Into his awareness came a sound, the sound of pipes cooling, water dripping from a great height. It was dark, stuffy, uncomfortable. Lying on his side, arms tight to his body, Daniel tried to move his legs. There was no pain there, but something held him fast nonetheless.
Think, Jackson, think. Where was he?
He directed a short, frustrated breath upwards, trying to dislodge his fringe from where it was stuck between his eyes and the rim of his glasses.
There had been some kind of explosion? He wasn't at the site. Where was he?
A narrow beam of light came through a crack in the ceiling, illuminating next to nothing except crates, and hulking, anthropomorphic shapes that could have been anything.
Slowly, it all started to come back to him. He had been working at the site, seemingly without rest for the last two weeks. Finally he had had to give in to the inevitable. The number of finds was so great, the backlog of paperwork so vast, he had taken the rickety old jeep and headed off into the city. To the museum in Cairo. And so this is where he had been, cataloguing artefacts in the basement, when the bomb (he supposed that it was a bomb) had gone off.
He wriggled his fingers. With a bit of an effort, he could get his arms free, then maybe pull himself to safety. Then what? He glanced up at the ceiling nervously. He hoped that it wouldn't cave in.
Ten minutes later, he got shakily to his feet. Let's face it, he thought, it hadn't exactly been one of his greatest years. Almost two years ago to the day, he had been laughed off the lecture circuit. Destitute, left out in the rain with only two small suitcases to his name.
He almost hadn't seen the car pull up. When he was invited to join the serene looking lady in the back seat, he had felt quite bemused. But it was once bitten, twice shy for this Daniel Jackson. She had offered him a unique opportunity, she said. The chance of a lifetime. For what? To work, hidden in some complex deep underground doing secret stuff for the military? No, thank you.
And so he had declined. Stepped back out into the street, into the rain. Really got splashed this time. He had tramped through the endless streets back to the hostel, to the room shared with twelve other sweaty men, to rebuild his life.
A year he had spent, wandering aimlessly from job to job. He made a pittance working as a translator, but something about his attitude made people wary; no one wanted to take him on full-time. He shied away from the archaeological world, but it was too tempting. He needed to be back in the field. It reached out and claimed him.
Two gruelling months later saw him back in Egypt, working on a dig. Nothing particularly salubrious, initially, but he had called in his last marker, a friend of a friend of his parents. Someone who knew cheap labour when they saw it; looked into his eyes and saw the desperation of a man with a magnificent mind, a man who was quite honestly willing to work himself to death.
Two months on from this saw the situation change again. It had begun with a simple canopic jar, discarded by the team of 'experts' Doctor Robinson had amassed. Daniel found it at his station, hunkered down over a bowl of water, cleaning shards with a toothbrush. His toothbrush.
At first glance it looked rather plain, but it was in near perfect condition, and he rolled it over in his hands with a fierce kind of pride. He admired the milky white calcite under his grubby thumb, and instantly translated the paltry inscription on the side. Turning it again, he had seen the curious symbols incised in the base. Nothing like anything he had seen before. He stood up and glanced around, shielding his eyes from the blistering sun. Most of them were over the next rise. He could see Doctor Robinson's arms waving, arguing with the workers. Probably due to the insufficient rest time they were all getting. They had ten months to complete this work; a year if they were lucky, before the site was levelled and the diggers moved in. The gods knew that Cairo needed better facilities, and this was where some of them were to be built. Daniel wasn't interested in what the government had planned for this spot, but he was passionate about making sure none of this was destroyed.
And then about three months in, the money had just seemed to run out. Apparently, one of Doctor Robinson's backers had been jailed for fraud. Everything was in limbo pending some kind of investigation. Indefinitely.
Funnily enough, it had been the locals that had started leaving first. Now, the team consisted of Doctor Robinson, himself, eight archaeologists and four unskilled labourers.
Daniel turned and placed the jar surreptitiously under his discarded shirt. It would not be missed, and for the first time in weeks he had something to look forward to this evening.
His attention was drawn back to the archaeologists. He heard a clang as a shovel was forcibly thrown to the ground, and Doctor Robinson's broken Arabic, disbelieving, floated across to him.
Asyan... thaurah.
Mutiny.
It was hard to pretend that he wasn't interested. Especially when five, angry men marched past, almost knocking him over on the way back to the tents.
And then there were nine.
The jeep tore off, leaving a trail of dust in its wake that settled like a pall over everything.
Daniel had gone back to washing the pots.
As the weeks went by, his private collection of pieces marked with the strange language grew. He kept them all safe in one of his two suitcases. Cases that were otherwise empty as clothes wore out and his precious books were 'appropriated' for the good of Doctor Robinson's cause.
And two months later still, a year and a half after his meeting with the American lady in the rain, it was down to him, Doctor Robinson, and Alec. Alec had been a student at Edinburgh, had come out here on a whim in a planned year off between university and 'getting a real job', and had never gone home. He'd been here ten years.
Daniel loved Alec. Loved the way that his extremely faint Scottish accent only appeared when he was smashed out of his mind. Loved the way that they knew what each other was thinking. Loved the way that there was still someone left in the world that he could talk to apart from the good Doctor. Someone to listen to all of his complaints deep into the night, comfort him when times were really rough.
Four months later, Alec had developed blood poisoning. He hadn't known what was happening. He'd thought the fogginess in his mind was just due to lack of water, put it down to overwork. When his leg swelled up like a balloon, they had driven pell-mell through the streets to the nearest decent hospital. It was in vain. Two days later, Alec had died.
Two months. Two months of just himself and Doctor Robinson, now forced by extreme circumstances and sheer bloody-mindedness down to one tent, one jeep, and a handful of tools. A ripped tent and old tarpaulins to cover the finds, staked down to the ground and hauled into the city once every two weeks, or when the need for supplies pressed them.
It was on just such a mission that the bomb had hit.
Daniel stumbled around in the dark, feeling his way along the walls. Of course the lights weren't working. He needed to get out of here. Assess the situation. Hopefully get back to the site. It wasn't that he really cared what had happened to the good Doctor any more. God knows how he had tried to be reasonable. What he really wanted was to get to his case; to the finds with the strange, almost alien text that had become his life.
Many things could be said of General Jack O'Neill, but that he was an optimist was not one of them. He stared desperately at the map, the map that until four days ago had been on some poor college kid's wall at home. The map that was now covered in blistering red dots displaying the impending annihilation of planet Earth.
He leant forward and bashed his head against it.
Doctor Langford interrupted his reverie.
"Jack, I know you're busy, but there's someone here you should really meet."
He turned to face her.
"There's a man here... he knows things. Things about us. I didn't tell him anything, I swear."
Catherine's words left him with an icy chill. They had so few options left, and now this? A major breach of security?
He had to admit he felt an initial surge of disappointment when he met Doctor Daniel Jackson. This man, who claimed to know them. Knew a lot about the Goa'uld, that was for sure, but was really just a tad too late to be of any real use. That cock and bull story hadn't helped, either. Alternative realities, his ass. And then, just when Jack had been contemplating calling the SFs, asking them to take this nut job away and just shoot him 'cos he had too damn much that was way more important to think about right now, Daniel had shown him the video tape. He had to admit to being just a little surprised.
How could he use this situation to his advantage? Think, O'Neill, think.
He'd ran out of ideas, then out of time. But he'd started believing Daniel. Not that it would do him much good. Daniel had deciphered the message: 'Beware the destroyers - they come from' - and then a Stargate address. They'd had the message three months and the man had deciphered it in three minutes. It was too late to do anything about it. Sending a bomb wouldn't help. The fleet was already here.
He stared bleakly round the briefing room.
"You want us to give up our last chance... to help ourselves in an alternate reality?"
And Daniel had stared him down. Like very few men before him had.
"The Jack O'Neill that I know would do it."
"Well, apparently, you and I have never met."
"No. I guess not."
And then, unbelievably, against his better judgement, Jack had started to soften. Daniel's soft, compelling voice assaulted him again.
"I have a chance to keep this from happening to the Earth that I come from if you help me."
And so he had helped. Had hugged his fiancée for the last time, and headed off to show a video tape of an alternate reality to a strange, alien warrior six and a half feet tall. How crazy was that? His last sane action was to collect as much C4 as he could carry, and strap it to his chest.
He wasn't surprised when the guy turned a cannon on him.
Jack stared down the muzzle of the gun.
"It's about bloody time," he thought.
He felt the sizzle of the blast as it shot past his right ear, heard the sound of the jaffa warrior crumpling to the floor. Was still too surprised to move when Teal'c turned and fired the gun at his other cohorts.
The air was still humming when the warrior approached. He hovered an inch from Jack's nose, oozing fury and an almost religious zeal.
"I will assist you," he had rumbled. "But time is short. You must await me on the ship."
Jack hadn't had time to ask any questions. Teal'c forced a worn slip of metal into his hand, stepped back and pressed a control on his wrist.
"Make your way to the lowest level. Find the warrior's quarters and ask for Master Bra'tac."
Jack barely had time to nod as rings descended from the ceiling and transported him to the alien ship.
Five minutes later, the ship was rocked by a tremendous blast as the whole of the Cheyenne Mountain Complex crumbled to the ground. Whatever plans a lone Jaffa warrior had had to assist the people of Earth were blown to the four winds.
Jack crept through the lower levels, ducking out of sight at the slightest sound. His world reeled about him. Everyone he knew was probably dead. Probably. It wouldn't sink in. Unbidden, a laugh rose to his throat. Everyone apart from Doctor Daniel Jackson, who was probably at this very minute relaxing back, coffee in hand explaining to astounded ears what a narrow escape he had just had. Before continuing quite merrily with his life as if nothing had happened.
Man alive. His universe was so screwed.
The sound of marching alerted him. Jack slipped behind a pillar and waited. Two guards. Just the two. He figured that a lot of them were already on the planet, wiping out the remaining stragglers. These two looked like they had just returned, wounded.
He waited until they passed him and sprang out, knocking one man flying. He landed him a stiff blow. Before the other could charge his weapon, Jack grabbed at the strange pistol on the fallen man's belt and fired it repeatedly at the other warrior. The man evaporated. He felt the soldier beneath him start to stir. He stood up and fired the device into his chest. Mustn't vaporise this one. He needed the change of clothes.
Jack dragged him behind a pillar and proceeded to strip him. When he stirred, Jack shot him again. Finally, when he had donned the armour, he let off the third shot that disintegrated the corpse.
It was a very quiet walk the rest of the way to the warrior's quarters. Jack got lucky. Feigning a limp, which wasn't difficult given the constriction that was being placed upon certain parts of his anatomy by the suit, Jack joined the tail end of a group of walking wounded.
They marched straight into what looked like a dismal storeroom. He'd never seen anything quite like it. It wasn't like a field hospital. Soldiers sat patiently round the outside of the walls, perched on rolled-up bed rolls. Some tended each other's wounds. The spookiest thing about it was that it was totally silent. Jack hobbled to a vacant corner and sat down to wait.
He guessed that the explosion had been the CMC's self-destruct mechanism. That meant that if Teal'c didn't return in the next couple of hours then he was in all probability dead. This ship didn't seem to have been adversely affected by the blast. He supposed that some weird freak of configuration, or some canny designer of the CMC had engineered that the blast would mostly be directed downwards. That made some sort of sense. Originally designed to protect the complex from the commies (hah!), the US wouldn't have wanted bits of the mountain to go landing all over Colorado.
Sam probably hadn't made it to the Beta site. Jack knew that she would have stayed on till the bitter end, in any case. The wounds were still too fresh to give him any grief; he just felt numb. It had been a strange year. They still loved each other, but knew the relationship wasn't working. They just kept steadfastly plugging away at it like they did with any other task they set their minds too. It wasn't anyone's fault. The spark just wasn't there. And now... it was gone forever.
Jack lowered his head to his knees and stifled a sob as the first wave of emotion washed over him.
Minutes later, he was roused by a stentorian voice, barking out commands. There was a huddle of Jaffa on the other side of the room, and Jack struggled to hear what they had to say. So this was Bra'tac. Old guy, older than him. Well, good.
Bra'tac seemed to have an entourage that kept particularly close to him. Jack drew himself to his feet and wandered after them as they made their way to the door.
Bra'tac swung round with a speed and grace that surprised him, and sent him flying across the floor with a swipe of his staff weapon. If this was supposed to discourage him, it didn't work.
Jack landed smack on his coccyx, eliciting a startled yelp.
"Hey! Whatd'ya do that for?"
Bra'tac cast a beady eye over him. He didn't seem to like what he saw.
Jack came to his senses real fast.
"Teal'c sent me," he whispered.
The next he knew, strong hands were drawing him up by the shoulders and dragging him out of the room.
"Come. We will teach you how to show the correct respect to your betters."
Yipes.
Bra'tac and his six companions escorted him to a room not much bigger than a cubicle a little way down the hall. When the door was closed, Jack was surrounded by an unyielding wall of Jaffa, smelling like they'd just come back from wiping out the human race. It wasn't pretty.
"What do you know of Teal'c?"
Jack told them everything.
Daniel wandered in a daze through the derelict streets of the city. Around him, burst water pipes washed the rubble dust in rivulets down streets lined with the dead and dying. He had managed to find someone to tell him what had happened, but it didn't make any sense.
An attack had come from the sky? Some kind of... of... space ship? He couldn't help it. His mind flew back to the unkind words spoken at his last lecture. The explanation didn't make much sense, but it would have to do for now. What he needed to do now was to get out of the city and head back to the dig. He could do next to nothing here, with no medical training and the emergency services stretched so thin they didn't even have time to tell him how he could help. He'd asked. It'd been the first thing he had done when he'd seen a medic. The man had just turned to him with a cold, calculating eye, and asked him if he was injured. When Daniel had said no, the man had simply turned back to his patient and said 'well, go away then, and stop wasting my time'.
Outside a grocery store, miraculously completely undamaged, he found an old Mercedes taxi, keys still in the ignition.
He slipped into the driver's seat and rearranged the beaded seat cover, swiped the eclectic mixture of lucky charms from the rear view mirror and threw them to land on top of the gilded plastic Kleenex box cover.
He turned the key and the engine purred into life. Slipping the car into first, Daniel even remembered to indicate before pulling out. The irony was not lost on him.
It was a long and torturous route back to the site. In those five miles, Daniel got an extremely good idea of the devastation that had been wreaked on the city. He turned the radio on, got static. Fumbling the controls, he tried again, and again, until... it was some kind of emergency bulletin. In his desperation to hear it, he nearly hit a stray dog, mounted the kerb then corrected himself. He slowed down and turned up the volume, struggling to hear the announcer, trying to get this information to make sense.
He looked at the city around him, some buildings untouched, leaving you unprepared for the rest. Rubble, ruin, wreckage. Panic. Sirens blaring, children screaming. A man pulled himself along a wall, his ankle twisted at an impossible angle, a shard of wood obscenely jutting from his back.
And it was global.
Not a single major city in the world had been left untouched.
Current estimates of casualties ran to one billion. One billion. Conservative estimates indicated that this was likely to double.
It was totally unreal.
Daniel gnawed at his lower lip, and wished himself back in his tent. This information... it was too much. It wouldn't go in.
He put his foot down once more, going to auto-pilot. He was a mile from the site when he saw the troops. Swerving to avoid them, it barely registered when the tires were shot out and he was dragged out by the hair.
These men were like no troops he had ever seen before. They barked out strange guttural commands as he was thrown to his knees. It must have been the shock, he figured, but the words sounded almost like a version of Ancient Egyptian. He couldn't help it. He laughed.
This caught their attention.
One of the soldiers came up to him, grasped his chin firmly in his hand and gave it a vicious little twist.
"...Sa aqer, en smam neter!"
What?
His befuddled brain supplied him the words he didn't want to hear.
'A man perfect... pleasing unto God.' He was supposed to please a god? What? He was supposed to be some sort of sacrifice?
He looked up as the man released him. They were all standing much closer now. One of the soldiers drew a strange-looking device from his belt. Daniel watched with no little curiosity as it sprung into a different shape. Then the soldier shot him.
This was the rebel faction? All seven of them? Magnificent.
"So, human. You will join us."
It was a bald statement of fact. Jack didn't see how he could refuse.
His next week was spent being 'trained' by Bra'tac, when he wasn't sent down to the Earth to collect slaves, or 'remove' stragglers. Apophis had demanded that those who were not needed as slaves should be killed, but Bra'tac and his guys were actually doing a reasonable job ensuring that the less injured collect supplies and head out into the countryside. Small towns and villages had been left almost totally untouched, so far. They intended to keep it that way.
Bra'tac knew it was a desperate situation. But it was the best they could do until they found a way to destroy Apophis and his son. With Jack on their side, they stood a slim chance. He knew of several military bases that Apophis hadn't found. All they needed now was an excuse and transport, and they could go get themselves some supplies.
All over the planet, forces dwindled under the fire from the two mother ships. But that did not stop them from fighting. In towns, school teachers gathered pupils to them in ruined playgrounds, and explained how to make Molotov cocktails. Nurses learnt how much of which drugs were lethal, and performed their own experiments on jaffa. Biologists camped out by battlefields and studied the scattered remains of symbiotes they found. In Kentucky and Minnesota, artisans returned to old crafts, bellows were repaired and blacksmiths roamed the streets stealing railings to make into weapons.
Jack thought about the two thousand people at the Beta site, and hoped they were faring better than they were. He somehow couldn't see all those politicians making nice and getting down to building cabins, chopping firewood. His imagination conjured up a picture of Major 'disaster' Davis with a splinter, saying 'I've got an owie'.
"Human! You will pay attention!"
Jack sighed. Bra'tac was on the war path again. These guys really needed to lighten up. Maybe get involved in some team sports. He couldn't help it. Six hours of these damn 'training' rituals, and he was bushed. Maybe he'd take Bra'tac fishing when this was all over.
Bra'tac biffed him over the head with his staff weapon.
Actually, Jack was getting pretty handy with the device now. He smiled, and swung it round. For the first time, he laid Bra'tac out, flat on his back on the cargo room floor.
Bra'tac actually laughed.
"Well done. That is enough for today, I think."
Well, good.
A guard came over and whispered something in Bra'tac's ear. His eyes lit up as he strode over to Jack and conspiratorially slung an arm over his shoulder.
"We have found ourselves a tel'tac, my friend."
Daniel awoke to a splitting headache and a room full of noise. The room was packed with frightened looking people. He became aware of a guard standing over him, waving some sort of staff in his direction.
"You. You will come with me."
Bemusedly, he followed the guard out of the room.
He had no idea where he was. This was all extremely strange. He followed the guard down a gilded corridor, the walls covered in hieroglyphics. He cast his eyes over them, desperately trying to translate as he walked. The guard was not impressed.
He was led into some kind of throne room, again the walls covered in text. He was lost in scanning it all when he became aware of a presence in front of him.
"This one appears to understand us, my lord."
"Is that so?"
Daniel looked up, startled. Again, he had caught strange snatches of some kind of derivation of Middle Kingdom Egyptian. He was too caught up in trying to catalogue the differences to answer.
The guard swiped his legs out from under him, forcing him into a kneeling position in front of the other man.
"I said, do you understand us?"
He looked up into the handsome face. Long, dark braided hair surrounded features that would have been forever youthful if they hadn't also appeared so stern.
"Yes, I understand."
The guard was on him again before he knew it.
"You will show respect to your God, Klorel!"
His what? Looking up into the face of the guard, he came to his senses and lowered his eyes.
His what? His god? His god who?
"How is it that you have knowledge of the Goa'uld language?"
"I know many languages..."
"You will correctly address your God!"
Jees, the guard was in his face again.
"I know many languages, my lord," he stammered.
"You are a scribe?"
"Yes... um... my lord, and a translator, and... um..." he struggled for the word. God, how did one say 'Anthropologist' in an ancient language? "And a student of the culture of man."
"Indeed?" The man appeared to contemplate this for a few minutes. He waved his hand in a dismissive gesture. "Take him away and prepare him. Leave him in my quarters."
What? Oh, god. What now?
"Yes, my lord."
The guard bowed, and dragged Daniel up by the hair.
An hour later, he was led scrubbed, oiled and manacled into Klorel's private apartment. His Adam's apple bobbed nervously as he tried not to contemplate how much worse his situation could get. He had already had to fend off the curious hands of the servants that washed him. And he wasn't too impressed with his new, pleated kilt and eye make-up either. His long hair had been freed from its pony-tail, and months of tangles painfully combed out.
The guard shoved him into the centre of the room, turned on his heel and left.
Daniel sagged. So what next?
This room was different from the others he had seen. White, billowing drapes covered the walls and surrounded a huge four-poster bed. The furniture all looked Egyptian, but there were subtle differences. He noticed a terracotta figurine on the other side of the room and went over to get a better look at it.
Lost in thought, he didn't hear Klorel approach, and jumped as the man laid a hand on his shoulder.
Much to his surprise, Klorel laughed.
"So, you admire this?"
"Yes."
Klorel's grasp tightened and he turned Daniel to face him.
"Sit. If you tell me all I wish to hear, you may be permitted to examine it some more later." The man raised an eyebrow and gestured to a divan.
Daniel swallowed, and with some trepidation sat down.
His next few days were spent in a whirlwind, finding out about Klorel and Apophis' destruction of the Earth, making lists of all the people that had been taken as their slaves, and trying to act as interpreter and translator for all of them. He didn't dare try to escape - he had seen what happened to those who did. And just one glance at the frightened faces around him, at people who hadn't got a clue what was going on and desperately needed someone to tell them convinced him that he was needed here. Possibly more than he had ever been before.
Daniel saw cruelty in the actions of Klorel, but as he learnt more about the Goa'uld, learnt to recognise actions directly influenced by the host. He stored all of these away, hoping that one day they would be useful in helping to free his people, all of his people, from their alien captors.
He learnt their language, too. It was not a derivation of any form of Egyptian. Quite the reverse; ancient Egyptian dialects were all a derivation of it. Its written form had a bizarre syllabary, totally unlike any form of hieroglyphics, and it matched perfectly the finds now lost to him, hidden in his precious suitcase.
Klorel called him hery-a, assistant, and when he was most pleased, nefer hery-a, a good and wonderful assistant. The name sent a shiver down his spine, but he kept his feelings to himself, knowing that this, too, might be to his advantage.
He slept curled on a bench at the foot of his master's bed, and bided his time.
The plan, when Bra'tac finally revealed it to Jack, seemed over-complicated and doomed to failure.
It was too problematic to get all of the humans off both ships. Instead, they had to get both Apophis and Klorel off of the planet, together no less, and blow them up in orbit. And they needed the humans on both ships to be aware of what was going on, and if possible, help them. Jack shook his head in disbelief. He'd spent a lot of time with these new human 'slaves', and though he knew a few words of Russian, Spanish and Arabic, he guessed they'd need some sort of super-translator if they were really going to pull this off. It was a shame that Daniel guy was dead in this reality. Hadn't he spoken a lot of different languages?
This information was imparted to Jack as if it were a special treat as he crouched in a cowpat in the middle of the night in the middle of a field in the middle of Nebraska.
Bra'tac handed him the 'scope.
"It is in the next field. It does not appear to be guarded."
Jack put the scope to his eye, and immediately focussed in on the baleful eye staring back at him. He gave a start, and pulled back the focus. The cow blinked.
In the field, partially covered by twigs, debris and dust, and surrounded by cows, stood the tel'tac.
They silently made their way towards it.
As it happened, it was guarded after all.
A small boy, no more than eight or nine, painfully thin and covered in grime, slept in the open doorway, an air rifle clutched under one arm.
Jack lifted a finger to his lips, asking the others to remain silent. He was glad that he had persuaded Bra'tac and his men to change into 'human' clothes for this mission. It would certainly make it easier for them to get the natives on their side.
He reached out a tentative hand for the gun barrel, simultaneously placing his other hand on the boy's shoulder.
The boy woke with a start, trying to bring his gun round but failing.
"I'm gonna kill yer!"
"Hey!"
"Gerroff! I'll kill yer!"
"Enough, human," Bra'tac interjected. "Boy, cease your whining!"
The kid looked at him with malevolence. Jack wondered whether he was contemplating spitting in Bra'tac's eye. It gave Jack the opportunity to wrest the gun from the boy's grasp.
"Hey! That's mine!"
"It's okay, kid. Did you see what happened here?"
"No." The boy looked thoughtful. "This thing just, I dunno, blew up the barn or somethin', then crashed."
"Any survivors?"
"Nope. Dunno."
"What about your family?"
"They're all asleep."
"Do they know you're out here?"
"No. Snuck out, did'n'I."
"What's your name, kid?"
"Andy."
"Well, Andy, is there anyone else round here that we can talk to, maybe tell us more about this ship?"
They were led into a spacious if drafty kitchen, where minutes later they were joined by a rather startled-looking woman who turned out to be Andy's mother. Although this village knew all about the attacks and had seen some of them on the television before the power finally went, the crash landing of the tel'tac was the only first-hand evidence any of them had had of the invasion. They'd been trying to take the ship to bits for its salvage value, but so far hadn't had any success. One of the old wags in the village was trying to appropriate it in order to turn it into a chicken run. Andy just wanted it as his secret hideout. The only thing that everyone agreed on was that it was valuable, and the villagers didn't particularly want to part with it. After some wrangling, and an impromptu meeting of almost the entire village, they struck a bargain to trade it for food, kerosene and medical supplies.
Bra'tac grumbled incessantly as they made there way back to the old ambulance that served as their transport.
"I do not see why we could not just take the ship, human."
"No, you really don't, do you?"
"We have wasted an entire day. Apophis' men could recover the vessel tomorrow."
"Well, that's a chance we're just going to have to take."
Bra'tac looked daggers at him.
"We'll bring the supplies back tomorrow, then fly the ship off somewhere to hide it as originally planned."
"Humph."
"Master Bra'tac!"
"What is it, Nestor?"
"There is an announcement," the young jaffa announced breathlessly from his seat in the front of the vehicle. "We must return to Apophis' ship. Apophis wishes to announce his new first prime. The presence of all jaffa is requested."
"Hurumph."
Jack guessed that this had been one of the reasons for Bra'tac's surly behaviour. Teal'c had been a good and loyal friend, and both of them had been first prime to Apophis at one time or another. Apophis' decision to take a new first prime was not only a reminder of the death of a treasured companion, it was a sign of his increasing fall from favour just when he needed the upper hand most.
"He will no doubt want to do this with the maximum pomp and ceremony. It may be a chance for us to see how things lie with Klorel".
Jack couldn't wait.
Daniel looked up from his transcription. Thanks to him, they had re-organised the slaves into definite groups by nationality and ability, where appropriate. People had now started to settle down slightly. This latest dictate was bad news, though. Klorel had decreed that they had now successfully subdued the Tauri threat, and planned to leave the planet in four days time. It was suggested that Apophis would leave shortly after, taking his own slaves to another world. The scattered remnants of the human race would be split over three planets.
He racked his brains. If only there was something he could do to get them all out of this mess. But any rebellion had been mercilessly quashed. The last remnants of it currently hung over the hall where the others met to receive their food ration, the man's lungs drawn out in a classic blood eagle. What was the point in using his abilities to incite a rebellion if this was going to be the result? No, best use his talents to humanitarian ends. He tried not to listen to his brain screaming at the thought of leaving Earth and a lifetime spent in some form of slavery.
Truth be known, Daniel realised that through some twist of fate, he'd actually ended up in a rather cushy position. He was 'favoured', after a fashion. He was fed, allowed to wash. Had his own sleeping space, such as it was. When he became too complacent he scared himself with the thought that some of the other slaves occasionally mistook him for a Goa'uld.
He looked up from his work as Klorel entered the room, his first prime Nehenet at his side.
It was difficult, but he remembered his 'place', bit his tongue and showed Klorel the deference that meant he would not get a beating tonight.
"Master."
The Goa'uld nodded.
"Nehenet, you will help me prepare. Hery-a, when Nehenet is finished here, you will go with him. There is a function at which I wish you to be present."
"Master."
Klorel shucked off his robe, and stepped towards his bathroom. Spontaneous nudity and world domination rolled into one malevolent little package. Daniel averted his eyes and returned to his work. He could feel Nehenet's eyes boring into the back of his head and steeled himself.
An hour later, Nehenet escorted him to the priest in order that Daniel could be 'prepared' for the function. This basically meant rigging things so that Daniel either didn't run off, or wasn't appropriated by Apophis.
He nervously fingered the new collar around his neck. Nehenet cheerfully waved a small device at him which led Daniel to believe that he could prevent any escape quite easily. At least now he did not have to wear the shackles. Klorel had been most generous in removing those on the third day, once he had assured himself that Daniel did not pose a threat. Daniel told himself that yes, he was a threat, he was just trying to lull them all into a false sense of security.
Once again, he had been made up, and given a fresh tunic. He felt a bit exposed, but stood his ground. He remembered reading somewhere about not showing signs of weakness, and tried to stick to it.
Much to his surprise, he was not led back to Klorel's quarters. Nehenet took him instead to a wide hall, where they awaited Klorel. Lounging with one foot perched behind himself on the now familiar gold hieroglyphic wall, Daniel was startled to see a series of rings descend from the ceiling and envelop a group of waiting jaffa. Hell. That looked... worrying.
Klorel arrived, accompanied by the rest of his honour guard. He moved away from them and gestured them towards the rings. Once again, the rings descended, and carried the men away.
Daniel breathed a small sigh of relief. It looked like this must be some sort of transport device, rather than something that made jaffa spontaneously combust. If so, where the hell were they going? When only Klorel, Nehenet and himself remained, they moved to the circle on the floor and Klorel pressed the device on his wrist that activated the rings.
They reappeared in a sumptuous, red hall, obscenely ornate. More gold, naturally, the room packed with jaffa, and a throne at the end. On which sat a regal-looking man, who Daniel assumed was Apophis. They were on Apophis' ship? Wow. So where else could those rings go?
Daniel received a prompt thwack to the calves that indicated he should start walking towards the throne. Klorel raised his left hand in greeting, and preceded Nehenet and Daniel on the walk to Apophis.
Daniel looked around himself. He could see some of Klorel's men. He'd started to recognise a few faces, and apparently it was only in recent months that Klorel's jaffa had started to be branded with Klorel's mark, rather than the brand of his father. This might indicate an animosity between the Goa'uld, or at least the possibility of some future struggle for power.
As he neared the throne, he caught the occasional curious glance thrown his way. Then, on the left, a startled voice cried out "oh my god!" before being silenced by one of his companions. Well, he didn't know what that was about. Weren't these guys supposed to be their gods, after all?
They mounted the dais, Klorel standing off to Apophis' right, Daniel and Nehenet a short distance to the right of Klorel.
The ceremony was mercilessly short. Apophis stood and gestured expansively.
"Behold my new first prime, Fro'tac of the High Cliffs. In my absence you will defer to him in all matters," he looked over at Klorel, who was seething with barely concealed rage, "or to my beloved son, Klorel."
What was this? Defer to the jaffa before Klorel? Something was definitely amiss. Daniel knew he should be able to use this to his advantage, he just didn't know how.
Fro'tac came forward and kneeled before Apophis, then simply rose and stood off to Apophis' left, scowling.
Jack nudged Bra'tac painfully in the ribs.
"That's the guy we need. There."
"He is Klorel's first prime. I know him well."
"No, not him. The guy in the skirt."
"The heret'per."
"What you said. If that's who I think it is, he can have our humans organised so this plan of yours won't be quite so doomed to failure. More organised than they're getting with you having Nestor poke them with a stick, anyway."
Bra'tac didn't think it was quite the right time to point out to O'Neill that he was now subconsciously referring to himself as jaffa.
"I have a better idea."
The crowd visibly relaxed once the ceremony was over. Klorel stalked to the side of the room, his honour guard and Daniel following him. Daniel lurked on the margins while Klorel whispered a few choice words to his men.
Suddenly, Daniel felt a hand on his shoulder. What now? He'd already been touched up twice that day, and he was getting fed up with explaining to people that he just wasn't that kind of servant.
"Yes? Can I help you?"
He swung round to meet the curious brown-eyed gaze of the unknown jaffa.
"Um. Sorry. It's just that you reminded me of someone I knew."
Oh, right. Like he hadn't heard that line before.
"Oh? And who would that be?"
"A Doctor Daniel Jackson."
"Do I know you?" Daniel started. "What... um... I mean, I'm him. Daniel. Doctor Jackson. And you are?"
"It's a long story... look can you get away from these guys for a few minutes? I've got a rather bizarre story to tell you."
Daniel fingered his collar nervously. The stranger caught the gesture and looked over his shoulder to Klorel and his men.
"Got you on a bit of a short leash?"
The stranger was joined by another, much older jaffa.
"Bra'tac, can we do something about this?" The man gestured to Daniel's collar. "I need to talk to this guy. Urgently."
"Humans," grumbled Bra'tac, and went over to have a word with Nehenet.
It turned out that despite their different allegiances, Nehenet and Bra'tac, while not friends exactly, at least trusted one another. The four of them moved a little away from the rest of the group and sat on the floor.
"So... you're Klorel's um..." Jack looked Daniel up and down, gesturing fruitlessly.
"I think the word you're looking for is linguist."
"Oh, yeah, right."
Daniel crossed his arms over his chest in the position that Jack immediately identified with someone that was going to go off in a major huff any second.
"Please," he said, "I've got something really important to tell you. You're just not going to believe it."
"Well?"
"Well... it goes like this..." he fingered his collar. "Once upon a time..."
That evening they drove their ambulance back to Nebraska laden with supplies. The villagers eyed them cautiously. Within an hour, Jack was braced against the side of the tel'tac as it tore through the night sky for Arizona.
It turned into a night that Jack desperately wanted to scour from his memory. He, Bra'tac and his men were forced to shoot USAF officers to get to the hardware and supplies. How could he possibly have explained? Sorry, guys, I know we look like aliens, actually, these other guys are aliens, but we're all on the same side. He tried to only wound some of the guards, was forced to kill others. Tjau got nervous and let loose with the cannon. Jack yelled out his rage at the sky, the sound swallowed up with the rip of the blast and the deadening of his eardrums.
Daniel had told him all he knew. By the time they returned to Apophis' ship, they would have three days to succeed before the ships left Earth forever. This meant leaving the tel'tac perilously close to the mother ship. They had no choice. He tried to catch a nap while being thrown around like an ice cube in a cocktail shaker. It was no use. There had to be something he could do to shake himself out of the blue funk he'd worked himself into.
Jack had found a deck of cards in the ambulance. He took them out of his armour and began to idly shuffle them. There were seven of them, since Nestor had been given the job of driving the ambulance back. Bra'tac probably wouldn't want to play, but still...
"Does anyone want a game of cards?"
Bra'tac eyed him suspiciously.
"To what end? I see little point in your games, human."
"Er, well, it's a game of skill and strategy. We pair into two teams of two, and work together using simply our knowledge of our team mate, with maybe a bit of non-verbal communication, to try to beat the opposing side."
Bra'tac appeared to give this some careful consideration.
"A bloodless battle."
"Yeah."
"One pits ones wits against the foe."
"In a matter of speaking."
"Alright then, human. You may, as you say, count me in."
Jack smiled, gestured to two of the other jaffa to join them, and proceeded to teach them Bridge. If they warmed to that, he'd teach them Poker later.
Nestor eventually caught up with them with the ambulance back in Colorado Springs. They hid the tel'tac inside a MacDonald's drive-thru, crashing it through the plate glass frontage. It was his favourite part of the day. Jack crossed himself fervently as they climbed back into the ambulance, and hoped that the Jackson kid could keep his end of the deal. The rest of it was down to Bra'tac, and what he said he knew about Fro'tac.
***
Daniel sat back on his haunches in Klorel's quarters. He had a duty to take the pile of scrolls in front of him and condense them down into a daily digest of useful information that Klorel would actually want to read. So far the work remained untouched.
He was still reeling from his meeting with Jack O'Neill. Colonel or General or whatever he had been - but working as a rebel jaffa?
He shrugged. Nehenet had been so amused by Jack's wild tale of alternative dimensions and a military Daniel that he had let his guard down for a few minutes. Let his old sparring partner Bra'tac take him off to the drinks table, still in line of sight, and surely still within reach of the remote device that activated the collar.
In any case, it had given Jack the time he needed to let Daniel in on their plan. It was risky, very risky. And it credited Jack with a total trust in Daniel's abilities which Daniel quite frankly found disturbing.
There were coded scrolls passed between the jaffa units all the time; it was one of Daniel's duties to decipher them and pass the information on. He wasn't given anything critical to do, but nonetheless... He had been asked to fake a communication between Klorel and one of his jaffa. A communication that would pass all checks and appear to be totally genuine. A communication that would suggest that Klorel was planning to band together with Ra, Apophis' brother, to overthrow Apophis. And then he had to secrete that scroll about his person, get out of these quarters, and let himself be captured by Apophis' men. That side of things, Bra'tac would organise. Apparently.
Unfortunately for Daniel, Klorel had wandered over at this point. He was curious as to why his first prime would leave his assistant for such a long time. He was not pleased. Daniel was a valuable resource and the care of him was not to be taken lightly. Daniel got a feeling that this meant they would keep a closer eye on him from now on. It made him wary, then, extremely wary, when nothing else was said and the collar was removed the instant they returned to Klorel's quarters.
Daniel waited until the sounds from the bed evened out. Klorel was an extremely light sleeper, and needed very little sleep to boot, so this had to be done with extreme caution. He raised himself up on one elbow, and gazed over at the sleeping figure under the light cotton sheets. One of Klorel's handmaidens had confided to Daniel that the host had been a boy called Skaara, taken only last year after a battle against Ra. Skaara had apparently been one of Ra's favourites, and taking Skaara as host was just one more sign in his rise up the hierarchy of the system lords. Before this, Skaara had apparently been from a peaceful, desert world. It was at times like this that Daniel could see it. In slumber, Klorel's scowl flattened out, and a boyish innocence took over. In the near darkness, the youth reasserted itself. Daniel shook himself. Who knew if anything of the host could survive? Nehenet had been with Klorel for over a hundred years, and had been adamant that this wasn't the case. Klorel was his god, was Daniel's god too.
He lifted his feet from the bench, and carefully turned round. Holding his breath, he placed his feet on the floor, stood up slowly and cautiously headed for the chest that contained the parchment. Daniel was guarded during the day while he worked; any false document would have to be made tonight, in the dark.
He found the ink and stylus, was grateful not to fumble it. It would be better to keep the document short; less chance of mistakes that way. He worked quickly, keeping an ear open for a change in the breathing behind him. When he was done, he put the utensils away, and closed the lid on the chest. The lid squeaked slightly. Daniel's heart missed a beat. Klorel turned in his sleep, but otherwise did not stir. Slowly, Daniel made his way back to his bench. He hid the scroll the only place that he could; between the slats of the bench and its gaudy cover.
Relieved, Daniel stood and took a deep breath. Now if only he could catch another couple of hours sleep before Klorel woke. As he stretched and turned, Daniel's shoulders clicked, a sign that he had spent far too much time hunched over the desk.
The figure on the bed stirred.
"Nefer hery-a. Why do you wake?"
Daniel stammered his apology. "Lord... I could not sleep. My back was aching."
This seemed good enough for Klorel. Too good.
"Then perhaps you should come over here, nefer. You may find this bed more to your liking."
Daniel eyed the Goa'uld hand device Klorel slept wearing, and knew that he had no choice.
Two days. Just two days left. Daniel repeated the words like a mantra as he roamed the deck, jaffa guard three steps behind. It was difficult to pass on the messages; let the slaves know that there was going to be an uprising in two days time. He had to attempt to pass on messages in their native languages, keeping the tone light and assuring his guard that these were just everyday pleasantries. Fortunately, he had already gone some of the way in laying the ground work in his previous weeks here. He shook his head. He'd been here two weeks already? In three days time, he would either be free, dead, or a broken man in a different form of service to his god. He tried not to think of the previous night, kept repeating his 'two day' mantra. Some things were best kept... as if they had been a ghastly, ghastly dream.
Nervously, he fingered the parchment folded in the front of his tunic. The forged document he had written before... just before. He hoped that O'Neill and the jaffa were going to come through. If they were, today he would be kidnapped, and taken to Apophis. He would not have to go through that again. But Apophis... Daniel had heard stories about the man that would make even Bra'tac's hair curl.
He picked up a scroll from the next slave representative. Supply lists, work completed. He stored it with the others in the bag on his back. He nodded his thanks. He caught the gaze of the slave in front of him. In the tone he had used for the previous week or so to pass on comments about the weather, the quality of their food, and whether they had adequate toilet facilities, he muttered "Qachmaq... Pershembe." Escape... Thursday. He nodded and smiled as if he had just commented on his bunions.
The man's eyebrows raised of their own accord before he managed to control himself. Looking back at the guard, he chanced a smile. "Sa'at qachda?" What time?
This was one of the elements of General O'Neill's plan that Daniel had the most difficulty with. The man had point blank refused to be held to a time. Had wittered on about too many variables, before throwing a frustrated look at Bra'tac. Daniel just had to shrug. The only thing he knew was that everyone was to wait for a sign. What that sign was... well, Daniel just hoped that it would be obvious when it came, 'cos he sure as hell didn't know right now. He shrugged again, feeling useless, and noticing the guard growing impatient.
"Gitmeliyim." I must go. He smiled again, feeling useless, and walked off. Things continued pretty much in the same vein for the rest of his rounds. He was on the final leg, returning down the fifth level corridor when a strangled grunt behind him made him turn round. Instantly, a hand came down over his mouth, and he felt the jolt of a zat burst through him.
When he came too ten minutes later, it was to face Apophis.
"We have found the scroll," Apophis wasted no time in gloating.
So Jack or Bra'tac had obviously managed to convey to Fro'tac that there was a plot against Apophis afoot. Fro'tac gloated from behind Apophis' left shoulder.
"So. Klorel's trusted scribe, his assistant." Apophis murmured. "I cannot say that I think much of you, though he obviously sets some store by your skills. Guards, remove this man and place him in the holding cells. I will deal with him later."
As they dragged him out of the room, Daniel realised that he did not know how Bra'tac and his men planned to get him out of this.
***
Jack and the jaffa rebels spent most of the day liberating the very people that they were supposed to be terminating. As they strode wearily into the jaffa quarters, one of Bra'tac's men broke off and sought out a guard. Five minutes later he was back, beaming.
"The plan is working. I heard that the Seh Daniel Jackson was in the holding cells. Apophis is most displeased."
Bra'tac tapped Kanu on the shoulder, gestured for them all to move to a more secluded spot.
"Brehanu says that Apophis has uncovered a plot to overthrow him. Rumours are rife."
"And what does the rumour mill say this night?"
"It says, that the Seh Daniel Jackson was bearing a scroll that told of a meeting to take place between Klorel and Ra. Brehanu says that Klorel plans to meet with Ra in two days time."
Bra'tac chanced a rare smile. "Then our plan is working. Is it known where this meeting was planned to take place?"
"No, master. Neither is anyone sure whether this meeting will still take place."
"I see."
"What about Daniel?"
Bra'tac shrugged. Damn lousy plan, thought Jack.
"Surely though, Master, if Apophis plans to confront Klorel he would not allow his discovery of the plot to become known."
"We can but hope."
***
Daniel woke, his head feeling like an anthill. He was lying on something soft. Something soft that groaned. He looked over at his guard. What had just happened?
The jaffa roused himself and also tried to get a grip on his bearings. He scowled over at Daniel, who tried to placate him before realising that even feigning innocence hurt.
Behind them on the floor was a dead slave, zat in his hand.
"We were zatted by a slave?" he asked.
"It would appear so. Do you still have all of your scrolls?"
Daniel looked over at his bag.
"I think so." He patted the front of his tunic. The hidden one had vanished. What had just happened here? Had he been taken by Apophis? If so, what had happened? Could he assume that Apophis now knew about the supposed plan for Klorel to side with Ra? Why could he not remember anything after talking to the Turkish slave representative? God, this all made his head hurt even more, if that was at all possible.
"You will not tell anyone about this." His guard made an effort to cover up his moment of weakness.
"No, of course not."
Daniel sighed. He hadn't been looking forward to being captured by Apophis, but all day had been setting store by the fact that he would not have to spend another night in Klorel's rooms. The guard grabbed Daniel by his elbow, and escorted him back to the quarters.
He collapsed wearily in his chair, and began to rifle through the scrolls for the day. It would take him several hours to prepare the digest, and he could murder a cup of coffee. Almost on cue, a young servant boy entered the room, carrying a tray. Ah, at least he could have a spot of food. He thanked the boy profusely and dug in. It was as he tipped the bowl into his mouth that he noticed that it had been standing on two more pieces of parchment. Glancing around, he saw with relief that it was almost time for his guard to change shifts. If he could just act nonchalant for a few more minutes, he could use the change over to pick them up, roll them and insert them with the others. Presumably they contained useful information about the next stage of the plan.
This was weak. This was really weak. Granted the guards had changed, but even so... Daniel had to pretend that this parchment had somehow been accidentally put in with the scrolls he picked up from the slave leaders? How lame was that? Who'd believe a damn fool thing like that? Not even the most ardent megalomaniac. At least the other message had confirmed the delivery of the gas masks, and that a few jaffa were willing to stand against Apophis' and Klorel's loyal men. It was fervently hoped that once Klorel and Apophis were safely out of the way, the resistance to the resistance, so to speak, would crumble.
It turned out that fortunately, this was plan B. Klorel stormed into his quarters, his face a dark cloud of discontent.
"Master?"
Klorel spat out his displeasure.
"I have just had word from Nehenet that Apophis schemes against me."
"Master?"
"There is some plan..." he gestured, "for Apophis to side with Chronos."
"How could that be, Master?" The first Daniel had heard of this Chronos was seeing his name on the first parchment a few minutes ago. The message had been so brief he could easily feign ignorance.
Klorel threw Daniel a calculating stare.
"It is of no consequence. When the tel'tac bearing Chronos arrives, I will deal with it. It may even work to my advantage."
Daniel looked up to see the serving boy still waiting patiently at the side of the room to remove Daniel's food bowl. The boy inclined his head slightly, winked. So... the trap now being set, Daniel had to find a way to get rid of the incriminating evidence. Oh well, if eating the parchment was what it took, then that was what he would have to do. He sighed.
Klorel mistook the gesture.
"Yes, I have been meeting some resistance of late. But it is nothing that we cannot handle." He smiled, walked over and placed a hand on Daniel's shoulder.
"How comes the daily digest?"
"Well, master. But there are many production figures to collate." Daniel's voice stilled as he felt Klorel's cool fingers run through his hair. He unconsciously tried to jerk his head out of Klorel's reach, but was stilled by Klorel's other hand holding his head still.
"I am sure that you will perform your function adequately."
Daniel was pleased that he was not facing Klorel at that point.
Klorel turned to address the figure in the corner. "Servant, remove this food bowl and leave us. Send in Maya, I wish to bathe." With that, he turned on his heel, shucked off his robe and stepped out of the room.
Daniel heaved a huge sigh of relief.
"Hery-a?" the serving boy gestured nervously, waving his hand in the general direction of the stack of scrolls. Daniel looked over at the new guard and knew he couldn't chance handing the incriminating evidence back.
"It's all right. Thank you."
The boy grabbed the tray and left at a run.
Daniel picked up his stylus, wet the ink block and settled down to his paperwork.
It was several hours after nightfall when Daniel once again awoke, rose from his stool, and went to the scroll chest. He had tucked the ones he wanted in the corner, so recovered them easily. Once again, he placed them between the slats of the stool and the covering sheet. Maybe if he just pecked away at them little by little, they would be gone before anyone noticed. He tore off a portion of the scroll revealing the attack plan. It was far more incriminating than the false evidence. Placing it carefully in his mouth, he chewed. The ink was foul, and something about the paper sucked all the moisture from his mouth. By the final mouthful, it was all he could do to keep himself from retching.
"Nefer?" a curious voice sounded from the bed.
Daniel rushed to hide the other parchment.
"Master?"
"Come here."
Daniel carefully blanked his mind and headed for the bed. When he awoke the next morning, there would only be one day left before the rebel attack. Or two days left before the ship left orbit.
In the gloom, Klorel's eyes glowed as he patted the space on the bed beside him.
He awoke to the clanging of an alarm, Klorel springing from the bed.
Nehenet stormed into the room, words dying on his lips as he took in the scene before him and curled his lip in a wry little smile.
"Well?"
"My lord, Apophis' men have launched an attack. Already we see them off."
Without a further word, Klorel stormed from the room, Nehenet following in his wake. Leaving Daniel quite alone.
He blinked, unable to believe his good fortune. What now? Escape? How? To where? The only escape route he knew was through the transport rings which took him to Apophis' ship. There must be other ways out, but Klorel still had many jaffa, and they all knew his face.
Daniel remembered the parchment. If he could only hide it on the body of one of Apophis' men... it would solve his problem, and maybe reinforce the lie. He tucked it into his tunic and snuck out.
Thankfully he got lucky very quickly. Following the sound of staff weapons fire, he ducked down a corridor and found one of Apophis' dead jaffa lying with his head embedded in a power conduit. He tucked the scroll into the man's armour and turned to leave.
"Oh no you... don't." Jack O'Neill's words of command died in his throat as he recognised Daniel.
"Hi."
"Hi?"
"Quick... in here."
Jack grabbed Daniel by the elbow and dragged him into what passed for a storage closet.
"Well, this is nice."
"Just shut up for a minute and listen." Jack silenced Daniel, then fell mercifully quiet himself, ear cocked to listen for noises in the corridor.
"I was just about to come looking for you."
"What's going on?"
"Apophis thinks Klorel is about to side with Ra to overthrow him, and Klorel thinks Apophis is about to side with Chronos to knock him off. They both plan to sneak up on the other one and catch them at it."
"I got that bit."
"Bra'tac managed to pass a few more rumours among the guards. Apophis decided that an early strike on Klorel's men might stop Klorel from making his rendezvous."
"And will it?"
"No. Funnily enough, Nehenet managed to find out that we were coming."
"So why did you come?"
"We're using it as cover to plant C4 all over this ship. We're also planting some weird sort of jaffa stun gas, which unfortunately works on humans too."
"Great plan, O'Neill."
"Just can your yap for a second, will ya? Anyway, we're also filling the main duct intersections on levels six, four and two with boxes of gas masks, which, by the way, is extremely risky. Here's a map of how to get to them."
He passed Daniel a small scrap of paper, which Daniel couldn't help noticing was decorated on one side with the calendar for July and picture of lakes and mountains. No parchment to eat this time, then.
"You know, we could kind of use your help over on Apophis' ship."
Daniel looked up at Jack, surprised.
"In what way?"
"Well, we're having trouble communicating the plan to all the different nationalities on board. Some of them speak more than one language, so the word is getting around a bit, but it's a real mess."
Daniel thought for a second.
"Have you got a pen?"
Jack looked momentarily confused, then stuck a hand into his armour and pulled out a chewed biro, a worn silver cigarette lighter and a yoyo.
"Just the pen will do."
Daniel carefully creased the calendar and ripped it along the fold, giving them a small piece of paper that was blank.
"I'll write 'rebellion tomorrow, wait for signal' in French, Spanish, Greek, Mandarin, Arabic, Russian and Latin. Will that help?"
"I can manage the Spanish and Arabic. Can you do an Indian one instead?"
"Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati..."
"Whatever. Why Latin?"
"With any luck, enough people from other European countries will remember some of it from school. Oh... and I'll write it phonetically."
His brow creased in concentration as he filled the tiny slip of paper with neat, blue print. He handed it and the pen back to Jack.
"Great, thanks."
Jack watched Daniel's nervous fingers as he hid the plan inside his tunic.
He flitted his gaze up briefly to lock with Daniel's, then slid it back to look somewhere over his right shoulder.
"That going to be safe in there?"
"As long as I can get rid of it before tonight."
He looked at Daniel again, understanding. Jack nodded.
"Do you think you can get word out?"
"Yes. I've still got all my rounds to do today. Hopefully the slaves can redistribute those masks a little more freely... so what is the plan exactly? Gas us all and then blow us up?"
Jack sighed, getting impatient now.
"Apophis and Klorel are scheduled to meet up at about sixteen hundred hours tomorrow. The meeting is due to take place on a tel'tac, which will be stationary over the dark side of the moon. We'll take Apophis there in the tel'tac, Klorel will be bringing his own ship. We have to hope that Klorel doesn't think it suspicious that Chronos doesn't bring his own mother ship, but he may believe that this is all part of the subterfuge. So, Klorel and Apophis should leave at about fifteen-thirty. One of our men will be piloting the tel'tac, and it'll be rigged to blow once they're both aboard.
At about sixteen hundred also, a charge will go off on both mother ships. This will trigger the alarms. A second trigger starts the gas a minute later, so when you hear the siren go, you'll have about three minutes to get the gas masks on. It'll stun the guards. You have to get the weapons off the guards and overpower them."
"Jesus, Jack... make it complicated, why don't you."
Jack reached out and patted Daniel's shoulder. In the warmth of the closet it felt strange, intrusive, but also comforting.
"Your guys will have to shoot the guards. Make for the exits marked on the map. When we get back, we'll launch the mother ships into orbit and blow them all to hell."
Daniel made a mental note to check for the exits as soon as possible.
"So the C4 charges are just for... the finale?"
Jack twiddled his thumbs.
"Or for if it all goes hideously wrong. I mean... if you'd rather all be redistributed permanently..."
"No. Of course not."
Jack reached out a tentative hand again.
"It's going to work, Daniel."
"Sure."
The hand stayed. It was a peculiar bond, between two almost total strangers. Weird, then, that they had so much faith in one another. Weird.
"Look, we'd better be making a move. You leave first, I'll be right behind you."
"Okay."
Daniel cast a final glance up into his friend's eyes, and left.
In the corridor it was cooler. He set off at a brisk pace, stopping only briefly to pull out the slip of paper and locate the exits. Hidden behind walls, but marked with a particular symbol... of course.
On a whim, he hid the paper in his sandal rather than his tunic.
Closing the doors to Klorel's quarters behind himself, he was stunned to see Klorel standing in the centre of the room, quietly fuming, but looking triumphant. Just a glance in Klorel's direction let him know that he was in big trouble. He sunk to his knees.
"Master."
Eyes averted, he heard the soft clink of the hand device as Klorel adjusted it against his palm.
"Where were you, hery-a?"
"Master... I heard weapons."
"You thought to escape."
"No, master... I went to see... I came back."
Klorel must see some truth in that, surely. He had come back of his own volition, after all.
"We shall see."
Ten inches from his face, he felt the warm glow of the hand device before a searing pain registered in his hind-brain, then the pull as sharp as skewers, direct lines of fire from points behind his eyeballs straight through his head.
He couldn't speak, couldn't cry out, as he sank to his knees.
It could have been seconds, but it felt like years. Eventually, the pain subsided into a slow wobble, throbbing through him as he collapsed onto his side and curled up in a foetal ball.
"You tried to escape."
"No, master. No, master."
"Hery-a. Come here."
Daniel rubbed a palm across his face, dislodging his glasses as he struggled to wipe away the involuntary tears. The pain in his head was so bad he thought he was about to be sick. He forced himself up on one arm, still shaking.
"Master."
Wearily, he struggled to his feet and stood before the bed.
"Your rounds for the production figures can wait a little while. I require... proof."
"Master?"
"Assurance, if you will, that you remain my faithful servant."
"Master."
"You will remove your clothing."
So. It was down to this again. For a god, Klorel sure thought of very little else. Daniel closed his eyes and steeled himself. Felt a bitterness rising in his throat, but thanked his lucky stars, charms, the cautious words of a soldier, for the whim that had made him hide the plan in his sandal.
He gripped one of the tall, draped bed posts and slid his sandals off, pushing them under the bed with his toes. The paper gleamed out at him, still visible from this angle. He crossed his fingers behind his back.
Klorel glowered impatiently as Daniel dropped his tunic to the floor.
It was nearly noon when Daniel started his rounds, Nehenet by his side. He passed his messages, just the same as usual, smiled at mothers clutching frightened children, and hoped to all the gods there ever had been that in twenty eight hours time they would all be free.
Thursday. The first thing to go wrong happened at about fifteen hundred hours. Jaffa guards on watch detail never worked alone, and as the most inexperienced, in Bra'tac's eyes, Jack had been paired with him. The atmosphere was palpable as they patrolled the decks, looking for signs of trouble, finding none.
Brehanu had just flown the stolen tel'tac back into the docking bay. Thirty minutes before departure, not enough time for anyone to sweep the place and notice that it was stacked to the eyeballs with C4.
Jack was just leaving when Apophis swept into the bay, Fro'tac and an honour guard of four other jaffa all nicely spit-and-polished close behind him.
"Come," he gestured, indicating that they should all get on the tel'tac.
Jack knew what the plan was. Bra'tac was going to blow up the tel'tac with all of them on it. No way did he want to be on board at the time. Anyway, he had a rebellion to run. To help run.
"Uh..."
Bra'tac gave him a scary look, and Jack meekly followed Apophis and his men to their doom.
As they steeled themselves against the walls, Bra'tac guided the craft silently out of the docking bay and straight up through the atmosphere. He decided that it was time to show off one of his new toys.
Actually, it was bit of a masterpiece, cobbled together from previous transmissions from Ra, but seamlessly pieced together and artfully retouched to include Klorel's voice in the background as a response.
"My lord, we are intercepting a transmission from Ra."
"On the screen."
Jack gazed at the projection. The face of the boy god glowered down at him. Now, this was a technology that Carter would have adored. Sam would have adored. Dammit. Only gone a few days, and already he was back to thinking about her as Carter. He felt guilty right down to his toes. Guilty for living, for not doing better by her.
He was brought back to the present by the sounds of Apophis angrily pacing the tel'tac. Of course, Apophis was more than willing to believe that there was a plot against him. Up on the screen, the communication continued.
"You have done well, Lord Klorel. When tomorrow is through, we will reign together as one and Apophis will be no more."
The smooth, white visage gleamed down on them, a cruel smile not reaching his eyes.
Jack gritted his teeth, remembering Ra's predilection for the younger representatives of manhood, and thought if anything, Klorel in the body of a teenage boy would be way too old for him. The transmission finished. Bra'tac handed control of the ship to one of Apophis' guard and sidled over.
"We may have a problem, my friend."
It must be bad for Bra'tac to call him friend. Since their first meeting, Bra'tac had resolutely failed to call him anything other than 'human'.
"So spit it out."
"We will reach our destination thirty minutes early. It will be difficult to persuade Apophis that Ra is nearby. Also, we do not want him to see that the other craft approaches from Earth."
"Hmm. Can we disable the ship somehow, slow it down so we get there at the right time?"
"We could use some of your C4 to take a few minor systems off line. That should work." Bra'tac nodded and set to work.
Jack wondered why neither Apophis nor Klorel was choosing to make this rendezvous in their mother ships. He guessed that even evil megalomaniac gods did covert occasionally, and that it might be a bit difficult to launch an all-out attack when you were loading up with slaves.
Bra'tac carefully paced the ship, briefly disappearing into the hold, re-emerging minutes later with a canteen of water before regaining his seat at the controls. Although Apophis had calmed down now, Jack was determined to stay out of the way if at all possible. Apophis lounged in a huge, golden throne, looking vaguely murderous. Thirty seconds later, there was a small 'pfft', and sparks shot out from one of the control panels.
"My lord. Life support systems are failing."
Bra'tac chose life support as the minor system that he chose to make malfunction? Oh, this was great. Jack had thought that maybe he'd take out the windshield wipers or something, but no. This was way better. That would be the second thing to go wrong today, Jack guessed. Oh well, only one more then.
Two of Apophis' honour guard rushed to the panel and pored over it. Apophis barely raised an eyebrow as the jaffa removed the face plate and set about fixing it. The ship dropped out of hyper drive and gave them a beautiful view of the full moon, filling the window and casting the interior of the ship in an icy grey light. It was beautiful, thought Jack. He'd been to other planets, got this close to the moon, and even if this all went tits-up then at least a few hundred jaffa would get theirs today. Yes, today was a good day to die. Or not.
The seconds ticked by as he made himself useful, handing the men the wrong sized tools before being shooed back to the corner. Jack sat and waited, naming all the craters he could see as they drifted closer.
He took it all back. Bra'tac was a genius. It took exactly twenty-five minutes to fix the thing, then they were speeding up again, hurtling round the moon to get themselves ready for the big shindig.
And there it was. The illumination from within the cockpit picked out the craft as it lay nestled in a crater. They ducked down into a crater of their own before they were seen.
So this was it. There were no other ships. What now? Klorel was supposed to think this was Apophis or Chronos, and Apophis was supposed to think that the other ship was either Klorel or Ra. There was a honkin' great flaw in the plan. There were no other ships. Jack looked at his watch. Two minutes to four. He hoped fervently that things were going better on Earth, and that Daniel was even now down in the servant's quarters, helping them move gas masks through the air conditioning conduits.
Thankfully, Bra'tac had another technical doohickey to spring on Apophis.
"My lord, we are picking up another craft approaching. It appears to be on of Ra's. What are your orders."
Apophis was on his feet in a second.
"We need to prevent a meeting between Ra and Klorel. We also require Ra to believe that we are Klorel, in order to mount our attack. Therefore we shall eliminate Klorel's ship."
Oookay... sounded like a plan.
The ship lifted dustily from the crater, keeping low. Suddenly, the transmission screen flickered into life again, the face of Klorel furious and looming. In the background, nervous shapes flitted about.
"Father." One word, before the ship opened fire on them.
Bra'tac wasted no time. They wanted rid of both the snaky scum after all. He opened fire and the starboard fins crumpled. Jack looked back up at the monitor again, the figures in the background becoming more distinct now. Two men, one a jaffa, the other, dressed in white linen, long brown hair combed straight down over his shoulders. Daniel.
And there it was. The third thing to go wrong that day.
Sixteen hundred hours.
On Earth, alarms sounded, slaves scrabbled to save themselves and jaffa fired indiscriminately. Three minutes was hardly time enough; three minutes before symbiotes started to compensate for the poisonous gas. But a desperate slave can accomplish many things, and a jaffa without his god and without his first prime is a jaffa without orders to follow. But he is also a jaffa running on instinct.
Jack gazed over at Daniel, and the first thing to run through his mind was 'oh, shit'. The second thing to run through his mind was also 'oh, shit', as one of Klorel's missiles hit home. He got an idea.
He sidled over to Bra'tac, furiously manoeuvring out of Klorel's way while assessing the damage.
"Bra'tac, hold back for a few minutes, try to stay clear of fire. It looks like there's only a few of them over there."
"What are you saying, human?"
"I'm saying that if I use the rings, I might just be able to get Klorel and his jaffa and leave us with one ship still able to make it home. You'll have to try and cover for me."
Bra'tac glanced over at Apophis, quietly fuming but still supremely confident in his throne on the other side of the room. "My lord..." he began, no doubt about to launch into some spiel whereby Jack's plan was all for the greater glory of Apophis.
He patted Bra'tac on the shoulder and ran for the rings.
"O'Neill..." Bra'tac's voice rang in his ears as the rings descended over him and whisked him up and away. Jack stared at him as his face split, and in the moment before his reintegration thought, 'so he does know what my name is..."
The rings came down in the centre of the main cabin, leaving a disoriented Jack facing the back of Klorel's head. Before the rings even had a chance to disappear, he fired; twisted, ducked, spotted Nehenet and fired again. A ringing sounded in his ears. Two targets, both still alive.
"Daniel, get his zat." He pointed towards the gun.
Daniel made a grab for it, and instead of pointing it at Nehenet, made for Klorel, firing indiscriminately.
"You. Sick. Bastard." He spat, striding across the floor.
Jack glanced at Nehenet, coming round from the blast, and shot him through the chest with his staff weapon.
Daniel was engaged in a battle with Klorel, a siren now filling the cabin. He heard the sound of feet marching in their direction. Not much time. Klorel had raised a shield around himself, and no matter how many times Daniel fired, nothing broke through. Klorel raised his hand device and aimed it leisurely at Daniel's head, opening his palm.
Jack pulled out his knife and threw. It sliced through the air and caught Klorel below the left shoulder. It wasn't a kill shot but it interrupted him, made him drop the force field. Daniel lay unconscious on the floor.
Two things happened simultaneously; Klorel's guards came through the doorway, and the ship was rocked by a blast from Apophis' ship. It saved Jack's life.
He rolled across the floor, avoiding the blast from Klorel's men. Klorel was getting to his feet now, staring down in fury at Daniel, who was shaking his head from side to side, trying to bring himself out of it. Klorel raised his hand again, ignoring Jack as he swung round to hide behind a bulkhead.
The guards were firing almost constantly, now, their blasts scouring through the black smoke that started to billow out of the control consoles.
Daniel's hand moved before his eyes opened. Jack watched in slow motion as his fingers snaked round the zat. Klorel was oblivious, eyes on Daniel's face as the hand device made his skull apparently shimmer up through the flesh and muscles around his cheeks and eyes.
Daniel raised the zat. Fired. Fired, fired, fired, as if it were the only thing he could do; hand locked on trigger in a spasm of motion, more crucial than drawing breath.
Jack took out two guards before the third caught him in the shoulder. He winced as the sick splat of impact on flesh threw him backwards against the wall, sucked in his breath and felt his legs fly out from under him.
The ship's engines whined, puttered, stalled; in the background, the sound of metal grinding against plastic, slicing through fragile components.
Klorel crumpled up on the floor, the glow fading from his eyes. The two remaining guards rushed to his aid. Jack lifted himself just enough, using the staff as a crutch, shot one through the head. As the other turned, Daniel lifted the zat once more. Just enough to shoot him in the leg. Jack finished him off.
Daniel's eyes fluttered and he lay still. The alarm continued to blare out as extinguishers finally cut in, the other sounds a faint drip drip of coolant, hydraulic fluid, and blood from Jack's gaping shoulder wound.
As the adrenaline started to ebb from his body, Jack felt an unholy blast of pain course through him. He scrambled to his feet, desperate to get a message to Bra'tac.
As he fumbled for the communication device, he gazed out of the view screen at the other ship; watched as it raised itself shakily into the air, and exploded silently into a million glittering shards.
No. Not Bra'tac too. He thumped his fist on the control panel, jolted then at the reminder of his wound, and looked down at Daniel, who gazed back at him.
Jack futzed with the controls bringing the tel'tac in to land. He cast a wary eye over at Daniel, raising himself onto his elbows but still on the floor.
"How you doing?"
"I'm fine. How are you?"
"Okay."
Daniel frowned, noting the blood dripping freely from the wound and starting to pool on the console.
"Jack, you have to stop. Jack."
Jack turned round again, briefly, distracted.
Daniel signed in resignation, and pulled himself up into a sitting position.
"Jack, if you don't stop whatever you're doing, you're blood is going to make that panel short circuit."
Jack turned round to face Daniel again, suddenly aware that he was starting to feel a little faint.
"Is the ship okay for now?"
"Yeah, I guess."
"Then come over here and let me take a look at that wound."
Jack practically stumbled across to him, collapsed next to him on the floor, back braced against the wall. His shoulder ground against Daniel's making him wince.
"I'm going to have to get this armour off."
"Okay."
He worked silently, efficiently, pulling the collar over Jack's head, undoing the ties at the front of the chain mail and carefully gliding the material down his arms and finally away from his body. It was messy, burnt and charred around the edges, but thankfully not too deep, nor anywhere too critical. Daniel had some basic first aid experience; fairly essential in his line of work. And he'd read up a lot after Alec died. He hoped it would be enough. He patted Jack carefully.
"I'll just go and get the first aid kit." It was out the back. He waded through foam from the extinguishers and bits of panelling. It was looking serious out here. How long would the engines hold out? The air?
Back at Jack's side, he cleaned out the wound, gave him some pain killers. Jack seemed to come to his senses pretty soon after that.
"We need to assess the damage, see if we can make any repairs."
"Yeah."
Daniel stood up and moved back to the controls, intent on translating them already.
"But first... can we shift some of these bodies out of the way?"
As they lay the last of the jaffa down in the cargo hold, they heard a faint rapping sound.
"Sounds like something else is about to break." Daniel looked up at Jack, surprised to see him smiling. "Jack?"
"Sounds like someone is knocking at the door. Shall we go see who it is?"
A grizzled face stared back at them from the screen displaying the outside of the airlock. Even behind the thick Plexiglas of the suit's helmet, it was unmistakably Master Bra'tac.
Daniel activated the controls that opened and shut the first door. Bra'tac's face appeared at the door, haggard and worn, but unmistakably triumphant.
As the door slid open, and Bra'tac stumbled in removing his helmet, the first words from his lips were "now he is a dead false god".
Bra'tac too was injured. Daniel rushed for the kit as Bra'tac removed his EVA suit.
"What happened?"
Bra'tac chuckled. "Apophis became increasingly angry that I failed to destroy Klorel's ship. He removed me from the controls, gave them to Luka. We had sustained several injuries, and the other men were occupied in repairing the ship. I simply left."
"And?"
"And when I left, I activated the detonator."
Jack slapped at Bra'tac's shoulder.
"Without knowing if this ship was okay? You..."
Bra'tac shrugged, cutting Jack off in mid sentence. "Apophis is dead, O'Neill. And as you have said on many occasions, the only good false god is a dead false god."
Jack tilted his head.
"You know, I think I liked it better when you just called me 'human'."
"Pah!"
"Er... guys... I hate to break this up..."
One of the lights on the main console winked evilly up at them, flashing red. A red light was never a good thing.
Two days it took them to get back. Two, stinking days of recycled water, stagnating air and dry biscuits. Two days of listening to Jack whine, Bra'tac curse at Daniel's apparent ineffectiveness, and occasional moments of panic while systems failed and were repaired interspersed with long hours of tedium. In some ways, Daniel had preferred being trapped in the museum. No-one went into the hold after the first day. They got everything they needed and stored it up front, sealing the corpses in and removing the air.
Jack recovered slowly in one corner, driving Daniel mad with his yoyo and cheating at Patience. Daniel knew the precise moment when Jack turned the corner on the road to recovery. It was the moment when Jack started to snip at him about his 'skirt', make nursey references. Daniel gave as good as he got, and started to smile again.
Bra'tac healed fast, and annoyed both Daniel and Jack with his callisthenics.
As the Earth grew large in the view screen, they heard the radio finally splutter into life. It was chaos on Earth. No-one knew what had happened to Apophis or Klorel – they had seemingly both just vanished. The slave rebellion had been a bit of a shambles, but it was a successful one, despite all the casualties. As it became apparent to the jaffa that their gods were not going to return, Bra'tac's supporters swelled in number. Finally close enough for the damaged communications systems to work, Bra'tac wasted no time in telling the world of his victory. Their victory. And he had Klorel's body to prove it.
They landed the tel'tac close to Apophis' mother ship.
"What, no welcoming committee? No tickertape parade? That's the last time I save this measly planet," winged Jack, taking in his first deep lungful of fresh mountain air, beating his chest and grinning from ear to ear.
Daniel scratched his ear thoughtfully.
"Sunday tomorrow."
"Huh?"
"Means you can at least have a lie in." He smiled.
They felt a buzz, elated, but tinged with the sour headache of personal loss. Reality was a bitch. The more they discovered, the worse the situation seemed. Jack seemed determined to raise their spirits, and for that, Daniel was extremely thankful.
Over the next few weeks, the people of Earth slowly struggled to pick up the pieces. Final casualty figures totalled around three billion. Which, as Jack pointed out, still left three billion or so people left. And he thought he could remember the last time Earth's population had been that level. Said he did, anyway.
Bra'tac became the undisputed leader of the remaining jaffa, and they set to work repairing Apophis' mother ship. They weren't staying, in fact their work had only just begun. Word had filtered through of a bomb sent to destroy Chulak at the start of the war; as soon as they were ready to go, Bra'tac and his men were off to rebuild their own civilization. As soon as they were gone, Jack would arrange a work party to commence digging down through the twenty-eight floors of the Cheyenne Mountain Complex to uncover the gate. Much as he didn't want those political types back, he needed to know deep down just who had died and who survived. Wanted all the people of Earth back in one place to help rebuild. Well, except for maybe Kinsey. And Simmons. They could stay out at the Beta site playing happy families if they wanted. Yeah, maybe he'd forget to tell them to come back.
Somehow they all agreed that it was right that Klorel's ship remain in Egypt, at least for now.
Jack put the SUV into park and pulled on the hand brake. The jolt of stopping woke his companion, nestled in between bags of bedding and boxes of food and books. Daniel sat up with a start.
"Is this it?"
"Yup."
Jack looked nervously over at his new friend, who was even now licking his lips and generally seeming confused.
"It's... it's not quite what I had imagined."
There was no sensible answer to that. The cabin had stood empty for the last year, and gazed back at them soulfully. It lay nestled in the foothills ten miles out of town, surrounded by pine forest, a crystal-clear lake just visible through the clearing.
Jack cleared his throat and made to get out of the truck.
"I... I mean, I'm sure it's fine."
Jack shrugged to hide his mounting disappointment, and not a little annoyance. What did the guy expect? The Earth was pretty much laid waste, and yet this corner of Minnesota was totally untouched, just the way it had been for as long as he remembered.
He jumped down from the cab, stretched and yawned as soon as the crisp air entered his lungs.
"I'll go get the generator started."
The last time he had been here was with Sam. She'd declared it too damn cold, and tactfully suggested that next vacation they should visit her family in California. The last time... about a million years and a couple of lifetimes ago. The events of the last two months had served to put a wedge between his old life and the new one which made everything seem unreal. He couldn't imagine being that man any more. Yet another reason to get out of Colorado.
Sam was dead; of that he was now certain. They left Colorado before the gate was uncovered, but not before the remaining powers that be started to press their new heroes to help in the rebuilding process. They were beat, worn out, needed time away. Like Jack always said, there were only so many times you could save the planet before it started to pall a little. He was desperate to stop thinking, if only for a little while.
Daniel hauled a suitcase out of the trunk and staggered up the path under its weight. He was almost hit by a flash of bronzed skin as Jack tore past him, heading for the lake.
"Last one in's a rotten egg!"
Daniel sighed, and lowered the case slowly to the ground, sauntering off after him, rubbing the cricks out of his back on the way.
He had to scan the lake a couple of times before he spotted him. Somewhere out in the middle, a tanned form rose porpoise-like out of the water and dove under once more.
It was curious. There had been so much destruction, so many casualties. There was so much to rebuild, so much work to do, but after all, they had won. If what it came down to was that men could relax, eat, and have a place to explore and be free, then surely the world would be right once more. It had been a very long, tiring journey. There was still a long, long road ahead. Daniel looked out again at the lake, cool and inviting. Just a short break. Time to recoup. He'd be allowed that, surely.
He gazed out again at Jack, now sculling by lazily on his back, and started to remove his shoes. Five minutes. Time enough to start to rebuild his life.
~END~