03 - The First Amendment

by Ashley McConnell - (ebook by Undead)

  Kinsey twisted around to face him. Teal’C’s customary expression looked very much like one of those statues on Easter Island, he thought, only much rounder. The deep frown was the same, though. “You’re a Jaffa?” the word was unfamiliar in his mouth.

  “Yes. I have renounced my allegiance to the Goa’uld.”

  “Uh, don’t take this wrong, please but… does that mean you’re not human? From Earth?”

  Teal’C nodded sharply, apparently unconcerned. “That is correct.”

  “Oh.” Once when he was a little kid, he’d dumped out a bowl full of goldfish onto the kitchen floor. For the first time he felt he understood how the goldfish felt as their mouths opened and closed uselessly. He couldn’t stop staring at the man. Except that, apparently, he wasn’t, strictly speaking, a man.

  He looked human. Except of course for that symbol on his forehead, which looked like a gilded scar. The guy had one head, two arms, two legs, hands that strongly resembled George Foreman’s. In his set of regular jungle cammie fatigues, he would blend in with any American military unit.

  Alien? Couldn’t be. They had to be making fun of him, seeing just how credulous the reporter would be in his search for a story. Aliens looking exactly like Earth humans are living among us!

  He still didn’t really believe it, he realized. Part of him still thought he was sitting in the briefing room at the Visitors Center for the Cheyenne Mountain Complex, listening to Captain Weikman go on and on about tracking Santa Claus from the North Pole on December 24, the primary role these days of Air Force Space Defense Systems.

  And the team members were watching him again, waiting to see how he would react. He experienced a slow burn of resentment that they could sit there chewing mystery meat and take all this for granted, that they could believe this, live this every day. Didn’t they appreciate the wonder and the scope of what they were doing?

  For the first time he asked himself, quite seriously, What the hell am I doing here? It wasn’t a question about what he was doing, so much as it was why he was here with these people who didn’t respect him or his work, were cooperating with obvious reluctance, and had no intention of ever letting him use the information they provided him. He was being shown a banquet and told he would never, ever be able to eat it. And these people could feast on it every day and considered it no more than another course of MREs.

  “Okay, folks, let’s hit the road,” O’Neill said. “We’ve got places to go and people to see.”

  Maybe one’s sense of wonder got burned out when you went to new worlds every week, Kinsey thought. Or maybe, he reminded himself sternly, the immediate possibility of getting oneself killed tended to shut down the oooooh-ahhhh reflex. He took himself by the mental scruff of the neck and shook himself sternly. Resentment? It was jealousy, pure and simple. These people—this unit, anyway, given that they weren’t all quite people—got to do things he’d only fantasized about. He’d always wanted to visit Barsoom, and now here he was, with a bunch of people who were incredibly blasé about it all. It made him feel like a tourist, like a kid at a science fiction convention instead of a seasoned, experienced professional. Well, he could be just as matter-of-fact about strange new worlds and alien sidekicks as the next guy. So there.

  He tucked the debris of his meal back into his pack and staggered to his feet to join the rest of them. Okay, so not all outer space creatures were bug-eyed monsters. At least some of them were. He could accept that. He hoped.

  On the other hand—he chuckled suddenly. The image that had just popped into his head was priceless.

  “What’s funny?” Carter asked, keeping pace beside him. At least she was human. If it turned out that she wasn’t, Kinsey decided he didn’t want to know. Some things were just too horrible to contemplate.

  “I’m just imagining what the look on my father’s face must have been when he first heard all this,” Kinsey sputtered. “I wish I’d been there to see it. He must have had a fit.”

  “Just about,” the blonde officer said cheerfully. “Has he always had this denial problem?”

  “Always.” With his determined change in mood, he allowed himself to realize that the major was really very attractive. Or maybe it was just the automatic rifle slung over her shoulder in such a businesslike fashion. He found himself wondering if she was married. “How’d you get hauled into this?”

  “Oh, I volunteered.” Once again that impish grin, and then she lengthened her stride and passed him, easily catching up with the three other members of the team ahead of him.

  It seemed to take most of the afternoon to circle the battle plain and reach the hills and the signs of construction at their base.

  Wonder what’s gonna pop out at us this time, he thought. He was almost looking forward to it.

  Jack O’Neill allowed part of his mind—the really irritated part—to keep track of their unwanted guest, while the majority of his thoughts were focused on what lay ahead. On their first visit to P7X-924, he’d been impressed by the warmth, friendliness, and practical intelligence of the human population of the place. The suggestion that the Goa’uld had found them again after centuries was deeply disturbing. The evidence of battle behind them was even worse.

  It was a big galaxy out there. Weren’t the Goa’uld bad enough? Were they going to have to battle tube-necks too?

  He made a mental note to ask the Nox about this if he ever had the chance. He hadn’t had a chance to look at the tubenecks’ opponents close up, though he had an impression of mothlike wings and very businesslike claws. As an older, wiser, and infinitely more tolerant race than Earth had yet produced, the Nox were sometimes willing to share information with their upstart neighbors. He wondered what Kinsey would make of the Nox sky city. Not that he’d ever managed to visit it himself, of course—the people of Earth were considered a bad influence on the impressionable young—but still, it was pretty amazing even from a distance.

  Then there was Morley. Nothing in Morley’s report had hinted at two new alien races, apparently at war with each other. If O’Neill hadn’t verified the coordinates himself he’d be wondering if they’d arrived at the right planet. Oops, sorry, wrong address, we meant to deliver the nukes next door. But Morley had gone well and truly off the deep end. Could it have been the tubenecks and the whatevers that did for him? Did he ascribe his casualties to the Goa’uld because that was what he could cope with?

  Did it really matter?

  Of course it mattered. Three Stargate teams had come to this world, and two of them had come back in tatters. He felt responsible. They’d come to this world expecting no trouble at all, based on the word of one Jack O’Neill, Colonel, USAF. They had a right to think this assignment would be interesting—problematic maybe, but mostly safe. What had gone wrong?

  “For crying out loud, Jack, are you in a race?”

  He glanced over to see Daniel puffing beside him, stretching his legs to keep up. Over his shoulder he spotted Kinsey, a good twenty yards back, gamely struggling.

  “Okay, okay.” He stopped and waited impatiently for everyone to catch up. It wasn’t his fault he had long legs. Now that he was stopped, though, he could feel his own lungs heaving the heavy air in and out, feel his own heart beating hard. He needed to slow down and take it easy. Easier, anyway. No point in wearing yourself out right before a firefight.

  Was he expecting a firefight?

  Yes, he was, and looking forward to it, too. He’d liked the Etaans. He wanted to find out who these new critters were and kick their butts. Hard.

  Kinsey tripped as he covered the last few yards, and O’Neill closed his eyes in pain. Hammond must have been out of his mind to send this jerk along. This wasn’t supposed to be a guided tour or a babysitting expedition. They had work to do, dammit.

  To his credit, Kinsey got up reasonably quickly and uttered no complaint. He was grateful for the unscheduled stop, it was obvious; he leaned over and clutched his knees, gulping air. But the others were breathing hard too, and they
were in fighting trim. O’Neil wondered what constituted “fighting trim” for a journalist. Fully armed with sharpened pencils, maybe?

  At the least the guy had the sense to laugh about his father. That was a big point in his favor.

  “Okay, the city is just past this last line of trees,” he said as the team gathered around. “According to Dave Morley, they were suckered in. So we’re going to take it slow and easy and keep our eyes peeled, not just for Jaffa but for our other unidentified friends as well.”

  Because the inhabitants called the little town with the twin towers Etaa, that worked for the name of the world too, SG-1 had decided. One of the interesting problems SG-4 had set itself was to discover from just which area of Earth the ancestors of the Etaans had been kidnapped. Some of the other worlds, such as Simarka—designated P3X-593 in the arcane numbering system used by SGC—had very clear roots in specific Earth cultures. Simarka’s inhabitants were descended from Mongolian herders and horsemen. The Cimmerians came from northern Europe. The Byrsa on P3X-1279 were an eclectic mix of Greek, Celtic, and Germanic. Etaa had the same fascinating combination of many cultures, in this case with hints of Syrian, early Byzantine, and more than just a touch of Masai. Their economy was based on trade and cattle, with some mining; they had really elaborate gold jewelry, necklaces and earrings and bracelets that would have been hot items on Earth. But SG-1 wasn’t in the business of setting up trading partnerships, and that had almost undone them until they realized the rules of this new culture. Everything on Etaa was a matter of trade.

  The Etaans were very tall, very black, very dignified. O’Neill had had a crick in his neck for a week after finishing the preliminary talks with Shostoka’an, the principal leader. He still thought it wasn’t quite fair that Shostoka’an’s badge of office was a towering plume of almost-ostrich feathers; the woman was already nearly eight feet tall. He rubbed at his neck, remembering. He had liked Shostoka’an a lot. He wondered what had happened to her.

  Daniel reached down and picked a candy wrapper out of some bruised vegetation, a look of disgust on his face. “This must be where Morley’s men stopped,” he said. “Litterbugs.”

  The team paused in the trees to survey the town.

  Etaa was spread out along the base of the hills, a bubble of human habitation bounded by a tall—a very tall—vine-woven fence. Some of the vines were in flower, giving the city wall an incongruously festive appearance. Beyond the fence they could see a few widely spaced roofs, shaped like onion domes but fashioned of some kind of straw thatch bundles. The main gate in front of them, a double door of wide wood planks nailed together by crosspieces, was flanked by one and a half cylindrical stone towers. The intact one was about fifty feet tall, providing a vantage point not only for the surrounding countryside but for the interior of the town as well. The other tower looked as if something had hit it with terrific force, knocking the top off at an angle and blasted to pieces. The gate between them sagged, all of its supports on one side vanished. There were several windows in the tower, higher than a Western Earth eye would look for them, and they made jagged dark holes in the ruins.

  “This is where they fired on the Jaffa,” O’Neill mused out loud. “They took out that right-hand tower with a grenade launcher—lucky it didn’t burn the whole place down. They reported the force field right in front of the main gate.”

  “It’s still really quiet in there,” Carter said, and shifted her weapon slightly. “There’s something wrong. Unless it really is deserted, but that doesn’t feel right.”

  “I agree.” O’Neill continued to study the brown towers. There weren’t any bird critters nesting on top of the flat platform at the top of the intact one—in fact, he couldn’t hear much of anything at all. The tall wooden gates sagged open, the supports on the right side vanished along with most of the tower they’d been connected to. There was no flow of merchants passing in or out, no bargaining going on in the shade of a hide tent. Etaa was humbled, not a proud city anymore but a little, primitive town that had fallen to a siege.

  O’Neill looked at the trees around and behind them. There was no sign of return fire from the Jaffa; the vegetation looked healthy and untouched.

  “O’Neill, look here.” Teal’C had taken a flank position some hundred yards north, scouting the smaller city gate on that side. O’Neill signaled Carter and the albatross to stay in place, while he and Daniel faded back to cross over to Teal’C’s position.

  “Uh-oh,” Daniel said, in a masterpiece of understatement.

  Approximately a third of the north boundary wall of Etaa was slumped, as if subjected to months of heavy rain that had pounded its mud bricks back into liquid, its woven vines and log supports into a tangled mass. It still retained some form, though, creating a Dali-esque image of a wall. Half the gate had melted too, the wood planks flowing onto the ground as if spilled. He could see bubbles, but they didn’t move; they were more like shells, as if the damage had been done long enough ago for the liquid to cool and solidify again. The remainder of the wall—and the gate—looked perfectly, obscenely normal. Whatever the weapon was, it could be targeted very precisely. Even if, in this case, it was the wrong target. He hoped it was.

  “I think the attackers, whoever they may be, are gone,” Teal’C said judiciously. “This does not appear to be the result of a direct assault on Etaa, but more likely collateral damage related to the battleground we passed earlier.”

  “I am so glad you think so,” O’Neill remarked. Then, at Daniel’s sharp look, he added defensively, “I am. Really!”

  “Just checking,” Daniel murmured.

  “Well, I guess we’ll have to do a little recce.” O’Neill stepped out of the tree line long enough to circle his hand in the air and pump his fist twice, then faded back into cover to wait for Carter and their journalist to form up on his position. Frank Kinsey was certainly getting an eyeful on this trip, he thought. Talk about an exclusive.

  A few minutes later the missing members of their group reappeared, looked at the ruined wall and winced. Even Kinsey, O’Neill noticed, seemed able to draw the proper conclusions, even though he had never even seen the residents of the town, much less sat down with the Etaa for a formal meal of blood and milk. Collateral damage or not, based on this it was likely that Shostoka’an and most of her people were dead.

  “Teal’C, I want you and Daniel to stay here with Kinsey and keep an eye out. I don’t want to get trapped the way Morley did. Carter, you come with me, and we’ll see if we can find anybody alive in there.” Anybody, in this case, definitely included the missing members of SG-4 and anyone Morley had left behind as well.

  Surprisingly, Teal’C shook his head. “It would be a better use of our forces to continue reconnaissance around the perimeter.”

  O’Neill paused. Teal’C was right, but he wanted to keep Kinsey out of the way.

  On the other hand, he didn’t want Kinsey in the way, either, and cutting his mobility in half was definitely in that category.

  “All right. Circle around, and we’ll look for you here in two hours.” With that, O’Neill and Carter took off for the melted wall, making use of every scrap of available cover. The others watched until they disappeared, and then went on their own assignment.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The buildings, streets, and open places of Etaa enclosed by its walls covered almost a square mile. When O’Neill and Carter picked their way through the solidified slush, they could see that whatever the weapon was that had destroyed the wall hadn’t stopped there. Every formerly solid structure in line with the wall for at least a quarter mile showed signs of slumping and damage.

  “That’s some weapon,” Carter remarked uneasily, poking at a bubble on the ground with the barrel of her rifle. The bubble cracked, releasing a weak puff of gas, and she backed away rapidly, weapon ready, even though there was nothing to fire at but rapidly dissipating pink gas. An insect flying by passed through the mist and promptly fell down dead.

  “Uh,
don’t breathe that,” O’Neill suggested.

  “Roger that, sir.” They stepped carefully around the bubbles and past the melted wall, stopping first to scan the area on the other side and, when no sign of life was detected, to examine the melted wall surface.

  “What would do that, Major? High temps?”

  Carter shook her head. “I’d expect ash and scorch marks,” she said. “This looks like something chemical. I have no idea what, though.” Removing a glass vial from her pack, she carefully chipped away a sample of the wall and tucked it away. “This stuff is really hard, too. Harder than I’d expect from adobe.”

  “Make sure you check that vial. Wouldn’t want it melting through the container,” O’Neill instructed. He couldn’t control a frisson of nerves.

  “Yes sir.” Carter could have objected—it was an obvious precaution, after all—but she simply nodded and took the order as meant.

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  Their boots crunched on the melt surface, and by mutual consent they moved away from the path of the damage and onto the softer, if considerably less sterilized, dirt surface of Etaa’s streets. They kept close to the walls, checking the open doorways before passing each one.

  It began to rain, a soft drizzle. The ground beneath their feet turned into a thin mud. Both glanced back to see what happened to the rain on the ruined surface; it hissed and spat pink gas.

  “Don’t get that stuff wet,” O’Neill advised.

  “Right,” Carter said patiently.

  The city was arranged on what Jackson told them was a “kraal” plan, with the city wall defining the perimeter, two or three concentric circles of round mud-thatch houses inside that, and a wide open area in the middle. Each house had its own satellites, for grain storage, cooking, and extended family. The middle, open area was the place that originally held the flocks of the cattle-herding Masai; for the Etaa, it was a marketplace, an occasional corral for the town’s more valuable jointly owned livestock, and a dance floor for the frequent celebrations. There had been a jump dance to welcome SG-1 to this world, and a big bonfire with lots of food and music.