Stargate SG-1: Survival of the Fittest: SG1-7

by Sabine C. Bauer

  "Can't promise I'll hit anything."

  "Caliber forty-three? You won't be able to miss, General."

  The sky had taken on a faint greenish tinge. Jack, whose sense of time seemed to have eroded under Nirrti's ministrations, was unable to tell whether this was what passed for dawn on the planet or whether it was the sheen of the fungus-riddled city.

  "Jack!" Daniel, Teal'c, and Bra'tac were headed across the clearing, returning from their foray along the temple walls. Going by Daniel's face it had been less than successful. "No joy," he growled. "Your friend, the reformed Marine Jaffa, said when they were sent back to `335 they got into the temple through a tunnel, but that's long gone. Fungus is gobbling up the foundations. No side entrances, either, so it'll have to be the front door, I suppose. Preferably before it belches and snaps shut."

  Front door-the maw of the stone face on the temple, home of the beasties; hell, if Carter was to be believed. Eighteen-inch teeth backlit by goop glow, it looked the part. Thirty feet above, a dark hole opened in the forehead of the face-the Stargate, which they hoped to reach from the inside. Jack cast a quick glance over his shoulder to see if everybody was present and correct. Carter, right behind him; Daniel, squinting at the shadows flitting behind the teeth; General Hammond, launcher raised and ready to give the nearest hog a bad case of heartburn; Teal'c, unruffled as usual; and finally Bra'tac, who seemed to be having the time of his life. Jack couldn't think of anyone he'd rather have watching his team's back.

  "Bra'tac?"

  "What is it, human?"

  "Thanks!"

  The reply was a grunt, and it sounded embarrassed-Jack would have to ask Teal'c if Jaffa got embarrassed. Not now, though. "Stay together and stay behind me. You got that, Daniel?"

  "Just go, Jack!"

  The stone tongue lolling out onto the clearing was already striated with fungus, and Jack carefully tested its stability. It dipped a little under his weight, and he hurriedly persuaded his body that this was no reason to futz out on him again. His body seemed willing to reserve judgment, which was about as good as it got. From inside the mouth came faint grunts and snuffling noises. Staff weapon primed, he crept up the tongue... ramp... reached that hump just above the teeth. One step further, and he'd trigger a gag reflex on the thing.

  Get a grip, O'Neill!

  At that moment the stench hit him, putrid and old and thick enough to feel solid. "Holy crap!"

  "What?" Carter, a barely perceptible edge of fear in her voice.

  "Stone guy's got the worst case of halitosis I've ever come across in my life."

  "Yes, there must be another ramp inside," she replied. Evidently her hearing hadn't recovered quite as much as advertised.

  "An ulcer, more like," Jack muttered to himself. "Unless it's a perforated ramp."

  He crouched and sneaked deeper into that hellish bouquet of feces, stale blood, and decay that somehow went with the giant teeth rearing either side of him. And then he was inside the temple. Carter's hearing might not be all there, but she'd been right about the ramp. Not as artistic as the tongue outside but a lot steeper. Its lower end was patrolled by a Volkswagen Beetle with bristles, one of more than twenty similar models, and they didn't like the fungus either.

  "Crap," he whispered again. It wasn't that he hadn't believed Carter about the hogs; he just hadn't expected her description of their size to be accurate. After all, she'd had a fever at the time.

  "Uh-oh." Daniel had crept alongside him. "This doesn't look good. I think."

  "Yeah, that's what they're thinking, too."

  Below lay an enormous stone-hemmed pit, its floor pulsing green. At the bottom of the pit milled Carter's hell hogs, snorting and squealing at the squishiness under their trotters and clearly agitated by the whole affair. Directly opposite a narrow set of stairs ran up to a gallery-Jack had had enough of those to last him a lifetime-that circled the room at about thirty feet height and hopefully led to the DHD.

  He scanned the temple for an alternative route, came up empty and gritted his teeth. Through the pit it was. God knew how the hell hogs would react if you threw six people into the equation. Badly was a fair guess.

  Beside him, Carter rose and aimed her grenade launcher. Jack's hand shot up, pulled down the barrel. "Easy, Major! Let's not upset the applecart. Right now they're busy figuring out the fungus. Maybe they're preoccupied enough for us to get past them."

  And they also can fly, carrying little olive sprigs in their snouts!

  The point was, though, they couldn't kill all of the hogs at once. One of those grenades could take out a lightly armored vehicle-close enough where it came to the hogs, though Jack wasn't too sure about the lightly part. They had eight grenades, a kill each if they were lucky, which still left the question of what the surviving dozen or so hogs would do.

  Carter seemed to have arrived at a similar assessment and gave a terse nod. Fear lurked in her eyes; nothing concrete and directed, but a purely atavistic terror he'd never seen in her before.

  "When you and Teal'c and Fraiser met them, Nirrti was running the show, Carter. For all we know, they might be perfectly harmless in real life."

  Okay, so they didn't look harmless, but Jack didn't feel that needed pointing out.

  Another nod. "I'm fine, sir. Whenever you're ready."

  Never?

  Jack got to his feet and slowly started down the ramp. Herbie downstairs grunted and squealed and backed up a couple steps, its little red eyes ogling each move they made. Two more steps down the ramp for Jack and his team; two more steps back from Herbie. Kinda like tango. If they didn't get their feet mixed up, they might just be okay. The final few meters of the ramp were coated in fungus, and Jack slipped a few times. Each time, Herbie snarled and hissed.

  And then they'd reached the bottom of the pit, carefully turned toward the stairs opposite-and all hell broke loose. Screeching, Herbie planted its bulk between them and the access to the ramp; its pals started circling, closer with each revolution, forcing them toward the center of the pit. The room rang with squeals and grunts.

  "Great! Pack behavior," observed Daniel, a little shakily.

  Trodden into the green slime lay countless cracked bones, hunks of rotting flesh, and scraps of olive drab material. Marine BDUs. Jack winced. "I think they want us to join them in the dining area."

  "O'Neill?" Teal'c's face beaded with sweat, and he was wound as tight as a spring. Staff weapon lowered, he followed every motion of the lead animal, Herbie's momma, by the looks of her, easily the size of a station wagon.

  "Not yet, Teal'c."

  Momma had planted her broad hindquarters in front of the staircase to hiss at them. If they brought her down where she was, they'd never get past the funeral banquet her grieving relatives were likely to throw. Somebody would have to draw her off.

  "General, Carter, blow her to Kingdom Come as soon as she's cleared the stairs! And then you and everybody else run like hell!"

  "O'Neill-"

  "We do this my way, Bra'tac!"

  Blanking out everything except Momma, Jack broke left, slipping and sliding in the gunk and tripping over bones. The hogs gave a universal snarl of surprise, then a delegation of three galloped across the pit, separating him from his team. A split-second before they could obstruct his line of fire, he loosed a staff blast that struck Momma squarely in the rump, with about the same effect a peashooter would have on him; she was pissed. Real pissed. An ear-piercing shriek, then she shot from her post and toward him with the brio of a freight train.

  "Now!" he shouted, barely able to hear himself over the noise of the hogs.

  Two grenades hit home, and Momma was knocked off her feet, skidding sideways. An instant later she literally flew apart, showering him in blood and hog entrails and raising a cacophony of squeals and grunts that drowned out the roar of the explosion. The three animals that tried to drive him off stopped dead in their tracks, whirled around and made a beeline for her carcass, oblivious to the human roadblock. The re
st of them also converged on Momma, and Jack hit the gunk, rolling and crawling and trying to stay out from under their feet. For a fleeting instant and between a pair of churning trotters, he spotted Daniel, Teal'c, Hammond racing for the stairs, then they were gone again, and he was scrabbling on hands and knees to get away from the heaving, stinking, bristling bodies and finally flinging himself into the clear.

  Everyone else was up on the gallery, staring back down, shouting. At him? And where the hell was -

  Carter stood frozen at the center of the pit, ashen-faced, eyes wide, lips moving. Even from where Jack lay, he could see that she was shaking like a leaf.

  "Go, Carter! Go!"

  No use. She stared past him, not taking in anything except the feeding frenzy that now buried Momma. Swearing, he shoved himself up, staggered toward her, terrified by the glazed look in her eyes.

  "Dammit, Major!" he bellowed. "That's exactly why they shouldn't allow women in frontline units! You just freeze when the going gets tough!" Okay, he was trying to snap her out of it, but maybe he'd overdone it a little.

  "No, you son of a bitch! No!" Her face contorted in absolute fury, she fired the launcher.

  Missing Jack by a finely judged hair, the grenade slammed into a hog that had come after the colonel hors d'oeuvres. The detonation propelled Jack forward in a mad shuffle to stay on his feet, and his chest felt way too tight to breathe again. He ignored it, grabbed her arm. "Carter?"

  Still pale but focused now, she whispered, "They were eating him, sir. They were eating him, and I shot him."

  Jack had no idea what she was talking about. It would keep. It would have to. "Go, Sam!" he yelped. "Go!"

  At that moment the entire temple shuddered and erupted into a crash that silenced even the hogs.

  Go with Carter! Find the DHD!

  Jack's gasp of an order drove Daniel along the gallery, though he'd hardly needed a reminder. Either the fungus had mutated into a more ravenous strain-did fungi have strains?-or it found the temple tastier than the fortress and city. The foundations had crumbled, and the stone maw had indeed belched and snapped shut. Their only way out now was the gate.

  In the pit below, the animals had forgotten about dinner and raced around in mad circles to avoid chunks of masonry thundering down on them. The gallery floor under Daniel's feet began to shimmer green. He ran faster.

  Ahead, Sam had come to a halt directly in front of the giant round window that was the Stargate. Through it he could see a pale morning sky and the black silhouettes of trees. Suddenly Sam darted toward a niche to the left of the gate.

  "I've got it!" she shouted.

  Which had to be the first bit of unequivocally good news he'd heard in a long time. Daniel reached her a few seconds later, almost sliding past her in the gunk. Crouched before the console, Sam had opened the maintenance hatch.

  "What are you doing? We don't have time for this." The moment it was out, he realized he'd sounded like Jack in the kind of situation where Daniel Jackson liked Jack O'Neill least. "Sorry."

  "Bra'tac told me the crystals in the DHD on `335 had been swapped," she explained. "We dialed Earth alright, but the gate read something else."

  "Which would explain it," Daniel said slowly.

  "Uhuh." Sam slammed the hatch shut. "This one seems to be okay. I haven't got the tools for a full diagnostic and, as you say, we don't have time."

  He heard the slight tremor in her voice and knew she had noticed it too. Around the DHD, the floor had turned a poisonous green and the device seemed to be melting. "The floor's going, Sam! Dial!"

  "Earth or the Alpha site?"

  "Earth. We need to get Jack to the infirmary."

  Sam's hand flew over the symbols, dialing in Earth. When she slapped the activation crystal at the center of the console, the DHD groaned and tilted. "Oh God, no!"

  Her outcry was overlaid by reassuring clunking and grinding as the inner ring of the gate spun to life. Barely in time. The DHD's console was flush with the floor.

  "Nice," came a gasp from behind Daniel.

  He turned, saw Jack, dragged rather than guided along the gallery by General Hammond and Teal'c. Bra'tac was watching their collective six.

  "Reminds me of Ernest's planet," Jack wheezed with a worried glance at the DHD. "How'd you feel about dialing in manually, Teal'c?"

  "I don't think we'll have to, sir." Sam's smile broadened. "Look!"

  The seventh chevron had locked. The event horizon filled the gate with a glorious surge of blue, seemed to hold its breath for a moment, and exploded-away from them, across the clearing outside.

  "That's... different," murmured Daniel, futilely battling the desperation that spread through his gut like ice water.

  "Now what?" Going by the expression on General Hammond's face, he was a hair away from kicking the gate. "Major Carter? Any ideas?"

  "How about we just tryit backwards?" Jack piped up again, though where he took the air from was anybody's guess. "Just because we've never done it before doesn't mean it won't-"

  "I once knew a man who thought the same as O'Neill," Bra'tac reminisced dryly. "His death was most unpleasant."

  "Thanks for clearing that one up, Bra'tac. What do we do? Carter?"

  "Sir, I-" She was cut off by another burst of grinding noise. "What...?"

  The Stargate itself was swiveling around its vertical axis, ponderous and much too slow for Daniel's liking, but swivel it did. He risked a small grin. "Now, that's really different."

  His grin died when the whole machinery gave a scream of metal on stone and jammed to a stop, some sixty degrees shy of a full oneeighty.

  "It's shifted!" Sam cried. "The subsidence must have-"

  "So what?" Jack had unhitched himself from Hammond and Teal'c and came stumbling toward the gate. "It's not straight, but it'll still work, and we can get to the right side now. Right?"

  This time Bra'tac had no cautionary tales to offer.

  "Right. Teal'c, you still have your IDC transmitter. Hit it!"

  Teal'c stepped forward, already keying the ID code into the device on his wrist. Sam watched, breath bated, but there was no indication that the gate wasn't functioning normally.

  Finally she released a sigh. "Let's go home."

  Termination Codon: Nucleotide sequence that signals the end of a growing chain.

  otify me the second M3D 335 makes contact!"

  The balding nerd at the dialing computer uttered a grunt that might or might not have been a response. What it did manage to convey quite clearly, though, was resentment. It carried, and Simmons thought he sensed a barrage of sniggers wanting to erupt all around him.

  "Am I inconveniencing you, Sergeant?" he hissed.

  "Oh no!" Harriman looked up at him, blue eyes behind those nerdy glasses brimming with innocence. "I just thought you didn't need it confirmed for the fifth time. Sir."

  "I hope you like cold places, Sergeant," whispered Simmons.

  Through the semi-darkness of the control room he felt the crew's stares boring into his back, their amusement souring, the air growing thick with hatred. He didn't care. If they hated him, it meant they feared him. Simmons was fully determined to make them understand why, above and beyond any cause for fear they thought they had now.

  He'd have his army of healthy and fully functional Jaffa, and then, finally, the White House would appreciate what a detached civilian perspective could achieve. They'd be kissing his feet. They'd put the NIT) in charge of the SGC and the base on `335, and-

  The klaxons blared the rest of the daydream from his mind.

  "Incoming wormhole, sir," Harriman announced mechanically.

  At last!

  A world of tension drained from Simmons's body. Van Leyden should have reported back hours ago, and he would hear a word or two about the value of promptness, but the main thing was the news Simmons fully expected to receive now. Alpha platoon had returned, hopefully with the Jaffa, Teal'c, and the rest of SG-1 was a thing of the past. He was looking forward to the
funeral ceremony. "Scramble the transmission and put it through to the monitoring station on Level 16."

  "Yessir."

  This time Harriman's reply came loud and clear, and Simmons fancied he heard a hint of disappointment in the sergeant's voice. Too bad, but it probably would wear off by the time the good sergeant arrived at his next posting in McMurdo. Simmons grinned and headed for the stairs.

  "Uh," said Harriman. "Sir?"

  "What?"

  "Receiving SG-1's iris code. You still want me to put it through to Level 16?"

  For an endless moment his next breath refused to come, frozen inside his lungs. Then Simmons took control of himself, forced his body to turn around, the man's insolence barely even registering. "Do not open the iris," he ordered calmly.

  "But, sir, they-"

  "You heard me, Sergeant. SG-1 has been compromised. Anybody could be using their code." Simmons didn't like what he saw in the sergeant's eyes. More than insolence-pure contempt. Contempt and defiance. "You're relieved, Mister."

  It was the last thing the man had expected. You could tell by the way he heaved his pudgy frame from the seat in front of the computer and, red-faced and flustered, tripped over a chair leg as he moved aside. Groping for support, his right hand slammed down, hit the palm scanner. Simmons heard his own yell of annoyance, but it was too late. Suddenly not clumsy anymore, Harriman reached across the chair, the fingers of his left tapping out a sequence on the keyboard.

  "Oops," he said.

  Through the control room window, Simmons saw the iris open on the shimmering blue surface of the event horizon. He grabbed the sergeant's arm, yanked him back into his chair. "Close it! That's an order!"

  "Sony, sir." The sergeant's look of imbecilic innocence reasserted itself. "I'm not authorized to do that. I've been relieved of duty."

  Below, black-clad SFs took their positions in the gate room, USAS leveled at the ramp. Simmons grabbed the microphone. "You're green-lighted to fire-"

  The traveler, stocky and in filthy BDUs, dropped from the event horizon at an odd angle, as if he'd been physically flung into the wormhole. He landed heavily, sending a rattle through the ramp, but the metal clanking was drowned out by his shout. "Stand down!"