03 - The First Amendment (17 page)

“Give the man a cigar,” O’Neill said wryly.

“So why am I
here?”
Here, on an alien world, weighing more than he
ought to, breathing funny-tasting air, watching aliens go at each other like
something from
Dinosaurus…

“Because General Hammond said so. I guess he thinks you have something your
father hasn’t got.”

“Common sense, maybe,” Jackson offered. He slapped hard at an insect that had
lighted on his arm. “Ouch.”

“Or maybe sending me to another world is just the biggest bribe that’s ever
been offered a newspaperman in the history of the Earth.”

“That too,” O’Neill agreed. “We’re hoping you’ll stay bought.”

He grinned despite himself. “So what’s the deal on this world?” It was easier
to breathe now, Kinsey found. His body was slowly adjusting to the heavier
gravity. “What’s happening here?” His briefing manuals had contained nothing
about where the Gates led, or aliens. Or Goa’uld.

Carter, who was unloading the mechanical puppy, took up the story. Kinsey was
fascinated at the volume and variety of materiel that piled up beside the metal cart. Weapons—some
of which he identified as such by default, having never seen them before—supplies, explosives. Carter passed around packs as she talked, and the others
busily loaded up.

“This is the world we designated P7X-924. Our team, SG-1, made first contact
here a couple of months ago. We found a human colony that has been here, as far
as we can tell, for several hundred years; the origin seems to be East Africa.
They’re a peaceful trading and farming community, pre-industrial, with a good
understanding of at least this part of this planet’s ecosystem. Our mission is
to find allies, tools, technology, anything that Earth can use against the
Goa’uld, and if there’s a cure for cancer lying around we’ll get that too.”

“And if you find something the U.S. could use against, say, China?”

“We’ve got our mission,” O’Neill said firmly. He didn’t look at all
uncomfortable. “Policy isn’t our bailiwick.”

“Besides,” Jackson put in, “the human communities we’ve found have all been
far less technologically advanced than Earth is. And we’ve got bigger worries
than China out here.”

O’Neill shot the blond man a bland look and continued.

“Anyway. The Etaans have adapted some of the local vegetation and come up
with what might be some new antibiotics. So we sent SG-4, a research team, in to
do a baseline study.

“Things went bad. A couple of members of SG-4 made it back to tell us that
most of the team was dead but some had been taken prisoner. David Morley was
supposed to launch a retrieval operation. You saw how well that worked out when
you were in the infirmary. We’re here to figure out what the hell happened.”

“So the ones who came through when Morley had me—”

“Nope, that was SG-9 on a different mission entirely. They were doing a
combat reconnaissance on a totally different world. It’s not just the four of
us, you know. There are several operations going at once at all times.”

The colonel fell silent, and Kinsey tried to sort through all the information
about SGs, planets, Goa’uld. He wished he had a camcorder of his own, or at
least a pencil and a piece of paper. It was too much.

And not enough.

“So what are
those
things?” Kinsey asked, jerking a thumb back toward
the now-deserted plain marked only by the Stargate.

“Damned if I know,” O’Neill shrugged.

Kinsey decided there was something seriously warped about O’Neill’s sense of
humor. And he liked it.

The little outcrop of rocks was developing all the signs of becoming a very
comfortable base camp. Carter was busy filling four sets of backpacks as they
talked.

“So what do you think happened to the people—the humans, from Earth, I
mean—who live here?”

“They’ve probably been taken by Goa’uld troops to be hosts.” There was a
strained harshness to Jackson’s answer. There was definitely something going on
there, something personal. Kinsey made a mental note to follow up on it
sometime. Maybe he could buy the man a drink. He didn’t look like a
straight-arrow military type.

“When you say hosts—what exactly do you mean?”

He noted with some interest that three of them glanced simultaneously at
Teal’C before Jackson said evenly, “The Goa’uld are a parasitic race. They need
other species to live with. In larval form it’s a symbiotic relationship. When
they become adults they take a new host and—it’s not symbiotic anymore. They take over.”

“So they look human? Or—I guess the hosts are, but can you see the aliens
too? At the same time?”

“No. Not exactly.”

“So how do you know whether you’re dealing with a real human or a pod
person?”

“You’ll know,” Jackson said dryly. “The behavior differences are—explicit.”

“Okay, now that we have the exposition over with, can we get on with the
mission?” O’Neill snapped.

“But—” Kinsey started to say that he had more questions, many, many more
questions, but the expression on the colonel’s face persuaded him that perhaps
this wasn’t a good time. He swallowed his curiosity and nodded.

“Okay, let’s move out.” All the packs were filled. Carter handed one to
Kinsey as well, an odd flat rectangle, and he grunted as he slung it across his
shoulders. He thought he was in shape, but he was glad he hadn’t bragged about
it.

He was even gladder when he realized that the pack was just as affected by
the heavier gravity as he himself was, and none of the others made an issue of
it. Everything had been divided up evenly, too, he noticed, so he was carrying
as much weight as Carter and O’Neill and Jackson and Teal’C were. They seemed to
concentrate on firepower; he had no idea what was in the rectangle.

Teal’C. What a weird name. Neither he nor Jackson wore any rank insignia,
unless that funny tattoo on the black man’s forehead counted. Kinsey tucked that
thought, too, away for greater consideration later.

The five of them slipped and slid down the little outcrop and headed across
the plain at a fast trot, keeping to the shelter of the vegetation, heading for
the thin line of smoke. The dark-red moon it marred had set, but the other two
between them shed as much light as—a sun? What was the sun of this world, he wondered. A red
giant? How far from it did this world revolve?

Were there other worlds in this system? Worlds with living beings? Could they
visit them, too?

He barely noticed when the smell of nuts was replaced with something else
less palatable. He was puffing as they came through a thin line of “trees,” and
so nearly ran up Teal’C’s back when the big man stopped abruptly.

“Down!” O’Neill whispered, and Kinsey was never so grateful to obey an order
in his life. He pressed his face into something that looked remarkably like
grass, breathing hard.

“Quiet!”

That particular order wasn’t quite as easy to obey, but he tried, opening his
jaws wide so his breath didn’t whistle quite so much, controlling the heaving of
his lungs as best he could.

“Wha—?”

He lifted his head at last to see his companions arrayed in a skirmish line
on either side of him, peering through the blades.

Holy sh—

He couldn’t even finish the expletive. He had never seen anything like the
scene that unrolled down the gentle slope in front of him.

He had been present at the uncovering of mass graves in Kosovo. He’d seen the
rubble of downtown Sarajevo, the damage that SCUD missiles inflicted on Baghdad.

He had never seen anything like this. Surely no American reporter had seen
anything like this since—since Gettysburg, maybe.

Carter, sprawled on the ground to his left, was pale but watchful. Teal’C, to
his right, had permitted two deep lines to mar his forehead. He couldn’t see
Jackson and O’Neill, lying on Teal’C’s far side.

They couldn’t see very much. The ground didn’t conveniently slope away as it
had from their last vantage point, so their angle of vision was restricted. It
was a blessing, Kinsey thought. It was a wide expanse of mostly open space; on
the other side he could see low hills. At their base was something that looked
like structures, irregular but unnatural. Whatever they were blended into the
hills behind them; they’d be barely noticeable if they weren’t yet another
source of the smoke disfiguring the sky.

Closer to, the ground before them smoked and bubbled like a gigantic,
overheated marsh. Stalking not six feet in front of the frozen humans was one of
the tubenecks, making a keening sound and dragging two of its legs and half its
cylindrical body behind it. The other half was simply missing. Blue-green ooze
bled from the hole where the creature’s side and back had been, and things were
falling out of it, internal organs and systems. Like the ground it dragged
itself over, the remains of the tubeneck’s body were smoking and bubbling, its
shiny black carapace expanding like heated plastic.

The alien paused, its triangular head swinging back and forth to survey the
humans lying prone before it, its horizontal jaws working, and then it toppled
ungracefully, twitched, and lay still.

Beyond the dead alien lay dozens—hundreds—more of its kind, in various
stages of meltdown. And the tubenecks weren’t alone; there were some other
things scattered among them too, things that might have had wings and certainly
had claws—the moth creatures.

The devastation covered acres. It was a soup of dead things, interrupted only
by tree trunks sticking up nakedly like exclamation points. Kinsey looked for,
but did not find, signs of human death. There were no bloated bodies, no staring
single-faceted eyes or gaping jaws.

Oddly, there also wasn’t much smell. What there was, was distinctly
unpleasant, but a scene like this on Earth would have reeked for miles, and they
hadn’t even noticed the aroma before nearly stumbling on the battlefield.

O’Neill made a signal, and the team started wriggling backward into the
shelter of the trees. Carter pulled Kinsey along with them, grabbing his
shoulder when he didn’t respond fast enough.

When they got to their feet they could see the extent of the damage even more
clearly and could hear the sounds the dying aliens made. The wind shifted,
bringing a concentrated whiff of what odor there was, and all five of them
gagged simultaneously.

Kinsey decided this was no time to ask questions. He stood silent, breathing
shallowly through his mouth and trying not to taste the air, while O’Neill
consulted with his team.

“I don’t think we’re gonna cross that area,” the colonel said at last. “I
really don’t like the way that ground looks. Let’s take the long way around and
hope that whatever it is, is over.”

“Second that, sir,” Carter said with feeling. Teal’C and Jackson nodded
soberly.

“Teal’C, do you have any idea—”

The big man shook his head.

“What about the weapons? Recognize any of them?”

Teal’C shook his head again. “We found signs of what could have been such
battles, from time to time,” he said, shifting his pack into place. “But we
never remained long, and never saw what caused such devastation.”

“It looked almost as if that alien had been sprayed with something.” Jackson
commented.

“Super insect spray?”

The look the archaeologist gave the colonel should have quelled him. It
wasn’t enough, of course, to quell Jack O’Neill. “Well, they look like bugs,” he said with mock defensiveness. Then, more seriously, “It did look like a
spray. I didn’t see any holes that would be made by projectile wounds.” He
looked to Carter for confirmation, and she shook her head.

How could they have maintained the presence of mind to assess the kind of
damage the alien had undergone? Kinsey wondered. How could they stand around
discussing it so calmly?

“All right. The last time we were here we saw a trail over the hill,
remember? We’ll try that route and see what we can see. The bear went over the
mountain—”

“Please, O’Neill, do not sing,” Teal’C said seriously. Carter smothered a
grin.

Kinsey was still in shock, trying to assimilate. The others might take this
kind of thing for granted, might even make jokes, but this wasn’t the way he’d
planned to spend the afternoon.

And there was more. They asked Teal’C for his opinion of the aliens and their
weapons as if he was in a position to know a lot more about it than they were.
What was it he’d said?
We found signs of what could have been such battles,
from time to time. But we never remained long, and never saw what caused such
devastation.
Who was the “we” to whom the big man referred? Obviously he was
more widely traveled than the other members of the team, but even he had never
encountered tubenecks before.

Kinsey realized with a shock that he was beginning to take travel between
worlds for granted too. When confronted with multi-legged intelligent alien
life-forms busy trying to exterminate each other, a little detail like a chilly
wormhole was barely worth noticing.

They backed away from the scene of the battle, keeping to the trees, moving
at right angles to the smoke. That smoke was suddenly considerably more ominous
than it had been a half an hour before.

The circuitous route around the killing field seemed to take forever. Every
time they thought they’d passed it they saw more evidence of battle. Even where
the vegetation was still a more or less healthy pink, it was dry and crunched
beneath their boots.

O’Neill called for rest breaks three times, the third time—finally away from
the pervasive, if discreet, smell of death—breaking out field rations. Kinsey
found a packet of nuts in his MRE, looked at it thoughtfully, and decided he
wasn’t very fond of cashews after all. The others didn’t eat theirs either, he
noticed.