1. Default Chapter

TITLE : SG-1 goes aaAAARGHHHH!!! 

  
AUTHOR : Perry Tratchett

  


In recent years a new civilisation has begun wandering through the stargate network, poking their noses into places where their welcome varied enormously. They had the cheek to tweak the noses of the Goa'uld system lords, and not just once. It makes knowing them to be an interesting experience, one that many races find…

…stressful.

They come from a minor ball of rock orbiting a G-class star, far out in a spiral arm of the Milkyway galaxy. It's not prime real estate by any stretch of the imagination.

Their ethical development is curious, encompassing a number of varying and contradictory views. In some ways they are admirable, and in others, well…

Under the circumstances, their paranoia is understandable, especially given that an earlier version of their genome was subdued by the Goa'uld, used as slaves and also as hosts for their procreation. It is not a situation that the humans intend allowing to occur again and that attitude tends to colour their interaction with other races. They labour under the aegis bequeathed to them by that situation.

In addition to that fundamental antipathy to others, they make a conceptual error, believing them selves to be a single entity. They are not. In reality they are, all of them, a symbiont, a mix made from a large organism that can only survive by the action of an army of bacteria and viral organisms. Without them they cannot function. We need to remember that, it is crucial to the events we must discuss.

Let us consider the nature of the human. We shall chose one for illustration…

*

Janet Fraiser woke to the sound of her bedside telephone. It had the sort of ring tone that was guaranteed to wake you up, the ones that only a hated aunt could possibly wish on you, but only if she was in one of her worst moods. It drilled into Janet's head like it was an electronic pile driver intent on a spot of cranial surgery. She cursed the world; told it to go away and leave her alone and then curled up in the bed with the intention of getting back to sleep. 

By then it was all too late of course, the raucous noise had done its job and she was wide-awake. A few unsavoury thoughts passed through her head and we won't bother to take any notice of them. Her eyes still felt horrible and her tongue tasted just awful, and now she was fully alert and able to savour the gloriously awful waking experience in its entirety.

She is so lucky.

An annoyingly breathless wheeze from her air conditioning was the only sound in her bedroom, for which she was thankful. She dragged breath between gritted teeth, filling her lungs with air - rich with a chemical dictionary full of unsavoury additives. Her lungs threatened to cough the mess straight back up. She rolled onto her side and peered myopically at the phone. 

The caller ID display said 'General Hammond' in little tiny cheery liquid crystal letters. 

She pulled her sheet over her head and hid. It didn't help. The phone was still there and it wouldn't shut up. She pushed the sheet back off her head and faced the day, one eye at a time admittedly. Unfortunately, the day faced her right back and it looked no better to her eyes (one at a time rather than concurrently) than it did seconds earlier.

The digital clock beside the phone gave the time as five thirty two. Their little Light Emitting Diodes glared at her in the dim light of her bedroom. It was barely light outside. She could tell that by the fact that her blinds were askew.

"Oh damn," she croaked with considerable feeling. She grabbed the headset off the phone, fumbled with it clumsily and then dropped it onto the floor. It hit one of the nobs on her bedside table on the way down, making a deafening racket in the otherwise quiet room. "Typical," she muttered.

She fumbled around, blind because her eyes were still refusing to stay open, with her hands, scraping around on the floor for a moment, trying to find where the headset had gone; finally resorting to pulling it in like a fish on the end of the spiral would cord. After an age, she managed to place the thing against her ear.

"What is it?" she snapped into the phone. She regretted the tone as soon as it came out. 

"Good morning Doctor Fraiser," General Hammond said with altogether too much intensity in his voice. "Look I'm sorry to wake you, but we have a messy one," his explanation came through the tinny little speaker in the phone and drilled into her head almost as bad as the phone's ring tone had done only seconds earlier. "I'll pick you up on the way though." 

She vowed to stop drinking, never ever again, ever. "Argh," she said out loud. God, being a doctor was a great life, she thought. She got to wake up to a hang over, and got invited to the scene of a military incident, all at the same time. Two horrible experiences for the price of one, oh yeah! Perhaps they could package the experience, sell tickets. Come one, come all for the experience of a lifetime…

Well at least Cassie wasn't home. Her step/foster daughter had stayed the night at Janet's mother's home while Janet stayed home last night and partied. Cassie was an alien child, but she seemed to be settling in to her domestic situation reasonably well. The dog helped of course. It was one of those odd moments when she could swear that Jack O'Neill was human, that time when he gave her that dog. Then of course a few minutes later he would prove once again and conclusively that he was not human at all, just vaguely human shaped.

"Yeah OK," she almost groaned into the phone. She unwound enough so her head could prop on the pillow and she blinked rapidly half a dozen times. Her eyes cleared enough to see across the room, just for a second and then gummed up again when she blinked the next time. Clear, clogged, clear, clogged, then sore. She screwed her eyes shut. "How long do I have?" she asked the phone.

"Fifteen," the phantom voice said into her head. "I can't leave it any longer."

"Done," she groaned. She dropped the phone back into the cradle, but it bounced off and landed on the floor again. She waited a moment while she worked up the enthusiasm to haul it into the boat once again. It took a remarkably long time.

Janet almost gave in to the temptation to roll over and go back to sleep before her eyes sprang open with a shake of her head. "Wake up dopey," she said out loud.

She rubbed her eyes in a misguided attempt to clear them; it only made them bleary all over again, and she climbed sluggishly from the bed. The remote for the blinds was sitting on the bedside table, she patted her hand around until she found it and then aimed it vaguely in the direction where she thought the window had been during the previous night. The blind moved, she could tell by the noise, allowing the window to become visible once again. It made no difference when the blind released its opacity, it was just as dark outside as it was inside. She fumbled around and found the switch for her bedside lamp and turned it on. It sprang into vivid, vibrant and vulgar life. Now she could sort of see where she was going, if she could just get her eyes open, so she padded over to look out the window at this brand new day. 

She stood beside the curtain, blinking in the rude light of the new day that came to her by peeking at her from across the street. The rising sun silhouetted the house across the road. Showing the maturity of her years, she stuck her tongue out at the world. 

It poked its tongue right back at her.

She blinked back a few sudden tears and stumbled away from the window, not drunkenly exactly because that was the state she had achieved hours earlier, just uncoordinated.

She closed her eyes and turned to face the wreckage of her bedroom. Clothes that she had worn at last night's sort-of-party were scattered all over the floor. All hers, she noted regretfully. Girl's night of fun and she slept alone for twenty-ninth time in a row. Not that she missed out on offers. She caught her reflection in the mirror; she was small, slender, auburn-haired with expressive eyes in a heart shaped package. It was a good face, she was happy to wear it. 

She poked her tongue out at the reflection that looked five years older than she did when she went to bed the previous night, then ran her hand through morning hair, making it differently messy. With a wristy flourish, she tossed her nightshirt over her head, and threw it onto the bed, before padding barefoot and naked into the bathroom. A well-deserved shower waited. We can only assume that was the case of course. In the interests of our PG-13 rating, all we saw was a glimpse of the discarded night dress and a pair of bare feet striding purposefully into the bathroom. It wouldn't do for us to take any more interest in Janet Fraiser at this point.

We will look away until she completes the cycle of washing-drying-selection-of-and-donning-of-underwear thing out of the way. 

The numerals on her clock change, and again and again; finally coming to rest on 5:41 before we can look away. Only now we are OK. Janet was still frantically drying her hair and fussed about with a random selection of bits and pieces that she had half used and then scattered throughout the bottom of her vanity cupboard and also still trying desperately to be ready before General Hammond reached her home, when the security alert sounded. 

Dressed in a mismatched brassier and panties, she toyed briefly with the idea of answering the door as she was, and grinned to her self happily. 

That might cause General Hammond a moment's disconcert. He was always so in-charge; sometimes she entertained little ideas to break his reserve. They were all impulsive and perverse ideas she was sure, but they were fun to entertain.

The skirt that she had selected for the day was draped over the end of her bed and the blouse was hanging on the back of a chair in her kitchen. She looked from one to the other in confusion for a moment, debating which would be best to put on to greet the door. Hide her legs or her torso? Decisions, decisions…

She thew the skirt on and then was about to put the blouse on as well when she realised that her hair was still wet and the blouse was silk and she did not want that to get even a little bit wet and… argh!

She looked quickly around her little home and decided that the mess wasn't too embarrassing. The remains of last nights dinner was still on the table, and the last of a few empty bottles of red wine that she had shared with Kristin and Leonora sat on the bench top, like a pair of useless palace guards. Otherwise the neat little home was clean and relatively tidy… 

Well, clean then…

Perhaps... 

So long as no one looked in the laundry or the bedroom, that was... or in the cupboards or…

Funny how the human mind works, she thought. She was sure all the stuff that she now saw scattered all over the house was sitting in it's rightful places just a few seconds ago. Where did all that crap come from? 

And better yet, where the hell could it possibly go?

OK, start somewhere, she decided hurriedly.

She picked up the wine bottle and was about to toss it into the garbage bin when the door re-announced General's approach. The sound of her doorbell drifted to her from the entry hall. She spun around suddenly, caught on the hop by the sound, and realised that her allotted fifteen minutes were already up.

Oh what the hell, she decided. He was going to find out what she was like one day. 

Besides, Janet had seen the top of Colonel O'Neill's desk, and of course there was Colonel Makepeace's idea of paper work to consider as well…

She padded barefooted across to the door and acknowledged the doorbell's insistent plea for acknowledgment. The door sprung open impatiently. 

She turned away immediately after the General appeared - loomed? - in the doorframe. He filled the doorway, sort of, being almost as wide as the doorway without being any where near as tall as the opening that the door swung away to reveal. 

We should take the time to examine General Hammond for a moment. He is a good example of the alpha male. It is a concept that is based on a pecking order established within the society of primates and represents the primary male primate, the one who gives the orders and decides the policy. The status comes from recognition of experience, knowledge and a healthy dose of attitude. Having now established his position within the society that we are viewing, let us consider the physical manifestation of the man. General Hammond was a wide man, but well under two metres tall, so he filled the width of the doorway. 

He stopped the light from the hall like a total eclipse of the maw. OK, so it wasn't poetic. His cropped hair ringed an otherwise bald head, decorated by surprisingly even features. Janet noted that he was dressed in a neat dress uniform and he filled it with a barrel like bulk that could only be developed over the years by a combination of early physical training followed by years of piloting a desk. During that time he had consumed one too many Pentagon lunches, and dinners and afters and… 

"Sorry to get you out of bed like that," he apologised softly. He had one of those radio announcer voices, deep and resonant like it was coming from the rear set of your car's speakers, the ones that use the trunk of a car to gain better bass response.

"Hang on while I finish dressing," she told him. She realised that she was still carrying the empty wine bottle. Oh, what he must think, half dressed, looking a mess and carrying a wine bottle around at 5:48am. Arrgh. She tossed the empty bottle away.

"No problem," he answered easily.

Janet waved vaguely at one of the lounge chairs and General Hammond took the hint. From that vantage-point he had only limited visibility through her bedroom door, and none in the bathroom. Good, she wanted the opportunity to tidy up before letting any thing become visible through either of those doors.

She stepped quickly into the bathroom, to cover her own confusion.

Her hair was almost dry. She flicked it about so that it draped loosely past her ears. The drier landed back in the little nook built into the bathroom wall before she stepped back into her living room. 

Where had she had left the blouse she intended wearing? Oh there it is, draped over the back of one of her kitchen chairs. She picked it up and was about to push her arm through the sleeve when she noticed a small stain on the collar. 

Oh no, she thought. Not all of the red wine had been consumed last night, and a brand new spot glowered at her from the collar of the blouse. It must have discharged from the bottle when she spun on her heel after the door's summons announced General's approach. It would soak out from the collar eventually, but…

"Damn," she cursed and went in search of something else to wear. "I could be a couple of minutes."

"We're not missing much," General declared. He looked at his watch. That is a way of contradicting his own statement.

"OK," She sprayed something that was supposed to lift stains out in the wash onto the red spot and then hung the blouse by the hem from a cord strung above her bath before she marched back into the bedroom. The wardrobe door slid aside. She dragged a smock dress from the wardrobe and looked at it carefully. It would have to do. She nodded, pulled the skirt from around her hips, threw it carelessly onto the bed. 

Perhaps I should start to tidy now, she thought, and hung it back in the wardrobe. 

Feeling very virtuous, despite wearing just a tiny white lace bra and even tinier pink lace panties she carried the smock past the door that led into the living room while she shrugged her arms and shoulders into it. It settled over her torso and then adjusted itself to fit to her body shape, by a combination of gravity and little pleats and darts. 

She checked her reflection in the mirror and was satisfied. Sort of? Maybe she should do something about the hair. 

Maybe? 

Not?

"Can you see any shoes in there?" she called to General Hammond. He made a show of looking for them, while she turned back through the door searched around the bedroom. A vision came to her. She suddenly remembered kicking them under her bed and strode across her bedroom to rummage around for them.

"Found them," she called.

"Ah good," General answered absently.

"Which team was it?" she called through the bedroom door. She sat on the bed and pulled the shoes onto her feet.

"SG-1."

"Oh," she moaned. It would be them.

She ruffled her hair. Her reflection was suitably bohemian; she grimaced and made for the living room.

"Ready to go?" she asked. In reflection in the hall mirror she ensured that the smock had settled nicely and her shoes gave her legs a graceful line. 

For a doctor that was a pretty shallow piece of thinking but that was the way of cultural conditioning. She was a western-society-female; that's how they are brought up to behave. No amount of logic will overcome that early conditioning.

She locked the door behind her.

*

The gate guards waved the giant black car through like it was a plague carrier, jumping out of the way as though they expected the infection might shorten their life span. Inside the behemoth, Janet Frasier marvelled at the behaviour of the gate guards; these were the same men who had consistently hindered her entry with an infuriating combination of supercilious bureaucracy and obsequious manners. She watched them prove that they were capable of simply saluting and then leap aside. All it took was the appearance of the man who authorised their pay-checks. 

She was wrong of course. It had nothing to do with authority. It was far more fundamental than that. She was probably unaware that the reason for the attention she received from the gate guards was a far more simple and fundamental matter. The gate guards were just making sure they got a good look at her legs through the window of her car. The suits she usually wore beneath her lab coat were always tight, tailored to a figure that was eye-catching (provided you were the appropriately cultured and biologically wired male human) and they were also definitely not designed to be worn while driving. They rode up while she was seated in her car and exposed a lot of thigh. It is a peculiar conundrum. Should she wear trousers she would enjoy the spectacle of watching men surreptitiously checking out her butt when she walked past. There is no hope for the human male, and she is uncertain whether she would really change them if she had the power.

After passing the guard post, their car rolled through the concrete hemi-circular portal mouth and in to the artificially lit cavern beneath the Rocky Mountains. 

General Hammond seemed not to notice the change in scenery. He was still talking at a mile a minute through the pick-up of his car phone.

"What have we got?" Hammond demanded of the microphone. The little ear peace buzzed some sort of answer to him. To Janet it sounded like an argument between a pair of irate blow flies.

General Hammond said "Uh huh," a lot and also "give me that again," occasionally, but mostly he just listened.

"Look we're almost there," he said finally. "We'll be ready for a briefing in…" he stopped in mid instruction and checked his watch. "Look, book the conference room for fifteen minutes from now. Yeah I knew that. I don't care, toss them out. Have Makepeace meet me, and…" he turned to Janet Frasier, "How soon can you give me a yes, no, prognosis? Ten minutes? Good. OK, there'll be Doctor Frasier as well. Have Teal'c ready to debrief."

He slipped the phone back into the little receptacle in which it would hide in until the next emergency. The car ground to a halt outside an elevator. General Hammond leapt from the passenger compartment almost before the giant black car came to rest, bouncing out of the door like a Doberman Pincer on steroids. One who had decided to set off after a burglar, and fact that he waved a big gun was on no consequence. General Hammond had about the same degree of fixation as well. He had things to do, people to chew out and desks to thump. Life doesn't get much better than that.

"Teal'c brought them through," he explained to Janet Fraiser while she extricated herself from the car. She seemed to he having trouble with the seat belt tangling in her jacket. "The rest of the team are lapsing into and out of consciousness. It's a weird situation. Get the details from your medtechs, but I have to tell you, what I heard seems very strange." He paused to gather his wits and his words into some sort of order. 

General Hammond's aide met him at the entrance to the elevator. They stepped inside and selected a button. The lift lowered itself into the bowels of the earth.

"Teal'c seems to be OK, but Jack, Daniel and Sam are in pretty bad shape," Hammond concluded.

"From what I can make out," the aide took up the story for Janet Fraiser's benefit, "there was something unusual going on over there, something new, possibly bad." He turned back to General Hammond. "Teal'c hasn't said much, preferring to wait for your arrival, sir so that he can tell the story in one go I suppose. I didn't tell you this before, but they brought back a body. Teal'c thought an autopsy might be a good idea."

"Did he say why?"

"Just something about confirming Major Carter's theory."

The door opened into a corridor of grey concrete and metal. The three of them stepped out of the elevator and into the corridor. A man in the Marine uniform met them. Major insignia embossing his shoulders.

"Where are they now?" General Hammond asked, "The infirmary," a quick nod, "and Doctor Fraiser…?"

She knew a cue when she heard one. "I'm on my way," she offered.

"Let me know as soon as you know anything. SG-1 or the body. I want to be informed about any and all developments. Our debriefing will be in ten. Can you be there for that as well? Get the Med staff to work on this as a priority." 

"OK," Janet said and disappeared. 

Hammond turned back to the Major who had been looking after the night watch. "Bring Teal'c through to the conference room. It's time to debrief."

*

The debriefing team went about their coffee pouring ritual and found a variety of places to seat them selves.

General hammond inhaled the bouquet that wafted from his cup and sighed. It was his first for the day, after being roused so unceremoniously by the night watch.

Teal'c stepped into the room and took his seat. He features heavily in the events that have unfolded so we should spend a moment to consider him.

Physically, Teal'c is a bulky dark hued man, with a shaven head and a sour expression. He has the overtly bulbous lipped look that bad plastic surgeons might one day slip up and leave on the face of Angelina Jollie or Pamela Anderson when either of them gets her collagen injections updated. He has a gold tattoo in the middle of his forehead. It is a badge of dishonour, telling people (well those who have sufficient security clearance to actually meet him, or those who have an unfortunate affinity for Teal'c plight) about the fact that he is a Jaffa. He has a Goa'uld larvae inside his body. It is symbiotically bound into his nervous system, taking nourishment, and not much else from him any more. A forest of micro-filaments interface the Goa'uld larvae with every function of his nervous system. Teal'c doesn't want it there, because the Goa'uld have a different view on self determination than the opinion held by their hosts, and Teal'c tries extremely hard to aid the medical staff supporting the SGC command in research into the manner of de-Goa'uld-ing Jaffas. 

As you could probably imagine, Teal'c and his symbiont do not get on at all well. You might even describe their relationship as dysfunctional. 

The goa'uld waits inside him and in that dull and dreary environment, it rages at it's own incarceration. We know all about their philosophy, they have published their manifesto in large deeds writ across the stargate network. They was born to rule, to make the decisions, to act like a god and generally make life miserable for those around them for their own ends… Needless to say the one that is lying captive within the confines of Teal'c's nervous system is not happy to be stuck inside a Jaffa who has control of his own body. The Goa'uld has gone quietly nuts in the sensory deprivation chamber that is the inside of Teal'c's body. Their disputes would make a story all by them selves.

One day human medical science (or blindly fumbling witch-doctor-y, depending on your viewpoint on these matters) is going to find a way to get the thing out from inside Teal'c. And Teal'c is going to party big time when it's gone. 

Once upon a time his fantasy of being free of the monster had amounted to wearing a happy expression. He might even have smiled. Later he entertained a desire to dance. He imagined the scene during any quiet moment. There it is on the floor, a thing like a tiny dragon, writhe-ing around on the tiles. First comes one booted foot, then the other and the first is back again, and the second repeats it's dramatic entrance. The little dragon becomes little road kill, a scaly mat with vivid red highlights, stomped to death like an elongated and antisocial cockroach. And still the desecration goes on until the tiles are stained red and there is a terrible job awaiting the cleaners after the party is over. But lately even that vision has not satisfied. Lately he has entertained visions of barbeques. His invited guests would eat steak, and the dogs would eat snake. The only variations on the fantasy were in the preparation. He debated the merits of puree, versus cremation. Both have their attractions. It is a fantasy that Teal'c entertains whenever he has a quiet moment. You can tell when he has one of those by the dreamy smile that crosses his otherwise impassive face.

Teal'c tends to extended silences and has an ingrained ability to stand in one place and stare straight ahead like a statue. The lack-of-activity is known as 'guarding' the universe over and is, with out a doubt, the greatest waste of talent that you could possibly imagine. I mean look at what you have. There, in that shaven pated skull, is one of the most sophisticated, self programming, biological neural-net wet-ware, parallel processors that the universe has ever seen. It was created with the capacity to interface through a series of articulated peripherals that combine manipulative functions with tactile feedback to allow the biological processor to grasp the universe by the throat and wring the life out of it. The Goa'uld recognised the essential kick-ass nature of the organism, it's capacity for universal manipulation and conceptualisation, that's why they chose it as their preferred host, and what do they do with it? They find ways to stand in the one spot and let it lie idle for long periods of time for the sole purpose of guarding things that never get stolen.

While the coffee consumption ritual proceeded around him, Teal'c looked toward Janet Frasier, hoping to find out more about the health (or perhaps otherwise) status of his team. 

She was deeply immersed in a conversation with her second in command, a dialogue facilitated by that wonder of human technology, the interoffice mobile phone hand set. (The reverence and esteem in which humans hold this device is best illustrated by their behaviour when one of them demands their attention. No matter what else is happening around them in that room, they must answer it. They might be in the process of dealing with something of vital importance, or it might be even a life-threatening situation, and still they entertain the overwhelming urge to respond to the thing's plaintive cry for attention, and answer the call. Try it some time. Next time you find a room full of humans, see how they squirm if there is an unanswered telephone.) 

Teal'c raised one eyebrow as a means of inquiry. Janet Fraiser's frown passed briefly. No communications were achieved by that exchange of expressions, but it was a worthwhile attempt at non-verbal communication. With a few years of practise, Teal'c may be able to communicate with pre-schoolers on a non-verbal basis.

General Hammond took a seat, placed a pile of file folders on the table in front of him and called the meeting to order. "Doctor Frasier," he commanded. "You first please…"

He took a sip from his cup and waited.

Janet Fraiser placed her phone on the table beside her and folded her hands in front of her. She leant this behaviour during her time at school, having made her way through that establishment before the more enlightened times that see guns and metal detectors being part of the natural habitat of the educationally motivated. "Colonel O'Neill and Major Carter appear to be stable," she began. "Their vital signs are all weak, and they are still in critical condition, but I see no cause for immediate concern. We are maintaining constant supervision though. Daniel Jackson's condition is still being investigated."

"Do you know what's wrong?"

"Not yet. We're still running tests." She stared up at him with those big gamine eyes of hers. She really does look too young to hold down such a responsible position, so she tried really hard to be serious.

"So you have no idea why this should have affected them and not Teal'c yet?" he demanded.

"I'll know the answer to that in an hour or so," she conceded.

"That soon?" General Hammond nodded; he almost smiled. "That is the best news I've had since this whole mess blew up."

"Thank you, sir."

"The autopsy on the body that Teal'c brought back?"

"Not begun yet," a hint of a smile almost crept onto her face, but she brought it to heel with a quick vision of the consequences of not-taking-this-business-seriously. "It's not as though the cause of death is all that difficult to determine."

"How important is the autopsy?" General Hammond asked Teal'c.

"I would say that was essential to understanding what happened during our last mission," Teal'c offered.

"Doctor Fraiser…"

"I'll get some one to look at that right away," she picked up the phone hand set and stepped away from the table so that she could place the call without disturbing the meeting.

General Hammond watched her for a moment before resuming his attention on the people he had gathered together. "Now we just need to find out what went on over there," General Hammond told everyone, and then he turned to face the burly Jaffa, "From the beginning Teal'c…"


	2. Chapter Two: The Team Arrive

A gigantic circular thing dominated the clearing. It carried the appearance of a carefully machined stone ring. But only the appearance, mind you. Around its periphery its builders had engraved it with runes, strange eldritch shapes that appeared to contain meaning beyond the squiggles that they might have appeared to be to an observer that indulged in just a hasty inspection. 

The ring was about forty centimetres thick and approximately five metres in diameter. 

Its very appearance carried a message of foreboding. If it were a map, the makers would have written 'here be dragons' and they would have been right. But in ways that the ancient cartographers would never have realised. Or even dreamt off for that matter. Not even after sneaking out to the refrigerator in the middle of the night to snack on the left over curry from dinner a couple of nights ago, and then to waking, screaming, afterward with their heart pounding and their sheets soaked with the sweat of fear. Not even then. 

The heavy stone ring rotated slowly within the confines of its stony shroud; finally drawing to a halt with a precision that was impressive in a machine of that size. Something went click with a solid sort of sound that is characteristic of large stone hitting stone, but the note was pure, as though it was made from accurately shaped large stones with remarkably few impurities, oh and a nice line in audio engineering. At equal intervals around the circular stone structure, the builders had arranged stone chevrons that were able to move into and out of mesh with the ring. This motion was executed with a similar machine like precision to that exhibited by the rotation of the ring. One of those had just locked into place while we watched.

One after another, each of the chevrons dropped into position, forming a sequence by landing with a pregnant click that might have signified something satisfying to anyone who happened to be standing around and watching things happen. Luckily there were none of those people things hanging around, so this introduction can take place without any of those inconvenient actions to describe, like what all the people standing around are actually doing. If they all just stood still it might be OK, but they insist in moving and exercising something they call free will and that plays havoc with the exposition phase of the narrative, where we must set the scene. This is especially true when an apparently inanimate object like a giant ring of stone takes it upon it's self to start moving purposefully without any obvious mechanism to do so. If there are people standing around it they react in the most profoundly chaotic manner.

OK, that's out in the open now. We can go back to the task of setting the scene here.

Continuing… 

If the ring had been formed from stone, it should have left a sizeable dent in the dirt… 

Well actually it did. We can see that it did even from this far away. If we move closer we can see that the bottom of the ring was buried about thirty centimetres into the loam, but that could be accounted for by the gradual accretion of dirt that accumulated as a consequence of the ring's disruption of the flow of wind across the plain. OK, that explains what happened there but…

If anyone measured the density of the material from which it had been fashioned, they would have realised that it should have left a sizeable dent in space-time. A negative dent and more aptly named a wormhole by the scientists of Earth, not that there are actual worms involved, except for the Goa'uld - who are vaguely wormy. 

This kind of wormhole is the sort of mathematical extrapolation that dizzy mathematicians make from quantum physical mathematics. The nature of those calculations suggested that exotic matter, that is matter with a negative energy density, could be used to stabilise the boundaries of a wormhole in space-time. 

Try that one on for size. It's a real conceptual stretch.

Is it real? Or is it a figment of the half-arsed and fundamentally flawed oversimplifications that come out of the mathematical models that humans have developed to describe the underlying mechanisms that make up the universe? 

They are good questions and humans do not ask themselves these questions often enough.

As it turns out the answer was actually the former, but the latter was a hell of a sentence. And should remain in this narrative, if only to prove that nonsense can be formed by employing standard words without the grammar checker built into the word-processing software making any kind of objection.

Having established the spatial wormholes are theoretically feasible, we should consider what might happen should a race with sufficient technological prowess attempt to fashion such a device. It might look just like the thing that occupied the centre of the clearing. 

That might be the case if they had a flair for ancient Egyptian imagery, that is. Or was that the other way around? History doesn't record. The winners write history, but they often go away before it gets read. In this instance it is unfortunately true once again, they were not available to interrogate, because you can only have a winning streak for so long before some punk comes along with a new slant on the old game and kicks your complacent ass. Afterwards, it is only your monuments that are left behind and the punks often marvel at them, but really, the only way those who come after you can understand you, is to dig holes and play with your garbage. Sort of makes a mockery of winning, when you think about it, but that's the long view, sentient beings tend to work to a shorter horizon than that. Their attention ranges beyond the instinctive desire to procure their next meal, although they do consider this subject on occasions, but it usually falls short of the reason behind the universe's existence (except for the occasional unwashed and undernourished guru that occasionally turns up on the top of mountains.)

The ring rotated again, slowly, moving in the opposite direction this time. From the ring came a rumble like a grinding wheel lazily crushing cornhusks that accompanied its majestic progress. It was a sound that filled the otherwise expectantly silent clearing with a new and dangerous foreboding. Well it would have been if there was any one there to listen. Those sorts of things have value judgements attached to them, and unless you have the sort of nervous system that responds to those sorts of things, then they are just so much noise in the forest. The ponderous rotation and counter rotation continued remorselessly until a sixth hieroglyphic from among those engraved into the circumference of the giant stony toroid, dropped into place, forming a pattern that ancient Egyptians might have recognised. The key mechanism surrounding the giant circular stone locked with a final robust click. 

There was a pregnant pause; it endured just long enough to lend an air of expectancy to proceedings. It was the sort of precisely fashioned pause that you would expect from any Creator who had a flair for the dramatic. As we shall see later, a flair for the dramatic is just a by-product of the wicked sense of humour that the creator of this universe displayed.

From within the ring, a burst of cloud rocketed almost five metres into the clearing. It swirled malignantly for a second before it retreated equally quickly and formed a shimmering interface that remained suspended inside the stone ring. It looked like the surface of a swimming pool, except it was vertical, and didn't slosh onto the floor. That was a poor piece of camouflage. Any fool could see that was not the sort of behaviour that you would expect from a pool of water.

The silhouette of a man stepped through the interface and surveyed the scene that confronted him. 

Only moments (or aeons depending on which side of the singularity in the equations defining the gate operation you assumed that we approached the mathematical limit from) Colonel Jack O'Neill led the SG-1 team into the stargate and made the disorienting roller coaster ride to the other side. He stepped through the final portal, lurching to a halt on the far side of the interface and then proceeded to stumble clumsily to a halt after a fraught passage of fifteen or twenty metres. He stayed upright this time, so he did a little victory dance and punched the air.

"Yesss!" he said.

Beneath his marine combat helmet, Jack O'Neill's face set in an expression of mild curiosity. It sat well among the other careworn lines that it encountered on his face. Someone once told Jack O'Neill that he looked like a worn out version of the guy who played MacGyver in that woeful old television program. He couldn't see the resemblance himself. And he has tried. A few times he had found himself in front of a mirror making critical assessments of the features nature had provided for him and he has cursed his luck. He was tallish, extravagantly fit for his age, which was middling, his aerobic fitness levels reflecting his active role in stargate exploration. 

O'Neill walked back over to stand beside the stargate, where he had just come through from Earth. We can see the shimmering surface of the event horizon. It glows from within. Illuminated by the leakage of the mighty power it consumes in holding itself open, and back lighting O'Neill so that he appears to be little more than a black interruption in the passage of light. It is such a pity that a visually spectacular display of that nature can go unseen by anyone (except for us of course, but we don't count in this instance).

Only moments (or eons, see previous description of nauseating passage through wormhole.) earlier, Jack O'Neill had been standing below (weeeeell below) a Mountain outside the city of Cheyenne, state of Wyoming in the country called the United States of America on Sol III of the Milky Way (It is important to be specific in these things because there are a lot of places in this little universe and you might get them confused). It was part of a top secret military research facility known as SGC. Guess what - that stood for Star gate Command. Subtle huh?

In the years that followed the stargate's initial discovery, uncovered in an archaeological dig in the back blocks of Egypt, the US government scratched their collective heads and wondered what to do with the thing. In the end they secreted (as in secret, not secrete, that's just a yuck concept in this instance) it beneath the Rocky Mountains outside Cheyenne, hiding it from the world's prying eyes by the simple expedient of burying it in a secured military compound. 

And then they tried to work out what it did. After all if you had found a giant stone ring, deliberately buried beneath the sort of rubble that looked like the reject material from a pyramid brick manufacturing facility, you might wonder why they had gone to so much trouble to hide it and what it might be used for. Especially if you had even the remotest suspicion that it might make a useful piece of martial technology. 

And so the US Military establishment did what they always did, they filled a room with experts in every -ology from archaeology to zoology and gave them the sort of budget that would feed most of Rwanda (or rather fill too many warehouses to count while the rebels prevented the food from getting through to the population they were 'liberating from the tyrannical regime of (_insert latest dictators name here_)') and still have enough left over to cover the third world's debt. 

The investigation team worked out what it was, (a circle of exotic matter. Now that caused some consternation, since many of the scientific community considered that an impossibility. See the previous dissertation on the nature of mathematical modelling applied to the workings of the universe) and they worked out how it worked and all that, but they never came up with a way to control it. 

The ring was somewhat lacking in usefulness, if it couldn't be controlled. 

They suspected the control of the ring had something to do with the runes arranged around the outside, but no amount of cryptographic analysis gave them the answer. They kept looking at it the wrong way. It was like trying to read a map if you thought it was in code, no amount of cryptographic analysis is going to decode the English language. Code needs rules, and we all know how the 'rules' work in English. They didn't need a cryptographer (or twelve) they needed a linguist.

This untenable condition existed until they enlisted Daniel Jackson, one time crackpot archaeological theorist, and now a valued member of the stargate investigation team. 

He was one weird unit. He actually read the stuff. 

It was a language that he understood. 

Language is not cryptography; it's coded into the neural hardware that we carry in our skulls. Bucket loads of it's meaning is carried in the body language, the tone, the tenor and worst of all in the idiom. Here's an example, 'the road to nowhere'; we all know where that leads. Imagine an alien with an English language phrase book trying to work that one out.

Jackson's work was pivotal in the deciphering of the gate runes. And of course his reward for a job well done - was another job and because of that we will hear a lot more about Jackson later. In fact, he is the man who just stepped from the event horizon, and he plays a key role in the rest of this story. 

He picked himself up from where he landed, dusted himself off ineffectually and marched back to stand behind Jack O'Neill. He took in the beautiful day that awaited them. He sucked in enough of the local air to fill both of his lungs. That was not a clever thing to do. There is another thing that needs to be stated at this point regarding Daniel Jackson. He suffers badly from allergies. Hayfever is his life. There he was, in a forest full of plants that used pollen as part of their breeding cycle and he has sucked a huge lung full of the stuff in.

He sneezed - a lot. 

While he suffers, we will continue with the narrative.

Daniel Jackson's PhD was actually taken in Egyptology, and he once upon a time made a living as an archaeologist, but we can forgive him, he can't help his lack of education, or the glaring conceptual gaps in his knowledge base. 

The linguistic skills that make him so valuable to the SGC is sort of a hobby that he added on the side, just something to make the job easier. 

And the job was easy for a while.

Then he went and developed some crackpot theory about the ancient Egyptian monuments being built by aliens. And that made the job difficult. It gets hard to find a job in archaeology when your pet theory conflicts with the pet theory of the old guy with the chequebook.

That was some time ago of course. He is now a valued member of the SGC program, although that was not always the case. Before the runes were translated he was a pariah, a latter day exponent of the theories of Erik van Dannekin. He had discovered evidence that the Egyptians had been enslaved by a race of aliens and further that the pyramids and other giant stonemasonry achievements of their culture were the symbols of these god-like interlopers. Jackson missed out on the vast tabloid sums on offer for crackpot theories; his celebrated predecessor had extracted all of that two decades earlier. Jackson was left with just the ridicule and derision without gaining any of the financial rewards, or even his own short-lived television program. Does any one out there remember 'chariots of the gods'?

It wasn't all doom and gloom. After a few sorry moments, that same theory made his new job easier. You have to understand that the US military didn't have just a theory about the aliens that built the Egyptian monuments. They knew for a fact that humans built the monuments, it was just that they were slaves to a bunch of parasitic aliens. It was a good theory, the one that Jackson developed, and it was almost right.

Naturally the military couldn't have a man who stayed at school until he was twenty five, and spent his time sprouting those sorts of things to anyone who would listen, especially since they were almost true. They had a couple of choices; they could have him shot, or they could hire him on to work for them.

It was a close run thing, but hiring him won them over. 

Since then he has been a vital cog in the great SGC machine, (Oh yeah, there was that thing about the thermonuclear device on Abydos. And the fact that Jackson stayed there with Shar'rea after O'Neill and team blew up the space ship that Ra was flying. And yeah, Jackson only came back when they found out that Ra wasn't the only Egyptian God who was really a Goa'uld, but that Apothis was out there as well. And there was all those others who called them selves system lords and… That'll take all day, so we'll just stop there. Except to tell you that Shar'rea was later kidnapped by the Goa'uld and her body was used to house one of their larvae and then they made her pregnant with a human baby and finally she was killed. Jackson thinks all that sucks and he hates the little wormy bastards more than Teal'c and that is saying something.)

Jackson was seriously pissed off with the Goa'uld by that stage. In fact things have got to the point where Indiana Jones and Lara Croft are not the only archaeologists who carry guns. Jackson doesn't do such a cool line in bull-whips, or look anywhere near as good in the tank-top and shorts combo, but he does a great line in distracted investigation in the face of pressing peril.

He also does great unconsciousness and he also has resurrection down pat as well. He's seen the inside of nearly as many of the Goa'uld sarcophaguses as he has Egyptian tombs.

So that was how he found himself standing in field full of artistically arranged rocks, surrounded by an atmosphere laden with pollen, as part of the exploration team known as SG-1 commanded by Colonel Jack O'Neill. 

Jackson ran his hand through what used to be a foppish hairstyle before he surrendered to US military convention and had it cut shorter. He was wearing glasses, which is not really in keeping with the amount of weaponry slung from his person, but it does add a bookish air to his otherwise threatening military presence, making a fashion statement about the nature of his involvement in the stargate program. Jackson is also tallish, with the boyishly regular features of a man who might have made a career in television news reading if he had been older and done his apprenticeship covering stories in war zones. 

He stares at things with the curiosity of the over educated. If we look closely we can see evidence of that now that he has finished sneezing.

"Well this looks like an exciting jaunt," Jackson commented.

Back where they came from - a small insignificant planet named Earth in all correspondence between the local inhabitants (well a small minority of the inhabitants, but they were the only ones who called it anything. In fact they were the only one's to develop any sort of expressive language. Not that you can draw much in the way of conclusions about a people who name their home planet after 'dirt'. Although, to give them their due, I suppose they did give it a capital letter. That's one thing I suppose) the stargate lay hidden and secure beneath the Cheyenne Mountains. That's the military kind of secure. Nothing turned net nerds on like the idea of a secret military establishment, we've all seen enough movies to know how easy it is for a greasy haired and unshaven pack of failed yuppies to break into the secured servers throughout the world. There is no protocol that is proof against a guy with a modem, a lexicon full of bad jargon and an under-utilised bathroom/laundry. So the SGC had a bit of a problem with electronic security. Physical security, that was another matter. You had more chance of getting into the place from another planet than you did of getting in there from anywhere on Earth. If you've followed all this to it's logical conclusion, then you will have realised that we have the situation where the semi-literate written reports prepared by the Star Gate Command exploration teams find their way onto sites like the one from which you down loaded this story. They get heavily edited by bored high-school students and the occasional university graduate with nothing better to do, so that the document you down load from this site has less of the piss poor grammar, and lousy spelling, but they remain otherwise correct. Meanwhile no one gets in and no one gets out without a presidential order. You have to wonder about the bureaucratic mind, and the Military mind and the scientific mind and the… never mind.

"Lot of nothing, just scrub and forest," O'Neill told Jackson, who didn't need to be told this, possessing as he did a pair of optical sensors of reasonable quality (baring the need for corrective lenses) and he took the same optical data through to the bio-ware processor inside his skull. O'Neill and Jackson also shared a reasonable correlation of conceptual schema, so the observation regarding the nature of the terrain was fatuous and unnecessary. That has never stopped O'Neill from stating the obvious in the past and probably never will, he being too old a dog to learn new tricks regarding his behaviour. 

O'Neill's booted feet were halfway submerged in the soft dirt floor of the clearing. They had been clean and shiny before he stepped though the gate and he was not looking forward to the job of cleaning that gunk off them.

O'Neill turned back to face the stargate, and so doing he looked directly into the optical cloak that protected them for the violent storm of radiation that would otherwise be emitted from the stargate wormhole's event horizon. O'Neill wondered, and not for the first time, just what exactly he was looking at. It had been explained to him, but not having developed the same conceptual schema as the explainee, O'Neill completely failed to grasp the whole explanation. 

He had managed to work out that the Symbols engraved into the circumference of the giant toroidal piece of stonemasonry represented addresses, locations in space where other gates awaited. Inside the circle of runes was a visually disturbing damper/interface, one that was modulated from within the wormhole portal so that it cloaked the event horizon. As we said earlier, it looked like some one had suspended the surface of a swimming pool in the vertical plane. And then the bastards had neglected to tell the water that it should run away and sulk (like it would have done if it had been proper water rather than some half baked alien construct left behind by a bunch of arrogant bastards who only wanted the lesser races that came after them to refer to them as the ancients). At least the Asgards had the common decency to give themselves a proper name. OK so they fashioned themselves as Gods. And they Lorded it over the Norse people as though they really were gods. 

We know all that. 

Hubris is not just a human affliction, all right. We are not alone in thinking we have a divine right to the divine. Yes, other races in this universe suffer from the same thing. OK. We have got that out of the way so we can move forward.

*

"It's just a thought," General Hammond ruminated, "but I think we need not go quite that far back. I'm not quite sure that you understood what I meant when I said I wanted you to start from the beginning." 

Around the table, several other members of the military management were visibly struggling to either stay awake or restrain their natural tendency to tell him to "hurry the hell up," or words to that effect, you know, those ones with a similar number of syllables in the expletive adjective.

There were universal expressions of gratitude displayed all around the table.

Teal'c raised an eyebrow in mute query.

"Let's concentrate on the nature of what you found after you got over there," suggested General Hammond. "Keep to the things that are pertinent."

"Under the circumstances," rumbled Teal'c, "many things may not seem pertinent until we examine them later. I simply felt that it was important that everything is brought out as it occurs. Doctor Jackson has spent many hours explaining the nature of thorough investigation to me."

Around the table, many knowing looks were exchanged. Groans were suppressed. They had all had the misfortune to have one of Daniel Jackson's briefs wheeled into their offices at some stage. As much as the military leadership hated wading through the things, the non-com staff particularly hated carrying the things. At least it sat on a desk (well the volume that you were reading, plus the volume which explained the glossary of terms, the rest waited in the bookshelf glaring at them malignantly). The non-coms had to lug them from Out-tray to In-tray, because the secretarial staff refused to try.

"Perhaps we should try to use the Samantha Carter model of investigation and reporting," suggested General Hammond.

Teal'c nodded in understanding. "I have spent many hours gaining an understanding of her methods of operation as well."

*

"Ah, primeval landscape, type II," commented Jackson. 

To Jack O'Neill's discerning eye, there seemed to be two types of landscapes on the far side of a stargate. Those are best characterised as trees and scrub, or sand and dunes.

"I think we did that one already," O'Neill said dryly. Most things of the things that O'Neill said were said dry. He could tell you it was raining and it would sound dry. That is because the style of his vocal delivery has something to do with his long career in military, or it might have been the fact that his son died accidentally while playing with O'Neill's gun, or lots of other things, that only confuse the issue and in no way explain the behaviour. Most of the people who knew him concluded that his vocal delivery style could simply be a result of the way his sense of humour was wired up and there ain't nothing that can be done about it. Some people are just like that. Hey it takes all kinds and he was certainly of the classification: kind, one of.

We should note that Teal'c and Daniel Jackson came through the stargate portal almost simultaneously. 

We have already met Teal'c in this narrative, we need not labour his description again. He stepped up to join the conversation between O'Neill and Jackson.

"Hmm," said Teal'c and then lapsed into silence while the other two waited for him to speak. He gets no invitations to speak after dinner. Lets' face it, after a four course dinner you need a rousing orator if you are going to avoid falling asleep in the remains of your dessert, so that sort of long pause is going to be extremely annoying. Teal'c does not care. He is happy with that aspect of his personality, because it beats the hell out of the life he led before joining the SGC team. At least now he gets to walk around and talk to people.

Teal'c and Jackson stood beside Jack O'Neill, (standing in the moist loam). They turned back toward the stargate and waited. Only three-quarters of the team had come through the gate as yet. For once the straggler was not Daniel Jackson, who had more ways to delay a departure through the gate than a Russian Airline.

After a pause, while they all stood around like a stale reception committee with something better to do, one more person came through the portal. Major Samantha Carter was the straggler, but we will forgive her tardy timekeeping because she was worth the wait. In that respect she has a lot in common with Janet Fraiser.

Let's watch Samantha Carter for a sec, because the three male members of SG-1 were doing that, and besides, there's not much else going on. Watching Carter is a common pastime in the SGC compound. It has something to do with the way human male's neural pathways are configured. In order to optimise the development of the species and ensure the best genetic mixing, there is a geometric affiliation between the male attention span and their idea of the optimum female anatomical arrangement. Geneticists are considering a theory related to the geometric spiral found in nature with the aspect ratio of 1:1.618. It seems to be linked to the nature of DNA and the gene complexes that form the basis of all life on Earth. Carter has commonly regarded as the best combination of those traits in the SGC compound, narrowly winning the admiration contest over Janet Fraiser because Carter is a bit taller than the auburn haired medic. So watching her walk through the event horizon and across the now trampled patch of loam is not going to be such a great hardship, so there was probably no need to remind you to do so. 

As for the true Samantha Carter, the reasoning and cogitating consciousness that is supported by that biological containment system that just happens to have that optimum structural arrangement, she has an impression of her own worth that far exceeds the narrow bounds of the male mating cataloguing system by which she is often judged (favourably). She has a PhD in physics but you could never tell the extent of her impact on the male of the species from that observation. 

It is such a crass understatement, but Carter was a handsome woman. She was still somewhere in the early phases of the transition from young to the 'uncertain age' of female matriarchal hierarchy. For the adult male of the species that is the time when a woman has her greatest appeal. 

The degree to which Samantha Carter was physically attractive was something of which Jack O'Neill was uncomfortably aware, despite her blonde hair now being cut relatively short, and crushed beneath a combat helmet that looked one size too large for her, and her unfortunate dress sense. Military clothing comes in two sizes (too big and too small). Carter seems to be afflicted with some sort of condition that ensures that she can only ever find a quartermaster who only ever has the too-small size in stock, and it fits her like a glove. Little does she know that money exchanges hands among the non-coms to ensure that this state of affairs continues.

Ethically, she is purely Earth based military like O'Neill and also like O'Neill she was overloaded with malevolent gear when she stepped through the gate. She carried a gun; she had a knife and grenades on the webbing around her waist. Her helmet crushed her hair into a shaggy fringe that protruded around the edges. Her combat fatigues moulded themselves to a shape that was worth a second look, especially if you like them with metallic objects of malevolent intent clipped and stashed all over her person. That group includes most of the SCG non-coms and all of the males among the officer cadre.

OK, we have a complete team now.

*

"Perhaps we should cut to the investigation Teal'c," suggested General Hammond. "this has been a wonderfully detailed exposition."

What was really going through his head was a comparison between the length and effort involved in this briefing and the task of herding thirteen year olds into the bus for a football match. General Hammond thought the latter might have taken less time, and less effort.

Teal'c took a sip from the glass of water that some one had provided for him.

"I don't know about the rest of you," began Colonel Makepeace. "But it's only," he checked his watch, "six forty four and I am in need of another cup of coffee."

General Hammond handed him his empty cup. "Carry on Teal'c," he said.


	3. The Team discover the value of bridges

The gate made a sound like a vacuum cleaner clogging and the watery looking interface was gone. The members of SG-1 weren't trapped on this distant side of a wormhole that no longer existed (or ever did depending on your view of reality. If it's not in this universe does it exist at all? Is a tunnel through the fabric of the universe real? Physicists will argue about that for years and make no sense at all. I mean how can you take something seriously when the fundamental assumptions about it begin with analysis using imaginary numbers?)

The four of them fanned out and looked around. Samantha Carter took a soil sample, by placing it in a little jar. Jack O'Neill continued to take soil samples by collecting them on his boots.

They nodded happily. There were no surprises and the place looked just like the video that their little robotic fiend recorded when it came through for a brief sojourn a day or so earlier. Unlike NASA's remote probe, this little roving sojourner managed to avoid colliding with the first rock it came near. It missed that one completely, by turning at right angles and colliding with the second one.

"Doesn't appear to be any one here, Jack," commented Daniel Jackson.

"Nope," agreed Colonel Jack O'Neill of the SGC.

This is what they saw. The stargate was surrounded by rocks and grass. That was familiar. The terrain surrounding about half of the gates they went through could be described in much the same way. The Goa'uld who had sampled terrestrial ecology, had very limited taste in their ecological decorations.

Further away, they saw a lot of trees. Conifers to be precise. Further into the distance was a woody slope that became escarpments at greater altitude. SG-1 appeared to have emerged in a valley surrounded by seriously craggy mountains.

"So where do we go?" Carter asked O'Neill.

"Well our instructions were pretty vague," O'Neill replied.

"'Find out what's going on and return home' is not really all that specific no," commented Jackson. As was his want he spoke slowly, like a personal computer running windows (any version) which thinks it's a multi-tasking environment, when really all that is happening is that the program doing the talking is only getting a small portion of the available processing power, and it sounds like it to the outsider. Jackson was already itching to go exploring for whatever ancient culture the Goa'uld had deposited on this planet, and that planning routine was the piece of software that was hogging the processor and all the available RAM at the moment.

Of course they did not know that this was a Goa'uld colonial development. Jackson just hoped that they had emerged inside another Goa'uld project, because the alternative was going to be pretty boring.

There's not a lot of archaeology in a forest full of trees, supported by a fleet of symbiotic insects, bacterium and viruses.

*

"Teal'c," General Hammond suggested with exaggerated patience. "We might move on to what you encountered when you moved further afield."

General hammond noticed the cup that Colonel Makepeace had left on the table beside the General's elbow. He took a sip and then wondered to himself what the drink had been before the cat drank it, processed it and then later discharged it through another, much smaller bodily orifice.

Teal'c nodded his understanding. Normally these post rout briefings were handled by the still upright and lucid from among the other three members of the SG-1 team. They had a lot more experience in the matter and usually at least one of them was conscious when they came back through the gate. It had to happen sooner or later, but Teal'c had never realised how difficult it was to deliver these things on an ad hoc basis.

He assembled his thoughts and began again.

*

SG-1 battled onward through the undergrowth and the rampant insect life. They were bitten, scratched and sapped on before they were a kilometre into the journey. Trees and scrub seemed to be actively impeding their progress.

"There's always been something that worried me about the Stagate," O'Neill said to Teal'c. They were sort of leading the movement through the underbrush at that moment, and striding side by side. "You hung around with the Goa'uld for a bit and they used the things pretty extensively, maybe you can answer the question."

"And what is that Colonel?" Being asked a direct question about his past was a rarity and Teal'c raised a single eyebrow in wonderment.

"Well, we know how big they are?" O'Neill drifted into his query, allowing Teal'c time to translate and catch up.

"Yes."

"What I want to know is what use could they possibly be?"

"I do not think I understand the context of the question." Teal'c very nearly raised both eyebrows at that one.

"Well, it struck me that they were too small and too slow to be any use as a transport medium. I mean ours is flat out handling the traffic from a dozen exploration teams. As a means of commercial transport they would be incredibly useless. Think about it. You have to transport the thing a zillion miles to the next star, and then you go to all the trouble to set it up and then what do you do? You put down a thing that's about the size of a kid's bedroom wardrobe. I mean what use is it being that small? If it were big enough to drive a train through, then I could understand, but…You know it would make more sense if you carried the little one to the next star and then expanded it once you got it there. You know send the bits through one at a time and then build a much bigger one."

Teal'c walked on in silence for a while. O'Neill respected his need to think about the query.

Finally Teal'c said. "So what is your question?"

"Nothing," O'Neill sighed. "I was just thinking out loud."

They pushed on through the underbrush.

"It would be nice to come across a conveniently placed roadway," moaned Daniel Jackson. "Or a track or a walking trail or maybe even just a dry river bed."

"Funny you should suggest that Daniel," said O'Neill with a mockingly serious note tinging his voice.

"Why? What have you found?"

"A river bed."

Jackson pushed through the bush to catch up to O'Neill.

"Trouble is," O'Neill continued, "that it isn't dry yet. In fact there's quite a river sort of meandering through it." 

And around one of O'Neill's legs. That is seriously going to effect his spit and polish.

The flow of water took care of the dirt on that particular boot but looked likely to give O'Neill the unique experience of walking in wet socks.

SG-1 crowded closer to have a look. Anything besides trees would be a welcome sight. The river looked little more than a wet interruption to the ever present trees though. The water was covered almost completely by a chaotic arrangement of water lilies. They were almost as dense as the grass covering in the clearing where the gate had been placed. It was that very lack of apparent water surface that led to O'Neill's soggy sock.

He pulled his leg out of the water and shook a few stray lily leaves off his boot.

"Oh, that might be bad," agreed Jackson tentatively.

"Yep," O'Neill agreed, and frowned at his now wet, but still partially muddy boot. "Looks pretty deep as well."

"Should we try to Fjord it?" Samantha Carter asked. Her arrival at the water's edge caught Daniel Jackson completely by surprise and almost gained him a pair of wet boots to match the one currently worn by Jack O'Neill.

"We could," O'Neill mused to himself, "we could, but then we could walk along the river a ways and see if we could find a bridge somewhere."

"Why would there be a bridge?" Teal'c asked. Teal'c eyebrow was up, as was his want when he was asking question. It was a sort of mocking physical piece of punctuation. 

Teal'c stepped up to join the rest of SG-1 and his proximity disturbed Daniel Jackson's precarious balance on the edge of the river. Jackson's arms windmilled for a moment until her regained his balance. He rocked and he jerked a few times and finally managed to right himself. The splash we heard was O'Neill being knocked into the water once again. Filling his other boot with water.

"Thanks Daniel," he said in a tone that completely lacked sincerity.

"About the bridge idea…" Teal'c prompted. Jackson's and O'Neill's actions had rather sidetracked the conversation for a moment.

"There might not be," O'Neill conceded while he climbed back onto the bank of the river, "but I don't have a better idea."

"Which way?" asked Jackson. "Up stream or down stream, that is the question."

"Actually I think it was 'to be or not to be'" suggested Teal'c.

"Is there a reason why there might be a village in one direction over another?" Carter asked O'Neill.

"Yeah that may be the case," Jackson agreed with Teal'c. "But it doesn't help us find a bridge."

"I don't know," conceded O'Neill. "We might look in the river and see if there's any signs of human habitation in the water."

"Or a bee," said Teal'c.

"What?" asked Jackson. He had been trying to listen to both the conversation he was having with Teal'c and the one between Jack and Sam at the same time and wasn't following either very well. He looked across at Teal'c and wondered for a moment what they had been talking about. Teal'c wore an expression that was slightly off centre of impassive, which might have meant anything if O'Neill had worn it, but signified an expectation of a humorous response when Teal'c wore it. It was not worn often.

"Sewerage?" asked Carter. 

"That was a joke Daniel Jackson," Teal'c said. "I am practising the delivery of Tau'ri humour."

"Why?" Jackson asked.

"Just signs of rubbish would be enough," said O'Neill, "any thing to suggest that people had been here and used the river."

"Because you all seem to do it at some time," Teal'c persisted. "Especially in times of stress, and I felt that it would help in the development of my personality."

"So where do you get your inspiration? Not from Jack I hope."

"If there's no rubbish then the village must be down stream," Carter concluded.

"No," Teal'c answered. "I have a book called 101 jokes for all occasions. It is published by the Reader's Digest Corporation."

"Or… they're really clean," O'Neill told Carter.

"Thanks for the warning," Jackson told Teal'c. "There's not much chance of a clean old civilisation," he said to Jack and Sam completely confusing Teal'c who had not been following both conversations.

"Well if you two are finished discussing lame jokes?" O'Neill reminded them of their plight in a much louder voice. "We should head up stream."

"I thought we just concluded that if there was no rubbish we should head down stream," Carter complained.

"Haven't you smelt this river?" O'Neill said sardonically.

"Oh is that what it is?" Carter asked as the idea dawned on her. She had just begun the entertain the idea that it wasn't the smell of three unwashed male bodies that she could smell, but might be the smell of more than three, and washing in the water was not the only use they made of the river.

And to think that Jack O'Neill had stepped in it. Yuck!

*

"Was there any thing there Teal'c?" General Hammond asked with exaggerated patience. "You were sent over there to find signs of life and some how SG-1 finished up a medical emergency. What signs of life did you find?"

Teal'c nodded. "Ah certainly General Hammond…"

*

"OK. It's a horse," said O'Neill. "I can also make that identification, Daniel. Horse, equine animal. Found all over the world and heavily domesticated."

The SG-1 team were huddled beneath the branches of a large tree and hidden from the horse's view by a heavily leaved branch. By now SG-1 had dispensed with their helmets and had twigs in their hair. After several hours on the march they also had a bad case of BO from all that effort carrying their field packs on their backs.

"Exactly," Daniel Jackson said with exaggerated patients. "On earth."

"Yep."

"This isn't Earth." He made a tah-dah gesture with his hands. 

It was wasted on O'Neill. 

Jackson did it again. 

A light came on inside O'Neill's head. It was a feeble sort of glow, like a torch trying to fill a room, but it was there all the same. Jackson had one of his charitable moments and conceded that O'Neill might have latched onto the idea after all.

"Oh so that was what the business was with the funny lights and the cold. I have only just now realised what it was all about. We're somewhere else," O'Neill said, not restraining the tendency he had toward sardonic, neigh, sarcastic humour.

"Yeah, to a place where horses are not a native species."

"OK. I'll go along with that."

"Then this is a human settlement, and there would be Goa'uld here."

"OK, I can wear that as a working hypothesis."

Teal'c had given up with the eyebrow raising by this stage. O'Neill wasn't watching for one thing and Teal'c had gotten used to the idea of O'Neill and his expanded vocabulary since he had taken to ready lately. Must be part of growing old, he thought.

*

"Perhaps I wasn't specific enough, Teal'c," General Hammond conceded. By this stage of the narrative, General Hammond really wanted to place his head in his hands and have a good scream. "What happened when you encountered the human settlement?"

"Ah that…" began Teal'c.

To the unbridled joy of the entire debriefing team, Teal'c was interrupted by the ringing of a mobile phone. Everybody in the room went through that newly developed ritual of searching through their pockets for their phones and surreptitiously checking to see if they were the ill mannered swine who had left their phone switched on. None of them had. It was actually the phone that Janet Frasier had brought into the conference room, just in case there was a change in the condition of the SG-1 team members currently in the care of her department. 

The entire conference room full of inhabitants looked her way. We can tell by the sickly looks on their faces, that pasty expression that comes when all of the blood finds another place to be, somewhere other than the little capillary blood vessels in the skin of their face, that they are not happy to be receiving information through that particular source at that moment. If no-news is good news, then the corollary might also be true, and any news is not good news.

Janet Fraiser picked up the phone and answered it, reluctantly.

Everybody listened into the conversation, well half of it anyway.

"Frasier here," she said, all official and suitably professional. It was a cover of course. What she really wanted to say was, "yeah, what?"

There was a delay while the phone filled her ear with information that the rest of the room's occupants were not privy to.

"How long has this been going on?" she asked the little assembly of electronic components that was talking to her ear.

Then there was another delay.

"I'll be right down," she said finally. She snapped the phone closed and cut the connection with a bitter flourish. The room full of military peacocks took a clue from her demeanour, she wasn't carrying bad news… just news.

"Good news?" General Hammond asked, there was a hopeful note to his voice.

Janet Frasier turned to look at him carefully. "Daniel woke for a few moments," she said "He wasn't lucid. He mumbled a few things and then lapsed back into the coma."

"What did he say? Anything?"

"Oh no! It's the accountant!" she replied softly. "And then he just screamed."

A wry smile appeared on General Hammond's face. "Perhaps it's time to promote than man to line management," he commented dryly. "Nothing else?"

"No,' she shook her head, "sorry."

"Pity," he muttered.

"I should go down and supervise."

"Will you be able to add anything to the work?"

"Possibly."

"I think it best if you hear what caused it in the first place. It might aid in the work later on."

Janet considered that for a moment and then agreed.

"Carry on Teal'c" General Hammond said after a heavy sigh. "You were going to tell us about the human settlement…"

*

"It's a village," said Teal'c. He rested on the top of a little hillock and looked out over a scattering of thatched roof huts and humpies. Smoke issued from rough chimneys that sprouted from the roof of over half of the huts like mushrooms. Goats and cows roamed aimlessly in the space between huts, leaving neat little piles of fertiliser on the ground. It looked far from clean. The river slinked past the huts and tried to get through the environs without being sullied, and failed dismally.

"Sort of I suppose," conceded O'Neill. "I hope that's not the hight of civilisation on this planet."

"We need to get closer so we can hear what they say and work out what language it is that they speak," Jackson said.

"Best idea I suppose," O'Neill agreed. He nodded and waved them back into the lee of the hillock so that the entire team could confer.

Jackson was a bit worried. He had agreed with O'Neill a lot today. It was getting scary.

"I've got a plan," said O'Neill.


	4. Chapter Four: Dr Frazier faces an unusua...

Daniel Jackson stepped out into the middle of the road and waited for the next cart to trundle his way.

The members of SG-1 had heard it coming, creaking and grinding along the road. Daniel was elected, being the one among them with the most facility in languages. He stood in the middle of the road and tried to look un-threatening. The sound of the whipped reins carried to him in the almost ethereal silence of the forest.

Daniel waited patiently, spending his time by trying to work out what Earth based society supplied the root-stock on this planet. He reviewed the cart design and the colours in the man's clothing. He considered the colouring of the man's skin and his hair and he also noted that he turned the cart down a side road and failed to come any closer.

"Damn," muttered Jackson.

*

Jack O'Neill watched the approaching cart with interest. So far, they had seen two of them come along that road and they had both turned off before they could make their past where SG-1 were camped. They were few and far between.

SG-1 had settled in for the wait and even broke out their rations, taking advantage of the time they had on their hands for a spot of lunch. 

The cart that O'Neill had spotted was still some way short of the turn off yet. It would probably follow the others, but you never knew.

"What have you got?" O'Neill asked Daniel Jackson.

Jackson opened his sandwich and catalogued the contents. "Salmon, mayonnaise, lettuce, cheese, tomato, and a bunch of green and yellow things that I can't identify. What have you got?"

O'Neill stared at a sandwich that seemed to be cheese and gherkin. "The short straw," he said. Perhaps there was something in the cart. He peered over his shoulder. It was still a ways short of the turn off yet. "I'll swap you," he offered Jackson.

"That was a good try," conceded Jackson and then bit into his own sandwich.

O'Neill turned his attention to Samantha Carter. "What have you got Sam?"

"Hrmph, gnaphfl," she said around a mouth full of grilled ham and pineapple in a savoury bun. "Amdfl myfn."

"Teal'c," O'Neill asked.

"Chicken salad," Teal'c said. His lip curled up at the sight.

"Damn," said O'Neill who was still contemplating which was worse, hunger or gherkin. Hunger still looked like a good option.

"Would you like to have it," Teal'c said. His lip wouldn't come back down out of his sneer until he closed the lid on his sandwich. "The idea of consuming flesh is repulsive."

"Each to their own," said O'Neill hurriedly and almost snatched the sandwich out of Teal'c's hand. He took a bite that was almost the size of half of the first triangle he managed to get near his mouth. "Goob paff gooff," he said.

Teal'c settled down to consume his sandwich with a more subdued expression on his ebony face.

O'Neill hadn't checked on the progress of his cart for a while. He glanced over his shoulder to see where it was up to.

It passed the turn off and continued on in the direction of SG-1.

O'Neill considered punching the air, but restrained himself when he thought how it would look to the others under his command.

"I suppose that I'll speak to the goatherd over there on the cart," Daniel Jackson said. He was about to put the unconsumed half of his sandwich back on the ground near where they were sitting and then saw the expression on O'Neill's face. He had second thoughts.

"The what?" O'Neill said.

"The cart? Down there. Can't you see it?"

"No. The other word. Goatherd?"

"Oh that? Job peasants used to do once. They herded goats. It's hardly something that needs a room temperature IQ to work out."

With that behind them, Daniel stepped onto the road and began waving at the man driving the cart. He still had his sandwich in one hand and took another bite.

It took the man about a second to spot Jackson, sum up the plethora of weaponry suspended on his person, note the dishevelled and dirty appearance of the man and then put two and two together. The cartwright worked out that it was a bandit. He heaved on the reins and implored the horse to accelerate along the roadway so that they could avoid the meeting.

Naturally the horse thought this was a great time to rear up and wave it's fore hooves about threateningly.

Daniel Jackson might have had guns hanging off either side of him, but his first reaction upon seeing half a tonne of horse intent on stomping him into the gravel was to dive for the underbrush. He acted on the impulse without further thought. He landed with a heavy thump that knocked the wind out of his lungs and caused his diaphragm one of those convulsions that make it difficult to draw your next breath.

The cart rocketed past his position with a rumble and a rattle, bouncing uncontrollably for a while, until the horse got it's rhythm back. It rounded the bend in the road and dropped a crate full of melons onto the gravel, where most of them broke into red fleshed watery shrapnel. Of course one of them remained intact and it rolled all the way back along the road until it came to rest against Jackson's foot.

Throughout the frantic flight, Jackson had not noticed the melon catastrophe, being occupied with the difficult task of jump starting his breathing again and it was left to Jack O'Neill to kick the melon away. Of course it smashed open onto his boot thus adding its syrup to the rest of the road dirty that was marring his spit and polish.

O'Neill thrust a hand toward Daniel Jackson and said, "I think that went about as well as could be expected."

Jackson looked down at the wreckage of his sandwich, lying scattered all over the road, and frowned in disappointment.

*

The phone that Janet Fraiser had so negligently left resting on the table beside her, rang a second time, thus interrupting the flow of Teal'c narrative just when it had started getting interesting. She had the good grace to look embarrassed.

Every one loves a good pratfall and that was one of the best. All eyes in the room whipped around to glare at the telephone malevolently.

"Answer it Doctor Fraiser," General Hammond instructed. 

She had been wearing one of those 'I can't believe this is happening to me expressions' that people wear after they forgot to turn their phone off when they were boarding the plane and it rings half way along the runway.

She listened to the blowfly voice on the other end for a moment and then her eyes sprang open wide. "You're sure?" she asked, breathlessly.

She waited a bit longer while the fly-voices in her ear rattled on a bit more about something that no-one else could make out. The entire conference room's compliment of military brass waited on her words, hanging there with bated breath. There were eight people in that room and you could have heard a pin drop. (And they still couldn't make out what the voice on the other end of the phone was talking about no matter how hard they tried.)

"I'll be right down," Janet Fraiser said finally, before she closed the phone.

"News?" General Hammond implored.

"That was the medical monitoring team," she said simply. "They've found a major anomaly."

"Find out the details and let me know as soon as you know what is going on."

Janet gathered her phone and excused herself from the table.

"Carry on Teal'c," General Hammond suggested.

*

Daniel Jackson tried first contact, a second time, but without the weaponry this time. Things went much better. 

He faced another cart full of goats, except this time there were no melons hiding back there. The cart contained five goats, smelling up the local environment and looking around at the world with an expression on their face that said, man-this-place-is-complicated---they-expect-us-to-breathe-and-eat-at-the-same-time---bummer. They stared at Jackson for a while before deciding that he wasn't edible, and then went back to their major preoccupation, converting food into fertiliser.

The goatherd pulled his cart to a halt and gave a visible start. To Daniel Jackson it looked as though the man hadn't seen him step onto the road. The horse had stopped the cart before the man had reacted. Obviously the brains of the outfit was in control of the vehicle. And there it was, standing indolently at the front of the cart, the horse regarded Jackson with an expression that seemed to have more intelligence behind it than the man holding the reins. For his part, the rein holder stared at Jackson as though waiting for him to do something amusing. They regarded each other from a distance of five metres for a while. No one spoke.

Jackson wasn't sure what language he should try first. Something European, Russian perhaps?

The goatherd appeared to be debating how it was possible for a person, one that he did not recognise, to exist in the world. He had the sort of inbred look that you would expect from someone with that approach to life. His eyes were too close together, his ears were too far apart, his forehead sloped back from his eyes and his teeth had long since begun finding other places to live.

For good measure, the horse commented on the situation by dropping a load of fertiliser onto the roadway. The air was that little bit thicker and hay fever was a viable option for Daniel Jackson. It was a great pity because he had been blessedly free of allergic reactions for the last hour or so, since his antihistamine tablets had kicked in.

From nowhere a flock of flies appeared. They made a fly-line for the new batch of fertiliser, except for the one that decided the investigation of Daniel Jackson was a much better idea.

"Hello," Daniel Jackson called to the man behind the reins of the cart. He felt the need to sneeze growing as a tickling at the back of his head.

The man's brain took a few moments to catch up with current events. It would not be unfair to say that he would need to watch CNN all day every day, to catch up with what day it was. Assimilating news required another plane of intelligence altogether.

He stared at Jackson suspiciously, but at least he hadn't run away. It was a major step forward in the development of Jackson's interpersonal skills.

His mouth dropped open, as though he was about to speak, and then he stopped, consulted the manual on the use of vocal chords, and tried to puzzle the whole process out. The index proved a significant challenge.

Jackson held his hands up in what he hoped was the universal gesture of surrender, or at least and attempt to convey the whole, 'see I'm unarmed and my hands are where you can see them' speech without resorting to words. The guy had obviously not seen an Arnold Shwazenegger or Bruce Willis movie, because if he had, then he would not have relaxed upon seeing this, knowing that the guy must surely have a gun strapped to his back somehow.

"**What do you want sir**?" demanded the man in the cart. He obviously lacked the brains to be suspicious about all the metal that had been hanging off Daniel's webbing. With another brain, he might be dangerous. This is what he was thinking; Jackson didn't have a knife or a sword or a cross bow so he couldn't be a bandit. That was the sort of logic this guy used. They hadn't had any of those things when Jackson and O'Neill took out Ra. 

They did have a five kilotonne nuclear explosive though.

The language the goatherd used was familiar to Jackson. It was a variant on German, probably rooted in Romania, or perhaps Hungary, from sometime in the early Middle Ages. It had diverged from the root, but only slightly. Yet another sign of the Goa'uld, Jackson thought. Continuity of language was a trait of more developed civilisation than they had seen any signs of so far.

"**We seek directions**," Daniel hazarded.

The cart-riding goatherd seemed puzzled by Daniel's awful pronunciation. His mouth moved while he translated it into German from garbled.

"**Whence to sir**?" He asked.

"**Your local lords abode**," suggested Daniel.

This was the sort of thing the goatherd was hoping for, an opportunity to refer this little conundrum to a higher authority. It had just started to dawn on him that speaking with a stranger on the road might not have been a good idea when it came to the self preservation stakes, and that there were ways to fashion weapons that need not use highly stresses pieces of timber.

"**Atop yon hill sir**," suggested the cart man.

"**And, ah, how far would it be**?"

"**That would depend on the manner of your transport sir**."

"**Afoot**?"

"**Why that would take ye most of a day sir. I would offer you the use of my cart, should I be travelling that way, but as you can see I am not**." And have no intention of doing so for you, was implied by his body language.

"**Then we had best be on our way then**," Jackson agreed.

"**There be a group of you then sir**?" the goatherd managed to work that out from the use of a collective pronoun, thus producing an extraordinary feat of cogitation given the processing equipment that he had been issued by genetic chance.

"**Some, yes**."

"**Then there is not such a need for my warning, but I give it to you freely. Be careful as you go sir. Those woods are full of daemons and nightwalkers. A man alone is much at risk. I would not be out at night if I were you. Be on your guard should you still be on the trail after dark**."

Daniel Jackson was an archaeologist. There was probably no curse that it is possible to mouth, or no obscure warning about monsters that could be uttered, that he had not been told, read or suffered at some time in his life. He grinned to himself before asking; "**Of what manner of monsters do you refer**?" He asked.

The goatherd gathered himself back to together after taking a long look into the depths of the woods. "**Daemons, and night walkers as I said sir. They are a bad lot sir, not behoved to the laws of man are they. They answer to our Lord and that only barely. When he sleeps they are free to roam and they are the devils own spawn**."

OK so that was nothing new, thought Jackson.

"**Thank you for the advice. Good day to you**."

The cart rolled drunkenly along the road heading slowly in the direction that SG-1 did not want to go.

*

Teal'c paused and took another sip from the glass by his side. He looked at General Hammond in mild inquiry, hoping for guidance on the manner of his story telling.

General Hammond nodded acquiescence.

Everyone enjoys a good campfire and a ghost or demon story (even if it is spelled with an 'a') and the entire conference room team had perked up at the possibility. Everyone knows that a story that includes a peasant making dire warnings in first contact means that the team will scoff at the idea and march ignorantly onward toward certain difficulties.

Inside the conference room where Teal'c held his audience in the palm of his hand, knowing looks were exchanged. There's an element of suspense missing in this instance of course because the debriefers already knew that bad things happened to the SG-1 team. For them the mystery centred around what it might have been that befell them.

A few of them sat up and paid more careful attention.

"Go on Teal'c," prompted General Hammond.

*

Daniel Jackson stared after the man and his cart for a moment. Well actually what he did was stare at the empty roadway and the lingering dust, but in his mind's eye he was still reviewing the conversation, and little things like the signal that his brain was receiving from his ocular sensory organs were being ignored for the moment. Jackson was digesting the information and tasting the nature of the warning. "Daemons?" he asked himself out loud. "Goa'uld perhaps?"

It seemed likely. He rubbed his hands together. Now they were talking.

As soon as the cart was out of sight, Jack O'Neill stepped from the underbrush and up to Jackson. He waited for a moment for Jackson to return to the real world. People who dealt with Jackson on a regular basis have developed a unique set of skills in the art of patiently waiting for Daniel to notice that you are there and are keen to interact. O'Neill employed his version of those skills, he whomped Jackson a big one on the shoulder, almost knocking him off his feet.

"What did he say?" O'Neill asked.

"He said there was a castle up that way," Jackson replied, putting his glasses back on the bridge of his nose with one hand while simultaneously pointing along the road from which the cart had rolled toward them, "and the lord lived there."

"All that," O'Neill said and waved his arms around, encompassing the cart and the world and the road and the long conversation between Jackson and the goatherd, "for that?"

Jackson had allocated more of his processing power to the conversation with Jack O'Neill realising that the input/output buffer was filling up while the processor was busy running a speculating routine with the goatherds warning as the seed for it's simulation study. He even managed to focus on Jack O'Neill's face and give a passable impersonation of someone who cared what O'Neill thought and what he had to say. "Well no, there was warnings about monsters and demons and other things that went bump in the night."

"You get that," O'Neill said and nodded his head sagely. "It seems to happen everywhere we go."

"He seemed very insistent," Jackson said. His tone was disquieted. Inside the nasty confines of his head, the simulation routine had finished delivered it's preliminary findings. The output method it chose to convey the results of that study was to produce stomach acid and make Jackson's bowels twitch. This combination of sensory impressions leaves the recipient with the impression that bad things are coming their way. Metaphorically speaking of course. It's the job of the optical sensors to let the central processing unit know that something physical was actually approaching, although the audio receptors have been known to undertake this task from time to time.

O'Neill gave him one of those 'god how can you credit this crap' kind of looks. "Wild animals?" he asked. "Renegade Goa'ulds?"

Samantha Carter and Teal'c stepped out of the undergrowth and stood on the track to better hear the conversation between Jackson and O'Neill. They weren't eavesdropping, they wanted to join in.

"I suspect he actually meant wild animals," Jackson agreed. "He suggested getting a move on so that we get there before dark and then, to be on our guard."

"Sounds good to me," O'Neill agreed. "Sound plan, OK, let's move it."

"Not like the Goa'uld to allow another organism to be competition to their slave species," Carter observed. "If the lord is a Goa'uld, he wouldn't leave any thing out there that might interfere with his slaves."

"I got the impression that the system lords are not so well in charge here," Jackson said.

"They do not alter their methods for any one Daniel Jackson," Teal'c judged.

"In what way?" Carter persisted, posing the question to Jackson.

"Only vague references," Jackson said. "Nothing really concrete. It's just that the locals seem to think of them as, you know, slightly better than human, not as gods as you normally hear them described. The description was no more awestruck than any peasant in a feudal society."

"Perhaps they're not the same," O'Neill said. "Perhaps we're not talking about Goa'ulds."

"Oh, come on Jack," Daniel said. "Look around you. They're as human as you and me. Only the Goa'uld carried men to other stars to act as their hosts. Why else would they be here?"

O'Neill nodded, agreeing again. It was disconcerting. "OK."

"Shouldn't we be moving?" asked Carter.

"Yep let's go," O'Neill instructed.

SG-1 set forth.

*

Janet Faiser paused for a moment before commencing the autopsy. She refused to look at the body on the table. It had already upset her composure more than she wanted to let on.

She pulled the second of her latex gloves on with a snap, giving her two layers on each hand. She was dressed in a environmental isolation suit, and breathed air from a medical air supply delivered from a bulk pressure cylinder behind one of the walls. 

It always paid to be careful when you were dealing with alien organisms.

OK, she was ready. Her assistant was poised by the table. Her shiny stainless steel and nickel plated implements were arranged in neat little rows beside the table. She stepped over and pulled the microphone down from the ceiling.

"Subject 119. Delivered from planet," she had to check her notes to find out what they were calling this one, it was the same unimaginative P4****. They were interchangeable as far as she was concerned.

"The subject is a male human, cause of death…" she paused. "This is going to be a real no-brainer."

She pulled the sheet off the body. It had been propped almost a metre clear of the table surface like a tent. The sheet tangled at the last moment and had to be tugged a second time to get it clear of the tree branch that was sticking out of the man's chest. There were even a few leaves still hanging from unbroken twigs. They waved in the breeze from the forced ventilation system that isolated the autopsy suite from the rest of the SGC compound.

"He appears to have a mall tree growing out of his chest, having pierced his lungs and heart between the third and fourth ribs. I'm going to removed the 'stake' now," she struggled with it for a few moments, and managed to wiggle it around, but it wouldn't come free. "Give us a hand," she asked her assistant. Between the two of them they managed to widen the hole where the stake had punctured the guy's chest but only enough to loosen it a bit. Janet was wary of doing too much damage to either the tissue of the guy's lungs or to the stick for that matter. Once it was free, she raised it slowly.

The guy's eyes flicked open and then focussed on Janet. They glowed from within. 

She had seen that trick before. It might win you a few free beers at the local pub, but it carried no weight with Janet Fraiser. She watched him warily for a moment while he decided how to behave. His chest rose and fell. She waited a bit longer. His face took on a nasty snarling aspect. She looked at him once more and then pushed the stake back into his chest. He was still.

"OK," said her assistant. "What do we do now?"

"I'm going to make a phone call," Janet said. The microphone pick ups built into the environmental isolation suits could tie into the local phone network. She dialled a key pad and waited while the ring tone buzzed into her ear.

"General Hammond, it's me Janet Fraiser," she told the microphone. "Can I speak with Teal'c for a moment. Thanks. Teal'c, yeah it's Doctor Fraiser. Is there anything I should do before I remove the stake from this guy? Uh huh. Uh huh. Is that really necessary? It sounds a bit drastic. Well if you're sure. That difficult? OK, no we have tools for that sort of thing. Thank you."

"What do we do?" her assistant asked.

"Can you just duck out the back and get me the chain saw?"


	5. Chapter 5: The Nameless Chapter

The road that SG-1 trod was little more than a worn out trail between and beneath the dense canopy of trees. They rarely saw the orange pinpoint that was the F - class star around which this planet orbited.

"You know, I was wondering whether they would ever make a movie about us," Jack O'Neill said after they had been collectively silent for almost half an hour. His feet had dried out by that stage and he was able to think of other things. He has limited interests and this discussion about movies about summed them up. "Who do you think would play you Daniel?" O'Neill asked.

Daniel Jackson thought for a bit before offering, "Tom Cruise."

"I thought maybe William Hurt," Samantha Carter added.

"I would have said James Spader myself," said O'Neill.

"He's a bit wussy," suggested Jackson.

"My point exactly," chortled O'Neill.

"What about you Teal'c?" Carter prompted.

"Samuel L Jackson," he said instantly, as though he had given the matter some thought.

The rest of the team nodded. It wasn't a bad choice.

"Or perhaps Lawrence Fishborne."

The rest of the team nodded more emphatically. It was a better choice.

"I would have said Will Smith," offered Carter.

"Too pretty," judged Teal'c.

"Too expressive," said Jackson.

"Not enough attitude," offered O'Neill.

"What about you colonel?" Carter asked.

"Harrison Ford," he answered instantly.

"They'd get the cut priced version for you," chortled Jackson. "Bruce Willis, no, I know…" he laughed a bit while he recovered from the idea. "Kurt Russell. That's it. I bet they'd use Kurt Russell."

"What's wrong with Kurt Russell?" asked Carter. Something from her younger years was starting to peep through the façade of maturity she had taken so much trouble to cultivate. The rest of the team looked closely at her. "You watched 'Big Trouble in Little China' a lot didn't you?" asked Jackson quietly. He layed a gentle hand on her shoulder.

"Well yeah," she said defensively. "Didn't you?"

"Once…"

"What about you Major?" O'Neill prompted.

"Kathleen Turner."

"A bit past it now," judged O'Neill.

"Sharon Stone."

There was a collective moment of reverent silence among the male contingent of the expedition. There was a patch in O'Neill's copy of the videotape of 'Basic Instinct' that was a little the worst for wear. It was a shared experience among the team. 

"I'm not sure how I would feel being out here in the middle of no-where with an ice pick murdering…" began Jackson hesitantly.

"There was always 'Total recall'…" suggested O'Neill.

"Wasn't she a villain in that too?" asked Teal'c. One eyebrow had arched upward in inquiry.

"That's true," O'Neill mused. "Casino?"

"Knowing our luck they'd make a TV-show instead. Ha, I'd bet they'd use Richard Dean Anderson to play you sir," Carter chortled. "You'd rescue us by turning the stargaet into an ultra light plane and fly us home."

"Very droll."

"I think it would make a pretty lame movie anyway," said Jackson. He stared out at a lot of scrub and bush that lined the side of a narrow dusty track. "I mean look how we spend our days, lugging through the trees, or ploughing through sand."

"Yeah, I guess so."

They lugged on in silence for a while longer.

*

The conference room phone rang and its insistent noise interrupted the interrogation one more time. 

Teal'c stopped speaking and looked from face to face among those who waited on his debriefing.

Everyone looked at General Hammond, none of them game enough to make the decision to answer the phone without his permission. It was more than their job was worth.

General Hammond for his part looked around at the room full of sycophants and sighed quietly to himself. He was about to climb to his feet and answer the phone, but Teal'c had decided that enough was enough. He was up to speed and starting to enjoy the telling of this tale and the interruption was unwelcome. So he decided that he would be the one who finally responded to the thing. He stepped away from the conference room table. The rest of the team looked after him in awe.

"Yes," boomed Teal'c into the phone. He listened for a moment before placing the head set back on the phone cradle carefully. "That was Doctor Fraiser," Teal'c told General Hammond. "She has expressed a wish for you to go down to the medical centre right away."

"OK," boomed General Hammond. "We'll break for a few minutes while I find out what this is about. Teal'c you can stay here, same with the rest of you, except for you Makepeace. You come with me."

*

Janet Fraiser met General Hammond and Colonel Makepeace at the door to her laboratory. Her smock was stained in streaks of brown. They were not left by spills of coffee, General Hammond concluded, unless she was really badly coordinated. He shuddered.

One thing about surgeons doing autopsies, they never indulged in artistry when they were putting the body back together.

She opened the security door and ushered them through.

The SGC Medical Examination room was a brilliantly lit warren of diagnostic hardware and bio-electronic interface equipment, organised neatly into aesthetic little arrangements of technological free-form sculpture. The floor had a nice hard-wearing surface that could be hosed off in the case of an emergency, hardly a good sign. The walls were fire proof, and the ventilation system was capable of being isolated from the world at the press of a button. It was such a cheery room, that people had been known to walk the long way around the infirmary to avoid walking past the door. The sound of a bone saw hacking away at the skull of something that might or might not have been a friend (or perhaps foe. Although those were in shorter supply, not because there wasn't that many of them, but mainly because the SGC teams tended not to bring a whole lot of those things home with them).

Over the years, General Hammond had spent altogether too much time in the Medical Examination room, looking at the results of some of the things they encountered whenever they ran across the Goa'uld. On this occasion, he had one of those gut wrenching premonitions that said to him that this was going to be another one of those little incidents that enliven your day and make coming to work such a pleasure.

Eauwe!

Janet Fraiser waved General Hammond and Colonel Makepeace into position by the wall opposite from the entry door. They shuffled into position and waited for Janet Fraiser's presentation. They even folded their hands in front of them like good little military men.

Janet pulled a draw from a refrigeration unit, heaving it for all she was worth, because she is reasonably tiny and the draw was heavy, and she was not going to ask for one of those macho military men for a hand. The draw rolled quietly out and revealed the naked, mostly decapitated body of the man Teal'c shot during their chaotic flight from the other side of the wormhole. We are only assuming that he is naked, because Janet Frasier had conveniently placed her self in the way. Which is just as well because we really want to keep that PG-13 rating.

The body had been opened up along the familiar Y incision. His ribs were carved open and the body had been layed out onto the slab like some one had half finished carving a Christmas turkey. He had more in common with a Christmas turkey than just the way he had been carved. The turkey carcass that lands on the dinner table has no head either.

"We found this," Janet said and pointed into the chest cavity. 

The human body is a complex interconnected system, wrapped around a skeletal structure of 206 interlocking bones, manipulated by a system of over six hundred muscles. It is fed through a Gordian tangled of capillary tubes that supply blood to the interlocking fibrous musculature. It is cleaned and regulated by an enzymic system in which complex chemical reactions happen continuously. All of it is under the control of a central nervous system more complex than the best of continuous automation systems and controlled by a parallel processor of unimaginable processing power. 

All of which would suggest that general Hammond might be a touch shallow when he thought that inside the incision, the mad on the table looked like a lot of gloopy red and purple blobs. But Janet seemed to think there was something of monumental importance to be seen in there. For our part, we don't even get to look inside, because it would be seriously gross.

General Hammond looked though, he looked more closely, hoping to convince Janet Frasier that he took her concern seriously. 

Nope, even the second time his interior looked no more enlightening.

"So you see why we were so concerned?" Janet asked. She stared up at him and blinked.

"I'll need a complete briefing," General Hammond said to cover his ignorance. "I need an assessment of the implications, as a matter of urgency, Doctor."

Janet Fraiser nodded her understanding. He had obviously understood the urgency of the matter. "I'll bring a couple of people in to help with that."

"Good," Hammond said, satisfied that he had covered the situation without loss of face. It was time to get back to the bit he understood. They would continue interrogating Teal'c. He reckoned he could handle that part. He escaped as quickly as he could.

Makepeace fell in behind Hammond and they made their way back to the conference room where Tea'lc waited.

"What was that all about?" Makepeace asked General Hammond before they stepped into the conference room.

"I have absolutely no idea," General Hammond said and then pushed the door to the conference room out of his way.

"Oh," said Makepeace. "Good. I'm glad I'm not the only one." But he was talking to the back of General Hammond's head.

"I want to know what you found when you got to the Lord's castle," General Hammond told Teal'c.

*

Near dusk, the dusty trail that SG-1 had followed for several hours widened out suddenly into a huge clearing. For the first time in almost as long as they had been walking (trudging, grumbling and stumbling) they could see something other than trees, and of course that subspecies of trees, bushes. 

Now they had stonemasonry and once laboriously tended gardens to examine. For close to a hundred metres ahead of them, the land had been cleared and cultivated, formed into a rambling garden of sculptured plants and meticulously arranged stone borders and statuary, and then it had been left to go to ruin for years. The grass was almost waist high and the privet hedges had become rambling bushes. But for all that, there was a sense of past order to it, as though someone had once tended the garden and might one day work up the enthusiasm to do so again. It might have to wait until the prince comes and kisses the sleeping princess, after which the whole family and all of it's staff might re-awaken, but then again it might not as well. 

The members of SG-1 contemplated their destination. 

At the centre of the garden sat a castle. It was a Gothic monstrosity, dark and foreboding, towering above the craggy escarpments of the hillock upon which it had been sat, with a malignant presence that had to be witnessed to be believed. In that environment, it looked like something out of the Addam's family, or perhaps from a B-grade horror movie. The battlements and towers loomed in the twilight, lit from behind by the setting sun, and silhouetted so all of the detail that the members of SG-1 could make out of them was that the castle had one too many battlements and way too much attitude. At their base, the towers gave way to walls of shear stone that seemed to grow out from and the shear cliff face that fell away from the foundations. The building screamed 'fortress against the marauding barbarian hordes' in 72 point headlines, with bold and underline and emphasised by the use of italics.

"Cheery sort of place," commented Jack O'Neill. His gaze had had been arrested by the impressive piece of stonemasonry that sat at the end of the road.

"I might have to get one like it for a summer retreat," Daniel Jackson said.

"Takes overkill to new heights," commented Samantha Carter.

"I wonder how many slaves are buried in the foundations," Teal'c muttered. He met the gaze of each team member in turn before he said, "Well it would. It just has that look about it."

"That's true of most human construction from before the middle ages," said Daniel Jackson blandly.

"Ohh. Kay…" O'Neill said. "Moving right along…"

"Many of my people died during the construction of monstrosities such as that," Teal'c added.

"It must have been awful," commiserated Samantha Carter.

"I do not have happy memories of the time."

"When every one is ready…" suggested O'Neill, there was an impatient edge to his voice now.

One at a time they looked around, first Carter (the one with the Air Force military background) then Teal'c (the one with blind obedience to the almighty Goa'uld background) and finally Jackson (the one who was wondering what the other two suddenly found so interesting that they both had to look at it).

"Thank you," said O'Neill with a touch of sarcastic humour. "Now, if every one is ready, let's go." 

He led the way.

The road upon which SG-1 trod, wound it's way to the gate. They trudged on. At least now they had an end goal.

For all of it's architectural ineptitude, the castle was a welcome sight after seven hours of walking up hill. They had fallen into silent single file for the last five of those and had spent it forging onward in a field march while sweating under the load of fifteen kilograms of field gear and weapons. Collectively SG-1 stank. They were sweaty and smelly and yucky. Even Carter's delicate antiperspirant deodorant (with special slow release formula to keep you dry hour after hour, for up to 24 hours a day) had given up. 

She had passed perspiration and gone into full on sweat about five hours earlier.

Daniel Jackson paused half way up that final slope and looked out over the view. The forest spanned for as far as the eye could see, interrupted only by the occasional outcrop of rock and the winding passage of the river.

"They probably built here for the view," he commented.

"It's picturesque," O'Neill agreed. It was not what Jackson had meant at all.

"So long as they have running water," muttered Samantha Carter. She had already concluded that this week's session at the gym was a total waste of time. Who would believe that she had paid someone to lead her through an aerobic work out and look how she had spent the last half a day.

"It's more a question of line of sight over any of the invading barbarian hordes," Jackson told O'Neill.

"I knew that Daniel," O'Neill said dryly. "It is one area of history that I have under control."

They had probably a half hour walk to the castle gate. It was almost dark and twilight was short here, that much became obvious very quickly. The light was fading already.

They marched on. Following the spill of light from the castle.

*

"Daniel Jackson took photographs of the castle," Teal'c said. "He used one of those polaroid cameras, you know the ones, that discharge the photograph almost immediately." He went to reach into his pocket and General Hammond stopped him with an absent wave of his hand. 

"We'll save them for the report," General Hammond told him.

Teal'c subsided reluctantly. "As you wish."

"Go…" began General Hammond, only to be interrupted by a knock at the door. "Who is it?" he called. 

It was one of Janet Frasier's newly recruited junior medical staff-member. For the life of him, Hammond could not remember the man's name. Hammond was usually pretty good with those things but for some reason this one just wouldn't stick, and now the guy had been on the staff too long to be asked for it again. It would be embarrassing.

"You have news?" General Hammond asked. That was one way to avoid using his name.

"It's about the body we're autopsy-ing," the med-tech said. He only half entered the room, sort of hovering in the doorway.

General Hammond found himself wondering whether the man was old enough to have been to university at all let alone completed his medical internship. He moved a bit further into the room and revealed a nametag attached to the pocket of his shirt.

Aha, Hammond's mind pounced. If he could just make it out he would be OK, but trying to do so from so far away would be a problem. Damn, he couldn't make it out. He was going to have to get closer to the man. Now how to cover the action? 

Coffee, that was the answer. General Hammond climbed to his feet and marched toward the coffee percolator, passing close to the man on his way through. The important thing to achieve in this manoeuvre was to pass far enough away so the man didn't feel the need to pull back through the doorway to avoid invading Hammond's body space, while still passing close enough to the man to be able to read the tag. It was a delicate manoeuvre, but General Hammond pulled it off with his usual military precision.

The ID read Dr Simpson, so… "What have you found Simpson?" There, he thought to him self triumphantly, reinforced through speech; that should lock it into his memory.

"Dr Fraiser asked that I bring you this preliminary report," Doctor Simpson said.

"Just place it here on the desk and I'll read it when I get time."

"Yes sir."

The medical officer stepped fully into the conference room, treading so carefully that the military men arranged around the table had to quell their natural inclination to inspect the floor for land mines. Doctor Simpson placed the manilla folder onto the mahogany desktop and scuttled out through to door without turning to watch where he was going. He missed the door way on his first two attempts and then decided that further embarrassment far out weighted the possibility of danger from turning his back on the General and fumbled behind him self for the door handle before sneaking away clumsily.

General Hammond looked at the report for a moment and debated whether he should open it now…

There were more pressing concerns, he decided and pushed the folder a few centimetres further away, symbolically putting off any examination of Janet Fraiser's bio-techno babble until later.

"Carry on Teal'c," he instructed.

*

Light failed them before SG-1 arrived at the castle entrance. Torches came to the rescue, and they shone ineffectually upon a massive oak drawbridge.

"I suppose we should feel lucky that they didn't build a moat," O'Neill muttered.

"It would have been useless here," Jackson said, "what with the river being all the way down there and moat likely to evaporate dry all the time."

O'Neill gave Jackson one of those, 'thank-you' looks that convey such delicate nuances of sarcasm.

"I don't hear anything going on inside," Samantha Carter said.

"So now what?" O'Neill asked his travel weary and smelly team. No one answered. He looked at the sturdy Oak gate and tried to search out a way to open it. No obvious mechanism presented itself. There was always Teal'c staff, but that tended to wind people up, and that was not the easiest way to meet and mingle.

"What about the goatherd's warning?" Carter asked.

"Well, yeah. I don't want to be out in the dark," O'Neill agreed.

For good measure he looked over his shoulder at the gloom surrounding them. It was dim and darkness was obviously not far away. Eldritch shapes were visible in the moonlight, appearing for all the world like the nightmare daemons and monsters that the goatherd had forecast. It was just the moonlit trees, O'Neill told himself, but the Goatherds warning was hard to ignore. They should try to get inside.

"**Hey is there any one there**!" Jackson called at the top of his voice.

"What do you think you're…" O'Neill hissed to Jackson. He almost slapped his hand over Jackson's mouth, but he had already got the question out before O'Neill could react.

The gate creaked open slowly. The members of SG-1 stepped back just as slowly and watched its progress closely. It was a tense tableau. O'Neill's hand found the butt of his AK-47.

The gate opened fully, but only after a great deal of frictional protest and groaning, not all of which came from the gate.

The entry gaped before them, to reveal that there was no one there.

In the distance a howl sounded from within the forest. Gooseflesh broke out on Jackson's neck, probably caused by the little leprechaun with the bad circulation in his legs who had run down his spine. Well, that was what it felt like. The parallel-processing unit that filled the void in his skull was working on identification of the howl and concluded that it sounded for all the world like the call of a wolf. This information was fed to his forebrain, which reacted to the news by attaching a series of impressions and misremembered high school biology and zoology to the message that reached his consciousness. In the mean time his autonomic system had decided that adrenalin might be a good additive to his bloodstream, and gave instructions to the appropriate glandular system.

His heart began to accelerate.

Well, he decided; that explained the reference to nightwalkers that the goatherd had mentioned. Wolves would do it.

The Goa'ulds had brought wolves over with them.

Why would they do that? He wondered. Goats, horses and cows he could understand, but wolves…?

Being inside after dark seemed a wonderful idea; forbidding entrance or no forbidding entrance.


	6. Chapter 6: Another Nameless Chapter

The report that Doctor Simpson had brought up for General Hammond was left lying on the conference room table. It's presence was proving a mighty distraction to Colonel Makepeace. He had long since given up listening to the tales of Teal'c's and trials of the intrepid SG-1, and he was now busy speculating about the contents of the file. The speculation routine that was installed with the operating system of his biological processor was not as sophisticated as the one that was used by Daniel Jackson, but does have some capacity, and it was busy producing fanciful scenarios to entertain it's self.

"Do you mind if I have a look at that file, General," he found himself asking. Colonel Makepeace had not meant to speak, and caught himself completely by surprise when he did so. He would have clamped his own hand over his own mouth, if he had any warning at all that the traitorous speculation routine had access to the verbal output buffer, but it was too late by that stage. The damage had been done. He sat there mortified and worried about what sort of response he was going to get.

Both Teal'c and General Hammond blinked for a moment and tried to reorient them selves in light of this new development.

"Yes, go ahead," General Hammond said finally. "Carry on Teal'c," he added.

They could probably hear the explosive release of Makepeace's pent up breath down in the infirmary.

*

Jack O'Neill led the SG-1 team forward. A gaping darkened maw awaited them. He had his AK-47 out and the safety was off. Almost in unison, they stepped over the portcullis and into the gloom of the castle entrance.

"**Ah the travellers have arrived at last**," called a voice from the shadows.

O'Neill restrained a blast of AK-47 hollow point teflon coated armour piercing rounds by an effort of will that cause a cold sweat to break out on his brow. It was not alone. He had already sweated enough to make his hair matted so it made no difference to his appearance. Inwardly he had a few concerns. The taste of unused adrenalin breakdown bi-products is always unwelcome.

SG-1 collectively turned to face the newcomer. The voice from the shadows dripped with something that was both seductive and repugnant at the same time. Why they should react in such an ambivalent manner was not clear to any of the SG-1 team. It was the sort of voice to make a radio announcer green with envy. The lovingly constructed diction even made the Germanic obsession with all things consonant and glutteral sound smooth and mellow, although it fell short of melodic, just.

A man stepped forward, appearing first as a pair of disembodied feet, which gradually accumulated the accompaniments of legs and body with each forward pace. The apparition was bathed in an eerie glow that appeared to have no source of it's own. A body clothed in evening dress and cape appeared above the legs. Finally a head appeared from the shadows. To Daniel Jackson's educated eye, the head sat atop a body clothed in a costume more appropriate to the middle-ages of central Europe than the Goa'uld preference for Egyptian finery. The new comer wore tights that bunched slightly at the knees, so they obviously hadn't invented Lycra yet. He wore a doublet and a cape. Everything was in a uniform amalgamation of harlequin colours. His hair was dark and sleek; it was pulled back from a high forehead and clasped at his neck from whence it trailed in a shortish pony tail.

For some reason Jack O'Neill thought the guy would look more appropriate dressed all in black.

To O'Neill the newcomer appeared youngish, perhaps the same age as Jackson, perhaps younger yet. 

A fine moustache ill-graced his upper lip and trailed onto his chin via the side of his mouth, bracketing it so that it took a cruel tilt. His eyes appeared to glow from within, and that was always a dead give away that he was host to one of those wormy things that are the Goa'uld (and the Tok'ra, but their on our side so we won't say nasty things about them, well not all the time anyway). But his voice had lacked the stereo soundtrack that the SCG teams always equated with Goa'uld in the variant forms.

O'Neill managed not to shoot him yet again when he did the eye-trick. There was always later, if it proved necessary. O'Neill's eyes stole to the man's hands, but he saw no evidence of a ribbon device, and that was a good thing. O'Neill had been hit with one of those things a few times and he was not excited about repeating the experience.

The newcomer bowed. "**Welcome to my home**," he said and waved an expansive gesture to encompass the castle and all of its environs.

"**You knew we were coming**?" Jackson asked.

The harlequin newcomer nodded and wore an expression of faint surprise. "**Certainly, did we not exchange our arrangements?**" he bowed and gestured to encompass the castle. His voice took on a self mocking tone.** "But as well, this castle has need of guardians and they keep me and mine well informed.**" He laughed; a quick bark that contained no mirth. "**The barbarians are always at the gate so to speak. My guardians are always on the look out for those who would make their way up to the castle, and they keep me informed of the presence or otherwise of strangers. But we were aware of your impending visit for some time. The communications carried no name, but upon examination of yourselves, who else could you be? My guardians are thoughtful and cunning, well able to think and reason for themselves.**" He turned and skewered Jackson with a gaze that bordered on the intensity of a Goa'uld system lord. "**And so, how might I address you?**"

Jackson considered his answer before replying. "**Daniel," **he told the newcomer**, "my name is Daniel. And now may I tell my companions who has provided us with such a hearty welcome?**"

The newcomer bowed. "**Welcome Dan'el, and to the rest of your troupe, I extend the hospitality of my house**. **As to who I am,** **I am the count of this district, fashioned as Romany by my people. I am called Dra'ula. I am surprised that you were not informed of such before leaving."**

Jackson waved at the remaining members of the SG-1 team, while giving the Count only their Christian names, while he decided what to say in answer to that last statement. **"We are but last minute replacements for the man who was chosen for this role initially,**" Jackson lied.

****

"Ah then we are suitably satisfied, come, make your way inside. It will not do to be abroad at night in these parts."

"**This is a highly fortified castle**," Jackson observed.

The Count nodded. "**A bloody history leads us to this point in time good sir. But that is not the conversation of the day. We have hospitality to offer and stories to exchange. Come take advantage of the opportunity to avail yourselves of shelter, food and entertainment**."

He waved once again and bade them into the courtyard of the castle. Jackson stepped past the Count first, continuing the illusion that he was the leader of the expedition. O'Neill fell in behind, eyes scanning the facility with interest.

Illumination was supplied by flickering candles, mounted every five metres around the perimeter of the massive entry hall. The candles were secured against the walls in little wrought metal frames, and riveted to wooden brackets. Inside the massive walls and battlements, the courtyard was tile floored. A staircase faced the entry. Huge arches of stone led to the left and right from the entry. Heavy tapestries hung from every wall.

"What was all that about Daniel?" O'Neill hissed through the corner of his mouth.

"We've been offered the run of the castle, food and entertainment," Jackson hissed back to him.

"Not any of that 'come be my slave and let's put one of the wormy things in your neck?'"

"Not a word."

"It's always there. He's just pretending."

"Yep, no doubt about it."

"Suggestions?"

"He has not recognised my staff or the mark of my tattoo," said Teal'c.

"OK, well that is a point in their favour," O'Neill conceded. The Goa'uld normally recognised Teal'c as a former slave (and the primary of Apophis, which was a good deal more visible in Goa'uld circles) and they normally acted accordingly. No reaction was telling in itself.

It probably only meant that the castle occupants had been out of communications with the rest of the Goa'uld for a while. 

And of course, it was a bit odd seeing them out of the Egyptian god mode. After their run in with Ra and Apophis and the little incident with Hathor and … The SGC one teams were getting a touch complacent with the Goa'uld Modus Operandi.

"**You are obviously tired from your journey," **said theirhost.** "We will provide you with places to freshen up, to bathe before we eat and take the opportunity to get to know one another. I recognise not the style of your speech, so perhaps there are genuine stories to tell and things we may both learn**."

Jackson translated this for the rest of the team.

"Be nice Daniel," O'Neill whispered.

"**We would be delighted," **Jackson conceded.** "The opportunity to wash off the dust of the road and to partake of the hospitality of this establishment would be most welcome. We rarely have opportunities to live under these circumstances while we are away. It is truly welcome**."

"**Then let us not delay. Let it not be said that the Count Dra'ula neglects his guests. We need not delay further**." He waved them past.

People appeared from beneath the massive archways. They were uniformly raven haired, slender, dapper, ethereal or athletic depending on gender and function. They watched the SG-1 team with interest. The Count made no attempt to introduce them, instead he waved to another group who appeared from beneath the stairs.

A trio of what O'Neill took for serving wenches stepped into the glow that surrounded their master. Without a word being said, they appeared to understand what was required. The nearest of them beckoned for the SG-1 team to follow. 

Here at least was one aspect of Goa'uld sociology that remained unchanged. The young women were dressed in the same barely there robes that the Goa'uld seemed to prefer for all of their vassals, a flowing white thing with poor quality control of seams, and poor recognition of the purpose of clothing (ie shelter from the elements and preservation of cultural taboos.)

O'Neill looked at Jackson, who raised one eyebrow and then tilted his head in ascent. He had been hanging around with Teal'c too long obviously. O'Neill shrugged and they stepped forward.

*

"What is it Makepeace?" General Hammond asked. "You've been making all sorts of faces and it's been annoying to watch it out of the corner of my eye. Is there something in the report?"

Makepeace had glanced up at the sudden attack from General Hammond and frowned. His eyebrows had a long way to travel because they had been migrating toward his hairline in small increments all the way through the report. Part of it was caused by the amazing jumble of letters that were formed into ways he had never seen before. He suspected that all of those apparently random conglomerations of letters were actually legitimate English language words. They seemed to have the correct arrangement of vowels and consonants to make them pronounceable (mostly) but he had not seen them before. But mostly his eyebrow migration was caused by a developing certainty that something was wrong. It wasn't as though Janet Fraiser had actually written those words in her report. An no stage had she come out and written, "there was something wrong," but phrases such as 'anomalous data', 'readings that we have not encountered in previous examinations using…' and 'should authorise more tests before a definitive conclusion can be reached,' always alarmed military minds. Oh, and accountants as well.

"Yes, I think you should read it sir," he summarised.

General Hammond had every intention of doing just that, as soon as he got this debriefing out of the way. "I plan to," he said. But something in Malepeace's demeanour got through to General Hammond. The man obviously thought he should read the report right now. "Why?"

"They're not your run of the mill Goa'uld," Makepeace explained.

"Then what are they?"

"I'm not exactly sure that we know yet sir. At this point in the report, Doctor Fraiser was still getting to that."

Hammond gave him one of those, 'it looks like a man but it's still a cockroach' looks that military commanders have perfected over the years. "Here give me that report," he said tetchily. "We'll look at it more closely after we finish debriefing Teal'c. It's not as though it has any immediate impact on what we need to do in the near future."

"I guess not sir."

"Carry on Teal'c."


	7. Chapter 7: Prizes if you can guess the n...

After being led through the labyrinthine passages at the top of the stairway, O'Neill stepped past the outstretched hand of the serving girl and through the entrance to his room. He looked around at the fixtures and tried to work out whether he should be impressed with the luxury, or appalled at the antiquity of the furniture. It was all a weird mixture of both. The bed was a huge canopied monstrosity that filled half of the room. Behind a heavily draped curtain he found a bath. The tub was crudely fashioned from copper, but the taps were fashioned by a master craftsman. They were statues of…We won't look to closely at what they were statues of, that is a bit 'adult' for this report.

The servant girl had followed him into the room and stood inside the door, hovering as though there was something that she still had to do. 

After a thorough inspection in which he had concluded unequivocally that the thing hidden by the curtain was a bath, O'Neill turned to look at the hovering servant girl for a moment and tried to work out why she had come into the room. Like he didn't know. 

O'Neill had been acutely aware of her during the walk to the room, aware of her slender elegant appearance and the manner of her walk. She was a strange mixture of hormone inducing sensuality and demure elegance. Her construction and manner was not the sort of thing that might have been designed so that she would be ignored by Jack O'Neill, he was a marine after all, quite a senior one in fact. They have a reputation for being able to spot a woman at several kilometres, through dense bush and heavy undergrowth. He had none of those obstructions to worry about here, and plenty to feast his eyes on. He tried really hard to ignore her presence. It was not working.

He shrugged at her, turned partly away and then watched her surreptitiously out of the corner of his eye. She seemed momentarily confused by his indifference. His sardonic expression managed to convey nothing to her. He could tell that by the hesitation in her body language. She was poised, alert, but still, as though unsure just which way she should go. 

Well it was worth a try…She bowed her head momentarily and then made a motion to come forward.

O'Neill stepped aside, curious to see what she intended to do.

She brushed past him, barely avoiding contact with his arm on the way past and made her way directly to the bath where she began playing with the fixtures. Water spouted.

"Ah now that is an idea," said O'Neill gratefully.

"**I shall wash you sir**," the girl said, and made to remove O'Neill's webbing.

"OK," O'Neill said. "I think I know what that meant. Under the circumstances, I don't think I need Daniel to translate for you at all." He held a hand up and shook his head. "If it's all the same to you, I think we can dispense with that option right now."

She looked up at him with a hurt expression. "**You are displeased with me**," she said. Her manner changed and she became more assertive. She reached up and touched O'Neill's lips. He stared into eyes that were dark and deep and for a moment he thought he might fall into them.

Her breath in his face was fragrant. Staring into those eyes was like…

What the hell am I thinking, he asked himself.

With a shake of his head, he broke the spell and grabbed her wrist. He pushed her hand away from his face gently. 

Her expression was coquettish. She stepped back slowly, leaving the temptation of her body within O'Neill's reach for a long moment, allowing time for the impulse to form in his mind.

He shook his head and then waved the pointed index finger of his left hand at her. She lowered her face from his and moved away from him. With one final glance at him, she bowed and then shuffled backward from the room.

O'Neill collapsed to the bed and stared into space for a moment while his heart slowed down. Motley Crue certainly got that part down. His heart had been kick started all right. Now if he could just calm down.

There was a woman who could tempt O'Neill with an offer like that, but she was in another room. Out of reach both metaphorically and literally.

*

Samantha Carter checked the temperature of the water by passing her hand through the stream that came pouring from the faucet. It was warm enough without being uncomfortable. She shrugged, no matter how bad she felt about their host and no matter how suspicious she was of their circumstances, a warm bath after a field march was always going to be welcome. 

The water continued to splash gaily into the huge stone tub, sounding like a miniature waterfall. A mist wafted from where the water landed, and carried with it a whiff of something floral and soothing.

The serving girl had stepped out of the room as soon as she had released the water. It was probably just as well, thought Carter, there was the language problem to deal with, and she could do without a protracted bout of misinformation. Even the few hand signals and misunderstood gestures they had exchanged had been enough. At one stage the girl had thought that Carter wanted her to undress her. The entire incident had been rather embarrassing.

That at least was one job she could do without help. The webbing came free of her hips, released with a deft flick of the wrist. Guns, knives and single bunch of grenades - that were like a small punnet of destructive strawberries - found their way onto the bed. They sank almost half of their depth into the soft covers.

She sat on the bed beside them and looked around her room. It was decorated in the theme of medieval castle, all stone walls and extensive tapestries. The windows were shuttered and glassless. The flickering candles cast eldritch shadows. She could see things moving in those shadows if she invested a bit of imagination.

She climbed to her feet and walked over to the shutters. They came free from their attachments with a bit of effort and swung freely to reveal a hole in the wall, without glass. 

Through the open window Carter was able to see into the courtyard below. People milled there with torches. There was a lot of them, so many that she though that something must have been going on down there, but they were silent and they moved rarely. It was vaguely creepy, the way that they were behaving. She watched them for a few seconds, tried to work out what they were doing, and failed. It seemed to be some sort of vigil.

In the flickering light of the burning torches she caught to looks on a few of the faces, they were expectant. Carter wondered what the significance might be. No answers were forthcoming.

She closed the shutter and returned her attention to the decor of her room. The only sound was the discharge of water. The bath was something to look forward to, and she intended enjoying it. No amount of peasant massing was going to distract her from it any longer than strictly necessary. She began preparations. The boots were going to be a protracted exercise in lace loosening. Carter flopped bonelessly onto the bed for a moment before starting on those. Motivation was lacking. 

She took a few moments to savour being horizontal, after spending such a long part of the day, vertical and perambulatory, before she began to worry about the water level. 

Her boots were no closer to coming off her feet either.

Ah, the trials that we content with, she sighed and pushed her self back upright. If she strained her neck a bit, she could peek over the lip of the bath and then be able to check on the water level. It still had a way to go before it overtopped the rim. That was good, she wanted as much water in there as she could get. She intended submerging her self in it and luxuriating in sensuality that only a warm bath-full of scented oils offered.

The mist was still wafting out from the rim to suggest that the water was still coming out warm.

Yes!

With the bath preparation still under control, she bent to the task of untangling her laces. They had accumulated a nest of thorns and tangled twigs. She brushed them aside. The boots loosened from feet that had grown about ten sizes during the days so that their swelling was limited by the seams of the boots. 

She was not looking forward to the state of her feet when she uncovered them. 

The boots came off reluctantly and its removal revealed an aromatic pair of socks. Her nose wrinkled in distaste before she pulled them off quickly. They followed the boosts on a ballistic path to the other side of the room. Her nose judged the trajectory to be still way too short.

She spent a moment to examine her feet; they were a glowing shade of pink, with little red patches where she could feel them trying to attract her attention via the expedient of clamouring nerves. The cheek of them, she chided.

She climbed to her feet and padded barefoot to the rim of the tub. The water level was almost high enough to satisfy her urge to submerge.

The mechanism of the water faucet had looked simple enough when the serving girl had operated it. Carter experimented with it and confirmed her judgement. She let a little more water in to the bath, and then smiled, nodded and shut it off.

The floral smell was richer now that the tub was full. It was a siren song.

The fatigues came off easily, for which she was grateful. She threw them onto the bed, where they were the only things not to sink half way into the covers.

Her underwear followed and she stepped up to the bath wearing, we presume, just a pair of diamond ear studs and a smear of road grime. We should take the time at this stage to preserve our PG rating and look somewhere else. We probably should have cut away to another room at this stage but there is a pivotal plot scene coming and we should make the effort to be here when it happens. So we will focus on something other than the curves and flesh that houses the delightful Samantha Carter.

We could launch into a description of the giant tapestry that covered the far wall while we wait for Carter to pad lightly across the stone floor and lower herself into the bath while we are looking away.

Carter is wearing only a couple of grams of road dust and a similar quantity of gold and molecular carbon, and that is not exactly the outfit she would have chosen to wear if she were greeting the lady of the house. So she was rather put out that it should be so. Her first clue to her un-scheduled audience was the sudden draught that tickled her bare back. Carter froze in position, one foot in the tub and the other on the floor. Her hands went everywhere, and failed dismally to hide anything, from the interloper's gaze. We missed it all, obviously because we were watching the newcomer throughout her entrance, so that we could savour the intense concentration she was expending on her examination of Carter.

"**I have caught you at a bad time**," the lady of the house said. Her voice came from behind Carter. There was only a mock apology in the sound of her voice. It was one of those voices - throaty and full of mocking. It would laugh and purr and do bad things to the male psyche. It did nothing for Carter's equilibrium either.

"I'm sorry I don't speak your language," Carter said slowly. She half turned to face the other woman; half hid her self at the same time. 

The woman who hovered in the doorframe was dark of hair and pale of face. Her hair hung in a raven cascade of silk down her back. She wore a tight dress of blood red, which seemed to have arranged itself several centimetres too close to the floor for it to be worn the way that the designer intended it to be worn. It was strapless, and seemed to defy gravity, barely. The hemline trailed onto the floor. The scarlet of the dress was all the more vibrant beside the alabaster of her skin. The woman was pale almost to the point of albino.

Carter had only one theory about why the dress didn't fall down. It related to a pair of portions of the woman's anatomy that had developed beyond the needs of their function. And even those were holding the dress up in a precarious fashion. 

"**One so fair should dress to advantage**," the interloper said. In her hand she held something made from cloth. She held it up for Carter's inspection. It might have been a dress, if you could call it a dress when it happened to be only a little bit more modest than a film of dirty water. Carter had another look at it. On second thoughts it was no more modest than a film of dirty water, it had about the opacity and fabric density of a net lace curtain.

"**I thought you might like to dress for dinner**," the lady of the house said.

Carter nodded, understanding the woman's offer without understanding a word that the woman said. Now that the awkward first moment had passed with the embarrassment being entirely one sided, Carter resigned herself to the attention. Carter realised that the woman was not going to become apologetic about interrupting her bath, so Carter decided that the best thing to do was to brazen her way through the indelicate situation. She dropped her hands from their feeble attempts to cover herself (we will look away at this point) and then she slipped into the tub as unobtrusively as she was able.

She felt much better once she was able to hide herself beneath a coating of bubbles. Given that she had spent a lot of time in barracks as an Airforce pilot, her modesty regarding her person was a testimony to the state of her mind. The attention that the woman paid her was disconcerting. And Carter had dealt with that kind of attention a few times in the past, but never from such a blatant come-on.

The Countess blinked momentarily and then said, "**Why would you do that to yourself? It must have been quite painful.**" Her head cocked to one side and a smile grew on her face at glacial pace. "**It is an interesting accessory though**," She added in a wistful tone.

What?!!

Let's have an action replay. 

Squiggle, squiggle, squiggle.

The Countess blinked momentarily and then said, "**Why would you do that to yourself? It must have been quite painful.**" Her head cocked to one side and a smile grew on her face at glacial pace. "**It is an interesting accessory though**," She added in a wistful tone.

Yep, it was the same the second time.

That sort of comment leads to all sorts of speculation… 

No, no, no! We should not waste a moment wondering what the Countess meant by that comment. 

It's had not to do so, though…

OK, OK. We have to try; we can't help it. Consider the evidence. OK, we can't see anything beneath Carter's neck, but we can speculate. In developing that line of speculation, we would no doubt remember that Carter was an officer in the USAF and when she was young and drunk… well, it's amazing what new things they have on their person when they come back from their recreational leave. The first idea that comes into the head has to be a suspicion that Carter had one of those pieces of jewellery fitted to her anatomy in such a place that showing it to you would involve losing our PG-13 rating and being saddled with at least an R-certificate. 

Surely not…

We're never going to find out while we retain a PG rating though.

AaAARGHH!

Things are happening; we should get back to the action. 

Even beneath the cover of the bubbles, Samantha Carter found that she was able to relax. She wore a puzzled expression because the Countess was still in the room, and showed little inclination to leave. Nothing about this castle retreat left Carter with any confidence. She was still convinced that there were Goa'uld around here somewhere, the only question was where. She had a vague feeling that she was sharing her room with one at that moment.

And, of course, that was what the SG-1 team had been sent through the gate to determine. How had this world accumulated terrestrial ecology? As a general rule there was only one answer to that question, but so far there had really been none of the usual trappings to be seen anywhere.

Perhaps she was misjudging the situation?

Carter watched the Countess wander across her room. She lowered the dress to the bed and then stepped back toward the door. Before leaving, The Countess cast one glance at Carter. It seemed to be more calculating than questioning, as though she were trying to decide how best to prepare Carter for dinner or something...

The Countess left Carter to her ablutions, shaking her head as she closed the door behind her.

"Thank you for that," Carter said, keeping her voice as neutral as she thought she could while talking to the closed door. After a while she gave up wondering about their hosts. It was only then that she relaxed and set about cleaning her legs, and letting the water lap against her chin. It felt wonderful.

*

Daniel Jackson marched along the corridor, led by the Count who made little economical gestures at the fittings and furnishings as they passed. For Jackson the impromptu tour was an occasion of professional interest. Archaeologically speaking the furnishings and facilities were much too modern for his taste, or even his area of major interest, but they were interesting in their own right when it came to establishing the vintage of this Goa'uld settlement (if indeed that was what it was). 

This had to be a Goa'uld settlement, Jackson believed, and also one of the last Goa'uld excursions onto earth, post-dating the Egyptian and the Minoan seeded sites that they had already seen in their travels through the stargate network, by several centuries.

"**I was so looking forward to your arrival**," the count said suddenly, bringing Jackson back from his favourite wool-gathering activity. "**We have so much to discuss**."

"**I think there must have been some sort of misunderstanding**," Jackson said. "**We, um, we only just arrived here and knew not who we should contact. We are travellers, explorers of life, if you like**."

"**But aren't we all,**" The count said, and then stopped in the middle of a hallway. He looked searchingly at Jackson, perhaps noting that the other man wore an earnest expression behind his glasses. "**You jest with me sir**," said the count finally, and threw back his head in laughter. "**For a moment there I thought you were being honest, and now when I look more closely I can see that you play with me.**" He laughed once more and then continued in a much more subdued tone. "**Your arrival has been expected. We have been waiting for the four of you for some time**."

Jackson decided to keep his council for the moment. "**You were expecting us, and we have come**." He nodded, and tried to look honest and upstanding.

"**We have much to discuss, and plenty of time ahead of us to do so over dinner. You should take the opportunity to freshen up**."

The count gestured toward the open door of a room. "**Until then I await**."

*

Teal'c thought that a bath was a great idea. After a bit of experimentation he managed to work out how the faucet mechanism worked. 

He was not particularly worried about how long it would take his clothes to dry. He knew that eventually they would, because he accepted the nature of experimentation. You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, and that has absolutely nothing to do with the story, but there are times when you need to employ cliche to fill up the gap between sentences, and this seemed like a good time to use one.

While the water gushed into the bath he took the time to examine his surroundings. There wasn't much to see.

He was alone in his room, having been shown the door and then rudely abandoned by the serving girl. When she had escorted him to the room she had been unable to get far enough away from him during their shared walk through the hallways. She had tried so desperately hard to do so that she had scraped her shoulder against the rock wall with every step. And then as soon as she had seen him into his room she had disappeared so fast she might as well have been a dot.com companies share value.

Teal'c wasn't about to take her lack of interest in him to heart. He was short of social graces. It wasn't that he lacked the intelligence to be able to work out what people expected and wanted, it was more a matter that he really didn't get out much and didn't really care.

He looked around the room one more time, very slowly.

Some one was watching him. He was sure of it.

Under circumstances like this a good sneer never went astray. He made one, as only he can, and then began a systematic search of the room. He pulled the tapestries aside and found a passageway that was obviously not intended as the main access to the room, but possibly it might have been intended for quick egress under duress. He leaned into the entry and looked both ways along the corridor. He saw no one.

He still felt like he was being watched. He fingered the mark of Apophis on his forehead and frowned.

*

The air had developed a slight chill in the short time since the sun had set. 

Samantha Carter was feeling the effects of the various draughts that seemed to come from odd angles when they wafted against the damp patches of her back that she hadn't been able to dry with the thoroughly inadequate towels that had been provided. She made a note to herself to pack a towel in her pack next time they planned an extended investigation.

After a great deal of debate with herself she had finally decided to wear the dress that had been provided by their hosts. The overriding consideration in her decision making had been the absence of anything else to wear in its stead. Somehow, while she had been reclining in the tub, with her eyes shut and her ears submerged beneath the surface, some one had come into the room and taken off with her clothes. She wasn't sure which was more off putting, her hostess's interest or the surreptitious servants.

With any luck they were only going to wash her fatigues, and especially the socks. They might need throwing away. 

She hoped they were only going to wash her clothes. The idea of wearing that dress for anything other than a formal orgy was not an option she really wanted to entertain.

Clothed in the inadequate towel, she picked the dress from the bed and tried to work out how it was assembled. It appeared to be a pair of straps and a series of cascading petals. She turned it a few times, tried alternate arrangements, but nothing changed it. No matter which way she held it up, it still looked like some one had taken to a curtain with a pair of pruning shears.

She had once worn a strapless evening dress, but this was more like a gown-less evening strap.

She looked at it one more time and then layed it on the bed. She thought she had it worked out now. She took the towel off and dropped it on the bed. She lifted the dress from the bed and stepped into it.

It was after she shrugged her shoulders into the straps that she thought she might appear more naked wearing it than she had been before she put it on.

*

Jack O'Neill slipped into the bath and thought that it was a pleasant way to soak away the aches and pains of that aging body. He was getting too old for this crap. A twenty kilometre route march with full pack was the sort of thing that they gave recruits to do to break them, not aging Colonels.

There was no soap, but the water was well softened. It might be OK.

He heard a soft sound from the direction of the doorway turned slowly to see what had caused it.

The servant girl had returned. He very nearly groaned. She seriously struggled to take 'no' for an answer. He was about to tell her so, when he realised that it was not the same girl who had escorted him to the room. They were alike enough to be interchangeable, although this one was clothed in a different coloured piece of curtain lace.

She just stood in the doorway and watched him. Her expression was intense, as though memorising him for a later time.

Then she disappeared behind the closed door.

O'Neill stared after the retreating girl and wondered what that had been about.

He blinked and gave it no further thought.

*

Daniel Jackson was cursing the nature of medieval towel technology, struggling to remove the water, and only succeeding in smearing it about.

A serving girl stepped through the door way and after a confused moment, Jackson found another use for the towel, one that it served much more purposefully than it had the task he attempted earlier.

The serving girl lowered her eyes subserviently, if a little slower than she had been trained to do.

"**Is there any thing that the master requires?**" she asked.

"**Ah, no,**" stammered Jackson. He was more than a little flustered by her attention and by her entrance. He barely saw her, dedicating more of his precious processing time to the question of how the hell to get her out of the room without offending anyone or breaking any local taboo.

She looked up at him and smiled shyly through a curtain of waist length dark hair. **"It would be my task to assist drying the master,**" she said.

It was a more than tempting offer. "**Ah, I think I can handle that myself,**" he said regretfully.

"**If that situation changes master, simply ask for Heidi.**"

She backed out of the room with her head bowed.

Jackson shook his head and stared at the closed door. It had dawned on him rather too late that she had a job to do and might be punished for not doing it. And he was left with a fleeting memory of her face, only acknowledged at the last as being considerably more elegant than normally associated with medieval societies. She had been rather taller than he would have expected also. The Goa'uld certainly looked after the physical aspects of their slaves and potential vassals.

*

The dinning room was a huge, vaulted room with arching ceilings and drapery lining each wall. Tapestries depicted bloody battles and heroic deeds in meticulous detail. Hanging from the ceiling was a giant chandelier composed of perhaps a hundred candles. The light that it cast flickered faintly. Directly beneath it and slicing the room in half was a giant oak table set for eight. A candelabra of Victorian ugliness formed the centrepiece. It carried twenty flickering candles.

O'Neill stepped into the room and looked around at the assembled guests. There was the count and a woman who hung off his arm as though she had been designed as a fashion accessory to match his cape. 

The Count was still cloaked in his riot of colour, as though deliberately distancing himself from the dark and brooding structure of his face.

The woman hanging from his arm was unfamiliar to O'Neill. She was dressed in red so vivid that it might have been fashioned deliberately to resemble spilled blood. As a means of preserving cultural taboos and covering her skin from the elements, her dress was a total failure. Any sudden move on her part and they whole thing would be on the floor as fast as gravity could take it.

Secretly O'Neill hoped that would happen. Then he could check his imaginary construct against the reality, because that was the only thing that filled his mind when he looked at her, speculation about what she would look like if she were naked.

"**Countess**," O'Neill hazarded, attempting to mouth the Germanic pronunciation. He made a reasonable fist of it.

Her gaze was direct to the point of rude. She took a long time to answer. O'Neill was aware of the glisten of her lips. He tongue teased her upper teeth. "**Welcome to our home**," she purred finally. Her arms remained entwined with that of the count, but her eyes were holding O'Neill's and issuing a visible challenge.

Surely the man must have known about the flirtatious nature of his wife? O'Neill wondered. But the Count's gaze was focussed elsewhere. 

Daniel Jackson had arrived, and the Count seemed more than pleased that he had done so.

"**I not speak your language**," O'Neill managed badly.

"**That rather depends on what I want to communicate**," the Countess said and batted dark eyes at O'Neill, making any translation rather superfluous.

"Oh…Kay…" said O'Neill and began looking for ways to get away without seeming too rude.

*

Teal'c pushed the tapestry hanging by the window aside and set out to confirm for himself that the draught coming from behind there came from outside the building. 

He found an opening that led into a passageway. He followed that for a way and found it was descending. After several minutes feeling his way along in the dark, he had a pretty good idea that he was now under the ground and outside of the castle walls.

He nodded to himself and stopped. There didn't seem any point continuing further. Those explorations could wait until later in the night. He couldn't see the end of the hallway yet, but he was satisfied by that much exploration. He turned around and retraced his steps and re-emerged inside his own room.

It was time to go down stairs. He marched across the room to the door and then went down to meet everyone for dinner.

*

The Count poured a glass of wine for Daniel Jackson, one for himself and one for his wife. The rest of the SG-1 team might as well have been somewhere else for all the interest the Count showed in them. 

His wife on the other hand seemed to be looking Jack O'Neill's way every time he chanced a glance toward her. The attention was long past disconcerting.

"**My wife admires the decoration that you wear before your eyes**," the Count said to Jackson against all evidence. She had not so much as glanced his way once since they had been introduced.

"**It is a means to correct my eyesight**," Jackson said and then took a sip from the goblet. The wine was coarse and crude, but he swallowed manfully.

"**Then you have difficulty with your vision**?" The count persisted.

"**Yes. The lenses correct the blurring so that I can see properly**."

"**What a marvellous idea.**" The Count said heartily.** "We are blessed, those of us in our clan, with a persistence of vision**," the count smiled at his own pun. Jackson smiled in appreciation. "**But there are others in our domain who might benefit from such a boon. You must speak with one of our artificers and educate him in the ways of preparing such a thing**."

*

"I have this idea that they were expecting some one else and they have mistaken us for them," Daniel Jackson confided to O'Neill over an aperitif. The count and his wife were discussing something in quiet tones by the table.

Teal'c stood by himself and tried to look like he wasn't bored stupid. Everyone ignored him as though he were the gatecrashing leper in a medical convention.

"Do you have any idea what they were expecting?" O'Neill hissed to Jackson.

"I didn't want to ask. It might sound a touch suspicious if I were to say something like 'oh and what was it exactly that you expected us to do for you once we arrived?' It just doesn't have the right ring of confidence about it. You know what I mean. I'm still hoping that if I talk only a little and listen a lot, then I might get a clue… and you aren't listening to me at all."

Jackson looked up at O'Neill's eyes and found them staring into space. Well not space exactly, just to the opposite side of the room, and part way up the stairs.

Samantha Carter had made her appearance. 

No, that's not quite correct. Samantha Carter was making an Entrance. 

She had spent many minutes working up the nerve to put that dress on, and then a few more minutes working up the nerve to wear it the down stairs, and now she had taken a deep breath (straining the limits of the garment in terms of skin coverage in doing so) and done so.

The dress had the impact she had dreaded. O'Neill managed not to see the countess from that moment onward. 

Jackson calmly closed Jack's gaping mouth for him, but it flopped back open again as soon as Daniel released O'Neill's chin. 

Carter's bubble of confidence was burst by the reaction of Jack O'Neill. If he had been cool about it, she just might have been able to carry it off, but that open-mouthed reminder of the tension that existed between them was unfortunate. 

OK, so now she knew, the dress was worse than being naked, at least then she would have understood the attention, but this was worse. She just knew that the men would be looking at the edges of each piece of the dress to see if it released her skin and showed off something that she would have preferred to keep hidden.

She stepped down the stairs, refusing to meet Jacks' eyes.

Then she saw the look on the Countess's face and decided that Jack's attention and her own desire to succumb to it, was not the worst thing she could deal with that evening.

Dinner was announced and they all took their seats.

Somehow, Carter managed to be seated beside the Countess. And she had tried so hard to avoid that too.

*

Dinner began tediously for the members of SG-1 who were unable to speak German. Jack O'Neill had noticed the attention that the Countess gave to Sam and entertained a vague jealousy, and that was more than confusing. He knew it was out of line and that one part of him was secretly pleased to be free of the woman's interest, but this was bizarre.

The Count, now that sort of attention O'Neill could have understood, but the Countess… 

He shook his head.

Teal'c looked across at him and raised an eyebrow.

O'Neill waved the question away with a flick of his fingers.

And then he saw the way that the Count was acting toward Daniel Jackson and it was all O'Neill could do to avoid laughing at that moment. Something must have shown on his face, because Teal'c had once again released one of his patented puzzled expressions. He raised one eyebrow.

"I'll tell you later," O'Neill told him.

"I look forward to the enlightenment," Teal'c said.

Then there were the two women that sat opposite from the Count. O'Neill had caught a reference to sisters from the conversation between Jackson and the Count when introductions were exchanged. He had missed whose sisters they were, but he suspected they were the Countess's sisters. They had the same raven hair and the same pale complexion. Their eyes were almost impossible to explain. They appeared to be violet coloured, but every time O'Neill tried to decide, he found himself staring at them intently and being unaware of why he had taken the trouble to stare at them in first place. He found himself thinking totally unacceptable thoughts at that point and forced himself to look away.

There had been lots of private predatory smiles.

A giant of a man emerged from behind a tapestry and pushed a trolley toward the table. The aroma of grilled meat wafted from the general direction. Jack O'Neill found himself salivating in disproportion to the food on offer. He couldn't even see it yet. The cart rolled to a halt beside the table and the giant waiter, lifted the silver lid from the tray. O'Neill watched the flourishing lid from over the shoulder of Daniel Jackson and Samantha Carter.

"Ah, Daniel," said O'Neill. "Could you ask out hosts a question for me?"

"Sure, what?"

"What's for dinner?"

"Hang on. **My companions want to know what is for dinner?**"

"**It is a favourite of the house, beef in our own special sauces.**"

Jackson relayed the information to O'Neill. "Beef," he said.

"Daniel, I recognised the shape, it is the colour that I don't recognise."

"What do you…?" Jackson turned around and looked at the food for him self. "Ah, it's blue."

"Yep."

"Blue?"

"That what it looks like to me as well."

"Special sauces," Jackson said sickly.

"I hope so."

"It does smell pretty good…"

It tasted better than either O'Neill of Jackson would have thought.


	8. Chapter 8:

The night dragged on. Strangely coloured and flavoured food came and went. O'Neill sampled a bit here and a bit there and managed to have his fill. 

The Count and his retinue ate sparingly but also steadily while they spent a great deal of time feting Daniel Jackson.

And then, finally, O'Neill recognised a few signs amid the conversation around him.

"**You must be tired after such a long day on the road**," the Count told Jackson. He had seen the looks that past between Teal'c and O'Neill and then caught Samantha Carter stifling a yawn.

Jackson translated.

"I could do with some sleep," Carter agreed.

Jackson translated back.

"**Then by all means we should not keep any one up who is not comfortable to do so**," he turned to his wife. "**Could you escort the lovely Miss Sam'tha to her room?"**

"**Gladly**," she agreed and nodded.

"I could use some sleep too," O'Neill said suddenly. "I am not as young as I used to be."

Jackson translated, and received a twittering of gentle laughter from the Countess's sisters that was all the more unsettling for its lack of mocking content.

"The Count and I have things we need to speak of," Jackson said and raised his eyebrows at O'Neill as if to add some significance to his words.

O'Neill smiled at Jackson coldly. Well if he hadn't figured it out for himself, O'Neill wasn't going to do it for him, no way.

*

The Count led Daniel Jackson out of the dinning room, through the draughty stone hallways and into a fire lit anteroom. A manservant hovered at the Count's beck and call. The candles in the chandelier had not been lit and the only source of illumination was the flickering fire.

The room was furnished with four high-backed winged chairs that had been upholstered with some of the most remarkably fine leather Jackson had ever seen. The chairs had a heavy appearance, but proved easier to slide closer to the fire that Jackson might have expected. He sank into the one that was offered to him by the Count's extravagant gesture.

"**The air has developed a chill**." The Count agreed. He turned to the manservant. Jackson hadn't heard his approach and restrained a start of surprise. "**A brandy for me**," the count said, "**and for our guest…**"

"**I'll have the same**," Jackson agreed.

"**We have much to discuss on the morrow**," the Count said affably.

"**I wanted to speak with you about that**, Jackson began.

"**It is too late in the evening to discuss matters of business. That can wait until the morrow. This evening we need to discuss worldly matters. I know how it is for you people, all work, work, work, but that is not the best way to live your life. You should take the time to savour the scents and tastes of this world, experience the variety and the variability that this world has to offer**."

The manservant returned with a tray. Two brandy snifters sat symmetrical on the tray and were proffered between the Count and Jackson.

Both were taken, and sipped.

"**I believe that me and my companions have travelled much and experienced much of what you speak**." Jackson said.

The count looked at Jackson over the brandy glass' oversized bulbous rim and nodded more with his eyelids than with his head, but his approval was obvious. "**I suspect there is a large element of truth in what you say. There is a sophistication about your team, that is not what I had expected. The Countess informs me that your female retainer has a piece of jewellery piercing the skin of her navel. That is not a common thing to encounter."**

That revelation caught Jackson by surprise. "**It is not uncommon where I come from,"** he explained.

****

"You see what I mean then. Your team is not what I expected. They are much more focussed and aware of their surroundings than I would have expected of your retinue. But that is too close to the nature of tomorrow's business, and I promised that I would not discuss that until tomorrow, did I not?"

"**That is true**."

"**Then Dan'el. Tell me about yourself. I want to hear it all**."

Jackson yawned hugely, but began his story. It was all a fabrication of course.

*

If we had the capacity to perceive reality in more than the standard three physical, and one entropic, dimensions. (Not withstanding Steven Hawkins contention that time is a reversible dimension in much the same way that we can experience genuine reversibility in the other three physical dimensions, or any of the quantum mechanical explanations of the nature of the universe, we all know that the passage time is marked by entropy). Sorry, lost the train of thought there for a moment.

If we could see into the dark realms that surround this space-time construct that we use to translate the quantum nature of the universe to ourselves, we would note at this point in the narrative, the arrival of a black robed figure seated calmly atop a giant pale horse. The robe has the aspect of midnight about it, as though it were fashioned from actual midnight, as opposed to the use of midnight black material. The skeletal hands with which he pats the horses neck, don't just look emaciated, they look positively fleshless, which they are, in actual fact. They are quite fleshless.

He turned toward the viewer and grinned out from within the folds of his hooded robe. He had little choice in the nature of his facial expressions, given the lack of lips. "TIME TO GET TO WORK," said Death in a voice that still had clods of coffin covering loam dripping from its diphthongs and consonants.

In the dank and oppressive hidden hallways of the castle, a feast was under way. It is a particularly nasty scene and we will not spend too much time dwelling on the details. It involves a lot of naked people and a lot of screaming. It does not look like the one in the middle is having much fun at all.

Watching it all with an impassive stare and a wide grin, Death waited for his cue. His timing was impeccable. He was always late.

*

It was only a couple of minutes beyond the time when he entered his room that Jack O'Neill found his preparations for bed disturbed by a knock at the door. It was a timorous knock. Not one of your more assertive 'police in the middle of the night' kind of knocks but more of an 'I'm sneaking about and I don't want any one to see me in the corridor' kind of knocks. That meant that it wasn't Teal'c and probably not Daniel, and that left him with his first choice of companions; Samantha Carter.

Given the sort of tensions that were evident at the dinner table nothing would have surprised O'Neill at this moment. He hoped the Countess wasn't too disappointed and then changed his mind. He hoped she was completely disappointed.

Wearing an undershirt and combat pants, and the rapidly deteriorating second pair of socks he had worn that day, he padded over to the door. He still had his toothbrush in his mouth and a froth of toothpaste on his lips.

He opened the door. "Hi Sam," he began, "I hope the Countess…." and then ground to a halt in the face of both his own confusion and the blank look on the face of the raven headed woman standing on the other side of the door. "Oh, it's you again."

She looked up at him and frowned at the froth she saw on his mouth.

O'Neill realised that he had made a mistake in identification. It was the second one, the one who had not spoken to him before. She had just looked.

He waved a few confused gestures and then decided that the whole thing was too complicated to explain, what with the lack of common language, divergent conceptual schemas and the nature of tooth paste anyway, so he hurried back to the bath and washed his mouth out.

She walked past him and made for the Tapestry hanging from the far wall. She pointed to him and said, "**We need to speak with you**." Of course to O'Neill this came out as gobbledy gook, so there was not much chance that she was understood in his mind. She probably had no idea that it was possible to speak another language, O'Neill thought.

She noticed the blank expression on his face and shook her head. O'Neill shrugged and she turned away. 

She marched for the door, pointed to the tapestry as though there was something significant about it and waved that he should look behind it.

He nodded as though in understanding.

She closed the door behind her when she left.

*

Pushing the tapestry aside revealed a hidden (well sort of) passage way. O'Neill stepped behind the tapestry and took a few steps. He stopped, looked around as though confused for a moment and then re-traced his steps. 

He rummaged around in his gear, found his torch and stepped back through the tapestry covered entrance. At least now he could see where he was going.

Now which way to head. What were the options? There was left and there was the other left. Ah, he thought to himself, (we'll listen in anyway, but he doesn't know that we're here. He might get self-conscious if he knew, so we'll be very quiet) there was a breeze coming from the other left. He set off to the right.

O'Neill sneaked through the hallways of the castle, conscious of his foot falls all the way. They seemed to echo through the draughty stone cavern like gun shots.

He heard something ahead of him and stopped to listen. He even held his breath so he could hear better. Which only left the pounding of his heart and he couldn't find a way to still that. He listened harder to make up for the noise.

He drew his AK-47, released the safety and waited a bit more.

"Grrrrrrrr," said a voice from below waist height and about three metres ahead of him. OK, he decided, that was not a good sign. The voice had muscles in it, and claws, and worst of all, it seemed to be full of teeth. 

That was a lot to conclude from an inarticulate growl, but it was one of those pre-programmed neural pathway kind of hard-wired things that his neural processor was programmed to identify. Evolution had given O'Neill's ancestors a concept of wolf that was hard to argue with.

"Nice doggy," he said.

A barrage from an AK-47 is seriously hard to disguise when it is let lose in a tunnel like the one that housed O'Neill and the angry wolf, so O'Neill discarded that option, but only for a moment. Right now, O'Neill's toddling toilet training was being tested for longevity. This mode of testing had been done to him a few times in the past and O'Neill is proof against this sort of test. It takes something a good deal better than a growling wolf to relax his control over his basis bodily functions.

Disappointed, the wolf thought it would have another go and produced a prolonged piece of glutteral grumbling.

Again no discernible result.

The wolf was having second thoughts about what it should do in the face of this lack of results. It usually hunted with a pack, and this time it was on its own. It had sort of backed itself into a corner however and would loose a lot of face if it backed off and thought these good second thoughts in the safety of a cave somewhere.

O'Neill was fingering the butt of the AK-47 again. He was pretty sure he could level it and provide the wolf with a few extra orifices if it was silly enough to pounce. He wasn't certain, but he was reasonably sure.

The wolf picked up on this whole quietly confident thing and wondered again if it was doing the right thing.

The tableau started to drag on a bit.

*

Samantha Carter was having difficulty sleeping. The bed was way too soft and the noise from outside was intruding through the timber shutter. It wasn't loud enough to wake her up but it was just barely loud enough to keep her awake. 

If they shut up for a few minutes, she might be able to doze off, but there was no respite.

After tossing and turning and playing with the blankets so the draught stopped blowing down her spine, she finally decided to give up. She climbed from beneath the covers and sat on the edge of the bed and tried to decide what to do.

She felt around for her clothes, but the elves that had taken them away had not thought to return them in the dark. There was nothing for it. She would have to wear the Countess's dress. It was only a piece of lingerie anyway, so she had felt less concerned about sleeping in it than she did about the idea of walking around in it. She had done so earlier in the evening, but it had taken a fair amount of nerve then and the dress had become somewhat the worse for wear since.

She padded barefoot across the floor and reached the window. She opened one of the shutters and folded it back so she could see outside.

The torches were milling around still. The scene was much the same as she had seen earlier. For the second time that evening she wondered what was going on down there.

A cold breeze caressed the small of her bare back. She turned to look at the heavy tapestry suspended beside the window and frowned for a moment. She pushed it aside and revealed a passageway built into the wall between her room and the next one. 

She needed a torch. There was a candle in the corridor outside her room's main entrance. She reached a decision.

*

A noise from further down the passageway caught the wolf's attention, like it needed more complications. A little later, O'Neill also heard the new sound. He set off and followed it along the corridor, cradling the AK-47 in the crock of his elbow while he waved his torch with his left hand.

He rounded a bend in the hall and almost shot Samantha Carter.

His finger itched, but he was a good boy and managed not to shoot. It would have been embarrassing and required a great deal of paperwork. Paper work was anathema. Paperwork was bad Karma. For a man who's mission reports addressed the headings of Who, What, Where, How and When, with single words, the idea of filling out the sixteen page mission accident report - sub-set injury to personnel (friendly fire); category, gun shot wounds, was enough to still his trigger finger.

In the confusion, the wolf had decided that this was a great opportunity to slink off and have a careful think. It had encountered a technical problem with its delivery and a bit of work wouldn't go astray before testing the toilet training of another human.

"What are you doing out at this hour of the night?" O'Neill hissed. His torch lit her face, so she squinted against the glare. He lowered the torch and then hurriedly turned it aside when he saw the state of Carter's dress. "Especially dressed like that."

"It's all they left me with Colonel," she explained and then she added; "And I'm doing the same as you," she hissed in return. "I'm snooping."

"Have you seen any thing?" O'Neill needed a distraction, any thing to get the memory of that dress out of his head.

"What haven't I seen," she hissed. "I've seen some very weird people who might be looking to seduce any and all of us, without due regard for gender or preference. I see people milling in the courtyard as though they are waiting for something to happen. I found a secret passageway linking my room with something else that I haven't found yet. And I find myself wondering just what they all think they're doing. Other than that I haven't seen much. What have you seen?"

"I think Daniel might be on the Count's shopping list," O'Neill suggested.

"I saw that," Carter agreed. "I hope Daniel knows what he's doing. Do you think he does?"

"Daniel?"

"Yeah."

They shared a vision. It wasn't telepathy but it was hard to tell the difference.

"I seem to remember," O'Neill said grimly, "that there must have been, I don't know, probably a dozen times, when I found him unconscious in the middle of some ancient temple. Probably more times. We've even found him dead a few times as well."

"Yeah," Carter said softly. "He might be in big trouble."

O'Neill nodded in the dark. It was a wasted gesture. "We should look for him," he said.

"Yeah," she agreed. "That seems a good idea. Any ideas?"

"Not a one."

"The count did lead him into the same wing as us," Carter said. "I remember hearing their voices walking past my door."

"OK, let's see if we can find him then."

*

They crept along another corridor. 

"God the Lord of the manner is a creepy guy," Carter judged. "I keep expecting him to start counting things."

"Like the count in Sesame Street," O'Neill asked. He was aware of the early childhood trauma she had experienced. They had been caused by images of the Count and he was conscious of the problems such an image might cause her.

"Yeah," she said and shivered.

They walked on a bit further. Carter was unusually quiet.

"Is there something else bothering you?" O'Neill asked.

"You mean other than skulking through a castle full of… what we think might be Goa'ulds, while I'm wearing something about as protective as a piece of fog. Some one has my guns and hasn't given them back and we've lost Daniel to what seemed like a predatory bisexual. Other than that there's nothing bothering me."

"Nothing in particular then?" questioned O'Neill showing remarkable perspicacity.

"There's still something that I don't understand," Carter conceded. "Before I came out to investigate, there were people milling in the courtyard," Carter explained. "They were carrying torches but they were very quiet. It's the one aspect of this situation that I don't understand. What do you suppose that was about?"

It wasn't an idea that O'Neill wanted to consider. Complications were something that he could do without. O'Neill preferred simple. Simple was good. He liked Sylvester Stallone movies, the bad guy get's killed at the end and there's none of that complicated legal system junk to worry about. "I don't know what that might be, and I don't like the sound of that one bit. It sort of suggests a peasant underground group."

"A revolution about to happen?"

"The very thing."

"How will that effect our mission?"

"I don't…What was that noise?"

"Where?"

"Ahead of us. I heard a noise."

A light lit the corridor ahead of them.

"Quick hide," O'Neill hissed. He leapt for a tapestry that covered the wall. He threw it aside and squeezed against the wall behind it. He fingered the butt of his AK-47 and waited. Breathing deliberately slowly.

The footsteps approached their position slowly. Then stopped in front of O'Neill for a moment.

The tapestry was thrown aside. O'Neill raised his gun and was about to cock the firing mechanism when he realised that the face staring into his own was terribly familiar. "Teal'c," he hissed. "What're you doing here?"

"I would ask the same of you Colonel O'Neill. And also ask why were you hiding behind this tapestry with your feet sticking out from beneath the drape? I even recognised the mud pattern on them as belonging to you."

O'Neill looked down guiltily. "Oh… Right."

"I would suggest that you might hide better as well Major Carter."

"I'm not even wearing boots," Carter complained. "And my feet weren't sticking out."

"You aren't wearing much of any thing," agreed Teal'c. "But your perfume this evening was particularly fetching."

"Ohhh. Kayyy," said Carter. She gave an experimental tug on the tapestry. If she pulled hard it might come down. It would be better than wearing the dress she had been saddled with.

"Well," began O'Neill, "all we need now is for Daniel to find his way into this corridor and we'll have a complete set."

"Ah," said Teal'c, "Doctor Jackson is only a little way ahead of us, in this very corridor. He did, in fact, send me to find you. He has found something that might be of interest to all of us. If you would just follow me?"

Before she set off the join them, Carter gave one last longing look at the tapestry. The others were leaving and she didn't have enough time, she followed on, but vowed to do something of that ilk soon.


	9. Chapter 10fooled ya, chapter 9

Jack O'Neill looked at Daniel Jackson in a wholly new light. It was not a nice light; it was in fact quite a nasty light. "Where did you get that outfit Daniel?" O'Neill asked before he could stop himself.

Jackson had the good grace to look embarrassed for a moment before answering. "I didn't chose it," he explained weakly.

He was dressed in a complicated arrangement of black leather straps and studs. It looked a bit like someone had gotten carried away when they were designing the mechanism to secure a jockstrap in place. 'If they get hit from this direction then it would be knocked loose so we need a strap that goes over the shoulder…' and a few more stupid ideas like that one before finally committing the design to the tannery.

"Who did?" O'Neill was having trouble focussing on any thing else now that the dam was broken. It was a bit like the that the first question was like the little leaky crack in the dyke and there was no little boy standing near by to put his finger into it so the water was going to start eroding his resolve really quickly if things don't change soon. He felt a back log of puns bubbling to the surface.

Jackson drew a quick breath and then said, "The last thing I remember before Teal'c sneaked in through the gap behind the tapestry was having a quite cognac with the Count. In between those two events…" he shrugged. "I have no idea."

"Out for the Count?" suggested O'Neill. "Or was that down?"

"Oh very funny," Jackson mocked.

"I wouldn't recommend that outfit in future."

"Do you feel OK?" asked Samantha Carter. She had a sneaking suspicion that Daniel had been less lucky than she had, and that was a conceptual stretch. Her outfit was no more sensible than his, and probably equivalently degrading, but at least she had been left alone.

Hadn't she…?

"Can we focus on the real issue here, please?" Jackson implored. "It's not as though this outfit is any worse than the one that the Countess chose for Sam," he said, thus backing up Carter's own internal argument.

Until this point in the conversation, Carter had been largely unaware of the way she was dressed, well partly (dressed that is). After a few hours wearing the thing she had become used to it, even if she was still occasionally aware of the way O'Neill was staring at her out of the corner of his eye, and she was not unhappy about that attention. She even felt no jealousy in the way he was focussing on Daniel at that moment because she felt the same insatiable curiosity to knew what happened.

"So when you woke up did you…?" she sort of half asked, unable at the last moment to commit the question in her mind to her output buffer.

Daniel looked at her. He wasn't going to save her by guessing what she was trying to ask and then answering her. If she wasn't going to say it out loud, he saw no reason to answer it. He stared her down. She shook her head. "Wouldn't we be better occupied by looking at this," he pointed his torch into the dark and made it less so.

The beam of his torch found the head of a man sprawled on the floor of the corridor. The entire SG-1 team turned to look at the face on the floor. It had the same animation as a store-front dummy.

"OK, you're right Daniel," said O'Neill. "But as soon as this little adventure is over, I want a full report."

"Not on your life," pledged Jackson.

"Come on. You have to tell."

"Look he has fang marks on his neck," said Carter. She had crouched down to examine the body.

"I'm serious, Daniel," said O'Neill, trying to sound like he was giving an order when he really wasn't.

"So am I," vowed Jackson.

"And he looks really pale," commented Teal'c.

"Are you two going to contribute to this investigation, Daniel, Colonel?" asked Major Samantha Carter USAF and dressed like a harem girl from an Arabian nights story in a bad B-grade movie, made recently enough to seek an R classification certificate.

"Yes," sighed O'Neill.

"I've already had a look," explained Jackson.

"He looks really anaemic," suggested O'Neill. "But then again so does every body in this place. They should get out more."

"Except for the serving girls," said Jackson.

"Yeah they looked pretty good," commented O'Neill.

"There's a dead body on the floor," reminded Carter.

"Yeah, OK," conceded O'Neill.

"Exsanguination is not such a bad way to go," said Jackson. "You gradually fade to unconsciousness and die in your sleep."

"I know we've been through a lot Daniel, but I don't remember you dying that way at any time in the past," noticed O'Neill. "Plenty of other ways…"

"Well yeah there is that."

"You can't bleed to death through a wound that small," observed Carter.

"Why not?" asked O'Neill.

"It coagulates and heals much too quickly to allow a whole couple of gallons of blood to leak out."

"Unless there was an anti-coagulant involved," suggested Jackson.

"I suppose."

"And those are fang marks right?"

"Yeah."

"Then you would need to have an anticoagulant in the saliva of whoever bit them."

"So what sort of animal was it?" asked O'Neill looking over his shoulder and fingering the butt of his AK-47. The wolf seemed a likely candidate. He said so.

"No," said Jackson.

"What just 'no'? Not, 'I don't think so because…' just 'no'?"

"That's right."

"Why?"

"Well it is a little wound and wolves hunt to eat. This guy would have his throat chewed out and…"

"I think that's enough detail Daniel," said O'Neill, thinking of Carter's sensibilities. The whole water vapour as clothing thing had confused O'Neill.

"You're right Daniel," Carter said, oblivious to O'Neill's solicitous cut off. "A wolf would have ripped his throat out and dined on his entrails. There would be gore all over…Is there something the matter Sir."

"No nothing," said O'Neill. He sighed heavily. "So what was it?"

"Vampire bat," suggested Carter. "They have an anticoagulant in their saliva."

"Oh yeah," muttered Jackson. "Like the Goa'uld would bring them across from Earth."

"Maybe it was a local animal," suggested Teal'c

"The xenobiologists will have to find it if there is one," Carter said.

"So how big would it have to be?" Jackson persisted.

"Looking at the bite marks, it would have to be big, maybe even man sized."

"How would you know that?" O'Neill chimed in.

"Well, the bite radius is like that big," she said and held out her hand so her fingers were a few centimetres apart. "You would need a stomach that was pretty big to take that much food in during a single bite and…"

Everyone was staring at her.

"What?" she asked.

"Then they're vampires right?" O'Neill guessed.

"No sir."

"Well Sam," O'Neill asked techily. "What is it then?"

"They're Goa'uld," suggested Jackson. It came completely from no where and caught everyone by surprise.

"How can they be Goa'uld?" O'Neill snarled. "OK, Daniel, I know that the Goa'uld are bloodsucking fiends. I know that, but this," he waved at the body that sprawled at their feet, "is not that kind of fiend."

"No that's true," agreed Carter. "I can't explain it. I just know that whatever did that, they have a need for blood."

"Vampires Sam," O'Neill said. "You're talking about vampires, real ones."

"Well I guess so," she said dubiously. She obviously didn't agree.

"Do you think we get the whole story here?" O'Neill warmed to the task of speculation. "Do we have to stake them and cut off their heads? Do they have to hide from the sun? Do they have to sleep on dirt and can't cross moving water? Do they have super human strength and can't be killed by bullets or steel or…?"

"I don't know," Carter said. "All I know is that we have a dead body on the floor and that something drained his blood through a bit mark."

"They probably don't, you know Jack," said Jackson.

"But how do we know?" O'Neill persisted.

"Well we don't."

"So we might have the real deal here. We'd be best to play safe."

"What, you mean the whole eat garlic and use the Christian Cross to ward them off and all that?"

"Yeah if necessary." 

Carter felt a chill run up her spine, but she was wearing almost nothing and it was probably caused by a stray breeze.

*

"Give me that report," General Hammond instructed Colonel Makepeace. "I think it's about time that I found out what is going on here."

"Vampires?" Makepeace asked. "Blood sucking ghouls?" He pushed the report across to General Hammond who picked it up and began reading.

His lips moved.

"Of sorts," said Teal'c.

"You can carry on Teal'c," General Hammond instructed.


	10. Chapter 10

Their trek back through the dingy corridors was uneventful, which is one of the great advantages of modern technology. The only way for their torch to go out was for the battery to go flat. Not like the old days when any stray breeze would blow the thing out and then they'd be stuck in the dark, lost and unable to even see where they were going, and then eventually you would fall into the cunning trap, where you slid down an impossibly slippery slide and eventually plummeted head first into the dungeon.

That sort of thing just doesn't happen any more.

"OK, well let's move along shall we?" Jack O'Neill said. He had been leading the pack when he realised that the team seemed to be short of one member. After a quiet walk back along the path they had taken, he found the missing team member staring at the wall, or rather he seemed to be staring at a displaced and discoloured stone that some one had inserted into the wall.

"I think I found something," said Daniel Jackson, using his best distracted-by-the-cool-old-stuff-that-I-found mode of human interaction. His input/output buffers were still in circuit, but they weren't getting the attention of the main processor anywhere near as much as the rest of the people around him.

"What is it?" asked O'Neill. He was in his patient mode. Some times the distracted scientists in his team made useful observations and you could never tell when they were about to make one, or whether they were about to comment on something totally irrelevant. O'Neill had leant to wait for a moment before launching into a chewing out.

"This stone is different to the others," Jackson said softly. He pried at the edges and found no mortar between the stones, but that was no surprise, there was none joining the others either. Some one with a real eye for detail had put each of the stones together very carefully, and at great personal cost.

He pushed at the stone. There was a horrible sound like some one scraping huge stones together.

Screams rent the air.

"I think you've done something wrong Daniel," O'Neill hazarded softly. "Again."

Jackson gulped. "That was Teal'c and Sam, right?"

"Uh huh."

"And they are in trouble right?"

"I think so. Yeah."

"We should go look and see what happened. Shouldn't we?"

"Yep. We might even bend our minds to the task of helping them out."

"Now would be a good time?"

"The best."

"Let's have a look at where they were."

"I do believe that it was over there," O'Neill said and pointed the beam of his torch into the dark. It hit nothing before fading into the oppressive new dimness. It should have hit a wall, it did when he tried this trick before, but now there was nothing there but more dark. "But they're not there any more."

"Naturally," agreed Jackson. "I must say I am impressed with how you are handling this crisis."

"You mean I haven't started chewing you a new asshole."

"That's the one."

"Trust me, that is coming."

"I rather thought it might."

O'Neill and Jackson walked over to where the beam of light found nothing. The nothing in front of them seemed to go down a long way. They looked down, waved the torch beam into the gap and saw more dark, it was simply further away. 

"I think that must be where they went," said Jackson.

"Down there in the dungeon," O'Neill agreed. They both peered in the direction that their torch beam was wasting it's energy by pushing at more dark than it could overcome if it took a course of steroids and human growth hormone.

"I've screwed up big time," Jackson said.

"That would be my guess," O'Neill agreed.

"What's going to happen?"

"To you, probably nothing worse than wearing that outfit. If they're OK, probably nothing else at all."

"And if they're not OK?"

'Then I might just hand you over to the Count and leave you here."

"Well at least I know where I stand."

"Just what did happen with the Count?" the question was never far from O'Neill's mind. He just had to know.

"Are you guys OK down there?" Jackson called into the dark, thus avoiding the question.

"Hey, yeah," said Carter. Her voice wafted up the slope and arrived as a feeble little voice, little louder than you'd get from a telephone.

"Are you hurt?" O'Neill asked.

"No, I'm OK, but I think Teal'c might be. He hasn't moved since we landed here. Do you have any idea what happened?"

"Pretty good idea," called Jackson.

"And that would be…?"

"Tell you when we get back together."

"What? I didn't hear that."

"Tell you later," O'Neill called down. He looked at Jackson who had the good grace to look embarrassed.

"OK," Carter called back up.

"What's down there?"

"Lot's of dark."

"We've got plenty of that up here as well."

"I think Teal'c dropped his torch when the floor fell out from beneath us. It might be up there somewhere. Can you toss it down?"

"It might get broken," Jackson called.

"Oh come on Daniel its military issue. We could use it as a club and still not break it."

"Yeah, OK," Daniel bent to the task and spent a few minutes searching the floor for the torch. He found a dead rat. He made a few sounds of disgust and then threw it away. It landed on the floor, bounced and then slid into the dungeon.

There was a delay.

"Ewau," called Carter.

"Sorry," apologised Jackson.

"What was that? A rat?"

"Something like that."

"Have you found the torch?"

He found an old D-cell battery. He decided that was a bad sign.

His hand landed on something long and cylindrical. "Ah I think I found it." He pulled at the thing that he found beneath the tapestry and discovered that it wouldn't move. "No that was the pipe carrying the water to the bath."

"Is this what you're looking for Daniel?" said O'Neill. He was leaning against the wall and looking like he was exercising a great effort in sustaining his patient mood. He was waving a torch in his hand. The dead give away about ownership was the fact that he was shining his own torch beam at it.

"I think so yes," said Jackson. He was still crouching n his knees and making a show of not getting up. He looked like he was praying, although in the outfit he wore his posture might have symbolised something else entirely.

"Here, toss it down to Sam," said O'Neill. He threw the torch across to Jackson, who dropped it because he had decided that might be a god time to climb to his feet. The torch bounced off his fumbling finger tips and landed on the floor with a clang. It bounced once before rolling against the wall. Jackson finished his laborious climb to his feet and wandered over to pick the torch off the floor. Just before his fingers reached it, the toes of his left foot bumped the torch and sent it rolling toward the black hole that marked the entrance to the dungeon. Jackson made a grab for the torch and his finger brushed it, accelerating it toward the opening, just before his head hit the stone wall with a thud like the crack of a well-hit baseball. Torch forgotten, he clutched at his head and almost over balanced into the dungeon himself. O'Neill threw out a helping hand and managed to grab one of the stud infested leather straps that crossed over Jackson's back. One of the studs cut heavily into the palm of O'Neill's hand and he very nearly let go. Jackson rolled with the action and landed heavily on his butt and leant against the wall panting and moaning.

O'Neill only had eyes for the torch. It rolled over the lip and followed the same path that Carter and Teal'c had taken, as though in slow motion. O'Neill had faced a choice, catch Jackson or the torch, and not to his own surprise, he had caught Jackson, but he watched the torch very closely. It tottered once at the edge, as though letting O'Neill have one last look at the consequences of his choice, and then again to be sure, before falling. O'Neill and Jackson listened for it but there was no sound.

After a long time falling, accelerating remorseless-ly, the torch landed once, bounced with a hollow bong. There was a wait that ended with a tinkling sound like broken glass, before finally, the landing, with a dull thud. The torch/stone impact didn't sound quite the same any more. Structural integrity was obviously compromised.

"Is it OK?" Jackson called into the dark. It was a forlorn hope, but he had to ask.

"I don't think…," called back Carter. We know this to be a falsehood because she has a PhD in physics. "No… it's OK. It's not great but it works even if the glass is broken. It doesn't throw a great beam, but it's better than nothing."

"Is it a dungeon?" O'Neill called to her.

"I think so. Hang on, I'll check a few things. Yeah, the door is locked from the outside."

"And surrounded by walls?"

"I think so. Yeah solid as…"

"Anything else?"

"There's a sarcophagus down here."

"Figures. Is Teal'c OK?"

"Aaaahhhh!" moaned a deeper male voice from the depths.

"Looks like it," Carter called up. "He has a nasty bump in his head."

"It's called the mark of Apophis," muttered Jackson.

"No jokes please Daniel," implored O'Neill.

"Down for the Count?"

"That was OK, that was a joke on you."

"That light is too bright Major Carter," said the phantom voice of Teal'c from the depths of the dungeon.

"Oh sorry."

"Is there anyone in it?" O'Neill called down.

"The light?" asked Carter. OK, so she must have landed on her head.

O'Neill groaned softly. "No, the sarcophagus," O'Neill said.

"Hang on I'll have a look."

Silence. O'Neill and Jackson exchanged looks that communicated confusion and concern.

"Well?" curiosity got the better of O'Neill. He had to ask.

"I see dead people," Carter called back.

"Really?"

"No. It's empty."

"I have an idea about how to get you out," O'Neill called down. He crouched beside Jackson and outlined his plan. His neural pathways had been busy, stringing together a threadbare piece of logic that just might work.

*

Samantha Carter hauled herself onto the floor level, dragging her way up the slope by pulling on the tapestries that O'Neill and Jackson had tied together. 

On the uphill, hard work end of the slope, the light from their remaining torch caught Carter at last and… Ah, we had better look away because the structural integrity of that dress failed dismally during her descent. Carter's attempts to rectify the situation by tearing the dress into two parts and tying one as a bandeau bikini bra and the other as a wrap around sarong, did not stand up to the effort of climbing the slope. And while we're on that subject, it might not be a good idea to contemplate the image that Teal'c had, standing at the bottom of the slope, shining the torch up to light the way, while she struggled upward clad in that lot.

She landed on to the floor with a fleshy thud. Her pose would have been intensely indelicate if not for the lack of light and the discretion of the audience. All eyes were averted. It is just as well that there were no paparazzi around because that shot would have been sold to Penthouse for sure.

She hurriedly rearranged her tatters and leapt to her feet.

A sound came from the bowels of the dungeon. O'Neill was not sure what it was. It was certainly worrying.

"You ready Teal'c?" O'Neill called down into the darkness.

There was no answer.

They tossed the end of the tapestry back down into the dark.

"Teal'c?"

"…"

"So, um, Teal'c?"

More nothing came back in reply.

"Teal'c?"

"I have opened the door," Teal'c called back.

"Oh, good. How?"

"I blew a hole in it with my staff."

"That would do it."

"I will continue, and meet you back at your room."

O'Neill scratched his head. "OK. We'll be in Daniel's room getting him a more suitable outfit."

"What about me?" Carter said indignantly.

"I don't see anything wrong with that outfit," O'Neill said and then relented under her glare. "I thought all your clothes were taken," he said and handed her the tapestry.

*

At the entrance to Jackson's room O'Neill paused. He waved them to wait and pulled his AK-47 from his webbing. He pushed the tapestry aside with the barrel of the gun and peered through the opening. He pulled his torch off his webbing and poked that through the opening and had another go at checking out the contents of the room. It worked much better now that he could see.

"It's clear," he hissed over his shoulder. "I want one of us on guard at all times," he hissed at Jackson and Carter. "All of us in the one room. I'll take the first watch."

SG-1 went to move forward. 

O'Neill raised his arm to stay them in place. "Did anyone else hear that?"

"What?" Jackson and Carter asked in unison.

"I thought I heard someone moving in the corridor ahead of us. Just wait here for a sec."

He walked past the tapestry opening and poked his head around the corner. He remembered the torch this time and was just in time to catch a flash of white as someone raced around the next corner and out of sight.

Puzzled by that chain of events he scratched his head and went back to join the others. "Come on," he said and waved them through the gap between the tapestry and the wall, "let's get some sleep. I'll take the first watch."


	11. Chapter 11

"I have a theory," said Samantha Carter suddenly. She was sitting beside Jack O'Neill at the foot of what was now her bed. Both Teal'c and Daniel had found the chairs beside the vanity cupboard to be extremely comfortable dozed off almost immediately after they came back through the secret hallway and found them selves in Daniel's room. Carter had found trouble sleeping, and rapidly became bored and lonely. She had eventually gravitated to O'Neill's side after a troubled half hour of tossing and turning.

"About?" prompted Jack O'Neill. Teal'c was right. Carter's perfume was not just enticing, it took alluring to new levels. The tatters of the dress she was still wearing after dinner was not helping his composure in any way. 

Talk of other things was a great idea, now if he could just remember what it was that they were talking about…

"Vampirism," she said, and tutted at him.

"Oh," he said. That! Damn he had forgotten about that, "go on."

"I think we might have stumbled onto a virus," she went on. She wasn't looking at him, just sitting beside him on the bed, intensely aware of the heat given off by his body. In the pale light from their torch, she wouldn't have been able to see much of him anyway, but she wasn't prepared to be that bold at that particular moment. She plucked at a piece of fluff that wasn't on the bed covers. "It affects their bone marrow," she continued, "so that they are unable to manufacture haemoglobin. They have to get it from another source, so they prey on the people who are immune to the virus, like that guy we found in the hall," she turned to look up at him. He had swung the torch beam around so that it landed on her hands. In the spill of the beam, he could see her face. Her look was challenging. "So why don't they just become anaemic and apathetic and then die, you might ask."

O'Neill shook his head. "Well actually no," he conceded, "I was happy with the idea that they needed another source of haemoglobin. It was enough explanation for me. The rest of this is going to go straight over my head."

She smiled at him. She was pretty happy that it was a good idea, but there are heaps of things that might disprove it. She was no Doctor (well actually she was, but she was not an M.D.) but even she could see a few problems with the idea. She continued, thinking out loud more than talking. "Yeah but our digestive systems can't just metabolise the haemoglobin. It doesn't work that way," she seemed to be arguing with herself. She noticed her hands suddenly and stopped plucking at the bed covers. She had pulled a thread from the stitching and it was unravelling in her hands. The end of the thread tickled her foot.

"Well obviously their's does," O'Neill pointed out. It was a pretty impressive piece of conclusion jumping, especially given the type of neural equipment O'Neill had been fitted with, and also given the sort of training he had undergone while he was still young and malleable. "The guy might have been killed in such a way that it looked like an animal attack, any thing…"

"Yeah…" Carter sort of agreed.

"But. We'll send in a medical biological team in to investigate and figure out what sort of mutation we're looking at here."

*

Colonel Makepeace turned to exchange a glance with General Hammond. "That's pretty much in line with the autopsy results," he said.

"I read the report," General Hammond commented. He looked at Teal'c again and wondered what was going on behind that bland expression. The man was so self contained. It was as though he was sitting there and laughing behind his mask at the antics of the pathetic Tau'ri. That would be a bit like the Tok'ra, who Teal'c had a certain affinity with, given that shared the whole symbiotic relationship with a parasite thing. General Hammond always thought they were secretly amused half the time, and openly contemptuous the other half, and sometimes he suspected Teal'c of something similar.

"The virus idea seems like a good one," Makepeace commented.

"Teal'c," General Hammond asked, "were you able to get better information on the nature of the mutation?"

"No," he said simply.

"After this story, I think I'm going to send in a biohazard team," General Hammond said in a low voice. "And flush the place out."

"Teal'c," Makepeace prompted, "was it just the Goa'uld that were affected by the virus or was it something that 'unblended' humans could catch."

That was an angle that General Hammond had not considered. He was not alone. Around the room there was suddenly a concerted, although subtle, movement of chairs, as everyone moved a little bit further away from Teal'c.

The logic was simple. After all, everyone who went across to the other planet with Teal'c, was currently occupying rooms in the infirmary, and keeping all of the medical staff very busy.

The idea of placing the base under biological lock down had just occurred to General Hammond. He looked longingly at the phone.

The movement of chairs did not happen without Teal'c's notice. His eyebrow rose ironically, which seemed to be his general-purpose response to any situation where his limited language skills failed to frame a suitable response. "We did not determine whether there was, in fact a virus, at all," Teal'c said.

"Our medical staff put forward the same theory," Makepeace said simply.

"Among others that they put forward," corrected General Hammond.

"We encountered quite a few of the afflicted," Teal'c said, "and I am not able to define what made the infection possible. Major Carter may have developed a better idea, but she is quite indisposed at present."

The chairs made another movement, radially from a common point.

"I think we need more of this story Teal'c," General Hammond prompted. "But first I need to make a phone call."

*

They heard screams in the night. 

Samantha Carter had dozed off eventually, after she had managed to articulate the vague theories that had developed in her own mind, and she was woken by the noise. She blinked for a moment and tried to work out where she was and what was going on. 

Her re-boot went smoothly, but she had several routines to get running and there was only so much processing power available. She remembered where she was and restrained the groan that threatened to escape from her lips. Her pulse was still pounding.

Something hard and lumpy was under her cheek and she looked around in the dim light spilled from outside the window. It turned out to be Jack O'Neill's chest that she was lying on.

Given the scraps of the dress that she was almost wearing and the nature of the relationship that was being stifled by the non-fraternisation regulations, under which they were obliged to live, it was an uncomfortable moment. Especially since his arm was draped along her mostly bare back and his hand was…

She was saved from examining the dilemma of how to behave at that moment; and she was in a dilemma, because she was about to succumb to an impulse that she would have been able to restrain if she were wide awake, by the second scream that came from the courtyard.

They all woke then. 

The entire SG-1 team were camped up in the same room, all of them sleeping on anything that looked vaguely soft (well perhaps not Carter. The one thing that you couldn't accuse O'Neill of was being soft. Although, perhaps in the head?).

Carter sat up and hurriedly pulled the tapestry around her self. 

O'Neill walked across to the window and looked down into the courtyard. He saw a melee of lights, but they had been down there all night and while the sight was odd, it wasn't new. They seemed to be moving about more purposefully than they had earlier in the night.

"What time is it?" O'Neill asked without turning around.

Carter pulled her arm out of her tapestry and found that her watch was not on her arm. She shook her head. It was the least of her problems with regard to lost equipment. She wondered what they had done with the heavy weaponry and the measuring equipment that she carried. A malicious vision appeared in her mind. It involved a thieving peasant, examining a grenade, and then pulling out the firing pin.

"About two hours before dawn," Daniel Jackson answered.

O'Neill nodded.

He couldn't quite make out what was going on down there, but he already had a suspicion. The lights were clustered much more than they had been. A theory was forming.

A moment later the rest of SG-1 joined him at the window. They were a rag-tag bunch now. Daniel Jackson wore some parts of the impractical leather ensemble that he had somehow accumulated, they had disposed on the more studded and uncomfortable parts by the expedient of cutting them with one of O'Neill's knives. Jackson was still wearing his bizarre ensemble because, while he had been busy doing whatever it was that the Count had wanted him to do, someone had taken his clothing, and his equipment.

O'Neill had given Jackson his fatigue shirt, leaving O'Neill wearing a decidedly second hand T-shirt.

"What do you think is happening out there?" Carter asked. He voice came from immediately behind O'Neill's neck and he felt her breath on the short hair that grew there. Goose-flesh broke out. It was the sort of effect that Carter always had on him. Waking beneath her and finding her barely clothed as she was had been a decidedly unfortunate experience for O'Neill. He had bad visions before his memory booted up and explained the whole circumstances to his reasoning centres. He was never good at complicated explanations and explaining that one to General Hammond was not something that he would have enjoyed.

"I'm not entirely sure I want to know," Jackson said.

"I have a nasty suspicion we are going to find out soon enough," O'Neill said grimly. All eyes sought his, but he did not elaborate.

*

General Hammond answered the phone, cruelly interrupting the flow of Teal'c narrative, just when he was getting into the swing of things. By this stage all eyes in the room left Teal'c reluctantly. They were hanging on the story waiting to see how it resolved.

"Yes," he said.

For the duration of Hammond's conversation, the biological processors contained within each of the bony protective envelopes made busy with it's speculative routines, trying to predict the course of the narrative. This activity uses up a great deal of the processing power of the human brain. It's a bit like a screen saver. Most of the processing power gets used up on something about as productive as the animation of flying toasters. When they could be doing something as useful as preparing reports for the upper management (the US senate) they are actually trying to extrapolate from scanty data and guess what happened to SG-1. It was more of a game, than real life and therefore much more fun.

There were exceptions to this of course. There was Teal'c, who knew what had happened and was teasing the whole thing out, and there was General Hammond who was carrying on a conversation with an inanimate object.

Janet Fraiser was on the other end of the line. "We have a problem, sir," she told him. She used one of those tones that people use which conveys the whole, I-think-this-is-bad-news-and-I'm-keen-to-avoid-the-whole-killing-of-the-messenger-syndrome. It's called circumlocution, and sometimes colloquially referred to as beating around the bush. In that sentence, she also used another of the human communications short cuts. By using the collective pronoun, 'we', she has attempted to share the responsibility for the problem and therefore make killing-the-messenger a more difficult reaction. It doesn't work, but that doesn't prevent people from trying it.

"What is it Doctor?" Hammond demanded. His tome was ominous. He recognised circumlocution when he heard it. In his position, he heard it all the time. Every time people came to him with bad news in fact. How often that situation occurs can be best understood by considering the fact that his job involved sending teams of military personnel out on blind investigatory missions to other stars, where the nature of the biosphere and the ecology are poorly understood. And on top of that there are these horrible bastards out there who love to enslave the human species and stick despotic symbionts into their bodies. Bad news is relative, depending on your expectations, but his are really low, and he still hears bad news.

"It's Daniel Jackson," the tinny voice of Janet Fraiser buzzed out of the phone head set. "The CT scan shows a sub-dural haematoma."

Hammond was not entirely sure what language that was in. He tried to translate. Sub-dural, meant under something or beneath something, or lower than something. Haematoma, that had something to do with blood? Blood under his finger nails? Blood under the skin? That sounded like a bruise. No, her tone was much grimmer than that. "OK," he decided to respond to her tone rather than the content, "that sounds bad."

"It is," she agreed enthusiastically. "We're going to have to operate to relieve the pressure on his brain. I need the authority to do that. Can you offer that for me?" General Hammond had always thought that Daniel Jackson's brain must have been under extreme pressure. Relieving that pressure sounded like a great idea, it was just that… He just knew he had the wrong end of that stick.

Back on track now. OK, it was bad. She had confirmed that much. "What are the alternatives?" he asked, to buy thinking time.

"None really," she replied rapidly. "It is life threatening."

He was afraid of that. He signed heavily. "Go ahead then. How are Carter and O'Neill?"

"Still in danger sir. We're very worried about their condition at this stage. They both have one of the worst cases of hyper-volemic shock that I have come across." She had done it again, spoken in medicalese, or latin, he wasn't sure which. Hyper meant over, or above. Volemic meant, volume? They were over-inflated? That couldn't be right. "They're lucky to be alive," she continued, bringing him back from the depths of speculation, "we only just got them in time, at least we hope so…" she broke off from their conversation for a moment. Hammond heard a few mumbled and muffled comments, but got no details through the phone. "Got to go," Janet continued hurriedly. "We have an alarm from O'Neill's room. Hopefully we got them in time," she amended.

The phone clicked in Hammond's ear and then he was left with the annoying pulse of the engaged signal that purred malevolently into his ear. He lowered the hand set carefully and turned back to the other members of the briefing team.


	12. Chapter 12 I thinklost track at one stag...

At first light Jack O'Neill led Samantha Carter back to her room, in the, probably vain, hope that someone had returned her clothes during the night.

"Are you always this messy when you stay at other peoples houses?" O'Neill asked her.

Samantha Carter's room had been disturbed during the night. It was certainly not arranged in the same way that she had left it. OK, so the bed had been disturbed a bit by her early attempts at sleep, but there were no clothes in the room when she left. She was pretty sure of that. It was the reason that she was wearing the tatty transparent rags that she was wearing. 

Yet what they found bore no resemblance to what she remembered..

She looked around and tried to put the pieces together. She had forgotten to put her towel up. It was still on the floor. That was the one aspect that she remembered being the same from when she left the room hours earlier. 

The crystal goblet that was now resting on the table was not there last night, she was pretty sure of that.

Carter stood at the doorway and looked around. Her equipment was scattered around the room. The bed clothes had been more than just disturbed, they had been thrashed, as thought someone had - occupied it. The word 'slept' just wouldn't come into her head. Whoever had been in her bed, they had done something much more vigorous than could be explained by her attempts at sleep. I wonder who it was, thought Carter. Memories of Daniel's apparent amnesia came to mind and she felt that horrible sinking feeling in her gut. She gazed at the bed again and hoped it wasn't her … and if she did, she hoped it was alone… And she had memories of the Countess accompanying her to the room but none of her leaving…

And we are going to get out of her head before we see anything that we shouldn't see…

She hurriedly gathered a few items to her, clutched them to her breast, and then found that she was shivering. It might have been from the cold because she was not all that well dressed, but then again it might not…

The dress she had worn earlier in the night was much the worse for wear. It hadn't been much to start with. She had spent much of the night wrapped in a tapestry, after the dress had been shredded by her slide into the dungeon. By the time she had climbed back up the slope it had not been up to anything at all.

She grabbed her gear off the floor and threw the tapestry aside before gathering as much of her clothing onto herself as she could manage in as short a time as possible, conscious all the time that her room had been invaded.

O'Neill had the decency to turn his back while she dressed. She had been so flustered by the lack of memory of the events of the evening that she hadn't even noticed his presence. In fact she had forgotten that he was even there to be honest.

"Umm," said O'Neill, after he realised what was going on. Carter realised that he was in the room with her and gave a momentary start. Oh what the hell it was all too late anyway. She decided to plough onward. O'Neill for his part was wondering what he should do about matters. He was thoroughly confused by Carter's apparent confusion and… Following the rustling of clothing Carter began speaking. "What happens now?" she asked. "We need to head home as quickly as possible, don't we?"

O'Neill made the understandable mistake of assuming that she had finished dressing and turned back to face her. He rather wished that he hadn't and turned back to face the wall so he could move past his embarrassment. She appeared to be wearing three postage stamp sized pieces of lace held aloft by strips of heavy-duty dental floss.

"Yeah," he said much more hurriedly than he would normally respond to such an obvious statement, if only because he had seized on the change of subject. Discussions about the things that were running through his head could lead to wholly inappropriate behaviour. "We have to get our information back as quickly as possible."

"What happened out there?" she asked, shoving her arm into the sleeve of her shirt. She looked up from what she was doing and noticed that he was staring at the wall. She took pity on him. "You can turn back now," she said and shrugged her shirt so that it seated onto her shoulders properly.

"Out in the courtyard?" O'Neill guessed and turned back to face her, slowly. Ah! It was sort of OK to do so now. "I don't know." 

All he had to deal with now was a length of leg… but what legs!

"Villagers?" she asked and then bent over to arrange her trousers on the bed. It wasn't a sight to do anything for O'Neill's piece of mind. Her underwear consisted of only _three_ fabric triangles, not the four that O'Neill expected. This modern girl tendency to avoid VPL has unfortunate consequences to the male psyche. They tend to notice these things.

"I think so," O'Neill squeaked and spun hurriedly so he stared out through the window at the early morning sun. With a sinking feeling he heard the tinkle of shattered crystal, and knew that the goblet had been knocked off the table by his wayward holster. He did not dare turn around yet. He could wait a few minutes. He blinked a few times at the discomforting glare pounding through the window, but it beat the hell out of the discomfort he would find elsewhere in that room. By the time he felt game enough to look Carter's way again she was doing up the fixtures that held her trousers aloft. O'Neill was much relieved. "Come on we'll get back with the others and get out of this place."

Carter stared at the broken crystal and fought her tendency to clean it up, Some one else would do it later.

Carter and O'Neill stepped back into the corridor and crept carefully back to Jackson's room. Strangely there was no sound from within. O'Neill frowned. You usually couldn't shut Jackson up, and Teal'c lacked the skills do so any way.

They pushed on the door and found it empty. Well not empty per se. It just had no other people in it. Jackson and Teal'c had gone missing.

"Oh sh…" said O'Neill and his voice trailed off to inaudibility, thankfully for our PG rating. He expected that sort of behaviour from Jackson, but Teal'c was usually more responsible.

*

"So what did happen to you two?" asked General Hammond, regaining control of the briefing from Colonel Makepeace. Hammond had not been happy with the direction that it had been going there for a moment, and tried to get things back onto the right track.

Colonel Makepeace had been hanging on every word that Teal'c uttered, as though savouring the description of the interchange between Carter and O'Neill. If he couldn't have the experience first hand he was determined to milk the vicarious option. Teal'c had wilted under the incessant questions and might have embellished the story a bit. General Hammond certainly hoped so, although with Teal'c that was rarely a consideration. He felt sympathy for O'Neill, General Hammond knew how O'Neill felt about Carter and she certainly pushed the envelope at times. She tried hard not to, but circumstances certainly conspired against her.

He shook his head. "So why did you and Daniel Jackson leave the room while Colonel O'Neill and Major Carter were out?" General Hammond asked before makepeace could embarrass him self (and General Hammond as well, truth be told) further

"We had a visitor…" began Teal'c.

*

The faint sound that they had both heard on the other side of the door attracted the curiosity of both Daniel Jackson and Teal'c. Jackson cur off in mid monologue and both sets of eyes swivelled toward the door. Jackson's curiosity bump was more developed than Teal'c's so he was the one that answered the door. He swung it aside suddenly. Behind him, Teal'c had his staff at the ready.

They found a serving girl waiting in the hallway. It would be fair to say they her eyes were suddenly very wide, and very expressive. Her mouth even dropped open a bit, but she caught it quickly and stood her ground.

The second thing that Jackson noticed about her was that she had all of his clothes stacked neatly in her arms. That observation took a while to dawn on him because, the first thing he noticed was the perfection of her face, the symmetry inherent in her bone structure and her adherence to the golden ratio that found its way into the development of every aspect of human physical development. The ratio of 1:1.618 had been employed accurately and everywhere when she was being put together. 

She wore much the same sort of diaphanous piece of confection that seemed to be the fashion throughout the place. If anything, this outfit was even more revealing than the one that Samantha Carter had worn all night. We should point out that this was the second time that Daniel Jackson had encountered this particular girl. He was reasonably sure; we can be more so. It was the one who introduced herself to him as Heidi.

It was only the distraction posed by his own discomfort that prevented Daniel Jackson from spending a few moments checking her out after he took the clothes from her. She stayed in place, waiting for something.

Jackson dropped his clothes on the bed gratefully and started shaking them out in preparation to putting them on. For a while there he had been entertaining the uncomfortable notion that they were gone forever and as much as he wasn't a fan of military finery, it beat this latest alternative offer that he had worn most of the night, hands down. His clothes had not been cleaned, he noticed, and they smelled very bad, but that was of no concern to Jackson. All he could see at that moment was a change of underwear. It might have been yesterday's and it might have been through a twenty kilometre uphill march, but it beat the hell out of the leather and studs that he had worn through the night.

While this inspection was occurring, the servant girl stepped through the door and into the room behind him. She seemed to float along the floor, principally because the skirt of her dress draped to the floor and not because of any bizarre physical evidence. Her legs were clearly visible through the fabric (and also adhered to the ratio of 1:1.619 regarding their length as a portion of her height), it was just that her tread was so light, it almost appeared that she wasn't touching the ground at all. She even had elegant feet Jackson noticed absently, although he had a hard time seeing them when he had been standing close to her because his eye got distracted before he could tilt his head down that far.

Jackson, you have other things to attend to, he admonished himself. He began fussing with the buckles on the leather thing and then stopped because it was only then that he realised that she had come into the room behind him. 

She showed absolutely no inclination to leave, much as she had done when he had rather less clothing on during the previous night. Unless she did make some sort of effort to leave, then the he was going to have to dress in front of her. He looked at her for a moment and tried to convey the idea that discretion might be a good idea.

She met his gaze blankly for a moment and then stared at Teal'c. She seemed to have no idea what Jackson's problem might have been.

"I have seen you around and heard you speak," she said urgently. She spoke in the same ancient Egyptian language that Teal'c, Jackson and the rest of the Goa'uld population shared throughout the rest of the galaxy. "I know that you can understand what I have to say." She stepped further into the room and marched across to Teal'c. She stood about half a metre away from him and stared at him, focussing on a point a couple of centimetres above the bridge of his nose, the place where the mark of Apophis had been embossed onto his forehead amid great pain. "I have wondered if that was real ever since I saw it the first time. I could not believe that it could possibly be true. We have… We have… I just can't believe it."

While she was distracted Jackson decided that he wasn't going to get a better opportunity to dress. He began releasing the buckles. 

Teal'c swayed slightly to get further away from her. The intensity of her gaze was disconcerting. He raised one eyebrow and tried to disconcert her with that. It failed, let's face it, when it comes to intimidating facial expressions Teal'c's generic raised eyebrow ranks right down there with the gormless grin. 

Off to one side of Teal'c and Heidi's little tableau, Jackson's leather ensemble landed with a tingling thud and Jackson grabbed at the underwear hurriedly. We are OK at this point. We have numerous options to avoid seeing anything that we shouldn't see what with our limited censorship classification. The shirt tails are quite long, and we also have the option to watch the interplay between Teal'c and the servant girl. We used both diversions, neatly.

"Umm," said Daniel Jackson, latching the catch on his trousers. He was safe to talk now, but he felt that he needed to go to a great deal of trouble to form the next thought before saying it out loud. His linguistic routine went into overdrive. While he formed the thought, the rest of the room's occupant's went to a great deal of trouble to focus his attention on the thought he was trying to make. "Just what exactly are you talking about?" He asked.

"That mark is the mark of Apophis," the serving girl said, breathlessly. She drew a great big breath. Look into her eyes, Jackson told himself, her eyes, OK, eyes, and of course he failed by about thirty centimetres. The excitement in her voice was starting to leak into her face. Her eyes were wide and her nostrils were distended. As soon as Jackson can draw his gaze up by about those same thirty centimetres, he will be able to see her excitement as well. (And don't any of you think that he can without raising his eye line).

And like she wasn't startlingly eye catching before that little piece of self induced wonder. I mean look at the girl. Jackson managed to look up by an effort of will and caught the tail end of the rapturous expression before it trailed off her face.

"And that is a good thing?" Jackson asked cautiously, struggling to keep his mind on the real task here, which was listening to what she had to say and assessing the consequences. This is not an easy task for the male of the human species. They try to listen to what women have to say, but when confronted with one of them who has such a neat line of symmetry and idealised size ratios, they tend to get distracted by other thoughts and resort to nodding at the right places without actually taking in what is said because their brain is not connected to their ears at all. It is connected to other bits of their anatomy, ones that rarely get used in social discourse, especially when there are more than two people present. Although there are those people who … (remember PG-13, PG-13, PG-13…). Back to the real topic, which was the pathetic attempt by the male human to listen to the words spoken by an attractive female human. They fail dismally, but they do try and it hurts them when their failure is pointed out to them (usually in a loud and shrill voice, or a throaty and scathing voice).

"It is the most momentous thing that has happened to us in, oh so many years." She said.

This was all good stuff, but there was more important information to be distributed.

"And you are?" Jackson prompted.

"My name is Heidi Pravda," she said and grinned as though her revelation was important. She then went and proved that she had some basis upon which to be proud of who she was. "I am the daughter of the leader of our opposition to the night walkers."

Jackson chose that moment to look thoughtful and then pronounce; "I think I understand." 

Daniel Jackson has a great line on parallel processing. The biological processor that rests inside his head has been doing variations on it for years. The minor task (listening and speaking) often gets the short shift when the processing power is allocated, but there is still enough left for general personnel interaction. It has come to his aid in this instance because what she has said has lined up with another of his favourite topics, which is the behavioural and sociological mores of ancient civilisations. So he now has two reasons to listen to what she has to say. He not only had the biological imperative to mate with her and therefore must make her positively disposed toward him by listening intently to what she had to say (and thus make her feel that she was important to him) but she was also dealing in the same subject that most interested him in life. She could not be more perfectly suited to him if se had been a fairy tale princess written into a fairy story where he was the hero.

Ideas flashed into Daniel Jackson's mind. The logical process cannot be explained. The human brain is a parallel processing unit and the logic train often appears to have been bypassed entirely by this arrangement. People of Jackson's intelligence often make what appears to be an intuitive leap across chasms as wide as the Grand Canyon from a standing start. They actually don't think that way. What really happens is a great heap of yes/no decisions are lined up and committed in parallel, just waiting for the right information to seed it. As soon as they have that last clue, the whole solution drops out.

"Then you might like to explain it to me," Teal'c said to Daniel Jackson.

"I think we have an underground movement focussed on the idea of Apophis returning to save this enclave."

The girl nodded enthusiastically. Her hair flew about like a silken cloud of midnight. "Yes that is how it is," she said. "The prophesy is passed from mother to daughter. My mother told me, after her mother had told her before that. It is vitally important that I take you to them. They need to know that the prophesied time has arrived."


	13. Chapter 141 Cause the answer is unlucky

General Hammond managed by an effort of will and a bit of dumb luck to avoid spraying a shower of atomised coffee across the room and was looking rather strained by the time Teal'c rattled to a narrative pause.

"This gets worse by the minute," General Hammond wheezed to Colonel Makepeace. "Apophis as a saviour? How the hell could that little story get started."

Makepeace was having his own difficulty in listening at that moment. His brain was wired directly to his libido. "Just how gorgeous was she?" Makepeace asked Teal'c absently.

"Hmph," said General Hammond. He glared at the Colonel.

"Oh, yeah, sorry. Apophis is a nasty piece of work, of the worst order," Makepeace agreed. "He obviously has a good PR team."

Hammond dismissed the man with a narrowing of the eyes and a pursing of the lips.

"I thought I had this situation under control," Hammond commented to himself, but out loud to confuse everybody else. "Then I hear this. Is there an explanation, Teal'c?"

"Not that I could think of at the time," Teal'c answered. "Daniel Jackson may have been able to come up with a cultural model to explain the drift in their legends."

"Excuse me," General Hammond's aide said. "I have a suggestion."

"Go ahead," Hammond conceded.

"Before they encountered the virus that cause the mutation, they were probably still in contact with the system lords. They would have sought help from them when the affliction first became obvious. The system lord's are a ruthless lot. They would have just cut them off rather than address the problem. If the virus wiped out the major Goa'uld, then they would have no way to access the gate any more. The story about sending to Apophis for help would have been carried onward by the survivors. It's not a hard stretch to guess that the development of the vampires would be equated with the disease, and then over time, the two became interchangeable."

Teal'c nodded. "That would indeed seem likely," he said.

Both Makepeace and Hammond regarded the aide with an air of suspicion; no one liked a bright junior officer showing them up in public like that. They used one of those intimidatory pieces of body language to portray this to him so that he subsided into silence. Once they were sure he had been reminded of his place, Hammond returned his attention to Teal'c. "So you went with her…"

"She was very insistent," explained Teal'c.

"And very attractive," added Makepeace.

*

"Where the hell would Daniel and Teal'c go?" Samantha Carter asked Jack O'Neill. She stood inside the doorway with her hands on her hips while she planted her feet firmly and spaced a shoulder width apart.

"This is all we need," O'Neill said bitingly. "Just when we decided to just skip out of here and take the story home, this goes and happens." O'Neill shook his head. He was as puzzled by their disappearance as much as she was. "It makes no sense to me," he admitted. "I told them we would only be gone a few minutes." He frowned. "It has to have been something bad. I can't see them leaving us behind no matter what the circumstances, because they knew we would be right back. They just wouldn't do it. Not if they had a choice in the matter."

"What do you think?" she asked, she looked a bit confused. "Is there any sign of a struggle?"

They looked at the room. It looked like a bomb had gone off in there. 

Jackson's leather outfit was thrown onto the floor. There was a pile of bedclothes beside it. The tapestries beside the window were awry, and a shirt was lying elsewhere in the floor.

Which was pretty much the state that the place had been in when they left it, with a few minor exceptions.

"Does anything look like it is out of place?" O'Neill asked. "You know any more than normal."

"Some parts of it might have been tidied up a bit," Carter said dubiously. She picked up the shirt and the leather bondage suit and frowned. The insignia on the shirt read 'O'Neill. SGC. Earth.' "I wonder what Daniel is wearing?"

"He might have gotten his clothes back as well," O'Neill suggested. He took the shirt from Carter and pushed his arms through the sleeves.

"He might not have gotten them back," Carter said grimly. "He lost his in a different way to the way that I did."

"We need to find out what is going on," O'Neill decided. "This is decidedly weird."

*

"Remind me again," said Teal'c. "How we combat vampires?"

Teal'c and Daniel Jackson followed the alluring Heidi Pravda through the dank passageways badly hidden by the tapestries that hung in every bed room.

"They're easy," said Daniel Jackson. He was only half-serious, although he had watched a lot of old movies, and that was what he had to say was only what they recommended. Even old Bram Stoker had written the method into Dracula. "We pin them to the ground, stake it through the heart and then we cut its head off. Gets them every time."

"What further proof would you need," added Heidi Pravda over her shoulder. She turned to face Jackson and took his hands in hers. Her expression was almost evangelistic in its fervour, as seen in the feeble light spilled from his torch. She looked imploringly up at Jackson, who consequently suffered one of those horribly male reactions to her attention. "You must be the prophesied one's," she said breathlessly. For Jackon's part, the heaving of her breast, the proximity (and extent and exposure) of her cleavage combined with the wide-eyed look on her face made rationalising extremely difficult. Right at the moment, if she had said 'leap onto that live grenade for me', he probably would and then wonder afterward why he had done such a damn fool thing. "You bring with you the knowledge that we worked for centuries to learn. You know what we face. Until we leant that little lesson, those monsters kept coming back to cause us more trouble over and over again. It took us a long time to perfect that technique, of restraint and then impalement and finally decapitation."

Jackson blinked like a small furry thing impaled in a truck's headlights. The two of them remained locked in that tableau for a little longer than the situation demanded. Even so the spell was only broken when…

"You wouldn't do that to me, surely," purred the voice that the producers really wanted for Jessica Rabbit, but had to settle for Kathleen Turner when Aphrodite was unavailable.

"OK," muttered Teal'c. "That is the first time I have hear one of those things speak in a language that I have understood."

"That is a bad sign," suggested Daniel Jackson.

"Oh no," hissed Heidi Pravda. "It is one of the central family."

The woman in charge of the voice stepped into the light of Jackson's torch and invaded the space where the SG-1+ team debated what the prophecy really referred to. She brought with her a sort of personal sphere of illumination that outshone both the gentle background light that filtered into the passageway from the bedrooms and the spill from Jackson and Teal'c's torches.

"I thought they shunned daylight," Jackson complained to Heidi.

"Common misconception," she shrugged. The gesture had all sorts of non-verbal communications associated with it, with some of those aspects intended for specific translation by human males. What those aspects had to say to Daniel Jackson had nothing to do with the words that she spoke. A couple of unrestrained parts of Heidi's anatomy took a moment to come to rest after her shoulders finished moving. Jackson's eyes followed their progress closely. "It is the direct light of the sun that they shun. Their skin is sensitive."

"Sensitivity to Ultra violet, maybe?" Jackson asked rhetorically. The star that the planet orbited was an F-class star, with a far greater UV-component than Sol discharged onto poor old Earth.

"That is a question we should pose to one of them later on," Teal'c suggested. "At the moment I think we need to focus on more pressing matters."

Heidi Pravda had summed the newcomer up reasonably accurately. The resemblance to the Countess was remarkable. Jackson recognised the newcomer from dinner the previous night. She was pale of flesh, but with the same ruby lips and large dark eyes as the Countess's family. Raven hair fell in long silken tresses to her waist. Her face was delicate; her mouth was sensual, with pursed lips and a teasing smile. Beneath that haunting visage was the body that the plastic surgeon had in mind when he set about re-manufacturing Pamela Anderson. 

She wore a series of gossamer fabric sheets that seemed to clothe her more by accident, than design. They gave the impression that a reasonable breeze would blow the whole ensemble into the next county. To any man with a smidgen of imagination, she would appear to be quite naked, despite the cloth that hung from all the protruding bits of her anatomy. Jackson did not suffered from that particular lack, imagination was there in abundance when presented with that kind of conceptual necessity. Teal'c on the other hand wasn't even aware that such a thing as imagination existed, let alone whether he had any. He raised a single eyebrow questioningly.

The newcomer looked between the three of them, reached a decision and then turned to Jackson. Her gaze transfixed him. All thoughts to Heidi Pravda disappeared like so much steam - and we must be aware, that was a feat in itself. The Countess's sister stepped forward and placed a delicate, perfectly manicured hand onto the centre of Daniel Jackson's chest. Well not central, it was slightly to his left.

"You haven't see a Vampire around here?" Jackson asked vacantly. His voice had one of those little squeaky noises at the end of the question. Jackson was having a problem with shortness of breath, palpitating of the heart and other biological manifestations of a physical desire to engage in propagation of the species. He squirmed uncomfortably. We shall not speculate on the exact nature of why that should be.

The woman who had him transfixed smiled sunnily and revealed a set of canines that might have been more appropriate in the face of Lassie. "I do not recognise the word. I hope it has good connotations, because I mean only good to come from our interaction," she used one of those voices that tickles the earlobes and cause goose flesh all down the backs of males the world over.

"Well now that you mention it…" Jackson began weakly.

She stepped up closer and examined Jackson's neck intently. To Heidi Pravda's eyes the vampire seemed to be trying to decide the answer to such pressing questions as whether she should tilt her head to the right or the left when she bent to rip his neck open and suck the life out of him.

Jackson once again wore an expression similar to that seen on the faces of small furry animals. You know the one they wear when they are caught by the headlights of transcontinental transport vehicles. They wear it for a moment just before the first of those nine sets of wheels on the left hand side of the eighteen wheeler smears their pathetic little body along twenty five feet of tarmac, instantly transforming them from a small animated creature (going innocently about it's instinctive imperative to eat and breed) to a badly mangled rug, with texture. Jackson's processing device had experienced an interrupt. One of those inconveniently hard-wired connections to the biological processor's peripherals had usurped the processing capacity for one of those low speed, single-task-needs-all-the-processor applications that inconveniently crop up from time to time. If he had a pointing device (and we will not consider any biological manifestation that the reader may conjure up in their imagination after reading that metaphor) it would have become a boring hourglass at this point.

It seemed that the committee for attending to this monster was electing itself. Heidi Pravda pushed Jackson aside roughly and stood in front of the vampire. Her hands rested on her hips. "Perhaps you should try someone with a different set of biological bits," she suggested, or words to that effect.

"I don't mind them either way," said the Vampire cheerily. Which just goes to prove that all those lame old movies made in the seventies by the Hammer Horror team were factually based documentaries rather than the poorly acted pieces of exploitative visual wallpaper that people took them for at the time.

"Urk," said Heidi Pravda, conceptually unprepared for that response, and caught completely off her guard. Thought processes that had been carrying such ideas as 'pulling out that hair and pinning the thing to the ground' were suddenly considering such important matters as; 'Those eyes really are the most amazing colour…'

She has the same interrupt programmed into her processing device as Daniel Jackson, and for much the same biological reason. In this particular instance, circumstances have seen to it that the interrupt has been corrupted by a viral program and it was not seeing its normal use (which relates to the propagation of the species) but a subsidiary minority based use which she would not normally consider relevant to herself. Just goes to show the power of… No we will not consider what that might mean.

The vampire reached out a hand and located Heidi Pravda's heart in much the same way as it had to Daniel Jackson. It's hand went further to Heidi's left and passed beneath Heidi's clothes and we will look away because that is not a suitable way for two young ladies to behave, and we wouldn't want to watch them do something like that, especially given the PG rating we have to maintain.

The pulse in Heidi's neck accelerated until it reached manic palpitations. We can tell that because we are watching it in extreme close up while the vampire's teeth gradually move toward their target - and besides it beats watching what the vampire's hand is doing to Heidi's body down a bit lower. Daniel Jackson appears to be watching the action of those hands very closely, but he's a bit like that, being a male human.

Those amazing eyes suddenly weren't in front of Heidi any more; they had drifted lower. She said something breathy and inarticulate. She felt weak at the knees and trembled at the feel of that hot breath against her neck. Her eyes closed and a sigh escaped from her lips.

"Don't look into her eyes," Teal'c gasped out. He leapt. 

Heidi shook her self, and looked around blankly for a moment.

Suddenly Teal'c was struggling with the Vampire on the ground. The creature screamed. It fought. It twisted. It bucked. It left forth with a few phrases that aren't in our Goa'uld - English dictionary, at least not the commonly used G rated ones that we have.

Heidi Pravda shook her head a couple of times more and then pounced into the fray. Teal'c had a fair bit of the monster pinned to the floor, leaving just a few stray peripherals to deal with. Heidi pinned the struggling legs of the Vampire to the ground as best she could by diving on top of them.

"A stake!" cried Jackson. In his panic he forgot any of the languages that he was fluent in (for the sake of this narrative we should point out that even Daniel Jackson is not able to keep an accurate count on the number of them). "We need a stake."

"What?" demanded the struggling Heidi Pravda. She dodged a delicate foot that might have taken her eye out and pinned it more carefully to the floor.

The vampire caught Jackson's eye. "Get them off me," It pleaded. Jackson bent to lend a hand and almost pushed Teal'c off of the struggling Vampire, but Jackson was prevented from making a fool of him self when he was knocked off his feet by an errant elbow. He shook himself for a moment and reset the operating system in the processor. "A stake," Jackson repeated. He picked himself up off the floor and searched around frantically.

What sort of medieval society didn't leave pieces of wood lying around everywhere? What other building materials did they have for god's sake? To Daniel Jackson's frantically searching eyes, there didn't appear to be anything. 

And that goes to show that he wasn't thinking at all clearly. I mean what sort of vampire lord would leave convenient stake like pieces of timber lying around for the first archaeologist to conveniently lay his hands on the moment things got tough? I mean really.

"Where the hell are we going to get a stake here?" Teal'c spat out around a mouthful of diaphanous fabric. It is probably irrelevant but we would note at this point that it has finally dawned on Teal'c just how the creature he is struggling to restrain is constructed, and despite the fact that a Goa'uld larvae is symbiotically bound into his nervous system, he is at heart a male human. The fleshy form beneath him was the one that his biological programming has been biased toward in his mating fixations. The nature of their assailant had filtered through his cultural programming and then through his neurological disadvantages. Ultimately this all meant that he had established an invidious situation. 

He considered the dichotomy and reached one tentative conclusion. He was suffering from a conflict of biology versus sense. He stared at the wall while he throttled the thing on the floor. At least that way he tipped the balance a little bit one way. The male mating drive has a high visual aspect and he had short circuited that bit handily by that little change in the source of his visual input.

Meanwhile Heidi was struggling to restrain what looked like a reasonably slender pair of legs but appeared to be made from some sort of carbon fibre composite, and operated by an industrial hydraulic system. She dodged the foot one more time and made a desperate grab for it again, finally pinning it in place by the expedient of lying on top of it.

"Daniel Jackson," Teal'c called out. "We are in trouble here. We need assistance. Anything wooden and pointed! Any thing at all."

"Certainly," Jackson agreed and stepped forward. Teal'c struggled to find a way to sit on the Vampire's chest, wrap his hands around the things throat and leave enough room for Jackson to get a good shot at the thing's heart. It was a bit like playing a game of twister with a boa constrictor.

"What about this?" Jackson asked and pulled on the bracket that was holding up one of the candelabras on the wall. It came free with a crack and a billow of fine dust. He waved the broken frame above his head triumphantly.

Teal'c grunted manfully, and struggled once more with the vampire beneath him. "Now would be a good time, Daniel Jackson," he said breathlessly. 

Jackson nodded and then set about getting himself involved in the action. He shoved the broken tip of the candelabra into the struggling vampire, pinning it's chest to the ground. It continued to struggle. "Hit it, someone," Jackson called. He was struggling to hold the stake in place.

The vampire screamed and it was a sound that went straight to the reptilian part of the human brain.

The members of SG-1 went "AaaAARGGHH!!!!" in return.

The Vampire kicked and bucked a few times, finally spilling Heidi Pravda, who rolled into the wall with a bone jarring thump. Heidi climbed to her feet, watching the vampire's legs thrash around uncontrollably while she tried to work out how to help. Teal'c and the partially restrained vampire rotated on the floor, covering almost a full circle while Daniel Jackson crawled after them with the broken candelabra in his hand, lagging always about ten degrees behind the action.

Heidi Pravda was poised to rejoin the fray. "Daniel Jackson…" she began and then stopped. Whatever she was going to say, she was interrupted by a blow to the jaw that came from Teal'c's fist. Her teeth clacked together with a snap. She fell back onto her butt again and shook her head a few times to clear it.

Jackson had finally managed to get the 'spear' into the Vampire's chest. The vampire was hanging onto the candelabra for dear li…(undead? Maybe…) and it had finally slipped from her grasp and punctured her chest. Unfortunately it wasn't a deep enough wound.

Jackson pounded on the end of the makeshift stake, driving it deeper into its intended victim.

The vampire was still thrashing away, even though the timber shard of the broken candelabra was embedded deeply into her chest.

"OK, that didn't seem to work," mused Daniel Jackson.

"Then I suggest that you try again," suggested the still struggling Teal'c.

"I don't know what you said, but I hope it was have another go," critique'd Heidi Pravda. She climbed to her feet and pushed Jackson out of the way. She grabbed hold of the candelabra. She pushed on it a few times to make sure that it bit in. She wriggled it around a few times for good measure.

"Yes Miss Pravda," Teal'c agreed. He pushed Heidi aside gently and then pulled the candelabra the rest of the way out of the vampire's chest. It came free with a meaty sucking noise as the wound healed up. No one heard that sound over the frantic struggling, heavy breathing and the gutter-mouthed curses of the Vampire. Jackson took the opportunity to restrain the vampire's head by pinning the head in place by the expedient of shoving the head of Teal'c's staff into the woman's mouth. Heidi made a move as well, she saw an opening and a chance to intervene. She pounced.

"I think I can do this now," Teal'c said. His eyes tracked the movement of the vampire's chest intently. There was a minor subroutine that tracked the movement of her chest for other reasons, not related to the placement of a timber stake. Teal'c shook his head and then had another go, slamming the broken spear from the candelabra into the Vampire's chest. She screamed again, but nothing else changed.

"Again Teal'c," Instructed Jackson.

Teal'c was ready for the Vampire grabbing hold of the candelabra this time. So was Heidi, she managed to get her jaw out of the way the second time.

Teal'c lunged with the candelabra yet again. 

Everything stopped. 

The Vampire was still.

Every one waited for a bit to be sure that the fight was over. Nothing happened.

"Oh thank god for that," Jackson sighed and slipped from his position leaning atop the Vampire's face and sat on the cavern floor.

"OK! Good!" said Teal'c in a vaguely disquieted voice. "That appears to be over then." He shook his head a few times to clear the cobwebs from his brain. He blinked a few times as though trying to get the world back into focus again.

"The head," reminded Jackson. "We have to cut off the head."

"How are we to do that?" asked Teal'c.

"We could put a grenade in her mouth and pull the pin," Jackson suggested. "I seem to recall that technique worked."

"Daniel Jackson," Teal'c said patiently. "You've forgotten one thing."

"What's that?"

"We don't have any grenades."

"There is that, yes. Rocket launcher? Then again, no. We don't have one of those either."

Heidi Pravda rolled off the vampire's legs and onto her back. She was breathing like she had just won the Boston marathon. 

And we are faced with a terrible dilemma once again. How are we supposed to tell this story with it's PG rating if she insists on doing that. The outfit that she wore was never intended for physical exertion, and the whole concept of underwear is centuries in the future of her society, so flopping onto her back with her knees raised like that is just not going to cut it at all.

__

(A couple of paragraphs have been removed from this portion of the narrative. They contain a passage in which Teal'c, subject to a merciless barrage of questions, described in some detail the appearance of Heidi Pravda's body for the benefit of Colonel Makepeace.) 

We will summarise. From the vantage point provided to Daniel Jackson, he was able to testify that Heidi Pravda could safely be categorised as species; human, gender; female, maturity; yes, but only barely.

"We need an axe, or a saw," suggested Teal'c.

"Hey all I've got is what you see here," Jackson said and held his arms out at his sides. Not a lot of detail was revealed by that gesture. But he meant well.

"It's not as though I have much to offer," suggested Heidi Pravda who was wearing just slightly more than the wardrobe for the movie 'Showgirls' by this stage of proceedings. She had thankfully moved a few pieces of cloth around so as to enable us to regain our PG rating - just.

"I don't know about that," said Jackson, and then remembered him self. "Sorry, uncalled for."

Heidi blushed.

Jackson blushed

Teal'c raised an eyebrow and shook his head slowly.

If O'Neill had been there he would have been faced with the decision between laughing and barfing.

Heidi Pravda had her breath back by that stage. She sat up and rubbed the bruises to her ribs and hips. She began to feel self-conscious when she realised that everyone was staring at her. She suspected that if she intended hanging around with these people for too much longer, her outfit was going to be a problem. She checked to make sure all of her bits were back in the right places. They seemed to be. But the male of the human species possesses a visual imagination and they were both in a position where they didn't need to imagine the details of Heidi Pravda, they just had to remember. Her outfit seemed to have been reduced to a series of hanging vertical rags, about the width and density of ribbons. She hurriedly plaited her hair behind herself and then used a piece of torn off dress to secure the end. Her hair still reached her waist. She reached behind herself and produced a knife. "This is the only blade that I have," she apologised.

"Um, that is a pretty big knife you have there," suggested Jackson.

"Uh huh," she agreed but her tone was distracted. She had a job to do and she intended doing it.

"So how did you manage to hide that knife under that outfit?"

"You don't want to know," she answered.

Something caught Jackson's eye. Heidi followed his gaze. Jackson was staring at the floor. She shook her head; that couldn't be it. Heidi followed his sight line a second time and found the vampire on the ground. She looked like some-one had pinned a school girl to the floor like she was a butterfly in a entomologists display. Her face was remarkably ethereal, as though she was the supernatural supernatant stereotypical angelic schoolgirl that might advertise milk on television. OK, so you would feel like a right monster for even touching that angel. And of course her outfit failed dismally during that melee in much the same way that Heidi's had. Naturally we need to describe her in some way at least to explain the effect she had on Daniel Jackson, and why he was reluctant to touch her at all. Let's try this solution to the problem of presenting the information in an appropriate manner. The vampire's dress had torn from collar to her knees. The ragged ends were draped around her like the petals of a flower awaiting the sun. Pinned between the fleshy swell of her full breasts was an off-cut of timber roughly fashioned into the shape of a stake. The alabaster perfection of her skin was in vivid contrast to the smear of blood that still welled from the wound, trickled across her chest and dripped onto the stone. Her ribs stook out in proud relief, their curve drew the eye to the arch of her flat belly and in turn drew attention to... Oh why bother? This is stupid. We'll just watch Jackson and Teal'c's reactions to what follows. It's going to be a whole lot simpler. 

Heidi Pravda knelt on the floor beside the prostrate Vampire. The impossibly perfect dark eyes followed the motion of the knife intently when she raised it above her head. The imploring look on the vampire's impossibly symmetrical features was not feigned in any way. If she doesn't move too suddenly we should be able to get away with our PG rating by watching this next bit from behind Heidi and to one side.

Jackson looked away as soon as he saw Heidi begin the down stroke. There was no way he wanted to watch this. It felt like he was an actor in someone's dream. 

There was a thud, like a butcher hitting a slab of beef with a cleaver.

"Damn," said Heidi, bitterly. "I only got about half way through. I thought it looked easy when I saw it done before."

"Oh gross," said Jackson. "You've never done this before?" he asked, genuinely curious.

"No," She stood upright, brushed her hands against her hips to dry her palms before having another go. She was about to bend to another attack at the vampire when she thought to attend to the ragged ends of her outfit. She pulled the ragged strands through her thighs, up behind her back and then tied the ends around her waist.

Daniel Jackson said something that came out as; "Urk," and looked away hurriedly. The way she was dressed now would have taxed the skills of a Brazilian bikini waxer. With her dark hair plaited behind her neck and clothed in almost several square centimetres of cloth, Heidi Pravda make Lara Croft look like someone's virginal little sister. "It's not a common occurrence in our society," she muttered and looked carefully at the vampire, as though deciding which flaw to use to cut the diamond. "We don't get the chance to get one up on these things often enough to practise."

"You'll have to have another go," suggested Teal'c, oblivious to the storm that was howling through Daniel Jackson's mind at this time.

"The last thing we want is for that thing to come after us," said Daniel Jackson, feebly. His mouth was in gear but his brain had been usurped by his biological hard-wired system, "with it's head half off. I can just see it there, flopping around against it's back while it tried to run." He gave a half hysterical laugh. "Now there's an image that I would rather not have in my head," Jackson said to Teal'c.

"That is the sort of thing I would expect Colonel O'Neill to say," said Teal'c. "It is comforting to hear such a comment at this time." He turned his attention back to the problem at hand. "I think it's stuck between two vertebrae," Teal'c said to Heidi.

"Just pull harder," suggested Jackson.

Heidi put her foot on the Vampires forehead and strained her back until the knife came free. She toppled off her precarious hold on the Vampire's head and fell on her butt. The tip of the knife described a perfect arc from the Vampire's neck to land behind her. All eyes followed the passage of the knife with hypnotised intensity. It hit no-one on the way past, more through good luck than good management. Part way through that we had to look away again, actually Heidi fell out of our view field before she hit the ground, and we will wait for her to rearrange her clothing before she stands up again. Hopefully…

She climbed slowly to her feet and organised herself for another attempt. The top of her head appeared in our field of view, followed by her face and her shoulders. That worked well.

She seemed to know what she was doing, so Teal'c and Jackson settled onto the floor and began a council of war. We shall take no risks, we shall concentrate on their conversation. There are sounds coming from a little behind and to one side of them that we cannot filter out. We shall just do our best to ignore them.

Thump! Hack! Curse!

"What do you think we should do here?" Tealc asked.

"I'm not sure it was a great idea leaving Jack and Sam back there," Jackson said.

"You heard what Heidi said, though. We were in danger back there."

There was silence from Heidi's direction for a moment.

Jackson and Teal'c looked over their shoulders in unison. Heidi was only taking a breather.

Grunt, grunt, grunt.

"God, this thing is tough," she said in an undertone.

Thump! Hack! Mutter!

"Yeah, but what about Jack and Sam?" Jackson asked. His voice carried a touch of empathic concern. "They must have been in danger as well."

"In my experience Daniel Jackson, Colonel O'Neill is rather more dangerous than the things that the Goa'uld leave lying around. I seem to recall that there was this incident where I believe that you and he were involved. Ra would probably testify that the two of you were rather dangerous."

Grunt, grunt, grunt.

Wait.

Jackson looked over his shoulder and shuddered. He turned back hurriedly.

"That knife of her's is not very sharp," observed Teal'c.

Thump! Thump! Hack! Groan! 

"She does seem to be enjoying herself back there though. Do you think one of us should stop her?"

Thump! Clank!

Teal'c took one look at the expression on her face and decided not to volunteer.

Sounds of butchery continued for a while without comentary.

"At last," Heidi breathed and stepped away from the vampire's corpse. Jackson and Teal'c stood and waited for it to turn to dust and blow softly along the corridor. It didn't. It just lay there on the floor, a bloody and gory mess.

"Well that didn't go according to the script," Jackson commented.

Heidi Pravda kicked the severed head. It rolled a little way and then rocked to a halt, partially covered by the trailing end of a tapestry..

"Come on," she said. "We must find my mother."

Jackson had an idea. "Would you like to borrow my shirt?" He asked Heidi.

She nodded. He took it off and handed it too her. Heidi wiped the blade of her knife on it and then made to hand it back.

"That's not what I meant," said Jackson and looked down at the smear of blood. It made a welcome change to see that the blood on his shirt was someone's other than his own. "I meant for you to wear."

Heidi blinked a few times in baffled confusion. "What is wrong with what I have on?"

Jackson blinked back in embarrassed confusion. "Ah, um, well, nothing," he stammered. Well if she wasn't worried about it, then he supposed he could avoid doing so as well.

"Then we must move," she said seriously. "We have wasted enough time with this little distraction. Come along Dan'iel. We have much to do."

*

"SO MANY PEOPLE AND SO LITTLE TIME," muttered death to himself. He looked down from his position atop his horse - Binky - and watched the shade of the Countess's sister slowly sit up from her position on the floor.

"I seem to have lost my head there," she said.

Death looked at her and if he had eyelids he might have blinked at that moment. "THERE ARE TWO OF YOU," he said. "I GET TO DEAL WITH YOU DUAL ENTITIES SO INFREQUENTLY. THIS MAKES A PLEASANT CHANGE."

"For you maybe," muttered the shade of the Countess's sister. She was already fading away to wherever it was that she expected to go in the next life.

Death stared after her departing shade and might have frowned thoughtfully if he was equipped with the means to do so.


	14. Chapter 14 The REAL chapter 14

General Hammond picked up the phone head set. "Just hold it a minute there Teal'c," he said. "I just want to find out how the medical team are getting on with the SG-1 team."

He dialled and then waited for a few moments until someone answered the phone at the other end.

"Is Doctor Fraiser there?" he asked. 

He waited for a moment, and then for a longer moment. He twiddled thumbs and coiled his fingers in the telephone cord.

"Well if she's expected to be in the OR for a while," he said finally, "then who else can give me the details of how SG-1 are faring?"

He waited.

"This _is_ General Hammond here. You're speaking with him. There is not much point ringing me to get permission to issue the information because I just gave it to you."

"--"

"Yes, well, that can happen."

"--"

"What about that young Doctor who had…" He realised that he had forgotten the boy's name. God, getting old was bad.

The image of a yellow face and spiky tendrils appeared in his mind. Now why would that have thrown up in his mind?

*

Samantha Carter and Jack O'Neill stepped further into the room that had been assigned to Daniel Jackson and in which they had all spent the night. There was no sign to indicate where the rest of the SG-1 team might have gone. There was no one in the corridor, and there was no notes left anywhere in the room.

"This is ridiculous," O'Neill summarised. "I'm just assuming that they must have gone through the passages behind the tapestries. I mean what else can I think?"

Carter nodded. She had been very thoughtful throughout the morning so far. That was just another of the imponderables that had come up in the hour since they woke.

O'Neill pushed the tapestry aside and stepped into the passageway. He shone his torch left and then right.

"Which way?" Carter asked.

O'Neill waved his torch in the direction of the right branch of the tunnel. They set forth. They rounded a bend in the passage and… There was something lying on the floor. O'Neill walked over for a closer look. Carter followed and they crouched together, almost shoulder to shoulder.

"Oh yuck," said Carter and restrained the barf that threatened. She hadn't had breakfast yet, and she was very glad. Last night's dinner continued to make threats of a comeback. It promised to be worse than any comeback by an eighty's hair-band. With the obvious exception of Bon Jovi, but they're legendary and besides they were never really into the self-parody bad-boy life-style to the extent that the rest of them were.

O'Neill and Carter stepped carefully over the remains of the vampire that someone had left lying among the cobblestones. She was sprawled mostly in the hallway and a bit beneath one of the draping tapestries. The scene would not have been quite so bad if those two locations were closer together, but unfortunately they were quite a long way apart.

"Oh yuck," said Carter again, just in case O'Neill had missed hearing it the first time. For O'Neill's part, he found no need to comment because, in its way, Carter's commentary was a masterly summation of the scene they confronted.

O'Neill walked over to the tapestry and then bent to examine the head. "One of the Countess's sisters," he concluded. "I guess this situation had to happen some time."

"There's the key stone to the dungeon over that way," Carter mumbled through the hand that she was holding over her mouth to clamp her lips shut. Every meal that she had eaten during the last month had decided that joining the Vampire on the floor would be the first thing it would do if it had the chance. "They might have been taken there."

"I don't think they were taken," said O'Neill slowly. "Some one killed this vampire. It might have been them. She might have been the one who took them captive."

"Then surely they would have come back along the corridor here and we would have met them coming the other way."

"Yeah, that's what I thought."

"Unless there was more than one of them and they only managed to overcome one of them before the other ones subdued them," concluded Carter.

O'Neill nodded. He had been thinking nothing of the sort. His thoughts were more along the line of; "this doesn't make any sense."

"Ah good," breathed O'Neill, he turned to regard Carter with mild interest. O'Neill had as much feeling for the dismembered Vampire as he would if it was a lump of dog droppings. (Smells bad, looks nasty, wouldn't want to step in it). The sight obviously had more impact on her.

"Come on," he said and boosted himself back to his feet. "They have to be ahead of us."

O'Neill led the way. Carter followed with perhaps a touch more haste than was strictly necessary, but she would need to seriously hurry if she were going to keep up with O'Neill who marched purposefully along the corridor. 

*

Heidi Pravda led the weirdly attractive man with the eye decorations, and the advance scout for Apophis along the hallway that was built into the castle walls, and therefore deeper into the bowels of the earth.

"This tunnel leads to the outside," she explained. "We will meet up with my father and the rest of the resistance movement once we get there."

Daniel Jackson nodded thoughtfully. 

Behind him Teal'c followed but spent much of his time looking over his shoulder as though expecting someone to come bounding out of the shadows. "I do not like this Daniel Jackson," he said.

"What's the matter Teal'c?" Jackson asked, he stopped to wait for the big Jaffa to catch up.

"We are leaving Major Carter and Colonel O'Neill in this place with these mutated Goa'uld. They have a great power over humans, as you very nearly found out. It is not like the previous times that they have confronted Goa'uld. And they are not able to speak with the Goa'uld, whereas we can, both of us."

"So what are you suggesting, that we go back and try to find them?"

"I believe that we should consider doing that. Certainly one of us should."

Heidi listened to the conversation with half an ear. She couldn't understand a word of it, but the tone was clear. They were having second thoughts about her strategy.

Jackson thought for a moment before answering. "We'll do that as soon as we have a chance to speak with the Resistance. If we go back in force we'll have a great deal more likelihood of success." 

Teal'c nodded. "As you say." With an air of visible reluctance he followed along.

Heidi led on again, with the air of one determined to be patient with fools.

*

"Let's get out of here then," Jack O'Neill said, tucking his Smith and Wesson back into it's holster. "We're going to have to look for them. God I hope Teal'c can keep Daniel out of trouble."

Samantha Carter gave a look that left him with no confidence at all.

O'Neill led the way out through the door and marched purposefully into the hallway. He had guns, he had friends (well, one any way), he had grenades, he had knives and he had the knowledge of how to use them. If he were Rambo, he'd be tying a bandanna around his brow about now. All of those words suggest that the mutated Goa'uld that were running the show should watch out.

The coast was clear for now. That is a particularly stupid cliché. On the face of it, the phrase can have nothing what so ever to do with the story. Unfortunately they were a long way from the ocean and the building they were trapped inside was full of mutated Goa'uld and on top of that there was something that they didn't know but it was going to make their lives intensely interesting when they found out. The castle was also full of rampaging and vengeful Villagers (with a capital V and that was also the first letter of violence). The little torch lit meeting of the night had mutated during the early morning and become quite heated. Alcohol had been consumed, lots of it in fact. Sense and alcohol are rarely used in the same sentence (except for that one, but that's just an interesting coincidence).

For the moment we will concentrate on the SG-1 military pair. They knew nothing of the Villagers and their intentions at this moment. For O'Neill and Carter there was only the small problem of the vampiric Goa'uld. 

They reached a bend in the corridor and stopped to see what was ahead of them. O'Neill waved Carter back against the wall. His AK-47 had a look around the corner and milliseconds later O'Neill did as well.

There were none of the Goa'uld loitering in the hallway at that moment, and O'Neill was just vaguely disappointed at the lack of opportunities to practice vampire dismemberment. The sight of that corpse in the passageway had done nothing for his diplomatic skills.

He took Carter's hand and led her around the corner and along the corridor.

"Where do you think Daniel and Teal'c are?" Carter hissed.

"Probably in that damned dungeon," O'Neill said with the absent air of a man who was utilising the majority of his on-board processing capacity running threat assessment routines and strategic speculation.

"What are you planning? Get them out and then get the hell out of here?"

"Yeah, pretty much," he said and then stopped at the next bend in the corridor. "Oh and blow up that sarcophagus," he added as an after thought. With the SG-1 team outnumber at least a couple of dozen to four by dangerous monsters, only some one like Jack O'Neill could make a comment like that. Imagination and Jack O'Neill have only a passing acquaintance. 

Samantha Carter does not suffer from the same lack of imagination. She has no trouble imagining her self being skewered, dismembered, disembowelled, drained or barbecued. Which one of them is the braver, the one who goes forth because he has to and can't conceive of losing, or the one who goes on even though he carried images like that in his head?

We'll take votes later and see how the consensus comes out.

Of course that might have to wait until after we discuss how the SG-1 team shook off the pursuing horde of desperately drunk villagers, because they were waiting around the next corner in the corridor. We probably should pay them more attention. O'Neill had heard their approach, had planted himself against the wall like he was making an attempt at mimicking the behaviour of the thousand and one tapestries that were hanging everywhere. He leant around the corner and spotted the horde that was coming his way. He pulled his head back hurriedly and cast a glance at Samantha Carter that said it all.

*

The meeting was tense. On one side of the debate were Heidi Pravda, Teal'c and Daniel Jackson. On the other side were her mother and her sister and most of the women of the village. The majority appeared to be intent on waiting for the outcome of the expedition on which their menfolk had foolishly set forth.

We shall listen in and try to catch up on all of the prior knowledge that these people have brought to the discussion.

"We are not about to listen to stories," Heidi's mother dismissed her daughter's augments with a flourish of her arms and sneer of her lips. We can assume from that little exchange that things have not gone well so far. "You're father has raced off and done something foolish on the basis of a rumour that you and the other serving girls brought back from the castle. He has marched off with all of those hot-headed drinking buddies of his and even now are probably in the clutches of those monsters up there." Her tone turned mocking and she put on a fake male voice. "We intend getting rid of everybody in the castle. Throw off the oppressive regime. Ha, he is a fool, your father, and some of that has bred true with you."

She turned and tried to flounce away. She made a fair fist of doing something with such a stupid name and such a poor definition.

"But mother, look at him," Heidi called after her. "You, yourself, told me of his coming. I showed you their clothes. You saw the cloth."

Her mother stopped in mid stomp, and turned back to face her daughter with a look of contempt on her face. "It was a story Heidi. A thing to amuse children when they are frightened, or to console them when bad things happen. It was never real. And now your father and your uncle have stormed off in a drunken rage to do…" She shook her head and made to turn away again.

"Is that what you think?" Heidi demanded, "or is that the way you hide from the truth now that it is in front of you?"

"I don't think this has gone the way she expected," Teal'c turned to Daniel Jackson and managed a mighty piece of understatement. "I think that it is time to 'make a run for it.'"

"I think you might be right. We need to get back and make sure Jack and Sam are OK."

One of the villagers noticed that the SG-1 team loitering by the side of the gathering and left the rest of the mob to investigate. The rest of the women had paid them barely any attention up until this point, but they needed some sort of distraction because there was an uncomfortable aspect of personal history implied by a few of the comments that Heidi and her mother were sharing right at that moment.

The woman peered up into Teal'c face and squinted.

"It's true," she says, looking closely at the mark on Teal'c forehead. She reached up with a tentative hand and fingered the mark on his forehead. "It is the mark of Apophis."

"See, I told you mother."

"Oh this is all I need," muttered Magda Pravda. She shook her head and stalked over to stand beside the woman who was staring at Teal'c. The mark looked very convincing, even she had to admit that. "May I?" she said and pointed to Teal'c staff. It hefted in her hand, feeling much heavier than a stick. It gave the impression of being filled with malevolent intent. She shucked it and the pointy end slid open to arm the weapon.

She handed it back without another word and then turned to face her daughter. "You say there are others like these up there?"

Heidi nodded enthusiastically.

"They know the means to kill these monsters that we face?"

"Yes," Heidi hissed with a heavy dose of tested patience. "It is all as I told you. I did not have to tell these people how this was done. They knew. He has the mark, they have weapons. This is an opportunity like we may never have again."

Magda Pravda turned to Teal'c and Jackson with the air of some one who was about step into the dentist's surgery after an absence of decades. "Tell us what we face," she said. "Tell us of your people and how they will react to us. Will they respond well to us?"

"They may well try kill you on sight," Jackson warned, about the threat that the SG-1 team posed by themselves. "No, no, that was not meant as a threat," he told their aghast new expressions. "It was meant more as a warning about how we should approach them. They are in a dangerous place and are very much aware of the danger that they face. Teal'c and I should go in first and let them know what is happening. We have to overcome the problem caused by you not being able to speak the same language that they do. Teal'c and I will have to do the negotiating with my people." 

The women looked at one another and muttered a few choice phrases to each other. A discussion group formed and they began debating about what was going on and whether they should be stupid enough to agree to help. 

*

Pursued by a team of angry villagers who appeared to be armed with a motley collection of sharpened timber implements and an alcohol induced bravo attitude, Samantha Carter and Jack O'Neill went racing back past the entrance to the dungeon where Teal'c had recently visited with dire results. 

Immediately after O'Neill had poked his head around the corner of the hallway, it had begun. They scampered out of the passageway, through the bed room, leapt over the discarded bed clothes and bounced off the walls. They made it into the corridor and then into a bedroom on the other side of the hall. From there they found another secret passageway (that was remarkably easy to find all things considered). It hadn't worked. The horde seemed to know about the passageways. Even in there, the SG-1/2 were still being pursued by a marauding mob that was hell bent on killing anything they found in the castle. They waved stakes and torches as though they were weapons. Up close they certainly could have been. O'Neill had no intention of testing that theory.

So they ran. Their booted feet clattered on the cobbled-stoned floor in a percussive symphony that contrasted markedly with the discordant racket that echoed from the passageway behind them.

O'Neill was reluctant to shoot any of the pursuing villagers, because that tended to make them angrier. And of course they were probably the good guys, if perhaps a trifle confused just at the moment. On top of those philosophical considerations, there was also the fact that they were armed and they were dangerous and there were a lot of them. On top of the obvious amounts of alcohol they had already consumed, putting a few of them down with a dose of lead medicine might not be a wise move.

O'Neill and Carter leapt over the corpse of the former vampire. Carter's boot collected the thing's head and knocked it rolling drunkenly further along the passage until it finally rolled to a halt in the middle of the floor, staring malevolently back at the on-rushing drunken hoard.

Oh, damn (or words to that effect), O'Neill thought to himself, they were running in circles. That had to stop.

O'Neill found a branch in the passage. One way led down, the other led onwards. He chose down. The sounds of a pursuing mob were still filling the corridor somewhat behind them. 

The SG-1 team members rounded another corner in the hallways and there they encountered a few members of the Vampire Gang coming from the other direction. In the brief moment when he bothered to look at who they were bearing down on, O'Neill recognised the second of the Countess's sisters and a couple of the guards they had seen loitering around the entry hall when the SG-1 team had first arrived at the Castle. Was that only yesterday? My how time drags when you're being pursued by rabid mosters.

"**That's them,**"intoned the countess's sister. She raised on elegant pale hand and pointed at the SG-1 team. "**We must bring them to the Count. He has plans for them.**"

O'Neill and Carter skidded to a halt, cart-wheeled their arms and legs for a few seconds like the good physical comedians that they were and then ran back the way they had come. Of course we knew what was coming along the hall way behind them. 

The guards grinned at O'Neill and Carter. Well actually they grinned at the patch of wall that was between them and the SG-1 team members, but it was close.

O'Neill didn't understand what they said, but the tone was obvious. He also recognised the teeth, they were hard to forget.

They were sandwiched. O'Neill and Carter raced back to the branch of the tunnel without encountering the drunken mob, for which they were eternally grateful, and so they were free to launch themselves down the second branch. They wasted no time, but plenty of effort, and a few square centimetres of skin and cloth on the stonemasonry as they went past.

For their part, the drunken mob had taken the opportunity to examine the body of the dead vampire and between them they had developed a story regarding the bravery of the leader's daughter. Under the circumstances (alcohol and adrenalin fizzing joyfully through their blood stream) it was an impressive piece of cognition. Proud tears were shed.

"Through here," O'Neill called over his shoulder and they rounded the corner represented by the change in direction of the hallways. At full tilt, and facing over his shoulder while he was running so he could be sure that Carter was close behind, he was confronted by an impossibly slippery slope. Funny how these things seems to sit there for years and never get used and now the trap was being used for the second time in half a day. O'Neill was on the fly and he could not have stopped his flight even if he was Jesus; he was already running too fast for braking to form any part of considerations in his short-term decision making process. He struggled for a moment to retain his balance amid the maelstrom, windmilling his arms this way and that way in an attempt to transfer his momentum, but it was all to no avail. No matter how much it's publicity might try to have you believe other wise, gravity sucks. O'Neill went down, sliding on his bruised derriere and screaming his lungs out all the way to the bottom, before landing amid the wreckage of a tangled tapestry with a bone jarring thump.

He had almost managed to untangle himself from the mess when Carter thundered into the room in much the same noisy fashion and neatly cut his feet out from beneath him. O'Neill tried hard, but to no avail and after he fell back down, he landed on top of her and the impact of his chest on her hip knocked what little air he still had in his lungs out through his gaping mouth. He sort of bounced and finished up sprawled full length along her.

They lay entangled for a moment while they got their collective breath back.

"I don't think that worked terribly well, Colonel," Carter wheezed.

O'Neill managed to find enough breath to hiss out, "Well at least we got ahead of them." It came out very weakly.

Carter's problem with shortness of the breath was caused by the weight of O'Neill sprawled across her chest. She managed to push him off and stumbled to her feet with an extraordinary effort considering the spaghetti like strength that she had in her arms and legs. She grabbed O'Neill by the arm and dragged him to his feet. 

Still joined at the palm, they clattered clumsily into the middle of the room. Carter regathered her torch from the floor and looked around. O'Neill was still nursing a few new bruises and the reluctance of his diaphragm to operate his lungs. Communications between the parties were continuing but the planned industrial action had only been postponed pending the outcome of mediation. As soon as he tried to walk, he found that he had caused himself another and potentially straw-camel-back-breaking final catastrophe. His feet were completely engulfed inside a tapestry upon which a seamstress had laboured for hours in the depiction a ferocious battle. He stumbling over his own feet and he found himself almost falling on top of the hapless Carter in her attempts to pull him clear of his self inflicted millinery misery.

They then set to competing with each other in the task of tangling his feet more completely and were on the point of exchanging angry words on the subject when another light drifted into the room. A Vampire burst through the shattered doorway, following immediately behind the light. It's badly booted feet stepping in from the hallway through the remains of the door that Teal'c had had a dispute with during the night. It waved a staff at the arguing pair. 

"**Stop right there," **the vampiric guard intoned.

O'Neill shrugged Samantha Carter's hands from his knee while he reached slowly under him self. His fingers encountered the familiar plastic with wood grained finish. He managed not to grin. He wrapped his fingers around the butt, pulled it through and brought it to bear. A hail of led pellets reduced vampire's head to a bloody stump. 

The blast from his AK-47 was deafening in the stone lined confines of the dungeon.

The vampire collapsed to the floor with a meaty thump. A few stray bullets ricocheted into the darkness with an intimidating whine. Once again Carter and O'Neill were lucky and managed to avoid being hit by their own friendly fire, mostly through dumb luck.

Carter dived for the floor in an understandably self-preserving move. The muzzle flash lit up the room like a spotlight. Much of that action on her part was too late, because those things come out of the muzzle travelling really fast.

The last whine faded to become a memory.

O'Neill grabbed Carter's hand and pulled her over the steaming corpse of the former Guard. O'Neill will not lean until later that the thing was only incapacitated.

*

Trailing along behind the SG-1 team came the same 25cm tall fluffy pink bunny. It was frantically beating a snare drum that it had suspended around it's neck while it rocked from side to side in a feeble imitation of a man marching. 

The bunny looked slightly second hand. The Emergency Toy Medical team had given it first aid, and that had consisted of placing a bandaid spread across it's forehead and filling the crack in it's head with beaded superglue. Beneath the pad of the bandaid was the hole left by a 0.38 calibre lead pellet that had once rested in the magazine of a gun owned by on Jack O'Neill of the SGC. 

The crack in it's head had been made by a fire axe. O'Neill again.

The pellet had passed through the bunny's head at great velocity some months earlier, as had the axe. 

In them selves neither had been a fatal blow. The bunny had only stopped it's frantic drumming when the recoil from either of those impacts had knocked it off it's feet, and dislodged one of it's life-giving energiser D-cells.

Rectification of that problem had been the final stage of it's laborious recovery. A gleaming almost-new pair of Energiser D-cell batteries nestled snugly in its back, placed their lovingly by the surgeons who had rescued it from sure Death.

There's no doubt about it's courage, it's brains are another matter. 

It paused in it's frantic drumming long enough to inspect the body of the newly disfigured vampire guard. The bullet holes were healing remarkably quickly. Even a battery operated child's toy understands that those sorts of things shouldn't happen. It began beating frantically on it's drum while marching frantically away.

*

The military half of SG-1 clattered to a noisy and thoroughly disorganised halt just before a bend in the corridor. O'Neill and Carter slumped against the wall, just a metre or so short of turning the corner. 

"Shoosh," hissed O'Neill. He waved downward at the rest of the team.

"Why Colonel?" whispered Carter.

"Just be quiet."

"But I just wanted to know why?"

"Shut the…Argh," O'Neill hissed and turned away.

He had heard something in the corridor, something familiar and uncomfortable. O'Neill was sure that he had heard some one counting furiously just around the bend in the corridor. Who ever it was, they had stopped now. He waited for a moment, his heart hammering in his chest. and then announced in a loud voice, heavy with eastern European pronunciation; "**Two hundred and sixty seven carved stones in the shape of a house**."

"It's a Count," said Carter. Her voice showed she was appalled.

"It's not possible," said O'Neill. "We shut down that Sesame Street production line. And besides, these guys have been out of touch with the Goa'uld for centuries."

"I'd know that voice anywhere," Carter insisted.

"It isn't. It can't be. Now, be quiet."

"I tell you…"

She finished her objections by mumbling suddenly into O'Neill's fingers that were suddenly clamped against her mouth. She tried killing him by glaring daggers at him over his hand, but it didn't work.

They had one of those brief battles with their eyes and eyebrows.

Eventually O'Neill released Carter's mouth with understandable reluctance; her desire to keep talking was transmitted through her body language and they had only reached a draw when they engaged in a brief contest of wills. Several seconds elapsed before her eyes finally agreed that she would be a good girl and cease speaking. 

"Yes it's a Count," O'Neill agreed. "And we need to plan the next few…"

He turned back to the source of their dispute and crept along the corridor. Who ever it was they were getting closer. He listened to the sound that was coming from ahead of them and decided that it was now only just around the next bend. He risked one quick look and then pulled back hurriedly. She was at least partially right. The voice sure had the same intonation and phasing as the Sesame Street Count that they had encountered on a mission a few months back. What she hadn't noticed was that it was speaking the same ancient Germanic language that the real Count and his wife's family had spoken. There was one thing that bothered O'Neill in this instance. They guy that was strolling along the corridor even looked a bit like the Count from Sesame Street, the same round face and the same wide smile. He even had the slicked back hair.

It was just too much of a coincidence to be believed.

Maybe on of the things had gotten away, he speculated. Or maybe when they were created, their image had been based on something else, something real.

Now that was a scary thought.

The last time they had been camped in a position like this, O'Neill had watched Daniel Jackson absently while he made busy with his hands and it took O'Neill a moment to realise that Jackson had a grenade in his hand. Camped in a corridor while they were being stalked by the Sesame Street Gang seemed a strange time to be playing with a grenade, but O'Neill had seen people play with all sorts of things when combat nervousness became intense enough to require physical movement. It took O'Neill a moment to work out what Jackson was doing. The Egyptologist bit the pin and pulled the grenade. He spat the pin onto the floor and lobbed the grenade around the corner. The pin landed on the floor and made a feeble little clatter at their feet. Shortly thereafter, the corridor ahead of them was momentarily full of light and noise and then it began raining broken body parts. Smoke and smell replaced the noise and light, but when it comes to changing your lawyers you can never go by their names.

OK, it worked once before. O'Neill reached around to his webbing and tried to free a grenade. These walls would stand up to a good blast, he thought, so there would be no danger to either Carter or himself from the explosion.

He pulled the pin and tossed the grenade around the corner.

Carter nodded to him. They covered their ears.

"**Vun small metallic pineapple**," Counted the voice around the corner.

The blast was very impressive in the limited and acoustically closed confines of the secret stone corridor.

"Well that was discreet," O'Neill judged.

"Effective," Carter suggested.

O'Neill and Carter climbed to their feet and stepped gingerly around the corner. It was a scene to remember, albeit not terribly happily, in fact it would normally come to you just before you woke up screaming. All around them, the walls were coated in gore. It was everywhere, like someone had chosen a scarlet paint scheme and then gone wild with the textured finishes.

"Where do I drive the stake?" Carter asked. It was reference to the baffled confusion that had assailed Jackson after doing something similar to a count once before.

They exchanged a bemused look and then smiled simultaneously.

O'Neill looked around the devastation that she had wrought, wearing a thoroughly and understandably perplexed expression.

He picked up a gory remnant and inspected it closely. It was a human foot, there was no muppetry involved in this one. It even had little hairs growing from the tops of it's toes, and it needed a good pedicure.

Of course you can't let off a grenade inside the confines of a narrow stone corridor, inside the badly insulated confines of a medieval castle and hope to keep it a secret. 

"Just drop it and run!" Carter shouted and pulled him by the crock of the elbow.

The sound of footfalls had sounded from along the corridor behind them, probably attracted by the noise of the grenade exploding. Hey, it hadn't been subtle. We could even hear it from here.

Over his shoulder, O'Neill saw a team of Peasants striding purposefully along the corridor. Each of them dragged an oversized club in one hand and a pointy piece of wood in the other. You didn't have to be a vampire for that lot to be effective. 

"There's a monster at the end of the corridor!" O'Neill shouted back at them. It hadn't worked with the muppets, what he thought it would do to a bunch of drunken peasants who didn't even speak English, we will never know.

He turned and ran some more, encountering the immobile form of Samantha Carter only a few paces along the hall. She had been staring after him and wondering what the hell had gotten into him.

O'Neill pushed onward and Carter was already well away down the hallway.

A severed Romanian foot fell from where it had been stuck to the ceiling. It landed on O'Neill's head. It had certainly travelled a long way in the blast he thought. He turned around to try and shoot something and left a whole bunch of little holes in the wall. 

O'Neill continued running, moving almost backwards while he waved his gun around threateningly. He almost overshot the next corner, only noticing the bend when the Peasants took aim and loosed off a lump of granite that bounced off the walls chaotically. O'Neill ducked for cover only to find that he was stumbling down a new corridor rather than flattened against the wall like he expected he would. He picked himself off the floor and ran for all he was worth. A large chunk of the ceiling fell in behind him leaving a cloud of dust and the smell of burnt wall coverings. OK so the corridor had not stood up to the grenade like he thought it would. It was just another chaotic piece of entropy in the life of Jack O'Neill.

The Peasants stepped around the pile of rubble that had just landed on the floor. They rounded the corner and strode onward, intent on throwing of the yokes of the oppressive regime that had controlled their lives for too long. 

O'Neill stopped in the hall and let forth a blast with the AK-47, aiming for the ceiling and bringing a few more ancient and weathered rock shards down. A few Peasants went down, hiding their heads from the avalanche of rock and lead. The others spun on their heel and took cover behind the corner in the hall. Some of them were starting to sober up, and realise where they were and what sort of risks they were taking. It seemed like a good idea to find a place by the bar where they could stare blank faced at the imposing authority figures and say some thing like; "It wasn't me officer, I've been here all night."

O'Neill spun and faced toward the direction he had been running and intensified his efforts to catch Samantha Carter. She had a good turn of speed and was well on the way.

*

A two metre tall skeleton dressed in a flowing black robe fashioned from midnight, (not that cheap midnight coloured cloth stuff, it was fashioned from just plain old midnight) stalked the corridor and regarded the body of the newly deceased counting Vampire. The shade making all the noise was not people shaped at all, it looked remarkably like a Goa'uld. Hey, it's a self-image thing. The one thing that the soul of a Goa'uld didn't think of itself was in the image of it's host. There was another, human shaped shade lurking in the hallway. It's expression was slightly put out, as though it was confused by the change in circumstances. They were free! They were free! But free to do what?

We heard the swish made by the passage of a scythe that was sharp enough to cut air (slicing N2 and O2 neatly IN2 and that's probably the worst pun in this whole story). 

Death was having a busy day. It's only a metaphor when you are a human; to an anthropomorphic personification of impersonal reality that has been cloaked in an image to die for by the machinations of an antiquated belief system, then metaphors have an unnatural life of their own.

The soul of the Goa'uld exchanged some abusive banter with Death and then faded into wherever it's belief system suggested awaiting it post mortem.

"THOSE THINGS ALWAYS DO THAT. WHAT WAS THEIR CHILDHOOD TRAUMA?" muttered Death and stalked off to find his next appointment. It was only just up the hallway.


	15. Chapter 15

We have a team of fleeing good guys, we have a horde of confused, drunken and slightly misguided guys pursuing them, we have a team of medieval demons staking all of them, and we also have a small group trying to rescue the fleeing good guys. On top of all that we have a long straight hallway and set in both of the walls we have a series of doors. And though we have done this before, it is a narrative opportunity that cannot be allowed to go past unexplored. All these stories have to have a scene of this type.

Samantha Carter and Jack O'Neill are the first to enter our set piece. They bounded around the corner, heedless of the scene ahead of them. They stopped in the middle of the hall, looked around frantically turned a full 360degrees on the spot in frantic confusion and then ducked into the first door on their left.

The pursuing horde of Peasants (minus a few less inebriated team members who are no longer among their original number and slinking off in the hope that nobody noticed that they were missing) cascaded into the hallway and found it empty. They skidded to a halt, except for the one trailing along last of all, who collided with the rest and toppled them over like a feeble attempt at the world domino toppling record. They clambered to their collective feet, looked around briefly to decide whether the SG1 team might have entered one of the doors, and entered the first door on the right.

After a few seconds, the first door on the left opened and O'Neill's head poked out for a moment. He scanned the hallway, found it clear and gestured for Carter to follow. Carter stepped through the door and they began sneaking along the hallway, walking with exaggerated motions signifying careful placement of their feet.

They stopped. There was a sound from the first room on the right. O'Neill led a frantic entry to the third door on the right.

The Count and his wife strode confidently into the corridor. They stopped and scanned the scene for a moment and then stepped over to the first door on the left. They peered inside and then closed the door. They found nothing in there. They strode purposefully over to the first door on the right and opened the door. They closed it hurriedly and ran back to the first door on the left, banging the door shut behind them.

Teal'c, Daniel Jackson followed by Magda and Heidi Pravda stepped into the hallway from the far end and strode purposefully between the doors.

They looked around as they walked, as though searching for something.

"They wouldn't be here," Heidi stated.

"You're probably right," Jackson said.

They walked on by.

The first door on the right opened and the Peasants trooped drunkenly into the hallway, looked around and then strode across to try the first door on the left. A couple of Peasants tried the second door on the right as well.

We had the requisite delay of almost two seconds before the Count and his wife came fleeing out of the first door on the right, made a quick U-turn and dived into the second door on the right. The drunken peasants followed a couple of seconds later, crowding into the door like the keystone cops before they tumbled into the hallway and then finally dashed across the hall into the second door on the left.

O'Neill's head appeared out of the third door on the right. O'Neill and Carter emerged in the hallway and tip-toed back to the second door on the left. 

Jackson and Teal'c reappeared in the hallway.

"I could have sworn that I heard something," Teal'c said.

"Yeah. Me too," Jackson said. He frowned behind his glasses.

"It's this way," Heidi Pravda called to them. She led the way back out of the corridor.

Jackson and Teal'c followed along behind but were still in the corridor when four Peasants burst from the Second door to the right. 

Obviously hyper-spatial bypasses, using technology similar to the stargates, connect the rooms on the other side of those doors to one another.

O'Neill, pursued by three Peasants raced from the second door on the left and entered the third door on the right. The door slammed shut behind them with a resounding bang.

Carter and O'Neill stepped into the hallway from the first door on the right looking very confused. They stopped in the hall for a moment before dashing into the second door on the left.

Four confused Peasants entered the hall from the third door on the left and staggered through to the third door on the right.

Carter's head popped out of the second door on the left and then back into the room. A second later her head popped into the hallway from the second door on the right and then withdrew hurriedly. She looked confused, and so do we.

The Count ran from the first door on the left and crossed to the second door on the right. Four Peasants ran from the second door on the left at the same time as a similar team of Peasants ran from the second door on the right. They collided and landed in a pile on the floor. They rolled onto their backs with their legs in the air.

Samantha Carter stepped from the third door on the left. Jack O'Neill stepped form the third door on the right. 

O'Neill scratched his head and wore a puzzled expression before he looked back at the door through which he had emerged.

O'Neill and Carter exchanged a quick look and then by unspoken agreement, they ran along the corridor, retracing the way they had entered, and out of sight. The Count and the Countess emerged immediately afterward and stalked after them. The Countess's sister stopped to inspect the damage done to the peasants for a moment. She licked her lips and tilted her head as though trying to decide where to start in this banquet, before hurrying after the rest of her family. Her brother in law's call had broken her spell.

For now…

After a few seconds the Peasants began to climb groggily to their feet.

*

Trailing along behind the half of SG-1 that consisted of Samantha Carter and Jack O'Neill came a 25cm tall fluffy pink bunny, frantically beating a snare drum that it had suspended around it's neck. A gleaming relatively-new pair of Energiser D-cell batteries nestled snugly in it's back.

Jack O'Neill stopped running, frowned for a moment and turned to face the little Bunny. He scratched his head in bafflement for a moment. "I hate that thing," he snarled and then he raised his gun and drilled it through the head, dead centre on the bandaid that crossed it's forehead. "How the hell does it manage to get into the places that it does?" he wondered and not without good reason. I don't have a good answer for that one.

The sound of tiny snare drums ceased. The bunny fell onto its side and tumbled against the wall. One reasonably-new Energiser battery rolled forlornly across the floor.

"Thank god for that," commented Samantha Carter. She shivered in revulsion.

*

A skeletal figure stalked the hallway, leading a large white horse. The midnight cape was flapped in the metaphorical breeze. Something laying on the floor ahead of him caught his eye. He strode over to it and then bent over to examine it more closely. On the floor was the body of the Energiser Bunny. He picked it up off the floor and examined it critically.

"AH, ONE OF THESE THINGS" ruminated Death. He picked up the loose battery and placed it back in the cavity in the Bunny's back. After a second, Death pulled the battery out and reversed its polarity before putting it in again. The Bunny immediately resumed beating the snare drum. "THEY SEEM TO TURN UP EVERY WHERE. I WONDER HOW THEY DO IT? AND MORE IMPORTANTLY, WHO WAS STUPID ENOUGH TO INVENT THIS THING?" He looked at it closely and then grinned. "THE GUY RESPONSIBLE IS PROBABLY STILL ALIVE. FOR NOW. HUMANS, YUCK?"

He pulled out the battery, because that was his role in the universe and threw the Bunny back onto the floor.

*

Teal'c stood guard in the doorway, once again failing to do justice to the quality of the bio-ware processor he had gone to so much trouble to grow when he was much younger. Magda Pravda stood beside him wearing an expression that said, 'I can't believe that I'm here.' Every now and then she looked across at Teal'c and stared surreptitiously at the symbol on his forehead. Teal'c found the attention to be slightly disconcerting, so he stared straight ahead so that he didn't have to deal with it. Not given to complex human interactions is Teal'c. 

Meanwhile Daniel Jackson clambered up to the sarcophagus and peered into business compartment. It was empty. 

Heidi Pravda walked around to the other side of the piece of alien technology and leant inside the bio-mechanical coffin. She confirmed for her self that there was no blood-sucking fiend lying in there. 

During their passage through the hallways and beneath the various tapestries, her hair had come unbound again. It cascaded over her shoulders in a raven veil. 

"I was sure that at least one of them slept in this things during the day time," she said. "It keeps them young and healthy… Sort of... Any way, that's what we were all told as children." She shook her head ruefully, then bowing slightly so that she had to look up at Jackson through her eyelashes. Her gaze met his across the sarcophagus. One of her eyes was partially hidden behind a veil of silken hair that draped from her forehead and onto her breast. And speaking of those, the combination of her leaning into and against the sarcophagus, with her arms folded across her chest was making a fashion statement that Jackson could not ignore under threat of death. It was one of those occasions when Daniel Jackson managed not to think about his dead wife. In fact if you were to ask him about Shar're at the moment, you would probably receive a blank stare, followed by a bewildered blink in reply. For a moment he was lost in the spell of those clear brown orbs. "I don't like the fact that this one is empty," Heidi said. "It means they are abroad in day light."

Behind Jackson, Teal'c rolled his eyes and raised one mocking eyebrow. He was starting to think that Daniel had a thing for the dark, brooding ones.

Magda Pravda had noticed the exchange between Jackson and Heidi as well. She frowned. It might be time to think about finding Heidi a nice boy to settle down with, some one with better eyesight and less of the wanderlust, she decided. Until that moment Heidi had been much more intent on running about with her father and planning to do lots of damage to the local Lord and his minions. Most of her friends had long ago settled down. A few of them had even started families of their own. Heidi had seemed immune to the call of biology. Until now that was. Magda was slightly concerned about the way her all-week warrior daughter was behaving at the moment.

"That's pretty much the same story that we were told," Jackson told Heidi. "But the other Goa'uld that we encounter throughout our travels only use these things when they have to. Like when one of their number is killed."

Jackson knew this from experience, not of watching the Goa'uld use the thing, although he had done so, but of using the thing himself, having been dead once or twice already.

"And yet," said a bemused Heidi. "There was the one that we killed earlier today, and that one is not in here. I felt sure they would have placed her in here by now."

"Your father is probably keeping them busy," Suggested Magda Pravda from the doorway. "They'll get around to it eventually."

"Or perhaps it's Colonel O'Neill and Major Carter that are keeping them busy," suggested Teal'c.

In a dimensional twist where they cannot see, but by the use of special narrative viewer, one that you can down load to your browsing software (just click here for…) that has been especially prepared for this story, we can see a lanky figure dressed in the coolest and smoothest line in black attitude-wear. He sat atop a pale horse with the most arrogant stance you could imagine in that most noble of equine beasts. He shook his head and grinned (like he had a choice). "IT WAS ( c ) NONE OF THE ABOVE. DEAD FOR GOOD THIS TIME. YOU CAN TRUST ME ON THAT." 

The black clad figure looked closely at Daniel Jackson and would have frowned if he had the necessary equipment. "FOR SOME REASON YOU LOOK FAMILIAR. BUT HOW CAN THAT BE…? IT WILL COME TO ME EVENTUALLY, BUT…" he scratched at his head and in so doing made a noise like two bones rubbing together. There was a reason for that.

"Come on Teal'c we have to find them," Jackson said with sudden decisiveness.

"I agree Daniel Jackson," said Teal'c. He was still maintaining his best guard pose at the doorway. "It is time we finished this business."

"They're probably back inside the main halls of the castle some where," Jackson speculated, and thus proved that even the best of simulation software provides little better than a stab in the dark.

"Or in the clutches of the Count," suggested Teal'c in his best approximation of human sympathy.

"I don't want to think about things like that," Jackson said darkly. Heidi cast a dark look at Teal'c for upsetting Jackson.

Magda Pravda groaned to herself and started making plans.

*

Jack O'Neill skidded into the dungeon where the sarcophagus rested, leapt athletically over the splintered remains of the door that had the effrontery to resist Teal'c earlier passage and landed square in the middle of the room. He looked around and catalogued the scene as only a combat veteran can. 

There was a derelict set of transport rings in one corner, covered in a heavy film of dust. There were no signs of life inside the rings. Well that was not going to be the way out for any one. That was a good sign.

There were other abandoned pieces of high technology stored beneath old tapestries and heavy layers of dust.

Only a metre or so ahead of him rested a Goa'uld sarcophagus, type I, nasty piece of technology that makes you a bit strange in the head, but comes in handy from time to time, ie every time you get killed.

He reached a decision.

It was here in this room where he could do the most damage on the way out, he decided. Now where to start?

O'Neill saw lots of places where he could lob a grenade and do a lot of damage. It was just one of those kinds of rooms. The real challenge was finding a way to maximise your impact. Any idiot with a grenade could do damage, it was in the artistic bit that the real skill lay. He was ranking the potential locations according to the impact they would have and the time it would take to fashion the repairs. It kept him occupied for a while.

Samantha Carter spent the time peering under the tapestry covers and cataloguing the machinery, trying to work out what role each component was expected to perform in the overall gestalt of the facility. She was struggling to figure out how some seemed to have mechanical functions and yet they appeared to be based on biological principals and in some cases, vice versa. The SGC researchers had not yet managed to reproduce the technology within the sarcophagus or the transport rings and she took every opportunity to examine pieces of Goa'uld technology when they had the chance. 

She looked closely at the sarcophagus. The entire SG-1 team had seen the inside of them a few times, mostly after having taken a mortal wound. In that respect the things are rather handy. This one seemed to be functional, and if so, it was probably the only piece of high tech gear left in this dungeon that was. She had managed to clamber into a compromising position between the piles of derelict equipment because she figured she had time for a detailed look around as soon as she saw that O'Neill had begun looking closely at the sarcophagus and fingering his grenades.

He had reached a decision on how to proceed, after debating a couple of equally likely scenarios. Carter's examination was going to be much more short-lived than she would have liked. She recognised the signs, simply by sound alone now. A few years in each other's company can do that to you.

All in all it was not the sort of tableau that either of them would have chosen for the entrance of the Count, his wife and his remaining sister-in-law.

"**Goodness**," said the Count. "**You lot have led us on a merry chase today. Altogether too athletic for your own good**."

"What did he say?" O'Neill asked.

Carter said something much less articulate, having brained herself on the lid to the sarcophagus in her anxiety to see who had just come into the room. She rather wished she had taken a bit longer, because the news was bad and she had a head ache to go with it.

"The only foreign language that I speak is mathematics," Carter quipped caustically. "How the hell would I know?" Her head hurt a lot.

"I don't think this is intended to be a pleasant greeting," O'Neill said. He wasn't fooled by the Count and Countess's smiles; while there was a lot of teeth on show, some of them were rather more pointy than suited the shape of the human mouth that surrounded them.


	16. Chapter 16: the end is nigh!

They re-entered the castle proper through a gap covered by the tapestries draped in a room that Daniel Jackson did not recognise. Teal'c stepped into the room and looked around impassively.

Magda Pravda took her daughter aside shortly after they stepped from behind the tapestries. They stood out of earshot of either Teal'c or Jackson.

"I am worried," Magda said and then looked over her shoulder. "I thought I would have seen a sign of your father by now."

"What will you do mother?"

"I will go and look for him. And then I will look to see whether the others have secured the cart yet."

"Be careful."

"As should you," Her mother had said and then looked significantly at Daniel Jackson, adding a slightly different slant to the conversation.

"He is interesting mother," she said evasively. "But he is not interested in me, nor do I know him well enough to judge what he may be like."

"He is exotic, do not mistake that for an entirely positive attribute."

"I am no longer a callow girl mother."

"Hmm."

They shed Magda Pravda in their flight at that point. 

Jackson questioned Heidi about what her mother intended doing while she led them across the room, and was told that she had gone to raise the alarm and bring assistance. And that she had undertaken to procure a cart to get them out if any of their number should be injured. She figured that the rest of the conversation was not a fit topic to raise with him just yet; perhaps after the action subsided…

It had seemed like a pessimistic attitude to Jackson, but there were a lot of villagers in the building now and some one was bound to get hurt. He just hoped it was not one of them.

"Now hush," admonished Heidi. "There are many guards prowling these halls, and not all of them appear as humans, there are also the wolves to consider. You must trust in me to lead you through this. Be careful to follow my lead."

Heidi stepped through the doorway that led out into the main hall. She waved to Jackson and Teal'c to follow. She led them in a staccato flight from one hallway to another. All the corridors looked the same to Daniel Jackson. If they hadn't been led by the apparently knowledgable Heidi Pravda, he would have been completely lost by now.

Teal'c and Jackson were led past a sequence of closed doors. 

Heidi stopped and listened attentively. She appeared satisfied by what she did not hear. She pointed to one of the rooms.

"I could have sworn this was not where they showed us to our rooms," Jackson said. He was not certain, but he was reasonably sure. He looked about and conveyed his scepticism with his body language.

"This is the wing where you were housed," Muttered an exasperated Heidi Pravda. She stopped. And looked around in confusion. "So, if they are no longer here, where else might they have gone?"

"If they're not here," Teal'c said finally. "Perhaps they have left the castle. Or perhaps they have been taken to the room where the Count took you last night," Teal'c suggested.

Jackson looked at Teal'c searchingly. It might have been an attempt at a joke, but he couldn't be sure.

"Let's have a look in Jack and Sam's rooms," Jackson suggested. "Maybe we'll see something there. I don't know, maybe a clue to where they might have gone."

"That might be a wise move."

They re entered the hallway and moved along until they came to the next doorway. It opened to reveal the wreckage that had been left behind during Carter's rapid and untidy gathering of her old clothes. The room looked like a bomb had gone off in there.

The dress that Carter had worn with such distinction at the previous night's dinner was thrown to the floor. The bedclothes were scattered everywhere. Jackson was pretty sure that no one had slept in the room, so the wreckage suggested that there had been a struggle in the room.

The final clue was a broken goblet scattered across the floor. It was dirty with the smear of something.

"It does not look good, Daniel Jackson," judged Teal'c.

"Yeah," said Jackson slowly. He bent and checked the glass. He had been drugged during the previous night, by something mixed with the brandy. The broken goblet was a bad sign.

"Has something happened to your friends?" Heidi asked. She layed a gentle hand on Jackson's shoulder.

"It certainly looks that way," Jackson said levelly. He fingered the butt of his AK-47 and then his features assumed a grim expression behind his glasses. "Teal'c," Jackson asked. "Do we know where the God damned door to the outside is?"

"No."

"Heidi?"

"It is that way, along the corridor and down the stairs," she said.

"No, not the front way. The back way. I think we are going to need to know where it is." His grim tone communicated his anxiety to her. She nodded in sympathy. "I thank you for your help, but it might be too dangerous for you to accompany us any further."

"You will not rid yourself of me that easily Daniel Jackson," Heidi Pravda vowed. "It is not your people who have suffered under this regime."

"Oh, but it is," said Jackson grimly. "It _is_ my people who have suffered."

"I will stay with you," Heidi vowed. "Now, what is it that you wish to do?"

"I want to get out of here and do as much damage as we can on the way. I want to find my companions and I want you to survive this expedition. I need you to show us the way that the underground gets in and out again so that we know in the event of a panic how we should go about that."

"You mean to take the same way that we used when we came in?" she asked. Her expression showed a trace of the same evangalistic zeal that had come over Jackson. It looked so much more convincing on her face, although the lack of age lines suggested more enthusiasm than experience on her part.

"What about the dungeon?" Jackson asked Teal'c. "We should at least make an attempt to wreck the Sarcophagus on the way out."

"I agree," the Jaffa said. "That would indeed make a fine gesture."

"Heidi. The dungeon entrance?"

"It is only just a little further down this hallway."

"We'll try there," Jackson suggested. "And then Heidi. You should go and join your people. We have a few things that we need to do, and they will be very dangerous."

"They will be less so with me accompanying you."

Jackson looked into her intent eyes and fell into the contemplation dopely. Before he knew what he was doing he found himself nodding and wondering if she had a bit of the same will sapping ability that the vampires had demonstrated.

*

The Countess looked Samantha Carter in the eye and smiled. Carter returned a dopey smile of her own. Her expression had gone past dreamy and approached moronic. It did not suit her. It is times like this that it becomes obvious what degree by which women are attractive is caused by the expression on their face as much as the shape in which it is formed. If they look intelligent they make much better mates after all.

The Countess's sister in law has fastened the same vulpine look on Jack O'Neill and she had him pinned to the spot in much the same manner. There was not a lot of cognition going on inside the skulls of either of the SGC personnel. Their personal bio-ware processors had gone into stand-by. If you looked closely you might even see the image of flying toasters flashing past their eyes.

The Count leant against the sarcophagus with his arms crossed in front of his chest. He obviously enjoyed the spectacle. This was so much more fun than working with his accountant (who we should point out is a blood spattered stain on the walls and ceiling of the hallway above them.) We have to question a lot of things about the Count's personality, most notably his tendency to watch his wife in action.

To the entranced Samantha Carter, the Countess's eyes were crystal clear orbs surrounding a pupil that was so deep a brown that it was almost black. They seemed to glow from within. Carter was fascinated, she felt as though she could fall head long into those eyes. They came closer, until she could smell the woman's perfume, feel the humid heat of her breath against her cheek. A little voice inside Carter's head said something about raising her gun and letting loose a prolonged burst of lead pellets, but the bit of her processor that was working the main locomotion routine was indulging in a bit a inappropriate procrastination. It was looking forward to a bit of procreation, which it would not normally consider under these circumstances. In this instance there was something quite seriously crossed among the wiring on her motherboard.

In O'Neill's case, he was conflicted about which part of his processing system to use. He has so much software available for the appreciation of the female of the species. There is the bit that wants to propagate the species and that bit is clamouring for his attention. It has found what it believes is a suitable candidate for the sharing a genetic material resulting in the creation of a new generation of human beings. It has control of the motor neurone system and it is staying put because the search is over for the moment. There is another part of his operating system that thinks that propagation of the species is not a suitable course of action when confronted by someone who is in serious need of orthodontic work, particularly on her canines, which appear to have a life of their own. 

A single drop of saliva on the tip of one incisor caught the light of his torch and glittered blindingly for a moment. Rather than draw his attention to the length and sharpness of her incisors, that glistening droplet, drew his attention to the red of her lips and the pout where they were crowded away from her teeth. We all know that red lips refers to a degree of arousal and therefore the sight of them causes a feed back loop to be established in O'Neill's biological hardware. He sank deeper into her spell.

She leant in toward O'Neill. He felt her breath on his neck. Warm and caressing. His hands dropped onto her hips and brought her closer to him, held her against him. He felt her kiss, gossamer light touch against his neck. She nibbled the lobe of his ear and then her tongue teased a line down his neck again.

His pulse pounded, drowning out the rest of the universe, until there was nothing but the woman encircled by his arms and the feel of her lips on his neck and the touch of her body against his. A fire engulfed him. His blood pounded and his sense waned (not that there was much of it mind you). She pulled back from her concentration on his neck and caught his gaze. Her mouth was ruby rimmed. Her lips scarlet in the feeble light spilled form his torch. Her lips parted, drawn open by a smile without mirth. Her teeth were red tinged. Blood dropped from one incisor. O'Neill did not care. He smiled back at her and surrendered to her embrace.

The spell was broken when her head exploded in a shower of blood, bone and grey matter. She collapsed to the ground, to reveal the smoking gun of Daniel Jackson some metres behind her.

O'Neill fainted, joining Samantha Carter who was already sprawled on the floor.

*

"**That is hardly the way to repay the hospitality that you were granted by this house**," suggested the Count affably. He held his hands away from his body to show that he was not armed.

The body of his wife and her sister were sprawled on the floor between Jackson and the Count. The Count pointedly ignored the sight. Jackson took that as a cue and did the same.

"**I would hardly call it hospitality**," Jackson commented darkly. "We should include my companion in the conversation. He would contribute greatly."

The Count nodded. "I have seen the mark on his forehead. At first I mistook it for the mark of the Eastern Provinces, where they still hold to the old ways. I see that it is not so. Is it the mark of Apophis?"

"Yes."

"How interesting. Is he coming, no of course not, you aren't Goa'uld at all. Although, I have no idea what else you could be."

"You don't seem terribly concerned for your wife and sister-in-law."

"They'll be back to normal in a few hours."

Jackson shrugged that off, although inwardly he quailed slightly. He thought back over what the Count had said earlier. "You thought that we came from the Eastern Provinces. To do what?"

The Count smiled a grin full of sharp teeth. "Why, to check my books and make sure that we had kept the right amount of taxes going to the king. I hired an accountant."

"You mistook us for Accountants." Jackson was appalled, but not half as much as O'Neill would have been if he were alert.

"At first, yes," He shrugged. "I haven't done for a while. You are not a convincing liar. I rather thought it might be fun to toy with the tool of the System Lord. They are only legends to the general population. It is only us who survived the plague that remember their presence."

"You've had no contact with them?"

"Not for centuries," The Count conceded. "Almost since this colony was seeded in fact. The virus that we contracted after we first came here meant we were isolated. Quarantined from the rest of our society. It has been a trial."

"This is wasting time," Teal'c said abruptly. "He is stalling for his reinforcements to arrive. We must get Colonel O'Neill and Major Carter out of here."

"So what happens now?" Asked the Count, not put out in the least that Teal'c worked out what he was doing.

"We wish to take our people home."

"Where is that?" Asked the Count, with genuine curiosity. "You came through the gate? Obviously! You don't wish to respond? It is no matter. Taking these people home is not going to be easy. I think Miss Pravda can tell you that. Your weaponry is a match for us in ones or perhaps twos, but transporting those two and running for your lives is not going to be an easy task."

For Heidi, that pronouncement broke the spell that was fixating her. She pounced, grabbed his staff from Teal'c and let one fly. It took out the Count with a blast that charred half of his head. He collapsed against the sarcophagus and then slumped to the floor. 

"Quick, we need to get Jack and Sam into the sarcophagus," Jackson shouted. It had taken him a few seconds to recover from his shock at the way their conversation had ended. He even had a cutting reply ready to give back to the Count and it died un-said on his lips.

"No," Commanded Heidi Pravda. "I will not allow that thing to be used again."

"But why?" Asked Jackson.

"She is correct, Daniel Jackson," Teal'c said.

"What?"

"The sarcophagus is the source of the virus of which he spoke."

"You mean a software virus."

"Yes. I believe that is the term."

Jackson looked up at the traitorous device and then down at O'Neill. His expression was desperate.

A thin but steady stream of blood trickled from the wounds in O'Neill's neck. There was no sign that the flow was going to be staunched by the coagulants that normally prevent exsanguination.


	17. Chapter 17: the end is nigher!

General Hammond looked across at Makepeace. "What is it Colonel?"

"We need that virus, sir," Makepeace said.

"I'm aware of the tactical implications of the idea Colonel. There is the minor problem that we don't yet know how the software in those things works at all, let alone how to implant a virus into it. Or how to modify one so that it does a better job of wiping the things out."

"The Tok'ra could…" He wound down in the face of Hammond's glare. "And then again maybe not."

"Thank you Colonel. You can continue Teal'c."

*

"Let's get out of here then," Daniel Jackson said, tucking O'Neill's Smith and Wesson into a holster that he had helped himself to by relieving O'Neill of the burden. Teal'c heaved a sigh of relief so deep his Go'uld larvae must have been worried that it was going to be shot through his chest wall by the reaction of his diaphragm. 

"We should bring him along," suggested Teal'c.

Jackson shook his head in total bafflement. "Who?"

"The Count."

"What on earth for?"

"To enable us to continue our research into removal of the Goa'uld larvae."

Jackson blinked a couple of times before replying. "Yeah, OK. I know how important that is to you, but at the first sign that we need to get a move on. He goes by the way side. OK?"

"Understood."

Heidi wore an expression that said, 'what planet are you from?' that gradually changed to one of awestruck respect as the nature of the discussion dawned on her. Jackson thought he was being a fool letting Teal'c talk him into it, but changed his mind when he saw the look on Heidi's face. For some reason that was important to him. Thus he proves once again that even the most intelligent of us have biological imperatives.

Jackson felt good, he felt bad and he felt mean. He had guns, he had friends, he had grenades, he had knives and he had the knowledge of how to use them. If he were Rambo, he'd be tying a bandanna around his brow about now. He wasn't John Rambo, but he might pass for Indiana Jones without the bull whip, or the sneer, or the scar under his lip or the attitude, or the…Ok, let's face it, he's not even a passable Lara Croft, but he's all we've got.

"Heidi, lead on," Jackson said. He heaved the comatose Count onto his shoulder, then he staggered, this was not going to be easy. Teal'c leant down to do the same to O'Neill. "Can you take care of Carter for us?"

Heidi Pravda debated her own sanity and then agreed to his request. Thus proving that even the most sensible of us suffer from the same imperatives. She staggered beneath the unhelpful bulk of Samantha Carter and led the way out through the door. They staggered purposefully into the hallway and debated which direction was the least unsafe.

"That way would be quickest," Heidi suggested, pointing in the direction that led back into the castle and the main hallways.

"But it will be full of guards and space for them to gang up on us," said Teal'c, "Whereas the other way is longer, but the narrow corridors offer only limited room for them to come after us."

"Which way will your mother bring the cart?" Jackson asked.

"To the tunnel entrance," agreed Heidi.

"Then that is the way we go."

They staggered into the corridor, burdened with the weight of two slightly drained SGC personnel and one slightly shop soiled vampire. Within a few metres it looked like the tunnel was a hundred kilometres long. For some reason they seemed to be going backwards. They would take a step forward and the end of the tunnel would seem even further away. It was all an optical illusion brought on by the lack strength and wavering commitment, of course.

A few pebbles fell from the roof in a little mineral shower. It landed on Jackson's head. He turned around to try and shoot something and left a whole bunch of little holes in the wall after his itchy finger squeezed the trigger. Each shot ricocheted into the dark with a high pitched whine that set their teeth on edge. He hit nothing biological but it was a close thing for Heidi and the hapless Samantha Carter.

"Sorry, sorry," Apologised Jackson. His paranoia was now in charge of the asylum. He continued staggering along beneath the weight of the Count, moving almost backwards while he waved his gun around threateningly. There was nothing behind him yet to be quailed by the sight of his weapon but he did it anyway. Something was moving in the corridor behind them. He could hear it, still someway away in the distance, but he couldn't see it.

He was concentrating so hard on identifying the sound, that he almost overshot the next corner, only noticing the bend when the pursuing guards clattered into view. Jackson ducked for cover only to find that he was stumbling down a new corridor rather than flattened against the wall like he expected he would be. He fell to the floor, down with the Count. For a moment Jackson struggled beneath the weight of the comatose vampire while the action happened around him.

The sound of Teal'c staff blowing holes in the stonemasonry filled the air, and drowned out the curses that Jackson muttered. The Count rolled off him with a meaty thud. Jackson staggered upright and found himself confronted by the concerned face of Heidi Pravda. 

He picked himself up from the floor and re-burdened himself with the uncooperative Count, then the three of them ran for all they were worth. Under the circumstances that wasn't much. A large chunk of the ceiling fell in behind him leaving a cloud of dust and the smell of burnt wall coverings. 

"I believe that I have delayed them enough to get some distance," bragged Teal'c.

The guards rounded the corner and strode onward, proving that Teal'c confidence was grossly misplaced. Jackson stopped in the hall, leant against the wall and let forth a blast with the AK-47. A few guards went down. A few others dived for cover behind a tapestry. They were not of the bright kind, these guards, they only had enough processing power for the task of guarding and breathing at the same time. The others spun on their heel and took cover behind the corner in the hall. Those ones were almost officer material.

Jackson spun beneath the burden of the Count, faced toward the direction they had been heading before they were so rudely interrupted, and intensified his efforts in staggering along behind the team.

A sound like an avalanche in a snow resort came from the corridor where the guards were hiding. A puff of air and dust billowed behind the SG-1 team.

"I think the grenades have done a bit of structural damage," concluded Teal'c.

"Wonderful," wheezed Jackson. The dust had irritated his sinuses. He felt the need to sneeze like the need to breathe, there was nothing he could do to control it. Burdened down by the Count's dead weight, it was the last thing he needed.

It was not exactly a great time to notice the sound that was coming their way from ahead of them. Priorities changed. Sneezing might be the second last thing he needed right at that moment.

*

"Just hold it there Teal'c," General Hammond said. He checked his watch. "We haven't heard much from the infirmary for a while," he said to Colonel Makepeace. "I'm going to check it out."

*

A lanky (literally) figure swirled into the hallway and looked at the damage that the collapsing roof had wrought. The newcomer's midnight robe was billowing in a breeze that wasn't there. All around it the devastation wrought by a few well-chosen grenades was still falling to the floor.

"DECISIONS, DECISIONS," ruminated Death. "WHERE, OH, WHERE DO I START? I THINK I SHALL START WITH…THAT ONE OVER THERE."

*

General Hammond stepped into the Infirmary and looked around him. Alarms sounded, their cacophony almost deafening, and they went unacknowledged. Confusion reigned and Catastrophe appeared to be the heir to the throne. 

The wild squeak, squeak of an overloaded set of hospital trolley castors signalled the approach of a team of medical staff. They ploughed straight at General Hammond, the two of them apparently more interested in the display on the contraption on the trolley than any thing that might be in their way. They were frantically wheeling a de-fribulator through the doorway and into the suite where O'Neill and Carter were housed. General Hammond jumped out of the way hurriedly before the runaway cart full of electrical and electronic medical technology mowed him down.

"Who is that for?" General Hammond demanded of the passing medical trauma team.

"Doctor Fraiser," the medical technician threw an answer over her shoulder, and proved by what she said that she had completely misread the nature of his request.

General Hammond pushed through the door and found himself confronted by a nurse who made to restrain his entry. 

The nurse wore a facemask, gloves and clean-suit. "This is a clean area," he said. "If you haven't scrubbed up then you can't come in." He held up his hand, almost touching the General but refraining from resting his gloved palm against the general's chest by just a few centimetres. It was almost as though he were restraining himself before toppling over and placed his gloved hand against the General's uniform. The hand stopped a couple of centimetres from contact. The nurse's restraint was not related to respect for Hammond's rank, but more through a desire to prevent the passage of possible infections.

Over the nurse's shoulder, General Hammond could see the back of Janet Fraiser's head. He recognised the colour of her hair more than anything else.

"Doctor Fraiser," he called over the nurse's shoulder. "What is the status?"

"I can't tell you yet," she looked up in baffled confusion for a moment before she said. "Just wait outside there and as soon as I know something I'll tell you everything."

He retreated from the infirmary reluctantly, only to find Teal'c standing behind him.

"No news then?" Teal'c asked.

General Hammond sighed. "No," he said reluctantly. "We may as well complete our debriefing while we wait."

*

Ahead of them, Daniel Jackson and Teal'c found a door marked with Germanic lettering. It read, "here be dragons." The writing was really on the wrong side, Jackson thought. 

He looked over his shoulder and thought he could here his pursuers. They had been remarkably circumspect since the SG-1 team had induced a pile of masonry to fall from the roof and onto their heads. They healed fast, but that did nothing to prevent the head ache.

Half of SG1 ground to a halt, struggling beneath the burden of the comatose Jack O'Neill and Samantha Carter, plus the extra burden of the Count who was dead to the world, for a while any way (probably forever really, although he was strictly speaking 'undead'). The way the Count's head was healing was distinctly creepy, Jackson thought. 

He dumped the Count from his shoulder unceremoniously onto the tiles. He landed with a meaty thud, again. 

Jackson was enjoying that part of the chase. He could take or leave most of the rest.

"How long until he's up and mobile again?" he asked Heidi.

Jackson relieved Heidi of her burden and then carefully placed the unresponsive bulk of Samantha Carter against the wall. Heidi collapsed to the floor beside her. 

"Half a day at the most," she said. Heidi was close to exhausted. Carter certainly didn't look heavy, but she had turned into a huge burden by the need to carry her through the last couple of hundred metres. Heidi was huffing and puffing heavily and that was the second most enjoyable part of their flight from the castle. Jackson was pleased that she had spurned his offer of a replacement shirt. Seeing her sprawled on the floor, labouring for breath in one of Jackson's shirts was not half as alluring as the outfit that she wore.

She saw that Daniel Jackson was no less exhausted than she was and felt more satisfied with her own performance.

Jackson pushed on the door. It resisted. He pulled on it, with similar results. He tried twisting, turning pulling and tugging on the door handle. Nothing made any difference. He tried kicking and got a result. His toe hurt. He let fly with a couple of invectives that we will translate as "!@#$%^&*()," or something similar. The words all seemed to have four letters and each seems to comprise just the one explosive syllable. They don't appear in the Germanic or Egyptian lexicons. 

Ah, perhaps they are in English. Just hang on while I look it up.

After and exhaustive search of the Oxford English dictionary we find that they are words with Anglo-Saxon roots and are considered impolite, expletives. 

Hmmm? We must make a decision here. 

After consulting the PG ratings guidelines, we will have to leave the words used by Daniel Jackson in expressing his feelings about his hurt foot un-uttered in this instance. Instead we will watch the comical dance he is executing. Jackson hopped on one leg, while holding the toes of the other between both hands. He pirouetted through one complete revolution and then began another before being interrupted by Teal'c who said, "we do not have time for this Daniel Jackson."

It is perhaps prudent to explain that Teal'c was still staggering beneath the weight of a perfectly unresponsive Jack O'Neill, and naturally he would be short of patience.

"It's locked," Jackson announced after he managed to regain control over his tongue. For a while there his reptilian brain (the old bit that was left over when the upgrade was done to the hardware a few generations back) was in control of the input/output buffer. He finally managed to open his eyes and close his mouth, and relax some of the new creases that marred the surface of his face there for a moment.

"It's locked," Teal'c translated for the benefit of Heidi Pravda.

"Of course it's locked," Heidi announced tetchily. "Do you think they leave the way into the castle from our village unlocked?"

"So who was it that was ahead of us in the tunnel?" Jackson asked. His tone was curious, as though puzzling one of life's fundamental mysteries.

"Probably my father and his cronies," she said. There was a note of unconditional admiration in her voice.

"Do you still have the key?" Teal'c asked. It was a perfectly reasonable request.

"What? Yeah of course."

"Grrrrrr," Teal'c hissed, staggered, and then placed the bulk of O'Neill beside Carter. She flopped sideways and rested her head against the shoulder of O'Neill. If it wasn't for their pale colouring and shallow breathing it might have been a touching scene. 

Something caught his attention in the passage leading to their position.

Teal'c turned from his contemplation of the unconscious military personnel and let off a blast with his staff, taking out a couple stones from the tunnel roof and interrupted the mad dash of the approaching vampire guards. It was like shooting fish in a barrel, only easy. They just filled up the hallway and waited to be shot. The rest ducked into a doorway, showing admirable self-preservation, and they hid for a moment.

Heidi skipped back along the corridor, brandishing Samantha Carter's guns. She skidded to a halt and took a wide stance before letting off a barrage of lead pellets that cascaded in a metallic hailstorm between the stones of the passage. "I love these things," she chortled. "They are so much fun!"

Teal'c and Jackson exchanged one of those, 'we've created a monster' looks.

Heidi sauntered back to join them, holstered the guns with a flourish that would have done Angelina Jollie proud. She fumbled in the folds of what was left of her dress and produced a key amid a rattle of small metallic objects. It was attached to a huge ring, probably 15cm in diameter and accompanied by several other old style cloverleaf headed keys. The whole mess looked like it weighed a couple of kilograms and would wear a hole in the pocket of any one who carried it in about two minutes.

Jackson caught sight of the mass of keys that might have weighed down a prison warden and frowned.

"What?" asked Heidi Pravda, after she caught the expression on his face. She tossed him the bundle of keys. It arced majestically through the air, heading straight for his outstretched hand. It bounced off the palm of his hand like a rubber ball hitting a concrete floor. It lobbed onto the floor and into the corner between the wall and the door.

He shook his head, not understanding for a moment where she could possibly have hidden that key bundle; which was his excuse for not catching them. In reality his clumsiness was caused by his preoccupation with things intellectual during that early phase of his life when the kinaesthetic traces were being developed for his gross motor skills. He had failed to develop the supporting neural pathways that would have allowed him to perform those tasks such as catching a ball when he was a child. 

While the keys lobbed into an inconvenient position on the floor, Jackson was using the biological processor that separated his ears to conclude that she probably kept those keys in the same place where she stored the knife, which was no answer at all. "Oh yeah," Jackson acknowledged and then scrambled onto the floor to gather them back up.

O'Neill flopped out from under Carter's head, and landed face down in her lap. She didn't seem to care. 

Heidi turned to halt beside Teal'c, guarding the passage from the approaching vampire guards. They stood side by side with their respective weapons drawn. Teal'c let off a blast that decapitated two more Vampires and covered the wall with scorch marks and a spattering of smouldering meat. Shooting Vampires was a frustrating experience. As much as they tried to cull the numbers they seemed to keep coming. They had to run out of the things sooner or later, or so Teal'c had once believed, but sooner was going to be a problem because they were still advancing. 

A few of them decided to try rushing the SG-1+ obstruction. It was a relatively short lived charge.

A rain of dismembered Vampire components rained down upon them like a gory hailstorm. Heidi dived for cover as soon as she saw Teal'c take aim. She somersaulted once and landed on her butt with precision timing that ensured maximising of bruising and minimising of self-confidence.

Teal'c had a similar tumble and cannoned into the unfortunate O'Neill, thus ensuring his ongoing descent into embarrassment by making the pair of them sprawl in such a way that they both measured their length with Carter's body.

Both Carter and O'Neill remained unconscious throughout this impingement of their person so they can only experience the embarrassment by reading this report.

Their combined excruciating moment was broken by the sudden intrusion of a few gory condiments that rained down to spice up the tableau. Teal'c pulled three furry fingers from his face and looked around for the exit to the compound. (Anything to take his mind off some of the other thoughts that such intimate contact with Samantha Carter's might cause. It was new territory for Teal'c and suggested that his intimate contact with Countess's sister had opened up new possibilities.)

The air was thick with smoke and the smell of barbecued…um…ah…yuck. I know what that smell represents. People smell all sorts of ways before they get burnt, but they only smell the one way afterward.

OK, so there were no more Vampires to worry about? Not in the sort term anyway.

They had been roasted in quantities to make a New Guinea highland feast look like a vegetarian convention.

Teal'c couldn't see the door from where he was, even after the obstruction provided by the bodies of Samantha Carter and Jack O'Neill was moved out of the way. He had to wait a few moments before the air cleared to reveal a gaping hole in the wall. Standing in front of it Daniel Jackson was still fumbling with the keys, trying to fit them into the door that was no longer even remotely secure. What can you say? He was in shock. The palsy of his hands made a mockery of trying to get the key into the lock anyway, so it was just as well that there was now a colossal hole in the wall.

Teal'c did a quick head count and came to a number that was much greater than six, but a couple of them weren't accompanied by bodies. The number of heads that were still attached to bodies seemed about right. A couple of them weren't moving. Heidi, he knew was OK. Carter was… O'Neill was… Well it was going to be up to Janet Fraiser to tell him how Carter and O'Neill were.

"Daniel?" Heidi Pravda asked. She crawled out from the tangled mess that was made by the limbs that belonged to O'Neill and Carter and found his face behind his badly skewed glasses. 

"I'm OK," he said and sneezed, twice.

He thought about trying to stand up, but found his lips planted against Heidi's. Her hands clutched at his hair, and anchored his head in place. He dropped his hands onto her back to stop him self from falling back onto the floor and his hands encountered a lot of bare skin. In fact it didn't seem to matter where he put them, it was all the same. Heidi didn't seem to object at all. It was not one of those moments of great self-discipline, but he decided to enjoy the moment.

She broke away eventually, breathlessly.

They exchanged one of those, 'ah… well… what do we do now?' kind of looks, and then they both went vivid shades of chartreuse.

"Oh, you have broken your facial decorations," she said, and then smoothed his hair.

Behind them, Teal'c climbed to his feet and swayed like he was dancing the last waltz before the night was over, two steps this way, two steps that way and then turn.

Heidi stood quickly and then slung an arm around Teal'c's shoulder and managed to make the whole tableau look at least slightly more incongruous.

"Heidi, is he OK?" Jackson asked.

"Mostly. I think, perhaps. Yes or No…"

"I'll take that as yes for now."

Daniel climbed partly to his feet and then bent to check on the status of O'Neill and Carter. They were both motionless. Jackson pulled a few lumps of plaster off Carter and at least proved that she had his full compliment of arms and legs and that there didn't appear to be any blood coming out of her (not that she had a lot left after her earlier contretemps with the Countess. The blood all over Jackson was still leaking out of the dismembered pieces of Vampires that had been baked onto his clothing.

The Count had slumped to the floor. Jackson only paid him enough attention to make sure he wasn't about to do any self actuated movement for a while longer yet.

"Daniel Jackson?" Teal'c said vaguely and then shook him by his shoulder. It was not a good move, because Jackson was holding himself upright by an effort of will, rather than any inherent balance.

He slumped to the floor, barely able to remain upright even on his knees.

Teal'c crawled groggily on his hands and knees and shook himself so that the smear of Vampire moved around. None of it had the common curtesy to fall off. He climbed shakily to his feet and staggered out through the hole on the wall, mostly because Heidi Pravda slapped him on the back and the momentum carried him through that way.

"OK," Heidi said exultantly. "We're out of here." 

She ran for the door only to be pulled up short by the appearance of a guard who was moving about like he meant to obstruct her. His mouth opened and revealed another orthodontic nightmare. 

"—!" yelled the Guard. I could translate that into Ariel 12 point like the other Goa'uld speech, but it had as much meaning as a cry of "Aiiiya" before someone in one of those lame Anime cartoons raced forward with a sword.

"—!" yelled Heidi in return and raised her knife. It did look rather pathetic, but nobody was laughing.

Teal'c almost fell back through the hole in the wall, shook his head once and then shot the guard with his staff. The guard collapsed to the ground, now the best part of half a metre less statuesque (although which statue we're comparing it to is a debatable point.) than he had been. 

"OK," Jackson said circumspectly and clambered to his feet. "We're out of here." Nothing went wrong this time. 

"What?" asked Heidi, before getting his meaning from context.

They regained their burdens and clambered through the still smoking ruin of the exit door.

"Snap," said the wall. "Crackle. Pop."

"Which way?" asked Jackson, befuddled. The patch of vegetation-less ground looked the same in every direction.

"Mother's cart should be here by now," Heidi complained.

"Well it isn't," pointed out Daniel Jackson pettily.

"Perhaps we should follow those marks over there," suggested Teal'c. "Just an idea, but they look like a heap of foot prints and the drag marks left behind by the passage of an army of boot heels."

"That would be Dad's group." Heidi guessed.

"Sounds good to me." Jackson agreed.

"What's that noise?" Teal'c ruminated. Like he didn't know.

"It's a team of Vampires," Heidi answered. "Come on! Run!"

It was only a matter of kilometres to the stargate. It doesn't sound much. The members of SG1 were huffing and puffing evilly by the time they got twenty metres down the road, labouring beneath the triple burdens of their comatose team mates, their captive Goa'uld vampire and their own terror. 

The entire cast of 'Dracula - the movie' appeared to be on their tail by that stage, and boy, were they pissed.

*

Janet Fraiser burst through the door, interrupting Teal'c's narrative yet again. She was still dressed in surgical scrubs and had a mask hanging around her neck. Her hair was still contained inside a disposable hat. General Hammond called after her. Framing the question he had been trying to get answered for several minutes.

"I don't know anything conclusive yet," she shouted over her shoulder while she marched purposefully through the hall and up to the door of another of the suites. "Nothing about anybody beyond what I've already told you." She glanced down at the pager on her hip, tutted once, and then set off back along the corridor before she disappeared into another ward, without saying anything else.

A gurney raced past the position where General Hammond and Teal'c were seated. It was heading back to the infirmary after leaving the operating room. On it, Daniel Jackson lay with his head bandaged and his arm coupled to a mixture of intravenous drips and monitoring equipment. A machine that went ping, went ping.

"Is he all right?" General Hammond called to the medical technician pushing the cart.

"The operation was successful," the medtech called back. "Well we released the pressure on his brain. There's no p[oint getting confident yet though. He's not out of danger yet, he's still in a coma." He shrugged and then they were moving along the corridor again.

General Hammond watched the gurney while it was pushed into the recovery room. His expression was speculative for a moment. Staring at the place where it passed from view. He was watching the swinging door, swing when a thought occurred to him; he appeared momentarily confused. One question needed answering still. "Teal'c," he said. "How did Doctor Jackson get injured?"


	18. Chapter 18: looky! I wrote a short chapt...

The vampires stopped at the lip of the gaping hole in the wall. They looked at the vivid patch of sunlight that separated them from the fleeing SG-1 team and then they looked up at the staggering SG-1 team and then they looked down again.

They sort of vibrated, caught in a loop between pursuit and their reluctance to risk the touch of sunlight.

Daniel Jackson stopped his staggering flight, breathing heavily, he smiled dopily. He placed the Count on the ground at his feet and thumbed his nose at the Vampires. He made a gesture where he placed his left hand in the crook of his right elbow and sort of swung an uppercut at the air with his right hand. While the gesture is not universal, the expression on his face probably conveyed the meaning to the hesitating vampires.

Heidi Pravda looked at him, her concern causing a frown to furrow her perfect brow.

"Huh," spat Jackson. "We made it."

Teal'c grabbed Jackson by the elbow and pulled him along.

"I think perhaps a little circumspection is order here," suggested Teal'c.

"Why?" Jackson was still exultant.

"Wolves."

In the distance, but not far enough away for anyone's confidence, a howl wafted from between the trees.

Jackson uttered a sound that might be represented by the symbols at the top of the typewriter keyboard once again.

They gathered their burdens up again and staggered onward.

*

The cart came bouncing along the roadway, finally clattering to a halt beside the beleaguered SG-1 team. Magda Pravda greeted her daughter happily and apologised for the delay.

They threw the comatose team members onto the back of the cart and dived into the back after them. 

Magda frowned at the body of the Count. Her eyes asked a question of her daughter who shrugged in reply.

Daniel Jackson leapt into the back of the wagon, landing beside the comatose members of the SG-1 team. He checked Samantha Carter's and Jack O'Neill's pulses while Teal'c and Heidi found places in the cart. 

Before they had gone more than a hundred metres down the road, Heidi clambered into the back of the cart to be with Jackson. She bent over with him to check on his companions, their heads almost touching. "Has Dad and his mates come back yet?" Heidi asked her mother without looking up.

"Mostly," Magda said and whipped the reigns to propel the horses into action. "Those that haven't come back yet are probably sleeping it off somewhere. While he's here with us," she said and nodded toward the body of the Count, "they are probably safe no matter where they are."

The cart bounced along the roadway, lurching alarmingly.

After exchanging a look with Daniel Jackson that caused Heidi's mother no end of concern, Heidi clambered from the back of the cart to sit beside her mother. 

Teal'c leant over his shoulder to thank her for her assistance.

"It was something that we had to do," explained Heidi graciously.

"Still, it is a good deed."

They galloped along the road. The howls of the wolves were not getting closer.

Daniel Jackson was leaning over the form of Jack O'Neill, checking to make sure that his breathing was still happening. It was, but his breathing was very shallow.

Jackson stood up, stabilised himself in the rocking cart so that he could move around to check on Samantha Carter.

The horses passed beneath a low branch.

Magda and Heidi ducked.

Teal'c ducked.

Jackson ducked beneath the low branch too. Unfortunately he ducked after the blow on the back of his head, and his action had nothing to do with his own volition. His head made a sound like a baseball that had just been hit for the season's most noteworthy home run. He landed face first in Samantha Carter's lap. If he were a cartoon character, he would be watching a circle of birds flying in tiny orbits around his head at that moment.

Heidi let out a little screamlet and dived into the back of the wagon after Jackson. A branch from the same tree landed in the cart beside the comatose Jackson, almost impaling the frantic Heidi, only missing her by inches as she fussed over him. Her sobs were audible over the clattering of the horses hooves, the rumble of the cartwheels and the whipping of the reins.

On the floor of the wagon, unseen by either Heidi or Jackson, the Count stirred.


	19. Chapter 19: FINISHED! finished finished...

Marines clattered across the floor in a mad scramble to cover the stargate entrance with enough firepower to puree anything that had the cheek to come through the portal unauthorised.

Telemetry suggested it was SG-1 that had activated the iris. They had been due back on Earth, almost a full day earlier. Their late return had prompted General Hammond to begin planning a rescue mission, and SG-4 team was due to depart as soon as day shift kicked off.

The iris covering the portal mouth dilated, exposing the vertical pool lookalike surface of the event horizon.

The last time this had occurred they were left with four basket cases and he held out little hope of a better result this time. The night shift medical team was on stand-by. They normally had little to do with gate operations and were not prepared for genuine emergencies. Their anxiety was palpable.

The blood-spattered figure that burst through the stargate portal was not recognisable on first inspection. A squad of marines ringed the portal with their guns raised.

"It is me!" shouted Teal'c. "Hold the gate open." There was a great deal of questioning babble from the control room.

Teal'c dragged the bodies of O'Neill, Carter and Jackson through the gate, one after another, returning through the gate each time to gather the next one.

"I have another one," Teal'c called up to the operations centre. Colonel Makepeace stayed the closure of the gate and the iris long enough for Teal'c to make one more passage through the worm hole. He returned dragging a man by the arms. The body seemed to have a tree branch growing from his chest.

It caught everyone's attention. "Medic," cried the marine squad leader in the gate-room. Although what use a medic would be to a guy with a tree growing out of him was any body's guess. Overhead in the mezzanine floor operations room, the mission monitoring technician already had the phone resting on his ear and his fingers were dialing the number of General Hammond's home.

*

"That's all of it?" General Hammond asked Teal'c.

"Yes. The rest you already know." He waved to indicate the infirmary and all of it's activity. "I had to restrain the Count, and the branch that Daniel Jackson brought down when the tree hit his head was the only piece of timber available."

"Thank you for that."

Janet Fraiser stepped slowly out of the emergency room. Her expression was extremely grave.

General Hammond dreaded the answer almost before he asked. "What is going on?" he asked her.

She was distracted, and barely registered his question. "I lost him," she said softly. "I can't believe it. I actually lost him."

General Hammond had a sinking feeling in his gut. It was the worst possible news. He had been told already that Daniel Jackson was still in danger and he had heard no news of Jack O'Neill at all.

It was obviously one of those two; there were no other SGC teams in the infirmary at that moment.

The procedure for notification of family after a death among his staff ran through his head unheeded. He knew what he had to do, he had done it often enough. Life expectancy among the less experienced teams was not long enough to satisfy General Hammond's perfectionist attitudes.

But he had begun to think his more experienced crews were beyond that kind of danger, were better able to look after themselves when things got tough on the other side of the worm hole.

"Give it too me straight," he said bravely. "Who are we talking about?"

"Daniel Jackson," Janet said. Her face remained grave. The shock was visible for all to see in the way her eyes refused to meet General Hammond's. He had seen people go like that in times like these. These stressful and grief-filled times before acceptance of the loss.

"What happened?" Teal'c asked.

"I can't find him anywhere," Janet said softly. Her eyes continued to track up and down the corridor searching for answers.

"I'll look after the arrangements," General Hammond said, and then he added. "What?"

"I told them to take him to the recovery ward and he's not there," she said. "I don't know where he is."

General Hammond blinked, and then again. There didn't appear to be a lot to say in the aftermath of that one. "Then they're all OK?" he managed finally.

"Oh yeah. Sam and Jack are being fed whole blood now. Daniel should be OK too. If I can just find him. I'll give you a ring as soon as I find out where the med-tech team hid him."

She marched off purposefully.

*

General Hammond called the meeting to order. The members of SG-1 looked much more dapper than the last time General Hammond had set eyes on them. They still looked weak and it would be a few more days before they were sent out on a challenging mission again, but it was pleasing to see them all back on deck. They sprawled around the conference table in their usual eclectic manner, somehow managing to look collectively attentive and distracted at the same time. 

"I'm pleased to see you all back in one piece," General Hammond said. He folded his hands in front of him. "SG-6 have gone through the gate behind you and confirmed much of the conjecture regarding the nature of the Goa'uld there and the nature of their mutation. They gathered enough data to give us pretty much the same story that you conjectured when you came through the gate. That was good work by the way, although it all sounds just a trifle hard to swallow. If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes…"

Jack O'Neill dropped his feet onto the conference room table and crossed them at the ankles. "Has the tactical nuke been sent through?" O'Neill asked.

Beside him Samantha Carter nodded enthusiastically.

"We should have authorisation within the next few days," Hammond answered. "I think we can safely say that the threat to that human colony will be over then."

"That's a relief," commented Jackson. "Let's hope that's the last we ever hear of them then."

Teal'c raised one ironic eyebrow. "All of them Daniel Jackson?"

Jackson had the good grace to blush.

*

"OH YES, VERY NEARY," said a voice that sounded pretty much how you would image two tombstones might sound if they were rubbing together. The voice seemed to issue from within the confines of a hooded black robe surrounding a figure seated on a pale horse. The hooded head turned toward you and revealed a face that most people would be happy not to have seen, ever. 

Its death's head grin might have been just a consequence of the fact that it's skull was fleshless, but then again it might just have been caused by that same entity being happy to be there. He turned to his horse and patted it's neck. It nickered once and waited for the skeletal giant to signal it to move forward. "COME ON BINKY," Death said to his horse. Yes we know it's a stupid name for such a spectacular horse, but the horse is stuck with it, and frankly whose going to argue. "WE HAVE LOTS OF WORK TO DO HERE."

*

Beneath the vivid orange glow that painted the sky at sunset, Heidi Pravda stepped out from the shade of the wagon and joined her parents while they watched the Count's castle, from a long way away. They were following the directions they had been given by the last team from the SGC to the letter. It had been quite specific regarding the precautions that they needed to take if you set of a tactical nuke. Distance was the primary requirement. The SGC team were concerned that the villagers wanted to watch the blast, it seemed a needless risk, but they were adamant.

Daniel Jackson had come over with the SGC team, acting as interpreter. He and Heidi had taken many long absences from the discussions and the preparations, and no one tried very hard to find them. Both teams, SGC and villagers, saved themselves the embarrassment of what they might find if they did.

For the small crowd that had gathered on the top of the hill, watching the blast was not going to be fun exactly, but there were a lot of satisfied expressions worn on the Villager's faces when the sky was lit by a glow that was brighter than the sun for a while. As forecast, the ground rumbled soon afterward, shaking the trees and setting all the wildlife to flight. The noise that came a long time afterwards was like the sky had split in two, more deafening than any peel of thunder they had ever heard.

"So why didn't you go through to that other place with them?" Magda asked Heidi. "You had two chances. Their offer would have been very tempting to a girl in your position."

"I think I'm more of a home girl," Heidi said and shrugged. "Besides, he was married before you know. I spoke to Teal'c a bit about him and…I thought to myself, no, not second hand goods. I'll look around here for a bit longer." She paused for a moment and then added, "Besides, I know where he is and how to get there." She smiled secretly, "And he knows where I am and how to get here too. Think of our separation as a test."

Magda exchanged a look with her husband that said, 'go figure.'

The sky was filled with a cloud the likes of which the villagers had never seen before.


End file.
