Tarantella 2

See part 1 for disclaimers.


1999 May 17 2200 approx. Earth Standard

Airman Frank Rossiter flinched. Jeez but the geek had sharp fingernails. For just a second it felt good, a clean wash of anger that took away the sick fear and the watery feeling in his gut. Then the guy hit a sweet spot and pain flared up his arm and terror chilled his skin as Dr. Jackson took a deep, noisy breath. A breath anyone with ears could hear oh Christ, oh Virgin Mary protect him but they were dead. Dead.

"Shutupshutupshutup . . ." Rossiter hissed, keeping his voice so quiet it was more a breath then a noise, leaning so close he could smell the soap on the other man's skin. "Christ's sake don't make a sound!"

"Airman . . ." The voice in his ear was soft, soothing, even as hands wrapped tightly around his wrists and forced them back against Rossiter's chest. "Airman, whatever they were, they're gone. Do you understand? We need to get out of here."

No . . . nonononono! He lashed out, clamping his hands around the other man's face. "You'll get us killed you'll get me killed they'll . . . they'll . . ." He shuddered, stomach lurching and got control of himself by an effort he'd never have believed he had in him. Yanking the archeologist close enough to breathe the words in his ear, he whispered, "You didn't see it. You can't imagine. We can't go out there. They'll rip us apart. We can't. We can't."

Strong thumbs dug into his tendons, forced his hands away from Jackson's face. "Listen." The word, spoken in a normal voice, was shockingly loud in the little room. "I don't hear anything, Rossiter. I don't see anything either. See the lights?" A pale hand moved, splayed out against the pretty screen that was one wall of their hidey hole. "I believe you, I do. But they're not there anymore. The lights aren't moving and there aren't any shadows. We have to leave."

". . . please . . " That tiny squeak couldn't be him, but his skin felt like ice, and his heartbeat pounded in his own ears.

"We can't stay here, Airman." Jackson's eyes were wide and dark in a pale face. "We have to . . . " He didn't go on, just waved at the screen again and got to his feet, pushing Rossiter's hands back and away. "I'll go first. You can wait here, listen for me. But there's no one there."

The archeologist - the CIVILIAN - pushed the door open slowly, slipping out. Rossiter held his breath and waited forever, counting his heartbeats, onetwothreefour - at twenty-five he couldn't stand himself and lunged at the door after the goddamn civvie, bursting into the hall, sure that his last sight in life would be gold and black walls, lights crazily askew, knocked off their stands, blood spattered . . . everywhere. He stared around at the looming shadows, the glints of light off gold and red. Where was the . . . "Jesus!"

"What?" Jackson spun, pressing his back against the wall at the corner he'd been about to turn.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing?" Rossiter was trembling. He could feel it, shaking where he stood like some rookie but that idiot, goddamn fucking civilian suicidal head case - "We're getting out of here, Doc. This way."

Blue eyes - they'd looked black in that closet, he thought irrelevantly - scanned past his shoulder to the end of the corridor. Jackson gestured vaguely towards the corner behind him. "We need to find them. The rest of the team are . . . they're the other way. We can help."

"They're gone, Dr. Jackson." Rossiter slumped. It was so quiet. The geek had been right. Nothing alive was left here but the two of them, nothing around that corner but things that Rossiter never wanted to see again. He spoke softly, respectfully, of the dead. "You didn't see it. They're . . . there's no one left."

"But . . ." his face twisted into a frown. "But there were eight of them. There has to be someone."

The Air Force didn't tell him about this, about how to make somebody believe in this shit. Hell, he didn't believe what he'd seen himself. He shuddered, queasy at a sudden thought as he stepped up next to the archeologist. "You didn't believe me, did you? You really didn't believe me."

Jackson's eyes flickered, the strange light reflecting off his glasses. Rossiter took a deep breath, smelling blood and shit and urine and something else, something acrid and wrong. Jackson's face had gone even paler. "What if somebody . . . there has to be somebody left." That flicker of the eyes again and Rossiter could see him making the connection, hearing the same silence that had taken away the airman's terror, and left only a bitter relief in its place. "Rossiter, didn't anybody . . ."

"I tried to tell you, Doc. Nobody."

He didn't believe him. Not really. Rossiter could see it. Could see him trying to believe that somebody was left to need their help. He reached for the guy's shoulder but the archaeologist slipped out from under his hand, around the corner and down towards where Rossiter would have given a year's pay never to have been and not to go back now. He swallowed hard and stepped around the corner, or tried to. He just couldn't. His bladder felt heavy and his hands shook and, for the life of him, he couldn't make himself take the three steps past the wall that blocked his view.

It was quiet for a long time. Forever. An instant. Dr. Jackson made a sound, a strangled little noise and Rossiter's nails dug deep into his palms. Jesus. He could still see it in his mind's eye, screwed his eyes shut tight as if that'd make the images go away, as if he wasn't thinking of what Jackson'd be seeing even now. Thank God and the Madonna but all he could hear was the soft scuffing of Jackson's feet. No screams. Not even the strange clicking sounds or the squelching noises he knew he'd hear in his nightmares for the rest of his life. Just that quiet sound, uneven as if the guy wasn't able to keep moving. Getting a little louder.

Jackson backed up into Rossiter's line of sight, face white and eyes wide, fixed back the way he'd come. Where Rossiter wouldn't, couldn't look. His glasses had slipped to the tip of his nose and his eyes looked glassy. He jumped when Rossiter spoke. "I told ya, Doc. They're gone."

The guy swallowed convulsively. Rossiter could see how his throat moved, see him collect himself. "You're sure? Are you sure no one could be left? Did they take anyone alive? Could they be -"

"Doc." Rossiter cut him off, shaking his head. "No. I'm sure. And even if I wasn't, I'm damn sure that you and I couldn't get 'em out. I don't know if an armored division could get 'em out and that's God's honest truth."

A shaking hand shoved the glasses back up into place. Jackson looked back over his shoulder. His voice was distant. "They came in through the rupture, didn't they? Where the hull broke when the ship crashed. They . . ." His voice trailed off and he swallowed again, face crumpling. His eyes were too bright when he looked back at Rossiter.

"Come on." This he could do. This, they'd taught him. "We've got to get out of here, Doc. We've got a long way to go."

This time Dr. Jackson let himself be guided, tugged out of the Goa'uld ship and into the moonlit cool of dusk on an alien world. Rossiter paused, checked his compass and got his bearings. The archeologist was starting to notice his surroundings again, and Rossiter was relieved. It'd be easier with two sets of eyes, even when one of 'em was civvie. Triple moons spilled dull light over the ruined city streets. Nasty ground, even when they didn't have to contend with . . . Jesus, but Rossiter hoped they didn't have to contend with Them 'cause no matter how fast or skilled you were, there were just some things you couldn't stop. And it was a long, long way to the stargate and home.


1999 May 17 2300 approx. Earth Standard

"C'mon Janet, you telling me that's the best you can do?" Jack O'Neill combed his fingers through his hair again. "You gotta have more than that. Give me SOMEthing! Speculate, estimate, hell, I'll take a silly-ass guess right now!"

"I'm sorry Colonel." She wasn't meeting his eyes. He hated that. It meant that not only were things every bit as much in the shit can as he thought, they were probably worse. If that was possible. Yep, it was possible. She was eyeing Carter like the Major was her last hope. Christ, Carter was good at pulling scientific rabbits out of her helmet but O'Neill had it on personal authority from the wizard herself that she had no fucking clue what those things were, let alone how to kill 'em. Well, short of shooting them into orbit or something like that.

Yep. Just like he figured. Carter's big baby blues went wide and she shrugged. "I'm an astrophysicist, Janet. I called everybody in my interstellar phonebook and they had nothing. Don't look at me."

"You see more xenobiology in the field -"

"AH!" O'Neill waved a finger at her. "I don't want to hear that. You see all our reports. You have GOT to have some idea what that . . . that . . . BUG was!"

She was rubbing the heels of her hands against her eyes. Bad sign. Baaaad sign. He sighed and resigned himself to it. "Colonel, I don't have the faintest idea. I am a doctor, an ER trauma specialist, not a cryptobiologist or a xenobiologist or, I don't know, an entomologist or ANY of the specialties or pseudo-specialties or psychic advisors you'd need to tell you how to kill those THINGS!" He winced as her voice rose to a full shout. "If I could tell you how to kill them I would! Hell, I would go WITH you and stomp 'em out myself. Right now I can't even tell you if what we killed is a juvenile or an adult or what they're even made of. I can't tell you what to look out for besides what we saw on that screen. Powers and Tremblay are so damn traumatized they can barely string a sentence together. They keep talking about exploding eggs and jaws and things. I can tell you to look for something scary and don't let anything stick to your face but until those . . . those . . . lily-livered, stinking COWARDS down at Colorado State -"

"State?" Carter's dismayed question stopped her.

"Subcontractors." Frasier sighed and shook herself. "We needed a fully equipped bio-containment lab. We didn't have the time to get this thing to Fort Detrick so it's down at the L3 at Colorado State. God help us."

"We couldn't do it here?" O'Neill started to comb his fingers through his hair again and stopped by an act of will. "Janet, why the hell couldn't we do it here? We did those little nano-shits here. And Machello's silverfish. And that caveman virus, you know -"

She was shaking her head. "Necessity. And my god, we were one step from disaster on every single one of those. I just don't have the room or the funding to do it right, Colonel. This thing - well. You saw what it did to those men. And I'm still not sure it's dead. We put it into the strongest containment we could find and now it's wait and see. I just don't . . . I don't KNOW what to tell you. I don't know what it IS!"

Her frustration stopped him in his tracks. Carter met his eyes and gave her head a little shake, no speculation, no estimation and not a silly ass guess between the lot of them. He felt his own shoulders slump. And stopped, grinned slyly at Carter and shook his head. "So. Situation normal, all fucked up, huh Major?"

Her answering smile was slow but steady. "I guess we play it by ear, sir."

"So what else is new?"

Frasier was looking between them like she couldn't decide who to sedate first, but the mood was getting to her too. He could see it. See the way the corners of her eyes quirked with a laugh she was trying to keep off her face. "Give me the phone, Colonel."

He grabbed the receiver, lobbed it over to her. "You mind if I ask why?"

"You make the Gate in 3 hours, right?"

"Barring sudden insights and new weapons, yeah. And your point would be?"

"Dr. Jackson's your usual wild-ass-guess specialist. You're short one psychic."

"I'll tell him you said so." O'Neill suddenly grinned back at her, and laughed out loud. "So who's it gonna be? Dionne Warwick?"

Carter piped up. "Try Madame Cleo. She's got the best ads."

1999 May 17 2330 approx. Earth Standard

"Did this . . ." Teal'c paused, allowed one eyebrow to rise minimally, "Madame Cleo recommend this course?"

"It's . . . she's . . . never mind!" O'Neill's worry-funk evaporated into consternation as he scrubbed the air with his hands. "Carter, did you have to bring that up?"

Teal'c suppressed a smile and shared a glance with Major Carter, who had dimpled but managed to keep the grin off her face. "Sorry Sir. No unauthorized intel sources. Right, Sir."

"Right." He shook himself, much like the earth dogs that Teal'c had seen, and pointed to the upper left quadrant of the map again. His voice was suddenly sharp, focused, and Teal'c leaned in next to him to see more closely. "All right, kids, we've got a little over two hours to gate time and a lot of ground to cover. Time to get out the cheat sheets and cram."

"Cram?" Teal'c considered the word and debated asking what should be crammed and where.

"You were one of those kids who copied the answers at the last minute, right Sir?" Major Carter was arranging her briefing.

"Think study group, Carter." O'Neill sighed and turned back to the white board with its image of dense forest and skeletal buildings. "What are we taking in?"

The Major traced a finger down a list. "The usual, plus machetes, a flame thrower and thermite grenades. I thought about defoliants but we won't have time to let them work."

"Janet come up with anything to kill the uglies with yet?"

Major Carter eyed him. "Sure. But I passed on the nerve gas and decompression tank so that's one we've still got to play by ear."

"She can't do better than that?" O'Neill grimaced. "What good are smart people when they don't give you the answers you want?"

"I couldn't possibly answer that, Sir," the major responded. Teal'c met her eyes and nodded, acknowledging her bravado, and the fear it kept at bay.

O'Neill zoomed the projection in on a glint of bright metal among the trees. "Okay. We've got, what, three teams on P4X-232. I guess they figured you don't find a downed pyramid ship every day and wanted to know how they did it. The UAV shot this five hours ago, just before Joe Norton, ah -"

"Died." Major Carter's comment was precise and neutral.

"Yeah. Died." Teal'c could hear him swallow. The image shifted as O'Neill tapped a few keys on the computer and the projected image moved. "The city and trees won't let us see most of the ground routes clearly but we can figure 'em out from where it thins out. Up here . . ." He scrolled the image northwest until it showed the ruins of an ancient, shattered ship, the trees in its crash path stunted even thousands of years after its fall. "This is where SG-10 was working."

The atmosphere was suddenly charged, all three of them focused. Teal'c knew the mood, had felt it before but it always reached something deep inside. Major Carter had risen to scrutinize the image the computer projected onto the screen. "That's where Daniel's team was?"

"Yeah." He glanced at his notes too quickly to read them, as if he had this memorized and was merely checking a detail. "SGC laid out the big bucks for this one. Botanists and engineers and anthropologists. And one archaeologist with the worst luck in the universe."

Major Carter ignored the commentary, staring at the image. "Can we get any closer, Sir?"

"You got it." Individual trees suddenly loomed up.

Teal'c narrowed his eyes and tried to make out the ground past the leafy canopy. "Have there been further attempts to contact the research teams?"

"Oooh yeah." The Tau'ri's drawn features belied the irony of his tone. "Every fifteen minutes we've been asking ET to phone home." He paused, eyeing Teal'c as if waiting for a comment. The Jaffa paused courteously, refraining from providing the straight line the colonel was so clearly waiting for. "We heard from SG-9. The bug lady and her guys are fine but nothing from SG-10 and we all know what happened to SG-4. More or less."

They were all silent for a moment. Teal'c took a deep breath. Failure could only be an outcome, never a possibility. "Therefore there is no evidence that SG-10 has suffered the same fate. Only that they have encountered difficulties."

The Tau'ri glanced at each other and he could read the thought that went between them. Had Daniel Jackson been there, he was certain he would have been reminded that denial was not simply a river, but it was also not an option that Teal'c was willing to consider until all others had been exhausted. He flipped through his briefing materials, locating the last substantiated contact with SG-10. O'Neill had anticipated him. It was . . . satisfying? Reassuring. Even as he studied the printouts the colonel was summarizing the material.

"We're gonna run through it out loud. Stop me if I miss a high point. Stop me if you spot something good. Hell, stop me for anything, cause I sure see shit-all in this stuff myself. Near as I can tell, all contacts looked normal forty-eight -"

"Fifty-two, Sir." Major Carter corrected him automatically. "P4X-232 has a 26 hour day."

"Six. Right. I knew that. Fifty-two hours ago all three teams checked in. And SG-9 and 10 and the gate all called in at midnight, right as rain. Nothing weird, SG-4 was squirrelly but the other teams were fine. We've got recordings from the gate boys that sounded like SG-4 was calling in too, right up until about 0900. Nothing to make 'em fire up the gate more often and make the bean counters scream. And that's the last time we hear from 'em until SG-three-out-of-4 comes through the gate. By then SG-4, 10 and the Gate team are all gone. Something took them out of commission so fast they never dropped a dime."

Teal'c paused. "Dropped a dime?"

An instant of triumph flickered over O'Neill's face. "Called and reported a bad guy."

Samantha Carter was writing down times, frowning. "Ignore him, Teal'c. Phone calls haven't cost a dime in more than a decade. Colonel, are you saying this was a planned attack? I mean, that thing on Norton didn't seem . . . intelligent."

Teal'c understood why she looked sick at the thought. It chilled his spine, as well. "For three teams to be disabled or destroyed in such a short period would indicate either a widespread catastrophe or excellent coordination. SG-9 did not report earth tremors or similar mishaps but for three teams to fall silent within two hours time? It seems unlikely that their silence is coincidental."

"You can say that again." O'Neill held up his finger before Teal'c could respond, "Ah! Figure of speech."

"I was aware." The Jaffa relaxed, soothed by the momentary absurdity.

O'Neill scowled, knuckles white on his pen as he sketched his own timeline. "SG-4 called in a medical evacuation but it all sounded under control. That's the last transmission SGC gets though they're recording calls with the gate boys until just after 0830 local time. Sometime after that the gate team dropped off the face of the earth. Whatever got 'em was fast and efficient. They couldn't get to the gate and there aren't any calls on the MALP. They just disappeared. The MALP recorder says SG-10 sent out one more shout at, I guess, just before noon local time?"

Major Carter nodded, confirming his timeline. "Yeah, right around 1100 or so. It sounds like they tried to raise the gate and no one answered. We called when they missed their check in and all we got was the MALP. "

"You listened to the tape, didn't you Carter?" O'Neill rifled through his folder, pulling out what Teal'c recognized as the tape transcript. "I couldn't get much out of it. They sent a general notice to look out for something before they went dead but there was a lot of static and they weren't any too clear by then."

Teal'c scanned his own transcript of the radio contacts from SG-4. "Eggs. When I listened to the recording it sounded like 'eggs.'"

"You've got good ears." Major Carter made a note on her file. "I didn't pick that up until they cleaned up the static."

O'Neill shook his head, mumbling something about "scrambled or fried" which Teal'c ignored. The Colonel's face was grim, though, when he looked up from his briefing file. "SG-4 said it had everything under control when they moved out. SG-10 went off line just before noon but they were calling in until then. When SG-4 ran into trouble last night Capt. Souris called in something about sending assistance right around 1700 or so. SG-4 said they had it under control then, and they were heading on in. SG-9 offered help too, same thing."

"Why weren't they on hourly check-in?" Major Carter could have been talking to herself. "We know the time, Sir, and we know the ground as well as we're going to but what was happening, what . . ." she shook her head, expression lost. "Where did they go?"

The plastic case of the pen cracked in O'Neill's hand. Teal'c slowly sat back, striving to keep his thoughts off his face as she looked between them. "Where did they go?"

"That's what we're going to find out, Carter." O'Neill's voice was gentle, calm. "And then we're going to bring them home."


TBC