Relativity

by Stargate

  Mirris snorted. “Some damage was inevitable. Continue on attack axis and bring all guns to bear on enemy vessels.” She straightened, her fists clenching. “Close the distance to the migrant colony ship.” Then, as an afterthought, she glanced at the holograph. “Where are the fighters that attacked us?”

  “Fighter craft have been neutralized,” Geddel said instantly, “Confirming, two positive kills, one target crippled and falling away without power. Likelihood is high of crew termination.”

  “Two positive kills?” Mirris echoed. She peered at the screen, watching the single icon representing the Death Glider spiral away, falling back toward the gravity well of Kytos. “I see only one wreck.”

  “Yes, administrator,” Geddel replied, regaining some of his poise. “The two Calaian fighters were atomized. If you wish, I can turn the main cannon and do the same to the other ship.”

  Mirris turned her back on the display. “Do not be wasteful,” she chided. “They’ll burn up in the atmospheric interface. I’d prefer to keep our war shots for bigger, richer targets…” On one of the secondary screens, the rocky shape of the Wanderer loomed large. “Like that one,” she continued. “Weapons control. Load bio-agent warheads on all ballistic munitions and target the colony ship.” Mirris felt a giddy rush of anticipation. “They will answer for Ryn’s failure. I want every last nomad on that derelict to perish choking on their own blood.”

  Like everything else on the Aschen vessel, the hexagonal corridors reflected a bland kind of design that reminded Jack of the dreary, featureless halls of some government institution. Like they got the DMV to do all their decorating, he mused. The ship’s interior spaces were clean but dull, and only the flickering lights looked out of place; and even those gradually returned to normal functioning as O’Neill followed the old man along the passageway.

  “You have some idea where you’re going?” Jack said quietly, glancing up and down the corridor. “It’s just that I’ve skulked around the insides of enough alien spaceships to know they never have those ‘you are here’ maps like they do at the mall.”

  “Remember who you’re talking to,” said the old soldier. “And this isn’t the first time I’ve been inside one of these Aschen tubs. They like a basic, uncluttered layout. Every ship they make is built from the same components.” He halted at a flat brass panel flush with one wall and tapped it. The panel flipped open to present a display screen, which obediently illuminated.

  “What’s that?” said Jack, peering over the other man’s shoulder.

  “One of those ‘you are here’ maps,” came the sarcastic reply, “like they have at the mall.”

  “Really?”

  “Yup,” said the old man. “The Aschen are an officious bunch of pricks. You think of the worst bureaucratic crap you’ve ever seen and times it by a thousand, that’s their culture. Aschen Prime is like The Planet of the IRS. They’re the kind of folks who have ‘no smoking’ signs posted even though nobody is allowed to smoke. And that’s why they have maps of their own ships on every deck. Because of their regulations.”

  Jack’s eyes widened. “How about that? And I thought the Air Force had regs that were redundant.” He scanned the corridor; the trilling alarms had gone quiet, and there were no signs of any security drones coming to investigate.

  “I’m tapping into the ship’s internal data network,” said the Commander. “See what we can see…”

  O’Neill’s hands opened and closed. Like he’d said before, he was no stranger to strolling through endless corridors, but he mostly had a gun in his grip when he was doing it. Here and now, with nothing to hand more lethal than his bootlaces and some sarcasm, Jack had to admit he was feeling somewhat vulnerable.

  “Weapons storage,” said the other man, as if he’d read his mind. But then, I shouldn’t be surprised he thinks the same way I do, Jack told himself. “On this level, two panels down that way,” he concluded.

  “Let’s go, then.”

  “Not yet.” The old man’s hands traced over the touchscreen. O’Neill couldn’t follow what he was doing, but then he couldn’t read Aschen either. His counterpart saw him watching and gave a small shrug, answering the unspoken question. “You know how it is. You pick things up along the way.”

  A new screen opened and trails of text rolled up it. After a moment, the other man’s expression shifted slightly. “What you got there?”

  The old man’s frown deepened. “We’re moving into the Pack fleet, on a combat alert. Mirris has deployed drones in orbit and on the ground.” He shook his head. “A stand-up fight. That’s atypical Aschen behavior. She must have gone off the deep end.”

  “All the more reason to stop her.” O’Neill insisted. “What else?”

  His counterpart hesitated and Jack read a trace of relief there. “No readings of any thermonuclear detonation on Kytos. The charge I planted hasn’t gone off.” He sighed. “Jade must have got to it first. She’s still alive, I know it…”

  “That’s a good thing,” said O’Neill.

  “She’s all I have left.” The words were almost a whisper, like they came from far away, so quiet that Jack almost missed them.

  “You ever tell her that?” From out of nowhere, the colonel felt a sudden surge of compassion for the elderly commander. For a moment, it was like he saw this Jack O’Neill for what he really was; an old and lonely man who had sacrificed his future in a war that had taken everything he cared about.

  “Never enough…” began the other Jack, “Never enough time. It’s always been about time.” Then a shadow passed over the old soldier’s face and he turned a fierce glare on his younger self. “Don’t you look at me that way, boy! Don’t you look at me with pity on that face!” He gave Jack a shove, pushing him away.

  “I don’t feel sorry for you,” Jack told him, “but now I think I understand you.”

  The commander made a spitting noise and walked on down the corridor. “You don’t understand anything, O’Neill. That was always your problem, just skatin’ over the surface of things, being glib, playing off your luck, letting Sam and Daniel and Teal’c do the heavy lifting. Lost them one by one, and then it was too late. Now it’s down to me, like it should have been.”

  Cold certainty crept through Jack’s bones, a dark and familiar sensation that he had thought long since banished. “No, I get you, old man. I get it all. Now you’re the one who’s forgetting who he’s talking to.” He stepped in front of his counterpart, halting him in the silent, empty corridor. “You’ve got a death wish. After everything you’ve lost, you just want the pain to go away. You want to make it stop. You’ll do whatever you can to make it end.”

  “You don’t know me!” snarled the old man.

  O’Neill shook his head. “I’m the only person who ever will. Because it’s a place we’ve been to before, haven’t we?” The words came out without any conscious effort, spilling from him. “After Charlie died. That moment, in his room, with that damned gun in my… In our hands. Ready to do it. If General West’s men hadn’t come that day…” The memory of his son’s death stabbed him like knives; the accident had been his fault, it had been his pistol, his responsibility. The stark recall hit him hard, undimmed by the passage of time. Just for an instant, he was there again, standing at the edge of that abyss.

  “They came to tell me about the Stargate. Reactivate me. I took the assignment.”

  Jack’s head bobbed in agreement. “But even then, it was a one-way trip. A suicide mission. There was nothing to come home for. And that was—”

  “That was what I wanted.” The old man finished his words for him.

  The silence between them went on for long seconds before O’Neill spoke again. “Yeah. I think I understand you, old man. Better than anyone ever could.”

  “I have a mission,” husked the commander.

  “Me too,” said Jack, “but no-one has to die for it.”

  Jade followed Jackson into the storage tent. She spotted Ite-kh’s gear immediately, the
Re’tu’s strangely-tailored vest lying in a heap on a collapsible trestle table, his weapon and his equipment piled to one side. There was dark insect blood on the vest and she tried hard not to see it, pushing away any thoughts of her dead alien friend. We’ll mourn our casualties later, her father would always say at times like this, when we’re done. But they were never done, and people kept on dying. When the time came when they could mourn, the number of the lost would overwhelm them.

  “Here, hold this.” Daniel pressed the Re’tu’s beam pistol into her hand and picked through the equipment. Her fingers closed around the oversized grip and by reflex she checked the charge and the power setting. Jackson had his back to her, and she realized that it hadn’t even occurred to him to think that he’d just given a live weapon to a woman who had been his prisoner only a few hours ago. He trusts me. The realization was a small victory among all the mayhem around them. “Thank you,” she replied, but he was too intent on his search to acknowledge her.

  Jackson removed the Ancient device from an inner pocket in the torn vest and cradled it in his hands. “Identical to the one you had.” He ran his finger along the seam and the pod folded open, presenting a glowing sheet of holographic controls. “It follows the same logic pattern as other Ancient technology I’ve seen. I think, I can…” He drifted off, tapping at the virtual console.

  Jade watched him work and felt sad. All the things she had wanted to tell him from the moment they had met in the corridor at the SGC bubbled up into her thoughts, streaming together. You were always such a kind person When I was a teenager and we were hiding on Chulak you were my teacher I had such a crush on you I never really got over it When Mom died you hugged me and said it was okay to cry Then the Aschen killed you and I was cut adrift I missed you Daniel I’m sorry I had to lie —

  “Jade.” His voice brought her out of her reverie with a jerk. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine.” Emotion thickened her voice. “Can you do it?” She gestured at the pod.

  “Well, from what we’ve learned, items of Ancient technology have some uncanny attributes, including an innate ability to work in unison with other items of Ancient technology, sometimes even at interstellar distances…”

  “Like the Stargates.”

  “Yeah. I think I can configure the pod to locate the nearest other pod… Which should most likely be on Mirris’s ship, if they took your father.” The device chimed and the display shimmered into green hues. “That… That looks like it. I think.”

  Jade held out her hand. “Give it to me. I’ll beam up to the ship and do whatever I can to neutralize it.”

  He frown ed. “I’m not letting you go alone.”

  “I can’t risk —” Letting you die again. The words choked her and she stumbled over them. “It doesn’t matter. The pods can only transport one person at a time, anyway.”

  Daniel shook his head. “Nope, that’s wrong. The field has an adjustable radius, here…”

  “It does?”

  He held out the pod and she leaned closer. “Like so, see?” Before she could stop him, Jackson’s thumb touched the activation pad and the nerve-tingling dislocation of a transit jump engulfed them both.

  Awareness gradually returned with sluggish, unpleasant slowness. There was the coppery metallic taste of blood in her mouth, and the acridity of raw ozone. The stink of air ripped open by electricity filled Carter’s nostrils and she suppressed a gag reflex. The action made her head loll, her neck rubbery and loose. Some indistinct object— part of a panel, maybe?— glanced off her face and Sam raised a weak hand to bat it away, failed. She licked dry lips, and tried to take stock of herself. Carter felt the telltale queasy sensation of zero gravity in the pit of her gut, but found herself stuck, rooted to the spot. The straps on her flight couch were tight over her shoulders and chest. With effort she extended her hands, fingers encountering the flickering controls in front of her. Sam blinked and felt blood gumming her right eye. How long? How long was I out? Laboring, she drew in a breath of tainted, smoky air.

  “Teal’c?” she managed, pushing the word out of her mouth in a slur, her tongue like a lump of old leather. “Y’hear me?”

  When no reply came, she tried to turn in her chair, but the exertion was like shifting a sack of wet sand. Abruptly, a knife of light sheared in through the canopy and marched across her, over her lap and up her chest. The glare needled Sam’s eyes and made her gasp with pain. After a moment to adjust, she squinted out through the transparent canopy. A streak of brilliant white glow was the reflected light of Kytos’s sun, hanging in a diamond ring corona over the surface of the planet’s day/night terminator. The gigantic black pearl of Kytos drifted lazily past; the Death Glider was in a spin, turning end over end, caught in a glittering nimbus of vented breathing gases and hull fragments. A jagged, broken piece of plastic skipped off the glass as it passed her.

  As Sam watched, the planet fell away, and the light continued its inexorable march up the canopy and down the length of the cockpit. Carter marshaled whatever reserves of strength she still had and pushed it all into one action; bracing her foot against the aerofoil control pedals, she managed to shift herself around enough to crane a look aft.

  The shaft of light traced over the ruined cockpit, illuminating tiny pieces of debris suspended in mid-air. It drew over Teal’c, who shifted against the pull of his straps like a stiff mannequin. Only the shallow rise and fall of his chest indicated the Jaffa was still alive. Sam saw dark streaks across his chest where his wounds from Ryn’s attack had reopened.

  “Hey!” Carter gave a hoarse bark, hoping to get a response. She gasped, and her breath curled away in a pop of vapor. The temperature was dropping rapidly, and with dawning recognition, the major realized that it was becoming harder for her to breathe. Slowly and deliberately, Carter worked at the console before her, ignoring the gradual tunneling of her vision, the grayish fog that began to clog her every move. Lights on the panel steadied and she blew out a sigh of relief as the emergency life support circuits kicked in.

  The Gilder’s erratic orbit turned it back toward the planet again, and now Carter was sure that the Goa’uld fighter was on a shallow descent course, heading inexorably into the grip of Kytos’s gravity well and a fiery death. She worked reluctant controls and made the ship stable, bringing it about to face the battle raging over the planet.

  Teal’c coughed and came back to wakefulness. “Major…” He began.

  “I’m okay,” she lied. “Can you get me mains power? Thrusters and guns?”

  “I will endeavor to do so,” came the stoic reply.

  He was as good as his word; in a few moments the Glider came under its own power and Sam throttled up, angling the craft back up toward the engagement. The Aschen vessel was moving like a slow knife, pushing toward the Wanderer through the breaking ranks of the Pack flotilla. As she watched, Carter saw a Goa’uld mothership shatter from within, disintegrating in a plume of nuclear fire.

  “Communications traffic,” said Teal’c gruffly. “Patching in.”

  Sam was instantly assailed by a cacophony of voices, some calling out for help, others in blind panic. Amid them she distinctly heard Vix; “The Aschen are opening their missile bays. Can anyone confirm? Are they going to launch?”

  “Teal’c?” she asked.

  The Jaffa nodded. “Vix is correct. I read several ship-to-ship weapons in pre-firing patterns…”

  Carter glanced up. They were powering back into the fray from below Mirris’s ship— not that concepts like up and down made a lot a sense in a space battle— while the majority of the confrontation was concentrated in a higher orbit. She could just about pick out the open missile chambers arrayed along the ventral surface of the Aschen craft’s hull. “What are they planning?” she said aloud. “They’ve got more than enough beam weapons to do the job.” The Death Glider’s targeting computer saw where the pilot’s attention was focused and dutifully enlarged an image of the location for her scrutiny. Sam
got a good look at the payloads sitting inside the firing tubes and her blood ran cold.

  There were missiles in there, each one the size of a school bus; and where Earth-made rockets would have had a conical cap instead they had a glassy sphere containing a writhing, blue-hued gaseous plasma. Carter had seen the same thing before on Volia, when the Aschen had tried to destroy SG-1. “Bio-weapons!” she shouted, “They’re going to fire—”

  As one, all the Aschen missiles leapt from their launch cradles and corkscrewed away on fingers of white-orange flame. In a lethal flock, they turned and rose toward the Wanderer.

  Daniel Jackson had been reduced to his component molecules and reassembled on more occasions than it was probably good for his sanity to consider, with hundreds of Stargate sorties, ring-transport journeys, Asgard beam-ups and beam-downs to his credit; but he wasn’t prepared for the sickening, inside-out sensation that the pod forced through his body. When the drab and featureless walls of the Aschen starship solidified around him, it took all of his self-control not to expel the contents of his stomach over the floor. He staggered a couple of steps and lurched against a rack of metal shelving. “Oh,” he began, “now I’m wishing I had let you go on your own.”

  Jade handed him a water bottle and he greedily took a swig to wash the taste of bile out of his mouth. “You think you feel sick now? That was just a point-to-point teleport. A time-jump transition is like that dialed up to ten. I puked my heart out the first time we tried it.”

  “Charming.” Jackson looked around, taking stock of their location. It was a storage chamber, with racks of Aschen hardware in charging ports along the wall. He glanced at the shelving he was supporting himself on and blinked at the barrel of a discarded P90. Beside were a spread of recognizably Air Force issue devices, a radio, a gear vest, a pistol and holster…

  “This is an armory,” Jade offered, helping herself to another beam gun.

  “Here’s the other pod,” Daniel gathered up the gear, taking the P90 and thumbing off the safety. “Jack’s equipment is here as well. Mirris’s people must have no idea what the pod is. We’re lucky they weren’t trying to dismantle it—”