Her new home was a little stone-walled cottage overlooking the glassy blue lake. Within days Linea had established herself as a healer and people began to arrive at her door seeking salves and bandages and tinctures, and even advice, though why they felt her opinion was of any more merit than their own was beyond her comprehension. She could deal with physical matters with ease, but to decide whether a woman she’d never met before should keep a secret from her male was something she neither knew the answer to nor cared about.
“I should tell him, yes?” the woman, barely out of her own childhood, blinked earnestly at her.
“That is not my business,” Linea said tersely.
“But our god frowns upon those who hold secrets.”
“What business is it of a ‘god’ whether you lie to your male or not?”
The girl gaped at her. “Apophis knows all and sees all. He will be angry with me if I lie, but if I tell Facher that I cannot bear a child he will seek another to wed.”
“Apophis is your god?”
The girl, Mascha, nodded eagerly.
“I do not believe in mythical deities. Now, I have another seeking my help. You may go.”
Mascha stayed planted on her stool. “Apophis is not a myth! He lives, he breathes. Why, he walked among us not two moons past.”
Linea paused. Daniel had told her of the enemy the Tau’ri fought on distant worlds. Goa’uld — that was what he called them. People who bore a parasite in their heads, who walked amongst the naïve and pretended to be their gods. Interesting.
“Your god, is he of the Goa’uld?”
Mascha nodded happily. “Facher is one of his Jaffa. He hopes one day to gain Apophis’ favor and maybe even become First Prime.”
“Then you had best be honest with him, lest you draw the wrath of this god.” Linea stood and shooed Mascha out the door.
Goa’uld. Human, yet gifted with strong healing abilities according to Daniel. What a challenge that would make…
“I think I lost my hearing with that last clap of thunder.” Daniel shook himself like a very wet dog.
“What?” Sam bellowed in his ear. Her hair was plastered to her scalp and stuck in bedraggled rat-tails across her face.
“Oh, there it is. Never mind.”
They were all drenched. Sunlight shone off Teal’c’s wet head making him look like a burnished Buddha as he surveyed their new surroundings.
Jack struggled out of his soaked vest and jacket and dumped them on the stone dais. “Carter, make a note to cross that planet off the list of potential mission sites.” He stuck a finger in one ear and gave it a good wiggle. “Or maybe Makepeace and his meatheads would like it. How’s it look, Teal’c?”
“No intelligent beings are in sight, O’Neill.”
“Present company excepted.” Jack took a good look at their new surroundings. “Well, no trees at least.”
“You have a thing against trees, sir?” Carter plucked ineffectively at her wet pants.
“No, I just like a bit of variety in my planets. Now this one, this is different.”
The Stargate platform stood on a small plateau amid a tumble of grey granite rocks. Close by, the rocks were smaller, soccer ball sized, but quickly increased to small car boulders and away on the horizon to massive house-sized ones — if the house was a three storied Dallas oil mansion. The only plant life to be seen were thin stalks poking up from cracks in and between the rocks, with bright, tiny flowers angling their faces to the sun.
“I can’t see Linea finding anything appealing here, Jack.” Daniel draped his wet jacket over a warm rock.
“No, still, we’ll go a short way, just to be sure.” He stepped off the dais, balanced on a rock, then stepped across to the next. “Watch your footing kids, last thing we need is a sprained ankle or two.”
Although he’d raised the issue himself, he’d been glad Daniel and then Carter had further pushed the general into allowing them this search for Linea. Jack was not one to wallow in guilt, but it had been his idea to take Linea with them in their escape from Hadante, not knowing what her crimes really were or that she would flee out into the wider network of Stargate-connected planets. Would she attempt harm on unsuspecting civilians? Who knew. He doubted they would find her, but at least they were making the effort to right their wrong. What they would do with her if they caught her was a problem for a higher pay grade. They didn’t have the co-ordinates for Hadante, they couldn’t really lock her up in Miramar or even Fort Leavenworth without a trial. Hand her over to the Goa’uld? Tempting. No, she’d end up working for them.
Wrapped in morose thoughts, Jack moved from rock to boulder, taking increasingly larger steps to get across the plateau. On his right, Teal’c moved with easy grace, placing his staff weapon in gaps between the rocks to aid his balance. Behind and to the left, Daniel and Carter hopped and jumped from one to the next.
“Boy, times like these I’m glad I’m on the tall side.” Carter’s voice carried clearly in the surrounding quiet.
They continued for ten minutes until they fetched up against a cluster of boulders the size of buses. Jack stopped and unhitched his pack.
“Okay, I’m calling this one. She’d never have made her way across this stuff, even if there are people living here.” He took a long swig of water from his canteen. Across the valley, the MALP looked tiny against the Stargate, patiently waiting for their return. “We’ll take a break and then head back.”
SG-1 perched on the weather-worn boulders, their clothing quickly dried in the sun. Errant breezes wound through the rocks causing odd moans and whines to echo in this otherwise silent world.
Jack found Daniel regarding him thoughtfully. He raised an eyebrow in query. In response, Daniel turned to Teal’c.
“Teal’c, if Linea committed her crimes on a Goa’uld world, what would they have done with her?”
“Execution.” Teal’c stared out at the empty valley. “Such aberrant people have been known on some Goa’uld worlds, but they are quickly caught and dispatched. Crimes such as Linea’s are seen not only as crimes against the people involved, but crimes against the rule of the god. Apophis would never tolerate an individual maiming or killing one of his subjects — that is his purview, and his alone. Such a one would be seen to be challenging him. They are as much a traitor as I am seen to be.”
Jack grunted. “Yeah, well, there’s traitors and then there’s traitors. I’ll take our kind of traitor any day of the week.”
Teal’c glanced over and inclined his head in thanks.
Within the first week of her stay in the village, Linea had identified fourteen samples from plant and mineral sources that would combine into a compound similar to the one she had come so close to perfecting on her former home. There, her experiments had progressed well; the sickness spread through the people with gratifying speed. The Taldor had called on her to assist with care of the sick, an opportunity which she had taken to further disseminate the plague. The death rate soared, the people bleated like the herd animals they were, rushing mindlessly from one place to another seeking any kind of cure, whether it was effective of not. Some had even found respite in the herb tansone, only to discover it accelerated the symptoms after a day of false-cure. That had been her downfall — she’d found the grower of the herb on Salos Island and bought all his stock to spread out amongst her test subjects. The grower had reported her interest to the Taldor.
Linea shoved her bowl away with force. The memories of that time rose fresh around her. The accusing faces of the soldiers who arrested her. The disbelief of the test subjects as they came to realize her assistance had in fact been killing them and their pathetic fellow weaklings. The hatred of the mob following her to the Tal’al. The cold, dispassionate voices of the Taldor delivering judgement and sentence upon her.
“Who are they t
o judge me?” She picked up the bowl and flung it against the wall. “Years in that stinking hole, playing petty politics with the likes of Vishnor just to stay alive.” Well, she had survived, and now, now was the time to wreak her vengeance upon the Taldor.
And the first step was ready to implement. She picked up the gourd filled with the powder she had worked all through the night to refine. Pausing to wrap a shawl around her shoulders against a chill bite in the air, Linea ventured out into the marketplace.
The community wells sat in the heart of the bustle of stalls and shoppers. Four elaborately carved ponds surrounded the central well, where an ingenious self-perpetuating bucket and pulley system splashed water out into the ponds. Guards from the temple stopped here to drink from the cups ranged along the edge of one pool, women filled buckets for their homes while gossiping with their neighbors, animals drank from another pond while children played and soaked themselves in the fourth.
It was an easy thing to slip a measure of the compound into three of the ponds. She avoided engaging with any of the people, answered greetings with a non-committal bob of the head, then wandered away through the stalls. She brought out her notebook, helpfully provided by Samantha, and carefully recorded the time of dispersal. First symptoms should arise within four hours, allowing the majority of subjects to imbibe the water.
Linea smiled thinly. Anticipation ran a shiver along her skin. She had missed this feeling. Only a few opportunities had presented themselves during her incarceration on Hadante, and then she was limited to one or two subjects at a time. Once she had toyed with the idea of eliminating all the prisoners, but the thought of remaining there, surrounded by stinking corpses had deterred her. She needed space to move on once an experiment was complete. A deep sigh escaped her. She had space aplenty now. A whole universe to play with.
SG-1 emerged from the Stargate into stardust sprinkled darkness. Usually missions were timed so that teams arrived in daylight, but there was no point loitering on one planet until daylight rose on the next. The MALP showed no hostiles, so on they went.
“Oh, look at that.” Sam almost tripped down the dais steps with her face turned upward to the magnificent celestial display overhead.
Billions of stars arced over their heads from one horizon to the other. Patches of dust shrouded parts of the galactic arm above them, which highlighted colorful clouds of gaseous nebulae and clumps of brilliant blue-white young stars
“Look, this planet has a ring,” Sam breathed in a sigh of wonder. The others followed her pointing finger to the sweep of thousands of tiny objects soaring through the ebony sky.
“Comet!” The colonel called, facing the other side of the Stargate. As they watched, a comet with a short tail of vapor rose into the sky and set a path straight for the ring. In no time it reached it and blew right through, creating a cascade of ice and shattered particles that followed along behind the comet to join its tail.
“Whoa, that’s something you don’t see every day.” Sam belatedly grabbed for her camera and tried to capture some of the glory above.
“That stuff’s not going to fall on us, is it?” asked Daniel.
“We won’t be staying long enough to find out,” the colonel replied. “Fifteen minutes, kids.”
Despite there being no moon, the starlight’s glow was adequate to see their way. Sam led the team across a barren landscape. There was no vegetation here, only stones and fine dust that pooled in hidden hollows and erupted into choking clouds when an unsuspecting foot went down. After a couple hundred yards, Jack sank knee deep into a dust hole. Daniel grabbed his arm and hauled him upright.
“Okay, Major, I think this is far enough. Linea wouldn’t be interested in this place.”
“She may not be, but I sure am. We have to come back here, sir. The celestial cartography we can do here could advance our understanding of space to unimaginable levels.”
“Well, we can flag it for one of the geek teams. Maybe Hammond will let you tag along.”
“It’s not just of interest to Sam, Jack, “Daniel said as he craned his neck to take in as much of the overhead wonders as possible. “I’m really curious why the gate builders put a Stargate here in the first place. There’s no settlement in sight, but there is an obvious drawcard. Finding out what brought the Stargate here might tell us a lot about the builders.”
“The heavenly bodies visible from this planet are most pleasing to the eye, O’Neill,” Teal’c added in a rare show of astronomical appreciation that had Sam grinning.
The colonel sighed dramatically. “Fine. We’ll come back. One day.” He met Sam’s hopeful look. “I’ll get Hammond to put it on our schedule — alien attacks and unexpected end-of-the-world scenarios notwithstanding. Let’s head back.”
They turned back to the Stargate. It sat gilded in starlight, beckoning them back to continue their explorations.
First symptoms of the compound were visible in all subjects within three hours, earlier than expectations. Adolescents and children succumbed completely in the first twelve hours. Many of the women and townsfolk succumbed successfully by the fifteenth hour. Strangely, other adults resisted the symptoms for a further six hours. These were noted to be what they termed priests and priestesses from the temple above the town, and the guards who stalked the streets in service of their ‘god’.
Linea looked up from her notebook. From where she sat on the edge of the well she could see many of her subjects scattered throughout the town, curled in the same knotted rictus. She rose and wandered a curving path through the bodies.
Subject Group B were incapacitated by the compound, but did not succumb immediately. Upon close examination a worm-like parasite extruded from the mouths of the priests and priestesses, and from the bellies of the guards. Once apart from their carriers, the humans expired quickly. The worms continued life for up to another hour. Some attempted to move toward me. I surmise these to be the Goa’uld that Daniel told me of.
For a brief moment she considered telling Daniel and Samantha of her success in eliminating the creatures that plagued the worlds in which they travelled. Surely they would welcome a method to end their war. But no. She stepped over a fallen man. The people of Earth were as enslaved to their consciences as the people under the Taldor had been. They would prefer to suffer their war rather than accept her assistance.
“Blind. Ignorant and blind. Why can they not see my way is the only way? Fools.”
Her voice echoed back to her. Blessed silence surrounded her and brought calm. Nothing moved apart from the animals she had set free from their pens. Birds flapped away from one group of carcasses and settled on another.
Something moved. Beyond the town, on the path to the temple. Someone came! Intrigued, she moved toward them. It was a woman, clad in an elaborate gold gown. She walked unsteadily, staggering now and again, hands clutching her belly. Her muttering reached Linea in a language she did not understand, then the moment the woman saw her she called out in the common language of the Tau’ri and the planets they travelled to.
“Help, help me please!”
Linea caught her as she sagged to her knees. “My dear, wherever did you come from? How did you survive this dread sickness that has claimed all these people?”
The woman looked up at her, pale and in pain, her dark hair plastered to her face in sweaty curls. “I was in the temple —” She cut herself off to search the empty road behind Linea. “Is everybody gone? How did this happen?”
“I know not, my dear. I am a traveler and only recently arrived.” Linea regarded her carefully. The gold dress was stained with bodily fluids and torn at the hem. “You are the only one I have encountered, the only survivor.” She tried to keep the excited curiosity out of her voice.
“My demon slept,” the woman’s voice was filled with bitterness. “When the guards fell and the priestesses became sick,
it awoke from its slumber. It fought the illness in my body. Eventually it prevailed.”
Cured by the worm inside her? How then was this parasite different from those who had succumbed? “Can you stand, my dear? You need rest and food.” She helped the woman to her feet. “What is your name, child?”
Brown eyes looked up from a frame of dark curls, and she spoke with fierce pride. “Sha’re. My name is Sha’re.”
Sha’re walked with the woman, Linea, back to a little stone cottage. She was still weak after the bouts of purging the demon had initiated to cleanse the illness from her body. Gratefully, she accepted a clean dress and cool water. She settled on a bed and looked with interest at the woman who helped her.
“Why did you come here?”
“I travel between worlds seeking herbs and roots that will make medicines to heal the sick. Sadly, I arrived on this world far too late to be of use. Except to you, dear. At least I can help you.” A smile creased the old woman’s lined face.
“I don’t understand how a sickness can affect so many people, so quickly.”
“Nor can I, child. You must be well blessed by the gods to have survived.”
“Blessed? By the gods?” Sha’re spat her distaste at the thought. “There are no gods. Only demons.”
“You said your demon awoke to heal you. What did you mean by that?”
Sha’re closed her eyes for a moment, feigning weakness. Much as it was a delight to talk to another human being without the foul demon putting the words in her mouth, something did not feel right. Sour, like mastadge milk. A flicker of melancholy passed through her at the memory of Skaara’s favorite saying.
“The worm that lives inside me, it pretends to be one of the gods that holds people like…those, in thrall.” She glanced at the wall, seeing in her mind the dead littered beyond. “When I became with child —” Her voice faded. Oh, Danyel, forgive me, my love. “When that happened, the demon had to sleep, lest its presence cause the child to be born before its time. Apophis, the mate of my demon, hid me here to protect it and the child.”
STARGATE SG-1 ATLANTIS: Homeworlds : Volume three of the Travelers' Tales (SGX Book 5) Page 23
