Stargate - SG-1 - 09 - Roswell Read online

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  STARGATE

  SG1

  ROSWELL

  SONNY WHITELAW & JENNIFER FALLON

  Post hoc, ergo propter hoc, (trans.) after this, therefore because this (n): the logical fallacy of believing that temporal succession implies causation.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Kill the unbelievers!”

  Lieutenant Colonel Cameron Mitchell knew to the second how long it took to dial Earth and for the Stargate worm-hole to stabilize. With a couple of hundred screaming villagers on their sixes, all of whom seemed to be waving ugly looking pikes and other various nasty, not to mention dangerously pointy objects at them, they were going to come up short by about eighteen seconds.

  A familiar chorus of, “All hallowed are the Ori!” accompanied the murderous mob around the bend in the track where it opened out on to...

  “Okay, this is going to be fun.”

  Last night's rain had transformed the ground around the Stargate platform into the perfect venue for the next intergalac-tic mud-wrestling championships. Now Cam understood why previous SG teams, as well as remarking on the issue of the local hospitality—or lack of it—had labeled this place Bayou. A full day's rain had turned the already sodden ground around the platform into a puke-green quagmire. If Sam's progress through the stuff as she fought the sucking, thigh deep crud to reach the DHD was anything to go by, his eighteen-second shortfall was wildly optimistic.

  And the stench... Cam's olfactory nerves recoiled as he tried to identify it. Nope. He couldn't name it. This stuff was in a league of its own. A whole new species of putrescence.

  “Butcher the blasphemers!”

  Daniel Jackson, who'd been a dozen steps ahead of Cam and Teal'c, hesitated on the edge of the bog.

  “After you, Jackson,” Cam invited, turning to cover his escape. With a grimace, Daniel lifted his P-90 above his head and waded into the slop, while Cam raised his weapon and planted a short burst into the mulchy ground just ahead of the oncoming mob.

  Pivoting around beside Cam, Teal'c also fired off a long burst into the base of a tree before bolting after Daniel, changing clips as he went. The C4 Teal'c had thoughtfully planted at the tree's base on their arrival exploded, temporarily halting the onslaught.

  “We will defend ourselves!” Cam yelled, the warning more a matter of protocol that any real hope the bucolic citizens of this particular hellhole of a planet were listening, even if they could hear him after that explosion. Still, if the UN ever took it into its collective head to play off-world diplomacy, he could honestly say that he'd given fair warning. Several times.

  “Wasting your breath,” Daniel yelled back at Cam, pushing through the mud after Sam. “They're convinced death is the road to Ascension.”

  “I know. I just keep hoping.”

  Different planet; same fundamentalist argument. First it was the Goa'uld playing god, now the Ori. As far as Cam was concerned they were both parasites, it was only a question of magnitude.

  “Strike down the unbelievers!”

  And to increase the crap factor by a few notches, the not-so good people of Bayou weren't baulking at making the whole religious crusade thing a family affair.

  The first to recover from the explosion were a horde of raggedy-assed kids, armed with slingshots, long knives, and the glazed expressions of fanatics-in-training. They clambered over the tree that the C4 and Teal'c's shooting had brought down and just kept right on coming.

  Cam raised his weapon again. If what they'd witnessed in the village was anything to go by, these same kids had been responsible for butchering the diplomatic team the International Oversight Committee had—in all its naive, bureaucratic wisdom—seen fit to send to this planet.

  “All hallowed are the Ori!”

  A short burst from either Daniel or Sam's P-90 behind him sent a splattering of mossy clods into the kids' faces, slowing them just long enough for Cam to turn and size up his team-mates' progress. Daniel was fighting the suction every step. Teal'c—whose feet were just smaller than those of a Kodiak bear—had been reduced to plowing his way through using brute force. Opting for a different tactic, Cam took the mud at speed, managing to get well ahead of his Jaffa teammate before the goop sucking at his boots slowed him to Daniel's pace.

  “Destroy the heretics!”

  Being lighter, Sam was having more success. She had almost reached the platform. That might buy them an additional couple of seconds. Still not enough, but once he and Daniel got through this gunk, they'd be able to provide suppressing fire from the elevated position of the Stargate platform. Assuming suppressing fire actually worked on people hell-bent on martyrdom.

  “Hallowed be the Ori!”

  Something hit Cam's backpack. It was followed a moment later by several more thumps from what he was certain were the small, spiked iron balls the Bayou kids used in their slingshots. If one of the dartballs connected with his head, it would penetrate his skull just far enough to puncture the meninges and allow the fluid to leak out. Enough dartballs would eventually kill him.

  Eventually.

  He knew that because one of the Marines who'd gone missing with the diplomatic team three days earlier had still been alive when they'd found him hanging in the trees just outside the village. A veteran of a hundred encounters with the Goa'uld, the sergeant had stubbornly refused to die until he'd been able to report exactly what had happened to the eight-man IOC delegation to Bay0ou.

  “Kill the blasphemers!”

  Another dartball struck Cam, this time in the fleshy part of his butt.

  “Ow!” That was gonna smart when it came time to sitting down and writing up this report. And since his reports tended to be influenced by how much pain he was in at the time, he wasn't going to have a whole lot of nice things to say about this place. “Sam?”

  “Almost there!” Carter had reached the platform. She grabbed the pitted base of the DHD to haul herself out.

  ''Hallowed are the Ori!”

  The stinging in his butt was real, but it was the burning in Cam's quadriceps that spurred him on. It was a familiar pain; an old friend that, along with a promise from General O'Neill that he could have anything he wanted, had hauled him out of a body brace after his F-302 had plowed in at the Battle of Antarctica.

  Focused on making his way through the thigh-deep muck, Cam had tuned out both the smell and relatively unimaginative rhetoric until, “Strike down their woman!” caught his attention.

  He glanced over his shoulder—and ducked to avoid one of the incoming dartballs. Okay, that was a mistake, because it put his face in the direct path of another dart, which sliced open his cheek and took out a piece of his nose as it passed. Still, that didn't bother him nearly so much as the realization that the villagers, who'd grown up running through Bayou mud, had recovered any ground they'd lost through smoke grenades, C4, and Teal'c's one man deforestation program.

  SG-1 would be lucky if they had eighteen seconds.

  Sam was punching in the first symbol on the DHD when one of the golf ball sized missiles caught her in the calf. She kicked her foot back, shaking the thing off like a pesky mosquito, but then a whole slew of them started pounding her legs. Specks of blood appeared through the small rips in her pants.

  “Blessed are the Ori!”

  Daniel hauled himself up onto the platform, spread out his arms and, dripping mud and looking more like the Creature from the Black Lagoon than an archeologist, stooped over Sam to shield her. Their attackers responded by fanning out, continuing their barrage on Sam from different angles, knoc
king her arms aside before she could finish the dialing sequence. Angling her body lower, she finished punching in the symbols with her elbow.

  The amber glow of the first chevron locking into place in the Stargate offered Cam only minimal reassurance. While his pack protected his back, and hunching forward kept his head from taking any hits, nothing could stop the darts striking his arms and butt. They were all taking a pounding. Dozens of tiny gashes down Daniel's arms and legs were turning dark with blood. The Chinese might've invented death by a thou-sand cuts, but these slingshot-wielding youths from the Village of the Damned had discovered a whole new variation. “Kill the heretics!”

  “That chanting is really starting to piss me off.”

  The third chevron locked. More dartballs zinged past, lodging in Daniel and Sam's pack and legs while they angled around to take cover behind the DHD. The darts started bouncing off the Stargate and DHD platform with staccato metallic twangs.

  Lunging forward, Cam grabbed the edge of the platform, hauled himself out of the mud and, almost slipping on the slimy crud, spun around and brought his weapon to bear. “Crap.”

  Teal'c was wrenching his body about, trying to fling off two greasy-haired kids hanging from his arms. The bloodied punctures in his neck were testimony to the number of dartballs he'd taken. Hopefully the recent addition of curly black hair on the Jaffa's head had prevented the spikes from penetrating his skull too deeply.

  The fifth chevron slammed into place with a solid reassuringthunk.

  “Stop the blasphemers!”

  Completely unmindful of his pals, one of the youths raised a long knife, flashed a set of cavity-filled teeth, and took a swing at Teal'c's momentarily exposed armpit. The knife abruptly flew backwards, its force propelling the wielder into the green slop. The shot rang in Cam's ears. He glanced at Daniel. For a civilian, he wasn't a bad marksman. But Teal'c was in peril. Three more kids had converged on him, swinging curved knives. The adults were right behind them, egging them on.

  “Hallowed are those who kill the unbelievers!”

  More fire from Daniel targeted the weapons rather than the wielders, but then one guy picked up a boy of about seven and flung him at Teal'c's head, distracting the Jaffa so the rest of his brood could slash at his exposed chest. A spark of cold rage briefly tempted Cam into emptying the contents of his P-90 into the whole pious pack of 'em. What kind of sick religion used kids as weapons?

  He sighted his gun. An unwelcome memory dredged up by Varrick's godforsaken machine momentarily filled his vision: three trucks crammed full of refugees destroyed in a fiery blast from a bomb he'd dropped on them. He never did learn exactly how many civilians—how many kids—he'd killed that day, because from fifteen hundred feet and four hundred knots, there wasn't a whole lot to see.

  And then the event horizon shot out behind him like a blast from a jet engine punching through water.

  “Destroy all those who do not believe!”

  Cam fired off a long burst in an arc around his teammate. The impact of the bullets plowing into the gunk sent needle sharp spurts of mud out everywhere, startling the kids into letting Teal'c go. Others still clambering to reach him, were momentarily driven back just long enough for Teal'c, eyes narrowed in determination, to surge forward, grab the platform and haul himself out.

  “This is SG-1. We're coming in hot!” Sam announced into her radio.

  “The Priors,” a woman cried out over the melee with a manic squeal of delight. “The Priors come to vanquish the enemy!”

  And that's when Cam saw two...no three—wasn't that kind of overkill for a backwater planet?—of the baldy priors appear from behind the nearby trees. The large aquamarine stones set in the tips of their wooden staffs glowed ominously

  Why did he get the feeling that this was planned?

  Teal'c staggered to the 'gate while Cam and Daniel continued to lay down suppressing fire.

  “C'mon!” Sam yelled.

  The last thing Cam saw before he and his teammates ducked low and backed into the wormhole were three bright beams of light shooting from the priors' staffs, over their heads and into the Stargate.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Close the iris!”

  General Jack O'Neill squinted through the smoke flooding the 'gate room. He wasn't certain if Sergeant Walter Harriman had heard his order above the shriek of wrenching metal, because the iris remained obdurately open. As did the wormhole. Crap.

  “It's not responding, sir!”

  Glancing in Harriman's direction, Jack saw that the palm scanner controlling the Stargate's protective iris was a lifeless dull gray—unlike the dialing computer, which, along with the bank of monitors and electronic devices lining the walls, was spitting out an alarming spray of pyrotechnics. “Blast doors?” Jack shouted.

  “Nothing, sir!”

  Carter's warning that SG-1 was coming in hot had brought Jack from his temporary office and down into the control room. Before he could even ask what was going on, the entire underground complex had begun shaking.

  Beneath the buildings inside Cheyenne Mountain were thirteen hundred and nineteen springs, each weighing a thousand pounds. In the event of a major earthquake or nuclear attack the springs were supposed to allow horizontal movement of the complex by as much as a foot in all directions. Wondering if the engineers had factored vertical movement into their equations, Jack cringed, ducking out of the way of a light fixture crashing down from the ceiling—which placed him squarely into the oncoming path of Walter and his chair. The sergeant had flung himself backward to avoid a nasty looking electrical discharge from the bank of monitors. The collision tossed Walter out of his seat, and the migraine-inducting woodpeckers that had earlier taken up residence in Jack's head, now launched an additional offensive on his knees. Legs buckling, he cracked his skull on the bench on his way to the floor. He made a stab at standing, but every surface was bucking and heaving like a steer on steroids. If the frames supporting the strengthened Plexiglas overlooking the 'gate room warped—

  Right on cue, a loud crack resolved itself into an even louder splintering. So much for the shatterproof Plexiglas. Something else—a glass panel by the sounds of it—also exploded, and an SFA who'd been monitoring a bank of computers, screamed and fell back on top of Jack, shoving him onto the leg of the upturned chair. Legs twisted awkwardly, the woodpeckers inside Jack's knees double-timed their hammering while a second squadron dive-bombed his chest. A rib, maybe two objected loudly. At least there was no telltale snap of bones.

  The watery blue reflections from the event horizon vanished and the juddering ceased. Any sense of relief that Jack felt was offset by the near certainty that SG-1 had not made it through.

  Oh, and there was also the matter of a faucet of warm blood pulsing into his face.

  Scrambling out from beneath the injured SFA, Jack reached up to the bench, grabbed the intercom and bawled, “Medical team to the control room, now!” The whoosh of fire extinguishers and trumpeting of klaxons competed with the screams of shock and mortal terror from the kid lying on the ground a few feet away, who was desperately trying to clamp his hand over a jet of blood pulsing from a short, deep slice in his neck. The SFA was new on the base and Jack didn't even know his name. Impatiently, he batted the kid's hand away and shoved his thumb into the wound, holding the flaps of the artery closed—he hoped.

  Looking around the chaos in the control room, his gut clenched. “SG-1?” he demanded.

  Walter found his glasses—one lens fractured—and pulled himself to his feet. He peered down into the 'gate room. Jack couldn't hear the reply above the noise, but he could see the movement of the sergeant's lips and the negative shake of his head. Turning to look down at him, the sergeant brought one hand to the earpiece of his com unit and shouted loudly, “Sir, reports coming in confirm that we're not under attack from the surface. Main computer is down, backup systems will be online in a moment.”

  While part of Jack was focused on keeping the injured airman from
bleeding out, his overriding concern was for SG-1. Some sort of weird light had preceded the team through the Stargate. This particular brand of weirdness had a distinct whiff of Ori, but since Jack had only been back at the SGC for all of an hour, he wasn't completely up to speed on their latest gadgets. “Any idea what just happened?”

  “The moment we have power I'll run a diagnostic, sir, but from what I can tell it appears that the wormhole was... diverted.” Walter's voice was steady, but the harsh shadows cast by the emergency lighting emphasized the concern on his face. “Sir, are you injured?”

  “Nope.” Several body parts screamed liar. “Diverted? Since when have wormholes been divertable? Maybe SG-1 never left.”

  “No sir, SG-1 definitely were in transit.”

  Recollections of a busted leg and his ass being frozen into a Popsicle waved a red flag. To the best of Jack's knowledge there were no spare Stargates stashed elsewhere on Earth, which meant Mitchell, Carter, Daniel and Teal'c could be anywhere.