“Say ‘hi’ from me.”
Nodding an acknowledgement, Sam frowned some more. “I can’t hear you,” she half yelled into the phone. “Hang on!” With a glance at Cassie, she added, “I’ve got to go outside. Too noisy in here, and reception’s lousy. You could ask for the check in the meantime.”
“Sure.”
Cassie watched Sam battle her way toward the front door through a throng of people hoping to be seated within the next two hours, then signaled a waiter who quickstepped past her under an umbrella-sized pizza, fully loaded. The pair of geeks two tables over was getting ready to leave as well.
Pizza hopefuls were piling up on the sidewalk as well— it was a Saturday evening, after all— and Sam escaped from the starving masses by dodging into an alley beside the restaurant. The day’s heat still hung in the narrow chasm between buildings, scaring a bouquet of stink from the dumpsters. But it was quiet, relatively speaking. She brought the cell back to her ear.
“Daniel?”
“That’s better. Where were you? Sounded like a canning factory.”
“Student watering hole.”
“Close. I take it you found Cassie?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’ve found her. She’s fine. Says she forgot. Don’t ask me how you’d do that. Maybe you’ve got to be eighteen. Though, admittedly, she’s got a hell of a lot on her mind.”
“Well, she’s on her own for the first time. I suppose that just drives home losing Janet and all, so—”
“Actually that’s not what’s eating her, though it obviously doesn’t help.”
“Oh?” Daniel’s frown was audible. “What’s going on, Sam?”
“Nothing I could go into over the phone. I’ll fill you in when we get there.”
“We? You’re bringing Cassie back with you?”
“Uhuh. Though she doesn’t know about that one yet. We should get there tomorrow, early afternoon.”
“I’ll pick you up.”
“Thanks. Everything okay your end? How’s the packing going?”
“All done. By the way, what’s the Air Force’s position on moonlighting?”
“Huh?” Sam asked. Sometimes Daniel’s segues were a little tricky to follow.
“Got a phone call today. Somebody in Vancouver of all places wants me to translate some document he got from a guy I used to know. Odd thing is, that guy died in an accident recently.”
“And?”
“I don’t know. Something’s off. The whole thing just feels weird somehow, and I’m not sure what I’m going to do about it. Anyway, we can discuss it tomorrow.”
“Sure. Thanks for checking in, Daniel. I’ll see you tomorrow. Take care.”
With a sigh that was somewhere between relief and exasperation, Sam flipped the phone shut and pocketed it. Truth be told, she didn’t look forward to persuading Cassie to come back to the SGC. No, sir. Not a bit. But they had to run those tests the girl had been trying to avoid. After that, God only knew. Depending on the test results, even General O’Neill might not be able to bully the NID into looking the other way again. And as if that weren’t enough to give you indigestion, the monstrous pizza Sam had had— pepperoni, anchovies, meatballs, peppers, chili, and pineapple glued to a wagon wheel of deep fried dough with mozzarella— was in the process of coagulating in her stomach.
Had she really subsisted on this type of junk while she was at college?
Scary thought.
Shaking her head, Sam turned from the alley back out onto the street and inhaled a lungful of exhaust fumes. Carbon monoxide or no, it was a distinct improvement over eau de garbage.
The crowd outside the Italian place had shrunk somewhat; a couple or three parties had either given up or found themselves a table. Sam pushed past those still waiting, garnering a number of nasty looks and less than polite comments in the process, and dived back into the atmospherically— in other words, barely— lit mayhem of the restaurant. Threading her way between bodies and chairs, she wondered how the establishment managed to pass its annual fire safety inspection. Probably by clearing out two thirds of the furniture first.
When she finally reached the back corner where they’d been sitting, Sam came to a dead stop. Blinked. Muttered something apologetic to the waiter whose path she was blocking. Admittedly, the noise and sheer number of people were confusing, but she couldn’t have gotten turned around this badly. This was their table, right?
Right. Definitely right. Sam remembered the dyspeptic rendering of Mount Vesuvius on the wall and outright dismissed the possibility of the same horror featuring twice in one restaurant. Except, Cassie was nowhere in sight, her bag gone, and the table occupied by a twosome too besotted with each other to even open the menu.
“Excuse me,” Sam said.
They seemed to be discovering new worlds on each others’ retinas.
“Excuse me!”
The male half of the twosome abandoned his explorations and looked up, less than thrilled with the interruption. “Huh?”
“The girl who’s been sitting at this table. Did you see where she went?”
“Lady, the only girl I see at this table is this one.” He flashed a remarkable set of teeth at his companion. “And she ain’t going anywhere. Ain’t that right, hon?”
“Uhuhhhhh,” his date sighed.
“Told ya. May wanna ask the waiter, lady.” With that he resumed his retinal studies.
The waiter took this as a cue to make his presence felt. “Ma’am? Ma’am, mind letting me pass?” he ventured from behind a pizza. “Folks’ll complain if it gets cold.”
Sam figured that, if folks had any sense or taste buds, they’d complain anyway. “Did you see the girl leave? She was supposed to ask for the check.”
“Sorry, ma’am. Not my table. Can I please pass?”
“Oh, for God’s sake! Whose table is it then?”
“No idea. Ask management. Please, ma’am!”
“Where’s the restaurant manager?”
The waiter, acne-ridden and anorexic, didn’t even bother to check. “I don’t know. Let me through.”
Later, Sam wouldn’t be able to tell whether it was the bored look on the kid’s face that did it or the same full-blast panic she’d felt at the airport earlier that day. She snatched the pizza from the waiter, plunked it down on the table between the smitten twosome.
“It’s on the house. Enjoy!” Then she grabbed the twig-thin arm of the waiter and swung him around toward the front and the cashier’s desk and the most likely location of managerial staff. “Restaurant manager. Now!”
Daniel had been about to head up to the commissary for his twenty-one hundred sugar fix when the phone rang again. He’d turned around to answer, believing it was Sam, and ditched that notion as soon as he saw ‘Caller Number Withheld’ on the display. Point was, the call shouldn’t even have gotten through in this case. Puzzled, he picked up the phone.
It was a recording, the voice was electronically modified, and the message was unequivocal.
We have a friend of yours. You’ve been contacted about a document. Translate it as requested and keep your mouth shut. You refuse, she dies. You tell the police, she dies. You tell O’Neill, she dies.
The line went dead.
Chapter 5
“It looks… dead,” Rodney McKay observed, succinctly by his standards.
Though, if Dr. Carson Beckett knew his man, Rodney would start to babble in a minute. The McKay therapy for rising panic, discomfort, and, in this particular instance, a rampant case of thanatophobia— fear of dead things. Rodney had a tendency of envisioning himself in the place of the dead things.
“It looks really dead.”
“That would be because it probably is dead,” Beckett shot back. “As a rule, anyone who looks like that is. But in case you’re doubting my expertise, I’m not getting any vital sign output from that gizmo here.” He tapped the pod’s control panel. “The screen’s dark, same as with the others.”
There. That should distr
act Rodney.
It did.
McKay dived under one of the stasis pods and began jiggling crystals in an open maintenance hatch at the base of the pod. Eventually he hooked a couple of them to his laptop and, still sprawled on the floor, studied the readouts flowing across the computer’s screen. “The lid mechanism still has minimal power, but that gizmo, as you choose to call it, is dead as a dodo. By the looks of it the central processing unit shorted out at some point. Best guess, it was some kind of power surge.” Grunting, he peeled himself off the floor and stared morosely at the pod. “I always knew these things weren’t safe. I mean, sticking a perfectly healthy human… alien being into a mason jar and expecting it to survive is just moronic. Irresponsible. Arrogant. Outrageous.”
“Talking about yourself, Rodney?” Colonel Sheppard, who’d come strolling through the door between moronic and irresponsible, smiled winningly.
“Did I mention the word ‘genius’ at any point?” snapped Rodney.
“I figured you’d be getting round to that.”
Rodney was opening his mouth, and the reply promised to be drawn-out. Drawn-out enough, Carson suspected, to stop any serious work for the next thirty minutes. At least.
“Have you found any more of these, Colonel?” he asked, not prepared to wait for Rodney to vent his peeve.
“Nope. These three are the last ones.” John nodded at the pods in the room. “Teyla and Ronon are checking the ones we’ve opened up next door, but they look pretty much the same as these.” He drew closer, peered at the pod’s occupant. “Bad.”
One way of describing it, and the fact remained that the pod people shouldn’t have looked, well, bad or dead or anything of the kind. Of course folk still aged, even if the stasis pod was in full working order, but the rate at which it happened was vastly reduced. When they’d found Elizabeth’s double, she’d been in stasis for ten thousand years, give or take, but physically she’d been a reasonably well preserved eighty. For a while at least. Ultimately, the cells of her body had been so damaged that they stopped functioning. Old age, really, except it had all happened more quickly and drastically than you’d normally expect.
This was different.
Without a proper examination Carson couldn’t even tell whether the body in the pod was male or female. Its face grinned out at him skull-like, teeth bared in a rictus, hair feathering white around the skull. Body fat was long gone, muscle desiccated and atrophied, and the skin sat tight as a drum over the skeletal frame. In other words, a bona fide mummy, which was to be expected if the system had malfunctioned.
“Too bad,” Sheppard murmured. “Chatting to one of them could have been useful.”
“Or lethal,” Rodney threw in, ever the ray of sunshine. “As you may recall, I was against this from the get-go.”
As it happened, Carson Beckett recalled no such thing. What he did recall, vividly at that, was Rodney arguing for an exploration of the chambers. With enough eloquence to sway Elizabeth, who was a wee bit less sanguine about prying the lid off another potential can of worms. After all, they’d got burned in the past, and soundly.
On the other hand, that was part of why they were here, wasn’t it? Exploring the city.
This section had been opened up courtesy of the Wraith— in a manner of speaking. They’d been conspicuously well-behaved lately, doing their culling and life-sucking in some other part of the Pegasus Galaxy. The lull had allowed the Atlantis expedition to divert a percentage of the city’s strictly rationed power supply from defense to other tasks. Such as bailing some of the flooded sections of Atlantis.
There still was a fair ways to go, but this week alone they’d dried out and provisionally sealed the three lowest levels beneath the south pier. The bottom two had been disappointing; signally devoid of the additional drones and/or ZPMs McKay and Sheppard had hoped to find. Instead it was bog-standard storage facilities, most of which contained furniture, of all things. Though one of the rooms, a large one, was a little more interesting. It housed two dozen or so very comfy recliners, a holographic console and, in cupboards hidden behind wall panels, some one hundred boxes of— formerly— dried goods. Albeit a scary shade of purple, they looked amazingly like sesame snaps. In the unlikely event that he had a quiet moment sometime soon, Carson would analyze some samples. Though that moment might never come. Finding out what the Lanteans liked to snack on during movie night, while culturally enlightening, wasn’t exactly a priority. The postmortems on these poor sods were. Among other things.
Speaking of snacks…
He felt his stomach growl and sneaked a glimpse at his watch. Well, that explained the sudden craving for a man-size portion of stovies. Half past lunchtime, and they’d been at it nonstop since first coming down here this morning. The only surprise was that Rodney McKay hadn’t fainted from hypoglycemia yet.
“… proposing to do next?”
The snippet of question scattered those platters heaped with food that danced before Carson’s inner eye. He shook his head, hoping to get rid of the leftovers, too. “Excuse me?”
Rodney stared at him. “If it isn’t too much to ask, maybe you could get with the program? I should have been back up in my lab hours ago. There’s no telling what Zelenka’ll get up to without adequate supervision. I said, what are you proposing to do next?” He made a meal of each syllable.
“Oh. Aye.” Cocking his head, Carson glanced over at Sheppard who was still studying the deceased. “If you don’t mind standing back a little, Colonel, let’s open it up and have a closer look at the poor lad… or lass.”
Sheppard returned a doubtful frown. “Do we actually know what they died of, Carson?”
The query came a little late, if you asked Dr. Beckett. They’d already opened eight other pods. “Given the condition of the remains, no pathogens could have survived, if that’s what you’re worried about. Spores would, but I found no trace of those with any of the other bodies. At any rate, Rodney thinks these folks died when the system shorted out.”
“I don’t think, I know. The diagnostics were perfectly conclusive. Could have happened when the chambers flooded, but I’d have to pull the pods apart to make certain. Of course that’s a no-go unless we remove King Tut here, together with the rest of his entourage.”
“Alright.” Sheppard blew out a breath. “Open it up.”
Oh goodie, Carson Beckett didn’t say. Lunch suddenly slipped into a dim and distant future. It would keep. He hoped.
Gingerly, he wedged the business end of a small crowbar under the bottom end of the lid and pushed. The seal gave, and he could hear air hissing through the gap and into the pod.
Then another, fainter hiss as the lid retracted. Dust motes, stirred by the motion, swirled up. Rodney took a leap back. “I thought you said it was safe!” Going by the look on his face he envisioned alien spores whirling into his lungs, settling in his alveoli, and was expecting to die a gruesome, excruciatingly painful death within the next three hours.
“It’s perfectly safe,” murmured Carson, frowning at the data crystal that lay on the mummy’s chest. They’d all had one of those. Maybe an ID document, maybe—
Without warning the lights in the room brightened to almost painful intensity, then there was a dull pop, and then everything went to black.
“What the hell?” inquired a voice in the darkness. Sheppard.
From Rodney’s last known position came a strange little squeaking noise. A second later the emergency lights came on to show him frozen in place, eyes wide. “Ah,” he said. “Power surge, probably. Though I’ve got no idea what—”
The rest was drowned out by a roar. It was punctuated by the tattoo of running feet. Ronon and Teyla barreled into the room, both of them looking… scared.
Colonel Sheppard must have noticed, too. “What?” he snapped.
“Out!” bellowed Ronon. “Shields gave!”
“Go! Dammit, leave that, McKay! We’re flooding!” Sheppard shouted at Rodney, who’d scrambled to save his toy co
llection. “You want to drown with that laptop? Go!”
For a split-second Rodney hesitated, then self-preservation won the day. He straightened up and ran, empty-handed. Carson knew exactly how he felt. Never mind the equipment, but all the data he’d collected would be lost. As would the bodies in these pods. Without even thinking about it, Beckett snatched the crystal from the mummy’s chest. They’d have that at least.
Fist tight around his booty, he ran past Colonel Sheppard and out into the corridor, racing to stay ahead of the water that came up behind them, black and unstoppable.
Chapter 6
The meeting, the fourth in a series of as yet undetermined length, was in its third hour. Approximately thirty minutes ago, Major General Jack O’Neill had discovered a lone paperclip stuck between the seat and backrest of his leather-upholstered office chair. It probably was instrumental in saving his sanity.
At the head of the conference table, ably assisted by an overhead projection doohickey that apparently was able to talk to a laptop, some pencil pusher in an exquisitely vile suit— double-breasted pinstripe polyester, complete with bowtie— was outlining the results of a study that had been five months in the making. Which was exceptionally quick, the pencil pusher had emphasized by way of an opening gambit, but no one should take this to mean that the committee hadn’t applied due diligence.
Committee.
For Jack, the word triggered a similar emotional response as, say, Goa’uld system lord.
The pencil pusher hit a button on his laptop’s keyboard, and the doohickey displayed a pie chart in red, blue, and pea green.
Jack adored pie charts. They vied with bullet points for the number one place in his affections.
The pea green made him feel slightly nauseated, and he focused his attention back under the table and onto the paperclip. He was trying to bend it into a likeness of Homer Simpson. So far the success was doubtful.
STARGATE SG-1: Transitions Page 4
