by Stargate
Gunfire rattled around the chamber and beam weapons spoke in return. Daniel pressed back to the throbbing plexus unit, trying hard to look everywhere at once. More Aschen emerged in a group of three, brandishing weapons, and he fired wide shots over their heads, sparking balls of flame off the control cables.
He heard the strident voice of a woman. “Stop them! Kill them all!”
“Mirris,” snarled Jade. “She’s here.”
There was a swirl of robes and he saw her. “There!” The Aschen woman had a cadre of armed men at her side and they all opened fire at once, raining streaks of white light toward him. By reflex, Daniel tried to lunge for the floor, but with no gravity his drop became a slow swan dive. He saw Jade turning, distracted for a lethal second, as Mirris aimed and fired again.
The beam grazed the young woman’s torso. She screamed, and the shock of the bolt spun her away from the ledge, trailing lines of flash-burned blood. Without thinking, Jackson threw himself after Jade and shot though the air to intercept her.
Daniel caught her and she shuddered with the impact. The woman’s face was pale with pain and the smell of burnt skin made his stomach lurch.
He heard the old man shouting her name. Jade’s eyes fluttered and she mumbled something indistinct. Daniel knew the signs; Jade had already been injured once on Kytos and there had barely been time for her to recover, even with the aid of her futuristic implants. She was going into shock.
“Jackson!” O’Neill bellowed across the chamber. “Get her out! Use the pod!”
Daniel’s hand closed around the Ancient device and it pulsed with warmth, ready to use. “The bomb?” he called back.
“We got it,” Jack retorted. “Just go!”
Daniel nodded, even though O’Neill couldn’t see him from his vantage point. More Aschen energy bolts hissed around him, finding their range. Jackson pulled Jade tight to him, crossing the staff weapon over her chest to hold her, and activated the pod. He’d passed the other one to Jack after programming in a return transit back down to the surface of Kytos. “At least, that’s what I think I did,” he told the woman. “Who knows where or when we’re going to find ourselves?”
With a flash of strobing colors, the two of them melted into a brief fracture in space-time, leaving a tiny thunderclap in their wake as the air in the room rushed to fill the void they had left.
“Jade!” shouted the old man.
“They’re away,” Jack retorted, pushing his counterpart out of the firing line. “C’mon, we gotta finish what she started.” He stabbed a finger at the core unit, lying below them from their inverted position. “Can you do it?”
“My daughter!” cried the Commander. “God, no, not now! Not after all this!”
O’Neill took the other man’s shoulders and shook him hard, bouncing him off a cable trunk. “She’s not dead! Look at me!” he growled. “Daniel’s got her! He’ll keep her safe!”
“Yes…” The word was a gasp. “Yes,” he said, with more certainty. “I trust him. You’re right. We have to finish this.” The old man drew himself up and coiled his legs against the cables, discarding the pistols in his hands. “I’m empty, so you better cover me.”
With a grunt of effort, the Commander threw himself down and fell like a diving hawk towards the ledge where Jade’s backpack lay tethered to the plexus unit. Jack floated out of cover and switched to single-shot firing. The recoil was easier to handle, and as the Aschen crew bobbed and weaved around him, O’Neill knocked them back with carefully aimed bullets. The Aschen had the numerical superiority, to be certain, but he could see in the way that they moved they were untrained and they lacked the certainty— and the killer instinct— of battle-trained warriors. “Not used to getting your hands dirty, are ya?” he called out, picking off another man as he drew a bead on the Commander.
“Kill them!” He heard Mirris screaming at her men. “Destroy it all if you must, but bring me the Tau’ri’s head!”
“Whoa,” Jack said aloud, “she is really pissed off.”
In the heartbeats as he tore out a spent stick of ammunition and slammed a new one home in the P90, Jack felt the pressure of the pod in his vest pocket, pushing on his chest. Once the naquadria device was ticking, all it would take was the push of a key and they’d be beamed off the Aschen ship to safety; so Daniel had told him. But nothing about this mission had gone right since the moment SG-1 had stepped through the Stargate to P5X-404, and the grim little nay-saying voice in the back of his mind was telling him, Why should things change now?
Jack moved, pushing himself away toward the old man, and from out of nowhere a gray blur barreled into him. The air in his lungs was knocked out in a rattling grunt and he felt the P90 tumble from his grip.
“Die!” Hot breath and spittle sprayed over his face and he struck out at his attacker; but Mirris’s eyes were wide with wild rage, her reason so far gone that she’d thrown herself at Jack in a vain attempt to kill him. The colonel fought her off, but the Aschen woman was in the grip of a berserk fury. She clubbed him over and over around the head with the butt of her gun, her fingers raked and clawed at his eyes. He landed punches blindly, but she didn’t seem to notice. Normally, Jack had reservations about striking women, but he left those behind now, fighting for his life against someone so directed by anger that it had consumed her.
“Mollem!” she wailed, calling her dead husband’s name in a reedy shriek, “Mollem!” The gun spun away, marked with Jack’s blood and Mirris’s attack continued. He struggled to disengage, but she wrapped her legs about his waist, her robe-tunic flapping open, in an obscene parody of two embracing lovers. Her hands coiled around his neck and locked tight, squeezing his throat, tightening with the hysterical strength of madness. O’Neill fought back, but still his blows did not register. Blood flowed from her broken nose and streams of dark tears lined the woman’s face as she leered over him. Jack felt his lungs fighting for breath, the sudden fear gripping him that the horror of Mirris’s screaming face would be the last thing he ever saw.
“Mol—”
The Aschen woman jerked and stiffened even as O’Neill felt the searing heat of a bullet cross past his cheek. Her hands parted and released him, and Jack coughed in a gasp of air. Mirris fell away, small panting sounds issuing out of her trembling lips, fading. In the center of her forehead there was a single wound blossoming tiny globules of blood.
“Come on, Jack” said a voice in his ear, and he felt a strong hand on his arm. “We gotta jet.”
For one dizzy moment, the pain and the lack of oxygen made the face of the man in front of him shift and flow like molten wax. “Pop? That you?” O’Neill gasped through a bruised throat.
“Nah,” said the old man, gripping the colonel’s P90 in his hand. “It’s just Jack.”
O’Neill shook off the fuzz in his thoughts. “Thanks for the assist,” he said with a nod. “Now let’s blow this tub.”
Both of them gripped the pod and held on. Light flashed once again inside the chamber and thunder sounded in its wake.
Her crew panicking around her, Mirris’s body drifted down in a slow tumble. She was long dead when the naquadria finally flashed into criticality.
The Aschen ship was split asunder by the detonation. A white glare of sun-bright energy flared through the brass and steel hull plates, turning them instantly to gaseous plasma. Huge pieces of the vessel’s prow and aft sections tumbled away from each other, propelled by the shockwave, leaving an expanding sphere of radioactive fragments trailing behind them. The blast rattled on every communications circuit in the orbital region, the static wake like the echoing report of a monstrous executioner’s gunshot.
Carter shielded her eyes with the blade of her hand as the stark white flash cut hard-lined shadows across the Death Glider’s cockpit. For long seconds the Goa’uld fighter’s systems flickered and jumped as the ship’s electronics were bathed in a wash of electromagnetic energy. Sam’s heart tightened in her chest. “Jack…”
; “I am certain Colonel O’Neill has effected an escape,” Teal’c said firmly.
Carter nodded and pushed her concerns away as the plume of nuclear flame began to fall back upon itself. Out to the starboard side, she saw two Aschen drones spin around on a drunken axis and collide in a cloud of metallic splinters. “The machines… What’s happening to them?”
“Their central control has been disrupted,” said the Jaffa, pouring power to the fighter’s weapons in anticipation, “command and control systems must have been affected by the mothership’s destruction.”
Sam gripped the steering yoke and turned the Death Glider to angle after the main flight of drones, dithering and drifting. “Copy that.” She toggled the general comlink frequency. “Attention, all Pack combat pilots, this is Major Samantha Carter. The drones have lost their control inputs, they’re vulnerable. Concentrate your firepower and take them out! We have no idea how long it will be before their own self-defense programming kicks in, so hit them now!”
She heard a chorus of fierce assent over the hissing channel as she swept in toward the mass of confused mechanoids and triggered her cannons. “Turkey shoot,” Carter said to herself.
Daniel made sure he was there when Jade awoke in the Alpha Site’s infirmary. He had expected to see Old Jack, but to his mild surprise Regular Jack (it seemed a better name than Now Jack or Present-Day Jack) was there as well. The two men had a pile of playing cards on the table between them, and O’Neill looked up as Jackson entered. “Huh. You know, I’ve always wondered what it would be like to play Chess with myself…”
Jade’s father tapped the tabletop. “Well, this is Uno. And don’t expect me to deal you in.”
“Yeah,” echoed Jack, “you know how you are with cards.”
Jade came to wakefulness and frowned. “I feel awful.”
“You took a swipe from an Aschen beam pistol,” explained the old man. “But you’re tough, kiddo. I always knew it.”
She smiled and her eyes found Daniel. “Hey,” she said.
“Hey yourself,” he returned, suddenly feeling the scrutiny of two sets of O’Neill eyes. “Doctors say you’ll be fine in a day or so, then you’ll be clear to gate back to Earth.”
She looked around. “The Alpha Site. I remember this place… Well, sorta.”
“A lot different last time we saw it,” agreed the old man.
Jack cleared his throat to change the subject. He sounded husky and the unpleasant bruising around his neck wouldn’t fade for a good few weeks. “Mirris is gone,” he told her, “and her ship to boot. Thanks to you and your father here, the nuke blew the whole thing in two.”
“What about the drones?” she asked.
Daniel made a winding-up motion by his ear. “Ah, well, without new input from the Aschen main computer, they got a little confused and started banging into things. Sam helped Vix and the other Pack pilots pick off the space-capable ones and Colonel Reynolds took out the ones on Kytos.”
“Good for him,” Jack allowed. “Marines. They always need target practice.”
“But the Pack?” she pressed. “What happened to them?”
Her father’s face darkened. “They didn’t do so good.”
Carter had her hands knitted together in a ball in front of her, because she was afraid that unchecked, they might wander off on their own and use, say, the pen or one of the small ornamental flags on the table to stab Vice President Kinsey somewhere painful.
He closed the preliminary report folder in front of him with a grimace after less than ten seconds of looking at it, and she could tell that he wasn’t even going to pretend to be interested. In the room adjoining this one, Vix and Suj and the healer Koe were waiting on his reply. They had come, along with almost every person who had been able to flee their colony ship and the other vessels destroyed by the Aschen, and built a shanty town tent city along the runway beyond the concrete bunkers of the Alpha Site base. In orbit over the planet were the handful of hyperspace-capable vessels they still had flying, a fraction of the nomad flotilla’s original number. She had seen the look on Vix’s face when he arrived at the Stargate Command’s primary off-world base. After the SGC troops had decamped from Kytos, he and a contingent of his people had remained to perform a solemn, painful duty.
The Wanderer, the ship that had been the very soul of their fleet, had been abandoned. Most of the population aboard had been able to escape the effects of the Aschen viral warheads thanks to Sam and Teal’c’s actions in shooting them down, but the one missile that made it through had been enough for a death sentence. The colony ship was sealed tight, the lethal bio-weapons on board rendering it uninhabitable. It was nothing but a stone tomb, empty except for the those who had perished from the toxins and the ravaged landscape. Vix had set the vast vessel on automatic pilot to take a final flight into the heart of Kytos’s sun, while Koe led prayers.
The loss showed on the face of every member of the nomad clans. They had lost their world, the living symbol of their freedom. Sam had seen that look on others recently as well; on the faces of Jade and her father. She looked up and found Hammond and Teal’c, both men mirroring the fixed, steady concern on her own face.
“I’m supposed to buy this?” Kinsey sniffed, tapping the folder’s cover. Like everyone who had been on Kytos for the treaty meeting, he had been forced to divert back to the Alpha Site instead of Earth, on the orders of General Hammond and the IOA, until it was clear that no traces of Aschen bio-agents still lingered. The vice president was not happy about having to wear the same suit for more than one day running. “Time travel? People from the future, invisible giant spiders and some crazed alien woman trying to murder O’Neill?” He smirked. “Okay, I might understand that last part, God knows I’ve had the urge myself, but the rest? It’s pure science fiction!”
“We are discussing this on the surface of an alien planet,” Carter offered dryly.
He ignored the interjection. “This was all a plot to prevent a bio-toxin being smuggled through the SGC to Earth? That’s what it comes down to, General?”
Hammond gave a slow nod. “That is correct, sir. We’ve since discovered that the plant extract you were given, the so-called ‘meladni’ flower, was in fact a carrier medium prepared by Ryn on the orders of the Aschen.”
Kinsey couldn’t help but look down at his hands. Sam knew he was thinking about the moment in the long tent on Kytos when he’d been handling the cube containing the dormant plant. Luckily for them, the flower’s encasement was designed to react and release its load only after exposure to Earth’s particular atmospheric signature. Vix had destroyed the flower back on the jungle planet himself when Suj made the discovery.
“It would have destroyed life across our whole world,” the general continued. “We have first-hand proof of the Aschen’s fondness for bio-weapons from SG-1… And if that’s not enough for you, sir, you could step outside and ask those people who’ve lost their home to the same thing.”
“The Aschen way of war is silent and insidious,” Teal’c rumbled. “We saw the aftermath of it on Volia, and now with the Wanderer.”
Carter picked up the thread. “The truth is, from what we can determine the Aschen had already started on a plan to wipe out the Pack. The grain blight that spurred Vix and his people to make a treaty with us? Doctor Lee’s analysis has shown that it was artificial in origin. It seems clear to me that Mirris created the crisis among the Pack and then used Ryn to further her own plans.” She paused, sickened at the monumental callousness displayed by the Aschen in using the clans as their cat’s-paw. “They would have starved them to death.”
“A tragedy,” Kinsey replied, “and clearly one that Earth has been fortunate to have avoided. I’ll be sure to include that in my deposition to the IOA’s committee, and reinforce my recommendations for a more stringent oversight of the SGC’s operations… Perhaps even a cessation until this can be properly analyzed.” He pushed his chair back, preparing to get up and leave.
“With al
l due respect, sir, we’re not done here!” Sam blurted out the words, and it was clear to everyone in the room that respect for Kinsey was the furthest thing from her mind. “What about the Pack?”
He arched an eyebrow. “What about them?”
“We have a responsibility here,” Carter retorted.
“Yes, you do,” said Kinsey sharply. “Believe me, Major, I’m well aware of the SGC’s culpability…” He glanced up as the briefing room’s door opened and his face soured.
“Hey gang, sorry I’m late.” Jack O’Neill stepped in and took the empty chair next to Sam. “Hi,” he told her. “I miss much?”
“Your input isn’t required here, Colonel,” Kinsey seethed.
“I beg to differ,” said Hammond.
“Oh, don’t mind me,” Jack continued. “Carter? You were saying something?”
“The Pack came to us with honest intentions for mutual trade,” said Sam. “Technology for food and medical supplies.”
Kinsey waved his hand as if he was dismissing a nagging insect. “Yes, yes. But since they flew their colony ship into a star and let most of their other vessels get blown up along with all the hardware on board, they really don’t have anything to offer us now, do they? Trade implies give and take, Major. Clearly, economics isn’t your strong point.”
Carter bristled. “The clans of the Pack are in dire need. Are you proposing, sir, that we turn them away? They don’t even have enough ships to form a new flotilla.”
“That, sadly, is not our concern. They’ll just have to find a planet somewhere to settle on…”
Jack clapped his hands together. “Wow. Y’know, that’s a brilliant idea. Brilliant. And magnanimous too, if I do say so.”
Kinsey glared at Jack. “What in God’s name are you babbling about, man?”
“A planet.” O’Neill made a globe shape with his hands. “Okay, so I know they’re gypsies and everything, and they like the peripatetic life, but they could do that on a planet. And we’ve got plenty to spare, right General?” He flashed a winning smile toward Hammond. “All those worlds we’ve surveyed, all full of nothing but trees and rocks. Frankly, Mister Vee Pee, your suggestion about helping the Pack settle on one of them is a gesture of great compassion. I’m sure the President would agree.”
