Fic: WiP: Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves :: SGA/SG-1 :: a
The first part of a multi-part Alternate Universe story, aka space pirates the au epic of doom. Some bits of teasers previously posted may be recognized. Some dialogue repurposed from SG-1 episodes Prometheus Unbound, Summit and Last Stand.
Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves
an Alternate Universe SGA/SG-1 Crossover
by Auburn
Words: ~27,280
Mixed Slash and Het
[a] [b] [c] [d]
Prometheus Purloined
Sometimes Jehan thought that Vala's trip through Thor's Hammer hadn't really gotten rid of Qetesh after all. Sometimes he wondered if it hadn't left her with some kind of brain damage. Usually those times were accompanied by the reflection that he must have been ribboned once too often or he wouldn't still be following her around the galaxy.
Those times, he reminded himself he could have had Ba'al sitting in his head instead of offering a bounty on it, laid down some cover lies or fire, and hoped being crazy would continue being lucky until they made it back to the chappa'ai or their ship in one piece.
Their latest plan probably pushed that luck farther than it would hold though, explaining why the rest of their crew had abandoned them.
~*~
They had six days left. He could feel the sand trickle of each irreplaceable moment disappearing as they waited at their metaphorical waterhole. The Tanafriti was gone, along with any other options beyond this plan. If it failed, they would have to cannibalize the cargo ship drifting at their bow and limp the al'kesh they were on to the nearest world with a chappa'ai, hundreds of lightyears away.
And Mer would die.
Vala sat at the pel'tak comm station and transmitted an artfully broken up distress call, her voice strained yet collected.
"Help... request assistance...have failed...we have lost power," Vala recorded, using the Jaffa variant of Goa'uld common through most of the galaxy, leaving out any pesky details and making them sound like easy pickings. "Repeat, stranded and in need of assistance, this is the al'kesh Bright Glory of..."
She recorded it and set it on repeat, programming the transmission to run through several long-range comm frequencies with fluctuating power levels.
"There," she said. "Now we wait."
Jehan stared at her. He hated waiting almost as much as she did.
They were both good at it though, thanks to the Goa'uld.
~*~
Sometimes he recited his whole name now, his name, to remind himself of who he was and who he wasn't. He wasn't, in any way he wanted to acknowledge, Jolinar of Malkshur, for instance.
Not any longer, no matter how many of the Tok'ra's memories remained.
He was Meredith Rodney Ingram McKay.
Meredith Rodney Ingram McKay.
He'd hated that name as a boy, had taken shit for it every day of school until he left for university and could insist on being called Rodney instead. But Jolinar had called him Rodney − her voice in his head remained − and he never wanted to hear it again. Never. Not in his head and not out loud − she'd instructed the other Tok'ra to address him as Rodney as well, but never released her stranglehold on his replies.
He wasn't Dr. Rodney McKay, civilian consultant to the Stargate Command and less than enthusiastic member of SG-1, any longer either. The SGC had allied with the Tok'ra at FTL speeds when offered the chance and never once inquired about him. At least the Tok'ra council had made a token gesture toward assuring that he was a willing host.
Of course, Jolinar had kept him silent and faked answering as him. There was no way the other Tok'ra could know it hadn't been him without extracting her.
The SGC hadn't even pretended he mattered.
He'd heard Sam had got his place on SG-1. That must have made her happy. And then Jacob Carter had agreed to host Selmak to save his own life. Jolinar had been careful avoid them. When SG-1 and SG-17 came to Ravenna, they'd been busy off planet.
Maybe that had been pity on her part. Rodney hadn't been forced to see that they didn't care or know the difference between him and Jolinar pretending to be him.
Hosting Jolinar had revealed all sorts of things about the symbiotes, whether they were Tok'ra or Goa'uld. They hated changing hosts for a myriad of reasons, beginning with how vulnerable and instinct driven they were in their natural state. They augmented their own tiny brains with their host's, after all, and a smart host made for a smarter symbiote. Taking a host was dangerous in other ways too: not every Unas or human was compatible. The longer a symbiote spent in one host, the harder it became to adapt to a new one, over hundreds or even in some cases thousands of years, the symbiotes lost flexibility and would involuntarily reject any new host, resulting in death for both.
Jolinar had been frightened that if the Tok'ra council discovered Rodney hadn't been a willing volunteer − or at least amendable in retrospect − they would demand she leave him or even forcibly remove her. Only the death of her last host had forced her out and into Rodney. She hadn't believed they would find another willing host as compatible. And she hadn't wanted to give up using Rodney's brain.
There were days he'd been content with the arrangement too: when Jolinar and he worked in tandem, because she hadn't been stupid − his brain after all − and their symbiosis had offered him access to Tok'ra science and technology that they would never share with the Tau'ri.
Then the ashrak had killed her. Tortured them both until Jolinar couldn't endure it any longer and left Ro − Meredith to put himself back together with a head full of her experiences.
He'd pulled himself together. He'd put himself back together, no thanks to anyone else, and he was never going back. Not to being a prisoner in his own head, not to being Rodney, not to Earth and the questions, the study, and whatever rationalizations were the flavor of the day there. The Tok'ra had wanted him to take another symbiote − to salvage whatever was left of Jolinar. He'd got out before any of the arrogant snakes could decide for him and never looked back. Screw them, he didn't see much difference between them and the Goa'uld, not once it came down the nitty-gritty of symbiote or host.
They were still snakes.
Meredith had his own motto.
Never trust a snake.
He didn't usually think about Jolinar or being a host if he didn't have to, but Meredith had already counted all the bulkhead panels and deck tiles and dismissed his every plan for escape too; the odds of recapture were too high. Odds of recapture and death were even higher. He was stuck on the wrong side − inside − of a Tok'ra forcefield on an fetid Oranian ship that smelled like skunk and sulfur.
Tenat and Jup were both stronger than Meredith too − or any human − and they'd already 'tuned' him up, wanting the secrets to some of the tech tricks he'd built.
His skin still burned where they'd handled him, thanks to the nauseating yellow fluids that seeped from their skins and boiled into the air, adding to the stink. Butyl mercaptan or something similar and probably an evolutionary defensive adaptation. It still made him puke on Tenat at least once.
It had hurt − it still hurt, he thought they'd at least cracked some ribs as well as done painful soft tissue damage; he'd been pissing blood for several days − but on the scale of agony he'd endured under ashrak torture, it hadn't compared. Meredith had grunted and yelled and called them the excrement-eating sons of whores too ugly for an Unas they were and given them nothing else. They'd finally given up because no one out-stubborned Meredith McKay.
No one hated pain more than he did either and he'd given up on reciting pi when the aches had kept distracting and making him lose his place.
Tenat and Jup weren't exactly reliable about feeding him either, never mind what they considered food. If Jolinar hadn't fixed his allergies and hypoglycemia he'd have been in a coma by now.
If he didn't occupy his mind with something though, he'd go crazy soon. He'd analyzed his childhood, his estrangement from his sister, and his divorce. He'd depressed himself wondering what had happened to his cat and amused himself imagining just how bad the contents of his old apartment's refrigerator might be by now if left untouched. Thinking of his refrigerator reminded him of all the Earth foods he hadn't tasted in so long, though, and left him hungry and more unhappy. Remembering all his new favorite meals only reminded him he was hungry, so that was out, and thinking about sex just led back to Jehan.
He kept remembering Jehan's face and imagining it when Vala told him. Vala's mask had crumpled for a moment before she left him behind. Oranians couldn't really read human expression, but Meredith could and hers had been terrible. Jehan's would have been worse.
Mer rubbed his face. He didn't want to think about Jehan alone in the galaxy if this went to hell. Went further to hell. Because he'd felt afraid Jehan wouldn't stay with Vala, despite knowing her longer than either of them had known Meredith. He and Jehan had been together since three days after he came aboard as their ship engineer. He knew how messed up Jehan had still been then; he knew Jehan wouldn't turn to Vala, simply because she had too much damage to do him any good. And if not Vala, then there was no one. Jehan didn't trust anyone else.
"Crap," he said in the quiet that made his voice louder than he'd meant. "Crap, crap, crap."
He had to get out of here and back to Jehan.
If only he'd stayed aboard their ship the way he usually did. Tenat and Jup would never have taken Jehan, because Jehan was their Goa'uld-damned pilot, who they would need to fulfill the bargain. The same went for Vala. Not to mention Tenat and Jup might not be able to conceive that Jehan and Meredith would have enough loyalty to her to come back.
Hard to say. One of them had shown enough perception to realize Vala would try her best to come back for Mer and decided to use that as a guarantee against her double-crossing them. Maybe even set them up so that Meredith would accompany Vala to the meet to check the naquadah was real and genuinely refined, weapons grade. More than they'd ever scored before, so they were naturally suspicious.
Low-lives like Tenat and Jup didn't come by that sort of treasure normally.
Of course, they hadn't. Meredith had been listening to the two of them since they locked him inside the Tok'ra forcefield. They were acting as agents for someone else.
They were also planning to sell Vala and Jehan out to Ba'al.
Knowing did him absolutely no good with no way to warn his partners.
~*~
Jehan didn't recognize the ship that answered the distress call. It wasn't Goa'uld or Hebridan, but the al'kesh's sensor array had been fried by a stray bolt from a staff weapon bolt when they took the pel'tak, and that was all he could make out from the sketchy viewscreen display. If anything, it looked a little like an Asgard ship, but their ships would have dwarfed this one. He was glad it wasn't Asgard; they'd have been in trouble if it had been, no pirate or even Goa'uld, had ever taken an Asgard.
He watched it approach the al'kesh at sublight after dropping out of a hyperspace window and wondered dubiously if it would even have a ring system. Not every space-going species out there used the ubiquitous Goa'uld technologies. Getting aboard would be harder if they had to suit up for vacuum rather than combat and cross the emptiness between the ships. They might even have to scrap the assault plan and play at being sole survivors in need to get aboard.
Once the ship began hailing them on the same frequency as their distress call, in stilted, computer-translated Goa'uld rather than a Jaffa dialect, Jehan stiffened. Prometheus. Human ship, then. He squeezed his eyes shut.
Mer.
Vala met his gaze as he opened his eyes and raised an eyebrow. "I'll take the bridge," she offered. Jehan just nodded.
They donned their helmets and left the powered down bridge, ignoring the dead Jaffa in the darkened, smoke-stained corridors, to wait for their chance.
~*~
The two of them ringed into the boxy ship that had answered Vala's not-so-bogus distress call and separated. They should have had boarding parties with them, but had to make do with surprise and using Kull armor.
The armor they were using smelled like ass inside − dead ass − no matter how many times they'd fumigated it, but it still shrugged off both energy and projectile weapons fire. Good enough. Jehan ignored the reek and kept moving, too busy zatting anyone he came across, heading for the engine rooms while Vala headed upship to secure the bridge, to register how alien it was to the Goa'uld ships he was used to.
Mer had been the one who taught them engineers could be as dangerous as Jaffa aboard a space ship. Normally, Jehan would have been following him, covering him, while they took over, but things weren't normal. Their crew − snakelicking ha'taakas − had taken off with the rich haul from the cargo ship. Reckell had gone with them to make sure no one shorted Vala and himself on their share of the profit from the goods − if they made it back.
No guarantees.
No guarantees, but Jehan didn't care. As far as Jehan was concerned, getting Mer back rated higher than all the ships and weapons grade naquadah in the Milky Way. You didn't abandon a crew mate He'd have done as much for any of them, not just Mer.
No longer. The rest of them could go to Netu.
If Vala's plan worked they'd fly away with both the ship, the naquadah, and Mer, and rendezvous with their Serrakin first mate on Hebridan in a few days. Jehan had too much experience with Vala's plans to count on that. Something would go awry.
He bared his teeth inside the helmet. He had no problems with ripping Tenat and his partners off, though. Snatching Mer had already broken faith.
Tenat would have to pay for that.
Sooner or later.
He zatted three more crewmen and stepped over their unconscious forms, registering that the patches on their uniforms were names lettered in English three steps further on. Not Goa'uld or Ancient or something even more alien. The wings were US Air Force. His heart hammered a little harder, but he didn't pause.
Jehan stalked into the main engineering after taking out a raggedly organized group of seven crewmen. The comm jammers Mer had designed kept the crew compliment from coordinating and made picking them off almost too easy, but he found a thin, ponytailed woman working frantically on a panel of control crystals for the hyperdrives, hiccups making her fingers jerk and slowing her down, but enough damage already done he began cursing in Goa'uld before he even stunned her.
One glance told him he would be spending hours, if not several days, putting right what she'd sabotaged.
The patch on her jumpsuit identified her as Novak, L. Jehan stunned her, checked she hadn't hid anything critical on her, then carried her out to corridor and fused the door locks with an energy pulse. It would take even an expert time or a cutting torch to get inside again, but the crystals would still be there when he got back.
He left Novak in the corridor and worked his way back through the ship, checking for hideouts, before heading to the bridge.
Vala had a seat at the navigator's console when Jehan arrived.
"Not Goa'uld," she said in annoyance, looking at the controls. "This will take longer than usual. Their language is gibberish."
He didn't bother correcting her.
Vala shrugged.
"I'm sure I can figure it out eventually. It's rather primitive."
"The engineer got to the hyperdrives," he said.
Vala hissed under her breath.
"Can you fix it?" she demanded.
"Probably." He wasn't Mer, but he'd hung around while Mer did his thing and paid attention. It would probably be easier than working on a Goa'uld ship. "We'll keep the engineer anyway." Keeping the rest of the crew on their prize was out of the question.
He crouched, wrestled the nearest unconscious body onto his shoulder and headed for the Ring Room they'd boarded by. The awkward burden of the bulky man made him stagger and swear.
Vala grabbed the ankle of another man and began dragging him along the deck behind him. The poor bastard was going to have a concussion on top of a stun headache when he woke. That would be the least of his problems, though.
He only noticed the three star rank as he dumped his man in the center of the rings with a groan. Only recognized who it had been after activating the rings and sending him on his way, the memory of the general from Cheyenne surfacing sluggishly − a sour welcome to a base about to be shut down the only meeting they'd ever had. Hammond. Mer had mentioned him. Hadn't mentioned Earth had interstellar ships, though.
It didn't bother him anyway. Screw the lot of them. He owed Earth exactly what he'd got from his home planet since the day Apophis came through the chappa'ai.
Clearing out the rest of the unconscious crew, with just himself and Vala to move everyone, turned out to be exhausting and back-breaking work. They had to hurry and get it done before any of the crew started coming around. A four-wheeled dolly for moving equipment let them sling three or four people together and roll them back to the ring room, at least, and speeded up the process.
"Meredith better appreciate this," Vala muttered. "We could both be on Lator'nin drinking Sels wine if he had paid attention and run when I told him to."
Jehan didn't tell her Tenat's people wouldn't have grabbed Meredith if she hadn't scammed them the last time they came through Freider's Moon. He just rolled a sergeant and a corporal into the center of the ring, kicked one man's feet within the perimeter and activated it. Sweat ran down his sides under the single-suit he wore beneath the armor and his shoulders ached.
He headed out again.
~*~
Jehan stashed Novak and a doctor from the infirmary, a trim and tiny woman who looked more competent than anyone else he saw, in the ship's brig once he found it. He wanted the doctor in case Mer needed better care than Vala could provide once they had him back. Everyone else went to the al'kesh. They just managed it before the stun wore off their first victims.
Prometheus was still drifting, but he trusted Vala to get the sublights online and get them away from the bait before any sharks or do-gooders showed up. Jehan needed to find a maintenance locker and head back to the engine room to repair the door he'd fried, then start on restoring the hyperdrives.
The ship felt hollow and cold without a crew; empty shadows everywhere in the dark passageways. Vala hadn't cracked the bridge controls as fast as usual. Goa'uld tech, scavenged and simplified for Jaffa to use without reading or writing, was the norm through the galaxy. Jehan figured she might be having a hard time with the idiosyncrasies of an operating systems based on an original design.
If they didn't have any luck with it by the time he had the hyperdrive working again, he'd get the engineer out of the brig and persuade her to hack any security protocols he couldn't.
One of the armories was open. Jehan closed it up, noting weapons were missing from several lockers. There were quite a few zats and handguns scattered where crew members had fallen. He'd have to police them up once they made the hyperspace jump.
He'd been in the Kull armor so long his nose had shut down. The helmet restricted his vision and hearing; he didn't pick up that there was someone besides Vala on the bridge until he reached the doorway.
He saw a crewman fire a weapon that probably came from the armory Jehan had noted. It hit Vala's back, the charge sizzling over her armor without effect. Vala turned and raised her zat.
The man fired at Vala again, but without effect.
"Oh, crap," he said.
Jehan almost sympathized as Vala zatted him. The man gave out a pained yell before dropping to the deck, knocked unconscious.
"You missed one, Jehan," Vala chided, turning back to the control console.
The Kull armor kept him from shrugging. More likely Vala had missed him, but it didn't matter. They had gotten lucky: these people hadn't been expecting pirates.
"Brig?" he asked, nudging the man with his boot.
"No," she said. "Tie him up. We're probably going to need someone who reads this language. Besides, he's rather nice to look at. Unlike the rest of this bucket. Haven't these people heard of design and decoration?"
Jehan almost snorted. The lack of the ubiquitous gold and hieroglyphs praising whichever 'god' had commissioned a ship came as a relief to him. Even Tanafriti felt like a flying dungeon some days. Prometheus, on the other hand, felt like a tin can or maybe an aircraft carrier.
He set about securing the man into a chair while he was still out. The combat vest, black tee-shirt and BDU combination didn't offer a clue to his name. Jehan thought that the muscles and glasses both signaled that the man was more likely a ground pounder of some variety than Air Force like rest of the crew. He worked fast and took away the glasses at the end − not being able to see would help keep the man off-balance.
"Have you commed Tenat yet?"
"No. I can't get into the system."
Jehan resisted the urge to remind her what Tenat had promised to do to Mer if they didn't come back with a ship. She knew. Acting unconcerned was just the way she coped.
Vala went back to randomly calling up screens. "This dungeating scrapheap must have sublights, so where are they?"
"I could − "
"Just let me work on this," Vala snapped. "Go make sure there's no one else left onboard."
"I need to work on the hyperdrives, remember?"
"Fine. You might want to find us both something to eat, too."
She sounded so much like the Goa'uld she'd been, Jehan wanted to snap her neck. He breathed out through his nose instead. It was just stress working on both of them. She could fetch her own damn meal, though. He was no one's slave any longer.
On the other hand, he was hungry himself.
He secured a set of plastic ties on their prisoner and left.
"Open your comm," Vala called after him. "I've shut down Meredith's jammer."
Jehan nodded and did so.
It took two tries to find the ship's mess and put together something Vala would eat. By then the comm was providing him audio from Vala and their prisoner, who recovered from a zatting faster than most. Vala must have kept the stinking helmet on; the prisoner still thought he was facing a Kull and started babbling.
Since even Jaffa wet themselves when facing off against Kull warriors, Jehan thought talking at one was crazy, but this guy seemed like he might annoy one into shooting him. He sounded perplexed by finding himself still alive, anyway, obviously well aware Kull didn't normally take prisoners. No doubt he'd figure it out given enough time. Jehan figured Vala was laughing her head off where no one could see, though.
"I'm just gonna talk to myself here for a while, 'cause you're not gonna talk to me. Not that you guys are very talkative, but uh..."
"You may prove useful," Vala said.
Jehan found the mess by accident and then after some thought found bottled water and MREs to take down to the doctor and Novak in the brig. It would ease their headaches and their nerves. He kept listening as their other prisoner asked about the rest of the crew.
"Transported to the al'kesh."
The prisoner claimed they had the wrong guy and that he didn't know anything about the ship. Jehan or Vala or anyone with the survival instinct of a gnat would have lied and faked it as long as they could. Jehan dropped him a notch in his estimation.
Vala seemed set on screwing with the guy's mind. Next she said, "But you are very attractive."
Jehan listened to the poor bastard cough and blurt out, "What!?"
He hoped Vala was just messing with the man and not about to start sleeping with anything on two legs that couldn't outrun her again. She hadn't propositioned Jehan since their one disastrous night together, but she'd been celibate for months now and she usually started up again after something went wrong.
Like losing Mer to Tenat.
Crap.
On the comm in his ear, the other prisoner squeaked a little as he said, "Hey, you know, big guy, I'm flattered, really I am, it's just that, uh, you're not my type. And I'm more than a little disturbed that I might be yours."
Jehan hurried the MREs and bottled water down to the brig, checked the surveillance camera and found both women awake and sitting against a bulkhead shoulder to shoulder. He opened the door and tossed in the bags and bottles.
The red-headed doctor looked up. "What do you want from us?" she demanded. Her eyes were filled with the same anger snapping through her voice.
Jehan took a page out of Vala's play book.
"You may prove useful." He pointed to the food and water. "Provisions."
Novak had her fist shoved in her mouth, but it wasn't stopping the hiccups jolting her with every breath. Jehan winced in sympathy.
Jehan headed for the engine room. If he hadn't been worried about Mer, he would have been laughing a little at Vala's game. As it was, she was wasting time with the cat-and-mouse fun. As far as he was concerned, she had until he made it back to the bridge, then he was taking over.
Jehan missed whatever the prisoner said next as he entered the elevator between decks. Static scrambled the comm connection inside the helmet he wore. The armor wasn't designed with networked operations in mind. Kulls didn't really have enough brain power to work in teams, anyway.
He caught the tail end of something Vala said as he exited.
" − not going to hurt you."
"Thank God."
"Much," Vala continued and added brightly, with just a touch of evil amusement, "I hope."
He felt the shudder of the sublight engines activating a moment later, though, which meant Vala had cracked the system far enough to begin maneuvering the ship away from the cargo ship and the al'kesh, taking them out of range of intership ring transports. So at least she'd been getting something done while she entertained herself.
She asked about long-range transmissions and got nothing.
"You lie."
If anyone would know, it would be Vala. Jehan found a tool box and went to work on the door lock, prying the black-seared facing and keypad off and pulling out wires, methodically trying connections until one disengaged the air seal and the door retracted with a soft noise.
He pulled off the helmet and his gloves once inside and began work. It looked like Novak had been pulling control crystals nearly at random. Crap plan. She'd crippled the ship's chance to retreat into hyperspace if they'd been under ship to ship attack instead of a boarding action.
Jehan sat down in front of one of the computers and began accessing engineering specs. Mer was going to go wild over this ship. Some of the designs had to be from the Asgard. Jehan refused to let himself feel any guilt over stealing the ship. It was what they did and this time they had a better reason than usual.
"Uh, okay, um, look. My name is Daniel Jackson. I'm an archaeologist, a historian. I study ancient cultures, histories of the past, ancient civilizations. Have you heard of Earth, Tau'ri?"
Jehan froze.
Jackson?
Mer had talked about Daniel Jackson, somewhere between scorn and admiration, describing the man who had opened the chappa'ai.
If Mer hadn't told him about Jackson's search for the wife the Goa'uld had stolen as a host, Jehan would have needed to kill him.
So much pain.
A process of trial and elimination eventually got all the crystals back into place. He ran a diagnostic and smiled. The hyperdrives were functional again.
The prisoner cried out and Jehan decided it really was time to get up to the bridge. He didn't want to, didn't want to face Jackson or anyone from Earth, or deal with all the memories explaining who he was would stir up.
He forced himself forward anyway. He still found it unbelievable that the thorn in the System Lords' side, the terrible Tau'ri, were from Earth. He'd held on for so long, alone, believing there was no one else, and they'd been out there the entire time.
They done nothing. He hated them for that.
They had ships.
Jehan brushed his hand over a bulkhead and smiled meanly. They had one less now.
~*~
Vala stripped the stinking armor off piece by piece, leaving her sweat soaked single-suit clinging to her skin, well aware of the man − Daniel Jackson, a name she'd heard here and there around the galaxy, usually accompanied by a Goa'uld curse − had his eyes on her. She flipped her loose hair back off her shoulders.
Revealing she wasn't a Kull didn't make him any more cooperative. She ended up slapping him to remind him who was in charge.
"Ow!" he protested.
Vala leaned in close and used her sultriest voice. "Shall I kiss it better?"
She was making him uncomfortable. Good. Though he was genuinely attractive and she liked men the Goa'uld hated.
"Um, no."
She waited.
"Just don't do it again," Jackson said on the heels of his refusal. "Hey, look, even if I knew what it is you wanted me to do, what makes you think I'd tell you? How the hell do you think you can steal a ship when you don't know how it works?"
"I got the sublight engines going," she said.
She'd get communications soon too, with or without him, or Jehan would, once he had the hyperdrives online again. This would have been easier with more crew, but she and Jehan could do it. And they wouldn't share any of the profit from the naquadah Tenat had promised with anyone else.
"Yeah, so you did," Jackson acknowledged.
"You really expect me to believe you don't know how your own ship works?"
He wasn't a slave born under the boot of a Goa'uld 'god', willing to believe anything more complicated than a big stick was magic. If he didn't know, he could still easily help her. If he wanted to, which she granted he had no reason to.
She seated herself in the command chair next to Jackson.
"Have you heard of Earth, Tau'ri?" Jackson asked her after babbling something about cultures and civilizations.
"No," she lied.
Jackson shifted uncomfortably against his bindings. It was distracting.
"Okay, well, we were on our way to rescue a few friends who are trapped − "
Oh, a sob story. Too bad she had her own. Everybody did, after all.
"I really don't care," she interrupted.
"Look, this really isn't necessary−"
Vala held up her hands and mimicked chitchat. Mer had taught her that one. "Can I have the ship?" she asked. She pretended the other hand was answering. "No? Okay." She stared at Jackson, dropping her hands again. "Discussion over."
He stared back, displaying an annoying stubbornness.
Vala hit the control console with her fist in frustration. The screen flashed a new message: COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEM ACTIVE.
"Oh, here we go." She nearly laughed. Another look and she had the gist of how the system worked and opened an transmission. "Tenat of Oran. Tenat, this is Vala, if you can hear me, please respond. I've managed to procure a vessel, bigger and better than what I'd hoped for," she said. She added, "Tenat, if you get this message, I apologize for the delay and will meet at the designated coordinates in one day. Vala out." Maybe that would appease Tenat's bad temper and ease Mer's captivity. She hoped.
She turned back to Jackson and smiled again.
"Now, about the hyperdrive."
She imagined the way the crinkles at the corner's of Jehan's eyes would tighten at the implication he couldn't get the hyperdrives up again.
Jackson sighed tiredly and wriggled against his bonds. Vala dismissed him from her thoughts, thinking instead of which tack they would take with Tenat. Land the ship and do an exchange for Meredith? Lay an ambush of some kind inside the ship? They couldn't just turn the ship over to Tenat or even if he left them the naquadah and gave Mer back, they'd be marooned on that worthless backwater moon with no way to get to the world in-system that had a chappa'ai.
Hyperdrives.
She wondered how fast this ship could transit. Al'kesh weren't as fast as Hebridan racers, so there was room for improvement with most ships. She'd need to see what Jehan had accomplished. If this ship could beat an al'kesh's hyperdrive speed, they could reach the rendezvous ahead of time and bust Mer out first, then renegotiate the deal for the naquadah.
By renegotiate, Vala still meant the three of them leaving with the naquadah and the ship. Tenat certainly didn't deserve either.
She kept working, finding that Jehan had the hyperdrives online again, but when she tried to input a course, the navigation systems shut down on her. ACCESS DENIED. Whichever of the crew had been on duty had password locked it before she managed to stun them all.
"Access is restricted by a code," she told Jackson in annoyance.
"Yeah, too bad."
That sounded just a little too self-satisfied for her. Vala's temper snapped and she swung around and fired an energy pulse at him from her arm weapon. She pulled the shot at the last second, burning through Jackson's tee-shirt sleeve and scoring a searing wound in his arm. Smoke, stinking of burnt flesh and fabric, curled up afterward, twisting in the invisible currents of the environmental system's air circulation.
Jackson jerked and cried out in pain. Vala swiveled her chair enough to face him again, propping her boots against his chair.
"Hurt?" she asked.
She knew it did. The Tok'ra had done much worse to her when they questioned Qetesh and Qetesh had made sure her host endured the worst of it. The torture had gone on and on, until they were inseparable in their pain, until Qetesh broke under it.
She pulled one of the small, less flashy healing devices out of a pocket in her single-suit as he replied affirmatively. She placed it onto the middle finger of her right hand, like a ring turned inward to her palm. A red telltale light flickered on as she showed it to him. "I can fix it."
Jackson's eyes widened and he began breathing even harder, panic and a new level of fear mingling with the pain. "I don't know the code!" he blurted. His gaze strayed between the healing device and Vala's eyes, looking for the telltale symbiote flash.
Vala smiled at him and moved to sit on the console before him. She aimed the device on her hand at his wound and willed it on. Qetesh had used anger and arousal to generate mental force to use both the healing device and a ribbon. Vala focused on her fear. The fear was always there, beneath every other emotion she let show, a fuel she would never use up. The wound on Jackson's arm healed quickly.
The pain went away with the wound. The skin knit without a scar and Vala lifted her hand away. Only the smoldering edges of the hole in his shirt remained to prove there had ever been a wound at all.
"There," she said. "Feel better?"
"You're Goa'uld."
The fear made her reckless. It made her want to prove she was still herself, still in control of her body, to feel something that was all hers. She knew Jehan disapproved, though he never said, the same way she knew all the things he could no longer bear after serving as a Goa'uld plaything.
Right that minute, she wanted Jackson. Well, she wanted someone and Jackson was right there, tied up and accessible. Sex always left her relaxed, the fear that had been part of her since she was chosen to become a host pushed back where it wouldn't interfere with her thinking.
She wanted Jackson, but even if she hadn't, she couldn't bear to have someone think she was a Goa'uld. That was Qetesh. She wasn't Qetesh, no matter how many times she still thought she heard the Goa'uld queen's voice in her head.
"No. But I was once a host to one."
"Which would explain the naquadah in your blood that lets you use Goa'uld technology."
"And how I quickly learned to fly this rather primitive ship." She kept it light. She had to or fall apart. Thinking about Qetesh left her feeling brittle. It reminded her of all the things Qetesh might have done to this man, given an opportunity, and it frightened that she might be forced to use the same techniques.
Worse, that she might just be looking for an excuse to use them.
"Yeah, so primitive, one would wonder if it was worth the bother," Jackson said. Very snippy.
Jehan would be grinding his teeth at the other end of the open comm. He did the flying. Mer and Jehan both agreed Vala was a terrible pilot. She could get a ship in and out of hyperdrive, de-orbit and take off. No one really wanted to be onboard during one of her landings.
"Well, in this case it's the size that matters," Vala told him.
Jackson pinched his brows together and stared up at her.
Tenat wanted a troop transport that could face off with an al'kesh or better. Ships fitting that description weren't just lying around waiting to be snapped up. They'd scouted four different blackmarket shipyards hunting something to pirate before settling on a the cargo ship and its al'kesh escort as the best of a lot of bad prospects.
Vala shifted over Jackson and glanced at his groin and the promising bulge there. "Actually," she breathed softly, "pretty much in every case."
He looked amazed and horrified by the brazen appraisal, which just made Vala want to keep teasing him or to touch him and see what other reactions she could draw from him.
She touched the healed skin on his arm.
"Tell me the code," she pleaded. "Please."
"I don't−I don't know it."
Resigned, Vala backed off.
"Fine."
She needed to consult with Jehan before she resorted to real torture. Maybe the engineer he'd kept on board would be better information source. If Jackson didn't have some use, he'd be better off dropped off at a world on the route to the rendezvous.
With a regretful glance back at him − she really wanted to keep him, preferably tied up and in her bed for a few days and nights − she left the bridge.
She really should have checked the ties. By the time she reached the bridge again, Jackson was gone. With a shrug, Vala dismissed him. She needed to set their course. Jehan would be up in another few minutes. He'd been irritated with her when she found him in the engine room.
Of course, the next time she saw him, Vala meant to twit him over his sub par knots.
She headed for the control console and called up a navigation screen. Jehan had managed to release it and the rest of the controls from the engine room's consoles. Expertise in the language of the ship's builders had no doubt helped him.
"Much better," she murmured to herself.
Knowing they were on a Tau'ri ship had left Jehan quieter and in a darker mood than usual. Quieter for Jehan approached mutism. She missed Meredith's babble and the way Jehan smiled and twitted him. They had to get him back; that was all. She'd survive if they didn't; that was what she did. She didn't know if Jehan would, though.
The scuff of a footstep alerted her to her latest miscalculation.
"Lose the weapon. Move away from the console," Jackson ordered.
Vala sighed theatrically.
"I liked you better tied up."
"Against the wall," he said.
Vala didn't move, watching him, calculating how far she could push before he zatted her. Could she get her arm up and a shot off from her own arm weapon before he did?
"Lose the weapon."
Probably not, she decided. She removed the weapon from her left arm and stripped off the glove she wore beneath it too.
"The suit still absorbs zat blasts," she pointed out as she strolled over to stand in front of a wall screen displaying something about the ship's status.
"Then cover your head."
She turned and said, "So you should let me take it off."
She wondered if Jehan was hearing this through the open comm. He'd expect her to deal with Jackson herself, though, since she'd been the one to leave him out of the brig.
"I think I'll turn the ship around first," Jackson told her.
"I don't know. If I had me at gunpoint, that wouldn't be my first choice."
She could see him think about it − for a second − then push away the temptation. People with principles were always harder to trick.
He went to the control console and began typing. The security code he'd denied knowing, so it served him right when the screen flashed ACCESS DENIED, rejecting it.
"What's going on?"
"I rewrote the access codes, so I'm the only one who can use the navigation systems."
And Jehan, but she thought Jackson didn't even know she wasn't alone and she'd keep it that way until she had the upper hand again.
He waved the zat at her.
"Undo it."
Maybe a small sob story of her own would distract him...
"Listen, hundreds of lives are at stake. I'm trying to save the last of my people − " In a way, that bit was even true. Meredith was one of her crew. She gentled her tone. Looked at him imploringly. " − and this ship is their only hope."
"Maybe if you'd mentioned that off the top."
"Would you really have helped?"
She didn't believe it for a moment. Not for a pirate. Not for Meredith. They hadn't helped him before. Hadn't done anything for Jehan. The Tau'ri were like everyone else in the galaxy; out for themselves, forgetting any individual who fell along the way.
Besides, anyone who allied with the Tok'ra couldn't be trusted in her estimation.
As Meredith put it: a snake was a snake.
"Look, as I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, we were also on a rescue mission."
A beeping sound came from the navigation console. Jackson checked it. Vala couldn't read the screen from where she stood.
"What is it?"
Jackson checked another console.
"A ship just appeared on our radar. It's an al'kesh."
"This quadrant is crawling with Goa'uld vessels," Vala told him. "Chances are it's not your friends. I made sure that ship was fully disabled when you showed up."
Daniel began typing in commands. "We'll see."
"We have to raise shields and arm weapons."
She really hoped Jehan was hearing this and on his way to the bridge. They couldn't afford to play games any longer with Goa'uld out there.
"I'll try and hail them first."
Idiot!
He began to walk away and Vala kicked out. She sent the zat flying from his hand, then back-handed him across the face. He rocked back and she swung again. He recovered fast and sent an elbow flying into her nose.
She hadn't really expected him to fight back and blurted, "Oh, oh, oh. You hit me."
"You hit me," he pointed out. Reasonably.
Vala wasn't feeling very reasonable.
"Yeah, you know we could just have sex instead," she said as a distraction.
She hit him again, kicked him next and sent him stumbling back part way across the bridge. Maneuvering room was limited by the islands formed by the control consoles. Vala took a run at him and grabbed his ear, pulling him up with every intention of slamming his head back against the deck plating and knocking him out.
Jackson fought back with a grunt. They tumbled, scrambled to their feet, and he threw a punch at her that she dodged. His fist hit a panel beside her head instead.
Vala dropped, twisted and went for a improvised weapon: a red painted cannister mounted on the wall. She slammed it into his groin.
Jackson doubled over.
Vala shoved him back to the console again and slugged him. He fell backwards to the deck again with another gasping grunt.
Gasping for breath herself, Vala reminded herself to practice hand-to-hand a little more often. She was getting out of shape.
Jackson crawled around the corner of the console, caught sight of her, and tried to crawl away. Vala sucked in another breath and leaped onto him. She caught his head between her thighs and squeezed.
Jackson surprised her, staggered up to his feet with her on his shoulders. Vala grabbed an overhead beam, glad for ceilings that weren't as cavernous as an al'kesh's, just before Jackson managed to twist out from under her. That freed Vala's legs though and she retaliated by kicking him back to the deck again.
She jumped down and onto him again.
Somewhere in their tussle, she'd marked him. A red abrasion was bruising up on his cheekbone.
"Are we done?" she asked.
"I am," he panted.
The adrenaline and fear made her stupid. She locked a fist in his shirt and dragged him up, kissing him with abandon.
Jackson jerked back and exclaimed, "You're a fruitcake!"
That hurt.
Vala headbutted him for that and left him on the deck, dazed, as she went for the navigation controls. Someone had to do something about the al'kesh on their tail.
It wouldn't be her, she had time to acknowledge, hearing the telltale sound of a zat powering up before it hit her. He must have aimed for her head after all. The suit ameliorated the effect enough she heard another zat sound before losing consciousness, and Jehan muttering, "Great plan. Just great."
~*~
Daniel woke with a groan before registering his head lay in Janet's lap.
"Ow."
"He's awake," Novak said.
He squinted his eyes open and then let Janet help him sit up with his back to one of the brig's walls.
"I got zatted again."
His head was ready to explode. The glare from Prometheus' uncompromising lighting didn't help. He wondered how close he'd come to the minimum time frame between one zat charge and a lethal second one. Close. The lingering headache and muscle pains seemed worse than usual.
Or, like Jack, he was just getting older.
"And banged around," Janet said.
Daniel opened one eye. There was that. The woman he'd fought hadn't exactly been pulling any punches. She hadn't been the one who zatted him either.
"God, I'm a idiot," he muttered and let his head thunk back against the cold brig wall.
Of course she hadn't been working alone.
The bulkhead behind him shuddered and the hum always present throughout the ship shifted, hitched, then dropped to the subtly rougher sound of the sublight engines. They'd just dropped out of hyperspace.
"Lindsay and I have tried to figure out how to get out of here, but we're not having any luck," Janet said.
"Funny how brigs make that so hard."
Novak let out small half-hiccup, half-laugh.
"At least they're not starving us," Janet said. "That thing, the Kull, came back with more MREs." She held up a bottle labeled aspirin. "And this."
Daniel held out his hand. "Gimme." He dry swallowed the two pills Janet gave him. He knew she wouldn't let him take more than the recommended dose, suspected that was why she measured them out rather than handing him the bottle.
"That Kull probably isn't one, you know," he said. "The one on the bridge turned to be a woman. Who beat me up."
"Really?" Novak asked.
"Really."
She made a small, interested sound. Or maybe she was just swallowing laughter. Janet certainly had a smirk on her face.
"So," Daniel added after some reflection, "this is familiar. Zatted, taken prisoner, zatted, thrown in a cell. Some differences. Jack's not here to piss anyone off."
"Looks like you did that for yourself this time," Janet told him.
"Ouch."
The problem being that along with missing Jack, he was missing Teal'c and Sam or Rodney. If either of them had been in the cell with him, Daniel knew none of them would have been in the cell much longer. Well, if Rodney had been there, he would have been alternating complaints, panic, and hypochondria, but he'd have been working on an escape at the same time. Daniel missed Rodney; Daniel had discovered exactly how often Rodney had been the team whipping boy once Jack's impatience had only Daniel to focus on.
It hadn't been fun.
Daniel didn't know if Jack had never picked on Sam the same way because she was a woman, because she'd been military or because she'd told him off after she'd resigned her commission in the wake of Rodney's loss. Jack just hadn't.
That had left Daniel and his 'pinko liberal pansy ideas' as a target, because Teal'c would not take that shit, not even from Jack.
They'd found a new equilibrium eventually though, with Sam doing Rodney's job, and later, Jonas Quinn doing Daniel's before the Others descended him and he returned, until Anise showed up at the SGC with a double whammy from the Tok'ra: Jacob and Selmak were dead and so was Jolinar, who had been responsible for Rodney's disappearance.
It hadn't been funny, finding out someone they'd assumed was dead was, but that he'd been alive while they hadn't been looking for him any longer. The guilt had eaten them all up; they'd been left with the question of whether they might have looked harder, longer, if they'd liked Rodney McKay a little more. The answers hadn't been pleasant.
And Sam had taken the job with the nascent Atlantis expedition in the aftermath.
"So, did they miss you on the first round up − " he started to ask.
"No, we were knocked out and woke up in the brig," Janet answered.
Daniel nodded slowly.
He didn't think Janet and Novak had been kept back because they were women. So. A doctor and an engineer. Useful people to have around if you thought someone might be shooting at your new ship any time soon.
"Great," he muttered and rubbed his temples. "I have a feeling we should probably brace our selves for a rough ride."
"Why?" Novak asked. She wasn't hiccuping and he wondered if Janet had found a way to cure her or she'd just run out of the energy for it.
"They ringed everyone else over to the al'kesh, but kept you two. They must think they may need you."
"At least we know the crew is alive, though," Janet murmured.
"Yeah," Daniel admitted. "They're not the worst pirates we could have run into. Maybe."
Janet opened an MRE and he choked down macaroni and cheese before falling asleep. Prometheus stayed at sublight or in orbit. Another pirate − Daniel guessed not the woman from the bridge thanks to the lack of suggestive or disturbing remarks − still in Kull armor, brought them more MREs − enough for several days − and a couple of blankets.
Shortly after, the engines changed pitch again. They were dropping out of orbit. Prometheus shuddered as it landed. Daniel was reminded that take off and landings were considered the most dangerous parts of flight. Re-entry of something as huge as Prometheus, without a hint of compromise toward aerodynamics, had to stress the ship to the max. Whoever had the controls knew how to fly, though, the only thing that betrayed they were on a planet again was the groan that ran through the ship when it switched from artificial gravity to local.
"Did we just land?" Janet asked.
"I think so."
"We did," Novak confirmed. "Do you think they'll let us out here?"
"I guess we wait and see," Daniel said, but he doubted it, considering the number of MREs they'd been left with.
They all still had their watches, so despite the constant lights, keeping track posed no problem. They took turns politely looking away whenever anyone need to use the open air toilet and washing up. Running water and a toilet were huge improvement on most of the jails and dungeons Daniel had known, which he told Novak when she went red with embarrassment the first time.
"You get used to ignoring each other."
Janet wasn't bothered. "I'm a doctor. Believe me, Daniel has nothing I haven't seen before and probably stitched up," she explained.
~*~
[b]
Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves
an Alternate Universe SGA/SG-1 Crossover
by Auburn
Words: ~27,280
Mixed Slash and Het
[a] [b] [c] [d]
Prometheus Purloined
Sometimes Jehan thought that Vala's trip through Thor's Hammer hadn't really gotten rid of Qetesh after all. Sometimes he wondered if it hadn't left her with some kind of brain damage. Usually those times were accompanied by the reflection that he must have been ribboned once too often or he wouldn't still be following her around the galaxy.
Those times, he reminded himself he could have had Ba'al sitting in his head instead of offering a bounty on it, laid down some cover lies or fire, and hoped being crazy would continue being lucky until they made it back to the chappa'ai or their ship in one piece.
Their latest plan probably pushed that luck farther than it would hold though, explaining why the rest of their crew had abandoned them.
~*~
They had six days left. He could feel the sand trickle of each irreplaceable moment disappearing as they waited at their metaphorical waterhole. The Tanafriti was gone, along with any other options beyond this plan. If it failed, they would have to cannibalize the cargo ship drifting at their bow and limp the al'kesh they were on to the nearest world with a chappa'ai, hundreds of lightyears away.
And Mer would die.
Vala sat at the pel'tak comm station and transmitted an artfully broken up distress call, her voice strained yet collected.
"Help... request assistance...have failed...we have lost power," Vala recorded, using the Jaffa variant of Goa'uld common through most of the galaxy, leaving out any pesky details and making them sound like easy pickings. "Repeat, stranded and in need of assistance, this is the al'kesh Bright Glory of..."
She recorded it and set it on repeat, programming the transmission to run through several long-range comm frequencies with fluctuating power levels.
"There," she said. "Now we wait."
Jehan stared at her. He hated waiting almost as much as she did.
They were both good at it though, thanks to the Goa'uld.
~*~
Sometimes he recited his whole name now, his name, to remind himself of who he was and who he wasn't. He wasn't, in any way he wanted to acknowledge, Jolinar of Malkshur, for instance.
Not any longer, no matter how many of the Tok'ra's memories remained.
He was Meredith Rodney Ingram McKay.
Meredith Rodney Ingram McKay.
He'd hated that name as a boy, had taken shit for it every day of school until he left for university and could insist on being called Rodney instead. But Jolinar had called him Rodney − her voice in his head remained − and he never wanted to hear it again. Never. Not in his head and not out loud − she'd instructed the other Tok'ra to address him as Rodney as well, but never released her stranglehold on his replies.
He wasn't Dr. Rodney McKay, civilian consultant to the Stargate Command and less than enthusiastic member of SG-1, any longer either. The SGC had allied with the Tok'ra at FTL speeds when offered the chance and never once inquired about him. At least the Tok'ra council had made a token gesture toward assuring that he was a willing host.
Of course, Jolinar had kept him silent and faked answering as him. There was no way the other Tok'ra could know it hadn't been him without extracting her.
The SGC hadn't even pretended he mattered.
He'd heard Sam had got his place on SG-1. That must have made her happy. And then Jacob Carter had agreed to host Selmak to save his own life. Jolinar had been careful avoid them. When SG-1 and SG-17 came to Ravenna, they'd been busy off planet.
Maybe that had been pity on her part. Rodney hadn't been forced to see that they didn't care or know the difference between him and Jolinar pretending to be him.
Hosting Jolinar had revealed all sorts of things about the symbiotes, whether they were Tok'ra or Goa'uld. They hated changing hosts for a myriad of reasons, beginning with how vulnerable and instinct driven they were in their natural state. They augmented their own tiny brains with their host's, after all, and a smart host made for a smarter symbiote. Taking a host was dangerous in other ways too: not every Unas or human was compatible. The longer a symbiote spent in one host, the harder it became to adapt to a new one, over hundreds or even in some cases thousands of years, the symbiotes lost flexibility and would involuntarily reject any new host, resulting in death for both.
Jolinar had been frightened that if the Tok'ra council discovered Rodney hadn't been a willing volunteer − or at least amendable in retrospect − they would demand she leave him or even forcibly remove her. Only the death of her last host had forced her out and into Rodney. She hadn't believed they would find another willing host as compatible. And she hadn't wanted to give up using Rodney's brain.
There were days he'd been content with the arrangement too: when Jolinar and he worked in tandem, because she hadn't been stupid − his brain after all − and their symbiosis had offered him access to Tok'ra science and technology that they would never share with the Tau'ri.
Then the ashrak had killed her. Tortured them both until Jolinar couldn't endure it any longer and left Ro − Meredith to put himself back together with a head full of her experiences.
He'd pulled himself together. He'd put himself back together, no thanks to anyone else, and he was never going back. Not to being a prisoner in his own head, not to being Rodney, not to Earth and the questions, the study, and whatever rationalizations were the flavor of the day there. The Tok'ra had wanted him to take another symbiote − to salvage whatever was left of Jolinar. He'd got out before any of the arrogant snakes could decide for him and never looked back. Screw them, he didn't see much difference between them and the Goa'uld, not once it came down the nitty-gritty of symbiote or host.
They were still snakes.
Meredith had his own motto.
Never trust a snake.
He didn't usually think about Jolinar or being a host if he didn't have to, but Meredith had already counted all the bulkhead panels and deck tiles and dismissed his every plan for escape too; the odds of recapture were too high. Odds of recapture and death were even higher. He was stuck on the wrong side − inside − of a Tok'ra forcefield on an fetid Oranian ship that smelled like skunk and sulfur.
Tenat and Jup were both stronger than Meredith too − or any human − and they'd already 'tuned' him up, wanting the secrets to some of the tech tricks he'd built.
His skin still burned where they'd handled him, thanks to the nauseating yellow fluids that seeped from their skins and boiled into the air, adding to the stink. Butyl mercaptan or something similar and probably an evolutionary defensive adaptation. It still made him puke on Tenat at least once.
It had hurt − it still hurt, he thought they'd at least cracked some ribs as well as done painful soft tissue damage; he'd been pissing blood for several days − but on the scale of agony he'd endured under ashrak torture, it hadn't compared. Meredith had grunted and yelled and called them the excrement-eating sons of whores too ugly for an Unas they were and given them nothing else. They'd finally given up because no one out-stubborned Meredith McKay.
No one hated pain more than he did either and he'd given up on reciting pi when the aches had kept distracting and making him lose his place.
Tenat and Jup weren't exactly reliable about feeding him either, never mind what they considered food. If Jolinar hadn't fixed his allergies and hypoglycemia he'd have been in a coma by now.
If he didn't occupy his mind with something though, he'd go crazy soon. He'd analyzed his childhood, his estrangement from his sister, and his divorce. He'd depressed himself wondering what had happened to his cat and amused himself imagining just how bad the contents of his old apartment's refrigerator might be by now if left untouched. Thinking of his refrigerator reminded him of all the Earth foods he hadn't tasted in so long, though, and left him hungry and more unhappy. Remembering all his new favorite meals only reminded him he was hungry, so that was out, and thinking about sex just led back to Jehan.
He kept remembering Jehan's face and imagining it when Vala told him. Vala's mask had crumpled for a moment before she left him behind. Oranians couldn't really read human expression, but Meredith could and hers had been terrible. Jehan's would have been worse.
Mer rubbed his face. He didn't want to think about Jehan alone in the galaxy if this went to hell. Went further to hell. Because he'd felt afraid Jehan wouldn't stay with Vala, despite knowing her longer than either of them had known Meredith. He and Jehan had been together since three days after he came aboard as their ship engineer. He knew how messed up Jehan had still been then; he knew Jehan wouldn't turn to Vala, simply because she had too much damage to do him any good. And if not Vala, then there was no one. Jehan didn't trust anyone else.
"Crap," he said in the quiet that made his voice louder than he'd meant. "Crap, crap, crap."
He had to get out of here and back to Jehan.
If only he'd stayed aboard their ship the way he usually did. Tenat and Jup would never have taken Jehan, because Jehan was their Goa'uld-damned pilot, who they would need to fulfill the bargain. The same went for Vala. Not to mention Tenat and Jup might not be able to conceive that Jehan and Meredith would have enough loyalty to her to come back.
Hard to say. One of them had shown enough perception to realize Vala would try her best to come back for Mer and decided to use that as a guarantee against her double-crossing them. Maybe even set them up so that Meredith would accompany Vala to the meet to check the naquadah was real and genuinely refined, weapons grade. More than they'd ever scored before, so they were naturally suspicious.
Low-lives like Tenat and Jup didn't come by that sort of treasure normally.
Of course, they hadn't. Meredith had been listening to the two of them since they locked him inside the Tok'ra forcefield. They were acting as agents for someone else.
They were also planning to sell Vala and Jehan out to Ba'al.
Knowing did him absolutely no good with no way to warn his partners.
~*~
Jehan didn't recognize the ship that answered the distress call. It wasn't Goa'uld or Hebridan, but the al'kesh's sensor array had been fried by a stray bolt from a staff weapon bolt when they took the pel'tak, and that was all he could make out from the sketchy viewscreen display. If anything, it looked a little like an Asgard ship, but their ships would have dwarfed this one. He was glad it wasn't Asgard; they'd have been in trouble if it had been, no pirate or even Goa'uld, had ever taken an Asgard.
He watched it approach the al'kesh at sublight after dropping out of a hyperspace window and wondered dubiously if it would even have a ring system. Not every space-going species out there used the ubiquitous Goa'uld technologies. Getting aboard would be harder if they had to suit up for vacuum rather than combat and cross the emptiness between the ships. They might even have to scrap the assault plan and play at being sole survivors in need to get aboard.
Once the ship began hailing them on the same frequency as their distress call, in stilted, computer-translated Goa'uld rather than a Jaffa dialect, Jehan stiffened. Prometheus. Human ship, then. He squeezed his eyes shut.
Mer.
Vala met his gaze as he opened his eyes and raised an eyebrow. "I'll take the bridge," she offered. Jehan just nodded.
They donned their helmets and left the powered down bridge, ignoring the dead Jaffa in the darkened, smoke-stained corridors, to wait for their chance.
~*~
The two of them ringed into the boxy ship that had answered Vala's not-so-bogus distress call and separated. They should have had boarding parties with them, but had to make do with surprise and using Kull armor.
The armor they were using smelled like ass inside − dead ass − no matter how many times they'd fumigated it, but it still shrugged off both energy and projectile weapons fire. Good enough. Jehan ignored the reek and kept moving, too busy zatting anyone he came across, heading for the engine rooms while Vala headed upship to secure the bridge, to register how alien it was to the Goa'uld ships he was used to.
Mer had been the one who taught them engineers could be as dangerous as Jaffa aboard a space ship. Normally, Jehan would have been following him, covering him, while they took over, but things weren't normal. Their crew − snakelicking ha'taakas − had taken off with the rich haul from the cargo ship. Reckell had gone with them to make sure no one shorted Vala and himself on their share of the profit from the goods − if they made it back.
No guarantees.
No guarantees, but Jehan didn't care. As far as Jehan was concerned, getting Mer back rated higher than all the ships and weapons grade naquadah in the Milky Way. You didn't abandon a crew mate He'd have done as much for any of them, not just Mer.
No longer. The rest of them could go to Netu.
If Vala's plan worked they'd fly away with both the ship, the naquadah, and Mer, and rendezvous with their Serrakin first mate on Hebridan in a few days. Jehan had too much experience with Vala's plans to count on that. Something would go awry.
He bared his teeth inside the helmet. He had no problems with ripping Tenat and his partners off, though. Snatching Mer had already broken faith.
Tenat would have to pay for that.
Sooner or later.
He zatted three more crewmen and stepped over their unconscious forms, registering that the patches on their uniforms were names lettered in English three steps further on. Not Goa'uld or Ancient or something even more alien. The wings were US Air Force. His heart hammered a little harder, but he didn't pause.
Jehan stalked into the main engineering after taking out a raggedly organized group of seven crewmen. The comm jammers Mer had designed kept the crew compliment from coordinating and made picking them off almost too easy, but he found a thin, ponytailed woman working frantically on a panel of control crystals for the hyperdrives, hiccups making her fingers jerk and slowing her down, but enough damage already done he began cursing in Goa'uld before he even stunned her.
One glance told him he would be spending hours, if not several days, putting right what she'd sabotaged.
The patch on her jumpsuit identified her as Novak, L. Jehan stunned her, checked she hadn't hid anything critical on her, then carried her out to corridor and fused the door locks with an energy pulse. It would take even an expert time or a cutting torch to get inside again, but the crystals would still be there when he got back.
He left Novak in the corridor and worked his way back through the ship, checking for hideouts, before heading to the bridge.
Vala had a seat at the navigator's console when Jehan arrived.
"Not Goa'uld," she said in annoyance, looking at the controls. "This will take longer than usual. Their language is gibberish."
He didn't bother correcting her.
Vala shrugged.
"I'm sure I can figure it out eventually. It's rather primitive."
"The engineer got to the hyperdrives," he said.
Vala hissed under her breath.
"Can you fix it?" she demanded.
"Probably." He wasn't Mer, but he'd hung around while Mer did his thing and paid attention. It would probably be easier than working on a Goa'uld ship. "We'll keep the engineer anyway." Keeping the rest of the crew on their prize was out of the question.
He crouched, wrestled the nearest unconscious body onto his shoulder and headed for the Ring Room they'd boarded by. The awkward burden of the bulky man made him stagger and swear.
Vala grabbed the ankle of another man and began dragging him along the deck behind him. The poor bastard was going to have a concussion on top of a stun headache when he woke. That would be the least of his problems, though.
He only noticed the three star rank as he dumped his man in the center of the rings with a groan. Only recognized who it had been after activating the rings and sending him on his way, the memory of the general from Cheyenne surfacing sluggishly − a sour welcome to a base about to be shut down the only meeting they'd ever had. Hammond. Mer had mentioned him. Hadn't mentioned Earth had interstellar ships, though.
It didn't bother him anyway. Screw the lot of them. He owed Earth exactly what he'd got from his home planet since the day Apophis came through the chappa'ai.
Clearing out the rest of the unconscious crew, with just himself and Vala to move everyone, turned out to be exhausting and back-breaking work. They had to hurry and get it done before any of the crew started coming around. A four-wheeled dolly for moving equipment let them sling three or four people together and roll them back to the ring room, at least, and speeded up the process.
"Meredith better appreciate this," Vala muttered. "We could both be on Lator'nin drinking Sels wine if he had paid attention and run when I told him to."
Jehan didn't tell her Tenat's people wouldn't have grabbed Meredith if she hadn't scammed them the last time they came through Freider's Moon. He just rolled a sergeant and a corporal into the center of the ring, kicked one man's feet within the perimeter and activated it. Sweat ran down his sides under the single-suit he wore beneath the armor and his shoulders ached.
He headed out again.
~*~
Jehan stashed Novak and a doctor from the infirmary, a trim and tiny woman who looked more competent than anyone else he saw, in the ship's brig once he found it. He wanted the doctor in case Mer needed better care than Vala could provide once they had him back. Everyone else went to the al'kesh. They just managed it before the stun wore off their first victims.
Prometheus was still drifting, but he trusted Vala to get the sublights online and get them away from the bait before any sharks or do-gooders showed up. Jehan needed to find a maintenance locker and head back to the engine room to repair the door he'd fried, then start on restoring the hyperdrives.
The ship felt hollow and cold without a crew; empty shadows everywhere in the dark passageways. Vala hadn't cracked the bridge controls as fast as usual. Goa'uld tech, scavenged and simplified for Jaffa to use without reading or writing, was the norm through the galaxy. Jehan figured she might be having a hard time with the idiosyncrasies of an operating systems based on an original design.
If they didn't have any luck with it by the time he had the hyperdrive working again, he'd get the engineer out of the brig and persuade her to hack any security protocols he couldn't.
One of the armories was open. Jehan closed it up, noting weapons were missing from several lockers. There were quite a few zats and handguns scattered where crew members had fallen. He'd have to police them up once they made the hyperspace jump.
He'd been in the Kull armor so long his nose had shut down. The helmet restricted his vision and hearing; he didn't pick up that there was someone besides Vala on the bridge until he reached the doorway.
He saw a crewman fire a weapon that probably came from the armory Jehan had noted. It hit Vala's back, the charge sizzling over her armor without effect. Vala turned and raised her zat.
The man fired at Vala again, but without effect.
"Oh, crap," he said.
Jehan almost sympathized as Vala zatted him. The man gave out a pained yell before dropping to the deck, knocked unconscious.
"You missed one, Jehan," Vala chided, turning back to the control console.
The Kull armor kept him from shrugging. More likely Vala had missed him, but it didn't matter. They had gotten lucky: these people hadn't been expecting pirates.
"Brig?" he asked, nudging the man with his boot.
"No," she said. "Tie him up. We're probably going to need someone who reads this language. Besides, he's rather nice to look at. Unlike the rest of this bucket. Haven't these people heard of design and decoration?"
Jehan almost snorted. The lack of the ubiquitous gold and hieroglyphs praising whichever 'god' had commissioned a ship came as a relief to him. Even Tanafriti felt like a flying dungeon some days. Prometheus, on the other hand, felt like a tin can or maybe an aircraft carrier.
He set about securing the man into a chair while he was still out. The combat vest, black tee-shirt and BDU combination didn't offer a clue to his name. Jehan thought that the muscles and glasses both signaled that the man was more likely a ground pounder of some variety than Air Force like rest of the crew. He worked fast and took away the glasses at the end − not being able to see would help keep the man off-balance.
"Have you commed Tenat yet?"
"No. I can't get into the system."
Jehan resisted the urge to remind her what Tenat had promised to do to Mer if they didn't come back with a ship. She knew. Acting unconcerned was just the way she coped.
Vala went back to randomly calling up screens. "This dungeating scrapheap must have sublights, so where are they?"
"I could − "
"Just let me work on this," Vala snapped. "Go make sure there's no one else left onboard."
"I need to work on the hyperdrives, remember?"
"Fine. You might want to find us both something to eat, too."
She sounded so much like the Goa'uld she'd been, Jehan wanted to snap her neck. He breathed out through his nose instead. It was just stress working on both of them. She could fetch her own damn meal, though. He was no one's slave any longer.
On the other hand, he was hungry himself.
He secured a set of plastic ties on their prisoner and left.
"Open your comm," Vala called after him. "I've shut down Meredith's jammer."
Jehan nodded and did so.
It took two tries to find the ship's mess and put together something Vala would eat. By then the comm was providing him audio from Vala and their prisoner, who recovered from a zatting faster than most. Vala must have kept the stinking helmet on; the prisoner still thought he was facing a Kull and started babbling.
Since even Jaffa wet themselves when facing off against Kull warriors, Jehan thought talking at one was crazy, but this guy seemed like he might annoy one into shooting him. He sounded perplexed by finding himself still alive, anyway, obviously well aware Kull didn't normally take prisoners. No doubt he'd figure it out given enough time. Jehan figured Vala was laughing her head off where no one could see, though.
"I'm just gonna talk to myself here for a while, 'cause you're not gonna talk to me. Not that you guys are very talkative, but uh..."
"You may prove useful," Vala said.
Jehan found the mess by accident and then after some thought found bottled water and MREs to take down to the doctor and Novak in the brig. It would ease their headaches and their nerves. He kept listening as their other prisoner asked about the rest of the crew.
"Transported to the al'kesh."
The prisoner claimed they had the wrong guy and that he didn't know anything about the ship. Jehan or Vala or anyone with the survival instinct of a gnat would have lied and faked it as long as they could. Jehan dropped him a notch in his estimation.
Vala seemed set on screwing with the guy's mind. Next she said, "But you are very attractive."
Jehan listened to the poor bastard cough and blurt out, "What!?"
He hoped Vala was just messing with the man and not about to start sleeping with anything on two legs that couldn't outrun her again. She hadn't propositioned Jehan since their one disastrous night together, but she'd been celibate for months now and she usually started up again after something went wrong.
Like losing Mer to Tenat.
Crap.
On the comm in his ear, the other prisoner squeaked a little as he said, "Hey, you know, big guy, I'm flattered, really I am, it's just that, uh, you're not my type. And I'm more than a little disturbed that I might be yours."
Jehan hurried the MREs and bottled water down to the brig, checked the surveillance camera and found both women awake and sitting against a bulkhead shoulder to shoulder. He opened the door and tossed in the bags and bottles.
The red-headed doctor looked up. "What do you want from us?" she demanded. Her eyes were filled with the same anger snapping through her voice.
Jehan took a page out of Vala's play book.
"You may prove useful." He pointed to the food and water. "Provisions."
Novak had her fist shoved in her mouth, but it wasn't stopping the hiccups jolting her with every breath. Jehan winced in sympathy.
Jehan headed for the engine room. If he hadn't been worried about Mer, he would have been laughing a little at Vala's game. As it was, she was wasting time with the cat-and-mouse fun. As far as he was concerned, she had until he made it back to the bridge, then he was taking over.
Jehan missed whatever the prisoner said next as he entered the elevator between decks. Static scrambled the comm connection inside the helmet he wore. The armor wasn't designed with networked operations in mind. Kulls didn't really have enough brain power to work in teams, anyway.
He caught the tail end of something Vala said as he exited.
" − not going to hurt you."
"Thank God."
"Much," Vala continued and added brightly, with just a touch of evil amusement, "I hope."
He felt the shudder of the sublight engines activating a moment later, though, which meant Vala had cracked the system far enough to begin maneuvering the ship away from the cargo ship and the al'kesh, taking them out of range of intership ring transports. So at least she'd been getting something done while she entertained herself.
She asked about long-range transmissions and got nothing.
"You lie."
If anyone would know, it would be Vala. Jehan found a tool box and went to work on the door lock, prying the black-seared facing and keypad off and pulling out wires, methodically trying connections until one disengaged the air seal and the door retracted with a soft noise.
He pulled off the helmet and his gloves once inside and began work. It looked like Novak had been pulling control crystals nearly at random. Crap plan. She'd crippled the ship's chance to retreat into hyperspace if they'd been under ship to ship attack instead of a boarding action.
Jehan sat down in front of one of the computers and began accessing engineering specs. Mer was going to go wild over this ship. Some of the designs had to be from the Asgard. Jehan refused to let himself feel any guilt over stealing the ship. It was what they did and this time they had a better reason than usual.
"Uh, okay, um, look. My name is Daniel Jackson. I'm an archaeologist, a historian. I study ancient cultures, histories of the past, ancient civilizations. Have you heard of Earth, Tau'ri?"
Jehan froze.
Jackson?
Mer had talked about Daniel Jackson, somewhere between scorn and admiration, describing the man who had opened the chappa'ai.
If Mer hadn't told him about Jackson's search for the wife the Goa'uld had stolen as a host, Jehan would have needed to kill him.
So much pain.
A process of trial and elimination eventually got all the crystals back into place. He ran a diagnostic and smiled. The hyperdrives were functional again.
The prisoner cried out and Jehan decided it really was time to get up to the bridge. He didn't want to, didn't want to face Jackson or anyone from Earth, or deal with all the memories explaining who he was would stir up.
He forced himself forward anyway. He still found it unbelievable that the thorn in the System Lords' side, the terrible Tau'ri, were from Earth. He'd held on for so long, alone, believing there was no one else, and they'd been out there the entire time.
They done nothing. He hated them for that.
They had ships.
Jehan brushed his hand over a bulkhead and smiled meanly. They had one less now.
~*~
Vala stripped the stinking armor off piece by piece, leaving her sweat soaked single-suit clinging to her skin, well aware of the man − Daniel Jackson, a name she'd heard here and there around the galaxy, usually accompanied by a Goa'uld curse − had his eyes on her. She flipped her loose hair back off her shoulders.
Revealing she wasn't a Kull didn't make him any more cooperative. She ended up slapping him to remind him who was in charge.
"Ow!" he protested.
Vala leaned in close and used her sultriest voice. "Shall I kiss it better?"
She was making him uncomfortable. Good. Though he was genuinely attractive and she liked men the Goa'uld hated.
"Um, no."
She waited.
"Just don't do it again," Jackson said on the heels of his refusal. "Hey, look, even if I knew what it is you wanted me to do, what makes you think I'd tell you? How the hell do you think you can steal a ship when you don't know how it works?"
"I got the sublight engines going," she said.
She'd get communications soon too, with or without him, or Jehan would, once he had the hyperdrives online again. This would have been easier with more crew, but she and Jehan could do it. And they wouldn't share any of the profit from the naquadah Tenat had promised with anyone else.
"Yeah, so you did," Jackson acknowledged.
"You really expect me to believe you don't know how your own ship works?"
He wasn't a slave born under the boot of a Goa'uld 'god', willing to believe anything more complicated than a big stick was magic. If he didn't know, he could still easily help her. If he wanted to, which she granted he had no reason to.
She seated herself in the command chair next to Jackson.
"Have you heard of Earth, Tau'ri?" Jackson asked her after babbling something about cultures and civilizations.
"No," she lied.
Jackson shifted uncomfortably against his bindings. It was distracting.
"Okay, well, we were on our way to rescue a few friends who are trapped − "
Oh, a sob story. Too bad she had her own. Everybody did, after all.
"I really don't care," she interrupted.
"Look, this really isn't necessary−"
Vala held up her hands and mimicked chitchat. Mer had taught her that one. "Can I have the ship?" she asked. She pretended the other hand was answering. "No? Okay." She stared at Jackson, dropping her hands again. "Discussion over."
He stared back, displaying an annoying stubbornness.
Vala hit the control console with her fist in frustration. The screen flashed a new message: COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEM ACTIVE.
"Oh, here we go." She nearly laughed. Another look and she had the gist of how the system worked and opened an transmission. "Tenat of Oran. Tenat, this is Vala, if you can hear me, please respond. I've managed to procure a vessel, bigger and better than what I'd hoped for," she said. She added, "Tenat, if you get this message, I apologize for the delay and will meet at the designated coordinates in one day. Vala out." Maybe that would appease Tenat's bad temper and ease Mer's captivity. She hoped.
She turned back to Jackson and smiled again.
"Now, about the hyperdrive."
She imagined the way the crinkles at the corner's of Jehan's eyes would tighten at the implication he couldn't get the hyperdrives up again.
Jackson sighed tiredly and wriggled against his bonds. Vala dismissed him from her thoughts, thinking instead of which tack they would take with Tenat. Land the ship and do an exchange for Meredith? Lay an ambush of some kind inside the ship? They couldn't just turn the ship over to Tenat or even if he left them the naquadah and gave Mer back, they'd be marooned on that worthless backwater moon with no way to get to the world in-system that had a chappa'ai.
Hyperdrives.
She wondered how fast this ship could transit. Al'kesh weren't as fast as Hebridan racers, so there was room for improvement with most ships. She'd need to see what Jehan had accomplished. If this ship could beat an al'kesh's hyperdrive speed, they could reach the rendezvous ahead of time and bust Mer out first, then renegotiate the deal for the naquadah.
By renegotiate, Vala still meant the three of them leaving with the naquadah and the ship. Tenat certainly didn't deserve either.
She kept working, finding that Jehan had the hyperdrives online again, but when she tried to input a course, the navigation systems shut down on her. ACCESS DENIED. Whichever of the crew had been on duty had password locked it before she managed to stun them all.
"Access is restricted by a code," she told Jackson in annoyance.
"Yeah, too bad."
That sounded just a little too self-satisfied for her. Vala's temper snapped and she swung around and fired an energy pulse at him from her arm weapon. She pulled the shot at the last second, burning through Jackson's tee-shirt sleeve and scoring a searing wound in his arm. Smoke, stinking of burnt flesh and fabric, curled up afterward, twisting in the invisible currents of the environmental system's air circulation.
Jackson jerked and cried out in pain. Vala swiveled her chair enough to face him again, propping her boots against his chair.
"Hurt?" she asked.
She knew it did. The Tok'ra had done much worse to her when they questioned Qetesh and Qetesh had made sure her host endured the worst of it. The torture had gone on and on, until they were inseparable in their pain, until Qetesh broke under it.
She pulled one of the small, less flashy healing devices out of a pocket in her single-suit as he replied affirmatively. She placed it onto the middle finger of her right hand, like a ring turned inward to her palm. A red telltale light flickered on as she showed it to him. "I can fix it."
Jackson's eyes widened and he began breathing even harder, panic and a new level of fear mingling with the pain. "I don't know the code!" he blurted. His gaze strayed between the healing device and Vala's eyes, looking for the telltale symbiote flash.
Vala smiled at him and moved to sit on the console before him. She aimed the device on her hand at his wound and willed it on. Qetesh had used anger and arousal to generate mental force to use both the healing device and a ribbon. Vala focused on her fear. The fear was always there, beneath every other emotion she let show, a fuel she would never use up. The wound on Jackson's arm healed quickly.
The pain went away with the wound. The skin knit without a scar and Vala lifted her hand away. Only the smoldering edges of the hole in his shirt remained to prove there had ever been a wound at all.
"There," she said. "Feel better?"
"You're Goa'uld."
The fear made her reckless. It made her want to prove she was still herself, still in control of her body, to feel something that was all hers. She knew Jehan disapproved, though he never said, the same way she knew all the things he could no longer bear after serving as a Goa'uld plaything.
Right that minute, she wanted Jackson. Well, she wanted someone and Jackson was right there, tied up and accessible. Sex always left her relaxed, the fear that had been part of her since she was chosen to become a host pushed back where it wouldn't interfere with her thinking.
She wanted Jackson, but even if she hadn't, she couldn't bear to have someone think she was a Goa'uld. That was Qetesh. She wasn't Qetesh, no matter how many times she still thought she heard the Goa'uld queen's voice in her head.
"No. But I was once a host to one."
"Which would explain the naquadah in your blood that lets you use Goa'uld technology."
"And how I quickly learned to fly this rather primitive ship." She kept it light. She had to or fall apart. Thinking about Qetesh left her feeling brittle. It reminded her of all the things Qetesh might have done to this man, given an opportunity, and it frightened that she might be forced to use the same techniques.
Worse, that she might just be looking for an excuse to use them.
"Yeah, so primitive, one would wonder if it was worth the bother," Jackson said. Very snippy.
Jehan would be grinding his teeth at the other end of the open comm. He did the flying. Mer and Jehan both agreed Vala was a terrible pilot. She could get a ship in and out of hyperdrive, de-orbit and take off. No one really wanted to be onboard during one of her landings.
"Well, in this case it's the size that matters," Vala told him.
Jackson pinched his brows together and stared up at her.
Tenat wanted a troop transport that could face off with an al'kesh or better. Ships fitting that description weren't just lying around waiting to be snapped up. They'd scouted four different blackmarket shipyards hunting something to pirate before settling on a the cargo ship and its al'kesh escort as the best of a lot of bad prospects.
Vala shifted over Jackson and glanced at his groin and the promising bulge there. "Actually," she breathed softly, "pretty much in every case."
He looked amazed and horrified by the brazen appraisal, which just made Vala want to keep teasing him or to touch him and see what other reactions she could draw from him.
She touched the healed skin on his arm.
"Tell me the code," she pleaded. "Please."
"I don't−I don't know it."
Resigned, Vala backed off.
"Fine."
She needed to consult with Jehan before she resorted to real torture. Maybe the engineer he'd kept on board would be better information source. If Jackson didn't have some use, he'd be better off dropped off at a world on the route to the rendezvous.
With a regretful glance back at him − she really wanted to keep him, preferably tied up and in her bed for a few days and nights − she left the bridge.
She really should have checked the ties. By the time she reached the bridge again, Jackson was gone. With a shrug, Vala dismissed him. She needed to set their course. Jehan would be up in another few minutes. He'd been irritated with her when she found him in the engine room.
Of course, the next time she saw him, Vala meant to twit him over his sub par knots.
She headed for the control console and called up a navigation screen. Jehan had managed to release it and the rest of the controls from the engine room's consoles. Expertise in the language of the ship's builders had no doubt helped him.
"Much better," she murmured to herself.
Knowing they were on a Tau'ri ship had left Jehan quieter and in a darker mood than usual. Quieter for Jehan approached mutism. She missed Meredith's babble and the way Jehan smiled and twitted him. They had to get him back; that was all. She'd survive if they didn't; that was what she did. She didn't know if Jehan would, though.
The scuff of a footstep alerted her to her latest miscalculation.
"Lose the weapon. Move away from the console," Jackson ordered.
Vala sighed theatrically.
"I liked you better tied up."
"Against the wall," he said.
Vala didn't move, watching him, calculating how far she could push before he zatted her. Could she get her arm up and a shot off from her own arm weapon before he did?
"Lose the weapon."
Probably not, she decided. She removed the weapon from her left arm and stripped off the glove she wore beneath it too.
"The suit still absorbs zat blasts," she pointed out as she strolled over to stand in front of a wall screen displaying something about the ship's status.
"Then cover your head."
She turned and said, "So you should let me take it off."
She wondered if Jehan was hearing this through the open comm. He'd expect her to deal with Jackson herself, though, since she'd been the one to leave him out of the brig.
"I think I'll turn the ship around first," Jackson told her.
"I don't know. If I had me at gunpoint, that wouldn't be my first choice."
She could see him think about it − for a second − then push away the temptation. People with principles were always harder to trick.
He went to the control console and began typing. The security code he'd denied knowing, so it served him right when the screen flashed ACCESS DENIED, rejecting it.
"What's going on?"
"I rewrote the access codes, so I'm the only one who can use the navigation systems."
And Jehan, but she thought Jackson didn't even know she wasn't alone and she'd keep it that way until she had the upper hand again.
He waved the zat at her.
"Undo it."
Maybe a small sob story of her own would distract him...
"Listen, hundreds of lives are at stake. I'm trying to save the last of my people − " In a way, that bit was even true. Meredith was one of her crew. She gentled her tone. Looked at him imploringly. " − and this ship is their only hope."
"Maybe if you'd mentioned that off the top."
"Would you really have helped?"
She didn't believe it for a moment. Not for a pirate. Not for Meredith. They hadn't helped him before. Hadn't done anything for Jehan. The Tau'ri were like everyone else in the galaxy; out for themselves, forgetting any individual who fell along the way.
Besides, anyone who allied with the Tok'ra couldn't be trusted in her estimation.
As Meredith put it: a snake was a snake.
"Look, as I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, we were also on a rescue mission."
A beeping sound came from the navigation console. Jackson checked it. Vala couldn't read the screen from where she stood.
"What is it?"
Jackson checked another console.
"A ship just appeared on our radar. It's an al'kesh."
"This quadrant is crawling with Goa'uld vessels," Vala told him. "Chances are it's not your friends. I made sure that ship was fully disabled when you showed up."
Daniel began typing in commands. "We'll see."
"We have to raise shields and arm weapons."
She really hoped Jehan was hearing this and on his way to the bridge. They couldn't afford to play games any longer with Goa'uld out there.
"I'll try and hail them first."
Idiot!
He began to walk away and Vala kicked out. She sent the zat flying from his hand, then back-handed him across the face. He rocked back and she swung again. He recovered fast and sent an elbow flying into her nose.
She hadn't really expected him to fight back and blurted, "Oh, oh, oh. You hit me."
"You hit me," he pointed out. Reasonably.
Vala wasn't feeling very reasonable.
"Yeah, you know we could just have sex instead," she said as a distraction.
She hit him again, kicked him next and sent him stumbling back part way across the bridge. Maneuvering room was limited by the islands formed by the control consoles. Vala took a run at him and grabbed his ear, pulling him up with every intention of slamming his head back against the deck plating and knocking him out.
Jackson fought back with a grunt. They tumbled, scrambled to their feet, and he threw a punch at her that she dodged. His fist hit a panel beside her head instead.
Vala dropped, twisted and went for a improvised weapon: a red painted cannister mounted on the wall. She slammed it into his groin.
Jackson doubled over.
Vala shoved him back to the console again and slugged him. He fell backwards to the deck again with another gasping grunt.
Gasping for breath herself, Vala reminded herself to practice hand-to-hand a little more often. She was getting out of shape.
Jackson crawled around the corner of the console, caught sight of her, and tried to crawl away. Vala sucked in another breath and leaped onto him. She caught his head between her thighs and squeezed.
Jackson surprised her, staggered up to his feet with her on his shoulders. Vala grabbed an overhead beam, glad for ceilings that weren't as cavernous as an al'kesh's, just before Jackson managed to twist out from under her. That freed Vala's legs though and she retaliated by kicking him back to the deck again.
She jumped down and onto him again.
Somewhere in their tussle, she'd marked him. A red abrasion was bruising up on his cheekbone.
"Are we done?" she asked.
"I am," he panted.
The adrenaline and fear made her stupid. She locked a fist in his shirt and dragged him up, kissing him with abandon.
Jackson jerked back and exclaimed, "You're a fruitcake!"
That hurt.
Vala headbutted him for that and left him on the deck, dazed, as she went for the navigation controls. Someone had to do something about the al'kesh on their tail.
It wouldn't be her, she had time to acknowledge, hearing the telltale sound of a zat powering up before it hit her. He must have aimed for her head after all. The suit ameliorated the effect enough she heard another zat sound before losing consciousness, and Jehan muttering, "Great plan. Just great."
~*~
Daniel woke with a groan before registering his head lay in Janet's lap.
"Ow."
"He's awake," Novak said.
He squinted his eyes open and then let Janet help him sit up with his back to one of the brig's walls.
"I got zatted again."
His head was ready to explode. The glare from Prometheus' uncompromising lighting didn't help. He wondered how close he'd come to the minimum time frame between one zat charge and a lethal second one. Close. The lingering headache and muscle pains seemed worse than usual.
Or, like Jack, he was just getting older.
"And banged around," Janet said.
Daniel opened one eye. There was that. The woman he'd fought hadn't exactly been pulling any punches. She hadn't been the one who zatted him either.
"God, I'm a idiot," he muttered and let his head thunk back against the cold brig wall.
Of course she hadn't been working alone.
The bulkhead behind him shuddered and the hum always present throughout the ship shifted, hitched, then dropped to the subtly rougher sound of the sublight engines. They'd just dropped out of hyperspace.
"Lindsay and I have tried to figure out how to get out of here, but we're not having any luck," Janet said.
"Funny how brigs make that so hard."
Novak let out small half-hiccup, half-laugh.
"At least they're not starving us," Janet said. "That thing, the Kull, came back with more MREs." She held up a bottle labeled aspirin. "And this."
Daniel held out his hand. "Gimme." He dry swallowed the two pills Janet gave him. He knew she wouldn't let him take more than the recommended dose, suspected that was why she measured them out rather than handing him the bottle.
"That Kull probably isn't one, you know," he said. "The one on the bridge turned to be a woman. Who beat me up."
"Really?" Novak asked.
"Really."
She made a small, interested sound. Or maybe she was just swallowing laughter. Janet certainly had a smirk on her face.
"So," Daniel added after some reflection, "this is familiar. Zatted, taken prisoner, zatted, thrown in a cell. Some differences. Jack's not here to piss anyone off."
"Looks like you did that for yourself this time," Janet told him.
"Ouch."
The problem being that along with missing Jack, he was missing Teal'c and Sam or Rodney. If either of them had been in the cell with him, Daniel knew none of them would have been in the cell much longer. Well, if Rodney had been there, he would have been alternating complaints, panic, and hypochondria, but he'd have been working on an escape at the same time. Daniel missed Rodney; Daniel had discovered exactly how often Rodney had been the team whipping boy once Jack's impatience had only Daniel to focus on.
It hadn't been fun.
Daniel didn't know if Jack had never picked on Sam the same way because she was a woman, because she'd been military or because she'd told him off after she'd resigned her commission in the wake of Rodney's loss. Jack just hadn't.
That had left Daniel and his 'pinko liberal pansy ideas' as a target, because Teal'c would not take that shit, not even from Jack.
They'd found a new equilibrium eventually though, with Sam doing Rodney's job, and later, Jonas Quinn doing Daniel's before the Others descended him and he returned, until Anise showed up at the SGC with a double whammy from the Tok'ra: Jacob and Selmak were dead and so was Jolinar, who had been responsible for Rodney's disappearance.
It hadn't been funny, finding out someone they'd assumed was dead was, but that he'd been alive while they hadn't been looking for him any longer. The guilt had eaten them all up; they'd been left with the question of whether they might have looked harder, longer, if they'd liked Rodney McKay a little more. The answers hadn't been pleasant.
And Sam had taken the job with the nascent Atlantis expedition in the aftermath.
"So, did they miss you on the first round up − " he started to ask.
"No, we were knocked out and woke up in the brig," Janet answered.
Daniel nodded slowly.
He didn't think Janet and Novak had been kept back because they were women. So. A doctor and an engineer. Useful people to have around if you thought someone might be shooting at your new ship any time soon.
"Great," he muttered and rubbed his temples. "I have a feeling we should probably brace our selves for a rough ride."
"Why?" Novak asked. She wasn't hiccuping and he wondered if Janet had found a way to cure her or she'd just run out of the energy for it.
"They ringed everyone else over to the al'kesh, but kept you two. They must think they may need you."
"At least we know the crew is alive, though," Janet murmured.
"Yeah," Daniel admitted. "They're not the worst pirates we could have run into. Maybe."
Janet opened an MRE and he choked down macaroni and cheese before falling asleep. Prometheus stayed at sublight or in orbit. Another pirate − Daniel guessed not the woman from the bridge thanks to the lack of suggestive or disturbing remarks − still in Kull armor, brought them more MREs − enough for several days − and a couple of blankets.
Shortly after, the engines changed pitch again. They were dropping out of orbit. Prometheus shuddered as it landed. Daniel was reminded that take off and landings were considered the most dangerous parts of flight. Re-entry of something as huge as Prometheus, without a hint of compromise toward aerodynamics, had to stress the ship to the max. Whoever had the controls knew how to fly, though, the only thing that betrayed they were on a planet again was the groan that ran through the ship when it switched from artificial gravity to local.
"Did we just land?" Janet asked.
"I think so."
"We did," Novak confirmed. "Do you think they'll let us out here?"
"I guess we wait and see," Daniel said, but he doubted it, considering the number of MREs they'd been left with.
They all still had their watches, so despite the constant lights, keeping track posed no problem. They took turns politely looking away whenever anyone need to use the open air toilet and washing up. Running water and a toilet were huge improvement on most of the jails and dungeons Daniel had known, which he told Novak when she went red with embarrassment the first time.
"You get used to ignoring each other."
Janet wasn't bothered. "I'm a doctor. Believe me, Daniel has nothing I haven't seen before and probably stitched up," she explained.
~*~
[b]