by Karen Miller
Ja’dok and Bikram ceased their motion through the back door, relief creased their features.
“My lord! We feared you were — uh,” Ja’dok stuttered. One did not say a System Lord — a god — was thought to be lost. “We wished to assist you in your mission,” he finished lamely.
Sarah arched an imperious eyebrow at him. Instinct took over; Sarah the unassuming archaeologist gave ground to the pseudo-god she had been for the past four years. She stepped around Janet and pressed her carry bags into the doctor’s arms as she passed, forcing Janet to juggle the whole pile of them to an untidy heap on the floor.
“Thought? When did We ever require Jaffa to think?” She stalked slowly across the room, heels clicking imperiously on the tiles. “We require you to heed Our orders, to act as We tell you to act. Your presence here jeopardizes Our mission. We are not pleased.”
“Forgive us, my lord,” Bikram said, tripping over his words in haste. “We feared some ill deed had befallen you. Of course we were wrong. Our god could never be compromised.” They both bowed to her, which brought the knife away from Daniel’s throat.
Sarah caught a glimpse of Daniel’s face; he was eyeing her with some degree of surprise. She heard a mutter from the direction of the floor. Jack O’Neill glared up at her, eyebrows furrowing with the beginnings of suspicion.
Behind her she heard Pete mutter to Sam, “I thought they took that thing out?”
“Shhh,” Sam flung back at him.
They were all staring at her like she was not the rescued friend she had been to them earlier in the day. She glanced at Daniel. Even he was boggling at her. Why — Oh. Her words came back to her: precise, practiced Goa’uld dialect, fallen from her lips with unconscious effort. Nausea curled in her stomach. Still, needs must.
“We have infiltrated these people,” she declared, hoping her former minions would realize her frilly dress underscored that point. “Our mission proceeds as We planned.” Her eyes fell on the knife Ja’dok held. “You will not harm this man, We have need of him still.”
“Of course, my lord. Shall we return to my lord’s vessel?” Ja’dok lowered the knife.
Feeling their grip on him lessen, Daniel edged away from the Jaffa, eyes darting from them to Sarah and back.
“Hmm,” Sarah kept up the haughty god performance. She casually strolled across the kitchen, pausing at the island bench to finger the fallen saucepans as if she’d never seen such items before. She could order them to return to their ship, but what then? They might return when their god failed to join them, or they could even decide to ‘rescue’ Osiris and beam her up to the tel’tak. The cold shiver returned full-force. She turned her back on them to cast an assessing glare over the captives. They were all watching her carefully. Daniel, she could tell, did not share the suspicion that was etched so clearly on O’Neill’s face. Pete and Janet were confused, Sam apprehensive. Teal’c, though, was harboring different thoughts, ones she immediately picked up on. Her, Osiris’s, two Jaffa were young, impressionable. They deserved to live their lives according to their own wishes, not a Goa’uld’s. Teal’c had told her of the resistance building within the Jaffa populations on many worlds. Despite recent setbacks, he believed it was the only future for his people. She had seen first-hand the misery and suffering they endured at the hands of the System Lords and Goa’uld in general; any small part she could play in putting an end to such tyranny would go some way to easing the torment she felt for her involvement — unwitting as it had been.
O’Neill caught her attention, his head indicating a slight tilt to the side. He repeated the action, and rolled his eyes to the left, toward the back door. Beyond the nervous Jaffa, Sarah saw a large expanse of trees and browning grass in Daniel’s secluded back yard. Get everyone outside, and hopefully disarm the Jaffa without causing further injuries — or damage to Daniel’s house.
“Jaffa,” she said in Osiris’s clipped tone, hiding a small flash of amusement as not only Ja’dok and Bikram but SG-1 also snapped to attention. “We require all these humans to accompany us to our ha’tak. Bring them outside. We shall call down the ring transporter.”
Ja’dok and Bikram bowed their acknowledgment, any misgivings they had were carefully shielded from the god who ruled their lives. One covered Daniel and indicated for him to help Jack to his feet. The other pushed Janet toward the back door.
“Hey, watch where you put your hands, buster.” Janet skidded on the tiles and skewered him with an indignant glare. She gave Sarah an infinitesimal nod of understanding and followed Daniel and Jack through the screen door.
Sarah tapped her foot impatiently while Bikram endeavored to get Teal’c and Sam to their feet. It proved impossible while they remained tied together. Pete’s attempts to assist only made the matter more convoluted. “Release them,” she commanded.
“Yes, my lord.”
Bikram slid the carving knife through the cords binding Sam to Teal’c. He trained the zat’ni’katel on them as they got stiffly to their feet, and prodded them and Pete toward the door. Sarah waited for them to pass, not liking the uncertainty that crossed Bikram’s face as he passed close to her. She followed them out onto the back porch where her Jaffa and her friends milled uncertainly. O’Neill was focused on the zat’ni’katel held by Ja’dok. There was a tension of impending violence in his stance that was mirrored in Teal’c, otherwise focused on Bikram.
“Down there.” Sarah raised her arm and grandly indicated the sweep of grass below them.
Ja’dok obeyed, walking backward to cover the prisoners who filed down the steps onto the grass. Bikram and Sarah joined them last. Bikram hesitated, staring apologetically at her.
“My lord?” He seemed conflicted, confused. “You appear changed, my lord. Forgive my boldness in saying such a thing, but I cannot sense your presence as I always have…”
“Presence?” She scowled down at him. “I stand before you!”
“But… Lord Osiris is not standing before us.” Bikram came to the realization as he spoke the words.
Sarah gasped. The Jaffa could sense the presence of another symbiote — a small thing forgotten in the tumult of pretending to be who she no longer was.
“Crap.” The snarled word heralded O’Neill’s blur of movement. He leapt for Ja’dok, slamming the Jaffa to the ground in a desperate grapple for the zat. Daniel joined in, the three of them rolling furiously in the dusty grass.
Bikram aborted the move he made toward Sarah and turned to help his companion. Teal’c stepped into his path.
“Surrender, Jaffa, and follow me to the path of freedom. You will join the Jaffa Resistance, and help your brothers to throw off the yoke of slavery to the Goa’uld.”
Bikram blinked at him, raised the zat and fired.
Teal’c threw himself sideways. Sarah winced as the zat charge missed its target and hit Pete, who crumpled with a pained squawk.
“Hey!” Sam yelled, indignant on Pete’s behalf. She tackled Bikram and they hit the ground hard. They rolled down the gradual incline, past the other untidy battle between Ja’dok, Daniel and Jack. A zat blast from Ja’dok narrowly missed Sam and flew on ahead to land on a large round hatch imbedded in the grass at the bottom of the garden. It sizzled and sparked brightly in the evening twilight.
Teal’c pushed to his feet and charged after Sam. Sarah exchanged a glance with Janet, who shook herself and pulled out a cell phone. She dialed and quickly began issuing orders for backup support.
Another zat blast escaped from Bikram, flying away to hit the same metal hatch, still sparking from the first blast. With a dull crump the piece of metal exploded skyward, whooping end over end it flew over their heads, over the house and landed somewhere out in the street with a crashing clang. A car alarm rang out in response.
The struggles on the lawn paused. Bikram, flattened by Teal’c on top
of him, surrendered his zat to Sam. Jack took advantage of Ja’dok’s distraction by the explosion and punched him solidly on the jaw. The Jaffa collapsed back into the grass, fingers reflexively tightened on the trigger and caused one final charge to escape the zat. It shot away on the same trajectory as the previous one, flew over the now gaping hole in the lawn and ignited the cloud of gases visibly escaping from it.
“What the hell?” Jack barely had time to ask as another explosion punched through the air. It knocked him off his knees into Daniel. They fell to the ground, Daniel’s one-worded cry reached Sarah’s ears just as they were all engulfed by a torrent of sludge pouring up and then, unfortunately, down on top of them.
“Cesspool!”
Janet heard Daniel’s cry a nanosecond before the deluge. She ducked behind the only thing taller than her — Sarah — held her breath and squeezed her eyes shut. Putrid sludge rained down on them, the overwhelming smell invaded every pore and set her eyes to watering. She could feel it sliding down the back of her neck. She shuddered, fumbled out a handkerchief from her sleeve and pressed it against her nose. Above, she could hear faint squeals from Sarah, battered with a frontal assault from the sludge. It seemed to last an eternity, but eventually the rain turned to random, then solitary plops. She could see the once pretty chiffon dress Sarah wore, plastered to her long legs by thick black muck.
“Cover your mouths and eyes,” she managed to call to the others. The only replies were groans, coughs and the sound of one unfortunate seized by vomiting.
Janet edged out from behind Sarah, one hand shielding her eyes from drips. The entirety of Daniel’s back yard was now a sludge pit, slowly sliding downhill back to where it had come from. Trees, plants, fences, people — everything was a uniform stinky black. Fortunately, most everyone had managed to cover their faces. Jack was sprawled on top of an unmoving Daniel, the Jaffa next to them curled into a fetal ball. Pete was beginning to stir from where the zat blast had tossed him, thankfully face down into the grass. Teal’c was making an attempt to get up from where he lay across Sam and the other Jaffa. He made it after slipping twice in goop, and sat blinking his eyes clear. Janet thought she heard him mutter something, but didn’t really think Teal’c would sum up the situation with the word “Dude”.
Both Jaffa appeared to have completely lost interest in the fight and lay in stunned surrender. From somewhere, a tinny voice penetrated Janet’s clogged ears.
“Major? Major! What on Earth is going on there? Major!”
“General?” She tried to clear an ear, fumbling her cell phone. “General!”
“Status, Major. That sounded like an explosion.”
“Yes, sir, methane explosion from a disused cesspool.” Dear lord, let it be disused. Even so… “We’re gonna need some SFs. And a decontamination unit. And some hoses. And some new clothes. And a hell of a lot of antibiotics.”
“You’re at Dr. Jackson’s home?” Hammond’s incredulity came over loud and clear.
“Yes, sir.” She took in the ruined back yard. “What’s left of it.”
“On our way, Major.”
Janet dropped the sludge-covered phone into the sludge-covered grass. She patted Sarah on the shoulder, sympathizing with the tiny distressed sounds she made. Using extreme caution, Janet made her way around the yard, checking everyone was in no immediate danger. It was like skating — in a stench-laden rink. Finally, she slid into Colonel O’Neill, cautiously pulling himself up off Daniel.
“Sorry, sir.”
“Well, this just puts the icing on the cake,” he grumbled.
“Par for the course?”
“All in a day’s work.”
“Daniel, you okay?” Janet peered over the colonel’s shoulder. Curled into a nice clean patch of green grass, Daniel Jackson slept the sleep of the obliviously stressed. Janet freely wished herself in his shoes, just this once.
She glanced back to Sarah and managed a rueful grin. “Welcome back to Earth, Sarah!”
Sarah Gardner, eyes bright in a black sludge complexion, sighed. “I really need a cup of tea.”
Stargate Atlantis
Kill Switch
Aaron Rosenberg
“What’ve we got?” Lt Colonel John Sheppard demanded as he burst into the main control center. As usual, he was already geared up and had his hand resting on his service pistol as if he might need to draw it at any second.
“Relax, Colonel,” Elizabeth Weir cautioned with a raised hand, though the slight smile on her face indicated that she wasn’t terribly upset that her second-in-command was always on high alert. She gestured toward the briefing room to one side of the operations center. “Take a seat, and I’ll explain in a minute.” As the Commander of the Atlantis Expedition, Weir was Sheppard’s superior officer. But she was also his friend, and it was as much for that as out of any respect for her rank that Sheppard nodded, stalked across, and dropped into a chair at one end of the array of monitor-covered tables. That didn’t prevent him from grumbling a bit under his breath, however.
“Urgent, something you need to see right away,” he muttered, crossing his arms over his chest. “Get to command ASAP. Guess it was just so I’d be sure to get a good seat, huh?”
“You know,” Rodney McKay commented as he strode into the room and took up position in the seat opposite Sheppard’s, “subvocalizing complaints is childish behavior better suited to lower primates and small children than to grown adults, especially senior officers.” As usual, Atlantis’ Chief Science Officer managed to look smug when he pointed this out, as if such action would be far beneath his own superior intellect — this despite the fact that he often behaved like an overgrown child himself, or like a crotchety old man.
“Gee, thanks for the tip, Rodney,” Sheppard snapped back, taking care as always to emphasize the scientist’s first name. “Trust me, whenever I’ve got complaints about you I’ll be sure to say ’em loud and clear.” The two men glared at each other. Anyone who didn’t know them would assume they hated each other, though in reality they were good friends and trusted each other with their lives. That didn’t mean they didn’t annoy each other, however.
“Will you two settle down and behave?” Teyla Emmagan asked, joining the rest of the team and settling into a chair between the two men. She rolled her eyes at both of them, then turned to give Weir her full attention. Ronon Dex had followed her into the room, and claimed a chair without a word, nodding to the rest of the team but with his customary scowl still upon his stern-featured face. No one took it personally — the Satedan former Runner was definitely a man of few words, but even though it had only been a few months since the Expedition Team had found him, much less since he’d joined them, they had already learned to trust the tall, brooding warrior.
“Good, you’re all here,” Weir said as she joined them, taking her customary seat in the center of the middlemost table. “Dr. Zelenka, if you please?”
Dr. Radek Zelenka nodded and quickly scurried into the room, fiddling with the controls for one of the large monitors set up on a rolling cart so it could be dragged about more easily and finally displaying the image of a familiar-looking starscape. “This is the space around Lantea,” the Czech scientist began, earning a snort from Rodney and provoking a glare in return. If Rodney rubbed most people the wrong way, he irritated Zelenka even more, in part because the two men were often forced to work together, but also because Zelenka was an expert in Ancient technology, second only to Rodney himself — and Rodney never let him forget it.
The image, which showed the night sky above the planet that hosted Atlantis, zoomed in on an area speckled with irregular shapes. “This is the nearby asteroid belt,” Zelenka continued. “But a recent scan has turned up something strange.” He adjusted the image to close in still further, zeroing in on a small cluster of rocks, then created a small halo around the one in the cen
ter, which was roughly pear-shaped. “This one.”
“What about it?” Sheppard asked, having no patience for the scientist’s theatrics.
“It is not an asteroid,” Zelenka replied. “In fact, I do not think it is natural at all.”
“Someone’s going around manufacturing asteroids?” Rodney commented. “Why bother? There are plenty of the normal ones just lying about.”
“We don’t know why,” Weir answered. “That’s what your team needs to find out.”
Teyla leaned forward, studying the image. “What makes you think it isn’t natural?” she asked.
“The mineral content, most likely,” Rodney answered before Zelenka could. “The asteroids in this system are mostly silicates, without a lot of iron or carbon. If this one’s got a different chemical composition, that would suggest it came from somewhere different from its companions, and possibly that it was manufactured rather than naturally occurring. A better question would be, why are we just finding out about this now?” He stared at Zelenka as if holding the little Czech personally responsible for this oversight.
It was Weir who answered, however, perhaps in an effort to forestall yet another argument between the two scientists. “We just upgraded our intrasystem scanners,” she explained. “The new software allows us to fine-tune our study of the area right around us, which should let us detect any small ships or other subtle threats we might have missed before. As part of the calibration we rescanned all of the existing objects, and that was when Doctor Zelenka’s team discovered the oddity.”
“So you want us to take a Jumper and go check it out?” Sheppard said, already rising to his feet. “We’re on it.”
