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  All that fell away as the sands trembled and small mounds began to press up from beneath the level ground. Vapor from rainwater, flashed to steam, billowed and faded around a shallow crater near where the UAV had been obliterated.

  “Was that lightning?” Sam heard Daniel’s voice behind her.

  “Lightning does not come from underground,” Teal’c’s retort was brisk.

  With a swift motion, she let the dead weight of the control unit detach from her webbing vest and Carter’s P90 came easily into her hands. From the blast crater a shape made of wet brass pushed itself up out of the clotted sand. Sam saw something that approximated a humanoid torso, but with four limbs emerging from the broad shoulders instead of two. It was a seamless thing that reminded her of an Art Deco sculpture more than a machine, and where a person would have had legs, the construct ended in a set of spinning wheels at canted angles. It was most definitely an automaton, moving with steady purpose, spitting out divots of mud as it climbed out of the earth. More of the things were emerging from the newly-formed mounds around them, blunt dome heads with actinic blue sensor monoculars casting about to find them. The one in the crater shifted and extended something that had to be a weapon barrel, the muzzle at the end still steaming from the blast that had brought down the UAV. Carter squeezed the P90’s trigger and suddenly everyone was firing, the flicker of amour-piercing rounds sparking over the brass machines.

  “Regroup!” shouted O’Neill, over the low shrill of blasts from Teal’c’s staff. “Use the spheres as cover!” He thumbed the selector switch on his weapon and sprayed a fully automatic burst of fire at the closest of the robots— that was how he was thinking of them, these big, brass Robby-the-Whatever rejects. The colonel took small comfort in the fact that they weren’t much harder to put down than a Serpent Guard, but he was already mentally counting off the number of rounds he’d fired. He could see the problem coming; these things were popping out of the mud all around them, and there was no way they could tell how many of them were buried down there. More yellow darts of laser light screamed past him, cutting black streaks in the dirt, fusing sand instantly into twists of dirty glass.

  “Must be some sort of defense mechanism,” shouted Daniel. “Looks like we found the ‘gizmos’ Dixon was talking about!”

  “Lucky us,” Jack retorted. “Reloading! Carter, cover me!” He swapped out the SMG’s spent ammo stick for a fresh one and backed off into the shadow of the closest stone sphere. Sam beat back a couple more Robbies and followed suit. The machines hesitated, as if they were reluctant to get too close to the stones.

  “Colonel, we have to disengage. We don’t know what we’re facing here.”

  “Yeah, I reckon we’ve outstayed our welcome, don’t you? We’ll double time it back to the gate, laying down fire as we go.”

  “O’Neill.” The tone of Teal’c’s voice was enough to drain the energy from his orders. Jack looked in the direction the Jaffa indicated and his heart sank.

  Across the mouth of the box canyon that led to the Stargate, there were a dozen of the battle machines, far more than the four of them could handle; and he could see others dragging themselves out of the dirt beyond those. “Ah, crap.”

  The machines turned their unswerving attention on the humans, and so none of them were witness to the new arrival at the Stargate.

  An observer, had there been one, would not have seen the usual sequence of events; the lighting of the chevrons in turn about the ring, the roaring plume of exotic radiation. Instead, there was only the briefest of shimmers around the circumference of the steel-gray construct, a crawling net of blue-white sparks that extended out around the ring, pausing to touch something deep inside the Stargate’s mechanism, then vanishing. In their wake, there came a peculiar hazing of the air some distance away from the gate proper, as if the light of day was being cast through a distorted lens; then the haze dissipated with a buzzing crackle and in its place there was a woman.

  She coughed and spat, holding her chest for a moment. The transition was unpleasant, and she never got used to the feeling. She swallowed hard to force down the vomiting reflex and sipped at a plastic squeeze-ball filled with water.

  Grimacing, she blinked at the rain and pulled the hood of her cloak up over a head of short, unkempt blond hair. The garment’s coloration changed as she fingered the cloak’s control studs at her neck. It shifted from tiger-striped jungle camouflage, to a torrid swirl of brilliant reds before finally coming to rest on something that approximated the shade of the local landscape. In the folds of the cloak, she paused to detach the cylindrical pod from her belt and turn it over in her hands. The device parted along its length to reveal a crystalline keypad and a small status screen. Power was low, she noted. This unit had been problematic before, one of the ones they had tried to repair back at the Holdfast, and it had a hard time maintaining a charge. Little wonder that she had materialized so close to the Stargate. She slid it shut and replaced it on her belt clip. There was enough energy inside for her to get back; but wasn’t the point of all this that she wouldn’t need to? If she did the mission right, it wouldn’t matter.

  Those had been the Commander’s words, not hers. She pushed them out of her thoughts and moved out, staying low in a quick, loping motion. The cloak blurred about her, keeping her on the edge of visibility.

  In her right hand she held her beam pistol, the folding stock extended and the digital-optic sight active. She gave it a quick double-check through the implant link; the emitter muzzle was tuned to the non-visible light spectrum, so any shots she fired wouldn’t be seen by organic eyes. She didn’t need to look at the weapon. The smart-chip in the control mechanism fed the raw data directly into the front of her thoughts. She felt the gun, understood the pistol like it was a part of her. All she needed now were her targets.

  The box canyon opened out, and she kept to the shadows, coming upon the sounds of sustained gunfire and directed energy discharges. She checked her internal chronometer. The time index was wrong. They shouldn’t have been shooting at each other yet, it was too soon! She was supposed to have arrived in time to scout out the area, lay the jammers, and get out.

  She cursed under her breath, using a particularly filthy and heartfelt epithet she’d learned on Chulak. But this is the problem with this sort of operation, right? And this is why I’m here, because these things never play out like they should, because you need an operative to be flexible and adapt on the spot. She watched. A bunch of the guardian mechs had already started new lives as piles of scrap metal, thanks to a few hurled grenades from the four figures firing from the cover of a stone sphere. Peering through the gun scope, she panned the sights over the machines. These droids were canny in the up-close fight, something she remembered from first-hand experience, but they tended to become a little unfocussed in a shooting battle. The problem was, there were enough of them that sooner or later they would wear down the intruders with sheer weight of firepower. And again, here was another point where her intel had been wrong. The briefing said there were a dozen of the mechs out here, maybe less. She could see at least twenty of the tin-heads, not counting the ones that had already been put down. The scope swept over the mechanoids and across the wet sands to the figures by the marble sphere. She wanted to dwell on them, take a good long look at their faces, but that would have been a mistake. She didn’t have the luxury of thinking of them as people; they were just elements in the assignment. Just pieces on the board, just units. Like me.

  The mission was already coming to pieces and she’d yet to even make a move. The choice lay open in front of her; she could bug out and scrub the jump, go back to the gate and trigger the pod’s return cycle, and no-one would know she had been there. But that would mean another window of opportunity sealed shut and blacked out, another roll of the dice coming up snake-eyes; and they were getting desperate now back at the Holdfast, as each missed chance and wrong step piled upon the last. She knew the theory as well as any of them. There would come a
point— and she knew they were damn close to it already— when the pods wouldn’t work any more, when it really would be too late to have any effect on things.

  She had to try, at least. Do your job. The Commander’s voice echoed in her head. Everything else is secondary.

  It would take crackerjack timing on her part. She watched the play of the gunfight, letting the implant ease into control of her human reflexes and perceptions, letting it shift her into fast mode. The familiar cool rush of it came on strong as everything about her seemed to slow down. She saw where they were placing their shots from the P90s and trained the beam pistol to hit the same marks. With the discharge from the gun rendered invisible, by thought she set it to wideband mode and let the energy blasts streak out in a fan of lethal radiation. The kill shots merged seamlessly, and as one robot went down sparking and fizzing, three more erupted in flames alongside it. Anyone watching would think that the machine had caught its comrades in a backfire, cooking off their energy cells in a rush of detonation.

  She did it again and again, firing in time with the machineguns or the whooping blasts of the Jaffa staff weapon. All she had to do was make sure that SG-1 got away, that they made it back to the gate before… Before…

  The implant’s time index pressed in on her accelerated consciousness. The window was closing. She had to get this done quickly, or it would all be meaningless. More time! I just need more time-

  Then the sand around her began to tremble and shift. The implant burned her thoughts with a violent alert warning. There were more of the machines, and she was right in the middle of them. Her eyes snapped to the cloak’s control brooch; the thing was working okay, but the droids weren’t stupid. They might not be able to see her, but they were clever enough to extrapolate the direction of incoming fire. Rookie mistake, she told herself, I should have known better!

  But that was what happened when you reacted to a threat instead of owning it. The implant did so much to make her a better soldier, but it also enhanced the mistakes she made as well. An oversight at five times the speed of human thought was an oversight made five times worse.

  She leapt backwards and away, hoping that SG-1 would see nothing but a weird flicker where she moved. The impact of realization hit her hard. The mission was blown. She had taken too long, her intel had been flawed, and now it was a failure. The machines flailed around, shooting in all directions, filling the air with laser fire as they tried to bring her down. Her legs went tense, the muscles pulled taut with a mixture of fight-or-flight reflex, the time index blaring through her brain. The window was closing. Time to go. Time to go.

  “No, damn it!” she grated, but her voice was lost in the sound of thrusters as a dozen mismatched shapes fell out of the low clouds and arrowed over the mouth of the canyon in a vee formation. The gunfire halted as the machines and the humans hesitated in the face of the new arrivals. SG-1 would be saved now, and in a few moments whatever remained of the robot guardians would be obliterated.

  But she had failed, and now there was no other choice to make. Turning the cloak to maximum opacity, she holstered the beam pistol on the run and fumbled with the pod’s controls without looking at them, just as she had a dozen times before. Somewhere inside her there was a young woman, a frightened and angry young woman who wanted to scream her fury at the sky; but she forced that voice into silence and ran on toward the Stargate.

  Unseen by anyone, a haze enveloped the cloaked figure and with a flicker of blue radiation, she vanished.

  “What the hell is going on over there?” demanded O’Neill.

  Carter ducked back as a salvo of energy bolts shrieked past her face. “Something might be interfering with their sensors…” Sam was just guessing, though. One second the robots had been pinning them down with wave after wave of concentrated firepower, and the next they had been falling like nine-pins. She wasn’t one to question a lucky break, though, and the members of SG-1 used the moment to press the attack; but there were still too many of the mechanicals ringing the entrance to the canyon and Carter and the colonel had just about exhausted their stocks of hand grenades.

  “Incoming!” Sam heard Teal’c bellow the warning and instinctively turned to look at him. The Jaffa stabbed a finger at the rainy sky, and it was then that Carter heard the noise of engines. She grabbed Daniel and yanked him into the scant cover of the stone sphere, aware of Jack and Teal’c doing the same just as the forms of a dozen aircraft hissed out of the clouds and roared past. Carter’s nerves twitched as she recognized the winged-scarab fuselage of a Death Glider, and she hesitated between training her P90 up to target it or stay on the mechanoids.

  “Goa’ulds!” spat Jackson.

  “No,” retorted Teal’c. “I do not think so.”

  Carter found herself nodding. The Death Glider was only one of several designs of flyer that comprised the formation; there were sleek, swan-like craft, a pair of bug-eyed machines that resembled helicopters without rotor blades, all of them following the lead of a long-nosed ship with tri-fold wings and three pulsing engines. Sam’s first impression was one of rough order, like an airborne street gang.

  The robots did not wait to establish intent. As one, they gauged the threat level between SG-1 and the new arrivals and reacted in kind. The machines turned their cannons skyward and threw up a curtain of laser bolts. Carter saw one of the swan-ships crumple into a fist of black smoke and crushed wings. The other flyers returned fire, ripping great divots of wet sand from the ground, shattering the robots with pinpoint strafing runs. In a few moments, the line of mechanoids trapping them in place were smoking ruins.

  Sam looked up and grinned in spite of herself as the lead fighter described a cocky barrel-roll over the victory it had just scored. “That’s pretty good flying.”

  “Eh,” shrugged O’Neill. “I’ve seen better.”

  Daniel hauled himself up and brushed flecks of mud from his jacket. “Well, whoever it is, they pulled our butts out of the fire.” He gave Jack a pointed look.

  Carter watched the fighter settle to the dirt on a jet of thrust. Nearby, two Death Gliders and one of the swan-ships were landing as well. “How do you want to handle this, sir?”

  O’Neill carefully moved his P90 into a more casual, but no less ready, stance. “Let’s play what we’re dealt, Carter. For all we know, this could be a set-up.”

  Three men approached from the parked ships, the pilot of the lead fighter walking at their head while a fourth ran to check the wreckage of the downed craft. Jack sized them up carefully; like their ships, there was nothing uniform about them. The clothes and gear they wore were a mix of high-tech stuff like ballistic body armor and comms headsets, combined with rough-hewn tunics and leather jackets. The only common denominator was a tattoo on their right cheekbones, a small four-pointed star in faint silver ink. All of them were armed— the ‘flight leader’ had what was unmistakably a zat gun tucked in his belt— and all of them moved with caution. O’Neill felt a faint smile tug at his lips. These people were as wary of his team as they were of them.

  The guy with the zat stopped, his hand close to the weapon but not so much that it looked threatening. “Which of you is in charge here?” The accent was thick, European-sounding; he had the craggy face of a boxer and a shock of red hair. He was a big man, as tall as Teal’c and broad across the shoulders. Jack found himself wondering how he managed to squeeze his bulk into the cockpit of the tri-wing fighter. Jack gave Sam and Teal’c a look that asked Are these guys Goa’ulds? Both of them returned a slight shake of the head.

  O’Neill raised a hand. “That would be me. How you doin’?”

  “We made claim here,” said the pilot. “Didn’t you see our ships?”

  “Not until just now, no.”

  One of the other pilots, a slender guy with curly hair to his shoulders, indicated Teal’c and hissed something under his breath to the others. Jack caught the word “Jaffa”.

  “We came through the Stargate,” offered Daniel. “Th
e Chaapa’ai?”

  “Planetborne,” snapped the slender man dismissively. “This isn’t their world.”

  “We were just out for a stroll,” Jack smiled politely. “Making new friends.”

  The big man’s wary gaze found Teal’c. “A First Prime of Apophis? What Lord do you serve now? Your god’s long dead.”

  “Yeah, we know,” O’Neill spoke before the Jaffa could reply. “We killed him. Teal’c plays for our team now.”

  That gave the man pause, and for the first time Jack saw a flicker of emotion on the new arrival’s face. “You… You’re the Tau’ri.” He scrutinized the SGC patch on the colonel’s jacket. “Of course. I should have recognized the wargear. I’ve heard of you.”

  Jack spread his hands and indicated the team in turn. “We get around. I’m Colonel Jack O’Neill, this is Major Samantha Carter, Doctor Daniel Jackson and the big fella is Teal’c.”

  The man tapped his chest with a thumb. “My name is Vix.” He paused. “You are SG-1… I have heard stories…” He gave Jack a long look. “I thought you would be taller.”

  “These people are Pack,” said Teal’c, touching his face to indicate the star tattoos. Vix nodded in agreement. “A community of refugees,” continued the Jaffa, “survivors displaced by the fighting between the System Lords.”

  “Selmak talked about them, in the last Tok’ra intelligence briefing,” added Carter. “They’re like a kind of gypsy colony, Colonel. They live on a fleet of ships instead of a planet.”

  “The Goa’uld crave territory and power over everything else, they gather up worlds to hoard like they were jewels,” said Vix’s companion. “We stay mobile and we stay free of them.”

  “You’re nomads,” noted Jackson.

  “We are free,” retorted the slender man.

  “Ryn,” warned Vix. “We share a common enemy with these Tau’ri. Show them some respect.”