XVIII
Carson tended to the injured as best he could.
There wasn't a great deal to be done, perhaps fortunately. He wasn't sure their captors would have accepted it so readily if he'd done much more than check pulses and make people comfortable. The energy weapons they'd used to put down rebellion he recognised by reputation only: a Goa'uld ribbon device, and the wee stunner thingies they called zats. The SGC's Chief Medical Officer had provided him with copies of their data before he left - the only reference material available for medical threats that might be encountered on other planets - but he hadn't committed any specifics to memory.
He'd rather hoped they wouldn't be meeting the Goa'uld in the Pegasus Galaxy.
Carson himself knew of Earth's long-standing enemy from second-hand reports only, but others in the Atlantis expedition had more personal experience. The moment the alleged 'engineer' Doyle had stalked in with glowing eyes and declared himself to be the god Baal, Sergeant Howard had stood up and called him out as a Goa'uld - and been blasted with the ribbon device for her troubles.
The other four members of the supposed SG team had quickly and efficiently used their zats to take down and disarm Bates's security forces and other potential threats. Carson's only consolation was that Sheppard didn't number among those taken down. Unfortunately, that could well be a sign he'd been dealt with separately, as the biggest threat to the false god's authority.
At least Elizabeth was safely away on another planet, and Rodney secreted in the infirmary. Carson just prayed he'd had the sense to obey medical advice and stay put. Perhaps the Goa'uld would overlook him tucked away there.
The rest of them had been left here in the conference room to 'contemplate' and prepare to accept Baal as their god. Carson couldn't imagine what Baal thought he was playing at. Surely he didn't think they could be induced to true worship? He must know that the people of Earth were far more advanced than the low-technology cultures the Goa'uld made it their usual business to oppress. Why bother with the god pretence at all?
Unless it wasn't a pretence. Perhaps the Goa'uld truly did believe they were gods.
The Wraith might be arrogant, but it was the learned arrogance of a race of predators who'd found little to fear from their prey. It might amuse them to see fear or futile defiance, but in truth they cared no more for the inner feelings of their victims than a fisherman did for his catch. Humans were food to them, no more and no less.
The Goa'uld didn't feed, they enslaved. They built empires and raised armies, stole the beautiful to use as hosts and ruthlessly crushed out any signs of initiative or advancement. While the Wraith simply slaughtered, the Goa'uld took over minds and souls - and made the people sing their praises for the privilege.
Both of them in the same galaxy was a disaster waiting to happen.
Carson couldn't help but remember that humans weren't the first race the Goa'uld had used as hosts - and genetically, the Unas were not exactly humanity's closest cousins. If a leap that big had been made before, could it be made again?
He was probably the closest thing this galaxy had to an expert on the internal workings of the Wraith, and what that expertise told him was chilling. Because while aspects of the Wraith were very alien, they were basically hybrid creatures... and he'd already discovered their bodies contained a quite surprising proportion of human DNA.
The Goa'uld had traded up once before, when they'd discovered humanity made better hosts for them. What happened if they discovered there was a new race on the block with even more impressive abilities?
Some instinct - or perhaps pure dumb luck - woke him at the horribly familiar sound of a Wraith stunner. John rolled sideways on reflex, and in his dazed state smacked into the wall. He thought for a moment he was seeing stars, then realised it was just the play of light over the patterned ceiling. Boy, Atlantis had some pretty ceilings...
The door to his cell swished open, and moments later the irritated face of McKay loomed into view. "Major, you're being rescued, do you think you could possibly manage to keep up with events?"
The answer to that was apparently 'no', for he staggered like a drunk as McKay and Doctor Zelenka attempted to help him out. His head was killing him, but he didn't think this was the right time to be asking for an aspirin.
He almost tripped over a prone body on his way out. "That's... Hertzberg?" he identified, after a moments' pause.
"It used to be," McKay said tersely. "Come on."
"Shouldn't we... take him captive or something?" John said hazily, hesitating. Damn brain. He and it seemed to be operating at a greater distance than they usually were.
"There is no time," Zelenka informed him. "He may recover from the stunner blast at any moment."
"Hey, no... Those things keep you out for hours." He'd had more than one unpleasant brush with them himself.
"You - not him," McKay corrected. "He's a Goa'uld."
"...Okay." John had no idea what that word was, but it had way more vowels than he could deal with right now. "Uh..."
McKay shoved him into a transporter and sighed explosively. "Major, did you do any background reading at all before you signed on for this mission?"
John blinked a few times. "There were assigned texts?"
The transporter flashed them over to a new location, and the two scientists ushered him out.
"The Goa'uld were a threat encountered by the SGC when they first started going through the Stargate," McKay lectured. "They're a race of parasitic aliens that use human beings for hosts."
He raised an eyebrow. Or possibly both of them. His forehead still felt kind of numb and tingly. "Like tapeworm?"
"Sentient tapeworm. With super healing powers, a serious god complex, and a penchant for stealing technology."
"Ah." He nodded wisely. His head felt like it was only loosely connected at the neck.
McKay and Zelenka hustled him into a small lab on the outer fringe of the area that the physicists had adopted as their own - an area occasionally known as Blow-Up Alley. The scientists usually used these smaller rooms for working on the things that they knew to be volatile.
As opposed to the things that they only suspected to be volatile. Or the ones they didn't suspect of being volatile at all until suddenly, boom.
Really, it was a surprise when something they brought back to study actually turned out to be inert.
"Uh... why are we in here?" John asked, eyeing the purple splotches on three of the lab walls uneasily.
"This is the room where Hockley tried to open that orb thing we found on the planet of the giant caterpillars," McKay told him.
"Ah." A memorable mission, that. "That was the thing that tried to terraform the lab?"
"Giant purple fungus was causing false readings on life signs detectors," Zelenka elaborated, already tapping away at a laptop. "Doctor Simpson devised temporary shielding measures to stop marines turning up every fifteen minutes to check for alien invaders."
"So we're shielded from detection?"
"If they're just using the standard visual display, yes," said McKay, working in tandem with Zelenka. Neither of them bothered to actually explain to him what they were doing. "If they set the system to do a deep scan for discrepancies we'll show up pretty quickly."
"Then let's hope they don't understand Ancient computers very well," John said, sitting down. His vision was still swimming a little and occasionally flashing migraine colours. He was pretty sure that if Beckett was around, he wouldn't be allowed to be upright. "Any idea what that metal glove thing was they used to fry my brains with?"
"It's a Goa'uld ribbon device," McKay said.
"Catchy."
"The Goa'uld are able to absorb naquadah - or produce it, or excrete it, or something. I don't know. Biology." He handwaved that as unimportant. "Some of their technology can only be activated by a host with naquadah particles in their bloodstream. There's some speculation that the original race the Goa'uld stole the technology from were able to crudely reverse engineer an Ancient device. They used the presence of naquadah as the trigger factor rather than test for the ATA gene."
"Yes." Zelenka nodded to himself. "I have read Doctor Lee and Doctor Carmichael's theories that naquadah particles somehow amplify and transmit specific kinds of electrical signals generated in the brain. Very interesting."
McKay let out a dissatisfied huff. "Doctor Lee? Please. The man's a moron. I had to spend months disentangling his DHD equations when I was over at Area 51. And don't even get me started on his laughable approach to classifying recovered technology... what is his degree in, anyway? Does anybody know?"
John should probably be stepping in right now to talk about... plans, and other such tactical stuff, but he was a little preoccupied tilting his head this way and that, trying to figure out whether the little green-pink supernova hovering next to the light was a free-floating alien lifeform or an afterimage from the ribbon device. From the fact that the parts of the room he wasn't immediately focused on tended to assume a consistency best described as 'weebly', he was leaning toward the latter.
So when there was a bright white light and the hallway outside the lab was suddenly full of people, he just blinked quietly at them for a few moments. Then he reached backwards with both hands, to tug on the bottom of McKay's shirt and tap Zelenka.
"Say. By any chance, do either of you guys see...?"
One of the people, who looked suspiciously like Doctor Daniel Jackson, gave him a friendly little wave.
The hallway Jack found himself now standing in was simultaneously completely new to him and as familiar as his own backyard. This was, in itself, both kind of bizarre and utterly unsurprising.
This whole downloaded alien knowledge thing was really getting old.
Beside him his clone sagged slightly, and Jack automatically did something that he couldn't have classified if he'd tried. Just... reached out and steadied him, only without actually moving.
The rest of SG-1 - the whole of SG-1, he ruthlessly corrected himself - had twigged that there was telepathic communication going on, but they didn't really know the half of it. He and his clone weren't so much communicating as sharing space; they had separate thoughts, but there was only one single mind, sloshing between the two of them like water. He remembered his months as a General just as clearly as he remembered spending those same months in high school; just as clearly as he remembered Atlantis.
"Patria," his clone said softly, touching the wall, and Jack thought Huh? at the same time as he understood Home.
This place resonated on the home frequency, but it wasn't home, and he wasn't an Ancient however much his braincells wanted to argue that, so Jack crammed it all in the box marked 'weird crap', and focused back on the here and now.
Here, a hallway in the city of Atlantis. Now, about thirty seconds since Ymir had pointed out three travelling life-form blips, said in his melodic Asgard voice, "We will transport you here where the population density is low enough to prevent collision," and kicked their butts the hell off the Skidbladnir without further discussion.
Jack absently threat assessed the identities of the three blips - scientist, scientist, that Sheppard guy, none of them pointing anything dangerous at him - and then turned to Daniel. "Hey! They're just gonna dump us here?"
"Bragi's given us a distress beacon in case we need to signal them for an emergency early collection," Carter said helpfully. "Otherwise they'll swing by and pick us up on their way back out of the galaxy."
"Generous," Jack said sarcastically. Goddammit, he always hated this setup. Helicopter, tel'tak, Asgard explorer vessel... it made no difference. When the guy you were relying on to pull your butt out of the fire had anything else on his priority list aside from that pick-up, it was baaaad news. With a capital 'baa' - because it was a pretty sure bet the folks in charge were only too happy to let the guys on the ground be sacrificial lambs.
Of course, Daniel had to just blithely ignore all the tactical implications and jump right in to defend the politicking. "Oh, er, well, yes it is, Jack, actually. Considering how badly the Asgard's resources are overstretched, it's a mark of huge respect that they were willing to make a detour to bring us here at all. In fact, to be brutally honest, I'm pretty sure the only reason this is happening at all is because Thor has a bit of a thing for you."
Okay, that got his attention. "Thor is a four foot tall grey alien of indeterminate gender with no genitals!"
Daniel wiggled his eyebrows. "I didn't say it was an easily classifiable thing."
Teal'c raised his own right eyebrow half a millimetre. Jack kept his dignity by studiously avoiding his team's gazes.
Rescuing him, Carter turned and flashed a bright smile at the three men clustered in the- (level three biocontainment chamber) -room beside them. "Rodney. Radek! Major."
Jack, an expert in Carter smiles, watched it fluctuate from wry affection to genuine pleasure to polite acknowledgement. The little fuzzy haired dude in the glasses was definitely feeling like the luckiest man in the room right now. Jack knew the other two but not him, so Carter's warm reception helped him to relax. McKay, not his favourite person; Sheppard, unpredictable; but still, not the worst possible choice of first contact situation.
McKay's face was readable as a baby book as he telegraphed surprise, pleasure at the sight of Carter, slightly disappointed jealousy when 'Radek' got the bigger beam, smugness when Sheppard got less of a greeting than both of them.
Sheppard looked drunk, not to mention slightly sunburned. What the hell kind of ship was Sumner running out here?
As both groups eyeballed each other, Sheppard sidled over to McKay. "Should we worry about them being compromised?" he asked.
"No, they seem pretty much like SG-1 to me," McKay said, snapping his mouth shut from the 'o' it had fallen into. "General. We have something of a problem," he said. "The Goa'uld have just arrived in Atlantis."
Jack instantly reclassified 'drunk and sunburned' to 'ribbon-deviced'. Oh, damn.
Every time. Pick-up team saunters off: nice, friendly, no-risk mission instantly goes to hell. Every. Single. Time. Why did nobody listen to him about these things?
He exchanged a look with his clone, and the same unpleasant, obvious thought flew both ways through the space between them. Baal.
Who else could it be?
Sheppard half narrowed his unfocused eyes, and then raised a wavering finger. "Um. Did somebody just say something about... balls?" he asked uncertainly.
Radek had not had much opportunity to get to know the members of SG-1, either separately or together. He had of course consulted with the lovely Colonel Carter on several projects, most often through email but occasionally face to face. Daniel Jackson he had met at the Antarctic site and found a pleasant conversationalist, although prone to be distracted by the half dozen other conversations he was having at the same time.
General O'Neill, Radek knew of through his two conflicting reputations: the superhuman military hero who left no one behind, and the overgrown child whose continued presence in the rigid confines of the USAF command structure mystified many. Radek's own concept of O'Neill, however, would be forever influenced by the near-funereal image of him frozen in the Ancient stasis booth in Antarctica. In the days before they had known if he would be possible to revive, even the scientists assigned to study the unit had tiptoed around him, nervous and respectful before that unseeing gaze.
Once, Radek would not have believed there were people who would voluntarily destroy their own mind and be frozen into living death for a fraction of a chance at saving those around them. Now he knew many of them - and yet, the more such heroes he met, the greater his esteem for each of them grew.
The other two members of the group, he did not know at all. The Jaffa warrior Teal'c was impossible to mistake for anybody else, but the young man was a mystery. He bore a strong resemblance to O'Neill, but Radek was uncertain whether the General had living family, and did not think it politic to ask.
Whatever the boy's identity, he was clearly unwell. Even as Radek took in his grey-toned, sweat-soaked skin and ragged breathing, he staggered and abruptly clutched his head.
"What's wrong with him?" asked Rodney, always to be relied upon to attack such things directly.
"It's too loud," said O'Neill, with a strange inflection Radek didn't quite understand. Apparently Major Sheppard did, however, for he straightened up and reached out, lightly touching the Ancient terminal their laptops were interfaced with.
An instant later Rodney frowned and O'Neill's shoulder muscles relaxed. Radek himself felt nothing, only saw from an on-screen report that a selection of non-essential systems had just gone offline. Apparently the 'noisy' ones.
He suppressed an unbecoming flicker of jealousy. The gene therapy had not taken with him; it was simply a minor deficiency in his genetic code, no worse than his being short-sighted, and to dwell on it was childish.
Still, to talk to the city with his mind... how could any true scientist not dream of it?
The young man seemed to feel some relief at the reduction in signals, although he still did not look well. He winced and stood up straighter, while Rodney studied him as if... well, as if he was a previously uninteresting person who had suddenly done something to change that status. "Hypersensitivity to gene-activated technology... I've never seen that before, either with the artificially introduced or naturally occurring ATA- who is he?"
He addressed the question to Colonel Carter, earning him twin glares from O'Neill and the boy. Yes, Radek decided, there was most definitely a family resemblance. But neither man made any move to introduce him. Instead, it was Daniel Jackson who spoke up.
"This is... Jon." A great deal of unexplained weight was packed into that simple syllable. "He's... um, kind of the reason we're here."
"He was exposed to an Ancient medical device intended to stabilise victims of the plague," Colonel Carter clarified. "We think that the presence of the ATA gene created a false positive when it scanned him to see if he was an Ancient, causing it to attempt to 'restore' him to wildly inaccurate parameters and leading toward eventual cellular breakdown."
"Yeah. That's what we think," O'Neill said wryly.
Radek had followed that, but it took Sheppard a moment longer to decode it. "He's transforming into an Ancient?"
"No," snapped O'Neill, at the same time as Jon blurted "Non sum!", Colonel Carter smiled and said "Essentially," and Daniel Jackson said "Ah... in a sense." A flurry of looks were exchanged between the four of them, and Teal'c raised a single eyebrow pointedly. It was the only contribution he had made to the conversation so far.
"Where's Beckett?" O'Neill turned to the three Atlantis residents, recovering control of the conversation.
"Carson?" Rodney asked. O'Neill narrowed his eyes.
"No, Sam Beckett," he said scathingly.
Radek grinned. "Ah, yes. Quantum Leap." He believed there were some episodes floating around the Atlantis network somewhere. If there was one thing a large body of scientists could be relied upon to sneak aboard - aside from coffee, of course - it was pirated science fiction. Surprisingly, Teal'c appeared to get the reference, while Daniel Jackson was left looking perplexed.
Carson, yes, of course. While Radek and his fellow engineers and computer scientists had learned much of how the gene interfaced with the technology, Doctor Beckett was their only real expert on how it interfaced with the human body. Here in the Pegasus Galaxy, with access to the largest available group of ATA carriers, a ready supply of Ancient technologies, and far less in the way of medical regulations, he had doubtless amassed much more knowledge than any of the researchers back on Earth. If anyone could help Jon, it would be him.
Which, unfortunately, presented something of a problem.
Rodney had turned back to his laptop, and now called up a display of the city's life signs readings. "Well, if you want Carson, I can pinpoint his position for you." He spun the screen around, so they could all see the densely packed mass of blips that was the captive population of Atlantis. "He's under Goa'uld guard, somewhere in there."
Human forms, Kaermec had discovered, provided a wealth of sensations that a naked symbiote could only dream of while it was in its pouch. This abundance of feeling, as it turned out, was a lot more enjoyable when the sensations in question were pleasant.
He had been numb, and now he hurt.
Kaermec, like all of his brethren, was possessed of the genetic memory of all Goa'uld in his line, but that knowledge told him nothing of the weapon that had taken him down. A rifle through the weakly protesting mind of Hertzberg yielded nothing of use, either. It must be a technology unique to this galaxy.
That, at least, was one small bright spot. A morsel of knowledge that he could bring before Baal, to offset the shame of having lost the prisoner he was assigned to guard.
It rankled, being subordinate to Baal. Why should Baal have the right to lead? He was old and weak, ripe to be supplanted. Soon, soon, Kaermec would end this charade of obedience and take his rightful place as ruler. But for now, Baal's knowledge of the Ancient computer system was of use. Once that had been cracked open and the city brought under their control, he would be free to make his move.
Perhaps it was as well that the prisoner had escaped. Kaermec permitted his host body to display a small smile. Yes, this was not a failure, this was wisdom. If he allowed Baal to take a new host who possessed the city's genetic key, it would only give him an advantage over his fellow Goa'uld. It made far more sense to let the host run free until Kaermec was in a position to take control of it.
Everything was falling into place perfectly. And this should not be a surprise - after all, was he not destined to be god over Atlantis?
Unfortunately, there was the small but annoying matter of dealing with Baal first. His soon-to-be-vanquished leader was in the Chappa'ai control centre, lounging in his seat as he studied the Ancient text on the screen. No doubt he thought he looked carefree and regal, whereas Kaermec saw him as he really was: merely slovenly, and undignified. Hardly a posture befitting a god.
He bowed low in order to disguise his urge to sneer. Human facial expressions and body language were strange things to control, intimately linked with emotions. One had to be aware of what one was thinking and make a conscious effort not to display it. Most inconvenient.
"Lord Baal, I regret that the prisoner has escaped. It seems that Tauri have acquired new forms of technology not seen in our own galaxy."
Baal smiled unconcernedly. "It is of no importance."
"Yes, Lord Baal." No doubt his 'superior' was only saving face by pretending so. How pathetic. "Do you wish me to apprehend him?"
"He is no longer required," Baal said curtly. He sneered. "The Tauri's attempts at data protection are primitive. Their secrets are mine to peruse. I have found something much more interesting than Major Sheppard." He turned one of the Tauri display devices to reveal the image of a nondescript human male. "Bring me this man."
Kaermec bowed again. "As you command."
For the moment, at least.