All This Time, part 2 of 2
Continued from Part 1.
By five o'clock in the morning, Daniel was awake again, alert and in full grump mode. When he insisted that he was capable of working, Sam chose not to argue with him. Teal'c stayed in the ring room to guard the complex against any intruders, and Sam and Daniel went to study the schematics for the power source.
With Daniel translating the rolling screens of text, it was suddenly easy. They joked about Japanese manuals as Sam traced the power couplings to the ring room, the laboratory, the heating system, and the anti-intruder mechanism. Sam was surprised to discover that some of the most damaged crystals she'd removed were actually for the heating, not the anti-intruder system. The feedback from the damage they'd done seemed more or less random. It was a good thing she hadn't tried to guess.
"Whoa," Daniel said softly.
"What is it?" Sam looked up from the half-melted crystal in her hand.
"Sam..." He traced his finger along several lines of Ancient text on the screen. "Sam, if we'd been any other SG team - in fact, if we'd been anyone else at all - we would have all been killed."
"What do you mean?"
"This intruder system." Daniel shook his head. "Any human who entered the complex and got hit by one of those beams you described? Their heart would've stopped. Instantly."
"Wow." Sam blinked. "What if we'd really been a Jaffa, a Goa'uld, and an Ascended being?"
"Not much better," Daniel told her, still scrolling through the text. "You said that you and Teal'c both felt intense pain, right?"
"You could say that," Sam said dryly, suppressing a shiver at the memory.
"As far as I can tell..." Daniel backed up to reread several passages, then shook his head. "Anubis definitely wasn't the sharing type. Anyone who wasn't a half-Ascended Goa'uld would get zapped."
"So, basically, anyone who wasn't him," Sam concluded.
"Yeah. It looks like a regular Goa'uld would've died in - the symbiote would have been killed, and the host wouldn't have survived much after that. And Jaffa would suffer the same way. No more larva, no more immune system."
"So, it targeted the symbiotes," Sam said, her mind racing ahead. "Any way we can use that against the Goa'uld ourselves?"
Daniel slanted a look at her. "I thought you said you broke it."
"Well, yes," Sam admitted. "But if the schematics explain how it was done..."
Daniel rubbed his unshaven chin thoughtfully as he paged through the schematics again. "This is way beyond me, Sam," he said finally. "Look, we can copy this down, and maybe you can figure out how it works at your leisure. But as far as I can tell, there's no way to separate one reaction from the other."
"So we might kill Goa'uld symbiotes, but we'd also kill human beings?"
"Doesn't sound too helpful," Daniel agreed wryly.
Sam hesitated. "What about targeting the Ascended?"
"I'm not sure." Daniel stopped scrolling through the text and turned to look at her fully. "Sam, I still don't remember yesterday, and from what you've told me - and how I feel now - I probably don't want to. I think that Anubis was trying to target the Ascended, but hadn't quite figured out how. So he was going after traces of Ascension in corporeal beings."
"You mean he was specifically aiming at you?" Sam asked, incredulous.
"I suppose it's possible, but it's more likely that he was focusing on anyone even remotely like himself. Or Orlin, maybe." Daniel considered the question, looking remarkably blasé at the thought of being a personal target. "Didn't you say the beam seemed to focus on the protein marker?"
"Yes."
"So, maybe I've got some kind of marker we can't identify. Something left behind from the year I was..." He waved a hand vaguely.
"Glowy?" Sam supplied, deliberately using the same kind of term that General O'Neill would employ.
He chuckled. "Yeah."
"I suppose that makes sense." Sam tapped her fingers absently on the half-melted crystal in her hand. "We've seen enough hints that there's something left, even if you can't consciously control it."
"Yeah, well." Daniel shrugged and dismissed it. "I'm glad you and Teal'c were able to destroy the burglar alarm. If we'd left it behind, it definitely would've killed the next people who ringed in."
Sam started at his statement. "Daniel, you don't think that the anti-intruder system is the only weapon we'll find here, do you?"
Daniel blinked. "I hadn't thought of it like that. It was a pretty powerful weapon, wasn't it?" He turned back to the screen and scrolled through the schematics again. "But we have to check out that lab. See if we can read the logs there and find out what Anubis was planning."
"Not until we finish here," she muttered, feeling frustrated, and then jumped back as Daniel suddenly swung away from the schematics and gripped her by the arms.
"You can't expect me to just watch and do nothing!" His voice, pitched low, carried a fierce, almost frightening intensity. His pupils were hugely dilated again, ridiculously so under the ceiling's bright light.
"Ah - Daniel?" Smiling tentatively, Sam tried to pull away, but his bruising grip only tightened.
"The only thing that matters is whether we are good or evil. That's what you said," he hissed. "Well, we have a saying, too: All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. So tell me how good I am, Oma, if I just stand around and watch Bra'tac and Ry'ac die!"
Oma? Bra'tac and Ry'ac? Oh, Daniel, don't you do this...!
"Daniel. It's me, Sam." She didn't try to pull away from him again. Instead, she reached up and laid her hand against his cheek, skin to skin. "You're here with me, Daniel. You're not Ascended any more."
His grip on her arms slackened, and even as she watched, she saw his pupils return to normal size.
"...Sam?" he whispered, then sagged against the wall.
She lunged forward and caught him before he fell. He hadn't passed out, at least, even if he was shaking.
"Sit down, Daniel," she urged. "That's right. Take it easy." She fought back an hysterical urge to giggle. In her mind's eye, she could picture herself telling the general, 'Well, sir, I didn't actually get Daniel killed on the very first mission, but he is a little broken. Sorry about that.'
"N-no, Sam, I'm good. I think." He blinked up at her from the floor, looking puzzled. "Uh, what just happened?"
"You had a flashback to when you were Ascended," she told him carefully. "It must be the after-effects of those light beams."
"I don't remember," he said. He sounded blank, almost dreamy.
"It's okay." She nodded, trying to force herself to believe the words even as she said them. "It's going to be fine."
He scrubbed his face with his hand. "I don't remember," he said again. "We - we were talking about the anti-intruder system, right?"
"Yes, we were," she agreed, watching him carefully. "And you were looking through the system logs. And I'm beginning to wonder if reading Ancient might be a problem for you right now."
"That's ridiculous." He struggled back to his feet. "I'm not going to, to, to go glowy just because I'm reading a language!"
"Something gave you a flashback," Sam said evenly. "And you were looking at the schematics when it happened."
He crossed his arms and glared at her, his mouth pulled down into a stubborn scowl. "You can't do this without me, Sam."
She winced. "I know." And she was going to have to continue to put his mind at risk, because it was the only way to get them all home.
"Maybe Teal'c should be here, too." Daniel didn't quite meet her gaze. "Just in case it happens again."
Sam frowned as she considered the idea. "I don't like wasting Teal'c on guard duty," she admitted. "And if he were here, we could probably work a lot faster. But we can't afford to leave the front door unlocked, either."
"Could someone really get in?" Daniel asked, eyebrows raised. "I mean, there's no power from this end. How could the rings work?"
"The ring system can work two ways: as a transportation device of its own, and as a receiving point for another ring system." Sam gestured as she spoke. "So anyone trying to activate these rings won't get through, but if someone had a ship or something with its own ring platform, they'd be able to transport down here, even without any power on the receiving end."
Daniel didn't need her to form the obvious conclusion: Ba'al might fly a ship to the planet and try to send a group of Jaffa down through a ring platform of his own. And if that happened, SG-1 could find themselves playing a very deadly game of hide-and-seek, with no safe zone.
"Isn't there some kind of - oh, I don't know. A sensor or something? Motion detectors? Some way to alert us if the rings are activated, without Teal'c having to actually baby-sit them?"
Sam blinked, then grinned. "Actually, yes, there is. Good idea, Daniel." She thumbed on her radio. "Teal'c? We're coming back. We're going to set up motion detectors in the ring room, so that all three of us will be free to move around."
"I do not have any such sensors, Colonel Carter."
"Neither do I," Sam told him, "but there's enough leakage in the fuse box that I can set up an alarm. Give me a couple of minutes to rig things here, and we'll come relieve you."
Less than ten minutes later, Teal'c had joined Sam and Daniel by the power source. Sam had managed to get Teal'c alone for a few crucial moments and quietly appraised him of their newest problem with Daniel's continuing lucidity. Now, Sam was turning a crystal over in her hands, frowning at the damage.
"The big problem is that there are very few working crystals left," she explained. "And since they weren't designed to be interchangeable, there's a lot of splicing that needs to be done to make anything work."
Teal'c removed one of the less-damaged crystals from inside the power source and ran a finger along its jagged edge. "We must first restore sufficient power to the laboratory so that we may determine its purpose."
"And get those stasis fields back up, and the freezers working," Sam agreed.
"Ita," Daniel said absently, scrolling through the schematics again.
Sam stared at him. So did Teal'c. Daniel didn't seem to notice anything was wrong.
Sam and Teal'c exchanged a meaningful look over Daniel's bent head, then turned back to their own tasks.
Between monitoring Daniel's condition and the painstaking nature of their task, fixing the system turned into long hours of boring, tedious work. Teal'c continued to strip the damaged crystals out of the power source and follow the damage to the conduits, while Sam tried to salvage what she could and splice the working crystals into the most urgent systems. Daniel followed the ebb and flow of power on the rolling screens, reporting to Sam and Teal'c about their progress.
They stopped twice to eat; no one had much of an appetite, but they dutifully chewed their power bars and drained their canteens. Sam kept a wary eye on Daniel, but aside from a little extra fatigue, he seemed to have fully recovered - physically, at least - from the attack the day before.
His mind, they discovered, was another matter entirely. He slipped three times into speaking Ancient, only realizing it when Sam or Teal'c asked him to repeat himself. He experienced two vivid flashbacks as well. The first had him clinging to Sam, begging Oma to allow him to help someone named Fillo who was lost in a deadly sandstorm. Neither she nor Teal'c knew what he meant, but it came as no surprise that Daniel's efforts as an Ascended being hadn't been limited to his friends from Earth.
The second one was much, much worse.
There was no warning. Daniel suddenly screamed, a high-pitched keening that sent him to his knees. Teal'c got to him first, and Daniel frantically clutched at his shoulders as he howled his protest to the walls.
"No! Don't do this!" He flailed, shaking Teal'c in frantic desperation. "You can't punish me for something I haven't done yet! He'll destroy the whole planet! You let me bargain with him, you let me talk to him, you can't let me go this far and then pull me back!"
"Daniel Jackson," Teal'c whispered. "Come back to us."
Daniel gave a single, agonized wail, then crumpled in on himself. "It's - it's gone." He sagged, and only Teal'c's strong grip kept him from pitching face-first onto the floor. "Abydos," he whispered. "No, no, no..."
It took close to ten minutes of near-catatonia before he finally snapped out of that one. By the time Daniel came alert again, with no memory of his fugue state, Sam's conviction that the ill-fated mission had irrevocably damaged one of her best friends had her mentally composing her resignation letter to the general. Only Teal'c's unwavering support - and the increasingly faint hope that maybe, just maybe, they'd find something in the computer system that might help fix Daniel - was enough to keep her doggedly going.
Finally, after seven o'clock that evening, Sam connected one last crystal. She nearly whooped out loud as Daniel gleefully reported success: full power had been restored to the laboratory.
"Let's go," she said briefly. She fitted the cover of the power source back into place and led Teal'c and Daniel down the hall. As they approached the laboratory, they could clearly hear the thrum of working machinery.
Sam slowed, and Daniel looked at her with surprise. "Would it be more dangerous now than it was without power?" he asked.
"It can't hurt to be cautious," Sam shrugged in reply. She eased against the wall next to the doorway and nodded at Teal'c, who silently slipped inside.
"You may enter," he announced after a few moments, and Sam and Daniel followed him in.
A faint shimmer in the air was the only indication that the open samples were now frozen in stasis again. The freezer units, at least, now had blinking lights to underscore the humming of their systems.
"That one," Teal'c said, pointing at the first specimen in line. "I estimate that it has grown to nearly twice its size since yesterday."
Sam took a wary look, and flinched away. Teal'c was right: the specimen was over two centimeters long.
"All right," she said. "Teal'c, check the machinery and make sure everything is working. Daniel, you're with me. Let's figure out what Anubis was doing here..."
She stopped short. The panels on the wall were as blank as ever.
"Daniel, didn't you say that the schematics reported that all power was restored to the lab?" she asked, frowning. "Why aren't the computer systems working?" She stepped forward, tracing a finger along one dark screen. "This doesn't make sense. We powered everything in the lab, right?"
No answer.
She turned. "Daniel...?"
Her breath congealed in her lungs at the sight of him. Daniel was on his hands and knees, trembling, whispering frantically to himself. Teal'c crouched at his side, one large hand pressed into the middle of Daniel's back, talking in a soothing, rumbling voice.
"You are here with us, Daniel Jackson. You are no longer Ascended."
"...won't act for lowers, at least defend..."
"Daniel?" Sam dropped to her knees in front of him, cradling his face in her hands and forcing him to look her in the eye. "Daniel, it's Sam. Sam and Teal'c. Can you hear me?"
His eyes wouldn't focus, and his whispers grew more desperate. "...call them lowers what are lowers when we don't act, you don't care, we have to stop it stop him stop now, it isn't working but it will it'll kill it'll..."
"Daniel!" She hated herself for doing, but she slapped him sharply across the face. "Wake up, Daniel!"
He gasped, like someone suddenly plunged into water, and his eyes came into focus again. But he still wasn't looking at her. Instead, he scrambled away from them both, still on hands and knees, lunging for the doorway to the hall.
Teal'c and Sam both pounced, pinning him back. As they pulled him away from the door, though, Daniel went nearly hysterical. Flailing arms and legs, hoarse cursing in English and Ancient and back again, desperate straining to escape...
But he was still in control, Sam realized abruptly. This was Daniel, who had managed to half-kill an SF when he was only in his second year of the program, at the time he'd been truly out of his mind from the sarcophagus. By now, he was six feet of solid muscle after his years of training with Teal'c and the colonel; and while he'd never be an expert in hand-to-hand, he certainly knew how to fight dirty.
He wasn't fighting them with that kind of insanity. He was only struggling to get through that doorway.
Teal'c and Sam looked at one another. Well, Sam thought grimly, she'd wanted command...
She gave Teal'c a nod, and they both released Daniel at once.
He was through the door in seconds, pausing only long enough to lurch to his feet before bolting down the hall. Sam and Teal'c dashed after him, just in time to see him disappearing through a doorway four meters down the corridor.
Bewildered, Sam ran down the hallway with Teal'c at her heels. Why would Daniel be so frantic to enter one of the empty rooms?
Things didn't make any more sense when they stepped inside the chamber, but at least they knew why Daniel wanted to go there. Because every screen in the otherwise empty room was brightly lit, filled from edge to edge with blocky Ancient script.
Daniel himself was on his knees in the far corner of the room, prying open a panel near the floor. He reached inside and fiddled for a moment, and all the screens went dark at once.
He stood on wobbly legs and turned to face them. "There," he said triumphantly, even as his shaking increased. "I transferred all the information back to the lab, so we can see what we're - what we're doing..."
This time, they didn't move quickly enough to catch him when he passed out.
He regained consciousness less than a minute later, blinking vaguely at Sam as she checked his skull for bumps.
"M'okay, Sam," he slurred. "I think it's over now."
"What's over?" she asked sharply.
"All this Ancient stuff." He licked his lips, then smiled in gratitude as Teal'c offered him his canteen.
"Take it easy," Sam cautioned, even as she helped him open it.
"I know. Little sips." His eyes were clearer now. "Sam, I was here, back then."
"Back then?" Sam repeated. "You mean, when you were..."
"Glowy," inserted Teal'c, utterly deadpan.
"Uh, yeah." Daniel took another swallow. "All those flashbacks, as you called them - I think it was my mind, trying to access the details of the lab. Anubis was doing something particularly awful here. I wanted to destroy it. They wouldn't let me interfere."
"That's no surpise," Sam said, frowning. "What was so awful, then?"
"I'm not sure," Daniel confessed. "I don't think it was just the anti-intruder system. Oma seemed pretty confident that Anubis would never be able to perfect it - something about the method of destroying Ascended beings being locked away forever. No, it was something else." He scowled at the canteen. "Something in that lab. And my mind remembered that extra security precaution that Anubis put in - that all the data would go to this room, instead of the lab. But it's switched back now." He handed the canteen back to Teal'c and tried to get his legs to work. "I think we'd better go and figure it out, don't you?"
"Are you up to it? Give me an honest answer, Daniel."
Daniel gave her a hurt look, then actually paused in self-assessment. "Yes," he said finally. "I've been feeling this - compulsion, I guess. Whatever it is, it's gone. The answer has got to be in the lab."
Command decision time, Sam told herself. She loved Daniel, she loved Teal'c, but she also needed to lead them - and that meant forcing herself to allow them to risk themselves when it was necessary.
She reached down and grasped Daniel's hand, helping him rise to his feet. She didn't know if she would ever command SG-1 as well as Jack O'Neill, but she promised herself that she could come close - and maybe, if she worked hard enough, she could keep Daniel's deaths down to an absolute minimum along the way.
"Come on, then," she said. "Let's get back to the lab and go to work."
They returned to the laboratory and found the screens active, filled with the information they needed so badly. As Teal'c moved from one unit to the next, checking the machinery for damage, Sam and Daniel put their heads together over the screens, Daniel translating aloud. It took time; Daniel needed to not only translate, but also find the right words for a subject that was out of his own field. As the hours passed, Sam was enormously relieved to see that Daniel had apparently recovered from the compulsion, or flashbacks, or whatever it had been. They eventually confirmed that it was something on the bio-chemical level, and Sam allowed Daniel to scroll ahead in the text while she worked out equations on her PDA.
"Okay, this is bad."
Sam turned at the hollowness in Daniel's voice. His face was pale as he slowly retraced several passages on the screen.
"What is it, Daniel?"
Daniel licked his lips. "Anubis was a cheater, right? He knew the Ancients would slap him down if he used Ascended powers, but there was nothing to stop him from taking the knowledge he'd gained as an Ascended and using it as a Goa'uld."
"Yeah, so?"
"So Anubis knew about the plague that wiped out the Ancients." Daniel swallowed hard. "And he tracked down the genome."
"This is the disease that nearly killed O'Neill?" Teal'c demanded.
"I don't know, but this is - Sam, Anubis was trying to refine it so that it would target a specific species - humans, or Goa'uld, or Jaffa. Right now, though, no one is immune. If this plague gets out..."
"...it would wipe out entire planets," Sam finished softly.
"Or, indeed, the entire galaxy." Teal'c unholstered his zat. "So we will destroy all the samples. Now."
"Wait, Teal'c." Sam pushed the muzzle of the zat downwards. "It's too risky. The electrical charge might jolt the organisms into active mode."
Teal'c frowned at this, then nodded. "How, then, may we destroy it?"
"I don't know," Sam admitted unhappily. "We could lock the whole thing back into stasis, but that wouldn't solve the problem - it would just leave a ticking time bomb for the next person who manages to get in here. And if that person is someone working for Ba'al..."
"And C4 wouldn't do the job thoroughly enough."
"No, Daniel, it wouldn't. Not only would traces of the plague's DNA survive the blast, but we might get infected - spores and dust and who knows what." Sam shook her head. "We need to come up with a way to destroy it completely."
The three of them stared at the samples behind their force screens. So innocuous at first sight. So incredibly deadly.
"The freezers," Daniel said suddenly.
"What?"
Daniel rounded on Teal'c. "How do Goa'uld freezers work?"
Teal'c raised an eyebrow. "Not with freon gases, Daniel Jackson. I am unsure of the precise mechanism, but I have worked with this kind of storage unit before. It is simply a matter of rotating the raised hieroglyph -" Teal'c pointed it out. "- to obtain the desired temperature."
"Does it only freeze?" Daniel demanded.
Teal'c's eyebrow climbed higher. "It does not. It may be used as a sterilization unit as well."
"I see where you're going with this, Daniel," Sam said, her eyes lighting up. "We shove everything into the freezer units and turn it up as high as it can go. If it really gets hot enough..." She paused, doing some rapid-fire calculations in her head. "You say it actually sterilizes, Teal'c?"
"Indeed it does." Teal'c considered. "I believe that the unit's most extreme temperature would reach an excess of five hundred degrees Centigrade."
"That's hot," Daniel observed.
"That's hot enough," Sam corrected gleefully. "There's no way the DNA would survive that temperature." She sobered a little as a thought occurred to her. "Does it take more power than we have here, Teal'c?"
"It should not," Teal'c reassured her. "However, it will take several hours to accomplish."
"Oh." Daniel deflated. "That means we can't disconnect the lab's power until the job is finished."
"No, we can't." Sam bit her lower lip. "We're going to have to stay here and make sure everything is completely destroyed."
"That means we won't be able to get out until tomorrow," sighed Daniel. He slid down to a sitting position on the floor, and Sam suddenly remembered that he'd not only suffered traumatic flashbacks during much of the day, but he'd also spent most of yesterday unconscious.
"All right, let's get this done," she ordered briskly. "Daniel, go back to the fuse box and monitor those schematics. Keep an eye on the power flow and make sure we're not going to have a meltdown half-way through the process."
"Right." Daniel reached out a hand to brace himself against the wall, but Teal'c merely gripped his arm and hauled him easily to his feet.
"We'll wait for you to give us the go-ahead on the radio," Sam prompted him.
"Right," Daniel said again. "I'll call you as soon as I'm there."
As Daniel disappeared into the corridor, Teal'c titled his head at Sam. "Why did you send Daniel Jackson away?" he asked quietly.
"Because he needs a break, and this is the only way I can get him to take it," Sam answered simply. "Come on. We can use the equipment here to avoid touching the samples directly."
The two of them worked smoothly and efficiently, and in less than ten minutes, they were ready to begin. Sam watched Teal'c activate the units, one after the other, until all seven of them were set to sterilization. Then they backed out of the room, sealing it carefully behind them.
"Just in case," Sam said in answer to Teal'c's questioning gaze. "Let's go see how Daniel is doing."
They found him next to the fuse box, watching the power flow regulators with heavily-lidded eyes. He reported that everything seemed to be operating within regular parameters.
"So what now?" he asked.
"Now you get some sleep," Sam replied.
"Oh, come on, Sam," he started, but she cut him off.
"Daniel, there's nothing more we can do until the sterilization process is complete. From what Teal'c says, that can take ten hours, possibly longer. It's just a matter of keeping an eye on the power flow to the ring platform sensors and the lab's power readings, and we really don't need to be able to read Ancient to do that." Sam's voice softened. "I want to get you home in one piece, Daniel. I could make it an order, if you'd like."
He raised his brows at that. "Okay," he agreed grudgingly. "Where are we camping tonight? Back in the ring room?"
"One of the empty rooms would be more defensible," Teal'c said. "There is no reason why we should not utilize the one that is right here." He nodded at the doorway only three meters down the hall.
So SG-1 spent their second night in Anubis' secret base bunked down in an anonymous room across from the complex's fuse box, monitoring the destruction of a deadly plague from within and the possibility of intruders from without. A good night's sleep seemed to fully restore Daniel to what passed for his normal self, and by the time they officially called it morning by heating up the last of Daniel's coffee, Teal'c had pronounced the sterilization process complete.
"So, they're not merely dead, they're really most sincerely dead?" Daniel asked innocently.
Sam stared at him. Daniel merely raised his eyebrows over his coffee cup.
Teal'c reached out and patted Daniel on the arm. "I believe the proper conclusion, Daniel Jackson, is that 'you have been hanging around O'Neill too much.'"
Daniel spluttered his coffee all over his BDUs, and Teal'c calmly offered Sam a cup of her own. She hid her grin behind it, as well as her relief that the end of the awful mission was finally in sight.
Teal'c ventured into the laboratory long enough to confirm that the sterilization had done what they hoped. Then it was time to start the whole tiresome process again of transferring sufficient power from the laboratory to the ring platform, so that they could safely transport out of the base.
Daniel unwrapped their last power bar at lunchtime and solemnly broke it into three.
"Your tretonin supply is okay, isn't it, Teal'c?" he asked. "Because if you're running low, I've got -"
"I always take two weeks' supply with me, Daniel Jackson, even if our mission is scheduled to last only a few hours." Teal'c graced them with a slight smile. "I thank you for your concern, however."
"How much tretonin are you carrying, Daniel?" Sam asked curiously.
Daniel flushed a little. "Ah, about a week's worth. In my right boot." He shot her a look. "You?"
"Six days' worth of doses," she admitted cheerfully. "In a zippered pocket in my belt."
Teal'c inclined his head to both of them in thanks.
Finally, shortly before five o'clock in the afternoon, Sam slotted the final crystal into place.
"We're done," she announced wearily. The words I hope lingered unspoken. "Let's get back to the rings."
They collected their tools and headed for the ring room. "Jack is going to be annoyed at us for coming back empty-handed," Daniel mentioned.
"I think he'll be happy just to get us back in one piece," Sam snapped. Then, walking a little faster, she added, "but - yeah. Three days, and nothing to show for it."
"That is untrue, Colonel Carter," Teal'c said firmly. "We have gained greater insight into Anubis' methods, and we have destroyed a potential threat to all life in the galaxy. I would classify this mission as a success."
Sam smiled despite herself, and she slowed down to her normal brisk stride. "Thank you, Teal'c," she said.
They gathered together in the center of the ring platform, back to back. Sam checked that the safety on her P-90 was off, and Daniel unholstered his Beretta. Teal'c gripped his staff weapon in one hand and the wrist device in the other.
"Remember, we might find anything out there," Sam warned them both. "It's been over sixty hours since we disappeared."
"Right," Daniel said, gripping his pistol a little more tightly. "Just a little stroll back to the SGC. No problem."
"Do it, Teal'c," said Sam.
Teal'c pressed the button on the wrist device, and the others held their breath...
And the rings sprang out of the floor, as if they'd never balked at all.
They weren't there, then they were again, rematerializing on the same patch of grassy ground where they'd disappeared nearly three days before.
"Nice," Sam breathed. "Good work, Teal'c, Daniel. Now let's get home."
Teal'c immediately pointed them in the right direction, and they started walking toward the Stargate, some five klicks away.
Sam tried her radio. "Sierra Gulf Three, this is Sierra Gulf One Niner. Please respond."
No answer.
"Would they still be here, after three days?" Daniel asked doubtfully.
"It depends on the general." Sam tried again. "This is Sierra Gulf One Niner. All Sierra Gulf teams, please respond."
When the response came, however, it wasn't in the Air Force lexicon. The whump and flash of the staff weapon blast came out of nowhere, missing Sam by a scant few inches. The three of them dived to the ground and came up rolling, alert and scanning for hostiles.
"Jaffa! Kree!"
"Oh, great," Daniel moaned.
"Come on," Sam hissed.
The next three hours were a nightmare, as they backed each other's retreat through scanty cover to reach the Stargate. The hunting parties were only sporadic, but by the time they made it to the Gate, they found an entire platoon of Jaffa waiting for them. The situation had deteriorated into a full-fledged firefight, and they were running out of ammo.
Then they were dialing Earth, and they were discovering that they'd been reported captured, and they were running for the event horizon...
And then their boots were clanging on the beautiful metal ramp, and the sound of the iris closing behind was the sweetest music they'd ever heard.
General O'Neill came striding into the Gate room, his face outwardly calm but his eyes alight.
"Hey, guys," he greeted them, the words casual but meaningful.
"Thank you, sir," Sam said, a little breathless.
"So." The general rocked back on his heels. "Trapped in a secret base, all this time. Go figure."
"The wrist device allowed us access..." Teal'c began.
"We couldn't get back out," Daniel finished simply. He apparently felt that the minor details could wait until later.
Sam tried to process the incredible news that the SGC had been convinced that they'd been prisoners. "You thought Ba'al had captured us...?"
They talked out the probable scenario, but in the end, it didn't matter. Ba'al hadn't gotten what he wanted, and they were all safe.
"It's a great story," said the general, cutting off the discussion. "More importantly - did Anubis leave anything cool behind?"
Teal'c lifted his chin. Sam pursed her lips. She wondered if it would be worth it to explain in full: Well, sir, we stopped Daniel from dying, again. And we destroyed an intruder system that killed anyone who wasn't actually Anubis himself. We have the schematics for that, although the chances of actually developing a safe Goa'uld killing weapon are pretty slim. We thought Daniel's mind might be finally snapping under the strain, but he got better. Most importantly, we destroyed a plague virus that might have been potent enough to wipe out all human life in the entire galaxy...
Then Daniel solved her dilemma by saying evenly, "Not really. No."
It was a good call, Sam decided. Bottom line now, details later. And it warmed her, through and through, to see Daniel so calmly watching her back with the general.
She'd brought SG-1 back safe - and sound, and solid - and that was more than good enough for her.
end.
