IX
Jamie didn't like to leave Jon for any length of time, but no combination of shaking or shouting could wake him up. So far as Jamie's lack of medical knowledge could ascertain he was simply asleep rather than anything more dire, but there didn't seem any way to rouse him out of it.
The fact that he was quite definitely snoring, however, was pretty reassuring.
Jamie hoped it was just the energy expended in... doing whatever he'd done... that had switched him off like a toy with its battery pulled. Maybe he just needed to recharge for a little while.
Maybe he needed to eat.
Disconcertingly, Jamie's own stomach was growling, apparently unperturbed by the fact that it had until quite recently had a bullet hole in it. Or some part of his anatomy had, anyway. He didn't like to think about it too deeply. Or at all.
There was clearly something crazy weird about Jon, but he was still Jon. Whatever strange powers he did or did not have, he'd shown no particular inclination to take over the world with them. Except possibly those areas of the world containing The Simpsons and fishing.
And, being Jon, it was entirely possible that the scent of fast food would wake him where all other methods had failed. What had seemed like a shadowy forest when Jamie was too busy dying to pay much attention turned out to be a scruffy clump of trees not far removed from civilisation. He could see the burger place from the edge of the trees. Surely he could get out there and back again before Jon awoke.
The disquieting suspicion that they might be being trailed by Hawkins' men, or whoever had raided their facility, or... somebody... didn't hold up well against the lure of French fries. And it wasn't like he could drive the van himself anyway.
A few minutes later, he'd blown every bit of cash left in his wallet, and was scoffing handfuls of too-hot fries on his way back to the van. He was too preoccupied with not dropping anything to notice that Jon had moved until he opened the passenger door.
"Supply run?" Jon said dryly from the driver's seat.
"Um, sort of," Jamie said, dropping the paper sack in his lap. "I got you, uh... whatever I haven't already eaten on the way back."
He was starving, and Jon appeared to be even more so, making him glad he'd bought so much food. Obviously healing bullet wounds with your magic superpowers took it out of you.
Yeah, that wasn't going to get any less insane the more he contemplated it.
He sat and watched Jon devour a burger in a way that could only be the act of a sixteen-year-old boy... but still, he had to say something.
"So, what... are you?" he asked carefully, when Jon looked up quizzically.
"Aquarius. You?"
Jamie narrowed his eyes. "You healed me."
Jon held his gaze for a moment, then sighed. "I'm... an experiment," he said finally. "A failed one," he added, with some bitterness. "I can't tell you about it, okay? But basically, there's been some monkeying with my genetic code, and that's why those guys back there were interested in me."
"It's their experiments that are making you sick, isn't it?" Jamie realised. "That football thing, it was emitting radiation or whatever... they were trying to trigger off... what? What you did for me just now? What else can you do?"
"Just that." Jon shook his head, then rested his forehead on the heel of his palm. "I shouldn't be able to do that. They've triggered something, all right." He thumped a hand against his thigh. "Only problem is, I don't know how to get it untriggered."
"You said something, before you passed out again," Jamie told him. "You were speaking that Latin stuff again, and then you said... Atlantis."
Jon's head snapped up just a fraction too fast for him to pretend it was meaningless babble. "What does that mean?" Jamie pressed.
Realisation of some sort was dawning in Jon's eyes, and he took a moment to answer. "It's... a codename," he said eventually. "For a project where there are some other guys like me. There might be a way to reverse this, but I need... something that they have there-"
He flinched and clutched his head, and Jamie reached out for him with alarm. A moment later, Jon untensed and waved his concern away. "It's okay. There's just... a lot of stuff in my head right now, and I don't completely have control of it. But now I know what I have to do."
He wiped his hands on his pants, then reached under the steering wheel to restart the hotwired van.
"Major Sheppard." Elizabeth smiled in relief as the last of the team appeared in the gate room and the wormhole shut off behind them. No matter how harmless a mission she'd sent her people on, she could never rest easy until they were home safe.
Especially these four.
They were all in one piece and none of them bleeding, which already made for a big check in the positive outcome column. Major Sheppard lifted an animal-hide bag that clinked, and gave her a disarming smile.
"You got the power crystals?" she said delightedly.
"Five of them. They're a little dusty, but they'll polish up good."
"Excellent." She activated the radio link. "Doctor Beckett. I believe Doctor Zelenka wanted you on hand to advise when he activated the Ancient medical scanner. We're just getting the power sources to him now."
"Aye, I'll be right down there."
Rodney looked irritated. "You realise there's absolutely no evidence that this is a medical device beyond Zelenka's wishful thinking? We're lucky he hasn't fried us all to a crisp - and now we have the power sources to actually get the machine activated he may have the opportunity yet. You can't possibly let him work on this without my supervision."
Elizabeth smiled at the predictable gambit. "You look tired, Rodney," she said. "Why don't you let Doctor Zelenka get the machine powered up, and you can both work on figuring out its purpose tomorrow?" In fact, he looked as if he was all but asleep on his feet, dark bruising shadows obvious under his eyes.
Rodney scowled dramatically. "I wouldn't trust Zelenka to wire up my car stereo. I saw the patch job he did on that console in the jumper bay, I'm surprised it didn't electrocute the first person who tried to use it. This is delicate work, Elizabeth, you can't just jam the crystals in willy-nilly and hope for the best."
"Willy-nilly?" Sheppard queried, raising an eyebrow. Elizabeth hid a smile.
"Anything else to report, Major?" she asked.
"Minor run-in with the Wraith," he supplied. "We didn't even see them, the locals had an early warning system in place." His expression darkened. "Early hiding, not so much."
"The Iaeronans believe the Wraith have the right to hunt them," Teyla explained. "They consider fighting back or going into hiding to be going against the natural order of things."
"We found an Ancient-built underground shelter and traded information about its location for the crystals," Ford said. "They were interested in it for the historical value, but they didn't seem to even consider the idea of protecting their people there."
"Well, we can't try to enforce our values on other societies," she said pragmatically, although she was sure Major Sheppard disagreed. "All we can do is give our best shot at offering help, it's up to them whether they take it."
"Yes, yes, this is all fascinating, cultural relativity in a brave new world," Rodney said dismissively. "If we were required to reeducate everyone less wise than ourselves I would never get anything done. Elizabeth." He nodded at her and strode toward the exit.
The first step was a stride. The second was more of a stagger. The third didn't happen at all, because he abruptly went the colour of curdled milk, and collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut.
She was back on the radio before his teammates had reached his side. "Doctor Beckett?"
"I can only walk so fast and no faster, you know," he said peevishly, obviously on his way down to join Radek.
"Well, don't slow down. We need you back here in the gate room." She glanced across at Ford, who was taking Rodney's pulse. He'd obviously found one, but didn't look entirely happy with it. "It's Doctor McKay - he's just fainted."
The raid on Bradleigh Biotech had gone pretty much to plan. Somebody's plan, anyway, although Jack was fairly sure it wasn't his. His plan had involved a lot more charging in at the head of the strike force instead of being carefully guarded toward the back like a good General should.
All attempts to point out that he wasn't a good General and never had been had fallen on deaf ears.
They'd captured a number of guys who looked like they only used their heads for smashing holes in things, a few of the 'I just work here, it's not my fault if they use my plans for weapons of mass destruction to build weapons of mass destruction' breed of scientists that he really hated, and a guy whose ID rather dubiously proclaimed him to be Andrew Hawkins.
Hawkins was Intelligence.
Oh, there were no visible ties between him and the NID, or their corporate sister organisation the Trust, but everything about him immediately pushed a button in Jack's brain.
Said button was labelled 'punch me', which made holding a useful interrogation session somewhat difficult. But since Hawkins was quite obviously content to smirk and make enigmatic statements until the end of time, Jack had few qualms about having the guy tossed in lock-up until he was in a more suitable frame of mind for dealing with him.
A couple of decades' time ought to be about right for that.
"Any luck?" He approached Siler, who alongside Bill Lee was providing the technical expertise on this mission. Good guys, some of the SGC's finest, but Jack still missed having Carter by his side. For many reasons, not least of which the fact that she laughed at his jokes. Siler took 'deadpan' to new levels of... deadness.
"We're almost in, sir," he said, fiddling with the controls on a... gadget of some sort. Jack assumed it was for breaking through the suspiciously complex electronic lock that was barring their way into one of the labs, but really, it could have been making popcorn for all he knew.
Which reminded him; it was about time they took Teal'c out to see another movie. Admittedly, Teal'c was now fully capable of taking himself out to see movies - not to mention using his otherwise mostly unneeded salary to keep the local DVD rental places in business - but still, educating him in Earth culture was a legitimate diplomatic duty. And therefore Jack could get away with pencilling it into his calendar.
At least, until someone picked up on it.
"Sir?" Siler looked up at him. "If you'd like to step back please?"
He hurriedly hopped behind the nearest piece of cover. One thing you learned early on in the SGC was not to mess about when Siler warned you something might blow.
As it turned out, the lab doors didn't explode outwards, just slid silently open like they'd been planning to do that all along. Siler gave a very small satisfied nod, which Jack suspected was Siler for 'Woohoo!' Jack clapped him on the shoulder.
"Good work."
He made to enter the lab, but Reynolds cut in ahead of him, much to his annoyance. Reynolds had been doing that a lot. Jack knew it was respect for his position rather than contempt for his skills, but it still sucked. He hung back while the science team did their gadget-filled version of casing the joint, although only because he was pretty sure there'd be an embarrassing incident involving him being shoved out of the way if he followed before the room was pronounced clear.
Being the man sucked.
"Sir?" Reynolds discreetly invited him, and gestured to the bizarre contraption taking up floorspace. "It looks alien in origin, but the energy readings we're getting off it are negligible."
"Meaning it's not going to go boom?"
"Or it's particularly well-shielded, sir," Siler spoke up, always the happy-go-lucky voice of bright and sunny optimism.
Jack tilted his head sideways as he contemplated the device. "Looks like a disco ball on a stick."
It had that certain 'carved out of alien rock' vibe that always made Daniel wet himself with excitement. In this case, the rock was dark and shiny - almost black, except where a facet caught the light and showed blue. The 'disco ball' stood at just above waist height, supported by a column of the same stone a couple of inches thick. If it hadn't been for the amount of trouble they'd had getting in to see it, Jack might have suspected they'd found themselves some alien version of a traffic signal.
"Pretty," he said dryly. "What does it do?"
Doctor Lee rubbed his head. "Well, we're... not entirely sure yet," he conceded. "As I said, the energy readings are fairly faint, comparable to what you might see from a, um, some sort of kitchen appliance, but the regularity of the signal suggests that it might be an automated transmission of some sort. Not quite clear on the nature of the energy as yet, but it appears to be focused in a beam, which suggests the existence of a receiver of some sort-"
"Whoa, whoa." Jack held up a hand to stop the flow of geek. "Transmitting?"
Lee blinked at him for quite a while before it seemed to occur to him why there might be some sort of issue with that. "Oh! Uh, short distance transmission, I think. No more than a couple of miles at the very most with this kind of power output. Which is why I think there's probably a partner device around here somewhere. It's probably wholly automated - the device doesn't appear to have any obvious controls to shut it off or modulate the signal."
"What about unobvious controls?" he growled. He took a step closer, and the column lit up with bright blue lettering.
Doctor Lee did some more blinking. "Hmm. Well, that's interesting," he said, and immediately started going over the device with a something-ometer.
Jack was not the best in the universe at distinguishing one set of squiggles from another, but this particular blocky script was very familiar indeed. "Okay, that's Ancient." Which probably explained why it had lit up. Call him old-fashioned, but there was something creepy about alien machines that used the details of your genetic makeup to decide whether they liked you.
Especially because, when they liked him, they had a bad tendency to grab him by the head and shove unwanted crap in his brain.
"Can you read it?" Reynolds asked him. Jack gave him a long, hard stare, then made an elaborate pretence of examining his own clothing.
"Okay, did I accidentally swap clothes with Daniel in the locker room again?"
In truth, he could read it, for a very limited definition of 'read'. After spending an unthinkable number of time loops helping Daniel translate and re-translate that inscription, not to mention twice having the knowledge of the Ancients downloaded to his brain and then erased again, he could sound out all the letters fairly effortlessly. Actually knowing what he was saying, aside from a few scattered words, was a different matter.
Where his knowledge was sketchy, he preferred to pretend it didn't exist at all. People had a disquieting habit of wanting to believe the best about their commanding officer, and if you let them think your grasp of a few big words meant you truly understood all the intricacies, someone was going to get killed.
"Doctor Lee?" Reynolds asked. The scientist grimaced apologetically.
"I took the Goa'uld class," he said. Jack briefly scared himself with the thought of Ancient and Goa'uld taught as high school language options, then looked across at Siler. Siler knew everything.
"Not in my job description, sirs," he said calmly.
Jack gestured at the... artefact, very careful not to touch it. "Can it be moved?"
"Technically? Yes," Lee said.
"Physically, we might need some mechanical assistance to lift it," Siler added.
"Okay, pack it up and get it back to the SGC, we'll have Doctor Jackson check out the lettering when he gets back, see if this thing comes with a quickstart guide." He stepped sideways to get out of the way of the door, and was suddenly weak at the knees. Not from the good old ACL problem, either - he was hit by a wave of dizziness that made his vision blur and his stomach lurch. He staggered back to his original position as the lights on the device all flared and flickered.
"Okay... what just happened here?" he asked, clutching his head. Reynolds hovered nervously.
"Interesting," Lee mused instead of answering him. "Oh, uh... something happened when you stepped through the energy stream."
Jack stared at him, and then at the device. "And there's no 'alien energy, do not cross' tape why?" he demanded.
"Oh, it's perfectly harmless," the scientist said cheerfully. "It's not radiating energy on a level that the human body can perceive or would be affected by. The signal must interact with the gene in some way... did you feel something when you passed through it?"
Jack was opening his mouth to describe, in great detail, exactly what he had felt and why he was pissed about it... but before he could begin, his vision started to grey out. His last coherent thought before he fell into unconsciousness was a very much aggrieved 'scientists!'
Jamie dozed while Jon was driving. By the time he was jolted awake by the cessation of movement, he had no idea where they were. Jon tossed a cell phone into his lap.
"I'm going shopping. Call your parents."
Jamie blinked at him blearily. "...Shopping?"
"I need some stuff," Jon non-explained. "There's no way I'm getting you back home tonight, and I'm not sure it's safe to 'til we know what happened to Hawkins and his goons. Let your parents know you're going to be at my place - tell them I'm sick or something if you need to."
Jamie eyed the cell dubiously. "If they're still after us, won't they be able to... triangulate the signal or something?" He felt like a dork, spouting ideas he'd picked up from too many cop shows in front of somebody who obviously understood the real deal. Jon tilted his head noncommittally.
"Maybe," he allowed. "But I know a bit about evading pursuit if we have to. I know a bit about parents and missing kids, too. Make the call." He hopped out of the van and slammed the door.
Jamie fiddled with the phone. It was Jon's, he guessed, although he'd never seen it before. In a fit of curiosity he checked the address book, but there were no numbers programmed in. Whoever it was Jon called on it, he kept the numbers in his head.
Maybe he should use his own cell - after the night he'd had, Jamie wouldn't be surprised if he had trouble remembering his own home telephone number. He reached for it, but then aborted the movement. For all he knew, the one Jon had handed him had some super cool secured anti-tracking device doodad. Could you secure a cell phone?
Crap, he knew nothing at all about any of this stuff. What was he doing here?
Jamie brushed his fingers over the bloody bullet hole in his T-shirt, almost invisible now in the darkened interior of the van. He was in way over his head, but he already had more proof than should be possible he could trust Jon with his life.
He made the call.
It was weird talking to his dad - like his father had somehow missed the memo about the world having transformed into something out of a sci-fi spy thriller. Hey, son. Jon's house? Sure, whatever, don't stay up too late with your computer games, you know you've got school tomorrow.
Jamie wasn't at all sure he was going to make school tomorrow, and couldn't imagine what he would do if he actually got there.
He'd just had time to get antsy about Jon's absence when he returned, carrying several bags that looked to be stuffed with small boxes.
"Whatcha got there?"
"Stuff." Jon didn't elaborate but dumped the bags in Jamie's lap, so he had a chance to rifle through them as they drove off. He studied the revealed set of electronic gizmos with bemusement. An alarm clock, a calculator, some sort of universal TV remote, mains adaptors... the sort of random crap you might get if, say, you visited the only kind of stores that were open at this time of night and bought everything you could find that contained some kind of circuitry.
"What do you need all this for?"
"No idea," Jon grunted; not sarcastically, but with a kind of finality that cut off further avenues of conversation.
He drove them to a motel - or something like, Jamie was really too tired to care - and arranged for a room with twin beds. The guy at the desk raised an eyebrow, but didn't challenge it. Jamie was sure that if he'd been the one doing the asking, it would have been a different story. Jon just had a way about him that somehow rendered the fact that he looked sixteen unimportant. Adults reacted to the aura of confidence instead of the face.
Jamie would have killed to have learned the trick behind it, but he doubted very much it could be taught.
He jerked his head back in the direction of the desk clerk as they moved away. "You realise he thinks we're here to have sex?" he said.
That fazed Jon, where thugs, guns, speaking in tongues and super healing powers didn't. He made an alarmed noise somewhere in the region of "Nnng!" and Jamie had to snicker.
"Should've got separate rooms," he said.
"Nuh-uh." Jon frowned. "No splitting up." He went through some entertaining facial gymnastics before sighing. "Ah, well. At least we're not gonna be interrupted."
As soon as they got to their room, he pulled his funny little sci-fi stun gun out of his pocket and begin to take it apart. He kept some of the components, pushed away the others, and then opened up the first of his purchases to start disassembling that. Periodically he would lift things up to the light and study them, like a master craftsman looking for flaws in his materials.
"What are you trying to make?" Jamie asked him, stifling a yawn.
Jon shrugged, quick hands not pausing in their endeavours. "I don't know." He snapped a couple of pieces into place and frowned down at it. "But I know it goes together like this."
He kept building. Jamie watched for as long as he could, but the sheer weight of exhaustion soon forced him into sleep.