Chapter 21

"Look, Katie, I know this is hard to accept, but the decision has been made." Mitchell stared down the long debriefing table to the girl sitting at the far opposite end. Daniel had apparently taught her well about how to make her presence known. From her seat, she could see everyone at the table, and stare them down with equal ease.

"General Mitchell, it's not hard to accept because it's downright unacceptable. You cannot leave my dad in that thing!"

"Katherine, darling, please try to understand. None of us wanted this." Vala tried to sooth her. She was closest to the girl in more than one way. The others, other than Jack, were still trying to figure out why Sam was keeping her distance. Jack knew though. After hearing Katie beg her to find a way to release Daniel, Sam had truly realized that the child she had given birth to what felt like mere days ago was not the same. She was grown, and nearly a woman. A woman that Sam did not know no matter how much she loved her.

Katie turned towards Vala with a stubborn gleam matched by the shine of her nose ring. "I'm not leaving him."

"Sounds like the old family spirit there." Jack mumbled to himself. Sam steeled her gaze at him before looking towards Cameron.

"Look, no matter how much we debate this, the fact is going to remain that the only way to get Daniel back is to put someone else in in his place." It was an exasperated plea. Sam knew better than anyone else that there was no other way. She had made the choice for herself. If anyone understood the finality of Daniel's choice, it was her. She knew why he did it. And she knew that he understood there was no way back. She had thought the same for herself when she had made the identical choice. "And even if we found someone else to take his place, we could not be sure that the cycle would not just restart."

"We have to try." Katie pleaded.

Teal'c allowed his silence to pass. "Katie Jackson is correct. We must at least consider some option to rescue Daniel Jackson."

"Thank you, Teal'c." Katie whispered in his direction. Teal'c bowed slightly.

"The issue is moot." Mitchell started. "Pandora's Box is closed. To get Daniel out, we have to put someone else in. We know that. But what we don't know is if it would be shut down, or who to trade him for, because with God as my witness, I'm not letting another member of the SGC die, even if it brings someone back."

"My father is not dead!" Katie banged her hand down on the table and stood.

"No he's not. But you still have one sitting right here." Mitchell pointed out. "I know you feel alone, but look around. Everyone at this table is here for you, including your parents. Daniel was a good father to you, but sweetheart you're going to have to let him go."

Katie's nostrils flared and she began to walk heatedly around the table. "This man." She pointed to Jack. "This man right here is not my father! I'm sorry, Jack. I really am. But I don't know you. And…Mom…I thought about you every day that I can remember. I tried to imagine you right down to your laugh. I had this picture in my head of a woman, but aside from physical characteristics…I got it wrong. I know you are my parents, biologically, and I love you both for that. But please, try to understand. Dad…Daniel was my father. He raised me. He's all I've ever known, and despite what you're trying to tell me, I can never let him go."

A tear ran down Sam's cheek, and Mitchell's cough showed how much more uncomfortable he had become. At the other end of the table both Vala and Teal'c were standing in support of Katie.

"Anyone owe us any favors lately?" Jack inquired.

Mitchell shook his head. "No one was able to help before. The science departments have figured all they could about the device. They could make it work based on what they know, but they don't have a full set of instructions to run on. The box itself was covered with inscriptions, and those change like those old Goa'uld tablets. I don't think Daniel even finished them."

"It's never been fully translated?" Katie practically gasped.

"Daniel gathered all the information he could on the Box. He figured out how it worked basically, and what made it stop. But he even admitted there was too much information to fully explore what it was capable of between cycles, or when activated in separate ways. The mission was to shut it down and save as many lives as possible. We did that. Jackson wanted to keep studying it after Carter was taken, but the government denied his request and had Pandora's Box returned to a watery grave. He picked up where he left off to no avail this time. Hence the part where your father is gone."

"But there's more?"

"It's possible. But if Jackson didn't find it the first or second time, then I doubt anyone else can."

"You haven't given this Jackson a crack at it though, now have you?"

Katie read the transcripts of Pandora's Box for forty-three hours before she took her first break. She refused to admit that there was little to go on. She also refused to give up. For every piece of information she went over, it seemed that there was a hundred times that amount lying beneath the alien technology's surface. So much that even her father had not been able to gather it all.

She woke on the ninth day with a start, remembering for the first time the Stargate trip that had brought her to this planet where she was kept under strict guard and with a few assistants to make sure that in her reading of the box she did not restart the plague, nor take her father's place (an option that many had believed she would not hesitate to take if given the chance). In fact, Katie was beginning to consider just that. She was running out of information to go through. The last few displays amounted to some sort of scientific jargon and applications that she could just not figure out. Somewhat ashamed for being happy at a reason to call upon her, Katie requested that Sam Carter be sent to Delphi to help her.

Sam Carter tentatively entered the tent flap of the large observatory that had been set up. In the middle of the room she saw Katie. Her hair was half up and half down, obviously a result of lack of sleep or care for anything other than the prints of the writings from Pandora's Box that laid out all around the ground, trapping her in the room as her mind was trapped in thought. A vision of a toddler surrounded by toys instead caught Sam by surprise and she had to suffer it until it passed before she spoke to the girl who was nearly a woman in front of her.

"Hello, Katie."

Katie dropped some of the papers in her hands as she turned. Gathering them in the air, and some from the ground, she responded with an awkward smile. "Hi…Sam…"

Sam's heart sank along with her gaze. Katie was quick to catch the look and understand its correlated emotion, after all, their faces were quite similar.

"Sorry…Jack just said that you were having a hard time with…hi Mom." The girl licked her lips in awkward frustration at the situation.

Sam faltered. "It's okay. You don't have to call me that. I know you're going through a lot right now, probably more than…"

"I want to." Katie cut her off in a strict no questions tone.

"Jack O'Neill just jumped out of your mouth." Sam quipped, trying desperately to lighten the mood as best she could in such a time.

"Apparently he's been doing that my whole life." The girl replied, stepping through the images on the ground. "Look, I hate to be rude, especially since we don't really know each other and I'm probably making the worst first impression ever, but I need your help with something."

Sam shook her head fervently. "No…sure, absolutely, anything, and you're not."

"I've been going over the translations of the readings from Pandora's Box. I've translated everything from scratch to remove any bias or prejudgment based on other people's assumptions…"

Sam's eyes grew wide. "You translated the whole thing?"

Katie huffed. "Well, almost. That's why I called you. There are three sections of something I can't make out. I mean, I know there are numbers mixed in…but that doesn't make any sense."

"Can I see?" Sam asked.

Katie searched out the necessary pages on the floor and handed them to Sam before racing over to a makeshift desk and retrieving a folder. "These are the originals…and these are the translations." She reported. "Does any of this make any sense to you?"

Sam wavered. "I'm not sure." She admitted.

"At first I thought it may have been some sort of binary code….but, these aren't ones and zeroes by far."

An impressed glance flittered on her face before Sam stared at the pages of translation for a long time, but it wasn't until she saw the images of the changing relieves of Pandora's Box that something struck in her memory. "I think I see where this is going…"

"It's a program!" Sam exclaimed at the briefing table. Katie was seated beside her, glowing with excitement and seeming more like her mother than ever as the two sat side by side. Had Daniel been there, he would have been astounded by how much deeper the connection seemed to grow within days.

"A program?" Mitchell replied.

Katie jumped in. "The Box is like a computer. These codes can reprogram it."

"You're telling me you figured out in about a week, what no one could figure out during two plagues?"

"The dialect the writings were in could have translated multiple ways, it's no wonder no one caught it before. It's crazy that I even caught it."

"But you did." Mitchell prodded.

"I had a good teacher." She replied bitterly. "And I'd like to get him out now if you don't mind."

"Katie, this is not to impugn against your character…but Sam, are you sure she isn't twisting this to get her way?"

Sam shot Katie a sympathetic glance before giving Cameron a you-should-know-better one. "She didn't know what she was looking at until I made the connection. She's not making this up. There is a way to reprogram the Box, without killing anyone. It's similar to the weapon found on Dakara. Basically, with a few hours work, we can change Pandora's Box in relatively the same way. It will take a sacrifice to free Daniel…but not a human one."

"Where's the catch?" Jack blurted as soon as he knew she was done.

Sam's features sagged. "It still requires a higher intelligence."

"So no cute little woodland creatures…."

"No." She shook her head.

"Well then…back to square one then…"

"We use a Goa'uld." Katie suggested coolly.

"Excuse me?" Jack looked at her like she had lost her mind, and was a little unsettled by the glare he received being one he usually only got in the mirror.

"It won't take the host, just the symbiote. Mom and I already talked it over."

"So how do we do that? Get a Goa'uld to go willingly into the box?" Vala questioned eagerly. She knew there had to be a way.

"Well…we lie." Sam suggested. "Set a trap so that a Goa'uld…preferably one without too much knowledge of their own history, at least this particular story, thinks it's something they want. They try to activate it, and shut themselves in. And so we don't take out the Tok'Ra, we'll set the program to close with one sacrifice."

"You can do that?" Mitchell said bewildered.

"It was in the text. This whole time. But it has to be activated before a cycle starts. We get one shot at this. And one shot only."

Mitchell huffed and stood. "Alright…get some targets in mind. I'm going to go call the president."

Two weeks passed.

One day to reprogram Pandora's Box.

Exactly thirteen days to find a suitable target, plant the seed in his head, and wait for him to arrive. Jack had made it clear that while he wasn't superstitious, the day count was somewhat disturbing.

They waited at the tree line, far away from the mock ruins that the archeology department had helped set up. The Goa'uld were ever so hard to come by after all these years. But every so often, a being of little or no power would try to gather their former glory. An offer like Pandora's Box, rumored under false intent by the SGC to be similar in power to the weapon of Dakara, was prime bait.

Katie was shocked they had allowed her to go, but she gave a convincing speech that should anything go wrong the text on the Box could change and she would be the only capable of a quick and accurate translation that could save many. A necessary lie.

She couldn't believe the patience of those around her. Though it took exactly twelve minutes and forty-two seconds for the trap to capture it's prey, it had felt like an eternity. But even that was only half the time it seemed to take for the Goa'uld's entourage to be neutralized and for her to run from the trees and throw her arms around Daniel when he appeared alongside the now bewildered but thankful host.

"I can't believe we're actually here." Katie gushed through chattering teeth.

"Well, I had a few favors to call in." Daniel admitted, blowing warm air on his gloved hands. The light show of the Aurora Borealis danced above them, one of God's greatest works of art. The color bounced on the snow around them as well. A helicopter would return in about half an hour to reclaim them. This was one last father-daughter moment that the two would share for some time. Life was calling, and for the first time, Daniel was willing to let some caution aside so that they could both move forward. But this was something he had always wanted to give his daughter, and now he could.

Daniel asked after a long moment of gazing had become long enough for the mind to be captured by one surreal sense that allowed the subconscious to bring up what was really bothering the person. "We going to be able to do this you think? You with college and me going off to advise Vala with her…presidency." The last word was still in a tone of disbelief. Katie's quick answer proved their approaching separation had been on her mind too.

"I think we both need this, as hard as it will be to start something this new. I mean, kids go off to school all the time. We're just going to be a few light years further apart than most families. But we both have some things we have to do still, and this is a good a chance as any. Besides, I'd like to see you keep smiling like you've been doing lately. It's a good look on you."

Daniel smothered a laugh. "You're right. Guess I didn't raise a half bad kid."

"I'm going to miss you Dr. Dad."

"I'll miss you more." Daniel smiled and gave a contented but forlorn sigh as he took in the majesty of the waves of color dancing in the sky above them.

"Dad?"

"Remember when they asked me to sign my real name in the elevator when we first got to the mountain?"

Daniel rolled his eyes. "How could I forget?" That had been merely a small tear in the fabric of his great secret, but it had set him even further on edge.

"I signed the right name you know."

Daniel gave Katie a puzzled look that he had perfected long ago.

She smiled. "My name is Katie Jackson."

Daniel grinned at his daughter and pulled her into a bear hug.

…End…

Dedicated to all those parents who adopt children into their lives and love them as their own flesh and blood.

A/N: Thank you all for reading. This chapter will be followed by immediately by an Epilogue. Thank you also to all those who have reviewed. This story has received more reviews than any other I have ever written to this date and I am grateful to each and every one of you who have made this possible. I also have an announcement on my profile as to any future writings.

And here's one last metaphor for the road….Reviews are like readers, I'm thankful for each and every single one.