A/N (2/27/05): Sometimes I wonder if anyone's even reading this. If you are, please review. Just so I know how I'm doing. Although my mentor tells me I'm doing fine. In fact, she says she thinks I can get "Death and His Shadow" published. Problem is, that's a totally different style than this.

Lol! I just came across the place where my drama teacher checked off my story because she thought it was my drama journal. She said that it was very thoughtful, as I recall. It's the part where I'm telling Jim how useless he is.

So we found ourselves a spaceship. Don't ask me how; I don't rightly recall. I think it was Nai'óbí who found it, but I could be wrong. I don't really care. I was bored most of the time anyway. I amused myself for a while by walking around with my eyes closed, using my psychic powers to keep from running into walls, but a person can only do that for so long before it palls. When I bored of that, I drew. Psychic powers are a great asset for an artist. I didn't have to keep looking up at what I was drawing; I could see it while still looking at the paper. Except it was more parchment than paper, because I wasn't about to delve into my stash of real paper just so I could draw some things. Besides, all the paper I'd brought with me was lined.

Finally someone brought back the news that a spaceship had been found. Probably Jim. Yeah, it must've been Jim. He'd enlisted Vaira to help kill the Jaffa warriors inside the small ship. She burned them. Not a pleasant way to die.

More Jaffa were sent down in death gliders to see what had happened to the first batch. They were also burned alive.

Jack assigned us all to death gliders based on team and flying experience. Naturally, I got stuck with the kid.

"You ever flown one of these things before?" I asked as I strapped into the back seat. It smelled faintly of scorched flesh. A very sickly-sweet smell akin in my mind to burnt marshmallow. Actually, burnt marshmallow isn't that bad anymore, since that time when we did a chemical reaction involving Osama bin Gummy Bear and the room smelled like burnt marshmallow for the rest of the day.

Blake gave me a superior look. "I've done better than anyone else in simulations."

"I'm sure you have," I said patronizingly, "but that doesn't answer my question. Have you ever actually flown one before?" Actually, at this point I wasn't entirely certain I wanted to know, and was proceeding on pure stubbornness. Either he hadn't flown one, or he'd crashed the only one he had flown.

"No, but that's beside the point," he said defensively. He went on to give me a lecture about how good the simulations were.

Some things never change.

"Kid," I interrupted, "shut up and fly this thing or I'll give you a lecture on different types of make-up."

He didn't shut up, but he did start up the death glider.

"So, Blake," I said casually. "Do you remember the difference between lipstick and lip gloss?" Then I launched into my lecture.

Nai'óbí's glider got to the mothership before ours did. That wasn't very hard to do, since Blake and I got there last. I could see her in my head as she took out the Jaffa warriors who seemed to be expecting her. There was no sign of the others. She and Jim, who had flown her glider (apparently he'd had one of those insights of his that told him how the thing worked) secured the immediate area and settled down to wait for us laggards.

An order went out throughout the ship for the Jaffa to go to the glider launch bay.

"Get ready for company, kid," I said.

I had to hand it to him, the kid could fly. I couldn't shoot, but he could fly.

We managed to land safely in the launch bay, no thanks to my shooting, most of which hit the big mothership and not the little gliders. Although I think I actually managed to damage the big ship a little bit. We were greeted by the Jaffa who'd been left behind in case of this eventuality. Unfortunately for them, Nai'óbí had discovered the wonders of the zat'nikatel. As soon as the area pressurized, she came out of one of the gliders and shot the Jaffa as they entered the bay.

"The groups you call SG-1 and SG-13 have been taken prisoner," Nai'óbí reported. "We are the only ones to remain."

"Yes, yes, I know," I said impatiently. I caught a question on her mind: How does she know? Lord Jim's powers are gone here; hers should be too. "I'll explain later, Nai'óbí. For now, you'll just have to trust me." I took a deep breath. "Okay, I guess this leaves me in charge. So here's what we do: we get to the bridge, take over the ship, and fly it into Omalyan space. Jim, any clues on how to fly this thing?"

"I can fly it," Blake said confidently. Oh dear God.

"Who don't we free Méra and Zak and your friends and escape in the gliders?" Jim demanded.

I was so tempted to say, "Because I said so," but I knew that it would just cause problems. Blake would follow orders (hopefully), and for some reason Nai'óbí trusted me, but Jim was a stubborn son of a gun, and he wanted answers. "Because these guys know your weakness, and we can't let them get away." And we can't afford to take the time to rescue the others. It would give the Goa'uld time that we just don't have to spare. Plus I didn't know which one of Tobeson or Weis was the traitor, and I didn't want to find out the hard way. "Okay, Jim, you're sort of the useless one here—sorry, but you are—so you put on one of those shining armor deals and go report to the Goa'uld head honcho dude that the intruders were killed, but so were most of the Jaffa sent to subdue them. Here." I reached into my pocket and scrounged around until I encountered something that felt like a pen. At least, I thought it did. I don't know how I could have confused my liquid eyeliner with a pen, but I did. I don't even know what the eyeliner was doing in my pocket in the first place. It didn't really matter; the eyeliner would work better than a pen anyway. "Observe, Blake, one of the many uses of liquid eyeliner." I opened the eyeliner and used it to draw the Jaffa warrior dude symbol on Jim's forehead. It was the snakey symbol like the one on the foreheads of the real Jaffa warriors. I have some talent for art, and drawing symbols is my strength, so it turned out pretty well.

"Let's find the bridge," I said to Nai'óbí and Blake as Jim left.

"It's this way," Blake said confidently, leading us in the opposite direction from the one in which Jim had gone. He had a pretty good sense of direction, so I trusted him. Even though I wanted him to be wrong. He could be so bossy at times.

Well, it turned out he was right. We didn't encounter any real trouble, just a couple of Jaffa patrols which we evaded easily. I swear, hatak vessels were designed for sneaking.

So, anyhoo, we made it to the bridge without incident and killed the Jaffa who were there. Luckily Mr. Head Honcho Goa'uld wasn't there. Black closed the doors and shot out the mechanisms to open them. He stood in front of the controls and placed his hand in the middle. The controls, by the way, looked more like a palm scanner than the controls to a spaceship.

The ship didn't more. It still wasn't moving about an hour later when Mr. Head Honcho Goa'uld decided he wanted onto the bridge and started banging on the doors.

"I thought you said you could fly this thing," I said to Blake.

"I'm trying," he said defensively.

"Well, stop trying and start doing."

The door opened a crack, and the Jaffa began to fire at us.

"Nai'óbí, help me hold them off!" We positioned ourselves behind barriers and fired back at the Jaffa through the crack in the door. Nai'óbí was hit by a zat blast, but she shook it off quickly and returned fire.

Finally Blake got the ship moving—so abruptly it threw all of us against the walls with enough force to knock us out. Well, except for me. See, I'm half-cat (not really, that's just something I say, but I think I was a cat in a past life), so I managed to land on my feet against the wall. Or, rather, foot. And it wasn't a very good landing. Actually, it was a very bad landing. It broke my left leg.

I started cursing in about twenty different languages, interspersed with rants at my unconscious brother for ruining my record of having never broken a bone in my life.

Meanwhile, the ship continued to speed toward Omalyan space. I hopped on one leg toward the control panel hand scanner thingamajig, hoping that I'd be able to slow us down before we crashed into the planer. Unfortunately, I had no more luck than Blake, but I refused to give up. Dum spiro, spero.

Oh, God, I'm going to die. I don't want to die. What will my parents think? What will Hammond tell them? "I'm sorry, your son and daughter were involved in an accident while working in CheyenneMountain. No, we can't tell you what happened. It's classified. No, we weren't able to recover the bodies." God. We're supposed to be studying deep-space radar telemetry. Well, at least we'll die on Omalya. Maybe we'll become ghosts. Maybe Zak will resurrect us. Come on, damn ship, slow dow—ow! I was thrown forward across the controls as the ship slowed abruptly. "I thought there were supposed to be inertial dampeners on these things," I said to no one in particular. I remembered that much from Blake's lecture.

"You shot them in the firefight," Jim informed me as he entered the bridge.

"Ow," I replied, unable to form a more coherent response.

"Rachel!" Jim called over his shoulder. "Our rescuer needs help."