"I could ask you the same thing, Colonel," said Buffy. "I don't think that automatic weapons are standard issue for archaeological expeditions, not to mention that staff thing that 'Murray' is holding, or Daniel's bug zapper."
Jack couldn't help noticing that she had called him by his rank, or hearing the quotes around Murray's name, but his thoughts were interrupted by a fresh cry of pain from Jerry, as another wave of convulsions racked his body.
Sam rushed to his side, and dropped down beside him. "I need the med kit!" Her fingers felt for the pulse at his neck.
"On it!" yelled Dawn. She dropped her sword, with it's spider, and took off at a run toward the SGC tents. Jack knew she had probably spotted the prominent white case with the big red cross on it while she was hanging out in the lab with Daniel.
Willow was kneeling on the opposite side of Jerry from Sam. Jack saw her passing her hands over his body. "The spiders injected him with some sort of neurotoxin," she said. "It's spreading fast!"
He watched Willow close her eyes, her hand hovering over one of Jerry's wounds. There was a golden glow—like one of the Goa'uld's hand healers—over the wound, and a pinprick of something formed in the air between the wound and her hand. It slowly grew into a globule of some sort of purple liquid floating in the air. The liquid suddenly flared and vanished. Willow let out a breath of air that he hadn't noticed she was holding, and moved on to the next bite.
Willow moved from bite to bite, extracting the poison from Jerry's body, and growing visibly more tired each time. When she reached the last bite the globule of poison didn't disappear in a flash when she was done. She collapsed over him, and the poison dropped back down and splattered across his clothes.
Dawn arrived back with the med kit. "What happened to Willow?" she asked as she set it down next to Sam.
"She wore herself out pulling the poison out of Jerry," said Buffy as she lifted Willow off him.
Sam opened the med kit. She looked at its contents, and wondered if anything in it could help Jerry. "What did she do?"
Buffy kept cradling Willow's unconscious body in her arms. "She pulled as much of the poison out of him as she could."
"She healed him?" asked Jack.
Giles had moved in beside Willow with Buffy. "Healing is more difficult. Whatever damage the poison did, she didn't have much chance to correct. I think she just stopped it from doing more."
"What about her?" Sam looked toward Willow. "Is she okay?"
"Exhaustion," said Buffy. "Let her rest, she'll be fine."
Giles looked at Jerry. "Do what you can for him, keep him comfortable. We'll see if Willow can do more when she wakes up."
Jack looked back and forth between Willow, Giles and Buffy, wondering what to do. What Willow had done—first the force field around Jerry, and then the blasts she had sent at the spiders from her hands—had looked like what a Goa'uld could do with one of their ribbon devices. The attempt to heal Jerry: like a Goa'uld hand healer. But she had done it all without any visible technological aid. That indicated a very advanced technology, like nothing he'd seen in human hands before…not that he'd actually seen anything in her hands. He'd never seen anything that looked like advanced technology in the hands of the Nox either. They had seemed to be a primitive people when he had first met them. But how could such advanced technology get into the hands of a girl who all their records said had grown up in California?
That Willow had done it all for one of his people, without anyone asking her, made him think that maybe he could trust her. Especially since she seemed to have exhausted herself to the point where she was now at his mercy… He looked again and saw that Buffy, Giles and Xander were sticking close to her, and reconsidered that last thought. He'd have to get past her friends first. Buffy had shown incredible speed during the brief fight with the spiders, but he hadn't seen anything unusual from any of the others…other than their preference for antique weapons.
Sam was still working on Jerry, cleaning and bandaging his wounds, with Dawn handing her things from the med kit as she asked for them. Dawn seemed to have a pretty good knowledge of its contents, and usually had the next thing Sam would need ready, when she asked for it. She also didn't seem to mind the sight of blood. It clearly wasn't the first time she'd had to help bandage someone who was badly injured.
Sam sat back, and looked up at Jack. "Sir, I've done everything I can for him here. I think we're going to need a medevac for him. He seems to have stabilized, but he's still in bad shape."
"Do it," Jack turned to Dr. Hawley, who, with the rest of the archaeologists, was standing around looking useless. "Call them now."
"Yes, Sir!" Hawley took off running toward their tents.
"You two!" Jack pointed to Charlie and Doug, "Get Jerry moved up to the camp, and stay there with him!"
Buffy looked up at Giles. "You and Dawn do the same with Willow, and stay with her. Keep your eyes open. We might have missed some of those spiders."
"Right!" Giles and Dawn picked up Willow between them, and carried her away. Xander looked around nervously, watching for any surviving bugs that might suddenly jump out at him.
Buffy looked toward the slab covering the entrance to the tunnel. "Now we have to deal with whatever you've stirred up down there."
"Hey!" said Jack. "You came here too!"
"Only because you started digging," said Buffy. "And now here we are: having to clean up after the military screws things up again."
"We didn't screw this up!"
"Yeah, right," said Buffy. "Just tell me one thing: are you guys with the Initiative?"
"The whatative?"
"Initiative. You know, the Army guys who deal with this sort of thing."
"The Army has a unit that does this?"
"I guess you're not with them."
Buffy looked around the area. She saw Murray—Teal'c—moving around, with one of the bug zappers, like the one Daniel had had. He was systematically shooting each of the bodies of the dead spiders three times with it. On the third zap the spider vanished. "You might want to save one or two of those," she told him, "Willow or the doctors might need some samples of their poison, if they're going to help Jerry." Teal'c nodded in acknowledgement, and zapped another spider.
"Xander, why don't you collect a couple," said Jack. If Buffy was going to start telling his people what to do, he could do the same with hers. He felt a little inner glee at Xander's obvious distaste for the task that Jack had given him, and saw him shoot an appealing look in Buffy's direction, only to have her nod her head in a way that told him to carry out Jack's direction.
Xander looked around, clearly not wanting to touch any of the bugs. "Ah!" He took a couple of quick steps, bent down, and came up holding the hilt of Dawn's sword, with its bug still impaled on it. He carried it gingerly over to where the archaeologists had left some of their sample cases piled up. He dumped some of their rocks out of one of them, and scraped the spider off the sword into it. He started to look around, and saw another, apparently undamaged spider body. He moved toward it.
"Be careful, Xander Harris," said Teal'c. "A spider that has only been shot once with a zat'nik'atel will only be stunned, not dead."
Xander took a step back. "Right…so why don't you zap this thing a couple of more times, to make sure for me."
"Very well." Teal'c shot the spider in front of Xander twice before Xander bent down and picked the creature up very carefully. He held it with just his finger tips, keeping his arms fully extended as he carried to toward the sample box.
Buffy noticed that Teal'c had lost his hat. She finally saw what he had been covering up with it. Some sort of gold symbol was embossed on his forehead. It looked like a snake inside an oval. "Nice tat. What is it?"
"It is the symbol of Apophis."
Buffy frowned. "I've heard of him…one of the Egyptian gods wasn't he?"
"A false god," said Teal'c.
"So why do you have his symbol on your forehead?"
"Ah, we have other things to worry about right now," said Jack. "Like what we're going to do about all those spiders."
"How many do you think there are?" asked Buffy.
"Way too many," said Jack.
Sam closed the med kit that she had been repacking. "We might be able to make an estimate from what was recorded off our goggles." She went over to Hawley's computer and started to access the records.
"I don't think it matters how many of them there are," said Jack. "We don't have the fire power here to handle them all. I'm going to have to call for reinforcements."
"Uh…Jack…I don't think we're going to have time for that." Daniel was staring over Sam's shoulder at the computer screen, and looking scared.
Buffy, Jack and Xander rushed up behind them. It took a moment for Buffy to figure out what she was looking at, the image was tilted almost upside down. When she figured that out, she realized that it was the inside of the stairway, under the slab. One of them must have dropped their goggles on the stairway before they came out. She could see dozens of the spiders crawling across the frame, and something else. Something a lot bigger.
"Uh-oh," said Xander. "Looks like Shelob is here."
