The guards--there were two of them now, for added security--had just closed the door and left him alone when the first convulsions hit him.
If they'd get worried and move him back to the infirmary... He really hated being there. He'd spent more than enough time in the infirmary in his own reality. In this one, he'd actually been there more than anywhere else. Besides, being stuck there would jeopardize everything. He wouldn't have it.
He fell to the bed and bit his teeth together, trying to keep as quiet as he could, so the guards wouldn't notice anything was going on.
But it was so hard. It hurt so much.
There was no other feeling that came even close to the effects of entropic cascade failure. Experiencing pain because of some medical reason, regular or alien, that was one thing. Feeling one's very being torn apart because it violated the laws of temporal physics was far worse. There were no words sufficient for it.
He couldn't imagine how it'd feel to die like this. But he wouldn't need to find out. He'd survive. Whatever it took.
The fit didn't last long, although it felt like hours. His watch showed that hardly any time had passed. A minute, if even that. Not very bad to begin with. It'd get worse soon enough.
The most important thing was, no one had heard a thing. No one had burst in to see if he was all right, and to drag him away from this room.
He lay back on the bed and tried to think of nothing at all. Empty his mind of all the horrors that lurked in the corners.
Maybe he could sleep. Just a bit. A few hours. That was the most he could hope for. He hadn't slept properly in three years. Being in a nasty situation in a reality that wasn't his probably wouldn't help a lot.
Jack swept yet another corridor with the TER, and found nothing.
So far, no one had found anything. So, TER was short for Transphase Eradication Rod, which was about as awful a name as Jack had ever heard. And it was supposed to reveal pretty much all things invisible. They'd successfully used it to find and stop the Retou, a sort of invisible aliens, and it'd worked on Nirrti's invisibility device as well.
If there really was something invisible following Jackson, this should work. Except that the base was huge, and there were so many places where an invisible killer could hide. At least there was nothing hiding in this particular corridor.
"Level 15, corridor 6 clear," Jack radioed, and moved on to the next one.
Of course, it was perfectly possible that they had an invisible thing of a completely other type in here. Something like the Ashrak that the System lords had sent after Jolinar, or maybe even a frank and old-fashioned Goa'uld hiding in someone.
They were doing everything they could to rule out all possibilities. Jack figured they should be pretty good at this already, considering how many times the base had already been compromised.
They had mobilzied all the men they could spare to scan the base, using all the TERs they had. Doc Fraiser had her hands full of work as well, since now she had to organize a full-scale parasite hunt, checking all personnel as fast and as thoroughly as possible. That, of course, came second to her all-important task of keeping Teal'c alive.
Hammond had put the base in quarantine. Nothing came in, nothing went out. There were two exceptions to that, though: the security video tapes from Area 51, which wouldn't arrive until late next morning, and the Tok'ra, who should be coming in through the gate a bit sooner than that.
As much as Jack hated being too dependent on their off-world allies, this was one case where they really could use any help the Tok'ra could offer. They'd be able to recognize any Goa'ulds on sight, even faster than Teal'c, who couldn't do anything now anyway, let alone Carter, with her residual Jolinar stuff. And hopefully they'd know something about the quantum mirror technology, so they could fix it and send Jackson away, before things got too nasty for him.
Another empty corridor done. "Level 15, corridor 5 clear."
Jack figured he hadn't been entirely fair with Daniel. He'd just told Daniel to go to sleep, when he'd stayed wide awake himself, planning stuff with the General and then putting the plans in motion. But even Hammond had agreed that Daniel might not be of much help to them in his current state of mind.
Jackson could hardly have chosen a worse time to pop in. Jack just wished they'd get this over with really soon. One part of him said that they should just fix the mirror and get rid of Jackson, and hope that his problems, whatever they might be, would just go away with him. Maybe he'd get hurt or accused of murder in some other universe too, but that'd be someone else's problem. The rest of his mind protested strongly against that. They couldn't just send him away without doing their best to help him. They would never do it to Daniel, so how could they do it to his counterpart?
Someone knocked at the lab door.
Before Sam had the time to do a thing about it, the door opened, and a tired-looking Colonel O'Neill stepped in.
"So, I'm not the only one working at odd hours," he told her.
"Can't waste time sleeping," Sam replied.
They really couldn't. She was surprised that Jackson hadn't started going through ECF yet, but that didn't mean it wouldn't happen all too soon. Even when they'd get the mirror fixed--and she was sure they'd manage it--even then, it'd take time to skim through realities and find a suitable one.
"Any luck?"
"Not really. I'm just trying to understand this as well as possible, so we'll have something to work on when the Tok'ra get here. Can't expect them to do all the work just like that. I don't think they know this technology all that well, either, since the Goa'uld apparently haven't even heard of it... Anyway, what about you? Finished already?"
"Finally. Took a while. Lots of people cursing and complaining. But we got there, and we found nothing. Nada. Zip."
Sam looked at her watch. 4 AM. Wow. She could hardly believe it was that late already. She'd completely lost track of time, totally absorbed in the delicate work of prying apart the partially melted components, and trying to get the vaguest idea of what they were for.
"Nothing at all? That's good," she answered him absently.
"But is it? It would've given us the easiest explanation. Just find the invisible bad guy and get rid of them, and end of story. Now, we've got a whole lot of other possibilities to pick from. Maybe it's an invisible bad guy who's good at hiding. Or a parasite. Or Jackson himself."
"You really think it could be him?"
"I'm definitely not going to rule that one out, until we find the real bad guy. You know, the knife that the attacker used, that was from the mess. Jackson had been to the mess. He could've taken it."
"But there were no fingerprints... And they found nothing from Teal'c's room that could've been used to cover the hilt and prevent them. Not to mention that Jackson said he'd been framed before, and really skillfully. This would certainly support that. Besides, Jackson got hit too."
"Yeah. Maybe the evil parasite option's the most plausible one right now. But there's the slight problem that no one could've entered Teal'c's room without being noticed by the guards, the security cameras in the corridor, Jackson and Teal'c. So, an evil parasite who can go invisible at will?"
"It could just be an invisible thing that's not using transphasal technology at all, but something else entirely. We don't know what the Nox used, for example. And who knows, it might be able to walk through walls, like the Tollans. We might not have the means to find it, let alone eliminate it."
"Carter, make my night, and don't say that. If it'd be something so weird and alien, how come the guys at Jackson's end of the mirror had no idea at all of it?"
Sam rubbed her tired eyes. "We can't know for sure. We can ask the Tok'ra if they know anything about other invisibility devices. And I'm sure the Area 51 tapes will reveal something. At least we might find out what happened to the mirror. I think the two things are combined. Someone probably broke it because they didn't want Jackson to have that way out."
"And that's one of the few things that say 'it wasn't him'. Good for him. Because if he did it, he's..." Jack shook his head. "He's so going to regret ever entering our reality."
Sha're was standing right in front of him, smiling at him, as beautiful as ever, the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen.
Daniel stepped closer, and smiled back at her.
Her eyes flashed. Glowed. Her smile changed, twisted, into a wicked grin. Her face remained beautiful, but the beauty behind it, that of her spirit, her soul, it faded away. She wasn't Sha're, she was Amaunet. A Goa'uld. She laughed at his soft, weak, human feelings.
Amaunet raised her hand, and caught him in the glowing beam of the hand device. He gasped in pain, felt his knees giving in.
And then, in a flash, it was over, and they were both on the ground.
The glow of her eyes went off once and for all as Amaunet died, and for a passing moment, he could see Sha're's spirit reflected in her eyes again, heard her last words, saying she loved him, for one last time. And then she was gone forever.
Teal'c was there, standing beside them. He had done it.
"I am sorry, Daniel Jackson," Teal'c told him.
Teal'c had done the right thing. Daniel knew that. Sha're had told him to forgive Teal'c. But how could he? How could he forgive, when she was gone forever, even though they could've saved her?
What did it matter if she might've killed Daniel first, if they could've saved her? Why should he live, when she was dead?
"Teal'c--why? It wasn't the only way," he whispered. "I can't forgive... It wasn't right."
Daniel bolted up in his bed, breathing fast.
That wasn't what he'd said. He'd said what he had wanted to say, what she had wanted him to say.
He didn't really think what he'd said in that dream, in that nightmare. He couldn't. Teal'c was hurt. Teal'c might die, too. Teal'c had done the right thing. He had to forgive Teal'c.
The doubt, the uncertainty, had remained in his mind. Jackson had brought it to the surface, made it awfully clear. He'd asked if Daniel really believed Teal'c had had no choice. And now, the thought wouldn't let him go.
He couldn't sleep. He'd slept a few hours already, and that was enough.
He got up and dressed, and headed to his office. He had plenty of unfinished work from a dozen different worlds waiting for him there. He could mercifully forget all this when he got into an interesting new translation.
He was waiting for the elevator, when the world suddenly stopped making sense.
All of a sudden, a pain unlike anything he'd ever known engulfed him. It felt like he was going to implode, fall apart, cell by cell, until nothing at all remained. He felt the convulsions gripping his body, fell to his knees, and then down to the floor, hitting his head to the wall.
It was gone as fast as it came, leaving him gasping on the floor, shocked.
He heard the elevator doors open, and then a slightly blurred, definitely worried Sam appeared in his field of vision.
"Daniel? You all right? What happened?"
"I--I guess so, now--I've no idea. I just, suddenly... Everything fell apart--it really hurt... Like nothing I've ever felt..." with all his linguistic competence, he could hardly put together one proper sentence.
The look on her face suggested that she had an idea, but she didn't like it at all.
"Come on, we'd better get you to the infirmary," she said, and half-dragged him to the elevator.
He was feeling a lot better already. He stayed up, leaning on the wall. He had the nagging feeling that he should know what was going on, but he didn't. He didn't think he'd been attacked. If someone had weapons that felt that bad at their use, they'd wouldn't go at Teal'c with a bread knife.
"Sam? You've got an idea, right?"
"Yeah, but it makes no sense. I don't know how it could be possible--I mean, theoretically, it's plausible that you'd feel it too, but not before him..." she mumbled.
Vague as that was, it was enough. He got it too, now.
"Entropic cascade failure," he said aloud. "I'm getting it too."
"Jackson said that ECF is nearly impossible to predict, and that though they've studied the mirror more than we, they haven't been able to come up with a working theory on it," Sam explained. "I guess his universe just really is very similar to ours. All too similar."