General Hammond managed by an effort of will and a bit of dumb luck to avoid spraying a shower of atomised coffee across the room and was looking rather strained by the time Teal'c rattled to a narrative pause.

"This gets worse by the minute," General Hammond wheezed to Colonel Makepeace. "Apophis as a saviour? How the hell could that little story get started."

Makepeace was having his own difficulty in listening at that moment. His brain was wired directly to his libido. "Just how gorgeous was she?" Makepeace asked Teal'c absently.

"Hmph," said General Hammond. He glared at the Colonel.

"Oh, yeah, sorry. Apophis is a nasty piece of work, of the worst order," Makepeace agreed. "He obviously has a good PR team."

Hammond dismissed the man with a narrowing of the eyes and a pursing of the lips.

"I thought I had this situation under control," Hammond commented to himself, but out loud to confuse everybody else. "Then I hear this. Is there an explanation, Teal'c?"

"Not that I could think of at the time," Teal'c answered. "Daniel Jackson may have been able to come up with a cultural model to explain the drift in their legends."

"Excuse me," General Hammond's aide said. "I have a suggestion."

"Go ahead," Hammond conceded.

"Before they encountered the virus that cause the mutation, they were probably still in contact with the system lords. They would have sought help from them when the affliction first became obvious. The system lord's are a ruthless lot. They would have just cut them off rather than address the problem. If the virus wiped out the major Goa'uld, then they would have no way to access the gate any more. The story about sending to Apophis for help would have been carried onward by the survivors. It's not a hard stretch to guess that the development of the vampires would be equated with the disease, and then over time, the two became interchangeable."

Teal'c nodded. "That would indeed seem likely," he said.

Both Makepeace and Hammond regarded the aide with an air of suspicion; no one liked a bright junior officer showing them up in public like that. They used one of those intimidatory pieces of body language to portray this to him so that he subsided into silence. Once they were sure he had been reminded of his place, Hammond returned his attention to Teal'c. "So you went with her…"

"She was very insistent," explained Teal'c.

"And very attractive," added Makepeace.

*

"Where the hell would Daniel and Teal'c go?" Samantha Carter asked Jack O'Neill. She stood inside the doorway with her hands on her hips while she planted her feet firmly and spaced a shoulder width apart.

"This is all we need," O'Neill said bitingly. "Just when we decided to just skip out of here and take the story home, this goes and happens." O'Neill shook his head. He was as puzzled by their disappearance as much as she was. "It makes no sense to me," he admitted. "I told them we would only be gone a few minutes." He frowned. "It has to have been something bad. I can't see them leaving us behind no matter what the circumstances, because they knew we would be right back. They just wouldn't do it. Not if they had a choice in the matter."

"What do you think?" she asked, she looked a bit confused. "Is there any sign of a struggle?"

They looked at the room. It looked like a bomb had gone off in there.

Jackson's leather outfit was thrown onto the floor. There was a pile of bedclothes beside it. The tapestries beside the window were awry, and a shirt was lying elsewhere in the floor.

Which was pretty much the state that the place had been in when they left it, with a few minor exceptions.

"Does anything look like it is out of place?" O'Neill asked. "You know any more than normal."

"Some parts of it might have been tidied up a bit," Carter said dubiously. She picked up the shirt and the leather bondage suit and frowned. The insignia on the shirt read 'O'Neill. SGC. Earth.' "I wonder what Daniel is wearing?"

"He might have gotten his clothes back as well," O'Neill suggested. He took the shirt from Carter and pushed his arms through the sleeves.

"He might not have gotten them back," Carter said grimly. "He lost his in a different way to the way that I did."

"We need to find out what is going on," O'Neill decided. "This is decidedly weird."

*

"Remind me again," said Teal'c. "How we combat vampires?"

Teal'c and Daniel Jackson followed the alluring Heidi Pravda through the dank passageways badly hidden by the tapestries that hung in every bed room.

"They're easy," said Daniel Jackson. He was only half-serious, although he had watched a lot of old movies, and that was what he had to say was only what they recommended. Even old Bram Stoker had written the method into Dracula. "We pin them to the ground, stake it through the heart and then we cut its head off. Gets them every time."

"What further proof would you need," added Heidi Pravda over her shoulder. She turned to face Jackson and took his hands in hers. Her expression was almost evangelistic in its fervour, as seen in the feeble light spilled from his torch. She looked imploringly up at Jackson, who consequently suffered one of those horribly male reactions to her attention. "You must be the prophesied one's," she said breathlessly. For Jackon's part, the heaving of her breast, the proximity (and extent and exposure) of her cleavage combined with the wide-eyed look on her face made rationalising extremely difficult. Right at the moment, if she had said 'leap onto that live grenade for me', he probably would and then wonder afterward why he had done such a damn fool thing. "You bring with you the knowledge that we worked for centuries to learn. You know what we face. Until we leant that little lesson, those monsters kept coming back to cause us more trouble over and over again. It took us a long time to perfect that technique, of restraint and then impalement and finally decapitation."

Jackson blinked like a small furry thing impaled in a truck's headlights. The two of them remained locked in that tableau for a little longer than the situation demanded. Even so the spell was only broken when…

"You wouldn't do that to me, surely," purred the voice that the producers really wanted for Jessica Rabbit, but had to settle for Kathleen Turner when Aphrodite was unavailable.

"OK," muttered Teal'c. "That is the first time I have hear one of those things speak in a language that I have understood."

"That is a bad sign," suggested Daniel Jackson.

"Oh no," hissed Heidi Pravda. "It is one of the central family."

The woman in charge of the voice stepped into the light of Jackson's torch and invaded the space where the SG-1+ team debated what the prophecy really referred to. She brought with her a sort of personal sphere of illumination that outshone both the gentle background light that filtered into the passageway from the bedrooms and the spill from Jackson and Teal'c's torches.

"I thought they shunned daylight," Jackson complained to Heidi.

"Common misconception," she shrugged. The gesture had all sorts of non-verbal communications associated with it, with some of those aspects intended for specific translation by human males. What those aspects had to say to Daniel Jackson had nothing to do with the words that she spoke. A couple of unrestrained parts of Heidi's anatomy took a moment to come to rest after her shoulders finished moving. Jackson's eyes followed their progress closely. "It is the direct light of the sun that they shun. Their skin is sensitive."

"Sensitivity to Ultra violet, maybe?" Jackson asked rhetorically. The star that the planet orbited was an F-class star, with a far greater UV-component than Sol discharged onto poor old Earth.

"That is a question we should pose to one of them later on," Teal'c suggested. "At the moment I think we need to focus on more pressing matters."

Heidi Pravda had summed the newcomer up reasonably accurately. The resemblance to the Countess was remarkable. Jackson recognised the newcomer from dinner the previous night. She was pale of flesh, but with the same ruby lips and large dark eyes as the Countess's family. Raven hair fell in long silken tresses to her waist. Her face was delicate; her mouth was sensual, with pursed lips and a teasing smile. Beneath that haunting visage was the body that the plastic surgeon had in mind when he set about re-manufacturing Pamela Anderson.

She wore a series of gossamer fabric sheets that seemed to clothe her more by accident, than design. They gave the impression that a reasonable breeze would blow the whole ensemble into the next county. To any man with a smidgen of imagination, she would appear to be quite naked, despite the cloth that hung from all the protruding bits of her anatomy. Jackson did not suffered from that particular lack, imagination was there in abundance when presented with that kind of conceptual necessity. Teal'c on the other hand wasn't even aware that such a thing as imagination existed, let alone whether he had any. He raised a single eyebrow questioningly.

The newcomer looked between the three of them, reached a decision and then turned to Jackson. Her gaze transfixed him. All thoughts to Heidi Pravda disappeared like so much steam - and we must be aware, that was a feat in itself. The Countess's sister stepped forward and placed a delicate, perfectly manicured hand onto the centre of Daniel Jackson's chest. Well not central, it was slightly to his left.

"You haven't see a Vampire around here?" Jackson asked vacantly. His voice had one of those little squeaky noises at the end of the question. Jackson was having a problem with shortness of breath, palpitating of the heart and other biological manifestations of a physical desire to engage in propagation of the species. He squirmed uncomfortably. We shall not speculate on the exact nature of why that should be.

The woman who had him transfixed smiled sunnily and revealed a set of canines that might have been more appropriate in the face of Lassie. "I do not recognise the word. I hope it has good connotations, because I mean only good to come from our interaction," she used one of those voices that tickles the earlobes and cause goose flesh all down the backs of males the world over.

"Well now that you mention it…" Jackson began weakly.

She stepped up closer and examined Jackson's neck intently. To Heidi Pravda's eyes the vampire seemed to be trying to decide the answer to such pressing questions as whether she should tilt her head to the right or the left when she bent to rip his neck open and suck the life out of him.

Jackson once again wore an expression similar to that seen on the faces of small furry animals. You know the one they wear when they are caught by the headlights of transcontinental transport vehicles. They wear it for a moment just before the first of those nine sets of wheels on the left hand side of the eighteen wheeler smears their pathetic little body along twenty five feet of tarmac, instantly transforming them from a small animated creature (going innocently about it's instinctive imperative to eat and breed) to a badly mangled rug, with texture. Jackson's processing device had experienced an interrupt. One of those inconveniently hard-wired connections to the biological processor's peripherals had usurped the processing capacity for one of those low speed, single-task-needs-all-the-processor applications that inconveniently crop up from time to time. If he had a pointing device (and we will not consider any biological manifestation that the reader may conjure up in their imagination after reading that metaphor) it would have become a boring hourglass at this point.

It seemed that the committee for attending to this monster was electing itself. Heidi Pravda pushed Jackson aside roughly and stood in front of the vampire. Her hands rested on her hips. "Perhaps you should try someone with a different set of biological bits," she suggested, or words to that effect.

"I don't mind them either way," said the Vampire cheerily. Which just goes to prove that all those lame old movies made in the seventies by the Hammer Horror team were factually based documentaries rather than the poorly acted pieces of exploitative visual wallpaper that people took them for at the time.

"Urk," said Heidi Pravda, conceptually unprepared for that response, and caught completely off her guard. Thought processes that had been carrying such ideas as 'pulling out that hair and pinning the thing to the ground' were suddenly considering such important matters as; 'Those eyes really are the most amazing colour…'

She has the same interrupt programmed into her processing device as Daniel Jackson, and for much the same biological reason. In this particular instance, circumstances have seen to it that the interrupt has been corrupted by a viral program and it was not seeing its normal use (which relates to the propagation of the species) but a subsidiary minority based use which she would not normally consider relevant to herself. Just goes to show the power of… No we will not consider what that might mean.

The vampire reached out a hand and located Heidi Pravda's heart in much the same way as it had to Daniel Jackson. It's hand went further to Heidi's left and passed beneath Heidi's clothes and we will look away because that is not a suitable way for two young ladies to behave, and we wouldn't want to watch them do something like that, especially given the PG rating we have to maintain.

The pulse in Heidi's neck accelerated until it reached manic palpitations. We can tell that because we are watching it in extreme close up while the vampire's teeth gradually move toward their target - and besides it beats watching what the vampire's hand is doing to Heidi's body down a bit lower. Daniel Jackson appears to be watching the action of those hands very closely, but he's a bit like that, being a male human.

Those amazing eyes suddenly weren't in front of Heidi any more; they had drifted lower. She said something breathy and inarticulate. She felt weak at the knees and trembled at the feel of that hot breath against her neck. Her eyes closed and a sigh escaped from her lips.

"Don't look into her eyes," Teal'c gasped out. He leapt.

Heidi shook her self, and looked around blankly for a moment.

Suddenly Teal'c was struggling with the Vampire on the ground. The creature screamed. It fought. It twisted. It bucked. It left forth with a few phrases that aren't in our Goa'uld - English dictionary, at least not the commonly used G rated ones that we have.

Heidi Pravda shook her head a couple of times more and then pounced into the fray. Teal'c had a fair bit of the monster pinned to the floor, leaving just a few stray peripherals to deal with. Heidi pinned the struggling legs of the Vampire to the ground as best she could by diving on top of them.

"A stake!" cried Jackson. In his panic he forgot any of the languages that he was fluent in (for the sake of this narrative we should point out that even Daniel Jackson is not able to keep an accurate count on the number of them). "We need a stake."

"What?" demanded the struggling Heidi Pravda. She dodged a delicate foot that might have taken her eye out and pinned it more carefully to the floor.

The vampire caught Jackson's eye. "Get them off me," It pleaded. Jackson bent to lend a hand and almost pushed Teal'c off of the struggling Vampire, but Jackson was prevented from making a fool of him self when he was knocked off his feet by an errant elbow. He shook himself for a moment and reset the operating system in the processor. "A stake," Jackson repeated. He picked himself up off the floor and searched around frantically.

What sort of medieval society didn't leave pieces of wood lying around everywhere? What other building materials did they have for god's sake? To Daniel Jackson's frantically searching eyes, there didn't appear to be anything.

And that goes to show that he wasn't thinking at all clearly. I mean what sort of vampire lord would leave convenient stake like pieces of timber lying around for the first archaeologist to conveniently lay his hands on the moment things got tough? I mean really.

"Where the hell are we going to get a stake here?" Teal'c spat out around a mouthful of diaphanous fabric. It is probably irrelevant but we would note at this point that it has finally dawned on Teal'c just how the creature he is struggling to restrain is constructed, and despite the fact that a Goa'uld larvae is symbiotically bound into his nervous system, he is at heart a male human. The fleshy form beneath him was the one that his biological programming has been biased toward in his mating fixations. The nature of their assailant had filtered through his cultural programming and then through his neurological disadvantages. Ultimately this all meant that he had established an invidious situation.

He considered the dichotomy and reached one tentative conclusion. He was suffering from a conflict of biology versus sense. He stared at the wall while he throttled the thing on the floor. At least that way he tipped the balance a little bit one way. The male mating drive has a high visual aspect and he had short circuited that bit handily by that little change in the source of his visual input.

Meanwhile Heidi was struggling to restrain what looked like a reasonably slender pair of legs but appeared to be made from some sort of carbon fibre composite, and operated by an industrial hydraulic system. She dodged the foot one more time and made a desperate grab for it again, finally pinning it in place by the expedient of lying on top of it.

"Daniel Jackson," Teal'c called out. "We are in trouble here. We need assistance. Anything wooden and pointed! Any thing at all."

"Certainly," Jackson agreed and stepped forward. Teal'c struggled to find a way to sit on the Vampire's chest, wrap his hands around the things throat and leave enough room for Jackson to get a good shot at the thing's heart. It was a bit like playing a game of twister with a boa constrictor.

"What about this?" Jackson asked and pulled on the bracket that was holding up one of the candelabras on the wall. It came free with a crack and a billow of fine dust. He waved the broken frame above his head triumphantly.

Teal'c grunted manfully, and struggled once more with the vampire beneath him. "Now would be a good time, Daniel Jackson," he said breathlessly.

Jackson nodded and then set about getting himself involved in the action. He shoved the broken tip of the candelabra into the struggling vampire, pinning it's chest to the ground. It continued to struggle. "Hit it, someone," Jackson called. He was struggling to hold the stake in place.

The vampire screamed and it was a sound that went straight to the reptilian part of the human brain.

The members of SG-1 went "AaaAARGGHH!!!!" in return.

The Vampire kicked and bucked a few times, finally spilling Heidi Pravda, who rolled into the wall with a bone jarring thump. Heidi climbed to her feet, watching the vampire's legs thrash around uncontrollably while she tried to work out how to help. Teal'c and the partially restrained vampire rotated on the floor, covering almost a full circle while Daniel Jackson crawled after them with the broken candelabra in his hand, lagging always about ten degrees behind the action.

Heidi Pravda was poised to rejoin the fray. "Daniel Jackson…" she began and then stopped. Whatever she was going to say, she was interrupted by a blow to the jaw that came from Teal'c's fist. Her teeth clacked together with a snap. She fell back onto her butt again and shook her head a few times to clear it.

Jackson had finally managed to get the 'spear' into the Vampire's chest. The vampire was hanging onto the candelabra for dear li…(undead? Maybe…) and it had finally slipped from her grasp and punctured her chest. Unfortunately it wasn't a deep enough wound.

Jackson pounded on the end of the makeshift stake, driving it deeper into its intended victim.

The vampire was still thrashing away, even though the timber shard of the broken candelabra was embedded deeply into her chest.

"OK, that didn't seem to work," mused Daniel Jackson.

"Then I suggest that you try again," suggested the still struggling Teal'c.

"I don't know what you said, but I hope it was have another go," critique'd Heidi Pravda. She climbed to her feet and pushed Jackson out of the way. She grabbed hold of the candelabra. She pushed on it a few times to make sure that it bit in. She wriggled it around a few times for good measure.

"Yes Miss Pravda," Teal'c agreed. He pushed Heidi aside gently and then pulled the candelabra the rest of the way out of the vampire's chest. It came free with a meaty sucking noise as the wound healed up. No one heard that sound over the frantic struggling, heavy breathing and the gutter-mouthed curses of the Vampire. Jackson took the opportunity to restrain the vampire's head by pinning the head in place by the expedient of shoving the head of Teal'c's staff into the woman's mouth. Heidi made a move as well, she saw an opening and a chance to intervene. She pounced.

"I think I can do this now," Teal'c said. His eyes tracked the movement of the vampire's chest intently. There was a minor subroutine that tracked the movement of her chest for other reasons, not related to the placement of a timber stake. Teal'c shook his head and then had another go, slamming the broken spear from the candelabra into the Vampire's chest. She screamed again, but nothing else changed.

"Again Teal'c," Instructed Jackson.

Teal'c was ready for the Vampire grabbing hold of the candelabra this time. So was Heidi, she managed to get her jaw out of the way the second time.

Teal'c lunged with the candelabra yet again.

Everything stopped.

The Vampire was still.

Every one waited for a bit to be sure that the fight was over. Nothing happened.

"Oh thank god for that," Jackson sighed and slipped from his position leaning atop the Vampire's face and sat on the cavern floor.

"OK! Good!" said Teal'c in a vaguely disquieted voice. "That appears to be over then." He shook his head a few times to clear the cobwebs from his brain. He blinked a few times as though trying to get the world back into focus again.

"The head," reminded Jackson. "We have to cut off the head."

"How are we to do that?" asked Teal'c.

"We could put a grenade in her mouth and pull the pin," Jackson suggested. "I seem to recall that technique worked."

"Daniel Jackson," Teal'c said patiently. "You've forgotten one thing."

"What's that?"

"We don't have any grenades."

"There is that, yes. Rocket launcher? Then again, no. We don't have one of those either."

Heidi Pravda rolled off the vampire's legs and onto her back. She was breathing like she had just won the Boston marathon.

And we are faced with a terrible dilemma once again. How are we supposed to tell this story with it's PG rating if she insists on doing that. The outfit that she wore was never intended for physical exertion, and the whole concept of underwear is centuries in the future of her society, so flopping onto her back with her knees raised like that is just not going to cut it at all.

(A couple of paragraphs have been removed from this portion of the narrative. They contain a passage in which Teal'c, subject to a merciless barrage of questions, described in some detail the appearance of Heidi Pravda's body for the benefit of Colonel Makepeace.)

We will summarise. From the vantage point provided to Daniel Jackson, he was able to testify that Heidi Pravda could safely be categorised as species; human, gender; female, maturity; yes, but only barely.

"We need an axe, or a saw," suggested Teal'c.

"Hey all I've got is what you see here," Jackson said and held his arms out at his sides. Not a lot of detail was revealed by that gesture. But he meant well.

"It's not as though I have much to offer," suggested Heidi Pravda who was wearing just slightly more than the wardrobe for the movie 'Showgirls' by this stage of proceedings. She had thankfully moved a few pieces of cloth around so as to enable us to regain our PG rating - just.

"I don't know about that," said Jackson, and then remembered him self. "Sorry, uncalled for."

Heidi blushed.

Jackson blushed

Teal'c raised an eyebrow and shook his head slowly.

If O'Neill had been there he would have been faced with the decision between laughing and barfing.

Heidi Pravda had her breath back by that stage. She sat up and rubbed the bruises to her ribs and hips. She began to feel self-conscious when she realised that everyone was staring at her. She suspected that if she intended hanging around with these people for too much longer, her outfit was going to be a problem. She checked to make sure all of her bits were back in the right places. They seemed to be. But the male of the human species possesses a visual imagination and they were both in a position where they didn't need to imagine the details of Heidi Pravda, they just had to remember. Her outfit seemed to have been reduced to a series of hanging vertical rags, about the width and density of ribbons. She hurriedly plaited her hair behind herself and then used a piece of torn off dress to secure the end. Her hair still reached her waist. She reached behind herself and produced a knife. "This is the only blade that I have," she apologised.

"Um, that is a pretty big knife you have there," suggested Jackson.

"Uh huh," she agreed but her tone was distracted. She had a job to do and she intended doing it.

"So how did you manage to hide that knife under that outfit?"

"You don't want to know," she answered.

Something caught Jackson's eye. Heidi followed his gaze. Jackson was staring at the floor. She shook her head; that couldn't be it. Heidi followed his sight line a second time and found the vampire on the ground. She looked like some-one had pinned a school girl to the floor like she was a butterfly in a entomologists display. Her face was remarkably ethereal, as though she was the supernatural supernatant stereotypical angelic schoolgirl that might advertise milk on television. OK, so you would feel like a right monster for even touching that angel. And of course her outfit failed dismally during that melee in much the same way that Heidi's had. Naturally we need to describe her in some way at least to explain the effect she had on Daniel Jackson, and why he was reluctant to touch her at all. Let's try this solution to the problem of presenting the information in an appropriate manner. The vampire's dress had torn from collar to her knees. The ragged ends were draped around her like the petals of a flower awaiting the sun. Pinned between the fleshy swell of her full breasts was an off-cut of timber roughly fashioned into the shape of a stake. The alabaster perfection of her skin was in vivid contrast to the smear of blood that still welled from the wound, trickled across her chest and dripped onto the stone. Her ribs stook out in proud relief, their curve drew the eye to the arch of her flat belly and in turn drew attention to... Oh why bother? This is stupid. We'll just watch Jackson and Teal'c's reactions to what follows. It's going to be a whole lot simpler.

Heidi Pravda knelt on the floor beside the prostrate Vampire. The impossibly perfect dark eyes followed the motion of the knife intently when she raised it above her head. The imploring look on the vampire's impossibly symmetrical features was not feigned in any way. If she doesn't move too suddenly we should be able to get away with our PG rating by watching this next bit from behind Heidi and to one side.

Jackson looked away as soon as he saw Heidi begin the down stroke. There was no way he wanted to watch this. It felt like he was an actor in someone's dream.

There was a thud, like a butcher hitting a slab of beef with a cleaver.

"Damn," said Heidi, bitterly. "I only got about half way through. I thought it looked easy when I saw it done before."

"Oh gross," said Jackson. "You've never done this before?" he asked, genuinely curious.

"No," She stood upright, brushed her hands against her hips to dry her palms before having another go. She was about to bend to another attack at the vampire when she thought to attend to the ragged ends of her outfit. She pulled the ragged strands through her thighs, up behind her back and then tied the ends around her waist.

Daniel Jackson said something that came out as; "Urk," and looked away hurriedly. The way she was dressed now would have taxed the skills of a Brazilian bikini waxer. With her dark hair plaited behind her neck and clothed in almost several square centimetres of cloth, Heidi Pravda make Lara Croft look like someone's virginal little sister. "It's not a common occurrence in our society," she muttered and looked carefully at the vampire, as though deciding which flaw to use to cut the diamond. "We don't get the chance to get one up on these things often enough to practise."

"You'll have to have another go," suggested Teal'c, oblivious to the storm that was howling through Daniel Jackson's mind at this time.

"The last thing we want is for that thing to come after us," said Daniel Jackson, feebly. His mouth was in gear but his brain had been usurped by his biological hard-wired system, "with it's head half off. I can just see it there, flopping around against it's back while it tried to run." He gave a half hysterical laugh. "Now there's an image that I would rather not have in my head," Jackson said to Teal'c.

"That is the sort of thing I would expect Colonel O'Neill to say," said Teal'c. "It is comforting to hear such a comment at this time." He turned his attention back to the problem at hand. "I think it's stuck between two vertebrae," Teal'c said to Heidi.

"Just pull harder," suggested Jackson.

Heidi put her foot on the Vampires forehead and strained her back until the knife came free. She toppled off her precarious hold on the Vampire's head and fell on her butt. The tip of the knife described a perfect arc from the Vampire's neck to land behind her. All eyes followed the passage of the knife with hypnotised intensity. It hit no-one on the way past, more through good luck than good management. Part way through that we had to look away again, actually Heidi fell out of our view field before she hit the ground, and we will wait for her to rearrange her clothing before she stands up again. Hopefully…

She climbed slowly to her feet and organised herself for another attempt. The top of her head appeared in our field of view, followed by her face and her shoulders. That worked well.

She seemed to know what she was doing, so Teal'c and Jackson settled onto the floor and began a council of war. We shall take no risks, we shall concentrate on their conversation. There are sounds coming from a little behind and to one side of them that we cannot filter out. We shall just do our best to ignore them.

Thump! Hack! Curse!

"What do you think we should do here?" Tealc asked.

"I'm not sure it was a great idea leaving Jack and Sam back there," Jackson said.

"You heard what Heidi said, though. We were in danger back there."

There was silence from Heidi's direction for a moment.

Jackson and Teal'c looked over their shoulders in unison. Heidi was only taking a breather.

Grunt, grunt, grunt.

"God, this thing is tough," she said in an undertone.

Thump! Hack! Mutter!

"Yeah, but what about Jack and Sam?" Jackson asked. His voice carried a touch of empathic concern. "They must have been in danger as well."

"In my experience Daniel Jackson, Colonel O'Neill is rather more dangerous than the things that the Goa'uld leave lying around. I seem to recall that there was this incident where I believe that you and he were involved. Ra would probably testify that the two of you were rather dangerous."

Grunt, grunt, grunt.

Wait.

Jackson looked over his shoulder and shuddered. He turned back hurriedly.

"That knife of her's is not very sharp," observed Teal'c.

Thump! Thump! Hack! Groan!

"She does seem to be enjoying herself back there though. Do you think one of us should stop her?"

Thump! Clank!

Teal'c took one look at the expression on her face and decided not to volunteer.

Sounds of butchery continued for a while without comentary.

"At last," Heidi breathed and stepped away from the vampire's corpse. Jackson and Teal'c stood and waited for it to turn to dust and blow softly along the corridor. It didn't. It just lay there on the floor, a bloody and gory mess.

"Well that didn't go according to the script," Jackson commented.

Heidi Pravda kicked the severed head. It rolled a little way and then rocked to a halt, partially covered by the trailing end of a tapestry..

"Come on," she said. "We must find my mother."

Jackson had an idea. "Would you like to borrow my shirt?" He asked Heidi.

She nodded. He took it off and handed it too her. Heidi wiped the blade of her knife on it and then made to hand it back.

"That's not what I meant," said Jackson and looked down at the smear of blood. It made a welcome change to see that the blood on his shirt was someone's other than his own. "I meant for you to wear."

Heidi blinked a few times in baffled confusion. "What is wrong with what I have on?"

Jackson blinked back in embarrassed confusion. "Ah, um, well, nothing," he stammered. Well if she wasn't worried about it, then he supposed he could avoid doing so as well.

"Then we must move," she said seriously. "We have wasted enough time with this little distraction. Come along Dan'iel. We have much to do."

*

"SO MANY PEOPLE AND SO LITTLE TIME," muttered death to himself. He looked down from his position atop his horse - Binky - and watched the shade of the Countess's sister slowly sit up from her position on the floor.

"I seem to have lost my head there," she said.

Death looked at her and if he had eyelids he might have blinked at that moment. "THERE ARE TWO OF YOU," he said. "I GET TO DEAL WITH YOU DUAL ENTITIES SO INFREQUENTLY. THIS MAKES A PLEASANT CHANGE."

"For you maybe," muttered the shade of the Countess's sister. She was already fading away to wherever it was that she expected to go in the next life.

Death stared after her departing shade and might have frowned thoughtfully if he was equipped with the means to do so.