Title: Fire in the Sky
Part: 8/10
Fandom: Stargate: SG-1
Pairing: Sam/Jack
Genre: Adventure, romance
Season: Post-season 10; after Continuum
Chapter Summary: SG-1 embark on their rescue mission, and Jack starts seeing things.
PART EIGHT
Mitchell emerged from the briefing room to find Daniel waiting for him outside in the corridor. He tried to walk on by, but Daniel was quick to fall into step beside him.
"A little harsh, don't you think?"
Mitchell shot him a look. "It's how it is, Jackson; better she hear it from me than somebody else."
"I think we both know Sam's aware of the mess Jack's got us all in. You could've at least–"
"What?" Cam interrupted. "Pretended it's all gonna be okay?"
"–been kinder."
"Wow, Jackson, I would've loved to," Mitchell replied, masking a sudden sense of guilt with even harder resolve. "But the fact is, we need Sam working on the Chimera device to have any chance of this mission succeeding. I needed her to know that; I need her to focus. If that makes her mad at me, well, I'll just have to apologise when we get back."
They rounded the corner, and almost bumped into Vala and Teal'c, who had been waiting for them. It was clear they had heard the tail of the conversation when Vala demanded: "Sam's not coming? Why not?"
Cameron sighed, loudly, and stepped past her to resume walking. "We need her to figure out the Chimera device. Besides, she's too involved."
"Too involved?" Vala repeated. "Come on, Mitchell. Since when has being 'too involved' ever stopped us? In my experience, having a personal interest in a mission tends to work in a woman's favour."
Daniel muttered something about not wanting to hear about Vala's experience or her personal interests, but Vala barely stopped for breath: "It's all about determination, fighting for a cause. Of course she should come, it's her battle! You really want to leave her on her own up here, while we go and break out General O'Neill without her?"
"Alright, enough!"
Mitchell rounded on the rest of his team, anger rising. "The decision has been made. Now please, all of you, can you just trust me on this one, and go get yourselves geared up for this very urgent mission?"
Vala folded her arms defiantly. "No."
"What?"
"No," she repeated. "I'm going to stay here. I'm going to stay here and help Sam fix that device. And when you get back you really are going to apologise, Cameron Mitchell. Big time."
Sam didn't bother to wait for SG-1's departure; she hadn't the patience, not now, not after Cam's treatment of her – and besides, there wasn't the time. He had been right about that.
Nevertheless she was finding it hard to shake the effects of his words, mainly because she knew just how right he had been – not just about their lack of time, but about everything. She hated it. She hated feeling helpless to help, powerless to save the one man she should be going to the ends of the world to save, even if that world happened to be several million light years away from home.
Especially if.
She was approaching the Research lab at speed, striding forward in anger at Mitchell, at Jack, at herself, throat tight with fear and frustration, with no plans of stopping; only plans of moving, always moving until this was done, until Jack was safe – and yet when the doors slid open in front of her, she stopped dead in her tracks.
She had been ready to burst in with orders, and a scathing response to the research team's inevitable protests that she was demanding the impossible; but now she found that someone else was doing it all for her.
"–better listen up!" she heard Vala exclaim. There was an edge to the other woman's tone which even Sam had barely heard from her before; it was authoritative and, from the startled expression on the faces of the Chimera research team, more than a little frightening.
"We have half an hour to get this thing working," Vala continued. "Half an hour to get it operational through several thousand miles of rock and some pretty advanced EM shielding, and yes, I know you're going to tell me it's impossible, laws of physics, blah blah, well I'm not interested, and neither is Colonel Carter. We have to make this mission a success, and the Chimera device is going to make that happen."
"But–" someone tried.
"The next person to say 'but' in this room I will personally hand over to Teal'c when he gets back!" Vala yelled, drowning out the sound of the protest. She found the source of the interruption and fixed the unfortunate scientist in her terrifying gaze. "And then you can explain to a very angry Jaffa why you felt it necessary to delay our progress – but not before I deal with you myself first."
She glared around the rest of the room. "Half an hour! Get moving!"
A few of the scientists sent a desperate look in Sam's direction, but they found no respite in her uncharacteristically hard expression. When the whole team had scurried off to their various tasks, Vala turned round with an enormous smile on her face.
"Motivating people is fun," she enthused, to Sam's grudging amusement.
"I appreciate you doing that, Vala," she said, allowing her expression to soften. "But... what are you doing here? Colonel Mitchell..."
"Mitchell doesn't know what he's talking about," Vala interrupted, with an impressive amount of contempt. "I, of course, know exactly what I'm talking about, but as he refused to listen I decided to stay and help with the Chimera device – what with my extensive experience of alien technologies and all."
Sam felt the anger draining away as quickly as it had come. "Vala... I don't know what to say. Thank you."
Vala waved a dismissive hand. "Don't thank me now. Thank me later, when there's time, and opportunity for ice cream." Her eyes glittered with mischief, determination, and the sheer audacity of her indomitable self-confidence. "Let's not keep General O'Neill waiting."
Jack O'Neill was waiting. He was waiting for some ingenious idea, some streak of inspiration on how to escape – or, failing that, an actual rescue.
By the way things were going, he thought, he could really do with that rescue.
He'd even put the rescue plan in place before he left. You couldn't argue with that for forward-thinking; hadn't Sam been telling him lately to think about the consequences of his decisions? Well, he'd listened. It wasn't his fault Mitchell and the rest of SG-1 were clearly having an attack of stupid.
He couldn't help thinking: If Sam was up there, she'd know what to do.
He grimaced. Ba'al had captured Sam because of him – to get to him, to torture him. This wasn't about information. Ba'al had enough bad guy experience and enough intergalactic contacts to get whatever information he needed, although perhaps he thought gleaning the information he was looking for from Jack's subconscious would be killing two birds with one stone. But the truth was that the whole thing was more personal than that. And in the darkness of Jack's innermost thoughts, he doubted that Ba'al would ever let Sam go, even if Jack spilled all of Earth's secrets to save her.
But he had to hope.
Something moved in the corner of his eye. He jerked his head around to look, only to curse angrily when he wrenched his neck. He looked across to the corner of the cell, but was nothing there. He was alone.
"Colonel, will you please ask Miss Mal Doran not to walk in front of the projection system?"
The plea came from an exasperated scientist who was in charge of the team responsible for developing the Chimera device. Her name was Dr. Cohen, and despite her generally patient disposition (she was, after all, the type of scientist who could sit at a desk for hours analysing a single set of results) she was growing increasingly frustrated with Vala's complete lack of lab etiquette.
"It's in the middle of the room!" Vala justified. "If I want to get from there to there, why should I go all the way around the outside when it's quicker to walk straight through? We're on the clock here, lady!"
"That's doctor, if you don't mind," Cohen replied, bristling.
"Vala," Carter called, without looking up from the delicate task of adjusting the elements of a non-functioning circuit board. "You can't walk across Chimera's field of vision – you'll distort the readings."
"What readings?" Vala muttered, sending a reproachful glance back at the three camera-like objects on tripods in the centre of the room. They were arranged in a triangle, cameras facing inward to provide a 3D rendering of the image being projected – at least, the image that would be projected, if they could just get the signal through the electromagnetic jamming on the planet below. Rebelliously, she stuck out a hand and waggled her fingers in front of the device.
"There it is again!" muttered a mystified voice from across the room. Vala glanced back towards Sam and Dr. Cohen, but it seemed neither one had heard the puzzled exclamation that had accompanied her petty act of defiance.
"Movement," Vala murmured. "I wonder..."
She turned and added, much louder: "Sam! I have an idea!"
In his cell, a sleep-deprived O'Neill frowned.
Hadn't he just seen–?
No. Impossible.
Fingers. Not an arm, not even a hand – the blurred shape of waving fingers, fading away eerily at the edges.
He rested his head back against the wall, eyes drooping as the weight of weariness fell down upon him once again.
He was definitely losing it.
"Just watch your readings," Vala instructed Cohen haughtily. When she was sure the lead scientist was paying sufficient attention to her computer, Vala stepped into the Chimera device's field of vision.
"Nothing," Cohen snapped impatiently. "Colonel Carter, this woman is wasting our time. I suggest we have her removed from the lab immediately."
Vala sighed theatrically and stepped out of range of the device.
"Well obviously I wasn't expecting anything to happen that time," Vala told her. "I wanted you to have a base-line reading. Now just watch."
"Vala," Carter began as Vala set off at a brisk walk, "I don't think–"
Vala passed in front of Chimera's cameras and several computers bleeped. Sam fell silent, staring at the read-out on Cohen's laptop.
"Again," she muttered, gesturing. "Vala, do it again."
Vala obeyed, smiling smugly.
"Same result," Cohen conceded, to the obvious surprise of the rest of her team, "but we should do some more tests – at least find out why..."
"Does it matter?" Vala asked, arriving beside them. "If movement is the key, we should use it, not sit around talking about it. Let's think about the important thing: how do we get enough movement without running back and forth all the time?"
The various members of Cohen's research team didn't look convinced by this brushing aside of scientific explanation, but Vala figured Sam would try anything at this point. She wasn't wrong.
"It's a lead," Carter told the group firmly, "and we're going to make it work. Dr. Cohen, I want practical solutions to introducing movement into Chimera's optic field. See if artificial manipulation of the projection has the same effect – start with high frequency oscillation of the image. It's possible that a projection transmitting high-intensity variants of the same image is filtering through the shield because of the frequency instability."
"Yes, ma'am," said Cohen, who knew an order when she heard one.
Vala turned back to Sam. "I hate to put a damper on my own genius idea," she said, "but won't projecting a fast-moving image like that mean it'll just look like a flickering blur on the other end?"
Sam grinned, her eyes alight with excitement. "Not if we oscillate the image fast enough. It's like those old movie projections; move successive frames fast enough and the brain interprets them as one consistent image."
It was clear Vala didn't understand the analogy, but Sam was flying. The whole world seemed illuminated with possibility and – crucially – hope. Hope that they had solved it. Hope that she would see her husband again.
Jack opened his eyes and immediately knew he was dreaming. Sam was standing in front of him, hazy at the edges, silently speaking his name. He could still distinctly feel the hardness of the ground he was sitting on, the severe straightness of the wall behind his back, and decided he couldn't be too far gone. Strangely, his eyes still felt heavy. Perhaps he wasn't quite asleep yet; just hovering on the edge of the dream, half-hallucinating, being drawn towards the comforting realm of sleep.
It occurred to him that he had been awake so long that Ba'al was probably getting impatient. He had said he could guide Jack's dreams to get at the information he wanted; perhaps he was trying to use the part of Jack's brain that was already half-asleep to lure him into submitting completely. Who knew what weird hallucinatory effects that bug in his stomach could have?
Jack smiled grimly and shook his head. "I don't think so."
The dream-image of Sam was looking at him imploringly. He could read her lips just enough to tell she was still trying to call his name.
"I know you're not real," he told the hallucination. "But hey, I might as well start talking out loud rather than in my head. I should warn you, though: for the most part my thoughts really aren't that interesting."
He grimaced. His head was still hurting from when he'd struck it back against the wall. He closed his eyes for a moment against the pain. When he opened them again, he saw nothing but the empty cell.
Sam hurried across the lab, abandoning the Chimera device in favour of typing feverishly on her laptop. Surprised, Vala turned from scrutinising Cohen's readings.
"Sam," she called. "Where are you going? It's working."
Sam didn't look up from her adjustments to the computer program. "He can't hear me."
Vala frowned. "Who?"
"Jack."
Vala shared a glance with Cohen, who answered, "Woah – Colonel – nobody ever said anything about audio."
"Sam," Vala added, "it's great that you've found him, but we should be concentrating on the mission..."
Sam made no response. Although she had set the projection co-ordinates to match those of his subcutaneous transmitter, seeing Jack had come as a shock to her. Now, she needed him to know she was real; she needed to give him something to hang on to.
"If I can communicate the plan he might be able to help with the escape," she babbled, not sure whether she actually believed that or not. "If nothing else at least he'll be ready when it all starts happening on the ground."
"But the F-302s will be arriving in..." Vala checked the estimate on the screen. "Less than fifteen minutes. Shouldn't we figure out some strategic co-ordinates to send the projection?"
"Got it!" Sam exclaimed, and finally turned to face them. "Find those co-ordinates. Call me when the F-302s report they're almost through the asteroid field." Without waiting for a reply, she stepped back into the centre of the Chimera device.
The sounds of the lab faded slightly as the device relayed new sensory information into her brain: dim lighting, the featureless walls of a cell, the ragged face and laboured breathing of her injured husband.
"Jack?"
He opened his eyes, saw her, and gave a cynical smile.
"Welcome back," he mumbled drowsily. "Was it something I said?"
"Jack," Sam persisted gently, kneeling so that her face was level with his, "it's me. I'm here."
"No," he replied, leaning forward slightly. He raised his hand and tapped his temple. "You're here."
He slumped back against the wall. "You're an hallucination, or a dream, or some weird side-effect of the freaky alien parasite Ba'al stuck in my gut. Or maybe I'm finally going crazy." He gave a sarcastic smile. "Not that I don't appreciate the company."
"Ba'al?" Sam repeated. "No, Jack – Ba'al is dead. The Tok'ra executed him; we were all there."
"Are you the part of my brain that never pays attention?" Jack asked disapprovingly. "He had a sneaky back-up plan. One that worked a heck of a lot better than my back-up plan..."
He trailed off, muttering darkly. His eyelids seemed to grow heavy; he leaned his head back against the wall.
"Jack, your back-up plan worked. SG-1 found the Gate address you left in the house. They got captured by a faction from the Alliance who were tracking a cargo ship you stole from them. Mitchell, Teal'c and Daniel are leading the mission to rescue you as we speak. Vala and I stayed behind on the Hammond to get the Chimera device working to give our guys an advantage. Jack, I'm here!"
His head jerked forward again at the forcefulness of her voice. He looked at her as though seeing her properly for the first time: eyes focused, gaze sharp and attentive.
"Sam?"
She closed her eyes briefly as relief washed through her. "Yes, Jack. It's me."
"But Ba'al..." He stopped, clearly confused, before giving her an indignant look.
"Hey," he objected. "This isn't right... I was supposed to be rescuing you!"
End of Part 8.
