Powerhouse part one
There were eighty-seven links in the chain, not counting the anchor-point that was riveted to the wall at one end or the four smaller chains (with twenty seven, twenty six, thirty five and thirty seven links respectively) leading from the ring at the other end to the shackles on his wrists and ankles.
There were four thousand eight hundred and seventeen tiles on the ceiling, most of them containing eight holes in an irregular pattern but there were a hundred and eight which contained eleven holes and forty seven which only had five. The floor was poured concrete and, depending on the depth of the foundations, likely represented something like four tonnes of concrete which in cubic metres would be…
He didn't know how he had come to be here, wherever "here" was. He and his brother, Don, had taken some sorely-needed vacation time, driven to the airport and… he wasn't sure what had happened after that. He had a dim memory of a parking lot and falling but how that fitted into… here… he wasn't sure. He was desperately worried about Don.
Using friction to wear away a link in a metal chain… say the muscles in the legs could be used to jerk the chain like… so. Factor in the likely number of hours in the day that an individual could work, the need for food and water, the possibility that they wouldn't be provided. And the tensile strength of steel, but taking into account the three dimensional shape of the individual links and the possibility of stressing the chain so that the links presented just right so that the force was exerted onto the weakest cross section…
Diagrams unfolded in his head and his eyes became unfocused.
Time passed.
The door opened and there was a man. Tall, ordinary, wearing a suit but no tie. Holstered gun under his arm. He could have been Don, or David, or any of the FBI team he consulted with… except none of them had that look in their eyes.
"My name is Brackett. How're you feeling, Charlie?"
"Where's Don?"
Brackett was frighteningly fast. He moved forwards like a striking snake, and suddenly Charlie's head was crushed into the wall behind him, and Brackett's hand was over his mouth and his fingers were pinching his nostrils shut and he couldn't breathe, couldn't move, couldn't get any air…
He started to see black sparkles round the edges of his vision and was about to pass out. But then Brackett was gone, and he heard the sobbing noise that was himself, sucking in air.
"Just a little reminder, Charlie. You don't get to ask me any questions. I *own* you. Just remember that and we'll get along fine. When I come into the room you sit quietly with your hands where I can see them, and you look down and stay quiet. If I want to hear something from you, I'll ask you a question and you'll answer it. Those are the rules. Just remember that and you'll be fine. Otherwise bad things might start to happen. Very bad things."
He looked at the floor between Brackett's feet and said nothing, panting for breath.
"That's right. Now we're communicating. OK then, here's the deal. You can see Don, but you can't hear him and he can't see or hear you. If you want to talk to him, you only have to ask…"
A panel slid back and there, next to the door, was a flat TV screen and on it he could see Don, sitting in a cell that looked just like this one. Like Charlie, Don was wearing a pale blue paper suit like hospital scrubs, and like Charlie he was sitting on a bench with his wrists and ankles shackled to a ring that led to a long chain that went under the bench and was bolted to the wall.
"Don!" He realised he'd broken Brackett's rules but the kidnapper just looked at him, smirking. "May I talk to him, please?"
"Sure thing, Charlie. Like I say, you can talk to him any time you like."
Brackett took a thing out of his pocket, like a remote control, and pressed it. The door to Don's cell opened and two men came in. Don stood up and the sound clicked on and Charlie said quickly "No!"
But it was too late. Don said "Charlie?", looking around for the sound of his brother's voice, as the two men grabbed him. "Don, I'm OK, I don't know where I am, there's this guy Brackett and - stop! Please! Stop! What do you want? I'll do whatever you want but stop it, please!"
Because they were hurting Don: one of them held him and the other one hit him, and Don was fighting, of course he was, that's what he did, but there were two of them and Don was tied up and oh god they were hurting him.
"It's all right, Charlie, it's over now. That was necessary, so you would understand, but it won't happen again unless you make it happen. You can watch Don as much as you like, but if you want to talk to him you can - so long as you're willing to pay the price. Now I'm going to fetch my other visitor and then you can get to work and earn your way out of here. OK?"
He patted Charlie's cheek affectionately, as though Charlie were his pet cocker spaniel or something. Charles Eppes looked resolutely at the floor and said nothing. Let Brackett think he was winning. The Eppes brothers would take him down. One way or another.
***
A paper plate of lukewarm beans and rice with a plastic spoon and a plastic bottle of water were pushed under the door and after Charlie had eaten the beans and drunk the water and recalculated the human muscle/metallic stress equations factoring in the possibility of food and drink he fell asleep on the bench. When he woke up he felt groggy and sick and realised there must have been something like sleeping pills in the food but there was someone else in the room, another prisoner in pale blue paper pyjamas, asleep on the bench at the other side of the room, just out of Charlie's reach.
The screen was still showing Don, and there was another prisoner in the room with Don now, too, an older man with grey hair. Charlie's guy was younger, perhaps in his mid thirties, with sandy hair. He looked fit, in the way that David or Colby did, that slightly pumped up, runs-every-day-pumps-iron kind of look. He wondered what the man did. Another policeman, like Don?
Blue eyes opened.
"Hello?"
"Hi. Charlie Epps. I'd offer to shake hands but, uh, I'm a bit tied up at the moment."
"Daniel Jackson."
Daniel Jackson sat up, rubbed his head, rubbed his eyes, examined the chain, his shackles, the paper pyjamas, the bench, the cell and Charlie respectively.
Last of all, he looked at the screen.
"Oh perfect," he said irritably.
"That's my brother, Don Eppes. He's with the FBI."
"Uhuh. That's my… friend… Jack O'Neill. He's a retired airforce general."
"The guy who did this to us is called Brackett. Well, that's what he said his name is, anyway."
"Yeah… er, Charlie, is it?"
"Yeah."
"Look, Charlie, no offence or anything, but it's a classic interrogation technique to put someone into the same cell with a prisoner so that they bond and all that, so that you tell your kindly cellmate all the things that they can't torture out of you. You know? So - like I said, no offence - I'm going to have to assume you're one of the bad guys till otherwise demonstrated, OK?"
That had to be the fastest, as well as the weirdest, speech Charlie had ever heard in his life. But it made a kind of sense, after all. If Daniel and this Jack guy were military they might have all kinds of secrets and they'd probably been trained to withstand torture. But then, where did he and Don fit in? Although, given some of the consulting work he'd done for different agencies…"
"Yeah. I get it. Good point, actually."
Jackson lay down on the bench and resolutely closed his eyes. Charlie, after a moment thinking about various game theory stratagems and coming up with nothing relevant to their current predicament, did the same.
"Brackett?"
Charlie opened his eyes. Daniel was still lying down, eyes closed. Charlie sat up and decided to start practical experimentation with the metal stress problem. He braced the chain with one foot and used the other to push against it - not hard enough to hurt his foot, just enough to stress the chain. The weakest link in the chain would be stressed repetitively along the same plane and after that, it was only a matter of time and power… the equations started to flow in his mind and he plugged in different variables…
"I said, Brackett?"
"Oh. Yes, sorry. Bad guy. Um… let's see. Tall, white, mid thirties, kind of ordinary looking. Suit, white shirt, no tie, underarm holster with some kind of gun, sorry. Don would have known. He said… let's see… he would go and fetch his "other visitor" and then I could "get to work and earn my way out of here." I think that was it. Does that help at all?"
"Never heard of him. But that doesn't mean anything. It's Jack who keeps track of the bad guys, mainly."
Daniel didn't open his eyes. Charlie kept on stressing the chain.
"Sorry, but what exactly are you doing?"
"This? Oh. A little practical demonstration of metal stress. I calculate that, given food and water and no, you know, physical, er, damage, working an eight hour day and alternating muscle groups, I should be able to apply enough stress to shear the weakest link in - approximately - seventeen days and three hours. Give or take."
Daniel opened his eyes and sat up.
"Seventeen days?"
"And three hours. Give or take."
"Give or take. Of course." He sighed. "OK then."
Daniel Jackson looked carefully at what Charlie Eppes was doing and then carefully looped the chain around his left foot and started to push against it with his right.
***
Charlie heard the door and immediately let the chain go slack, rearranged himself on the bench with his hands on his knees and sat up straight. Out of the corner of his eyes he saw Daniel, after a second, imitate him. Charlie felt his heart start to speed up and he lost himself for a second in working out his pulse rate and realising, distantly, that he was having a Pavlovian response to Brackett's return.
"Brackett."
"Yeah, I kind of guessed. Charlie here briefed me. But he couldn't tell me what exactly this is all about?"
Brackett didn't do the scary stop-you-breathing thing with Daniel, which seemed kind of mean, Charlie thought, but then he also seemed to be very careful to keep well out of Daniel's reach. He calculated the furthest Daniel could reach, in any configuration of his chain, and mentally drew a red sphere sectioned by the room's walls and bounding Daniel's space. Yes, Brackett was very carefully staying outside that space.
"What, you don't want to talk to Jack?"
"He's an old work colleague. A *retired* work colleague. Why the hell would I want to talk to him?"
"Daniel, I'm disappointed. You're going to try the 'I don't know him, I'm not going to be upset if you torture him' ploy? Really? I mean, you realise I'm going to do it anyway, right?"
"Yeah, well, you know, bad guys are usually pretty stupid in my experience, so I figured it was worth a try."
Brackett took the remote out of his pocket and Charlie said, quickly, "I didn't ask you, leave Don alone-"
And then Brackett looked at him and he realised he'd spoken without being asked and that was against the Rules. "Please?" he said, feeling every bit as pathetic as it sounded.
Brackett smiled. "Just for you, Charlie."
He watched the screen and the two men came into the room again only this time it was the other man they grabbed and Don was yelling and straining against his chains but he couldn't reach the men or Jack and Daniel was watching and his face was all frozen and they were hurting the other man and suddenly Daniel said "Yes, all right, stop it! Enough! Stop it now! I get it, OK, I get it."
But Brackett just looked at him. He hadn't said he'd do what Brackett wanted, Charlie realised.
"He'll do it," Charlie said. "Whatever it is you want us to do, we'll both do it, OK? OK Daniel?"
Brackett looked at Daniel and raised his eyebrow. Don was fighting the chains trying to reach the guys who were hurting Jack but it was like the bad guys had drawn Charlie's red sphere too and they kept Jack outside of the imaginary sphere that Don could have reached and one of them was holding him, the way they had held Don, and the other one was…god, just stop. Then he realised he was yelling and he heard himself, "Stop. Just stop." Over and over.
Then it was - over, that is. And they were all looking at him.
He curled up on the bench, pulled up his feet, wrapped his hands around his knees. If Brackett was going to come into the cell every day then there would be some time they weren't able to work on the stress variables which would be another factor to plug into the equation so if t=19…
***
"Last time, they were drugged," he said. More beans, rice and water. Daniel ignored him and started in on the food. "I mean, it was all right. But there was some sedative effect, so that I slept through them bringing you here."
"Well, if they're going to bring someone else in here there isn't really a lot we can do about it, is there?" Daniel said grimly.
Charlie thought about it for a second.
"I guess not. And it would be another variable."
"Yeah. About that?"
"What?"
"Variables? Seventeen days and three hours?"
"Oh. Er… Charles Eppes, Professor of Applied Maths, CalSci."
"Ah. Wait a minute… Eppes… Eppes… The Eppes Convergence?"
"Yeah. That was me."
Daniel said nothing for a moment. Charlie wondered if Daniel still thought he was one of the bad guys.
"What's the square root of 1764?"
"42."
"You're kidding me."
"Math prodigy. Sorry."
"Yeah… about that whole 'bad guy' thing? I work with the airforce some times. Daniel Jackson, Egyptology."
"Oh man… you're *that* Daniel Jackson? The-pyramids-weren't-built-by-the-Egyptians Jackson?"
"I guess Brackett is collecting academics."
"And their military/cop brothers."
"Oh… this is going to be bad."
***
No sedatives this time. Charlie wondered, as the long hours unfolded, if being drugged wouldn't have been better. He and Daniel worked diligently but quietly on stressing their chains, constantly aware of Don and Jack on the tv screen. Both of their partners were pretty banged up from the beatings by Brackett's men, but they seemed to be coping. Mostly they sat and talked, the screens letting Charlie and Daniel watch but not hear, but for a while they tried exercising, experimentally working on ways to do sit ups and press ups whilst hampered by the chains, obviously sharing techniques.
Brackett came back, of course, and this time he had a box with him. It was one of those flimsy cardboard boxes that a ream of photocopier paper comes in, but as well as paper it had pencils and a calculator.
"There you go, boys. Now, I take it neither of you wants to talk to Jack or Don?"
"Not if that means you're going to beat the crap out of them again, no, thanks," Daniel said sarcastically.
"Well good. So I can expect your co-operation in a little scheme I have in mind. You see, boys, what I want is money. I'm sorry I can't come up with something exotic or interesting for you, but that's the bottom line. I need to retire, and for that I need a retirement fund, somewhere in the billions range. About five should be enough. And you two are going to get it for me."
"Five. Billion. Dollars? Boy, are you barking up the wrong tree," Daniel said.
Brackett's mouth quirked but he put the box of papers on the bench next to Charlie, not to Daniel.
"OK then. Charlie, what I need from you is the algorithm to break into a high security computer. You'll understand why I can't give a professor of applied math access to a computer, so you're going to have to work it all out on paper. And Daniel, you'll have to help him. Because when I say high security, I mean written in a language that only a hundred people on the planet can understand at all and only seven speak fluently, because it's not even remotely a human language."
He took a piece of paper out of the box and unfolded it to show the print-out of a computer screen. There were symbols, arranged in a circular pattern around a central empty space. "See, Charlie, Daniel here is a member of a top secret government project that uses a device called a stargate to travel to other planets via a stable wormhole. It costs a couple of billion a month to keep it running. We're going to steal six months or so of that funding."
"No we're not," Daniel said.
"I really don't think you want to argue with me, Daniel," Brackett said.
"Oh, I think I do. None of this is true, of course, but - if it were - if there really were some kind of top secret project that could take people to other planets, other civilisations, do you really think I'd let you just… shut it down?"
Brackett laughed. "Oh Daniel, Daniel - so many years dealing with the government and still so naïve? Do you really think that stealing the funds will shut down the project? If the government wants it to work, then they'll slush a few more untraceable funds into the pot and we'll all wind up paying a few dollars more next time the taxman comes around. Well, you all will. I'll be somewhere else, of course. With eight or nine billion on a nice little island in the sun, somewhere with no extradition treaties, I think I can have a very nice life."