Relativity

by Stargate

“My equipment, then!” Jade snapped. “Bring it to me! It’s important! I have to see the pod…”

  Jack shook his head. “Nope.”

  Jade rocked back in her chair and fell silent. After a moment, she spoke again. “All right, then.” She convulsed and her eyes rolled back in her head, showing the whites.

  “What the hell?” said the guard. A drool of white foam issued out of Jade’s lips and she lolled back against her chair, twitching.

  “Ah, damn it!” O’Neill got to his feet and punched the intercom on the wall. “Containment room six, medical emergency. I need a doctor down here, double-time! The prisoner’s having some kind of seizure!”

  The guard was already at the girl’s side, reaching for her.

  “Careful,” Jack began.

  “I’ve got her, sir,” said the airman. But he hadn’t.

  Jade moved like lightning, her eyes snapping back as she did an nearly-impossible pivot on the steel chair and spun her legs around to scissor-kick the guard in the head. The man fell and she was rolling over him, tugging his Beretta M92 pistol for the holster on his belt as she flipped, her jumpsuit making her a blur of orange.

  O’Neill pulled his own gun and leveled it as a shot echoed through the concrete room. The colonel felt the sonic pulse as the bullet passed his head and smashed the intercom vox on the wall. Jack shifted, his back pressed flat against the door, and then they were there, the two of them aiming guns at each other’s heads.

  “Drop the weapon and get out of my way.” Jade spoke tonelessly.

  “I’m not going to be doing that,” Jack’s reply was careful.

  “I’ll kill you,” she told him.

  The moment the words left her lips, he knew it was a lie. “No. You won’t.” He looked her right in the eyes. “You can’t.”

  She pulled back the pistol’s hammer. “I will!”

  “This from a woman who planted a bomb that was made to be a dud. Who could have used her nano-deelies to strip Carter’s skin from her bones. Who let two prisoners live when it would have been simpler to just roll them in a ditch somewhere.” He nodded at the insensate airman on the floor. “All those guys you beat up? You went for disabling hits instead of straight kills. And now you’re gonna turn murderer?”

  “Get out of my way!” she shouted, her face reddening.

  “Seems we had this conversation before,” Jack safed his weapon and placed it back in the holster. “Gate-room? Remember? I didn’t go then. I won’t go now.”

  Jade flinched as if he’d struck her. Slowly, the woman turned the pistol in her hands, weighing a darker and more final solution to her confinement.

  O’Neill used the moment of distraction and grabbed at her, tearing the weapon from the woman’s grip before she could use it. “What the hell were you thinking?” he demanded.

  Jade sat silently on the table and looked up at him. Her eyes were shining. “I’m sorry,” she said, in a small voice, like a child. “I’ve let you down. I’ve let everyone down.”

  Behind him, the door slammed open and in the corridor beyond there was Warner, Siler and a detail of armed men. Jack ignored them and kept his steady gaze on the girl. “Why don’t you tell me about it?”

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Jaffa walked the edge of the tree line, taking care to move as silently as possible, his staff weapon held in the crook of his arm. Although he had made no mention of it to Major Carter, he was glad to have been given the opportunity to slip away from the discussion in the long tent. She was a perceptive woman; Carter only had to glance at him to see the hardness in his eyes and know that Teal’c was, as O’Neill would have put it, “bored out of his skull”. She suggested quietly that he check the perimeter and Teal’c was more than willing to oblige.

  Listening to Kinsey’s pontifications and Vix’s grim-faced rebuttals tried his patience. More than once, the Jaffa had entertained the fantasy of bellowing “Enough!” at the top of his lungs and slamming his staff down on the tabletop. What was it, he wondered, that made all races become hidebound and slow when affairs of state were the matter at hand? Politics— he loathed the idea of it. It was anathema to a man of action like Teal’c, and he hoped fervently that his nascent nation of the Free Jaffa would not fall prey to the same sort of chattering and time-wasting. He had not fought to break the yoke of the System Lords for such things…

  He passed around the soldiers from the SGC and the guardsmen from the Pack flotilla, taking care not to disturb their patrol patterns. All seemed attentive and at the ready; he threw a nod to Everitt, who stood at the outer edge of the encampment, and the wary young Lieutenant raised his rifle in a half-salute.

  Teal’c hesitated for a moment at the edge of the open clearing where the Pack had landed their ships. Already, an unspoken agreement had formed between the two groups, with the Air Force troopers sticking to their side of the space and the warriors of the Pack keeping out of the tented camp, but Teal’c was Jaffa, and he felt that gave him the entitlement to move wherever he wished. He walked on, around the slightly inclined glade, studying the silent vessels. Most of the Pack’s guardsmen were concentrated around a thermal heater at the rear of the parked Tel’tak; the cargo vessel’s loading ramp was down and dull red illumination spilled from inside. He noted this with an approving nod— Vix’s men were intelligent enough not to ruin their night vision with lights in the normal spectrum.

  He continued on his patrol, passing the two parked Death Gliders. They were models he recognized, two-seater Osiris-types with twin fixed energy cannons. Between them sat Vix’s personal starfighter. The Pack’s leader no doubt had the pick of vessels in the flotilla’s inventory, but rather than pilot something showy and large, the man had chosen a compact craft, a well-muscled ship that gave fully half its fuselage to a triad of pulsar engines. Twin beam weapons hung either side of the blunt snout, and the puffs of carbon scoring around them made it clear they were no strangers to being fired in anger. Teal’c found himself wondering what the starfighter would be like to fly; doubtless fast and lethal, but perhaps without the agility of a Glider.

  His attention was on the cusp of wandering when an involuntary twinge in the muscles of his forearm brought the Jaffa back to the moment. The sudden bloom of tension flowed through him and settled in a tightness around his chest. There is a threat here.

  Teal’c’s eye line was instinctively drawn across the landing field to one of the other Pack ships, the swan-necked flyer. The craft had an oval primary hull with engines on outriggers and a delicate forward fuselage studded with canards and gun muzzles. Ryn’s vessel, he remembered. The egress hatch at the rear was open, and as he watched through the bubble-canopy, the Jaffa made out the shape of something moving inside the ship’s cockpit. Just the ghost of a motion, a faint shadow; there was something about the movements that struck him as wrong, as covert.

  “Intruder…” The word came out in a whisper, a confirmation of what his senses were already telling him. He was feeling the same rough edges of sensation that had brushed against his thoughts back at the SGC. Was it possible? Could the Re’tu saboteur somehow have followed them here, to Kytos?

  Part of Teal’c knew that his first action should be a warning to Carter and the others, but that part was drowned out by a hot flood of anger, by the need to face the enemy that had left him beaten and bleeding in the SGC elevator shaft. Keeping low, he skirted around to the swan-ship’s aft quarter and slipped through the open hatch.

  “No, Doctor Jackson, down here.” Siler pointed along the corridor in the opposite direction.

  He halted, drumming his fingers on his belt. The rush of adrenaline from the raid on the Farrell house was still tumbling around his system, and the helicopter ride back to Cheyenne Mountain hadn’t calmed him any. “This is the way to the base’s cells, isn’t it?”

  “Yes sir,” said Siler, “but the prisoner’s been moved to medical isolation on Colonel O’Neill’s orders.”

  “She’s sick?”

  �
�No, but Doctor Warner…” Siler frowned. “Well, I guess it probably would be best if the colonel filled you in on the whole thing.”

  Daniel nodded. “Okay. That way, then.” Jackson followed the sergeant, musing. He’d relaxed a little after they’d touched down and Warner’s senior nurse— Cathy, that was her name, the one who had the nice smile— had taken custody of Wells and the boy. She’d confirmed what he’d begun to suspect on the flight back, that the white residue was some kind of by-product of nanomachine use. Clearly, the nanites she deployed had multiple applications. Perhaps the marks on his jacket had been some kind of tracer; and it was obvious that Jade hadn’t tried to dose him in the same way she had the others. He found that odd. Why had she left him untouched?

  Siler opened the door and gestured inside. “Here we are, Doctor.”

  Daniel stepped into the room and saw a ring of medical monitors, a couple of gurneys and assorted other kinds of hospital hardware. Jade was sitting on one of the beds with a dejected look on her face as Jack and Warner stood nearby in close conversation with General Hammond. He couldn’t miss the two armed Marines flanking the door, each with an M4 rifle in a ready stance.

  The woman looked up as Daniel approached and a glimmer of gratitude lit her face for a brief instant.

  Jackson’s first response surprised him. “You didn’t hurt her?” he demanded from O’Neill, feeling a flare of anger as he recalled their earlier conversation.

  “Of course not,” the colonel shot back hotly.

  “I’m… okay,” offered Jade. “I thought it would be best to have a doctor present.”

  “Present for what?” said Daniel.

  “I’m still against this, Colonel,” Hammond’s voice was low. “Willfully exposing two of my senior staff to this, it’s inviting havoc.”

  Jack nodded at Warner. “The risk is minimal, right?” The doctor nodded back warily. “He knows what to look for, how to pull us out if it all goes screwy. And it’s not like we haven’t done this kind of stuff before, with those human-form Replicators.”

  “Sorry, what?” Daniel waved a finger, trying to get a feel for the situation. “I’m missing something here.”

  Jack kept talking. “I’m going to run the risk, General. We need to know the whole truth, sir, not just scratch around with pieces of it.” He pointed at the woman in the orange jumpsuit. “If her way is the only way to do it, then I’m taking that train.”

  “Perhaps, if I had a couple of days to give Major Wells and the boy a thorough examination, learn more about the nanites.”

  “There’s no time for that,” said Jade dully. “Everyone on Kytos is in jeopardy.”

  “So you say,” replied Hammond. “For all we know, this could be an attempt to manipulate us into taking you there.”

  “General,” O’Neill’s voice was firm. “I know this sounds wacky, but I trust her. Even after everything that’s happened, I believe one hundred percent that she is not lying about this.”

  “I trust her too.” It was a moment before Daniel realized that the words had been his. He frowned. “Why do I get the feeling I just agreed to something I shouldn’t have?”

  “She’s willing to give us the skinny on her mission and the reasons behind it,” said Jack, “but only to you and me and only through, uh… What did you call it?”

  “A neural induction link,” Jade replied. “It’s like touch-telepathy, but via technological means.”

  “As in those nanites?” Daniel’s blood ran cold.

  Warner had one of the vials of silver fluid in his hand. “She’ll need this.”

  Hammond took the glass tube and stepped closer to the woman. “I want you to understand me, miss. I’m agreeing to this against my better judgment. Hell, I’m agreeing in spite of all evidence to the contrary that I should lock you up and throw away the key. The only reason I’m not doing that is because those two men say they trust you.” He unlocked the cuffs around her wrists and handed her the vial. Jade pressed it to the back of her hand; with a slight hiss of pressure, the silver liquid discharged into her flesh. “You need to know one thing,” the general continued, the normally composed lines of his face hard and serious. “If I even so much as suspect you are attempting to coerce or injure Colonel O’Neill or Doctor Jackson, those two Marines at the door there have orders to shoot you where you stand. Are we clear?”

  “Perfectly, sir,” Jade replied. “I don’t want to see them hurt any more than you do.”

  “Then let’s get this over with.” Hammond stepped back as Jack approached the gurney, beckoning to Daniel.

  “C’mon. What, are you chicken?”

  “A little,” Jackson admitted, coming closer. “I don’t want to end up blank-eyed and brain-fried.” He tapped his head. “It’s my favorite organ.”

  “My second-favorite, actually,” said O’Neill.

  “This is different to what I did to Tyke and Hannah,” Jade raised her hands, and he saw the shimmer of something metallic on her fingertips. “It only works when you’re in physical contact with someone else. I’m going to give you both a direct link into my conscious thoughts. You’ll see my memories.”

  “The truth?” asked Daniel.

  She nodded. “I can’t lie to you in there. No-one can.”

  He was aware of Warner taping medical sensors to his throat and temple. Jade’s fingers touched a spot behind his right ear and he flinched; it was cold.

  “Here we go,” she said. “This will feel…a little weird.”

  The Pack ship was cramped, the interior spaces ranging off a single narrow corridor that ran from the open airlock at the aft right through to the slender cockpit area in the nose. Teal’c belatedly realized that he had practically no room to maneuver his staff weapon inside the close quarters; a zat’ni’katel or a Tau’ri handgun would have served him better. He moved silently forward, spreading his weight as he moved to avoid any tell-tale creaking from the deck plates beneath his boots.

  The pressure on his senses was there, the taint of the Re’tu’s presence hanging in the air. Light shifted as something rendered barely visible moved in the cockpit section. The shape dithered over a console and then drifted away. The Jaffa studied the panel that had attracted the alien’s interest; it seemed out of place, as if it had been retrofitted into the swan-ship’s systems. Where the controls of Ryn’s vessel were made of beaten copper or red-enameled steel, this device was of blank, brushed silver. A hologram cube hovered over it, turning slowly. Teal’c’s eyes narrowed. It looked like some kind of communications module, and the design was familiar to him, but he couldn’t place it.

  He moved closer, to the threshold of the hatch that led into the cockpit proper. There. He saw the shimmer, like heat haze, where the Re’tu was toying with the ship’s navigational logs.

  The Jaffa knew that the staff was useless to him in such a confined space. He let it drop with a clatter that drew the arachnid’s attention, the Re’tu’s ghostly head swiveling to face him.

  The creature pushed off at him, spinning around hands of bladed talons, but Teal’c was too fast. The two warriors collided with one another and went down to the cockpit floor, the alien’s form shimmering between opaque and glassy invisibility.

  There was this one time, out at Nellis for a Red Flag tournament, when O’Neill had learned what the real meaning of the term flight envelope was. Aviators use the phrase to describe the graph of capability given to any particular aircraft— how fast it can go, how high it can fly, how many gees it can take before it starts to spit rivets and disintegrate, that kinda thing— and each plane has its own one. Take your aircraft too far toward the upper right-hand corner of that graph, though, and bad things will happen to you. And on this one day, when he was strapped into the cockpit of an F-16C and making it do things that would have caused airframe designers to weep, Jack had learned that the reason it was called an envelope was because the upper right-hand corner was the place where they got stamped.

  The bird just ca
me apart underneath him and one second he was flying, the next he was falling. Ejected, out, tumbling toward a featureless sea of desert. And the rush, the sensation it gave him… Jack had never forgotten it.

  What was happening to him now was a lot like that, except this time he didn’t have a parachute.

  “Holy crap.” She hadn’t been wrong when she said it would be weird. Jack felt a dozen sensations all at once, flashing through him with incredible speed. Images and feelings bounced through his mind’s eye so fast he could barely comprehend them. The fur of a sleeping cat. Ice cream taste on the tongue, chocolate chip. A dog barking. Screams. Freshly-cut grass. Falling. A gunshot wound. Wet stones. Music, like wind chimes. Darkness. And cold. And…

  He shook the feelings away, letting them ebb. “Uh. That was unpleasant.” O’Neill blinked. The cold was staying with him, not fading like everything else. It was a deep chill, the kind that made you feel like the ice was getting into your bones. He shivered involuntarily and looked up. “Oh.” He managed, after a moment. “Wow.”

  Desolation; the word had more meaning to Jack in this one moment than it ever had before in his entire life. They were standing on a road, with stands of dead trees going on for miles on either side. Cars were dotted here and there along the highway at odd angles, like they were toys abandoned by a child. The sky was the color of old granite, low and threatening; the air was the worst thing, though. It was dense with the smell of decay, old ash and damp rot. He was walking, Jackson and Jade there next to him.

  She wore a slight frown, concern in her eyes mixed with a sort of sadness that reminded him of doctors. That kind of look they had when they brought you bad news. Someone you love is gone forever. I’m sorry. Are you all right?

  “Are you all right?” said Jade. “Take a moment. The shift can be difficult if you’re not used to it.”

  “Where…” Daniel seemed to sag under the weight of his own question. “Where are we?”

  “Still in the SGC, still in that room,” she explained, “but this is from my memories. You’re getting it first hand. Think of it as virtual reality.”