“You think he needs tretonin?”
“Maybe.”
“Or maybe whatever hit those Dragon Guards got to Teal’c, too.”
“Honestly? I think he was weakening even before those doors opened up.” She slumped, a very un-Carter-like thing to do. “Once Yu’s ships… I mean, those images — ”
“I get it.” Jack rubbed his face. “I’m pretty beat myself, but how come we’re not hungry or thirsty?”
“Or why Weiyan’s stomach bled out like that, and now — ”
“She seems fine.” Jack glanced toward Teal’c. Weiyan cradled his beefy hands while Daniel chattered on about god-knows-what. “Any chance her being here is just one big coincidence?”
Carter shook her head. “I doubt it, sir. What we just witnessed pretty much matches Daniel’s account from when Lord Yu held him hostage last year.”
She shifted her gaze toward the building, the one constant throughout this nightmare. “I barely remember that building from our visit a year ago. What is it about this place? Why the show and for who’s benefit? Lord Yu captured Daniel as a sort of test, but — ”
“Yeah, wasn’t that a fun time?” He glanced down at a smooth, brown pebble he’d unearthed. If buildings and motherships could come and go, why were simple things like pebbles still around?
“The bigger question we should be asking is who’s pulling the strings?” He knelt down to pick up the pebble. “You ever get the feeling that every time we’ve tied off a knot, the thread just unravels somewhere else?”
Carter sighed. “Pretty much.”
He stood up. Out of the blue, a buzzing noise filled his ears. Carter said something, but he couldn’t hear her.
He must have stood up too fast. He took a deep breath and his ears popped, like a rubber band smacking against a wall. The buzzing was gone. “What the hell?”
“Sir, are you all right?”
“Sam! Jack!” Daniel called. “Behind you!”
Jack whirled around.
And got a good, hard look at himself. Or rather, a khaki-clad phantom version. P90 in hand, favorite ball cap firmly in place, he — or rather, the phantom — stopped about twenty some-odd feet away and faced the building. Though his double shouted out soundlessly, Jack knew exactly what he’d said that day.
Daniel!
The phantom whirled toward the funky Unas-looking statue on the far-off hill. He raised a hand to his mouth and shouted. Soundless.
Daniel!
“Sir,” Carter whispered, “none of this is real.”
“No kidding.” Though he believed her, the pebble in his hand said different.
Jack threw the pebble at his doppelganger. It sailed right through. He followed the pebble’s trajectory as it skittered to the ground a few feet away and kicked up a puff of dust and sand.
“General!” Carter called out.
Still charging forward, his khaki-clad other stormed right through him without as much as a ripple. It was as if his current self had no impact on the bigger things at stake.
Yet another reminder of just how useless he felt. Here. At the SGC. Even at the Ancient outpost.
The buzzing returned with a vengeance. “Do you hear that?”
Carter raised an eyebrow. “Hear what?”
Another snap. The buzzing quit again. “It sounded like… I dunno, Carter, like bees, or a machine, or some — ”
A shadow passed overhead. He glanced up, saw the source, and while he should’ve been surprised, he wasn’t.
That was the problem with reruns. No surprises.
An Al’kesh dropped out of the sky, honing in on his departing double’s six. Both the ship and his other self headed toward the cliff, an activated Stargate precariously perched on its edge. The saucer-shaped Goa’uld ship laid down round after rapid round of weapons fire as his other self scrambled up the cliff.
As he watched himself climb, Jack remembered how the chase had pumped his heart. The world had narrowed down to survival. Reach the gate. Stay alive.
Of course, last time this happened, he didn’t have quite the same view. “Talk about an out-of-body experience.”
Behind him, another set of footsteps pounded the dirt, headed his way.
“Jesus, Jack!” Daniel stopped beside him, eyes bulging. “What the hell were you thinking?”
“I wasn’t.” Another round of fire shattered the pathway leading from the cliff’s topside to the active gate. His younger self rolled sideways as more enemy fire peppered the ground. Finally, in an act of bravado — or stupidity, Jack still couldn’t say which it had been that day — he dived into the active gate and disappeared.
The Al’kesh did, too.
“Fun stuff, huh?” He missed that kind of action. No boring papers to sign. No casualty reports to read. No pandering to politicians.
Jack pulled out his old Zippo. Huang’s kid, the crazy quakes, the lighter. It all added up to something. His thumb rubbed over the case, a pesky thought niggling at him.
Screw it. There was only one way to find out.
He eyed Weiyan. “She’s got something to do with all this. Stay here.”
“Jack, what are you doing?”
“A different approach.” He marched toward the girl stuck by Teal’c’s side like there was no tomorrow.
“You miss it, don’t you?” Daniel called out. “The missions, the fight. You can’t do it all, Jack.”
“T-shirts, Daniel!”
“Excuse me?”
Jack didn’t break his stride. “Make mine a double XL.”
Daniel wasn’t the only member of the ‘if-only’ club.
ANCIENT OUTPOST, ANTARCTICA
18 AUG 04/2100 HRS MCMURDO STATION
By the time Ambassador Zhu finished explaining the details of her short-term marriage to Lord Yu’s spy, George wasn’t sure whether to pity her or be outraged.
He’d yet to make up his mind when the bandage on her left cheek fell off, exposing a three-inch cut. Blood oozed from its edges. “Are you all right, Madame Ambassador?”
Zhu palmed her wound. “Compared to my daughter? This is nothing.”
“General Hammond?” The click-clack of Lee’s keyboard kept up for a few moments, and then, “If these numbers are right, the device sent out a significant blast of photonic energy during that last quake.”
“In which direction, Doctor?” George braced himself, knowing he wouldn’t like the answer.
“There were multiple epicenters this time.” Lee squinted at the monitor. “From fifty miles away to a few hits several thousand miles off. Up near the Magallanes-Fagnano fault line.” He looked up, frowning. “That fault line stretches almost 500 miles from the Pacific Ocean into Argentina.”
“Doctor, I suggest you return your focus to shutting down the device.” Noting Simmons’ absence, George listened to the scurried footsteps and command barks emanating through the archway. What personnel were left proceeded with evacuations. The emergency exit door thudded shut.
The door!
Bolting up from Zhu’s side, he joined Lee by the computers. “Could the Ancients have built an entryway of some type that might access the lower level?”
“If they did, we never found it.” Lee switched the display to a schematic of the outpost’s various chambers. A quick count told him there was six, but all on one floor.
George eyed the force field. “There has to be an entrance leading from this floor down to the next. We just didn’t look hard enough. Airman?”
Lt. Gerling stuck her head in from just outside the archway. “Sir?”
“Take Lt. Brooks with you. I don’t want one inch of this outpost left untouched. If there’s another way down into that device, find it.”
“Yes, sir.” Gerling headed toward the main chamber.
George refocused on Ambassador Zhu and the ‘Huang problem.’ Her former marriage to an enemy spy put an entirely new spin on their situation.
He should be more surprised. For some reason, he
wasn’t. Standing two-hundred feet inside a glacier that could come down on his ears at any moment brought home the key lesson he’d learned in his eight years with the Stargate Program — crows always come home to roost.
In this particular situation, Huang was the crow and the Ancient weapons platform was the roost. A vital, but now dangerous, roost.
“You’ve put me in a difficult position,” he told Zhu. “By your own admission, vital information that would’ve affected the IOA’s selection of your daughter, and your post as ambassador — ”
Zhu laughed, the sound bitter and empty. “If the Chinese government can see past a family member’s crimes — ”
“Ambassador, I don’t blame you for Huang’s actions, but the fact that Weiyan’s overpowering ATA genetics are behind our predicament…”
“What do Huang’s actions have to do with Weiyan’s abilities?”
“There are security issues,” he said half-heartedly. When the president had deemed the circumstances surrounding Huang’s origins should be kept under wraps, current circumstances hadn’t even been part of the picture.
“Security issues?” Zhu’s eyes widened. “If she was your daughter, wouldn’t you want to know?”
“It’s getting colder in here.” He tugged his parka’s zipper up higher.
“General, I deserve the truth.”
“It’s not that simple, Madame Ambassador.”
She gazed down at her daughter and sighed. “It never is.”
Quit stalling, George.
He told her everything he knew.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
SHUNYI PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL
BEIJING, CHINA
2004 JULY 31, 9:00 PM
Huang knelt within the four-walled garden and gazed upward. The city’s polluted haze blanketed the night sky, but surely, tomorrow’s sun would break its boundaries and reach this one spot. This one place he could succeed.
Satisfied, his hands plunged into the dense, black soil.
“You failed,” a whisper murmured behind him. “At everything.”
A woman’s voice. A voice that belonged to another life.
He scooped back mound after mound of the dirt. Earthworms and bits of mica sparkled beneath the pale light of the night’s full moon. Beside his burgeoning hole lay four bundled saplings. His reward for cooperation, for allowing himself to be placed in solitary confinement. For no longer saying those two words which revealed his burden. Two words which spoke of his ruin.
They cannot.
He would plant each sapling to honor Lord Yu’s Dragons.
“Weiyan told me of your meeting,” the woman said. “How you taunted her with a last goodbye before your American adventure.” It was good soil. Rich soil. His trees would grow well here. Though the doctors refused him tools to do his planting, he would still succeed. They could not take away his mind.
Even though Jack O’Neill had taken his soul.
One moon. Not two.
Such a fool am I.
“Huang, please… Turn around. Talk to me.”
The voice again. A time of trespass. One he must not remember. It was bù zhǔn xǔ. Forbidden. No Dragon Guard must take a wife or mate. Such had been Lord Yu’s command.
One moon. Not two.
He picked up the nearest sapling. “For Kung Qiu,” he whispered.
He removed its burlap cover. The small gather of roots and twigs smelled of cherry blossoms. Of promise. Placing the base gently in the hole he’d created, he began to swipe the soil in around its roots. Each stroke of dirt eased his heart, allowing his mind to wander. Though he begged his thoughts to travel further back in time, to a happier moment, all he saw was his ultimate failure to Lord Yu.
“At least do me the courtesy of explaining why you did this,” the voice demanded.
He crawled to the next planting spot and thrust his hands into the dirt once more. He scooped back more soil. As he did so, the memories returned unasked, but demanding.
He remembered it all.
Lord Yu’s capture of Dr. Jackson on Kunlun had given Huang the perfect opening to infiltrate Stargate Command. All it had taken was one call to the Americans’ inept president with the threat of disclosing their secret program to the world. By forcing SG-1’s team members who had the necessary naquadah to use the communications devices, he’d been given the opportunity to view his former home world once more.
He had sat within Stargate Command’s conference room, so intent on contacting his master that he’d paid no intention to the trap closing in around him. The droning unimportance of words spilling from the porcine General Hammond had been inconsequential. Mindless banter that required little attention.
Huang had bided his time as SG-1 blundered through the outer defenses of Lord Yu’s fortress, knowing that once Lord Yu captured them, he had only to announce his presence and his master would retrieve him.
“Former husband, I am being punished for your crimes!”
Huang turned his back on the voice and uncovered his second bundle. “For Qin Shi,” he told the sapling.
A thrill ran through him upon remembering when the communications device had sent back images of his home world. Craggy mountain peaks enveloped in snow. Mist rising from the shores of Zhēn Xiàng. His amusement at SG-1’s absurd struggles to traverse Lord Yu’s maze, all the while hoping they’d fail, but needing them to succeed if his plan was to work.
He had ignored the signs of SG-1’s ulterior motives. Perhaps it had been the delight at Colonel O’Neill’s feigned demotion? The pleasure at witnessing his defeated stride past the communications device had been unquestionable. That accomplishment had made Huang disregard Jacob Carter’s comments on the two moons of Lord Yu’s home world.
There was only one moon on Lord Yu’s home world.
Not two.
Huang shuffled further into the garden and dug a third hole. Only now could he admit to himself how arrogant had been his disregard for the Tok’ra’s duplicitous words. He had been too caught up in O’Neill’s downfall and the reunion yet to come with Lord Yu. He should have recognized the Tok’ra’s lies for what they had been. A signal. A warning.
He picked up the third sapling. “For Lao Dan,” he croaked, his voice thick with regret.
He should not have forgotten the words of his dead brother’s ancestor. It shamed him now to remember.
The skillful man must be on his guard against being vain or boastful or arrogant in consequence of it.
Huang thrust the third sapling into the ground.
“I am being sent to Antarctica to oversee negotiations.” The woman’s voice once more. Another sin for which he could never atone.
The woman’s voice dropped to a whisper. “I must conspire some way to bring Weiyan with me — ”
“They cannot.” Huang cringed as he spoke the banned words. Heinous images of his failure to Lord Yu tumbled through his memory. The fortress littered with the bodies of Lord Yu’s Jaffa. A young warrior racing by the communications device, preparing to attack the pathetic Tau’ri. Electric blue arcs of zat’ni’katel fire decimating the brick-lined terrace.
Through it all, he had sat in the SGC’s conference room, a sense of panic seizing him. The device had rolled through the ensuing battle between Jaffa and Tau’ri, permitting Huang a moment’s view of a young man bearing the First Prime’s golden tattoo. Green-flecked black eyes, square jaw. A high forehead that spoke of an aristocratic air born of intelligence, not blind faith.
Another clone of Sun Tzu.
For Huang, it had been like looking in a mirror.
The device had rolled on. Jaffa far too inept at battle erupted from the patio column’s secret passageways. They became easy targets for SG-1. Stunned, he watched each warrior fall.
The Jaffa had been pale imitations of those he’d known in his time as a Dragon Guard trainee. He had known then and there that Lord Yu needed him to return and set things aright. To take his place as Dragon Guard and become th
e true First Prime.
He picked up the fourth sapling, remembering how his dedication to returning to Lord Yu had been born anew upon seeing the Jaffa battle the Tau’ri.
A breeze blew against his neck. Another memory. One of desolation. Of his time in the frozen wasteland of Earth’s southern pole. The being of light that helped him survive. He struggled to suppress the memory. Crushing the dirt between his fingers, a silent wail lodged in his throat, begging for escape.
“Huang, please…” A hand circled his wrist. Pulled his hand back from the soil.
The fourth sapling tumbled to the ground.
The words he must not utter tumbled from his mouth. “They cannot,” he told the Tau’ri woman.
“Cannot what?” Quing Zhu whispered. “Tell me.”
Memory of his failure pressed down on him. The sound of rifle fire emitting from the communications device as it rolled by. A jumble of images. Bits of broken brick terrace. Collapsed Jaffa. A moment’s glance of Major Carter and Bra’tac, the rebel Jaffa Master, racing toward O’Neill and the Shol’vah Teal’c.
The device had continued rolling, heading toward a marble column near the center of the terrace.
“What have you done?” Huang shouted over the din of bullet and zat fire.
“What I should have done days ago,” General Hammond had said, his pig-faced dense stupidity replaced with certitude.
The display stopped rolling, wedged up against the column. The view revealed the sacred statue commemorating the wife of Lord Yu’s host. A memorial of the shared sacrifice of symbiote and man to save China from Anubis a thousand years ago. The green marble statue depicted the wife cradling a baby in her arms, a child at her feet. A glorious reminder of what mattered most.
Twin sets of Tau’ri standard-issue boots ran out of frame. O’Neill and the Jaffa rebel. Out of nowhere, P90 fire erupted from beside the statue. Lord Yu’s Jaffa responded with a rapid succession of zat fire.
The statue disintegrated.
“No!” Huang cried out. “They cannot!”
Rough hands pulled him from his plantings. As the hospital guard dragged him from the garden, he permitted himself a final glance of Quing Zhu. The woman who had once been his wife. The mother of his child.
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