by Stargate
The old man made a disgusted spitting noise. “Look at you. You make me sick. I’m embarrassed to think I was like you once.” He got up and came to the bars, closing the distance between them. “You… I… We never used to be this weak. Back in the day. Afghanistan and Libya. Kuwait City. That thing outside of Gdansk? Remember those days, Jack? The things you did under cover of darkness?”
O’Neill’s blood ran cold. Each of those places, and more that the other man left unspoken, conjured moments from his tours with the Joint Armed Forces Special Operations Division, memories of missions so secret— so black— that many of his colleagues at Stargate Command had no idea of their existence. “I put all that behind me,” he said quietly.
That got him a sneer in return. “After Charlie, yeah. As if that would make things better. But you couldn’t help wondering, could you? If his death was payback for it all? Like scales being balanced?” There was accusation in the tone.
For a long moment, buried emotions pushed at O’Neill’s thoughts and threatened to rise up and swamp him; but then he met the old man’s gaze and held it. “That’s not who I am anymore. If you’re really me, you’d know that.”
“Yeah,” agreed the Commander. “You lost that for a while, that edge.” His voice softened. “The gate… It was redemption, in a way. Until the Aschen and the war, at least.” His eyes glittered like chips of granite. “That brought it all back. Had to be that man again, ruthless. You get me? Dosed up on alien tech to keep me tickin’, using everything we had to fight them. Tactics we never would have conscienced before…. But I couldn’t afford to be the good guy any more. Had to make choices, take a hard road.” He gave a soft, humorless laugh. “Black Jack came back.”
“In God’s name, are you deliberately trying to provoke a war?” Kinsey had given up all pretence of maintaining a calm and considered façade, and now the vice president’s face was red with fury. “You’re all as bad as O’Neill, nothing but a bunch of cowboys!”
“Ryn killed Williams in cold blood,” Sam retorted hotly, “Teal’c saw him do it! It was self-defense.”
“I cannot accept that,” Koe shook his head gravely. “Ryn was no stranger to battle, yes, but to commit murder…” He looked up across the long tent to Vix and the rest of the Pack delegation.
“He stabbed Williams in the back,” Teal’c’s voice was a rough growl, still leaden with pain. “He attempted to kill me, and shot down the Re’tu after it had surrendered.”
Koe grimaced. “Forgive me, but the word of Apophis’s First Prime is difficult to accept.”
“I am Free Jaffa!” Teal’c roared, startling everyone in the tent. “I do not lie! Whatever enmity lays between my people and yours, do not let it blind you to the obvious truth!”
Vix’s stony expression was rigid. “Why would he do such a thing, Jaffa? What proof do you have beyond your declaration?”
Daniel pushed forward and tossed something on to the long table. “How about this?” The silver rod rolled to a halt before the Pack. “The murder weapon.”
Koe’s eyes widened and he gingerly picked up the device. There was still blood on it. “A medical injector…” He noted.
“It’s not of Goa’uld or Earth manufacture,” Sam added. “It’s Aschen.”
She saw recognition creep across the Pack healer’s face. Koe nodded slowly. “Yes. Yes, the major appears to be correct. This is indeed of Aschen origin.”
“You know of them?” said Jackson.
Vix nodded once. “We have encountered the Aschen… And their works.” His manner betrayed the low esteem the warrior had for the aliens. “They offered us membership in their Confederation of worlds if we would settle in their space. We declined their offer and the refusal did not sit well with their emissary.”
“Was her name Mirris, by any chance?” Daniel asked.
“It was,” Vix eyed him. “How did you know?”
“Educated guess.” He glanced at Carter, who gestured for him to go on. “That’s not all the Aschen kit that Ryn had. Teal’c also found a communications device in his ship. Now, unless the Pack have recently salvaged any Aschen vessels—”
“We have not,” Suj broke in.
“Then Ryn was likely working with Mirris,” Sam finished. “He killed the Re’tu to stop it raising the alarm and Teal’c was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He just didn’t reckon on Jaffa strength.”
“Ryn came to silence me while I lay injured,” continued Teal’c. “He would have killed Jade as well if I had not been able to stop him.”
A grim silence settled over the Pack side of the room as Vix, Koe and Suj exchanged glances. Finally, the historian-engineer spoke. “Ryn made no secret of his plans to challenge you for leadership, Vix. When we refused the Aschen offer all those cycles ago, perhaps he did not.” Her face was troubled. “Many of us wondered why they did not simply force us to submit to their rule. Now we know why.”
“They always said they were a patient people,” Koe admitted, “and it was only after our encounter with them that the grain blight came upon the Wanderer. I never dared suspect the two might be connected, but now…” He trailed off and looked up to meet Teal’c’s gaze. “Forgive my earlier words, Jaffa. I see I may have been in error.”
With a sudden rush of motion, Vix came up from his chair, startling all of them. The big man’s craggy hands balled into fists. “Ryn was my rival but I gave him commerce, the free trade of ideas and trust! Now I hear this, and curse that he is not here to answer to it!”
“Mistakes were made,” Kinsey ventured; Carter could see that the situation was getting away from him again, and he wasn’t willing to let it go. “The important thing is, we’re still talking. We can still walk away from this with something tangible.”
Vix glared at the politician. “The matter has gone beyond questions of trade and treaty, Kinsey. We skirt issues of honor now!” He took a menacing step forward. “Every man, woman and child in the Pack is free from the yoke of the System Lords. I will not stand by and let them be manipulated by the Aschen instead!”
“I… Couldn’t agree more,” replied Kinsey, clearly daunted by the other man’s passionate rejoinder.
There was a commotion at the entrance to the long tent and Sam blinked in surprise as the door flap was flung open and the woman Jade entered. She was sallow and drawn, but her face was set with determination. “I have to be heard!” she snapped, shrugging off Lieutenant Everitt’s hand on her arm.
“It’s okay,” Sam told the officer. “Let her speak.”
Colonel Reynolds nodded agreement, speaking up for the first time. “The major’s right. If you’ve got something to say, now is the time.”
Jade threw a look at Daniel and he gave her a supportive smile in return. She looks like hell, he thought. It can’t be easy for her to be here, to have had to go through all this.
“I’m the one who sabotaged the assembly on Earth,” she said bluntly, “I did it to stop the Aschen using your people to take revenge on mine… But things have gone beyond that now.”
Kinsey sniffed. “I appreciate your confession, young lady. When we return to the SGC, I promise you there will be plenty of blame to be apportioned.”
Jade shot him a withering glance. “We’re not going back to the SGC, Mr. Kinsey, not unless you listen to me! I failed in my attempt to prevent this meeting and now other contingences have been set in motion!”
“Why do I not like the sound of that?” said Reynolds.
“Somewhere out in the jungle is a naquadria-enhanced fusion device primed to detonate, probably on a timer.” Jackson heard the shock at her statement roll around the tent. “It’s got a failsafe that will trigger it early if anyone dials out from the Stargate. I can disarm it, but we have to find it now.”
“You admit your part in this subterfuge with one breath and then you ask to prevent it in another?” Suj snorted. “Now you wish us to trust you as well?”
“My father activated it before he and… A
nd Colonel O’Neill were taken by the Aschen’s drones. I’m the only person who knows how to defuse it.”
“You must find it first,” said Teal’c.
Sam gasped as a thought struck her, and she pulled a small hand held sensor device from her pocket. “If she can give me the energy pattern, I can track it down.”
“Are you sure?” Kinsey demanded.
Daniel saw Sam look right past the vice president to Colonel Reynolds. “Sir. Permission to execute EOD sweep?”
Reynolds gestured sharply. “Don’t wait for my say-so, Major, go, go!”
Daniel caught her arm as she turned to leave. “Sam! What about everyone else?” He lowered his voice. “There’s not enough ships down here to get everyone off the surface if you can’t find that bomb.”
Carter glanced at Jade, then back at Jackson, and he felt her eyes boring into him. “You said you trusted her, despite everything that’s happened. Now we’ll get to see if you made the right call.”
The two women headed out toward the tree line, and into the darkness.
O’Neill watched his counterpart’s craggy, age-scarred face. He was caught between pity and fury at the old man. “So you brought your war here? You made your own kid a soldier, you played it like a coward, like a terrorist?” He shook his head. “I look at you and I’m supposed to accept that you’re what I’m going to become? A man who sneaks a nuke into a peace conference. Someone willing to sacrifice the lives of his closest friends and the men he served with for a mission objective.”
“The end justifies the means. The camp gets wiped out, the treaty’s gone and the Pack collapses, Mirris and the Aschen get caught in the fallout.” His lip curled. “Earth goes on, the SGC goes on. Millions live instead of dying. The war never happens.”
“There’s gotta be a better solution!” Jack snapped. “Stop this! We’ll help you find Mirris, we’ll go after the Aschen and hit them first.”
The old man shook his head. “Doesn’t work out. We tried it that way and that jackass Kinsey screwed it up even worse, started a goddamn interstellar conflict.” He sighed. “This is the best tactic. Quick and clean. No survivors. Just like in Libya.”
“This is nothing like that, and you know it,” O’Neill retorted hotly.
A crooked finger tapped on the bars. “Out there, thirty years from now, thirty damn years of hell, with everyone dead and the rest of us barely hanging on, the human race goin’ over the edge to extinction… All of it’s ruined, Jack. The whole galaxy, on fire. This is the only way to stop it.”
O’Neill pushed away and turned his back on the old man. “To hell with you. I don’t care if you’re me or the Ghost of Christmas Future or Santa freaking Claus. I’m not going to trade one set of deaths for another. Not now, not ever. If you won’t help me, I’ll stop it myself.” He knelt at the fresher unit and turned all his attention on the device, looking for something he could use to escape.
“So, is this thing on a countdown, or what?” Sam asked, holding her scanner close to her face, reading the display. A faint trace lit the edge of the sensor envelope.
“Primary detonator will be a remote link. Failing that, after a pre-set period a timed delay will kick in.”
“What’s the clock on the timer set for?” Carter asked.
“I have no idea,” Jade admitted.
“Great,” said Sam, “so no pressure, then.” She kept her P90 in her free hand, alert for any signs of trouble, but as much as she tried to keep her thoughts on the immediate problem, her gaze kept wandering back to the girl. And without thinking about it, she said the words. “You’re Colonel O’Neill’s daughter.”
“Commander-in-Chief O’Neill, yes,” she corrected, and then pointed along the ridgeline. “This way?”
“Yeah.” Sam kept close, a step or two behind her. “You’re from the future.”
“The year 2032, Earth calendar,” Jade replied. “I’m not going to be born for another couple of years yet.”
Sam fumbled with her next question. “What’s it like… then?”
Jade didn’t look at her. “If it was good, I wouldn’t be here.”
She frowned, her thoughts swinging back and forth between questions of the mundane and ordinary, and the scientific and cosmological. Inevitably, the scientist in her won out. “I get what you’re trying to do here. Change your own past for the better and everything… But M-theory means you may not change anything. History splits off into branches at every decision point… You may do all this and get home to find nothing is different.”
“Maybe,” she agreed, “but it’s worth the risk. If you saw how we lived, you’d feel that way too. Where I come from, mankind is a generation away from extinction. Even if you’re right, if time splits into alternates and our future still happens, at least you won’t have to live through it.”
The simple directness of Jade’s statement made Carter shiver involuntarily. “If you succeed, you may cease to exist in this timeline. It’s not much of a reward-loss balance.”
The other woman laughed quietly. “You’re amazing. I’m telling you about the end of the world and you’re worrying about me.” Jade gave Sam a sideways look. “You’re just the same as you were. As you will be.”
“You know me?” Carter asked, even as a voice in her head warned her to say nothing more. “We were friends?”
The moment of warmth on Jade’s face faded. “We were,” she replied. Then the scanner beeped, and the woman became all business again. “Do you have it? We must be very close.”
Sam saw the bloom of radiation on the scanner. “I read something over there. An energy surge, very faint.”
Jade broke into a run. “The device is charging,” she called, “we don’t have much time, it’s on a build up to detonation.”
Carter sprinted forward and came upon something that looked like a camouflage poncho heaped over a shallow pit in the jungle loam. Jade ripped it away and the two of them hesitated at the sight revealed. It was similar in mass and design to the unit that Sam had disarmed in the air shaft at Stargate Command, but she could see immediately that this device had a much larger naquadria vial, and far more strands of anti-tampering mechanisms.
A holographic panel showed a stream of tumbling symbols; they had no more than a minute before the bomb went critical. Carter felt sick inside. She had no time to dismantle the weapon, no time to think it through as she had back on Earth. Her hand hesitated on the hilt of her knife, even as she realized her slash-and-hope approach wouldn’t work again here.
“Let me,” said Jade, bending down to study the keypad. “It’s locked with a codeword for deactivation.”
“You know what it is, right?” Sam asked.
The other woman shook her head. “Nope.”
Carter’s knuckles tightened around her weapon. “You told me you could disarm it!”
“That wasn’t the complete truth,” said Jade, tapping out data strings into the panel. “What I meant was, I think I can disarm it.” The spool of vanishing symbols was streaming away to nothing before Sam’s eyes. “My father programmed this,” she explained, as calmly as if they were discussing the weather, “and he’s never been that original about coming up with passwords.”
Carter’s mind raced; she remembered a discussion about the same thing, years ago at the SGC when she’d accidentally discovered Jack was using the name of his favorite sports team as a code key. In the tension of the moment, her mind blanked. “Ice hockey!” she blurted.
Jade shook her head. “I guessed that one when I was twelve, and he stopped using it. And, besides, I tried it already.” She hesitated, then typed something else. Sam didn’t see the word, but it did the trick. The symbols froze and the device went inert, shutting down.
With care, the two of them pulled the bomb from the earthen pit and secured it in Jade’s backpack. When she was sure it was safe, Carter allowed herself a moment to take a breath. “That was close. Two bombs in a week. I don’t want to have to do that again any time s
oon.”
Jade nodded distractedly, staring out into the trees.
“So what was the codeword, then?”
“A name,” Jade said quietly. “My mother’s name.”
A branch snapped out among the trunks and Carter caught the sound of movement over fallen leaves. “We got company…”
A shape, large and metallic in the twilight, rolled forward, picking its way through the jungle. Twin limbs ending in gun pods turned toward the women, thread-thin targeting lasers cutting through the air. “Drones!” snapped Jade.
“Run!” shouted Sam, and she pulled the P90’s trigger, lighting up the night with an arc of muzzle flash.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
In the clean and well-lit chamber, the clinician showed Mirris how the interview chair would operate, demonstrating the unit’s restraints and the multiple injector ports along the arm rests and the torso mounts. There were wireless monitor pods that would keep track of blood chemistry, heart rate, neural condition, endocrine saturation and the like to ensure that the subject remained completely awake during the interrogation; medical automata arms lay curled up behind the chair, ready to unfold in the event of a catastrophic physiological collapse. The machine was designed solely to prolong the life of a subject while information was extracted from them.
Mirris kept the device on board her ship with the vain hope that one day she would have the chance to use it, and now, by some odd chance, she found herself wishing she had brought two of them. Confederation Central would be eager to see what secrets the Tau’ri Colonel had to give them, but in all truth Mirris cared little about what kinds of intelligence they could glean from Jack O’Neill; she only wanted him to suffer.
“I would suggest processing the older one first,” the clinician was saying. “He will likely not survive an intensive interview. Additionally, his bio-scan shows signs of some interesting cellular reconstruction on the nanometric scale. I deduce he may have used rejuvenating chemicals at some point… After he expires I would like the opportunity to conduct a dissection of his major organs.”