And hopefully my dividers will show up this time. They were edited out somehow by in chapter 10.
Janet was through with walking—her legs were going on strike—by the time the Jaffa got her back to the holding cell. Thankfully the Colonel was fast enough to catch her in a half-hazard manner before she could hit the floor face first.
"Easy there Doc," he cautioned her good-naturedly. "You never let me out of bed when I'm in such poor shape, and yet here you are—gallivanting all around the mothership." He tsk-tsk'ed while helping her settle comfortably against the far wall, earning a glare from her that could boil ice.
"If you ever bring this incident up as proof that you should be discharged from the infirmary early, I will have your hospital gown stapled to your bed." Janet didn't even bother to add a 'Sir' as an afterthought. She outranked him in medical matters anyway.
"You know how flimsy those things are," he rebutted. "It wouldn't be much of a deterrent."
"Then I'd staple you to the bed!" She spoke this time through gritted teeth as she tried to tighten the dressing on her leg wound. Very seldom in her life had she regretted being a doctor. Wealths of medical information were useful in most situations of this sort—when it meant there was something she could do. In this case all it meant was that she knew exactly how bad her leg wound was, and how much worse it was going to get. Second and third degree burns on most of the front and side of her lower leg and extensive muscle and soft tissue damage internally. In her first examination she had hoped the internal damage wasn't too bad, but the continued bleeding was a bad sign. She was certain the artery was fine, as the bleeding wasn't high pressure or bright red. Hopefully it was just a nick in one of the larger veins, and nothing more serious. Hopefully. She consciously shut the injury out of her mind at this point. 'Don't dwell!' she chided herself, shushing the part of her brain that insisted on continuing to search for a diagnosis or solution—some things are just hard wired. The Colonel's question was a welcome interruption to her thoughts.
"What did you learn?" he asked, entering interrogation mode.
"Olorun has Sam working in some lab to find a cure for the Olokun's contagion."
"How is she supposed to do that?" Daniel interjected.
"She has a computer terminal separated from the rest of the ship's systems with a lot of symptomatic information, and some mechanical descriptions and technical scans. There are a collection of engineering and diagnostic tools at her disposal. Olorun has allegedly given her everything he has on the contagion. She is to find a cure, or we all die."
"Of course," the Daniel commented unhappily. "And if she doesn't find a cure she and Jacob die, leaving the rest of us doomed anyway."
"Was she showing any symptoms yet?" the Colonel inquired. She had a unique physiology and it was uncertain how and how quickly the nanites would affect her.
"She seemed fine through most of our discussion. There were no signs of fever or illness yet."
"That's good to hear." If her symptoms developed quickly and overwhelmed her efforts toward a cure, she was as good as dead. "Was there anything useful in that lab?" the Colonel asked quietly, conveying his meaning in his glance.
"No, sir," Janet said with a sigh of defeat. "Sam said the tools she was given were fairly innocuous."
"She won't have time," broke in a voice from the edge of their circle, surprising all.
"Jake!" Jack said, turning to the prone figure. "Nice of you to join us."
"I was listening," Jacob started, unnecessarily. "The Tollan technology is too advanced, even for most of the select Tok'ra scientists who have been allowed to try to understand it. The engineering and physics they use in their designs is based on mathematics and physics far beyond even what Sam understands. That is why it took the System Lords so long to figure out who to blame. It just didn't seem possible that a Goa'uld would be able to make the changes necessary to turn the Tollan's medical technology into a plague." He finished with a hacking cough, his breath spent.
"So she has to do the impossible," the Colonel summarized nonchalantly, trying to keep spirits up. "She does that everyday."
"That is impossible!" Sam said out loud, seeing no reason at this point to refrain from sharing her frustration with her guards. Maybe she could annoy them do death.Sam had been pouring over the images of the nanites for almost five hours since Janet had left, trying to understand the mechanics behind their programming. The water the human slave had brought her was gone, but the food was forgotten and untouched. The bowl's contents didn't smell like much (from a distance anyway—and it seemed smarter not to examine too closely) but the chunks of what appeared to be meat just seemed like a bad idea. Despite the amount of water she had consumed, she was still incredibly thirsty. She was uncomfortably warm and had started to perspire. As her head began to throb her symptoms could no longer be shrugged off.
"Dammit!" They had probably been on the ship for about twelve hours, and she imagined that was plenty of time for the nanites to find her and get to work destroying her from the inside out. Not that she was surprised. She gave a small humorless laugh. SG-1 seemed to have taken up residence between a rock and a hard place. Thankfully (in a roundabout way) Janet had removed her spleen a year and a half earlier after a mission went bad and she took an arrow at an odd angle. Maybe it would progress more slowly in her since it had less to attack, or because she had no symbiote. Or maybe that would leave more nanites to go after her lungs. All the more reason to find an answer.
"It's so damn intricate I would be in awe under different circumstances," she explained to her guards. The one on the left ignored her, continuing to stare at the far wall. The one on the right just met her eyes, following her movements. She was aware that he had been watching her closely.
"The nanites are made out of naquadah themselves, which allows them to withstand incredible internal and external pressures. And the shape—they look like tiny, short eggs. Have you ever tried to crush and egg in your fist without using your thumb?" The Jaffa didn't answer so she assumed that was a 'negative.' "The pressure is transferred and balanced throughout the shell and its contents, so it won't break." She spun around, gesturing to the images she had pasted to the wall of the nanites innards. "This uses a similar technique. Which just makes it that much harder to destroy." Sam trailed off in thought, her hands on her hips.
"The entire thing designed from the molecular level up. Individual atoms are bonded and aligned just so, with everything in its place. The outer shell is seamless at first glance, but is embedded with telescoping arms like Freitas' that physically grab the microbes. And instead of being directed into an ingestion port like the one Freitas has designed, it hugs the microbe to itself tightly. Then it makes an incision, and literally sucks out the internal contents of the microbe, breaks them down into their component parts—cellulose, mitochondria, nitrogen bases, etc.—that the body can then use for repair."
"It's beautifully efficient!" she explained, still pacing slowly in front of the images. Only occasionally did she turn to face her audience. "But Olokun ruined it. It still destroys, but doesn't digest. The microbes or errant cells are torn apart and left to poison the bloodstream. Most likely they still deliver oxygen to the rest of the body's tissue because the nanites needs the gas exchange to maintain structural integrity, and it appears to be a core function of the design. That part isn't controlled by programming. It is controlled by sensitive internal pressure sensors."
"And the glucose engine is deceptively simple, but efficient and effective. It might possibly be the worst part about all of this, although I understand why they use it. Other fuels in the body could easily be used to fuel these bugs, but this one is the closest to the body's natural processes. And more importantly, this tiny glucose engine doesn't care about electromagnet interference." Both Jaffa were starting to look less than pleased with her running monologue, but she continued anyway. Speaking out loud made it easier to concentrate with the increasing pounding in her head. Did the Goa'uld have advil?
She paused for a moment and sat on her stool with her head in her hand, staring down at the floor. The images themselves were redundant. It was all in her head now. She just had to sift through, and find the central computer. It's design would give her the clues she needed to learn how to communicate with it—and hopefully to reprogram it.
Thanks for reading! Please review, if only to tell me it was worth the handful of minutes of your life that it to took to read.
And i'm taking a bit of a poll for a decision about some upcoming chapters. Does anyone want to see some (subtle most likely) Daniel/Janet ship? It won't be nearly as large a part of the plot as Sam/Jack, but I can definitely expand on their friendship in a shippy direction. Just tell me what you want!