03 - The First Amendment (4 page)

And then the enemy had opened fire.

The humans had retreated and scattered along the tree line, hitting the
ground and returning fire. High explosives roared. Lances of pure energy pierced
the trees.

If the other side had been human, Morley would have expected them to use infrared to locate and target the body heat of
intruders. Infrared, of course, worked best at night, when the blurring effect
of the heat of the sun was absent.

They were not human. It wasn’t clear exactly what weapon they were using—probably
those damned energy staffs—but at least the humans could tell where the
most accurate blasts were coming from. Fire from seven grenade launchers
converged on a single point in the long, skinny window of the tallest tower.

The tower blew apart.

The bird things weren’t making noise anymore, Morley noted absently.

The frequency of hostile fire was substantially lessened. Morley signaled his
men to spread out in an even longer line, making them a more difficult target.
As they did so, every other member of the team stopped firing. Or at least, it
was supposed to be every other member of the team; there seemed to be holes in
the line.

There was activity at last around the base of the ruined tower. Morley could
see several natives and one or two serpent-headed Jaffa ducking in and out
between the rubble and toppled stone blocks. Fries, a highly trained sniper,
took one of the Goa’uld troops out with one of the new, specially formulated
explosive bullets, designed to punch through Jaffa armor like copkillers through
Teflon. If there really had been a second Jaffa, he was smart enough to keep his
head down. There was a scraping sound, loud enough in a sudden silence to hurt
the eardrums, and then nothing but drifting smoke.

Piece of cake, Morley thought deliriously. If the Jaffa were still here, the
prisoners were probably here too. All they had to do was take out the Goa’uld
servants, walk in, and walk out again.

The line began cautiously moving forward under cover of the smoke and dust
from the exploded tower. They could see strange objects weaving back and forth—Goa’uld
machines? SG-2 kept firing, alternating between odd and even members of the
line, laying down cover for themselves. There were no return energy blasts, though a few slender, arrowlike
wands bounced harmlessly off their helmets and body armor. With growing
confidence, they moved up to the city wall.

Morley looked around to assess his casualties. At least four were missing.
He’d pick them up on the way back, he promised himself. He wasn’t leaving any
humans on this planet, dead or alive.

The battle line began to contract as they approached the open gate. “Sir!”
Fries called his attention to an opening in the remains of the blasted tower.
“Look! There’s someone up there!”

There was. He could see a shadow, and on some instinct he ordered his men to
hold their fire. That instinct was rewarded as he glimpsed a distinct pattern of
jungle camouflage.

“They’re tip there!” He was going to do it. He’d taught those damned Jaffa,
and those traitorous natives took a lesson—they couldn’t just grab Earth
humans and think they could get away with it.

He left three men at the foot of the ruined tower to guard their backs, and
led the rest inside. Even if they’d cleaned out the Jaffa, there were still
those natives, after all. Though they represented no threat at all.

“There was some kind of force field waiting for us,” he said, the words
difficult to force past his dry throat. “At the top of the stairs they had the
bodies of the remaining members of SG-4 propped up as if they were standing
there waiting for us. And the rest of the Jaffa were standing on either side.”

The rest of the Jaffa… as if they were standing there waiting for us.

And what was waiting behind them—

Morley shook his head, hard, blocking the picture out of his mind.

Someone pushed a carafe of water and a glass toward him, and he poured
unsteadily, one container rattling against the other as he did so. The water was cool against the
lining of his throat.

“Any ideas about the nature or source of the force field?” It was O’Neill,
his voice carefully lacking in accusation or judgment. It might have been a
question asked for the mere curiosity of it, except for the underlying
intensity.

Morley put the glass down and shook his head. “I don’t know. I thought,
thought maybe it was a Goa’uld we hadn’t seen, using those, those
powers
of theirs.”

No one reminded him of his own remarks of only a week before, scorning the
reports of “bug-eyed aliens with mental zap guns.”

No one had to.

“But we didn’t see one,” he forced himself to go on, still not looking up.
“All we saw were… Jaffa. There were at least a dozen of them, and we were
fish in a barrel. They got Paul Fries with the first volley.”

All we saw were… Jaffa…

A pin dropping on the wooden table, bouncing, would have made more noise
than his audience.

“Most of us got knocked out. When we woke up, they had us locked up in this
big square stone room. It was still daylight, we could tell from the windows up
near the ceiling.

“And then they came and started taking us away to ask us… questions.”
His hands were clasping each other now, the knuckles white and red from the
desperation of his grip. “I thought, I thought they’d be tactical stuff. You
know, like whether there were more of us, and what weapons—” He lifted his gaze
from its fixed study of his trembling hands, finally, and looked around at them,
his mouth working, no words coming out.

Hammond shot a sharp look at Frasier. She was watching Morley very carefully,
clearly worried but not yet ready to call a halt to a briefing that had turned, despite the
general’s best intentions, into a public confession.

“They didn’t care. They didn’t
care.
They were just laughing at us. It
was as if we couldn’t possibly threaten them. Nothing Earth could do could
threaten the… Goa’uld.”
It was laughter. Had to be.

He paused again, and something changed behind his eyes. “They roughed up some
of the boys, but not too bad.” It was clear that he wasn’t thinking about his
own injuries. “When they sent me back into that room, we decided we weren’t
going to wait any longer. They didn’t come for any more of us until the next
morning, and then when they did, we, we rushed them.”
Didn’t we?

“There were only two”—
weren’t there?
—“a-and we got past them.” He
swallowed hard. “Most of us did. Sergeant Wilkinson and Captain Dell’angelo both
had broken legs. They were still up in the, the tower. We tried to take them
with us but—”
but it was too late
—

“That’s enough, Major.” Hammond spoke quietly. “You managed to get the
remainder of your squad back home. You had no reason to suspect a trap.”

He could sense O’Neill’s disagreement from the opposite end of the table, but
that wasn’t the issue and he wasn’t going to open the matter up for debate in
this forum. The mission had been a spectacular failure; not only had it failed
of its objective, the retrieval of the captives, but more than half of the
“rescue” squad had been lost as well. Including the abandonment of two men. They
were back where they’d started—farther behind where they’d started, in fact,
counting all the dead.

He wasn’t going to order yet another team in to try to recover the two men.
It made his teeth ache to bite that order back, but P7X-924 was bad luck and an
asset sink as well. They would have to assume Wilkinson and Dell’angelo were dead—probably as soon as the rest of SG-2 had
operated the Gate for their return home. The Jaffa would have killed them just
as they’d killed the “survivors” of SG-4. They were injured and of no tactical
use. There was no interstellar Red Cross to parley for an exchange of prisoners
in this war.

It was time to move on to the final item on the agenda. He’d give the problem
of David Morley and Etaa further consideration—it deserved investigation—but not
here, not now.

“Harriman? I need to be able to tell Pace that we’ve scoped out the costs for
repairing the damage our little vibration problem—our
former
vibration
problem—caused.” When Cheyenne Mountain had been built originally, they’d had a
small problem with a geological fault in the mountain. When they first started
operating the Gate on a regular basis, the alien artifact had shaken the entire
mountain. The problem had been solved, but someone had to pay for the repairs to
all the other facilities affected.

Davis, the man in charge of Gate operations and maintenance, stood up. He
seemed to be as eager as the rest to change the subject, to direct attention
away from the officer who stared now at his hands, oblivious to anything else
going on around him. “Er, sir, I have the data, but some of the other analyses
don’t quite agree. They, er, the others, keep finding a lot of, well, they call
it collateral damage.”

“Hmmph.” Hammond took the printout and scanned it quickly. There were always
those gray areas where damage could be attributed to more than one cause. “I
take it that if we accept responsibility for this list, the repairs and
replacements come out of
our
budget?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Hmmph,” Hammond repeated. “I have a meeting with Pace later today. I’ll talk
to him about it. We don’t need to run up our costs any more than he does.” And certain senators
were far less likely to pick on NORAD than SGC when it came to costs.

“In fact, sir,” Rusalka interjected, “I’d appreciate it if you could also
speak to General Pace about the procurement lists for medical supplies and parts
for the probes. They go through his offices, and some of his personnel have been
questioning our needs.”

“Tsk, tsk,” O’Neill, commanding SG-1, remarked. “You mean they think
something funny’s going on down here?”

“Possibly the excessive requirements for antibiotics attracted their
attention,” Rusalka parried, with a straight face.

“You mean we’ve been using too much penicillin? Gee, I thought we’d cured
that little problem.”

“That will be enough,” Hammond said. “Harri-man, add it to the list. They’ve
got no business questioning anything that comes through here.”

“That’s probably what ticks them off,” O’Neill muttered.

The other team commanders, four out of the fourteen, chuckled. Hammond
cleared his throat. O’Neill and the rest immediately assumed looks of angelic
innocence, perfected by long practice.

The morning briefing wound down to a close, and the assembled officers rose
and gathered their papers, exchanging a few last comments as they went. O’Neill
paused, drawing breath to speak to his commander, and then shook his head and
went away, rather to Hammond’s relief.

Harriman stood respectfully by, agenda in hand.

“All right, what’s next?” Hammond muttered.

“Short break, sir, and then the meeting with General Pace.”

Hammond sighed inaudibly. Meetings. Decisions.

Command was
not
all it was cracked up to be.

“So what’s the good word, Colonel?” Sam Carter was feeling almost jaunty.
She’d just managed to destroy Daniel Jackson in a fast game of racquetball, and
now, having showered and gotten into clean, if casual, clothes, she was ready to
take on the world. Or possibly the worlds, depending on what the next assignment
was.

But as soon as the words were out of her mouth she regretted them, having
caught sight of O’Neill’s face. He looked grim, to put it mildly.

“I’m not sure there
is
a good word today,” the colonel growled.

“Uh-oh,” Jackson observed. “What happened?”

“Is it something to do with the members of SG-2 presently in Medical?” asked
Teal’C.

The team members of SG-1 were gathered in O’Neill’s office, their informal
ready room for post-command-meeting briefings. It wasn’t unusual for O’Neill to
come away from one of those briefings annoyed or exasperated, but this time he
looked frustrated as well as angry. He was standing with his back to them,
staring at the giant poster of stars that covered his back wall. A scattering of
pushpins marked places they’d been, or might have been, as closely as they could
correlate the outdated star map with the reality of the Gate.

“What do you know about SG-2?” the colonel asked Teal’C, finally turning to
face them.

Someone else might have been intimidated, but nothing and no one intimidated
the former Jaffa First, who had left the service of Apophis in the hope that one
day he could find a way for his people to be free. Certainly O’Neill couldn’t do
it—they had saved each other’s life too many times.

“I was providing more blood specimens to Dr. Frasier,” the black man said.
“She is still examining the symbiotic relationship between the Goa’uld larva and
my body.”

O’Neill winced involuntarily, as he did most times when he was reminded of
the creature that lived in Teal’C’s abdomen.

“I observed the arrival of several injured personnel. Upon inquiry they
proved to be members of SG-2. I believe that team had attempted a retrieval on
P7X-924. They did not appear to have been successful.”

“They weren’t,” O’Neill responded, leaning against his desk and folding his
arms across his chest. “They walked into a trap. Not only did they not get the
guys they were sent for, they lost a bunch of their own.”

“Oh,” Carter said in a very small voice. She knew—they all knew—how much Jack
O’Neill hated the very thought of leaving someone behind in the hands of the
enemy. Perhaps because SG-1 depended profoundly on one another and the trust
that they’d never abandon one of their own.