Archaeology (22a/30)
Title: Archaeology ( Table of Contents)
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Nothing you recognize is mine. I gain nothing of material value from this.
Pairings: Gen
Chapter1a-- 1b Chapter2 Chapter3 Chapter4 Chapter5 Chapter6 Chapter7a-- 7b Chapter8 Chapter9a-- 9b Chapter10 Chapter11 Chapter12a-- 12b Chapter13a-- 13b Chapter14a-- 14b Chapter15a-- 15b Chapter16a-- 16b Chapter17a-- 17b Chapter18 Chapter19a-- 19b Chapter20a-- 20b Chapter21
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Chapter 22: Lux et Veritas
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1 May 2001; Stargate Room, P4X-347; 1600 hrs
"Where are my friends?"
Daniel tried to open his eyes but couldn't. It sounded like Jack. Jack's voice made his head hurt.
Someone else said, "With the light."
"Get them for me, will you?"
"They won't come."
"Well, try!" Jack snapped. Daniel's head pounded a little harder, and then Jack shook him just to make it worse. "Daniel, come on, wake up."
He opened his eyes just enough to decide to close them again.
"That's it," Jack said, slapping him.
"Stop it, Jack," Daniel tried to say. Instead, he said, "Nn."
"Oh, god," Jack said, but the slapping and shaking stopped. Fingers touched his throat, and some part of him that was still functioning properly remembered that that meant something was going on. "Daniel, can you hear me? Can you open your eyes again?"
Fine, Daniel thought grudgingly, dragging his eyes open with effort. Jack was blurry. His glasses must have disappeared again. "Tired," he said. He thought that was impressively succinct.
"Okay," Jack said. The blur moved away. "Okay."
"Jack?"
"We're on '347 again, Daniel. I'll be right back. Stay right there. I have to get the others. Carter!"
Daniel did not have a problem with staying there.
But the fact was that sleeping on the ground outside was very different from lying on a hard, unyielding floor made of whatever rock this floor was made of, and eventually, Daniel decided it would be better just to get up and move to somewhere more comfortable. His arms and legs had a different idea, though, and the first direction he picked had stairs, so he dropped down on the last step he wanted to try getting up and dropped his throbbing head onto his knees. His knees were a lot quieter than Jack.
Of course, Jack came storming back in with no regard at all for people who... Why did his head hurt so much, anyway, and why was he so tired?
He needed coffee. That must be it.
"Daniel Jackson," Teal'c said.
"Yep," Jack said as Daniel wished very hard (to no avail) that they would all go away and leave him alone, but only after giving him a cup of coffee. "Had to bring him back. It was the only thing that was going to keep him alive."
That was unfair. Another cup of coffee would not have killed him.
Someone sat down next to him, not sitting close enough for it to be Sam and too restless for it to be Teal'c. Daniel leaned very slightly toward it. It was definitely Jack.
"...thinks we're addicted to something here that alters our brain chemistry," Jack was saying when Daniel pulled his focus back onto the conversation. "And dollars to doughnuts, it's that damn light."
That was a strange expression. Why would someone compare dollars with doughnuts, except maybe to buy doughnuts, in which case it was just an expression about stakeouts and bore no relation to the matter at hand. Daniel still didn't know what the matter at hand was, though, so maybe they were addicted to coffee and needed doughnuts to go along with it.
"Oh, I don't see how that's possible," Sam said, but Sam thought everything was possible until she found something she didn't think was possible but actually was. The whole SGC was kind of like that.
What was going on, again? Something about the light--which, actually, made a little too much sense. Daniel remembered having to pull members of SG-5 out every once in a while; it was beautiful, he acknowledged, but the others had been absolutely obsessed with it.
Jack stood up. "Ah, screw it," he said, "we're turning that thing off."
"No," someone else said. Too curious not to look this time, Daniel peeked out of his arms and saw all of his teammates stomping off toward the light room. A boy he didn't recognize watched them pass.
"You stay here," Jack ordered the boy, and then they disappeared.
The boy wrung his hands, looking after the others. Finally, he turned around to face Daniel. "Hi," he said, raising one hand in a partial wave and smiling nervously.
Daniel braced himself and sat up mostly-straight. "Hi," he said when it seemed his head wasn't about to throb itself apart. "Who are you?"
"Um," the boy said. He rocked once on his heels, looked over his shoulder as if to see where the others were, then said, "Loran."
"That's your name?" Daniel clarified, intrigued by the boy's obvious understanding. He spoke with some unfamiliar accent--he must be an alien, but..."Your name is Loran?"
"Yes," Loran said, smiling again. "You're Daniel?"
"Uh...well...yes, I am. How did you--"
"I was hiding when you came before," Loran said, looking proud for a brief moment, and then uncertain.
Unsure what to make of him, Daniel offered a quick smile in return. Loran didn't look that young--about the age Daniel himself had been when he'd first been brought to the SGC--but something was odd about him. Then again, if he'd been hiding...
"Oh no," Daniel sighed. "Did we break into your home? You must have thought we were...wait, are you the only one here?"
Loran frowned in puzzlement. "Break...into my home?"
"Is this your home?" Daniel said, berating himself for using idioms that wouldn't mean anything to someone who knew literal definitions, however it was that he seemed to know even that much. "Do you live here?"
"Yes," Loran said again.
"We didn't mean to...come in without permission," Daniel said, reaching up to rub his nose and make sure his glasses were missing, because otherwise his eyes had gone haywire. "Sorry."
"Not--" Loran started, then seemed to think. "It's...O-K," he amended.
Wow. He must have been not only hiding while Daniel had been here with SG-5; he'd been listening the whole time and picked up a lot of their speech. "You're very good at English," Daniel told him, still trying to figure out how he was supposed to deal with the boy. "That's what we call what we're saying--this language."
"I'm very good at languages," Loran confided.
"Yeah, you must be," Daniel agreed. "You, uh...have you always been good at languages? That's my specialty, too."
Loran's face lit up. "Really? Is Jack your..." He paused. "Pater?" he said.
"Pater," Daniel said, excited. "You speak--uh... loquerisne hanc linguam?"
"Lo--oh, uh... Loperis han linjam," Loran corrected, but they were close to being mutually intelligible languages, with some effort, which was what counted. "Ego iam lopar."
"Wow," Daniel said, wishing he had a recorder with him.
"Then Jack is your...pater?"
"Oh, no," Daniel said quickly. "He's not my father. That's 'pater' in English." Then he thought about that question and the question before it and what it implied. "Did your father teach you?"
Loran dropped his gaze and started to rock agitatedly where he stood. "Uh...yes. We learned a lot of languages. Your friends said you had to come here. Do you like it here?"
Huh. Daniel wondered if people had looked at him like this when he'd first arrived on Earth. He must not have been a subtle as he'd thought.
"It's a very interesting place," he agreed, looking suspiciously in the direction where the others had gone. "Like the room with the light--have you been in there?"
"I'm not allowed to go in," Loran said with the casually quick air of something that was obvious, natural, reflexive, and it meant there was someone who did the allowing.
"According to your parents, you mean. Your mother and father."
Nodding, Loran clasped his hands together, glancing again toward the light room. "It doesn't work on me, anyway," he said. "I'm too young. Are you too young?"
"Hm...I don't know," Daniel said honestly. If the light really was addictive in some way, that would certainly explain why SG-5 had been so fascinated with it, and if it was age-dependent, then maybe that was why he'd been somewhat less fascinated than the others. On the other hand, Daniel must have been addicted, too, and in a bad way if Jack had been so frantic after coming back here. "How young is too young?"
"I don't know," Loran said.
They made quite a pair, then. "Were your parents too young?" he said, trying to establish some sort of upper and lower bound--
"Uh," Loran said. He swallowed, then said, "They liked it. I know this language, too," he added, pointing at the Goa'uld writing on the walls.
There was something missing--something huge. Daniel recognized the tactics well enough from himself.
On the other hand... "You can read this?" Daniel said. "I mean, you know what it means?" Loran nodded. "Could you help me?"
The Stargate activated.
("Daniel, no!" Jack yelled.)
"Move out of the way," Daniel said sharply, tugging Loran away from the 'gate as it whooshed open. When had that happened? The image was fuzzy in his mind--maybe it had been a dream.
Or maybe...
"SG-1, this is Stargate Command," General Hammond's voice said from a few feet away. Daniel looked past a surprised Loran to a pile of equipment near the DHD. "Please respond."
"They're not going to answer," Loran said anxiously as Daniel waited for Jack to return. "The light...they're...they won't come."
"Right," Daniel said, pushing himself to his feet with a grimace, pausing when his head spun. "Loran, c-can you stand in front of that, please? There's a--"
But Loran seemed familiar with the MALP already and moved in front of it to wave at the camera. "Hi, General Hammond," he said.
"Loran," the general answered after a brief hesitation. "Where are the others?"
Well. Apparently, Daniel had missed quite a bit. He made his way toward the MALP and sat down rather heavily next to Loran. "General," he said, blinking a few dark spots out of his vision and not sure why he was out of breath.
"I'm glad to see you, Mr. Jackson," the general said. "We thought we'd lost you."
Not quite sure what that meant--but beginning to think Jack hadn't been exaggerating about keeping him alive--Daniel said, "To be honest, I didn't have a chance to get the whole story yet, and I don't really remember much beyond--" And then he did with a flood of shame. "I yelled at you. Sir, I'm...very sorry about that."
"That's all right," the general assured him. "Do you need anything?"
"Glasses," he said immediately. "Uh...Jack said we're addicted to something here, so if we have to stay--"
"I'll send supplies through."
"And the...the hand-held computer with instructions that I was trying to figure out before. Loran says he can help with the translation." Daniel didn't think he'd ever worked on a translation with someone younger than himself before. It was an odd concept, but an interesting one.
"Stay clear of the Stargate, son. We'll start sending everything through right away. Anything else you need?"
"I don't seem to have my boots," he added, looking at his socked feet.
Hammond chuckled. "We sent you through in a bit of a hurry--we'll get you some shoes, too. Where's Colonel O'Neill?"
"Uh..." Daniel rubbed his eyes and looked over his shoulder, where Loran had gone back to lurking in the corridor leading to the light room. Loran shook his head. "They're in the room with the light, which we're apparently addicted to. They're, uh...distracted."
There was a brief silence, and then, "You're alone right now?"
"Loran's with me."
"Why isn't your team there?"
"They're trying to turn it off," Daniel said. "But I think they got distracted pretty quickly. I can go get them--Loran says it doesn't work on younger people, but I don't know if I'm over the limit, so until we finish the translation, I don't want to risk getting stuck with them. It doesn't seem to be harmful in the short-term--just, uh...mesmerizing."
"No, don't go in there," the general said. "Contact us again if you can't figure it out quickly. Are you sure you're feeling all right?"
Daniel took a moment to give that some consideration. "I think I'm okay," he decided. The first, small box popped out of the wormhole. "Oh, I see my glasses!"
"Wait, Daniel," Janet's voice said over the MALP. "I need to you to take your vitals and report them to me right now."
"But there's the computer," Daniel said, pointing as another box slid through. "I need to read it to turn off the light--"
"Sit down, look at your watch, and take your pulse," Janet ordered. "I'm sending some medical supplies through just in case."
Frowning, Daniel obeyed and dutifully reported his heart rate and assured her he was still breathing, and then asked, "Medical supplies?"
"If it were up to me," Janet said testily, "you'd still be in bed in the infirmary until I could be sure your heart wasn't going to stop beating again." Daniel felt his jaw drop open. "Yes, Daniel, that's what happened."
"But I'm fine," Daniel said uncertainly. "Isn't that a normal pulse? I don't have a blood pressure thing with me, but I don't feel like I'm going to...you know...die."
She sighed. "Drink some water, eat a little food if you can. Don't get up too much if you don't need to, and when one of your teammates gets out of that room, have them take a full set of vitals. I'm sending some instructions, and as soon as you start to get a handle on things, I need vitals and samples from all of you."
"Okay," he said. "But I really need to get up to get my glasses." Even as he spoke, a FRED wheeled through the 'gate and stopped just in the right place for the glasses case and the Goa'uld handheld computer to be trapped between the wheels. Luckily, Loran must have been listening, and he scampered up the steps, stretched a hand under the FRED, and handed both over, even turning the computer on for him. "Never mind."
"Keep us informed of your progress," the general said. "If you don't call back in the next few hours, we'll check in again, but keep in mind that I cannot risk sending another team to that planet if you all get stuck in that room. Be very careful."
"Yes, sir," Daniel said. "Thank you."
When the wormhole finally shut down again, Daniel scooted back to where he'd been sitting before and patted the step next to him. "Do you want to help me read this?" he said.
"O-K," Loran said happily.
...x...
"How did you do that?" Sam said when Daniel turned off the light.
"How long have we been standing here?" Jack said.
Daniel held up the Goa'uld computer. "General Hammond sent us this thing. Loran and I translated the writing on it. Among other things, it tells how to turn the light off."
"That long?" Jack said, shaking his head.
With a shrug, Daniel tapped his device again and said, "Apparently, the Goa'uld used to use this place as a...a place to get high on whatever it was that made us feel calm and happy when we came here before. But their symbiotes were able to keep them from going into withdrawal after they left."
"Then it is most likely I will be able to leave," Teal'c said.
Jack scowled at his happy expression. "Oh, how nice for you," he said.
"Wait a minute," Sam said. "If you just turned it off, how come I'm not getting depressed?"
"Perhaps it will take some time to feel its effects," Teal'c said.
Jack scowled harder. "Let's take advantage of that," he said, and walked quickly out of the light room. "Loran," he called.
Loran popped back out from where he'd been half-hiding behind the MALP. "Jack," he said.
("Daniel," Colonel O'Neill greeted, hands in his pockets.
"Jack," Daniel answered cautiously, looking up at the hero of Abydos.)
"All right," Jack said, planting himself in front of the boy. "Where did your parents actually go?"
The nervous frown-smile-grimace appeared again, and Loran averted his eyes. "Far, far away from here," he said.
Oh, Daniel thought.
"How far?" Jack insisted. "Which direction?" Loran swallowed and took a half step back but didn't answer. "Kid's hiding something," Jack said, turning back to the team. "You two, with me. Daniel...sit down."
"Jack, you're being a little hard on him," Daniel said quietly, glancing at Loran, who'd wandered to the other end of the room and was rummaging in what looked like a pile of his belongings but glanced back at them every few seconds. "Look at him--I think something's wrong with--"
"I'm not here to be his friend right now," Jack snapped. "Something killed four of our people and could still kill us, and if he knows something..."
"Four?" Daniel echoed, realizing too late he should have asked about SG-5 earlier when General Hammond had called. "You...you mean the rest of SG-5?"
Jack paused. "Yeah," he said, more gently. "We were too late for them. I'm sorry, Daniel, but we're not going to die here, and we're not going to live here forever, either. Stay here and rest, and keep an eye on the kid."
Daniel sat down.
Teal'c and Sam glanced at him, then seemed to decide that disobeying Jack would be the worst of a few bad options at the moment and followed him out of the palace.
He supposed he should trust Jack to deal with Loran properly. Jack tended to err on the side of leniency with children.
"That's my...mother and father," Loren said, dropping suddenly to a seat next to him.
Trying to hide his surprise at the boy's abrupt reappearance, Daniel took the device Loran was holding out. It was some sort of image-displaying technology that looked like a digital camera. Loran must have come from a technologically advanced world, then--if not more so than Earth, then certainly close.
Of course, pre-Latin Italic languages on Goa'uld worlds was something they hadn't seen much before; it was something Daniel associated with the Ancients, or maybe Machello or the Linvris, and others whose races or worlds opposed the System Lords and have never been completely conquered. Maybe Loran had come from one of those planets. He didn't seem afraid of Teal'c, after all.
Loran leaned over to tap the center of the image. "That's me," he added cheerfully.
"Uh...I see," Daniel said. The boy in the picture looked several years younger. "You were a lot younger there," he prompted, not sure if there was a more tactful way to say, 'are your parents dead, too?'
"Yeah, it's old," Loran agreed.
Daniel nodded. "Um. Yes. About that--"
The device was pulled out of his hands. "Can I take an image of you?" Loran asked, holding it up hopefully, and Daniel realized it really was a camera.
"Um," Daniel repeated. Should he be encouraging this, when it seemed an effort to dodge around a topic? Then again, Jack wasn't trying to be Loran's friend now, but Daniel didn't know how to handle the other parts with children that didn't involve being a friend, so surely he could do that. "Sure," he said.
Before he could finish saying the word, a bright light flashed at him.
Loran looked at the device and laughed. "What?" Daniel said. Loran held it back up to show a picture of Daniel with his mouth halfway through a word and one eye squinted shut. Daniel found himself snickering, too.
"I'm sorry that you can't leave," Loran said, "but it's fun here. There are a lot of things to do."
Suddenly, Daniel wondered if that was what he sounded like when he told people like Nyan that he was sorry the man was stuck on Earth, but it wasn't so bad, really. "Um," he started again, glancing outside and wondering if the others were coming back. "Right, about that. You've been here by yourself for a while, right?"
A look that was almost surprised crossed Loran's face before it turned into wariness.
"It's okay, you can tell me," Daniel said, hoping his age would work for him this time and wishing he'd spent more time with people his own age so he'd know how he was supposed to act. "My parents died when I was...fourteen," he offered. Quid pro quo was a mode of communication that seemed to span a lot of cultures and species. "My age, I mean," he amended. Linguistic shortcuts were pervasive. "I had lived fourteen years when my parents died."
"I'm fourteen," Loran said, which could mean anything from about ten to twenty, probably, depending on the planet's cycle around the sun, but it was probably close enough to Earth's terms, judging by what Daniel would have estimated for the boy based on looks.
"Did your parents die, too?" Daniel tried.
Loran shook his head, looking away. "They'll be back," he said in a small voice.
Daniel bit his lip. "You know, I...I'm not sure they--"
Footsteps announced the rest of the team's return. Relieved, Daniel turned, ready to hand the conversation off to people who would know what to do with it, but Sam was pinching the bridge of her nose while Jack bent over and scrubbed a hand through his short hair.
"What's wrong?" Daniel said.
"Oh," Jack said, standing up again as Teal'c kept a careful eye on all the humans in the room. "We're going through that...withdrawal thing again."
Daniel assessed himself and said, "I felt fine the whole time you were gone."
"Actually, sir," Sam said, "I'm starting to feel myself again."
Jack paused and seemed to consider that. "Me, too," he finally said. "What's going on?"
"Well, something other than that light must be affecting us," Sam said.
"Perhaps we should examine the device more closely," Teal'c suggested.
"No!" Loran said.
Daniel turned to look at him again, realizing that someone as smart as Loran seemed to be, and someone who clearly knew something about the light, must have figured out more than just the Goa'uld language on the walls.
Jack narrowed his eyes and marched into the light room. For the first time Daniel saw, Loran entered the room, too, following him. "Jack, don't," Loran pleaded.
"You know how it works," Jack said when Loran stood directly in front of the pedestal, blocking something. "You knew all along."
"No," Loran repeated. "My parents...when they come back, they'll--"
"They're not coming back!" Jack snapped. Daniel winced, his suspicions confirmed.
"They...they will," Loran insisted.
"Someone buried those bodies!" Jack yelled, and even Sam flinched a little at that. Loran fell completely silent. Daniel could see him trembling. "Now, how do you shut that thing off?"
And Loran ducked under one leg of the pedestal and opened it.
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1 May 2001; Light Room, P4X-347; 2000 hrs
Sam grimaced as Loran opened the pedestal's control panel and then fled the room, looking like he was about to cry. Colonel O'Neill closed his eyes for a brief moment, then ordered shortly, "Figure this thing out."
"Yes, sir," Sam said, eager to have something to do as the colonel followed Loran back out. She crawled under the pedestal with Daniel to one side of her and Teal'c to another.
"So...you found them," Daniel said quietly once the colonel had left. "Loran's parents."
"We found two partially-buried human skeletons by the ocean," Teal'c confirmed, "with stones marking each grave."
"He's been alone here all this time," Daniel said. "I can't imagine what it must have been like."
"You think he's telling the truth about this only working on adults?" Sam said, hoping to steer the conversation onto more productive--safer--ground. "Janet says he's addicted, too, judging by his bloodwork."
"Maybe it's just the light that affects people differently," Daniel suggested, carefully sliding one panel of the base lower to expose what looked like writing under it. "But it's not what we're actually addicted to, and whatever that is affects everyone equally. I got just as addicted, but I was able to shake off the effects of the light more easily than the rest of SG-5."
His finger paused on a symbol as he said it. Sam glanced at him, but he moved on, and she couldn't tell whether he'd just been stuck on the translation or caught up in the whirlwind of missteps and disasters that couldn't seem to let them go lately.
"Anything?" he said a moment later, looking at her.
"Uh..." she said, turning back to her own work. "Well, this is pretty standard Goa'uld crystal technology, but the way these are configured... I'd love to dismantle this and see exactly how it's set up." He raised an eyebrow at her. "In other words," she clarified, "I can probably figure out how to manipulate it, but I need someone to tell me what to manipulate."
"Perhaps this will be of assistance," Teal'c said. Sam leaned over to see what he was doing before she remembered that she didn't understand what he was reading, anyway. "The text states that human slaves cannot be removed immediately from the planet."
"Removed," Sam echoed in disgust. "Like the humans are pieces of baggage to move around."
Daniel perked up, though. "But useful baggage. The Goa'uld wouldn't have wanted them to die; it says here that, uh...I think this refers to an imbalance, in the sense of 'insanity'..."
"The withdrawal would have seemed like a sort of insanity, I guess," Sam agreed, shivering as she remembered a very unbalanced Daniel with a gun.
"Well, the whatever-it-is has to be...decreased?" Daniel said, squinting and leaning in so close his nose actually touched the base of the pedestal before he backed up and blinked rapidly. "I think that says something about a reduction."
Sam snapped her fingers. "That makes sense. If stopping cold-turkey kills you, then there must be a better way to stop."
Two puzzled stares fixed on her. "Cold...turkey," Daniel said, wearing a slightly disturbed expression that said he was probably imagining a hypothermic bird.
"It means stopping all at once," she explained. "Is there way to reduce the...output of this thing incrementally? And then we'd need to know the maximum safe rate of decrease..."
"These control the power level," Teal'c said, reaching over to point out a row of crystals in front of Sam's face. "The instructions say that each level must be maintained for a minimum of..." He paused, thinking for a moment. "I believe that is slightly less than thirty hours."
Sam sat back on her heels in dismay. "There are...these make up twelve switches. If we keep to that minimum, it'll take two weeks before we can leave."
"At least we'll get out eventually," Daniel said, leaning back to sit against one leg of the pedestal. "I've been on longer missions. We all have, if you count the Enkaran relocation."
With a sigh, Sam wondered why they couldn't have had this extra time on that other planet, that one where there had been all that unusual solar activity...until she remembered that she was now stuck on a planet with some of the most advanced technology they'd seen yet.
This might not be all that bad, really.
Just then, Colonel O'Neill returned, steering a tear-streaked but calmer Loran in front of him. "What's the news, kids?" he said.
"Well, sir," Sam said, setting the first switch and climbing out from under the device, "the good news is that we can turn it off."
"Don't let them!" Loran said immediately, turning wide eyes to look at the colonel. "They'll die, just like my parents."
Which explained how the boy's parents had died.
"He's right; that's what would happen if we shut it off all at once," Sam said. "But Daniel and Teal'c were able to translate the writing, and we've determined that we should be all right if we turn it down little by little. I've already turned it down a notch with no immediate effects, and if it turns out it's not working, we can always power it back up and look for another solution."
"Okay," O'Neill said, still looking a little suspicious. "So...what's the bad news?"
"It will take two to three weeks for the process to be completed safely," Teal'c said. Daniel shrugged from where he still sat under the pedestal, making no attempt to get up.
The colonel managed to find an optimistic outlook, however. "Two to three weeks in a palace by the beach?" he said. He took a breath and shrugged. "Teal'c, you don't have to hang around. Why don't you head back and let Hammond know what's going on."
"Very well," Teal'c agreed.
"You might have to move the FRED, Teal'c," Daniel called, and was interrupted by a yawn. "Sorry. I shouldn't have left it in the path of the kawhoosh."
Sam had to look away. After what had happened to Barber, and what had almost happened to Daniel, she wouldn't be seeing that vortex the same way for a long time. "And then you'll leave?" Loran said, looking up at O'Neill again.
The colonel glanced up at Sam, raising an eyebrow in question. "I think we all will," he said. "Right?"
It took her a minute to realize he was asking about the addiction and not about the problems and questions that would come with taking an(other) orphan home with them. "Uh, yeah. He should return to normal along with the rest of us."
"Then I can go with you?" Loran said.
"Sure," the colonel said easily, because it wasn't up to Loran to worry about the things that would make it more complicated than a simple 'sure.' "Come on--let's go see Teal'c off." The colonel looked at her and nodded back once toward Daniel before leading Loran back into the 'gate room.
"Need a hand?" Sam said, bending to reach toward him. Daniel grabbed her arm and pushed himself to his feet rather shakily. "You okay?"
"A little tired," he admitted, looking exhausted. "But very...relieved you're not all going to die because of..." He stopped.
She ushered him toward the 'gate room, realizing that, as much as SG-1 might feel that loaning Daniel to other teams was bad for his health, Daniel must feel that being loaned out was bad for the other teams' health.
Before she could say anything, though, they were back in the main chamber and Teal'c was dialing the SGC. "Oh, wait," Daniel said once the wormhole was open. "Can you tell them to send...ay, I should have made a list of what I'll need to finish the translations--"
"I thought you already did the translation," Colonel O'Neill said.
Daniel raised his eyebrows. "Of the tiny amount of text on the pedestal, yes, but there's more all over the palace, and there are rooms SG-5 never finished documenting..."
"I will gather what equipment I can find that seems necessary, Daniel Jackson," Teal'c said. "Perhaps you can all later send for the items you require for the duration of your stay."
"Ice cream," O'Neill said immediately. "A freezer?"
"There's a thermal...something...thing down that way," Daniel said, pointing down one of the corridors. "Lieutenant Barber thought it was how they kept things warm, but there was something about adjustable temperatures... I didn't pay a lot of attention, to be honest."
"I'd like to take a look at that," Sam said, interested.
"Told you you'd like it here," Daniel said. "Unambiguous, concrete things to measure."
Sam started to answer but couldn't decide whether that was a joke or an insult or just a comment, so she closed her mouth. Daniel looked surprised, too, and then took his glasses off to wipe the lenses, ducking away from her gaze at the same time.
"Just the ice cream," the colonel told Teal'c, not seeming to have noticed the odd exchange.
"Oh, and coffee?" Sam added.
"Janet's instructions say 'no caffeine,'" Daniel said as he waved a hand toward the untidy pile of supplies that had been sent through for them. "I already checked."
With the wormhole open and the IDC already sent, Teal'c turned and raised an eyebrow at them all. "We'll call if we need anything," Sam said.
"Thanks, Teal'c," the colonel said, still holding onto Loran with one arm. "And let General Hammond know about Loran, too. It's probably best to get things rolling so he can settle in somewhere as soon as we get back."
"Very well," Teal'c repeated, nodding to them all and adding a small smile for Loran. "I wish you the best of luck. I will return when I can."
"Wait!" Loran said, pulling away from the colonel and running into an adjacent room. Teal'c stopped obediently. Loran returned a moment later with what looked like a gun, until he neared and it became clear it was just a plastic toy. "You almost forgot," he said, handing it over.
Sam felt her eyebrows rise, but Teal'c accepted the toy very seriously. "Thank you, Loran," Teal'c said, and then pushed the FRED through and followed after.
...x...
The heater Barber had found could be set as low as negative thirty-four degrees, so their ice cream stayed safe. The colonel seemed amused that she'd actually checked and that the SGC had actually sent them ice cream. Loran was off playing with something and didn't notice. Daniel was sleeping and didn't notice, either.
"Are you feeling all right, sir?" she said quietly, unable to erase the idea that she might have flipped the wrong switch and that they'd commit suicide before they could figure it out and fix it.
"I'm stuck on a planet for two to three weeks, Carter," the colonel said in answer.
She nodded. "I could try to speed it up, but I don't know if it's worth the risk."
He waved a hand. "Yeah, I know. Don't try anything funny unless Teal'c comes to visit, just in case we all go..." He pointed a finger to his head and glanced at Daniel.
Checking to make sure the two more-or-less kids weren't in hearing range, Sam asked, "How did the rest of SG-5 die? Did they all commit suicide, or...?"
"No," O'Neill said, sitting loosely on the steps, his frustration and irritation drained away now. "One tried; wife stopped him. Another one was found on his apartment balcony, but he'd passed out, so we're not sure...you know. They were all unconscious by the time someone went to check. And then they coded, a few hours before Daniel did."
There was an AED in their pile of equipment. Sam hoped no one would need it anytime soon.
"So," she said hesitantly, "the suicides...they were just because of the withdrawal and the...the depression from that...right? Sir."
As if hearing her unspoken question, he looked again at Daniel. "Yeah," he said. "I'm sure. Don't worry, Major. Daniel's not--"
"Jack!" Loran said. They turned to see the boy gesturing enthusiastically and holding up a toy of some sort. "You have to see this."
The colonel smiled slightly, shrugged at her, and followed Loran away into the next room.
Sam glanced back to see that Daniel was still asleep and sat back down, starting to sort through the supplies the general had sent through. Her laptop was even there, which was nice--now, if only they'd sent some way to recharge the battery, too, she'd be set.
Although...with the amount of power that must be needed to keep this place up and running, if she could locate the main sources, she could probably jury-rig some--
"Sha'uri?" Daniel mumbled.
Sam looked up from her computer's boot-up screen as Daniel turned over under a blanket and muttered something that probably wasn't English. She glanced around the room, but Loran must have dragged the colonel off for show-and-tell, so she left her laptop to one side and crept closer. She could make out the word for 'kill' in Goa'uld (even she knew that one in a few languages) and reached out to see if she could make him calm down without waking him up.
Before she could even touch him, though, his eyes snapped open, and he started violently upon seeing her face in front of his. "Sorry, sorry," she said, wincing. "You, uh... Bad dream?"
He stared at her several moments longer before he looked around the room, breathing a little too fast. "Um," he said, then closed his eyes again.
"Daniel?" she said cautiously.
"Yeah," he said.
She scooted around to face him fully. "Wanna talk about it?"
Instead, he sat up and said, "Not really."
Sam didn't like to push, not when it came to serious, personal things like this. Sha'uri and Shifu were right now rolled up into what might just be the biggest personal thing currently on Daniel's mind, which was pretty impressive considering what went on in his head, so the instinctive voice that told her 'don't ask' managed to beat down the voice that was really, very curious about what the dream had been. She wasn't going to ask how Shifu had given them the same dream, either--the image of a boy turning into energy kept prodding at her, and it unnerved her in some deep-down way she couldn't describe.
"So it's some kind of energy?" Daniel said.
"What?" Sam said. Daniel nodded in the direction of the light room--he'd changed the subject. "Oh--well, that's what I'm assuming, since we didn't find any foreign substances in any of the samples and since the pedestal doesn't seem to have a reservoir for a substance..."
"But a power source is basically a reservoir for energy, right?" Daniel said. "If we're assuming they built a battery that's lasted all this time, how do we know they didn't have a reservoir of some chemical that lasted this long? If you're assuming it's an energy because you didn't find the chemical, why wouldn't we assume it's a chemical because we can't detect the energy?"
"Well...I admit it's...possible," she said. "But it's less likely, just based on what we know."
Daniel opened his mouth, then closed it, looking annoyed, but didn't respond.
"Not that it's not possible," she repeated, confused. Hadn't the colonel said Daniel was mad at them about something and he didn't know what? Maybe that was what this was. Whether or not it was justified, she found herself trying to explain, "We know for certain that their power crystals can last a long time, and we've never seen evidence of a chemical that could or would last so long without being degraded or running out, that's all."
"Yeah," Daniel said.
Sam couldn't tell whether that was agreement. "Um..."
"No, it's not... I just hate having my brain...influenced by things no one can see," Daniel said, flapping a hand at his head. "It feels like I'm always going insane or something."
"No one likes this, Daniel, but we'll get over it--two weeks will be over fast."
"It's just...doesn't it feel like you want to be angry but you can't?"
"I don't feel like I want to be angry," Sam said. "Are you angry about something?"
Daniel furrowed his brow. "I should be sad, at least. SG-5 is dead. And every time I think about that, I keep thinking about how much I want to finish reading that pillar." He pointed, and for a moment, he actually did seem to be distracted before he shook his head. "I'm getting tired of not knowing whether I'm thinking things because they're me or because something's telling my brain to think them."
On second consideration, Sam wondered if she wasn't as frustrated with the situation as she might have been exactly because of that--the colonel had managed to hold onto being pissed off from the withdrawal for a while, but even he was calm now, and the only thing really bothering Sam was that she didn't have anywhere to plug in the AC adapter for her laptop. "Okay," she conceded, "it is a little weird."
He huffed. "It's going to get worse, isn't it?"
"Well, it might be okay, going down one step at a time," she said.
"Because the Goa'uld are notorious for caring about the comfort of human slaves," Daniel said.
Actually, it would be in the Goa'uld's interest to make sure their slaves didn't get uncomfortable or annoyed enough to do anything like rebel, which would only mean more trouble for the masters. She frowned. "What's going on? Are you feeling off again?"
"Are you?" Daniel said uncertainly. "I think I have a headache."
"That's probably just from today and yesterday; I didn't decrease it that much," she assured him, then stood, glad to be busy with something. "Let me get you some aspirin, and then go to sleep and see if you feel better when you wake up."
"I'm sorry," he said as she rummaged through the medical kit to find what she was looking for. "I have no right to be annoyed at you."
Sam thought over that odd wording as she fished out some water. "Since when?" she said, handing everything over. He glanced at her but didn't answer. "Let me guess," she said, too curious to be wary anymore. "Since Shifu gave you that dream?"
He leaned back against the Stargate platform. "I'm going to change the subject," he said.
"Daniel..."
"No, really," Daniel said.
She sighed. "Okay."
"I don't have a subject to change it to," he said after a short wait.
She laughed, only to stop and wonder if it was funny or if she was a little high. "We'll talk tomorrow, then. I'll find buttons to push and you can read the instructions to tell me what they do."
"That sounds like...a lot of fun, actually," he said, smiling ruefully himself. "Good night."
XXXXX
Continued in Part b...