XXV
Okay, now Daniel was pissed.
Not just, 'a Goa'uld broke my fingers' pissed, although, okay, that wasn't bringing him floods of joy. Not just, 'I now have more muscle mass than anyone else in this room and yet? Still the Goa'uld's first choice of hostage,' pissed. No, this was a special kind of stomp-your-feet-and-jump-in-a-circle-and-throw-a-tantrum-and-aaargh! kind of incensed that he could only ever be pushed into by one specific person.
Or in this case, two specific people.
"So let me get this straight," Daniel said, ignoring Beckett's attempts to strap up his broken fingers. "In the time allotted him for the express purpose of saving his life - and yours - before he got too sick to work, your clone has been building a Goa'uld remover." He spat the words out one by one, precisely articulated verbal bullets.
Jack clearly couldn't see what was wrong with that picture. "Well... yeah."
Well, yeah. We have to get those symbiotes out somehow, don't we, Danny-boy? Never mind that there are methods of doing it that won't require committing suicide.
"Jack, we have methods of removing-"
"In our galaxy," Jack corrected fiercely. "You want to take these people on a three-week hyperspace cruise and then make them wait on the favour of allies who turn up remarkably fast when they need something and whenever the hell they get round to it when it's our people's asses on the line?"
"The Skidbladnir-"
"Is an exploration vessel, not a warship. We don't know if they're equipped to remove symbiotes. We don't know if the crew has the time or the expertise to assist us. We don't know when they're coming back!"
One thing that Daniel had learned early on was that when Jack had settled into an entrenched position - no matter how wrong-headed - there was no budging him from it by brute force. Daniel deliberately stamped down on his anger and let his earnestness show.
"Jack. The seizures are getting worse - for both of you. The condition seems to be accelerating since Jon started taxing his brain to try and access the Ancient knowledge. How long before one of you suffers fatal brain damage?"
"We free Casey. Then we work on the solution," Jack said, unmoved.
Daniel shook his head despairingly. "There won't be enough time!" He launched another silent appeal to Beckett, and this time the doctor was firmly on his side.
"The lad's condition is very volatile," Beckett confirmed, shooting a worried glance at Jon where he sat staring into space. "If you won't let me sedate him-"
"He doesn't want that," Jack interrupted, in a tone that brooked no argument.
The doctor shook his head. "If we don't take steps to limit brain activity, then we're talking hours, not days, before the frequency of the seizures becomes too much for his body to handle. His heart rate's already erratic, and he's no longer responding to the medication I've been giving him. He could have a fatal aneurism at any moment."
Daniel gave Jack his most beseeching look. "Jack... you have to tell him to adapt the machine before it's too late."
"He won't. Not until Casey's Goa'uld has been removed." And Jack clearly backed him up in his insane decision.
Daniel mentally lined up half a dozen avenues of argument, and found he was just too weary, mentally and physically, to try and pound them home in the face of certain failure. He touched his radio with his good hand.
"Sam? Come up here and beat some sense into Jack for me?" he pleaded.
The pause was rather longer than a summary rejection required. "Daniel, you know I'm not allowed to strike a superior officer," she said, with brisk professionalism and the subtlest hint of regret.
"Come and beat some sense into Jon, then," he offered. This time, the hesitation was a whole lot shorter.
"I'm on my way," she said, and signed off.
Sam didn't know who to curse most. Herself, the General, Daniel, Teal'c- No, wait, Teal'c hadn't done anything wrong. He always seemed to come out smelling of roses while the rest of them took a wormhole straight to Screwup City.
She'd made the rookie mistake of assuming the Goa'uld would take the host that seemed most advantageous by her standards. Thinking like a human, she'd believed Weir's command codes to be the most valuable intel on offer. But to the Goa'uld, unlocking the city's technological wealth was a secondary goal; to build a power base in a new galaxy, what they needed most was planets full of potential worshippers. The Athosian woman's knowledge of the worlds her people traded with was a Goa'uld gold mine.
This was what she hated about being in command. The instinct to lock on to the most likely hypothesis and chase it down tripped her up in the switch between science and tactics. In the field, your priority wasn't to prove you had The Answer, but to make damn sure you'd covered your butt if it turned out that you didn't. General O'Neill would never have made such a dumb mistake.
Which wasn't to say he didn't have a creative talent for screwing things over in different ways. She could strangle McKay for letting Jon waste his one chance at a cure on freeing the Goa'uld hosts instead. Maybe it made her a callous bitch - especially in light of her own horrible experience with Jolinar - but so far as she was concerned, the damage was already done. It wouldn't kill any of them to keep their symbiotes a little longer until the General and his clone could be cured.
Damn the man. Both of him. Irresponsibly selfless bastards.
It wasn't really fair to blame McKay for not stopping him. Sam had seen herself what the General had been like under the influence of the Ancient knowledge download. He'd been piecing things together by instinct, no more able to explain what he was doing than a child could give the equations of force and velocity that they used to catch a ball. But she was mad at several people she couldn't yell at - most notably herself - and McKay was a convenient target who, as a plus point, had almost certainly done something to deserve it.
Her mad wilted abruptly as she entered the hallway outside the scanning chamber, and found McKay and Sheppard hovering protectively over their Athosian teammate as Doctor Beckett checked her out.
Sam had met Teyla for all of about three minutes, and she would have been talking to the Goa'uld at the time, so she didn't feel right offering words of comfort or condolence. Instead she kept it briskly professional, addressing her words to the doctor. "Are we sure the Ancient device completely removed the symbiote?"
"Aye. Completely disintegrated, as far as I can tell," he acknowledged. "Not a single trace of foreign matter remaining. It's quite incredible."
"I am glad," Teyla said soberly, staring at the wall. She was shivering, despite the regulated room temperature in the city. "That was a most unpleasant experience. I do not believe even the Wraith can have such evil in them."
"But it's gone now. You're going to be all right- she is going to be all right?" McKay reversed his intended reassurance in mid-flow, but his obvious worry was sweet in itself.
"I will be fine," the warrior woman said decisively, pushing to her feet without waiting for word from Beckett. Sam admired her fortitude, remembering her own crushing depression in the wake of losing Jolinar. Part of that had been physiological, her system beset by chemical imbalances as it struggled to absorb the dead symbiote, but even so, being taken as a host was no easy thing to come to terms with.
Teyla wobbled at little as she stood, and Sheppard reached out to steady her with a worried, "Whoa!" McKay paled and spluttered in alarm.
"Soon," she amended, with a hint of a self-deprecating smile, and Sam's estimation of her went up another notch. Once this crisis was over - if it was ever over - they really had to sit down over whatever the local equivalent of coffee was and chat about their respective gate teams. She was willing to bet that, alien culture or no, Teyla would have some stories to tell about being The Girl.
"So you will," Beckett agreed warmly, and patted her hand. "But all the same I'd prefer that you spend the night under observation, just to make sure there are no side effects. Colonel, have our forces retaken the infirmary?" he asked Sam. "I sent Doctor Jackson off to Doctor Barumbe to get his hand scanned, but I'd prefer to have a more permanent facility available for more serious problems."
She nodded, pleased to have good news to report. "We've taken back most of the city. The two remaining Goa'uld are trapped in the control room. Unfortunately, they still have control of the Stargate, but we have all the exits covered so they can't get any further into the city."
"This is nuts." Sheppard scowled unhappily. "Even the Genii at least sent a full-scale invasion force. How the hell were they expecting to hold an entire city with five people?"
"They did not," Teyla spoke up, and they all turned to look at her. "The taking of hostages was purely a distraction. Baal's plan all along has been to acquire a host with the activation gene, then escape with a ship and the database of gate addresses."
"Well, two out of three ain't happening," Sheppard said brightly.
"Make that three out of three." McKay looked smug. "That database is triple-encrypted. It'll take him a century to crack through it."
"Baal's good," Sam warned him, but it didn't dent his self-confidence.
"Better than you, you mean?" he said, arching his eyebrows.
She narrowed her eyes. "As good as me," she allowed.
"Oh, well, then no need to worry." He waved a hand airily. She considered slapping him with it. "He doesn't stand a chance against my superior cryptography."
"Should we not be attempting to rescue the other Goa'uld hosts?" Teyla said.
Sam could sympathise with her priorities, but- "We have get Jon to reprogram the machine. If he doesn't create a cure for himself and the General soon, he's going to get too sick to keep working on it."
Beckett nodded solemnly. "I don't think he can take too many more of these seizures. I'm afraid there's nothing more I can do to help him medically."
"If the machine is converted, can it not be restored to its current function afterwards?" Teyla asked.
McKay puffed out his chest... then deflated. "Not a chance," he admitted reluctantly. "If he actually gets it to do what it's supposed to, then he'll lose the knowledge base that he's working from. Zelenka and I were watching every step of the way, and there's still no way we can replicate his work. At least three of the fixes he cobbled together are impossible by our current understanding of Ancient technology. And that's not even touching on the part with the power bar wrapper and Zelenka's pen cap - which he will probably be wanting back, by the way, being the kind of sentimental fool who brings pen and ink to a fully computerised work environment-"
"So why don't we just program it to do both?" Sheppard demanded impatiently. McKay rolled his eyes.
"It's a highly delicate piece of Ancient technology that's been jury-rigged to perform functions it was never intended for, not your grandmother's Compaq Presario. Most of the code alterations are written directly into the firmware, and there's no facility to back that up, because it was never intended to be rewritten-" He stopped abruptly, supercilious expression collapsing into a wide-eyed look of realisation. "-Except that there is, actually." He spun to look at Sam. "What do you do, on your grandmother's Compaq Presario, when you update your drivers and it screws with your system?"
She grinned, getting it, and pointed a finger at him. "Roll back to the previous drivers!"
"Yes!" He whipped back to face the others. "All pieces of Ancient computer hardware, like Earth-based computer peripherals, automatically back up the previous configuration when you update the control software. Now, what Jon did in no way constitutes a legitimate upgrade, and it won't have been backed up. But, if we can isolate the protocol that performs the automatic backup, we can adapt it to read the whole of the modified firmware and store it externally. Then all we need-"
"Is to create a memory buffer big enough to hold on to the data while Jon adapts the device second time around," Sam chimed in. "Do you have the right crystals?"
"In Simpson's lab. She had to back up the memory of one of the puddlejumpers when it was damaged and we needed to reboot everything."
"Puddlejumpers?" she queried.
McKay frowned and looked at Sheppard. "I said we should have called them gateships."
Sheppard shrugged lazily. "It's a puddle. They jump." He made an illustrative swooping hand movement.
"Fine." McKay swivelled back to her. "Right. Colonel...?"
"We'll go to Doctor Simpson's lab and retrieve those memory crystals," she said. "Doctor Beckett, you and Teyla go on to the infirmary. Major, go back and tell the General what we're doing. If this works, we should be able to send a team to capture Colonel Casey and remove the Goa'uld from him." It was too much to hope that they could do the same for Baal's host - and she wasn't sure it would be a kindness if they did. How many thousands of years had the poor man been a prisoner in his own body? By now, death would be a better end than any other they could give him.
Sheppard straightened up and gave her a nod, and they split off to head in three different directions. At last - they had a game plan.
Jack was glad to be moving again. Ever since the seizure he'd had from healing Daniel, his brain had started to feel... strange. Like an underwater city itself, the structure of his normal thoughts still there but with... other stuff... sloshing around it. Knowledge that had been locked away since Thor removed the download, now loose and swilling around at random.
He was pretty sure he hadn't always thought in weird poetic imagery.
He was also pretty sure that he hadn't actually meant to heal Daniel. It wasn't as if it had been a fatal wound - or even a dangerous one - and he certainly hadn't consciously thought of fixing it. It was just that as he'd touched Daniel's shoulder, he'd felt a wrongness within him, and corrected it as automatically as you straightened a crooked picture.
Jack deliberately focused his mind on the here and now, drawing on years of military experience. When you fought, you got pretty good at clamping down on unwanted knowledge. It wasn't good to know that the figure in your sights was a living, breathing person with hopes and dreams and family connections. It wasn't good to know all the tiny things that could go wrong that you had no control over. It wasn't good to know the exact reason why Uncle Sam had sent you to do terrible things in the ass-end of nowhere, or the full details of the prize that had been won with your teammates' lives.
Compared to the things he'd had to not know in the course of his murky career, blocking out a head full of unfolding alien knowledge was child's play.
Jack blocked it out even further as he approached the territory that two the Goa'uld still held. Their sensors had shown one blip lurking around here, and he was betting it wasn't HairBaal who'd drawn sentry duty.
"Casey," he called out, not bothering to remove his hands from his weapon though he was sure he was under observation. "You're surrounded, and you're not getting through that gate without the address database. Even if Baal gets it, you know he's not going to share it with you. So let's talk."
"What is there to talk about?" the Goa'uld voice asked coolly. "My host knows you well, General O'Neill. You do not deal with Goa'uld."
There was no point denying it. "No. We don't. But we've got bigger snakes than you to fry. You help us to take down Baal, and maybe we can work something out."
Over his dead body. Casey had to know that. Therefore the Goa'uld in him had to know that. The question was, was it arrogant enough to believe it could doublecross him and Baal in one stroke? He was betting on yes.
"And what is to stop you having me executed before we have 'worked something out'?" the Goa'uld demanded.
Jack briefly considered 'honour', and then wrote it off as a lost cause. "You have your host as a hostage." The symbiote would have Casey's knowledge that they wouldn't abandon their man while there was still a chance to remove the Goa'uld from him. What it didn't know was that said means of removal was not in a galaxy far far away or waiting on the return of the Asgard, but rather waiting on their forcibly grabbing the Goa'uld and escorting it down to the scanner room.
"Very true." The voice had that tone of Goa'uld-y amusement that never failed to make his skin crawl. "Then let us talk. Stand back from the doors."
Jack took the step and raised his weapon in the same motion. As the doors slid open, he swung the barrel away from the doorway.
Not so much out of good manners as to cover the second exit. The one from which, surprise surprise, the Goa'uld emerged. Firing.
Blasting, actually; the ribbon device didn't strike him full on, but it was still enough to throw him back against the wall. Jack returned fire, but the Goa'uld had darted past him long before he'd found his feet. It was headed in the direction of the east pier and the disabled hybrid ship. Rather than jump up to give chase, he grabbed his radio.
"Ford, Bates. Target is headed your way."
Maybe Sam had been wrong about McKay's level of fitness.
The labs were a fair distance from the scanning chamber, true, but he really shouldn't be wheezing quite so hard from the run. She wouldn't put it past him to fake or even psyche himself up into respiratory distress just to make a point about the pace she was setting, but given that the breathlessness had stopped him even complaining, she was betting it was genuine.
He was pale and sweating by the time they'd arrived at Simpson's lab, and his ragged breaths were punctuated by dry coughing. He seemed to have an inordinate amount of difficulty unhooking the crystals he wanted from the other scientist's setup. Her concern warred with the backseat-driver instinct to elbow him out of the way and take over. She couldn't stand watching other people make a mess of things.
"Need some help there, McKay?" she said coolly, which stirred him up into defiance.
"Oh, please. Do you even know what kind of-" cough, "-crystal array we need to-" cough, "build in order to maximise the-" cough, "aargh!" He gave up on dialogue and made a sound of frustration as the crystal refused to leave its socket. Sam thrust her water canteen at him and gently but firmly shifted him out of the way.
"Drink some water, McKay."
She made quick work of disconnecting the remaining crystals.
"And those," McKay directed in a strained voice, jerking his head towards an arrangement on another bench. He coughed into her canteen, and she made a mental note not to drink from it until she'd had it sterilised.
She really hoped she wasn't going to come out of this with some kind of Pegasus Galaxy 'flu.
"You okay to make the run back to the scanner room?" Sam would rather he didn't keel over and die on her, but with Jon waiting on the external memory device before he could work on his cure they were severely strapped for time. Of course she could build it herself given long enough, but McKay was more familiar with the technology, and - she would have to admit at gunpoint - a better man for the job than Zelenka. The Czech scientist was brilliant and very thorough, but when the clock was ticking, you needed the kind of brain that would make the grand leaps without stopping to second-guess itself.
McKay waved the words away impatiently, said brain already back in the scanner room and working on the problem. "We should take the laptop, too. It's probably got her research notes on the memory system, and- uh-oh."
Sam turned to find him studying the handheld life signs detector. "What?"
He looked up, eloquent face already telling the bad news. "Baal's signal is gone from the control room - and there's an unknown blip headed for the jumper bay."
Jack's hand went to his radio as Carter's voice crackled out of it. "Sir? Baal is on the move and close to your position. He's got to be headed for the jumper bay."
Beside him, Sheppard smiled in grim triumph as they both swung round to respond to the news. "Sir, we've got marines covering all the exits. We close in behind him, and he's trapped."
Jack gave him a look. "Yes. Trapped. In the big room full of spaceships!" he said incredulously.
"They're keyed to the gene. Those puppies won't fly for him." Sheppard smirked.
"He's right, General," McKay chimed in over the radio. "We've only retrofitted one of the jumpers for control by non-gene users, and that one's down for repairs while Simpson fixes a memory bug. I have two thirds of its onboard computer in my hand right now."
"He's not going anywhere," Sheppard reiterated, as they entered the jumper bay.
...In time to see one of the craft taking off. A horribly familiar jovial voice cut into the radio chatter. "General O'Neill! How kind of you to come and see me off on my journey to new realms of godhood."
"You're wasting your time," Jack retorted, careful to keep his voice level. "These people have the Wraith breathing down their necks. They won't worship you."
"On the contrary," Baal said cheerfully. "Who better to worship than the one who will protect them from the Wraith menace? Especially when they see with their own eyes how the technology of their ancestors lights up in his presence." He chuckled lightly, and his voice took on a chiding tone. "Now, really. Did you truly think I would be unable to replicate the work of your primitive genetic scientists? Do thank your Doctor Beckett for me - his notes on retroviruses were most enlightening."
One of the very worst sounds you could hear in the field was a tiny, tiny little click. It was the sound of the pistol being cocked behind you, the landmine going down under your foot, the enemy that you'd been sure was down slipping out of their restraints. It was a sound that said, in the most economical fashion possible, 'Oh boy, have you ever screwed up.'
The sound of the first chevron locking was like a louder echo of it.
"Farewell, Tauri," Baal continued as the other six snapped into place. "Enjoy the remainder of your stay in my capital city. Perhaps, if you look after it well, I shall even allow you to serve me as slaves when I return."
The kawoosh of the forming wormhole was clearly audible... and there was nothing at all Jack or Sheppard could do to prevent the ship from leaving the bay and disappearing through it.