Shadows and Siege 11
I'm almost to the Chimera!! I'm almost there!!! *glares at
sparrow2000*
Two years ago, a secret covert ops organization (Section One) showed up in Jim's loft to force Jim and Blair to help rescue an agent named Nikita. (~Shadows of the Past~). Now, Section's new head, that same Nikita, tells him that he's supposed to work with traitors from Stargate Command to get rid of a group of invading aliens called goa'uld. Jim really, *really* wishes he could just pretend none of this ever happened.
Shadows and Siege part one
Shadows and Siege part two
Shadows and Siege part three
Shadows and Siege part four
Shadows and Siege part five
Shadows and Siege part six
Shadows and Siege part seven
Shadows and Siege part eight
Shadows and Siege part nine (Sunday morning chapter)
Shadows and Siege ten (Sunday afternoon chapter)
Jim froze in the middle of the street. Daniel noticed first, resting a hand on Jim's arm, and the creeping feeling of cold wrongness sank into Jim's flesh. Without a word, Jim turned and ran toward the plaza where he'd last seen Blair.
"Ellison!" Jack snapped, but he kept his voice low. The goa'uld they'd been tracking was on the other side of the Drava, the murky waters keeping them from getting close enough to have any shot at taking him out, but right now, Jim couldn't care less. The alien could have all of Slovenia if he wanted it, he just wanted his guide.
Jim charged through the plaza and toward the street where Carter had pulled Sandburg.
"Ellison!" called a voice behind him, but Jim filtered that out as he focused everything on scent. The bitter smell of ozone and zat discharge made his nose ache, and when he reached the café, the scent was almost overpowering.
"Soldier, you'd better explain yourself," O'Neill hissed as he came to a stop behind Ellison. "Danny, get Carter."
"She's not in there," Jim said before Jackson was half way to the door of the café. "Someone discharged zats, multiple firings."
"Multiple?" Daniel swallowed heavily.
"Check the café," O'Neill ordered calmly. "Ellison, you take east, sweep the area." O'Neill ordered Jim to cover the area they had just covered, but Jim ignored him. "Murray, we need you to sweep north of the current... hey!" O'Neill had been quietly speaking into his jacket, but the last bit he shouted in Jim's direction. Jim just kept walking north, reaching out with his senses as he sifted through every scent in the street. The rain was starting to sprinkle, each drop pounding against the stone as Jim walked faster.
"Ellison!" A hand grabbed his arm, and Jim shrugged off the touch with a growing impatience.
"Stand down, now!" When a body appeared in front of him, Jim stopped and blinked at the image of a very angry O'Neill, his zat gun out and held down by his leg.
"They have Sandburg," Jim growled.
"And Carter. We'll get them back. But right now, we don't even know who has them."
"The goa'uld," Jim said as he wrinkled his nose at the unnatural scent. And now, with Teal'c codenamed Murray coming closer, that unnatural scent intensified.
"You can tell that... in the rain... without your companion even here to center you?" O'Neill didn't even pretend to hide his disbelief.
Jim glared at the man and clenched his fists in an attempt to not grab O'Neill and slam him into the nearest wall. Daniel came running up.
"They're not there," he said.
"No shit, Sherlock," Jim offered as he started walking again. O'Neill didn't move, and Jim ended up chest to chest with the man. "Colonel, get out of my way," Jim said slowly.
"Stand down, Ellison. You agreed to take my orders, remember."
Jim struggled. If this were Simon, he would have no trouble following that order because he could trust Simon to act with Blair's best interests in mind. He didn't know O'Neill well enough to make the same assumption. On the one hand, the aliens had taken Carter, too, so he had a good reason to want to track them down. However, a man didn't reach O'Neill's rank without making sacrifices and learning to live with the consequences. That was the main reason Jim had left the service. After Peru, he knew he could never make a command decision again because he wouldn't put other lives on the line.
Jim cocked his head to the side and listened to distant whispers distorted by the rain that was now starting to fall a little harder.
"Does anyone have a visual on Blair?" That was Bruhn in the distance, his voice muffled by the rain and the echo from the buildings between them. Jim couldn't hear the answer, but Bruhn quickly followed with, "Keep on him. Ellison may follow. Do I offer Ellison backup if O'Neill becomes a problem?"
Jim really didn't like the sound of that. "I don't need back up," Jim said, hoping they either had him bugged or they were using a directional mike.
"I'm not offering backup. In fact, unless I started randomly blurting alien words again, I ordered you to stand down. Daniel, I am speaking English, yes?" O'Neill asked. Jim couldn't hear any response from the distant shadow, but he didn't know why. Bruhn might be following orders to not interact with him or Jim might have lost the sound in the rain which was falling with a steady patter now, mimicking a white noise generator.
"Unless there's something wrong with my hearing, yes," Daniel offered and he was looking strangely at Jim as well.
"My team has confirmed a visual, but I am under strict orders to keep the two teams separate," Jim explained briefly. Teal'c materialized silently from the shadow, but Jim wasn't surprised. The prickling feeling of the alien in Teal'c body made his stomach lurch queasily, so Teal'c had no chance of sneaking up on him.
"I heard no such confirmation," Teal'c said as he stood near the others, the rain soaking into his bandana so that the symbol below was even more visible.
"That's because you're not a sentinel," Jim said. "Sir, I can follow, and if you want to trail after me with your zat pointed at my back, that's fine, but I won't be able to keep the trail for long if it starts really raining." Jim forced his fists to unclench as he waited for O'Neill's order.
"If I say no, you're going anyway, aren't you?" the colonel asked.
"Yes, sir, I am. This is Blair."
"That's kinda my point. With your companion missing, should you be doing this?" For the first time, Jim could see the unmistakable signs of distress on O'Neill's face. The man had a good poker face, but not good enough to fool a sentinel. He was actually worried. Jim revised his impression of the man just a little.
"Sir, I track without Blair all the time. I'm a cop, and if I waited for Blair to get back from his endless meetings, I'd work about twenty hours a week instead of the forty or fifty I put in every week. Blair was right when he said you don't know the first thing about sentinels."
"I know exactly what the US military knows," O'Neill pointed out. He sighed. "And this would not be the first time the military didn't know nearly as much as they thought they did. Go. Find your partner," O'Neill said as he stepped to the side.
"Yes, sir," Jim agreed as he started trotting down the narrow road, his sense of smell wide open. The rancid smell of alien hit him so hard that he immediately gagged and had to brace himself against a brick building as he struggled with a need to not vomit.
"Okay, this is what I mean. This is not inspiring confidence, Colonel Ellison," O'Neill pointed out.
Jim carefully stood, his sense of smell dialed down as he looked at Teal'c who still stood behind Daniel even though Jim could smell him so clearly that he felt suffocated by the scent of something reptilian, but not, something so alien that Jim's every instinct was to rip it out and strangle it. "No offense, but that... thing," Jim gestured toward Teal'c stomach... it smells worse than any rotting body I've ever stood downwind of."
Teal'c's eyebrow rose. "I was unaware of any particular odor."
"It's there," Jim said as he started backing away. "I need to smell for Blair, before the rain washes the scent away, and I can't with you so near."
Teal'c's eyebrow twitched up another notch. O'Neill rolled his eyes. "Teal'c, you have our six. Danny, stay close and try not to get captured. Ellison, you have point."
Jim nodded and trotted down the road, getting a hundred yards or so before he started opening up smell again. The rain was pulling down scents from the air, the bitterness of sulfur oxides and the tang of ammonia trapped within each drop. Jim filtered that and focused on the scent of Blair. He'd seen whatever hit him... had seen it and had time to produce stress hormones, but when he'd been through here, he'd been unconscious. Jim picked up the pace, trotting down the road as the scent thinned. They'd put Blair in a car, but the windows had been open, so particles of Blair were still scattered in the air, floating like those messages tucked into bottles and tossed into the ocean.
But the bottles were getting fewer and farther between as the rain started coming down heavier now. Jim settled into a loping run, dodging locals who dashed from car to doorway and stray dogs seeking a dry stoop. Jim almost missed the turn. He had totally lost the scent and stood with the rain sliding down his back, and then the scent of Carter caught him. Thank god she was a woman, and a woman who was still young enough and healthy enough for menses, he thought as he doubled back and took a side road that was more alley than road. The neat trimmed streets were wilder here, weeds sticking out from the trellises and vines, and Jim slipped into double time.
His legs ached, and he dialed down his sense of touch as he pushed himself harder. He lost his balance once, slipping on the mud and falling to one knee before he could catch himself on a rail fence, and a body just about crashed into him from behind.
"Geez, Ellison, take it easy on an old guy with older knees."
Jim glanced back and O'Neill held the fence with one hand and shaded his eyes from the falling rain with the other. For all his complaints, the colonel looked fine. Jackson was wheezing as he caught up and grabbed at the fence. O'Neill's hand went to Jackson's back.
"You okay?"
"I'm fine," Jackson panted.
"Yeah, you look fine."
Jackson waved his hand in a gesture obviously meant to wave O'Neill off. It didn't work.
"Are we near?" O'Neill asked as he looked around. Jim truly studied the area for the first time. It was raining harder than he thought, and the clouds were thick enough that he wasn't sure how much detail O'Neill could actually make out.
"Fairly close. I can smell Carter."
O'Neill frowned at him. "Carter? I thought sentinels were better at tracking their companions than random people. Ellison, if you're angling to take my astrophysicist away, I'll arm wrestle you for her."
"Carter is just easier to track right now," Jim said, not wanting to invade her privacy more than he had to.
"Which would indicate that you're beginning to bond with Carter. It's not happening colonel." O'Neill stepped forward aggressively, and Jim fought an urge to tell the man to fuck off.
"He's bonding with Sam?" Daniel stood wiping his rain-spotted glasses with his rain-soaked shirt. He shoved his glasses back on and then sighed unhappily. Jim suspected the man couldn't even see out of them. And O'Neill was worried about Blair in the field?
"No, he won't be," O'Neill warned darkly.
"She's just easier to smell this time of month," Jim finally snapped as he turned back toward the squat building in front of him.
"Oh." O'Neill didn't say anything else. Daniel cleared his throat and tried to clean his glasses again. Jim ignored them both and edged closer to the back of a red brick building with decorative bars on the windows, his hearing focused on the distant heartbeats muffled by the brick.
"That the place?" O'Neill asked, and Jim flinched as the words blasted through him, echoing against the inside of his skull. Jim glared, but O'Neill didn't react as he studied the building.
"Two heartbeats below the first level. Three on the main level, two more in the upper levels."
This time O'Neill did give Jim a long, hard stare. "What margin of error are we working with here?" he asked.
Jim flashed the man a cold look. "None."
"And I don't know how many are aliens," Jim added as he struggled against the creeping feeling of wrongness, "but some of them are."
"So, it's time for a little poking around," O'Neill offered with a grim cheerfulness. "What can you tell us about the inside?"
Jim glanced over, not sure what exactly O'Neill wanted, or if O'Neill just wanted to keep him too busy to break down the door and try to rip the goa'uld apart with his hands. The rain created tiny magnifiers that made the pores of the colonel's face zoom in and out of focus as they fell, and Jim turned back toward the house. "Second floor, third window in. It isn't latched," he said as he watched the warm air from inside the house swirl out into the growing chill of the evening.
"One of the heartbeats upstairs is slow: sleep or meditation probably. The two heartbeats in the basement are fast... I'm guessing at least one of those is Blair. On the main level, there's a..." Jim paused and tilted his head to the side. He could hear it, but he couldn't quite understand what he was hearing. He focused on the curtains on the first floor window until the weave became huge and he could see between the individual threads. Aw shit.. like things weren't weird enough already, he thought to himself as the brown on brown mottling magnified until he could see those distant pores, and then nothing.
sparrow2000*
Two years ago, a secret covert ops organization (Section One) showed up in Jim's loft to force Jim and Blair to help rescue an agent named Nikita. (~Shadows of the Past~). Now, Section's new head, that same Nikita, tells him that he's supposed to work with traitors from Stargate Command to get rid of a group of invading aliens called goa'uld. Jim really, *really* wishes he could just pretend none of this ever happened.
Shadows and Siege part one
Shadows and Siege part two
Shadows and Siege part three
Shadows and Siege part four
Shadows and Siege part five
Shadows and Siege part six
Shadows and Siege part seven
Shadows and Siege part eight
Shadows and Siege part nine (Sunday morning chapter)
Shadows and Siege ten (Sunday afternoon chapter)
Jim froze in the middle of the street. Daniel noticed first, resting a hand on Jim's arm, and the creeping feeling of cold wrongness sank into Jim's flesh. Without a word, Jim turned and ran toward the plaza where he'd last seen Blair.
"Ellison!" Jack snapped, but he kept his voice low. The goa'uld they'd been tracking was on the other side of the Drava, the murky waters keeping them from getting close enough to have any shot at taking him out, but right now, Jim couldn't care less. The alien could have all of Slovenia if he wanted it, he just wanted his guide.
Jim charged through the plaza and toward the street where Carter had pulled Sandburg.
"Ellison!" called a voice behind him, but Jim filtered that out as he focused everything on scent. The bitter smell of ozone and zat discharge made his nose ache, and when he reached the café, the scent was almost overpowering.
"Soldier, you'd better explain yourself," O'Neill hissed as he came to a stop behind Ellison. "Danny, get Carter."
"She's not in there," Jim said before Jackson was half way to the door of the café. "Someone discharged zats, multiple firings."
"Multiple?" Daniel swallowed heavily.
"Check the café," O'Neill ordered calmly. "Ellison, you take east, sweep the area." O'Neill ordered Jim to cover the area they had just covered, but Jim ignored him. "Murray, we need you to sweep north of the current... hey!" O'Neill had been quietly speaking into his jacket, but the last bit he shouted in Jim's direction. Jim just kept walking north, reaching out with his senses as he sifted through every scent in the street. The rain was starting to sprinkle, each drop pounding against the stone as Jim walked faster.
"Ellison!" A hand grabbed his arm, and Jim shrugged off the touch with a growing impatience.
"Stand down, now!" When a body appeared in front of him, Jim stopped and blinked at the image of a very angry O'Neill, his zat gun out and held down by his leg.
"They have Sandburg," Jim growled.
"And Carter. We'll get them back. But right now, we don't even know who has them."
"The goa'uld," Jim said as he wrinkled his nose at the unnatural scent. And now, with Teal'c codenamed Murray coming closer, that unnatural scent intensified.
"You can tell that... in the rain... without your companion even here to center you?" O'Neill didn't even pretend to hide his disbelief.
Jim glared at the man and clenched his fists in an attempt to not grab O'Neill and slam him into the nearest wall. Daniel came running up.
"They're not there," he said.
"No shit, Sherlock," Jim offered as he started walking again. O'Neill didn't move, and Jim ended up chest to chest with the man. "Colonel, get out of my way," Jim said slowly.
"Stand down, Ellison. You agreed to take my orders, remember."
Jim struggled. If this were Simon, he would have no trouble following that order because he could trust Simon to act with Blair's best interests in mind. He didn't know O'Neill well enough to make the same assumption. On the one hand, the aliens had taken Carter, too, so he had a good reason to want to track them down. However, a man didn't reach O'Neill's rank without making sacrifices and learning to live with the consequences. That was the main reason Jim had left the service. After Peru, he knew he could never make a command decision again because he wouldn't put other lives on the line.
Jim cocked his head to the side and listened to distant whispers distorted by the rain that was now starting to fall a little harder.
"Does anyone have a visual on Blair?" That was Bruhn in the distance, his voice muffled by the rain and the echo from the buildings between them. Jim couldn't hear the answer, but Bruhn quickly followed with, "Keep on him. Ellison may follow. Do I offer Ellison backup if O'Neill becomes a problem?"
Jim really didn't like the sound of that. "I don't need back up," Jim said, hoping they either had him bugged or they were using a directional mike.
"I'm not offering backup. In fact, unless I started randomly blurting alien words again, I ordered you to stand down. Daniel, I am speaking English, yes?" O'Neill asked. Jim couldn't hear any response from the distant shadow, but he didn't know why. Bruhn might be following orders to not interact with him or Jim might have lost the sound in the rain which was falling with a steady patter now, mimicking a white noise generator.
"Unless there's something wrong with my hearing, yes," Daniel offered and he was looking strangely at Jim as well.
"My team has confirmed a visual, but I am under strict orders to keep the two teams separate," Jim explained briefly. Teal'c materialized silently from the shadow, but Jim wasn't surprised. The prickling feeling of the alien in Teal'c body made his stomach lurch queasily, so Teal'c had no chance of sneaking up on him.
"I heard no such confirmation," Teal'c said as he stood near the others, the rain soaking into his bandana so that the symbol below was even more visible.
"That's because you're not a sentinel," Jim said. "Sir, I can follow, and if you want to trail after me with your zat pointed at my back, that's fine, but I won't be able to keep the trail for long if it starts really raining." Jim forced his fists to unclench as he waited for O'Neill's order.
"If I say no, you're going anyway, aren't you?" the colonel asked.
"Yes, sir, I am. This is Blair."
"That's kinda my point. With your companion missing, should you be doing this?" For the first time, Jim could see the unmistakable signs of distress on O'Neill's face. The man had a good poker face, but not good enough to fool a sentinel. He was actually worried. Jim revised his impression of the man just a little.
"Sir, I track without Blair all the time. I'm a cop, and if I waited for Blair to get back from his endless meetings, I'd work about twenty hours a week instead of the forty or fifty I put in every week. Blair was right when he said you don't know the first thing about sentinels."
"I know exactly what the US military knows," O'Neill pointed out. He sighed. "And this would not be the first time the military didn't know nearly as much as they thought they did. Go. Find your partner," O'Neill said as he stepped to the side.
"Yes, sir," Jim agreed as he started trotting down the narrow road, his sense of smell wide open. The rancid smell of alien hit him so hard that he immediately gagged and had to brace himself against a brick building as he struggled with a need to not vomit.
"Okay, this is what I mean. This is not inspiring confidence, Colonel Ellison," O'Neill pointed out.
Jim carefully stood, his sense of smell dialed down as he looked at Teal'c who still stood behind Daniel even though Jim could smell him so clearly that he felt suffocated by the scent of something reptilian, but not, something so alien that Jim's every instinct was to rip it out and strangle it. "No offense, but that... thing," Jim gestured toward Teal'c stomach... it smells worse than any rotting body I've ever stood downwind of."
Teal'c's eyebrow rose. "I was unaware of any particular odor."
"It's there," Jim said as he started backing away. "I need to smell for Blair, before the rain washes the scent away, and I can't with you so near."
Teal'c's eyebrow twitched up another notch. O'Neill rolled his eyes. "Teal'c, you have our six. Danny, stay close and try not to get captured. Ellison, you have point."
Jim nodded and trotted down the road, getting a hundred yards or so before he started opening up smell again. The rain was pulling down scents from the air, the bitterness of sulfur oxides and the tang of ammonia trapped within each drop. Jim filtered that and focused on the scent of Blair. He'd seen whatever hit him... had seen it and had time to produce stress hormones, but when he'd been through here, he'd been unconscious. Jim picked up the pace, trotting down the road as the scent thinned. They'd put Blair in a car, but the windows had been open, so particles of Blair were still scattered in the air, floating like those messages tucked into bottles and tossed into the ocean.
But the bottles were getting fewer and farther between as the rain started coming down heavier now. Jim settled into a loping run, dodging locals who dashed from car to doorway and stray dogs seeking a dry stoop. Jim almost missed the turn. He had totally lost the scent and stood with the rain sliding down his back, and then the scent of Carter caught him. Thank god she was a woman, and a woman who was still young enough and healthy enough for menses, he thought as he doubled back and took a side road that was more alley than road. The neat trimmed streets were wilder here, weeds sticking out from the trellises and vines, and Jim slipped into double time.
His legs ached, and he dialed down his sense of touch as he pushed himself harder. He lost his balance once, slipping on the mud and falling to one knee before he could catch himself on a rail fence, and a body just about crashed into him from behind.
"Geez, Ellison, take it easy on an old guy with older knees."
Jim glanced back and O'Neill held the fence with one hand and shaded his eyes from the falling rain with the other. For all his complaints, the colonel looked fine. Jackson was wheezing as he caught up and grabbed at the fence. O'Neill's hand went to Jackson's back.
"You okay?"
"I'm fine," Jackson panted.
"Yeah, you look fine."
Jackson waved his hand in a gesture obviously meant to wave O'Neill off. It didn't work.
"Are we near?" O'Neill asked as he looked around. Jim truly studied the area for the first time. It was raining harder than he thought, and the clouds were thick enough that he wasn't sure how much detail O'Neill could actually make out.
"Fairly close. I can smell Carter."
O'Neill frowned at him. "Carter? I thought sentinels were better at tracking their companions than random people. Ellison, if you're angling to take my astrophysicist away, I'll arm wrestle you for her."
"Carter is just easier to track right now," Jim said, not wanting to invade her privacy more than he had to.
"Which would indicate that you're beginning to bond with Carter. It's not happening colonel." O'Neill stepped forward aggressively, and Jim fought an urge to tell the man to fuck off.
"He's bonding with Sam?" Daniel stood wiping his rain-spotted glasses with his rain-soaked shirt. He shoved his glasses back on and then sighed unhappily. Jim suspected the man couldn't even see out of them. And O'Neill was worried about Blair in the field?
"No, he won't be," O'Neill warned darkly.
"She's just easier to smell this time of month," Jim finally snapped as he turned back toward the squat building in front of him.
"Oh." O'Neill didn't say anything else. Daniel cleared his throat and tried to clean his glasses again. Jim ignored them both and edged closer to the back of a red brick building with decorative bars on the windows, his hearing focused on the distant heartbeats muffled by the brick.
"That the place?" O'Neill asked, and Jim flinched as the words blasted through him, echoing against the inside of his skull. Jim glared, but O'Neill didn't react as he studied the building.
"Two heartbeats below the first level. Three on the main level, two more in the upper levels."
This time O'Neill did give Jim a long, hard stare. "What margin of error are we working with here?" he asked.
Jim flashed the man a cold look. "None."
"And I don't know how many are aliens," Jim added as he struggled against the creeping feeling of wrongness, "but some of them are."
"So, it's time for a little poking around," O'Neill offered with a grim cheerfulness. "What can you tell us about the inside?"
Jim glanced over, not sure what exactly O'Neill wanted, or if O'Neill just wanted to keep him too busy to break down the door and try to rip the goa'uld apart with his hands. The rain created tiny magnifiers that made the pores of the colonel's face zoom in and out of focus as they fell, and Jim turned back toward the house. "Second floor, third window in. It isn't latched," he said as he watched the warm air from inside the house swirl out into the growing chill of the evening.
"One of the heartbeats upstairs is slow: sleep or meditation probably. The two heartbeats in the basement are fast... I'm guessing at least one of those is Blair. On the main level, there's a..." Jim paused and tilted his head to the side. He could hear it, but he couldn't quite understand what he was hearing. He focused on the curtains on the first floor window until the weave became huge and he could see between the individual threads. Aw shit.. like things weren't weird enough already, he thought to himself as the brown on brown mottling magnified until he could see those distant pores, and then nothing.