XVII
Okay, his trouble sensor had officially stepped up a notch from 'mildly wigging' to 'seriously wigged'. John hesitated in the doorway of the briefing room, suddenly very, very reluctant to step in. Pretty much the entire population of Atlantis was gathered there to hear the SGC representatives speak.
And not all the SGC representatives were here yet.
Bad, bad feeling. Bad bad bad. He made a sharp decision and swung right.
"Hey. So. I should probably contact Doctor Weir before this meeting goes ahead," he said, raising a finger.
"Of course," Colonel Casey agreed with an easy smile, falling in beside him for a few paces. "I met Doctor Weir when she was in charge at the SGC. Want me to come with you so she can make another positive ID?"
There was just a tiny fraction too much smirk behind the helpful suggestion. John gave a taut smile.
"No-" way in hell- "need. Hey, Bates says he's your buddy, I believe him."
In the face of the evidence, he had no particular problem accepting this man was Benjamin Casey. Whether Benjamin Casey was somebody he could trust was another matter entirely.
"Okay."
To his relief, the Colonel hung back and let John get ahead of him. His pace quickened as he reached the next corner, already plotting what he was going to do once he reached the control room. Contact Weir, have Grodin seal all the transport tubes, block all access to the east pier-
There was a sound like somebody stepping on an electronic keyboard, and blue lightning engulfed him from behind. His nervous system was suddenly out of his control and he dropped like a stone, twitching wildly.
Stunner, John guessed as he hit the deck face-first. Not Wraith - they were more with the numbness and less with the 'yeeouch!' - but alien-based tech for sure. He tried to stand, but it wasn't happening. The pain signals were quite happily shooting back to his brain, but none of the commands he was trying to give were going the other way. He was helpless.
Maybe his ears were affected too, because the next voice he heard was too heavily distorted to identify. "He is still conscious."
"The Tauri have observed that our zat'nikatels react unpredictably with their physiology." From the direction of the voice, that had to be Casey, but he too was sounding like he'd swallowed a 1980s voice synthesizer. "A second shot will take care of the matter."
"No." Footsteps approached him. "This one has the genetic key to access this city's technology. He may be suitable to use as a host."
Before John could ponder all the less than cheerful interpretations of that, his head was unceremoniously yanked upwards. He couldn't force enough cooperation from his eye muscles to focus, but he thought the man holding him was Doyle. His right hand loomed large in John's vision, something metallic held in the palm.
Then there was heat, and light, and it felt like his brain was melting from the inside out.
And then there was nothing at all.
"...patriam... asordo... non paratus... indeo inver... non anquientam..."
Jon's feverish voice veered from frantic cries to a papery whisper, the words always Ancient, seldom intelligible. The last truly lucid period had been hours ago, but still the translator in Daniel snatched at syllables, tried to draw sense out of disordered babbling. He could pick out themes, at least, if not internal logic: home, assistance, error, reversal...
"Any change?" Sam asked quietly as she slipped into the room. Jack looked up from where he'd been mindlessly spinning a power bar between his hands.
"He remains in a state of high fever," Teal'c rumbled from the corner.
They'd all clustered around Jon, despite the fact there was nothing of any real significance they could do for him. Daniel looked to Sam, although he could already tell they weren't getting any good news.
"The Asgard say this is beyond their expertise," she said. "The only thing they could do would be to put him into stasis, and Ymir isn't sure that would actually halt the progress of the transformation."
"Which one's Ymir?" Jack had to ask.
"The tall one," Daniel supplied, which won him a raised eyebrow. Okay, so among the Asgard 'tall' was more a euphemism for 'half an inch less short', but when you had five near-identical little bald grey guys, you worked with what you had.
"Sir, I think the stasis may be his best option." Sam herded them back on track. "Even if it doesn't slow the degeneration, at least he'll be-"
"No," Jack said, simply but with utter finality.
"Sir, we're still days away from the coordinates for Atlantis," she warned.
"It takes days, it takes days," he said curtly. "No stasis."
Confinement of any kind never sat easily with Jack, whether it was paperwork chaining him to his desk, injuries chaining him to his infirmary bed, or bad guys chaining him to the first thing that was handy. Stasis took even more control from him than that, leaving him not just trapped, but completely helpless until someone on the outside chose to revive him. Daniel still remembered waking up in the Hathor House of Fun four or five years ago - being told he was the only one to have survived, and everyone he knew was decades dead. He could understand full well why Jack wouldn't want to risk that ever again.
Of course, that didn't mean he wasn't selfish enough to shove Jack into a stasis pod kicking and screaming if necessary, privileging his right to have a Jack O'Neill in his life over Jack's right to choose his own destiny. And he knew the rest of SG-1 would back him up on that.
Unfortunately, he had two Jack O'Neills in his life right now, and one was playing guard dog over the other.
"O'Neill. I do not believe your clone can last out several days," Teal'c said starkly.
"Jack, he's getting worse by the hour." Daniel added his voice to the pessimistic chorus.
"It could be just a stage," Jack said stubbornly. "He's had seizures before and come out of them."
He stepped closer to study his clone, resting his hands on the edge of the sleep pod so that the base of one thumb just brushed the side of Jon's forearm. It was such a casual pose that Daniel wouldn't have registered the contact at all if he hadn't noticed earlier how far Jack went out of his way to avoid getting close to his duplicate.
"This isn't the same, General," Sam said, shaking her head. "His temperature's been climbing steadily. I'm worried that a complete molecular breakdown isn't far away. The human body just isn't built to withstand the strain of these kind of changes. Sir, remember Nirrti's machine?"
"Ew." Jack's face darkened as the two of them shared a memory that Daniel wasn't privy to. He knew from mission reports that Nirrti had been one of the Goa'uld taken out during his euphemistically termed 'year off', and that she'd been up to her usual tricks with genetic experimentation, but the graphic details had been buried in paragraphs of scientific speculation.
Jon let out a low, shuddering groan, different in tone to the noises he'd been making before. Jack stepped back to be out of the way as Sam tested the temperature of his forehead. "Sir, I think the fever may have broken," she reported a moment later, looking up.
Jack spread his hands. "See? What did I tell you?"
Daniel wasn't fooled by the show of innocence. "Jack, what did you just do?"
Jack put on an eloquently clueless face. He was persistent, Daniel had to give him that. Eight years and a promotion to General, and he still wouldn't ditch the dumb act that not one of them had ever been fooled by.
"I have observed instances of telepathic communication between O'Neill and his clone," Teal'c put in, earning him twin stares from Daniel and Sam. Neither of them bothered asking why he hadn't shared that fact earlier. They both knew.
Daniel had many thoughts about the nature of loyalty, religious indoctrination and attitudes to faith, but they would remain forever unvoiced. He'd died, fought gods, and defied the Ascended, but nothing could make him prepared for the likely reactions of both parties to the suggestion that Jack might be Teal'c's god-substitute.
The god-substitute in question was pouting like a four-year-old who'd been denied a puppy.
"Thanks, T," he said somewhat bitterly.
Sam was busy checking the Asgard equivalent of a vital signs monitor on the side of the pod. "That was more than just a conversation. All his stats have improved... so far as I can tell, he's just asleep."
"You healed him," Daniel realised. "Just like you did for Bra'tac when you had the knowledge of the Ancients before."
"Which means this is progressing way faster in you than we'd originally envisioned," Sam said seriously. "Sir, at this rate, you're both going to be in critical condition before we even reach Atlantis."
"And we have yet to determine whether anything of use remains there," Teal'c reminded them. For all they knew, the Atlantis expedition had gated in to find the city ruined, and died or remained trapped there with no power to get home.
Jack threw up his hands. "Okay, Carter - give me options," he demanded. "And don't say stasis!"
There was a rustle of cloth, and they all turned as Jack's clone swung his legs down from the pod. His skin tone was doing a disturbing impression of Asgard colours and he was visibly shaky, but he held himself upright with O'Neill determination.
"Jon?" Daniel said. Jon met his gaze with eyes that were not so much unfocused as... removed, as if he was looking at things on a slightly different plane to the rest of them.
"Movus indeo scrutat," he said hoarsely.
Daniel's brain kicked into gear as he tested and discarded possible Latin roots. "Er, he said-"
"-To let him take a look at the engines." Jack beat him to it.
Oh, this was not good.
Rodney, if he could see Radek now, would be laughing.
Radek did not consider himself an absent-minded scientist. The stereotype was absurd. Nobody who worked with electrical equipment, chemicals, or other such potentially lethal materials could ever be absent-minded. They were simply, at times... atypical in their priorities.
Like now, for instance. Many people would question why Radek might have been over on the far side of Atlantis, attempting to uncover more secrets of the Ancient medical scanner, at a time when such momentous events were in motion. A fellow scientist, however, would understand fully what happened when one had an intriguing reading and a spare half hour to work with. He had planned to head back well before the official SGC-attended debriefing was due to begin.
But the anomalous reading had taken time to reproduce, and then he'd had a flash of inspiration that had to be turned into code before it faded from his mind, and then there had seemed to be just time to test it, but testing had led to debugging...
He swore quietly to himself, secure in the knowledge that no one would understand him even if they were around to hear, and scurried faster. Yes, Rodney would be laughing indeed. Or else furious. A meeting that Rodney would have chewed his own foot off to attend, and Radek was going to miss the beginning of it.
In his haste, he was not taking the precautions that he usually took even when Atlantis was not known to be under attack. Therefore, the hands that grabbed him and pulled him into a side avenue came as an unpleasant surprise.
"Radek!" The voice was reassuringly familiar, but not one he should be hearing here and now.
Radek turned on his captor with a frown. "Rodney. You are supposed to be in the infirmary."
"Oh, don't start with all that," he said, waving a hand impatiently. "This is far more important. Hold still." He produced, to Radek's confusion, one of the handheld scanners off-world teams used on mineral surveys, and ran it over Radek's head and shoulders, relaxing in response to its readings.
Radek ignored this peculiar behaviour in favour of the more important issue. "Rodney, you are still infected with the parasites! You will undo all Doctor Beckett's work, and then you will end up confined to your sick bed for even longer."
"Trust me, the spores in my lungs are the least of our parasite worries. Look at this." He spun a laptop screen Radek's way.
"Abstract art. Very pretty," Radek said dryly. He tilted his head this way and that, trying to make some sense of the picture. Interesting. That looked like a representation of the human nervous system, or perhaps a network of blood vessels... biology was not really his field. But if that was a human body, then the strange, snake-like shape tangled up with the brain and spine... "What is that? I've never seen anything like it."
"I have." Rodney closed his laptop up grimly. "It's a Goa'uld. There are five of them here, and they're in Lieutenant Colonel Casey and his team. This isn't contact from home. It's an invasion."
Okay, this proved it. Sheppard and McKay were the jinx.
Ford had been tensed for a confrontation over the four local days of the negotiations. It had all the classic signs. Friendly natives. Trade agreements on the verge of being signed. Even a feast in their honour. Feasts in their honour inevitably ended with them being drugged, slapped around, and forced to run for their lives. It was, like, the rule of the Pegasus Galaxy. And their home galaxy, too, if even half the stories he'd heard about SG-1 were true.
And yet... zip. Nada. Not so much as a single mutter about not trusting the off-worlders.
It was actually kind of creepy. Teyla and Doctor Weir had negotiated for things and made nice, and the natives had... given them things, and been nice.
Weird.
The lack of action had done more to rattle his nerves than an actual conflict. Teyla and Weir were both pleasant company, but they were also, well... dignified and mature. After being accustomed to Sheppard and McKay bickering over everything from mission priorities to sleeping arrangements to what was in the suspicious native stew they'd just eaten, it was a little bit like going someplace with your schoolteachers.
He was looking forward to being home.
Ford punched in the gate address on the DHD, but paused just before completing it, realising there was somebody else along who didn't get to do this very often. "Doctor Weir?"
She gave him a warm smile. "Thank you, Lieutenant." She stepped forward and decisively pressed the panel to enter the address. There was the familiar whoosh and outward spray as the wormhole connected.
"Atlantis, this is Weir," she said into her radio. "We're coming through with trade goods. Is the gate room clear?"
The fraction of a pause before any response was enough to get his hackles up. "Uh, negative, Doctor Weir," said a voice that Ford couldn't quite place. "We have a... slight problem with the gate here. We're running diagnostics, but the gate may not be clear for travel for another ten hours."
"Understood." Doctor Weir nodded gravely, even though there was no visual link. "Is anyone else off-world?"
Again, just enough of a silence to make him antsy. This was information that the gate techs shouldn't even need to think about. "Uh, no, Ma'am, just your team."
"Okay." She relaxed a little. "We'll make contact again in..." She eyed the colour of the sky, judging the local day and night cycle. "...Fourteen hours. Weir out."
She shut off the radio, and a few moments later, the wormhole disconnect itself.
"I will go and explain to Aethred that we will be staying another night," Teyla said. Ford halted her with a quick gesture.
"Something's not right here."
Weir raised an eyebrow. "What's wrong, Lieutenant?"
"Did either of you happen to recognise that voice?" he checked.
Teyla smiled in puzzlement, but shook her head slightly. "I am afraid the accents of those from your and Doctor McKay's countries all sound most alike to me," she apologised.
"Well, I know it wasn't Peter," Weir said, with a wry twist to her mouth. "Could it have been Doctor Marlowe?"
Ford shook his head. "No. I kind of thought I recognised it from somewhere... but the thing is, I'd swear it's not one our gate techs." The voices that told you whether it was safe to come home or you were about to be splattered into a layer of molecules all over the defence shield were ones you soon came to know very well.
"Perhaps they are busy with the gate diagnostics," Teyla suggested. "You cannot be expected to know the voices of every person in Atlantis."
Ford shook his head miserably. "I don't know, I just..." His mind was trying to come up with a context for that voice, and it was a wrong context. Not Genii, thankfully - his first grim thought when it came to stealth invasions. It had been a solid mid-west accent, not the kind of thing you heard around the Pegasus Galaxy outside of their own expedition, but still, something...
Where did he know that voice from?
Doctor Weir touched his shoulder. "I'm sure everything's fine."
"Yeah."
All the same, he thought he might just make a few extra preparations before they headed on home tomorrow morning.
"Looks like they've got everybody holed up in the briefing room," Rodney reported, viewing the city's life sign readings on his laptop screen.
"If I had not been delayed, I would be with them," Radek said, and let out his breath in a huff. He owed his own distractedness a debt, it seemed. "Is there any way of distinguishing our people from the Goa'uld?"
"Not on this thing." He glowered at it. "It's the same as the handheld units. It can't tell human beings from Wraith - or, for that matter, chipmunks. With Goa'uld hosts being so close to human parameters in the first place, we haven't got a prayer of even jury-rigging it."
"Very shoddy design," Radek agreed. "We assume there are five Goa'uld, yes?"
"Probably. But only one of them's likely to be a big cheese. Goa'uld don't like to share power. The other four could be Jaffa, but I don't think so. I doubt our people could be brainwashed thoroughly enough to avoid suspicion. Most likely they're young symbiotes, given SGC members as hosts to act as backup for the deception. Damn! We should have sent them all for MRIs as soon as they arrived. Standard SGC procedure. Why didn't we think of it?"
"Because we are accustomed to our enemies being blue and scary," Radek reminded him.
"Or plain old human beings." Rodney scowled at the context-free blips milling around his screen.
"Which Goa'uld do you think we are dealing with?" Radek asked as he contemplated subtle ways of entering the computer system. There was no way to know how much control the invaders had of the system already, and whether they would notice an intrusion.
"It's got to be a System Lord," Rodney said. "No minor Goa'uld would be able to do what's been done with that hybrid ship."
"It is some years beyond even our capabilities, I think," Radek agreed seriously.
"Months," Rodney corrected, giving him a stern eyebrow. "The Goa'uld aren't smarter than us, they just need fewer coffee breaks. And there weren't that many high-stakes players left when we left the galaxy. Let's see... Osiris? No, wait, SG-1 dealt with him - her? - and freed the host. There's Yu... but I don't recall him ever using Ancient technology, and anyway, last I heard he'd gone ga-ga. No, I think there are two main contenders." His face darkened. "It's got to be either Baal, or Anubis."
Radek was aware of the terrible threat that Anubis had posed. "Then we should be hoping for Baal, yes?"
If anything, Rodney's expression grew grimmer. "I wouldn't be so sure about that. Did you hear about what happened to General O'Neill?"
He had not, but the circumspect nature of the reference was troubling enough. When nastiness was so bad that Rodney McKay failed to ramble about it in excruciating detail, it was time to be very worried indeed. However, before he could inquire further, a command on the list he had accessed caught his attention.
"Ah. McKay. I believe I have found something interesting." The door to a small, innocuous chamber close to the gate room had been sealed.
Rodney leaned over to look, and understood the significance immediately.
"They've taken a prisoner."