Relativity

by Stargate

  “You think she’s from this planet?”

  Sam gestured with the papers. “Doctor Warner seems to think it’s likely. She’s definitely an Earthborn human, doesn’t appear to have any of the biological markers we associate with our off-world cousins. Warner’s doing full blood panels and physiological work-ups right now. He should have the results within the hour.”

  There was an x-ray image in among the papers. Jack tapped it with a finger. “And that?” He gestured to the back of his head, indicating the location of a dark smudge on the scan. “I heard him say something about surgical implants.”

  “Yes sir,” Carter nodded. “She’s got an artificial device attached to the inside of her skull, close to the brainstem, and what seem to be nanomachine reservoirs in the hollows of her arm bones. ”

  “Her head’s not gonna blow up, is it? I’ve had enough of booby traps for one day.”

  “This room’s being blanketed with high-intensity electronic countermeasures to block any incoming or outgoing signals, just in case.” Sam frowned. “But she doesn’t seem the type to me, colonel.”

  Jack’s eyes narrowed. “They never do.” After a moment he looked back at her. “How’s Teal’c?”

  “Pretty ticked off. Soon as he had his ribs taped up, he was pushing to join the sweep teams outside the base looking for the Re’tu.”

  “I take it they haven’t found it?”

  Carter shook her head. “It clearly used the Ancient device to beam out of the base. I’d be willing to bet that by now the pulse effect has worn off and it’s regained its ability to become invisible.”

  “So we’d have a snowball’s chance in hell of finding it anyhow. Great. A missing major, our computer firewalls leaking like a sieve, and a giant spider loose in the Colorado Mountains.” Jack felt like he was going to spit. “I want to know how it was she was able to breeze through every level of our security like it wasn’t even there.” He blew out a breath and looked back down at the figures in the holding chamber. “At least we got something to show for this.”

  “How did you know she was going to go for the Stargate?” said Sam, after a moment. “There’s a dozen other ways she could have tried to get out of the facility.”

  Below them, the woman looked up and stared directly into the mirrored glass, as if she were looking Jack right in the eyes. “It’s what I would have done,” he replied.

  “If you release me now, I promise you I will return Major Wells to you unharmed.”

  Daniel flicked a glance at the security camera trained on the woman’s face. “Really? Take a look around. I don’t think you’re in a position to make any deals, do you?”

  Her lips thinned. “It’s funny.”

  “What is?” he grated.

  “Listening to you as you try to sound like an interrogator. But you can’t. You want to look like you’re not worried about Wells, but you are. You’re afraid for her life, but you don’t want to give it away.” She smiled a little. “You’re too kind a man, Daniel. You don’t even know her, and you’re afraid for her.”

  Jackson colored, fuming at her insight. “Can you blame me, after seeing what you and your Re’tu friend are capable of? Hannah Wells has a family, and yeah, I’m afraid that they will have to be told by someone like me that their daughter is dead.”

  She leaned forward. “Look at me.” She met his gaze. “This is me, not lying to you. Hannah Wells is alive and well. Believe it.”

  And the thing was, he did. Her words didn’t have the same kind of slick patina they had all the other times they had spoken. They were raw, unfiltered. He felt as if he were seeing into the truth of her, just for a moment. Then she closed up, and the instant was gone. “We’ll find her,” he replied. “You can be sure of that.”

  “Ite-kh’s difficult to control when he’s on his own.” She said carefully. “If I’m not around, he might do something… Unpleasant.”

  Jackson folded his arms. “Now who’s trying to play the tough guy? That’s a lie again. See, I’m getting the hang of you. It’s not so hard, once you know what to look for.”

  “You always were perceptive, Daniel,” she said quietly.

  “And while we’re at it, you have me at a disadvantage. You’re not Hannah Wells, so what is your name?”

  She sighed. “Jade. My name is Jade.”

  “Jade what?”

  The woman shook her head. “That’s all you’re getting for now.”

  “Why are you here? What’s your mission?”

  “I won’t give that up to you. Ask me something else.”

  “All right.” Jackson tapped lightly on the tabletop, thinking back to what the colonel had told him before he entered the room. “You said you’re from Earth…”

  “I never said that. But, yes, I am.”

  “So maybe you can tell me how it is you happen to be in possession of a number of alien artifacts?”

  “Don’t tamper with my equipment.” She shifted in her seat. “If I were you, I’d warn Major Carter to leave anything she doesn’t understand alone.”

  “Is that right?” Daniel’s lip curled. “Trust me, Sam’s smart enough to understand a lot.” He took two items from his pocket and placed them on the table; the strange probe-like thing made of bony shell and the data transmitter rod. “This,” he held up the organic probe. “Okay, I admit I don’t have the first clue what that is. But this thing…” He picked up the rod. “This is of Tok’ra manufacture, and they’re not real big on handing out their hardware to all and sundry. I’m thinking that makes you a thief as well as a liar.”

  She sighed. “The man I took that from had no use for it any more.”

  “What kind of lies did you tell him?”

  “He was my friend!” she snapped, suddenly angry. “I watched him die!” Jackson stiffened at her sudden outburst, and Jade herself was surprised just as much by it. What the hell was wrong with her? She’d let herself be caught, and now the ironclad mask she always wore was crumbling in her hands. As much as she wanted to, she couldn’t summon the strength inside her to lie to Daniel, to shroud herself in easy falsehoods. It was as if she had become glass, and Jackson could see right through her— but then, hadn’t that always been true?

  Jade glared at him. “I watched him die,” she repeated, “him and hundreds of others, over and over. It made me sick. I wanted to stop it. I will stop it.”

  “By attacking us? What does Stargate Command have to with this? What do the Pack have to do with it?”

  “Everything!” she spat, and sagged back into her chair. “Nothing,” she continued, deflating. “It’s all so…complex.”

  “Not from this side of the table.” Daniel put the devices back in his pocket. “Look, you were right, I’m no good at this intimidation stuff.” He jerked his thumb at the door. “But outside, there are people that are. And there’s a man on this base whose conscience will not prick him one iota when he decides to turn them on you.”

  “Kinsey…”

  “Understand this, Jade. If you don’t talk to me, you’ll have to talk to them.” He got up and walked to the door.

  “Daniel,” she called, her gaze falling to the floor so that she would not have to look him in the eye.

  “Yes?”

  “It wasn’t all lies. The connection, the friendship between us? That’s real for me.” She meant every word.

  The only reply was the sound of the cell door locking shut.

  “It’s my recommendation that we immediately recall all off-world SG teams, cease gate travel and postpone the meeting with the Pack until we can get a read on this woman’s intentions.” Jack had barely got the words out of his mouth before Kinsey made a spitting noise under his breath from across the briefing room.

  “Frankly, Colonel, I am staggered by the arrogance you display. After the monumental screw-ups you’ve allowed to occur on your watch, you then have the nerve to sit there and make recommendations to me?” The vice president’s face twisted with scorn. “What makes yo
u think that anything you say has any value at all?”

  Inwardly, O’Neill was seething, but he maintained an insouciant air of innocence largely because he knew that would annoy the politician. “Actually, I was talking to General Hammond, not you.”

  “I’m inclined to agree with the colonel,” said Hammond. “We need to isolate and contain any fallout from this incursion before we address any other concerns.”

  “You agree with O’Neill. What a surprise,” sneered Kinsey. “Well I don’t, George, and seeing as the President of these United States and the IOA have given me oversight in this situation, the colonel’s recommendations are irrelevant.”

  “Technically, that’s only oversight over the whole Pack treaty agreement thing,” broke in Jack. “Military matters like base security—”

  Kinsey’s fist pounded on the top of the conference table. “You’re going to lecture me on base security when you were the one who let alien terrorists inside the SGC…. Again!” He made a sharp gesture of dismissal. “Come on, Jack, why don’t you reiterate for the record just how many times you’ve taken this facility— hell, this whole damn planet!— to the brink of destruction?”

  A thousand acid retorts balanced on the tip of O’Neill’s tongue, but with effort he reeled himself in. “Well,” he said, in a languid voice, “I guess you had to be there, really…”

  “Here’s how it’s going to be,” continued the vice president, as if Jack had never spoken. “You and your people are going to clean up this mess, and we will go ahead with the rendezvous on Kytos. The Pack aren’t going to tolerate another delay. We postpone this thing now and we can kiss goodbye any chance of a trade alliance with them. Nothing is going to be allowed to stand in the way of this treaty ceremony, is that clear?”

  “That’s your direct order, sir?” Hammond said in a level voice.

  “Oh, you bet your two stars it is.”

  Sure, Jack thought to himself, why let a small thing like invisible enemy infiltrators stop you from grabbing at all the prestige you can get? Kinsey was too far into the Pack deal now to back out, not after he’d made a big show of it to the IOA and the rest of the political hordes in Washington. Even as the new president had been inaugurated, Kinsey had made no secret of his desires to take the Big Chair for himself. They’d barely gotten into the White House and already the politico was trying to cover himself in glory. No wonder he’s got such a bug up his ass about the situation… Well, more than usual.

  “Colonel,” began Hammond, “brief your people. I want SG-1 to run point at the meeting site.”

  “One more thing,” Kinsey spoke over the general. “Before I forget.” He pointed at Jack. “He’s not coming.” The politician glared at him. “You want to stay on base, O’Neill? Be my guest, because you’re on the bench for this one.”

  The Commander sat in the deep shadows of the rotting back porch, his leathery fingers curled around a beer bottle. He took a slow sip from the longneck and listened. There were noises coming from most of the other squalid single-story clapboard houses around the cul-de-sac where Tyke’s family home sat. A few were boarded up and dark, but the majority threw sticky yellow light out on to the street through windows lined with crude iron security grilles. He could hear the babble of a television set, the wooly sounds of people arguing through walls, and under it all a constant rolling rush of sound like surf, coming from the elevated highway crossing over the projects. In the distance there was the sound of glass breaking and the pop-pop-pop of an automatic pistol. It sounded like a nine millimeter.

  The noise of weapons fire made the old soldier tense a little, but he knew that the bullets weren’t meant for him. The gang tags on the walls told everyone that this was a contested area, a buffer for showdowns between the idiot tribes of misguided kids that populated the slums.

  Just the thought of them out there, these hordes of youths throwing each other’s lives away over nothing, set the Commander’s teeth on edge. They had no idea what they were doing with their future. They were wasting every second of it, squabbling over meaningless parcels of turf that were so infinitely tiny compared to all that up there.

  He glanced into the sky. It was difficult to see many stars because of the light pollution spilling from the highway lamps, but he picked out a couple of constellations: Cassiopeia, The Little Bear. He’d stood on the surface of worlds on the far side of the suns that made up those shapes and looked back towards Earth. He thought about Jade, when she was small, how she asked him to explain what the shapes on the Stargate meant, the glyphs that mimicked the star-silhouettes. He’d found her a dog-eared book on the sky at night and she’d devoured it, cover to cover in a single day.

  The old man rubbed the spot on his jawbone where his mastoid communicator was located; it had been quiet for days now. At his feet, in the dark, he had the grubby rotary telephone from Tyke’s kitchen, a connecting length of extension cord trailing away from it across the floor and out through the open screen door. Just in case she called; in case she was forced to use conventional comms. But she wouldn’t. He’d trained her better than that.

  At the corner of his vision he caught a glimmer of movement. A slight impression of a non-shape, of the overgrown grass in the backyard parting in a breeze that wasn’t blowing. Instantly, his beam pistol was in his hand, the weapon going warm in his grip to show it had a full charge. The Commander panned it slowly across the yard, and he saw the motion again. This time, there was a shimmering around it and presently he could make out the edges of the Re’tu as the alien adjusted its phase index enough that the old man could see some of it. Ite-kh was hazy, like something made of smoke. He could tell the arachnid was injured, and he fought down a pang of sharp fear. “Status?” he demanded. What he really wanted to do was to shout, “Where is my daughter?”

  Ite-kh rasped as he walked, in the Re’tu equivalent of panting. The creature settled low on its legs, moving gingerly on one limb that seemed to be broken. It signed to him with slow, deliberated care, making sure he understood it. Objective compromised. Mission in jeopardy. Agent captured.

  The old soldier’s knuckles went white around the neck of the bottle, and with a single fierce jerk he threw it hard at the concrete wall surrounding the yard. The glass shattered wetly, leaving a fan of beer over the shabby stonework. “I told her to be careful!” he growled. “Didn’t she listen?” He glared at the alien. “Why didn’t she listen?”

  The Re’tu bobbed gently on its good legs. Rescue dangerous, but possible, it told him.

  The Commander wanted to say yes; so it shocked him as much as it did his comrade when he shook his head. “No.” It was strange; for a moment, it was like someone else was making the choice for him. “We can’t risk losing someone else. There’s only the two of us now. The mission takes priority.” The old man snatched up the telephone and went back into the house. “Get inside. We can’t chance you being seen.”

  The Re’tu carefully pulled the door shut behind it and made a low whistling noise.

  “Don’t give me that face,” snapped the old man, without even turning to look at the alien. “You think I like it any more than you do?” He finally turned and shook an age-spotted fist. “For cryin’ out loud, she’s my only child! You think I wanted to make Jade do this crap? Hell, do you think I even wanted any of this for her?” He gestured around angrily, as if he were taking in all the room, the world, the whole universe.

  His voice carried, but no-one else in the house made any issue of it. From the other room, the muted sounds of a television on low volume reached his ears. He could see the shapes of two people on the threadbare couch; the ganger kid staring slackly into the screen, and beside him the Wells woman wearing a shapeless jogging suit that Jade had found in Keesha’s closet. They did little but breathe and blink occasionally. Colonies of nanites in their bloodstream were keeping them in something just the right side of a waking coma, docile and suggestible.

  Ite-kh used two of the kitchen’s shabby chairs to suppo
rt his thorax and picked at the wounds on his exoskeleton with a length of paper cloth. The alien eyed the Commander, not interrupting him, just waiting for him to work out what was pent up inside.

  “It’s my fault,” said the elderly warrior, for a moment feeling every second of his advanced years. “What was I doing, putting her in harm’s way?” He looked at his hands. “I made her just like me. And now I’m going to pay for it.”

  The alien cocked its head and grumbled. Risks were evident, it signed, best agent for the operation was chosen.

  “I know that,” he said hotly. “But I’m her commanding officer. I’m still to blame.” He sagged into one of the other chairs. “And now… Now I have to finish this myself.”

  Ite-kh’s manipulator talons were damp with the alien’s reddish-green blood, and the Re’tu took a piece of the disposable cloth and used the fluid to mark on it, then slid it across the kitchen table toward the Commander.

  The old man picked up the scrap. There were shaky four letters picked out: LNMB. He recognized the military acronym immediately. Leave No Man Behind.

  He was silent for a moment. Then he crumpled the paper in his hand and stood up. The grim, emotionless mask of leadership had returned to his expression. “We don’t have that luxury.” He walked away. “Patch yourself up and gather the gear. Make sure the pods are configured for an interstellar jump. We’ll piggyback off the Earth gate, save some power…” The old man paused at the threshold. “We do this right, and nothing that’s happened up ‘til now will matter a damn.”

  Carter checked the strap on her P90 for a second time and secured the weapon on her gear-vest’s fast-release clip. She looked up as Colonel O’Neill entered the staging room, with Daniel a couple of steps behind. The two men threaded their way through the soldiers readying their gear. Jack ignored the junior officers and non-coms as they came to attention, making a bee-line for Sam. She noted he wasn’t in off-world fatigues, but the base-side garrison jacket. “Sir?”