"Lieutenant," the Deputy First For Security said musingly. "You're sure he gave a military rank, Scholar First?.

"Yes." It was Troop Leader First Sargon Ulmesh who answered, his back to the other men in the observation gallery as he looked down through the one-way glass. "He is a soldier. One who's seen combat very recently."

"He said his people had just lost a battle with the Oppressors." Ashptim added, shuffling his notes. "That was toward the end, sir, when he started talking quickly again. I'm not entirely sure I understood him completely but I'm quite clear about his people being at war with the Oppressors."

"Yet he speaks their language," Over-Comander Eniku said, frowning.

"According to Lieutenant Elliot just about everybody 'out there' does. He spoke of hundreds of inhabited worlds -!"

Ulmesh broke into the Scholar's excitement. "He uses a different language when he talks to himself. Listen to him." The other three men joined him at the glass.

Elliot was leaning back in his chair, legs stretched out and eyes closed, speaking softly but fluently. Expressions of amusement, regret, astonishment and interest flickered across his face. His words were fully audible, thanks to the mikes, and totally unfamiliar. The Deputy and the two military officers looked at Ashptim.

The scholar shook his head. "Never heard anything like it in my life."

"But surely if Tauri was our planet of origin his native speech should be similar to ours?" The Deputy said doubtfully.

"Not necessarily, sir," Ashptim answered promptly. "If the Flight is factual history rather than allegory our people were held captive for generations, add the two thousand or so we've been on Nisir and it's more than enough time for language to change beyond recognition."

"Obviously," said Ulmesh dryly.

Over-Commander Eniku frowned frowned down at the subject, or the prisoner, or whatever they were to call their unexpected visitor. "Is he quite right in the head?"

"Oh a great many people think out loud," Ashptim assured him. "I do so myself."

"But do you have lively conversations with yourself?" Ulmesh inquired even more dryly.

All three looked back at the prisoner. They listened for several minutes to what sounded very much like half of a dialog.

"He does seem to be listening and reacting to - to something." Ashptim conceded worriedly.

"An alien soldier from the Place of Origin, at war with the Oppressors and schizophrenic to boot," the Over-Commander said grimly. "It just gets better and better doesn't it?"

The Deputy took a deep breath. "Gentlemen I have the press, the President of the Council and every one of our allies demanding information. What am I supposed to tell them?

That we've got a space traveling madman on our hands?"

"Mention the Oppressors and we'll have panic," Eniku warned.

"I know," the Deputy agreed gloomily.

"Everyone in the park heard him say he was Tauri," Ulmesh said leadingly.

"I suppose we can just confirm that for the moment," the Deputy said without much conviction.

"But is he? We have only his word for it!" said Eniku.

"Speaking personally I would have tried to come up with a more believable lie," Ulmesh observed mildly.

Eniku gave a reluctant grin. "I see your point, Troop-Leader."

"Oh!" they all turned to Scholar Ashptim. "I forgot, he asked for food."

"Better do the medical exam first, we don't want to poison him," said Eniku.

---

Elliot obediently followed Ulmesh through a door. "Right," he took in the equipment scattered around the room. "I was wondering when they'd get around to the medical."

This may present problems.

"Tell me about it. That sure looks like an X-ray machine, I don't suppose they can miss you - or the naquadah in my blood."

Definitely not. An explanation will certainly be in order.

'Unfortunately we seem to have lost old Ashptim,' Elliot answered silently, allowing himself to be maneuvered into position on a small platform between two mechanisms. 'Yup, x-ray. We're in trouble now.'

Just a few more moments...

'Beg pardon?' Elliot placed his arm on the indicated surface and winced as the needle went home. "Ow."

I just need a few more exchanges.

'For what?'

For this. Lantash's mental voice had a distinctly smug sound.

Suddenly the doctors, or whatever, jabbering away to Ulmesh in front of the x-ray plates were making sense - or as much sense as medical personnel ever made with their jargon.

'Whoa!' said Elliot, impressed. 'How'd you do that?'

It's a gift.

----

"Structurally he seems perfectly normal," the senior medician was telling the Troop Leader. "Except for this whatever it is here -"

"My symbiote. His name is Lantash."

Heads turned all over the room to stare at the alien. Ulmesh's eyes narrowed. "You speak our language?"

"Not till about five seconds ago," Elliot answered, adding to the med-tech drawing blood; "Not meaning to complain but I can only lose three pints or so without ill effect."

"Surely you have enough for your tests, Medician Third," Ulmesh said mildly.

"Yes, yes, of course sir." The green smocked man next to Ulmesh made a signal to the tech who pulled out the needle and pressed a wad of sterile cotton against the puncture. "You were saying - ?"

"Elliot, Lieutenant Kevin Elliot." The alien pulled his jacket back on. "Lantash is why I can suddenly talk your talk, though how he did it -" Elliot paused, seemed to be listening. "Oh. He says he simply matched your phonetics with the various languages in his genetic memory then pulled it to the forefront of his - our - minds."

"Genetic memory," a medician echoed as his colleagues exchanged intrigued glances.

"Yeah," Elliot listened some more. "Because of their life-cycle Tok'ra are unable to instruct their young the way we do, instead they pass on knowledge, skills and even personal memories genetically. Oh, and when you analyze that blood you're going to find an alien element in it, that's normal. And you're going to find blood sugar levels in the basement which isn't. Can I please have something to eat now?"

----

"I apologize for the delay," said Ulmesh.

Elliot swallowed. "I understand, sir. We're careful not to poison our visitors too."

"The medicians are sure that this at least will not disagree with your system," Ulmesh continued, watching bemusedly as the alien put away sticky gray gruel with truly astonishing enthusiasm.

"As a rule we can eat whatever the locals do," Elliot answered between bites. "Genetic drift usually hasn't taken the Diaspora populations that far from Earth-normal."

"Now that the language problem has be resolved perhaps you'd care to explain how and why you've come to us in more detail?" Ulmesh hinted.

"Please!" added Ashptim, who'd joined them in the small, bare holding cell sitting alongside Ulmesh across the table from the alien.

"Yes, sir," Elliot paused in his eating to think. "It's hard to know where to start...Okay, you know about the Goa'uld, the Oppressors as you call them. They came to Tauri - which we call Earth - thousands of years ago and enslaved our common ancestors, claiming to be their gods. Only about four thousand B.C. we kicked their collective asses off our planet and buried our gate so they couldn't come back."

"The Tauri successfully rebelled against the Oppressors?" Ulmesh asked, eyebrows rising.

Elliot shrugged. "Yeah, no idea how we managed it. Apparently they raided us for slaves every so often but never tried to bring us back under control - which is downright weird when you think about it. Eventually they forgot about us altogether. Okay, fast forward a few dozen centuries to about fifty years ago when we accidently uncovered our stargate. It took us decades to figure out how it worked and when we found out what was on the other end our government decided maybe using it wasn't such a good idea. We were all set to put it back in cold storage when a Goa'uld named Apophis used it to kidnap some of our people. We went to get them back and when the dust cleared we were sort of at war with the Goa'uld." He shrugged again, a little apologetically. "That's the short version anyway. We've been fighting them ever since."

"Which brings us to your Stargate Command," Ulmesh prompted.

Elliot nodded. "Yeah. Like I told Scholar Ashptim here, our mission is to look for allies and/or weapons we can use against the Goa'uld. To be honest we haven't found many, just the Tok'ra and the Asgard so far, but we have trade and diplomatic relations with a number of worlds now -"

"Hundreds you said," Ashptim put in eagerly.

"We been to hundreds of worlds," Elliot corrected. "Most are in no position to help us. Our usual advice is to bury their gate and keep their heads down." He hesitated, then continued; "To be honest that doesn't always work. The Goa'uld have space ships as well as the gates but your particular 'god' is dead so odds are nobody remembers you exist."

"You are certain Marduk is dead?" Ashptim asked. "According to tradition the Oppressors were immortal."

"They do take a lot of killing," Elliot agreed ruefully. "But we're sure of Marduk. Seems sometime after you folks left his own priests rebelled against him and trapped him inside a ziggurut. SG-1 and a Russian Team - that's another nation on Earth - broke into it, which wasn't a smart move as it turned out, but they ended up collapsing the ziggurut on top of Marduk so it's pretty safe to assume he's squashed."

Ulmesh looked at the alien consideringly. "Would I be correct in assuming the Tauri have killed other Oppressors?"

"Oh yeah," Elliot answered with astonishing casualness. "Over thirty I think -" he paused to listen to his inner voice, grinned. "Make that thirty-seven, including Zipacna. Seems the Tok'ra have been counting. Mind you we've had to kill some of them three or four times before it took!"

Ulmesh's eyes narrowed thoughtfully on the young man sitting opposite. "You Tauri would seem to be a dangerous lot."

"Thank you, sir. We try." Another uncannily disarming grin. "Lantash says we are insanely reckless and unaccountably lucky." Suddenly the grin vanished. "Not always, pal, not always." The young face went grim and hard.

Oh, yes, Ulmesh thought, Definitely a combat veteran.

"You said you were here because of a battle you'd lost?" Ashptim ventured.

Elliot sighed looking down at his spoon idly drawing patterns in the dregs of his gruel. "More of a pyrrhic victory, sir. The kind of win that costs as much as a defeat." Ulmesh nodded involuntarily. He knew that kind of victory. "The Tok'ra were setting up a new base on a planet called Revanna, they move base regularly as a standard security measure. My team, SG-17, and SG-1 went there to liaise. We were having our usual argument about tactics and goals when the base came under attack from the Goa'uld. The base started collapsing around us." His grip on the spoon tightened, knuckles whitening with the intensity of his contained emotion. "My team, my whole team, was killed. So were most of the Tok'ra. Lantash had lost his last host some time before and his life support unit was damaged, I'd been hit bad myself. A joining seemed the only way to save both our lives, it didn't quite work."

Elliot seemed to realize for the first time he was still holding the spoon. He put it down carefully beside the bowl. Ulmesh saw the steel handle was bent and twisted from the force of the alien's grip and automatically noted that this young man was considerably stronger than he looked.

Elliot breathed out carefully and continued. "We managed to get to the surface, thanks to Lantash's knowledge of Tok'ra technology but it was crawling with Jaffa - that's the System Lords' cannon fodder -"

"The staff-wielders," Ashptim murmured.

"You got it. The situation was bad but we had a weapon, a poison gas canister. The only problem was how to use it without killing ourselves. Lantash and I'd realized we weren't going to make it. We volunteered to cover the others' escape.... the last thing either of us remembers is breaking the canister seal."

"How did you survive?" Ulmesh asked gently.

"Zipacna had a sarcophagus," Elliot answered simply. The two Nisirians looked at him blankly. "That's a powerful healing device. It can even revive the dead, which is one of the reasons Goa'uld are so hard to kill." A faint smile cracked the grim mask of his face. "And how some of us Tauri have managed to die two or three times for our planet. Tok'ra don't let themselves be taken alive. I suppose Zipacna was hoping to revive a few." The alien took a deep breath. "When we came to we were surrounded by dead Jaffa and a very dead Underlord. Lantash remembered this address and we came here - " he paused to listen. "Uh, he says his people had scouted your planet as a possible base a few hundred years ago. They dropped the idea when they realized it was inhabited, but there was no city here then.

Ashptim and Ulmesh exchanged looks. "That must have been over four hundred years ago then," the scholar said. "Er, exactly how old are you - both?"

"I'm twenty-three," Elliot answered. "Lantash is -" his eyes rounded, "Wow, really? Lantash says he's just over three thousand."