“Oh yes.” Colonel Frank Simmons smiled. “Surely you were made aware that the NID had assigned an observer to this… masterpiece?”
CHAPTER THREE
“Come on, Gus! Don’t go official on me,” Sam Carter purred, grimacing—partly at herself for the purr, partly at Gus and his habit of making people woo him. She wasn’t a wooer.
Eighty-seven degrees through a monumental eye roll she caught sight of Daniel who came strolling into her lab, Teal’c in tow. Pinning the handset between ear and shoulder, she gestured for them to grab chairs. At the other end of the line, in an office in Chantilly, Virginia, Augustus “Gus” Przsemolensky was graduating from No way! to I’m not supposed to.
“For old times’ sake. Gus! This is me!”
Teal’c’s left eyebrow did a pull-up, and Dr. Jackson mouthed Gus? with such an exaggerated look of surprise that Sam exploded into a snort.
“No! I had to sneeze. Dust.” She glowered at Daniel. “Look, if somebody asks… Yeah, blame it on CORONA… You will? Great! Got something to write? Here goes…” Sam reeled off a set of coordinates, date, and time and repeated it all for good measure. “You got my email address. Ten minutes would be good… Okay, okay… Half an hour. Thanks, Gus.”
She put the handset back into the cradle and sagged onto her lab bench, forehead resting on folded hands. “Talk about giving birth to China,” she muttered at a technical drawing.
“Gu-u-us,” sang Daniel, drawing it out over three syllables. “Anything you want to tell us, Sam?”
Raising her head just enough to glare at him between bits of disassembled particle accelerator and mummified donuts, she growled, “Not really. How about you?”
Daniel’s glee evaporated. “Looks like they’re here to stay.”
“Damn! Have they talked to either of you yet?”
“They have not, Major Carter.” Teal’c sounded like a funeral director.
“What about the Colonel?”
“No idea. I doubt it, though,” said Daniel and shrugged. “I tried to phone him a few times. Don’t know how he did it, but his service is redirecting all calls to the talking clock in Tokyo.”
“It’s what?” Sam straightened up, knocking a donut mummy off the bench. It bounced. “That’s… impressive. How do you know it’s the talking clock?”
“I speak—”
“Japanese. Of course.”
“Anyway, I guess even those NID jerks would have got the Do not disturb part.”
Yesterday, three days after that misbegotten exercise, two faceless, flavorless NID agents of unspecified rank and sublime dress sense had descended upon Stargate Command. Over the protests of General Hammond. The protests had been silenced by a call from Washington. It wasn’t the first time it had happened, it sure as hell wouldn’t be the last—unless somebody finally grew the balls to shut down that nest of vipers—but usually you found out in a hurry why the NID came at you. If only because they came at you with all the diplomatic finesse of an Abrams M1A battle tank.
Sam winced at the memory of her own interview with Frank Simmons a few months back. He’d made a damn good bid at dismantling her professionally, mentally, emotionally. Halfway through she’d grasped that Simmons had to be the illegal user who’d hacked into the SGC mainframe. Thinking she could rattle him, she’d accused him point blank. Water off a duck’s back. He hadn’t even tried to deny it, and the threat implicit in his indifference had scared the hell out of her. Eventually, Simmons had left. The threat hadn’t. It lingered like a bad smell. His impromptu appearance at the debriefing four days ago had reinforced it nicely. And now his henchmen were here, sniffing after—
“Major Carter.”
“What?”
Teal’c silently pointed at her computer. In the lower right-hand corner of the screen the mail icon was flashing.
“That was quick. I think Gus is a little overeager.” Daniel’s eye patch rode up his forehead, and he grinned. “Want me to check?”
“You wouldn’t be able to read it. Besides, it can’t be him yet. He’s never in his life been ahead of a deadline.”
Then again, stranger things had happened. She darted out from behind the lab bench, pushed aside her computer chair, currently inhabited by Daniel, and opened the email.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Long time no see
Sam, great to hear from you and thanks for thinking of an old flame. Do as you promised and drop in on me next time you’re in this neck of the woods. Gus xoxox
No attachment. More significantly, no encryption. Gus encrypted his shopping lists. She should know because, once upon a time, she’d played Crack The Algorithm with him. Either Gus wasn’t the author, or he’d wanted to demonstrate to somebody standing over him that this was perfectly harmless—and at the same time warn Sam Carter. She felt a lump of ice congealing in the pit of her stomach. “Oh crap,” she whispered. “Crap!”
“Hey! He did sign off with hugs and kisses. There’s hope yet.” Daniel was scanning the mail, then his gaze arrested on the sender’s address. “National Reconnaissance Office? Friends in high places, huh? All the way in orbit. Now care to tell us what this is all about?”
Sam dug a crumpled piece of paper from her back pocket and tossed it at Daniel. “Your little math problem.”
“My what?” Smoothing out wrinkles between thumb and forefinger, he stared at his own writing. “Oh. Well, that got slapped down alright. Dr. Jackson, have you considered that Colonel O’Neill’s reconnaissance wasn’t quite what it should have been?” His rendition of Crowley’s adenoid twang was flawless. “So what about it?”
“Daniel, we both know that the Colonel’s reconnaissance was just dandy. Teal’c did most of it.”
“Indeed.” The Jaffa had risen from a chair that seemed two sizes too small for his frame and wandered over to them, all elegance and contained power. “O’Neill had no reason to assume that there were sufficient numbers for the kind of ambush we experienced.”
“But telling that to Crowley would have gone over like a pregnant pole-vaulter,” Daniel glumly completed the thought. “Jack must have realized when I got my butt kicked by Norris. Maybe I should have just kept my mouth shut.”
“O’Neill would not have told General Crowley under any circumstances.”
“Teal’c’s right,” said Sam. “The Colonel believes he’s to blame. No points for guessing what that means.”
“Yeah,” grumbled Daniel. “Anybody who wants to tell him otherwise can go have a heart to heart with the talking clock in Tokyo.”
“Which is why Major Carter attempted to obtain independent evidence from Augustus Przsemolensky.”
“Yup.” Sam nodded at Teal’c. “Your momma didn’t raise no dummies.”
“She did not.” The smile was there if you knew him, quirking just beneath the dignified surface. “I am an only child.”
“Sooo…” Pensively shredding the notepaper, Daniel gazed at the computer screen and then back at Sam. “You asked your friend Gus at the NRO to get you a satellite picture of the factory grounds at the time of the exercise. The idea being to run a headcount of everybody outside. How am I doing for a civilian contractor with no grasp of tactical issues?”
“Not bad.” She grinned. “Colonel Norris would be shocked.”
“I don’t see a picture.”
“No.”
Her grin died, and Sam crossed her arms in front of her chest as if to protect herself. The iceberg in her stomach wanted to stage a comeback. For a minute or two she’d allowed herself to push aside the implications of Gus’ email. They meshed perfectly with the diffuse sense of dread the presence of the NID agents had triggered. But none of this would go away just because she ignored it. Simmons wouldn’t go away. She drifted back behind her lab bench, feeling safer among the familiar clutter of research and experimentation. At least that was predictable, obeyed rules. By and large.
“Somebody inte
rcepted my phone call,” she said at last. “My money’s on the NID. Unless Gus told them, they won’t know what I asked him to do, because the call was scrambled. But they do know where it came from and where it went, and they got to Gus by return post. There’s no chance of him sending me any pictures now. No chance of proving anything, either way.”
“Oh crap, huh? But you’re wrong.” The corners of Daniel’s mouth twitched, and he looked nine shades of smug. It went well with the eye patch. “They’ve shown their hand. They’ve just told us loud and clear that there is something to prove. All you’ve got to do is find another way of proving it.”
“There is no other—” Her eyes arrested on the dismantled generator and a clutch of tools. Research and experimentation. Predictable. Obeying rules. By and large. Sam gazed up and smiled. “Okay, scratch that. Gentlemen, we’re going on a fieldtrip back to the factory.”
As they left the lab, klaxons started wailing, signaling an incoming wormhole five levels below. Habit tugged at her and demanded she head down to the control room. Sam made for the armory instead. There were some props they needed to collect, ideally without answering questions. The well-timed excitement in the gate room would keep the NID creeps occupied.
The stowaway stepped from the chill, liquid embrace of the Chappa’ai. Behind her the wormhole destabilized and died, and the barrier, which the Tauri thought could protect them, slid into place. Before her two of them slowly marched down the ramp, supporting a third. He was injured. So fragile, humans. So ignorant.
Little did they suspect that she had caused the injury, caused the man to trip and fall down a ravine and break his leg. She had heard the bones snap. It had amused her. Fragile indeed. And because they feared their own fragility, they had invented a goddess of deceit and destruction to appease. Destruction and deceit were apt enough, but there was much more.
“So much more, my children.” Her lips moved, but she did not utter a sound. Not yet.
For the ones who appeased her enough, there were rewards—screaming, blood-sweet turmoil of body and mind. If, ultimately, the rewards pleased her more than their recipients, it was only due tribute to a deity.
The humans had eased their injured comrade onto a step at the bottom of the ramp. Others, clad in black, swarmed around them. Toward the edges of her vision they appeared increasingly distorted, grotesque gnomes brandishing grotesque weapons. The phase shifting device smudged her view of their reality into a gray-in-gray perspective through shattered glass. A noise to the left made her turn her head—too fast—and her eyes snapped shut against a jagged blur of images. She blinked and saw the healer rush into the room. No black for this one. This one wore white. For purity, she presumed, snarling at the thought. Not so pure, this one. Not above destruction and deceit, just like her.
She remembered this diminutive woman pointing a weapon, large and out of place in too-small hands. This healer, so-called, had forced her to reverse the maturing of the first viable hak’taur. Centuries of labor destroyed at the cusp of fruition… She felt a swell of rage, let it fill her, relishing its heat. No weapon now. It would be easy to crush the healer’s body. It could be achieved in a heartbeat, and the humans, fragile and ignorant, would be helpless to prevent it. But this was not the time, and it was enough to know that she could do it. That knowledge held a satisfaction all of its own, an assurance of godlike power over life and death. She smiled.
Their fat, bald leader had joined the group around the injured man. “What happened?” he barked.
Did it matter? And did anyone believe this show of concern? Apparently they did. Excited voices chattered out a garbled account of an accident that had been no accident. Humans. How they bored her! Most, but not all of them. She scanned the room for more adequate. entertainment and was disappointed. Then again, she would have wanted to meet him alone, like the last time…
“In your place I doubt I would have done the same.” The fact that she concedes even that much is remarkable, and she does not quite know why she has admitted the truth or what it means. A grudging tribute or a warning against future folly. At any rate, a challenge.
Dark eyes unreadable, he turns it back on her. “I’ll keep that thought alive.”
About to step onto the ramp, she throws a last look at him—tall, lean, gray-haired, fearless. A worthy adversary. Better yet, a complex one. Life has scored that handsome, narrow face, and hidden behind his eyes lies a much older man’s experience of bliss, agony, death. A lot of the latter, she suspects and idly wonders what it will take to break him. Deceit and destruction? Perhaps. Perhaps she will find out. Perhaps not. But whatever the answer, they are not finished yet.
She smiles a promise, and he understands her perfectly.
The memory was shattered by two more men entering the room below, their clothing markedly different from the others’. These were the ones the human Simmons had advised her to contact. She briefly recalled the image of his face in the communication globe. No secrets here. The mouth alone, sensuous and cruel, betrayed his thirst for power, and the long, fleshy features held a haughtiness that rivaled her own. He could be trusted, because his most fundamental trait could be trusted: greed.
Noiselessly she glided down the ramp and toward the new arrivals. Slipping in behind the younger one, blue-eyed and innocent, she caressed his neck. He would not be able to feel her touch in his phase, not completely. It would seem like a breath of cool wind to him, she assumed. She had assumed correctly. Fine blond hairs stood on end. A second gentle stroke across soft skin, and he shivered imperceptibly, which pleased her. Perhaps she would reward him. A poor substitute, but a substitute nonetheless.
At the third touch he nudged his companion, who turned around, frowned, shrugged. They had been told what to expect but still hesitated to accept what they could not see. So very human. It did not matter, however, as long as they obeyed their instructions.
A mere two paces away, the injured man was carried from the room. Behind him followed the healer and the human leader. The elder of the escorts stepped forward and addressed him. “General Hammond?”
“I don’t have time for you now, Kyser!”
“This won’t take a moment, and I guarantee you’ll like what you hear.” The man Kyser gave a tight smile.
The General stopped in his tracks and whirled around, nimble for a man of his girth. “Make it quick!”
“Simply a courtesy, General. We’re finished here. You can expect Colonel Simmons’ report within a day or two.”
“Fine. Don’t let the door hit you on your way out.” The human leader strode off.
“Don’t let that head of yours get too big,” Kyser hissed into thin air. “One of these days, it’s gonna roll, General. Real soon.” Then he nodded at the younger man. “Let’s go.”
She followed them through a maze of drab corridors, into two elevators for an endless journey toward daylight, and finally out into a manmade cavern. This area accommodated surface conveyances, and it smelled acrid with fumes. Her escorts stopped at a vehicle, large and sand-colored. The young one unlocked its doors.
“Now what?” he asked.
“We wait a few minutes, then we make tracks,” replied Kyser. “If she’s in the car, great. If not, I won’t complain. I’m not exactly keen on spending hours on a plane with an invisible snake at my back.”
“Would it make you feel more confident if I were visible?” She enjoyed the effect immensely. The man stifled a scream and staggered against the rear of the vehicle, staring at her in pure terror. She approached until she stood pressed against him, fingers playing across his cheek. Without warning they clenched in his hair. “Be grateful that I choose not to punish you for your insolence!”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Now take me to your master.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Daniel watched the anchor-like metal contraption reach its zenith and stall. It hovered for a moment, then it flipped downward and nosed into yet another plunge, trailing rope. He
clamped his hands over his ears, winced. The noise of a grappling hook striking concrete, amplified by God knew how many thousand cubic feet of empty space, was cataclysmic. It seemed to drill through his hands and into his ears, after which it converged somewhere behind his shiner to pound around a bit. Wonderful. By the end of this he’d probably be deaf and blind.
Eventually the echo died down and Sam shouted, “That was great, Teal’c! Nearly there. Try again!”
Oh for cryin’ out loud… to coin a phrase. “Sam, I really—”
“Major Carter.” Teal’c actually looked frazzled. “ATauri scientist named Albert Einstein devised a most apposite definition of insanity. Are you familiar with it?”
“Yes. Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
“I assure you, the result will be no different however many times I attempt this.” Which was the sound of a Jaffa digging in his heels.
Cross-legged on the floor, Sam hunched over her laptop, keying stuff that presumably made sense to her. Now she gazed up. Just how she did it was a mystery to Daniel, but her smile lit up the gloomy factory hall and raised ambient temperatures by several degrees. A select few had been known to say No to the killer beam. Jack, for instance, though he probably practiced in front of the mirror. On this occasion, the full force of it was directed at Teal’c, who wasn’t in training. His resistance wilted, and he wordlessly began coiling the zip line attached to the grappling hook. Take umpteen.
“Your last two tries were really close,” she said, faintly apologetic. “I’ve computed the kilopond necessary to get that hook up there. That’s easy, just a function of weight and distance, with the aerodynamic drag of the rope factored in. I’ve also downloaded your physiological profile from Janet’s databank, which allows me to calculate the force you put into a throw like this. Now, given that the differential between—”
“Major Carter. I am ready, and it is getting late. We shall not be able to continue after sunset.”
07 - Survival of the Fittest Page 3
