03 - The First Amendment (16 page)

O’Neill wasn’t impressed, and Carter was on her feet, waiting, rifle in hand.

“All you’ve done so far is show me that we’ve got space travel. I thought you
were trying to keep my mouth shut about it. Besides, I’ve been under fire
before. I won’t get in your way.”

“Uh, Jack—” Jackson interrupted, at almost the same instant that Teal’C said
sharply, “O’Neill!”

Kinsey turned to see what the other two were looking at and nearly choked.
Standing in the little plain that separated their copse of vine-trees from the
round Gate stood… something.

Aliens he wanted; aliens he got.

“Hasn’t anybody told this world about the inverse square law?” O’Neill
inquired plaintively.

The thing’s body stood about twelve feet tall at what Kinsey couldn’t help
but identify as a shoulder, with a shiny black carapace and a triangular head
that looked like nothing so much as a praying mantis. It balanced on six
impossibly slender legs. Its body was almost a perfect cylinder, with a long,
flexible tube at one end that terminated in the triangular head. The smooth
hardness of its carapace blended into a wrinkled, leathery skin on the neck. If
the alien stuck its head straight up in the air—which it didn’t do often,
preferring to keep it slightly above body height—the neck added another six feet
of height.

In its arms it cradled something that was probably a weapon. It too was long and roughly cylindrical, catching the sunlight as
metal did. It reminded him of nothing so much as the rifle that Carter, beside
him, carried at the ready. It was slung onto a harness woven around the thing’s
legs and body, not quite clothing but definitely manufactured.

Three more, similarly attired and armed, entered the clearing behind it. The
tubular necks were snaking in all directions, wrapping around each other briefly
as if in greeting and then twisting to scan the horizon. Two of the things
stalked over to the Gate, examining it and the DHD as if they had never seen it
before, sticking necks through and curving them around to look at themselves as
if locking their necks through a hoop.

“Uh, sir—” Carter said hesitantly.

“Belay that order. Dammit,” O’Neill directed, and sighed. Without taking his
eyes off the aliens, he went on, “Okay, Kinsey, you wanted space travel and
alien worlds, you got it. Let’s see what you think the man on the street on
Earth ought to know about it.

“Dave Morley didn’t say anything about tubenecks on P7X-924. He was supposed
to rescue one of our teams on this world from the Goa’uld. Teal’C, what are
those
things?”

“Those aren’t Gold?”

“Goa’uld,” Jackson corrected. “There’s a glottal stop in the middle of the
word.” The younger man was staring intently through the camcorder as it ran
quietly, taking data.

“Not the time for a linguistics lesson, Daniel. Teal’C?”

“I do not know,” the answer came. “I have never seen these people before, and
I have never heard them described. They appear to have been attracted by the
activation of the Gate.”

“I agree, and I don’t like it,” O’Neill muttered.

“They don’t seem to be familiar with the Gate,” Daniel remarked, still
filming. “And that pattern of digitation—I wonder if they’re from here at all.
Maybe they got here in ships.” He kept on talking softly, providing a running
commentary for the film. “That neck-twining thing looks like a giraffe mating
dance. Appears to be related to communication, although these people do
vocalize.”

People? Kinsey wondered, unable to tear his eyes away from the creatures now
directly between the little party of humans and their only means of escape. The
creatures were making a chirruping sound as they spread out in the fashion of
recon teams from time immemorial. Both Jackson and Carter were running their
camcorders. Kinsey’s hands itched for a camera.

“They look like something out of a Heinlein novel,” Carter remarked as she
changed out tapes.
“Starship Troopers,
maybe. Or
Tunnel in the Sky.” .

“Yeah, well, the good guys always won in his books, but we don’t have any
such guarantees.” O’Neill was on one knee, his rifle rested butt-down on the
ground, shielding himself behind a low-hanging vine. “I wonder if this is what
Dave really saw. If it is, then they’re responsible for his breakdown, too,
which means we probably don’t want to walk up and introduce ourselves. What
we’re gonna do is sneak the hell around them and try to get to the city again
and see if we can figure out what happened.”

“There are cities, too?” Kinsey said, unable to keep the rapture out of his
voice.

O’Neill glared at him. “Your job is to keep out of our way and to stay alive,
in that order, Kinsey. I’m not going to lose one of my people because of a
journalist.
Understand?”

“I’ve been in combat,” the journalist retorted with an injured look. “I know
the drill.”

“I’ve got news for you, mister. Out here there aren’t any drills, because it’s different every time. We owe you nothing, you
understand? But if I give you an order you’re going to follow it, right now, no
questions. Got that?” O’Neill’s voice was low, his words rapid-fire.

All four of them were looking at him now, their faces expressionless.
This
is a team,
Kinsey realized, a real team,
not just four people thrown
together for an assignment.
He had seen this before in tightly bonded
military units, and he knew O’Neill meant exactly what he said. His own life was
his responsibility. They took care of each other first.

From the clearing behind them came a gentle hissing sound from the triangular
heads. It sent a cold chill down his back. Kinsey swallowed twice. “I got it.”

The hissing sound increased exponentially, and SG-1 and their unwanted guest
snapped their attention back to the clearing, flattening themselves even closer
to the ground. The tubenecks were becoming agitated, their triangular heads
swinging back and forth.

“They’re looking for something,” Carter whispered.

“And I think they found it,” O’Neill responded in a low voice. “Seven
o’clock.”

Kinsey traced the imaginary line. The four tube-necks had converged in front
of the Gate, their necks twisting together like courting giraffes. A flickering
speck at seven o’clock was rapidly becoming larger.

The speck became a dot, a blotch against the sky, splitting and coming
together again.

“It’s a moth!” Carter sputtered. “A giant moth!”

And it was: a giant moth with extra legs—arms?—folded up close to its
thorax. Unlike the tubenecks, it didn’t seem to be carrying anything. Its
wingspan stretched at least fifteen feet across, in three sections, the largest
on top, a smaller wing segment in the middle, with the third segment midway
between the other two in size. It was brown, with white and black markings scattered
randomly across its entire surface. Its body, from one end to the other, was
longer than a tall man. It didn’t have antennae.

And its thorax was sheathed in something that didn’t look like moth fur.

“Oh, come on. Those things aren’t Godzilla. That
can’t
be Mothra.”

“Could it just be an animal?” Carter asked.

“I don’t know,” Jackson responded. “It’s tough to tell yet whether it has
intelligence or not. It seems to recognize the tubenecks, though. It’s obviously
perceived them and is responding to their presence. From the reaction of the
tubenecks it’s an aggressive move.”

“Scientists,” O’Neill muttered.

Teal’C was ignoring this byplay, Kinsey noted. It appeared to be an excellent
example to follow.

Both camcorders whirred steadily.

The tubenecks split apart, scattering to four quarters, and the moth hovered
between and above them. Even at this distance they could hear the beating of its
brown wings against the air, see a shimmer as some kind of dust fell from the
wings to the ground.

Then the tubenecks fired their weapons simultaneously, with a stream of blue
fire. The brown wings burst into flame and the moth fell, screaming thinly. The
tubenecks converged on it.

“I can’t see what they’re doing,” Daniel Jackson fretted, standing up to get
a better view for his camera.

“I don’t care what they’re doing. This is a really good time to retreat,”
O’Neill retorted. “Let’s go, people.”

They crept through the underbrush, pausing only to disentangle themselves
from the vines and creepers. Kinsey found himself panting to keep up with the
others as they made their way around a small outcrop of rock and slithered to
the top to study their back trail. The tubenecks were heading in the opposite
direction, and all five breathed a sigh of relief.

Kinsey took the opportunity to look around. One of the three moons was
setting, huge against the horizon; a thin trail of smoke twisting up from the
ground marred its red-gold beauty. Eastward of the smoke, jagged reddish-purple
mountains defined the distance. Patches of trees—or what passed for trees—dotted
the plains below them. In the middle distance he could see the Gate, rising out
of the ground as the only object that was clearly artifact, manufactured by
intelligent hands. Or handlike objects.
Would that be handibles? Handoids?
Not far away, the ruined body of the moth still smoldered.

He glanced around at the others, who were taking a break after making sure
there was no immediate threat. “Wow,” he said.

Carter looked up at him and gave him a brief grin. “Yeah, wow.”

At least somebody appreciated the sheer wonder of the situation. He was
beginning to think that the three men on the team were either entirely without imagination or simply jaded by too much exposure to the unearthly.

O’Neill was watching him too, his face expressionless. There was no telling
what kind of thoughts were moving behind those dark eyes.

“Colonel,” Kinsey said, trying to be conciliatory, “I really
don’t
want to get in the way. I especially don’t want to get myself or anyone else
killed. So do you think you could just fill me in on the basics, so I have some
clue?”

O’Neill’s lips tightened. Before he could say anything, Jackson spoke up.
“He’s right, Jack. He’s here; time to give him Briefing B.”

“Yeah. Like, who are these Goa’gurgle you’ve mentioned?”

O’Neill waved a hand to Jackson, who took it as permission and assumed his
lecturing-professor persona.

“The Goa’uld are intelligent aliens, with space-travel capability. We think
they found the Stargate system rather than built it themselves, but they’ve
found it very convenient, probably because it’s faster than ship travel. We’re
not certain where their original homeworld is. In their natural state they look
sort of like worms, or lampreys, as adults, but before that they spend several
years in a larval form. In order to survive as larvae, they have to achieve a
symbiotic relationship with another species. They first visited Earth at least
three millennia ago, with the intention of harvesting human beings for use as
hosts.”

Kinsey found his mouth open, an
oh come on now
hovering unspoken. Then
he glanced up at the sky again, remembering the tubenecks and the moths and the
conflict he had just witnessed, and decided to let Jackson continue
uninterrupted.

“A few decades ago we discovered the Stargate on Earth. More recently we
found out how to operate it.” Jackson paused and bit his lip, obviously trying
to decide what parts of a very large and complex story to tell. The other members of the team remained silent, listening.
“Anyway, the first world we found was the planet Abydos. Abydos turned out to be
one of many planets the Goa’uld had seeded with human beings from various
cultures and periods of Earth history. It also provided the clues we needed to
operate the Gate to reach those other planets. This is one of those planets.”

“Ra,” O’Neill said laconically.

“I was trying to be brief,” Jackson responded.

O’Neill shrugged.

“Who’s Ra?” Kinsey said predictably. None of this had been in the manual he’d
read the night before.

“Ra was a Goa’uld who was using the people of Abydos as fodder—harvesting
them as hosts.” Jackson’s voice was suddenly tight and uneven, as if this part
of the narrative had personal meaning for him. “We—well, Jack—destroyed him.

“We thought that was the end of it, but another Goa’uld discovered the
coordinates for Earth. That brought Earth into direct conflict with the
Goa’uld.”

“Okay,” Kinsey said, trying to buy time to choose the first of the dozens of
questions that were vying for precedence. “So we’re at war with these guys.
They’ve actually launched an attack on Earth itself? Why the hell shouldn’t the
world know?”

“Because right now the Goa’uld aren’t unified, any more than we are. But
they’re perfectly capable of taking advantage of a world split into factions
pro-alien and con. Before that happens, we’re trying to accumulate information
about them, their various factions, plus all the other worlds out here. Apophis,
the one we’ve got really ticked off at us, apparently doesn’t have all the
resources he needs to launch an overwhelming attack right now. We’re buying
time, and we’ve got no guarantees we’re going to win,” O’Neill said wearily.
“It’s bad enough that we can’t even get support from our own government. What makes you think the whole
world will cooperate?”

“I take it you’re referring to my father.”

O’Neill tilted a half-nod of agreement. “He thinks we can win because God is
on our side. At the same time he’s scared to death we’re going to bring
something back through the Gate that’ll destroy us all. He’s already tried to
shut us down once. The fact that it wouldn’t stop Apophis doesn’t seem to matter
to him.”

“Consistency was never one of my father’s biggest virtues.” Kinsey
considered. It had been a long time since he’d agreed with his father on much of
anything. “So you’re saying he arranged to have me come out here to blow the
whistle on you in the hope that world pressure will succeed where he failed?”