Loki couldn't have looked more stunned if Ian had whacked him on the head again.

"You know?"

Ian sat down in the chair, too tired really to keep his feet even though he was still furious.

"Yeah."

"How?"

"None of your fucking business."

Which of course it was, but he was beyond caring. He ran his hand along the panels that were labeled 'comm', pushing things at random, but Loki wasn't paying attention to what he was doing.

"You must help us."

"Like you're helping me? Fat chance."

"The Asgard are a dying race, boy… we-"

"If you call me a boy again, I'm going to toss you out the airlock."

"My ship does not have an airlock."

"Whatever. How do I call the others?"

"I will not tell you. Not until you help me."

"I'll figure it out."

He pushed another button, and suddenly the alarms in the ship were once more screaming at them.

"What was that?" Ian asked, looking down at the panels on the chair.

"It is the proximity alarm," Loki said, and now his voice had an odd sound to it. Odd enough to make Ian look over at him. The Asgard wasn't looking at the chair, however. He was looking up at the headsup display. Ian looked, too, and scowled.

"Shit."

"Indeed."

Closing in on their position – which was marked in the center of the display with a tiny green dot – was a larger ship, one that the Asgard computer identified for the occupants. It was Goa'uld.

OOOOOOOOO

"What do you mean?" Sam asked. "Save your race…?"

Thor sighed.

"The Asgard have a serious problem, Major," he said. "One that we've known about for a long time but haven't managed to find a solution to."

"It's the genetic problem, isn't it?" Jack asked, causing everyone on the bridge to look at him in various degrees of surprise.

"How did you know that?" Thor asked.

"Because Do- someone I know – knew – told me that you guys had a problem. One that the Ancients tried to warn you about a long time before it actually became a problem."

"Who was it?" Thor asked.

"I can't tell you that," Jack said, shrugging. "It was told to me in confidence."

"But-"

"What exactly is the problem the Asgard are facing?" Sam asked, curiously. She, too, remembered when Dotty had told them about the Asgard problem – but Dotty hadn't told them what it was. Only that Shawn was ultimately the solution to it. Sam wasn't surprised that Jack had left Shawn's parentage out of things, and she had no intention of bringing it up, either. As far as they knew, Thor didn't know Shawn was Ancient – and certainly didn't know there was Asgard in his genetic make up as well. "You've mentioned it before now, but never really said what it was…"

Thor turned to Sam, and then to Shawn.

"The Asgard are going to be facing critical genetic problems in the next generation or two…"

"Why's that?" Janet asked, surprised.

"They reproduce by cloning themselves," Shawn said, remembering something that he'd been told once. And now he was beginning to put all the little pieces of information he'd been given over the past several years together. "There must be a problem with the process…?"

"Not the process," Thor corrected. "With the clones themselves."

"What do you mean?" Jack asked.

"It is a long story," Thor said. "But there was once a time when my people looked much like your own."

"I figured that…"

Otherwise Shawn would have at least some kind of Asgard characteristics – no matter how diluted that blood was over however many generations had passed between those Asgard and Ancients that had been his ultimate grandparents and himself.

"Over many millennium, the clones became less and less like what we once were, and more like what we look like now."

"Why would that happen?" Jack asked.

"Because they're making a copy of a copy," Sam guessed, even as Shawn started to say the same thing. "They're not using the original copy, but clones of that one. Right?"

Thor nodded.

"Worse than that, really. We're using copies that are much further along – and are no longer stable. Our people suffer from many problems with internal organs and-"

"Why not just go back and use the original again?" Jack asked.

"It has long been lost to us. We have… a copy that isn't quite human looking, and isn't as bad as what ours have become, hidden in a secret laboratory that we are trying to work with to stabilize, but it is not working, because even that copy is too far gone from the original to be stable."

"It's like when you make a copy of a letter or something," Sam explained to Jack – and Teal'c. "The more times you copy that, the more chances there are that something can contaminate the copies and they become less and less defined as the-"

"I get it," Jack said. "What are you planning on doing about it?"

"We are-"

He was interrupted by a soft beeping from the arm of his command chair, and he looked down at it.

"What's up?" Jack asked.

"We are receiving a distress call."

"From…?"

Thor pushed a button on his chair arm, and looked up.

"From Loki's ship."