Inland Sea, Chapter 1
THIS IS NOT A WIP.
Because I know that these days I cannot be tempted by a huge story. I have been skipping really big ones, because I just don't have the time.
So, to assist people like me, I am publishing this story in 5 pieces over five days. It is complete, and available in its entirety at DreamWidth or by request for a document from me (see header, below).
Title: Inland Sea, Chapter 1
Author: muck-a-luck, posting in brainofck
Pairings: Many. Mainly Daniel Jackson/Jack O'Neill. Also Teal'c/Samantha Carter, John Sheppard/Rodney McKay. Something for everyone, all OTPs violated. Additional pairing warnings under the blur. Highlight to read. Teal'c/Vala MalDoran, Vala/everybody-at-one-point-or-another, Rodney McKay/John Sheppard, Cameron Mitchell/Vala MalDoran, Cameron Mitchell/Samantha Carter. Heck, implied indiscriminate mutant sexin'. You have been warned!
Rating: NC-17
Summary: Inspired by lokei's fantastic AU, Still Waters, and particularly the phrase: "bare-chested colonels hefting tridents and wearing crowns of starfish."
Content/warnings: Highlight the blur to view. Sex with mutants. Prehensile penises. Um. Prehensile penis sex bears a lot of resemblance to tentacle!porn, though I suppose it would be a quite mild variety.
Words: 3,212 words, this chapter. 20,116 (approximately) entire piece, available at this link as a single psot. 53 pages, available in PDF, just e-mail me at brainofck at gmail dot com (e-mail responses will begin late Monday, after PDF is created!).
Disclaimer: If anybody is planning a script like this for SG-1, I'm certainly not going to claim any rights to it. However, I'd be delighted to work in a co-writing/consulting/first-reader/advisory-type capacity, with my fee to be negotiated at that time. :D
Archive rights: Absolutely none. My journals only. muck_a_luck and brainofck
The Matrix: Water. The Matrix is located here.
Author's notes: Go here for a few notes regarding factual and canon blunders found within.
Beta: The wonderful, dolphin loving lokei!
A storm was coming. Possibly a big one, Jack thought as they sat on the battered sea wall, staring out over the choppy water. The air was full of spray as they ate their breakfast of salted clam and hot sauce. Sam had brought some sweet honey rolls, and Teal'c had contributed the coffee. Their legs dangled and they enjoyed the pause between squalls. The sky was completely grey now. It would be raining again soon. Yesterday they breakfasted under a red sky. His clear rain poncho crinkled as he lifted his coffee to his lips.
"Humanity has done itself an injustice, by taking itself outside the process of natural selection," Teal'c replied. Jack sighed. Here they went again. Sam hated the natural selection argument.
"Didn't your great, great, great grandfather get genetic engineering to fix some inherited immune system thing?" Sam countered. "Rya'c would never have been born if he hadn't done that. You would never have been born."
Teal'c inclined his head in acknowledgement.
"And yet, the path of genetic engineering has lead so many of us to sterility," Teal'c stated. "Perhaps that is why O'Neill has no son."
My parents have no son, Jack thought to himself. Aloud he said, "I don't deserve a son."
"You have to let that go, sir. A lot of people fought in the Land Wars," Sam admonished him, not unsympathetically. After all, she served, too, at the very end. That was how they'd met. "That was a long time ago, and it's over now." Her hand was light on his elbow. "Besides," she declared to Teal'c, "Genetic engineering is the reason he can remember Dallas."
"Dallas? Dallas…" Jack pretended to search his memory. "Twinkie guy, blond hair, great boots, cute accent? He was a damned good lay. I don't need genetically enhanced memory to remember him. And neither do you, if memory still serves."
Sam blushed. It amused Jack to remember that Dallas was specifically how they'd met.
"Not him. Antediluvian Dallas. I know you're at least 150 years old."
"I never got to antediluvian Dallas. I'm from antediluvian Minnesota, don't forget."
"Much older than we thought, then," Teal'c murmured. Jack made a rude hand gesture and finished the rest of his coffee.
"You're starting to sound like one of those Bart people who thinks Bart's comment about stem cells being our enemies was one of his teachings rather than one of his jokes. Next you'll be attacking monogamous homosexuals," Sam said accusingly.
"In this day, if the fertile fail to reproduce, it is a harm to us all," Teal'c intoned, like a preacher on Sabbathday morning.
Sometimes it was hard to tell when Teal'c was kidding.
"Well, look around, Teal'c. If the Land Wars taught us anything - sorry, sir - it is that humans weren't made to tolerate one another in extremely dense populations. Maybe lower fertility is the price we needed to pay for longevity."
"Genetically engineered longevity for which humans were never designed. Or perhaps sterility is the price we pay for melting our polar ice caps," Teal'c rebutted. "Perhaps since you favor a less dense population, you would like to sing the praises of the Smallpox Fifty."
As Sam stammered in outrage, Jack rolled his eyes and got up from the wall, stepping off the lip to the ground behind. The fifty fanatics who delivered the smallpox plague of 2538 were by far the most reviled and hated of the terrorist groups who had brought 200 years of chaos to the planet starting around 2300. They were also the last of those groups, as three out of four people died in that outbreak. There was nobody left to join the groups, nothing left to fight for, and only hatred and death at the hands of angry mobs for any newly aspiring terrorists.
"This is precisely why humans were not intended to live forever. After about eighty years, we start to have the same stupid conversations over and over," Jack declared as he turned on his heel to walk back to their pier.
He ran smack into the kid. He was a member of what appeared to be an excursion of college students having an educational trip to the Sea, to observe giant crocodilians or flooded ecosystems or something. As they both stumbled and regained their footing, the young man muttered, "Sorry, sir," and their eyes met and Jack knew. The kid did, too, apparently. He gave a barely audible gasp and stepped back - just enough that Teal'c and Sam got a good look at him, too.
"Oh, my God," Sam breathed.
Jack hissed in anger.
"Get out of here!" he whispered to the kid. Himself, but a whole hell of a lot younger. He moved quickly away both from his breakfast companions and the younger clone and his college excursion. Jack thanked whatever deities watched over him that none of the other clone's classmates appeared to have noticed him. He strode briskly away from the scene of the encounter toward his boat.
He heard Teal'c and Carter coming fast after him. Let them catch up if they could.
Hammond stared around the table, completely at a loss. He finally settled on Jack.
"Colonel, I know how you feel about this kind of thing. You don't have to be the one to do this. There are other strong gene carriers. Hell, it's genetic engineering. They'll be putting the damned gene into all the participants."
Jack knew it was too much to hope that he could just volunteer for the mission and move on.
"Sir, you asked for volunteers, you've got a volunteer."
Anubis had destroyed Abydos. Anubis had destroyed glowy Daniel. Anubis had to be stopped, or he would destroy everything. If Jack could walk into the Ancient device they found in Antarctica, and walk out Earth's own version of a super solider, well, why the hell not, really?
"I, too, am volunteering," Teal'c intoned. He raised his hand to forestall the general's protests. "While tretonin is preferable to slavery, Jaffa anatomy now makes us completely dependent on the supply of this drug. Tretonin can be only a temporary solution for my people. This process promises to yield a healthy, functional immune system. I am not at all hesitant to volunteer."
Hammond turned to Carter.
"Colonel," he began again. Carter cut him off.
"Sir, I saw what Anubis did to Abydos. He'll do that here, if we don't stop him."
"Colonel, it doesn't have to be you."
"Really?" she replied. "If not me, then it will have to be someone else. I volunteer, sir."
Hammond was furious with her. Jack could see it in the old man's face. He turned a baleful eye on Jack, and even on Teal'c, though Teal'c had a good reason, at least.
"If those are your final decisions, then I have my volunteers," he said, with steely professionalism. "Your transport to Antarctica leaves from Peterson at 1100 tomorrow. You're dismissed," he said tersely, pushing back his own chair.
Carter and Teal'c were out of there, but as Jack made to follow them, the general stopped him.
"Jack," he said softly.
Jack turned back to his CO.
"Skaara wouldn't want this. Kasuf wouldn't want this."
He held Jack with a penetrating gaze.
"And Jacob Carter would kick my ass," Jack agreed lightly, though he met Hammond's gaze without flinching.
"You know Dr. Jackson wouldn't want you to do this."
"Daniel doesn't get to object anymore, sir. He gave up any right to do that when he ascended. Then died."
Hammond sighed.
"If you don't mind, General, I'm shipping out tomorrow," Jack said, with a gesture toward the door. "Lots to do."
"Don't let me keep you, Colonel," the general replied. He turned and retreated into his office. Jack didn't wait to see him pick up the phone to call Kinsey and tell him he had his volunteers.
Jack made his living on the Inland Sea. He took families of four on fishing excursions to the safe, shallow spots. He took tourists out to the clam beds and helped them haul in the monstrous shelled beasts. They took pictures and shells and pounds of salted clam back upland with them. He took the thrill seekers out to the deeper waters, to watch crocodilians as long as his boat lunge out of the water with twenty-foot sharks clasped in their huge jaws. Long ago, he had stopped explaining to people that the shallow waters were really more dangerous, because there sarcosuchus didn't have sharks to hunt. That was counterproductive, because then even the thrill-seekers wouldn't get in the boat. Jack knew he could keep his passengers safe. He didn't need to describe the non-risks to them. Sometimes, ignorance was bliss.
His boat, The Homer,was a 40-foot long solar-sail hybrid catamaran. Jack loved her. The solar technology was his own design, exploiting the super-efficient solar cells Sam liked to make in her toaster and the fibers she had patented while pursuing her doctorate, before she ran off to join the Tarheels in the Land Wars. Somehow, they were the catch-all for anybody with no place to call home anymore. That was where Jack ran off to, so he should know.
He had applied Sam's solar cell technology to his entire deck. Durable as fiberglass, even on a rainy day it could provide enough energy to run his engines at a respectable ten knots. When it was sunny, he could run his engines and his water desalination plant (also his own design), too. Throw in the sails he had specially made from Sam's solar fibers, and Jack could power all the other equipment in his boat. The Homer could go places no other craft her size could venture in the shifting delta systems of the Inland Sea. He carried 200 gallons of fresh water, with hot water under pressure. He made his own beer.
He lived on The Homer, but unlike other charter captains, who stashed their own quarters in the front of a pontoon under a hatch, the entire starboard pontoon was Jack's home. It made him feel strangely secure, to know that he could pick up his life and move it with the changing of the tide or the turn of the wind. Kick the tourists out of the port hull and he was on his way.
No matter what he let his fundamentalist clients believe, the name of his boat was not, in fact, a reference to the teachings of Bart Simpson, but rather harkened back thousands of years earlier to the Greek historian Homer and his Odyssey. Jack wanted to put war behind him and return home. The Sea was between him and the place he needed to go. Literally, he supposed, as his home was technically a flooded piece of land far north of his current home port, but that wasn't the home he missed. The home his heart longed for was… somewhere. Maybe he would never find it. Despite that, he couldn't hate the Sea. He loved her like he loved The Homer, and damn him, Jack wanted to hear the Sirens sing, and see Scylla and Charybdis, and the herds of the Cyclops. Maybe, eventually, he would wander to Ithica.
The Sea was a refuge, too. It was not widely travelled, there wasn't much on the other side, just treacherous, nuclear damaged, radioactive mountains, it was said. And the Sea itself was inhabited by beasts from the ages of the giant reptiles - reborn from the mists of time, created by the chemical soup of years of over-enthusiastic and overly-optimistic human industry. By the time people understood the dangers of certain paths of experimentation, the recent and belated development of effective waste treatment and disposal were too little, too late.
So those who sailed the Sea didn't have a wide social circle. They weren't seen by many people. And if things got too crowded, well, The Homer was even more isolated than the Sea.
Of course, it would be very difficult to hide from Sam. Even if he took The Homer out, she would just follow him in his other boat. It was really her boat, The Schrödinger. Captain Sam was respected among mariners. The best pilot out of Port Town, most believed. Only Jack and Sam knew that Teal'c was even better. Jack knew he was better than both of them, but it wasn't by much.
"Why didn't you tell us?!" Sam demanded, storming aboard with nary a hail.
"Permission to come aboard granted," Jack muttered.
"Oh, don't start with me!" she shouted, prodding him in the chest with a very hard, very pointy finger. "Idiot! You should have told us! We should have known!"
"In what way would that have helped anyone?" Jack asked. He was already mentally distancing himself from them, moving about the cabin, doing a quick inventory of his stores by memory, as he planned for what was going to be a long trip.
"We cannot protect you if we do not even know you are in danger, O'Neill."
"Oh, my God. He's from one of the first lines! I can't believe I never connected the name!"
Jack sighed.
"Nobody knows their history anymore. I've been using that name for years. In the service, everybody thought I was just trying to be tough."
Teal'c's eyes widened.
"You are the clone of the Jack O'Neill, of the original, genetically engineered super soldiers of the War of 2005? You fought the Gate War against the Goa'uld?"
It was rare that Teal'c said something quite that idiotic.
"Look, I'm 200 years old, not 1000, fercryinoutloud," Jack said in exasperation. "And none of the clones ever fought the goa'uld anyway. Or was your history teacher so bad you don't even know that?! Clones only ever killed each other. And mutants. And of course, about a billion normal people. But not one single goa'uld."
"But that line doesn't exist anymore," Sam whispered. She was looking a little skittish, too. "It was exterminated. You can't exist." Jack could see the rapid beat of her heartbeat in the side of her neck.
Jack laughed bitterly.
"Nope! Not a single clone still exists, as you saw this morning!" he said, with mock cheerfulness.
"But, I don't understand…" Sam stammered. "How can you be here?"
Jack sighed and gave in. He sat down heavily at the helm and leaned his head against the high chair back.
"As best I can tell, some fertility clinic operating out of New Chicago has been releasing one Jack O'Neill clone about every five years for a long time. One of the O'Neill's actually runs the place. He has the whole series of 2005 clones on ice somewhere. They're all still in circulation. There was a Carter series, you know," he said, with a pointed stare at Sam. She blinked at him a little stupidly. She was clearly too shell-shocked by his first revelation to pick up his broad hint.
Teal'c suddenly moved forward, upping the volume on the radio that had been chattering quietly in the corner.
"…apprehended. The second one disappeared. The witnesses described him as older, with brown hair, graying, similar otherwise in height, build and appearance to the first one. If you sight this clone, do not approach him. I repeat. Do not approach the clone. Clones are genetically engineered with telepathy, telekinesis, super-strength and very high intelligence quotient. He should be assumed armed and extremely dangerous. Contact the local militia immediately…"
Teal'c turned the volume down again.
Sam swallowed audibly. Teal'c turned a grim face toward them.
"It will not be long before someone identifies you," he growled.
"No one would give you away, sir. People love you here."
"Yeah, what about Kinsey? He'd hang me high, toss the two of you in the Sea, and take my boats with a smile on his face."
"Kinsey should be fed to the clams," Sam snapped, almost reflexively.
"The best thing to do is for me to get the hell out of Dodge. Maybe finally go looking for Cheyenne Mountain."
Teal'c raised an eyebrow.
"Indeed, we do repeat the same conversations as we age."
It was Sam's turn to sigh.
"Cheyenne Mountain is a myth, sir."
"What? Jack O'Neill is real, but Cheyenne Mountain is a myth? You can't have it both ways."
"Well, you can't have it both ways, either. If Cheyenne Mountain isn't a myth, then it's a nuclear zone. Even a thousand years wouldn't be enough to make it safe," Sam countered.
Jack shrugged.
"Well, maybe I'll do something else. There's always the floating city of Atlantis. But I'm not sitting around here waiting for Kinsey and the lynch mob. Merry Christmas, I give you guys The Schrödinger. You should head north, see if you can set up some kind of tourist gig closer to Rya'c's school."
The cabin took on a thoughtful stillness. The other two didn't leave or comment. Teal'c wore a far away expression. Sam studied Jack's face as if she were seeing him for the first time. Finally, Jack stood.
"I want to cast off in thirty minutes. I'm going to ask you to be gone when I get back. I'll be raiding the stores. Whatever's left when I'm done belongs to you guys."
Then Jack jumped out to the dock and dashed to their storage locker to begin the frenzy of preparation needed to cast off as quickly as possible.
"Cloning was not part of the deal," Jack said, staring at the long row of test tubes. He had already seen the growth acceleration chambers in the next room. He rounded on Kinsey. "These won't even be real people! They won't have childhoods! They won't have parents! I don't see the point in trying to fight Anubis at this point. Hell, he's way better at this crap than you."
"You'll watch your tone with me, Colonel," Kinsey puffed.
"It's General, and pretending to forget that is a funny insult until it means something. This program stops now," Jack growled.
"Jack, I'm sorry, but this order came down from…" Hammond began.
"Do not say the White House," Jack ordered. "That's me in there. And Teal'c. And Carter. Nobody has any right to do this without our permission."
"Desperate times, General," Kinsey said, actually sounding slightly apologetic.
Then Jack did the unthinkable. Well, technically, not unthinkable. He thought it, and it happened. Kinsey clutched at his chest, eyes widening in horrified realization. Jack belatedly tried to prevent it, but he was too late. Ever since his 'genetic reorganization,' as the doctors called it, he had not had the same ability to compartmentalize, and that ability had always been poor where Kinsey was concerned, anyway. Hammond ran for the phone, calling for a medic, as Jack stared, appalled, at the dying man at his feet.
Jack had stopped Kinsey's heart with just a thought. He raised his eyes to the glass wombs all around him. An army of Jack O'Neill clones, without even the grounding that made Jack O'Neill the man he was.
Desperate times, Jack thought. He'd bet Kinsey had second, and maybe even third, thoughts as he lay dying.
On to Chapter 2.
If you're interested, all my stories, in order, from one page. Also, my fiction recommendations.
Because I know that these days I cannot be tempted by a huge story. I have been skipping really big ones, because I just don't have the time.
So, to assist people like me, I am publishing this story in 5 pieces over five days. It is complete, and available in its entirety at DreamWidth or by request for a document from me (see header, below).
Title: Inland Sea, Chapter 1
Author: muck-a-luck, posting in brainofck
Pairings: Many. Mainly Daniel Jackson/Jack O'Neill. Also Teal'c/Samantha Carter, John Sheppard/Rodney McKay. Something for everyone, all OTPs violated. Additional pairing warnings under the blur. Highlight to read. Teal'c/Vala MalDoran, Vala/everybody-at-one-point-or-another, Rodney McKay/John Sheppard, Cameron Mitchell/Vala MalDoran, Cameron Mitchell/Samantha Carter. Heck, implied indiscriminate mutant sexin'. You have been warned!
Rating: NC-17
Summary: Inspired by lokei's fantastic AU, Still Waters, and particularly the phrase: "bare-chested colonels hefting tridents and wearing crowns of starfish."
Content/warnings: Highlight the blur to view. Sex with mutants. Prehensile penises. Um. Prehensile penis sex bears a lot of resemblance to tentacle!porn, though I suppose it would be a quite mild variety.
Words: 3,212 words, this chapter. 20,116 (approximately) entire piece, available at this link as a single psot. 53 pages, available in PDF, just e-mail me at brainofck at gmail dot com (e-mail responses will begin late Monday, after PDF is created!).
Disclaimer: If anybody is planning a script like this for SG-1, I'm certainly not going to claim any rights to it. However, I'd be delighted to work in a co-writing/consulting/first-reader/advisory-type capacity, with my fee to be negotiated at that time. :D
Archive rights: Absolutely none. My journals only. muck_a_luck and brainofck
The Matrix: Water. The Matrix is located here.
Author's notes: Go here for a few notes regarding factual and canon blunders found within.
Beta: The wonderful, dolphin loving lokei!
A storm was coming. Possibly a big one, Jack thought as they sat on the battered sea wall, staring out over the choppy water. The air was full of spray as they ate their breakfast of salted clam and hot sauce. Sam had brought some sweet honey rolls, and Teal'c had contributed the coffee. Their legs dangled and they enjoyed the pause between squalls. The sky was completely grey now. It would be raining again soon. Yesterday they breakfasted under a red sky. His clear rain poncho crinkled as he lifted his coffee to his lips.
"Humanity has done itself an injustice, by taking itself outside the process of natural selection," Teal'c replied. Jack sighed. Here they went again. Sam hated the natural selection argument.
"Didn't your great, great, great grandfather get genetic engineering to fix some inherited immune system thing?" Sam countered. "Rya'c would never have been born if he hadn't done that. You would never have been born."
Teal'c inclined his head in acknowledgement.
"And yet, the path of genetic engineering has lead so many of us to sterility," Teal'c stated. "Perhaps that is why O'Neill has no son."
My parents have no son, Jack thought to himself. Aloud he said, "I don't deserve a son."
"You have to let that go, sir. A lot of people fought in the Land Wars," Sam admonished him, not unsympathetically. After all, she served, too, at the very end. That was how they'd met. "That was a long time ago, and it's over now." Her hand was light on his elbow. "Besides," she declared to Teal'c, "Genetic engineering is the reason he can remember Dallas."
"Dallas? Dallas…" Jack pretended to search his memory. "Twinkie guy, blond hair, great boots, cute accent? He was a damned good lay. I don't need genetically enhanced memory to remember him. And neither do you, if memory still serves."
Sam blushed. It amused Jack to remember that Dallas was specifically how they'd met.
"Not him. Antediluvian Dallas. I know you're at least 150 years old."
"I never got to antediluvian Dallas. I'm from antediluvian Minnesota, don't forget."
"Much older than we thought, then," Teal'c murmured. Jack made a rude hand gesture and finished the rest of his coffee.
"You're starting to sound like one of those Bart people who thinks Bart's comment about stem cells being our enemies was one of his teachings rather than one of his jokes. Next you'll be attacking monogamous homosexuals," Sam said accusingly.
"In this day, if the fertile fail to reproduce, it is a harm to us all," Teal'c intoned, like a preacher on Sabbathday morning.
Sometimes it was hard to tell when Teal'c was kidding.
"Well, look around, Teal'c. If the Land Wars taught us anything - sorry, sir - it is that humans weren't made to tolerate one another in extremely dense populations. Maybe lower fertility is the price we needed to pay for longevity."
"Genetically engineered longevity for which humans were never designed. Or perhaps sterility is the price we pay for melting our polar ice caps," Teal'c rebutted. "Perhaps since you favor a less dense population, you would like to sing the praises of the Smallpox Fifty."
As Sam stammered in outrage, Jack rolled his eyes and got up from the wall, stepping off the lip to the ground behind. The fifty fanatics who delivered the smallpox plague of 2538 were by far the most reviled and hated of the terrorist groups who had brought 200 years of chaos to the planet starting around 2300. They were also the last of those groups, as three out of four people died in that outbreak. There was nobody left to join the groups, nothing left to fight for, and only hatred and death at the hands of angry mobs for any newly aspiring terrorists.
"This is precisely why humans were not intended to live forever. After about eighty years, we start to have the same stupid conversations over and over," Jack declared as he turned on his heel to walk back to their pier.
He ran smack into the kid. He was a member of what appeared to be an excursion of college students having an educational trip to the Sea, to observe giant crocodilians or flooded ecosystems or something. As they both stumbled and regained their footing, the young man muttered, "Sorry, sir," and their eyes met and Jack knew. The kid did, too, apparently. He gave a barely audible gasp and stepped back - just enough that Teal'c and Sam got a good look at him, too.
"Oh, my God," Sam breathed.
Jack hissed in anger.
"Get out of here!" he whispered to the kid. Himself, but a whole hell of a lot younger. He moved quickly away both from his breakfast companions and the younger clone and his college excursion. Jack thanked whatever deities watched over him that none of the other clone's classmates appeared to have noticed him. He strode briskly away from the scene of the encounter toward his boat.
He heard Teal'c and Carter coming fast after him. Let them catch up if they could.
Hammond stared around the table, completely at a loss. He finally settled on Jack.
"Colonel, I know how you feel about this kind of thing. You don't have to be the one to do this. There are other strong gene carriers. Hell, it's genetic engineering. They'll be putting the damned gene into all the participants."
Jack knew it was too much to hope that he could just volunteer for the mission and move on.
"Sir, you asked for volunteers, you've got a volunteer."
Anubis had destroyed Abydos. Anubis had destroyed glowy Daniel. Anubis had to be stopped, or he would destroy everything. If Jack could walk into the Ancient device they found in Antarctica, and walk out Earth's own version of a super solider, well, why the hell not, really?
"I, too, am volunteering," Teal'c intoned. He raised his hand to forestall the general's protests. "While tretonin is preferable to slavery, Jaffa anatomy now makes us completely dependent on the supply of this drug. Tretonin can be only a temporary solution for my people. This process promises to yield a healthy, functional immune system. I am not at all hesitant to volunteer."
Hammond turned to Carter.
"Colonel," he began again. Carter cut him off.
"Sir, I saw what Anubis did to Abydos. He'll do that here, if we don't stop him."
"Colonel, it doesn't have to be you."
"Really?" she replied. "If not me, then it will have to be someone else. I volunteer, sir."
Hammond was furious with her. Jack could see it in the old man's face. He turned a baleful eye on Jack, and even on Teal'c, though Teal'c had a good reason, at least.
"If those are your final decisions, then I have my volunteers," he said, with steely professionalism. "Your transport to Antarctica leaves from Peterson at 1100 tomorrow. You're dismissed," he said tersely, pushing back his own chair.
Carter and Teal'c were out of there, but as Jack made to follow them, the general stopped him.
"Jack," he said softly.
Jack turned back to his CO.
"Skaara wouldn't want this. Kasuf wouldn't want this."
He held Jack with a penetrating gaze.
"And Jacob Carter would kick my ass," Jack agreed lightly, though he met Hammond's gaze without flinching.
"You know Dr. Jackson wouldn't want you to do this."
"Daniel doesn't get to object anymore, sir. He gave up any right to do that when he ascended. Then died."
Hammond sighed.
"If you don't mind, General, I'm shipping out tomorrow," Jack said, with a gesture toward the door. "Lots to do."
"Don't let me keep you, Colonel," the general replied. He turned and retreated into his office. Jack didn't wait to see him pick up the phone to call Kinsey and tell him he had his volunteers.
Jack made his living on the Inland Sea. He took families of four on fishing excursions to the safe, shallow spots. He took tourists out to the clam beds and helped them haul in the monstrous shelled beasts. They took pictures and shells and pounds of salted clam back upland with them. He took the thrill seekers out to the deeper waters, to watch crocodilians as long as his boat lunge out of the water with twenty-foot sharks clasped in their huge jaws. Long ago, he had stopped explaining to people that the shallow waters were really more dangerous, because there sarcosuchus didn't have sharks to hunt. That was counterproductive, because then even the thrill-seekers wouldn't get in the boat. Jack knew he could keep his passengers safe. He didn't need to describe the non-risks to them. Sometimes, ignorance was bliss.
His boat, The Homer,was a 40-foot long solar-sail hybrid catamaran. Jack loved her. The solar technology was his own design, exploiting the super-efficient solar cells Sam liked to make in her toaster and the fibers she had patented while pursuing her doctorate, before she ran off to join the Tarheels in the Land Wars. Somehow, they were the catch-all for anybody with no place to call home anymore. That was where Jack ran off to, so he should know.
He had applied Sam's solar cell technology to his entire deck. Durable as fiberglass, even on a rainy day it could provide enough energy to run his engines at a respectable ten knots. When it was sunny, he could run his engines and his water desalination plant (also his own design), too. Throw in the sails he had specially made from Sam's solar fibers, and Jack could power all the other equipment in his boat. The Homer could go places no other craft her size could venture in the shifting delta systems of the Inland Sea. He carried 200 gallons of fresh water, with hot water under pressure. He made his own beer.
He lived on The Homer, but unlike other charter captains, who stashed their own quarters in the front of a pontoon under a hatch, the entire starboard pontoon was Jack's home. It made him feel strangely secure, to know that he could pick up his life and move it with the changing of the tide or the turn of the wind. Kick the tourists out of the port hull and he was on his way.
No matter what he let his fundamentalist clients believe, the name of his boat was not, in fact, a reference to the teachings of Bart Simpson, but rather harkened back thousands of years earlier to the Greek historian Homer and his Odyssey. Jack wanted to put war behind him and return home. The Sea was between him and the place he needed to go. Literally, he supposed, as his home was technically a flooded piece of land far north of his current home port, but that wasn't the home he missed. The home his heart longed for was… somewhere. Maybe he would never find it. Despite that, he couldn't hate the Sea. He loved her like he loved The Homer, and damn him, Jack wanted to hear the Sirens sing, and see Scylla and Charybdis, and the herds of the Cyclops. Maybe, eventually, he would wander to Ithica.
The Sea was a refuge, too. It was not widely travelled, there wasn't much on the other side, just treacherous, nuclear damaged, radioactive mountains, it was said. And the Sea itself was inhabited by beasts from the ages of the giant reptiles - reborn from the mists of time, created by the chemical soup of years of over-enthusiastic and overly-optimistic human industry. By the time people understood the dangers of certain paths of experimentation, the recent and belated development of effective waste treatment and disposal were too little, too late.
So those who sailed the Sea didn't have a wide social circle. They weren't seen by many people. And if things got too crowded, well, The Homer was even more isolated than the Sea.
Of course, it would be very difficult to hide from Sam. Even if he took The Homer out, she would just follow him in his other boat. It was really her boat, The Schrödinger. Captain Sam was respected among mariners. The best pilot out of Port Town, most believed. Only Jack and Sam knew that Teal'c was even better. Jack knew he was better than both of them, but it wasn't by much.
"Why didn't you tell us?!" Sam demanded, storming aboard with nary a hail.
"Permission to come aboard granted," Jack muttered.
"Oh, don't start with me!" she shouted, prodding him in the chest with a very hard, very pointy finger. "Idiot! You should have told us! We should have known!"
"In what way would that have helped anyone?" Jack asked. He was already mentally distancing himself from them, moving about the cabin, doing a quick inventory of his stores by memory, as he planned for what was going to be a long trip.
"We cannot protect you if we do not even know you are in danger, O'Neill."
"Oh, my God. He's from one of the first lines! I can't believe I never connected the name!"
Jack sighed.
"Nobody knows their history anymore. I've been using that name for years. In the service, everybody thought I was just trying to be tough."
Teal'c's eyes widened.
"You are the clone of the Jack O'Neill, of the original, genetically engineered super soldiers of the War of 2005? You fought the Gate War against the Goa'uld?"
It was rare that Teal'c said something quite that idiotic.
"Look, I'm 200 years old, not 1000, fercryinoutloud," Jack said in exasperation. "And none of the clones ever fought the goa'uld anyway. Or was your history teacher so bad you don't even know that?! Clones only ever killed each other. And mutants. And of course, about a billion normal people. But not one single goa'uld."
"But that line doesn't exist anymore," Sam whispered. She was looking a little skittish, too. "It was exterminated. You can't exist." Jack could see the rapid beat of her heartbeat in the side of her neck.
Jack laughed bitterly.
"Nope! Not a single clone still exists, as you saw this morning!" he said, with mock cheerfulness.
"But, I don't understand…" Sam stammered. "How can you be here?"
Jack sighed and gave in. He sat down heavily at the helm and leaned his head against the high chair back.
"As best I can tell, some fertility clinic operating out of New Chicago has been releasing one Jack O'Neill clone about every five years for a long time. One of the O'Neill's actually runs the place. He has the whole series of 2005 clones on ice somewhere. They're all still in circulation. There was a Carter series, you know," he said, with a pointed stare at Sam. She blinked at him a little stupidly. She was clearly too shell-shocked by his first revelation to pick up his broad hint.
Teal'c suddenly moved forward, upping the volume on the radio that had been chattering quietly in the corner.
"…apprehended. The second one disappeared. The witnesses described him as older, with brown hair, graying, similar otherwise in height, build and appearance to the first one. If you sight this clone, do not approach him. I repeat. Do not approach the clone. Clones are genetically engineered with telepathy, telekinesis, super-strength and very high intelligence quotient. He should be assumed armed and extremely dangerous. Contact the local militia immediately…"
Teal'c turned the volume down again.
Sam swallowed audibly. Teal'c turned a grim face toward them.
"It will not be long before someone identifies you," he growled.
"No one would give you away, sir. People love you here."
"Yeah, what about Kinsey? He'd hang me high, toss the two of you in the Sea, and take my boats with a smile on his face."
"Kinsey should be fed to the clams," Sam snapped, almost reflexively.
"The best thing to do is for me to get the hell out of Dodge. Maybe finally go looking for Cheyenne Mountain."
Teal'c raised an eyebrow.
"Indeed, we do repeat the same conversations as we age."
It was Sam's turn to sigh.
"Cheyenne Mountain is a myth, sir."
"What? Jack O'Neill is real, but Cheyenne Mountain is a myth? You can't have it both ways."
"Well, you can't have it both ways, either. If Cheyenne Mountain isn't a myth, then it's a nuclear zone. Even a thousand years wouldn't be enough to make it safe," Sam countered.
Jack shrugged.
"Well, maybe I'll do something else. There's always the floating city of Atlantis. But I'm not sitting around here waiting for Kinsey and the lynch mob. Merry Christmas, I give you guys The Schrödinger. You should head north, see if you can set up some kind of tourist gig closer to Rya'c's school."
The cabin took on a thoughtful stillness. The other two didn't leave or comment. Teal'c wore a far away expression. Sam studied Jack's face as if she were seeing him for the first time. Finally, Jack stood.
"I want to cast off in thirty minutes. I'm going to ask you to be gone when I get back. I'll be raiding the stores. Whatever's left when I'm done belongs to you guys."
Then Jack jumped out to the dock and dashed to their storage locker to begin the frenzy of preparation needed to cast off as quickly as possible.
"Cloning was not part of the deal," Jack said, staring at the long row of test tubes. He had already seen the growth acceleration chambers in the next room. He rounded on Kinsey. "These won't even be real people! They won't have childhoods! They won't have parents! I don't see the point in trying to fight Anubis at this point. Hell, he's way better at this crap than you."
"You'll watch your tone with me, Colonel," Kinsey puffed.
"It's General, and pretending to forget that is a funny insult until it means something. This program stops now," Jack growled.
"Jack, I'm sorry, but this order came down from…" Hammond began.
"Do not say the White House," Jack ordered. "That's me in there. And Teal'c. And Carter. Nobody has any right to do this without our permission."
"Desperate times, General," Kinsey said, actually sounding slightly apologetic.
Then Jack did the unthinkable. Well, technically, not unthinkable. He thought it, and it happened. Kinsey clutched at his chest, eyes widening in horrified realization. Jack belatedly tried to prevent it, but he was too late. Ever since his 'genetic reorganization,' as the doctors called it, he had not had the same ability to compartmentalize, and that ability had always been poor where Kinsey was concerned, anyway. Hammond ran for the phone, calling for a medic, as Jack stared, appalled, at the dying man at his feet.
Jack had stopped Kinsey's heart with just a thought. He raised his eyes to the glass wombs all around him. An army of Jack O'Neill clones, without even the grounding that made Jack O'Neill the man he was.
Desperate times, Jack thought. He'd bet Kinsey had second, and maybe even third, thoughts as he lay dying.
On to Chapter 2.
If you're interested, all my stories, in order, from one page. Also, my fiction recommendations.