"I have a theory," said Samantha Carter suddenly. She was sitting beside Jack O'Neill at the foot of what was now her bed. Both Teal'c and Daniel had found the chairs beside the vanity cupboard to be extremely comfortable dozed off almost immediately after they came back through the secret hallway and found them selves in Daniel's room. Carter had found trouble sleeping, and rapidly became bored and lonely. She had eventually gravitated to O'Neill's side after a troubled half hour of tossing and turning.
"About?" prompted Jack O'Neill. Teal'c was right. Carter's perfume was not just enticing, it took alluring to new levels. The tatters of the dress she was still wearing after dinner was not helping his composure in any way.
Talk of other things was a great idea, now if he could just remember what it was that they were talking about…
"Vampirism," she said, and tutted at him.
"Oh," he said. That! Damn he had forgotten about that, "go on."
"I think we might have stumbled onto a virus," she went on. She wasn't looking at him, just sitting beside him on the bed, intensely aware of the heat given off by his body. In the pale light from their torch, she wouldn't have been able to see much of him anyway, but she wasn't prepared to be that bold at that particular moment. She plucked at a piece of fluff that wasn't on the bed covers. "It affects their bone marrow," she continued, "so that they are unable to manufacture haemoglobin. They have to get it from another source, so they prey on the people who are immune to the virus, like that guy we found in the hall," she turned to look up at him. He had swung the torch beam around so that it landed on her hands. In the spill of the beam, he could see her face. Her look was challenging. "So why don't they just become anaemic and apathetic and then die, you might ask."
O'Neill shook his head. "Well actually no," he conceded, "I was happy with the idea that they needed another source of haemoglobin. It was enough explanation for me. The rest of this is going to go straight over my head."
She smiled at him. She was pretty happy that it was a good idea, but there are heaps of things that might disprove it. She was no Doctor (well actually she was, but she was not an M.D.) but even she could see a few problems with the idea. She continued, thinking out loud more than talking. "Yeah but our digestive systems can't just metabolise the haemoglobin. It doesn't work that way," she seemed to be arguing with herself. She noticed her hands suddenly and stopped plucking at the bed covers. She had pulled a thread from the stitching and it was unravelling in her hands. The end of the thread tickled her foot.
"Well obviously their's does," O'Neill pointed out. It was a pretty impressive piece of conclusion jumping, especially given the type of neural equipment O'Neill had been fitted with, and also given the sort of training he had undergone while he was still young and malleable. "The guy might have been killed in such a way that it looked like an animal attack, any thing…"
"Yeah…" Carter sort of agreed.
"But. We'll send in a medical biological team in to investigate and figure out what sort of mutation we're looking at here."
*
Colonel Makepeace turned to exchange a glance with General Hammond. "That's pretty much in line with the autopsy results," he said.
"I read the report," General Hammond commented. He looked at Teal'c again and wondered what was going on behind that bland expression. The man was so self contained. It was as though he was sitting there and laughing behind his mask at the antics of the pathetic Tau'ri. That would be a bit like the Tok'ra, who Teal'c had a certain affinity with, given that shared the whole symbiotic relationship with a parasite thing. General Hammond always thought they were secretly amused half the time, and openly contemptuous the other half, and sometimes he suspected Teal'c of something similar.
"The virus idea seems like a good one," Makepeace commented.
"Teal'c," General Hammond asked, "were you able to get better information on the nature of the mutation?"
"No," he said simply.
"After this story, I think I'm going to send in a biohazard team," General Hammond said in a low voice. "And flush the place out."
"Teal'c," Makepeace prompted, "was it just the Goa'uld that were affected by the virus or was it something that 'unblended' humans could catch."
That was an angle that General Hammond had not considered. He was not alone. Around the room there was suddenly a concerted, although subtle, movement of chairs, as everyone moved a little bit further away from Teal'c.
The logic was simple. After all, everyone who went across to the other planet with Teal'c, was currently occupying rooms in the infirmary, and keeping all of the medical staff very busy.
The idea of placing the base under biological lock down had just occurred to General Hammond. He looked longingly at the phone.
The movement of chairs did not happen without Teal'c's notice. His eyebrow rose ironically, which seemed to be his general-purpose response to any situation where his limited language skills failed to frame a suitable response. "We did not determine whether there was, in fact a virus, at all," Teal'c said.
"Our medical staff put forward the same theory," Makepeace said simply.
"Among others that they put forward," corrected General Hammond.
"We encountered quite a few of the afflicted," Teal'c said, "and I am not able to define what made the infection possible. Major Carter may have developed a better idea, but she is quite indisposed at present."
The chairs made another movement, radially from a common point.
"I think we need more of this story Teal'c," General Hammond prompted. "But first I need to make a phone call."
*
They heard screams in the night.
Samantha Carter had dozed off eventually, after she had managed to articulate the vague theories that had developed in her own mind, and she was woken by the noise. She blinked for a moment and tried to work out where she was and what was going on.
Her re-boot went smoothly, but she had several routines to get running and there was only so much processing power available. She remembered where she was and restrained the groan that threatened to escape from her lips. Her pulse was still pounding.
Something hard and lumpy was under her cheek and she looked around in the dim light spilled from outside the window. It turned out to be Jack O'Neill's chest that she was lying on.
Given the scraps of the dress that she was almost wearing and the nature of the relationship that was being stifled by the non-fraternisation regulations, under which they were obliged to live, it was an uncomfortable moment. Especially since his arm was draped along her mostly bare back and his hand was…
She was saved from examining the dilemma of how to behave at that moment; and she was in a dilemma, because she was about to succumb to an impulse that she would have been able to restrain if she were wide awake, by the second scream that came from the courtyard.
They all woke then.
The entire SG-1 team were camped up in the same room, all of them sleeping on anything that looked vaguely soft (well perhaps not Carter. The one thing that you couldn't accuse O'Neill of was being soft. Although, perhaps in the head?).
Carter sat up and hurriedly pulled the tapestry around her self.
O'Neill walked across to the window and looked down into the courtyard. He saw a melee of lights, but they had been down there all night and while the sight was odd, it wasn't new. They seemed to be moving about more purposefully than they had earlier in the night.
"What time is it?" O'Neill asked without turning around.
Carter pulled her arm out of her tapestry and found that her watch was not on her arm. She shook her head. It was the least of her problems with regard to lost equipment. She wondered what they had done with the heavy weaponry and the measuring equipment that she carried. A malicious vision appeared in her mind. It involved a thieving peasant, examining a grenade, and then pulling out the firing pin.
"About two hours before dawn," Daniel Jackson answered.
O'Neill nodded.
He couldn't quite make out what was going on down there, but he already had a suspicion. The lights were clustered much more than they had been. A theory was forming.
A moment later the rest of SG-1 joined him at the window. They were a rag-tag bunch now. Daniel Jackson wore some parts of the impractical leather ensemble that he had somehow accumulated, they had disposed on the more studded and uncomfortable parts by the expedient of cutting them with one of O'Neill's knives. Jackson was still wearing his bizarre ensemble because, while he had been busy doing whatever it was that the Count had wanted him to do, someone had taken his clothing, and his equipment.
O'Neill had given Jackson his fatigue shirt, leaving O'Neill wearing a decidedly second hand T-shirt.
"What do you think is happening out there?" Carter asked. He voice came from immediately behind O'Neill's neck and he felt her breath on the short hair that grew there. Goose-flesh broke out. It was the sort of effect that Carter always had on him. Waking beneath her and finding her barely clothed as she was had been a decidedly unfortunate experience for O'Neill. He had bad visions before his memory booted up and explained the whole circumstances to his reasoning centres. He was never good at complicated explanations and explaining that one to General Hammond was not something that he would have enjoyed.
"I'm not entirely sure I want to know," Jackson said.
"I have a nasty suspicion we are going to find out soon enough," O'Neill said grimly. All eyes sought his, but he did not elaborate.
*
General Hammond answered the phone, cruelly interrupting the flow of Teal'c narrative, just when he was getting into the swing of things. By this stage all eyes in the room left Teal'c reluctantly. They were hanging on the story waiting to see how it resolved.
"Yes," he said.
For the duration of Hammond's conversation, the biological processors contained within each of the bony protective envelopes made busy with it's speculative routines, trying to predict the course of the narrative. This activity uses up a great deal of the processing power of the human brain. It's a bit like a screen saver. Most of the processing power gets used up on something about as productive as the animation of flying toasters. When they could be doing something as useful as preparing reports for the upper management (the US senate) they are actually trying to extrapolate from scanty data and guess what happened to SG-1. It was more of a game, than real life and therefore much more fun.
There were exceptions to this of course. There was Teal'c, who knew what had happened and was teasing the whole thing out, and there was General Hammond who was carrying on a conversation with an inanimate object.
Janet Fraiser was on the other end of the line. "We have a problem, sir," she told him. She used one of those tones that people use which conveys the whole, I-think-this-is-bad-news-and-I'm-keen-to-avoid-the-whole-killing-of-the-messenger-syndrome. It's called circumlocution, and sometimes colloquially referred to as beating around the bush. In that sentence, she also used another of the human communications short cuts. By using the collective pronoun, 'we', she has attempted to share the responsibility for the problem and therefore make killing-the-messenger a more difficult reaction. It doesn't work, but that doesn't prevent people from trying it.
"What is it Doctor?" Hammond demanded. His tome was ominous. He recognised circumlocution when he heard it. In his position, he heard it all the time. Every time people came to him with bad news in fact. How often that situation occurs can be best understood by considering the fact that his job involved sending teams of military personnel out on blind investigatory missions to other stars, where the nature of the biosphere and the ecology are poorly understood. And on top of that there are these horrible bastards out there who love to enslave the human species and stick despotic symbionts into their bodies. Bad news is relative, depending on your expectations, but his are really low, and he still hears bad news.
"It's Daniel Jackson," the tinny voice of Janet Fraiser buzzed out of the phone head set. "The CT scan shows a sub-dural haematoma."
Hammond was not entirely sure what language that was in. He tried to translate. Sub-dural, meant under something or beneath something, or lower than something. Haematoma, that had something to do with blood? Blood under his finger nails? Blood under the skin? That sounded like a bruise. No, her tone was much grimmer than that. "OK," he decided to respond to her tone rather than the content, "that sounds bad."
"It is," she agreed enthusiastically. "We're going to have to operate to relieve the pressure on his brain. I need the authority to do that. Can you offer that for me?" General Hammond had always thought that Daniel Jackson's brain must have been under extreme pressure. Relieving that pressure sounded like a great idea, it was just that… He just knew he had the wrong end of that stick.
Back on track now. OK, it was bad. She had confirmed that much. "What are the alternatives?" he asked, to buy thinking time.
"None really," she replied rapidly. "It is life threatening."
He was afraid of that. He signed heavily. "Go ahead then. How are Carter and O'Neill?"
"Still in danger sir. We're very worried about their condition at this stage. They both have one of the worst cases of hyper-volemic shock that I have come across." She had done it again, spoken in medicalese, or latin, he wasn't sure which. Hyper meant over, or above. Volemic meant, volume? They were over-inflated? That couldn't be right. "They're lucky to be alive," she continued, bringing him back from the depths of speculation, "we only just got them in time, at least we hope so…" she broke off from their conversation for a moment. Hammond heard a few mumbled and muffled comments, but got no details through the phone. "Got to go," Janet continued hurriedly. "We have an alarm from O'Neill's room. Hopefully we got them in time," she amended.
The phone clicked in Hammond's ear and then he was left with the annoying pulse of the engaged signal that purred malevolently into his ear. He lowered the hand set carefully and turned back to the other members of the briefing team.