To Dance Between the Raindrops: A Snowflake's Waltz - Chapter 10
To Dance Between the Raindrops: A Snowflake's Waltz
Rating: T
Disclaimer: I own nothing in this Stargate SG-1/Sanctuary crossover story but my altered headspace. Stargate SG-1 belongs to Gekko Film Corp, MGM, Fox, various individuals and companies and whoever owns them. Sanctuary belongs to Damian Kindler, Amanda Tapping, Martin Wood, The Beedie Group, Tricon Films & Television, Space and whoever else owns bits and pieces of it.
Spoilers: For SG-1, to the end of series; for Sanctuary, up to the episode “Pavor Nocturnus” (Season 2, Episode 5). Everything after that is up for grabs.
Summary: Sam and Cassie go Christmas shopping in New City ...
To Dance Between the Raindrops: A Snowflake's Waltz
Chapter 10
In the back of the surveillance van, Jack O’Neill watched Janet Fraiser as Lieutenant Jennifer Hailey played back the crappy security recording and attempted to decipher what the kidnappers were saying. However, one thing was clear; it was a professional precision job and Samantha Carter had been specifically targeted.
Jack hadn’t seen the small doctor look this angry since the Goa’uld, Nirrti’s experiment on Cassandra’s people-in an effort to produce a genetically advanced host-had come to light. The parasitic alien’s experiment had expanded Cassie’s mind so much, the girl had developed telepathic and telekinetic abilities, but it had the side-effect of nearly killing the then sixteen year-old. Six years ago, Fraiser had held a gun to the Goa’uld’s head to force the bitch to cure her daughter, and right now, Jack was seeing the same expression on her face.
After that incident, Cassandra had seemingly gone back to normal. Only Janet and the original SG-1 team-Jack, Sam, Daniel and Teal’c-knew that the young woman’s abilities had started to manifest again in the last two years, but in a slow, incremental manner that she worked hard to control. It made sense that Nirrti would hedge her bets and try again to re-acquire a powerful and mature Cassandra again in the future.
However, not even the two new team members, Cameron Mitchell and Vala Mal Doran, knew about the young woman’s abilities; although Jack was fairly certain that the wily Vala-having had experience with her own super-powered daughter-suspected something was up with Cassie.
Pain and worry etched Janet Fraiser’s face, overlaying the anger, as she again watched Cassandra collapse and Sam’s valiant efforts to defend their daughter despite the tranquiliser flooding her veins. And Jack knew that if Cassie was awake and in range, the first person she’d try to contact telepathically would be Janet.
“I think I’ve got it,” Hailey said quietly as she turned up the volume. “It isn’t much and it’s confusing, but here goes.”
“The old girl’s still got some fight left in her,” the lead kidnapper sneered. “Hit the bitch again!”
A second dart took the fight out of Sam as it imbedded itself in her chest just above her right breast. She crashed hard, her head bouncing off the concrete as she went down.
A younger, dark-haired man asked, “What do you want to do with the car?”
“Leave it,” the first man replied. “Leave it all for Druitt and the rest of the Sanctuary’s freaks to find. They’ll know who it was. And who knows, maybe it will teach them not to interfere in our business again.”
“Well that makes no sense!” Jack fumed. “And who the hell is Druitt?”
“It could be Pruitt,” Hailey offered quietly, but the question still hung in the air; Jack knew of no Pruitt who had any connection to Sam.
“And what about this sanctuary they’re talking about?” Mitchell asked.
“Well, we’ve given sanctuary to any number of refugees over the years,” Daniel offered. “Could this be someone or some rogue group that objects to us offering aid and shelter to-you know … other people out there?”
“I don’t think so, Daniel,” Janet said thoughtfully as she studied the frozen recording of the five men-dressed in black similar to the SG teams-who were in the process of loading Sam and Cassie’s limp bodies into a non-descript black van. “The way he says “Druitt and the rest of the Sanctuary’s freaks”, makes it sound like “the Sanctuary” is a place or an organisation, which leads me to suspect that this Druitt might be a leader who got in these people’s way. You know, Jack, this might be a case of mistaken identity.”
“What?” he exploded.
“Is the FBI still out there?” she asked, ignoring his outburst as she flipped through Sam’s personnel folder. “I have a hunch.”
“Yes, they’re still there,” Hailey replied as Janet pulled a photo from the file.
Before Jack could say anything, she opened the back door and jumped out of the van. All Jack and the others could do was follow as she hurried through the late evening drizzle to Patey and his colleagues.
“Agent Patey,” she said briskly. “Do you know of a place or an organisation around here called Sanctuary-possibly run by someone named Druitt?”
All the FBI agents reacted visibly; interestingly, the people who had the strongest reactions were the two local detectives.
“Yes, there’s a private clinic down in Old City called the Sanctuary, ma’am,” Patey replied. “But I don’t know about any Druitt associated with them; it’s run by a woman named Magnus-Dr. Helen Magnus.”
“It figures,” said the Hispanic detective in an exasperated tone. “Anything weird happening around here and Old Helen is bound to be in the thick of it somewhere.”
“Old Helen?” Jack asked.
“Well she ain’t that old,” his partner said with a grin. “She’s quite the looker actually-looks about thirty-five or forty, although she has to be pushing fifty by now. British woman ... but she’s been a fixture around here for at least twenty-five years-old friends with the chief of police, according to scuttlebutt. Bit of a vigilante-she and that daughter of hers go around rescuing the more unfortunate dregs that seem to gravitate here ... do some monster hunting.”
“What the detective means,” the young Japanese FBI agent, Tanaka, continued quickly, “is that Dr. Magnus tends to take in the more unusual cases-the disfigured and deformed, and she apparently doesn’t shy away from taking violent patients. A colleague of ours, Jake Polanski, worked with Dr. Will Zimmerman, a forensic psychiatrist who also used to work as a profiler for the NCPD, and now works for her. Zimmerman has nothing but good things to say about her and her work.”
“Does she-or anyone who works for her-look like this woman?” Janet asked holding out Sam’s picture.
Tanaka took the photograph and peered closely at the face. “I’ve only seen her once, but yes, that looks like Dr. Magnus,” he replied. “In fact it does look a lot like her, except that Magnus is a brunette, not a blonde.”
He handed it to the city detectives and Cruz whistled loudly. “Man, does she ever look like Magnus!”
“You think it might be a case of mistaken identity,” Patey said shrewdly as he took the photograph and studied the face, “that your Colonel Carter was snatched by someone gunning for Dr. Magnus?
“It’s starting to look that way,” Jack replied as Patey returned the photo to Janet.
“You know, this may fit with some things we’ve been hearing down in Old City lately about Magnus and the Sanctuary,” Cruz said. “According to Detective Kavanaugh, rumour has it that Old Helen and Will Zimmerman got sideways of some pretty dangerous people a few months ago and her daughter, Ashley, may have paid the price for it-got kidnapped and was killed sometime in the last couple of months.”
“Oh God!” Fraiser paled and looked like she was about to faint as Daniel put his arms around her.
“This is the first I’m hearing of it,” Patey said darkly.
“Hey, just a rumour on the streets,” Cruz said. “Nothing’s been confirmed except that Ashley Magnus hasn’t been seen for at least five or six months.”
“Do you know who Old Helen may have pissed off so badly?” Mitchell asked.
“Not a clue, except that they’re pretty damned well connected-way above even the Chief’s pay grade,” Cruz replied. “There hasn’t been a whiff of it in any official channel, but the way I hear it, Magnus and Zimmerman got in the middle of a turf war between guys running some sort of berserker designer drug and another gang running some underground bloodfights using street people-or maybe they were the same gang, I don’t know. But it was soon after the fights stopped that the rumours started-that while Magnus was out of town, someone had made a play for Ashley and Henry, a kid she’d taken in about twenty years ago, and that she managed to get Henry back, but not her daughter. Then about two months ago, there was some sort of disturbance at the Sanctuary-again, nothing made it into the official record, but it was after that the rumours started about the kid being dead.”
“Then this Sanctuary is where we go next,” O’Neill said decisively. “Find out from Helen Magnus who in hell she got herself mixed up with.”
“Sir, you may want to hold off on that thought-we may already know,” Hailey said from behind him-he hadn’t even known she was there. “Those assets you wanted me to check out sir-we got a hit.” Moving off to the side, she showed him her computer screen, on which there was a map of the city grid with two blinking icons. Pointing to the icon in New City, she continued in a hushed whisper, “It’s a pharmaceutical company now in the hands of GenTech Pharma, a subsidiary of an international conglomerate called Methuselah International. However, two years ago, it was a part of Henry Wallace’s Devlin Medical Technologies.”
“The guy who kidnapped McKay and his sister?” Mitchell said frowning as he made the connection.
“Yes sir,” Hailey said. “Thing is, General O’Neill,” she said lowering her voice, “this place has an EM shield around the entire building.”
“What?” Jack shouted.
“Furthermore, so does this Sanctuary over here in Old City,” she continued quietly, indicating to the second blinking icon.
“How the hell do these people have EM shields?” Jack hissed.
“I don’t know, sir, but I think it’s safe to say that Methuselah may be the group that Magnus and her Sanctuary ran afoul of,” she replied. “And as of five minutes ago, Hammond registered some strange seismic activity at the building site-and it’s localised to just that building. That’s what tweaked their sensors, but it took a deeper subspace scan to get a read on the Sanctuary’s shield-it’s pretty sophisticated, sir. The shield around the pharmaceutical building is destabilising-throwing off random frequency shifts in radiation. It’s like there’s something powerful inside trying to smash its way out, but even with the massive explosions Hammond is picking up, there’s no evidence of any type of explosives at work that could cause such seismic activity, sir.”
“Jack ...” Janet Fraiser whispered, the look in her eyes telling him she was thinking the same thing he was.
Cassandra.
“I know, Janet,” he said gently. “All right-is the car secure?”
“Yes sir,” Mitchell replied, studying them speculatively. “SG-13 will take it back to Reardon.”
“Then let’s move out,” Jack ordered and Mitchell hustled the teams to their respective vehicles. Jack walked back and held his hand out to the senior FBI agent. “Good meeting you, Patey,” he said as they shook hands. “Thanks for the co-operation and for not pushing to get in the middle of this. Word of advice-there’ll be a report in a few minutes of a disturbance at one of the buildings in the downtown core. You and your guys might want to take your time getting there.”
Patey’s eyes widened a fraction, before understanding and respect settled in them. “Understood, General O’Neill,” he replied quietly. “Thank you-I hope you find your people.”
“Me too,” Jack said as the van pulled up beside him. He hopped in the back and closed the door as it roared out of the mall parking lot. “Major Benson,” he called to the Hammond’s new second in command. “What’s the situation at that building?”
“The EM shield came down about two minutes ago,” Sam’s 2IC reported smartly. “It crashed part of the power grid, so there’s a blackout for about a five block radius surrounding the place. We’re getting ready to beam three units of Marines in to secure the site.”
“Good man,” Jack said approvingly. “Once that’s done, beam my personnel-except for the drivers and their wingmen-up to the ship and then down to the site.”
“Understood sir,” Benson replied. “Stand by.”
#
Chapter 11
Rating: T
Disclaimer: I own nothing in this Stargate SG-1/Sanctuary crossover story but my altered headspace. Stargate SG-1 belongs to Gekko Film Corp, MGM, Fox, various individuals and companies and whoever owns them. Sanctuary belongs to Damian Kindler, Amanda Tapping, Martin Wood, The Beedie Group, Tricon Films & Television, Space and whoever else owns bits and pieces of it.
Spoilers: For SG-1, to the end of series; for Sanctuary, up to the episode “Pavor Nocturnus” (Season 2, Episode 5). Everything after that is up for grabs.
Summary: Sam and Cassie go Christmas shopping in New City ...
To Dance Between the Raindrops: A Snowflake's Waltz
Chapter 10
In the back of the surveillance van, Jack O’Neill watched Janet Fraiser as Lieutenant Jennifer Hailey played back the crappy security recording and attempted to decipher what the kidnappers were saying. However, one thing was clear; it was a professional precision job and Samantha Carter had been specifically targeted.
Jack hadn’t seen the small doctor look this angry since the Goa’uld, Nirrti’s experiment on Cassandra’s people-in an effort to produce a genetically advanced host-had come to light. The parasitic alien’s experiment had expanded Cassie’s mind so much, the girl had developed telepathic and telekinetic abilities, but it had the side-effect of nearly killing the then sixteen year-old. Six years ago, Fraiser had held a gun to the Goa’uld’s head to force the bitch to cure her daughter, and right now, Jack was seeing the same expression on her face.
After that incident, Cassandra had seemingly gone back to normal. Only Janet and the original SG-1 team-Jack, Sam, Daniel and Teal’c-knew that the young woman’s abilities had started to manifest again in the last two years, but in a slow, incremental manner that she worked hard to control. It made sense that Nirrti would hedge her bets and try again to re-acquire a powerful and mature Cassandra again in the future.
However, not even the two new team members, Cameron Mitchell and Vala Mal Doran, knew about the young woman’s abilities; although Jack was fairly certain that the wily Vala-having had experience with her own super-powered daughter-suspected something was up with Cassie.
Pain and worry etched Janet Fraiser’s face, overlaying the anger, as she again watched Cassandra collapse and Sam’s valiant efforts to defend their daughter despite the tranquiliser flooding her veins. And Jack knew that if Cassie was awake and in range, the first person she’d try to contact telepathically would be Janet.
“I think I’ve got it,” Hailey said quietly as she turned up the volume. “It isn’t much and it’s confusing, but here goes.”
“The old girl’s still got some fight left in her,” the lead kidnapper sneered. “Hit the bitch again!”
A second dart took the fight out of Sam as it imbedded itself in her chest just above her right breast. She crashed hard, her head bouncing off the concrete as she went down.
A younger, dark-haired man asked, “What do you want to do with the car?”
“Leave it,” the first man replied. “Leave it all for Druitt and the rest of the Sanctuary’s freaks to find. They’ll know who it was. And who knows, maybe it will teach them not to interfere in our business again.”
“Well that makes no sense!” Jack fumed. “And who the hell is Druitt?”
“It could be Pruitt,” Hailey offered quietly, but the question still hung in the air; Jack knew of no Pruitt who had any connection to Sam.
“And what about this sanctuary they’re talking about?” Mitchell asked.
“Well, we’ve given sanctuary to any number of refugees over the years,” Daniel offered. “Could this be someone or some rogue group that objects to us offering aid and shelter to-you know … other people out there?”
“I don’t think so, Daniel,” Janet said thoughtfully as she studied the frozen recording of the five men-dressed in black similar to the SG teams-who were in the process of loading Sam and Cassie’s limp bodies into a non-descript black van. “The way he says “Druitt and the rest of the Sanctuary’s freaks”, makes it sound like “the Sanctuary” is a place or an organisation, which leads me to suspect that this Druitt might be a leader who got in these people’s way. You know, Jack, this might be a case of mistaken identity.”
“What?” he exploded.
“Is the FBI still out there?” she asked, ignoring his outburst as she flipped through Sam’s personnel folder. “I have a hunch.”
“Yes, they’re still there,” Hailey replied as Janet pulled a photo from the file.
Before Jack could say anything, she opened the back door and jumped out of the van. All Jack and the others could do was follow as she hurried through the late evening drizzle to Patey and his colleagues.
“Agent Patey,” she said briskly. “Do you know of a place or an organisation around here called Sanctuary-possibly run by someone named Druitt?”
All the FBI agents reacted visibly; interestingly, the people who had the strongest reactions were the two local detectives.
“Yes, there’s a private clinic down in Old City called the Sanctuary, ma’am,” Patey replied. “But I don’t know about any Druitt associated with them; it’s run by a woman named Magnus-Dr. Helen Magnus.”
“It figures,” said the Hispanic detective in an exasperated tone. “Anything weird happening around here and Old Helen is bound to be in the thick of it somewhere.”
“Old Helen?” Jack asked.
“Well she ain’t that old,” his partner said with a grin. “She’s quite the looker actually-looks about thirty-five or forty, although she has to be pushing fifty by now. British woman ... but she’s been a fixture around here for at least twenty-five years-old friends with the chief of police, according to scuttlebutt. Bit of a vigilante-she and that daughter of hers go around rescuing the more unfortunate dregs that seem to gravitate here ... do some monster hunting.”
“What the detective means,” the young Japanese FBI agent, Tanaka, continued quickly, “is that Dr. Magnus tends to take in the more unusual cases-the disfigured and deformed, and she apparently doesn’t shy away from taking violent patients. A colleague of ours, Jake Polanski, worked with Dr. Will Zimmerman, a forensic psychiatrist who also used to work as a profiler for the NCPD, and now works for her. Zimmerman has nothing but good things to say about her and her work.”
“Does she-or anyone who works for her-look like this woman?” Janet asked holding out Sam’s picture.
Tanaka took the photograph and peered closely at the face. “I’ve only seen her once, but yes, that looks like Dr. Magnus,” he replied. “In fact it does look a lot like her, except that Magnus is a brunette, not a blonde.”
He handed it to the city detectives and Cruz whistled loudly. “Man, does she ever look like Magnus!”
“You think it might be a case of mistaken identity,” Patey said shrewdly as he took the photograph and studied the face, “that your Colonel Carter was snatched by someone gunning for Dr. Magnus?
“It’s starting to look that way,” Jack replied as Patey returned the photo to Janet.
“You know, this may fit with some things we’ve been hearing down in Old City lately about Magnus and the Sanctuary,” Cruz said. “According to Detective Kavanaugh, rumour has it that Old Helen and Will Zimmerman got sideways of some pretty dangerous people a few months ago and her daughter, Ashley, may have paid the price for it-got kidnapped and was killed sometime in the last couple of months.”
“Oh God!” Fraiser paled and looked like she was about to faint as Daniel put his arms around her.
“This is the first I’m hearing of it,” Patey said darkly.
“Hey, just a rumour on the streets,” Cruz said. “Nothing’s been confirmed except that Ashley Magnus hasn’t been seen for at least five or six months.”
“Do you know who Old Helen may have pissed off so badly?” Mitchell asked.
“Not a clue, except that they’re pretty damned well connected-way above even the Chief’s pay grade,” Cruz replied. “There hasn’t been a whiff of it in any official channel, but the way I hear it, Magnus and Zimmerman got in the middle of a turf war between guys running some sort of berserker designer drug and another gang running some underground bloodfights using street people-or maybe they were the same gang, I don’t know. But it was soon after the fights stopped that the rumours started-that while Magnus was out of town, someone had made a play for Ashley and Henry, a kid she’d taken in about twenty years ago, and that she managed to get Henry back, but not her daughter. Then about two months ago, there was some sort of disturbance at the Sanctuary-again, nothing made it into the official record, but it was after that the rumours started about the kid being dead.”
“Then this Sanctuary is where we go next,” O’Neill said decisively. “Find out from Helen Magnus who in hell she got herself mixed up with.”
“Sir, you may want to hold off on that thought-we may already know,” Hailey said from behind him-he hadn’t even known she was there. “Those assets you wanted me to check out sir-we got a hit.” Moving off to the side, she showed him her computer screen, on which there was a map of the city grid with two blinking icons. Pointing to the icon in New City, she continued in a hushed whisper, “It’s a pharmaceutical company now in the hands of GenTech Pharma, a subsidiary of an international conglomerate called Methuselah International. However, two years ago, it was a part of Henry Wallace’s Devlin Medical Technologies.”
“The guy who kidnapped McKay and his sister?” Mitchell said frowning as he made the connection.
“Yes sir,” Hailey said. “Thing is, General O’Neill,” she said lowering her voice, “this place has an EM shield around the entire building.”
“What?” Jack shouted.
“Furthermore, so does this Sanctuary over here in Old City,” she continued quietly, indicating to the second blinking icon.
“How the hell do these people have EM shields?” Jack hissed.
“I don’t know, sir, but I think it’s safe to say that Methuselah may be the group that Magnus and her Sanctuary ran afoul of,” she replied. “And as of five minutes ago, Hammond registered some strange seismic activity at the building site-and it’s localised to just that building. That’s what tweaked their sensors, but it took a deeper subspace scan to get a read on the Sanctuary’s shield-it’s pretty sophisticated, sir. The shield around the pharmaceutical building is destabilising-throwing off random frequency shifts in radiation. It’s like there’s something powerful inside trying to smash its way out, but even with the massive explosions Hammond is picking up, there’s no evidence of any type of explosives at work that could cause such seismic activity, sir.”
“Jack ...” Janet Fraiser whispered, the look in her eyes telling him she was thinking the same thing he was.
Cassandra.
“I know, Janet,” he said gently. “All right-is the car secure?”
“Yes sir,” Mitchell replied, studying them speculatively. “SG-13 will take it back to Reardon.”
“Then let’s move out,” Jack ordered and Mitchell hustled the teams to their respective vehicles. Jack walked back and held his hand out to the senior FBI agent. “Good meeting you, Patey,” he said as they shook hands. “Thanks for the co-operation and for not pushing to get in the middle of this. Word of advice-there’ll be a report in a few minutes of a disturbance at one of the buildings in the downtown core. You and your guys might want to take your time getting there.”
Patey’s eyes widened a fraction, before understanding and respect settled in them. “Understood, General O’Neill,” he replied quietly. “Thank you-I hope you find your people.”
“Me too,” Jack said as the van pulled up beside him. He hopped in the back and closed the door as it roared out of the mall parking lot. “Major Benson,” he called to the Hammond’s new second in command. “What’s the situation at that building?”
“The EM shield came down about two minutes ago,” Sam’s 2IC reported smartly. “It crashed part of the power grid, so there’s a blackout for about a five block radius surrounding the place. We’re getting ready to beam three units of Marines in to secure the site.”
“Good man,” Jack said approvingly. “Once that’s done, beam my personnel-except for the drivers and their wingmen-up to the ship and then down to the site.”
“Understood sir,” Benson replied. “Stand by.”
#
Chapter 11