Relativity

by Stargate

  He answered the question before she asked it. “I’m not coming with you, Major.”

  “Kinsey benched him,” offered Jackson helpfully.

  Jack shot Daniel a hard look. “Do you have to say it like that? In front of the troops? I’ve got a certain dignity to uphold.”

  He was playing it lightly, but Carter could see that O’Neill was not pleased about being held back from the mission. “Who’s going to handle the SGC detail on Kytos then, colonel?”

  “Reynolds,” said Jack. “but you’re the officer with the most field experience, so I’d think he’d defer to you if things get, y’know, hinkey.”

  “Hinkey.” Teal’c repeated the word, approaching from the weapons racks, his staff weapon at his side. “What is the meaning of that term?”

  “It’s a real word,” insisted the colonel. “Hinkey. Meaning like when everything goes…weird. Like it always does.”

  “We have taken part in missions that did not result in any weirdness,” the Jaffa noted solemnly. “On many occasions.”

  “Yeah,” admitted Daniel, “but those aren’t the ones people remember.”

  O’Neill made a dismissive gesture. “Whatever. Look, the op is this: Carter, you and Teal’c are going to escort that dick— I mean, the vice president— to Kytos. Make sure the meeting goes smoothly, and keep a secure perimeter around Kinsey at all times.”

  She nodded. “Roger that, sir. I took the liberty of issuing some Transphase Eradication Rods to SG-13. If that Re’tu turns up again, we’ll be ready.”

  “Good call. Daniel and I are going to follow along later, after things have started rolling.”

  “But you’re benched,” insisted Jackson, “as in take off your skates and sit down.”

  The colonel spoke in a low, sarcastic voice. “I’ve always thought the orders of Robert Kinsey to be more like suggestions than actual commands…” He paused. “Besides. I want a little face time with our guest, one on one, and I’d like it without his security detail looking over my shoulder.”

  Carter looked to Jackson, who wore an uncomfortable expression, and then back to O’Neill. “What makes you think you’re going to get any more out of her than Daniel did?”

  Jack’s expression softened. “I dunno. Call it instinct, but I think I might be able to get her to open up.”

  “The woman’s behavior indicates she is an experienced clandestine operator,” noted Teal’c. “She may require a more forceful application of intent before she yields.”

  “Let’s not go to that place just yet,” insisted the colonel. “Carter, you’re good to go. Break a leg, or somethin’.”

  Sam saluted. “I’ll try not to, sir.”

  Back in the tunnel-like corridor, Jack and Daniel made their way down the passageway. The alert sirens were sounding as the detachments made their way through the open wormhole to the Pack’s rendezvous point.

  “You think Teal’c might be right?” O’Neill asked the question without looking at the younger man.

  “What, are we going to break out the thumbscrews, Jack?” The scientist pinched the bridge of his nose. “Come on, I mean ‘forceful application’? He was talking about torture.’

  O’Neill shot him a look. “Teal’c’s been on the wrong end of a Goa’uld pain-stick enough times to know what it’s like, Daniel. And I had my fair share too. It’s not something he’d say lightly.”

  “I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation.” Jackson shook his head.

  “I didn’t say we were gonna stretch her on a rack, damn it!” The colonel’s temper flared briefly. “But we might have to ask some hard questions. I’m thinking we could call in the Tok’ra, maybe use that mind-scanner gizmo they got.”

  “You say that like it’s the gentler option.”

  Jack stopped and looked the other man in the eye. “Hey!” He snapped his fingers in front of Daniel’s face. “Hey, Space Monkey! Look at me! What’s goin’ on? This woman lied her ass off to you, she tried to blow us all up, and here you are stepping up to defend her? Am I missing something?”

  “I…” Jackson faltered, trying to find the right words. “Look, forcing confessions out of people by coercion is morally wrong no matter how you justify it.”

  “It’s not just that, though, is it?” He could see the uncertainty in Daniel’s eyes. “She really got to you, didn’t she? Jackson, this woman is not what you think. She’s a spy, a professional deceiver. Whatever connection you think you may have with her, it’s bogus.”

  “No.” The other man shook his head. “You’ve got it all ass-backwards, Jack. She’s not what you think she is. I know it. I can’t tell you how, it’s just a feeling.”

  The intensity behind his friend’s words gave O’Neill a moment’s pause. He’d encountered this side of him before, in times when they had been on either side of an argument, and in times when they had stood together on something. “Is this some kind of ‘Former Ascended Being’ thing going on here? Where you have the power to see into people’s souls?” Jack was only half-joking.

  “No, it’s a ‘Daniel Jackson’ thing. You told me once you keep me around because I tell you what I really think. Well, I’m doing that now.”

  And he couldn’t argue with that. “Okay. I’ll talk to her, and we’ll see what happens.” He glanced away. “And for the record? I keep you around because you’re such an easy mark at poker.”

  Ahead of them, Doctor Warner emerged from a side corridor and caught sight of Jack. “Colonel! Colonel O’Neill! I’m glad I caught you! There’s something here you really should see…” He bounded up, brandishing a folder full of medical paperwork and printouts.

  Jackson cast a eye over the files. “Is this the data on Jade?”

  “Jade?” Warner blinked at the name. “Oh. The prisoner. Yes, of course. Yes, it is. Well, not all of it, but the majority…”

  “What do you have that’s so important I have to see it right now?” demanded Jack. Warner was a good doctor, so people told him, but the man had a tendency to ramble and meander around the point of things. He was a marked contrast from Janet Frasier, whose directness and straightforward manner had always made things clearer. O’Neill felt the slight pang of sadness when Janet’s face came to him, and he forced it away. “Give it to me straight, doc.”

  “The prisoner— uh, that is, Jade— her blood tests and preliminary DNA scans threw up some very interesting correlations. At first I thought we might be looking at a genetic duplicate with chromosomal modifications, but that was clearly incorrect.”

  “Clearly,” said Jack, frowning at the papers and the incomprehensible medical technobabble covering them.

  Warner didn’t pick up on the irony. “I looked at the possibility of her origin as something alien, perhaps with heavy retroviral adaptation, but that came up negative as well. It’s clear she has had some implantation and physiological restructuring in key areas of her anatomy—” The doctor pulled at a CAT-scan and the papers in his hand came apart. Warner grabbed at the folder, trapping them before they could scatter across the floor. “Uh. Sorry.”

  “Warner.” Jack eyed him. “Skip to the end.”

  “Yes, of course.” He gulped. “When I was testing Jade’s genetic markers, I came across a pattern that seemed familiar to me… I was sure I’d seen it before, and recently.”

  Daniel considered this. “Your labs are doing blood tests all the time, as a matter of course when SG teams come back through the gate.”

  “Looking for infection or alien infiltration, yes.” agreed Warner. “So I ran a comparative analysis of Jade’s profile with our database of SGC personnel.”

  “And you found a match?” said Jackson, reading the answer on the doctor’s face.

  He nodded. “A positive correlation, in the 98th percentile.”

  “I’m not going to like this, am I?” Jack asked.

  “Her DNA matches yours, Colonel O’Neill.”

  In the cool of the evening, only the television chatt
ered in the darkness of the house. The Commander weighed his pod in his hand and watched the sensor display spiking up and down. “Ready?” he asked.

  Across the room from him, he heard Ite-kh make a snapping click of agreement. The Re’tu had sheathed itself once more, becoming indiscernible. The old soldier touched the controls of the camouflage cloak at his neck and he too shimmered into invisibility.

  “Mom?” The ganger kid spoke thickly, with the diction of a drunk. “Issat you?” Beside him on the sofa, Hannah Wells was dozing lightly.

  “Go to sleep, Tyke,” said the Commander. “You’re dreaming.”

  “Uh’kay,” said the boy.

  The pod chimed. “Wormhole’s at optimum. Initiate jump.” He pressed a sensor spot on the device’s surface and the cold rush of transport enveloped him.

  Outside on the street, a flare of star-bright light flashed through the barred windows of the house, and vanished.

  Harriman looked through the control room window as the last few men stomped up the embarkation ramp and into the shimmering vertical pool of the wormhole. At that moment, one of the other technicians handed him a clipboard with a report that needed his signature, and Walter’s attention strayed from the Stargate.

  He never saw the flicker of silvery sparks that danced around the rim of the steel-gray ring, so fast and so subtle that to any other set of eyes they would have seemed like a reflection. This time no alarms sounded, no alerts were called. By the time the sergeant had turned back to his console, the wormhole had shrieked closed and the gate had gone dark.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Advance squads of USAF engineers had already set up a camp of temporary tents in the shallow valley below the ridge where the Kytos Stargate stood. Samantha Carter’s first impression of the planet was the humidity; it washed over her as she stepped away from the gate and she shifted, feeling uncomfortable. One of the things they never told you about Stargate travel was the small dislocations that came with walking from one world to another in the blink of an eye. She’d gone instantly from the air-conditioned cool of the gate-room at Cheyenne Mountain to the heart of a steaming alien jungle, and her body reacted to it. The instantaneous transitions of gating were shocking if you weren’t used to them.

  And Vice President Robert Kinsey certainly wasn’t. He emerged behind her with an air of mild terror about him, blinking in the waning light of two orange suns setting below the tops of the tree line. Then he caught Carter scrutinizing him, and he straightened, as if all this was as normal to him as climbing out of a limo at some swanky Washington function. “Carry on, Major,” he told her.

  “Sir,” she conceded, and walked down the cairn of oval rocks that made up the Stargate’s podium. Teal’c was already in discussion with Colonel Reynolds near the DHD, and Sam walked on, using the moment to take in the site the Pack had picked for the meeting.

  There were some stone ruins dotted around the edge of the football field-sized clearing, blunt stubs mostly overgrown with native creepers. The khaki tents were arranged in a ring, with one larger than the others that was probably to serve as the gathering point. Portable generators were humming, and a group of airmen were erecting collapsible towers for halogen flood lamps. Night would fall quickly out here, and they’d need the illumination. Beyond them, she spied a hexagonal command and control antenna pointing up into the darkening sky.

  “Major.” She turned as Teal’c caught up with her. “Colonel Reynolds reports that his men detected a faint energy spike in the upper atmosphere just before we arrived.”

  “A hyperspace transition?”

  “Most likely. I suspect the Pack flotilla are already in orbit.”

  Carter looked at her wristwatch. “That’s about right. If they stick to the schedule, they should be here any minute.”

  “Hmph,” said Kinsey, with an arch sniff as he drew near them. “This isn’t the sort of thing I’m used to, I must admit.” He sipped from a bottle of water. “Handshakes in the middle of a rainforest. But then these Pack folks seem to have a primitive mindset, so I suppose we all have to make allowances.” He made a face at the muddy path they walked.

  Sam’s brow furrowed. “Sir, the Pack society is at least two hundred years in advance of ours…”

  “In technology perhaps, I’ll grant you,” he allowed, “but I’m talking about culturally. Rootless nomads are essentially archaic in nature, Major. You can give them rockets and ray guns, but they’re still primitives at heart.”

  Carter had a few choice thoughts on Kinsey’s point of view, but the chance to share them with the man was lost as several fast shapes swooped low over the treetops in tight formation, the sound of their engines arriving split-seconds after the craft had flashed past.

  “Painting six airborne targets,” called Boyce from in front of them, relaying a radio report from the antenna tent. “Fast-movers, rolling around on another inbound pass.”

  “Is this an attack?” demanded the politician.

  Teal’c shook his head. “If it were, we would be dead.”

  “They’re just making a show,” said Sam. “Letting us see their rockets and ray guns, sir.”

  Kinsey grimaced, but said nothing.

  The twin sunset turned the jungle sky a burnt umber color, catching the shapes of the Pack ships as they swept back in, this time at a higher angle. The craft loitered in the air like circling birds, one by one descending to touch down in the clearing on the far side of the tents. Carter spotted Vix’s tri-wing starfighter, a Tel’tak shuttle, another one of the swan-neck flyers and a brace of Death Gliders. The last to land was a peculiar spherical craft arrayed with diamond-shaped solar panels.

  Sam and Teal’c led the military contingent as Kinsey and his aides moved up to flank them. Carter gave the vice president a sideways look and saw that he’d returned to his default expression of patrician smugness.

  From the parked ships came the familiar faces of Vix, Koe, Suj and Ryn, along with a few other men and women who appeared to be a security contingent. All of the Pack members were conspicuously armed this time, more so than they had been at their other meetings. Even Koe and Suj carried large and very visible guns in holsters at their belts. I guess we shouldn’t be surprised, Sam thought. Not after what happened at the SGC.

  Vix ran a hand through his red hair and nodded to Carter and Kinsey. “You came, then? I admit, I entertained some doubts that you would.”

  “We don’t break our promises,” Kinsey said smoothly. “I take it you picked up the samples of the supplies we offered you.”

  “We did,” Ryn replied. “If those were a representative sample, then we have good cause to make trade.”

  Vix made a short noise in his throat. “Trade we can find on many worlds. It is only your assurance that you can help us defeat our grain blight that brought me back to the bargaining table, Tau’ri.”

  “The circumstances aboard the Wanderer and the greater flotilla continue to degrade,” noted Koe, drawing a glare from his leader.

  “Where are Doctor Jackson and Colonel O’Neill?” asked Suj, glancing around.

  Kinsey answered before Carter could speak. “They’ve been assigned to other duties. I’m going to be leading the negotiations from this point forward.”

  “You?” said Vix. “The speaker? The man with only a single purpose for his clan?”

  “That is their way,” insisted Ryn. “We spoke of this. We cannot judge the Tau’ri by our own standards.”

  “Yes,” added Koe. “Let Kinsey fulfill his role. If we require the viewpoint of a soldier or a scientist, the major may provide it. The Jaffa may speak also.”

  “If you wish,” Teal’c offered. Sam heard the lack of enthusiasm in her friend’s voice.

  Vix fixed Carter with a firm, measuring stare. “I will tell you this, here and now. It is the reputation of SG-1 that convinces me to put value to your words. I believe that you, at the very least, have honor. I have little time for speakers and those whose only contribution is to lecture.
Am I understood?”

  “Vix, my friend,” Kinsey smiled warmly, either missing or deliberately ignoring the implied jibe, “I think we’re all on the same page here.” He gestured to the tent set up for the meeting. “Shall we?”

  As they walked, Sam lowered her voice so only Teal’c could hear her. “This is going to be a long night…”

  The Jaffa didn’t look at her. “Indeed.”

  “Show it to me again,” Mirris demanded, glaring into the holographic display. “Filter out the background clutter and isolate the trace.”

  Geddel made the sighing noise and his fingers danced over the surface of the control slate in his hands. “One moment, Administrator. The effective range of our sensors is somewhat attenuated by the presence of the aura-cloak field.”

  “I am aware of that,” she told him, irritably. “Compensate for interference by running a suppression protocol. It should not be necessary for me to remind you how to perform your tasks, sub-director.”

  Geddel sniffed. “I am attempting to perform those tasks as swiftly as I can, Administrator. I would respectfully request patience on your part.”

  Mirris’s hands dropped below the level of her desk and she knitted them together, kneading the fingers and imagining Geddel’s soft, fleshy neck in their grip. She did not want to admit it to herself, but as time passed on, she was having greater and greater difficulty in maintaining her outward pretence of control. They were so very close now, and there had already been too many upsets to her plans. To have another problem arise at this moment, just as it seemed events were returning to the pattern she had made for them, was almost too much to bear. “Geddel,” she said, a warning tone in her voice.

  “I have it,” he replied. The holographic tank writhed and changed, becoming two conjoined cubes of ghostly light. One showed the streams of data filtering in from the ship’s sensor array, the other gave them a topographical map of an area on the surface of Kytos, a zone several metrics wide around the Stargate. Dots of color indicated the presence of many Tau’ri warriors. As she watched, Mirris saw the time index loop back to a moment just before the alert had sounded and then begin moving forward once more. Small peaks and troughs showed the minute energetic fluctuations of the gate’s wormhole conduit as it deposited travelers on Kytos; and then suddenly, on a sub-frequency unconnected to the usual workings of the Ancient devices, there was a brief spike of output. Mirris froze the image and expanded on it, teasing the waveform apart.