XVI

As the First Prime of Apophis, Teal'c had at times partaken of the finest delicacies the galaxy had to offer, and at others subsisted on the meanest of rations. A Jaffa might crow about the privileges his position bought him, but he would know better than to ever complain about its punishments.

In his time among the Tauri, he had experienced the pre-packaged field rations known as MREs - and discovered the honoured tradition of bitching about them. Although he did not compete in the sport himself, he was by now a well-educated spectator.

So it was always a shame when his companions declined to play.

Daniel Jackson, engaged in studying his books in preparation for their arrival at Atlantis, was eating mechanically with no apparent attention to what he was consuming. Colonel Carter, apparently experiencing some sort of flashbacks to Asgard rations, had been stockpiling the much-despised meal packages as though someone might take them away from her. And O'Neill, acknowledged champion in all fields involving complaining, was... preoccupied.

"Should we not invite your clone to join us in eating, O'Neill?" Teal'c suggested. He had noticed that the young O'Neill had begun to isolate himself from the other humans, spending most of his time in solitude or in silent companionship with the Asgard crew. Teal'c suspected that he was attempting to conceal the details of how far his situation had progressed.

"He's not hungry," O'Neill said, merely picking at his own meal.

Teal'c allowed his eyebrow to speak for itself. After a moment, O'Neill realised what he had said.

"I'm him!" he said defensively, spreading his hands.

Teal'c refused to let him off the hook. "You are in telepathic contact with your clone," he observed, not making it a question. O'Neill grimaced, but had the grace not to lie to his face.

"Look. T," he said finally, lowering his voice so their teammates could not overhear them. "I know, and you know, that the kid's on borrowed time. Atlantis is a shot in the dark. We don't know if he's got a plan - we don't even know if the city's still there. You know Daniel and Carter. They don't give up. They're going to want to document every second of this, keep looking for a solution... The kid doesn't want to spend the last days of his life as a test subject."

"You mean you do not," Teal'c corrected mildly.

"He's me," O'Neill said, flatly holding his gaze.

"Of this I am aware." Teal'c inclined his head slightly. "Very well."

He would keep O'Neill and his clone's secret - for the moment. If the time came that sharing it would benefit O'Neill, then that would change. As Master Bra'tac would have put it: kol'ma a kol'sha nai'eem.

Loyalty is not the same thing as obedience.

"But come on." Rodney stared at him in disbelief. "You can't seriously be expecting me to stay here in the infirmary while the rest of the city meets the SGC delegation. I'm the chief scientist! What, they're going to get their report from the first spotty little intern in a labcoat they can grab? I have vital information to impart."

"Rodney!" Carson spread his hands in exasperation. "You can't leave the environment-controlled hospital area. The second you're exposed to unfiltered air, the organisms in your lungs will start multiplying again, and you'll be right back where you started. They're almost gone!"

Rodney rolled his eyes dramatically. "Yes, but you could cure me again, couldn't you?" he said, apparently directing the words at his bedside table rather than at Carson.

"Rodney!" The man was a menace. "You were severely weakened by the initial chest infection triggered by the spores. I know you think you're well now, but you've been lying on your back for a week. If the problem reoccurs, it could be much worse a second time."

"Fine. Then bring them in here."

It wasn't that he didn't sympathise, but... "You need clean, properly filtered air, controlled humidity, and minimal exposure to stress and agitation." That last was a losing battle at the best of times. "Crowding a dozen people around your bed and rehashing everything that's happened since we've come to Atlantis is not the way to go about it. Doctor Zelenka can sit in on the initial meeting and report back everything you need to know."

"Doctor Zelenka-" Rodney interrupted himself with a squeaky cough. "Doctor Zelenka is not my understudy in a high school production of Romeo and Juliet. We are not interchangeable! He won't ask the right-" He coughed. And coughed. And coughed again.

Carson placed a hand in the centre of his chest, and gently but firmly pressed him back down onto the bed.

"Rodney. Rest," he said sternly, and went to retrieve a glass of water. Rodney couldn't quite speak yet, but still managed to give him a malevolent look over the rim of the glass.

"I was going to give your laptop back, but now you've overexerted yourself, I'm not sure that's such a good idea," Carson added. "I'll have one of the nurses drop it in for you in a little while, when you've recovered."

He beat a hasty retreat from the room before Rodney could regain his voice.

After any number of attempts at conversation with the Asgard crew, Sam was still no closer to getting that peek into the Skidbladnir's inner workings that she craved. And since, in the rush of their rather hurried departure, she hadn't been able to organise any work that it was safe to bring along, she was forced to focus her scientific curiosity elsewhere.

The mind of Jack O'Neill was probably fodder for a dozen different psychological studies, even when there was only one of him, but right now her interest in his actions was more medical in nature.

Which he would hate even more than the idea of his thoughts being analysed. After growing up with her father's example and years of experience at being The Girl, she thought she had the whole 'not showing your soft underbelly' thing down. Jack O'Neill, however, apparently handled injuries in accordance with some kind of inverse square law. His new boots gave him a blister, and you could bet the entire SGC, at least two Goa'uld, and half a dozen of Earth's allies would know about it before the week was out. Out on a mission, he could be hobbling around with a sprained ankle, fractured ribs and a knife wound to the gut, and the first you'd hear about it was when everyone was back home and the medical staff had the chance to blow their tops about it.

Trying to diagnose problems that left no obvious physical traces was even more fun.

"You noticed that too?" Daniel said, as they conferred in the small communal area adjacent to their quarters. Teal'c was sat cross-legged in his own room, getting in some kelno'reem time, but both O'Neills had disappeared into the bowels of the ship. As they had become inclined to do more and more often. Sam wasn't sure if it was more troubling to assume they were brooding together or separately.

"He's been zoning out more and more often when I talk to him," she confirmed. And she had enough experience to tell a worrying zone-out from the more traditional, 'Okay, I have no idea what you just said, so I'm just gonna stare at your left eyebrow here until you snap and run off to find a mirror.'

Not that she ever fell for that tactic.

Much. Anymore.

"It's got to be proximity to Jon," Daniel said. "You've noticed how when they're in the same room now, they both go non-responsive? Somehow, Jon's condition is accelerating the degradation in Jack."

"Is it degradation, though?" The question had been troubling Sam for a while now. "I mean, in a sense, it's evolution - artificially imposed, but is it so different from, say, the nanotechnology that allowed Shifu or the people on Argos to age at an accelerated rate? If the General's condition were to stabilise..."

"If his previous experiences with Ancient technology are any indication, Jack's body - even if it's more advanced than ours-" he spared her a slightly wry smile, "just isn't capable of supporting the necessary changes."

"Different situation, Daniel." Sometimes, in the excitement of discussing things with someone whose mind raced at the same speed as hers, she forgot that they weren't always approaching things from the same groundwork. Daniel's was a science of joining together isolated dots of information into a picture that made sense, whereas hers was a discipline married to the principle of the null hypothesis: nothing to be inferred from anything else until the connection is proven. "Before, we were talking about a knowledge database that flooded the memory storage centres of his brain. Not capability: capacity."

"Whereas this time it's actually restructuring his brain, rather than trying to fill it," Daniel said, nodding to show he understood.

"Like a hardware upgrade," Sam agreed. "Think of it as if, before, it was somebody trying to install a hugely complicated computer program on a system that didn't have the memory or processor speed to support it. Whereas this time, it's a case of putting in more RAM, a new processor, more peripheral devices... improving functionality without touching the information stored in memory."

"Except that it's being done by an incompetent engineer who's ripping things out and replacing them without shutting the system down first, causing glitches."

Sam smirked at him. "Back away from the computer metaphors, Daniel," she advised. He grinned back. "But yes, it's obvious from the seizures that the process isn't completely harmless - but then, it's working with inaccurate parameters. The technology falsely identified him as an Ancient, and so it's treating his body as if it can tolerate greater stresses than an ordinary human's. The chance of permanent damage is there - but so is the possibility that he'll achieve stability once the changes are completed."

Daniel had stilled. "So you think Jon... and Jack... may not need curing at all?"

She spread her hands helplessly. "I'm just saying, if the process does achieve stability... is it right to 'cure' somebody of having evolved to a higher level?"

The question took on a new resonance considering who she was posing it to: Daniel, who had once himself evolved beyond the human form, and then returned stripped not just of his powers but of the knowledge of what it had been to have them. She had often wondered how it felt to him to be mortal once more; whether his Ascension was as distant to him as a dream lost on waking, or if he was aware somehow of his shrunken limitations, conscious of feeling smaller, lesser, more contained.

There were a million questions, and all of them would go unasked, because the scientist in her was still shouted down by the part that was just selfishly glad to have him back. Daniel seemed, since he had come back, a calmer, more contented man, and she wanted that to be the truth so badly that she'd never probed deeply enough to risk finding evidence against it.

She was a lot afraid that if she did, it wouldn't change her opinion in the slightest.

And maybe that was why Sam was reluctant to trust her first instinct that any change in the General was automatically something that she had to change back.

"The question is," Daniel said soberly, "would Jack really want to become an Ancient? He'd be chased by the NID, the Trust, our own scientists... his life wouldn't be his own. The same for Jon."

A subtle shift at the corner of her vision alerted her that Teal'c had come out of his meditation. She turned, and found dark eyes regarding them.

"Jon O'Neill's life is not his own in any case," Teal'c reminded them.

Maybe he'd just been marooned in Pegasus too long, but John couldn't help but feel wary of the new arrivals.

John himself had seen only as much of Stargate Command as he could glimpse on a one-way trip through it, but a number of the men under his command had served there. Over a dozen of them had confirmed the identity of Lieutenant Colonel Casey, and Bates had known the man well enough to conduct a lengthy interview with him and his 2IC and come out satisfied.

And yet there remained an itch at the back of John's brain, warning him not to trust these people. The trouble was, he didn't know if it was the voice of hard-won experience with enemy infiltration... or the voice of having been dumped in the crap by those higher up the command chain one too many times. Was the bad vibe he was getting his subconscious trying to save his life, or just good old-fashioned paranoia?

His own exposure to SGC personnel had been barely long enough to pick up names, never mind take a reading on whether these were people he would be willing to have at his back in combat. O'Neill had seemed okay - weird, and kinda blunt for a General, but okay - but then, at the time, John hadn't been assessing him as anything more than another random bigwig he had to chauffeur about for a day or two. Doctor Jackson had been distinguished from the dozens of other scientists running about the site only by the fact that he'd stayed on Earth.

The only other person he'd heard much about was Samantha Carter, and all he knew about her was that she was A, a Lieutenant Colonel, B, tragically dim for somebody who'd apparently designed the entire Stargate program from scratch, and C, madly in love with Rodney McKay. He had doubts about the veracity of at least two of those pieces of information.

To be honest, John had kind of expected that if the SGC were going to make contact with them, they'd either send a couple of hundred people or put the famous SG-1 on contact duty. This five-man team of relative nobodies was pinging his alarm bells, even though Casey's explanation - that they were the most qualified expendables to shove aboard a highly experimental ship - held water.

The ship itself was currently parked on the east pier, and causing much excitement among the scientific community.

"This vessel is amazing!" Zelenka had declared, waving his arms dramatically. "A true hybrid of Goa'uld and Ancient technology. The interfacing issues alone- if I could see how the engine has been connected-"

"All in good time, Doc," Casey said, clapping the smaller man on the shoulder with enough friendly force to rock him slightly. "I've got orders to debrief you all pretty thoroughly before I let anybody play with the technology. No offence."

"Not much taken," John said, baring his teeth in a stretched smile. Casey just laughed.

It probably said something about his life that he was highly suspicious of friendly people. If Casey had blasted in here with guns blazing, bitching him out for the crappy job he'd been doing, John might have been a lot faster to believe he really was from the SGC. This whole buddy-buddy, 'great to see you guys alive out here!' deal he had going on was making him nervous.

Hertzberg was surlier, in a way that reminded him too much of Bates to immediately peg as hostile. John couldn't really begrudge him the finger-on-the-trigger attitude when he was privately wishing that Elizabeth was here so he could be making the same posture in response instead of playing diplomat.

He really wished McKay was out of the infirmary. There was nothing quite like having Rodney McKay at your side to make you look like the model of tactful diplomacy.

The rest of Casey's team, he hadn't yet had much exposure to. The skinny redheaded Lieutenant - Brand? - was staying aboard the ship, while Doctor Sorvino was keeping pretty quiet. Of course, she was the team's resident linguist, so she was probably reading the walls. For some reason, those wacky Ancients liked to write the equivalent of calming haiku on their staircases. Because nothing added that extra touch of Zen to your day quite like walking into the guy in front because you were trying to read a message at foot level.

And then there was the fifth man, the engineer. Alleged engineer. A big part of John's persistent brain itch was centred around him. There was just something... something.

He was a good-looking guy, almost obnoxiously so. And okay, a few smacks with the pretty brush wasn't technically suspicious even in the military, but there was a kind of self-awareness about it that screamed 'underwear model' more quickly than it did 'engineer'. In John's experience, the sort of men who spent a lot of time doing serious things with wrenches only paid attention to their own appearance when somebody stopped them to tell them they'd forgotten to put on pants.

Engineers could have charisma, but it was scientist charisma, which typically came in three flavours: 'fun to watch when excited', 'scary intense about energy conversion ratios', and 'a few fries, some chicken nuggets, and a cardboard box short of a Happy Meal'. This guy had a cult-leader smile. There was an amused twinkle in his eyes all the time, and it wasn't the diplomatically held back laughter John was used to with Elizabeth.

No, John recognised this particular gleam very well. It was the kind that came along with a real gut-buster of a joke like, Hey, hope you didn't need those people I just brutally slaughtered for anything important, ha ha ha.

He fell in beside the man as they headed with the others toward the room that Bates had chosen for the debriefing. "I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch your name earlier-?" He aired an insincere smile of his own, and didn't give a damn if it was spotted as such.

"Doyle," the man said, as the patch on his SGC uniform indeed bore out. He paused for a moment and tilted his head as if thinking, and then added smugly, "Jack Doyle."

John couldn't help but mentally reach out for the city's systems, the eager buzz as reassuring as the weight of a weapon in hand.

Really, you'd think that a race as advanced as the Ancients could at least have invented video conferencing.

Rodney glowered as he scrolled through subsystem after subsystem on the laptop, looking for something useful and coming up dry. Dozens of sensor arrays checking for things the science teams still couldn't even identify, and they couldn't manage CCTV?

Maybe the Ancients believed in privacy. Or trusted their security procedures to keep all hostiles on the outside. Or hell, maybe they just turned into glowy balls of energy and floated through walls whenever they wanted to chat long distance. Whatever the reason, it was highly annoying.

"Don't worry, Zelenka will report back," they said to him. Which was entirely missing the point. He needed to be part of the discussion! Yes, yes, of course Zelenka could handle the tech specs, but he wouldn't push in the right places, he'd back down for stupid reasons like politeness, he didn't have Rodney's prior experience with the SGC or current experience on a field team...

Oh, hello, hello.

Rodney stopped, and scrolled back to the intriguing little flag that had caught his eye. Yep, one of the DDS sensors had picked up a signal.

It was Simpson who'd begun the standard notation of classifying the different systems and subroutines they uncovered as UI, TWUI, KWID or DDS. So far, not even Elizabeth had waded far enough into the lab reports to find out these stood for 'Understand It', 'Think We Understand It', 'Know What It Does' and 'Definitely Doing Something'.

It was definitely doing something. Rodney located the sensor array that had sent up the flag, and found it was out on the east pier. Hmm. So the hybrid ship had set off something.

He dug into the code and tried to figure out just what readings they'd picked up. It had to be something unique to the modified tel'tak - a quick browse through the sensor log confirmed that this particular sensor had never been triggered before. He grimaced over the untranslated annotations. Languages were not his thing; his knowledge of Ancient was mostly limited to computer syntax, a few standard phrases, and every conceivable variation on 'Urgent/Do Not Touch/Lethal/Caution'. The autotranslator could process the computer code itself, but it would slow everything down ridiculously to try and plug in even a halfway complete Ancient dictionary. He could see what was happening, but knowing how the signal was processed didn't help him to identify it.

On the plus side, he could tell from some familiar-looking time delay calculations that he was working with an array of transducers arranged over a plane, so it was obviously some kind of beamforming. It was child's play to assign a pixel colour to each value and put together an ultrasound-style picture. If he had no idea what the sensors were supposed to be looking at, then hey, why not translate it into a form he could actually look at?

At first the image was too messy, and had a definite 'aargh, my eyeballs are melting' quality about it. Okay, maybe he should have taken a closer look at the noise levels before going wild with the high resolution. Rodney reduced it down to a nice, blocky, basic sixteen colour bands, and tried again.

This time, the shape was obvious. And it turned out it wasn't the ship that had set off the sensors after all - it was what had arrived on board it.

Oh, this was very, very bad.

Rodney reached for the radio he had stashed in the drawer, but when he turned it on, he got nothing but static.