Hydra Page 4

  Through a pair of wide blue non-secure doors, Jack found himself in a straightforward briefing room with one large circular conference table and about a dozen chairs. At the far end of the table, a man in a navy blue suit was standing, smoothing his silver tie. Jack disliked him on sight.

  “Come in,” the suit said, gesturing expansively at the table. His black hair was slicked back neatly. He looked spit-polished but not in a military way. Manicured. Civilian. “Have a seat.”

  Jack walked around the table and pulled out a chair facing the door. The others filed around behind him and sat to his left. Piper sat down next to Jack. To his credit, he didn’t scoot his chair away, though his body language made Jack think that was just an act of willpower.

  Suit smiled a smile that under other circumstances might seem genuine. Hard to tell. “My name is Carlos Mendez,” he said. “I’m going to get right to the point. I’m sorry for the way you had to be…awakened…but we weren’t actually certain everything would go as planned.”

  “Cryptic,” Jack said. “Not exactly getting to the point.”

  “You’re duplicates,” Mendez said bluntly. “Let’s just get that out of the way. You are not the real SG-1.”

  Beside Jack, Carter gasped softly. Jack stared at Mendez for a long moment, trying to put some context to the words. “What are you talking about?” he said.

  “We created you from off-world technology.” Mendez had the nerve to look apologetic.

  Jack immediately patted his chest, then jerked up the edge of his T-shirt and stuffed a hand under it, palm pressed flat to where his beating heart should be. His skin was warm, but there was no heartbeat.

  “Duplicates.” Teal’c raised his eyebrow.

  “Androids,” Mendez answered. “Sophisticated ones.” This time the smile that twitched the corners of his mouth looked real and proud.

  Jack turned sideways in the chair to Carter, who was pressing at her pulse points. “You’re not you,” Jack accused her, and not until he heard the words did he realize how ridiculous it sounded, or how a thin, sharp line of anxiety had tightened around his throat. It wasn’t possible. But something in his brain told him that it was. If he concentrated on it, he could almost bring it into focus, a running patter in the background. He thought of the blinking consoles in the lab down the hall, programs running silently, click click click. For the tiniest fraction of a second, something flashed in his eyes — numbers, maybe — but he denied it. The patter receded. He fisted his hands on the table in front of him. Not the time for an existential crisis.

  “I feel like me,” Carter said, meeting his eyes with her own wide blue stare. As if trying to prove it, her hands traveled over her fake skin, looking for…what? Seams? “But I don’t…I’m not…”

  “No. You’re not.” Mendez pulled out his chair and sat down, leaning forward to clasp his hands and rest them on the smooth wooden table. “We created you to serve a need.”

  “Created us how?” Daniel, of course, interrupting as per his usual pattern. Or the usual pattern of the original. Jack tilted his head to one side and shook it. Too bizarre. In the back of his mind, or whatever it was, he was preoccupied with his own series of questions: where they were, what the real deal was here, and how he could immediately terminate his existence if he didn’t like the answers to questions one and two.

  He grabbed the pen clipped to the edge of Mendez’s folder, clicked it open, and plunged it into his leg. It hurt, a brief flare of pain, and then it just…didn’t. He pulled the pen out, ignoring Carter and Daniel’s shocked looks and Mendez’s thinned lips. The pen dripped a viscous gray goo.

  “Ugh,” he said, flinging the pen back on the table.

  “You can be damaged,” Mendez said. “Make no mistake: you can die.”

  “You mean be terminated,” Carter said coldly.

  “Whatever terminology suits you, Captain.” Mendez assessed her for a moment, then directed his attention back to Jack. “We represent Earth’s interests. The SGC has been closed down for some time now. Bureaucrats and paper-pushers have seen to it that the value of Earth’s Stargate goes unrecognized. SG-1 is presumed dead.” He paused to let that sink in. “No one is going out there, looking for technology to save our world. We couldn’t stand by and see this happen, so we took matters into our own hands.”

  “And created a bunch of robots?” Jack pressed his fingers experimentally into the hole he’d made in his robot leg. He needed a Band-Aid. Or a glue gun.

  “Yes — can we get back to my question? Created us how?” Daniel again, persistent.

  “We used duplicating technology SG-1 originally found off-world.”

  “Our team…originally…” Carter frowned. “What year is this?”

  “2002.”

  Carter said, “Sir, it should be 1998.”

  “That’s when SG-1 stumbled across this technology, yes. The team was duplicated, and when that matter was resolved, they left the technology behind. Fortunately for us.”

  “Yes, isn’t that nice,” Jack said. “What was that about the SGC?”

  “Closed,” Mendez said. “Shut down. No one looking out for Earth.”

  “I sense a ‘but,’” Daniel said.

  “Oh, yes,” Mendez answered. He smiled. “Looking out for Earth is your job now.”

  Jack folded his arms across his apparently empty chest. “And we should believe you why, again?”

  “Because it’s the truth.” Mendez looked from one to the other of them, ever so earnest. Jack couldn’t get a clear read on him. That bugged him. “We will give you access to SG-1’s essential mission files. Everything you’ve missed. New languages, Dr. Jackson. New technologies, Captain Carter. Many new things, new projects.”

  “And then?” Jack said.

  “Then you’ll begin going off-world. You’ll need to earn your keep.”

  “This is not a life,” Jack said. “This is…”

  “This is your duty,” Mendez said. He stood up, which was apparently some kind of signal. The guards pushed the doors open and stood waiting. “You’ve been designated SG-Alpha. You’ve already met your handler.”

  Piper pushed back from the table and stood up. He cleared his throat and moved down the table, shaking their hands in turn like some kind of perverse receiving line. The expression on his face told Jack this was a brave new world for him too. He seemed a little stunned by the whole thing, and when he caught Jack watching him, his eyes shifted away.

  “Handler?” Carter said, as if the whole thing was too surreal for words.

  “For your missions. You’ll be going off-world regularly.”

  Jack glanced at Piper. Piper looked away again. Suspicion took up a nice permanent spot in the back of Jack’s brain.

  “And what world would this be, exactly?” Jack was working pretty hard to maintain a dispassionate attitude about the fact that he wasn’t Jack O’Neill, wasn’t on Earth, and had no idea who the hell these people were, but it was getting more difficult by the second.

  “All in good time.”

  “Now seems like a good time,” Daniel said.

  “We’ll need to get you outfitted. Tell you a bit about your enhancements. Then we’ll answer more of your questions.” Mendez nodded to Piper, who smiled nervously at them.

  “Come on,” Piper said. “I have some stuff to show you.” He popped open the door with one hand and held it, waiting. Jack had the impression that he was an overeager kid about to play with his new toys on Christmas. He finally looked right at Jack, this time not so much meeting his eyes as trying to look inside his head. “Have you accessed it yet? The heads up?” He swirled a finger in front of his own eye. “Pretty useful in the field. Pretty cool too.”

  Ignoring the question, Jack backed away from the table and as he passed Daniel, said, “Maybe there will be an army of robot women.” Carter’s scowl was the best, most normal thing Jack had seen all day. He thought that was probably going to be the high point; it was bound to be all downhill from th
ere.

  Ignis (P9T-166)

  May, 2002

  The moment they stepped out of the Stargate, spikes of crimson fire exploded along Jack’s fake skin, like flaying acid. He looked down at his arms, expecting to see blackened skin shriveling back along gears and circuits, but they looked perfectly normal. The pain would have taken his breath away, if he still needed to breathe. All Mendez’s speeches, all the pretty pictures of red gases swirling in the breeze on this strange little planet where the magical alien doodads were hidden, and he hadn’t mentioned how it would feel.

  “Oh, my God,” Daniel said next to him, shaking his arms as the wind cut across them again. Jack grimaced in empathy.

  “It’s the pain response,” Carter said faintly, shoulders hunched in as if she hoped to curl in on herself, defend her body against the assault. “It’s there to tell us there’s danger to the mechanism.”

  “Just like being alive,” Jack said, wallowing in the lovely irony of it. Meanwhile, his fake eyeballs were burning like sulfur was being streamed into them. “Let’s get on with it so we can get the hell out of here.”

  “Sir,” Carter said, pointing to her right at something Jack vaguely interpreted as primary target .238 kilometers buried 10.6 centimeters beneath the surface. He blinked, annoyed at his own supposed brain going into stealth analytical computer mode without him asking it to. He had no idea, anyway, how he knew all that. He just did.

  Teal’c stepped away and set off at a rapid jog across the wasted burnt-red landscape, Daniel right behind him, and Jack loped along with them. The contrasting joy of having no pain in his knees, his back, or his neck was overwhelmed by the beating agony of the ferocious radiation, the heated wind battering at him. He couldn’t even properly appreciate not having to feel old for a change.

  It wasn’t a high price to pay for doing something his real live counterpart could never do, even in a protective suit. But pain without a real purpose made him sad because it didn’t make much difference if he melted on the spot. There were other kinds of pain, and there was a debate for people like Daniel in that, but Jack didn’t have time for it.

  The ruins around them were scrubbed a sickly gray-green. The squat buildings, their tops blown away, had singed edges crumbling into the gusting wind. Someone had lived here once, in this place that reminded Jack of hell; the idea of it seemed impossible. Jack had tuned out all the scientific stuff about the what and who of it, but he couldn’t imagine how anything breathed here.

  Of course, he was proof that what lived didn’t have to breathe. The irony slapped him upside the head, hard.

  Ahead, Daniel stopped and scrubbed furiously at his arms and chest like he was brushing away flies. The same sensation assaulted Jack, sharpened-glass pinpricks all across his body, overloading him with the desire to scratch. He stopped, focused on forcing the sensation away, and it receded. “Come on,” he said to Daniel, with gritted teeth. “Think your way through it.”

  “Sir,” Carter said, pulling up short beside him. Ahead, Teal’c continued on. “Sir, it isn’t that easy, it’s — ” She gestured to her neck, where it looked as if seams had opened up along the once-graceful lines of her throat, and her head looked in danger of toppling off.

  Daniel held out his arm. The skin over his wrists and below his shirt cuffs had a strange grayish char to it, the kind of thing that had stopped turning the real Jack’s stomach years before, but it looked pretty horrible. “So much for indestructible,” Jack said, noting the stoic way Daniel’s jaw was set, no complaints finding voice. “Let’s move it, people.”

  Teal’c knelt beside a free-standing wall where the invisible crosshairs in Jack’s brain said X marks the spot and began moving dirt with his bare hands. Daniel crouched beside him, not digging, his hands tucked down between his legs. Carter turned to take up a defensive position, though there wasn’t much to defend against, other than the atmosphere.

  Carter closed her eyes and said, as though reading from the inside of her eyelids, “Atmospheric pressure and temperature are increasing, sir. We have two minutes before system integrity is compromised.”

  “Nice,” Jack said, thinking that “compromised integrity” was such a pleasant way of referring to imminent death. He noticed his clothes were starting to disintegrate now, bits of thread flying breezily off into the ether.

  “O’Neill,” Teal’c called, and then a blaring shout inside Jack’s head: O’NEILL.

  “Ahhh,” Jack hissed, heel of his hand coming up to knock against his temple.

  “Internal comms,” Sam said urgently. She held one hand to her throat, covering the damaged area. She closed her eyes and her voice blared inside Jack’s head, as Teal’c’s had a second before: CAN YOU HEAR ME?

  “Dial it down,” Jack said, through gritted teeth.

  I have the object, Teal’c said, and through him Jack understood it was small enough to fit in the palm of Teal’c’s huge hand, a round ruby with hash marks scored across its face. There was nothing about it that seemed to make it worth this little trip into the furnace, beyond giving Mendez a chance to see how well his new toy soldiers were going to jump through his hoops. For all Jack knew, the little jewel was a championship belt buckle for alien rodeo-riding. It’d look good on the shelf in Mendez’s office. He felt a sudden pang of empathy for every MALP he’d ever watched tip over an event horizon. Careful not to touch its surface, Teal’c slipped the jewel into a pouch Daniel held out, and Jack pivoted on his heel, what was left of his boot flapping around his foot.

  The DHD was off-center of the gate, some of its symbols excoriated by the elements, but intact. Jack punched the symbols fast, so fast his blackening hand was a blur. The wormhole popped to life, an odd purplish color, wrong and weird like everything else in this place. Carter passed him, her uniform hanging off her shoulders in a patchwork of sooty green and gray. Jack hit the bottom step and turned to see Teal’c doubled over, whatever cranks that turned the machinery having apparently given up. Daniel bent beside him.

  Jack had barely moved two steps toward them when Daniel slipped an arm under Teal’c and dead-lifted him from the ground to throw him over his shoulder. Jack took a moment to properly appreciate how wrong that was. A moment was all he had; one of his eyes gave out, a misfire of green sparks and then darkness. “Go!” he told Daniel, unnecessarily, and Daniel threw him an impatient look as he took the steps two at a time and barreled through the wormhole.

  Jack followed, and on the other side he met the steaming, charred heap of his friends: Teal’c flat on his back and half-clothed, Daniel looking as pissed as Jack had ever seen him, and Carter staunchly ignoring the fact that her skin had opened up in maybe a dozen places, all her innards sparkling silver out at them in ways that made Jack turn away. The stoic part of him that had gone along in the name of duty, of being useful, morphed into an ineloquent rage. He had to resist the urge to put his hand on Carter’s shoulder, to pat Daniel on the back.

  Mendez stood at the low edge of the ramp watching, the antithesis of Hammond in every way. His smile seemed lopsided, the first evidence of actual humanity Jack had seen out of him, as he made sharp gestures sending technicians to their side. “Welcome back,” he said. “Congratulations on completing a very difficult first mission.”

  First. Many more to come. Jack submitted to having his blackened pieces peeled off, his arms wrapped, a blanket thrown around him for the sake of appearances and practicality, no real comfort or need, and pictured an unending life filled with moments just like this.

  He thought next time he might just take the chance to get in the way of an incoming wormhole.

  But then Daniel made a noise, something that might have been a cry of pain, and he remembered: his team, his duty, his responsibility. For as long as the last of them were in existence. And maybe one second longer.

  In Carter’s eyes, he saw the certainty that the time was going to come sooner rather than later.

  CHAPTER THREE

  SGC

  Oct
ober 30, 2002; one day after invasion of Eshet

  Daniel had no love for the interrogation rooms. Aside from the fact they were cold and claustrophobic, he’d spent enough time on the wrong side of the table over the years. He shared at least some of those unpleasant memories with the Daniel Jackson facsimile waiting to be debriefed inside Room A. Daniel watched him through the small rectangular window and tried to keep in mind that this other Daniel might have a knowledge gap of four years. A great deal had happened in that time.

  “You really think this is going to be productive?” Jack leaned closer and looked through the window, then pulled back like he was afraid he’d be caught staring. Daniel glanced in again and saw a small smile on the facsimile’s face. It was unnerving to recognize it, and the sentiment behind it: Jack was never subtle, and that never ceased to amuse Daniel. Either Daniel, apparently.

  “Well, if he’s willing to give up information, I don’t see why it wouldn’t be.” Daniel held up the tablet he’d been curling in front of him like a shield. “I have a long list of questions, some from General Hammond, some from Sam. You want to add anything?”

  “No,” Jack said. “Unless maybe he can tell me how to get you to stop arguing with me when you’re clearly wrong.”

  “Very funny.” Daniel gave him a look and nodded to the airman at the door, who swiped his security card and pushed the door open for Daniel.

  Airmen bustled around, setting up cameras and microphones, but Daniel’s attention was focused on his duplicate, who glanced up at him once and then looked back down at his hands. Daniel couldn’t help staring at the robot, at the fine lines on his skin approximating the same lines Daniel saw on his own face every morning when he shaved. The hair on the back of his neck rose.

  “Um,” Daniel said. He set his notebook and pen down on the table and nodded to the airman. “You can go.”

  “We’ll be outside, sir. Colonel O’Neill’s orders.”