“I take it you’re referring to my father.”
O’Neill tilted a half-nod of agreement. “He thinks we can win because God is on our side. At the same time he’s scared to death we’re going to bring something back through the Gate that’ll destroy us all. He’s already tried to shut us down once. The fact that it wouldn’t stop Apophis doesn’t seem to matter to him.”
“Consistency was never one of my father’s biggest virtues.” Kinsey considered. It had been a long time since he’d agreed with his father on much of anything. “So you’re saying he arranged to have me come out here to blow the whistle on you in the hope that world pressure will succeed where he failed?”
“Give the man a cigar,” O’Neill said wryly.
“So why am I here?” Here, on an alien world, weighing more than he ought to, breathing funny-tasting air, watching aliens go at each other like something from Dinosaurus…
“Because General Hammond said so. I guess he thinks you have something your father hasn’t got.”
“Common sense, maybe,” Jackson offered. He slapped hard at an insect that had lighted on his arm. “Ouch.”
“Or maybe sending me to another world is just the biggest bribe that’s ever been offered a newspaperman in the history of the Earth.”
“That too,” O’Neill agreed. “We’re hoping you’ll stay bought.”
He grinned despite himself. “So what’s the deal on this world?” It was easier to breathe now, Kinsey found. His body was slowly adjusting to the heavier gravity. “What’s happening here?” His briefing manuals had contained nothing about where the Gates led, or aliens. Or Goa’uld.
Carter, who was unloading the mechanical puppy, took up the story. Kinsey was fascinated at the volume and variety of materiel that piled up beside the metal cart. Weapons—some of which he identified as such by default, having never seen them before—supplies, explosives. Carter passed around packs as she talked, and the others busily loaded up.
“This is the world we designated P7X-924. Our team, SG-1, made first contact here a couple of months ago. We found a human colony that has been here, as far as we can tell, for several hundred years; the origin seems to be East Africa. They’re a peaceful trading and farming community, pre-industrial, with a good understanding of at least this part of this planet’s ecosystem. Our mission is to find allies, tools, technology, anything that Earth can use against the Goa’uld, and if there’s a cure for cancer lying around we’ll get that too.”
“And if you find something the U.S. could use against, say, China?”
“We’ve got our mission,” O’Neill said firmly. He didn’t look at all uncomfortable. “Policy isn’t our bailiwick.”
“Besides,” Jackson put in, “the human communities we’ve found have all been far less technologically advanced than Earth is. And we’ve got bigger worries than China out here.”
O’Neill shot the blond man a bland look and continued.
“Anyway. The Etaans have adapted some of the local vegetation and come up with what might be some new antibiotics. So we sent SG-4, a research team, in to do a baseline study.
“Things went bad. A couple of members of SG-4 made it back to tell us that most of the team was dead but some had been taken prisoner. David Morley was supposed to launch a retrieval operation. You saw how well that worked out when you were in the infirmary. We’re here to figure out what the hell happened.”
“So the ones who came through when Morley had me—”
“Nope, that was SG-9 on a different mission entirely. They were doing a combat reconnaissance on a totally different world. It’s not just the four of us, you know. There are several operations going at once at all times.”
The colonel fell silent, and Kinsey tried to sort through all the information about SGs, planets, Goa’uld. He wished he had a camcorder of his own, or at least a pencil and a piece of paper. It was too much.
And not enough.
“So what are those things?” Kinsey asked, jerking a thumb back toward the now-deserted plain marked only by the Stargate.
“Damned if I know,” O’Neill shrugged.
Kinsey decided there was something seriously warped about O’Neill’s sense of humor. And he liked it.
The little outcrop of rocks was developing all the signs of becoming a very comfortable base camp. Carter was busy filling four sets of backpacks as they talked.
“So what do you think happened to the people—the humans, from Earth, I mean—who live here?”
“They’ve probably been taken by Goa’uld troops to be hosts.” There was a strained harshness to Jackson’s answer. There was definitely something going on there, something personal. Kinsey made a mental note to follow up on it sometime. Maybe he could buy the man a drink. He didn’t look like a straight-arrow military type.
“When you say hosts—what exactly do you mean?”
He noted with some interest that three of them glanced simultaneously at Teal’C before Jackson said evenly, “The Goa’uld are a parasitic race. They need other species to live with. In larval form it’s a symbiotic relationship. When they become adults they take a new host and—it’s not symbiotic anymore. They take over.”
“So they look human? Or—I guess the hosts are, but can you see the aliens too? At the same time?”
“No. Not exactly.”
“So how do you know whether you’re dealing with a real human or a pod person?”
“You’ll know,” Jackson said dryly. “The behavior differences are—explicit.”
“Okay, now that we have the exposition over with, can we get on with the mission?” O’Neill snapped.
“But—” Kinsey started to say that he had more questions, many, many more questions, but the expression on the colonel’s face persuaded him that perhaps this wasn’t a good time. He swallowed his curiosity and nodded.
“Okay, let’s move out.” All the packs were filled. Carter handed one to Kinsey as well, an odd flat rectangle, and he grunted as he slung it across his shoulders. He thought he was in shape, but he was glad he hadn’t bragged about it.
He was even gladder when he realized that the pack was just as affected by the heavier gravity as he himself was, and none of the others made an issue of it. Everything had been divided up evenly, too, he noticed, so he was carrying as much weight as Carter and O’Neill and Jackson and Teal’C were. They seemed to concentrate on firepower; he had no idea what was in the rectangle.
Teal’C. What a weird name. Neither he nor Jackson wore any rank insignia, unless that funny tattoo on the black man’s forehead counted. Kinsey tucked that thought, too, away for greater consideration later.
The five of them slipped and slid down the little outcrop and headed across the plain at a fast trot, keeping to the shelter of the vegetation, heading for the thin line of smoke. The dark-red moon it marred had set, but the other two between them shed as much light as—a sun? What was the sun of this world, he wondered. A red giant? How far from it did this world revolve?
Were there other worlds in this system? Worlds with living beings? Could they visit them, too?
He barely noticed when the smell of nuts was replaced with something else less palatable. He was puffing as they came through a thin line of “trees,” and so nearly ran up Teal’C’s back when the big man stopped abruptly.
“Down!” O’Neill whispered, and Kinsey was never so grateful to obey an order in his life. He pressed his face into something that looked remarkably like grass, breathing hard.
“Quiet!”
That particular order wasn’t quite as easy to obey, but he tried, opening his jaws wide so his breath didn’t whistle quite so much, controlling the heaving of his lungs as best he could.
“Wha—?”
He lifted his head at last to see his companions arrayed in a skirmish line on either side of him, peering through the blades.
Holy sh—
He couldn’t even finish the expletive. He had never seen anything like the scene t
hat unrolled down the gentle slope in front of him.
He had been present at the uncovering of mass graves in Kosovo. He’d seen the rubble of downtown Sarajevo, the damage that SCUD missiles inflicted on Baghdad.
He had never seen anything like this. Surely no American reporter had seen anything like this since—since Gettysburg, maybe.
Carter, sprawled on the ground to his left, was pale but watchful. Teal’C, to his right, had permitted two deep lines to mar his forehead. He couldn’t see Jackson and O’Neill, lying on Teal’C’s far side.
They couldn’t see very much. The ground didn’t conveniently slope away as it had from their last vantage point, so their angle of vision was restricted. It was a blessing, Kinsey thought. It was a wide expanse of mostly open space; on the other side he could see low hills. At their base was something that looked like structures, irregular but unnatural. Whatever they were blended into the hills behind them; they’d be barely noticeable if they weren’t yet another source of the smoke disfiguring the sky.
Closer to, the ground before them smoked and bubbled like a gigantic, overheated marsh. Stalking not six feet in front of the frozen humans was one of the tubenecks, making a keening sound and dragging two of its legs and half its cylindrical body behind it. The other half was simply missing. Blue-green ooze bled from the hole where the creature’s side and back had been, and things were falling out of it, internal organs and systems. Like the ground it dragged itself over, the remains of the tubeneck’s body were smoking and bubbling, its shiny black carapace expanding like heated plastic.
The alien paused, its triangular head swinging back and forth to survey the humans lying prone before it, its horizontal jaws working, and then it toppled ungracefully, twitched, and lay still.
Beyond the dead alien lay dozens—hundreds—more of its kind, in various stages of meltdown. And the tubenecks weren’t alone; there were some other things scattered among them too, things that might have had wings and certainly had claws—the moth creatures.
The devastation covered acres. It was a soup of dead things, interrupted only by tree trunks sticking up nakedly like exclamation points. Kinsey looked for, but did not find, signs of human death. There were no bloated bodies, no staring single-faceted eyes or gaping jaws.
Oddly, there also wasn’t much smell. What there was, was distinctly unpleasant, but a scene like this on Earth would have reeked for miles, and they hadn’t even noticed the aroma before nearly stumbling on the battlefield.
O’Neill made a signal, and the team started wriggling backward into the shelter of the trees. Carter pulled Kinsey along with them, grabbing his shoulder when he didn’t respond fast enough.
When they got to their feet they could see the extent of the damage even more clearly and could hear the sounds the dying aliens made. The wind shifted, bringing a concentrated whiff of what odor there was, and all five of them gagged simultaneously.
Kinsey decided this was no time to ask questions. He stood silent, breathing shallowly through his mouth and trying not to taste the air, while O’Neill consulted with his team.
“I don’t think we’re gonna cross that area,” the colonel said at last. “I really don’t like the way that ground looks. Let’s take the long way around and hope that whatever it is, is over.”
“Second that, sir,” Carter said with feeling. Teal’C and Jackson nodded soberly.
“Teal’C, do you have any idea—”
The big man shook his head.
“What about the weapons? Recognize any of them?”
Teal’C shook his head again. “We found signs of what could have been such battles, from time to time,” he said, shifting his pack into place. “But we never remained long, and never saw what caused such devastation.”
“It looked almost as if that alien had been sprayed with something.” Jackson commented.
“Super insect spray?”
The look the archaeologist gave the colonel should have quelled him. It wasn’t enough, of course, to quell Jack O’Neill. “Well, they look like bugs,” he said with mock defensiveness. Then, more seriously, “It did look like a spray. I didn’t see any holes that would be made by projectile wounds.” He looked to Carter for confirmation, and she shook her head.
How could they have maintained the presence of mind to assess the kind of damage the alien had undergone? Kinsey wondered. How could they stand around discussing it so calmly?
“All right. The last time we were here we saw a trail over the hill, remember? We’ll try that route and see what we can see. The bear went over the mountain—”
“Please, O’Neill, do not sing,” Teal’C said seriously. Carter smothered a grin.
Kinsey was still in shock, trying to assimilate. The others might take this kind of thing for granted, might even make jokes, but this wasn’t the way he’d planned to spend the afternoon.
And there was more. They asked Teal’C for his opinion of the aliens and their weapons as if he was in a position to know a lot more about it than they were. What was it he’d said? We found signs of what could have been such battles, from time to time. But we never remained long, and never saw what caused such devastation. Who was the “we” to whom the big man referred? Obviously he was more widely traveled than the other members of the team, but even he had never encountered tubenecks before.
Kinsey realized with a shock that he was beginning to take travel between worlds for granted too. When confronted with multi-legged intelligent alien life-forms busy trying to exterminate each other, a little detail like a chilly wormhole was barely worth noticing.
They backed away from the scene of the battle, keeping to the trees, moving at right angles to the smoke. That smoke was suddenly considerably more ominous than it had been a half an hour before.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The circuitous route around the killing field seemed to take forever. Every time they thought they’d passed it they saw more evidence of battle. Even where the vegetation was still a more or less healthy pink, it was dry and crunched beneath their boots.
O’Neill called for rest breaks three times, the third time—finally away from the pervasive, if discreet, smell of death—breaking out field rations. Kinsey found a packet of nuts in his MRE, looked at it thoughtfully, and decided he wasn’t very fond of cashews after all. The others didn’t eat theirs either, he noticed.
Daniel Jackson sat with his arms on his updrawn knees, staring at nothing in particular as he swigged water from his canteen. Kinsey sat beside him and rubbed his legs, trying to ease the cramping from the unaccustomed exercise.
“I take it you’re not military,” Kinsey said, attempting to strike up a friendly conversation about something, anything other than what they had just seen.
Jackson gave him a considering look, not as suspicious as O’Neill’s but not particularly forthcoming either. “No, I’m not.” A winged insect, or this world’s equivalent, buzzed by, and Jackson took a halfhearted swipe at it, nearly knocking his glasses off in the process. The insect went spinning, and Jackson winced as a bubble of bright-red blood squeezed from his thumb. “Ow. That’s some set of claws on that sucker.”
“You’re an anthropologist, right?”
“Archaeologist, actually.” The bug came back,, and Jackson swatted at it again. Kinsey wondered if the blond man welcomed the distraction. It landed beside the scientist, and he studied it as if there were nothing more fascinating in the whole world.
“So how did you get involved in this whole thing?” He could feel the eyes of the other team members boring into him, but this was his job, after all. Besides, he was genuinely curious.
“I help translate.” Clearly Jackson wasn’t interested in giving out his life story, but even he could hear the abruptness in his response. In a more conciliatory tone he went on, “My background’s in ancient Middle Eastern cultures, and that turned out to be one of the hot spots of Goa’uld visitation.”
“So those things back there aren’t Goa’uld?�
�� Kinsey made a genuine effort to pronounce the word correctly. He was rewarded with a brief smile. The man must have been devastating as a graduate assistant. He didn’t look much older than graduate assistants Kinsey had seen; late twenties, very early thirties, tops, and he wouldn’t look that old if it weren’t for the sense of wariness in otherwise guileless blue eyes. He had the look of a man who’d been bitten by the universe a few times, but hadn’t quite reached the stage of cynicism about it that O’Neill had. A dreamer, Kinsey decided. A dreamer of the day, one of the dangerous ones who had the capability and determination to make his dreams real.
“Oh no,” Jackson said. “We don’t have any idea what those are. Every time we go through the Gate, we find something new. It’s a big universe.”
“So you’ve gone through the Gate a lot?” The question was a little too disingenuous, and he decided to be blunt. “How long have you been using this Stargate of yours?”
Jackson was silent for a moment, thinking, maybe weighing alternative answers. “Years,” he said at last. “Mostly the last couple of years. We didn’t know how to get anywhere, how to use the Gate for a long time. Abydos was—” he took a deep breath and let it out. “Abydos was an accident. The Gate was pre-set for that location.”
“How many locations are there?”
Jackson shrugged. “Hundreds. Thousands. We don’t really know.”
“And do you find new alien races every time?” He couldn’t believe he was asking these questions, seriously asking and getting serious answers back. And for the life of him he couldn’t think of a lead for the story anymore. Usually by this time he had the first half of his story, or at least the first story in the series, mapped out. Not this time.
“No. The coordinates we have are for Goa’uld worlds, so mostly we find humans. Sometimes Goa’uld. Sometimes Jaffa.”
[Stargate SG-1 03] - The First Amendment Page 13
