Murphy's Physics
Murphy's Second Law: "If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong."
Jack was vaguely aware that he was being lifted. He felt the confines of an escape pod around him, recognized the pressurized feeling as the door slid firmly closed. His face ached; he was sure he'd at least broken his nose or cheekbones, but the pod was so close that he could not lift his hands to feel the damage. He heard his radio crackling at his collar, felt the cold trickle of blood down his neck, soaking into his shirt.
"Launch! Colonel O'Neill, you must launch your escape pod!" So'len's voice on his radio.
The controls for the escape pod were beneath the fingers of his right hand. He could feel the textured panels. Choosing the center one, he pressed it firmly. There was a vacuous hiss, and the whole pod jolted slightly.
Jack frowned. He had not been launched. He stabbed down on the button again. This time nothing happened, but Jack became aware of a high-pitched whine, and the sounds of impact in the distance. He felt as if he were spinning in one of the Air Force's flight simulators; the inertial-dampeners in the escape capsule cushioned him from the crash as the scout ship made an ungraceful, distressed landing.
He stabbed the button again, and then pressed all of them. The door did not open. He twisted and managed to get his arms up enough to try to force the doors apart. He could not budge them, but he strained and clawed at them until stars danced behind his aching eyes. Life support inside the pod was working-- one of the few things that had gone RIGHT today-- but the feeling of suffocation persisted. Claustrophobia had nothing to do with it. This is what anyone felt when they are trapped, and of not knowing where their team was or if they had even survived their own descent.
He bent his arm further, feeling as if he was folding the bones in his forearm to reach the toggle on his radio. "Teal'c! Carter! Daniel! Report!" No response. "So'len? Get me out of this box! Hey, So'len!"
There was a thud outside of the pod. Jack dug his already broken nails into the fine crack where the doors joined. There came a scrape of metal, and then a thin gleaming line of light appeared. Jack shifted his hands and pushed with all his desperate strength on one side of the doors. They slid back slowly, and So'len appeared, levering the doors open with a bent metal rod.
The Tok'ra helped Jack out of the pod, and then collapsed onto the deck. He was bleeding freely from wounds on his head and face, and one of his pant legs was soaked with blood. Jack approached him hesitantly, unsure if the host was wounded enough to make his symbiote abandon him. He had no desire to test the moral judgment of another Tok'ra; he'd had enough of that kind of fun. "Hey! Sullen, old buddy? You still alive?" Gingerly, he touched the man's throat with two fingers, feeling the strong pulse beating there.
The Tok'ra opened his eyes. Jack was startled to notice that they were brown, like his own. "O'Neill. You have survived." The eyes rolled closed again.
"Hey now! Don't nod off on me yet! I haven't thanked you for the nice, soft landing." But So'len was unconscious. Jack didn't feel much better than the Tok'ra looked, but he struggled against his own dizziness to wrestle open one of his team's packs to find a first-aid kit. He crawled over and did what he could to help So'len.
Jack was flat on his back when his awareness returned to him. 'Must have passed out sometime after the feature film', he thought ruefully. There was a tiny voice entreating him out of the smoky darkness, buzzing in his ear like an insect. He sat up with a groan, feeling his forehead to see if there really was a ten inch nail stuck through it.
"O'Neill, please respond." The radio chattered at him, dragging at his collar.
"Teal'c?" Jack's voice cracked. He cleared his throat and said, "Report, Teal'c. What's your situation?"
"I have exited the escape vessel without injury. I have scouted the area, but have not yet located Major Carter or Daniel Jackson. I have determined the direction the scout ship's homing beacon. Do you wish me to join your position?"
"Negative. We need to find Carter and Daniel. I am in the scout ship now. So'len is injured, I'm not sure how badly." Jack saw no reason to mention his own problems. "I'll contact you after I complete a sweep of the area. Maybe they are near the landing site. Hopefully, old Sullen didn't run them over when he rubbed down the ship."
"Understood. I shall broaden my search and report again. Teal'c out."
Jack took a moment to feel his face for loose bones. Other than a whumping headache and a few scratches, he seemed mostly uninjured. He sat up slowly, then stood up, surveying the rest of his ravaged territory and for once finding nothing seriously wrong.
'Well,' he thought with an inner grin, 'there is a first time for everything.'
So'len was lying where Jack had left him, in a state of deep sleep. From what Jack could tell, the symbiote seemed to be healing him. There wasn't much more that Jack could do, so he left a canteen of water near the Tok'ra's hand and geared up for a sweep of the area. He found his pack in the ring transport room, where Carter and Daniel had placed it beside their own. He stuffed in an extra first-aid kit, then grabbed up his P90.
Stepping outside, Jack did a double-take of the ship. So'len had really done some trick piloting to bring it down in one piece. There was a swath of trees lying like broken matchsticks in a broad avenue, still smoldering, where the ship had bellied down until it banked onto the ground. A fair mound of dirt was ploughed and piled up over the nose of the vehicle, nearly obscuring it. They seemed to be in a valley between steep, rocky hills. In the great distance, blue smudges of mountains lay like low clouds on the horizon. The sky was pale blue and hazy. An orange sun was quartering in the sky, but Jack had no way of knowing yet if it was going up or down, or just hanging out. This was an alien planet, after all.
Jack swept the area, then circled again in a wider path, checking at every compass point for a response from Carter or Daniel. Teal'c was headed toward the scout ship, searching in a zigzag pattern as he moved toward the position. The sun rose to zenith, took on a pinkish hue as the clouds thickened, then began to descend.
"Colonel O'Neill," the radio crackled to life with the strangely timbred voice of So'len.
"I'm returning to the ship. Hang on." Jack double-timed it back to the crash site, feeling light-headed as he arrived. Maybe the air here was thinner than Earth, he mused as he breathed deeply, striding the last few paces to the ship. The doors slipped open readily, revealing So'len sitting against the wall, his wounded leg stretched out before him. "Feeling better?" Jack asked, squatting down next to him.
So'len grimaced as he shifted his battered limb. "I will live, Colonel. It will take some time to heal, then I will set to work on the ship. I hope that I will be able to repair the systems, but I fear that much damage was sustained to the hull."
"Yeah, nice landing! We won't be needing to cut any firewood for, oh... I don't know... a year. But any landing you can walk away from is a good one... oh, no offense!" Jack added with a smirk. "Any landing that you can limp away from..."
"I am glad to see that you sustained only minor injuries, O'Neill. I would have been most distressed if you had failed to live long enough to criticize my flying." One side of the Tok'ra's mouth twitched up in a hint of a smile.
"Hey, I'm not being critical! I'm grateful to be alive. I wouldn't be, if you hadn't got me into that escape pod." Jack sighed. "Look, you did good. Now take care of yourself and get this ship fixed. I'm going to try to find Carter so she can help you, and Daniel so he can drive me nuts while we wait."
So'len answered with slight nod, then closed his eyes.
'If we were stranded on this rock long enough,' Jack thought with a touch of hopeful arrogance, 'I just might live to hear a Tok'ra laugh.'