See part 1 for header information. Slightly shorter chapter this time – it just wouldn't stretch.

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Alec Hardison very carefully did not laugh at the expression on Eliot's face as Parker hugged him. He found he quite enjoyed breathing, and laughing right now would probably not be conducive to that.

He sighed and lay back himself, trying to see a way out of this mess.

Dubenich, it seemed, had grossly underestimated this command. He had taken General O'Neill at face value, and General O'Neill had neatly sidestepped their expectations and unleashed the hounds. Not that he would ever call Lieutenant Colonel Carter a hound to her face. Or Major Feretti for that matter.

And certainly not Doc J. unless he wanted more information than he thought could possibly exist on people being compared to animals.

He hadn't stood a chance, he reflected. Yeah, he was a child genius, one of Intelligence's wunderkind. What he wasn't, was a front line fighter with above par reflexes and an ability to think on his feet at high speed. Under fire. With a suspicious general breathing down his neck. A suspicious general whom you were beginning to suspect was brighter than everybody thought.

Add to that his tendency to babble nervously, and something was bound to slip.

Lieutenant Colonel Carter had been very nice about it, he reflected. Not that she needed to be nasty about it; he had seen her sparring with Teal'c, after all.

He had been the first, which showed exactly the level of security they had on their computers. It had been completely unexpected, a whole level of checks and balanced behind what he had been expecting, what he had been looking for, in code he had never seen before.

Something reverse engineered from a captured Goa'uld vessel, Lieutenant Colonel Carter had informed him as she had taken him to holding. At least she hadn't had the marine guards come and drag him off to the cell in which he and his co-conspirators were now being held.

He'd been expecting to see Eliot Spencer sitting in the cell waiting for him, and when the man hadn't been present had merely assumed that they had tried to arrest him and failed. It had therefore come as something of a surprise when Parker joined him, ducking her head and pulling an 'oops' face as she entered, and informed him; after checking for bugs, naturally; that their third was still on the job.

Alec had to admit that he had been surprised. Or at least, had been surprised until Parker explained that Eliot was Delta Force and therefore 'brighter than he looks'.

So seeing the other man standing resignedly in the doorway as the marine guard removed his cuffs and ankle shackles had been something of a surprise. That they were actually letting him out of the hardware at all was even more of a surprise.

And okay, poking a cranky Delta Force operative with a metaphorical stick was possibly a bad idea, but the sour expression on the man's face was too good to leave alone. Particularly when there were guards outside the door to stop him from being outright killed.

Probably.

But all Eliot did was lie back on his bunk and cover his face with one arm. The move revealed the blank patches where the other man's name tape and rank patches were missing.

Hardison considered his own uniform. The one which still bore the rank patches and name tape. He considered Parker's uniform, which also still bore the items and came to a startling conclusion. "You're not really a lieutenant?"

He was surprised. The man had an air of easy command about him, one more appropriate to an officer than an NCO, and was about to say so when something else dawned on him. If Eliot were the only one impersonating a different rank, was this set-up only to gather information about the SGC?

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Jack rapped on the door to the Legal department that the SGC shared with the NATO command above them before pushing it open and ambling in. Nathan was a couple of paces behind as he made a beeline for a desk near the back of the mostly empty room. He gestured for Nathan to make the introductions as the rest of the room took in the BDUs with no rank patch and dismissed the man in charge of the SGC as one of the civilian contractors. Not that he blamed them. The facade was a good one, and let him find out a heck of a lot more about what was really happening around his base than roaming the corridors in shirt sleeve order.

Nathan glanced at him briefly before heading over to the brunette at the desk.

"Hello Sophie," he greeted quietly, making the woman startle and knock over her coffee cup.

"Nate!" she exclaimed, eyes widening. "What are you doing here?"

He smirked at her. "I might ask you the same thing, Captain, particularly after you shot a senior officer."

Jack noticed that Nathan was very carefully not turning round. Not that it would have mattered anyway.

"This the time you and Army CID were investigating the same thing and managed to flush out each other?" he asked the pair.

Really, you wouldn't have known that Nathan was holding back a blush unless it was pointed out that the backs of his ears were turning pink.

He continued: "The one where you and your fellow flushee were put in the same room by medical personnel because you'd pissed everyone else off so they thought you should make each other suffer?"

Captain Deverereaux narrowed her eyes at him. "Nate, won't you introduce us?" she asked as Jack caught the flash of recognition in her gaze. He filed the 'Nate' away for later torment. Possibly over beer and barbeque.

Nathan nodded, turning slightly to shoot Jack a 'Behave!' glare, one Jack replied to with a smirk which quite clearly read 'Ranking. Officer. Whatcha gonna do about it?' and said, "Captain, this is General O'Neill. General, this is Captain Sophie Devereaux. "

Jack extended his hand to her just as she moved to salute, which seemed to baffle her for a moment. "Captain," he said politely, "We have a proposition for you."

He could tell at first glance that she was as bad as Nathan. Tied to a desk, the pent up energy made her twitchy and nervous. He had heard from others in the department that she was wrong more often than she was right in basic cases, and that she came out with wild ideas for the more complex ones that had people laughing in the canteen, never mind that she had been proven correct in more than one of the cases.

Boredom. It was, he guessed, like taking Carter and putting her into middle school, making her teach basic calculus day in day out, or forcing Daniel to teach French to sixth grade. Wheels would spin, gears would grind and no-one would come out the other side unscathed.

She raised a brow challengingly. "Really, General?" she queried with a brief glance at Nathan and oh yeah, Jack was going to be asking his friend about that later. "I'm intrigued."