03 - The First Amendment (3 page)

“Nine hasn’t reported back yet. We don’t expect to hear from them for another
eight to ten hours. We know that there has been recent Goa’uld, or at least
Jaffa, activity on Tinkerbelle—er, P3R-620. We aren’t sure whether they’re
coming back or not. The Jaffa, I mean. To P3R.” Harriman swallowed, probably
hoping he hadn’t managed to ill-wish the team.

“SG-14’s mission was to destroy a newly discovered Goa’uld hatchery. Initial
reports indicate success, but that was six hours ago. We haven’t heard anything
since.”

Janet Frasier sighed and made a note, passing it to her chief surgeon. He
nodded grimly.

“Keep me posted on all of them,” Hammond said unnecessarily.

“Shouldn’t we at least send a follow-up probe on a couple of those?” O’Neill
asked.

“We’re running out of probes,” Harriman responded. “You need to bring them
back whenever possible. We can’t keep up with the combinations team. They’re
finding new places to go faster than we can build probes to check them out.”

“We’ve still got people out there—”

Harriman lifted one hand helplessly and turned to the head of the table.

“We’ll give them another day, at least. How many new destinations do we have
probe reports on?” the general asked, making a command decision to move on.

“Seven,” Rusalka responded promptly. “Of those, four don’t look like any
place we want to visit soon. Three may be possibles.” Harriman sat down with
relief.

“Oh?” O’Neill challenged. “Who made that determination?” The leader of SG-1 was feeling restless, Hammond could tell. Jack
O’Neill didn’t like not hearing from teams, and didn’t like missions that hadn’t
gone well. This was a particularly bad day on both counts. As the leader of
SG-1, which normally made first contact, he sometimes acted a little proprietary
about “his” new worlds. Hammond kept giving him new ones so the colonel wouldn’t
get in the way of the follow-up teams. O’Neill hadn’t been out for a while. It
was time to give him fresh meat to chew on, and Rusalka wasn’t being very
encouraging.

Rusalka shrugged. Part of the duty of the research section of SGC was
deciphering new Gate combinations and sending out probes to see what was on the
other side before the human teams actually ventured forth. Her group was also
responsible for assessing the risk to the first team through. That usually put
her in conflict, to one degree or another, with O’Neill.

“Well, we lost three of the four probes immediately, and the fourth one
melted in a pool of lava,” she responded. “I didn’t think you’d want to go
wading in that, although it does give new meaning to the concept of a hot tub.”

“Well, no wonder we’re running out of equipment.”

Hammond just barely managed to keep from rolling his eyes in exasperation. He
couldn’t keep O’Neill from making wisecracks, he’d realized long ago, and he
couldn’t keep Rusalka from trying to set him down a notch. He wondered if
Rusalka considered the colonel a challenge of some kind. Maybe he should ask
Frasier to have a little woman-to-woman talk with the major. Maybe get Sam
Carter into it, too.

For an instant he toyed with the idea of asking Carter to set up a formal
female-only staff briefing on How to Handle O’Neill, but it would be useless anyway. Incorrigible.

Besides, they were adults and they’d damn well work it out on their own time.
Or else.

Incorrigible took up the report. “The rest of our teams are twiddling their
thumbs, ready to go,” O’Neill said. “SG-1 is more than ready for its next
assignment—as soon as we can find someplace other than a lava pool to dip our
toes in.”

“We still have three possibles,” Rusalka continued grimly as though she
hadn’t been interrupted, “although I don’t like the atmospheric readings on two
of them. We haven’t finished interpreting the data.”

“Standing by.”

“If you really want to use total environmental suits for your next mission,
my team should have a report by the time we finish up here, Colonel. If you’d
care to stop by the labs we’ll have the lists for you.”

O’Neill grunted and waved his hand as if to say,
I’ll wait.

The reports went on, a smooth flow of information, comments, suggestions,
decisions. Hammond orchestrated it all, watching as his command team worked
together, letting them sort through options, goals, plans. They were good at
what they did.

Usually.

But every once in a while, things went rather horribly wrong, and they
weren’t able to blame the Goa’uld.

“I’d like to hear now from SG-2 about the details of their last mission,”
Hammond said at last. “I believe that’s the world you called Etaa, Jack.”

“That’s what the inhabitants called their city, yes.”

The officers around the table looked at each other uncomfortably, then
directed their gazes to the major sitting halfway between Hammond and O’Neill.

“Major Morley?” Hammond prompted, his voice oddly gentle.

Morley cleared his throat and looked down at the papers carefully squared on
the table in front of him. His face was heavily bruised along the left side, the
entire left eye surrounded by black markings; a pattern of stitches along the
cheekbone held together a raw gash. When he moved his arm along the table it was
clear that he was favoring it. The end of a bandage peeked out from under the
cuff of his jacket.

When no one broke the silence, he sighed, sharply catching his breath halfway
through the exhalation. “Yes, sir.”

Without looking up, he continued, pitching his voice just loud enough to be
heard clearly by all those at the table, “As you are aware, sir, our assignment
was the recovery of SG-4 personnel captured by the Goa’uld on P7X-924.”

Piece of cake, Morley thought, as his squad formed up for one last weapons
check before going through the Gate.

He hadn’t actually been to P7X-924 before, but he’d spent hours poring over
the probe reports, lie knew everything there was to know about the Goa’uld,
everything that had ever been reported by O’Neill and his hotshot team. This was
going to show just how good he really was. That downcheck on his last evaluation
would be wiped away as if it had never happened. Hammond would see that O’Neill
just didn’t want the competition, didn’t want anybody who could maybe take his
place one day as the leader of SG-1. O’Neill had told the boss that Morley was
the wrong choice, he had no experience.

The hell he didn’t. Maybe he’d never been through the Gate before, but he’d
been on plenty of recoveries on Earth. It wasn’t any different just because the
sky was a different color. And he deserved the chance. What happened last time,
in Iraq, well, that wasn’t his fault, and anybody who wanted to give him a fair
shake knew it. The temporary vacancy in the command position for SG-2 was a
godsend.

He’d argued long and hard for this assignment, and it was all going to go
perfectly. Perfectly. Hammond thought so too, or he wouldn’t have let Morley go.

The reports all said that the wormhole was cold. At first he’d figured that
was just more bull—making it look harder than it was. But it had come up
again and again, in all the reports from all the teams.

And whaddaya know, they were right. Damn. For those long minutes—or
was it only seconds? Impossible to tell—he was frozen right down to his
guts. He hoped he still had his weapon—all his weapons. Couldn’t feel
anything.

But then they’d come out the other side, and for the first time ever, Morley
was on an alien world.

The first thing he did, as soon as he could feel anything, was spin around
and count his men to make sure they’d all come through okay, make sure the
F.R.E.D. with all their weapons and supplies was there. And the DHD. Had to make
sure they weren’t trapped. Of course, there had been at least two teams through
this Gate already, and the very first probe had verified, but it never hurt to
check.

O’Neill had gotten caught that way; it wasn’t going to happen to him.

Yeah, all twenty of them present and accounted for. And there was the DHD. It
looked just as they described it in the reports, a wide round platform with
squares marked by the Goa’uld coordinate symbols, with a big red dome in the
middle, the whole thing standing about a yard high and a yard wide, including
the base column. The face was angled to allow easy access to the thirty-nine
glyphs that surrounded the activating dome.

That took care of the first two things. The third was detecting the presence
of hostiles. He could afford to make that number three in his hit parade because
he had recent intelligence from the probe. Sure enough, the area around the Gate
was quiet.

And then he could afford to take a deep breath of the alien air of an alien
world.

It smelled funny. Like a bowl full of nuts.

The air was the wrong color, too. Well, not that air could have color,
really, but the sky was a peculiar reddish blue, and he had the feeling he was
looking at things through pink-violet-tinted lenses. At least it was warm, much
warmer than the wormhole; he could feel his face tingling in response to the
higher temperature. His men were looking around, blinking, trying to adjust, and
stumbling their first few steps in a new and heavier gravity. One point two
times Earth, the report had said. Morley had trained with extra weights to
prepare for it.

But none of that mattered. He’d told Hammond that, and he believed it. What
mattered was the mission.

“Okay, let’s move out!” His voice sounded different in this air, too, but
that was something else that didn’t matter. His men responded exactly as they
were trained.

Four members of SG-4 had made it back from P7X-924. They said they’d lost
fourteen more in a pitched battle with Jaffa and natives. There were still at
least three men, last seen being dragged into a native stronghold, whose current
status was unknown. That was the same native stronghold that O’Neill had rhapsodized about being so friendly and
cooperative. Hah.

SG-1 had made first contact with this world and came back with the message
that all was well, the people of this world were ready and eager to cooperate,
with Earth in the battle against their common enemy. So when SG-4 had gone in
with a full research team, they’d expected to find allies, not a trap. They were
easy pickings. O’Neill felt guilty about it, of course—he’d screwed up
royally, not that anybody would ever admit it. That was another reason why
O’Neill had tried to take over this assignment. But it was SG-2’s job to do the
dirty work, and they were here to do it. Under a competent commander, dammit.

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.