Hydra Read online

  It went on for almost a minute, the pain producing ever wilder grimaces from Makepeace, and then Jack nodded to Teal’c, who released his grip. Tears leaked from the corners of Makepeace’s eyes, but he only looked at Jack with something like admiration. “Guess Maybourne was right about you after all,” he said.

  Jack was only a little surprised to find he had to suppress a wince. He’d thought he was long past that.

  Makepeace was slumped sideways in the chair. Teal’c hauled him upright, and Makepeace made an impatient sound. “Everything I knew is useless now.”

  Jack braced his hands on the table and said, “Let me be the judge of that.”

  “The mission to steal the technology on Altair was on our agenda months before you came on board. I guess they continued on with the plan, even after you busted up our shop.” Makepeace eyed Teal’c, who was watching him carefully, his hand poised just above Makepeace’s vulnerable elbow. Jack had no idea what he planned, but he was certain now it wouldn’t leave lasting marks. It didn’t matter. Jack didn’t think for one second Makepeace was talking because of the pain. “All I know is that they wanted invulnerable soldiers, and they wanted the code. Guess they figured once they got it, they wouldn’t have to recruit on-world anymore.”

  “Where were the additional teams based?” Teal’c asked. He moved his hand, subtly.

  Makepeace hissed through his teeth. With a glare improperly directed at Jack, Makepeace said, “They never told us. Every off-world cell operated independently. Our job was simple: steal, report back, reverse engineer, ship the goods. But I did have additional contacts in the chain of command, in case Maybourne was ever eliminated.”

  “Names,” Jack said.

  “Washburn and Farmi.” Makepeace smiled. “You know there’s always another one. And another one in his place. You catch me, somebody else steps up, funnels the information through. Right this minute, there’s a mole scuttling around the SGC, picking up stray bits of information and sending it on.” He paused, tilted his head. His eyes gleamed. “How’s it feel, Jack? Knowing there’s a version of you doing the job you should’ve done in the first place? You like it?”

  “One of me’s enough.” Jack stood up. Teal’c let go of Makepeace. “Who’s the mole?”

  “Don’t know.” Makepeace met his stare. “Couldn’t say.”

  Jack sighed. They had enough. It wasn’t especially useful, but it confirmed Harry’s tip at least. “I’ll talk to Hammond, see if I can get your sentence commuted.”

  “Doesn’t matter.” Makepeace lifted a hand to his shoulder and rubbed. “Dead or good as dead, it’s all the same to me now.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  NID Primary “Hydra” Project Site, Perseus (P66-421)

  August, 2002; two months prior to invasion of Eshet

  Piper sat up straight in the chair, blinked hard, and cracked a huge yawn. Somewhere on Earth, it was around one a.m., but not on Perseus, Land of Eternal Morning, where the days were 18 Earth-standard hours long. Not that he ever got to see the sun, of course. The gate-room was just outside, close enough to shout information back and forth to the security guys and the techs, but he might as well be on the moon for all the human interaction he actually had. He’d been stuck in the cubbyhole that passed for a communications center and bunk room for going on two days, ever since the incident with the epsilon team. Six teams in rotation and already two down. Beta and epsilon. Not exactly a stellar success rate, there. He scanned the roster pinned up next to his desk. Gamma and delta were fine. Zeta was fine. Alpha was fine. Fine, fine, fine stumbled around inside his head, going nowhere helpful. He needed caffeine.

  He groped around on the top of the console, fingers reaching through assorted debris and empty coffee cups, and came up with half a power bar. Enough to keep him going a little while longer. The yellow legal pad in front of him was covered with scratched-through scrawls, the outline of a situation refusing to lend itself neatly to an organized explanation.

  The facts seemed clear on the surface: epsilon Teal’c had suffered a catastrophic power failure while on the team’s last mission. Some of the technicians had an idea that the power failure was a result of the weird way the Teal’c units integrated their programming, but Piper had a sinking feeling it wasn’t that at all. He’d been watching the teams for four months now, listening to their chatter, and there had never been a single sign that the Teal’cs were having power issues. They gutted out harsh conditions stoically, just like the file indicated the real version would, and came up swinging on the other side after minor repairs.

  There were signs, though, that they weren’t taking well to being under such strict controls. Piper didn’t have a good word for it, but the term “enslaved” screamed around in the back of his head a lot. That’s what it was, really. He was pretty sure how Teal’c would take to that. Maybe Teal’c had just gotten tired of it. The technical phrase was “cascade failure in the emotional circuits of the duplicate,” but Piper couldn’t bring himself to write it down. It seemed so…impersonal. So inaccurate.

  Piper sighed and rolled his pen around on the tablet. The epsilons had relayed the information back about Teal’c and then gone quiet, not a word from them in over twelve hours. Mendez had finally sent the gammas to have a look around and report back, and now it was just a waiting game, listening for a report and hoping nothing else had gone wrong.

  “Hi.”

  Piper twisted around to see Daniel Jackson — the alpha version — standing in the doorway, watching him. “Uh, hi,” he said, flipping his tablet over. Daniel’s lips curved up in a small smile. “I’m actually not supposed to talk with you except in the course of duty.”

  “I know.” Daniel nodded, as if he’d taken the hint. Then he grabbed a chair and rolled it up next to the console. “Mendez is in his quarters, though. What’s the harm?”

  “Mendez turns up sometimes when you least expect him,” Piper said, pulling all his junk to one side as Daniel settled into the chair.

  “He make you nervous?”

  “No,” Piper said. Daniel’s eyebrows lifted just a hair, and as if Daniel had called him a liar, Piper suddenly felt guilty. “Okay, yes. But I’ll deny it.”

  “It’s okay. I think he makes several people here nervous.” Daniel was taking a casual look around the room, like he came visiting every day, which was weird.

  “But not you?”

  “I’m not a people, technically speaking.” Daniel didn’t look back at him to see whether Piper agreed. “Besides, the original Daniel has dealt with all sorts of aggravating authority types over the years. I have all that experience to fall back on.”

  “Right,” Piper said. He tried to keep the wince off his face.

  “So. You sleep here too?” Daniel asked, nodding to the cot in the corner.

  “Just sometimes. When I have teams out.”

  “Like now.” When Piper nodded, Daniel asked, “So what do you think really happened to the epsilons?”

  Piper fidgeted in the chair, looked down at the bland gray cardboard back of his tablet, on which nothing of any use was written. He really needed a sounding board, and the temptation to talk to Daniel about it was pretty strong. “I don’t know,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me?”

  “Come again?”

  Piper looked up at him, at the open, friendly expression on his face. Kind of funny, considering, so Piper answered, “I know you guys are talking on comms channels I can’t monitor or record. You’re keeping secrets.”

  “Wouldn’t you, if you were in our position?”

  Piper shrugged. It hadn’t escaped him that Daniel was really good at answering questions without actually giving any information. “Don’t know.” He thought briefly of all his pledges of secrecy to the US of A, and the long nights of self-struggle, trying to figure out what the greater good would be if he broke those pledges. “Maybe I’m not the best person to ask.”

  “Maybe you’re exactly the right person to ask.”

 
Two techs went by the door, but neither of them so much as glanced into the room. Piper scooted away from Daniel a little anyway. Daniel didn’t budge. “I can’t really trust you,” Piper said.

  “Look at it this way,” Daniel said. “What do you think you’d be telling me that I don’t already know?”

  “Kind of not the point.” Piper put an arm over his closed laptop. A whole chorus of warning bells was ringing in his head. Obviously Daniel was looking for some kind of information. But what could he do with it, really? It wasn’t like anything was a huge secret around here. Well, except for the one thing he really couldn’t give away. But he had enough sense not to say one word about Earth. Or the SGC. In any iteration, Daniel Jackson was smart, and all he needed was a tiny clue to make the connections.

  Daniel leaned forward in the chair. “Did you know they tried to activate the eta team yesterday?”

  “What?” Piper frowned. “No. Usually I get an introduction to the team right after.”

  “Would have been hard to do, this time.” Daniel’s expression remained entirely composed. “They didn’t wake up.”

  “That’s…really?” Implications fluttered through Piper’s mind. Bad programming, maybe the cascade failure he’d been thinking about, or the power issues. Could be something about all those code manipulations they’d been doing too. Really, Daniel’s team was the only one that still seemed true to the originals, which was interesting, come to think of it.

  “Interesting, isn’t it?” Daniel said. Piper twitched. He was pretty sure the robots couldn’t read minds, but Daniel seemed too perceptive.

  “Yeah,” Piper admitted. “Yeah, I guess.” A twinge of sadness poked at him. Each of the teams, no matter how different from the one before, had become his responsibility. It was weird to think one of them was, in essence, DOA.

  “So, the epsilons.”

  Piper grinned. “You’re a persistent SOB.”

  “So I’ve been told.” Daniel smiled back, not a big smile, but one that suggested he didn’t smile all that often.

  Lowering his voice just in case, Piper said, “I’ve been thinking something’s wrong with the Teal’c circuits. If they don’t get it corrected, it’s just…we’ll keep losing them, and I…” He cleared his throat. “I hate to see that happen, you know?”

  Daniel’s expression softened then. “I know. We all appreciate how hard you’ve been working to keep us safe.”

  “Yeah, well.” Piper shrugged. “Anyway, I don’t know what else I can — ” The gate alarm klaxon cut him off, and he swiveled back to the panel, threw on his headset. “It’s an incoming wormhole.”

  Into the earpiece came the tinny voice of the gamma Jack. “Piper, SG-one-niner-Golf.”

  “I read you, Colonel.”

  “Found the epsilons,” Jack said. “In pieces.”

  Piper’s stomach dropped. He swallowed hard. “Say again?”

  “No sign of any resistance or obstruction here at the gate,” Jack came back. “Seems they sat down on the platform and…waited.”

  Waited until their power ran out maybe, or…Piper closed his eyes. “Can you check their power levels?”

  “Already did. They had plenty of juice.” Jack didn’t say it, but he didn’t have to.

  Intentional self-termination. An image popped into Piper’s head — the team sitting down to die, just waiting for an incoming wormhole to take them out. “But why,” Piper whispered.

  “Heading back now,” Jack said. “Bringing in the remains.”

  “Understood.” Piper pulled off his headset, hands shaking. The taste of bile lingered bitter in the back of his throat. He should go to the gate-room, be there when the gammas brought in whatever was left of the epsilons, but he couldn’t seem to make his legs work. Maybe he had failed them somehow; maybe there was something he should have seen, predicted.

  Daniel put a hand on his shoulder, gentle comfort.

  Carlos was having a hell of a bad run.

  He’d lost the beta team to psychosis, the epsilons to something he refused to call suicide, and the etas had failed to activate. According to Piper’s report, the deltas and gammas were in various stages of what amounted to a robot nervous breakdown, questioning their orders and acting oddly, which only complicated things — particularly since he couldn’t pull any in from the field right now. The push was on to secure additional technology. The word from on high had been clear that he needed to produce results now.

  Calling in to explain how he’d lost valuable assets — and not even due to mission-related danger — had not been the high point of his career. They were expendable, sure. But the project’s resources weren’t infinite.

  Peterson was sitting at the briefing table, going on and on about why the eta duplicates didn’t switch on as planned, and all Carlos could think about was the mangled remains of the epsilon Carter. For some reason, the image of gamma Teal’c carrying her down into the gate-room was stuck on an infinite loop in his head.

  “Sir?” He looked up to see Peterson, frustration written all over his face, obviously waiting for him to answer a question.

  “Sorry,” Carlos said. He drew himself up, smoothed his tie. “What was that?”

  “I asked if you’re ready for us to attempt activation of the theta team.” Peterson flicked the corner of his project file with a thumbnail. “We want to see if we’ve solved the coding problems.”

  “You have the alpha team standing by to debrief?”

  “Yes, sir,” Peterson said.

  “You’re still calling me ‘sir,’” Carlos said.

  “Sorry,” Peterson said, though he looked as if it was killing him not to add the ‘sir.’

  Carlos left his briefing materials on the table and followed Peterson out into the corridor, as he had seven times before, for teams alpha through eta. He glanced into the debriefing room as they passed by. Alpha team was milling around with the bored, restless expressions he’d come to understand so well. He would have had them out there searching a hundred worlds a week if they could get the intel to guarantee the missions were safe, but intel was coming slow these days. He had to be patient. The alpha team was his ace in the hole for breaking in each successive team. He wouldn’t have to lie over and over about the mission and worry about how much of the lie might show on his face; the alpha team had already swallowed the story, and now he relied on them to carry the torch. Nothing like looking into the face of your duplicate self to convince you that every word was true. Or so Carlos assumed. He hoped to God he’d never have a reason to know for himself.

  The theta team — the most recent incarnation of these duplicates — seemed to be sleeping in the racks designed for them, their expressions peaceful and at rest. Carlos never ceased to be amazed at how lifelike they were and how easy it would be to forget they were as disposable as the toy robots he bought for his nephew. Except they were a hell of a lot more expensive. Hence his problem.

  “Wake them,” he said to Peterson, who nodded and set down his clipboard.

  “It’ll just be a minute or so while I power them up.” Peterson bent over the panel the engineers had rigged up. He was one of the brighter talents recruited from Area 51. His genius was tweaking technology, making alien gizmos do things they were never designed to do.

  The O’Neill duplicate’s eyes blinked open, and it turned its head toward Carlos. Even though Carlos knew the cause was artificial, the spark of intelligence in its eyes unnerved him. O’Neill stared at him, then sat up and looked around until it saw the other duplicates nearby. Already the Carter duplicate was stirring to life. “Where the hell are we?” O’Neill said.

  “You’re in a secure off-world base,” Carlos answered.

  “Well, that clears everything up,” O’Neill said, his stare never wavering. Sarcasm was the one thing all the O’Neill duplicates had in common. The robot swung its legs over and stood up, lightning quick. “Now let’s move on to who the hell you are.”

  “I’m Carlos Mendez. As soon as th
e rest of your team is awake, I’ll explain everything.”

  “You’re damn right you will.”

  “Jack?” The Jackson duplicate sat up quickly and practically launched itself off the platform.

  “See about Carter,” O’Neill told it, still watching Carlos, who was sure that if O’Neill had a weapon, Carlos would already be dead. There was something about the expression on this one’s face that was different from the ones that had been created before him. This version seemed…colder.

  “She’s fine,” Jackson said, helping Carter up.

  “Teal’c?” O’Neill turned its head to the side and waited for the response.

  “I am uninjured,” Teal’c answered, standing up.

  “Guess you’d better get started on those answers,” O’Neill said to Carlos.

  “Sir,” the Carter duplicate said, stepping up beside him. “Something’s happened. Our uniforms are different.”

  O’Neill glanced down at its chest, saw the THETA designation on its pocket. “Start with this,” he told Carlos, tapping it.

  “I will. If you’ll follow me?” He gestured to Peterson, who went ahead of him to open the blast doors. He turned and led the way out of the lab, all four of the duplicates following behind him at a distance. He could hear them talking softly to one another, and then O’Neill swore suddenly, and the team fell silent. It always happened that way when the new group of duplicates realized they could hear each other thinking. It never took long for them to realize what had happened after that.

  He rounded the corner to the debriefing room and stepped inside, let the reveal take care of itself. The alpha team stood up to welcome the newcomers, who filed slowly into the room, watching their counterparts with wary, angry expressions.

  “I know,” alpha O’Neill said. “Believe me, I understand exactly what you’re thinking.”

  “You should have a seat,” the alpha Jackson said. “This will take some explaining.”

  “Get to the bottom line,” theta O’Neill answered, throwing out a hand to stop the theta Jackson from sitting down. “What’s been done to us? What are we?”