Part 49
Jack watched Stitch plummet out of the sky and broke into a run, ignoring both the protests his knees put up at the motion and the sudden ringing of his cell phone. He was pretty sure that the little blue alien would survive the fall, given the state of the spaceship wreckage and the fact that he had apparently been hit by a semi before being taken to the animal shelter from which Daniel "adopted" him. "Truck-proof dog," indeed.
He skittered to a stop when he reached the landing zone. The groggy alien was just beginning to sit up, rubbing at his eyes. In the time since Jack had seen him last, Stitch had sprouted an extra set of arms, a pair of antennae, and a row of springy-looking spikes down his spine. Alarmed at how alien the creature now looked, Jack seized the first weapon he could find: a tree branch. Just as Stitch made to stand up, the colonel hauled back and swung for the proverbial fences.
Whap!
"All right, talk!" Jack snapped, face red with anger, brandishing the tree branch like a Louisville Slugger. "I know you had something to do with this, you little blue rat, so where's Daniel?" Stitch sat up and blinked at him dumbly. "Start talkin' or I'll beat the answers out of you!"
Stitch's shoulders slumped and he hauled himself to his feet with a sigh. "Okay, okay..."
"Crap!" Jack swore and swung again, surprised to actually hear the "dog" talk. When Stitch slid to a stop at the end of the long furrow his spines dug up, he waved the branch again and demanded, "Where's Daniel?"
Stitch sat up again, this time a little more slowly and cautiously, eyeing the leafy limb with trepidation. "Dan-yul--"
From out of nowhere, a bolt of energy struck the small creature, then a rather large figure did a commando roll into the clearing and pounced, snatching Stitch high in the air. "Ah ha!" the accented voice declared triumphantly, confining the flailing blue arms in a set of metallic cuffs. "Now all your washing is up!"
"You're under arrest! Read him his rights!" chimed in a squeaky voice, which Jack suddenly recognized as the one who had briefly taken the phone from Daniel when the down-sized archaeologist called to report the invasion. The voice belonged to a skinny, sallow-skinned alien with three legs whose upper body was clad in a military-style dress shirt.
These were some sort of intergalactic police? If that was the case, then they apparently had no concept of the limits of police brutality. Jack stared in mixed shock and horror as the bigger alien began to thump on Stitch, eliciting squeaks of protest from the blue creature. As the smaller of the two newcomers flipped open a cell phone-like device, lightning snaked out twice, enveloping the big guy first, then the yellow-green one. Both fell to the ground, and Stitch tumbled free, rolling to a stop at Jack's feet.
Teal'c stepped out of the woods, zat arm still extended. "Are you well, O'Neill?"
"Yeah, fine," Jack managed numbly. Looking down, he watched Stitch stumble to his feet, staggering around in a drunken circle before banging into the colonel's legs. He would have fallen again if Jack hadn't reached down and scooped him into the air.
"Where's Daniel?" he asked again, shaking Stitch and staring him straight in the eye.
To his surprise, the alien gave him a mournful look and cast its eyes first skyward, then at the zatted would-be captors. "Gone," Stitch whispered, ears flattening against his skull.
"Gone where?" Seeing that Stitch was struggling to find the words to answer him, Jack set Stitch down and walked over to the other two aliens. Nudging the larger one none-too-gently with his foot, he asked again, "Where's Daniel?"
"Who?" the bigger one asked.
"Don't interact with him," mumbled the skinny one, then yelped and cowered when Teal'c pointed the zat at him again. "We surrender, we surrender!"
"Uh, sorry," the larger alien began, "we do not know anyone by this--" He abruptly broke off, swallowing and blinking his four eyes when Teal'c swung the zat to cover him.
"Daniel!" Jack shouted emphatically, seeing red. "Little boy, dark blonde hair, the bluest eyes you've ever seen, and hangs around with that thing!" He pointed sharply at Stitch, who cringed again.
The bigger alien sighed. "We know of him."
"Bring... him.. back!"
"Uh, no... we can't do that!" the skinny one protested. "That would be a misuse of Galactic resour--"
His companion silenced him with a meaty paw, then reached down and hoisted Stitch in the air. "Problem is, we're just here for him." At the big guy's words, the furry blue alien seemed to shrink further, ears and antennae plastered against his skull in an expression of abject guilt.
"Perhaps so," Teal'c began, "but your presence here has resulted in the disappearance of a human child."
"The kidnapping of a child," Jack corrected. "Some great big gray guy stomped through the woods here trying to cart off Stitch and Daniel in a bag, and while he--" Jack jabbed a finger at Stitch "--managed to get away, Daniel's locked up on that guy's spaceship and headed for only you--" the finger pointed at the two interlopers "--know where!"
"That must be Captain Gantu!" exclaimed the green alien.
"I don't care who he is!"
"He is commander of Galactic Federation Police," the other alien explained, setting Stitch down and shaking his head slowly. "He will go to hyperspace as soon as he clears orbit. I do not think there is anything we can do."
The colonel clenched his fists, wanting to fly into a rage and pound on whichever alien was closest... well, not Teal'c. All this time, Jack had been letting Daniel hang around with Stitch--or whatever his name really was--blissfully unaware that the furball was apparently an interstellar criminal wanted so desperately, his government had sent two separate extraction forces after him!
"Team."
Surprised, Jack turned and looked at Teal'c, who merely raised an eyebrow and directed his attention downward at Stitch.
"You said, we made... a good team," Stitch clarified in his strange, halting voice, "when rowing... boat. Daniel said... team is family... and we don't leave--"
"--Our people behind," Jack finished with him, eyeing Stitch with surprise.
"Yeah," Stitch grinned, nodding his head vigorously. Suddenly, he turned and chattered something off in a foreign language.
"What?!" the big alien roared, lunging for Stitch and wrapping a massive paw around the comparatively tiny creature. "After all you put me through, you expect me to help you just like that? Just like that?!"
"Ih!" Stitch answered.
"Fine." Digging into the satchel over his shoulder, he produced a slender slip of metal and unlocked the cuffs around Stitch's arms.
"Fine?" the skinny alien protested. "You're doing what he says?"
"Uh, he's... very persuasive," the bigger one answered sheepishly.
Jack exchanged an incredulous look with Teal'c, whose eyebrows seemed to be performing acrobatic feats. He turned back to the tableau before him just in time to hear the word "rescue".
"You're going to help after all?" Jack asked.
"Ih!" Stitch replied cheerfully.
Author's Notes:
Whee! Jack, Teal'c, Stitch, Jumba, and Pleakley to the rescue!
