XXVI

Teal'c silently slipped into position.

His target remained oblivious to his approach. Colonel Casey was a cautious and sensible commander, but the Goa'uld were endlessly arrogant, and would not listen to the instincts of their hosts. They did not believe they could be outwitted. They did not believe that they could be outdone. Ever, such blind confidence was their downfall.

The Goa'uld they were attempting to capture had fled to the pier where the modified tel'tak had landed. Baal had clearly made no provision for any surviving underlings to join him in his escape, but still this one believed it could do so. No doubt it was sure that mere Tauri could not have disabled the craft sufficiently to stop it.

Teal'c had learned well that 'mere Tauri' could be counted upon to do a great deal more than they were credited with.

However much their attitudes belied it.

"Give it up, Casey," O'Neill called from the front of the ship, with every evidence of exasperated boredom. "That bucket of bolts is going nowhere with half the control crystals missing."

Were he not currently keeping his location concealed, Teal'c would perhaps have pointed out that Goa'uld craft were not, in fact, held together by bolts. Nor were they indeed bucket-shaped. The members of SG-1 had long since 'twigged' that his grasp of Tauri idiom was greater than he openly let on, but O'Neill's reaction to such comments was still highly entertaining.

A missed opportunity. Teal'c contented himself with a minutely raised eyebrow instead.

"Do you take me for a fool, O'Neill?" The distorted voice of the Goa'uld created strange echoes, making it more difficult to pinpoint its location. Teal'c did not have it in his line of sight, but he was nonetheless confident that the Goa'uld was concealed close by. This would be the logical position from which to ambush O'Neill.

"Uh... was that a rhetorical question?" O'Neill responded, with no evidence of guile.

"You are the fool, General." The Goa'uld continued to pontificate, giving Teal'c more time to approach its place of concealment. "But then again, no doubt your feeble Tauri body is already approaching senility. You should consider yourself blessed to possess the gene of the Ancients. When I take you as my new host, you will be restored to your prime."

"Gee, thanks, but I think I'll pass," O'Neill said loudly. "I tried the whole symbiote thing - gave me gas."

"Your flippancy will be your undoing." The Goa'uld's voice revealed the fact that it was on the move, and Teal'c prepared himself to move as it passed by his position. "You think you have me trapped-"

It was time. Teal'c swung out, staff weapon at the ready - and found himself staring down the barrel of a zat'nikatel.

"-But it is I who controls the playing field now." The Goa'uld made Casey's face smile, and gestured with the zat. "Drop your weapon and move away from it."

Teal'c glowered, but obeyed the direction. His reflexes could outstrip any normal human, but not a Goa'uld. A larval symbiote was less of an advantage than one in full control of the body, and tretonin lesser still. He might succeed in making a single shot before the zat'nikatel took him down, but given that their intent was to subdue and not kill, it would be a futile manoeuvre.

The Goa'uld herded him back toward O'Neill. "I have your pet Jaffa, General," it called. "Do not make any sudden movements, or you will be forced to go to the effort of training up another. Given your advancing decrepitude and the limited intelligence of the Jaffa race, I doubt very much you will have time."

They rounded the corner and O'Neill lifted his hands off his weapon, raising them half-heartedly. "Well, this is embarrassing, isn't it?" he said to Teal'c.

Teal'c declined to comment. The Goa'uld gestured for the two of them to stand side by side against the wall.

"Your overconfidence betrays you," it said contemptuously. "To try such a pathetic attempt at ambush - you forget, I have the knowledge of my host. I know you. I know how you think. I know exactly what you will do in any given situation."

Major Sheppard appeared on top of the hybrid ship, lightly jumped down, and shot the Goa'uld in the back with a Wraith stunner.

"Guess it's a shame that you don't know me, then," he noted.

"It worked!" McKay, for all that he'd been confidently blustering every step of the way, blinked in startlement at their success. Sam exchanged a punchy smile with Doctor Zelenka. All three of them were running on fumes, at that point in the second or third day awake where you snatched your rest in micro-naps every time you closed your eyes.

"Data swapover process is complete," Zelenka reported, squinting at a block of Ancient text. "Code to run removal of Goa'uld symbiote is safely stored in external memory - cure program has been downloaded to device." He lapsed into muttered Czechoslovakian.

Sam closed her eyes in relief. Now all they had to do was get General O'Neill up here and activate the device.

And there was no time to lose on that. Jon was unfocused and swaying, and Doctor Beckett hovered on the sidelines ready to rush in and attend to him at a moment's notice. He'd had two seizures already while they were working, the second one so long and so violent that Sam was amazed he hadn't broken bones.

She doubted he could reproduce now the work he'd been doing less than half an hour ago. If McKay hadn't come up with a way to exchange blocks of memory between their jumper crystal memory bank and the device, Jon wouldn't even have been able to start work on his cure until Casey had been hauled up and here and de-Goa'ulded.

His idea had saved Jon's life for sure, and possibly the General's too. Sam turned and beamed at him. "That was some pretty quick thinking, McKay," she told him generously. "Very... artistic."

McKay actually blushed.

In fact, he was getting steadily redder. Sam's mood took a sharp swing from amused into concerned as he struggled to clear his throat. He opened and closed his mouth soundlessly, and stared at her in wide-eyed panic before scrabbling at one of his pockets.

Beckett paled and dived toward him. "It's not your allergies, Rodney! Damn it!" He cast around the room helplessly. "He needs to be intubated." They had no such medical equipment on hand.

"Is it the spores?" Zelenka asked, eyes huge behind his glasses.

"Aye! I warned him that it wasn't safe to leave the infirmary before they were fully eradicated. The samples we had multiplied like wildfire when the population was reduced then allowed to grow again. If the colony's spread to his airway..."

Years of experience had trained Sam to mostly curtail the useless questions like, 'Huh?', 'Spores?' and 'Why the hell didn't anybody mention this?' "What does he need?" she asked immediately.

"The only thing that'll kill the spores is pure oxygen. We'll never get him to the infirmary in time!" Beckett pinched McKay's nose and tried to breathe for him, but Sam could barely see any evidence of his chest inflating.

Jon stumbled forward and weakly tugged at the doctor's shoulder. Beckett looked horribly torn.

"You shouldn't even try it, lad. The chances are-"

Sam wasn't sure that Jon could even hear him. He placed a hand flat in the centre of McKay's chest, and screwed his eyes shut in agonised concentration. McKay took a sudden deep, gasping breath-

-And then Jon pitched forward over him, going into a violent seizure.

They were on their way back to the scanner room when O'Neill broke into a spontaneous run. John was considerably younger than his superior, but it took all he had to keep up with the General's long strides. He had no idea why they were running, but the General's sudden urgency was palpable. John could almost hear it singing to him on the same subconscious channel as Atlantis, saying hurry-crisis-repair-weakness-fix.

Something had gone wrong.

Conviction became solid reality as he chased O'Neill into the hallway leading to the scanner, and heard the confusion of panicked voices. He picked up inflections more than words: Beckett, sounding like he did in a hectic surgery, but with an extra edge of panic that made John's own heard beat faster; Zelenka worried, wanting instruction; Carter, self-controlled but tense.

...And no McKay.

Because there was McKay, on the ground, choking, lips turning blue. Carter was trying to give him mouth-to-mouth, and there was no time to find any degree of amusement in that, because it was painfully obvious it wasn't working. Beckett was darting his attention between McKay and the boy Jon, in the grip of another seizure, while Zelenka hovered helplessly. It was the kind of frantic activity that was as bad as none at all, because it was born out of desperation rather than purpose.

And McKay was turning blue.

"What's wrong with him?" John blurted.

"The spores have spread beyond his lungs and they're starting to close off his airway," Beckett reported, sounding a long way from his usual collected self.

"Well, get them out of there!" he suggested incredulously, but the doctor was shaking his head.

"There's no way we can get him hooked up to an oxygen supply fast enough to clear the blockage before he suffocates."

"Then use your super parasite remover!" John waved a hand at the glowing Ancient pillar.

"If we restore the Goa'uld removal program and recalibrate, we will lose all the work on Jon's cure," Zelenka warned, bobbing up and down in agitation.

If the kid had looked a day over sixteen, John would have said damn him anyway. "Well, can't he-?"

He shut that thought down, because it was damn obvious the kid wasn't reprogramming anything. Beckett must have hit him with a muscle relaxant or something because the fitting had finally stopped, but he was slack-faced and dead to the world. John had seen better skin tone on corpses.

Not that McKay wasn't putting up stiff competition.

He'd completely forgotten the oddly silent O'Neill until he moved to kneel by McKay. Carter gave the General a quizzical look as she came up from the latest burst of rescue breathing, but he ignored her and looked to Beckett.

"Do you know what needs to be done?"

There was an odd quality to his voice, a stilted intonation that John associated with computers and aliens. Words not spoken as a natural language, but dredged up and assembled like building blocks.

Beckett had reached that end of his rope where things like 'tones appropriate for use with Generals' no longer registered. "It's not a question of knowing what needs to be done, it's having the facilities to do it! I'm not bloody Doctor McCoy, you know. If I had a handheld thingie that could cure all known ills, I'd be carrying it!"

"I don't need technology. I need knowledge," O'Neill said. Then he stood up, and grabbed Beckett's hand. Before John had the chance to ponder the weirdness of that, O'Neill had grasped his right hand too. He placed it over the back of Beckett's, and John interlaced his fingers automatically. O'Neill pointed their three stacked hands in the direction of Rodney.

Then just stood there.

"Well. This is nice..." John began slowly. And that was when it hit him.

It started as a warm, tingly glow in the region of his stomach, which was vaguely disturbing until he realised it was just more Weird Alien Crap. He felt the energy build and flow through him, channelled into their linked hands. It met answering pulses of something that was more than just contact, less than telepathy. He looked at Carter, and felt a familiarity that wasn't his; looked at Rodney, and his thoughts flowed with medical terms. He understood what was wrong, saw what needed to be fixed, and reached out with his mind just the same as he would to adjust a control on the puddlejumper.

He felt Carson's quick mind shaping and directing the flow of energy, while O'Neill's solid presence surrounded them both, shielding them from forces that would have torn them apart. Together, they sought out the alien invaders in Rodney's system, rounded them up and ruthlessly starved them of their stolen resources.

Then O'Neill released his grip on the two of them, and the link between them was lost. John felt like a newborn baby, only seconds out of the womb: cut adrift from a place of warmth and connection that had been his by right and safe and home, and that he would never return to.

"Is he all right?" he asked, shaking himself out of the melancholy with an effort. Beckett knelt to check on McKay with something like gratitude, his own echoing sense of grief clearly stamped across his face.

"He's fine," he reported a few moments later. "Pulse is steady and he's breathing well. He's just unconscious."

"Then let's get him-"

"Sir, you're bleeding," Carter said suddenly.

They all turned to look at O'Neill, who raised a hand to the blood pooling underneath his nose. "Nihil-" he began, then cut himself off with a grimace.

Zelenka scrambled up out of the frozen pose he'd been holding since before McKay's healing began. "The device must be activated now," he said. "It requires someone to be conscious inside the chamber while it is operating." And Jon was in a coma and O'Neill undoubtedly on borrowed time after the stunt he'd just pulled. He might have tapped John and Beckett's genes for assistance with his healing efforts, but he'd been the one doing the psychic heavy lifting. John helped Beckett carry the unconcious McKay out of the shielded chamber.

"Sir, will you be able to work it?" Carter asked worriedly.

A flurry of unspoken conversation passed between them, and then O'Neill gave her an 'aw, shucks' shrug. "Nil vexare."

Whatever emotion might or might not have been in Carter's eyes was stamped down on in a heartbeat, and she turned away from the General and spoke briskly. "We need to clear the chamber doors," she directed. "Make sure all our computer equipment is moved out. We have no way of knowing what kind of radiation this thing produces."

They set McKay down as comfortably as was feasible in the hallway while Carter and Zelenka shifted their equipment. John stood and turned just as the doors to the scanning chamber were sliding shut. Through the last sliver of a gap, he glimpsed O'Neill looking grave, and Jon lying still as the dead.

Then the two men inside were cut off from them.

"How will we know when the device has been activated?" Zelenka worried. John didn't get a chance to reply, because the force of the mental vibrations that exploded out from the chamber rattled his teeth and stuck his tongue to the roof of his mouth.

"Oh, it's activated, all right," Beckett said.

And all they could do now was wait.

"You switched it on without me?"

Rodney appeared to be very stuck on this particular point. Radek sighed, and pulled his glasses off to massage his aching forehead. "Yes, Rodney, we switched it on without you. We are very sorry. Next time we will allow you to continue choking so you may spend your final moments watching doors close as machine switches on."

He had a feeling his sentence structure was beginning to suffer from his tiredness. In fact, he was not entirely certain that all of those words had been in English. It made little difference, since McKay was self-evidently not listening.

"There was still testing to be done! The, the- what about those power fluctuations? The memory buffer hasn't been tested for tolerance to radiation. I was going to disconnect it before we- Maybe I should just see if there's time to-" He wheeled about in his pacing and headed for the doors. Carter stepped forward caught him by the shoulder; just as well, for Radek couldn't have moved if he'd been paid to.

"It's done, McKay," she said. "It holds or it doesn't. There's nothing more we can do."

Rodney scowled at her. "Oh, yes, you would say that, Miss 'I hold all my alien technology together with duct tape'. I saw your original gate interface at Stargate Command. What was keeping those connectors in place, spirit gum? You know, here in Atlantis where we practise a process called science, we like to be sure our devices won't blow up the city before we go pressing the 'on' button."

Carter just smirked at him. "Wuss."

Mercifully, they were saved from more theatrics by the approach of several people down the corridor. Radek failed to see who, since that would have required moving his neck muscles.

"Anything?" Ah, Doctor Weir. And that delicate yet unmistakeably heavy tread could only be Teal'c.

"Still waiting," Sheppard said tautly. Radek mentally drew in the exchange of eyebrow movements for himself.

"How long before we try, uh-?" That was Doctor Jackson. Radek was not familiar enough with the language of his eyebrows to supply the visuals, so he cracked open an eyelid. Said features were tilted pointedly in the direction of the doors.

"We can't risk opening the chamber before the healing cycle is complete," Beckett cautioned. "There's no telling the effect it could have on both of them."

"Not to mention the brain-melting radiation that would flood out and kill us all. What?" Rodney demanded, in answer to their reactions. "Am I the only one here who pays attention to OSHA guidelines?"

"Yes, but how long are we intending to leave them in there before we assume something's gone wrong?" Jackson pressed. "The Ancient technology we've come into contact with has invariably worked instantaneously or close to it."

"This is hodge-podge Ancient technology, Daniel," Carter pointed out. "Who knows how it will operate?"

"All the more reason to be prepared for the fact that it might not do what it was planned to," he argued. "We should make sure that Jack is all right."

"O'Neill will prevail," Teal'c rumbled, with finality.

Who was Radek to argue with such faith? He was thinking of allowing himself to slide off into sleep when the patterns of light around him changed, the only indication that the entirely silent Ancient doors were drawing open. He forced back the encroaching fog and sat up.

O'Neill appeared in the doorway. His granite face was unreadable, and Radek had no clue whether to expect good news or bad. Had the boy Jon survived? Had the machine fulfilled its function?

Would the words they heard next be in Ancient?

Then O'Neill tucked his hands in his pockets, and bounced on the balls of his feet. "Hey," he said.

"O'Neill," Teal'c said, and inclined his head, but not before Radek caught sight of a smile building.

"T." O'Neill reached up and briefly gripped his shoulder; not the deliberately rough interaction Radek had often observed among the marines, but the unhurried, almost tender gesture of a man who felt no need to prove anything.

"Sir," Carter acknowledged once O'Neill had stepped back. She made no move to approach him, but packed a world of warmth into that simple title, and even more into the dazzling grin that followed. Radek caught only a reflection of its glow, and it warmed him all the way to his toes.

"Carter." O'Neill nodded back at her, with a wry twist to his mouth. He turned and raised an eyebrow expectantly at Doctor Jackson, who was wearing a faintly puzzled look, as if he'd got distracted in the middle of choosing a facial expression.

"Jack." He scrunched his eyebrows up.

"Daniel."

"Jon?" Jackson followed up.

O'Neill gave a small jerk of his head toward the chamber behind him. The boy Jon appeared in the doorway with an awkward smile. As he stretched one long arm out to grip the edge of the doorway, the resemblance to O'Neill was startling. "Hey," he said, with identical intonation.

Doctor Jackson nodded at him. "Hi." Carter smiled, and Teal'c briefly bowed his head.

Doctor Weir, having observed all this, raised an elegantly amused eyebrow. "Ladies and gentlemen, the SGC's premier first contact team," she announced.

"We got by," O'Neill said, with a self-deprecating little shrug.

"You're both all right?" Jackson asked him. "Back to your... not-so-Ancient selves?"

"Fit as a violin," O'Neill said, and met Jackson's slight frown at the words with a look of innocent enquiry.

"Yeah. No more funky alien head trips." Jon massaged his forehead with a scowl.

"What about the device?" Colonel Carter asked. "Did the code in the buffer survive the radiation?"

Radek went to investigate. Moments after hooking up his laptop, he was able to call up long pages of code. He could recognise small parts of it, but it would take many long years to understand it well enough to replicate or adapt it. There were sections of code for which the autotranslator provided no suggestions at all. Ancient medical terminology, or advanced brands of mathematics - how could they translate the words that human language had not yet evolved a need for?

He felt a pang for the loss of the knowledge that had been in Jon's head, even through his relief that it had been safely removed. "The Goa'uld removal program has survived," he reported. Then his smile faded. "But... I have no idea how to transfer it back into the device."

Rodney had adapted the machine's automatic backup to make a full copy of its operating system, but they couldn't just dump that data back into the device in the same way. Overwriting sections of the OS while it was still up and running could cause a disastrous system failure. And when you were working with hardware capable of rewriting DNA, disasters took a more serious form than the Windows blue screen of death.

Rodney barged him out of the way. "Let me see. Obviously, you just, uh- You just need to... Hang on a minute." He tapped busily at keys, but anyone who knew him well would know that he was flummoxed.

O'Neill stepped forward. Rather than attempt to dislodge Rodney by argument or elbowing, he simply took hold of him by the shoulders and shifted him gently but firmly out of the way. He tapped a long sequence of buttons with the fluid speed of a touch-typist.

When he stood back, the data was transferring.

Rodney boggled. "Wait- what? How did you-?"

"Sir?" Carter was looking equally puzzled. O'Neill was transparently brighter than he chose to appear, but he was no programmer, and unless he had been in full telepathic contact with Jon by the end there, he had never seen the code that they were working with before.

Radek frowned up at him. "If you have lost all access to the knowledge of the Ancients-"

O'Neill's face was a detailed study in reasons why it would be a very bad idea to continue. He shifted mental gears.

"-Then I can only theorise that you must have left yourself an embedded instruction, like post-hypnotic suggestion, to allow you to complete the data transfer after the cure took effect."

"Something like that," O'Neill agreed. There was the very faintest edge of threat visible beneath his wry smile, which was only understandable. After all, it would not do to have any suspicion that a man in his position of importance might have been compromised by alien technology, would it?

Radek smiled back guilelessly.

He did not voice the suspicion that, given the two O'Neills were at quite different stages in their shared condition, administering a cure to suit both would require some complex adjustments to the controls. Adjustments that would require some degree of Ancient knowledge to perform. After all, it was entirely possible that O'Neill had made all of the adjustments, and then given the machine a final automated instruction to wipe his memory clean.

If one postulated that O'Neill was the sort of wholehearted optimist who would take it on faith that the process would work perfectly the first time.

Radek thought these things as he monitored the transfer of the Goa'uld-killing program, but mentioned none of them.

Unlike Rodney McKay, he knew very well when it was best to keep his mouth shut.