For notes, warnings and disclaimers see chapter 1

Chapter 27: Smoke and Mirrors
(Jack's POV)

As I watch Carter from the lab's door even I can tell that she is just pretending to work, keeping herself busy with something that doesn't really require much thought --or at least not by her standards-- and the fact that I can tell that is saying something, especially considering that I don't have the first clue as to what she's doing in there 99 percent of the time.

"Hey," I say as I walk in the door.

"Good morning, sir," she greets me, sounding even more formal than she usually does.

"So, whatcha doing?"

"I was just measuring the energy output of a..."

"Let me rephrase that, can it wait a while?" I interrupt her.

"Sir?"

"You've got a minute?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good, come on, I feel like taking a walk."

"Sir?"

"You know, I want to go topside, to get out of under this mountain, to feel the sun on my face... feel free to stop me if any of this sounds remotely familiar, Carter."

"Yes, sir."

Five minutes later we are walking away from the compound, away from the security cameras and the prying eyes. It's a nice day out here... sometimes we tend to forget that working underground as we do. I swear that I spend more time under other suns than under my own. The thing is that we have a beautiful planet but today the fact that it's a nice day just seems incredibly wrong.

I wait for Carter to say something, to give me some kind of sign but she isn't saying anything, not that I'm particularly surprised by that fact. I think I've received more 'yes, sirs' from her in the past few minutes than I get from the average new recruit in a week. She's hiding behind military protocol --even more than she usually does-- and that's bound to make this even harder. Deciding that subtle just ain't me, I decide to cut to the chase.

"Why didn't you say something?" I ask.

"Sir?"

"Would you please drop the 'sir', Carter?" I snap. I don't expect her to call me by name but I could do without the 'sir' right now, I mean, we are the only people here so it's a pretty safe bet that she's not addressing anyone else.

"Sorry, s..."

"Ah, ah, ah... what did I just say?" I ask, cutting her off.

"Sorry."

"Good, now, why didn't you say something? And I'm not talking about Warner, I'm talking about what happened back in Simarka when we first got you out, about what happened before we came back," I ask.

"Moughal," she says... not that that is much of an explanation.

"Moughal? What does he have to do with anything?"

"He was with you and he..."

"He what?"

"A woman must bear her pain in silence," she whispers.

"What kind of crap is that?" I ask. It doesn't sound like something she would say, not by a long shot.

"It's what Turghan said. I..." she trails off.

"You what?" I encourage her to go on.

"I didn't know how Moughal would react to anything I said and I knew you didn't know the ways of the Shavadai , sir. I mean, sure, Moughal was nowhere near as bad as Turghan but he followed the same rules. I knew I..."

"What did you know?" I prod, choosing to ignore that 'sir'... at least as long as she's willing to talk to me, as long as that damned 'sir' doesn't become her whole vocabulary.

"I knew I couldn't afford to break the rules and I was afraid you'd say something that would end up getting me in trouble again, besides, it wasn't like there was anything you could possibly have done anyway," she says, shrugging her shoulders.

"We could have gotten you back home right away, that's something! We certainly could have kept you from going back to fight Turghan!" I say, trying hard not to yell at her.

"But Nya would have been killed!" she exclaims, sounding more than a little horrified at that thought... not that it is a particularly pleasant one.

"You were in no shape to fight him, damn it!" I remind her. "Do you have any idea how dangerous that was? You could have been killed and we were so badly outnumbered that even with our weapons I wasn't sure we could have fought our way out of there... not to mention that in doing so we would almost certainly have triggered a war between the People of the Steppes and the People of the Forest. I know you were worried about that girl but the risk you took, challenging Turghan when you were hurt was..."

"Believe me, sir, no one knew what was at stake in that fight better than I did. I knew I couldn't lose and I didn't, but Nya had defied her father because of what I had said to her and I couldn't let her die for it. It was my mess and I had to clean it up somehow!" she insists, sounding almost desperate.

"You were hurt!"

"With all due respect, sir, that's not the issue," she reminds me, refusing to accept the obvious euphemism. "You've known I was hurt for months and you've never brought it up before."

"Well, maybe I should have had! What the hell were you thinking?" I insist.

"As I said, sir, I couldn't let Nya die. You have no idea what that camp was like, what women in that world went through... and not just women in Turghan's clan," she says, looking down at her hands and I get the funny feeling that there's something I'm still missing here --something big-- the problem is that I don't have the first clue as to what that 'something' could possibly be.

"Then tell me," I all but challenge her.

"After I first escaped, he wasn't going to hurt me... not until after I challenged him to do it," she admits.

"What do you mean?"

"Back at the camp Nya's mother was in charge of all of Turghan's women so she was deemed to be responsible for my behavior, for my escape," she explains. "When I was brought back it wasn't me he was going to punish, it was her because she was the one who had failed in her duties but I told Turghan that if he had to beat someone to feel like a man he should beat me and he did. After I had been sent back to the women's area Nya and I started talking. Even after what her father had done to me, even after Nya had warned me that he would not hesitate to kill me and after I had seen how women were treated, I kept encouraging her to defy him. I kept telling her that they'd never be free unless they stood up for themselves and that was a mistake, a big one. I should have known better... the abyss was too great for that defiance to do anything but get her killed and I should have realized that much! It was a situation in which if change was going to come it was bound to come slowly... or from a man, as was the case when Moughal decided to allow his clan's women to show their faces in public. It wasn't a situation in which women could afford to take the initiative, not to that extent. You know the old saying 'you have to crawl before you walk'? Well, I totally forgot about it and rather than encourage Nya to craw I encouraged her to take what amounted to a huge leap forward. I really didn't think things through and she was about to pay the price for my mistake. I couldn't leave her there to die any more than I could let her mother be punished for my actions."

"And that's why you insisted on going back?" I ask.

"Yes," she admits. "At first I didn't know I was going to have to fight Turghan, that was not the plan, and I figured that as long as I stayed close to the rest of you I'd be safe, but once we were there --once it became apparent that he wasn't going to fight Moughal for Nya's life-- I knew I couldn't just walk away."

"So you fought him..."

"Yes, sir," she says. "There was no other way and I wasn't going to stand by and watch her be stoned to death by her own father. I would never have been able to live with myself if I hadn't done something about it so I challenged Turghan and I won."

"It was too dangerous!" I exclaim. I can certainly understand where she's coming from but still when I think of what could have happened if that fight had ended in any other way...

"Maybe, but I was the only one who could do it, sir, don't you see? Daniel had said that I was the chieftain and that meant that none of you could hope to challenge him in Moughal's place because the old law we were appealing to in the first place required that the one issuing the challenge be another chieftain. There was no other way," she insists.

"But you were hurt!" I say, even though I know she's right.

"I was more than a little sore, I won't deny that, but you know as well as I do that none of my injuries were life threatening, in fact they weren't even serious," she points out, still downplaying their significance... and turning a deliberate blind eye to the real issue. "The flogger Turghan used on me was specifically designed to be used on women. It was meant to cause a considerable amount of pain and it left me with some pretty deep and extensive bruising but at the same time it wasn't meant to break the skin or cause any kind of permanent damage so it really wasn't anything I couldn't handle. In Simarka women were valued as property and because of that that flogger had been designed to 'protect' that property... or at least its market value. Turghan was furious when he used it on me, believe me, he didn't hold anything back and the beating I took was probably far worse than what was the norm but in spite of that he only managed to break the skin in a couple of places... and even those cuts weren't deep enough to require stitches."

"That's not the point!" I all but yell at her, more than a little frustrated with all this tap-dancing.

"Then what's the point, sir?" she asks, even though I know she knows what I mean and she knows I know she knows.

"The point is that..." I can't believe we are arguing over this, it has nothing to do with anything. I'm trying to figure out what to say when all of a sudden I realize exactly what she's doing. "You are trying to distract me, aren't you?"

"Sir?"

"And we are back to that. I told you, drop the sir... and cut the crap! This is not about your back being bruised by that bastard and you know it! Why didn't you tell us you'd been raped?" I ask, point blank. It makes me sick to say it out loud but I know that, as long as I keep trying to avoid that word, Carter is going to be able to deflect my questions... heck, I know she can talk circles around me even when she isn't trying.

"I don't know," she says, not meeting my eyes. "Moughal was there, I couldn't afford to stop and think about any of it so I just didn't, and then after I'd had time to think things through I had already kept it out of my report and there was no going back... besides I couldn't see how it could possibly be anybody's business but my own. I still don't!"

Well, at least that got her angry... not that that's much of an improvement. Why did I ever think I could do this? Oh, wait, that's right... I never did.

Author's notes: So we've finally come to Jack's confrontation with Sam, now the question is how's Sam going to react to Jack's pushing.

Also, thanks for the reviews for last week's chapter (especially considering how the site was acting up), as always they are deeply appreciated.

Take care and keep reviewing!

Alec