Stargate SG-1: Trial by Fire: SG1-1 (11 page)

"You locked them out!" Ashen-faced, Sam voiced what none
of them wanted to admit. "Was there any particular reason or were
you just scared to kill them yourselves?"

It sparked a murmur of outrage among the men, and Hamilgart
winced. Daniel supposed he should step in and smooth over the
friction. He couldn't bring himself to do it. Passivity by choice this
time, not by higher obligation, and for once it felt right. If he closed
his eyes he saw the same images Sam must be seeing - charred,
blackened bodies. The memory of that stench seemed terribly real,
and Jack had not responded to Sam's radio call.

"Woman! Do not speak out of turn! And do not accuse us of
cowardice when it is your friends who acted cowardly," spat
Kandaulo. "They fled with the Phrygians. Once they had captured
our children."

"O'Neill would do no such thing." The Lord Spirit stared down
the priest. "We wish to view the temple precinct."

"Meleq protect us!"

The guard carrying the torch flinched at the sudden glare of the
flashlight.

Teal'c had not required it earlier. His eyesight was sharp enough
to discern where a multitude of footprints veered off the stone path.
As the Tauri were fond of saying, a blind man could have seen
it. Now the broad white beam of Major Carter's flashlight picked
out the smooth imprints of numerous sandals that had flattened
plants and soil and overlaid any earlier trace. He could not say with
certainty whether O'Neill had come this way.

He followed the trail regardless, motioning Major Carter to
accompany him. His perseverance was rewarded. Some twenty
paces further into the trees, he discovered a puddle surrounded by
muddy ground. Most of the sandal-wearers seemed to have evaded
it, and at the far end he found the profile of a combat boot.

"Looks like the Colonel's," Major Carter stated.

"Indeed. And it appears that a great many others were in pursuit
of him."

"Thanks, Teal'c. Keep those positive thoughts coming, why
don't you?"

"As yet we know nothing of the pursuers' intentions."

"Sure. They were trying to sell Girl Scout cookies." The beam
of light scanned the ground as she moved further along the tracks.
"It's probably why the Colonel shot this guy. He wasn't in the
mood for cookies."

This response took Teal'c by surprise. It had been worthy of
O'Neill. But like O'Neill, she used flippancy to conceal her anxiety
from herself and from others.

Major Carter was pointing the flashlight at a waxen face. The
eyes stared wide open, etched with an expression of rage and
surprise. Almost exactly between them gaped the entry wound, its
size consistent with a 9 mm round. Even without this additional
confirmation he would have been certain. The Tyreans did not
possess firearms. The Jaffa peered past gloomy tree boles and at
the ghostly shapes of men who lingered on the path, whipped by
the rain and the biting wind that had risen.

"Priest! You requested proof that O'Neill was not aiding the
attackers," he called out. "You may wish to view this."

A tall, white-haired figure emerged from the group and
cautiously glided into the forest. A pair of guards escorted him,
lighting the way. It was true that Kandaulo had demanded proof,
but he would not relish seeing it. Men such as he resented having
their assumptions overthrown by fact. Conceivably this and the
humiliation that went with it would heighten the priest's hostility.

When he arrived, he regarded the corpse with disdain. "Is
this your proof? You have seen what the Phrygians do. They are
animals. His fellow bandits could have killed him."

"They could not." Teal'c permitted himself a minute smile. It
was as he had foreseen. "Which of their weapons would cause a
wound such as this? Turn him around."

The guards obeyed and recoiled when they beheld what the
Jaffa already knew to be there. The back of the dead man's skull
was missing, disclosing a mess of blood and brain matter. At last Kandaulo's scorn gave way to uncertainty.

"What did this?" he rasped.

"A small piece of metal ejected at high speed from the weapon
O'Neill used."

"But this cannot be! You are -"

"Dammit!"

While they were debating, Major Carter had continued to search
the area. Clearly with some success, although she did not appear to
welcome the results. Retrieving an object from beneath a patch of
fern some ten meters to the right, she straightened up abruptly.

"Want me to demonstrate, Kandaulo?"

An instant later, the nature of her discovery became obvious.
She fired, and the bullet tore into a tree trunk behind the priest,
provoking a shocked outcry. It was Kandaulo's good fortune that
Major Carter's fury did not affect her marksmanship, and perhaps
it would teach him not to employ the term `woman' in a pejorative
fashion. Teal'c did not wait for this, admittedly unlikely, event to
occur. He joined his team mate.

"It's Colonel O'Neill's Beretta, and it doesn't look like he
dropped it deliberately. The safety was off, and there are three
rounds left in the magazine, counting the one he'd chambered."
She swiped rain water from her face, and her voice sounded rough
with anxiety. "He said he didn't need backup. Why the hell did I
listen to him?"

The Jaffa could have given several answers to this query, none of
them helpful. At this stage the evidence suggested that O'Neill had
succumbed to vastly superior numbers. Major Carter's presence
would have made no difference.

"We should proceed," he advised, silently admitting that he
dreaded what else they might come upon.

The ground around the ferns was trampled, footprints converging
on it and verifying Teal'c's first impression. A fight had taken place
here. Within a short time they had collected two further items: the
peculiar seating device the Professor had employed earlier in the
evening and a Bowie knife. The knife lay trodden into the soil a
few meters away from the location where Major Carter had found
the sidearm. There could be little doubt that O'Neill had been disarmed, and that Professor Kelly had indeed been with him.

However, the near total absence of blood was encouraging.
Teal'c had seen the massacre on the ship and he had seen the
sword lying next to the dead soldier. When these people killed,
they killed messily. For the first time since Kandaulo had arrived at
Hamilqart's house, he dared to hope. The hope was spurred further
by a combination of tracks, which -

"Sam? Teal'c?"

Daniel Jackson had been examining the interior of the complex,
and now he approached through the trees, his task evidently
completed. What was more, it seemed to have left him agitated
enough not to observe where he was going. A frequent occurrence
with the young man. He tripped and nearly fell, backtracked and
picked up an old-fashioned leather bag.

"Hey! Did you see this? Kelly's bag."

It was indeed. Teal'c received the item, and Daniel Jackson
squinted at the small pile that constituted their previous finds.

"I take it Jack was here?" he asked.

"Teal'c and I are leaning towards the idea," said Major Carter.
"You come across anything useful?"

"Depends on how you define useful. According to the people
in there" - Daniel Jackson cocked a thumb in the direction of the
temple - "the first wave of the actual attack came from the roof.
While some of the mob staged a mock run on the gate, the boys on
the roof rappelled into the courtyard and opened a side door."

"Tactics 101," muttered the Major. "Nice, tidy, almost guaranteed
to work."

"Tidy being the operative word, which is where it gets
interesting... I mean, you guys know more about this stuff than
I do, but compared to the ship this was asking politely. It looks...
less angry."

"In what way, Daniel Jackson?"

"No gratuitous butchery. It's still not pretty; the Tyreans took
casualties and they've got two men seriously wounded, but it seems
to have been a straightforward fight, rather than..." He shrugged.
"You know."

Less angry... Teal'c turned the words over in his mind. "I believe your description may be apt, Daniel Jackson. O'Neill killed
one of their number, yet they did not kill O'Neill when they had the
chance to do so. They abducted him."

"What makes you so sure all of a sudden?" Major Carter gazed
at him, the strain in her face easing slightly. Unlike death, capture
could be remedied.

Teal'c pointed out the tracks he had noticed just prior to Daniel
Jackson's arrival. Two parallel sets of sandal prints scaled the hill.
Between them ran a pair of smudged, uninterrupted marks, almost
certainly left by boot caps.

"Someone tall and heavy was dragged by two men. I am
confident that this person was O'Neill."

"What about Kelly?"

Off to the side yet another trail could be seen. "Professor
Kelly was carried. The imprint left by the right foot is deeper. Her
abductor must have conveyed her slung over his right shoulder."

Major Carter gave a bleak smile. "Anyone mind if I get Kandaulo
and rub his nose in this?"

he groaning was frightful and it wouldn't stop. Drawn-out and
labored, it rose at ten-second intervals, ebbed and erupted again,
interspersed with reedy sighs. He had a vague but nasty suspicion
that he might be responsible for it, because the sheer misery of the
noise roughly equaled the torque somebody had applied to that vise
around his skull.

Suddenly the groans were overlaid by a new sound, just as
drawn-out but less rhythmic in nature. He was fairly certain that,
on this score, he couldn't possibly be the offender. Even with all the
chili in Mexico both volume and aroma would have been beyond
him. The mother of all farts was followed by a second helping,
marginally less succulent.

"Graph," he said, not sure what exactly he meant by it.

The good news was that the groans continued. In other words, if
he'd been the one saying Gmph, he couldn't be the one doing the
groaning.

How about you open your eyes and check, huh?

He was still admiring this sterling piece of advice when a whole
new insight wafted through the fog that inhabited his brain. His
current abode moved. To be precise, it rolled. Pitched. Swayed.

"Oh crap," mumbled Colonel Jonathan `Jack' O'Neill, USAF.

In response, something velvety snuffled across his face and
began nibbling at his hair. Sweet. He tried to swat at the snuffly
velvet thing and noticed that he could barely move his arms. There
probably was a connection between the vise and the fact that his
hands were shackled.

"Lookee here! Who's returning from the Land of Nod?" said a
voice, not quite identifiable yet, but already grating on his nerves.
"Wakey-wakey, duckie!"

His eyes snapped open, from dismay if nothing else, adding
to his list of excellent reasons for which to throttle Miss Marple.
The abrupt onslaught of light, dim as it was, tightened the vise by
several notches. Fighting the urge to pass out again, he had a go at orienting himself. He was lying on a pallet of dank straw, which
presumably explained the stalks in his mouth. The pallet hugged a
curved wall of wooden planks and had an opposite number. Kelly
sat on that, looking offensively cheerful, despite the fact that she
was trussed up as well.

"Marvellous, isn't it?" she chirped. "Cricklebottom and Haig
claim that Phoenician ships had no hold compartments. Morons!"

She'd said the `s'-word.

Jack allowed himself a moment of empathy with Messrs
Crinklebutt and Haze and set about regaining something that
approximated an upright position. No point in postponing the
inevitable, and the endeavor might help him forget Kelly's presence
for a while.

Oh yeah... His head vigorously disagreed with the sit-up.
Somebody else seemed to disagree too. An indignant snort buzzed
into his ear, and tiny warm flecks of spittle sprayed the left side of
his face. Looking up, he found himself staring at a snuffly, velvety,
hairy snout. It belonged to one of two horses chained to metal rings
in the floor. Mr and Mrs Ed shared their fate with his right ankle.
Nice.