Daniel took it for the olive branch it was. "Well... they're friendly. Or at least we don't see any weapons in evidence here. Also, look at the range of people pictured. Young, old, even children. And I don't see anyone who looks like a Jaffa, do you?"
"There are none present in this image," Teal'c said definitively.
"hi fact, there's nobody with any kind of marking to suggest that this is a Goa'uld stronghold. No Jaffa, no - " Daniel tapped his forehead. "Tattooing, not even any jewelry depicting Egyptian symbols, which seems to be pretty standard among the Goa'uld, so far as we've seen to date."
"The other thing is that nobody seems alarmed at the presence of the MALP," Carter pointed out. "They just look curious."
"Exactly, Captain - Doctor - which is a very interesting point," Daniel nodded enthusiastically. "We'd assume if the Goa'uld weren't present that there would be nobody coming through their Stargate, but it looks like a pretty busy place, judging from the number of people we're seeing from the video. Either the Stargate is in a high traffic area, or..."
"What's our objective, General?" Jack asked. "They look like nice folks, snappy dressers, but if there's no Goa'uld, what's the tactical mission?"
"This is only your second scheduled mission through the Stargate, Colonel," Hammond said. "I don't know what the tactical mission might be. We're on a fact-finding brief at this point. Our mandate from the President is to perform reconnaissance, assess any threats that may exist, and make peaceful contact with these people. If the Goa'uld aren't present on this world, it's possible these people might have found a way to eliminate them, or at least deter them."
"And they're obviously operating at a pretty high cultural level," Daniel jumped in. "If what I see here is representative, it's a prosperous, living history of ancient Greek society. We can't possibly not explore this place, regardless of what kind of technology exists here. And we can offer them some kind of trade, build peaceful relations..."
Oh, great, Jack thought. Now it's some kind of U.N. mission. Those always work so well. He turned to Teal'c. "This place look familiar to you?"
Teal'c was studying the picture closely. "It is difficult to be certain. Apophis rules many worlds. This has some resemblance to one he visited, though rarely."
"But there would have been Jaffa on duty at the Stargate, if Apophis ruled the planet, right?" Carter asked. Teal'c nodded. "Then this might not be his world at all."
Daniel looked solemn. "But if it is his world, then maybe they have some idea where Sha're and Skaara might have been taken. Jack, we can't take the chance. We have to at least investigate the possibility."
Hammond folded his thick hands together and leaned forward, elbows on the table. It occurred to Jack - late - that this was the first time he'd seen the General out of his full dress kit. The short-sleeved look suited him, made him look more hands-on, less consciously intimidating.
Not less authoritative, though.
"Colonel?" Hammond asked, focused on him. Jack was starting to get a feel for Hammond's command style, and it mostly added up to choose the best people and trust the hell out of them. And probably kick their collective asses when they screw up.
He could live with that.
Jack nodded. "Guess we're a go, sir."
"Go it is." Hammond shut his folder. "SG-1, see the Quartermaster for your gear. Captain Carter, what's the next full daylight window on this world?"
"The MALP's been there long enough to take some readings. By our calculations, it's before dawn there now, sir. Any time before twenty-one hundred should put us in for a daylight arrival."
"Let's make it a departure at seventeen hundred. I'll get the orders drawn up." Hammond stood. Jack, Carter and Teal'c rose with him; Daniel, already standing, settled for another cautious nod. "Dismissed, people."
Jack picked up the memo that Daniel had left on the table as Hammond closed the door of his ready room. "Oh, Daniel?"
Daniel was already gathering up books, coffee cup, pens, leather binder, folder... he paused in the act of juggling. "Yes?"
"Funny thing, but this memo has my name on it."
"Well... yes... I was supposed to give it to you. Nobody knows where your office is. Including me, by the way."
"Good. Let's keep it that way." Jack flicked the memo across the table with a fingernail toward Carter, who fielded it and put it in her own folder. "Captain, as my second in command, you're the keeper of the paperwork. And, next time a little pre-mission briefing, okay?"
"Absolutely, Colonel."
Was that a smile? Nah.
Couldn't be.
Based on Hammond's seventeen-hundred departure time, they had three hours to kill.
Jack chivvied his team into the Quartermaster's office, without so much as a restroom break. Ultra-secret, high-tech, save-the-world kind of stuff as this program might be, he knew damn good and well that Quartermasters offices around the world ran at exactly the same speed... slowly.
Four standard SG field packs, two MP5s, three Beretta sidearms, and one staff weapon later, they'd wasted nearly two hours, between the inventorying, packing, unpacking, repacking, and forms. There were always forms. Even Daniel had been spooked by the amount of paper being generated.
Which left them an hour. Carter, who'd taken on the role of Daniel's keeper, helped him set his alarm for departure time, which in typical military fashion she specified as t-minus ten minutes. To be early is to be on time, to be on time is to be late. Waiting was a sacred meditation.
Jack had dispensed with that years ago. He showed up on the dot, every time, but knowing Daniel, having a ten-minute window of opportunity probably wasn't a bad idea. Still wouldn't keep him from being late, but it would keep him from holding things up too much.
Funny, how well he seemed to know Daniel, considering they'd spent all of a couple of days together, more than a year ago. But they'd been highly concentrated days, full of the kind of stresses that either tore people apart or forged them together for life. He could tell that Carter felt disadvantaged by that, but she'd adjust; in this line of work, they'd all get a chance to build those bonds. The trouble was, it would probably come at one hell of a price. It usually did.
After a relaxing hour of target shooting in the base range, he cleaned his weapons and got everything ready, and strolled into the Embarkation Room at exactly seventeen-hundred hours, to find the team - even Daniel - already assembled.
"Sir," Carter said. She looked tense and a little flushed. Adrenaline pumping.
Jack nodded to her, to Teal'c, and fastened a weather eye on Daniel, who looked keen as a new recruit. "Got your Kleenex?" he asked.
"Even better," he said. "Prescription allergy pills." Then, inevitably, an uncertain look. "And, ah, tissues. For backup."
"Good plan." Jack turned to look up at the control room, where General Hammond stood at a loose parade rest, staring out. "Radio test."
They each confirmed their radio reliability, and he made a crank it up gesture at the little guy in the glasses, the one seated at the console next to Hammond. Need to find out his name, he reminded himself. Probably a good guy to know, considering he has his finger on the button to close that iris thing and smash us into little particles so small even Carter couldn't measure them...
Then he settled in to watch the Stargate begin to dial.
Something awesome about that, watching the massive bulky thing fire up, the inner ring begin to grind its way around. Chevrons locked, each in turn, with heavy metallic chunks. This close to it, he felt a surge of electricity sweep over him, not exactly static, not exactly anything he'd felt anywhere outside of this room. His skin shivered into gooseflesh.
When Chevron Six encoded, the room started to shake. He rode the turbulence with practiced ease, watched the seventh symbol lock in.
Plasma boiled toward them in a furious explosion, reaching nearly twenty feet straight out, and then collapsed back to form the glittering, liquid-silk entrance to the rest of the universe.
; "Wow," Carter breathed. "Just doesn't get old."
"Hope." Jack adjusted his hat. "Carter, take point, move out of the line of fire when you arrive. Daniel, you're next. Teal'c, behind me."
At his nod, Carter strode up the incline of the ramp, heading for another world.
t was like falling, just for an instant, into a sea of stars that blazed and froze and tore him apart and put him back together, and then he was falling as gravity took hold and rolled him painfully, two or three feet.
Jack landed flat on his back, staring up at a really bright white sun, and heard Daniel sneeze, hard, two times.
A black shadow occluded the sun, and Carter reached down and hauled him to his feet, then gave the same assistance to Daniel, who was blowing into a tissue nearby. Teal'c was up, hell, he'd probably never even gone down.
They were the center of attention.
You could have heard a pin drop. The scrape of their boots on stone sounded ridiculously loud, because nobody else was moving. There were more people than probably even Daniel had been expecting - at least thirty or forty in the near vicinity of the team on the landing, and another hundred or so in the large open square below the steps.
Jack's first tactical instinct kicked in, scanning for threats, and came up with nothing. No weapons in evidence, nobody making hostile moves.
Kind of a nice surprise, actually.
The people had on a wide variety of colors and styles - long tunics, short ones, in blues and greens and golds and prints like tartans; some looked like silk, some like cotton. Gold trim. Sandals. Nice hair.
Civilized sort of place.
Everyone was standing in neat little carefully roped lines, under canvas canopies. There were desks set up in rows in front of the lines, too, fancy curlicued things with backless stools for chairs and men perched on them who were writing on what looked like sheets of pale paper.
People had bags. Carrying bags, with handles. Some even had wheels. There was a pallet full of bags stacked nearby, with a large sign on it in symbols that seemed to be - and this was just a guess on Jack's part, because he'd seen enough fraternity shirts in his day - Greek.
"Oh my God," Daniel said numbly. "Do you see this? This is... incredible!"
Jack turned and looked for the MALP. The bulky robot was parked over on the side, labeled with another sign, tucked in a corral full of battered-looking luggage.
"Daniel," he said slowly, "Tell me what that sign says."
"Lost and found," Daniel translated.
They all stood in silence and contemplated the strangeness.
After a few seconds, the natives started talking. Loudly. Mostly commenting to each other, pointing, but some getting argumentative with the - staff? - sitting behind the desks. One of the functionaries got off his chair and ran up the steps, looking anxious and harried; he had ink-stained fingers, and his toga - tunic? - was yellowed and frayed at the hems. Knobby knees. Definitely a working-class man.
Jack backed off from the frenzied gestures and resisted the impulse to swing the MP5 into a firing line. "Daniel? Little help?"
Daniel was focused intently on the man's fast-firing speech. He made the universal gesture for slower, looking uncomprehending, and the man took a deep breath and evidently started over. Annoyed. How exactly had SG-1 gone from the locals bowing and scraping and hailing them as gods to some bureaucrat being annoyed at their arrival? Jack felt robbed.
"I was right, it's a derivation of Ancient Greek. Ah... he says we're off schedule," Daniel interpreted. "There aren't supposed to be any incoming travelers right now. This is the departure hour."
They all stared in silence at the lines of people, the bags, the paperwork. One guy getting searched by a burly-looking man in a dark tunic, who confiscated what looked like a belt knife.
The lost luggage corral.
"It's an airport," Jack said, resigned. "We're at a freakin' airport."
"All we need are the vending machines," Daniel agreed, and then pointed to a vendor at a cart handing out drinks and paperwrapped snacks.
"Okay, now that's just weird."
Their harried bureaucrat upped the volume on his complaints. Daniel focused on him again. "He's asking us to get off the, ah, I guess for want of a better word it would be runway," Daniel said. "Apparently, we're holding up the scheduled departures."
The guy was making furiously animated shooing gestures. Jack led the way down the steps, then followed the air-shoves off to the left. Behind them, a group of people queued up near the DHD, chattering and staring at SG- l's strange gear.
Dark-tunic guys ahoy. Ah. Airport security. Figured. One of them flexed his muscles, but next to Teal'c he was nothing to write home about. Not that Jack hoped it would come to hand-to-hand, because if it did, well, there was Daniel.
One of them made an unmistakable give it over kind of gesture, and pointed to Jack's MP5.
"They're not touching my weapons," Jack said pleasantly. "Might want to tell him that before we get into the shouting and hitting part of diplomacy."
Daniel was deep into his Hi, we're peaceful explorers speech, which he seemed to reel out with practiced ease. Prepped it before we came, eh? He could well imagine Daniel standing in front of the mirror, trying out non-threatening expressions. Well, fine, that was his job. Jack's was to look dangerous, though probably not as dangerous as Teal'c, who had that frozen cold distance thing down pat. Probably had a class in it at Apophis University.
Carter was... fascinated. Looking everywhere at once, taking in more than Jack would probably ever see if he spent a week with a camera. Hammond had warned him she was way smarter than him, and he was strongly reminded of it in the cogent way she surveyed the layout of the place. He decided to take advantage of it, at least. "Captain Carter? Thoughts?"
She could barely tear her eyes away from her appraisal. "Apart from their understandable confusion, I don't see anybody panicking, sir. They're used to visitors here, though we're out of the ordinary. Dr. Jackson would be able to say for sure, but it sounded to me like a number of languages being spoken out there, which means a very multi-cultural sort of place." She paused. "Have you ever seen any thing like this before?"
"In my vast experience? No. Which means, oh, exactly zero, Carter. I've been to Abydos. Even Daniel will tell you it wasn't the crossroads of the universe."
"Sir, I just can't see this kind of industry springing up under Goa'uld rule. They strike me as anti-trade, unless it's to their benefit. And this isn't exactly slave labor. It's more like..." She nodded at a family of five clustered nearby in one of the lines. Baby in arms, three-year-old squalling and clutching at Mom's skirts, Dad looking harried, an older boy trying to appear haughtily disinterested. "This sounds crazy, sir, but that looks like vacation, sir. Holiday travel. Something like that."
"I'm still adjusting to the fact that they have a lost and found."
"Sir, these people look, well, normal."
He couldn't dispute that. The more he looked past the costumes - and truthfully, they weren't as wild as all that, he'd seen stranger things walking around Times Square - the more he saw people who might not have been out of place back home in blue jeans and sneakers, kicking their heels at LaGuardia or LAX. A few were sitting on their baggage, reading scrolls or sipping drinks.
Drinks... he followed the lines and saw a building off to the side. With a built-in counter. And high, three-legged stools with patrons firmly in place. More tables and chairs inside, in the shade.
Of course. What was an airport without a bar? The resilience of the human spirit never failed to amaze him. You plunk a few people down in alien terrain, give them nothing to do, and within a few weeks, one of them would master home brewing...
"Jack!" Daniel was back, glowing with enthusiasm. "This is les- tos, he's, well, I guess you'd call him a ticket agent. I've explained to him we came through the Stargate."
"And?"
"And he gave me a list of three planets we could have come from! Delphi, Sikyon, Myce
nae - Jack, they're names of ancient Greek city-states! This is incredible - apparently each of these worlds has trade routes through the Stargate to this place and - "
"Vacation travel, yeah, we got that." Daniel's enthusiasm was contagious. Jack had a hard time keeping his necessary pessimism intact. "You made him understand we didn't just get separated from our tour group, right?"
"He understands that we're from a world outside of their normal routes - it's called the Helos Confederacy, apparently - and the name of this world is Chalcis, by the way." Daniel took a deep breath and visibly calmed himself. "He's sending a message to his superiors. We're supposed to wait."
The dark-tunic guys -who didn't need Security badges to identify them, the body language was unmistakable - were looking nervous about all the talking and gesturing. Jack tried a friendly smile. None of them smiled back. "So? We wait?"
"Yes."
Jack let a brief silence go by. "Right here? In the sun? `Cause it's going to get toasty."
"Well..." Daniel looked around and focused on the building. "There's a place to wait in the shade over there."
"That's some kind of tavern, Daniel."
"Oh." Daniel's eyebrows went up. "And...?"
For the life of him, Jack couldn't think of a single reason not to do it. He turned to the security guys and said, "Right. We'll... be in the bar."
Two important things to learn about offworld bars.
One, money was important. Daniel had managed to trade some kind of jewelry he'd brought along - for the sake of history, Jack hoped it wasn't beads - for a round of local brew. Jack had specified nonalcoholic, but Daniel wasn't sure the concept had translated. Teal'c unhesitatingly tasted his, and said gravely, "This contains intoxicating substances."
"Right. Stick to canteens." He gazed at Teal'c for a few seconds. "But it's safe, right? Not poisonous or anything?"
"I do not believe so. My symbiote would react if the drink contained anything harmful."
That did it. Jack frankly couldn't resist a sip - not every day you run across alien daiquiris - and was surprised at the taste that exploded on his tongue. Heavy, silky, fruity, sweet, with a nice brisk slap at the end for freshness. "Not bad," he said. Might try it on the way back, especially if they ended up stuck in the departure line for, oh, hours. Take a sample of it back for the lab geeks. Might have some medicinal purposes.
Stargate SG-1: Sacrifice Moon Page 2
