“Sir… what happened with Lord Yu?” Sam asked. “What made you decide not to kill him?”
“Good question, Carter.” Jack put a hand on the back of his neck.
When he didn’t say anything more, Daniel pushed him. “Jack?”
Some things needed answers. Especially when that something was Jack not acting like… well, Jack. Normally, he’d jump at the chance to knock off another Goa’uld, so whatever happened between him and Yu — it had to have been significant. Daniel had no way of knowing. The communication device had blanked out when Yu ringed down to meet him.
Finally, Jack just shrugged. “Contrary to popular opinion, not all battles have to be about winning.”
“Speaking of winning…” Daniel shoved a hand in his lower pant-leg pocket and pulled out the four dragons. He gave the red one to Jack, the grey to Teal’c, and the blue one to Sam.
“These are lovely, Daniel,” said Sam.
Jack held up his dragon. “Now you’ll have something to carry with you, Carter.”
“I already have something, sir.” She grinned at Daniel and he instantly understood what she meant.
Placing his dragon on the console, Jack asked, “You’re sure Yu isn’t going to be pissed when he finds out you took them?”
“He kind of gave them to me.”
“He told you to take them?”
“Maybe not in so many words.” Daniel glanced down at the one he’d kept for himself. “But I think he’d agree that I earned them.” The dragon’s green eyes reminded him of something Lao Dan’s ancestor had once said, and Yu had driven home.
Words were just words, but the father of Taoism had been right. A man who didn’t know where he’d been, couldn’t know where he was going.
Maybe he couldn’t remember his time as an Ascended Being, but as he looked at his friends, and then out at the stars streaking by, Daniel knew one thing was certain.
He was home.
CODA
STARGATE COMMAND
STATUS: SAR MISSION ACHIEVED
05 JUL 03/1620 HRS BASE TIME
Jack strode into the locker room, ready for a good, long hot shower. Hammond had gotten his debriefing, Frasier got her examinations, and Siler… well, Siler got a round of thanks for saving their butts with a few well packed P90s.
As he made his way over to his locker, Jack noticed yet another row had been installed. Hammond had said something about more SG teams so it only made sense.
He went over to take a peek at the name tags. Major Lyn, Captain Allen, Lieutenant Ford… Jack had spent a bit of time with each of them. They were perfect additions to the S.G.C.
The fourth member of the team’s locker was labeled: Kevin Hopkins, PhD.
Jack vaguely remembered him from the attack on P3Y-702. He was an old archaeology friend of Daniel’s. A bit high-handed, but if it made Daniel happy to have Hopkins around, it was fine with him. How the guy would fare on an SG team? Well, that was Hammond’s problem. Not his.
Sitting down in front of his own locker, Jack cracked the door. He took out the old Van Dyck cigar box and opened it up. A photo of Charlie welcomed him home.
He pulled out Skaara’s Zippo and placed it in the box beside the photo.
As he closed the lid, a breeze blew by.
* * *
The story continues in STARGATE SG-1: The Drift.
About the Author
Diana Botsford has written science fiction for a variety of mediums including books, television, stage and comics. Her screenwriting credits include “Rascals” for Star Trek: The Next Generation and episodes of Spiral Zone. She recently completed her first original novel, Critical Past, and the comic book series, The Fracture. Prior to picking up the pen, she worked in the television and film industry as a producer and visual FX supervisor. When she isn’t writing, she teaches the craft of writing for the Missouri State University screenwriting program.
Find out more at dianabotsford.com
Sneak Preview
Stargate SG-1: Oceans of Dust
by Peter J. Evans
It was cold, up on the mountain. A frigid wind was whipping down off the high peaks, laden with powdered snow and sharp, stinging frost. As soon as Jack O’Neill stepped out onto the Stargate’s dais the wind hit him in the face, making him duck away from it and shield his eyes. The transition from the flat, filtered air of the gate room to this painful scour — with only the subjective tumble through the Stargate itself between them — took the strength from him.
“Whoa,” he gasped, blinking hard.
There was a sharp intake of breath next to him as Daniel Jackson left the gate and got a mouthful of the same jagged air that was battering O’Neill. “Okay, that’s cold.”
“Think it’ll wake you up some?”
Daniel cupped his hands together and blew through them. “Nature’s espresso.”
O’Neill would have preferred the real thing. He was no stranger to early starts, but being rushed through the Stargate in the small hours of the morning wasn’t really how he liked to begin his day. Not that he had any idea what kind of time he had just stepped into: no other world rotated at quite the same rate as Earth, or span at the same distance from its sun. All he could tell was he had left Stargate Command at three in the morning and had walked out of the gate into bright, if cloudy and bitterly cold, daylight.
There was another gasp behind him as Carter arrived on the dais, and then Teal’c followed her through, striding quickly across the platform and down the short set of steps to ground level. If he was surprised by the weather, he didn’t show it, but O’Neill hadn’t expected him to. “We should have sent a MALP,” he griped, starting down the steps.
“There wasn’t time,” Daniel replied. “Anyway, Bra’tac said that the conditions were okay.”
“I think he was lying.”
“‘Bracing’,” said Carter. He saw her shrugging unconsciously deeper into her uniform, trying to let her tac-vest take the brunt of the weather. “He said the climate would be ‘bracing’.”
“Gotta be a Jaffa thing.”
O’Neill felt the wind tug at his cap, and put a hand up to clamp it tighter onto his head. “Teal’c, this feel ‘bracing’ to you?”
“I had not noticed.”
“Figures.” Where the three humans were almost crouched against the wind, Teal’c was standing as upright and unconcerned as though he were indoors; his staff weapon held at vertical rest, his head tilted almost imperceptibly as he scanned the surrounding terrain.
O’Neill heard the grumble of the event horizon rise in pitch, and he glanced back in time to see the rippling mirror behind him fragment and spin away to nothing. The gate became an empty stone ring atop its dais, revealing nothing but gray rock and the pale, roiling sky.
In fact, apart from the sky and the mountain, there was almost nothing to see anywhere. To O’Neill’s right the ground jutted into a cliff, ragged-edged and brutally steep. To the left it fell away into what looked like an uncomfortably sheer drop. The two cliffs joined somewhere behind the gate, and splayed away from each other ahead, forming a narrow, roughly triangular step that curled away out of sight. Broken stone littered the ground, parts of the upper cliff that had shattered away and fallen onto the step, and everything around the Stargate was rimed with slippery frost. It was a monochrome place, lifeless and desolate and utterly dangerous.
Which told O’Neill much about the people who would choose this world as a place of refuge.
He saw Teal’c lift his head slightly. “What?”
“We are being watched, O’Neill.”
He had thought as much. “Up on the ridge?”
“And from the broken ground behind the Stargate.”
O’Neill resisted the urge to check. “Nice job. Good lines of sight, no chance of crossfire.” In such terms, the placement of the gate made a lot of sense. There wasn’t enough room around it to form a staging area, no space to rank troops or set up equipment. Anyone emerging from it
could go neither left, right or to the rear — an invader would always be funneled forwards, while anyone on the cliffs above could rain fire down on them with impunity.
The Stargate had been set up in a killing zone.
Realizing that made O’Neill even more anxious to get out of the cold. “Teal’c, can we hurry this up?”
“Our instructions were to wait and allow ourselves to be observed.”
The wind gusted in a high whistle, spattering O’Neill with sleet. “If we wait much longer they’re going to be observing four popsicles.” He glanced up at the Jaffa’s impassive face. “Three popsicles and, well, you…”
“Very well, O’Neill.” Teal’c took a breath and shouted: the harsh, barking language of the Goa’uld.
An answering voice came from above, up on the cliff edge. O’Neill saw no-one. “What was that?”
“We are required to identify ourselves.” Teal’c called back, a barrage of syllables.
As soon as he had finished, men appeared.
They were Jaffa, that much was obvious. O’Neill counted ten up on the cliff top, their heads and staff weapons suddenly outlined against the scudding clouds, and at the sound of scuffling behind him he turned to see another half-dozen taking up position behind the gate.
All the new arrivals were holding staff weapons. Like Teal’c, however, they were carrying them upright, which O’Neill took as a good sign, just like the fact that none of them were in any kind of uniform. Most were hooded against the cold, some wore long robes that fluttered madly in the wind. He did spot a few items of what he had come to know as typical Jaffa armor and equipment, but on the whole, the men approaching him looked like people who had picked up whatever they could and run for their lives.
The Jaffa on top of the cliff began to descend, running down a set of carved steps so narrow and fractured that O’Neill had thought them just another crack in the stone. Within a few seconds, they had reached level ground and spread out into ragged formation a few meters away. It was all O’Neill could do to keep his MP5 slung and his hands low.
Finally, one of the Jaffa stepped forwards. He shrugged back the hood he had been wearing and raised a hand. “Teal’c!”
In response, Teal’c tipped his head. “Tek ma te.”
The hooded man’s dark skin was roughened by time, and a life in the service of terrible masters. He wore a skullcap, a neat white beard, and on his forehead the golden symbol of Apophis glittered in the meager light.
O’Neill let out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding.
Bra’tac stepped forwards. “Greetings. You are here sooner than I had hoped.”
“Couldn’t keep away.”
“Once we had your message, General Hammond wanted us here as soon as possible,” Daniel explained.
“Yeah…” O’Neill suppressed a shiver. “He was eager. Nice place you’ve got here.”
Bra’tac was perfectly capable of recognizing human sarcasm, although sometimes he chose to pretend he didn’t. Today, it seemed, he had no time for such games. “It may be harsh, O’Neill, but for the moment it is safe.”
“Perhaps no longer,” Teal’c replied. “If you have indeed found what you describe.”
“Which is why I contacted you as soon as I discovered the bodies.”
That was news. “Bodies?”
“Of course. The significance of the ship was hidden until I saw who had been at the helm.” Bra’tac turned away, into the wind. “Follow me.”
He stalked away. The Jaffa he left in his wake shifted into a kind of expectant line, waiting for O’Neill and his companions to follow. None of them, O’Neill noticed, had acknowledged Teal’c in any way other than suspicious glares, and some looked as if they would have been happier with their staff weapons leveled and open.
Teal’c made no comment on this, and O’Neill decided it would be churlish to bring the subject up. Maybe later, he thought. When things are a little warmer all round.
He set off after Bra’tac, trotting to keep up with the man’s long strides, Carter and Daniel falling in alongside him and Teal’c a few steps behind. A rearguard position. The fact that he thought this necessary made O’Neill feel even less comfortable than before, if that were possible.
Bra’tac reached the bottom of the stone steps and launched himself up them. Watching him, O’Neill winced slightly. “Okay, people. Don’t try this at home.”
“No intention, sir,” muttered Carter.
O’Neill reached the bottom step, hesitated, then planted his boot on it. Immediately he felt it slide fractionally, frost and loose grit on its surface forming a treacherous coating. He sighed, then saw Bra’tac frowning back down at him. “Hurry,” the Jaffa snapped.
“Fine…” O’Neill steadied himself against the rock on either side of the steps, and began to climb.
Stargate SG-1: Oceans of Dust
Published March 2011
Table of Contents
FOUR DRAGONS
CONTENTS
PRELUDE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Interlude
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Interlude
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
CODA
About the Author
Sneak Preview
SG1-16 Four Dragons Page 29