Chapter 2
The first things Janet Frasier saw when she opened her swollen eyes were the stars. Bright, distant, and glaringly painful as they whizzed by up above in the night sky. The first things she felt, other than the complete dizziness and nausea from what she was certain would turn out to be a concussion, were the equal sensations of falling and sliding as her captor was dragging her very quickly and very roughly down a steep graded hill. Janet couldn't tell who was dragging her along because of the bouncing silhouette she was seeing as her head kept knocking the ground in perfect time with his footsteps. Something was around her ankles so tightly, all the feeling in her feet was limited to the pinpricks and numbness that came from lack of circulation. On a second jostling look, Janet saw what appeared to be ropes around her legs, secured to something like a harness around the thug's torso. The glint of body armor twinkled briefly, and Janet knew right away that this behemoth was not Jaffa. The armor that Jaffa wore were unique and familiar enough to her that she'd recognize them anywhere. She tried glancing down at her wrists which were bound every bit as tight as her ankles, but tried to stabilize her head instead, when her backside was scraped over an enormous dry, rocky patch of ground.
The sudden change in terrain made Janet lose her breath, and the foreign, tape-like substance that was across her face made getting another breath in rather difficult. She quickly snuffed three ragged puffs through her nostrils. The cold air was very harsh in her nose, and she was able to gain a bit of control back of her senses. She heard grunting and dragging sounds coming from somewhere up ahead of them. She guessed from the noise, that her two team members were up there in a similarly precarious situation to hers. Janet started to lick the insides of the taped gag so that she could better catch her breath and possibly make some noise. The edges were so sticky, it seemed that the more she licked, the harder the gag stuck, and she had to quit when her tongue got tired and dry from the lack of saliva. She had no idea how long they had been traveling, or how much further they would be going. She couldn't gage distances, and telling time wasn't really possible.
Without warning, gorilla neck stomped to a stop, and Janet was almost able to pick her head up off of the ground and get a good look around her, when the rope on her ankles was pulled even more tightly. Her body was jerked forward with such speed that it didn't even register in her mind at first. She let out a gummy, muffled "mmmpf" as another huge chunk of rock scraped her back deeply. The wetness from the blood was instantaneous. All of the sudden, there were no more rocks beneath her. In fact, all at once Janet felt no more of anything beneath her. For countless seconds there was air and only air. With her legs and arms bound, flailing wasn't an option, even as futile as it would have been. Janet tried to brace for the impact of a landing that could not be seen, but she couldn't brace quickly enough or well enough, and the ground gave a quite inhospitable welcome as she slammed down with a teeth-chattering, bone-jarring, skull-splitting thud. The stars appeared to wink out one by one as Janet fell into unconsciousness for the second time since her trip through the Stargate earlier that day.
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"Dr. Frasier?!" a faraway, but familiar voice wove its way into the murky folds of Janet's semi-coherent awareness. The voice seemed to be coming from somewhere between Oz and her left shoulder.
"Dr. Frasier, can you hear me? You need to open your eyes now, you need to wake up." the voice kept interrupting her mind's attempt at another trip back down the yellow brick road, and a rather rude shake to her left arm chased the last yellow brick away completely.
"Ohhhhhhhh nOOOoo" Janet groaned. She still couldn't get her eyes to open, but at least she was able to breathe. Someone had removed her gooey tape gag, and the sound of her own pained moan brought her around a little more. Janet guessed that that someone was the owner of the voice that now tried to rouse her.
"Dr. FRASIER!!! PLEASE you have to wake up ma'am. I don't know how much longer I'll be able to recognize you and keep talking to you." the voice was terrified, and it was that sound of terror more than anything,that helped Janet fully come around.
She opened her eyes slowly, and the orange-Grey haze that represented daylight on this planet made them sting and water.
"Oh I don't think we're in Kansas anymore Toto."
"What?" said her team mate. She remembered his name now; Markinson, David. Rank: Staff Sergeant, USMC. Position: field medic. About 6'3'', well-built, around 235lbs. She remembered that he had dark brown hair, and round, dark eyes to match.
"What?" he repeated again with a huff
"Never mind." it was more of a hoarse, dry croak, than actual words. "What's happening Markinson? Are you injured? Where's lieutenant Brinks? Is he okay? Here, help me sit up."
As Janet attempted to sit up her injuries made themselves known in a blatant fury. She looked down at her wrists first, which were still bound painfully tight. Markinson yanked her to a near-sitting position, and the cut on her lower back broke open again at the edges, re-wetting her t-shirt underneath her BDU top. A headache the size of Cheyenne mountain pounded behind her temples. Apparently, the crash landing opened a nasty little gash on the back of her scalp, and Janet felt the pull of dried blood in her hair as she turned her head slowly to her left to look warily at the Sergeant beside her.
"I don't know, I don't know. I don't even know if I have time to explain what I DO know. But here look at this. LOOK at him Dr. Frasier!!" Markinson scrambled to the other side of their roomy, oblong shaped pit where a still, lumpy form lay crumpled in the cold shadows.
Janet still couldn't keep her eyes focused enough to track Markinson in his panicked haste. He was shuffling back and forth between herself and the form on the floor, which Janet could barely recognize as her other team member, Brinks.
"Is he......?" she didn't have the heart or the voice to croak out the last word.
"YES! YES! YES! See? They killed him! Just like that! But you didn't see what he was like when they brought him back. When they threw him back down here again after that THING hauled him up to the top like it did to me. He didn't know me! He didn't know his own name!! He had no memory of anything whatsoever!! What are we going to do now Dr. Frasier, what now? I don't know how much time I have left before I end up like him. We've got to do SOMETHING.....ANYTHING....I ...Just..." the young Sergeant broke off his rant as he sat back down beside her again and began to weep hysterically. Big, heaving sobs racked his body as Janet just stared between him and Brinks lying in what would most likely be his final resting place. She couldn't believe he was dead, but she had work to do.
Her medical training had been a vital part of her life, but she praised her military training every day of the week and twice on Sunday for getting her through moments like these. First things first. She had to try and get Markinson to calm down so he could untie her hands before they fell off.
Calmly, in the most stern, motherly, tone she could manage, Janet spoke to her team-mate.
"David, look at me." the sobs continued to burst from him, and his head remained tucked in his knees. He hadn't heard a word. "David, please look at me, I need you to tell me what's happening." Nothing. Janet spoke louder, and with as much authority as she could muster.
"STAFF SERGEANT MARKINSON, YOU STOP THAT NOW AND LOOK AT ME, THAT'S AN ORDER!!!"
That did it. Never underestimate the power of rank. He lifted his chin from his knees and stared at Janet's chin, not making eye contact. "Yes Ma'am."
"Markinson, first I need you to untie my hands please, right now. You can talk as you untie me. Tell me what's going on. The last thing I remember was being dragged down a mountainside and dumped rather rudely into this hole. Before that, I remember coming through the Stargate with you and Brinks, and being blinded by something very hot and very painful. Before that, I was actually having a pretty good day." she took a breath, and tried to shift her butt to shimmy against the wall so she could give Markinson some leverage with the bindings.
"There, see that rock? Maybe it's sharp enough to help loosen these vines enough for you to get them undone." Janet held out her hands, which were a very disconcerting, dusky shade of Grey. Markinson found the rock and got to work.
"Well ma'am, the only thing different in my version of the story so far, is what happened when they sucked me out of this pit and dragged me to their base of operations. Everything else that you just said goes the same for me."
"Who is "they"?
"I don't remember what they call themselves, but the species of this planet are humanoid in form, although they look nothing like us. In fact, they look like something from a Star Trek reject episode. You know, the one that didn't air?" Janet shook her head in an amused acknowledgment, as he continued to work the bindings on her wrists.
"Yeah, right. So anyway, they have this thing, this huge uh....like robot snake thing with a eye on the end of it that just reached down in here with it's slimy black snake....arm, or whatever it is, and heaved me right up and over the top of this hole. You were out like a light, and you didn't move at all. That was about six and a half hours ago. They took Brinks before that, maybe three hours before me." Markinson had to stop for a breath and looked up at Janet.
"You started coming back around right about the time they dumped me back in here again. Aahhh...."
The Sergeant suddenly let go of Janet's hands and the rock, and grabbed his head in pain. She saw a sweat wash over his face, and the color drain out of it. She looked down at her hands and realized that with enough strength she could free her hands with a good strong pull; the vines were relatively slack. With a painful tug, she pulled her arms free as the bindings tore loose. In an instant, the rush of circulating blood back to her fingertips made both of her hands feel like thousands of tiny little fire-ants were crawling all over them. She shook them out to get the feeling back again.
"David what's wrong?" Janet was trying to reach for Markinson, but her legs were still bound. She started trying to undo the bindings on her ankles, but her fingers still wouldn't work right. The young man continued to grab his head in his hands and let another low garbled moan.
"GAAAHH, it's gonna happen to me too right? I'm gonna die just like Brinks!"
Her own pain momentarily forgotten, Janet used her hands instead to help scoot herself around so that she was closer to Markinson. She reached up and grabbed his large hands in her small ones, and tried to make him look at her again.
"Sergeant you have to tell me what's going on, what the hell happened?" as she was looking into Markinson's face, she happened to glance along the side of his neck. On the right, almost directly over top of the carotid artery, Janet saw an ugly, purplish mark with a red center. It looked curiously similar to the marks that were sometimes left by the rapid injection capsules the military used in their field medical kits for medicines like pain killers and sedatives.
"What's this mark here?" Janet let go of Markinson's hand long enough to smooth her fingers over the spot on his neck. When she gave a slight push with her fingertips, the skin beneath broke open, and immediately began to bleed. "They put something in you didn't they?"
The young man gasped when Janet touched his neck. " Ooww yes, that's what I was trying to tell you, it was when they had me at their base!!!! They wanted the iris codes. They wouldn't say why, and I didn't care! They injected me with this clear syrupy stuff to make me tell the truth, but I didn't cave, I swear it! I didn't tell them anything, you have to believe that!" Now Markinson shook off Janet's hands, and rose to his feet.
"Okay listen to me Sergeant, I don't know what it is, but you have to FIGHT this! We are going to get home, and get you better, but I can't do that without you. You need to be strong, do you hear me? And yes, goddamn it, I am making that an order!"
Janet still sat, and her voice was still croaking, but her strength was returning. Her adrenal system was firing overtime. She knew the "fight it" speech by heart, and here lately it seemed that she had been using it all too frequently. But it was currently the only weapon that she had available in her personal arsenal, and she wasn't afraid to use it.
" I CAN'T! I CAN'T! IT HURTS!! The Sergeant kept a firm hold on his head, and backed up against the crumbling dirt wall, only to slide himself back down onto his butt next to Brinks' contorted body. As soon as his rump hit the ground, Markinson's nose started bleeding along with his neck. He reached across his face to try and wipe the blood away. When he did, Janet saw new blood coming from the man's left ear as well. Extra cranial bleeding was never a good sign. In fact, she knew right at that moment that Markinson's time was short.
Janet rolled over onto her belly and pushed gingerly up onto her knees. It wasn't easy with her feet bound and her head swimming, but she did it anyway. She used her hands to steady herself and pulled her knees in towards her chest. Then, she half jumped, half fell over to the young man who had begun to weep again. He just simply let the blood run down his face, not caring to wipe it away after the first couple of useless attempts.
After she was quickly seated again, Janet took the Staff Sergeant into her arms and cradled him like a young child after a brutal nightmare. She didn't know what else to do. She had no instruments, no medicines, no equipment. She just held him close and began to stroke his hair as he sobbed. She couldn't believe how fast this was happening, whatever it was. She couldn't believe that she was just going to sit while her team mate died in her arms. But that's exactly what she did.
"SSSHhhhhhhh. There there now. Hush David. Sshshshhhhhh." she rocked him gently, and when he quieted a little, she rolled him onto his back so that he was looking up at her. His head was still in her lap. Janet continued to pet his hair, as the bright crimson blood flowed from his nose, his ears, his mouth, and even his eyes as he cried. With a final wet cough, and a last gasping breath, Janet saw the light leave Markinson's eyes, as his face and body went slack. She held him for a few slow minutes more, then carefully moved his torso off of her lap and gently onto the floor of the pit. She reached out and closed his eyes carefully. Next, she reached under Markinson's shirt and removed his dog tags, which she placed in the cargo pocket of her BDU pants.
Janet sat for a few more seconds before finally beginning to untie her ankles. The work was ridiculously tedious, and the light seemed to be fading quickly. She had no idea how long it actually took, but at long long last the knots were untied and her feet were free. The first thing she did was attempt to stand up. Another mistake, she dully realized, as the fire-ants invaded her boots, and her knees threw a mutiny in protest to her brain's request to remain upright. So again, Janet sat down hard on her rump, and waited patiently for the sensation to return to her lower extremities. After she was certain she wouldn't fall again, she stood up, and went over to the still form of Brinks a few feet away.
As she reached down to try and turn him over, she saw the dried dark blood that had exited his skull in the same manner as Markinson's. Instead of turning him full over, she grabbed the chain around his neck and yanked hard to release the dog tags. These too she shoved into the cargo pocket on her pants leg.
She began to study her surroundings for the first time, and realizing that there wasn't much to study except for the common variety dirt hole in which she found herself trapped, she let her mind wander back to when she first arrived on the planet so many hours ago.
They had gotten the message from SG-1 about 8pm local time. The team hadn't even been gone for their allotted 24 hours, and the fact that Janet had been so close to the gate room when the distress call had come in was a complete fluke. She had gone to tell the General that she was releasing SG-9 for full, active duty, and was getting ready to head home to Cassie for the night. After the gate engaged, she stayed to eavesdrop like she did sometimes, and the anxiety in Colonel O'Neill's voice had been painfully obvious.
Janet had listened with a pounding heart as the Colonel had described how they had been ambushed soon after their arrival, even though they had no intelligence that had told them it was an unfriendly planet. She had tried to keep her stomach in it's correct anatomical position, as she heard him tell Hammond that Sam had been kidnapped while the rest of them had been blinded by some sort of shock grenade. Poor Sam, she had thought. Why did these things always happen to her?
"Well Sam, this time I really do know how you feel." Janet thought out loud. As her mind carried her forward in time to when she herself had arrived on this planet and had also been ambushed and kidnapped.
When the Colonel had asked for back up to secure the gate and help locate Sam, the General had denied his request. More because of the IOA committee than because of his personal judgment. Hammond had told O'Neill to locate Sam's position and gather intelligence first, and then he would send back up. But he wouldn't risk another team until they could understand what they were up against. And of course, after hearing the exchange, Janet had excitedly protested the General's decision to hold the back-up. If it had been anyone else challenging his orders, he would have had them on latrine duty for a week. But with her, he seemed to accept her outward disagreements with his orders as simply a part of who she was. He knew she always kept the personnel's safety a top priority, and she knew Hammond respected her medical opinion very highly when it came to the lives of the people under his command. So usually, she always got some sort of compromise from him that hey both could live with. This time had been no different. Hammond had agreed to send herself and two other personnel to this planet if, and when Sam was found.
Janet had called Cassie and made arrangements for her, then spent her time packing the necessary supplies in case she was needed off world by SG-1. As it turned out, they hadn't had to wait but about eight more agonizing hours. When Daniel had re-opened the gate to say that they had found Sam, he had requested the medical team in the same breath. He wouldn't give details, but when the staff replayed the transmission in the control room, they could hear Sam screaming in the background. Janet had had her team in the gate room within ten minutes, geared up and ready to go.
Abruptly, Janet was shaken from her reverie by a rumble in the walls around her dark little pit. A clod of damp dirt landed on her head, and she followed the trail that it had made down the impossibly steep wall up to the top of the hole. All she saw was the same, orange-grey sky that had been growing steadily darker by the minute. But she felt the vibrations under her. She heard a low rumbling coming from above. They were coming for her now. It was her turn. Janet looked down at Markinson, and then back up at the opening of the pit, and that's when she saw her own reflection mirrored back down to her by the snake-like arm above. The arm was very thick, and black as far as she could tell, and on the end of it was a shiny, silvery substance that reminded her of the mercury used in old thermometers.
She couldn't speak. She couldn't move. She couldn't think of anything but seeing her own reflection at the bottom of the pit in the mirror on the creature's head. And somehow she just knew it was a creature, she felt it. Her suspicions were confirmed as the mercurial substance spread wide, and two very large sets of silver, razor-sharp teeth glinted down at her; dripping a clear, jelly-like fluid from between them. No eyes or nose or anything. All Janet could see were teeth. Then, in a flash of movement the thing was down in the pit with her, wrapping itself around her middle, and like lightning was lifting her up and out of the pit. That's when Janet Frasier began to scream.