X Marks the Spot: Part Two
Cue Teal'c's voice: " Last week, on Stargate SG-1 . . . "
X Marks the Spot
Part Two: Penny Wise
Having Lacie’s dig invaded by mystery men with military backup didn’t seem like a great way to start the morning. Based on past experience, that kinda thing usually seems to end with me getting locked up, or beaten up, or arrested, or worse. I never thought I’d still be using the ‘bomb defusing’ section of my resumé this late in life, y’know?
But we didn’t get armed posturing and attempts at intimidation. Not even from Jack, unless you count his personality, which I suppose isn’t being real fair. I’ve got a little trouble being fair around Jack O’Neill.
“So whatcha been doin’ since high school, anyway?” Jack’s question broke the silence in the Jeep. “I didn’t hear anything about you getting a Nobel or anything, but I haven’t exactly been following that kinda stuff, if ya know what I mean. How many doctorates didja pile up?”
“None.” MacGyver tried not to look in the rear-view mirror at his cousin. The last section of the road from Pachna back to the dig was a battered and twisted washboard, a good excuse not to look. “There wasn’t much money after Dad died. There was even less after Harry left.”
“Crap. I figured you’d be playing the mad scientist in a lab all this time.” The silence thickened again. “What about the hockey? Hell, I thought you’d make the Olympic team -
“I broke my arms.”
Even without looking, Mac could hear Jack wince. “Both of them?”
“Yeah.”
“So what’d you do?”
And just how was he supposed to answer that one? “Oh, a buncha stuff. Wandered around. Lots of odd jobs. I ended up working for the Phoenix Foundation.” Mac braced for some kind of diatribe about Phoenix - left-wing lunatics? Enviro-Nazis? Anti-government anti-American peacenik freaks? - but Jack didn’t say anything at all. Sam Carter, however, turned and gave Mac a look that had him sitting up straighter and feeling a bit better about the whole morning.
The others - well, my son likes to kid me about how many friends I’ve got, and how quick I seem to make them when we’re traveling. Although he’s a fine one to talk - his mom was always the best at that, and he’s got her mojo plus mine, which is real unnerving when you think about it.
Dr. Jackson - Daniel - was real easy to talk to. Actually, I think it must be hard to get him to shut up sometimes. Not that I had much of a chance for chatting. By the time we got back from visiting Costas, he was getting along way better with Lacie - I’d’a given a lot to know how he pulled that one off - and all that conversational energy was directed at her.
Seems she’d had some kinda dizzy spell while we were gone, and he wanted her to get it checked out at the hospital in Limassol. It’s only about thirty miles by road, but it woulda taken over an hour each way, and she wasn’t having any of it. She did agree to hydrate a lot and spend the afternoon working outside in the fresh air at the canopied worktables, instead of in the stuffy underground passages.
And then there was Teal’c. He wasn’t chatty at all, but that wasn’t a problem; that was obviously just the way he was.
I absolutely could not get a line on him at all. That was the problem.
I didn’t think English was his first language, even though he had no accent other than a flat American non-accent you could cut with a knife. I couldn’t place the name, although that’s nothing unusual; it seems like half the kids at the Challengers Club these days have names that’re exotic, or imaginative, or just plain weird. And that’s not even mentioning the would-be DJs and rappers. Teal’c wasn’t a rapper, of course, whatever else he might’ve been. He was obviously military, or maybe a cop; something about him made me wonder if his involvement with Jack’s unit might be just a bit unofficial. Of course, that just brought me right back around to wondering what the heck the Mystery Team was doing there in the first place.
I figured out pretty quick, after we got back to the dig, that they were trying to get me out of the way so they could talk amongst themselves. They finally sicced Teal’c on me - he asked me to show him around the area near the dig, and I couldn’t resist the chance for a little one-on-one time, even though I knew it was a ploy. Not that we did much real talking while we were hiking around the folds of the dry hills. Like I said, he wasn’t much for talking. But what he did say made you listen.
“Mac’Gyver.”
“Yeah?”
“Do you notice something unusual about this area?”
“Yeah, a few things.” Mac rubbed the back of his neck, trying to dismiss an uncanny sense of unease. “How about you?”
“Are there no birds on this island? Or small animals?”
MacGyver mentally crossed ‘urban kid’ off his shrinking list of possible personal backgrounds for Teal’c. No inner-city kid would have spotted that. “There are a lot, or oughta be. And I haven’t seen any around the camp at all - not even in the trash - and no signs anywhere nearby either. Nothin’.”
“Remarkable.”
“You could put it that way.”
Teal’c cocked his head fractionally. “I believe I just did.”
They were walking on the flat bed of a dry watercourse that snaked between two ridges, but MacGyver felt his skin crawling, as if he was balancing on a narrow ledge above a sheer fall. The eerie silence didn’t help - no birdcalls, no scratchings in the brush. The afternoon was bright and still. The creeping sense of wrongness faded, returned, faded again.
During one of the respites, Mac broke the silence. “Y’know, you might be more comfortable without the hat.”
No reply - in fact, no response.
“Is the mark on your forehead something you’d rather cover up, or are you just trying to keep me from seein’ it?”
Teal’c stopped moving abruptly, as if a landslide had suddenly dug in and become a mountain. He regarded Mac.
“I only got a glimpse, but I can see there’s something there. Is it a gang marking? Or some kinda tribal tattoo?”
No reply.
“I’ve been wonderin’ if it’s something you’re ashamed of, or proud of in a private way, or maybe it’s just something most people won’t understand, and it’s not the kind of thing you explain.”
Teal’c raised one hand and slowly removed his hat.
They followed the trail back towards the dig in companionable silence. Teal’c replaced his hat just before they came in sight of the work area where Lacie Najjar and Daniel were bent over an enlarged photograph of one of the decorative murals, vigourously debating the symbolism of the images.
Like most of the real smart women I know - and I seem to know a lot of them - Lacie’s real stubborn. I think it comes with the territory of being a woman, and being real smart, and not letting anyone shove you off onto a sideline. Speaking of real smart, as soon as we got back, Captain Carter dived right into samples and measurements and readings with all the analytical equipment they’d brought, right after she’d packed up the samples she’d taken in Pachna while she didn’t know I was watching. With her other hand, she wasn’t above accepting a little help rigging their fancy comm setup.
Me, I wanted a nap after the hike and all the food Costas had piled into us, but it was worth shaking off the grogginess for the chance to work with her. Sam, Carter that is, must be the smartest woman I’ve ever met, period. Jack would probably say she blew the others all out of the water. That’s just the kinda thing he’d say. Problem is, he’d be right. I couldn’t keep up with her, and it was a real stretch just to keep her in sight, and it was the kind of real hard stretching that leaves you worn ragged but feeling good all over.
“You work for the Phoenix Foundation? That’s amazing. They do incredible work. What do you do for them? R&D?”
“Man, I wish. No, I work with our R&D sometimes, but mostly I’m in Operations. My buddy Willis is the head of Research - ”
“The Willis? Wow!” Sam Carter had a really, really nice smile. “Your people have made my work a lot easier more times than I can count. Some days, you’ve made it possible.”
“No kidding? I’m glad to hear that.” Mac gave her what he hoped was his most charming smile. “And that kinda work would be . . . ?”
“Deep-space telemetry. My unit’s based at Cheyenne Mountain, with NORAD.”
Mac looked over from where he was repositioning the wide microwave uplink dish for the satellite communications rig, and raised his eyebrows. “Isn’t this kind of a long ways off your beat?”
The really nice smile disappeared. “It’s hard to explain - ”
“Try me. I’m pretty good at understanding stuff.”
“Yes, I’m sure you are. And you’re a civilian, and it’s classified.” Sam studied MacGyver’s expression. There was a particular quality to that mulish look that she’d seen before. Probably on Jack O’Neill, although Mac was making a good show of being reasonable and easygoing on the surface. She wasn’t fooled when his next question was a change of subject.
“So how long have you and Jack known each other? He’s your CO, isn’t he?”
“We’ve been serving together about a year and a half.”
“And he’s at Cheyenne too?”
Sam nodded and tried to be very deeply absorbed in calibration.
Mac continued. “Kinda overkill, isn’t it? Two Air Force officers at a little dig in Cyprus? Or even at NORAD. They need colonels there? I’d’a figured Jack was the type to be runnin’ covert ops in the Middle East, not babysittin’ scientists.”
Sam’s eyes flicked to behind MacGyver just as he heard the crunch of boots approaching on the hard ground.
“Carter, haven’t you made any progress on our little communications problem there? We need to report back to Hammond. We coulda sent a carrier pigeon by now, except I didn’t bring any carrier pigeons.”
“I’m doing my best, sir.” Sam gestured at the microwave uplink dish. Her hair was plastered to her face by the heat of the afternoon. “It’s not the equipment. We’ve checked it all out.” MacGyver poked his head up from the other side of the dish, and saw Jack’s face twitch; his hair must have looked even worse than Sam’s. Not to mention being longer.
“There’s some kind of interference, and we just can’t punch through it for long enough to get a link established. Mac here had an idea to try blocking the interference by rigging a kind of Faraday cage around the antenna, but it didn’t work.”
“All we’ve got is chicken wire, and the holes in the mesh are too big to attenuate the interfering signal enough to make a difference,” Mac added helpfully. He looked at Jack’s face and realised that it was the wrong kind of help.
“You shoulda used smaller chickens. Can’t you boost the signal with some of those other doohickeys?”
“You mean the RF amplifiers for the spectrum analyzer? They’re for received signals. The output power’s much lower than the output of the transmitter.”
“That’s just terrific. They’ll be all worried about us at home, and when we turn up late for dinner, they won’t let us have dessert.”
“I know, sir. Request permission to go to the Western Sovereign Base Area at Akrotiri to report in.”
Jack frowned at her. “You want dessert that much?”
“I need to send them the data we’ve collected as soon as possible so they can start running analyses, sir.”
He nodded. “Get back here as soon as you can. And no pickin’ up hitchhikers.”
After Sam headed out, I thought about trying to get Lacie alone and find out if she’d noticed anything funny, with the dig or with our visitors. And I still didn’t know why she’d sent for me in the first place. But Daniel kept her pretty well sewed up all afternoon. And, to be honest, I was a little uneasy about being alone with her, after the way she’d acted last night. I suppose the good part about the extra people was safety in numbers - although the bad part was that Lacie and me were outnumbered.
MacGyver watched as Teal’c drew Jack O’Neill aside for a few moments of quiet speech. The two men left camp immediately afterwards, heading back into the hills where Mac and Teal’c had been reconnoitering. Mac ground his teeth and considered trying to shadow them - but he didn’t think he could pull it off. Not against those two.
* * *
Jack pulled his sunglasses off and peered around at the unpromising landscape. “You’re sayin’ the whole area has some kinda perimeter defense in place?”
“It does. The effect can be felt in at least two areas along every possible approach. I have counted eleven locations so far where the sensation of anxiety can be felt.”
“I noticed we didn’t have any rats or crows around camp. And the locals don’t like the place either - it’s pretty clear it creeps them out. So how come the dig staff was okay till now?”
“The answer may lie in the throne room. Lacie Najjar and her people were working there yesterday .”
“And sometime in the night, they all bugged out.”
“Indeed.”
“ ‘Cept for Doc Lacie.”
“And your kinsman. He did not remark on it, but he was clearly affected.”
Jack ran a hand along the back of his neck. He had to fight the urge to whirl around, to check his back for unseen enemies creeping up behind him. He experimented and found that if he took a few long strides, the sensation faded, and he could think rationally again, although he swore the skin between his shoulderblades was still twitching. Danger.
“ONeill.”
“What?” Jack’s voice was harsh.
“Why do you dislike him so much?”
“What?”
“Your kinsman. Mac’Gyver.”
Jack fished his sunglasses up on their lanyard and put them on again. “In case you haven’t noticed, it’s mutual.” Teal’c didn’t answer, in that very eloquent way Teal’c had of not answering because he was waiting for you to finish, even though you thought you had. The usual result of that non-answering was that you ended up saying more than you’d planned.
As usual, Teal’c won the silent standoff. “Mac thinks I’m a baby-eating murderer. He’s thought that since we were kids and I told him I was gonna join the military as soon as I was old enough.”
Teal’c raised an eyebrow a fraction of an inch. “You are certain of this?”
“Yeah. He told me so.”
“And your opinion of him?”
“MacGyver? He’s a sanctimonious know-it-all. And a treehugging eco-freak. And a peacenik wimp. That about covers it.”
Teal’c frowned. “A ‘wimp’? Why do you call him that?”
“ ‘Cause he’d rather get his ass kicked than fight back.”
“Indeed?”
“Geez, T, what’s got into you? And don’t give me any crap about how important ‘family’ is. We haven’t been ‘family’ for thirty years.”
* * *
By the time evening was falling and dinner was being prepared, Jack was remembering all the other reasons he’d found Mac so annoying when they were younger. And it had only gotten worse in the intervening years.
There’d been the instant camaraderie with Captain Carter, and the unexpected advocacy from Teal’c. Back at camp, Daniel was still managing to keep Doc Lacie out of the tomb, but he’d been charmed into the MacGyver cult as well. Mac was inside the rock maze, apparently doing something clever with the electric lights and reflectors made out of aluminum foil. Any minute now, Jack was expecting to hear one of his own team members start to say something like 'He keeps asking questions - are you sure we can’t answer any of them?' and they’d have another big argument about need-to-know and civilians without security clearances and the insane danger of clever guys who asked lots of questions in a way that made people like Daniel want to answer them.
Dinner looked like being even more aggravating.
They’d brought rations, of course, but that wasn’t good enough for the archeologists. Costas had loaded them up with food supplies when he’d found out that the groceries hadn’t been delivered, and now Daniel and even Teal’c were cheerfully helping Lacie set up the groaning board.
Jack stood by the fire, where Mac was doing something clever again with a contrived grill and scavenged metal fittings for shishkebab skewers. He’d shown Daniel some trick or other in building it that yielded a nice bed of coals in record time.
“Better save some for Carter. She’s gotta be back soon.”
Mac waved an absent-minded hand towards the table. “Don’t worry, Daniel made sure that Lacie set aside plenty for Sam. I hope she likes lamb.”
Half a day, and the guy was on a first-name basis with everyone. Jack squatted next to the fire and positioned his own loaded skewer. “I’d’a figured you for a vegetarian, Mac. And here you are eating cute little baby sheep.”
That got him a glower. “You can’t always pick and choose what you eat in the field. And those ‘cute baby sheep’ are yearlings, and they weigh about sixty pounds. And they’re raised naturally, without any chemicals or hormones - ”
“Thank you, Professor - ”
“Would you two knock it off?” Lacie had turned around from the prep table, where she’d been cutting the rest of the lamb into skewerable chunks. “Hell, Colonel, I didn’t invite your gang to this party. The least you can do is be civil. You should be thanking MacGyver for making the grill work so well. Without him, we’d be eating boiled lamb, which is just plain nasty.” Behind her, Daniel was wincing. Teal’c’s eyes were gleaming with concern as he followed the argument.
“Well, of course,” Jack drawled. “Good ol’ Ang - ” Mac made a harsh noise in his throat, and Jack smirked. “Good ol’ Brainy-Mac. Straight A’s, Eagle Scout badges, and he could even fix the toaster. ‘Why can’t you be more like your cousin?’ ” Jack stood up, a single sudden movement. “Some problems can’t be solved with duct tape and paper clips.” He stalked away, off into the shadows where the firelight didn’t reach.
Behind him, he heard the soft crunching of Mac’s sneakers. He sidestepped and turned in time to keep MacGyver from putting a hand on his shoulder. “S’matter, Mac? You don’t like my party manners?”
He’d been afraid that Mac would have a let’s-talk-this-over look on his face. He welcomed the glare he got instead. Glares were good. He could deal with glares.
“I suppose I should be glad that you didn’t just shoot her, huh? Or punch her out? Isn’t that your answer to everything?” Mac rubbed his chin. The scar was barely visible, and the gesture was probably unconscious, but Jack had to suppress a wince. He’d given Mac that scar during that last fight when they were teens, the one that had left them both bruised and bleeding and half-stunned, Mac sobbing and Jack boiling. The fight that had meant the end of summers in Minnesota, the end of fishing in the lakes, rambling in the woods, camping rough and feeling free. Ellen MacGyver had enough on her hands without having to deal with the O’Neill boy, if he was going to be unpredictably violent.
“There’s some things that do need shooting, whether you like it or not. Ever think of that?” Night had fallen, and the first stars were beginning to show, glints against the darkness of space. The moon was rising, glowing like a burnished penny. Jack remembered a time when he’d been able to look at the moon and not see a potential tactical strongpoint for an enemy attack.
Jack thought about space, and the metallic gleam of Goa’uld warships in Earth orbit, and the oblivious idiocy of people who should be smarter than that. Death in the skies and fools on the ground. “Naw, who’m I kidding? I bet that when soldiers get back from war zones, you hang out in the airports and spit on them. I bet you’ve been doin’ that since Vietnam. Or were you in Canada then?”
Dark eyes locked onto dark eyes. If Jack hadn’t known better, he’d have sworn the other man was getting ready to take him apart.
Jeep headlights cut a bright line through the darkness; both men looked away, to save their night sight from the dazzle. Carter had returned, hopefully with word from Hammond. Jack had made his recommendation that a full scientific team be sent in to take that damned throne room apart and ship the pieces home, with or without Doc Lacie’s consent. Teal’c believed there was another chamber hidden behind the walls, and Jack wanted to get the civilians out of the way ASAP before something nasty crawled out of it. He turned his back on Mac and walked away to meet the Jeep.
“Took you long enough, Carter.”
Sam didn’t seem to notice the acid tone. Maybe she’d heard it too many times to notice. “Sir, there’s something you should know about your cousin.”
* * *
MacGyver watched Jack walk away and wished he could plant a boot in the middle of that arrogant backside. Hopefully, the goon squad would leave in the morning, assuming the fascinating and very attractive Captain Carter had finished her assessment of whatever she was really assessing. He was pretty sure by now that her mission was the real point of the visit - although he had to admit, using a noisy and notorious archeologist for cover was a pretty nice ploy, especially in a place like Cyprus. It was a shame Sam would have to leave; heck, it was a shame she was stuck with a jerk like Jack O’Neill as a CO.
He turned to head back to the fire and the evening meal. The full moon was well above the horizon, bright enough to cast shadows on the pale sandy earth. It was a shame they weren’t in sight of the sea, where the water would be catching the moonlight and reflecting it even more; or maybe not. The seaside cities were sprawling farther every year, and the light pollution would drown out starlight and even moonlight. Up in the hills here, well away from the cities, the night sky was still clear and the air was still fresh. He could hear Lacie and Daniel laughing about something.
The laughter suddenly turned to shouts echoing across the camp, and the sounds of a scuffle beside the campfire: the clatter of metal on stone as the grill tipped over, a sudden crackle and shower of sparks from the fire, and the smell of scorching shishkebab. Then Lacie shrieked, a long scream with words that Mac couldn’t make out. He broke into a run.
The firelight threw wild orange flares and confusing shadows. MacGyver saw Lacie slumped in Teal’c’s grasp, and realised in horror that the big man was holding her arms behind her. Daniel was holding her face between his hands, trying to make eye contact; she was shaking her head, trying to fight off both of them.
Mac’s mind started racing down a mental list of the objects in the food prep area. He really didn’t want to have to take Teal’c out - he’d thought the intruders were well-meaning, he’d been a fool -
Daniel stepped back from Lacie, turned and saw Mac running towards them. “Aw, crap.” He held up a hand. “Mac. Wait. This isn’t what it looks like - ”
“Lacie Najjar is not hurt,” Teal’c broke in, his voice deep and emphatic. “We are trying to keep her from harm.”
Mac skidded to a stop. “What?!”
“She is unhurt.”
“Then let her go!”
“I cannot. We must not allow her to enter the tomb.”
Lacie stirred, opened her eyes and stared at MacGyver without recognition. She began to speak, but Mac didn’t understand a word: he couldn’t even recognise the language. He hardly recognised her voice: the words were a mystery, but the tone was haughty, harsh, demanding, dripping with contempt. Mac took a half-step back without realising he’d moved.
She shut her eyes hard and blinked, and for a moment looked like herself again. “MacGyver, help me . . . ” Her face was bathed in a weird light that cast her features into sharp contrast. Not firelight: the light was coming from under her shirt.
“What the heck - ”
“Aw, crap.” Daniel stepped up, dipped a hand into her shirt even as Mac began to splutter another objection, and fished out a pendant on a fine chain around her neck. Mac winced at the blaze of light; he couldn’t see the pendant clearly, but it didn’t look like anything from the local shops. Or from anywhere else he’d ever been.
“It must be from the tomb,” Teal’c rasped. “Get it off her! Now!”
At his words, Lacie exploded into movement as if every cell in her body had been flooded with adrenaline. She twisted in Teal’c’s grasp, so furiously Mac heard a bone crack - not in Teal’c’s hand; she had snapped a bone in her own arm trying to free herself. Teal’c’s eyes widened in horror at the sound, his grip loosening involuntarily . She pulled the undamaged arm away, grabbed a fistful of Daniel’s hair and yanked him off balance, half-spun to deliver a roundhouse kick to Teal’c’s stomach, then shoved Daniel again so that he began to topple towards the fire. Teal’c had no choice: he released her to catch Daniel before he landed in the blazing bed of coals.
Mac saw her turn towards the black mouth of the tomb entrance. He sprang forward and intercepted her as she began to run; she collided with him hard, knocking the breath out of him. “Lacie! Stop it! What’re you doin’?”
Her eyes met his, but now he didn’t recognise her. She tried to pull away from him, panting, bumping into the food prep table behind her. She reached behind herself with her good hand and scrabbled for a moment. When she raised her hand again, the firelight gleamed on the blade of the big cutting knife she’d used on the meat.
Mac yelped with alarm and tried to jump back out of her reach without actually letting go. It didn’t work. Her hand came down, and his left leg erupted into blazing agony and crumbled underneath him. Lacie leapt over his fallen form and ran for the tomb.
Pain was roaring in Mac’s ears. Far above the clamour, he could hear Jack’s voice, also roaring. “Carter!! Get after her!!” Teal’c was bending over him, turning him so the bright moonlight fell on the gashes, the solemn face concerned.
A huge hand clamped on the pressure point in Mac’s leg. The pain went on and on. MacGyver tried to focus on the hard ground under him, Russian verb conjugations, the multiplication tables, what people were saying, anything other than the howling demon that was his leg.
“What happened, Daniel?” Jack’s voice, clipped, no-nonsense. “From the beginning, damn it, not from the end, I can see how it ended!”
“Um, we saw the moon rising - Dr. Najjar was watching it - and, ah, suddenly she had her arms around my neck and was, well, she started coming on to me. Then she turned to Teal’c and started giving him orders. In Goa’uld.”
Teal’c spoke. “She commanded us to kneel and join her in worship of the Most Powerful and Glorious Goddess Aphrodite, or suffer the most terrible consequences.”
“You know, the usual - ” Daniel put in.
“We tried to restrain her - ”
“Yeah, I can see how that ended.” The harsh sound of metal sliding against metal - MacGyver knew the sound without looking, the sound of a magazine clicking into place in a firearm. Jack, no - “Teal’c, look after Mac. Daniel, you’re with me. Let’s go.”
Booted feet jogging away. Mac dug his fingers into the ground, tried to push the ground away before it swallowed him in more waves of pain, tried to sit up.
“Help me up . . . ”
“You should not move. You are hurt.”
“Yeah, I noticed that . . .” Mac made himself look at his leg, where dark blood was welling up from two long, deep gashes. “I’ve had worse . . . she missed the arteries anyway . . . ” He gritted his teeth and told himself the pain really wasn’t all that bad. He knew he was lying. “Teal’c, please, I gotta get in there before they kill her, she’s my friend, help me - ”
“I will help you.” At the quiet words, a wave of relief washed through Mac, strong enough to help him push the pain a little ways away. “Perhaps you can stop her if Captain Carter cannot.”
“I don’t get it - how could Jack send her in alone after a crazy woman - ?”
“If there is a Queen within the tomb, Captain Carter will be immune.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Later. You must save your strength. Come.”
~ tbc ~
Part Three is now online here.