Journeys (5a/5)
Title: Journeys (Table of Contents)
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Nothing you recognize is mine. I gain nothing of material value from this.
Part I a b Part II a b c d Part III a b c d e Part IV a b c d
XXXXX
Part V: The Journey Home
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16 June 2003; SGC, Earth; 0800 hrs
"Come on, Daniel," Carter's voice was saying as Jack made his way toward her lab, "it's only been, what, a month?"
"More, counting from when I arrived on Vis Uban," Daniel answered. "Why can't I remember--"
Jack peered inside to find Daniel with his head down on top of the bench next to Carter's desk. "What's going on?" Jack said.
They stopped talking, and Carter looked up. "Uh...nothing, sir," she said, with the wide-eyed, vaguely guilty look she always wore when telling him a white lie.
Jack frowned suspiciously at them. "New problems with your memories?" he asked cautiously. Daniel peeked upward and shook his head. "Okay...so how much do you remember now?"
"Enough," Daniel said, but his tone was a bit doubtful.
"Enough, as in..."
"I can get by from day to day. People aren't tiptoeing around me anymore."
Except Jack and people like their team who knew all wasn't miraculously fine--they were the ones who knew the details and knew when the details weren't in place yet. Jack was pretty sure Daniel had read over every journal he'd written in the last six years, as well as every report filed by SG-1 and quite a few others. There were still a lot of blanks, though, and while most people didn't notice because Daniel was back to walking comfortably around the SGC and greeting old friends as they passed in the halls, Jack couldn't help but notice when Daniel spent more time studying the conversations among SG-1 than participating in them. "Ah," Jack said. "Well, maybe you're thinking too hard."
"I can't just not think about remembering my life, Jack."
"I didn't say that," Jack said. Daniel scowled at him. "All right, all right. Look, I'm here for Carter. We're up on the mission roster, and we've got MALP data from a big list of planets. You need to start looking over them; I'm about to head over to tell Jonas the same thing."
"What should I--" Daniel started, then stopped. "Uh, never mind."
"Actually," Jack amended, "Carter, you go tell Jonas. You two put your heads together."
"Yes, sir," she said, sending Daniel an unhappy look before she left.
Daniel waited for her to leave, then said, "I'm not after Jonas's job. Really. I was only--"
"I talked to the general five minutes ago," Jack said. "He agreed to let you join the four of us when you're ready to go into the field again. If it's up to me, SG-1 will take both you and Jonas."
"Jack--"
"Daniel," Jack said pointedly. Daniel shut up and raised his eyebrows expectantly. "The fact is, Hammond's worried about whether we can afford to keep resources like you two together."
"I'm not sure how much of a resource I am right now," Daniel said.
"Which is why you need to ease back in," Jack said. "Hammond will let me keep both of you until your memories are all back--get you back into the game. And then he'll make a decision, and maybe you'll both stay. You'd drive anyone else insane, anyway, and Jonas is the only one who can keep up with you and Carter. It's the only real way."
"Jack, he went on your last couple of standard recons, not me, because--"
"--because of a little something called 'amnesia,'" Jack said.
Daniel ignored that. "I left. I'm not entitled to something I walked away from." Personally, Jack didn't consider it walking away--not completely, anyway--since that part hadn't come until he'd literally been tortured to the brink of death. "It doesn't seem fair to make him fight for a position he already earned."
"That's funny," Jack said, "because that's kind of what Jonas said about you. Something about the fact that you worked with us for years before he did. You two have a problem working together?"
"Well, no," Daniel said, though his expression said he was wavering. "But that's not the point."
"There's no rule about four people per team--there've been plenty of five- and even six-man teams around here. We're SG-1. If any team's gonna be loaded with experts, it should be us. It'll just mean there's more overlap in our science experts, which means any of you can take temporary missions with other teams without sidelining all of SG-1, and we can even accelerate our schedule since we've got extra manpower."
The idea had taken hold, and Jack was already imagining what that schedule would look like, what with the fact that SG-1 could now carry on with most missions even if one or two of their members were otherwise occupied or injured, leaving them with at least three or four people. The uncertain situation with Anubis and the System Lords meant that SG-1 was basically going to be on call for emergencies all day every day, even more than usual, and that was on top of the regular exploration schedule; having an extra person would be useful in the coming months.
Before he could go on, though, Daniel said, "I think I remember Abydos."
Jack stopped. Daniel was looking at Carter's desk. "Oh?" Jack said, hoping that didn't mean what he thought it meant.
"Yeah," Daniel said, still not looking up. "Not much, but I remember a few things from...before."
"We don't know what happened there a month ago, you know that," Jack said.
"What if I need to stay there to help?" Daniel said.
"Do you want to?"
"Well...I don't know. But what if--"
"The SGC needs you," Jack pointed out, pushing down an encroaching sense of dread.
"The SGC was fine for over a year without me," Daniel said.
"No, we weren't!" Jack snapped. "You weren't here!"
Daniel finally looked up at him, biting his lip, but when he spoke, it was only to say calmly, "I don't know what it was like for you, but I can imagine it was difficult. And I'm sorry that I was the cause of grief and a lot of problems--"
"A lot of problems?" Jack echoed. "Whatever the situation is on Abydos, what do you think you can do? Help rebuild a house? Herd a few mastadges? Because I gotta tell you, your talents are better suited to tasks like saving the galaxy."
"You don't think it's important to see whether our first allies out there are even alive?" Daniel said evenly, quietly. "You don't think it would be worth the time to build a house because it would only shelter five people instead of helping a hundred?"
"Don't--don't start with that," Jack said. "You know that's not what I mean."
"Then what do you mean?" Daniel said.
"I mean," Jack said, "if you have a choice between pitching in muscle to do something others are probably better at anyway or doing something no one else in this galaxy can do--"
"They're my people, Jack," Daniel snapped.
"So are we," Jack snapped back.
Daniel didn't move. Jack was becoming nostalgic for the early days when he'd fidgeted when he was nervous instead of staring unnervingly at people. Finally, he said, "You're going to make me choose?"
"We don't even know what the choices are," Jack said. Daniel finally looked back down. "But if there turns out to be a choice, you're gonna have to choose, whether I make you or not."
"I know," Daniel said quietly. "It just...it depends on their situation. We still can't dial in?"
Jack shook his head. "No lock on their 'gate. Sorry."
Daniel sat back down at Carter's bench. "It's not your fault."
Ah. That tone. "You didn't lead Anubis to Abydos, Daniel," Jack said. "You led him to Earth--for which, by the way, I will yell at you once you have all your marbles back--but Abydos would've happened either way, even if they'd never met the SGC. At least you gave them a warning."
"Skaara says I told him gather men to stay and fight," Daniel said.
"Which was the right move," Jack said. "To be honest, I didn't think you had it in you."
Daniel snorted without amusement. "Sending idealistic young men to their deaths, you mean."
Yes, Jack thought. The Daniel he'd known before wouldn't have done that, and as bad as he might feel about it now, it was the only reason they had had time to succeed even to the extent that they had. "Anubis would've had the Eye of Ra otherwise," he said, "and they'd all be dead, and so might we. I doubt Yu--the Goa'uld--would've been able to beat Anubis with nothing but his regular old weapons--"
"Jack," Daniel sighed. "I know all that."
It didn't help, though. Jack knew as well as anyone that the feeling of sending in the few--even if they had been volunteers--as a sacrifice for the many was something logic could dull but not sooth completely. "Just stick around with us for now and finish filling in your memory," Jack said. "We'll see what happens when the Tok'ra get a ship over there."
...x...
22 June 2003; SGC, Earth; 1600 hrs
"We're never getting weekends off again, are we?" Jack said when he was called in on Sunday.
But it wasn't just his team and the general who met him in the briefing room; Skaara was there, too. "We got a call from the Tok'ra," the general said. "One of their operatives just finished a mission and got away in a teltak. He flew briefly over Abydos."
Jack stopped halfway into his seat, then dropped the rest of the way down. "Sir?"
"From orbit, there was nothing wrong with the planet that he could see," Hammond said. "Obviously, you can't see detail from that height."
Refusing to feel too relieved too soon, he clarified, "But the people...?"
"We don't know, Colonel. Korra--the operative--is injured and wasn't able to linger there long enough for a thorough sweep, but he's coming to Earth and is willing to let us use the teltak to see for ourselves," Hammond said. "We'll either care for him here or send him wherever he needs to go--I trust you'll be able to reach Abydos on your own without damaging their ship."
Jack looked at Daniel, who was already watching him. "Yes, sir," Jack said. "Do we know how long it'll take for him to get here?"
"He'll be arriving in about eight to ten hours, sir," Carter said. "The teltak's not in mint condition, so he's not pushing it as fast as it can go."
"We can fly the ship ourselves," Teal'c confirmed.
"All right," Jack said. "We'll need to bring a few things, General."
"Medical supplies," Carter said. "Containers and suits, just in case."
"Electrical equipment," Jonas added. "Spare crystals if their Stargate and DHD need repairs."
"Weapons, in the case that Anubis left forces there without our knowledge," Teal'c said.
Hammond nodded. "You have the next few hours to put together what you need."
"General, what happens when we get there?" Daniel said.
Looking between him and his brother, Hammond said, "It's a relatively short trip. We'll decide what to do once you've assessed the situation. Remember that we have this ship available to us for now, but it still belongs to the Tok'ra. We don't have our own fleet."
"I understand, sir," Daniel said.
...x...
23 June 2003; Teltak; 0100 hrs
"You look antsy," Jack said when he found Daniel reading in the cargo hold.
Daniel shook his head, glancing up from his book. "It's odd," he said, quietly enough not to disturb Skaara, who had dozed off soon after entering hyperspace. "I'm...nervous. More than I should be--like I don't want to see Abydos, even though I do."
Jack watched Daniel polish his glasses on his shirt, something he did when he was trying to buy time while avoiding eye contact. "You really don't remember as much about Abydos as you do about the SGC?" he asked, settling into a seat on an empty cargo crate.
"Really," Daniel said. "I actually know a lot about it, since I wrote about Nagada and Kasuf and everyone, and Skaara's told me even more. And there are pieces here and there. But I keep trying to remember Nagada and just can't picture it."
"Not at all?"
"Nothing. Not the 'SGC house,' or my old house, or Ra's pyramid, or anything that happened in Nagada proper, people I knew there... I've had dreams of playing outside it. I think I sneaked out some back entrance a lot--"
"Yeah, that's where the mines were," Jack said. "You said you studied there a lot as a kid."
When he received a startled look in answer, Jack realized that was exactly the point--he hadn't even known Daniel as a kid, and he still knew more about Daniel's childhood from what Daniel himself had told him. "Oh. Well. I've got nothing of the village itself, aside from what my journals told me."
Jack frowned. "Maybe you're blocking it out," he said awkwardly. "You know. Psychologically."
Daniel smiled humorlessly. "I've been talking to Dr. Mackenzie." Jack barely stopped himself from asking whether he'd gone temporarily insane. "I know, I know, but I figured it was worth a shot, right? He's dealt with a few cases of amnesia before."
"I guess," Jack said doubtfully. "Did it help?"
"Uh...well, not exactly. Basically, he thinks I've blocked out memories that are associated with being there, in Nagada--but why would I? Why be that specific? Unless you guys have been hiding something really big from me, then...there's just no logic in that."
"We're not hiding anything," Jack said. "But...sometimes, it's not so logical."
"Yeah, he said that, too."
"Maybe it'll come back. It can't just be gone from your memories; that makes no sense."
Daniel gave him a look. "Because everything else about this makes sense."
"Good point," Jack conceded, and wondered with a jolt if that was Daniel's punishment. He'd interfered in a big and flashy way on Abydos--maybe Oma had taken something of Abydos away from him in exchange.
"With you, Skaara, Teal'c, Sam...I felt almost like I should recognize you, even before I understood why. But with Nagada...nothing."
"Well, what about your parents?" Jack said.
To his surprise, Daniel shook his head again. "I've seen the few pictures I have. I know, factually, what they did for the SGC and what happened to them. I remember..." He stopped and bit his lip, turning away to look intently at his foot when he said, "Some things. I just wish it were more concrete."
"Still no?" Jack guessed.
"No," Daniel sighed. "At least not yet."
"I'm sorry," Jack said sincerely.
"Maybe eventually."
"Sure," Jack agreed, trying not to sound impatient with the tiny strides being made and knowing Daniel would probably hear his impatience, anyway. "You've been making progress."
Jonas appeared at the bulkhead. "What's up?" he said, grinning, and then, "Oh. Uh...never mind. I'll leave you guys--"
"Hey, Teal'c has a son, right?" Daniel said before Jonas could go.
"Rya'c?" Jack said. "You remember Teal'c's son but not your--"
Too late, he heard the words coming out of his mouth and stopped.
Daniel pressed his lips together for a moment, then said, "Rya'c. That's right."
"Yeah," Jonas said. "He's starting to get pretty active in the Jaffa rebellion."
"Apparently, he was pissed that Teal'c called him too young, even though he was about the same age you were when Teal'c was taking you into battle," Jack said. "Of course, Teal'c's answer was that you were dead, but Rya'c got himself in the thick of it anyway. Saved a lot of people."
"Right, I read that--he destroyed the weapon Anubis was using to attack the Tau'ri Stargate," Daniel said, frowning as if trying to remember something. "Where is he now?"
"He came to visit when Teal'c and Bra'tac were starting on tretonin," Jack said, confused about where this was going. "He left with Bra'tac once they were better. They went off recruiting rebels." Daniel considered his knees and fell silent. "So...is that what you were asking?"
There was no answer. Jack glanced at Jonas, who shrugged.
"Hello?" Jack waved a hand in front of Daniel's face.
"What?" Daniel said, looking up at last.
Jack raised his eyebrows. "Are you...?" He waggled his fingers near his head. "You know." Daniel raised his eyebrows. "You know," Jack repeated.
"I'm fine," Daniel said, wearing the puzzled and vaguely irritated expression he often wore when he felt people around him were being stupid.
"Maybe you should get some rest," Jack said. "Jonas, everything okay up front?"
"Yup," Jonas said, nodding. "Sam was just checking to make sure all systems will hold, even if they're not at full power. Oh, and Teal'c says to tell you we'll be there in about five hours."
"All right," Jack said. He tilted his head in Daniel's direction. "You two rest. We don't know what we'll find when we get there."
"Jack..." Daniel said.
"Hey, can I ask you about something?" Jonas said, sitting down next to him and thrusting a notebook under his nose. "I have some questions about the conclusions you drew from a few of your studies."
Daniel gave Jack a reproachful look but obediently allowed himself to be distracted and took the notebook from Jonas.
Carter and Teal'c were both in the peltak. "I put the kids down for the night," Jack told them. "Should be another hour or so before one of them needs something."
Teal'c raised an eyebrow at him as Carter smiled down at her feet.
Jack looked out the window. "So...about that burst of energy we got from Abydos after the Anubis thing," he said. "Doesn't tell us anything?"
"Sorry sir," Carter said. "Nothing definitive. I've looked at the data collected by the radiation team that checked the iris afterward. All I can tell is that there was an explosion of some kind. Getting quantitative data from a burst like that through a wormhole is difficult at best."
In other words, they might find that barely anything had happened to Abydos, and they might find that the planet was dead. "You can start a nuclear reaction if there's enough naquadah in the planet, right?" Jack said. "We've seen that happen."
"Yes, sir," Carter said, settling into what he'd come to know as her lecturing pose. "It depends on what Anubis's weapon actually did. Naquadah is fissile, but it takes a lot and the right conditions to initiate a nuclear chain reaction."
"If Korra was right, at least we know it's not as bad as when we did our naquadah-nuclear weapon test," Jack said. "As in...the planet's not a ball of fire."
"Nuclear capabilities aside, sir, there are other ways the weapon could have been just as bad. Naquadah is more explosive than fissile--I'm more worried that the shockwave might have detonated the naquadah that the damage could have spread to the rest of the planet. A large Goa'uld weapon could certainly do that."
"However, Skaara has said that their people were all evacuated," Teal'c said. "Perhaps they were far enough to be sheltered from damage."
Carter shrugged. "There are just too many factors we don't know. If the damage was contained, and those caves they're hiding in are far enough away, stable enough, well-enough shielded..."
"I get it," Jack said. He glanced in the direction of the cargo hold, where Jonas was with the two Abydons. "Look, if something goes wrong, no questions--they're coming back with us, Daniel and Skaara both."
"Of course, O'Neill," Teal'c said.
"Jack," Daniel said, striding out into the peltak with Jonas on his heels, a sheaf of papers in his hand. "Was this you?"
"I thought it'd be at least an hour," Jack sighed.
Daniel shoved the sheet into his face. "Did you draw pictures over my notes?"
"How could you possibly know that was me?" Jack said.
"Oh, I'm sorry," Daniel said facetiously. "I suppose it might have been Teal'c who was doodling in my notebooks."
"It was a boring page," Jack defended, suppressing satisfaction that Daniel at least knew enough to know it must have been Jack, even if he didn't yet remember the day he'd walked into his office and caught Jack in the act.
Jonas gave him a grimace and a shrug for ratting him out, then settled in the copilot's seat. "When do I get to learn to fly this thing?" he asked.
"I had to wait about five years before anyone taught me," Daniel told him.
Jack rolled his eyes. "Are we there yet?" he said hopefully.
Carter grinned at him. "Four and a half hours to go, sir," she said.
XXXXX
23 June 2003; Abydos; 0600 hrs
For a while, Jack thought they'd arrived on the wrong side of the planet, or even that they'd gone to the wrong planet altogether. And then he realized that they were hovering smack over Ra's former seat of power, the hatak landing pad that had housed the Stargate on Abydos. It was just hard to recognize the place at first.
The pyramid was in ruins. As far as they could tell from this height, the land around it was cleared, too. 'Flattened,' Jack thought numbly, would probably be a good assessment.
So much for fixing everything by fixing their Stargate.
Even picking out Stargate debris from pyramid debris, much less putting it back together, was out of the question. Everything below them looked like molten and cooled rock. Jack didn't want to think about what the rest of the world looked like.
"What is this place?" Daniel asked.
Jack glanced back at Skaara's stricken face. "It's where the Stargate was," he said. "There was--"
"Oh, the pyramid," Daniel said, and only the look of triumph on his face before it dissolved into realization told Jack that he was remembering it from a report, not an image from his childhood.
"Our sensors detect normal temperature," Teal'c said as he flew in the direction of the main village. "We are not detecting significant radiation."
"Does this"--Daniel gestured to the view outside--"mean we are or aren't expecting radiation?"
Jonas shrugged. "Anubis could've dropped a nuclear bomb here for all we know, although it's not really characteristic of a Goa'uld ship's weapon. Even a beam weapon, with enough energy of the right type and a fissionable element like naquadah all around..."
"It's possible," Carter finished. "If I had to guess, though, I'd say not, but with Anubis, we can't rule out anything entirely...including other chemical or biohazards Anubis might have released for...for completion or just out of spite."
Jack blinked at them. This was what he got for spending time with a theoretical physicist and someone who had spent his life studying the nuclear physics of naquadah. "So we're wearing our hazmat suits," he summarized.
Carter exchanged a glance with Jonas. "Yes, sir, until we know the extent of the damage."
"Anubis attacked just here, yes?" Skaara said. "Perhaps the only damage is here."
"Perhaps," Teal'c said.
Skaara was the first to catch sight of Nagada proper. He started to point, then stopped.
"Is that the--" Daniel started.
"Yeah," Jack said, staring at blackened smudges that looked like ashes embedded in rock. He imagined that might have been a piece of the village gates, once upon a time.
Beyond the gates were barely-recognizable pieces of houses, though Jack could still imagine how they were supposed to look. If they dug through the debris just there, they might find part of Daniel's old home or even a few crushed boxes of SGC supplies, left by and for the teams that sometimes stayed here. Skaara's old house was further in, closer to the central public areas. Jack couldn't even tell where that was anymore--some of it had been covered over by shifting sand and the rest was buried in rubble.
"There are no people," Daniel said, though he sounded more interested than upset.
"That could be a good thing," Jonas said. "Everyone was evacuated. They wouldn't have been here during the attack. We might still find them in those, uh...caves of Kalima--"
"Wait," Skaara said suddenly. "Wait! Teal'c, stop!"
Jack leaned forward and found himself bumping shoulders with Carter on one side and Jonas on the other as everyone else tried to crowd around to look out. "What is it?" Jonas said.
"Look," Skaara said, pointing. "It stops here." Jack squinted more closely at the ground and realized what he meant.
"What the...?" Jonas said. "There's a...it's like a line. Past that, it's like nothing ever happened."
"And yet," Teal'c said, "the structures before that line have been entirely demolished."
What they called a 'line' was more like a ridge that looked like it had boiled and bubbled upward, then cooled in place. It wasn't immediately obvious from the sky, but once they really looked, it was easy to see a border, more or less, with destruction on one side and almost nothing out of the ordinary on the other. Only a handful of houses were still there on the undamaged side, and part of a fallen fence, but still...
"All right, that's not normal," Jack said, staring. "Tell me that's not normal."
"A change that sharply and cleanly delineated?" Carter said, shaking her head, her eyes huge and staring outside. "No, sir. No way. Even ignoring blast damage and looking just at the temperature, there would at least have been a gradient, not a sharp change from a couple thousand degrees to ambient temperature."
"Thousand degrees?" Daniel echoed.
Carter pointed at the ground. "See how glassy the rock looks? That's probably molten sand, maybe even naquadah. You need it to get pretty hot for that."
"Yeah--the Stargate itself is over thirty tons of solid naquadah, not to mention whatever the pyramid was made of and any unstable objects in that secret chamber," Jonas said. "Not even considering Anubis's weapon, an impact like an exploding Stargate near a large naquadah mine should have spread a lot farther. It's like something..." He broke off.
"Something stopped the damage from spreading to the rest of our planet," Skaara finished, turning to Daniel.
Daniel was frowning at the ground outside the ship and didn't notice until everyone else was staring at him, too. His expression became wary. "Look," he said, holding up a hand, "I don't know what happened here. I don't even know what the pyramid looked like."
"Like a pyramid," Jack told him.
Daniel looked at him with clear irritation, then determinedly turned his attention back to the ground. "This looks like a pretty big village," he said. "A lot of people must have--"
"Whoa, this isn't an ancient city for you to study, Daniel," Jack interrupted when Skaara's hand clenched hard around the edge of the main console. He recognized that tone of voice.
"Right," Daniel said absently, not paying attention. "I wonder if any artifacts would have survived that--no, the temperature would've been too high if it was able to melt the naquadah. But I'll bet, if we work through the rubble on the other side, we could--"
"This was our home!" Skaara burst out. "Our home is destroyed, Dan'yel! Do you understand that? You--you were born there"--he pointed backward--"and my father lived there, and Sha'uri--" His voice broke, and he turned away.
Daniel's expression was stricken, as if he'd remembered only then that this was more than a trip for the sake of architectural archaeology. "I..." he said, looking around the peltak. He turned back to the window. Jack looked for a flicker of recognition, but he only said, more quietly, "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have...sorry."
Skaara took a breath and sat slowly in the seat next to Teal'c's. "The people might be somewhere else," Jonas said again into the silence, forcibly optimistic. "That's what matters, right?"
"Yes," Skaara said quietly. He glanced at Daniel, his expression showing that he very badly needed Daniel to remember something, and said, "You said we could rebuild, as long as we had our people. No?"
I don't remember, Daniel's expression said, but he bit his lip and stayed silent.
"Sir," Carter said, "I'd like to grab a few samples, just in case we need them later for analysis. We might need it to figure out exactly what happened here. We may as well pick here to do a quick materials analysis before we move on to the rest of the planet."
"All right," Jack said, eager to do something before they stared any longer at the skeleton of a dead town. "Teal'c, put us down here. Major, Jonas, break out the suits and do a radiation and hazmat check first--Daniel will stay and help you collect whatever you need and stand guard. Teal'c and I'll take Skaara and look around the planet in the teltak."
XXXXX
23 June 2003; Nagada Ruins, Abydos; 0800 hrs
"Jonas, hand me that," Sam said. As the vial appeared in front of her, she added, "Daniel, what do you have?"
"I'm still not getting significant radiation or anything that registers as dangerous," Daniel said, holding his gun loosely. "And it's way too open for anyone to be around without our knowing."
"Well, I've got naquadah readings that look about right for this region of Abydos," Jonas said, looking between his quickly run assay and a previous report on Abydonian soil. "I bet a detailed analysis would show different mineral composition, though; some parts of the raw ore were probably vaporized in the blast."
Daniel turned from where he was dutifully watching the land around them for possible people, friendly or otherwise. "Is that significant?" he said.
"It might tell us more about the conditions during the attack," Sam said, "but I don't know how useful exact measurements might be, just that the conditions were obviously unsustainable."
"Soil conditions could have an agricultural impact," Jonas put in.
"True," she conceded. "But Nagada was never a heavily agrarian society."
"We should look closer to where the pyramid was too, right?" Daniel said. "That was the focus, and there was a lot of unknown technology there."
"Yeah. We'll definitely swing by there before we leave. Looking for people is a higher priority for now, though."
"Where did Skaara say they were hiding again, Daniel?" Jonas said.
Sam labeled the last of her samples and packed them. She touched the ground again where sand had melted into a slab of dirty silica glass and marveled at the sharp edge where the heat had, apparently, stopped in its tracks. Energy never stopped in its tracks, not like this. Then again, energy from another plane of existence didn't usually materialize as people, either, but she'd already seen that and its reverse several times now. She carefully chipped some of the naquadah away, already planning the tests they would want to run on this.
She didn't look up until Jonas repeated, "Daniel? What's wrong?"
Sam turned and saw Daniel crouching on the ground in his suit, his face mostly hidden by his mask. She bent and set a hand on Daniel's shoulder, making him jump. "What?" Daniel said, looking around.
"Did you hear what Jonas said?" Sam asked.
"What?" Daniel repeated.
Exchanging a look with Jonas, she asked, "Are you okay?"
"I..." He adjusted his mask, almost nervously. "It's just, I don't even remember what this place is supposed to look like, and...something happened here."
You happened here, she thought--it was the only explanation--but said, "Okay, you know what, let's pack it up and get out of here." She pushed herself to her feet and tucked away her box of samples as Jonas and Daniel picked up their weapons. "Let's walk a little and if we still don't detect any radiation or toxins, we can take all this stuff off. Both of you keep your meters out and keep an eye on them. Jonas, call the colonel and tell him we're done."
"Colonel O'Neill, come in," Jonas said.
Immediately, the colonel's voice said, "Where are you guys?"
"We just finished," Jonas said. "We're thinking of starting toward the caves of Kalima, if you've found anything there."
There was a pause, and then, "It's too far; it'd take you a couple of days on foot. Start heading west--Teal'c's going to swing back and pick you guys up to meet us here while Skaara and I keep moving."
As they started off, Sam glanced back at the corpse of the village they had come to know so well, then turned away and went on. Daniel was checking the sun to find west and didn't notice.
"None of this is naquadria, right?" Daniel said, gesturing around them as they walked.
"No, it's all naquadah and other common minerals," Sam said. "I'm sure Ra would have found a use for naquadria if he'd had it on this planet."
"Well, yeah," he said, "but Anubis has all sorts of energy weapons. Are we sure this weapon didn't release the subatomic particles that convert naquadah into naquadria in the first place?"
Sam felt her jaw drop. She turned to look at Jonas, whose eyes were wide with question. A glance at Daniel showed that he was still obediently monitoring radiation and didn't notice their surprise. "What are you talk--" Jonas started.
"Shh," Sam interrupted quickly, holding up a hand. "Daniel, how do you--what do you know about subatomic particles?"
"I know that they...uh..." Finally, Daniel looked up at her, but he shrugged. "...are smaller than atoms? I don't know. They were released in the Kelowna naquadria test. I thought that was why the planet collapsed. Am I remembering that wrong?"
"Where did you hear that subatomic particles convert naquadah to naquadria?" Jonas said.
Daniel blinked. "It must have been in one of your reports."
"Well, I didn't write it in mine," Jonas said. "I've always assumed naquadria was a rare but naturally occurring isotope on my planet, not one that was...created."
"And I didn't know about the subatomic particles emitted during the test," Sam added, still watching him carefully for his reaction. "There wasn't enough left to do much more than evacuate as quickly as possible. Neither of us knew or said anything about that, Daniel."
His mask hid most of his face, but eventually, Daniel said, "Well. I don't know what subatomic particles are, so where does that leave us?"
"Oh, wow," Jonas breathed. "That...that explains...so much about naquadria and why our underground supplies went critical. It was naquadah to begin with, just like our original geological data said, and that's why the bomb test didn't just destroy the planet immediately--"
"The earthquakes," Sam remembered from the evacuation, realizing now what that had been. "They must've been minor explosions from naquadria nearer the surface, but deeper veins of naquadah weren't converted until--"
"--yeah, so there was a delay until we reached that critical point, which gave us enough time for the evacuation."
"The naquadria would have decayed to a more stable isotope over time," Sam said, disturbed, "except that the test bombarded everything with particles that restarted the conversion."
"Exactly."
"But what that doesn't explain," she said, "is why Daniel knows and we didn't."
Daniel shook his head. "Look, maybe I remembered it wrong and my mind filled in the blanks with an explanation. Memory is not exact; I know that as well as anyone."
Sam shook her head. "Subatomic particles don't come out of your imagination, Daniel. You wouldn't've said it if you hadn't heard it or known it before."
"You saw the test," Jonas said, staring, too. "You must've watched--you were there, on Kelowna, you said so."
"No, I didn't," Daniel said immediately.
"Yes, you did, check the security tape sometime from when you said you were watching."
"Whoa, hold it," Sam said. She let the past minute of conversation whir through her head, then said, "Look, there's no naquadria here. When we get home, we'll figure out whether or not Daniel's actually remembering something from Kelowna, and whether or not it affects our future use and handling of naquadah and naquadria. Right now, we deal with Abydos. Okay?"
Daniel and Jonas looked at each other, then turned back to her. "Okay," Daniel said.
Sam looked down at her Geiger counter and glanced back to gauge how far they'd come. "You can take off your masks and carry your suits if you want--I think we're okay," she said. "C'mon, let's keep moving. Teal'c should meet up with us soon."
...x...
Sam had never been this far from the Stargate on Abydos--in fact, they'd only ever been here on foot, and this journey must have taken at least a day or two to walk. She'd known vaguely from little things Daniel had said (before) that Nagada had been chosen for its naquadah and not its fertile soil or ease of living, and that there were mountainous regions where the second-largest settlement on Abydos was nestled. Even then, the picture he'd painted had been a bit hazy, like something he might have seen at some point but didn't remember clearly. He probably hadn't been very far from Nagada in his own lifetime, either, or at least not often.
"I cannot land this vessel far enough into the mountains," Teal'c said as they reached the mountains. "We can see caves from here, but we cannot search effectively from the air."
"Would people come out if they saw us?" Daniel said.
"They'd more likely hide," Sam said. "The Abydons have learned that Goa'uld ships flying overhead are rarely a good thing."
"Indeed," Teal'c agreed. "We have found, however, that there are also no detectable hazards in this region."
"That's good," she said, deciding to rule out radiation and chemical or biological warfare once and for all. "Since it looks like a lot of the damage was sort of...restricted, the people might be okay, after all."
"Unless they died from starvation or extreme climate changes following the impact," Daniel suggested. "Like the dinosaurs on Earth."
Jonas was starting to look nervous, the way people were nervous around psychopaths who didn't seem to care when entire populations of a planet might have been destroyed.
"Daniel," Sam said, "could you...please try to keep in mind that there are real, live people here?"
"Unless they--" Daniel started, then stopped, looking ashamed and not a little frustrated. "Sorry."
Sam leaned against the back of Teal'c's chair and reminded himself that Daniel got like that sometimes--he would be the first to argue for a people's rights, but he would also be the first to poke at some unusual corpse and declare that it was interesting. If he didn't remember Abydos, then his reaction to this destruction was, if a little cold, not totally out of the ordinary. In fact, it was exactly the way Daniel Jackson would react to a planet that looked like this, which they would have assumed to be abandoned. Maybe this was his way of coping.
"Yeah," she said. She patted his arm. "Just tone it down, okay?"
Daniel nodded once, suddenly looking very uneasy again. "I don't like it here," he said.
Surprised, Sam turned to him and said, "What? What do you mean?"
He shrugged. "I just..." He stopped. "I don't know. Never mind."
"No, no," she said. After what he'd just told them about naquadria without even thinking about it, she was not about to ignore it when he said he had a bad feeling about something. "Teal'c slow down. Daniel, what are you talking ab--"
"Teal'c, it's fine," Daniel said, but he was standing far too stiffly for that to be the case. "It's nothing."
Teal'c looked sideways at Sam. She nodded to him to keep flying, but turned back to Daniel, aware of Jonas hovering nearby, unsure whether to jump in. "I need to know what's going on with you, Daniel," she said frankly.
"This place...just...makes me uncomfortable," he said, clearly at a loss himself. He stared out the window for a moment, then shook his head. "I don't think it's anything real to worry about. I just don't like it, that's all."
"Maybe you're psychic," Jonas suggested.
"I'm not psychic," Daniel retorted. "You're the one whose tumor could predict the future."
"So it's possible," Jonas said.
"But there's no reason to think that in this case," Sam said, thinking. "You still don't remember anything about Nagada, or..."
Daniel's hand clenched a little tighter on the console in front of him. "I feel like I forgot something...really important."
"Then this trip might help," she said.
"Not like that. Something else. I shouldn't be here." When she stared at him, not sure how to answer that, Daniel rubbed his eyes and said, "Never mind. I don't know what I'm saying."
"You know what?" she suggested. "Maybe there's some cognitive dissonance associated with this place, even if some of it is subconscious. You know it, but you don't. You...know what happened back there and how, on some level, but logic tells you now that it makes no sense. That might be what's making you uneasy."
"Maybe," Daniel said. He took a breath, as if deliberately calming himself, and stuffed his hands into his pockets.
"Are you going to be okay?" she said.
"Yeah."
Sam looked past him to Jonas, raising her eyebrows and glancing pointedly at Daniel. Keep an eye on him. Jonas nodded.
"I will land here, and we will proceed on foot," Teal'c said as he set the teltak down. "Skaara is leading O'Neill toward what he believes is the most likely location."
Jonas stepped out first and looked around. "Are you sure this is the right way?"
"I am certain that we came this way with Skaara," Teal'c said. "Come."
Eventually, though, they reached the end of where Teal'c had followed Skaara and the colonel, and he admitted that he couldn't follow their trail much further on the rock.
"All right, someone get the colonel to use his radio," Sam said, carefully checking her footing before she pulled out her meter and set it to track an RF signal. "Skaara probably knows the way, and the colonel will be with him."
As Jonas reached for his radio, Daniel said, "Hey, I think I see them. Jack!" he called, squinting.
Sam moved until she could see around the bend in the path and followed his gaze. "Oh my god," she breathed when she caught a glimpse of waving cloth that Daniel must have missed with his myopic eyes--that was part of a robe, not combat gear. "That's not the colonel or Skaara."
Even as Teal'c and Jonas scrambled to join them, the person in the distance stopped. Sam couldn't tell from here what he--or she--was doing, but suddenly, the figure disappeared. "Hey!" Jonas yelled, his voice echoing loudly. "Hello? We're friends! S! G! 1!"
"C'mon," Sam said, leading the way around the path as it narrowed and then softened into a less rocky road. "Hello!" she called, too. "Don't be afraid! We're--"
"Quit yelling," the colonel's voice said through their radios. "Keep walking--you're almost there."
As if that were the signal, the speck of a person came back out into view, and close behind was another, and another, and then a flow of people, and excited voices shouting back...
Sam picked up her pace and, and soon she could see what looked like the entire population of Nagada trying to crowd into the path and rush toward them in a wave. Two blurs of olive drab caught her eye, one of them barely managing to break out of the mass of people and the other yelling, "Hey, kids!"
"Sha'uri. I know that one--that's Sha'uri," Daniel said suddenly, perking up for the first time on this planet as another familiar head popped into view, and he rushed past them.
Sam, Jonas, and Teal'c caught up to him just in time to collide with the Abydonian people. Looking out at the open valley that opened up beyond the pass they'd taken to get here, she could see now that their clothing and even coloring didn't all look Nagadan--some of these were people from Nagada, but others were from the other villages and towns she'd heard about before and never seen.
"Major Carter!" someone yelled. It was a young woman who had spoken, one she'd seen in passing a few times before, but several others waved enthusiastically in her direction. Sam waved back and smiled when she saw Kasuf nod at her while Sha'uri tried her very best to strangle her brother in a hug.
Colonel O'Neill was watching with a smile. "Sir," Sam said. "What...they all...?"
"They were miles away from the blast," the colonel said. "Apparently, they actually heard it, but the mountains are fine. Everyone from Nagada has set up shop here. People from more distant towns and villages have gone back to their homes, but Kasuf sent messengers to give them the news about Anubis and the Eyes. They tried to contact us, but obviously..."
"So they've seen the blast site," she said grimly.
His face became more serious. "Yeah," he said. "A lot of people went out there. There was talk of rebuilding, but Sha'uri's been telling people to stay here in the mountains for now--they've at least got shelter here in the caves and fertile ground nearby, and they need all their workers here if they're going to survive past the next harvest season."
"You think they'll make it, sir?" she asked, looking past him and into the village, where even more people were pouring out.
"Yeah, they'll live," O'Neill said confidently. "They're tough. But it'll be hard."
"They're cut off from most of their usual resources, which means they can't trade for all their food. They've never lived anywhere like this. And frankly, I don't think Nagada's sustainable anymore, sir--even a little plant growth will be hard, and I didn't see any animals at all."
"They used to trade in livestock, right?" Jonas remembered. "Talk about changing lifestyles."
"Closer to a river here, though," the colonel said. "A two-hour walk if you're careful not to slip down a cliff face. Kalima natives who are used to the land can make the trip in half that."
"Colonel, has someone checked their water source?" Jonas said. "If enough naquadah particles got spread around after the blast, it could potentially exceed toxic levels."
"As well as other contaminants that might've gotten into the water," Sam added.
"Haven't gotten a chance to check yet," the colonel said. "That'll be a priority. Soil, too, for farming. Do you have what you need to take a look at that?"
"I think so, sir," she said, thinking over the equipment they'd brought. "We can start, at least."
The noise of the crowd stopped.
Sam turned around and saw Daniel standing uncertainly before the throng. As she watched, he took a single step back and looked like he was considering taking several more.
"I'll handle this, Major," the colonel said. "Take Teal'c and Jonas. Follow this path here and figure out what these people need that we can fit it into a teltak."
"Yes, sir," she said, then caught Jonas and Teal'c's eyes and gestured for them to follow her.
Continued in part b...