Stargate SG-1: Sacrifice Moon (17 page)

They'd found bodies here too, long-dead skeletons that probably
dated from when this city had died. Daniel couldn't tell much about
them, except that at least three had been children, one just a baby.
They'd left them huddled together in the back room where they'd
found them. Jack, seeing a glint of gold around the baby's bony arm,
had gestured to Daniel; Daniel had just shaken his head and walked
away.

Jack already liked him, but he liked him a hell of a lot more for
that.

"Let's get some sleep," Jack said, loud enough to cut through the
still-enthusiastic dialogue going on between Iphigenia and Daniel.
"Carter, Daniel, we'll wake you at 0300."

Nobody protested; truthfully, Jack thought, every one of them with
the possible exception of Teal'c was pretty much wrung out. Daniel
and Carter stretched out on the thin bedrolls, pulled blankets over
their heads, and within minutes Jack heard the light sound of Daniel's
snores. Carter slept silently - military training - and Iphigenia and
Pylades curled up in the comer together, back to back. No self-consciousness about sleeping so close together, Jack noticed, but then,
different planet, different customs. Daniel and Carter had unconsciously left a good amount of space between them, even though the
chill was settling in deeply.

Jack blew out a breath, saw it spread out silver on the air, and
hugged his hands under his armpits.

It was going to be another damn long night.

Hours passed in silence. Jack watched the night go from ink-black
to silver, washed in the thick moonlight; nothing moved out there,
but there was a feeling to it. Sinister. Maybe it was imagination, but
he didn't think so. He remembered the mosaic back on Chalcis, the
ruined city, the moonlight, the sense of danger lurking in shadow. It
occurred to him, kind of cheerfully, that somebody had been here to
see that scene, so maybe there really was a way off this rock.

Although it was way too easy to believe, here in the darkness
down the throat of night, that there wasn't any hope - that all that was
left was a futile, desperate struggle and an ugly death. But he'd faced
that before, many times, and it didn't drag on him the way he knew
it would the others. Daniel might be resistant to it, too. For all his
imagination and quick intelligence, Daniel could be amazingly dense
when it came to recognizing danger. Carter, on the other hand... all
the sensitivity, none of Jack's hardening. He knew she was tough, or
he wouldn't have picked her for the team, but she hadn't been tested
the way Daniel had, or Teal'c. It took special hardness to make it
through something like this without breaking.

And now she was whimpering in her sleep again, making sounds
of real distress.

Jack left his post and shuffled over to her, wincing at the strain in
his still-sore ankle, and put a hand on her shoulder and shook gently.
"Captain," he whispered. "Captain Carter."

She came awake with a galvanic shudder, straight up, and he saw
the shine of sweat on her flushed face.

She also came up with her combat knife in her hand. Jack threw
himself back instinctively, before his brain even reported the flash of
movement, and felt the tip of the knife dig into his tac vest a second
before ripping free in a diagonal line.

"Captain!" he barked, and grabbed her arm. He twisted, hard, felt
her fighting him but adrenaline and training, not to mention superior
upper body strength, won out. She dropped the knife with a metallic
klang and spun up to a fighting crouch. "Captain Carter!"

Everybody woke up. Teal'c came to his feet, but didn't abandon
his post.

It took long sweaty, skin-crawling seconds before the sanity crept
back into those wide eyes, and finally Carter swallowed hard and
whispered, "Colonel?"

"What's left of him," he said in disgust, and looked down at his
vest. Another inch, and he'd be picking up his guts with both hands.
"Any particular reason you want to field-dress me, Carter?"

She sucked in a deep, shaking breath. "Sony, sir. I was -

"Dreaming, yeah, got that." He engaged her eyes and held them.
"You okay?"

"Yes sir."

"I'm not asking for the P.C. answer, Captain."

"And I'm not giving it." A deep, convulsive breath. "I'm good,
sir."

Daniel, up on one elbow watching the drama, had frozen in place,
as had Teal'c; when she followed up the declaration with a murmured, "Sorry, bad dream," Daniel rolled back flat and closed his
eyes in relief.

Teal'c kept watching, expressionless and tense.

Jack wasn't buying her apology; she had a pale, shaky look he
didn't like. And it might have been his imagination, but she looked
fevered - flushed, eyes glittering. Reaction time a little too fast. In
the pale reflected moonlight and the half-light of the camp stove that
kept the room moderately warm, he caught sight of her collar, and the
moonstone in the center.

The dark mark on it was larger, nearly a full quarter. Like Alsiros's.

"Turn around, Captain," he said, and made a twirling motion when
she didn't respond. She did, unwillingly, and turned her head to try
to catch sight of what he was doing. "Nothing personal, Carter." He
moved her hair off her neck and looked first at the unbroken skin - no
stealth invasion by Goa'uld, at least - and then at the silvery mesh of
the collar. It was seamless. He probed at it with his fingers, looking
for some kind of catch, then had her turn to face him again. This close,
it was impossible not to feel some discomfort. He compensated by
focusing hard on the objective - the damn collar. She was breathing
shallowly and fast.

When he reached out, she blocked him with a fast upraised arm.
"Don't, sir," she said hoarsely. "Don't touch it."

"Why not?"

"Because - " Her eyes were a little wild. "Just don't."

He felt his frown groove deeper. "Carter - "

She put a hand up over the collar, not as if she was trying to rip it
away - which was what he wanted to do - but as if trying to keep it
on.

Okay, something was deeply wrong here.

"Why me, sir?" It burst out of her in a shaking rush. "Why is this
happening to me? Why nobody else?"

"I don't know, Captain."

"Is it just that I'm the only woman, or - "

"Alsiros went faster than you did," he reminded her. "One or two
nights, he was over the edge. Maybe it's body chemistry. Maybe it's
magnetic waves. Hell, Carter, for all I know, we're right behind you.
Stay focused. You're not crazy."

"Maybe not yet," she said, and forced a shaky smile.

"Maybe not ever."

They both flinched at the high, thin, panicked sound of a scream. It
ripped the fabric of the night, echoed, multiplied. Echoes? More than
one voice? Jack took a step back, saw Teal'c turning to face him too,
face wiped blank in concentration. Daniel rolled groggily up for the
second time.

The screaming was close. Very close.

Carter darted around him, grabbed her MP5, and hit the door at a run.

"Captain!" he yelled, but she was already gone at a dead run.
"Captain, halt! That's an order!"

No way he could keep up with her, not with his ankle; he tried
anyway, running until the fiery ache crippled him and he had to sag
against a crumbling wall, hissing in pain. Somebody ran past him, flat
out - he thought it was Teal'c, at first, until he felt a ham-sized hand
closing on his shoulder to support him from behind.

Daniel. Daniel had been chasing after Carter. Going like a goddamn track star.

"I'm fine!" Jack lied. "Go go go!"

Teal'c abandoned him and loped on, running after Daniel, and
damn, where had Daniel learned to run like that? Well, Abydos, probably. He'd had plenty of time toning up, chasing after the Abydonian
kids up and down sand dunes. He would have been training them,
same as he'd trained them to use the ordnance that the first Stargate
mission had abandoned there.

Bad time for Daniel to decide to be a hero, and dammit, there was
no way Jack was going to keep up, his ankle was folding up like wet
cardboard the harder he pushed it. It was pulsing now, sickening red/
purple pulses that thudded in time with his heartbeat.

He rounded the next corner in time to see Carter climbing a mountain of rubble, cresting it, and disappearing on the other side. Teal'c
and Daniel were kneeling next to a crumpled dark shape in the moonlight - another black-robed tribute victim, this one a woman, her
throat slashed. Blood slid in dark sheets over the stone, and Daniel's
hands were covered with it as he tried to stop the bleeding.

No good. Daniel sat back and looked up at the moon. Blood-flecks
on his glasses, splashes on his face. He looked exhausted and ill.

Jack remembered the flash of the knife in Carter's hand, and felt a
sickening drop at the pit of his stomach. God, no.

Daniel must have read the thought in his face. "She didn't do this,"
he said. "She - she went after the one who did."

Jack keyed the radio. "Carter! Captain Carter, break off pursuit
and get your ass back here, now!"

"She can't," Daniel said, and scrambled to his feet. "She can't stop
now."

"Daniel!" Jack barked, and hobbled toward them as fast as possible. "Stay, dammit - "

But it was like Daniel couldn't hear him, or didn't care; he hit the
pile of rubble at a run, scrambled up with hands and feet, and slid over
the top out of sight.

Jack felt a sudden strength-sapping wave of weariness, outright
fear, and looked at Teal'c. Was it just his imagination, or was there
something there, too? Some sense of futility, of uselessness, of inevitability?

"Teal'c," he said hoarsely. "Go after them."

The Jaffa nodded and took off after Daniel and Carter. Jack sucked
in heavy, blood-tasting breaths and looked at the scene again. Bloody
corpse, bloody footprints leading up to the mountain of rubble.

This is going so far south it's meeting north.

And he didn't understand why. Daniel was headstrong, but he
wasn't stupid; he wouldn't go after Carter against orders, he knew
he'd be lousy as backup. And Teal'c should have been way ahead of
him. It was as if..

As if they'd all changed, in small but telling ways.

Yeah? Is that why you weren'tfaster on the uptake? Why you didn't
grab Carter and slam her down before she could make it out of the
shelter? Why you couldn't stop Daniel just now?

Jack turned, a slow, limping circle, looking around. There was a
dark doorway to his left. He took it, found a half-fallen wall that he
managed to roll himself over, then a shortcut past the massive pile of
fallen wall that blocked the street.

He limped grimly on, knowing that whatever was happening, he
was going to be too late to stop it.

We left those kids alone back there. In the fast press of events, he'd
forgotten Pylades and Iphigenia, and that wasn't like him, he should
have snapped out orders to protect the camp, should have kept command...

Worse, he left them with the supplies. Dammit. If those were gone,
they were deeply screwed.

He took another shortcut, then another, listening for the sound of
pounding footsteps, and came out less than a hundred feet away from
Captain Carter.

She was standing very still, her MP5 trained on a man lying on his
back, hands flung wide. There was a bronze ram's head dagger in his
right fist, but he wasn't making any threatening moves. He was staring up at the moon like a blind man, face open and weirdly ecstatic,
and as Jack watched, his back bowed and he had some kind of seizure, foaming from the mouth.

He saw the fury twist on Carter's face just an instant before her
trigger finger tightened.

Daniel exploded around the comer, reached Carter and knocked
the muzzle of her rifle up into the air just as she let loose a full auto
burst that would have shredded the man lying on the ground into
hamburger.

It would have been stone cold murder. Jack felt that settle over him
like frost, even as Carter rounded on Daniel with a snarl like nothing
he'd ever heard in his life, animal and furious, and swung her MP5
straight at his head like a club.

Daniel ducked fluidly and decked her with a backhanded blow to
the face. Flat out on the stone next to the man with the knife. He went
down with her, knee in her chest, holding her flat as she struggled, and
wrenched the MP5 away from her with one hand.

He lifted it with a snarl, ready to slam it down into her face.

"Daniel!" Jack roared, and saw the man hesitate, every muscle in
his body trembling, and then Daniel dropped the gun, hit Carter hard
on the chin again with his fist and rolled away.

Carter went limp.

Daniel fell over and curled up on his side, shaking, as Jack limped
forward and grabbed the MP5, slung it over his shoulder, and kicked
the knife out of the reach of, well, everyone.

He stood there in the moonlight looking down at Daniel, at Carter,
not knowing what exactly he should be feeling but knowing what he
did feel, inappropriate as it was.

He was scared shitless for them. Of them.

Teal'c rounded the comer and advanced slowly, staff weapon held
at cautious half-staff, and some of Jack's irrational fear eased a little.

"Teal'c, nice of you to join us. Zip-cuff that guy," Jack said, and
jerked his chin at the foaming, spasming figure of the killer still lying
on the ground in some kind of ecstatic frenzy. As Teal'c moved to comply, Jack carefully eased himself down on one knee next to Daniel and put his hand on a shaking shoulder. "Daniel. Hey. Easy..."

Daniel flinched. More than ever. Then he rolled painfully over on
his back, and stared up at the moon; there was some of the same
blindness in him, as if he'd been drugged. His pupils were hugely
dilated.

"Oh, God, Jack," he whispered, and shut his eyes. "Help me. Help
me.

"How?"

"I - " Daniel threw his arm up, blocking out the light. "Get us
inside."