02 - The Price You Pay Read online

  THE PRICE YOU PAY

  Stargate SG-1 - 02

  Ashley McConnell

  (An Undead Scan v1.0)

  Author’s Note: The action in this book takes place approximately midway through Season One of the series.

  Special thanks to Robert Cooper, who caught several errors on my part, and to Jonathan Glassner. Any errors which still exist are, obviously, strictly the fault of the author.

  This book is dedicated with great conviction to Bildair’s After Glow, sine qua definitely non.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Jack O’Neill pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed, leaning back in the gray chair and shoving himself away from the metal desk. He had to admit that Devorah Randolph was good at logistics, even though the Major had never been on a Stargate mission herself. Once a new Gate had been located and a probe sent through, Randolph would set to work, taking whatever data on terrain, weather, flora and fauna were available and planning supplies and weaponry as appropriate. She was particularly gifted at learning from past missions and applying those lessons to future ones.

  Flora—O’Neill skimmed the consumables list again. Yep, there it was: three boxes of tissue for Daniel Jackson, whose allergies seemed to be triggered by Gate travel. O’Neill could tell they hadn’t invented an antihistamine for wormholes yet because Randolph hadn’t included any on the supply list.

  Randolph kept hinting that if only she could go along on a mission sometime, she’d be ever so much more efficient at the supply business. She seemed to think that the Star-gate missions were Great Adventures and that she was missing out on all the fun. O’Neill thought back on some of the “fun” and grimaced. One of these days he was going to take her up on it, but then they’d probably need a new Logistics Officer in short order.

  Stargate missions weren’t “fun.” They were necessary reconnaissance to ensure Earth’s survival in an undeclared war against the Goa’uld, a race of parasitic aliens who had established—or borrowed, or stolen—the Gate technology to make travel between worlds easier by opening worm-holes between predetermined coordinates. Thousands of years in the past, one of the Goa’uld had set a Gate in ancient Egypt and used it as a base to kidnap humans and seed them all over the galaxy. The Goa’uld liked to think of themselves—and have humans think of them—as gods. They had adopted much of ancient Egyptian mythology along with their human hosts.

  But that had been long ago. Eventually both humans and Goa’uld had forgotten the existence of the Earth Gate, until it was rediscovered by archaeologists. The Gate had been moved to a site in the U.S. at Cheyenne Mountain, and almost by accident they’d found a sequence of symbols that jolted the ancient Gate back into operation. That had led, in turn, to the planet Abydos, and a pitched battle in which one of the most powerful Goa’uld, Ra, had been killed.

  One of Ra’s rivals had decided that this upstart Earth needed to be brought back to heel. Ever since, the Stargate Project had conducted a topmost-secret effort to prepare for an inevitable confrontation. Earth had managed to safeguard its own Gate by installing an iris shield, which had to be opened separately—anyone, or anything, attempting to use the Gate without sending the proper signal would find itself splatted against the shield.

  Meanwhile, nine Stargate teams, made up of the best of the best from all U.S. military services, used some of the most powerful computing hardware in the world to calculate the proper sequence of signals to find new Gates and new worlds. The formal mission of the Stargate teams was “to perform reconnaissance, determine threats, and if possible make peaceful contact” with as many worlds as possible.

  In fact, the Earth teams went through the Stargate searching for allies, for weapons, for intelligence about the alien race. As the senior officer with the most experience with the aliens, Colonel Jack O’Neill commanded SG-1. It was his responsibility to keep his team safe, to accomplish the mission and get everyone home in one piece. And to do that he had to make sure they had enough weapons, blankets, and Kleenex.

  It was so much easier just to shoot at problems…

  And this new world, like all the rest, presented special problems of its own. The Stargate teams had found Gates in a lot of out-of-the-way places, on worlds that had forgotten their very existence; they’d found them set up as shrines, or remade as triumphal arches. O’Neill allowed himself to contemplate painting a Stargate bright yellow and asking the Goa’uld if they wanted fries—he shook his head. It was really getting late.

  The Gate on the world designated NPR76309, however, appeared to be squarely in the middle of a lively town marketplace. The probe had come through the Gate at the other end of the latest set of coordinates only to see buildings, people, animals, all staring at it in bemusement.

  It made, as Patton might say, an interesting technical problem.

  Ideally, O’Neill preferred to do reconnaissance of new, possibly hostile places from a nice safe distance—say, a space satellite, or at the very least a tall mountain miles away—not from the middle of the sales floor. It was sort of hard to execute both discreet intelligence-gathering and a grand entrance. The Stargate teams could field a lot of manpower these days for the grand entrance part, but there went your discretion factor all to hell and gone.

  Made for a challenge, all right.

  O’Neill shoved himself back from the table and pinched the bridge of his nose again. He was tired. He’d been working late, and he was wondering if maybe he ought to have a bad feeling about this one. Or maybe he’d be better off saying the hell with it and catching some sack time.

  Sometimes it was just more convenient, the night before a Gate jaunt, to stay in quarters in the guts of the mountain. Officers’ quarters were cramped, containing only a cot covered with a greenish-gray wool blanket, a metal desk with a lamp and a computer terminal, and a chair. A closet at one end of the room, a tiny bathroom, and a television set tuned more or less permanently to CNN completed the suite.

  Oh, all right, he did have an actual office. But it reminded him too much of Hammond, flying a desk, to spend any time working there.

  George Hammond, the general commanding the multiservice base in the depths of Cheyenne Mountain, wanted him to take SG-2 along for this one, because of the unique circumstances. Daniel Jackson was appalled at the very thought. For once Jack found himself agreeing with the (relatively, anyway) little archaeologist. SG-2 was a team used for very military encounters, the kind of guys you expected to find walking around the base with Special Forces knives between their teeth, grunting their salutes. Appearing in the middle of a peaceful marketplace with a squad of mixed military types, all lusting for a fight, just didn’t feel right. (As long as it really was a peaceful marketplace. Appearances could be, well, deceiving.) SG-1, on the other hand, was himself, Daniel Jackson, Captain Samantha Carter—specialty astrophysics, which made her more of a scientist than a soldier in O’Neill’s not-unbiased opinion—and Teal’C, who came from offworld. There were only four of them. SG-1 did mostly science and culture stuff.

  They also sometimes carried knives between their teeth, but that was just the nature of the job.

  He tapped the touchpad on his keyboard and studied the data from the probe one more time. Daniel said the level of technology for this place looked like maybe early technological on Earth—they had some nice stone architecture, fairly sophisticated textiles, iron weapons but no percussion weapons were visible. Daniel had spent years studying the Stargates, both on Earth and on Abydos. His background was in ancient archaeology and alien anthropology, insofar as anyone could be said to be an expert in alien anthropology. But he had unique knowledge, the necessary clearances to work on the project, and he said he saw nothing that coul
d begin to stand up to a standard sidearm and no indication that this culture was at that level of development.

  All right, it wasn’t very much data, and the lens had been obscured more than once by the noses of little kids trying to figure out what the probe was. The first couple of times that had happened the intelligence analysts had freaked out. They couldn’t recognize the noses on the faces. After all, how often would an Iraqi kid press his nose up against a lens on a piece of alien machinery?

  So, Daniel had argued earnestly, those noses were data too; they indicated a reassuring level of curiosity and lack of fear. Maybe that meant there weren’t any Goa’uld on this new world.

  Teal’C hadn’t commented on that. Jack still wasn’t sure whether the Jaffa warrior knew anything about this world or not. Jack had kept an eye on him when the whole team had reviewed the tapes, and Teal’C had looked grim and foreboding as the images flashed on the big screen in the briefing room. Unfortunately, Teal’C always looked grim and foreboding. He hadn’t volunteered any comments during Daniel’s preliminary analysis, though, and the big man would have, if he’d thought the team needed to know. Teal’C had served the Goa’uld as a very high-ranking guard and soldier until he finally became convinced that a race existed that might be able to successfully challenge them. He also carried the larva of a Goa’uld within his body, serving as a living example of the threat the aliens represented.

  Once more into the breach, dear friends…. Once more, and once again.

  O’Neill sighed. Time to get serious about this. All right, so assume that Jackson won the day, and it was just the four of them, Jackson, Teal’C, Carter, and himself. Sidearms, definitely. Rations?

  Could they assume they could find food and shelter in this place? Sure, it was a city, and they could bet that the inhabitants were just as human as they were, originally from Earth itself. No problems with food, then, or air. It would be a distinct advantage to travel light, but they might have to pitch a tent in the middle of the town square. If they were ridden out of town on a rail they might need more than that. He scribbled some notes in the margin, looked at the data summary again, and swung around to the keyboard. Moments later a concise request was winging its way to Supply.

  A glance at the clock showed 2300 hours. He thought about stepping over to the bar they called the Officers’ Club to see who else was up, but decided not to. He wasn’t as young as he used to be. Before venturing out to strange new worlds, he’d have to get a good night’s sleep. Who knew when he would have another chance?

  Elsewhere in the depths of the hidden mountain base, Samantha Carter stared upward, counting the shadowy dots of the acoustical tiles on the ceiling by the green glow of the nightlight in the bathroom. The dots blurred together, and she squeezed her eyes shut.

  She could never sleep the night before a mission. The idea of stepping through the Gate, traveling through the chill depths of space to pop out the other side millennia of light-years away, was still hard to believe no matter how many times she did it. O’Neill never seemed affected by it at all, as if it wasn’t any more fantastic than taking a flight to New York.

  Jackson didn’t seem affected by the traveling part either, though he was always intrigued by the unusual and sometimes bizarre twists in human culture that they found on the other side. He was too eager to find his lost wife, Sha’re, to spare time for wonder about wormholes he didn’t have the math for anyway.

  Teal’C—well, Teal’C had been traveling through Star-gates since he was a child, and to him there wasn’t anything wonderful about them. He was looking for a way to defeat the Goa’uld, and nothing else mattered.

  But for herself, the concept of stepping, or perhaps falling, across space was still fabulous, and every night before a mission she lay awake, testing the delicious fear that maybe this time the mysterious technology of the Star-gate wasn’t going to work.

  If it didn’t work, what would happen? Would they freeze, human snowballs spinning in space, compressed molecules never to be reconstituted? Or would they be in some other dimension entirely, maybe aware of being lost for eternity? She had a doctorate in astrophysics, and a vivid imagination—never a good combination for an assignment like this one.

  She’d always wanted to go into space. Now, at not yet thirty, she had bypassed mere rocketry and walked on alien worlds.

  In her off-hours, when she wasn’t on a mission, preparing for a mission, or recovering from a mission, she spent her time studying the Stargate, trying to understand the physics of wormholes. Let O’Neill take care of the military stuff; he was good at that. She’d take the science every time. The possibilities were endless.

  Tomorrow she was going to step through emptiness again, fall between the stars to a brand-new world. And it was terrifying, incredible, and wonderful. And the math of it was beautiful.

  Daniel Jackson dreamed.

  In his dreams, Sha’re smiled at him.

  Sha’re, his love. His life. His wife.

  They were on Abydos again, her homeworld, in their own place, the place that had taken him in and welcomed him and made itself his home too.

  Her eyes were dark and lovely, her lips parted. He could smell her perfume, feel the touch of her fingers against his skin, and in his sleep he moaned and twisted against the mattress. She loved him, and he would never stop glorying in the wonder of that love, never stop feeling unworthy of it.

  She breathed lightly in his ear, and his breath came short, and he turned to respond to her, to her beautiful eyes and tantalizing touch, to the warmth of her body and soul. Her lovely dark eyes glimmered in the firelight. Her eyes… glowed.

  And glowed.

  Brighter, and brighter.

  Until they weren’t dark anymore but pits of liquid metal, too hot for mortal eyes, and recognition died in them. The warmth of her touch turned to a terrible heat that pushed him away. Her lips closed; her face was wiped of all expression, as if she had turned to stone, and he felt himself pushed away, falling.

  Falling, as she receded from him, slipped out of his arms, away from him, smaller and smaller into the darkness until all that was left of her was the shine of glowing eyes and the terrible lonely echo of his voice calling her name.

  “And the top ten reason why Madonna isn’t Queen of the World is…”

  A furrow wrinkled the golden symbol, the Snake enclosed in a royal cartouche, marking him as the personal property of the Goa’uld Apophis, imprinted on Teal’C’s forehead. The reasons made no sense. “Virgins don’t have enough votes”? “Royalty wears its underwear on the inside”?

  Perhaps O’Neill would explain.

  On the other hand, often O’Neill made no sense either.

  It was, in the phrase of another bald person whom Teal’C had never heard of, a puzzlement. This Earth was a very strange world indeed.

  Despite O’Neill’s insistence that the people of Earth loved peace and freedom, he could see the very opposite in their “news” broadcasts every night: they had wars, murder, starvation, disease. The Jaffa had none of those things.

  But every misery that Earth had, it inflicted upon itself; it was the source of its own problems and therefore held the hope of curing them. The people of Earth were not forced to worship alien parasites as gods, nor were they compelled to host those parasites within their own bodies. None of Earth’s peoples surrendered mind, personality, their very souls to Goa’uld, leaving only their bodies as shells and puppets to be manipulated by the aliens, abused and tossed away when they no longer served the alien purpose.

  And Earth had honorable men who believed in freedom, in the right to make their own mistakes and find their own solutions. They were willing to fight for that right; they had the hope and the desire and the will to win, and a glimmer of understanding of high technology. That was what he required of his allies. It might not be enough, but it was the best beginning he’d seen so far.

  Next to all that, who cared if Madonna was Queen of the World?

  CHAPTER
TWO

  They stepped through the Stargate on NPR76309 to find hundreds of people crowded around the alien Gate, gaping at them.

  As marketplaces went, it wasn’t bad. It was a large, open area paved with cobblestones. Low places puddled with water showed decades of wear as well as a recent rainstorm. The Gate was on a raised, three-step platform at one end, and a long street maybe fifteen feet wide led off the other. The square was defined by the one-and two-story flat-topped stone buildings surrounding it, fronted by shops shaded by colorful cloth awnings. O’Neill could see the usual assortment of goats and radishes, fried foods and copper bowls and stacks of frangible pottery.

  Not Nordstrom’s, certainly, but it had a nice variety and a lot of customers, even though nobody was buying anything at the moment—too busy staring. Not only in the square, but standing at the open windows and porches of the buildings, even perching on the roofs, looking over low walls and down at the unexpected visitors.

  Well, it wasn’t as if they didn’t have some warning. When the Stargates activated, the sound and fury was pretty unmistakable.

  O’Neill stood at the top of the stone platform and surveyed the crowd, sternly repressing the urge to say, “I suppose you’re all wondering why I’ve called you here together today…” The crowd looked back as if they expected him to say it, too.

  As it was apparent that they weren’t going to fling themselves upon his team, howling for blood, he allowed himself some more time to look around and orient himself. It was an uneasy look, distracted by the pressure of the stares upon SG-1. There was the probe, tilted over on one side, with a couple of scratches on the surface but no immediately apparent damage. They’d have to remember to take it back with them.

  The city resembled ancient Athens, with its white stone, columns, trees, and open spaces. The main street leading off the square dipped down and then led up about a mile to a building whose row of outer supporting columns looked very much like the Agora, the heart and soul of ancient Greek cities, where politics and philosophy and the birth of democracy took place. They would call the place Athenaeum, O’Neill decided in executive fashion. He’d make a note of it.