markings scattered randomly across its entire surface. Its body, from one end to the other, was longer than a tall man. It didn’t have antennae.

  And its thorax was sheathed in something that didn’t look like moth fur.

  “Oh, come on. Those things aren’t Godzilla. That can’t be Mothra.”

  “Could it just be an animal?” Carter asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jackson responded. “It’s tough to tell yet whether it has intelligence or not. It seems to recognize the tubenecks, though. It’s obviously perceived them and is responding to their presence. From the reaction of the tubenecks it’s an aggressive move.”

  “Scientists,” O’Neill muttered.

  Teal’C was ignoring this byplay, Kinsey noted. It appeared to be an excellent example to follow.

  Both camcorders whirred steadily.

  The tubenecks split apart, scattering to four quarters, and the moth hovered between and above them. Even at this distance they could hear the beating of its brown wings against the air, see a shimmer as some kind of dust fell from the wings to the ground.

  Then the tubenecks fired their weapons simultaneously, with a stream of blue fire. The brown wings burst into flame and the moth fell, screaming thinly. The tubenecks converged on it.

  “I can’t see what they’re doing,” Daniel Jackson fretted, standing up to get a better view for his camera.

  “I don’t care what they’re doing. This is a really good time to retreat,” O’Neill retorted. “Let’s go, people.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  They crept through the underbrush, pausing only to disentangle themselves from the vines and creepers. Kinsey found himself panting to keep up with the others as they made their way around a small outcrop of rock and slithered to the top to study their back trail. The tubenecks were heading in the opposite direction, and all five breathed a sigh of relief.

  Kinsey took the opportunity to look around. One of the three moons was setting, huge against the horizon; a thin trail of smoke twisting up from the ground marred its red-gold beauty. Eastward of the smoke, jagged reddish-purple mountains defined the distance. Patches of trees—or what passed for trees—dotted the plains below them. In the middle distance he could see the Gate, rising out of the ground as the only object that was clearly artifact, manufactured by intelligent hands. Or handlike objects. Would that be handibles? Handoids? Not far away, the ruined body of the moth still smoldered.

  He glanced around at the others, who were taking a break after making sure there was no immediate threat. “Wow,” he said.

  Carter looked up at him and gave him a brief grin. “Yeah, wow.”

  At least somebody appreciated the sheer wonder of the situation. He was beginning to think that the three men on the team were either entirely without imagination or simply jaded by too much exposure to the unearthly.

  O’Neill was watching him too, his face expressionless. There was no telling what kind of thoughts were moving behind those dark eyes.

  “Colonel,” Kinsey said, trying to be conciliatory, “I really don’t want to get in the way. I especially don’t want to get myself or anyone else killed. So do you think you could just fill me in on the basics, so I have some clue?”

  O’Neill’s lips tightened. Before he could say anything, Jackson spoke up. “He’s right, Jack. He’s here; time to give him Briefing B.”

  “Yeah. Like, who are these Goa’gurgle you’ve mentioned?”

  O’Neill waved a hand to Jackson, who took it as permission and assumed his lecturing-professor persona.

  “The Goa’uld are intelligent aliens, with space-travel capability. We think they found the Stargate system rather than built it themselves, but they’ve found it very convenient, probably because it’s faster than ship travel. We’re not certain where their original homeworld is. In their natural state they look sort of like worms, or lampreys, as adults, but before that they spend several years in a larval form. In order to survive as larvae, they have to achieve a symbiotic relationship with another species. They first visited Earth at least three millennia ago, with the intention of harvesting human beings for use as hosts.”

  K
insey found his mouth open, an oh come on now hovering unspoken. Then he glanced up at the sky again, remembering the tubenecks and the moths and the conflict he had just witnessed, and decided to let Jackson continue uninterrupted.

  “A few decades ago we discovered the Stargate on Earth. More recently we found out how to operate it.” Jackson paused and bit his lip, obviously trying to decide what parts of a very large and complex story to tell. The other members of the team remained silent, listening. “Anyway, the first world we found was the planet Abydos. Abydos turned out to be one of many planets the Goa’uld had seeded with human beings from various cultures and periods of Earth history. It also provided the clues we needed to operate the Gate to reach those other planets. This is one of those planets.”

  “Ra,” O’Neill said laconically.

  “I was trying to be brief,” Jackson responded.

  O’Neill shrugged.

  “Who’s Ra?” Kinsey said predictably. None of this had been in the manual he’d read the night before.

  “Ra was a Goa’uld who was using the people of Abydos as fodder—harvesting them as hosts.” Jackson’s voice was suddenly tight and uneven, as if this part of the narrative had personal meaning for him. “We—well, Jack—destroyed him.

  “We thought that was the end of it, but another Goa’uld discovered the coordinates for Earth. That brought Earth into direct conflict with the Goa’uld.”

  “Okay,” Kinsey said, trying to buy time to choose the first of the dozens of questions that were vying for precedence. “So we’re at war with these guys. They’ve actually launched an attack on Earth itself? Why the hell shouldn’t the world know?”

  “Because right now the Goa’uld aren’t unified, any more than we are. But they’re perfectly capable of taking advantage of a world split into factions pro-alien and con. Before that happens, we’re trying to accumulate information about them, their various factions, plus all the other worlds out here. Apophis, the one we’ve got really ticked off at us, apparently doesn’t have all the resources he needs to launch an overwhelming attack right now. We’re buying time, and we’ve got no guarantees we’re going to win,” O’Neill said wearily. “It’s bad enough that we can’t even get support from our own government. What makes you think the whole world will cooperate?”