Chapter One

Earth- Colorado Springs, Colorado- Cheyenne Mountain Complex

"I'm bored." Jordan O'Neill sat, turning on a swivel stool, in her mother's lab. Sam raised an eyebrow. She'd been listening to Jordan's whining for the better part of an hour and it was getting old fast.

"Then build something."

Jordan stopped spinning and hopped off of the stool. She picked up a spare piece of something lying on the workbench and started rotating a small piece of metal aimlessly.

"Every time I build something, eight guys come in here and take it from me, at gunpoint occasionally, and then I have to go to a briefing explaining why I no longer have the clearance to talk about the thing that I just built."

Just as Sam opened her mouth to tell Jordan to go and do bug Walter or something, a warning klaxon sounded through the base.

"Security Team Alpha report to Storage B! Security Team Alpha to Storage B!" The pre-recorded voice announced, and Sam dropped her experiment. She pushed away from the table and headed toward the door calling over her shoulder,

"Jordan! Stay here!"

Jordan stayed in the room for exactly 3 minutes, as always, to give her mother enough of a head start to get to the corner.

"Are you new, Mom?" she muttered under her breath before following her mother down the corridor.

A squad of security officers had surrounded the door to the storage room, and from her vantage point, Sam couldn't really make out what was going on. She cast a quick eye around for Jordan, since she knew she was around somewhere and satisfied herself with the knowledge that Jordan was hidden around the corner. Jacob's occasionally angry predictions of long ago had finally come true and Sam had a daughter that never listened to a word she said.

She saw Daniel standing over by one of the officers towards the back and worked her way over to him.

"Hey. What's going on?"

"Hey, Sam. I, well, I have absolutely no idea. They're opening the door now. Jack is in a briefing, but, one of the, uh, the sergeants went to get him." Daniel gestured down the corridor vaguely, but it was obvious that his attention was focused on the opening door. Three of the security officers immediately disappeared inside the darkened space and from inside, and unfamiliar and very young sounding voice cried out.

"Whoa! Okay, okay. Look, can I just talk to someone." An Ancient Egyptian curse interjected itself into the conversation. Actually, it wasn't so much just Egyptian as it was a specifically Abydonian epithet and Daniel felt his ears prick subconsciously. There weren't that many around who even knew those words, let alone used them so instinctively.

The guards emerged back into the corridor with a girl held tightly between them. She looked frantic, upset, and mostly frustrated. "Okay, okay. I get it. Okay, I have been through this three times already and I've been shot at once and ran before I could get shot at the second time. I lost my glasses on the last planet, or plane, or whatever and I just really need to talk to someone."

"Who are you?" Colonel Reynolds stepped forward and addressed the girl.

"I can explain that. Honestly I can. It's a bit… Well, it's complicated." The girl was obviously trying to free herself from the grip of the men on either side of her. She was not having much luck, which suited everyone in the corner just fine.

"That's unfortunate." Reynolds raised his arm dropped her with one shot o the zat. "We don't do well with complicated."

"What in the world did you do that for?" Daniel stepped forward. "You have no idea who or what she is!"

"With all due respect, Dr. Jackson, that's exactly why I did it." Reynolds holstered his zat gun, stepping forward to observe the prone form of the girl, toeing her tattered backpack out of her reach. "We have no way of knowing what weapons she may have."

"That's ridiculous, Reynolds. The girl can't be older than fourteen." Daniel gestured to her in frustration.

"The Goa'uld have used children before, Daniel." Sam stepped forward and put a hand on his arm.

"Not her." Daniel shook his head.

"How can you be sure?" Sam tipped her head expectantly.

"She was… Sam, she was speaking Abydonian. I haven't heard it spoken in years, but I'd recognize that dialect anywhere."

"Daniel. You have to realize that that could easily be a trap. There's not a Goa'uld in the galaxy that doesn't know your history and none who wouldn't love to take advantage of it. We don't know who she is or where she comes from, and it's best if we ask those questions under guard." Sam knew she'd won when he sighed heavily.

"I know." He ran a hand over his close-cropped hair, and crouched, smoothing the girl's own dark, curly hair out of her face. "I'm going to look at the stuff in her backpack to see if any of it might help us figure out who she is or where she comes from. Come and get me the minute she wakes up."

"You got it, Dr. Jackson" The soldier closest to her nodded. Clemens, Daniel thought his name was.

"Thank you."

The stretched arrived and one of the guards lifted the slight form onto it. There really wasn't much to her, Daniel observed, with a growing sense of pity. She had obviously been without decent nourishment in a long time. Whoever she was, he hoped that the could get her sorted out without having to cause her any more pain that the, in his opinion, unnecessary zat blast already had.

With Reynolds at the head of the stretcher, the guards, radioing ahead to the infirmary to let them know they were coming, moved the girl down the corridor and out of sight. Daniel stood to watch her go.

Sam's voice broke his contemplative silence. "Daniel, as for the backpack, let me do some scans first to make sure its not booby trapped or full of something dangerous. You can come to the lab and watch, and you can have it the minute that we've determined that it's absolutely safe." Sam turned surveying something that Daniel couldn't see from his vantage point. "And you, young lady, you can go to your father's office and wait there until this is all resolved."

"But, Mom…" Jordan emerged from around the corner, just inside Sam's line of vision and Daniel hid a smile behind his hand. "I really want to see who she is."

"No way, young lady. You've already seen entirely too much for a civilian, as usual, and you will wait in your dad's office. Am I making myself clear?"

"Yes, Ma'am." Jordan's tone was frustrated but, as always, Daniel noted, respectful. She turned and shuffled off towards Jack's office, slower than necessary, but still with enough purpose to fulfil her mother's request. Sam waited until she was out of hearing range before continuing.

"That girl drives me crazy." Sam shook her head, smiling. "I don't even know what to do with her some days."

"Just like her father?" Daniel cbuckled, and Sam smacked him lightly on the arm.

"Now, about this backpack." Sam crouched down and observed it, trying to determine if it would be safe to touch without danger.

"You think it'll be okay?" Daniel leaned over .

"I don't know. But, it was on her back and has been dropped already and kicked across the corridor. So, I'm going to assume that I can at least carry it to the lab in one piece." Sam reached out and picked it up, holding her breath for a moment.

Determining that, clearly, the bag was not going to detonate on contact, she carried it off to her lab with Daniel following her. If he couldn't talk to the girl yet, maybe she had something in her backpack that would tell him who she was, and why exactly it was that she spoke Abydonian.