Stargate SG1 - Roswell (32 page)

“I...I will be all right in a short while.” An tried to lift his hand, but failed. Sam broke more small pieces from the red food shapes and placed it in his mouth. When he indicated the water, she helped him into a sitting position then brought the glass to him. His mouth moved around some, giving Sam the impression he was allowing the red food—or maybe it was some form of Asgard medication—to dissolve, before swallowing.

While he ate, Sam explained who she was and that they had come to take him to the future, adding that the replicators had been destroyed and the Goa'uld pretty much eradicated. She also detailed what Loki had done to the transport and time machine, finishing with, “Is your escape pod operational?”

An had managed to consume only two of the red food cubes before falling back against the pillow, exhausted. The Asgard had abandoned sexual reproduction millennia ago, and Sam had never witnessed anything that vaguely resembled affection between them, yet they did not appear offended by physical contact. When she took his hand again, he opened his eyes and said, “Thank you. This has been a very bad...time.”

“You can say that again.”

“This has been a very—” He stopped when Sam smiled. “Ah. Yes. A human expression. In answer to your question, the flight systems in the pod should be fully capable by now, however ancillary systems and weapons will require manual repairs.”

“Sir, did you copy that?”

“Yeah. Weapons? In an escape pod?” O'Neill demanded through the radio. “Carter, why am I getting the feeling we arrived in the middle of an Asgard academic coup d'etat?”

Sam glanced across at Loki's clone, wondering if he really was dead—and wondering what had transpired between An and Loki. Unlike their ships, Asgard escape pods were—naturally—designed to survive an uncontrolled entry into the atmosphere. The lack of telltale impact crater and wreckage at Mark Brazel's ranch was indicative that the pod had exploded prior to impact.

Or been shot down.

An followed the direction of her gaze. An expression Sam could only describe as sadness crossed his face.

“I'm sorry,” she said, moving to stand. “I'll see if I can help him.”

“Loki's clone has expired. My fault. All of this is my fault.”

Before Sam could answer him, the door burst open and Cancer Man walked in.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

There were no guards on the flatbed. Who expected anybody to steal something so large? And nobody in 1947 had any idea what they were dealing with, anyway. It was a fair call, Jack supposed, that the US Army thought an alien spacecraft was safe from being hijacked a few miles from one of their top bases but he was still pissed in principle that security was so lax.

In deference to his knees, Jack didn't attempt to crouch as he ran toward the flatbed, Daniel limping along beside him. There were no streetlights, so they'd parked the jeep and switched off the headlights in case anyone up front bothered to look in their rearview mirrors. Not that it would have been able to see anything anyway, because the pod blocked their view, which brought Jack back to the whole lack of security thing. On the upside, it meant they probably had a few minutes alone with the pod to make certain it was hijackable.

Daniel, being somewhat younger—not to mention the whole intact ribcage and knees thing—climbed onboard first, and then turned to give Jack a hand up. It hurt like he'd been stabbed but the pain soon subsided after they lifted the canvas and ducked underneath.

Jack ran his hands over the smooth exterior, trying to discern if there was any external damage. Based on the radio message from Carter, he strongly suspected his time-traveling jumper was not in the least responsible for the Asgard abandoning their orbiting ship, although the impact probably had damaged its beaming technology, explaining why Loki had used the jumper's to beam himself back to the ship. As for this escape pod...admittedly he'd zoned out the only time he'd been confronted with Asgard operations manuals, but the self-repair systems apparently had been working overtime.

“Back here!” Daniel whispered. He was on his hands and knees, peering underneath the pod.

With a grunt of pain Jack knelt beside him. He couldn't see worth a damned under the canvas, but Daniel was playing a flashlight across the hull. “It's upside down,” he pointed out, unnecessarily.

“I can see that, Daniel.” The escape pods had been purpose-built to keep an Asgard alive in the event of a catastrophic hull failure in interstellar space, where there were no handy planets they could beam to. This particular model was apparently weapons' capable, which raised another whole slew of questions.

“Can we still open it?”

“Dunno.”

Jack palmed the control panel that, to the untrained eye. would have looked no different from any other part of the ship. You had to know where to find it. The hatch opened in a flood of light, pushing the pod upwards in a screech of metal as it scraped along the flatbed.

Even over the grumbling roar of the truck's engines, someone
must
have heard that.

As soon as the hatch was wide enough, Jack pulled his palm away and crawled inside, with Daniel right on his six.

The pod rocked back and forth. The truck had stopped. “Shut the hatch!”

Daniel did as he was asked, precipitating another screech of composite material on metal. According to Teal'c's tabloids, it'd taken years before anyone—the NID most likely—had figured out how to break inside, which gave Jack some time to figure out how to fly the thing.

But not much time. Those misbegotten bastards snooping around the place explained a whole bunch of things that Jack really didn't want to think about right now. Instead, he tried to reposition himself inside of something that had about as much room as a Volkswagen—the original model, not the twenty-first century version, which he refused to get into on principle.

“Can you fly us out of here?”

“Gimme a minute.” Jack had flown Asgard ships before, more or less, but usually when he was the right way up relative to the controls. Speaking of which, there was a distinct lump under his left kidney.

A loud banging on the hull reverberated through the pod.

“We got company.”

“No kidding.”

“Can I help?”

Awkwardly shifting around, Jack yanked out the stone and held it up. “Find the rest of these.”

Placed against the slots on the control panel, the stone attached itself like a magnet. Jack was rewarded with a subsonic thrumming that permeated his bones and sent a peculiar tingling sensation through his knees. Not knowing if that was a good thing or a bad thing, he decided it didn't much matter.

“Here.” Daniel twisted around and handed him a second stone.

Attaching it to the panel achieved nothing, so Jack twisted it slightly. Half one side of the pod turned translucent with a HUD insert on which a bunch of Asgard diagrams rapidly flashed across the screen, like the thing was trying to reset itself. Hopefully it would skip through the engineering primer for Beliskner class escape pods and get straight down to business.

A slight adjustment of the stone and much of the hull turned transparent. He knew that because through the hull he could see a pair of boots, but on the HUD the same boots appeared upside down. The system's computer was compensating for the inverted perspective. Nice, but not helpful at the moment.

“Why don't you try—?”

Jack shifted the stone forward half an inch, and the pod abruptly moved in a vertical direction—straight down
into
the flatbed. The boots vanished; their owner either thrown off or he'd jumped clear as the pod's force field rapidly disintegrated the base of the truck and axle in quick succession, followed soon after by the road. The inertial dampeners must have kicked in as well, because the there was no sense of motion whatsoever.

Naturally, the truck had come to a grinding halt. Jack knew that because the view through the screen offered a surprisingly well-lit but slightly fuzzy image of what remained of rubber tires oozing across a rapidly melting asphalt and concrete road, and soldiers scattering in every direction.

“Jack!”

“Whoops.” He flashed Daniel an unrepentant grin. “Had the silly thing in reverse.”

In all fairness, it wasn't so much reverse as their currently inverted situation. He couldn't hear the racket outside, but he reckoned that, by now, they were making enough noise to alert a fair percentage of the population of New Mexico.

“Jack.”

“Not now, Daniel.” He rotated the stone one hundred and eighty degrees. They both tumbled backwards, crashing into each other—which sent a jolt of agony through Jack's chest, as the craft also rotated one hundred and eighty degrees.

Maybe the inertial dampeners needed work.

Their vision promptly vanished, presumably because the pod had taken off in a vertical direction—this time, up—and carried the canvas covers away with it, which blocked the viewers. Either that or he'd bumped the second stone.

“Jack, I think we're airborne. Can you get us cloaked—aside from the canvas hood flapping around the place, I mean?”

“If you get your elbow out of my mouth.” Yeah, it was definitely the stone, because a slight twist to the left and the HUD cleared to reveal stars.

“Ah... Jack... have you noticed the stars aren't twinkling?”

He glanced up. Okay, so they'd left the scene of the heist at Mach Several and were approaching orbit, which meant the inertial dampeners worked just fine. Maybe the artificial gravity needed tweaking, since Daniel's elbow was now digging into his shoulder.

“And isn't the moon getting kind of close?”

“Daniel, who's driving this thing?”

He ignored the mumbled reply 'Duck Dodgers', conceding he'd brought that one on himself. At least they weren't staring at Jupiter. Which reminded him. “We should probably let Teal'c know we're coming.”

“How we going to do that without breaking Sam's cover?”

“Got the cloak working...I think. We'll park behind the jumper and wait until she calls.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Teal'c was intrigued by the knowledge that events long dismissed by the Air Force and much of the Tau'ri population as fictional, were indeed entirely factual.

The mythology that had evolved as a consequence of the crashed Asgard escape pods had been but one of many such beliefs for which certain members of the Tau'ri had developed a deep, indeed, almost spiritual fondness. The crash sites near Roswell had been enshrined by some, with rituals that involved prayer, the giving of flowers, meditation, and a memorial plaque, which read:
We don't know who they were. We don't know why they came. We only know they changed our view of the universe.

Despite their misplaced sympathies for what was now evidently Loki's clones, Teal'c empathized with the deeper need of the Tau'ri to understand the truth of their place in the universe. Like the Jaffa, they, too, desired to invest their faith in something greater than themselves, naive and blind in their desperation. And seemingly willing to follow any path in their search for enlightenment. To his dismay, even Jaffa as astute and powerful as Gerak and the Sodan leader, Haikon, had foolishly chosen to follow the path of Origin—until learning the true nature of the Ori.