Gen fic... my one true love...
So, apparently sg_fignewton is requesting SG-1 gen fic (I may be late to the party as is the norm... heh). Even if it's unfinished snippets...
I do have a fic which I'm not sure I'll ever finish, but it's Sam and Jack escaping from... somewhere with Sam being all McGyver-ish in the beginning...
... Must finish sg1teamficathon fic...
Be warned, I do like this a lot but I'm not sure where it's going... Wow, this is actually 3,465 words... maybe I *should* finish the damn thing...
---
Sam had no idea if she had been unconscious for two minutes or two hours when the cold in the floor finally roused her. She felt numb down the side of her body pressed against the concrete and she was shivering. She sat up and pins and needles sprung to life in her right leg, making her whimper. She leaned forward and tried to knead the muscles back into life as the leg felt like a dead piece of wood. She bent it back against herself and stretched it out straight again and life and warmth finally started flowing through the abused limb. Sam pushed herself onto her haunches and stood, using the wall to lever herself upright.
Sam brought her left arm up, palm outstretched and slapped herself across the face, back and forth, two stinging blows that brought tears to her eyes.
“Get it together,” she said grimly to the empty room. Her cheek tingled with warmth and she held onto the feeling, shutting out anything else until her breathing was under control and the black panic that had arisen unbidden was quelled.
Sam stumbled away from the wall and made her way into the small bathroom she had just noticed off the cold room she was currently in. She pushed her way inside, opening the door further and placed her palms flat on the counter to either side of the metal sink, fighting for control.
There was an electric toothbrush to one side of the faucet, looking up at her with it’s impassive face of bristles. A new bottle of mouthwash and an unopened package of dental floss sat beside it.
Sam opened the cold tap up full, a spray of fine droplets pattering her stomach. She took a breath and plunged her head beneath the water, gasping for air and against the chill when she pulled her head free, flicking her wet hair behind her. She put both hands beneath the water and splashed what gathered there on her face, trying to shock herself out of the terrible weariness that was trying to take her body back down. There was a caramel coloured hand towel draped over a rack behind her. She pulled it free and wiped the water out of her eyes. She dropped the towel back onto the sink beside her and put her wrists back under the cold water while she thought.
How on earth had she ended up here?
Sam made her way back out to the main room now she could focus better and assessed her situation. The floor was polished concrete but there were two rugs, but the same thick pile but light blue in colour. There was a desk in one corner that was made of a honey-coloured wood. There was only a pitcher of water on it with a glass sitting beside.
The door to this room was the thing that truly scared her though. The one thing that made her mind deal with the fact that she was in trouble, and probably really bad trouble.
The door was normally sized, but padded on the surface with a thick layer of foam rubber, wine red. There was a small, square window set about half way up the door’s length, not even big enough for a small child to have wriggled through. She knew something was also missing from the door.
A handle.
There was a black panel on the wall to the right of the door. There was a light blinking on this panel and it was blinking red.
Sam reached for the water jug on the desk. As she reached forward she noticed that her hand was trembling. She had thought that her shakiness was due to her disorientation but she thought that perhaps it was a sign of something more sinister. There was a weariness in her body that she couldn’t seem to shake and she was still a little shaky on her feet.
Sam did another circuit of the room and the bathroom, looking for a weapon of some kind. Her search didn’t yield anything at first, but when she returned to the padded door, she looked down at the water jug off to the side. Sam picked it up and dropped it on the floor, the heavy thing exploding on impact. One piece was still rocking back and forth on the floor when Sam leant down to survey the damage. This piece was from the bottom, large, thick and snapped off so it formed a triangle.
Sam went back to the bathroom and retrieved the towel. Using the jagged edge of glass to get it started, Sam ripped the towel in two and then ripped again until she had a long piece of thick material. She brought that back over to the door and wrapped the bottom of the piece of glass on the material so she could pick it up and hold it without cutting her hand. She hefted the heavy piece of glass and swung her arm in an arc, the glass slicing through the air. She smiled grimly. It would have to do.
Sam laid her makeshift dagger on the desk carefully and then went to task, clearing the glass and spilled water away from the door as best as she could, hiding the evidence. She wanted anyone who came through the door not to see anything unusual.
Sam dropped the broken glass, wrapped in the remains of the towel, into the bathroom sink. Sam moved back out to the main room and to the door and looked it over critically. She couldn’t tell if it swung inward or outward but she could tell it opened from right to left. The window, also small, wouldn’t allow someone looking through to see anything directly on either side of the door. She placed herself on the hinge side of the door and lowered herself to a crouch, the glass knife clutched in front of her.
And waited.
000
Sam was dimly aware that someone was grasping her wrist and was attempting to remove something gently from her hand. She was fighting her way back to consciousness and she knew there was a reason she shouldn’t be sleeping right then. She started wondering if she had slept through her alarm for work but in a rush everything came back and her hand spasmed, bearing down on what she had been holding. There was a faint cracking sound and a sharp pain that jolted her all the way back into wakefulness.
“Oh god, what have you done?” A voice in front of her exclaimed and she tried to focus on the pale blob in her vision, resolving it into the shape of a man hunkering in front of her. The pain in her hand was hazing everything she saw in white. She brought her hands up in defence, pulling her wrist free of the grasp that had held it. Warm droplets spattered her face and she cried out, trying to scrabble backwards but there was only unyielding wall behind her.
“Stop… you’ve hurt yourself!” Both Sam’s wrists were captured in strong hands and pulled down away from her face. The pain in her right hand flared briefly and Sam slipped sideways, vision greying. The hold on her wrists relaxed and instead an arm came around her, pulling her to her feet. She was half dragged, half carried to the bathroom and sat down in front of the toilet. Sam slumped sideways until she had cool tile against her cheek. She dragged her hand in front of her face, not wanting to lift her head and saw that a shard of glass from her makeshift knife had speared all the way through the fleshy part of her palm when she had squeezed it. There was blood coating her hand and arm and she was dimly aware that it was still bleeding.
She heard tap in the sink turned on. Something was held under the water and then she felt strong hands again, only around her ankles and she was yanked forward, out from beside the toilet. Sam yelped, bringing her arms over her head and turning her face to the floor, expecting a blow but none came. Instead she was turned onto her back and something soft was shoved under her head. “Just take a few deep breaths.” A gentle voice instructed and the wrist of her hurt hand was taken again.
Sam raised her other arm and struck out blindly. She heard a grunt as she connected with something solid but her left arm was then pinned beneath a knee. “Hold still. I’m trying to help it.” The voice commanded, her hurt hand again being taken under control. She felt the piece of glass embedded in her skin being touched and she screamed, her eyes flying open wide.
The man sitting across her chest, one knee pinning her left arm while he worried the piece of glass in her right hand, was not someone she recognised and Sam wished desperately to be able to fight through the fog in her mind long enough to remember just where she had been before this room. Offworld… had she been offworld? Had they done something? What had happened to the rest of her team?
The man bore down with his knee on Sam’s left arm and she cried out, her head swinging sideways. He used this distraction to pull the glass free. Blood spurted, hitting him in the face but he didn’t seem to notice. He was intent on getting a damp strip of material around her hand.
“What on earth were you doing with that thing?” he asked, snugging the makeshift bandage tight with a clumsy knot. Sam turned her head away, searching the room for anything that might save her. A hand grabbed her chin and brought her face in line again.
Sam bucked her hips upwards. She very nearly managed to throw the man above her off, so sudden and savage was her motion but he managed to regain his balance and bore down harder on the arm he was kneeling on.
“Stop this, Major Carter, I don’t want to hurt you,” the man admonished and she could tell he was trying to make his voice calm and soothing. She also knew that he was trying to take control of the situation. Sam’s head rolled as she tried to catch sight of where he had dumped the broken glass that had been in the sink when he had used it, but the glass wrapped in the towel was down near her feet and might as well have been on another planet for all the chance she had to reach it while he was still on top of her.
Despite the pain, she brought her right arm up and around, slamming it against his side while trying to roll left. This time she did manage to dislodge him. The man who she thought was wearing some kind of dark blue uniform, was pushed sideways and he muttered an oath as his shoulder slammed the bathroom vanity, making the mirror above shudder in its mooring.
Sam was up on her feet in the second she had free but a painful cramp twisted her leg out from under her. She fell heavily across the bathroom threshold but kept crawling, trying to get her knees under her long enough to be back up on her feet again. Then something caught her eye. There was a big piece of the glass she had been planning to use lying on the floor by the door, obviously forgotten. It still had some of her shirt around the base. Sam wrenched herself forward, grasping it in her left hand by the end still protected and used the door to push herself erect.
She turned, the glass held in front of herself to face the uniformed man, now standing in the bathroom doorway. “Were you planning on killing me with that?” he asked, speaking softly and calmly as if talking to a wounded animal, which Sam figured she was by that point.
“Where is the rest of my team?” Sam ground out. She widened her stance, holding the glass low and at a slight angle.
“You need a six digit combination to get out of this room. There’s a numbered panel behind the black plate on the wall,” he said, almost as if he were explaining to a child. “You might hit the right combination, given a few months of trying every possible number.”
Sam was always a good judge of character in a crisis and she recognised that the man in front of her was bluffing. She turned her head slightly, enough to still keep him in the periphery of her vision and saw out of the very corner of her eye that the light above the door panel was now green.
He hadn’t locked it when he’d entered the room.
Sam moved backwards the three steps necessary to bring her up flush against the door and used her hip to push. The door gave way behind her. She grinned, still feeling a little disoriented and knowing she must look wild.
“No!” He yelled as she moved through the door and slammed it shut. She heard locks click into place and slumped down, knowing she needed to get moving but needing just a minute to catch her breath.
000
There was no one in the industrial-looking hallway when Sam peered around the corner, still with a death-grip on her hand-made weapon. There was another padded door a few feet from where she was and Sam moved to it, going up on her toes to look through the small viewing window. The room beyond was dim and she couldn’t see if anyone was inside.
Sam knew it was a risk, but she was hoping that the rest of SG-1 was being held close to her. She looked at the code panel set next to the door before using her glass-knife to pry the casing off. The inside mechanism was wired and not crystals like she’d been dreading and she smiled to herself.
Easy.
It only took a few minutes but Sam heard the locks go on the door and she pushed it inwards, stepping warily around and then sliding sideways, her back to the wall. She saw a figure in the furthest corner of the room, curled with their back to the door and she moved quickly, recognising BDU’s.
When she rolled the prone figure over, she found Jack, face slack but no visible injuries. Shaking didn’t wake him, but Sam found a similar setup to her own room she’d started in and used the bathroom sink to her a double handful of water, walking it back quickly into the main room and opening her hands above Jack’s head.
Jack coughed, swore and coughed again, rolling back onto his side. “Not funny, Daniel,” he griped.
Sam hunkered down next to him, taking a shoulder in her hand and shaking firmly. “Not Daniel, Sir.”
“Carter?” Jack rolled onto his back and blinked at her blearily. “’Hell’s goin’ on, Major?”
“I think we’re prisoners, Sir,” Sam said, getting her arm under Jack’s back and pushing him upright. “I think we’ve been drugged, I don’t really remember how we got here.”
“Where’s here?” Jack asked, shaking his head and scrubbing a hand over his face, looking as groggy as Sam still felt.
“Don’t know that either, but I’ve opened your door so I’d say we should get out of here and reassess later.”
Jack took a moment to blink up at Sam as she stood and offered him a hand. “You look like hell,” he noted dryly.
000
It took another ten minutes to check the remaining cells on their floor and find they didn’t contain either Daniel or Teal’c, Sam sure they would be discovered at every turn. Jack was looking steadier and more concerned with each new empty cell.
“Where the hell are they?” he grumbled as they ran out of rooms to check.
“Another floor, another facility maybe? Hell, might be being interrogated as we speak,” Sam answered, knowing she sounded as frustrated as she felt. While they were together, Sam always had hope. It was when her team was separated that she really started to worry. “Sir? What do you want to do?”
“We have no way of knowing where they are. We should try and make it back to the ‘gate, get reinforcements. Anything coming back to you about where we are?”
“I’m not sure we’re offworld,” Sam said uncertainly.
“What makes you say that?”
“There was an electric toothbrush in the bathroom of my cell.”
“Ah,” Jack said, nodding. “So, what? NID maybe?”
“We can’t just assume it’s them every time, Sir,” Sam chastised, smiling tiredly.
“I just find it makes life less complicated.”
“So, up and out? You think we’re underground?” Sam guessed, plucking her shirt away from her stomach that was sticking with sweat.
“Yeah, I get that feeling,” Jack agreed, nodding at the stairwell at the end of the hallway.
Sam knew it tore him up inside to do it, but she also agreed that their best chance was to get themselves free, so they could concentrate on mounting a rescue. It didn’t help that they had no idea where they were. Being on earth would make things a little easier, but despite the presence of familiar objects, Sam was starting to doubt her initial assessment.
Something just didn’t feel right.
000
Four hours later and Jack was saying, “So, not so much with the Kansas anymore.”
Sam shielded her eyes, looking up at the violent-tinged sky and the day-washed shadow of three distinct moons. They were standing on the side of a street, next to what at first would look like a run-down warehouse but they knew to be just the entry point to a multi-levelled underground complex that held labs, offices and in the lower depths, cells. They’d come into contact with surprisingly few guards and as a result, Sam had traded her makeshift weapon for a stubby, blue firearm and Jack had a long rod that incapacitated whoever was hit with it when a trigger was thumbed.
He’d relieved the man of it who’d tried to use it on him.
“Does any of this look familiar?” Sam asked, falling into step behind Jack as he jogged across the street and into an alleyway opposite.
“Apart from the three-moon thing, this could be anywhere on Earth,” Jack said, snugging the rod against his side so anyone in the street wouldn’t immediately spot it. Sam did the same, tucking her revolver against her ribs.
“What was our last mission?”
“’564,” Jack answered, moving down the alleyway, trailing a hand against the wall and halting when they reached a corner. The sounds of people and movement had grown as they’d made their way down and he could see coming out of the alleyway, a busy-looking city street. The people moving passed were mostly dressed in non-descript greys and blacks and Jack looked down at his own dark green BDUs and then across at Sam.
They both looked like hell.
“Farming colony. Agriculture and crumbly walls,” Sam recounted, remembering how excited Daniel had been about the initial surveys of the planet that had shown a vast ring of partially collapsed temples on the outskirts of the populated areas.
“Is there any chance this was on the other side of ‘564 and we just didn’t know it?” Jack asked.
“Highly unlikely.” Sam shook her head.
“But possible?”
“With the new Asgard sensors on the aerial MALPs, we can do a population reading of an entire planet’s surface, plus pull valuable environmental and technological readings. We considered something like this happening, a planet’s population developing away from the stargate and the Asgard tech allowed us to actually do something about it. PX7-564 showed a population of roughly twenty thousand, all concentrated in the outlying areas immediately surrounding the ‘gate. We didn’t get any readings to indicate a post-industrialised city.”
“But possible?” Jack repeated and Sam rolled her eyes.
“Anything’s possible,” she snapped and he gave her a raised eyebrow and a wry grin.
“More likely we were seized off ‘564 and transported?” Jack allowed and Sam nodded. “Okay,” Jack said, clapping his hands together. “Looks like we’re going to have to mug someone to be able to blend in until we can figure out just where we are.”
“Sir?” It was Sam’s turn to raise an incredulous eyebrow.
“It’ll be a gentle mugging,” Jack offered. “The last thing we should be doing at the moment is standing out.”
“Any likely candidates?” Sam asked, resigned.
“Bingo,” Jack breathed, watching a couple making their way towards their alleyway.
---
ETA: Please excuse the horrible number of grammatical errors in this thing... it was a stream of consciousness writing... *sheepish*
I do have a fic which I'm not sure I'll ever finish, but it's Sam and Jack escaping from... somewhere with Sam being all McGyver-ish in the beginning...
... Must finish sg1teamficathon fic...
Be warned, I do like this a lot but I'm not sure where it's going... Wow, this is actually 3,465 words... maybe I *should* finish the damn thing...
---
Sam had no idea if she had been unconscious for two minutes or two hours when the cold in the floor finally roused her. She felt numb down the side of her body pressed against the concrete and she was shivering. She sat up and pins and needles sprung to life in her right leg, making her whimper. She leaned forward and tried to knead the muscles back into life as the leg felt like a dead piece of wood. She bent it back against herself and stretched it out straight again and life and warmth finally started flowing through the abused limb. Sam pushed herself onto her haunches and stood, using the wall to lever herself upright.
Sam brought her left arm up, palm outstretched and slapped herself across the face, back and forth, two stinging blows that brought tears to her eyes.
“Get it together,” she said grimly to the empty room. Her cheek tingled with warmth and she held onto the feeling, shutting out anything else until her breathing was under control and the black panic that had arisen unbidden was quelled.
Sam stumbled away from the wall and made her way into the small bathroom she had just noticed off the cold room she was currently in. She pushed her way inside, opening the door further and placed her palms flat on the counter to either side of the metal sink, fighting for control.
There was an electric toothbrush to one side of the faucet, looking up at her with it’s impassive face of bristles. A new bottle of mouthwash and an unopened package of dental floss sat beside it.
Sam opened the cold tap up full, a spray of fine droplets pattering her stomach. She took a breath and plunged her head beneath the water, gasping for air and against the chill when she pulled her head free, flicking her wet hair behind her. She put both hands beneath the water and splashed what gathered there on her face, trying to shock herself out of the terrible weariness that was trying to take her body back down. There was a caramel coloured hand towel draped over a rack behind her. She pulled it free and wiped the water out of her eyes. She dropped the towel back onto the sink beside her and put her wrists back under the cold water while she thought.
How on earth had she ended up here?
Sam made her way back out to the main room now she could focus better and assessed her situation. The floor was polished concrete but there were two rugs, but the same thick pile but light blue in colour. There was a desk in one corner that was made of a honey-coloured wood. There was only a pitcher of water on it with a glass sitting beside.
The door to this room was the thing that truly scared her though. The one thing that made her mind deal with the fact that she was in trouble, and probably really bad trouble.
The door was normally sized, but padded on the surface with a thick layer of foam rubber, wine red. There was a small, square window set about half way up the door’s length, not even big enough for a small child to have wriggled through. She knew something was also missing from the door.
A handle.
There was a black panel on the wall to the right of the door. There was a light blinking on this panel and it was blinking red.
Sam reached for the water jug on the desk. As she reached forward she noticed that her hand was trembling. She had thought that her shakiness was due to her disorientation but she thought that perhaps it was a sign of something more sinister. There was a weariness in her body that she couldn’t seem to shake and she was still a little shaky on her feet.
Sam did another circuit of the room and the bathroom, looking for a weapon of some kind. Her search didn’t yield anything at first, but when she returned to the padded door, she looked down at the water jug off to the side. Sam picked it up and dropped it on the floor, the heavy thing exploding on impact. One piece was still rocking back and forth on the floor when Sam leant down to survey the damage. This piece was from the bottom, large, thick and snapped off so it formed a triangle.
Sam went back to the bathroom and retrieved the towel. Using the jagged edge of glass to get it started, Sam ripped the towel in two and then ripped again until she had a long piece of thick material. She brought that back over to the door and wrapped the bottom of the piece of glass on the material so she could pick it up and hold it without cutting her hand. She hefted the heavy piece of glass and swung her arm in an arc, the glass slicing through the air. She smiled grimly. It would have to do.
Sam laid her makeshift dagger on the desk carefully and then went to task, clearing the glass and spilled water away from the door as best as she could, hiding the evidence. She wanted anyone who came through the door not to see anything unusual.
Sam dropped the broken glass, wrapped in the remains of the towel, into the bathroom sink. Sam moved back out to the main room and to the door and looked it over critically. She couldn’t tell if it swung inward or outward but she could tell it opened from right to left. The window, also small, wouldn’t allow someone looking through to see anything directly on either side of the door. She placed herself on the hinge side of the door and lowered herself to a crouch, the glass knife clutched in front of her.
And waited.
000
Sam was dimly aware that someone was grasping her wrist and was attempting to remove something gently from her hand. She was fighting her way back to consciousness and she knew there was a reason she shouldn’t be sleeping right then. She started wondering if she had slept through her alarm for work but in a rush everything came back and her hand spasmed, bearing down on what she had been holding. There was a faint cracking sound and a sharp pain that jolted her all the way back into wakefulness.
“Oh god, what have you done?” A voice in front of her exclaimed and she tried to focus on the pale blob in her vision, resolving it into the shape of a man hunkering in front of her. The pain in her hand was hazing everything she saw in white. She brought her hands up in defence, pulling her wrist free of the grasp that had held it. Warm droplets spattered her face and she cried out, trying to scrabble backwards but there was only unyielding wall behind her.
“Stop… you’ve hurt yourself!” Both Sam’s wrists were captured in strong hands and pulled down away from her face. The pain in her right hand flared briefly and Sam slipped sideways, vision greying. The hold on her wrists relaxed and instead an arm came around her, pulling her to her feet. She was half dragged, half carried to the bathroom and sat down in front of the toilet. Sam slumped sideways until she had cool tile against her cheek. She dragged her hand in front of her face, not wanting to lift her head and saw that a shard of glass from her makeshift knife had speared all the way through the fleshy part of her palm when she had squeezed it. There was blood coating her hand and arm and she was dimly aware that it was still bleeding.
She heard tap in the sink turned on. Something was held under the water and then she felt strong hands again, only around her ankles and she was yanked forward, out from beside the toilet. Sam yelped, bringing her arms over her head and turning her face to the floor, expecting a blow but none came. Instead she was turned onto her back and something soft was shoved under her head. “Just take a few deep breaths.” A gentle voice instructed and the wrist of her hurt hand was taken again.
Sam raised her other arm and struck out blindly. She heard a grunt as she connected with something solid but her left arm was then pinned beneath a knee. “Hold still. I’m trying to help it.” The voice commanded, her hurt hand again being taken under control. She felt the piece of glass embedded in her skin being touched and she screamed, her eyes flying open wide.
The man sitting across her chest, one knee pinning her left arm while he worried the piece of glass in her right hand, was not someone she recognised and Sam wished desperately to be able to fight through the fog in her mind long enough to remember just where she had been before this room. Offworld… had she been offworld? Had they done something? What had happened to the rest of her team?
The man bore down with his knee on Sam’s left arm and she cried out, her head swinging sideways. He used this distraction to pull the glass free. Blood spurted, hitting him in the face but he didn’t seem to notice. He was intent on getting a damp strip of material around her hand.
“What on earth were you doing with that thing?” he asked, snugging the makeshift bandage tight with a clumsy knot. Sam turned her head away, searching the room for anything that might save her. A hand grabbed her chin and brought her face in line again.
Sam bucked her hips upwards. She very nearly managed to throw the man above her off, so sudden and savage was her motion but he managed to regain his balance and bore down harder on the arm he was kneeling on.
“Stop this, Major Carter, I don’t want to hurt you,” the man admonished and she could tell he was trying to make his voice calm and soothing. She also knew that he was trying to take control of the situation. Sam’s head rolled as she tried to catch sight of where he had dumped the broken glass that had been in the sink when he had used it, but the glass wrapped in the towel was down near her feet and might as well have been on another planet for all the chance she had to reach it while he was still on top of her.
Despite the pain, she brought her right arm up and around, slamming it against his side while trying to roll left. This time she did manage to dislodge him. The man who she thought was wearing some kind of dark blue uniform, was pushed sideways and he muttered an oath as his shoulder slammed the bathroom vanity, making the mirror above shudder in its mooring.
Sam was up on her feet in the second she had free but a painful cramp twisted her leg out from under her. She fell heavily across the bathroom threshold but kept crawling, trying to get her knees under her long enough to be back up on her feet again. Then something caught her eye. There was a big piece of the glass she had been planning to use lying on the floor by the door, obviously forgotten. It still had some of her shirt around the base. Sam wrenched herself forward, grasping it in her left hand by the end still protected and used the door to push herself erect.
She turned, the glass held in front of herself to face the uniformed man, now standing in the bathroom doorway. “Were you planning on killing me with that?” he asked, speaking softly and calmly as if talking to a wounded animal, which Sam figured she was by that point.
“Where is the rest of my team?” Sam ground out. She widened her stance, holding the glass low and at a slight angle.
“You need a six digit combination to get out of this room. There’s a numbered panel behind the black plate on the wall,” he said, almost as if he were explaining to a child. “You might hit the right combination, given a few months of trying every possible number.”
Sam was always a good judge of character in a crisis and she recognised that the man in front of her was bluffing. She turned her head slightly, enough to still keep him in the periphery of her vision and saw out of the very corner of her eye that the light above the door panel was now green.
He hadn’t locked it when he’d entered the room.
Sam moved backwards the three steps necessary to bring her up flush against the door and used her hip to push. The door gave way behind her. She grinned, still feeling a little disoriented and knowing she must look wild.
“No!” He yelled as she moved through the door and slammed it shut. She heard locks click into place and slumped down, knowing she needed to get moving but needing just a minute to catch her breath.
000
There was no one in the industrial-looking hallway when Sam peered around the corner, still with a death-grip on her hand-made weapon. There was another padded door a few feet from where she was and Sam moved to it, going up on her toes to look through the small viewing window. The room beyond was dim and she couldn’t see if anyone was inside.
Sam knew it was a risk, but she was hoping that the rest of SG-1 was being held close to her. She looked at the code panel set next to the door before using her glass-knife to pry the casing off. The inside mechanism was wired and not crystals like she’d been dreading and she smiled to herself.
Easy.
It only took a few minutes but Sam heard the locks go on the door and she pushed it inwards, stepping warily around and then sliding sideways, her back to the wall. She saw a figure in the furthest corner of the room, curled with their back to the door and she moved quickly, recognising BDU’s.
When she rolled the prone figure over, she found Jack, face slack but no visible injuries. Shaking didn’t wake him, but Sam found a similar setup to her own room she’d started in and used the bathroom sink to her a double handful of water, walking it back quickly into the main room and opening her hands above Jack’s head.
Jack coughed, swore and coughed again, rolling back onto his side. “Not funny, Daniel,” he griped.
Sam hunkered down next to him, taking a shoulder in her hand and shaking firmly. “Not Daniel, Sir.”
“Carter?” Jack rolled onto his back and blinked at her blearily. “’Hell’s goin’ on, Major?”
“I think we’re prisoners, Sir,” Sam said, getting her arm under Jack’s back and pushing him upright. “I think we’ve been drugged, I don’t really remember how we got here.”
“Where’s here?” Jack asked, shaking his head and scrubbing a hand over his face, looking as groggy as Sam still felt.
“Don’t know that either, but I’ve opened your door so I’d say we should get out of here and reassess later.”
Jack took a moment to blink up at Sam as she stood and offered him a hand. “You look like hell,” he noted dryly.
000
It took another ten minutes to check the remaining cells on their floor and find they didn’t contain either Daniel or Teal’c, Sam sure they would be discovered at every turn. Jack was looking steadier and more concerned with each new empty cell.
“Where the hell are they?” he grumbled as they ran out of rooms to check.
“Another floor, another facility maybe? Hell, might be being interrogated as we speak,” Sam answered, knowing she sounded as frustrated as she felt. While they were together, Sam always had hope. It was when her team was separated that she really started to worry. “Sir? What do you want to do?”
“We have no way of knowing where they are. We should try and make it back to the ‘gate, get reinforcements. Anything coming back to you about where we are?”
“I’m not sure we’re offworld,” Sam said uncertainly.
“What makes you say that?”
“There was an electric toothbrush in the bathroom of my cell.”
“Ah,” Jack said, nodding. “So, what? NID maybe?”
“We can’t just assume it’s them every time, Sir,” Sam chastised, smiling tiredly.
“I just find it makes life less complicated.”
“So, up and out? You think we’re underground?” Sam guessed, plucking her shirt away from her stomach that was sticking with sweat.
“Yeah, I get that feeling,” Jack agreed, nodding at the stairwell at the end of the hallway.
Sam knew it tore him up inside to do it, but she also agreed that their best chance was to get themselves free, so they could concentrate on mounting a rescue. It didn’t help that they had no idea where they were. Being on earth would make things a little easier, but despite the presence of familiar objects, Sam was starting to doubt her initial assessment.
Something just didn’t feel right.
000
Four hours later and Jack was saying, “So, not so much with the Kansas anymore.”
Sam shielded her eyes, looking up at the violent-tinged sky and the day-washed shadow of three distinct moons. They were standing on the side of a street, next to what at first would look like a run-down warehouse but they knew to be just the entry point to a multi-levelled underground complex that held labs, offices and in the lower depths, cells. They’d come into contact with surprisingly few guards and as a result, Sam had traded her makeshift weapon for a stubby, blue firearm and Jack had a long rod that incapacitated whoever was hit with it when a trigger was thumbed.
He’d relieved the man of it who’d tried to use it on him.
“Does any of this look familiar?” Sam asked, falling into step behind Jack as he jogged across the street and into an alleyway opposite.
“Apart from the three-moon thing, this could be anywhere on Earth,” Jack said, snugging the rod against his side so anyone in the street wouldn’t immediately spot it. Sam did the same, tucking her revolver against her ribs.
“What was our last mission?”
“’564,” Jack answered, moving down the alleyway, trailing a hand against the wall and halting when they reached a corner. The sounds of people and movement had grown as they’d made their way down and he could see coming out of the alleyway, a busy-looking city street. The people moving passed were mostly dressed in non-descript greys and blacks and Jack looked down at his own dark green BDUs and then across at Sam.
They both looked like hell.
“Farming colony. Agriculture and crumbly walls,” Sam recounted, remembering how excited Daniel had been about the initial surveys of the planet that had shown a vast ring of partially collapsed temples on the outskirts of the populated areas.
“Is there any chance this was on the other side of ‘564 and we just didn’t know it?” Jack asked.
“Highly unlikely.” Sam shook her head.
“But possible?”
“With the new Asgard sensors on the aerial MALPs, we can do a population reading of an entire planet’s surface, plus pull valuable environmental and technological readings. We considered something like this happening, a planet’s population developing away from the stargate and the Asgard tech allowed us to actually do something about it. PX7-564 showed a population of roughly twenty thousand, all concentrated in the outlying areas immediately surrounding the ‘gate. We didn’t get any readings to indicate a post-industrialised city.”
“But possible?” Jack repeated and Sam rolled her eyes.
“Anything’s possible,” she snapped and he gave her a raised eyebrow and a wry grin.
“More likely we were seized off ‘564 and transported?” Jack allowed and Sam nodded. “Okay,” Jack said, clapping his hands together. “Looks like we’re going to have to mug someone to be able to blend in until we can figure out just where we are.”
“Sir?” It was Sam’s turn to raise an incredulous eyebrow.
“It’ll be a gentle mugging,” Jack offered. “The last thing we should be doing at the moment is standing out.”
“Any likely candidates?” Sam asked, resigned.
“Bingo,” Jack breathed, watching a couple making their way towards their alleyway.
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ETA: Please excuse the horrible number of grammatical errors in this thing... it was a stream of consciousness writing... *sheepish*