XXIV
In the movies, when the good guys swept in to rescue the hostages, it was never this much of a headache.
Sam hadn't slept since they'd come off the Skidbladnir, and the one she had right now was making an impressive bid for migraine status. There were two blips holed up in the control room, and Sheppard had reported in that his team had neutralised a second Goa'uld, but that still left the one who'd started off in Brand unaccounted for. And by unaccounted for, they meant hiding out in one of the hostages.
One of the many, many hostages. Whose bright idea had it been to send so many people on the Atlantis expedition?
The prisoners were scattered around the central part of the city in lots of separate pockets. Weir's command code could override the security measures Baal had put in place, but they couldn't unlock all the cells simultaneously for fear of releasing the Goa'uld. She and Teal'c were trying to circulate among the prisoners in the hopes of sensing naquadah, which was A, not the world's most reliable detection method, and B, less than easy considering the expedition members' understandable wariness around anyone in an SGC uniform.
It didn't help that they were having to separate out and isolate the ATA gene carriers as the most likely potential hosts. None of the prisoners had been fed, some of them had been wounded attempting to escape, Security Chief Bates was refusing to accept that any of the rescuers were un-Goa'ulded - a highly commendable degree of caution that was a massive pain in the ass right now - and some guy with a ponytail that she really wanted to snip off with her field knife was bitching about his civil rights and her lack of organisation. And, to top it all off, nobody seemed to know where they kept the damn coffee in this place.
Frankly, she'd preferred the part where she was trying and failing to rescue her trapped teammates from certain death.
And of course, while she was stuck with this personnel-juggling nightmare, General Sneaky Bastard O'Neill had managed to excuse himself on the grounds that someone had to check in with Sheppard's team.
The perks of rank, indeed.
The trouble with archaeology and linguistics in a world-saving context was that past a certain point, you usually had to find some other way to make yourself useful.
Now that they'd arrived at the Ancient scanner room and the machine was in too many pieces for the original documentation to be helpful, Daniel wasn't called upon to do much except translate when Jon was having difficulty making himself understood. That happened less and less often as the project progressed, since scientists were well accustomed to collaborating with people who communicated with grunts, curt gestures, and incomprehensible mumbling. So that left Daniel with some free time to, as Doctor Beckett put it, rest up a wee bit. Or, in practise, dwell.
He'd been an idiot.
He couldn't regret approaching Sorvino, however pissed at him Sheppard might be for it. That was the same single-minded military mentality he'd banged heads over with Jack again and again. Just because they knew now that it hadn't been the host didn't negate the fact that then, it had been a possibility. You couldn't condemn a course of action on the basis of results that weren't known until you'd taken it.
He never had been able to get Jack to see that yelling at him for making an overture that turned out to be ill-received was as idiotic as berating a woman for taking a pregnancy test that came out negative. Mainly because analogies that involved comparing himself to a pregnant woman were not the most sensible thing to wave in front of Jack. That was just asking for trouble.
He had been right to proceed as if it might have been Sorvino. He'd been an idiot in that he hadn't had a non-lethal contingency plan for if it wasn't. He couldn't blame Sheppard for killing the host along with the Goa'uld, because it was Daniel's own fault for putting him in a position where he had to. He'd been blinded by the memory of Sarah and Sha're, haunted by the ghosts of chances missed. He'd been an idiot because he'd wanted it to be Sorvino.
And the cycle of guilt and frustration went round and round and round.
It was almost a relief when Jack turned up. In the way that a poke in the eye with a blunt stick tended to take your mind off your other aches and pains.
Daniel had to admit, looking at things from the outside for a change, that Jack might just, possibly, have a point when he muttered darkly about scientists. He and Sheppard were the only ones to even register that someone was coming down the hallway. Zelenka was concentrating furiously on making some sort of fiddly connection, while McKay kept loudly and obnoxiously clearing his throat as he jumped in with 'suggestions'. Jon was shuffling identical-seeming crystal circuit boards in a near trance while Beckett watched him closely for signs of another fainting spell or seizure.
All in all, a relatively peaceful scene, until Jack came storming into the middle of it. He looked pissed, but since when was that new?
"Major, what the hell part of escort duty do you regard as a licence to abandon your team and seek out and engage hostiles without so much as calling in for confirmation?"
Funny how Jack's vocabulary mysteriously expanded as soon as he was pissed about something.
Not so funny, how he always went for the military leader whenever Daniel got in trouble without him, as if Daniel were an unruly puppy who should have been kept on a tighter leash. He bared his teeth. "Jack-"
"I apologise, sir, it was an error of judgement," Sheppard said stiffly. Buying into the same ridiculous culture of abdicated responsibility, as if human beings could be reduced to cogs in a machine with no decision-making capability of their own. Daniel briefly considered the joys of knocking their heads together.
Donk! Like coconuts.
"It was my call, Jack," he said patiently, equilibrium thus restored.
"Your call? Did you have calls? Did I give you calls?" Jack turned to face him, and immediately lit upon a new area to rant about. "Why did nobody inform me that Daniel was injured?"
Because none of them know you well enough to realise that you are, in fact, General Mom? "It's just a scratch." He'd had worse. Jack had seen him take worse. Jack had given him worse.
"I know you, Daniel. You've got your mind set on something, and it could be 'just a scratch' with arterial blood pumping up the walls."
Well, wasn't that just the event horizon calling the kettle black?
"She nicked me with a combat knife. It barely needed more than a Band-Aid." He looked to Beckett for confirmation, who visibly gulped at being dragged into Jack O'Neill's warpath.
"Well, actually, it-" Daniel glowered warningly, "-really wasn't very serious at all," he finished hastily.
"Yeah," Jack said sceptically. He laid his hand on Daniel's shoulder, the usual reassuring touch that his teammates pretended not to notice was more for his own benefit than theirs. But then, instead of giving a transient squeeze or pat, his hand lingered in place.
Daniel felt a tingle of alien warmth travel down from his shoulder and into his injured knee. There was the itchy feeling of flesh knitting that he knew from the Goa'uld healing devices, a sudden cessation of pain...
...And then Jack sagged against him. Daniel caught him in his arms before he could hit the ground. For a moment he thought that Jack had just fainted - and then he saw and felt the way his limbs were juddering.
Jack was having a seizure.
"Colonel?" As Brand approached her and Teal'c through the crowd, Sam saw that his face had grown even paler. He handed her a list on one of the city's handheld datapads. "We just scanned the last of the ATA gene carriers. The Goa'uld isn't in any of them."
Sam blanched herself. That meant-
"Then the Goa'uld could be in any of the people we have freed," Teal'c said soberly.
Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn! The logistics of testing every one of the hostages for Goa'uld before releasing them were near impossible. They'd taken a calculated risk that the expedition members without the gene were safe.
They'd calculated wrong. By now, with the Atlantis security forces deployed to retake areas of the city, there had been countless opportunities for the Goa'uld to switch hosts yet again. They'd never find it now. Unless...
'Where?' was the wrong question. What they should be asking themselves was 'why?'
"So why did the Goa'uld switch hosts in the first place?" she posed to the others. "We've been operating under the assumption that it left Lieutenant Brand for a host who had the gene. If that wasn't the motive, then why make the switch? These are young symbiotes: it takes a lot out of them to move from one body to another."
Teal'c nodded. "It would be foolish indeed for a Goa'uld to attempt to change hosts so quickly without a compelling reason."
The Jaffa version of 'what she said'.
"Just knowledge of Atlantis wouldn't be reason enough," Sam continued her train of thought. "Baal's had access to the unencrypted computer files from almost the very beginning, and the Goa'uld already had a host with an understanding of Ancient technology." She shot Brand a brief look of apology. "The Goa'uld are too arrogant to believe a human expedition could have uncovered anything about the city that they couldn't find out themselves."
"Then we are looking for somebody with knowledge that is unique to them."
Sam was fairly sure she and Teal'c had reached the same conclusion simultaneously.
"Lieutenant Ford said-"
"-That he had been separated from both of his fellow prisoners when they were taken off for individual interrogations," he completed for her.
And one of those fellow prisoners had the command code that would unlock the database of gate addresses and give Baal full control of the city. Sam reached for her radio.
"Doctor Weir?" she said. "We have a situation that requires your presence."
John had long ago given up on understanding what the hell was going on.
One moment the General had been pissed as hell at either him or Jackson, most probably both; the next he'd gripped Jackson's shoulder, stared at him with enough intensity to make John wonder if SG-1's internal relationships really did live up to some of the wilder rumours, and abruptly collapsed into his arms. Not, as it turned out, in a ladylike faint, but in one of those seizures the kid had been having.
It seemed that he had the same condition, but that didn't mean it was contagious, because he and the kid were in some under-explained fashion the same person...
While Beckett attempted to revive the General, Jackson hovered anxiously, and the kid spurred McKay and Zelenka on to work at an even more frantic level, John had appointed himself door-guard. There was a door, he was guarding it. Right now, that was the kind of duty he could really come to appreciate.
Even so, with the General having just regained consciousness and irritably fighting off all attempts at medical assistance, John almost didn't catch the soft footfalls approaching. He tensed and raised his weapon, but then a welcome face appeared.
"Teyla!" His greeting caught the others' attention, and McKay and Zelenka popped up from behind the Ancient machine like startled prairie dogs.
"Is the, uh, fighting over?" McKay asked, looking dazed and glassy-eyed. He'd been so wrapped up in the modifications they were making to the scanning device that he had yet to take any of his customary breaks to root around for food.
"There was little need for fighting." Teyla smiled beatifically. "The rescue of the hostages was accomplished without bloodshed."
"Yeah, that's what bothers me," O'Neill said cynically, sitting up and shooing Beckett away. "The Goa'uld don't like sharing their toys. Why take so many prisoners in the first place? They can't have believed our people would just roll over and worship them. This isn't some dim bulb still living in make-believe ancient Egypt - Baal knows the Tauri better than that."
Jackson's eyebrows made caterpillars over his glasses. "You think it's, what, some kind of distraction tactic? To keep us focused on freeing the prisoners instead of ousting Baal from the control centre?"
"I think that when you can smell something hinky, it's a fair bet you're going to find... hinkiness." The General frowned slightly at the way that sentence had turned out, and he and Jackson exchanged matching 'What?' looks.
There was a moment of trouble silence, spoiled when McKay coughed and Jon muttered something to himself in Ancient. Teyla cocked her head curiously.
"Is that... the language of the Ancients?" she asked, eyebrows high.
"Er, yes," Jackson began, over-earnestly. "It's, uh, actually a slightly different dialect to the one I think would have been employed by the Ancients of the Pegasus Galaxy. It's interesting, actually, that despite their capacity for faster than light travel, the writings of the Ancients still show evidence of-"
His no doubt fascinating explanation passed John by in one smooth stream of unimportant as he focused on the part that felt off.
"You mean the Ancestors," he interrupted, and Jackson stuttered to a halt.
Teyla tilted her chin towards him, looking sincerely confused. "Is that not what I just said?"
John narrowed his eyes at her. "No, that is not what you just said!"
Teyla didn't talk about Ancients. Even now that she knew that the people who'd once walked these halls were people, not gods or infallible wise men, to her they would always be the Ancestors.
Her eyes glowed.
He could have shot her before she had time to move, but instead he went for his zat.
The extra split second was crucial. Teyla could move like a cat at the best of times; now she was a chemically enhanced cat. Before John could get the zat gun up and aimed she backhanded him into a wall.
His abused head luckily escaped another blow, but the force of the hit drove the air out of his lungs. As he struggled to regain his breath, he saw Jackson dive for the dropped zat. His leg wound seemed to have magically cleared up, but he still wasn't quite fast enough. As his fingers closed around the zat, Teyla stamped, and John winced at the crunch of small bones.
O'Neill had produced a zat of his own from somewhere, but before he could get a clear shot, Teyla had hauled Jackson up to use as a living shield. When she spoke again, the voice was not hers but the harsh metallic tones of the Goa'uld.
"One zat'nikatel strike will not harm me. More than one will kill the human. You dare not fire upon me."
Listening to the smug superiority in the parasite's voice, John couldn't help but wonder how he'd ever thought McKay was arrogant.
In the silence of the standoff he pushed himself up, stifling a groan. He was still armed, but the weapon was useless; even if he'd been willing to pump Teyla full of bullets, the shots would have cut right through her and gone into Jackson, and probably into the other non-combatants beyond.
The two scientists had frozen, Zelenka's eyes wide and McKay's face drained of all colour. Beckett had either taken cover behind the General or the General had stepped forward to cover him - knowing a little bit about both of them, John suspected it had been a kind of mutual do-si-do - and Jackson was, of course, playing hostage, though he seemed remarkably prosaic about it.
And, slap-bang in the middle of what was otherwise a credible attempt at a freeze-frame, Jon continued to calmly work on the machine. With every evidence of obliviousness, he pressed a crystal into place, and the whole thing started to hum.
Teyla's eyes flashed. "What technology is this?" the Goa'uld demanded, gesturing with the liberated zat. "Cease your work immediately!"
Jon lifted his head slightly, but not enough to look at her; more like a person momentarily distracted by a background buzz. Jackson, despite his ostensible position as hostage, raised his non-broken hand. "Er, he probably doesn't understand English anymore," he said, blinking, as if genuinely trying to be helpful.
Teyla raised the zat. "Then he will be replaced with someone who does," she said coldly. "Doctor McKay, shut off the machine."
In the fraction of an instant before she squeezed the trigger, several things happened.
Jackson started to pull away from her, obviously hoping to use her distraction to shove her aside and get free.
General O'Neill, apparently tuned to the same mental station, started to bring up his own zat for a counter-shot.
And Jon, still fully focused on the Ancient machine, shoved a circuit board into place and pressed several buttons.
The room filled with brilliant white light.