Sorry for the delay in updating. I seem to be having a lot of trouble writing for Daniel in Season 9 but I really wanted to explore what the changes he has gone through would do to a friendship he has had for most of his life. You won't see much of that in this chapter, but it will be in the story.
Thanks must go out to the creators and writers of Wikipedia who prevented me from making a great big continuity error. Who knew they had information on Stargate?
In the last chapter, Cameron's line should have read, "Especially one whose husband seems to be working for the bad guys."
Previously:
"Stay with me until I'm asleep?" she asked.
"Of course." He leaned over and kissed Ella's forehead as she closed her eyes. Ignoring all of the work he had to do, he watched her sleep.
Ella slept deep and hard. She was exhausted. She did not wake when her bed was wheeled from the regular infirmary to the medical isolation room. She did not stir when Daniel finally had to leave her side, nor did she notice when a larger, silent man replaced him in his vigil.
In the darkness, she dreamed…
She lay in a warm, white room. To her side was a beautiful rocking chair that held her husband, rocking a baby in a pink blanket. The baby slept, rocking back and forth, back and forth. Alex was singing something to soft for Ella to hear. She treasured the sight in front of her. Her husband's features, so dear to her heart. His dark, almost black hair. His paintbrush eyelashes, framing soft gray eyes. The sharp, prominent nose; the "Portmanoy nose," he had called it, laughing. Ella watched his long strong fingers rub the baby's back in circles, widening, growing smaller, over and over. The baby's face was buried in her father's shoulder, but Ella knew that there was a light dusting of bright red hair and sleepy gray eyes.
Alex turned and looked at his wife. "Look what we made," she said to him. He continued to rock. "I love you, Alex." She reached out her hand to touch him, but he was too far away.
"Ella, we have to leave," he replied.
She struggled to sit up. "Oh, okay. Where are we going?"
He stood, still out of reach. "Not you. Just the baby and I. We have to go. We are not even here."
She tried to understand. The warm light of the room was growing brighter. "What do you mean? You can't leave me, I love you."
"I already left. The baby left."
"But you haven't left. You're still here. Stay here."
"Ella, the baby doesn't want you."
"Yes, she does. I'll be good to her," Ella begged, feeling tears in her eyes. "Please, Alex, don't take my baby. She's too young. She needs me!"
"We have to go." He began to walk away. She saw him rub the baby's back in ever-widening circles.
"Alex, come back. Why are you doing this?"
"Ella, you won't be a good mother. It's better this way."
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry," she sobbed. The light was hurting her eyes. "Don't take my baby. I'll do better, I'll be better. Don't leave me Alex, please. Alex. Alex!"
Tears on her face, her husband's name on her lips, Ella jerked into consciousness. She found herself staring into the intense gaze of a large, dark-skinned man. She tried to catch her breath while her eyes darted around the unfamiliar room. "Where's Daniel?"
"DanielJackson has left the base to pursue information concerning your husband's whereabouts. Ms. MacPherson, are you well?"
"Please call me Ella." She squinted up at the man, wondering where her glasses were. "I remember you. I danced with you at my wedding."
He nodded his head solemnly. "Indeed you did."
"What is your name again?"
"Teal'c."
"Teal'c, right." Ella spotted her glasses on the bedside table and she slipped them on. The room came into dim focus. "Teal'c, where am I?"
"You are in the medical isolation room of the Cheyenne Mountain Complex."
"Am I sick?" Instinctively, shetouched her abdomen.
"No, you are not sick," Teal'c assured her. "There are many things on this base that might be dangerous to a civilian. General Landry requested that you stay in this room until other accommodations could be made. DanielJackson requested that I stay with you so you would not awaken alone."
"Okay, thanks." She thought for a few seconds, chewing her lip. Her brain felt scrambled. "Can we turn up the light a little?"
"Certainly. And I will notify Dr. Lam that you are awake."
While he turned up the light and called the doctor, Ella closed her eyes. Her dream came back to her. Alex didn't leave me, she reminded herself. He wouldn't leave me.
Teal'c came back to her bedside. "Dr. Lam will be here in a moment. Is there anything I can get for you?"
"I'm a little hungry. And I would like to sit up." Teal'c helped her adjust her bed.
"I will get you some food once the doctor has come in."
She felt so tired but she did not want to sleep again. After a few moments, she asked, "Is there anything to read here or anything?"
"Would you perhaps like to watch a movie?"
She looked at him and smiled. "Sure. What do you have in mind?"
"I am currently enjoying the works of an actor named Tom Hanks. Do you enjoy him?"
Ella was beginning to like this man. He speech patterns werevery unusual buthe had a voice that she could fall into. It made her feel safe. "Do you have Apollo 13?"
"It is one of my favorites."
OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOo
Earlier that morning, Daniel Jackson had started his day on far too little sleep. Much of his night had been spent watching his friend sleep in the isolation room. At one point he drifted off to sleep, only to dream about the weapon. His weapon. He had been sitting in front of a view screen, looking down at Abydos. His hand was on the firing button. He knew he was about to murder thousands of innocents and he did not care. They were weak and he was strong. That was all the permission he needed. As his hand slapped the button,Daniel woke up. His pulse was pounding and he was sweating in the cool dimness.
In her sleep, Ella was frowning. She looked desperately unhappy. He reached over to smooth her hair, willing the anxious lines away. He thought of all the times in the past that he had smoothed away Ella's nightmares, or she his. He had known most of what she feared in the dark. She knew little of what he did. Now, he worried that somehow his life had hurt her. Was Alex's disappearance connected to him? Daniel would never forgive himself if something happened to Ella's husband because of her relationship with him.
He'd slept enough. It was 0400. There was work to do but he could not do it from here. Outside the isolation room stood two armed guards that General Landry had ordered watch the civilian. Daniel went to Teal'c quarters, briefed him on the events of the previous night, and asked the Jaffe to watch over his friend. Daniel was concerned that if Ella were to wake up on her own in an unfamiliar setting with only armed guards for company she might react in such a way that Dr. Lam would be required to sedate her. Or shoot her.
Once in his office, Daniel laid out all of the information that he had about Alex's work. There was precious little. He had a pencil sketch on a napkin that showed the weapon from Daniel's vision. The same weapon was reproduced in greater detail, complete with schematics in the paper that Daniel had found in Alex's safe. Next to these, he laid the two scraps of paper that had writing on them. Consulting his books, Daniel learned that the Teutonic writing said the same thing as the Goa'uld script; "…because sometimes we choose our gods and sometimes they choose us…" So what does that mean? Daniel asked himself. His eyes strayed around his room. It was possible that he would find the quote in one of his books, but he decided to try the Internet first.
A quick search revealed that the quote was in reference to the Norse god, Loki. Well, that makes no sense. SG1 knew Loki very well. He was a renegade Asgard scientist who had attempted too clone Jack O'Neill a few years back. As far as Daniel knew, Loki was still in Asgard custody. At any rate, the weapon was Goa'uld not Asgard. It was possible that the weapon was an Asgard design that the Goa'uld had appropriated but that didn't sound right to Daniel. This weapon just wasn't in the Asgard style.
Daniel leaned back and drank deeply from his coffee mug. He had never put any time into researching the weapon after he had had the terrifying vision. It was one of the few times in his life he had avoided knowledge. He never wanted to know more about where it had come from or what it could do. He chose to assume that the weapon only existed in his own mind. Now he was forced to accept that the weapon was real, could be built and that Alex Portmanoy had some connection to it.
There were too many questions. Who was Alex working for? What did he know? What did the Asgard have to do with any of this? Was Ella in danger? And where was Alex?
Daniel wanted to call his team together, but it was too early. And he made a mental note to call Jack. He would want to know what was going on. Rather than spend the next few hours watching the hands of the clock move, Daniel buried himself in research about the legend of Loki.
Loki was a Nordic trickster god. Other gods often came to him for favors, but rarely did anything for him in return. However, Loki always found a payment of some sort. He was reputed to be a shape-shifter and a fire devil. Some stories wrote him as the father of the Midgard serpent that circled the ocean.
That struck a cord in Daniel's mind. He considered how the weapon worked. Several large cannons, positioned in orbit around the Earth. Designed to work alone or as a group, each individual cannon was capable of massive amounts of destruction.
So, had this weapon existed before? Daniel could easily see how lasers coming out of the sky and destroying land could evolve into a myth about a serpent and a fire god.
The archeologist's tired brain was beginning to loose focus. In his mind's eye, he could see a serpent rise from the sea and ravage a village. Daniel saw villages burned to the ground, terrified humans running away but still caught ina white-hot fire, vaporized instantly. His mind created screams that the people would not have had time to voice. He could smell the charred flesh of what was once a living human being. An apocalypse that he himself had created.
For the second time that morning, Daniel jerked awake, his heart lodged in his throat. He reached for his coffee and was surprised to find it stone cold. It was 0715. It was time to call his team.
OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOo
Samantha Carter was pulling up in front of the pretty two-story house at the same time that Daniel was pulling into the driveway. He had only given her the briefest amount of information. She knew that Ella's husband was missing and that somehow the Goa'uld were involved. But that explanation didn't account for the deeply disturbed look in Daniel's eyes. As she walked over to her friend and teammate, Cameron Mitchell's car pulled up behind hers.
As soon as all three were standing in the yard, Daniel began to talk. "Okay, Mitchell knows some of this already, Sam you'll catch up as we go. Ella's husband, Alex, disappeared sometime in the last 36-48 hours. It seems that the mild mannered astrophysicist was actually designing weapons for someone who was not the United States or the Stargate Program. Whether or not he knew that is uncertain at this point. What we do know is that the weapon he was working on is of Goa'uld design and until yesterday only existed in my mind thanks to a vision given to me by Shi'fu, the Harcesis child."
His rapid monologue was followed by a long silence. "And good morning to you too, Dr. Jackson," Cameron finally said wryly.
"Daniel, did you get any sleep last night?" Sam asked.
"No, not yet, not really. Why do you ask?" Daniel took a sip of coffee. Barely waiting for an answer, he continued. "Okay, so come on. We need to find something that tells us where Alex is. Who took him and why. Sam, I have schematics on this weapon that I need you to go over. I need to know what this thing can do and if we can build it because everything I know says that Earth technology is not up to the challenge yet so why is it being worked on? What? Why are you both looking at me like that?"
"No reason," Cameron answered, exchanging a look with Sam.
Daniel took a breath and tried to line up his thoughts. "Okay, I know this is a lot of information and it's not making much sense. Let's go inside and I will explain everything."
As the team approached the front door, they noticed something that made them all pull out the guns they were carrying under their street clothes. The cheerfully painted front door was open. Not enough to notice from the street, but it was cracked open far enough to prove to Daniel that someone had been here last night after he and Cam left.
Sam signaled Cameron to go around the back. Then she and Daniel slowly, silently opened the front door all the way.
The house had been trashed.
Daniel and Samantha crept down the front hallway on full alert. The office was a mess. Books were strewn about the floor, file cabinets had been opened and emptied. In the bedroom, the bed had been flipped and the dressers were emptied.
When they reached the living room, Sam unlocked the back door and let Cameron in. "Nobody's here," she told the Colonel.
Cam holstered his gun. "Well, I gotta' say, Jackson, I feel better about kidnapping your friend last night."
"So do I." Daniel was kneeling by the bookcase. Two framed photographs lay on the floor, glass broken. One was a wedding picture of Ella and Alex. It was a candid shot, taken when they thought no one was looking. It was Ella's favorite. Next to it was a snapshot of Daniel and Ella from when they were much younger, living together in a foster home. He knew that Ella would scream if she saw the mess of her house. She would not forgive the invaders any time soon. Careful of the glass, Daniel placed the photographs on the coffee table and sat back on his heels.
"Wait a minute," Sam said. "You two kidnapped somebody? Daniel, what's going on?"
Where to begin? He considered everything that happened last night and then started the story. "Last night, after our budget meeting, I got a message from Ella that her husband was missing. Then I got called to General Landry's office where he told me the same thing. It seemed weird that the General would be involved in acivilian's dissaperance, even a civilian who had contracted with the SGC, but then things got much more complicated."Daniel told them about the weapon, and how hehimself had first enccountered it.This was something he had never told Samantha about before. "Alex was apparently working on this weapon. The thing is, I have never told anyone until last night what was in the vision that Shi'fu gave me. I put in my report that he taught me a 'lesson' and left it at that. I never explained how or what the 'lesson' was. I knew that if I breathed a word of how destructive this thing is, someone here would try to make it." He looked into Sam's worried blue eyes knowing that she would understand what he was trying to say. "I took over the world with this thing. I destroyed Moscow with it. All because Russia dared to disagree with me." He held up the pencil sketch that Alex had made. "This is what Alex was working on. It's identical." Sam took the papers from his hand and began to examine it. "We have to find Alex. We need to know whom he is working for because I bet that is who took him. And if someone is building this weapon…we have to stop them. We have to…" Spent, Daniel closed his eyes and leaned against the couch.
Sam and Cameron exchanged another worried glance over Daniel's head. "Jackson," Cam said, clapping his hand on Daniel's shoulder, "we are going to find him. Let's get started."
They were there for hours. Daniel and Cameron sorted through all of the papers on the floor, passing over anything that looked remotely technical to Samantha. Daniel kept a lookout for anything in an unusual language. But there was nothing. Just when they reached a point where they were going to have to admit defeat, Daniel's cell phone rang.
"This is Jackson," he answered.
The voice on the other line was very familiar but still surprising. "Hey, Daniel. What's going on?" General Jack O'Neill asked.
"Jack?" Daniel asked. He saw Sam and Cameron's heads turn towards him. "I was going to call you today."
"Really? Why?"
"Well, there's –"
"You wouldn't by any chance be looking for a missing astrophysicist, would you?" Jack interrupted.
"Yeah, I am. How did you know?" Daniel looked over at Sam with a question in his eyes.
"Daniel, I am a General now. I do have some sources. Granted, I don't honestly know who this one was, but, never mind. Look, I'm coming down to you."
"What do you mean."
"I mean, Daniel, I'll be at the base in 90 minutes. Seems there's some stuff we didn't know about Alex."
TBC