Chapter 66

2008

She was cooperating.

Fully.

A day into this, she had already delved deep into translations and notes. She was hoarding most of the papers and every now and again slipped a stack of notes under their mattress. They barely talked about what she found out, just communicated via written messages passed between them. It was almost like their vivid e-mail exchanges, only a lot shorter and far less fulfilling.

That night, when the light had gone out, she lay in his arms, her head resting on his shoulder, his hand protectively on her belly. She was almost sure she'd found something of value to Ba'al. And it was far too soon for that. Far too soon to let him know. Evan knew she wanted to keep the things she'd found out. Just in case they ever got out of here. Just in case these things could be valuable after all. She accessed the files she kept on her tablet on constantly complained about the lack of storage on it. She kept a lot of books stored on there, but Evan knew she had a lot more material on her hard drive back on Atlantis.

Evan kissed her forehead and closed his eyes as she leaned into him. The bed here was almost as narrow as the one on Larsa had been, but this was different. This was no safe space. No room in which they could feel secure. This was a prison cell in every respect, and every second one of Ba'al's men, or the bastard himself, could barge in and kill them both.

Not that he would.

He needed Alex. And he needed Evan to put pressure on her. To keep her working on his translations. And in a very sick way, Evan suspected that Ba'al had his eyes on their son as well. Not that he needed him, not that he had a perfect replica of their first child, but Evan doubted Ba'al would just throw away the opportunity to experiment on this one as well, and the thought made him sick.

"We should try to sleep," Alex whispered and Evan nodded. She was right, but he doubted he'd manage to close his eyes today. At least not for a long while. He was restless, unable to do anything but scribble and stare at the words and symbols he couldn't understand. He'd tried to learn Ancient, he really had, but this was far from anything on Atlantis. Even if he'd been fluent in Ancient, he doubted he'd manage to decipher the Ancient writing in front of Alex now, much less the Nox and the other letters on those papers.

Reaching up, she brushed a hand soothingly over his cheek, over the stubble growing there. He remembered how much she'd liked the look and recalled almost too vividly the astonishment in her eyes after waking up and realizing that he'd shaved it all off.

Evan slightly turned his head to kiss the palm of her hand.

"What was your major at the Academy again?"

"Military and Strategic Studies," Evan answered with a frown. The Colonel must have read his file. Why else would he have been asked to sit in for this interview? About thirty others had been chosen to interview, and the application form had already clearly stated that this assignment would only offer ten jobs. The selection process had involved a physical examination and a psych evaluation and to this day Evan had no idea how he'd passed those.

Well, he must have passed quite well, or he wouldn't be sitting here in this dingy room at NORAD.

The Colonel nodded, opened Evan's file again and flicked through it, but not seeming remotely interested in what he saw. "Your last assignment was in DC, Captain, right?"

Evan sat up straight. "At the Pentagon, sir." Somehow he doubted the man was too fond of desk jobs himself.

"Missing the action?" There it was.

Evan found himself grinning. "I miss flying, sir. I only get to do a couple of training sessions a month. I haven't seen action since the Bosnian War."

"So, it's been a few years. You've never been involved in combat on the ground?"

"Briefly, sir," Evan said, nodding at the file, where the few missions on the ground he'd been on were listed. "When I finished pilot training, I was immediately transferred to Spangdahlem. We flew from there."

"So I see," the other man said, leaning back in his metal chair. His brown eyes looked at him intently, but they didn't make Evan feel uncomfortable. "And you're up for ground combat? You sure about that?"

"Sir, I went through the Academy, I went through all the training necessary."

"You have no idea what you're getting yourself into."

"I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I applied to the Air Force Academy, sir. I did it anyway. I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I applied for this assignment, but I did it anyway."

Colonel O'Neill grinned slightly, then he put Evan's file to the side. "You should know that what I'm about to tell you is top secret. You're not allowed to reveal this to anybody else, understood?"

Evan's heart began to pound. His commanding officer at the Pentagon had told him about this, had told him to apply and had probably even pulled a few strings to get him this interview, but the sparkle in Major Lewis's eyes as he spoke of this job, had made Evan want it more than anything else. It was top secret, yes, but it was also high profile and probably a lot more interesting than shuffling papers around all day. "Yes, sir." Evan said, unable to hold back a grin. There was no way to say he'd gotten the job already, this was still just an interview, but he had a feeling the Colonel liked him. That was something, wasn't it?

"Alright, Captain Lorne, the program I'm about to tell you about is called the Stargate Program."

The way Johnson held herself the next day, the way she stood next to Ba'al, unmoving, her trousers and wide shirt matching his exactly, made Evan feel sick.

He should have guessed this was coming. He should have expected it. After Alex had only handed in three pages of notes the previous day, it was bound to happen. When Ronda had come to them that morning, the tenth of their imprisonment, she had found the pieces of paper hidden underneath their mattress.

Now, as he and Alex were led into the vast hall with massive windows looking out on the landscape below. Evan had sketched the hills he could see from their little window at least ten times, missing his colours as he did so. The view from here was almost refreshing, but he couldn't focud on it for longer than half a minute.

Ba'al and Johnson were standing at a table, deep in conversation and the smile on Ba'al's face as Ronda put the stack of papers in front of him was disconcerting to say the least. "There they are," Ba'al said quietly, waving at Alex and Evan to approach the large wooden table. There were no chairs, so at least they wouldn't be forced to eat with him again. And the way Ba'al grinned at him, he doubted Ba'al had anything of that kind in mind for them anyway. "Thank you for this," he said, with a smile at Alex. "How is the heir?"

Alex didn't reply, just folded her arms and scowled at him.

"Very well, then," Ba'al's voice became a little deeper as he motioned for Alex and Evan to come closer. Evan could see her hesitating for a second, but then she stepped closer, ignoring Johnson and the way she looked Alex up and down.

"You were right not to have chosen her." The voice that came out of Johnson's mouth was distorted and almost metallic. Like it was coming out of a very old stereo.

Ba'al nodded absentmindedly. "Whatever you say." The almost soft smile in his eyes made Evan want to punch him. What a strange impulse, he thought a second later, as he realized that he couldn't look at Johnson for too long. It wasn't her. Not Nora, nor Johnson. This was the Goa'uld which Ba'al had gone through all that trouble for. And yet…

Get over it.

He could tell himself the same thing over and over again, he doubted it'd get easier. That strange feeling in the pit of his stomach, the one which had begun the moment he'd first voiced his thoughts concerning Johnson, were slowly but surely taking hold. Reason argued that this individual wasn't- that she simply couldn't be his daughter. There was no connection between them apart from the DNA. And yet… as he turned his head into her direction, as he looked at those eyes again, he couldn't help but think of his sister. This wasn't his daughter. But it could have been. Had they found this infant, instead of the one they had found, then she wouldn't have been artificially aged, but one day, maybe in twenty years or so, she would look like this. And just thinking that he was even beginning to doubt, made him feel sick with grief once more. For the child that wasn't there anymore. For the child who'd never stand tall or be able to fight. Not that Johnson had even attempted to fight. Evan doubted Ba'als brainwashing techniques would allow for that sort of thinking.

And at the same moment the idea of brainwashing- the instant the sense of the word brainwashing popped up in his mind, he couldn't help but think that maybe this woman could be saved after all.

Immediately he dismissed the thought. Because this was exactly what Ba'al wanted them to think. That Johnson couldn't be killed. Not only because she was just a blameless victim, because she wasn't, but because they sensed a trace of their daughter in her.

And that was wrong.

Just plain wrong.

"What he have found," Ba'al was saying, walking around the table and standing next to Alex, "is this." He pulled one of the sheets laying in front of them to the side to reveal a rather crude drawing of a something looking eerily like a spiderweb in the centre of which consisted of which was just a flat circle with no more lines intersecting withing or aiming towards the innermost workings of it. "Three of them."

"Ancient repositories," Alex said. "Where? In the courtyard?" Evan could hear the thinly veiled excitement. She, Jonas and Anna had suspected something like this lurking at the end of those riddles. Like this was the final, the most sacred of all the meeting places. And here they were now. Ba'al's prisoners, incapable of relaying what had been discovered here to the people who could make good use of it.

Ba'al nodded again. "It can't be accessed."

Evan snorted. Doctor Beckett had suspected the repository could only be activated and fully accessed by someone possessing the ATA gene. So, of course O'Neill had been able to access it. And Ba'al could, too. The question was, was he fool enough to try it out? O'Neill had nearly died accessing that knowledge. Twice. And twice it'd taken the Asgard to remove that knowledge. A human brain could not even begin to store all that knowledge, and somehow Evan doubted a symbiote would be a whole lot of help. The Goa'uld might help the brain to hold on to that knowledge for a while, maybe even permanently, but definitely that of not three different databases.

"They are encoded," Ba'al said, throwing an annoyed look at Evan. "The power sources are not nearly depleted, but they can't be accessed. We tried with several other copies of Johnson here. They all failed."

Evan ignored the searing hot pain in the pit of his stomach.

"We need you," Johnson said, and Evan corrected himself immediately. The Goa'uld said it. Not Johnson. "To crack the code."

Alex's eyebrows rose. "You got the wrong scientist for that task," she said. "I'm no good at solving riddles."

"I disagree," Ba'al argued, unimpressed by her statement. He shuffled the papers together again, making a pile in the centre of the table. Then he waved at someone to come closer and Evan felt the hair on the back of his neck rise. He started turning around, but before he'd even turned his head, a searing pain rushed from his body and everything blurred into nothingness. There was no light, nothing to see. Nothing to hear but the Alex's screams. Nothing to feel but his muscles screeching in agony.

It stopped suddenly, but all his limbs were still shaking, his throat hoarse without him ever realizing he'd been screaming. He was lying on the floor, his cheek pressed against the cold stone as he felt a hand on his back. This had happened to him once before. Once, when Ba'al had taken their child. Somehow this time the pain had been worse.

He tried pushing himself off the floor and he was sure, hadn't it been for Alex, he would not have been able to do it. Her cool hand was on his neck as the guard stepped to the side.

"And you should know," Ba'al said, his voice above him, "that I will not tolerate you trying to hide something from me."

Evan blinked, his eyes still fixed on the light stone floor, when a new set of footsteps approached, hurrying towards them. Slowly he looked up, ignoring Alex's face. He couldn't stand looking into those eyes right now. Not when he was the leverage Ba'al needed to keep her working for him.

"Mylord." A stranger's voice. Taking a deep breath, Evan lifted his head. Unlike the servants on that ship, the ones who were stationed down here didn't look like soulless phantoms. They had real expressions, or at least they allowed themselves to show traces of them every once in a while. "A ship has just exited hyperspace."

Evan's heart missed a beat. The Daedalus. It had to be them!

"The Tau'ri can't know where we are!" Johnson's voice said, the metallic undertone missing all of a sudden as her eyes flew from Ba'al's frown to the servant.

"It's not them," the servant said. "It's a Hive."

A/N: Sorry this has taken so long! I work on this every single day, but this week's been super busy, and I doubt the next one will be any easier. Hope you liked this chapter anyway!