Hydra Read online

  O’Neill’s smile was thin with mean satisfaction. “Things aren’t going so well for Mendez, it seems. All those tin soldiers defunct, AWOL or half brain-dead.” He cocked his jaw. “The alphas are a problem.”

  Looking up from her work, Carter nodded. “Somebody must’ve tipped off the SGC. Why else would they have been at Harlan’s installation?”

  Daniel agreed. “The alphas are the likely candidates. They’re the closest to — ” He lifted one hand off the keyboard to wave it in the general direction of Earth. “ — you know, them. And I doubt Mendez would do it, although that doesn’t rule out someone else on Perseus, I suppose.”

  Jack’s gaze slipped sideways to the flashing data on Jackson’s screen. Without even trying, he was reading each page before it was replaced by the next. He closed his eyes, but he could feel the data swarming around in some virtual space that wasn’t really a brain. “No,” he growled, “it’s the alphas.” He opened his eyes and dropped his fists to his thighs with enough force to leave bruises. If he could still bruise. “And that is not a good thing. They’ll be on our asses.”

  Carter dropped a tool into her box and felt around for another, never taking her eyes off the pump primer. It didn’t seem to care one bit what she did to it, though. It just kept sitting there, a lump of stone, doing nothing. “It’s a sure bet that if the alphas are working with the SGC, they’ve spilled the beans about the whole power supply issue. Maybe they even know about this.” She picked the primer up and held it closer to the light. It was so black it seemed to suck the color out of the room. She glowered at it and went back to poking at it with all the pointy things she could find.

  Jackson’s hands lifted from the keyboard and hovered there.

  “What?” O’Neill asked.

  “You know, we could turn ourselves in.”

  “To the people who most likely want to grind us into itty-bitty pieces? I thought you voted no to that plan.”

  Jackson wagged his finger at him. “No. No, not to them. To the SGC.”

  O’Neill narrowed his eyes at him. “Now that’s a stupid idea.”

  “Think about it. If they know about the power source, well, the alphas are them, and they’ll want to help them. I mean the alphas are the good guys, aren’t they? At least, they’re pretty much identical to them. And so are we.” His lips twitched in a qualifying smile. “Sort of. They could save us. It’s what they do. The SGC won’t countenance the systematic destruction of a whole race of sentient beings.”

  “Really.” O’Neill leaned forward and clasped his hands between his knees. “Ever heard of the Goa’uld? What do you think they want to do to them? Invite them over to play bridge?”

  Jackson blinked. “That’s different. The Goa’uld are evil snaky things. We’re them.”

  “All the more reason to have us destroyed,” Teal’c said.

  O’Neill wondered if everything he said would sound equally dire. “Say ‘Mary had a little lamb,’” he ordered.

  “Mary had a little lamb,” Teal’c responded. It sounded dire. He continued as though there had been no interruption. “They are real. We are not.”

  “I’m real,” Carter said from her workbench.

  “Right,” O’Neill said. “But I bet you a — ” He couldn’t think of anything worth betting that didn’t belong to someone else’s life. “ — whatever, that the flesh-and-blood Carter wouldn’t be on your side.”

  “Maybe she would. It’s not like I want to be her.”

  “Don’t you?” Again, the ghost of memory made an agitation of static in O’Neill’s head, like faint chatter in comms, a whole context he could sense but that didn’t belong to him.

  Jackson put his fingers back on the keyboard and sighed in resignation. The sound made anger sizzle again inside O’Neill. There wasn’t any need for breath, except to make a better lie, a finer illusion of humanity they had no right to claim.

  “Nobody’s turning themselves in,” O’Neill said with finality. “Unless you actually want some geek to make a career out of poking at your bits to see what makes you twitch.”

  Jackson frowned. “Vivisection,” he said. “Now that sounds like fun.”

  “Well, then,” Carter announced as she slid off her stool and stuffed the doodad into her vest, “we’d better get a move on, because this thing is useless without the other half, and we have a little over thirteen hours to find it and figure it out before the debate about our future becomes moot.”

  “Dr. Jackson? Ideas?” O’Neill leaned in to watch the data zipping across the screen.

  “I can tell you what the other half looks like.” He paused at an image of another doodad made of the same material. Photographed in bad light, it looked like an oversized cockroach and was nestled in folds of rough blue and gold fabric. It was hard to see in the grainy picture, but, like the one in Carter’s vest, it definitely had markings on it.

  “You recognize these?” O’Neill asked, his fingers drifting across the screen.

  Jackson shook his head slowly. “No. But I saw markings similar to this in the database somewhere.” He started rummaging around in the directories. “Somebody was speculating that they were related to markings found on another artifact.”

  While he was looking, Teal’c lifted the headset off his ears and said, “It appears that Mendez has been ordered to evacuate Perseus. They’ve dispatched the ship to transport the equipment to the beta site.”

  “Do you think they terminated the ones who followed orders and reported in?” Carter asked.

  O’Neill considered and shook his head. “Mendez hasn’t got a lot of assets left. But the gammas are a wild card. Maybe they’ll play nice, maybe not.”

  “If the alphas are with the SGC,” Daniel began, “they’ll — ”

  “Die slow instead of fast,” O’Neill said. He got up and stabbed a finger at Jackson’s screen. “Screw ’em. We knew we were on our own. So let’s get to it.”

  Jackson’s mouth gaped for a second, then snapped shut. His hand drifted up to his face like he was about to adjust his glasses and then fell again. “Okay, here. We know the device was split up and hidden on two of these three planets.” He indicated three addresses and highlighted one. “The gamma team already searched this one. So that leaves these two.” He sat back. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  O’Neill tapped the second one. “We start there.” Then he pointed to the image Jackson had isolated on the screen. “What’s that?”

  “It’s the other artifact that had the same markings. It’s in storage on Earth somewhere.”

  “Huh,” O’Neill said. “What’s a quantum mirror?”

  SGC

  October 31, 2002, two days after

  the invasion of Eshet

  Interior briefing rooms always gave Jack the hives. At least Hammond’s general-purpose conference room, outside his office, gave the illusion of space and comfort. Having a direct view of the gate didn’t hurt that feeling, the reason for it all just a stone’s throw away. But secrecy forced them into a level 22 conference room barely big enough to contain Daniel’s laptop and Jack’s pen — and strictly speaking, only the laptop was necessary since the pen was for chewing and doodling.

  Carter finished up her synopsis of her recon on Harlan’s world. It was one of the most blindingly unsuccessful missions Jack could remember sending her on. “To recap,” he said, letting a little of his frustration out, “you came back injured, without Harlan, without any of the rogue team, and no information.”

  “That’s about it,” Carter said. She lifted her chin and gave him a one-eye-narrowed look that bordered on downright testy. Of course, it could be that she was just wincing from the pain of the steam burn that covered that side of her face. “If it weren’t for the fact that they beat us to the punch, we could have surprised them when they arrived.”

  “Spilled milk,” Jack said, glancing at Daniel.

  Daniel’s fingers rubbed at the small, round bruise on his temple, left behind by the
muzzle of the theta’s 9mm. “But at least we saw them for ourselves.” He caught Jack watching him and dropped his hand to his keyboard. “We know Dan was telling the truth.”

  “At least part of it,” Jack said. Where the NID was concerned, truth was a tricky, tricky thing.

  Even Daniel had to admit that, and he did, with a tilt of his head and a suppressed sigh. He looked tired, his eyes a little too bright, his hands a little too jittery as they tapped the keys of the laptop. Self-medicating with caffeine again. What he needed was a good eight hours sack time. They all did. Except Teal’c, of course, who didn’t have the courtesy to show a little wilting around the edges, even when listening to technobabble at one in the morning.

  Speaking of technobabble, Carter launched into a diatribe about power sources and schematics, what technology the NID could have captured, and what they might have done with it. Jack leaned back in the chair, trying to find a position that didn’t make his tailbone ache since they seemed likely to be at this a while. And they still hadn’t gotten around to discussing the critical piece of information he and Teal’c had obtained from Makepeace — the names of his contacts hadn’t panned out, and they’d probably been removed or replaced months ago, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t make the situation work to their advantage.

  “So, a mole,” Daniel was saying, and Jack had the distinct feeling he’d missed about a paragraph of nonessential information before the word “mole” caught his attention. Eyebrows raised, Daniel was watching him with an expression both expectant and slightly miffed, and Jack sighed, long-suffering. Next to Daniel, Major Davis — the president’s favorite Pentagon emissary — was sitting at attention in his regular uniform, hands clasped in his lap, waiting for…something…from Jack.

  “Yes,” Jack said, sitting up straighter. “A mole. Which only makes sense, if you sort of take for granted that we didn’t actually break up the NID operation. We just disrupted the part we could see. Like…killing bugs on the kitchen floor. For every one you see, there’s a hundred more.”

  Davis blinked and looked over at Hammond. He said, “That’s not a bad analogy, actually. We believe there might be as many as forty cells, scattered on and off-world, and each has a separate chain of command.”

  “Our priority has to be uncovering the mole passing on information through this particular chain,” Hammond said. “Suggestions, people?”

  “There’s one tried and true method,” Carter said. “Plant information and watch where it travels.”

  “Yes.” Davis swiveled in his chair, facing Jack. “But for that plan to be effective, we would have to know who to target, and I don’t think the suspects have been narrowed sufficiently — have they, Colonel?”

  “There were eleven people who had knowledge of the upcoming mission schedule and unconfirmed gate addresses…” Daniel trailed off, having apparently realized his title wasn’t “Colonel,” and shrugged apologetically, depriving Jack of an opportunity for picking on him. Jack waved a hand, and Daniel continued on. “SG-1 and General Hammond account for five of those. The other six are all long-term employees: two civilians, four career military.”

  “Much like Colonel Makepeace and Colonel Maybourne were before they were recruited.” Davis took the folder Daniel offered but didn’t flip through it. Jack admired his attention span. “None of them show any particular resentment toward the military?”

  “No,” Daniel answered.

  “One of them, however, did serve with Colonel Makepeace in a previous assignment,” Jack pointed out. Three pairs of eyes turned toward him expectantly. “Aaronsen, the gate tech.”

  “That’s a place to start,” Hammond said. “Work on it, Major Davis, and put the plan in motion once you’ve chosen the information to pass on.”

  “Yes, sir.” Davis nodded to Hammond.

  “Anything else?” Hammond asked.

  “The president’s highest priority is the capture of the remaining active duplicate teams and the remains of the other five, if possible,” Davis answered.

  “Capture, or destruction?” Jack asked, ignoring Daniel’s pointed stare.

  Davis cleared his throat. “Whatever is necessary to remove the threat.”

  “Understood,” Hammond said. He stood. “Let’s get this done. Dismissed.”

  The five of them stood as Hammond left the room. Carter and Teal’c stepped out into the corridor for a sidebar; Carter always did have an excellent sense of the strategic withdrawal, Jack thought.

  Davis looked from Jack to Daniel and said, “If you’ll excuse me.” Quick as a rabbit, he was gone, and Daniel couldn’t wait two seconds to open fire.

  “Dead or alive, Jack? Is that really how you want to do this?”

  “You heard the major.” Jack shoved all Daniel’s report-filled folders back across the table. “Not my call.”

  “Yes. I think it is.” Daniel ignored the mounting pile of dead paper.

  “Listen, Daniel, just because you’ve been talking with your mirror image, don’t start feeling sorry for it. Them. Whatever.”

  “That has nothing to do with it.”

  “Of course it does.” Jack shoved his hands in his pockets. “You can’t help feeling sympathetic. I get that. I really do. I watched mine…kick off on Juna, remember? But they aren’t human, and they have to be eliminated.”

  “You said it yourself, Jack. I’ve been talking with my duplicate. And he’s me. Don’t you get that?”

  “No. He’s a corrupted copy. He’s not you.” Jack waited a moment, let that sink in. Then he said, “We can never be sure of them. Any of them. All of them could be changed. This one could be lying, too. We’ll never know their true agendas. They are a threat, Daniel. A threat. We answer threats with force.”

  “We could help them,” Daniel said.

  “With what? What are we gonna do, plug ‘em into the wall? You were there, Daniel. We can’t get a lock on Altair. No gate connection, no access to Harlan’s power source or his fancy robot factory — if it even survived.”

  “Maybe it did. And if it didn’t, we could find a way. The NID obviously have a way.”

  “Right. And what then? We wind up their toy soldiers and let them rattle around the galaxy wearing our faces, with who knows what kind of crap in their heads?”

  “It doesn’t have to be like that.”

  So damn stubborn. It made Jack want to vault the table and shake sense into him, but he just shook his head instead and looked at his boots while Daniel barreled on.

  “We could reverse the changes to their programming. They deserve a chance, Jack. A chance to live out some kind of life.”

  “Some kind of life? You mean our lives? Sorry, but it’s mine, and I’m not giving it up.”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. Not…I know they can’t live our lives. But they can have a life, Jack. They can do meaningful things.”

  “Like what? Crocheting? Basketweaving?”

  Daniel’s jaw set. “Research. Daniel is still Daniel. Sam is still Sam.”

  “And what about Jack?” The idea of it made Jack want to puke — the thought of sitting around, not able to work, not able to live his life. See his friends. Drive an open road and know where he’ll be at the end of it. Have a purpose. “I guarantee you, Daniel, no robot version of me wants to go on living without some reason for being.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Oh, yes. I do. And if that Jack wants to live that way, he’s not me. He’s something else. Do you get that?”

  “But he’s still sentient. He’s alive. We don’t have the right to end that. We can help to give them meaning.”

  “Oh, for — ” Jack bit it off, because there was no point. All these arguments with Daniel had the same rhythm, the same annoying patterns. All the talk of real and alive was just the same old crap.

  But Daniel never caught the hint. “They have a contact. They call him the Piper.”

  “As in ‘Pied’?”

  “Yes. And he has contact
with all the other teams. If we can somehow get to him, maybe he can help us find the others. Then we can figure out what to do.”

  “How can you be this naive after all these years?” The words were out before he could stop them, and Daniel’s accusatory glare made him a little sorry, but not as much as he should have been. “If we find them, Daniel, we are shutting them down. End of story. End of argument. Not one more word.”

  He was saved from having to hear his order contradicted when the alarm klaxon sounded, and Harriman’s voice echoed through the corridors: “Off-world activation. Colonel O’Neill, General Hammond to the gate-room.” He went, confident Daniel would follow — because it suited him. He had no illusions about that. Jack wasn’t the naive one anymore.

  “Colonel O’Neill,” Harriman said, the comm system making his voice thin. “We have a transmission coming through from SG-13.”

  “What now?” Jack muttered. He jogged the few steps up to the control room, the rest of his team right behind him.

  Harriman turned and said, “They’re doing recon on P3N-113. The locals call it Dunamis. When you’re ready, sir.”

  “Lynch?”

  “Colonel O’Neill.” Static threaded through Lynch’s voice, breaking it into insubstantial splinters, and he sounded little like the man O’Neill knew. In the background, he could hear others talking. “Sir, I’ve…we’ve seen…that is, we just spotted a team here that we thought was SG-1. They’ve got SGC patches, but they’re not identical.” A sharp staccato sound raised the hair on Jack’s neck, and he locked eyes with Teal’c just as Lynch shouted, “We’re under fire, sir! We could use some backup!”

  “Hold them there, Lynch,” Jack said, gesturing to the others, who were already moving, headed out to gear up. He glanced at Hammond, sure already of his permission. “Keep them there at all costs. Do not, I repeat, do not let them access the gate. We’re on our way.”

  “Understood.”

  On his way to the locker room, it occurred to Jack that he might have to kill this version of himself. Not like he hadn’t contemplated cutting parts of himself out before. The irony wasn’t lost on him.