04 - The Morpheus Factor Read online

  The response was immediate and sharp as Etra’ain pulled her attention away from what he was doing to face her challenger. Do you propose to replace me? Can you do what I do?

  And then he really was pulling air and not liquid into his lungs, and his arms and legs were beating a frantic tattoo against the dry earth of the cave where they’d made camp. He stilled himself and lay stunned, trying to understand what was happening to him, not moving except for the heaving of his chest as he pulled oxygen past the raw tissues of his nose and throat. His tongue probed gingerly at the raw place where he’d bitten his lip to try to wake himself up. It was still bleeding.

  Perhaps we should! Are you doing anything at all?

  I provided Shapes we could touch and feel.

  Those are little things. Small things. You are very good at little things, Etra’ain.

  You know what I can do, Shasee. And if you have forgotten, observe!

  Having tentatively decided that as long as he didn’t go anywhere he was probably not going anywhere, Daniel pulled himself into a tight ball, wrapped his arms around his knees, and looked at his peacefully sleeping teammates. The position reminded him unpleasantly of the vise imagery, and he bounced to his feet instead, teetering dangerously in his effort not to step in any direction. He didn’t want to know where he’d find himself next.

  Perhaps they weren’t sleeping so peacefully after all, he thought after a moment. There was Carter—fully dressed in regular camouflage fatigues, and he could feel himself blushing hotly—lying asprawl a backpack, her face twitching and her hands clenching and unclenching as if she were wrapping and unwrapping something around them.

  Teal’C was frowning even more deeply than usual, if that were possible. He was sleeping at attention practically, with his arms straight at his sides. It looked supremely uncomfortable.

  And O’Neill—if the man had been upright he’d be setting records for the hundred yard dash. He was gasping as if he were running too, and his face twisted with an expression difficult to read.

  Jackson pushed a lock of hair out of his face and thought long and hard.

  He was reasonably sure that he was, at this moment at least, awake. But then he thought he’d been awake when he was drowning too, and his clothing was completely dry. His lip was still bleeding though. He couldn’t tell anymore. If he was awake, why was he the only one? Was he awake? Or was this another dream?

  It was too weird, he decided. They had to get out of this place, fast, whether they were dreaming or waking. Hidden supply of offworld weapons be damned. How would they even know what they had when they found it, if they ever did? He reached over and picked up a clod of dirt from the mouth of the cave, crumbling the encrusted dirt off one edge and sifting it between his fingers, rubbing the silicate grains into his fingertips. It was real—felt real, smelled real even—he touched it gingerly to his tongue and made a face—tasted real. He drew a deep breath and tossed it the few feet across the little picnic ground at O’Neill.

  The clod shattered an inch in front of the other man’s face, and Jackson winced.

  Rather than waking up, O’Neill twitched his nose and upper lip and batted one hand at his face, as if to dislodge a particularly annoying insect. Then, groaning, he rolled over so that his back was to the rest of the team.

  Jackson shook his head. All right. Raw sandy fingers and the taste of dirt said he was awake, but an O’Neill who slept that heavily was against nature. He’d been standing watches with the colonel for years now, and if there was one thing certain in the universe, it was that Jack O’Neill was a light sleeper. If he were drugged, he wouldn’t have reacted to the dirt clod. So this must be a dream.

  He was fairly certain that there was a hole in his logic somewhere, but by this time he had too much adrenaline in his system to try to get back to sleep or to dreaming, whichever was appropriate. It looked as if, in this part of his consciousness, he was elected to stand watch, since no one else was volunteering—another indication that he was dreaming, no doubt.

  O’Neill had fallen asleep on watch. Jackson wondered if the colonel had thought he was awake all the while.

  Cautiously, he took one tentative step toward the cave, then another, pausing to look up at the brilliant blue sky. The moons hung in the east, pale in this season against the glare of this world’s sun. It certainly looked like daytime.

  “All right,” he said to himself. Looking around, he eyed a convenient outcropping of rock, took up position, and kicked at it as hard as he could.

  He had to stuff his hand in his mouth to keep from cursing at the pain. If he hadn’t been wearing combat boots, he would have broken his foot. Tears started up in his eyes as he caught himself on the rim of rock at the mouth of the cave and gingerly wiggled the abused toes. He was not dreaming, dammit.

  The rest of the team slept on in the little clearing.

  Setting the foot carefully on the ground, he limped forward a couple of yards, so focused on testing the foot’s ability to bear weight that he didn’t immediately notice the change in the surface it rested upon.

  He was standing on a slope.

  On a ramp. A steel ramp. A very familiar steel ramp.

  In the middle of the Gate room.

  But the Gate room had never stunk like this before.

  At least, not in his own universe. There’d been another Gate room once, in an alternate Earth, where O’Neill had commanded—

  Take three deep breaths and you won’t notice the stink anymore, one of his professors had told him in graduate school. The advice had been meant for a young man who’d grown up in the relatively sterile world of Western culture, whose first encounter with the realities of new cultures could be overwhelming. He hadn’t needed it, growing up with parents who spent their professional lives on digs. Those parents had died early in his life, but he remembered what it was like to live in places on other continents and in other cultures.

  He’d always thought that particular professor was full of it. The advice had never worked, and even now, when he tried it yet again out of habit, he only managed to inhale the scent of smoke and burning plastic, discharged weapons and death.

  Bodies were sprawled before him, all wearing uniforms and bearing the signs of intense energy beams targeted on human flesh.

  He limped down the ramp and listened, holding his breath now as much to shut out the smell as the distraction.

  He could hear machinery humming, the faint crackle of exposed and shorting-out wiring. Turning, he could see the depthless surface of the Stargate shimmering, waiting.

  He was morally certain he had not come here through a wormhole. For one thing, he wasn’t cold, and he was always cold from travel through the Gate.

  And besides, the Gate on P4V-837 was far from the cave and its apron of grass where they had eaten their breakfast/lunch with the Kayeechi.

  Gate or not, he was home. In a manner of speaking. Cheyenne Mountain was as close to “home” as he got.

  Something horrible had happened here.

  He rested his hand on his sidearm and moved farther into the room, stepping around the bodies and the ruined machinery, avoiding the sightless stares of the dead, but recognizing them nonetheless.

  That was Jolley, one of the technicians, and that squad over there, he’d played cards with them one night—they were good losers.

  Their blood was dried and black on the metal floor. The bodies had been lying here for some time—long enough for putrification to set in, long enough for bloating, long enough to smell.

  He swallowed and stepped to the door, afraid for a moment that the electronic locks had shorted out and he would find himself shut in with the Gate and the dead; but to his relief the door opened smoothly, and he found himself in a corridor scarred with deep black slashes in walls and ceiling and floor.

  There was still no human sound, only the humming of fluorescent lights. His own footsteps were louder, came faster as he began to trot down the hallway, ignoring the pain in his foot.<
br />
  In the briefing room, he found Hammond slumped in his chair. He had been unarmed. So had most of the staff in the room. What few weapons there were hadn’t been nearly enough.

  It was Goa’uld—it had to be. He had seen what happened to worlds where the Goa’uld had unleashed their Jaffa minions to know the signs. The burns were from the slash of energy staffs. The other damage was, if not from the same staffs, from similar weapons the Jaffa wielded.

  He left the briefing room and headed for the infirmary, certain that if there were any survivors they would be there—but once again he found only the dead. Janet Frasier lay behind an overturned lab table, a gun still clutched in her hand. Not far away he found the bodies of three of her staff and a couple of patients—and that of Amanda Carter.

  It stopped him cold. He fell to his knees beside her, lifting her lax form, brushing the blond hair out of her eyes. It was impossible. Carter was on P4V-837, with the rest of the team, not here. And he was here, not there…. Choking, he pressed her eyelids shut and laid her back down again, straightening her limbs carefully, tugging the remains of the battle jacket over the bloody mess that had been her abdomen.

  “I want to wake up,” he whispered, getting to his feet. “I’m dreaming. I know I’m dreaming, and I want to wake up.”

  There was no response, no change in his surroundings. The complex was silent save for the murmur of abandoned machinery. The smell of decay was almost visible, far stronger, in fact, than the apparent decomposition of the bodies would warrant.

  He spun and ran out of the infirmary. The elevators were still working; he took them to the living area, where a number of the Stargate team members maintained residence in between missions. The doors to the individual rooms stood open; again, blackened swaths and smears of blood testified to a slaughter. The only bodies he found were human ones; whatever had done this had taken their casualties away with them. The Complex had never seemed so large to him before, and he had never felt so alone in it.

  He found O’Neill’s body in the officer’s mess, his rifle still in his hands, along with a half dozen others. Several of the other bodies were burned and torn. As far as he could see, there had been two groups of humans here: one being ripped apart and the other merely destroyed. O’Neill had belonged to the latter group, apparently leading a rescue mission that had failed. The rifle told him that the colonel had had enough warning to get to the arms lockers. It hadn’t been such a short battle after all.

  He stepped across the bodies to the bar, and in the process, a glint of light caught his eye—a reflection off a shard of glass. He bent over and saw a mat of light hair, one pale lock sticking out of a thick, dark, gummy mat. The mat was attached to a body.

  He looked closer and saw himself, half under a table, facedown, head pulped and misshapen from a heavy blow. He’d been a member of the first group, the ones O’Neill had tried to rescue, and there were no weapons in his hands. His feet were tied together. His clothing was soaked in stiff, dried black blood.

  Under the circumstances, he felt that vomiting was an entirely reasonable response. He just managed to avoid doing so all over his own corpse. At least “his” eyes were closed. He wasn’t sure if he could have handled staring into his own—No, he wasn’t even going to think about it. He wasn’t going to let this nightmare get the better of him.

  At least his face—his dead face—was serene, even if it was only the serenity that came from muscles relaxed by—

  Grabbing a bottle of alcohol from the cabinet behind the bar was entirely reasonable too. At least one glass-fronted window had survived the carnage, and he reached in while steadfastly ignoring the mirror behind it.

  The sharp taste of good whiskey shocked him; after one long swallow, the bottle fell from his trembling hands, shattering on the floor, splashing over his fatigues and boots. He jumped at the sound.

  “Alternate universe,” he said, ignoring the fact that there was no one left to hear but himself. “Okay. It’s an alternate. That’s what it is. I’m dreaming of an alternate universe, and that’s an alternate me and an alternate Jack and Janet and Sam and—it’s not us—

  “But how the hell did I get here and how can I get back?”

  The sound of rising hysteria did as much as the drink had to help bring himself back under control. He’d been in alternate universes before—maybe, he realized, even this very one. This could very well be the universe where the Goa’uld had invaded. He hadn’t seen any sign of Teal’C among the bodies, and he was morally certain that the Jaffa he knew wouldn’t have allowed the others to die without him.

  It was somehow steadying to think of it that way, but that still left the problem of why he’d found himself here. In that other universe, he’d never been a part of the Stargate project.

  It didn’t really matter. So what if this was still another variation in an endless procession of not quite identical Earths? In one the Jaffa had invaded at the behest of the Goa’uld. In another, Teal’C had killed his own alternate version. In this one, all the human members of the team, himself included, had died. He supposed he could go back and check rank, see if Hammond still outranked O’Neill or vice versa, but what difference would it make? They were still dead. He, on the other hand, was still alive, at least for the time being. He took a long, steadying breath and stepped around the bodies. He’d arrived in this universe in the Gate room. Maybe the way back was by the same path.

  He was passing a cross corridor, retracing his steps, when he thought he heard voices, and before he had a chance to reason it out, he flattened himself against the wall. The voices went on, neither rising nor falling in volume, and he relaxed slightly and began edging toward them.

  They were coming from one of the ready rooms. He was within a few yards when he realized that he was hearing the sound of a television set, a news announcer making a report. He stopped just outside the door, ready to bolt if he caught sight of almost anything alive.

  As far as he could tell, the room was empty. He could see a corner of the television image, and he edged nearer, improving his line of sight.

  “Washington, D.C. is recovering from the initial devastation of the long anticipated reprisal, if recovering is a word that can be used in this context.” The voice was British; the BBC-1 logo appeared in the lower right-hand corner of the screen, and the images shown by the panning camera revealed the Capitol in smoking blackened ruins beneath a lowering sky. At least there were signs of life in the streets: a dark sedan maneuvered its way between wrecked vehicles, the Washington Monument pristine and untouched in the background; a party of rescuers carried stretchers down the steps of the Supreme Court building. The cameras focused on the face of a weeping mother, a shocked and silent policeman, and then moved on, pausing at the gap in the dome of the Capitol Building, letting Jackson get a good look at the semicircular hole. It was as if a giant genie had taken a bite out of an apple or shot a zat gun at a giant kraken.

  “There is of course no way of knowing if this is the last lesson the Goa’uld will see fit to administer to a rebellious United States. World leaders agreed that the loss of Philadelphia and San Francisco should have been enough to convince the American President of the overwhelming technical superiority of the Goa’uld, but her advisors evidently disagreed, with predictable consequences….”

  A burst of static interrupted the transmission, and he stepped closer.

  “On the home front, His Majesty’s Government have made all efforts to ensure that no such dreadful fate shall befall—”

  Jackson moved inside the ready room, looking for the remote to turn the damned thing off. But he promptly tripped over the recumbent body of a snoring Jack O’Neill, who was lying exactly where he’d been left, in a cave on a world called P4V-837.

  J can walk through dreams. I can take the waking ones through the Shaping of those dreams. I blend the dreams. You see what I have done. Can you do as much, Vair? Do you challenge me still?

  Elsewhere on that world, a red-furred
alien raised one hand in a gesture of temporary defeat, acknowledging the mastery of the one sitting opposite him in the Circle of Shaping.

  With a regal nod, Etra’ain released the Shape of the world so that her Circle could return to the village.

  Once they were gone and she was alone in her own place, surrounded by her own things made with her own hands—not a single Shape among them—she sagged, once more exhausted and sickened by what she had created from what she had seen in the minds and the dreams of the Tall Ones.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  This time, at least, O’Neill reacted as expected. The colonel woke abruptly and completely, grabbing Jackson by the ankle and pulling him down, twisting to bring himself up to deliver an elbow strike to the throat.

  “Awk!” Jackson could only raise his hands in a futile effort to ward off the blow, but by that time, O’Neill had recognized him and let him go, falling back to a sitting position and holding his head in his hands.

  Daniel lay quivering. He was going to have a breakdown after this mission, he promised himself. He’d worked hard for it, he’d earned it, and nobody was going to take it away from him. And he was damned if he was going to be killed twice on the same day.

  “Uh, sorry about that,” O’Neill said, looking up at last.

  “Hey, no problem.” The archaeologist sat up and brushed himself off. He could still smell the odor of decay and Scotch whiskey on his clothing, and he gagged.

  “Are you okay?” O’Neill asked at once.

  Jackson raised a hand to reassure him and fend off any misplaced sympathies. As he did so, O’Neill took a puzzled sniff. “That’s whiskey,” he said. “Where’d you get it?” And then, startled, he looked around and up at the position of the sun in the sky. “Don’t tell me we fell asleep again!”

  “I think we’d better talk,” Jackson said, finally recovering a measure of his mental equilibrium. “All of us. Now.”

  Since Jackson made no move to implement his own suggestion, O’Neill aroused the others. Carter and Teal’C were equally startled and dismayed to discover they had been sleeping in the middle of the day—indeed, in the middle of the picnic—and once again they took a thorough inventory of their weapons and supplies, only to find, once again, nothing missing at all.