SG1-16 Four Dragons (28 page)

Chapter Eighteen

DESTINATION: TOK’RA OUTPOST

STATUS: ON ROUTE VIA HYPERSPACE

SHIP TIME: N/A

04 JUL 03/2030 HRS BASE TIME

Daniel stared out into the blue streaks of hyperspace, unable to shake the image of Yu’s Royal Guards bowing in farewell as the cargo ship had lifted off. Repeated offers of escape from Teal’c had fallen on deaf ears. The guards were content to remain behind.

It wasn’t just contentment, Daniel mused. Those four men were driven to stay with Yu. They knew they were cloned, they knew their leader was a Goa’uld, and yet, they believed in him. Completely.

More importantly, they believed in themselves.

“How goes the flying?” Jack asked, sliding into the vacant navigator’s chair.

“Uh… good,” he replied. “Beats staring at a
Wéiqí
game board for days on end.”

“Okay… whatever.” Jack fell silent.

Which was no surprise. Words and Jack didn’t always mesh.

But they mattered to Daniel.

Things needed to be said. The trick was easing his friend in that direction.

Daniel turned from the control globe and looked at Jack. “You know that chamber Yu mentioned? The one on Kunlun, I mean P3Y-702 — ”

“What about it?”

“Right before I was ringed up to Yu’s mothership, I got a halfway decent look at some of the writing.”

“And?”

Classic O’Neill stonewalling.

Daniel returned to the view out the window, his hands draped on the sides of the red control globe. “It was definitely Ancient lettering.”

“So?”

“We should go back and take a closer look.”

Jack sighed. Loudly.

“What’s wrong?”

“Truth be told, I’m not too keen on going back there… At least not for a while.”

Daniel glanced back over at him. “I honestly don’t think Lord Yu will come after us again, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“Blame it on bad memories,” Jack said, his voice low. “I was stupid… You know that, right?”

Daniel recognized a Jack apology when he heard one. He turned to face his friend and asked, “Hey, Jack?”

“Yeah?”

“When we get back, how about some more target practice?”

Jack sat back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. “You bet.”

“But no flying objects this time.”

“Not even an MRE? How about turkey with mashed potatoes? Or how about diced turkey and gravy?”

Daniel laughed. “Especially not turkey.”

“Almost as good as fireworks,” Sam said, entering the cockpit. She stepped down between the chairs, smiling broadly.

“Fireworks?”

“As in happy fourth of July,” she explained.

“Wow… I didn’t even realize what day it was.”

“You’ve been a little busy,” Jack replied. “Carter, what part of ‘get some rest’ did you not understand?”

“I’m fine, sir. Daniel,” Sam looked at him, begging silently for help to get Jack off her back, “tell him I’m fine.”

“Nothing doing, Carter. Dislocated shoulder, concussion…”

Daniel turned back to the view out the window. From the sudden drop in conversation, he knew his two friends were having one of those ‘thousand words in an instance’ conversations which required no talk, just an exchange of glances. They were good at those.

Actually, the entire SG-1 team was pretty good at saying a lot without speaking.

Another set of footsteps entered the cockpit area. Daniel glanced over his shoulder as Teal’c stopped beside the central console.

“How’s Bra’tac feeling?” he asked. The Jaffa Master had barely been conscious when they’d climbed on board.

“He is resting comfortably,” Teal’c replied. “The tretonin heals us slower than our symbiotes once would, though even he cannot deny the delay worthwhile.”

“Very worthwhile,” Sam added.

“O’Neill, Master Bra’tac has expressed interest in learning Morse code upon our return.”

“Another convert!” Jack stuck up his finger up in a victory salute. “Chief Master Sergeant Teal’c, I leave it to you to teach him.”

Daniel groaned at the idea of Morse code spreading out across the galaxy. Forget trying to get Jack to say more than a few words. Thanks to him, Teal’c and the entire Jaffa Alliance, everyone would be banging at dots and dashes. Words would become obsolete.

Or maybe not.

A hand dropped on his shoulder. “I am pleased to see you are well, Daniel Jackson.”

“With no small thanks to you, Teal’c. Three days with a Goa’uld was a bit much.”

“Indeed,” Teal’c intoned. “I only wish I had recognized Ambassador Huang sooner.”

Daniel shook his head. “I don’t think it would have made much of a difference. Yu was determined to get our attention, one way or another.”

“Yet I do not believe we will hear from Lord Yu again. I doubt he can be called upon to assist in the battle against Anubis.”

“In a way, I think he’s already helped.” Daniel leaned back in his seat and considered what Yu had said to him about being a scholar and a warrior. With Anubis still out there, he knew target practice
and
research were the only way to prepare for whatever lay ahead.

“I’ve got a question,” Jack said. “What the hell does
wo meng
mean? Those clone kids of Yu’s kept saying it, over and over again.”

“Could be a couple of things,” Daniel said. “It sounds like an old Chinese dialect, though, so it would basically translate as ‘I dream.’ Sort of makes sense when put in context of the situation. I mean, you did wake them up.”

“Sir… what happened with Lord Yu?” Sam asked. “What made you decide not to kill him?”

“Good question, Carter.” Jack put a hand on the back of his neck.

When he didn’t say anything more, Daniel pushed him. “Jack?”

Some things needed answers. Especially when that something was Jack not acting like… well, Jack. Normally, he’d jump at the chance to knock off another Goa’uld, so whatever happened between him and Yu — it had to have been significant. Daniel had no way of knowing. The communication device had blanked out when Yu ringed down to meet him.

Finally, Jack just shrugged. “Contrary to popular opinion, not all battles have to be about winning.”

“Speaking of winning…” Daniel shoved a hand in his lower pant-leg pocket and pulled out the four dragons. He gave the red one to Jack, the grey to Teal’c, and the blue one to Sam.

“These are lovely, Daniel,” said Sam.

Jack held up his dragon. “Now you’ll have something to carry with you, Carter.”

“I already have something, sir.” She grinned at Daniel and he instantly understood what she meant.

Placing his dragon on the console, Jack asked, “You’re sure Yu isn’t going to be pissed when he finds out you took them?”

“He kind of gave them to me.”

“He told you to take them?”

“Maybe not in so many words.” Daniel glanced down at the one he’d kept for himself. “But I think he’d agree that I earned them.” The dragon’s green eyes reminded him of something Lao Dan’s ancestor had once said, and Yu had driven home.

Words were just words, but the father of Taoism had been right. A man who didn’t know where he’d been, couldn’t know where he was going.

Maybe he couldn’t remember his time as an Ascended Being, but as he looked at his friends, and then out at the stars streaking by, Daniel knew one thing was certain.

He was home.

CODA

STARGATE COMMAND

STATUS: SAR MISSION ACHIEVED

05 JUL 03/1620 HRS BASE TIME

Jack strode into the locker room, ready for a good, long hot shower. Hammond had gotten his debriefing, Frasier got her examinations, and Siler… well, Siler got a round of thanks for saving their butts with a few well packed P90s.

As he made his way over to his locker, Jack noticed yet another row had been installed. Hammond had said something about more SG teams so it only made sense.

He went over to take a peek at the name tags. Major Lyn, Captain Allen, Lieutenant Ford… Jack had spent a bit of time with each of them. They were perfect additions to the S.G.C.

The fourth member of the team’s locker was labeled: Kevin Hopkins, PhD.

Jack vaguely remembered him from the attack on P3Y-702. He was an old archaeology friend of Daniel’s. A bit high-handed, but if it made Daniel happy to have Hopkins around, it was fine with him. How the guy would fare on an SG team? Well, that was Hammond’s problem. Not his.

Sitting down in front of his own locker, Jack cracked the door. He took out the old Van Dyck cigar box and opened it up. A photo of Charlie welcomed him home.

He pulled out Skaara’s Zippo and placed it in the box beside the photo.

As he closed the lid, a breeze blew by.

* * *

The story continues in STARGATE SG-1: The Drift.

About the Author

Diana Botsford has written science fiction for a variety of mediums including books, television, stage and comics. Her screenwriting credits include “Rascals” for
Star Trek: The Next Generation
and episodes of
Spiral Zone
. She recently completed her first original novel,
Critical Past
, and the comic book series,
The Fracture
. Prior to picking up the pen, she worked in the television and film industry as a producer and visual FX supervisor. When she isn’t writing, she teaches the craft of writing for the Missouri State University screenwriting program.

Find out more at
dianabotsford.com

Sneak Preview

Stargate SG-1:  Oceans of Dust

by Peter J. Evans

It was cold, up on the mountain. A frigid wind was whipping down off the high peaks, laden with powdered snow and sharp, stinging frost. As soon as Jack O’Neill stepped out onto the Stargate’s dais the wind hit him in the face, making him duck away from it and shield his eyes. The transition from the flat, filtered air of the gate room to this painful scour — with only the subjective tumble through the Stargate itself between them — took the strength from him.

“Whoa,” he gasped, blinking hard.

There was a sharp intake of breath next to him as Daniel Jackson left the gate and got a mouthful of the same jagged air that was battering O’Neill. “Okay, that’s cold.”

“Think it’ll wake you up some?”

Daniel cupped his hands together and blew through them. “Nature’s espresso.”

O’Neill would have preferred the real thing. He was no stranger to early starts, but being rushed through the Stargate in the small hours of the morning wasn’t really how he liked to begin his day. Not that he had any idea what kind of time he had just stepped into: no other world rotated at quite the same rate as Earth, or span at the same distance from its sun. All he could tell was he had left Stargate Command at three in the morning and had walked out of the gate into bright, if cloudy and bitterly cold, daylight.

There was another gasp behind him as Carter arrived on the dais, and then Teal’c followed her through, striding quickly across the platform and down the short set of steps to ground level. If he was surprised by the weather, he didn’t show it, but O’Neill hadn’t expected him to. “We should have sent a MALP,” he griped, starting down the steps.

“There wasn’t time,” Daniel replied. “Anyway, Bra’tac said that the conditions were okay.”

“I think he was lying.”

“‘Bracing’,” said Carter. He saw her shrugging unconsciously deeper into her uniform, trying to let her tac-vest take the brunt of the weather. “He said the climate would be ‘bracing’.”

“Gotta be a Jaffa thing.”

O’Neill felt the wind tug at his cap, and put a hand up to clamp it tighter onto his head. “Teal’c, this feel ‘bracing’ to you?”

“I had not noticed.”

“Figures.” Where the three humans were almost crouched against the wind, Teal’c was standing as upright and unconcerned as though he were indoors; his staff weapon held at vertical rest, his head tilted almost imperceptibly as he scanned the surrounding terrain.

O’Neill heard the grumble of the event horizon rise in pitch, and he glanced back in time to see the rippling mirror behind him fragment and spin away to nothing. The gate became an empty stone ring atop its dais, revealing nothing but gray rock and the pale, roiling sky.

In fact, apart from the sky and the mountain, there was almost nothing to see anywhere. To O’Neill’s right the ground jutted into a cliff, ragged-edged and brutally steep. To the left it fell away into what looked like an uncomfortably sheer drop. The two cliffs joined somewhere behind the gate, and splayed away from each other ahead, forming a narrow, roughly triangular step that curled away out of sight. Broken stone littered the ground, parts of the upper cliff that had shattered away and fallen onto the step, and everything around the Stargate was rimed with slippery frost. It was a monochrome place, lifeless and desolate and utterly dangerous.

Which told O’Neill much about the people who would choose this world as a place of refuge.

He saw Teal’c lift his head slightly. “What?”

“We are being watched, O’Neill.”

He had thought as much. “Up on the ridge?”

“And from the broken ground behind the Stargate.”

O’Neill resisted the urge to check. “Nice job. Good lines of sight, no chance of crossfire.” In such terms, the placement of the gate made a lot of sense. There wasn’t enough room around it to form a staging area, no space to rank troops or set up equipment. Anyone emerging from it could go neither left, right or to the rear — an invader would always be funneled forwards, while anyone on the cliffs above could rain fire down on them with impunity.

The Stargate had been set up in a killing zone.

Realizing that made O’Neill even more anxious to get out of the cold. “Teal’c, can we hurry this up?”

“Our instructions were to wait and allow ourselves to be observed.”

The wind gusted in a high whistle, spattering O’Neill with sleet. “If we wait much longer they’re going to be observing four popsicles.” He glanced up at the Jaffa’s impassive face. “Three popsicles and, well, you…”

“Very well, O’Neill.” Teal’c took a breath and shouted: the harsh, barking language of the Goa’uld.

An answering voice came from above, up on the cliff edge. O’Neill saw no-one. “What was that?”

“We are required to identify ourselves.” Teal’c called back, a barrage of syllables.

As soon as he had finished, men appeared.

They were Jaffa, that much was obvious. O’Neill counted ten up on the cliff top, their heads and staff weapons suddenly outlined against the scudding clouds, and at the sound of scuffling behind him he turned to see another half-dozen taking up position behind the gate.

All the new arrivals were holding staff weapons. Like Teal’c, however, they were carrying them upright, which O’Neill took as a good sign, just like the fact that none of them were in any kind of uniform. Most were hooded against the cold, some wore long robes that fluttered madly in the wind. He did spot a few items of what he had come to know as typical Jaffa armor and equipment, but on the whole, the men approaching him looked like people who had picked up whatever they could and run for their lives.

The Jaffa on top of the cliff began to descend, running down a set of carved steps so narrow and fractured that O’Neill had thought them just another crack in the stone. Within a few seconds, they had reached level ground and spread out into ragged formation a few meters away. It was all O’Neill could do to keep his MP5 slung and his hands low.

Finally, one of the Jaffa stepped forwards. He shrugged back the hood he had been wearing and raised a hand. “Teal’c!”

In response, Teal’c tipped his head. “Tek ma te.”

The hooded man’s dark skin was roughened by time, and a life in the service of terrible masters. He wore a skullcap, a neat white beard, and on his forehead the golden symbol of Apophis glittered in the meager light.

O’Neill let out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding.

Bra’tac stepped forwards. “Greetings. You are here sooner than I had hoped.”

“Couldn’t keep away.”

“Once we had your message, General Hammond wanted us here as soon as possible,” Daniel explained.

“Yeah…” O’Neill suppressed a shiver. “He was eager. Nice place you’ve got here.”

Bra’tac was perfectly capable of recognizing human sarcasm, although sometimes he chose to pretend he didn’t. Today, it seemed, he had no time for such games. “It may be harsh, O’Neill, but for the moment it is safe.”

“Perhaps no longer,” Teal’c replied. “If you have indeed found what you describe.”

“Which is why I contacted you as soon as I discovered the bodies.”

That was news. “Bodies?”

“Of course. The significance of the ship was hidden until I saw who had been at the helm.” Bra’tac turned away, into the wind. “Follow me.”

He stalked away. The Jaffa he left in his wake shifted into a kind of expectant line, waiting for O’Neill and his companions to follow. None of them, O’Neill noticed, had acknowledged Teal’c in any way other than suspicious glares, and some looked as if they would have been happier with their staff weapons leveled and open.

Teal’c made no comment on this, and O’Neill decided it would be churlish to bring the subject up. Maybe later, he thought. When things are a little warmer all round.

He set off after Bra’tac, trotting to keep up with the man’s long strides, Carter and Daniel falling in alongside him and Teal’c a few steps behind. A rearguard position. The fact that he thought this necessary made O’Neill feel even less comfortable than before, if that were possible.

Bra’tac reached the bottom of the stone steps and launched himself up them. Watching him, O’Neill winced slightly. “Okay, people. Don’t try this at home.”

“No intention, sir,” muttered Carter.

O’Neill reached the bottom step, hesitated, then planted his boot on it. Immediately he felt it slide fractionally, frost and loose grit on its surface forming a treacherous coating. He sighed, then saw Bra’tac frowning back down at him. “Hurry,” the Jaffa snapped.

“Fine…” O’Neill steadied himself against the rock on either side of the steps, and began to climb.

Stargate SG-1: Oceans of Dust

Published March 2011