The road that SG-1 trod was little more than a worn out trail between and beneath the dense canopy of trees. They rarely saw the orange pinpoint that was the F - class star around which this planet orbited.
"You know, I was wondering whether they would ever make a movie about us," Jack O'Neill said after they had been collectively silent for almost half an hour. His feet had dried out by that stage and he was able to think of other things. He has limited interests and this discussion about movies about summed them up. "Who do you think would play you Daniel?" O'Neill asked.
Daniel Jackson thought for a bit before offering, "Tom Cruise."
"I thought maybe William Hurt," Samantha Carter added.
"I would have said James Spader myself," said O'Neill.
"He's a bit wussy," suggested Jackson.
"My point exactly," chortled O'Neill.
"What about you Teal'c?" Carter prompted.
"Samuel L Jackson," he said instantly, as though he had given the matter some thought.
The rest of the team nodded. It wasn't a bad choice.
"Or perhaps Lawrence Fishborne."
The rest of the team nodded more emphatically. It was a better choice.
"I would have said Will Smith," offered Carter.
"Too pretty," judged Teal'c.
"Too expressive," said Jackson.
"Not enough attitude," offered O'Neill.
"What about you colonel?" Carter asked.
"Harrison Ford," he answered instantly.
"They'd get the cut priced version for you," chortled Jackson. "Bruce Willis, no, I know…" he laughed a bit while he recovered from the idea. "Kurt Russell. That's it. I bet they'd use Kurt Russell."
"What's wrong with Kurt Russell?" asked Carter. Something from her younger years was starting to peep through the façade of maturity she had taken so much trouble to cultivate. The rest of the team looked closely at her. "You watched 'Big Trouble in Little China' a lot didn't you?" asked Jackson quietly. He layed a gentle hand on her shoulder.
"Well yeah," she said defensively. "Didn't you?"
"Once…"
"What about you Major?" O'Neill prompted.
"Kathleen Turner."
"A bit past it now," judged O'Neill.
"Sharon Stone."
There was a collective moment of reverent silence among the male contingent of the expedition. There was a patch in O'Neill's copy of the videotape of 'Basic Instinct' that was a little the worst for wear. It was a shared experience among the team.
"I'm not sure how I would feel being out here in the middle of no-where with an ice pick murdering…" began Jackson hesitantly.
"There was always 'Total recall'…" suggested O'Neill.
"Wasn't she a villain in that too?" asked Teal'c. One eyebrow had arched upward in inquiry.
"That's true," O'Neill mused. "Casino?"
"Knowing our luck they'd make a TV-show instead. Ha, I'd bet they'd use Richard Dean Anderson to play you sir," Carter chortled. "You'd rescue us by turning the stargaet into an ultra light plane and fly us home."
"Very droll."
"I think it would make a pretty lame movie anyway," said Jackson. He stared out at a lot of scrub and bush that lined the side of a narrow dusty track. "I mean look how we spend our days, lugging through the trees, or ploughing through sand."
"Yeah, I guess so."
They lugged on in silence for a while longer.
*
The conference room phone rang and its insistent noise interrupted the interrogation one more time.
Teal'c stopped speaking and looked from face to face among those who waited on his debriefing.
Everyone looked at General Hammond, none of them game enough to make the decision to answer the phone without his permission. It was more than their job was worth.
General Hammond for his part looked around at the room full of sycophants and sighed quietly to himself. He was about to climb to his feet and answer the phone, but Teal'c had decided that enough was enough. He was up to speed and starting to enjoy the telling of this tale and the interruption was unwelcome. So he decided that he would be the one who finally responded to the thing. He stepped away from the conference room table. The rest of the team looked after him in awe.
"Yes," boomed Teal'c into the phone. He listened for a moment before placing the head set back on the phone cradle carefully. "That was Doctor Fraiser," Teal'c told General Hammond. "She has expressed a wish for you to go down to the medical centre right away."
"OK," boomed General Hammond. "We'll break for a few minutes while I find out what this is about. Teal'c you can stay here, same with the rest of you, except for you Makepeace. You come with me."
*
Janet Fraiser met General Hammond and Colonel Makepeace at the door to her laboratory. Her smock was stained in streaks of brown. They were not left by spills of coffee, General Hammond concluded, unless she was really badly coordinated. He shuddered.
One thing about surgeons doing autopsies, they never indulged in artistry when they were putting the body back together.
She opened the security door and ushered them through.
The SGC Medical Examination room was a brilliantly lit warren of diagnostic hardware and bio-electronic interface equipment, organised neatly into aesthetic little arrangements of technological free-form sculpture. The floor had a nice hard-wearing surface that could be hosed off in the case of an emergency, hardly a good sign. The walls were fire proof, and the ventilation system was capable of being isolated from the world at the press of a button. It was such a cheery room, that people had been known to walk the long way around the infirmary to avoid walking past the door. The sound of a bone saw hacking away at the skull of something that might or might not have been a friend (or perhaps foe. Although those were in shorter supply, not because there wasn't that many of them, but mainly because the SGC teams tended not to bring a whole lot of those things home with them).
Over the years, General Hammond had spent altogether too much time in the Medical Examination room, looking at the results of some of the things they encountered whenever they ran across the Goa'uld. On this occasion, he had one of those gut wrenching premonitions that said to him that this was going to be another one of those little incidents that enliven your day and make coming to work such a pleasure.
Eauwe!
Janet Fraiser waved General Hammond and Colonel Makepeace into position by the wall opposite from the entry door. They shuffled into position and waited for Janet Fraiser's presentation. They even folded their hands in front of them like good little military men.
Janet pulled a draw from a refrigeration unit, heaving it for all she was worth, because she is reasonably tiny and the draw was heavy, and she was not going to ask for one of those macho military men for a hand. The draw rolled quietly out and revealed the naked, mostly decapitated body of the man Teal'c shot during their chaotic flight from the other side of the wormhole. We are only assuming that he is naked, because Janet Frasier had conveniently placed her self in the way. Which is just as well because we really want to keep that PG-13 rating.
The body had been opened up along the familiar Y incision. His ribs were carved open and the body had been layed out onto the slab like some one had half finished carving a Christmas turkey. He had more in common with a Christmas turkey than just the way he had been carved. The turkey carcass that lands on the dinner table has no head either.
"We found this," Janet said and pointed into the chest cavity.
The human body is a complex interconnected system, wrapped around a skeletal structure of 206 interlocking bones, manipulated by a system of over six hundred muscles. It is fed through a Gordian tangled of capillary tubes that supply blood to the interlocking fibrous musculature. It is cleaned and regulated by an enzymic system in which complex chemical reactions happen continuously. All of it is under the control of a central nervous system more complex than the best of continuous automation systems and controlled by a parallel processor of unimaginable processing power.
All of which would suggest that general Hammond might be a touch shallow when he thought that inside the incision, the mad on the table looked like a lot of gloopy red and purple blobs. But Janet seemed to think there was something of monumental importance to be seen in there. For our part, we don't even get to look inside, because it would be seriously gross.
General Hammond looked though, he looked more closely, hoping to convince Janet Frasier that he took her concern seriously.
Nope, even the second time his interior looked no more enlightening.
"So you see why we were so concerned?" Janet asked. She stared up at him and blinked.
"I'll need a complete briefing," General Hammond said to cover his ignorance. "I need an assessment of the implications, as a matter of urgency, Doctor."
Janet Fraiser nodded her understanding. He had obviously understood the urgency of the matter. "I'll bring a couple of people in to help with that."
"Good," Hammond said, satisfied that he had covered the situation without loss of face. It was time to get back to the bit he understood. They would continue interrogating Teal'c. He reckoned he could handle that part. He escaped as quickly as he could.
Makepeace fell in behind Hammond and they made their way back to the conference room where Tea'lc waited.
"What was that all about?" Makepeace asked General Hammond before they stepped into the conference room.
"I have absolutely no idea," General Hammond said and then pushed the door to the conference room out of his way.
"Oh," said Makepeace. "Good. I'm glad I'm not the only one." But he was talking to the back of General Hammond's head.
"I want to know what you found when you got to the Lord's castle," General Hammond told Teal'c.
*
Near dusk, the dusty trail that SG-1 had followed for several hours widened out suddenly into a huge clearing. For the first time in almost as long as they had been walking (trudging, grumbling and stumbling) they could see something other than trees, and of course that subspecies of trees, bushes.
Now they had stonemasonry and once laboriously tended gardens to examine. For close to a hundred metres ahead of them, the land had been cleared and cultivated, formed into a rambling garden of sculptured plants and meticulously arranged stone borders and statuary, and then it had been left to go to ruin for years. The grass was almost waist high and the privet hedges had become rambling bushes. But for all that, there was a sense of past order to it, as though someone had once tended the garden and might one day work up the enthusiasm to do so again. It might have to wait until the prince comes and kisses the sleeping princess, after which the whole family and all of it's staff might re-awaken, but then again it might not as well.
The members of SG-1 contemplated their destination.
At the centre of the garden sat a castle. It was a Gothic monstrosity, dark and foreboding, towering above the craggy escarpments of the hillock upon which it had been sat, with a malignant presence that had to be witnessed to be believed. In that environment, it looked like something out of the Addam's family, or perhaps from a B-grade horror movie. The battlements and towers loomed in the twilight, lit from behind by the setting sun, and silhouetted so all of the detail that the members of SG-1 could make out of them was that the castle had one too many battlements and way too much attitude. At their base, the towers gave way to walls of shear stone that seemed to grow out from and the shear cliff face that fell away from the foundations. The building screamed 'fortress against the marauding barbarian hordes' in 72 point headlines, with bold and underline and emphasised by the use of italics.
"Cheery sort of place," commented Jack O'Neill. His gaze had had been arrested by the impressive piece of stonemasonry that sat at the end of the road.
"I might have to get one like it for a summer retreat," Daniel Jackson said.
"Takes overkill to new heights," commented Samantha Carter.
"I wonder how many slaves are buried in the foundations," Teal'c muttered. He met the gaze of each team member in turn before he said, "Well it would. It just has that look about it."
"That's true of most human construction from before the middle ages," said Daniel Jackson blandly.
"Ohh. Kay…" O'Neill said. "Moving right along…"
"Many of my people died during the construction of monstrosities such as that," Teal'c added.
"It must have been awful," commiserated Samantha Carter.
"I do not have happy memories of the time."
"When every one is ready…" suggested O'Neill, there was an impatient edge to his voice now.
One at a time they looked around, first Carter (the one with the Air Force military background) then Teal'c (the one with blind obedience to the almighty Goa'uld background) and finally Jackson (the one who was wondering what the other two suddenly found so interesting that they both had to look at it).
"Thank you," said O'Neill with a touch of sarcastic humour. "Now, if every one is ready, let's go."
He led the way.
The road upon which SG-1 trod, wound it's way to the gate. They trudged on. At least now they had an end goal.
For all of it's architectural ineptitude, the castle was a welcome sight after seven hours of walking up hill. They had fallen into silent single file for the last five of those and had spent it forging onward in a field march while sweating under the load of fifteen kilograms of field gear and weapons. Collectively SG-1 stank. They were sweaty and smelly and yucky. Even Carter's delicate antiperspirant deodorant (with special slow release formula to keep you dry hour after hour, for up to 24 hours a day) had given up.
She had passed perspiration and gone into full on sweat about five hours earlier.
Daniel Jackson paused half way up that final slope and looked out over the view. The forest spanned for as far as the eye could see, interrupted only by the occasional outcrop of rock and the winding passage of the river.
"They probably built here for the view," he commented.
"It's picturesque," O'Neill agreed. It was not what Jackson had meant at all.
"So long as they have running water," muttered Samantha Carter. She had already concluded that this week's session at the gym was a total waste of time. Who would believe that she had paid someone to lead her through an aerobic work out and look how she had spent the last half a day.
"It's more a question of line of sight over any of the invading barbarian hordes," Jackson told O'Neill.
"I knew that Daniel," O'Neill said dryly. "It is one area of history that I have under control."
They had probably a half hour walk to the castle gate. It was almost dark and twilight was short here, that much became obvious very quickly. The light was fading already.
They marched on. Following the spill of light from the castle.
*
"Daniel Jackson took photographs of the castle," Teal'c said. "He used one of those polaroid cameras, you know the ones, that discharge the photograph almost immediately." He went to reach into his pocket and General Hammond stopped him with an absent wave of his hand.
"We'll save them for the report," General Hammond told him.
Teal'c subsided reluctantly. "As you wish."
"Go…" began General Hammond, only to be interrupted by a knock at the door. "Who is it?" he called.
It was one of Janet Frasier's newly recruited junior medical staff-member. For the life of him, Hammond could not remember the man's name. Hammond was usually pretty good with those things but for some reason this one just wouldn't stick, and now the guy had been on the staff too long to be asked for it again. It would be embarrassing.
"You have news?" General Hammond asked. That was one way to avoid using his name.
"It's about the body we're autopsy-ing," the med-tech said. He only half entered the room, sort of hovering in the doorway.
General Hammond found himself wondering whether the man was old enough to have been to university at all let alone completed his medical internship. He moved a bit further into the room and revealed a nametag attached to the pocket of his shirt.
Aha, Hammond's mind pounced. If he could just make it out he would be OK, but trying to do so from so far away would be a problem. Damn, he couldn't make it out. He was going to have to get closer to the man. Now how to cover the action?
Coffee, that was the answer. General Hammond climbed to his feet and marched toward the coffee percolator, passing close to the man on his way through. The important thing to achieve in this manoeuvre was to pass far enough away so the man didn't feel the need to pull back through the doorway to avoid invading Hammond's body space, while still passing close enough to the man to be able to read the tag. It was a delicate manoeuvre, but General Hammond pulled it off with his usual military precision.
The ID read Dr Simpson, so… "What have you found Simpson?" There, he thought to him self triumphantly, reinforced through speech; that should lock it into his memory.
"Dr Fraiser asked that I bring you this preliminary report," Doctor Simpson said.
"Just place it here on the desk and I'll read it when I get time."
"Yes sir."
The medical officer stepped fully into the conference room, treading so carefully that the military men arranged around the table had to quell their natural inclination to inspect the floor for land mines. Doctor Simpson placed the manilla folder onto the mahogany desktop and scuttled out through to door without turning to watch where he was going. He missed the door way on his first two attempts and then decided that further embarrassment far out weighted the possibility of danger from turning his back on the General and fumbled behind him self for the door handle before sneaking away clumsily.
General Hammond looked at the report for a moment and debated whether he should open it now…
There were more pressing concerns, he decided and pushed the folder a few centimetres further away, symbolically putting off any examination of Janet Fraiser's bio-techno babble until later.
"Carry on Teal'c," he instructed.
*
Light failed them before SG-1 arrived at the castle entrance. Torches came to the rescue, and they shone ineffectually upon a massive oak drawbridge.
"I suppose we should feel lucky that they didn't build a moat," O'Neill muttered.
"It would have been useless here," Jackson said, "what with the river being all the way down there and moat likely to evaporate dry all the time."
O'Neill gave Jackson one of those, 'thank-you' looks that convey such delicate nuances of sarcasm.
"I don't hear anything going on inside," Samantha Carter said.
"So now what?" O'Neill asked his travel weary and smelly team. No one answered. He looked at the sturdy Oak gate and tried to search out a way to open it. No obvious mechanism presented itself. There was always Teal'c staff, but that tended to wind people up, and that was not the easiest way to meet and mingle.
"What about the goatherd's warning?" Carter asked.
"Well, yeah. I don't want to be out in the dark," O'Neill agreed.
For good measure he looked over his shoulder at the gloom surrounding them. It was dim and darkness was obviously not far away. Eldritch shapes were visible in the moonlight, appearing for all the world like the nightmare daemons and monsters that the goatherd had forecast. It was just the moonlit trees, O'Neill told himself, but the Goatherds warning was hard to ignore. They should try to get inside.
"Hey is there any one there!" Jackson called at the top of his voice.
"What do you think you're…" O'Neill hissed to Jackson. He almost slapped his hand over Jackson's mouth, but he had already got the question out before O'Neill could react.
The gate creaked open slowly. The members of SG-1 stepped back just as slowly and watched its progress closely. It was a tense tableau. O'Neill's hand found the butt of his AK-47.
The gate opened fully, but only after a great deal of frictional protest and groaning, not all of which came from the gate.
The entry gaped before them, to reveal that there was no one there.
In the distance a howl sounded from within the forest. Gooseflesh broke out on Jackson's neck, probably caused by the little leprechaun with the bad circulation in his legs who had run down his spine. Well, that was what it felt like. The parallel-processing unit that filled the void in his skull was working on identification of the howl and concluded that it sounded for all the world like the call of a wolf. This information was fed to his forebrain, which reacted to the news by attaching a series of impressions and misremembered high school biology and zoology to the message that reached his consciousness. In the mean time his autonomic system had decided that adrenalin might be a good additive to his bloodstream, and gave instructions to the appropriate glandular system.
His heart began to accelerate.
Well, he decided; that explained the reference to nightwalkers that the goatherd had mentioned. Wolves would do it.
The Goa'ulds had brought wolves over with them.
Why would they do that? He wondered. Goats, horses and cows he could understand, but wolves…?
Being inside after dark seemed a wonderful idea; forbidding entrance or no forbidding entrance.