04 - The Morpheus Factor Read online

  Somewhat reassured, the three subordinate members of the team stretched out to sleep while a still confused O’Neill sat a few yards in from the mouth of the little cave and looked out into the darkness. The light of the single torch was so dim that he couldn’t even distinguish his own shadow.

  If mere confusion were a good reason to abort a mission, he thought, then this one would have been toast the moment the trees started walking. But the thing about alien worlds was that they were, well, alien. So far, nothing sentient had tried to hurt them.

  Or had it and the Earth team simply didn’t see it?

  Probably not, he decided. They’d all seen the same things, only different versions of buildings and landscape and whatnot. His gut said they were all right here. Whatever threat there was didn’t seem to be directed at them personally.

  He got up, stepping softly over a snoring Jackson, and walked noiselessly to the mouth of the cave and a couple of steps outside. They’d all agreed it was a cave, but who knew what kind of cave each of them saw? He was going to double-check the camcorder in the morning to make sure it was running properly. He hadn’t met the alien yet that could make a machine hallucinate.

  Behind him, Carter stretched and muttered in her sleep, and O’Neill allowed himself a smile. Whatever the major was dreaming about, it sounded like fun. The torches were smoking even more now, giving off a not unpleasant scent. He could smell it clearly, even standing outside the cave entrance and looking upward.

  The moonless night sky was velvety, spangled and powdered with stars in unfamiliar constellations. Wondering which ones he ought to know, he shook his head. One dot of light was much like another, and lacking a spectral analysis, he could only identify them by their relationship with each other, and then only from Earth as a reference point. It was a big universe out there.

  And he got to walk in it.

  “Cool,” he murmured, and suddenly one of the constellations stepped closer.

  He blinked. He hadn’t seen anything like that since the Seventies. Or maybe since Apophis had made him the Blood of Sokar—except that this time, he wasn’t seeing Charlie, and oh, yes, his leg wasn’t killing him.

  Apophis was dead. Whatever was going on here was something else.

  A line of treetops, blacker against the black of the night, began to sway seductively in a hula rhythm. Above them, the stars danced.

  He took one step back, deeper into the cave, and the trees stilled.

  One step forward. The trees were just trees.

  “This is crazy,” he told himself. If the cave was protected by some kind of antihallucination force field, how come he wasn’t hallucinating now?

  On the horizon, light blossomed, not like an explosion but like the glow of a city that moments before hadn’t been there. As he studied it, the light changed colors, and tiny specks zipped through it in orderly lines, as if under the benign dictatorship of an air-traffic controller.

  A meteorite shower maybe?

  He stepped back again, and the light faded.

  “Shoulda had something more to eat,” he said and began searching through his pack for a candy bar. He’d have Janet check his blood-sugar levels when they got back. He was starving, suddenly.

  “Hungry?” It was Shasee. He hadn’t heard the little silver-furred alien approach, and for a moment, that was cause enough for alarm. But Shasee was holding out an armful of fruit, much like the apple he had sampled earlier, and somehow it was only logical that he should have some more. Shasee nodded and made smiling faces as O’Neill devoured the food. As if the taste itself created more hunger, he couldn’t get enough of it.

  Behind him, his team slept on peacefully.

  Eventually sated, he joined them.

  In the Kayeechi village, several small anxious aliens gathered under the shelter, casting wary eyes as they came. They crowded around the four in the center of their circle and waited in breathless silence.

  Finally, the thoughts said desperately, and the observers stirred in agreement. Now let us see what our visitors shape for us.

  But it was too late for shaping.

  Etra’ain! came a panicked mental cry. Etra’ain! The Narrai are moving closer!

  Go and meet them, the response came. Drive them away with lesser shapes. We must take the opportunity offered now. It may not come again.

  There were moans of terror, but the observers obediently scattered, leaving the four surrounded by smudge pots, staring into each other’s eyes and each other’s thoughts, reaching for other realities. Shaping.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  With a jolt, Jack O’Neill found himself in Iraq, under a blazing sun, bellied up to a sand dune and looking down at a small green spot in the desert that meant “water here.” In this case it also meant one of Saddam’s underground germ factories. His assignment was to take it out.

  He had been here before.

  That spot of green—and it shouldn’t be that vivid: Iraq wasn’t all sand dunes and rocks after all—was close up, much closer than it had been a moment before. He was within scaling distance of the wall.

  He looked around for his team.

  Teal’C.

  Teal’C, wearing desert cammies, with a military-issue rifle and sidearm and a belt full of grenades, the mark on his forehead—No, wait. It had only seemed to catch the sun, but it was gone now. Teal’C was watching him, waiting for the signal.

  As soon as he gave the signal, the two of them would swarm past the hidden checkpoint through the little village, force their way into the dilapidated mud building, and find themselves in a modern laboratory filled with purification vats and filters and all manner of stuff used to purify and replicate viruses: anthrax, HIV, things with the incubation period and infectiousness of the common cold and the deadliness of Ebola.

  It made perfect sense for Teal’C to be here. Some part of O’Neill knew that there were supposed to be others—he wasn’t supposed to do this alone—he had been hurt…

  No, the thought said with agitation. Not this time. I need something else.

  Outside the disguised lab building, he could see a heavy stake driven into the ground. Tied to it was the body of a young chimpanzee, lying in a puddle of fluids and covered with a mantle of flies—a test subject.

  It seemed logical to test a virulent biological weapon in the middle of the town used to disguise the presence of the laboratory, right in front of the target building.

  Not far away, three women in black gowns sat, their faces uncovered since only women were present, gabbing away as they threaded something on strings.

  A little boy raced past, screaming, chasing a young brown goat.

  Teal’C was waiting.

  O’Neill waved him in and took off himself at a low, ground-eating run, his rifle heavy in his hands. He could feel the metal against the palms of his hands, a sensual chill and weight that nearly distracted him from his target.

  The women, surprised, turned to look at him. They exclaimed to each other as they hastily covered their faces, but made no move to escape or avoid him.

  He could hear Teal’C beside him, behind him, his footsteps thudding heavily against the hard ground as they gave the dead chimpanzee a wide berth by common consent. The two of them headed for the door and planted themselves on either side.

  There was no sound from the inside. The women were still whispering and giggling to each other, making the little head movements that meant they were pointing with their chins to indicate the two invaders. O’Neill was puffing hard—out of shape, bad news on a mission. His glance fell on the body of the chimp, with smears of blood at every orifice and lips skinned back from long, businesslike teeth. It hadn’t been an easy death. It wasn’t one that O’Neill would wish on anybody, even Saddam.

  Well, maybe Saddam.

  He and Teal’C communicated with quick glances that gave directions about who was high, who was low, which direction to sweep fire. He took a deep breath and looked up to see that an audience had gathered before the bu
ilding: women and children. Mostly children.

  He shook his head and waved the rifle at them, trying to warn them to get out of the way. But they laughed and applauded.

  If they weren’t careful, they were going to get those kids killed. Like Charlie. No, there he was standing in the front row with the rest of them, his blond head making him stand out from the others but part of them nonetheless. O’Neill waved at his son—his dead son—to stay back because he could get hurt. He couldn’t stand it if Charlie got hurt again.

  He had come home early and was nuzzling Sara in the garden when he heard the report of the gun. He knew the sound of that gun as well as he knew the sound of his son’s voice. He knew what had happened. He could still feel the stab of the icicle in his heart as if it were happening all over again: the glimpse of movement in the corner of his eye that was his son ducking out of the way the day he’d put the gun away. Charlie loved to watch his daddy cleaning it, loved to play with the gun oil and cotton patches and make a mess, but Daddy never showed him where the gun was kept, up on the very top shelf out of the reach of inquisitive fingers, but there had been that movement. He was a smart kid. He’d figured it out. All the warnings, all the patient explaining counted for nothing—and here they were, a crowd of kids watching the grownups play with guns, and now they descended on the two men like a pack of ferrets, reaching for the deadly toys.

  No. Wait. Something was wrong.

  “Teal’C? What the hell are you doing here?”

  Abruptly, Teal’C was gone, and he was lying still—so very still, trying not to breathe, trying to play dead, to be dead. Frank had to come back for him and get him out. The Iraqis were all around him, standing over him, watching for any signs of life, and suddenly he couldn’t stand it anymore. He reached for his boot knife and felt the metal hilt against his hand as he had felt the weight of the rifle.

  No, the thoughts said. Useless against so many. Try something else.

  And now he was in a cage, and the Iraqis stood around and poked at him through the bars.

  And the one in particular who always smiled at him, the teeth white against the black beard.

  “Confess, American dog.”

  “That is so old-fashioned—”

  So was a cattle prod, but it worked nonetheless. He screamed and his back arched high. They gathered around him and laughed, kicking him.

  What do you use? You are alone, one against many. What can you use?

  Submachine gun.

  It appeared in his suddenly unbound hands, and he pulled the trigger in one long burst, spraying upward at the grinning faces. Firing straight up.

  What goes up must come down with equal velocity.

  His own bullets killed him.

  No. Something else.

  It is a powerful weapon.

  It strikes back at itself. There must be something else.

  Back in the desert. It was the seventh day of hell, but he was still moving. He could feel ribs grinding together; he took short, shallow breaths, panting to keep from expanding his fractured rib cage. He didn’t want to look behind himself, because he was pretty sure he would see an O’Neill-wide path of blood across the sharp rocks of the wadi.

  At the moment, he was nose to nose with a small grayish-brown snake. It hissed, and he could see venom running from the fangs, dripping to the sand.

  “If you bite me, son, you’re gonna be the sorriest snake in the Middle East,” he breathed, and held very, very still.

  The snake hesitated, holding at least a third of its body in the air, and jabbed. He could feel the push of displaced air against his face.

  He held still.

  He could feel the sharp point of a rib trying to probe its way through his skin and out his side.

  The snake tasted the air. It had to smell him. Hell, he could smell him after seven days of crawling across the Iraqi desert. His parachute had provided silk to splint his leg together, but the blood had soaked through. Sweat was running into his eyes, and through the stubble of his beard. He had an almost irresistible urge to sneeze from the dust caked around his nose and mouth. Air flowed softly, quietly past parched lips, down his throat, into his barely stirring lungs.

  The snake decided O’Neill was too big to eat and slithered away.

  His head dropped to the sand, and he groaned.

  Not useful.

  The snake was back suddenly, as if time had clicked backward several frames—only this time his side didn’t hurt so much and he had an automatic in his hand. He managed somehow to pull back the slide and point it at the snake. The barrel wandered back and forth with the shaking of his hand, and the snake’s head began to follow it.

  He pulled the trigger, and missed.

  Useless! Something else!

  Perhaps a different place?

  He fired a flare to signal the choppers to land. They were coming in low, having dumped a load of defoliant over Colombian poppy fields. The arch of light hissed through the sky, bringing them home.

  They are coming in from the skies. Is there any way to stop them in the sky?

  The thunder of the rotors came closer, blowing dust into his eyes, whipping at the hair on his head and the clothes on his body. He held up an arm to protect his sight, and the Huey settled to the earth right next to him.

  That could be—

  Look closer. It isn’t a weapon.

  Does it matter if we can use it?

  Can we use it?

  They’re coming! They’re coming—many of them! Etra’ain, help us!

  The circle of Shapers broke as the Narrai swept through the homes of the Kayeechi. The first of them landed on the roof beam of the tallest building and spread his wings to their full span, balancing, as the rest of them tore through the place. The Kayeechi poured out of their homes, some trying to strike back and some seeking shelter under trees. The wings of the Narrai were so large they had difficulty negotiating through the boughs. Their wings were their deadliest weapons, smashing roofs and walls like tinder, while the Kayeechi used bows and staffs in a largely futile effort to beat them off.

  The Narrai sent their long necks twisting and turning through the wreckage of the buildings, seeking the little ones of the Kayeechi, snapping them up. Some they swallowed immediately; others they chopped in half with the great beaks; a few they transferred from beak to clawed foot to carrying pouch. One or two managed to scramble free of the pouches, only to fall to the ground, dazed and wounded. The Kayeechi brought out fire arrows and torches to burn the houses, depriving the Narrai of their perches. Two of the gigantic birds twisted and screamed as the arrows penetrated flesh; one toppled to the ground, where the Kayeechi swarmed upon it with axes, chopping it to pieces while it thrashed. Several of the Kayeechi were flung through the air by the desperate flailing, but each time they were replaced, and finally one of the axes found a vulnerable spot in the throat and the bird screamed out a fountain of blood before shuddering into stillness. Another swooped down beside it, only to have another ax bury itself in the massive wing joint; it shrieked and collapsed. The others hovered over it, but the arrows came in black clouds now, and four Kayeechi managed to heave the weighted ends of a net over the crippled flier.

  The Narrai finally fell back, hissing, before the fire arrows and long torches of the humanoids. The sounds of screaming echoed over the hills and trees.

  The raid was as brief as it was sudden. Less than an hour after they had been first detected, the Narrai were rising in the air, beating their way back to their aeries, leaving the Kayeechi and their single fatality in a midnight shambles behind them.

  Vair, Shasee, and Eleb, the leaders of the Council of Kayeechi, stood in the middle of the smoking ruins and looked around them. Nearby, a wounded mother dragged herself free of the debris of a wall. Her child lay just outside, its guts spilled from a gaping wound that had just missed killing it instantly. The canopy beneath which they had feasted with their alien visitors was reduced to three and a half wooden posts thrusting charr
ed splinters into the sky. The three of them reeked of smoke and blood.

  “May their eggs shatter,” Eleb the brown muttered. “We should have destroyed their nests when we had the chance.”

  “Yes,” Vair said through clenched fangs. “We can Shape and Shape, but until we destroy them it will do us no good. We have to carry the battle back to them and finish them before they finish us.”

  “What we have to do now,” Shasee said firmly, “is Shape shelter for our people. We will let Etra’ain seek a way to win. Meanwhile, we have work of our own to do.”

  Eleb sighed in agreement.

  The three of them stood shoulder to shoulder and stared at the crumbled wall. Mother and dead child had been moved out of the way as the others saw what their leaders were about.

  As they stared at the wall and Remembered what it had been like, the fallen timbers and stones and cloth trembled.

  And rose.

  And reassembled themselves.

  The three breathed shallowly, Remembering the wall whole. Behind them the survivors gathered, watching, Remembering too.

  The smell of burning vanished with the charring, the smoke, the signs of utter destruction. The little crowd of Kayeechi, united, remembered what it had been before, only hours ago, before the Narrai came.

  Before them, the house stood whole again. Eleb stepped up to it and touched it lightly with his hand, then hit it as hard as he could. The wall stood firm. He rubbed at the sore spot on his hand.

  The trio of leaders and the little crowd moved on to Remember the next house, and the next, removing the dead and injured each time before they began to Shape the houses exactly as they had been before, minus the dead inhabitants.