Relativity Page 6

  As he got to the foot of the gate ramp he realized that two of the five people were dressed in quasi-African robes, and one of them was one of his officers. “Major, you appear to be out of uniform.”

  Carter gave a wan smile. “Just picking up some local color, sir.”

  “General Hammond,” O’Neill said brightly, “may I present Suj, from the Pack?” He gestured to the other woman in robes.

  She bowed slightly and looked around. “You are the Tau’ri leader?”

  “I’m in command of this facility,” Hammond replied. “Welcome to Earth, Suj.”

  “Her folks are kinda like interplanetary gypsies, sir,” added O’Neill, “and they have this really funky spaceship.”

  “I look forward to reading your report, Colonel.” He glanced at Doctor Jackson and the young man took the hint.

  “Suj, why don’t you come with me? We need to be cleared by medical before we can proceed.”

  The woman nodded, distracted by the scope of the gate-room. “Of course…” She smiled briefly. “Forgive me. This isn’t what I was expecting…”

  O’Neill made a face. “Oh, this? Well, y’know, we don’t go in for anything fancy.”

  The others walked away, leaving Hammond and his subordinate officer alone. “What have you got for us this time, Jack?” he asked. “Space gypsies?”

  “For real, sir,” said O’Neill, “and more than that. These Pack guys are pack-rats, they have technology and hardware from dozens of planets, and a lot of it is from worlds without Stargates that we’ve never even heard of. And they want to trade.”

  Hammond studied the colonel for a long moment. He trusted Jack O’Neill implicitly, having learned through experience to look past the undisciplined edges of the man’s personality to the seasoned soldier inside. “What’s your gut feeling?”

  “Cautious but optimistic, sir. These folks are proud, but they need our help and they’re not too dumb to admit it.” He gave a rueful chuckle. “I know I’ve said this before, but we may actually get something out of this one.”

  The general gave a wary nod. “Don’t jinx it, Jack,” he warned.

  “This won’t hurt a bit,” said the woman with the blonde curls, and she pressed the small vial to Suj’s bare arm. She felt a sharp stab, like an insect bite.

  “Ah.” Suj shot her a glare. “I thought you said it wouldn’t hurt?”

  The woman gave her a sheepish smile. “Sorry. Force of habit.” The vial filled with a measure of Suj’s blood and then she removed it, tabbing an adhesive bandage over the wound. “There. All done.”

  Suj rubbed the sore spot gingerly as another of the Tau’ri approached. Warner. She had heard Daniel call him by that name, and like the blonde woman he wore a long white tunic over his clothes. It was clearly some kind of uniform, like the drab green that Jackson and the others wore. Suj began theorizing about the Earthers; perhaps they had some kind of regimented culture, where the color of their clothing delineated their position and status. The leader Hammond wore blue. White seemed to be the signifier for their healers.

  Warner took the vial from the woman. “Thanks, Cathy. I’ll take it from here.” He shot Suj a flat smile and glanced at a portable computer device in his hand. “Can I ask you a question, Miss?”

  “My name is Suj.”

  “Suj, yes,” He nodded. Warner reminded her of a farmer she knew in the spinward townships, with a large frame and big hands that belied the delicacy of them. “Doctor Jackson told me you come from a space colony, is that correct? You don’t live on a planet?”

  “No. The Wanderer is my home.”

  “Interesting. I’d like to examine you, if you’d be willing. I’m conducting research into the way that artificial gravity affects human bone structure and—”

  “Doctor,” Daniel emerged from behind a folding screen near the foot of the bed where she sat, and interposed himself between them. “Suj has only just arrived. Could we leave the poking and prodding for later?”

  Warner’s face fell. “Oh. Yes. Of course.” He flashed the same slight smile. “Later then.” He moved away.

  “Maybe,” added Jackson. He sighed. “I’m sorry about that. He doesn’t get out much. His social skills are a little limited.”

  She rubbed her arm again. “Is all this necessary?” Suj’s gaze crossed the chamber to where the rest of Jackson’s cadre were being ministered to by the white-coats.

  He nodded sadly. “Unfortunately, it is. We’ve been on the sharp end of a fair few invasion attempts in the past… Everything from Goa’ulds secreting themselves inside our people to aliens duplicating images of us.”

  Suj inclined her head. “It is sad, is it not, that the nature of the universe forces one to be so cautious around new faces and new places?”

  “Yeah.” She heard the regret in his voice. Suj watched the other Tau’ri, considering them. They were an eclectic mix, to be certain. Jackson, with a keen mind and a searching intellect that burned fiercely behind his eyes and those peculiar lenses he wore across his face; he seemed to be a rogue element among the rest of SG-1. The others had a more martial tone to them. The woman, Carter, shared Daniel’s insight but she carried it beneath an aura of soldierly precision where Jackson was more open. She reminded Suj of Vix; she seemed, for want of a better word, leaderly. And then there was O’Neill. She still wasn’t sure quite what to make of him. On the surface, he appeared flippant and lacking in focus, but Suj was starting to realize that might be an affectation. She suspected he was far more intelligent than he appeared at first glance. Perhaps it is a tactic on his part, she mused, a deliberate attempt to make others underestimate him. Suj filed that conclusion away to later relay to Vix.

  Finally, she settled on the Jaffa, and a dart of old terror made her go tense. The burnished golden brand on the dark-skinned warrior’s forehead rang peals of warning deep inside her. This man was a First Prime, the most feared and lethal warriors in service to a System Lord. Even being in the same room as him made her uncomfortable.

  Daniel saw her looking at Teal’c. “He’s a great guy, once you get to know him.”

  Suj nodded woodenly. “How… How did you manage to tame him?”

  Jackson laughed briefly. “Tame him? I don’t think anyone will ever be able to tame Teal’c!” Then the amusement left his expression as he saw Suj did not share it. “He came to our side of his own volition. He rescued us when Apophis was planning to murder us all. Teal’c turned against everything he had been brought up to serve because he knew it was wrong.”

  “And yet…” Suj licked dry lips. “His kind were the hammers that shattered our worlds. If not for the Jaffa, the people that form the Pack would have lived peaceful lives.”

  “Not all the Jaffa serve the Goa’uld. Many of them are free now, they’ve rejected their false gods like the Pack have.” He paused, considering. “You have no Free Jaffa in the Pack, do you?”

  She shook her head. “They have not been welcomed,” Suj admitted. “The memories of worlds and loved ones lost still burn strongly in much of the Pack hierarchy. Every time we have crossed paths with the Free Jaffa it has resulted in disagreement.”

  “I understand how you must feel,” said Daniel, after a while. “I’ve lost friends to Jaffa, to the Goa’uld. They took my wife Sha’re from me…” He looked away, then back. “But that’s true for Sam, Jack and Teal’c as well. We’ve all suffered because of them.”

  Suj nodded again. “I do not doubt your words. But it is difficult to look beyond the legacy of a bloody past.”

  Daniel echoed her nod. “Yes, it is. But what happens from here, between our people and yours, that’s going to be about the future.”

  She felt a smile emerge on her lips. “You’re right.”

  O’Neill and the others got up from the examination beds. “Daniel,” called the colonel. “C’mon. Hammond wants us in the briefing room for a chit-chat.”

  “I have to go.” Jackson patted her on the arm. “Are you hungry? Doctor Warner
can have someone take you down to the mess hall.”

  “Mess hall?” Suj blinked in mild alarm at the name. “How do you people eat on this planet?”

  But Daniel was already on his way out. “Try the Jell-O,” he said over his shoulder, “it’s a Tau’ri delicacy.”

  Teal’c took his seat at the far end of the table next to O’Neill. The colonel settled into the chair and drummed his fingers on the wood as Major Carter and Doctor Jackson took their places. The Jaffa eased into the comfortable seat and rolled it back slightly, giving his legs the room he needed in the event an emergency required him to get quickly to his feet. It was force of habit for him, an ingrained faculty that automatically led Teal’c to place himself in the most tactically advantageous place in a room. To be Jaffa, as Bra’tac had taught him, was to always be ready.

  O’Neill watched him survey the room and rolled his eyes. “Relax, T. It’s the briefing room. We’ve been here a million times.” He nodded at the heraldic standards on the far wall. “I don’t think the flagpoles are going to attack us, not after all this time.”

  It would have been easy for Teal’c to make a list of all the adversaries that SG-1 had encountered which were capable of making themselves invisible to the naked eye, but he chose not to and simply accepted O’Neill’s mild admonishment in his usual way; by ignoring it.

  At the far end of the table, General Hammond looked up from a spread of printouts and still images that had been generated by the MALP sent to P5X-404. “So, SG-1, another mission that went off at a tangent…” He shook his head. “How did it happen this time?”

  “Ah, you know us, sir,” began O’Neill, “every day’s an adventure.”

  Jackson manipulated a remote control and directed it at a screen by the far wall. “I took the liberty of cueing up some of the footage I captured on the planet.” Images of the rainy canyon scrolled past, quickly followed by shots of the stone spheres. “The information Colonel Dixon and SG-13 brought back from their mission last week led us to believe that we’d find alien hardware on the planet, and at first that seemed to be wrong. There were only these monuments.”

  “Yeah, until the big honking robots started poppin’ up everywhere,” broke in O’Neill.

  Jackson advanced the footage to a set of blurry stills that showed the brassy mechanoids moving and firing at them. Hammond’s eyes narrowed. “That doesn’t look like any technology we’ve seen before. Major?”

  Carter nodded. “Yes sir. I mean, no sir, it doesn’t seem so.” She produced a drawstring bag and pulled out a piece of broken, charred metal plate. “I took a sample of wreckage from one of the machines. Just on first impressions you can see it weighs less than aluminum, but it has the tensility of tempered steel. It’s some kind of exotic composite alloy.”

  Hammond took the scrap from her and ran his fingers over it. “Have Doctor Lee give this a full metallurgical work-up. Let’s find out if those machines are native to the planet.”

  “That shouldn’t be a problem. We already have some preliminary geological scans of the area around the Stargate from the MALP. We can compare the results.”

  “As thrilling as the geology stuff is, I’d like to cut to the chase if I may, General.” O’Neill tap-tapped his fingers on the table. “The long and the short of it was, sir, we were about to get our asses handed to us by those Rock-em Sock-ems when these Pack guys intervened.”

  “Coincidence, Colonel?” Hammond asked. “Or a set-up?”

  Teal’c saw O’Neill’s lip twist. “Still working on that one. My gut says no, but…”

  “Sometimes a fluke is just a fluke,” protested Jackson. “I’d like to float the possibility that we might just have been lucky today…” He glanced at the noncommittal faces around him. “Or is this the wrong crowd for that?”

  “All right, Doctor Jackson, for the moment let’s give these people the benefit of the doubt, and accept that they were there following the same rumors we were.”

  Daniel nodded. “Apart from the stone spheres, which I will want to take a team back to examine, the rumors of Ancient technology on P5X-404 look to be just that. Rumors.”

  “We should send out long-range UAVs to be sure, but I’m going to concur with Daniel,” added Carter.

  O’Neill shook his head. “Dixon’s gonna be pissed. Reynolds bet him twenty bucks it wouldn’t pan out.”

  “I think we can all agree that the Pack aren’t out to pick a fight with us,” said Daniel.

  “Indeed?” Teal’c offered. “I sensed a distinct aggressive undercurrent among them.”

  “Toward you, maybe,” said the colonel. “You’re a big guy, you intimidate folks. Try working on those people skills some more.”

  “The Pack exhibit a strong dislike toward Jaffa,” Teal’c continued. “Regrettably, I understand their anger. They look upon me and see only the Goa’uld who attacked their birthworlds.”

  “That’s as may be,” said Hammond, “but the Free Jaffa are our allies and if, as Colonel O’Neill says, these Pack are in the market for a treaty, they’ll have to accept that.” He looked at Carter. “What do they want and what do they have to offer?”

  “Food, in the short term,” said the major. “They’re suffering from severe crop failures related to some sort of plant-based virus.”

  “Which is why you had me institute full decontamination protocols,” nodded the general. “Go on.”

  “We’ve agreed in principle to lend any scientific expertise we have to their problem. In return, they’re going to let us cherry-pick from the salvage they’ve gathered on their journeys. We’re talking about captured Goa’uld technology, items of Asgard and Ancient origin, maybe more. Plus that genetic ‘patching’ thing.”

  “I believe they also have a wealth of tactical data.” Teal’c added. “The Pack survive by remaining one step ahead of the System Lords. In order to do that they maintain surveillance on all the Goa’uld powers. They are likely to possess information about threat forces and territories that we do not.”

  The room fell quiet as Hammond took in their words and considered them. After a several moments, Daniel Jackson was compelled to break the silence. “So, where do we go from here, General?”

  Hammond closed the file in front of him with a decisive motion. “You, Doctor, and the rest of SG-1 stay here at the SGC and continue an ongoing evaluation of that young lady you brought back as the Pack’s representative. I am going to head out to Washington to brief the President and set the wheels in motion for a treaty agreement. This is a formal request, so we have to take it up to the State Department.” The general got to his feet and the rest of the team stood up with him. “The IOA are making things difficult back on the Hill. This could be a good opportunity to silence some of the nay-sayers.”

  Teal’c saw a crooked smile cross the colonel’s face. “Don’t forget to give the boss a hug from me, sir.”

  The liquid in the glass caught the light and refracted it around the sparse walls of the chamber. The blue shimmer moved in gentle silence over the undecorated steel-gray supports and the umber walls. As the light from the holographic console changed, so did the reflections. The display unfolded like an opening box, a ghostly wire-frame filled with a slow rain of symbols that moved to and fro, repeating information from all stations of the starship to eyes that were dimmed, that did not see them.

  Mirris let the clear liquid in the glass fill her sight. She turned the tumbler in her hands, watching the sluggish motion of the fluid. After a moment she took another purse-lipped sip and felt the warmth of the liqueur spread down her throat. As she lowered the glass from her lips, her eyes happened to fall across the metallic desk in front of her and they snagged on the brushed alloy bracelet that rested there, alone and to one side, isolated across the work surface from the profusion of disposable screens and other devices that constituted the debris of her rank. Mirris felt the urge to reach out and touch it in the tips of her fingers, in a peculiar tightening of the skin. It took an almost physical
effort on her part to do nothing, to sit there and watch the hologram without watching it.

  A low, resonant chime sounded from the door and she flicked a glance up. Mirris tapped a sensor spot on the desktop and the door slid into the wall to reveal Geddel, who entered with his usual expression of muted discontent. He was slightly too old for his posting aboard the ship, and in the usual manner of things a man of his age should have been in administration of a vessel or installation of his own by now. He was rail-thin and lacking in hair, both traits that Mirris found unattractive in males.

  He nodded and gestured slightly with a screensheet in his hand. “Administrator, if I am not interrupting?” Geddel phrased it like a question, but he worked in a small measure of reproach as well.

  She turned the glass in her fingers. “What is it?”

  “Signals Parsing has received an encrypted communication from the migrant fleet. Your…operative…has provided an update.” He held out the flimsy sheet of plastic.

  Mirris ignored the disdain in his tone and nodded. “Read it to me.”

  He didn’t want to, but her word was her command aboard the cruiser. “Very well. The operative says that the Tau’ri suffered no casualties, which concurs with our own telemetry. There were apparently some matters of small local import that took place aboard the colony ship…” He scrolled down the page, tutting quietly at what he no doubt saw as a disordered and impatient communication. “The end result, if I understand correctly, is that the Tau’ri are following predicted patterns of behavior.”

  “Good. We will move to the next phase of the project once the Pack have secured an agreement with them.” There was an unmistakable undercurrent of relish in her words, and Geddel frowned openly at it. She eyed him. “Is that all, sub-director, or do you have something of your own to add?”