NEW SG-1: Walkabout (gen, PG)
Title: Walkabout
Rating: PG, gen
Spoilers: into season 9
Summary: AU, apocafic. It's like fishing, Jack decides. You can't tell whether the fish is there, you can only cast the line out and hope to get a strike.
Notes: written for apocalypse_kree, and posted absurdly late. Prompt at the end.
In the end, the easy part is getting off-world.
Used to be, leaving Earth was a fairly simple thing to do. Sure, it was expensive: every time the Gate was opened it burned the equivalent of a days' worth of power for a small city, and the computing power necessary filled three racks of servers in a chilled closet behind the control room. But it was also straightforward: call up the dialing program, dial, walk twenty yards, find yourself on another planet.
Usually surrounded by pine trees, and being shot at by Jaffa.
Now, though, now it's harder. It takes Jack four months to work his way from the ruins of Washington to Mexico, where Quetzalcoatl--seriously, a snake with feathers?--has established his headquarters, on the ruins of an old temple complex. Good thing Jack kept his Spanish up, but it isn't easy for the last three weeks; he doesn't exactly blend into the local population.
Not to mention there is some resentment of Los Americanos who, many Mexicans suspect, brought this catastrophe on them. Not that they're wrong. Makes things a little dicey.
Along the way he's had a couple of chances, but none of them pan out. The Jaffa in Arkansas are well-trained, and spot him before he gets within a hundred yards of the al'kesh. In Texas, it isn't an al'kesh at all, just a wrecked death glider, with no hyperdrive capacity even if it weren't smashed flat into a rocky hillside.
He strikes paydirt in Mexico, if by "paydirt" you mean "takes out two Jaffa on patrol without alerting the others and then shoots the last two in the back". He's spent too many years sneaking through Goa'uld ships and temple complexes to be discovered once he bluffs his way into the ha'tak.
Of course, then he has to spend three days hiding in a closet on the cargo ship until there is enough activity to give him a chance of taking it out of the landing bay. Two death gliders come after him, but it's a surprisingly agile little ship, and he corkscrews hard enough that he's able to jump into hyperspace before they get a shot off.
He doesn't let himself wonder if he'll ever be back.
*
Jack ditches the cargo ship on PXF-443, a shithole of a world that even Camulus didn't want, empty as it is of naquada, any human population, or a dry acre within a hundred klicks of the gate. They spent a miserable three days here back in '99, made memorable only by a marathon gin game between Carter, Daniel, and Teal'c. At every chance Teal'c would take out the deck, his notebook and pencil, and the three of them would hunch together over the cards, hair dripping onto their hands while Jack kept watch.
Teal'c was ahead of Carter by four thousand points by the time they went back through the gate. Daniel refused to ever play cards with him again, and snarled every time Jack brought it up. Which Jack did as often as possible.
The forest is as wet and dark as Jack remembered it--at least some things remain the same. He settles for hiding the ship instead of disabling it, in the end. There is no way to know if he'll need it again, and it's always good to have a last-ditch refuge available. Carter, if she were here, would want to keep the little ship, but Jack isn't willing to take the risk. He isn't good enough to fool anyone into thinking he really is a Jaffa, and besides, being either Jaffa or Goa'uld isn't exactly a recipe for longevity in the Milky Way Galaxy anymore. Much safer to slide into the river of displaced humans fleeing the Ori offensive, keeping his head low and using the gate network, which at least can't be tracked. So far as he knows, anyway. He wonders briefly if the Ori know more about the gate network than the SGC does, figures they probably do, and then decides it doesn't matter.
He treats himself to a solid seven hours of sleep in the cabin before setting off at dawn the next morning, loading as much gear as he can fit into the pack he scavenged from the supply cabinet on the bridge. It's only raining lightly, and he makes good time, reaching the gate around noon. He forces himself to rest for a while, huddled under a fallen pine, before touching the DHD. He's fit for his age, and leaner than he was even before he gave the team over to Carter, but he isn't ever going to be able to run twenty K with a loaded field pack again. Besides, there is no knowing what he'll find on the other side of the wormhole. He has to pace himself.
The sun is just touching the ridgeline, and the shadows are lengthening, when Jack shrugs the pack into place on his shoulders and walks up the platform into the event horizon. When he finishes that first long stride, he finds himself blinking into a greenish sun rising behind the massive temple to Apophis on PMW-957. He can't go to Chulak, and Dakkara has fallen, but he may get some intel here if he's lucky. Wearing stained and torn sweatpants under a battered leather jacket that saw better days even before he had to hide from a patrol in a dumpster in San Antonio, he doesn't look much like anyone else, but he also doesn't look much like a tau'ri either. Someone will talk to him.
There are no guards on the gate, but there is a small crowd at the entrance to the temple. Refugees, maybe, hoping for charity. Jack shrugs to himself and edges into the crowd, sliding in behind a greasy-looking fellow in a striped robe.
"Do not step on me, peasant," snaps Stripes, and Jack forces himself to take a step back rather than reply in kind. He isn't backed up by over five hundred pounds of the SGC's finest anymore, and the SIG in his backpack is for emergencies only.
"Sorry, friend," he said. When Stripes nods, the pride on his face easing to petulence, Jack adds, "Ah, where you from?"
Stripes purses his lips, but answers nonetheless. "Drinsi, obviously. We reached the chappa'ai mere moments before the heathens began landing their troops, may Qetesh blacken their names and those of their ancestors."
"Yeah, I'm with you there," agrees Jack. Now is not the best time to point out that Qetesh is no more a god than the Ori are. Hey, wait: if Stripes is one of Qetesh's people, that means that--shit. That's a whole new sector to have fallen; the last intel Jack had (okay, five months out of date now) was that Qetesh and Camulus' old stomping grounds were still clear. The Ori are moving fast.
"I do not understand why the gods have failed to stop them," complains Stripes. "My family has supported the temple with sacrifices and prayers for a thousand years! Always before, the gods have defended their own..."
Yeah, we kind of took care of that for you, fella. Not that the Goa'uld could fight off the Ori, anyway. Which is why Quetzalcoatl is camped out in Mexico and Cheyenne Mountain is a pile of rubble: even the Goa'uld are on the run.
"So we can get food and a bed here?" Jack waves at the temple, which is still emblazoned with the serpent-symbol of Apophis. Despite everything that happened since, Jack still finds a sour pleasure in recalling the bastard's death, screaming down into the atmosphere as the Replicators ate him alive. No more than he deserved, really. But it is nice that his priests make the effort to feed the hungry.
"The Great God Apophis will always protect the truly faithful," says a priest, his stocky build revealing just how well the god's faithful followers have protected him. "There is sanctuary to be had in the temple, but I fear there is little room left," he goes on, expression grave.
The priest is right; the sanctuary is packed with people from a dozen worlds. Once inside and armed with a chipped bowl of the local equivalent of split pea soup, Jack ducks away from Stripes to scout the room. He needs local intel.
He finds his first clue in the corner, where an older man with Apophis' blazon on his forehead is surrounded by a bunch of kids about Ry'ac's age. They are human, not Jaffa, and they have those tight faces that warn of violence barely-leashed. Jack sidles up behind the older guy, hat yanked down over his forehead, ostentatiously slurping at his soup.
When one of the young men, a black kid with braids to his waist, leaves the temple an hour later, Jack follows him.
*
Ingara follows PMW-957, and Walloon follows Ingara. It's like fishing, Jack decides as he hunches over a damp and fizzling fire a couple of klicks up the valley from the Stargate on Walloon. You can't really tell whether the fish is there, you can only cast the line out there and hope to get a strike. A good fisherman can tell where fish are likely to be, but you can't know for sure.
*
He finally gets a hit on the line three planets after Walloon, after coming up dry with one Jaffa cell and an abandoned Tok'ra depot. It's been at least a month, maybe, and he's running out of things to barter.
Shanda is one of the more industrialized planets, in a backwater outside the System Lords' domain, but the Ori tide is washing up refugees here, too. It reminds him of Pakistan shortly after an earthquake, where the line of people walking out of the mountains seemed to stretch for miles. Shanda is like that, except the line stretches along narrow boardwalks between tall adobe walls. Windmills spin overhead, and the air is filled with their humming. The sound reminds him of the bees on that planet where he was trapped with Maybourne.
At least here, nobody is trying to kill him. Yet.
The Shandans have a registration table set up in the plaza at the end of the line, and carts loaded with packages of food; they are better prepared than Jack expected. "Name?" asks the tiny-yet-officious woman with black-and-tan hair behind the table. She is backed by half a dozen looming men and women in maroon jackets, armed with Jaffa staff weapons and sidearms Jack doesn't recognize.
He hesitates; he doesn't have any identification on him, not being deeply stupid. And while he is pretty far from home, SG-1 has earned itself a World Series reputation. "Harry Maybourne," he finally replies Anyone he wants to find him would likely recognize the name, but it would be meaningless to his enemies.
"Shanda has a strict policy for refugees," says the official, slapping the back of Jack's hand with a small green tag that beeps once and affixes itself to his skin.
"Hey!" Jack protests, but the tag won't come off, even when he pries at it.
"As I said, we have a strict policy. You have three days to locate lodging and ten days to locate employment; if at the end of three days you are not housed or at the end of ten days are not productive, you will be put to work by the regional council preparing nutriment for others."
Crap, what a system. "What if I leave before the time is up?"
"You may return in two hundred days and the clock resets. If you return before that time, you will be put into the council work program automatically."
Forced labor, or a practical method of dealing with an overwhelming immigrant population? Why not both? Jack stops asking questions, takes his small packet of rations, and disappears into the crowd.
By dint of some not-very-subtle questions, he locates a small community of refugee Jaffa in the northwest city suburbs, about an hour's walk from the gate. It's a small complex of huts, straw-brick construction with woven fences confining the not-chickens and not-goats. Around the huts are small plots of grey-green plants in careful rows: Jack doesn't recognize any of them. There's a handful of kids playing in front of one of the huts, and a woman sitting in the doorway, weaving a brightly-colored cloth on a small frame.
She looks up as Jack approaches, keeping his body-language casual. The glyph on her forehead is Lord Yu's; she's no one he knows, a middle-aged woman with copper skin, in a green dress. "Yes?" she asks, when he stops in front of her, making sure not to block her view of the children. There's a knife in her belt big enough to take off his head.
"Looking for work," Jack says. "I heard you might need some help with the... harvest?" He waves a hand at the plots around them.
She raises an eyebrow. "We are not so poor we cannot work our own fields, human." But she says it sardonically, and there's gold at her neck and her ears. She was wealthy, once: maybe she had servants, maybe her husband was a captain of one of Yu's ships, and now, thanks to Earth and the Ori, she's living in a hut with a dirt floor. If Jack had any energy left to care, he'd probably be a little ashamed.
"Yeah, okay," says Jack, shoving his hands in his pockets. The sun is bright and hot and he squints, wishing for his sunglasses. "Sorry, it's just--they told me I gotta work, or they'll--"
Her face darkens. "The Shandans will make a slave of you, yes." One of the kids in the yard shrieks, and she looks at them, then back at Jack. "Our children, too--if they do not produce, they will be indentured at their majority. It is no better than the Goa'uld," and she spits on the ground.
Jackpot.
He doesn't respond to that, although his left fist clenches in his pocket. "So why do you stay?"
"Where else can we go?" she answered bitterly. "The Ori are everywhere, and we are destitute. At least here we are not forced to worship: as long as our men continue working, we are free. But it is hard, so soon after winning our freedom at last."
"Yeah." He shifts his feet; his back's begun to twinge and he's been on his feet since before dawn local time. The weight of his pack drags at his shoulders, heavier than it was an hour ago. "Say, can I--"
But before he finishes the sentence, she has pulled a small stool out of the hut and placed it in the shade at her side. "Sit down, O'Neill of the Tau'ri. You are welcome here." Her smile is all sly innocence.
*
Ven'tac is La'Rann's husband, and the leader of the small Jaffa community on Shanda. At the moment he's also Jack's guide through a marketplace on some planet Jack never got the name of. It's all scrap-metal booths and fluttering yellow cloth under a hot gunmetal sky, and races from a dozen worlds or more yelling across the narrow aisles at one another. This isn't just a market, it's a weapons market, the last one Ven'tac knows is still running in this sector. And somewhere here is a cell of the Free Jaffa, operating quietly in the interstices of the growing Ori domination of the Milky Way.
They process down one aisle after another, anonymous in their dull robes. Jack left the leather jacket behind at Ven'tac's insistence (and as partial payment for two days of La'Rann's hospitality), but kept his sunglasses, and the SIG is tucked precariously into his robes. He should probably dump it and get something less identifiably tau'ri, but he's got nothing to barter with, and it's probably the last piece of Earth weaponry he's ever going to see. He tightens his belt and lengthens his stride, following Ven'tac around another corner.
They're out of the open marketplace suddenly and into a neighborhood: the buildings here are stone and wood, two and three stories tall with domed roofs. Jack's reminded of Greece or North Africa by the whitewashed walls and green, yellow, blue doors. Ven'tac turns right, then left, and at the second door (blue with green tile around it), he lifts the latch and waves Jack through.
Inside is a large, dark, cool room with some pillows on the floor and a wicker table that wouldn't be out of place at Pier One. There's nobody there. Ven'tac doesn't look surprised; instead he leads Jack through the opposite door, down a hallway, and into a large open courtyard. Palm-type trees shade it, and there are more cushions on the ground here, scattered in a rough circle around a tiny tinkling fountain tiled in the same colors as the front door. Six robed men sit on the cushions, deep in conversation.
Jack slides a hand into his robes, wraps it around the butt of the SIG. Just in case.
Ven'tac scuffs his sandal on the tile floor and the soft voices go silent. One of the men has a zat aimed at them, and a second has a staff weapon under his hand, although it's still on the ground. Jack doesn't recognize either of them.
"Ven'tac," says the man with the zat, but doesn't lower it. He's tall even seated, lean, and darker than Teal'c: the silver glyph on his forehead is startling against his skin. "Who have you brought to this place?"
"O'Neill of SG-1," replies a voice Jack does know.
From the shadows next to the door, just ten feet away, a robed figure emerges. Jack pushes past Ven'tac, his chest tightening. Blue eyes flash as the hood is thrown back, and Jack stops. The sarcastic comment forming on his lips falls away, and he just stares for a moment as his brain skips and stutters.
"Sorry, sir," says Mitchell apologetically, and steps forward to shake his hand. "I bet you were expecting someone else."
"Damnit, Mitchell," Jack starts, allowing the surprise to shift to anger, but Mitchell interrupts him, moving closer and lowering his voice. He looks worn, there's a bruise on his left cheek and his hands are scraped and scarred. But his eyes are clear, and he's grinning.
"It's okay, sir, we're okay. Sam's just up the street, and Teal'c's holding down the fort back on--" here Mitchell cuts off, shrugs. "Home base."
Ven'tac, bless him, steps forward to talk to the other Jaffa, drawing their attention away. Jack lets his eyes drift over Mitchell's shoulder. Someone else is there, in the shadows next to one of the carved wooden columns ringing the courtyard. "C'mon out, Daniel."
The shadows move, shift and rustle, resolving themselves into a broad-shouldered archaeologist with a P90 in his hands. Jack can't see his eyes.
"You're a long way from home, Jack."
"Yeah, well, the new landlords kinda blew up the place," Jack says, taking a long stride forward.
Daniel falls into him, or Jack maybe stumbles, and strong arms wrap around Jack's back, the dangling P90 bouncing against them both. It's a long time since Jack has touched anyone except in passing or ritual courtesy, since he's stopped moving, even for a moment. Cat-naps snatched leaning against the wall of a hut, or crouched in the brush upwind of a squadron of Ori soldiers; food eaten cold, half-rotted, or not at all. Daniel is solid, warm, and stinks of sweat and goats. Familiar.
Mitchell and the Jaffa are watching them. Jack closes his eyes.
"We'll get it back," says Daniel, and Jack isn't sure what it is, but just for a moment, he doesn't really care.
He takes a deep breath and lets go of Daniel, straightening. Daniel grins at him, and Jack leaves one hand on his shoulder. "Yeah, okay."
END
"There ain’t no moral to this story at all
Anything I tell you
Very well could be a lie
Been away from the livin'
I don't need to be forgiven
I'm just waiting for that coal black sun-cracked soul of mine
To come alive"
(Nada- The Refreshments)
ETA: find a follow-up to this story here.
Rating: PG, gen
Spoilers: into season 9
Summary: AU, apocafic. It's like fishing, Jack decides. You can't tell whether the fish is there, you can only cast the line out and hope to get a strike.
Notes: written for apocalypse_kree, and posted absurdly late. Prompt at the end.
In the end, the easy part is getting off-world.
Used to be, leaving Earth was a fairly simple thing to do. Sure, it was expensive: every time the Gate was opened it burned the equivalent of a days' worth of power for a small city, and the computing power necessary filled three racks of servers in a chilled closet behind the control room. But it was also straightforward: call up the dialing program, dial, walk twenty yards, find yourself on another planet.
Usually surrounded by pine trees, and being shot at by Jaffa.
Now, though, now it's harder. It takes Jack four months to work his way from the ruins of Washington to Mexico, where Quetzalcoatl--seriously, a snake with feathers?--has established his headquarters, on the ruins of an old temple complex. Good thing Jack kept his Spanish up, but it isn't easy for the last three weeks; he doesn't exactly blend into the local population.
Not to mention there is some resentment of Los Americanos who, many Mexicans suspect, brought this catastrophe on them. Not that they're wrong. Makes things a little dicey.
Along the way he's had a couple of chances, but none of them pan out. The Jaffa in Arkansas are well-trained, and spot him before he gets within a hundred yards of the al'kesh. In Texas, it isn't an al'kesh at all, just a wrecked death glider, with no hyperdrive capacity even if it weren't smashed flat into a rocky hillside.
He strikes paydirt in Mexico, if by "paydirt" you mean "takes out two Jaffa on patrol without alerting the others and then shoots the last two in the back". He's spent too many years sneaking through Goa'uld ships and temple complexes to be discovered once he bluffs his way into the ha'tak.
Of course, then he has to spend three days hiding in a closet on the cargo ship until there is enough activity to give him a chance of taking it out of the landing bay. Two death gliders come after him, but it's a surprisingly agile little ship, and he corkscrews hard enough that he's able to jump into hyperspace before they get a shot off.
He doesn't let himself wonder if he'll ever be back.
*
Jack ditches the cargo ship on PXF-443, a shithole of a world that even Camulus didn't want, empty as it is of naquada, any human population, or a dry acre within a hundred klicks of the gate. They spent a miserable three days here back in '99, made memorable only by a marathon gin game between Carter, Daniel, and Teal'c. At every chance Teal'c would take out the deck, his notebook and pencil, and the three of them would hunch together over the cards, hair dripping onto their hands while Jack kept watch.
Teal'c was ahead of Carter by four thousand points by the time they went back through the gate. Daniel refused to ever play cards with him again, and snarled every time Jack brought it up. Which Jack did as often as possible.
The forest is as wet and dark as Jack remembered it--at least some things remain the same. He settles for hiding the ship instead of disabling it, in the end. There is no way to know if he'll need it again, and it's always good to have a last-ditch refuge available. Carter, if she were here, would want to keep the little ship, but Jack isn't willing to take the risk. He isn't good enough to fool anyone into thinking he really is a Jaffa, and besides, being either Jaffa or Goa'uld isn't exactly a recipe for longevity in the Milky Way Galaxy anymore. Much safer to slide into the river of displaced humans fleeing the Ori offensive, keeping his head low and using the gate network, which at least can't be tracked. So far as he knows, anyway. He wonders briefly if the Ori know more about the gate network than the SGC does, figures they probably do, and then decides it doesn't matter.
He treats himself to a solid seven hours of sleep in the cabin before setting off at dawn the next morning, loading as much gear as he can fit into the pack he scavenged from the supply cabinet on the bridge. It's only raining lightly, and he makes good time, reaching the gate around noon. He forces himself to rest for a while, huddled under a fallen pine, before touching the DHD. He's fit for his age, and leaner than he was even before he gave the team over to Carter, but he isn't ever going to be able to run twenty K with a loaded field pack again. Besides, there is no knowing what he'll find on the other side of the wormhole. He has to pace himself.
The sun is just touching the ridgeline, and the shadows are lengthening, when Jack shrugs the pack into place on his shoulders and walks up the platform into the event horizon. When he finishes that first long stride, he finds himself blinking into a greenish sun rising behind the massive temple to Apophis on PMW-957. He can't go to Chulak, and Dakkara has fallen, but he may get some intel here if he's lucky. Wearing stained and torn sweatpants under a battered leather jacket that saw better days even before he had to hide from a patrol in a dumpster in San Antonio, he doesn't look much like anyone else, but he also doesn't look much like a tau'ri either. Someone will talk to him.
There are no guards on the gate, but there is a small crowd at the entrance to the temple. Refugees, maybe, hoping for charity. Jack shrugs to himself and edges into the crowd, sliding in behind a greasy-looking fellow in a striped robe.
"Do not step on me, peasant," snaps Stripes, and Jack forces himself to take a step back rather than reply in kind. He isn't backed up by over five hundred pounds of the SGC's finest anymore, and the SIG in his backpack is for emergencies only.
"Sorry, friend," he said. When Stripes nods, the pride on his face easing to petulence, Jack adds, "Ah, where you from?"
Stripes purses his lips, but answers nonetheless. "Drinsi, obviously. We reached the chappa'ai mere moments before the heathens began landing their troops, may Qetesh blacken their names and those of their ancestors."
"Yeah, I'm with you there," agrees Jack. Now is not the best time to point out that Qetesh is no more a god than the Ori are. Hey, wait: if Stripes is one of Qetesh's people, that means that--shit. That's a whole new sector to have fallen; the last intel Jack had (okay, five months out of date now) was that Qetesh and Camulus' old stomping grounds were still clear. The Ori are moving fast.
"I do not understand why the gods have failed to stop them," complains Stripes. "My family has supported the temple with sacrifices and prayers for a thousand years! Always before, the gods have defended their own..."
Yeah, we kind of took care of that for you, fella. Not that the Goa'uld could fight off the Ori, anyway. Which is why Quetzalcoatl is camped out in Mexico and Cheyenne Mountain is a pile of rubble: even the Goa'uld are on the run.
"So we can get food and a bed here?" Jack waves at the temple, which is still emblazoned with the serpent-symbol of Apophis. Despite everything that happened since, Jack still finds a sour pleasure in recalling the bastard's death, screaming down into the atmosphere as the Replicators ate him alive. No more than he deserved, really. But it is nice that his priests make the effort to feed the hungry.
"The Great God Apophis will always protect the truly faithful," says a priest, his stocky build revealing just how well the god's faithful followers have protected him. "There is sanctuary to be had in the temple, but I fear there is little room left," he goes on, expression grave.
The priest is right; the sanctuary is packed with people from a dozen worlds. Once inside and armed with a chipped bowl of the local equivalent of split pea soup, Jack ducks away from Stripes to scout the room. He needs local intel.
He finds his first clue in the corner, where an older man with Apophis' blazon on his forehead is surrounded by a bunch of kids about Ry'ac's age. They are human, not Jaffa, and they have those tight faces that warn of violence barely-leashed. Jack sidles up behind the older guy, hat yanked down over his forehead, ostentatiously slurping at his soup.
When one of the young men, a black kid with braids to his waist, leaves the temple an hour later, Jack follows him.
*
Ingara follows PMW-957, and Walloon follows Ingara. It's like fishing, Jack decides as he hunches over a damp and fizzling fire a couple of klicks up the valley from the Stargate on Walloon. You can't really tell whether the fish is there, you can only cast the line out there and hope to get a strike. A good fisherman can tell where fish are likely to be, but you can't know for sure.
*
He finally gets a hit on the line three planets after Walloon, after coming up dry with one Jaffa cell and an abandoned Tok'ra depot. It's been at least a month, maybe, and he's running out of things to barter.
Shanda is one of the more industrialized planets, in a backwater outside the System Lords' domain, but the Ori tide is washing up refugees here, too. It reminds him of Pakistan shortly after an earthquake, where the line of people walking out of the mountains seemed to stretch for miles. Shanda is like that, except the line stretches along narrow boardwalks between tall adobe walls. Windmills spin overhead, and the air is filled with their humming. The sound reminds him of the bees on that planet where he was trapped with Maybourne.
At least here, nobody is trying to kill him. Yet.
The Shandans have a registration table set up in the plaza at the end of the line, and carts loaded with packages of food; they are better prepared than Jack expected. "Name?" asks the tiny-yet-officious woman with black-and-tan hair behind the table. She is backed by half a dozen looming men and women in maroon jackets, armed with Jaffa staff weapons and sidearms Jack doesn't recognize.
He hesitates; he doesn't have any identification on him, not being deeply stupid. And while he is pretty far from home, SG-1 has earned itself a World Series reputation. "Harry Maybourne," he finally replies Anyone he wants to find him would likely recognize the name, but it would be meaningless to his enemies.
"Shanda has a strict policy for refugees," says the official, slapping the back of Jack's hand with a small green tag that beeps once and affixes itself to his skin.
"Hey!" Jack protests, but the tag won't come off, even when he pries at it.
"As I said, we have a strict policy. You have three days to locate lodging and ten days to locate employment; if at the end of three days you are not housed or at the end of ten days are not productive, you will be put to work by the regional council preparing nutriment for others."
Crap, what a system. "What if I leave before the time is up?"
"You may return in two hundred days and the clock resets. If you return before that time, you will be put into the council work program automatically."
Forced labor, or a practical method of dealing with an overwhelming immigrant population? Why not both? Jack stops asking questions, takes his small packet of rations, and disappears into the crowd.
By dint of some not-very-subtle questions, he locates a small community of refugee Jaffa in the northwest city suburbs, about an hour's walk from the gate. It's a small complex of huts, straw-brick construction with woven fences confining the not-chickens and not-goats. Around the huts are small plots of grey-green plants in careful rows: Jack doesn't recognize any of them. There's a handful of kids playing in front of one of the huts, and a woman sitting in the doorway, weaving a brightly-colored cloth on a small frame.
She looks up as Jack approaches, keeping his body-language casual. The glyph on her forehead is Lord Yu's; she's no one he knows, a middle-aged woman with copper skin, in a green dress. "Yes?" she asks, when he stops in front of her, making sure not to block her view of the children. There's a knife in her belt big enough to take off his head.
"Looking for work," Jack says. "I heard you might need some help with the... harvest?" He waves a hand at the plots around them.
She raises an eyebrow. "We are not so poor we cannot work our own fields, human." But she says it sardonically, and there's gold at her neck and her ears. She was wealthy, once: maybe she had servants, maybe her husband was a captain of one of Yu's ships, and now, thanks to Earth and the Ori, she's living in a hut with a dirt floor. If Jack had any energy left to care, he'd probably be a little ashamed.
"Yeah, okay," says Jack, shoving his hands in his pockets. The sun is bright and hot and he squints, wishing for his sunglasses. "Sorry, it's just--they told me I gotta work, or they'll--"
Her face darkens. "The Shandans will make a slave of you, yes." One of the kids in the yard shrieks, and she looks at them, then back at Jack. "Our children, too--if they do not produce, they will be indentured at their majority. It is no better than the Goa'uld," and she spits on the ground.
Jackpot.
He doesn't respond to that, although his left fist clenches in his pocket. "So why do you stay?"
"Where else can we go?" she answered bitterly. "The Ori are everywhere, and we are destitute. At least here we are not forced to worship: as long as our men continue working, we are free. But it is hard, so soon after winning our freedom at last."
"Yeah." He shifts his feet; his back's begun to twinge and he's been on his feet since before dawn local time. The weight of his pack drags at his shoulders, heavier than it was an hour ago. "Say, can I--"
But before he finishes the sentence, she has pulled a small stool out of the hut and placed it in the shade at her side. "Sit down, O'Neill of the Tau'ri. You are welcome here." Her smile is all sly innocence.
*
Ven'tac is La'Rann's husband, and the leader of the small Jaffa community on Shanda. At the moment he's also Jack's guide through a marketplace on some planet Jack never got the name of. It's all scrap-metal booths and fluttering yellow cloth under a hot gunmetal sky, and races from a dozen worlds or more yelling across the narrow aisles at one another. This isn't just a market, it's a weapons market, the last one Ven'tac knows is still running in this sector. And somewhere here is a cell of the Free Jaffa, operating quietly in the interstices of the growing Ori domination of the Milky Way.
They process down one aisle after another, anonymous in their dull robes. Jack left the leather jacket behind at Ven'tac's insistence (and as partial payment for two days of La'Rann's hospitality), but kept his sunglasses, and the SIG is tucked precariously into his robes. He should probably dump it and get something less identifiably tau'ri, but he's got nothing to barter with, and it's probably the last piece of Earth weaponry he's ever going to see. He tightens his belt and lengthens his stride, following Ven'tac around another corner.
They're out of the open marketplace suddenly and into a neighborhood: the buildings here are stone and wood, two and three stories tall with domed roofs. Jack's reminded of Greece or North Africa by the whitewashed walls and green, yellow, blue doors. Ven'tac turns right, then left, and at the second door (blue with green tile around it), he lifts the latch and waves Jack through.
Inside is a large, dark, cool room with some pillows on the floor and a wicker table that wouldn't be out of place at Pier One. There's nobody there. Ven'tac doesn't look surprised; instead he leads Jack through the opposite door, down a hallway, and into a large open courtyard. Palm-type trees shade it, and there are more cushions on the ground here, scattered in a rough circle around a tiny tinkling fountain tiled in the same colors as the front door. Six robed men sit on the cushions, deep in conversation.
Jack slides a hand into his robes, wraps it around the butt of the SIG. Just in case.
Ven'tac scuffs his sandal on the tile floor and the soft voices go silent. One of the men has a zat aimed at them, and a second has a staff weapon under his hand, although it's still on the ground. Jack doesn't recognize either of them.
"Ven'tac," says the man with the zat, but doesn't lower it. He's tall even seated, lean, and darker than Teal'c: the silver glyph on his forehead is startling against his skin. "Who have you brought to this place?"
"O'Neill of SG-1," replies a voice Jack does know.
From the shadows next to the door, just ten feet away, a robed figure emerges. Jack pushes past Ven'tac, his chest tightening. Blue eyes flash as the hood is thrown back, and Jack stops. The sarcastic comment forming on his lips falls away, and he just stares for a moment as his brain skips and stutters.
"Sorry, sir," says Mitchell apologetically, and steps forward to shake his hand. "I bet you were expecting someone else."
"Damnit, Mitchell," Jack starts, allowing the surprise to shift to anger, but Mitchell interrupts him, moving closer and lowering his voice. He looks worn, there's a bruise on his left cheek and his hands are scraped and scarred. But his eyes are clear, and he's grinning.
"It's okay, sir, we're okay. Sam's just up the street, and Teal'c's holding down the fort back on--" here Mitchell cuts off, shrugs. "Home base."
Ven'tac, bless him, steps forward to talk to the other Jaffa, drawing their attention away. Jack lets his eyes drift over Mitchell's shoulder. Someone else is there, in the shadows next to one of the carved wooden columns ringing the courtyard. "C'mon out, Daniel."
The shadows move, shift and rustle, resolving themselves into a broad-shouldered archaeologist with a P90 in his hands. Jack can't see his eyes.
"You're a long way from home, Jack."
"Yeah, well, the new landlords kinda blew up the place," Jack says, taking a long stride forward.
Daniel falls into him, or Jack maybe stumbles, and strong arms wrap around Jack's back, the dangling P90 bouncing against them both. It's a long time since Jack has touched anyone except in passing or ritual courtesy, since he's stopped moving, even for a moment. Cat-naps snatched leaning against the wall of a hut, or crouched in the brush upwind of a squadron of Ori soldiers; food eaten cold, half-rotted, or not at all. Daniel is solid, warm, and stinks of sweat and goats. Familiar.
Mitchell and the Jaffa are watching them. Jack closes his eyes.
"We'll get it back," says Daniel, and Jack isn't sure what it is, but just for a moment, he doesn't really care.
He takes a deep breath and lets go of Daniel, straightening. Daniel grins at him, and Jack leaves one hand on his shoulder. "Yeah, okay."
END
"There ain’t no moral to this story at all
Anything I tell you
Very well could be a lie
Been away from the livin'
I don't need to be forgiven
I'm just waiting for that coal black sun-cracked soul of mine
To come alive"
(Nada- The Refreshments)
ETA: find a follow-up to this story here.