Shedri struggled to control his breathing as the cup dropped from his hands. “No,” he whispered. He moved sluggishly toward the door as he realized the implications of the key’s absence, only breaking into a run when he reached the wide expanse of the hallway. The guards he had summoned split to either side as he raced past them, muttering an endless litany of “No, no, no!” under his breath as he reached the treasury. Ordinarily he wouldn’t have been able to get inside, but now he could see that the door was standing open and unsecured. He threw the door wide and stepped inside to have his greatest fears confirmed.
The room was empty.
Shedri dropped to his knees and roared with rage as he stared at the bare shelves. Hundreds of thousands of direfs, gone in a flash. Even if the thieves could only get a fraction of the coins’ face value in exchange, they would still come out rich. For the past few months the royal family had been exchanging their old currency and stocking up on the new diref, a coin that wasn’t even in circulation yet. The royal family had just become the poorest people in the entire realm.
When Shedri finally found the strength, he rose to his feet and turned to see the door barricaded by his men.
“We will find the people responsible,” he declared, “and we shall make them pay! We must begin the search now, before they have a chance to escape!”
None of the men moved, save for a red cap who shouldered the others out of the way to join Shedri in the treasury. Shedri understood what was about to happen and felt his anger and dread giving way to reluctant bitter acceptance. He had failed the Queen and the entire royal line; he deserved his fate. He raised his hands and awaited the judgment for his failure. Whoever the midwife was, he hoped he would have a chance to repay her duplicity in the next life.
It had taken the maid nearly three weeks to discover the access corridor hidden within the Queen’s chambers. It stood to reason it only existed so royalty had a way to move around the palace unseen in the event of an attack, so she knew it was there somewhere. But for the longest time its actual location had eluded her. She had been forced to actually clean the entire room several times before she discovered how it was triggered. She tracked it backward through the stone walls and created a comprehensive map of all its points of egress. The next step of the plan involved getting her hands on enough ashroot to achieve their goals, but not so much it would harm the mother or child. Finally, they had to get the midwife out of the palace on the necessary day so the Queen was forced to get help elsewhere.
Months of planning boiled down to less than an hour of frantic scrambling in the darkness. They had barely been able to carry their ill-gotten gains from the treasury to the tel’tak they had parked on one of the unfrequented turrets of the castle, but all her work scrubbing floors and lugging her cleaning supplies around the palace had left her strong enough to make it work.
Now at the controls of the ship, preparing their great escape, she struggled to remember her true self. She had spent so long as the maid that it was hard to shake off the identity, but now that she was in her own space she was starting to find the mask was dissolving with each passing moment. The engines hummed and she looked over her shoulder. Through the open door of the cargo hold, she could see her accomplice securing the last bag against the hull with stretchy rubber netting. “The esteemed physician Shakatt,” as she would be remembered in the palace, but the maid knew her by a different name.
The physician exhaled, wiped her hands, and tucked her shock of white hair behind her ear as she strode forward. “Anything standing in our way?”
The maid looked at the readings that had just come to life. “Blue across the board. The royals might make a fuss about a search for thieves, but they won’t be too eager to let people know just how serious this is. They don’t want to tell people they’re flat broke.” She grinned. “Right now they’re keeping it so low-key that no alerts or restrictions have been issued.”
“Excellent!” The physician dropped into the navigator’s seat and put her boots up on the console. “Let’s get out of here before they decide justice is more important than saving face.”
The engine hum increased in pitch until the hull shifted under their feet. The maid set a course with the practiced ease of someone who spent more time at the controls of a ship than on her hands and knees scrubbing tile, her face set in serious concentration at her task. They received a few radio signals that neither of them bothered listening to and, within moments, the view out the front of the ship faded from a winter afternoon blue to deep violet.
“And we’re clear,” the physician said.
The maid smiled. “Yes, we are.” She linked her fingers and stretched both arms over her head as if she had just woken from a long nap. “Nice to be out of there. What’s the next step?”
“We go straight to Lucia. I have a fence there who is trying to pad the treasury for that new alliance they’re putting together. Coin is coin, doesn’t really matter where it comes from so long as someone considers it legal tender. They’ll only pay a fraction of what it’s worth, but a fraction of a royal fortune will still buy us a few weeks of nice suppers. Maybe even some new clothes.”
“It’s good to be freelance. Well done, Shakatt.”
“Ugh.” The erstwhile physician stuck out her tongue. “No more of that. The job is done. We can be ourselves again.”
“Right. That should be nice. I’ve missed myself.”
Her partner smiled as she activated the hyperdrive to take them to their next port of call. She closed her eyes and linked her fingers behind her head to relax during the trip. She had gotten so accustomed to her cover identity that it would take a little effort to fall back into the habit of answering to her real name. But she was once again Tanis Reynard, and she would remain so for the foreseeable future. Plenty of time to get reacquainted with herself.
Mayani and Shakatt were dead. Until their next job required new identities, they could once again be Tanis Reynard and her partner in crime, Vala Mal Doran.
CHAPTER ONE
San Diego, California
Sam Carter remembered standing in this same spot when she was twelve years old, shaken and lost, trying to comprehend her mother’s name on the headstone. It seemed unfair that the moment hadn’t gotten any easier with time. Before she had been a frightened girl in her Sunday best, shivering in the shadow of someone in a crisp and beautiful air force uniform. At the time she took comfort in the uniform; someone that polished must have some idea how to handle something of this magnitude. So she had taken her father’s hand so he could show her the right thing to do. Now she was the one in uniform and she realized it didn’t give her magic answers. All she could do was try acting composed when she felt anything but.
The actual funeral had been over for a while, but she wanted to take a final moment to say goodbye to her father one last time. It truly was a goodbye this time; anything she had to say to the man had been said, and all the issues between them had been resolved during the past seven years. She smiled a little when she thought of their renewed relationship and the utterly bizarre way it had come about. Of everything the Stargate had given her, the wonders she’d seen because of her work, her resurrected relationship with her father was the biggest miracle she could have asked for.
He’d given his life not only in service to his country, but to save the entire galaxy from Anubis. The old soldier who had resigned himself to wasting away in a hospital bed was given a new and fantastic war to fight. He’d stood on the front lines and helped deliver the final, decisive blow. And even better, it had allowed him the chance to fight alongside his daughter. What was there to regret?
Well… maybe there was one thing.
She turned and smiled when she saw Mark watching her from a few yards away. She nodded that it was okay for him to come over, and he approached slowly with his hands in his pockets. She had been staying with him and his family since arriving in town. Their estrangement had caused her to miss a lot of time with her niece a
nd nephew, but now she was more than making up for it. She had to admit that getting up to help make breakfast, helping them with their homework, and watching her brother and sister-in-law be parents had affected her. It was the same bond that had brought her closer to Cassandra Fraiser; sometimes she wanted to forget about being Colonel Carter so she could be Aunt Sam. Maybe now that the Goa’uld were no longer a threat she could take the time to figure out that ‘life’ thing General O’Neill kept telling her to get. She had sacrificed so much to get where she was. Maybe the time had come to start focusing on other achievements and possibilities.
Mark reached the grave and stood beside her. “I didn’t want to disturb you. Just in case there was some kind of post-mortem alien telepathy thing going on that I don’t have the clearance to hear.”
She chuckled. “No, nothing that sci-fi. Just remembering.” She looked at the graves, their mother and father together again after so long. “I’m sorry we didn’t tell you earlier.”
Mark sighed. “Me too. But I understand why you didn’t. It’s one thing to hear your father had a spontaneous remission and is off doing top-secret government work. It’s something else entirely to know he was cured by an alien in his head and now he’s fighting an intergalactic war. Oh, and that your sister is one of the frontline soldiers in that same war.”
“Hallmark doesn’t really make a card for that.”
“No.”
They stood in silence for a long time, but it was no longer the anxious and weighted silence they had grown so accustomed to. Now they were just adult children saying goodbye to their parents, two people with vastly different lives brought together by common tragedy.
“You know, Hallmark does make blank cards,” Mark said. “So you could have dropped one of those in the mail to explain what exactly happened with Pete.”
Sam bit back a groan. There weren’t enough blank Hallmark cards in the world to explain everything that happened with Pete. A year earlier she’d experienced a hallucination of her father telling her that she needed to be happy. She took that advice to heart and started focusing on her private life as a new sort of experiment. When Mark called and told her he knew a great guy who lived in her area and just happened to be single, she jumped at the offer to be set up with him. In addition to saving her the trouble of going out to find someone for herself, it was another piece of the bridge between her and Mark. It was hard to make up for decades worth of bad feelings when she still had to lie to him about some very basic stuff in her life.
Pete came along at the perfect time in more ways than one, and it helped that he was sweet, funny, charming, and easy on the eyes. It made sense no matter how she looked at it, so she jumped in with both feet. He genuinely cared for her, and she found it so easy to trust him that she found herself telling him the truth about the Stargate rather than risk losing him because of lies. She had a man she cared about and they were happy together. That was what people were supposed to do. Marriage was obviously the next step, and saying yes when he proposed just made sense.
Saying yes was easy.
When Jacob died, he told her the same thing she’d heard in her earlier hallucination but with a slightly different phrasing. He told her, “Don’t get in the way of your own happiness.” She realized she was about to make an enormous mistake. When her father first revealed he had cancer, he surprised her with the news he’d gotten her into NASA. He’d been hurt when she refused, and rightfully so. On paper it made sense, and it was the absolute right thing to do. But there were things he didn’t know, another path that was even more sensible, and she was already on that path. She’d broken her father’s heart by refusing his offer because she’d known it was the only logical course of action.
She was doing the same thing with Pete. He looked perfect for her in theory, and the white picket fence was something everyone strove to achieve. Marrying Pete was NASA, and she was destined for something greater. Even if she couldn’t say what that would be yet, she knew she couldn’t use Pete as a placeholder until it came along. She loved him too much to destroy his life by walking away at some future point. So she had settled for breaking his heart now, when it still had a chance of recovering.
“I’m sorry, Mark. There are just some things I can’t explain.”
“Classified?”
She shook her head. “Just too complicated.”
He nodded. “I understand. And thank you for finally spilling the beans about Dad and, uh… Uh…”
“Selmak.”
“Right. Him.”
“Her.”
Mark shook his head. “Right. Anyway, it’s good to finally know how Dad spent his last few years. And knowing everything he did for the planet. And us.”
Sam smiled at her brother and nodded. “You deserved to know a long time ago. It was such a huge, closely-kept secret for so long. When Dad and Selmak first joined, there were soldiers stationed at the SGC married to people who didn’t know the truth. We were so nervous about the secret getting out that we lied to the people we were closest to. And once things became a bit more relaxed, there was never really a good time for the ‘Dad’s got an alien snake in his head.’”
“Couldn’t have slipped that in a Christmas letter?”
“I thought about doing a Candygram, but I couldn’t find a rhyme for ‘symbiotic alien parasite’.”
They chuckled together. Mark said, “Are you going to come back to the house? We could have some lunch before you head out…”
“Ah.” She checked her watch and winced apologetically. “I should probably be getting back soon. The war might be over but there’s still a lot of messes that need to be cleaned up.”
“Right. It’s an open invitation. Especially now that I know you can just, ah…” He gestured at the sky. “You know. With spaceships.”
She turned and started walking with him back to the car. “Transporting people like that costs money, Mark.”
“You can afford it. How much does World-Saving Ass-kicker pay these days?”
“Not as much as you might think.”
He put an arm around her shoulder. “My big sister, saving the world for peanuts.”
“No one gets into the world-saving business to get rich.”
“Of course not,” Mark said. “They do it for the glory and the recognition… Oh. Right.”
Sam grinned and glanced back as Mark led her away, almost positive either he or his wife would eventually convince her to come back to the house for something to eat before she left. She didn’t mind. It would give her one more chance to play Auntie Sam, a role she had missed out on far too much in the past. She was grateful to have Mark and his family in her life, and she owed their reconciliation to her father and the influence of the alien that had saved his life.
Goodbye, Dad. Goodbye, Selmak. Thank you both. For everything.
The work table in the middle of Daniel Jackson’s lab was nearly invisible under the boxes and crates he’d placed there. He had a system, the fine points of which currently eluded him as he turned and searched for the crate of scrolls brought back from PX8-275. He spotted it under another box and put his pencil in his mouth and bit down on it to free his hands. As he excavated the box he wanted there was a knock on the open door of his office followed by a slow, quizzical, “Hello-oo…”
“Jack.” The pencil fell from his mouth. “Want to give me a hand here?”
Jack O’Neill entered the room, saw what Daniel was doing, and took the box from him. He looked for a flat surface on which to place it, gave up, and bent down to put it on the floor at Daniel’s feet. “There you go.”
“Thanks,” Daniel muttered. He took out one of the scrolls and skimmed it to make sure it had the information he needed before he took it to the worktable. “Did you need me for something?”
“No,” Jack said, hands in his pockets as he looked over the clutter. They’d recently discovered that something he touched in Daniel’s lab had telepathically connected him to a barber from Indiana. Since t
hen he’d tried very hard not to touch anything he didn’t recognize. “It’s been eighteen hours since anyone on the base has seen you. I just wanted to make sure you hadn’t gone all… glowfish on us again.”
Daniel chuckled. “I don’t have any plans to do that again, thank you.”
“Yes, well. That’s what you said last time. I figured if you were still among the non-Ascended beings, you might want to stick your head out for a little food. Cafeteria is serving… something. They claim it’s meat. I’m not so sure.”
“Sorry, Jack. I’m…” He gestured at the pile as if it made his case.
“Man cannot live by dust alone. You need to eat something.”
Daniel sighed. “For the first time in, well, the history of the SGC, we actually have a little downtime. No imminent dangers on our doorstep, no Goa’uld running around threatening us, no missions on the docket. Teal’c is off with the Free Jaffa, Sam is in California, and I finally have the free time to go through the past eight years’ worth of artifacts we’ve brought back with us through the gate. This is what I do for fun, Jack. It relaxes me.”
“If you say so.” Jack had already forgotten his ban on touching things and picked up an owl carved out of stone. “You ever thought about opening a booth in a craft mall? You could probably make a killing with some of this stuff.”
Daniel snatched the figure away and returned it to the proper position in his chaotic system. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do, honestly, but I’m fine. Clean bill of health, completely and totally descended in proper working order. I have a library of journals collecting dust in here with information I’ve collected on dozens upon dozens of worlds that I haven’t had the time to go over properly.” He rested his hand on top of a crate. “I’m not gun-shy, Jack. I’m not feeling anxious about yet another near-death experience. Frankly, I’m kind of used to them by now.”
SG1-24 Two Roads Page 2
