Relativity

by Stargate

  “Quiet!” snapped the woman. “Outside!” She pointed her guns at the recessed oval door that was the room’s only exit.

  Daniel held his breath and listened; sure enough, there were noises coming from the other side of the hatch, muffled thuds and scrapings. “Drones?” He whispered.

  Jade nodded and gestured for him to take up a place on the right side of the doorway. She moved to the left and raised her weapons. Jackson did the same, putting aside the gear and aiming down the spine of the submachinegun. Something chimed faintly and the door shuddered as locks disengaged. “Get ready,” she hissed.

  He expected the hatch to roll open at a sedate pace, but instead it snapped back into the wall in the blink of an eye. Sheer adrenaline pushed Daniel on to the balls of his feet and he thrust the P90 into the face of the first person to step through the doorway, even as he found the intruder’s gun at his neck. Jade had reacted the same way with a second intruder, and found herself in a similar predicament.

  “Daniel?” said the new arrival, with a raised eyebrow.

  “Jack?” he replied, not quite catching up to the face of the person before him.

  Jade gasped. “Dad?”

  An older man went pale. “Jade?” Jackson’s jaw dropped open as he recognized both of the men as Jack O’Neill; oh sure, one of them looked more like the colonel had that time he’d become a septuagenarian overnight on Argos, but he knew instantly that they were the same man.

  Old Jack— as he instantly labeled him— let his gun fall away and pulled Jade to him in a gesture that seemed to shock and delight the girl in equal measure. Daniel saw tears shimmer in her eyes as they embraced. The older man, this Commander, let her go, suddenly hesitant and self-conscious, as if he were surprised by his own actions. “I thought… I’d lost you.”

  She gave the old man a brittle smile in return. “That’ll never happen.”

  The other Jack— the Now Jack— pushed the P90’s muzzle away from his face with a wan look. “Far be it from me to break up this touching, if somewhat unusual family reunion, but what the hell are you two doing on this ship?”

  “Good question,” echoed Old Jack.

  Jade blinked and she was all soldier once again. “We used Ite-kh’s pod to teleport aboard, Daniel locked on to the trace from yours.”

  “Pods don’t carry two. How’d you manage that?”

  “Actually, it does, uh, Commander,” Jackson interjected. “You just need to know how to read the controls to widen the field radius.”

  The older man nodded to himself. “Huh. We always thought that could be done, just never could figure it out.”

  “What, you never asked the future me to do it for you?” He asked the question before he’d really thought about it and the uncomfortable silence that followed sent a shiver down his spine.

  “Well,” Jack broke the tension of the moment, grabbing his gear vest and strapping it on. “Nice to see you both and all, but you should probably beam back out of here. I think one of these nerds we kay-oh’ed hit an alarm…” He nodded at a pair of unconscious Aschen males on the floor in the corridor outside. “This deck is gonna be swarming with them any minute.”

  Daniel shook his head. “It’s a war zone on Kytos, Jack. Reynolds is barely holding the fort down there, and Sam and Teal’c are up to their neck in the fight in space.”

  “We’ve got to put the Aschen down hard,” said Jade. “Knock out Mirris’s control of the drones…”

  “And send a message to the Confederation,” added O’Neill. “If that black hole wasn’t enough, we need to take this ship out, convince them to stay the hell away from Earth and our buddies.”

  The old man shot his younger self a hard look. “And how do you propose to do that, junior?”

  “Actually, I have a solution,” Jade replied, shrugging the heavy pack off her back. “Something I picked up earlier…” She unzipped the bag and Daniel saw a skeletal construct of steel and carbon inside.

  “That would be your naquadria bomb?” asked Jack.

  His elder self nodded. “Yeah. I have to admit, I didn’t plan on seeing it again.”

  “They’re coming in too fast!” cried a voice over the com channel. “I cannot get a vector on them!”

  Sam heard the voices through her bone-induction comlink as the Death Glider’s engines shrieked at full power, throwing the Goa’uld ship up past the Aschen vessel and into the flaming wake of the missile swarm.

  “All ships, concentrate fire on the missiles! If they strike, the Aschen poison will be injected into the Wanderer’s atmosphere!” Vix’s order was harsh and direct, but even as he gave it Carter knew his pilots had little chance of obeying. The fighters were spread too thinly, too diffuse across the engagement zone in dozens of small dogfights with the drones, unable to simply disengage and go after the bio-weapons.

  “Engines are approaching redline,” Teal’c told her. “Damage from our attack on the warship has drained the coolant tanks.”

  Sam saw the glowing alert glyphs on the console in front of her and ignored them. “Guns up,” she reported, jinking the Glider into a six o’clock position behind a trailing missile. “Firing!” Carter squeezed the energy cannon triggers and watched three pulses of orange lightning streak out through the dark. The backwash from the blast that had killed Noa had also knocked the Glider’s electronics off-kilter, and the major adjusted instinctively by eyeball to move the target cues over the missile. The shots hit home and the rocket exploded, discharging its lethal cargo into the vacuum where it could do no harm. “Splash one,” Sam reported. “How many more?”

  “Four targets remaining,” Teal’c reported, fighting to keep the fatigue from his voice. “Terminal impact on Wanderer in ninety seconds.”

  Carter let the Death Glider slide to port and ranged her weapons. The missiles were fanning out, opening up their separation to strike the colony ship at all points of the compass. The fighter’s fuselage rattled and howled around her, but Sam’s attention had narrowed to the space around her gun sight. Reacting on pure aviator instinct, she fired again and gritted her teeth as the pulse blasts went wide of her target.

  “Engines at critical,” called Teal’c. Any other backseater might have suggested that their pilot throttle back, but not the Jaffa; he understood what was at stake. Sam matched velocity with the second Aschen missile and ripped it open with a cascade of shots.

  The rocket’s motor spat a jet of flame that flicked it out of its programmed pattern and it looped over, narrowly missing the Glider. The missile spun away and collided with another of the death-dealing warheads, destroying both of them in a burst of white fire.

  Carter tried to vector away from the detonation, but she was too late. Fragments of metal and ceramic rattled over the fighter, leaving ominous cracks in the canopy and streaking the forward-curved wings. The Glider vibrated as if it had been struck by a colossal hammer and to the pilot’s horror, the drive monitors flashed once and went dead. Sam felt the pressure of the ship’s engines cease at the same moment. “What the hell?”

  “Emergency engine shutdown,” reported the Jaffa. “Drive systems have gone off-line.”

  “Damn it!” shouted Carter, watching the two remaining rockets arc away. With no throttle power, the Death Glider had become an unguided missile itself, unable to change vector or accelerate after the final targets. “Vix!” Sam bellowed into her radio mike. “Stop the last two!”

  Behind her, Teal’c’s face was stony. “Thirty seconds to impact.”

  A pilot in a saucer-shaped flyer gave up his life and put his ship directly in the path of the lead missile; unable to turn his guns upon it, it was the only way he had to stop the oncoming weapon. Fighter and warhead met in a globe of gas and flame, and for one heart-stopping moment it seemed as if the fifth and final missile would be caught in the shockwave of the blast; but then the last remaining rocket curved out of the expanding cloud of debris, undamaged, and fell hard into the stone and steel hull of the Calaian
colony ship.

  The Aschen warhead penetrated the outer decks and polymer plating of the Wanderer, finally impacting against a set of support braces with enough force to trigger the weapon’s internal detonator. The synthetic diamond sphere exploded along pre-stressed lines of collapse and released a tornado of bio-plasma into the massive ship’s environment. Killing organic matter on contact, every living thing close to the impact point that had not died in the shock of collision perished a heartbeat later; and like a spreading cancer, the lethal Aschen germ weapon began to blacken and consume in a creeping wave of death.

  Sam saw the distant flare of contact on Wanderer’s hull and her heart sank.

  When Vix’s voice came back on the radio, the big man sounded as if he had been hollowed out and broken. “The weapon has struck, but there is still time. This is a clan-wide command— there are lifepods for all who can reach them, but you must go now. Leave everything, and go now!”

  Teal’c bent over his console. “Engine temperature is dropping. I will be able to restore motive power momentarily,”

  Carter nodded distantly, unable to look away from the Wanderer. “Do you think… Anyone will be able to get away?” Even as she said the words, Sam saw glitters of light as arrow-shaped objects detached from the colony ship’s hull in pairs and trios, darting away into the black.

  “Anyone who does not is already dead,” said the Jaffa, with grim pronouncement.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “Sensor probes confirming lethality level,” Geddel said tonelessly, his voice carrying over the dull trill of the ship’s alert bells. “Estimated total toxin spread through the migrant’s colony ship in less than one demicycle.” Mirris glared at him, waiting for the sub-director to finish his report. And inevitably, he sighed. “However, we have tracked multiple launches of auxiliary vessels from the hulk, many of which have fled the main conflict zone for open space.”

  “Lifepods,” she spat. The Aschen ship’s signals officer had intercepted Vix’s earlier transmission. “I want them exterminated. Every last one, found and vented to space. No survivors.”

  Geddel swallowed hard. “That may be difficult, administrator. Our drones are still engaged in ship-to-ship battle with the remainder of the nomad fleet.”

  Mirris saw the holograph separate into multiple images from scanners on her ship and others relayed from the prows of their robotic fightercraft. There was a storm of laser fire and explosions raging around them. “Fools. Don’t they understand they are beaten?” she snorted. “Why do primitives never show the intelligence to submit?”

  “It seems your tactic did not have the desired effect,” Geddel added warily. Mirris was surprised that he was daring to be even slightly critical of her, so soon after she had disciplined him. It was clear that she had not done enough to dissuade him from challenging her commands. The administrator’s hand slid into a pocket inside her robes as her subordinate went on, looking around the command nexus as if he were trying to garner support. “You said that the Pack would lose the will to fight if we struck at their colony ship, their symbolic home… The reverse appears to be true. Our drones report increased aggression on the part of the migrant pilots. If anything, attacking the Wanderer has incensed them.”

  “They know nothing of fury,” said Mirris in a low voice.

  Geddel wasn’t listening; he was talking for the benefit of the rest of the command staff. “An error on your part, Administrator Mirris. And now I must report another, which can also be laid at your feet.” He touched a control and one the holoscreens shifted to show a corridor inside the ship. The image displayed four figures, clearly not Aschen, moving and firing at a patrol of security drones. One of the humans— the woman from the planet, she realized— pointed a staff weapon right into the eye of the scanner and destroyed it, turning the image into a rain of static. “Your prisoners have escaped, and there are intruders on board. I have taken the liberty of initiating a search for them.”

  Mirris’s cheeks flushed red. She felt like she was on fire. Each time the rage came and took her, she thought it could burn no hotter than it had before, and each time she was wrong. The vicious hate flooded the Aschen’s mind, wiping away any instant of rationality. Her teeth flared white as her lips peeled back in a pure, animal snarl.

  And still Geddel prattled on, unheeding of the towering anger building behind him. “You have compounded your mistakes with poor choices, distasteful displays of emotionalism and physical violence. I have no option or recourse but to relive you of command.”

  “Shut up!” All the vehemence exploded in those two words and Mirris fired her beam pistol into Geddel’s back at close range. Some of the intendants at cubicles close by screamed in fright as the sub-director tumbled back over the main console, leaking blood, and fell to the deck. “Shut up shut up Shut up!” Mirris dove forward and fired again, punctuating each word with a blast from the gun. Geddel’s corpse jerked with each bolt, quite dead but not dead enough to satisfy his commander’s murderous fury. Finally she swept around, her eyes alight with madness, and spat out an order.

  “Find me the Tau’ri! I’ll kill them with my bare hands!”

  With an Aschen beam pistol in either hand, the old man lead the way into the anteroom before Jack could stop him. He kept up with his elder self, using his P90 to knock out the security drones guarding the wide oval hatch in the far wall. Jade swung Teal’c’s staff like a pro, battering an Aschen technician senseless with the blunt end. Daniel was tail-end charlie, watching the corridor behind them. “Clear,” reported Jackson, “but not for long, I think. I heard what sounds like more drones, coming closer.”

  “Not a problem,” said the girl’s father. “This is the central processing plexus. The robots don’t go inside.”

  “Why?” Jack demanded.

  Jade used the Jaffa weapon to blast the door controls and the hatch retracted. “Take a look and see.”

  Cautiously, O’Neill peeked inside, leading with his P90. The room was spherical without anything that even remotely resembled a floor. Other similar hatches were visible spaced around the circumference, above, below and on the opposite side from the anteroom. In the very center a wide drum of complex-looking crystalline electronics hummed and glowed green-blue; there were hundreds of cables and rods of varying thickness coming out of ports on the walls, connecting to the unit at the core. Jack’s overall impression was of something big, important, and most of all, breakable. “Cool,” he opined, “let’s blow it up.” He took a step toward a ledge just inside the chamber as the Commander called out a warning. The old man’s spindly fingers caught the collar of his jacket just as gravity suddenly vanished and O’Neill’s legs spun up in front of him. He was hauled ungraciously backwards and dropped to his haunches back in the anteroom.

  “It’s a zero-gee chamber,” said Daniel. “No artificial gravity inside there.”

  Jack got back to his feet. “Well, now I know that,” he said testily.

  “The drones have wheels for motive traction. They can’t function that well in zero gravity conditions.” Jade handed off Teal’c’s staff weapon to Jackson and stepped up to the lip of the hatch. “I’ll need some cover while I reprogram the detonation sequence. Just watch what I do, and follow me.”

  “Okay…” said the scientist.

  The woman leapt through the hatchway and Jack had to fight off the reflex to reach after her; there was nothing but dead air and a twenty foot drop after the ledge. But Jade moved fast and smooth toward the plexus, like a swimmer crossing a pool, guiding herself by making little pushes off the cables and support pillars. Daniel pulled a face and followed along, with a lot less grace than Jade displayed.

  The old man beckoned him. “C’mon, junior,” he said, “we’ll scoot around the edge, keep an eye out for company.”

  Jack raised a hand. “One thing. That ‘junior’ crap? It’s getting real old, pops.”

  His counterpart gave him a cold grin. “Ain’t it just?” He pushed off into
the room and Jack went with him. This time, he was ready for the instant transition, and he used his free hand to find places to pull himself along, keeping the P90 tucked in close to his chest.

  He shifted around the cables and stanchions. It wasn’t as open as it looked; in fact, there were more obstacles inside the chamber than anything. O’Neill caught a rumbling noise of metal on metal and he glanced around, looking for fire corridors. Abruptly, Jack realized he couldn’t see the other hatches any more. “Hey,” he called. “I got no joy. Any targets?”

  “I see movement,” Jackson called back. “Your three o’clock.” The scientist and the woman were both crouched on a maintenance ledge jutting out from the main section of the core unit.

  “High or low?” Jack demanded.

  “High!”

  The reply was followed by the sizzle of air molecules as a white beam slashed past O’Neill’s head and scorched a line across the wall. Jack triggered the P90 and the recoil jetted him back against a support brace. Batting away a small cluster of drifting bullet cases, O’Neill moved away as fast as he could.

  Daniel panned the staff weapon around, fingers tight on the firing pad. While he’d grasped the nature of the chamber immediately, he still found himself a step behind, thinking in a two dimensional way when he should have been thinking in three. O’Neill had adapted in seconds; probably his fighter pilot training kicking in, Jackson thought, but for Daniel it was like being trapped inside a life-size M.C. Escher painting, with upside-down and inside-out walkways all over the place.

  “I’m almost done,” Jade reported from far end of the ledge.

  Jackson nodded and fired off a shot at a figure in Aschen gray threading through the cables toward them. “They must be desperate,” he said aloud, “they’re actually sending people after us now.”