(A.N. Minor edits made for repost)
Ch. 31 — Surprise Visitors
Two days after the party, Tuesday, the Runabout, with Harry, Hermione, Fred, George, and Lee, coasted around the "edge" of the Moon to the "dark side" and out of view from any observers on Earth. While called the "Dark-side of the Moon," by most people, it was, at the moment, actually quite brightly lit. The Moon was currently waxing, and on its way to being a full-moon. Which meant more of it was lit by the Sun than could be seen from Earth.
Seconds later they were descending towards the side of a non-descript crater wall. At the last moment, before they were about to crash into the wall, a camouflaged, very wide and tall door slid up. Their ship settled to the floor of the large hangar, near one of the side walls and beside another Runabout. The hangar was clearly big enough to comfortably fit eight football-fields, four-wide by two-deep. It was tall enough to have housed two of the Quidditch field stands, the ones used for the World Quidditch Match before Harry's Fourth Year at Hogwarts, one atop the other. The wall closest to them had a knee-high wall, then a window as tall as the Runabout that ran the length of the hangar. On the other side of the window was a hallway. There wasn't a doorway in that wall.
The large door closed behind them. "We don't pressurize this hangar, we can just use apparition or portkeys," Lee said, standing and nodding to the hallway. "That way, if someone or something does come through the gate, they wouldn't be able to get to any of our Runabouts."
The room on the other side of the hallway, once they apparated in, was only double the size of a football field, with only half-as-high a ceiling as the hangar for the Runabouts. The Stargate was at the far back-end of the room centred on the wall. Not far in front of it, ten or fifteen yards or so, was a pedestal.
There were four Marines sitting at a nearby table, playing cards. They immediately jumped to their feet and saluted. "Nothing to report, Sir!" the Sergeant half-shouted.
"Thank you," Lee said, returning the salute. "Carry on."
The Sergeant and the others didn't relax their salutes.
Bemusedly, both Hermione and Harry saluted. The twins went over the top with their salutes by suddenly snapping their legs together and clicking their heels.
The soldiers relaxed, but picked up short rifles from beside the table and moved to box their visitors, but not close enough to make them uncomfortable. The guns looked like the M-16's he had seen in the Yanks movies, but without the big ammunition magazines.
Harry still had to shake his head, baffled at the Marines insistence on strict military bearing and command structure instead of the looser-style civilian police-force. However, he had decided last year that it was easier to go along than to try to make them stop. If it made them happy, why not let them do it? They weren't hurting anyone.
"We have rooms, bathrooms, a meeting room, a kitchen, and a dining room through that door." Forge pointed at the door in the corner farthest from the Gate and opposite the entry hallway.
"In case anyone is too enthralled with the Stargate to leave," said Gred, jauntily.
"And other marines if we need more than just a few."
Lee looked around the room. "Building this was a good test for the Galileo's Replicator. This place has its own replicator . . ."
"But can only do things such as food and light clothes," interrupted Forge.
"No spacesuits, though," said Gred, shaking a finger.
"We stored only the basic stuff in it," said Forge, nodding his head wisely.
"Underwear."
"Over-wear."
"In-between-ware."
"The patterns for the remote drones."
"And a couple of prank patterns."
Lee sighed and shrugged. "There's plenty of storage memory for anything we might want to add. But it doesn't have a scanner of its own, so it can't create a suitable pattern for duplication."
By now they had stopped in front of the pedestal.
"That's the dialling device," Lee said. "It's currently locked to prevent anyone accidentally activating a destination for the gate."
It stood just a bit higher than waist-high, with a wider, round top. The top-piece's edge went about eighty-percent of the way around it, with the remaining open section facing the gate. The last few inches of each arm of the top-piece separated from the rest to vaguely point at the gate. Three raised rings were in the top-piece. The first ring was decorative, or simply the top of the pedestal. The next ring in was divided into twenty sections, each with a distinctive rune. Inside that ring was a second ring, with another twenty sections and their runes. In the centre was the top-quarter of a red-patterned sphere. The whole pedestal had a dark, weathered-bronze appearance, with abstract, curved lines on the sections that didn't have runes on them.
Harry and Hermione spent a few minutes studying it.
"The stargate is just over seven yards in diameter," said Lee, gesturing at it as they moved closer, "and weighs thirty-two tonnes on Earth."
The gate itself was an enormous circle, with a slightly flattened bottom that made a level surface for walking. It was dark-grey in appearance with seven red-orange-coloured chevrons at regular intervals. It appeared to be divided into two rings, the inner ring was sectioned with the runes they had seen on the pedestal. From the small gap left where the gate met the floor, it was obvious that the Stargate was actually a complete circle and a portion had been sunk down below the floor to provide easy access to the centre section.
They all walked a bit closer.
Occupying that centre was what looked like a pool of opaque dark-blue, rippling water.
"You know that fuel we were looking for?" Lee said dryly. "The one that isn't in our solar system and the nearest source seems to be thousands of light-years away?"
"Tada!" said the twins, one on each side of the group and framing the gate in their arms.
"Here it is!"
"The one . . .,"
"The only . . .,"
"The Naquadah!" they cried in unison. They held the pose for a beat. Then they dropped their arms and gave big dramatic sighs.
"And totally unavailable to us," Gred groused.
"Completely useless . . .,"
"Except in the gate."
"It's all one piece,"
"Under the other pieces that cover it."
Lee sighed. "We don't dare take any out of the gate because we aren't sure if that would harm the gate's performance in some way. It might even cause it to fail completely. It shouldn't, but the library doesn't have anything on that, except to say that the quantity used to build the gate is an exact amount, no deviation allowed."
"There are other gate designs," Forge said.
"One has eight of those glowy things," Gred said excitedly.
"It is apparently used to go to other galaxies!"
"Another has nine."
"Which can specifically target individual gates."
"But the amount of energy needed to build a gate is almost equal to the mass of the Naquadah in gate," said Lee. "So, it takes a Naquadah to make a Naquadah."
He shook his head. "Trying to use a spell to duplicate it isn't possible, it's simply too big for any of us to do it. I don't think even Dumbledore could pull it off without killing himself. We need a much smaller piece." He again shook his head sadly.
"So, . . .," he waved a hand at the gate with a dejected expression, "we've left it intact. And here I thought we had found an easy a solution that would cut out waiting a year for the Fuel Depots." He sighed deeply.
"Well, anyway," Lee said changing track, "according to what Angelina has researched and shown me, that pedestal thing," Lee pointed, "allows you to select a destination gate. The Stargate creates a stable, artificial wormhole between itself and the other Stargate. That allows near-instantaneous travel from the addressing gate to the destination gate, but it's one-way, only. Which is fortunate as it would be quite a mess if someone at the destination stepped into that gate at the same time as someone stepped into the dialling gate." Lee shuddered. "Anyway, when used, the pedestal connects to the receiving gate over a subspace link and exchanges precise locational details. Once that is done, up comes the stable wormhole between them." Lee shook his head.
"A wormhole is basically a hole through space," he explained. "The distance between two wormholes is either much shorter than normal space, or when you go into it, it sends you to the other end at speeds billions of times faster than of light." He shrugged, "Don't know which, the math supports both."
That was simple enough that even Harry could understand it.
"You'll notice that we've coloured red the floor in front of the gate. That's because, when activated, a Stargate produces a violent burst of energy that fits that red profile. Anything in that area when that happens is destroyed, according to the Library."
They looked down at the red floor they were now standing on, and all took several steps back.
He pointed at the rippling surface of the gate. "That's the event horizon of the wormhole. Anything that moves through it is torn down to its basic atomic structure, converted to energy, and sent to the destination. At the moment, that's just an illusion so you know what it looks like."
"Is there any way to stop someone from arriving without permission?" Hermione said, raising her eyebrows.
"Fortunately, yes," Lee said. "If we place anything over the opening, like, say, a magic shield or barrier of any kind, the gate will refuse to . . . rebuild . . . them."
"The sending gate won't warn them?" said Hermione, aghast.
"There's a setting on the receiving pedestal that would indicate the gate was 'out-of-service' to any transmitting gate, I guess you could call it. But if you choose not to set that, then the sending gate has no way of knowing that the destination is blocked."
Abruptly, an alarm klaxon sounded. Two loud, medium-to-high pitched noises, echoed through-out the room.
"Shite!" yelled Lee, "Someone's coming through!"
They all reflexively hit their comm-links, and the tech cloaks triggered, as Lee ushered them away from the Stargate and towards the wall beside the hangar hallway.
The marines were completely invisible. They had either hidden the table and their cards, or both had been conjured items they had finited. There were no signs that anyone was in the room.
Harry imagined they were already on their hoverboards, guns at the ready, with their wands slung under the barrels against the hand not on the gun's trigger.
There was a sudden kawhoosing sound and a cloud of roiling . . . something flooded out of the gate. Its shape matched the profile on the floor very nicely. Just as quickly, it disappeared back into the gate, leaving the same rippling water-like surface of they had seen before. The illusion, of course, had been disrupted and dispelled.
The group silenced their footsteps as they moved, and deployed their helmets as fast as they could. Harry pulled his hoverboard off his back and dropped it to the floor, following the example of Hermione and the others. In seconds, they were far enough from the gate to stop and watch.
Suddenly the surface broke apart to reveal two humanoids coming through, walking, hurrying, through the gate. At first glance, they were two old people, one with grey-hair, the other bald. On second look, the bald one, who appeared to be a man, was wearing old and worn rags for clothes, and didn't appear to be in good health. The other, a woman, was wearing a green blouse and trousers, with a many-pocketed, black vest of some kind over the blouse. She was obviously in much better health. There was an identifying patch on each of her shoulders. She was grinning and the man had an apprehensive expression.
She had an arm around the man and was helping him walk. They both slowed, and stared around the room, clearly not expecting what they were seeing, both stunned at the sight of the large, empty room.
A moment later, a tall, dark-skinned man jumped from the gate, dressed similarly to the woman and carrying a long spear. Harry assumed that the large thing strapped to his right leg was a weapon of some sort. He had a gold-coloured brand or tattoo on his forehead. His reaction to the room was different in that he calmly looked around slowly as he walked away from the gate and approached the other two.
The old man looked at the other two. "I suppose this isn't where we're supposed to be?" he said dryly.
Shaking her head, the woman said, "Most certainly not." She did a slow, complete turnaround.
"Indeed, it is not," said the dark-skinned man. He was almost a full head taller than the other two.
"Well," Harry said, over the comm. "At least they speak English."
"With a Yank accent," Lee commented.
"The patch on their shoulders says S.G.C.," Hermione put in. "I rather doubt that aliens would have adopted the English language over their own."
"I'll bet you five galleons," Gred said, "That they are Yanks."
"No deal," said Forge and Lee almost simultaneously.
They all held their wands at the ready.
The two "Yanks" stayed together while the third stood slightly apart, clearly keeping his spear-weapon at the ready in both hands as he looked around.
Another figure stepped through the gate, a woman, again, dressed the same as the other. This one was younger with short blonde hair. After a few steps and a look around, she unholstered a pistol from her side and took a stance opposite the dark-skinned man. Harry didn't know much about guns, but the one this woman held was clearly a machine gun, with a short barrel and a long, curved ammunition clip.
In between warily looking around the room, she was giving nervous glances at the gate.
"Definitely military," Hermione said, voicing what everyone was thinking.
Harry sighed and tapped his comm-link. "Attention all crewmembers, the Stargate activated while we were examining it and so far, four apparent humans have come through it. All non-combatants onboard the Requirement are instructed to disapparate or use the Vanishing Cabinets to go to Hogsmeade, immediately. I need two squads of Marines on standby. As soon as the ship is clear, the Requirement is to take station above the Stargate at middle apparition distance. This is just a precaution; no hostilities have taken place or are expected."
The gate flashed white for a moment, attracting everybody's attention. Then it did it again.
Then a man came jumping through the gate, and rolled on the floor. An instant later, another man followed him. The second man's feet had barely cleared the gate when the rippling-blue surface of the gate vanished to reveal the wall behind it.
On that wall, now clearly visible, was a message obviously written by the twins that said, "Nothing to see here!" with an animated stick figure of someone with its hands behind its back, rocking back and forth on its feet. In front of its head little music notes appeared and drifted away to vanish, indicating it was whistling.
Which explained the real reason why the twins and Lee had put an illusion on the Stargate before bringing Harry and Hermione over to look at it. Harry resisted the impulse to face-palm. Hermione gave the trio a hard look, but their outlines indicated they were standing with their arms clasped behind their backs, rocking back and forth on their feet as they whistled a tuneless tune over the connection.
He heard one of the marines snickering.
The four who had come through first were giving disbelieving looks at the animated image on the wall, and the message that accompanied it.
"Colonel!" the woman called sharply, and returned to warily studying the room.
The last man through the gate, still a bit dazed, looked up over at her, then looked around the room. He had salt-and-pepper hair. When he stood up, he was almost as tall as the dark-skinned man.
"Daniel," he said, "This doesn't look like home, to me. You did phone home, right?"
Daniel, the next to last man through the portal, seemed to be taking an inventory of his limbs and the book he was carrying. Hearing his name, he looked up at the Colonel, then the rest of the room. He slowly got to his feet. He was shorter than the younger woman and wore glasses.
"No, Jack," he said, frowning as he turned in place, "I didn't make any mistakes The glyphs were all the proper ones."
"Admiral," came Marietta's voice over his comm." We're in position as requested."
"Okay, guys, let's portkey to the ship. Anyone got a rope?"
The outline of Fred in his helmet display held out a rope. A few seconds later the five of them were on the Requirement's Bridge. Lee and Hermione both hustled over to unoccupied consoles and went to work.
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"Daniel, check the DHD," Colonel Jack O'Neill said, gesturing at the device, "see if we can continue on from here." He turned and squinted at the animated message on the wall.
"Wherever we are, they seem to have the same awful sense humour we do," he mused.
"It's in English, so that really narrows down the number of places we could be. I mean, in all the places we've visited so far, they don't use the English alphabet, or syntax," said Captain Samantha Carter.
"Canada, England, Australia, New Zealand," rattled off Catherine Langford. "Those are about the only ones who could have something like this and keep it a secret."
"Jack?" said Dr. Daniel Jackson, "The gate appears to be disconnected!"
They all turned to him. "I mean, there's power," He waved a hand at the glowing glyphs on pedestal. "The DHD dialling seems active, they light up when I touch the glyphs, but nothing is happening.
As Daniel continued to fiddle with the DHD, Jack started for the door at the far end of the hall. Perhaps there was something there that might help them.
Teal'c was standing in the middle of the room, beside Catherine and her old beau, Dr. Ernest Littlefield.
A male-sounding voice with a British accent suddenly announced, in English, "Ah, um, sorry for the delay, ladies, and gentlemen. You've caught us by surprise. We just set this up and we weren't expecting any visitors so soon. Could you answer a few questions for us? Do we need to shield the gate?"
Jack stopped and looked back at the others, but before Jack could answer, the voice spoke again.
"Was there a reason for your . . . energetic . . . entrance? Is there something where you came from that we should be concerned about? Will anything unpleasant be coming after you?"
This time there was a pause.
The Colonel stood still for a moment as the others looked at him. "No," he finally said. "The place was a wreck, abandoned and falling apart. We were worried the gate might fail before we could escape."
"Why were you there, if it was abandoned?"
"We didn't know it was abandoned until we got there."
"And the falling apart, part?"
Daniel spoke up. "It was very, very old, tens of thousands of years old, maybe hundreds of thousands. It was on the edge of a cliff and a storm was rapidly eroding the cliff. Part of the complex fell into the sea not too long after we arrived."
They were all looking around, trying to locate the origin of the voice.
A second voice British voice cut in. "I would jolly well be in a hurry to get out of there!"
"Yes," said the same voice, "I would be, too!"
Someone cleared their throat. "So, why did you go there?"
They exchanged looks again.
"We were going to get Dr. Ernest Littlefield." Catherine said and glanced at the bald old man. "We discovered he had been stranded."
There was a long silence.
A British woman began to speak. "From his . . . clothes . . . and physical condition, I'd say he was lost quite some time ago. That you say you didn't know that the facility you were visiting was abandoned implies you didn't really expect him to be alive when you got there. How did you know there weren't any hostiles at the facility?"
"I'm sorry," Jack said, "But that is classified information and we can't talk about it."
"Fair enough," replied the first male voice, jovially, "we all have our secrets. Continuing, our scans show that five of you are bog-standard humans, and the other is a genetically-modified human who seems to be carrying what appears to be a separate life-form in his abdomen. Is that correct? Or is he pregnant?"
This time there was a pause. The other team members glanced at Teal'c, surprised. How could these aliens know about Stargates, but not Jaffa? Had they never encountered the Goa'uld?
"Uh," the Colonel said, giving one last look around the room to locate the origin of the voice, and the microphone they clearly had to be using before giving up. "I guess you could say he is pregnant, not that we call it that. He is carrying another, unrelated lifeform, though." He resumed walking towards the door at the far corner of the room.
"Uh-huh. Does he come from another world? That is, not from Earth?" asked the female.
The colonel stopped again, raised his eyebrow and looked at his companions. They didn't know about the Jaffa! "Yes."
"He belongs to a race called Jaffa, his name is Teal'c," offered Daniel, looking around the room.
There was a brief pause. "What is the thing inside him called?"
"The Jaffa call the little snakes, prim'ta," Jack said.
"Are they sentient? That is, intelligent, too?"
Teal'c answered the question. "The prim'ta are immature Goa'uld, and while intelligent, spend most of their time asleep."
"What happens when they become mature?"
"Some are moved to a host, and the Jaffa is given a new immature prim'ta to incubate for another seven years."
"When that happens, the new host, what happens?"
"The Goa'uld moves to the brain of the host and controls it. The host is a mere passenger. The Tok'ra share, and act as advisors to their host"
"Takra? Are they the same creature as a Gauld?"
"Yes."
The other team members gave Teal'c surprised looks. This was the first they had heard of the Tok'ra. Jack decided he needed to sit down with Teal'c and see if there were any other items he knew that they had never thought to ask.
"The Tok'ra," Teal'c continued, "believe that what the Goa'uld do, taking over the host, is wrong. They have been fighting each other for thousands of years. The Goa'uld rule the galaxy and are winning because they have armies of millions of Jaffa, and the Tok'ra refuse to resort to that."
"And the . . . Jaf-fa?" the voice queried.
"The Jaffa are the armies of the Goa'uld. They serve them believing them to be gods, as they claim, and will fight to the death at command. There is a resistance, however, that is slowly gathering."
"You said that some of the primda are moved to a host? What happens to the others?"
"The Goa'uld don't care about the prim'ta except to use them to hold onto power," Teal'c said. "The newly mature prim'ta are usually discarded or used as food by the Goa'uld in hosts. Their main purpose is to keep the Jaffa as their slaves.
"The Jaffa do not have an immune system, as the Tau'ri do," he continued. "The prim'ta acts in its place. If a Jaffa does not get a new prim'ta when the mature one is removed, he will sicken and die in immense pain in less than a month. The prim'ta acts as his immune system. To survive, Jaffa must have prim'ta, which are only available from the Goa'uld."
There was dead silence at that. "Immoral cannibals," a third male British voice said quietly, disgust evident in his tone.
"You mentioned that the prim-da is moved to a host?" It was the British female this time. "Does that meant there's another race involved? Are they the Tauree you mentioned?
"In a manner of speaking," Daniel interrupted. "Ten thousand years ago, a Goa'uld pretending to be the Egyptian god Ra transplanted humans from Earth throughout the galaxy using the Stargates. He was also responsible for changing humans into Jaffa. The unmodified humans are called Tau'ri."
He was met with dead silence.
"When a host gets too old, or one of the Goa'uld decides to promote a prim'ta into his staff," he continued, "he selects a human, a Tau'ri as the host."
"When a host gets too old the Gold transfers to a new host? What happens when a Gold gets too old?"
"The snakes don't die unless you kill them," Jack said dryly.
"They are functionally immortal then?" came the surprised response.
"Yes," Daniel said. "Ra, the one I mentioned earlier, was the Supreme Leader of the Goa'uld, and only recently was killed — last year, in fact."
"Shite!" exclaimed a new male voice. "We get rid of one monster and a hundred more appear!"
Breaking the long silence that followed that, the female said, "If a Jaf-fa has a mature prim'ta, and doesn't give it up, what happens?"
"If a prim'ta stays inside the Jaffa after it matures, it will eventually try to take him over as a host," Teal'c explained, "Unfortunately, Jaffa cannot be hosts, and they will both die."
The voices went silent for a long time, again.
"Tellk, what is that symbol on your forehead?" she asked.
Teal'c answered, "It indicates I was First Prime to Apophis. It is the highest Jaffa rank. I joined Stargate Command to fight for freedom."
"Apafis?"
"He is a System Lord, one of the hundreds that rule the galaxy."
"Stargate Command?" interrupted the first male voice. "Does that mean you have access to a Stargate like this one?" said.
"Well, duh," said the female voice, reprimanding the other, "They had to have a Stargate to get to the other world, didn't they?"
"Ah, right, right," said the other contritely, "Wasn't thinking, sorry." He cleared his throat. "Where's your base located?"
Everyone looked at Jack. He shrugged. They had seen them come out of the stargate. "Sorry," he said. "But I can't tell you. Classified."
"Well," said the female, puzzled, "how are we supposed to send you on to your home if you can't tell us where it is?"
They all exchanged glances. How, indeed?
"We can enter the address for our stargate, and use that."
"That won't work," the female said, "Our gates are too close together and share the same address — each address is a cube of thirty lightyears on a side. We can fly you home, though. Or we could use the Rings when we got close enough . . .." she mused.
There was another long silence.
"So, I expect you're all hungry?" The first voice had returned. A table and six chairs appeared, in a bright flash of light, off to one side of the room. "Just tell us what you would like and it will appear on the table. You can discuss what you want to do while you eat."
"Could you give us a menu?" asked Carter.
"At over ten thousand selections, I think you would find it intimidating. Just ask for what you want. If we don't have it, give us half-an-hour and we'll get it. Well, except for Tellk. We don't know what foods he normally eats, yet."
"Anything that a Tau'ri can eat, so can a Jaffa," Teal'c stated.
Jack shook his head disbelievingly, and strode over to the table. Pulling out a chair, he cautiously said, "Sixteen-ounce cold Heineken, sixteen-ounce, peppered, t-bone steak smothered in onions, medium rare, baked potato with cinnamon butter, and corn on the cob."
The other yanks all rolled their eyes at his ridiculous request.
Before he could fully sit, what he had ordered appeared on the table, with a full set of cutlery. They all stared at the steak on the metal plate, still sizzling, the steam rising from the corn and potato, each on a separate dish, and the frost still condensing on the mug of beer.
"Be careful of the plates and bowl, it is still very hot." There was a brief pause. "By the way, through that door you were looking at are bedrooms with full bathrooms, a public restroom, a meeting room, a kitchen, and a dining-room. If you wish to clean up first, help yourselves."
Five minutes later, all six were digging into the best meal they had had in many days, one of them in over 50 years.
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"Well," Harry said, rubbing the back of his neck. "That was certainly unexpected!"
"I vote we stun them, veritaserum them, copy their memories, obliviate them of what they've seen and heard, and dump them in New York City," said Ginny, with a hard look in her eyes. Luna, standing beside her, was staring over her head and nodding slowly.
The twins were slowly nodding their agreement.
Harry sighed and looked at Hermione, who was clearly deep in thought. "It's true we desperately need to know what they know, especially about these Gold-things." He looked at the other three. "But do we want to take a chance that these Gold can't break an obliviate? I know that Tommy-boy used torture to break an obliviate, and these Gold certainly don't sound averse to torturing someone for either information or fun. Or that after some traumatic event, one of them might remember this back at their base?"
"How do we get them to give us the memories without revealing we use magic?" mused Susan, at one of the consoles.
They all fell silent. They stared out the Bridge's window at the Moonscape three hundred miles below them.
Gred snapped his fingers, and his eyes lit up as he had a brainstorm. "Why not make them think it's all a dream?"
The other's turned to him.
"Not the part in the room with the Stargate, but giving us the memories!"
His brother grinned. "Perfect! Wait until they fall asleep, hit them with a confundus, then wake them, tell them they're dreaming and to concentrate on various things, pull the memories, then obliviate them of everything but their memories."
"By the time they wake, they'll forget most of what we did, and dismiss the rest as dreams."
"We get what we need,"
"They never suspect us of magic."
"Then, the only question is how to get them home."
"The way they came through seems to indicate it wasn't planned."
"So, if we hold them for a few days . . .,"
"And convince them it was only one day . . .,"
"They'll never suspect a thing!" George concluded triumphantly.
"I don't like the idea of doing this without their permission, but I don't see any other way to handle this," Hermione said. "We obviously need the information."
Harry sighed. "Okay. Let's start with the old man, first, find out why he was where he was, and when it was." He looked over at the twins. "Then this Daniel. He seems the most knowledgeable." He looked back at Hermione. "We can save the Colonel for last; he would have the most memories and take the longest."
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Jack leaned back in his chair, very content at the steak he had demolished. It was quite different from the rations they had been eating since arriving at Heliopolis, and he greatly appreciated it. "Well, they serve a mean last meal." He looked over at the Jaffa. "Teal'c, who are these Tok'ra?"
"There is an old legend among the Jaffa, forbidden to speak of, concerning a group of Goa'uld who oppose the ways of the System Lords. I know it is fact."
He looked calmly around the table. "They only take volunteers as hosts. Most frequently those who are sick or injured. As I said, they do not suppress the host's mind, allowing both full consciousness and control over the body. They refuse to be called 'Goa'uld' because of their philosophical differences."
"And you never mentioned them . . .?"
"We have never met one, so it wasn't important," Teal'c said mildly.
"What about our hosts?" asked Daniel.
Teal'c shrugged. "I know nothing more than you."
The scientist frowned in thought. "They sound like they're British," he mused quietly.
"Means nothing," Jack said. "I met a Jap who spoke English with a French accent. Turned out his teacher was a Frenchwoman who taught German, English, and French at his school. He said she spoke Japanese with a cue-shoe-ben accent." He shrugged. "All we can really say is that they learned English from a Brit." He narrowed his eyes. "Can you imagine the chaos if they had learned English from a Scot?" He paused. "No, the real question is why did they learn English from a Brit?"
"Especially considering the vastly greater number of broadcasts that come from America," put in Sam.
They lapsed into silence.
"What shall we tell them about . . . home?" said Catherine. "They said they wanted to help us get there, but what can we tell them?"
"That's assuming they were telling us the truth," Dr. Littlefield darkly suggested.
"Well, I think they can tell from our accents where we hale from," Catherine said wryly.
"Just tell them we want an out-of-the-way place anywhere in America, and we'll phone home," suggested Samantha.
The others slowly nodded.
Jack sighed. "Anyone got a dime? I left my wallet at home."
The others stared at him.
"Ah", came the voice of the first male they had heard. "I see you've finished eating. Have you decided where we should drop you off?"
Jack looked up at the ceiling. "Anywhere in America would be fine. Preferably close enough to a city that it's a short walk."
"We can do that." There was a brief pause. "However, depending on where we drop you off in America, it's between one A.M. and five A.M. in the morning, right now. Unless you want Hawaii, there it is only ten P.M.." There was a brief pause. "I'm not sure that you want to be stumbling around in the dark, and then having to wait until later in the morning to contact your superiors."
Jack shook his head. "I think you're right. Are you okay with putting up with us for a few more hours?"
"Not a problem. How about eight hours? That would mean the entire country, except Hawaii, is awake when you arrive? As I mentioned, there are sleeping accommodations down that corridor, if you find yourselves tired. Just help yourselves." There was a pause. "You might want to kip a bit anyway, I'm sure your superiors will want to put you through a sieve on what happened when you get back."
That was probably an understatement!
Jack shared a look with the others. "Yeah," he said dryly, "eight sounds about right." Being able to start a debrief while freshly awake was a great idea, in his book.
Discovering there was a high-tech civilization close enough to Earth to share the address was, in a word, ground-breaking! That they were aware of Earth enough to understand where America was, and had easy access to anywhere on the planet was very disturbing. That they knew more about Stargates than Earth, but nothing about the Goa'uld was a real puzzler. The Ring technology had some very serious implications, too, in that it wasn't limited to being on the surface for a destination.
Jack pushed his chair back and stood. "I think that might be a good idea," he said, and headed for the door to explore the "accommodations." The others followed him. "It has been a long day."
Sam yawned, and the others quickly followed her. "I think you might be right," she said.
The rooms were spartan in that each had a bed, a chair, and a small table suitable for using for writing. The attached bathrooms were three-quarter's baths — each had a sink, toilet, and shower, but no tub.
There were several hooks below a shelf on the wall inside the room beside each door, obviously for people to hang their clothes or any accessories they might be carrying.
They quickly settled on which rooms to take.
"I shall take first watch," Teal'c said, and took a chair from the room he had selected and set it outside the room so he could watch the hall.
Jack nodded. "Wake me for second. Sam'll take third, Daniel last."
He fell asleep almost as soon as his head hit the pillow.
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