Relativity

by Stargate

  “I am disquieted,” rumbled the big man.

  “You’re spooked?” Jackson was slightly surprised at the admission. “By what?”

  “I cannot say.” Teal’c paused, marshalling his thoughts. “Before, with the explosive device, and on a number of other occasions. I have felt… Uneasy.”

  Daniel gave his friend a measuring look. “Your Jaffa spider-sense is tingling?”

  “I find it difficult to articulate. It is as if I see the shadow of an intruder from the corner of my eye, but it is not there.”

  “It could be stress,” said Jackson. “When was your last tretonin injection or meditation?”

  Teal’c nodded slightly. “I am several hours overdue. With the alert in place, I felt it was not right to engage in kel no’reem.”

  “Well, no disrespect to your Jaffa grit, but I’d prefer it if you were at your peak condition. Maybe you ought to stand down. Just for a little while.”

  The Jaffa gave him a frown. “Perhaps you are correct.”

  “And if nothing else, it gives you a great excuse not to be in the same room as Kinsey.”

  The control room was, to say the least, a tad cramped. Along with all the people who actually had to be there, like Jack and Hammond, Walter and all his technician crew, there was also the vice president, a couple of his flunkies, those same humorless Secret Service guys and a unit of Marines. The latter were doing their best not to look too bored by it all, and at least the recent emergency had meant that the film crew had been left upstairs at NORAD. O’Neill pushed past a suited supernumerary with a snide “Excuse me,” and moved to Harriman’s shoulder just as the Stargate flashed open.

  Walter already had the massive titanium alloy iris closed, preventing anything from exiting the gate’s event horizon. “Incoming signal, General,” he reported. “It’s the Pack.”

  “Right on time,” Hammond remarked. “Let’s see them.”

  Jack caught Kinsey straightening his tie as the monitor screens flickered, revealing Vix’s face. O’Neill recognized the interior of the man’s home aboard the Wanderer. “Do you hear us?” he demanded.

  “We do,” Kinsey was quick, getting in before Hammond could respond. “And before this endeavor proceeds any further, I would like to extend, on behalf of myself, the President of the United States and the people of Earth, our deepest regrets at the distress you have been subjected to. Be assured that I am taking steps to see that the people responsible for placing your lives in jeopardy will be punished.”

  With that last sentence, Jack could almost feel the vice president’s eyes burning into the back of his head. He had no doubt that on some level, Kinsey had to be loving this, being on the spot to gloat when something went awry at the SGC.

  Vix peered out of the screen, unimpressed by the rhetoric. “We have discussed the matter of an alliance with you and there has been dissent.” In the background, Jack saw Koe, Suj and Ryn, along with other Pack members he didn’t recognize. “But we have reached an accommodation, for the moment.”

  “I can’t tell you how pleased that makes—”

  The Pack leader ignored Kinsey’s platitude. “We shall meet and attempt once again to find a common agreement. This I do for my people’s sake.” He motioned to Koe, who moved to the edge of frame and operated a small handheld device. “The glyph code for a Chaapa’ai is being transmitted to you on a side channel.”

  Walter tapped out a command on his keyboard and O’Neill saw a string of gate symbols spool out to form a dialing address. “Confirmed, I have it,” reported the sergeant.

  “These are the coordinates for Kytos,” said Suj, leaning forward. “It is an arboreal world, currently unclaimed by any of the System Lords.”

  Vix nodded. “Our fleet is preparing to leave Golla IX. It will take us two of your Tau’ri rotations to reach Kytos via hyperspace flight. We will expect to find you there.”

  “Vix, I look forward to it.” Kinsey gave a plastic smile, but the wormhole hissed out of existence and the link was severed.

  “Quick and to the point,” noted Jack, with an arch tone. “If only all national leaders could behave in such a way…”

  The vice president shot a look at Hammond, pointedly ignoring O’Neill. “General, I’d like a word with you.”

  They adjourned to the briefing room on the next level up, and Kinsey ordered the Marines and his security detail out into the corridor. Daniel entered, looking distracted, as the politician threw a seething glare at Jack.

  “Colonel O’Neill,” he growled. “I think in future it would be best if you kept your thoughts to yourself. Your personal grudges against me are one thing, but I’m not going to have you diminish me in front of potential allies or junior officers!” He tapped the small Stars and Stripes pin on his lapel. “You will show my office the respect it is due, Colonel!”

  “I’ve never been to your office,” Jack said innocently. “Is it nice?”

  Kinsey’s lip curled in a sneer. “That cute insubordination act won’t fly much longer, Jack. You may think you’re amusing now, but you won’t be laughing when I post you to some iced-over airstrip at the ass-end of the Aleutian Islands!”

  Daniel sat down and caught his eye. “They get the hockey games out there,” he said, in mock comforting tones, “you’ll be fine.”

  “And as for you,” Kinsey fumed. “Doctor Jackson. Would you like to spend the next ten years of your life in a bunker at Area 51, sifting through pottery shards with a toothpick?”

  “Well, actually…”

  Jack shook his head and mouthed a ‘no’ to the other man, and Daniel fell silent. There was no sense in riling Kinsey any more than they already had. There would be time for that later.

  Hammond stepped in. “Doctor, what do we have with regards to background on this planet Kytos?”

  Jackson opened a laptop and used it to manipulate images on the briefing room’s video screen. Jack recognized some blurry MALP photos and what looked like scans from the pages of an old illuminated manuscript. “Kytos, also known as P3F-964. Surveyed four years ago by SG-2, designated as utterly unremarkable. Gate is located in a tropical jungle region below the equator, local life forms encountered by the survey team were mostly benign. Some signs of former human occupation in the last five hundred years or so, but no apparent sentient life…” He tapped the scanned pages. “It used to fall within the domains of the System Lord Notus, but he was apparently disposed of by an alliance of ships led by Athena and K’tesh. This was a outlying world on the edge of his territory, and it seems like it just got overlooked, just slipped through the gaps.”

  “Empty, uninhabited,” said Kinsey. “Good choice for a private rendezvous.” He looked at Hammond. “I want a team sent there, right now, to check it out. I need to make sure these Pack folks aren’t trying to play us.”

  Jack rolled his eyes. “If they were going to try something, they’d have done it before they gave us the gate address, don’t you think?”

  “You can be as cavalier as you like with your own life, Colonel,” Kinsey retorted, “but after your failure to protect the SGC from a terrorist bomb, you’ll forgive me for being cautious!” He stood up, and pressed his normal, superior façade back into place. “I have some important matters to conclude before we get to the treaty, gentlemen, so I’ll leave you to get on with whatever it is you do. But before I do, I’d like to make this crystal clear, so that we all understand exactly what is at stake here.” The politician sniffed. “I’m holding the senior staff of Stargate Command personally responsible for the bomb threat and the disruptions to this diplomatic enterprise. If this treaty encounters any more problems due to your incompetence, if it doesn’t go off without a hitch… I will see to it that you take the full weight of the blame and have you reassigned so fast it will make your heads swim.” He made his way out without looking back.

  “They got any carnivorous jungle cats on Kytos?” asked Jack, after a moment.

  “I think so,” said Daniel. “Some.�
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  “You think they’ll be hungry?”

  Jade kept to the side of the corridor as the security detail passed by with the men in suits in the middle of their number. She gave the man at the very center of the group a sideways stare. Robert Kinsey. Of course. She recalled him now. That had been a moment of inattention on her part, to allow Jackson to see her slip up on that minor point of background. It would not happen again.

  Within moments, she was alone in the passageway. There was nobody to see her, but she prided herself on her tradecraft, and with a convincing misstep, Jade made it appear as if she had tripped on something. The file of paperwork in her hands went all over the floor and she sighed, dropping to her haunches to gather it back up. Once she was in a crouch, she ran a finger over the implant’s dermal control surface and let the device in her skull tune into the resonance frequency of the nanites on Daniel’s jacket. He was two, perhaps three walls away from her, at the edge of the broadcast range for the microscopic machines. It wasn’t possible for them to draw any more power and transmit a stronger signal; anything more than the tiny waveband they emitted might be picked up by the SGC’s internal sensors. The implant’s software sifted through the incoming material, filtering out bio data and audio pickups, until all that was left was the faint aura of Jackson’s computer, glowing in the information void like a dying ember. Jade let the signal filter into her thoughts. The symbols were as familiar to her as the letters of the alphabet, and as the nanite web decoded the electromagnetic patterns of the laptop screen from the air, the constellation runes formed in her mind’s eye.

  Auriga, Lynx, Orion, Scorpius, Pisces, Taurus…and Earth. Just like that, and she had the dialing address for the new meeting point. Jade mentally sent the code for the nanites to cease operation— they only had a lifespan of a few hours anyway, and the longer they were live, the more chance they might be discovered— and picked up the last of the papers, coming back to her feet.

  There were offices on this level, and with care, Jade crossed to one of them and fingered the door handle. The office belonged to Colonel Dixon, an officer whose paternity leave had been allowed to stand in the wake of the alert, thanks to the goodwill of General Hammond. Jade removed a thin rod from her pocket and inserted it into the lock; in turn, the rod— which was actually a kind of gene-engineered mollusk from the Re’tu homeworld— expanded to trip the locking pins and release the latch. In a moment, Jade was inside Dixon’s office and closing the door behind her.

  The implant automatically adjusted her optical register so she could work without switching the light on. She moved carefully around the colonel’s desk, taking care not to disturb the mess of paperwork and files strewn across it. Beside a small collection of framed family photos she found a telephone and dialed an off-base number from memory. She could have used the implant’s comlink to convey the intelligence, but that would have violated orders; and like the nanites, the subspace carrier wave it generated might be detected. Each time the device operated, she ran the risk of alerting someone on the base.

  Somewhere in Colorado Springs, a handset was picked up after the first ring sounded. Neither Jade nor her father spoke. All the Air Force’s monitoring software would hear was the sounds of six numerical tones as she tapped out a number code that corresponded to the gate symbols. She took a breath as she finished, perhaps some small part of her expecting the Commander to say something to her; but then the line went dead and she was alone again.

  Jade’s eyes focused on one of the pictures on Dixon’s desk, of the man holding up a little girl. There was a childlike scrawl of writing on the photo; Vera loves Daddy!

  She scowled at the image and made her way out of the room, taking care to lock it shut behind her.

  “Now that just doesn’t make any sense,” said Sam, laying her palms flat on the work surface.

  “Oh, how many times those words have crossed my mind,” Colonel O’Neill stood at the door, arms folded, with a slightly amused expression on his face.

  Sam blinked, slightly off-put. “Ah. Sir. How long have you been standing there?”

  “Since Lee left. It’s kinda fun watching you do your thing, Carter. You know, you talk to yourself? A lot.”

  She grinned sheepishly. “I’m just free-associating, sir. Articulating my thoughts.”

  “That’s what it’s called, huh?” O’Neill wandered into the lab proper. “My mom always said it was the first sign of madness.”

  “Well, maybe that too,” Sam admitted. “It’s been a long week.”

  “And it’s only Wednesday.” Jack nodded at the remnants of the bomb. “What you got so far?”

  “Honestly? More questions than answers. I can tell you more about what this isn’t than what it is.” She gestured with her hands. “It wasn’t made on Earth. It wasn’t beamed in. It’s not a Goa’uld weapon. It doesn’t match anything we have in our databases… and….”

  “And?” The colonel cocked his head. “C’mon, Major, the and bit is always the juiciest part.”

  Carter scratched her head. Now she came to actually say it out loud, it sounded kind of dumb; but there was the evidence staring her in the face. “Well, sir, as far as I can determine… This bomb is a dud.”

  O’Neill blinked and sat down on a stool. “Okay, now you’re confusing me. I’ll grant you, that’s not too difficult a thing to do, but it’s not funny.”

  She held up a portable datascreen. “It’s really subtle, colonel, so much so that at first I just thought I was seeing the circuitry of the device wrongly. But the more I dig through the layers of the programming, the more it seems right. There are fail-safes built into the device’s core detonator, deliberate limits imposed on the explosive yield.”

  “I thought you said it was a dud.”

  “Well, a sorta-dud. The binary liquid explosives would have reacted if they’d been allowed to mix fully, and that would have caused a low-level blast. Probably something around the potency of a block of C4.”

  He toyed with a magnifying lens on a gimbal arm. “That’s hardly enough to bring the house down. And if it went off in the shaft, it wouldn’t do much damage.”

  “No, exactly!” Sam nodded. “The blast would have been channeled up and down the air vents, probably blowing out a few ducts, but the energy of the explosion would have dissipated.”

  “But your report said the gizmo was a two-stage munition. Binary explosive ignites bigger, nastier naquadria plasma detonation.” Jack mimed an expanding fireball with his hands.

  “That’s where the ‘dud’ bit comes in. The naquadria in the vial would never have reached the criticality needed to vaporize. It’s just meant to look like it would.”

  “With all due respect, Carter, your theory’s tweaked. Who builds a bomb that’s not supposed to go off? Apart from idiots.” He thought for a moment. “Maybe that’s it? Whoever made this was just incompetent?”

  Sam shook her head. “Actually, I think the reverse is true. Whoever built this device was very smart. They covered their tracks well. Odds are, someone examining these remains after the fact wouldn’t notice anything and just thank their lucky stars that they hadn’t all been blown into, uh…”

  “Wispy gas?” offered the colonel.

  “Right.” She sighed heavily. “So now we have to ask ourselves, what’s the point of planting a deliberately-engineered dud in the SGC, that we were possibly meant to find and disarm?”

  Jack stood up, and Carter saw his eyes narrow, all jocularity fading from his manner. “Let’s not dance around this, then. The bomb looks like Pack tech, right? If it is this whole bait-and-switch thing you’re talkin’ about, then what we got here is some misdirection going on. Someone’s trying to throw blame on the Pack, stall or destroy any chance of an alliance with them before it even gets off the ground.”

  “A fake bomb seems like an overly complicated way of making that happen.”

  “Yeah, isn’t it though?” O’Neill peered at the remains again. “I’m going t
o take this to Hammond. This puts a whole new spin on things.” He walked away and sighed. “Remember when we used to just get into fights and shoot at bad people? I miss those days. They were simpler times.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  In the kel no’reem, there is no self.

  How long had it been since the day Bra’tac had said those words to him? Teal’c had still been a youth, no older than his son Rya’c was now. At the time he had thought himself to be a man, that there was little in the universe that he did not grasp. He had been filled with the self-assurance of the young; and the old Master had quickly broken that from him.

  So many years ago, and the lesson Teal’c had learned was that there were no answers, only new questions, new challenges. To his strength, to his soul.

  To his mind.

  The Jaffa’s expression tightened, there in the gloom of his quarters, his tawny skin lit by the thick candles arrayed about him. The faint smell of the tallow connected him to his home; the candles had been made on Chulak, by the hands of artisans in simple workshops. Teal’c held on to the slender thread of sense-memory, but it was elusive. He wanted to let himself drift, to find his center, but the obdurate reality of the walls around him remained at the edges of his thoughts, keeping him here, rooted.

  In the kel no’reem, there is only knowing, and the peace it brings.

  And yet that peace eluded him. Teal’c found himself wishing his mentor was here with him now, to offer some measure of guidance to his former pupil. The Jaffa healing trance was as much a factor of Teal’c’s existence as eating and sleeping were to his Tau’ri friends, but today, in this place, it would not open itself to him. The doorway to the meditative state of the kel no’reem remained beyond his reach, held aside from him by the splinter of disquiet that continued to dog his every waking moment.

  At first, he had thought that it might be the unidentified device he and Major Carter had disarmed in the vent shaft, that perhaps something in its makeup was disturbing the delicate balance of his Jaffa equilibrium. But the weapon was inert now, and the creeping unease had not abated. The sensation— it was so faint and so fragmentary that he could hardly justify giving it that name— ebbed and flowed as a tide would upon a shoreline. Down on the maintenance levels, in the corridor with Daniel Jackson, and in other places, for moments it had felt so strong that he had sensed the presence of another at his shoulder, no more than a breath away. Then there was nothing. Just the echo of a feeling. Of a threat.