03 - The First Amendment Read online

  The area around the Gate was cleared ground. The few patches of trees nearby were at least twenty yards away. SG-2 hustled for cover, taking its bearing from the directions they’d been given; on the other side of that line of vegetation, there’d be a broad plain, and then the tall towers that marked the native stronghold.

  The natives were strictly low tech, the reports said. The only thing they’d have to worry about was the Jaffa. But those reports were from SG-1, and Morley wasn’t dumb enough to believe them, even though the survivors agreed that the only heavy artillery belonged to the Jaffa. He moved his men through dripping trees and oily vines, ignoring the shrieks of things that probably weren’t birds.

  His second-in-command, Lieutenant Fries, kept looking up, as if trying to identify the noises. Alarm calls? Morley wondered. But no, it couldn’t be. There was so much noise, coming from all directions, that nobody could tell if one particular set of shrill cries was a warning of intruders.

  They formed a loose array at the tree line, grenade launchers already loaded and ready. The tactical meeting had discussed the possibility of a direct frontal attack: “Let’s blow a hole in it and blast them to hell and back.”

  Unfortunately that would probably result in the immediate deaths of the captives, so that plan was discarded, somewhat to Morley’s disappointment.

  There had been speculation about whether the captives were still alive or even still on P7X-924. Morley refused to call it Etaa—that was just another instance of O’Neill losing sight of the mission. So what if that’s what the natives called home? The man had to personalize everything. Planetary coordinate designation numbers were good enough for Morley. It wasn’t like he was planning a vacation here.

  The behavior of the Jaffa and their efforts to capture some of the SG-4 team alive argued that the humans had been taken for a reason, probably interrogation. Hammond had decreed that SG-2 would assume the captives were alive unless otherwise proven. As for their location, well, if they weren’t still on the purple world, it would be up to SG-2 to find out where they’d been taken.

  The town looked pretty much as described—mud walls, two big circular stone towers on either side of a pair of outsize wooden gates bound by rough iron. The place was the biggest “city” identified so far on this planet, and it only had a population of maybe ten thousand or so. Some outlying farms existed, but nobody had investigated them yet. SG-1 had said there was a lot of movement in and out of Etaa-the-city, but right now the gates gaped open and empty.

  No activity in the streets of the city was visible through the gate. Fries looked over at Morley and shrugged, a half-grin on his face. “Quiet,” he whispered. “Too quiet.”

  It was, of course. There should have been activity. The Gate was close enough to the main population center that its activation wouldn’t have gone unnoticed.

  “Launch a spy eye,” Morley had ordered. Fries had to dig the little remote-controlled plane out of his pack, set it up.

  And then the enemy had opened fire.

  The humans had retreated and scattered along the tree line, hitting the ground and returning fire. High explosives roared. Lances of pure energy pierced the trees.

  If the other side had been human, Morley would have expected them to use infrared to locate and target the body heat of intruders. Infrared, of course, worked best at night, when the blurring effect of the heat of the sun was absent.

  They were not human. It wasn’t clear exactly what weapon they were using—probably those damned energy staffs—but at least the humans could tell where the most accurate blasts were coming from. Fire from seven grenade launchers converged on a single point in the long, skinny window of the tallest tower.

  The tower blew apart.

  The bird things weren’t making noise anymore, Morley noted absently.

  The frequency of hostile fire was substantially lessened. Morley signaled his men to spread out in an even longer line, making them a more difficult target. As they did so, every other member of the team stopped firing. Or at least, it was supposed to be every other member of the team; there seemed to be holes in the line.

  There was activity at last around the base of the ruined tower. Morley could see several natives and one or two serpent-headed Jaffa ducking in and out between the rubble and toppled stone blocks. Fries, a highly trained sniper, took one of the Goa’uld troops out with one of the new, specially formulated explosive bullets, designed to punch through Jaffa armor like copkillers through Teflon. If there really had been a second Jaffa, he was smart enough to keep his head down. There was a scraping sound, loud enough in a sudden silence to hurt the eardrums, and then nothing but drifting smoke.

  Piece of cake, Morley thought deliriously. If the Jaffa were still here, the prisoners were probably here too. All they had to do was take out the Goa’uld servants, walk in, and walk out again.

  The line began cautiously moving forward under cover of the smoke and dust from the exploded tower. They could see strange objects weaving back and forth—Goa’uld machines? SG-2 kept firing, alternating between odd and even members of the line, laying down cover for themselves. There were no return energy blasts, though a few slender, arrowlike wands bounced harmlessly off their helmets and body armor. With growing confidence, they moved up to the city wall.

  Morley looked around to assess his casualties. At least four were missing. He’d pick them up on the way back, he promised himself. He wasn’t leaving any humans on this planet, dead or alive.

  The battle line began to contract as they approached the open gate. “Sir!” Fries called his attention to an opening in the remains of the blasted tower. “Look! There’s someone up there!”

  There was. He could see a shadow, and on some instinct he ordered his men to hold their fire. That instinct was rewarded as he glimpsed a distinct pattern of jungle camouflage.

  “They’re tip there!” He was going to do it. He’d taught those damned Jaffa, and those traitorous natives took a lesson—they couldn’t just grab Earth humans and think they could get away with it.

  He left three men at the foot of the ruined tower to guard their backs, and led the rest inside. Even if they’d cleaned out the Jaffa, there were still those natives, after all. Though they represented no threat at all.

  “There was some kind of force field waiting for us,” he said, the words difficult to force past his dry throat. “At the top of the stairs they had the bodies of the remaining members of SG-4 propped up as if they were standing there waiting for us. And the rest of the Jaffa were standing on either side.”

  The rest of the Jaffa… as if they were standing there waiting for us.

  And what was waiting behind them—

  Morley shook his head, hard, blocking the picture out of his mind.

  Someone pushed a carafe of water and a glass toward him, and he poured unsteadily, one container rattling against the other as he did so. The water was cool against the lining of his throat.

  “Any ideas about the nature or source of the force field?” It was O’Neill, his voice carefully lacking in accusation or judgment. It might have been a question asked for the mere curiosity of it, except for the underlying intensity.

  Morley put the glass down and shook his head. “I don’t know. I thought, thought maybe it was a Goa’uld we hadn’t seen, using those, those powers of theirs.”

  No one reminded him of his own remarks of only a week before, scorning the reports of “bug-eyed aliens with mental zap guns.”

  No one had to.

  “But we didn’t see one,” he forced himself to go on, still not looking up. “All we saw were… Jaffa. There were at least a dozen of them, and we were fish in a barrel. They got Paul Fries with the first volley.”

  All we saw were… Jaffa…

  A pin dropping on the wooden table, bouncing, would have made more noise than his audience.

  “Most of us got knocked out. When we woke up, they had us locked up in this big square stone room. It was still daylight, we cou
ld tell from the windows up near the ceiling.

  “And then they came and started taking us away to ask us… questions.” His hands were clasping each other now, the knuckles white and red from the desperation of his grip. “I thought, I thought they’d be tactical stuff. You know, like whether there were more of us, and what weapons—” He lifted his gaze from its fixed study of his trembling hands, finally, and looked around at them, his mouth working, no words coming out.

  Hammond shot a sharp look at Frasier. She was watching Morley very carefully, clearly worried but not yet ready to call a halt to a briefing that had turned, despite the general’s best intentions, into a public confession.

  “They didn’t care. They didn’t care. They were just laughing at us. It was as if we couldn’t possibly threaten them. Nothing Earth could do could threaten the… Goa’uld.” It was laughter. Had to be.

  He paused again, and something changed behind his eyes. “They roughed up some of the boys, but not too bad.” It was clear that he wasn’t thinking about his own injuries. “When they sent me back into that room, we decided we weren’t going to wait any longer. They didn’t come for any more of us until the next morning, and then when they did, we, we rushed them.” Didn’t we?

  “There were only two”—weren’t there?—“a-and we got past them.” He swallowed hard. “Most of us did. Sergeant Wilkinson and Captain Dell’angelo both had broken legs. They were still up in the, the tower. We tried to take them with us but—” but it was too late—

  “That’s enough, Major.” Hammond spoke quietly. “You managed to get the remainder of your squad back home. You had no reason to suspect a trap.”

  He could sense O’Neill’s disagreement from the opposite end of the table, but that wasn’t the issue and he wasn’t going to open the matter up for debate in this forum. The mission had been a spectacular failure; not only had it failed of its objective, the retrieval of the captives, but more than half of the “rescue” squad had been lost as well. Including the abandonment of two men. They were back where they’d started—farther behind where they’d started, in fact, counting all the dead.

  He wasn’t going to order yet another team in to try to recover the two men. It made his teeth ache to bite that order back, but P7X-924 was bad luck and an asset sink as well. They would have to assume Wilkinson and Dell’angelo were dead—probably as soon as the rest of SG-2 had operated the Gate for their return home. The Jaffa would have killed them just as they’d killed the “survivors” of SG-4. They were injured and of no tactical use. There was no interstellar Red Cross to parley for an exchange of prisoners in this war.

  It was time to move on to the final item on the agenda. He’d give the problem of David Morley and Etaa further consideration—it deserved investigation—but not here, not now.

  “Harriman? I need to be able to tell Pace that we’ve scoped out the costs for repairing the damage our little vibration problem—our former vibration problem—caused.” When Cheyenne Mountain had been built originally, they’d had a small problem with a geological fault in the mountain. When they first started operating the Gate on a regular basis, the alien artifact had shaken the entire mountain. The problem had been solved, but someone had to pay for the repairs to all the other facilities affected.

  Davis, the man in charge of Gate operations and maintenance, stood up. He seemed to be as eager as the rest to change the subject, to direct attention away from the officer who stared now at his hands, oblivious to anything else going on around him. “Er, sir, I have the data, but some of the other analyses don’t quite agree. They, er, the others, keep finding a lot of, well, they call it collateral damage.”

  “Hmmph.” Hammond took the printout and scanned it quickly. There were always those gray areas where damage could be attributed to more than one cause. “I take it that if we accept responsibility for this list, the repairs and replacements come out of our budget?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Hmmph,” Hammond repeated. “I have a meeting with Pace later today. I’ll talk to him about it. We don’t need to run up our costs any more than he does.” And certain senators were far less likely to pick on NORAD than SGC when it came to costs.

  “In fact, sir,” Rusalka interjected, “I’d appreciate it if you could also speak to General Pace about the procurement lists for medical supplies and parts for the probes. They go through his offices, and some of his personnel have been questioning our needs.”

  “Tsk, tsk,” O’Neill, commanding SG-1, remarked. “You mean they think something funny’s going on down here?”

  “Possibly the excessive requirements for antibiotics attracted their attention,” Rusalka parried, with a straight face.

  “You mean we’ve been using too much penicillin? Gee, I thought we’d cured that little problem.”

  “That will be enough,” Hammond said. “Harri-man, add it to the list. They’ve got no business questioning anything that comes through here.”

  “That’s probably what ticks them off,” O’Neill muttered.

  The other team commanders, four out of the fourteen, chuckled. Hammond cleared his throat. O’Neill and the rest immediately assumed looks of angelic innocence, perfected by long practice.

  The morning briefing wound down to a close, and the assembled officers rose and gathered their papers, exchanging a few last comments as they went. O’Neill paused, drawing breath to speak to his commander, and then shook his head and went away, rather to Hammond’s relief.

  Harriman stood respectfully by, agenda in hand.

  “All right, what’s next?” Hammond muttered.

  “Short break, sir, and then the meeting with General Pace.”

  Hammond sighed inaudibly. Meetings. Decisions.

  Command was not all it was cracked up to be.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “So what’s the good word, Colonel?” Sam Carter was feeling almost jaunty. She’d just managed to destroy Daniel Jackson in a fast game of racquetball, and now, having showered and gotten into clean, if casual, clothes, she was ready to take on the world. Or possibly the worlds, depending on what the next assignment was.

  But as soon as the words were out of her mouth she regretted them, having caught sight of O’Neill’s face. He looked grim, to put it mildly.

  “I’m not sure there is a good word today,” the colonel growled.

  “Uh-oh,” Jackson observed. “What happened?”

  “Is it something to do with the members of SG-2 presently in Medical?” asked Teal’C.

  The team members of SG-1 were gathered in O’Neill’s office, their informal ready room for post-command-meeting briefings. It wasn’t unusual for O’Neill to come away from one of those briefings annoyed or exasperated, but this time he looked frustrated as well as angry. He was standing with his back to them, staring at the giant poster of stars that covered his back wall. A scattering of pushpins marked places they’d been, or might have been, as closely as they could correlate the outdated star map with the reality of the Gate.

  “What do you know about SG-2?” the colonel asked Teal’C, finally turning to face them.

  Someone else might have been intimidated, but nothing and no one intimidated the former Jaffa First, who had left the service of Apophis in the hope that one day he could find a way for his people to be free. Certainly O’Neill couldn’t do it—they had saved each other’s life too many times.

  “I was providing more blood specimens to Dr. Frasier,” the black man said. “She is still examining the symbiotic relationship between the Goa’uld larva and my body.”

  O’Neill winced involuntarily, as he did most times when he was reminded of the creature that lived in Teal’C’s abdomen.

  “I observed the arrival of several injured personnel. Upon inquiry they proved to be members of SG-2. I believe that team had attempted a retrieval on P7X-924. They did not appear to have been successful.”

  “They weren’t,” O’Neill responded, leaning against his desk and folding his
arms across his chest. “They walked into a trap. Not only did they not get the guys they were sent for, they lost a bunch of their own.”

  “Oh,” Carter said in a very small voice. She knew—they all knew—how much Jack O’Neill hated the very thought of leaving someone behind in the hands of the enemy. Perhaps because SG-1 depended profoundly on one another and the trust that they’d never abandon one of their own.

  That trust had been tested and forged in battle. There had been occasions when one or another of them, separated from the others, had had to depend on it for life itself. They had come to accept that it could not be broken, not by outside forces or even by themselves.

  But for Jack O’Neill, the issue had nothing to do with trust and everything to do with responsibility.

  “Morley ran into a trap,” he said angrily. “They used some kind of force field on the team, he says. But he managed to break free and get at least some of his guys back.”

  “But not all of them,” Jackson said softly.

  “No. Not all of them.”

  “What about SG-4?” Carter asked, recalling the group SG-2 had been sent after.

  “All dead, apparently.”

  She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

  “There may indeed be a type of force field available to the Jaffa,” Teal’C said thoughtfully. “Such a device was being developed. It may have been perfected by now.”

  “I don’t understand how we could have been so wrong about Etaa,” Carter said. “I thought Shostoka’an was being straight with us. She said they’d never encountered the Jaffa.”

  “It is possible they had not,” Teal’C reminded her. “The Goa’uld could have decided only recently to harvest that world.”