Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Daniel doesn't squeal like a girl when the wormhole spits him out. His breath does rush out of him, though, and he staggers a bit, crowding up against Dumais, who falls forward a step, drops her case with a clatter and says in a soft exhalation, "Damnit."

Daniel can't figure out why everyone is crowded up together in the "debarkation area." The colonel said to clear it as soon as they got through. That was an order. But everyone is standing still and the event horizon is belching the last few people and Daniel has to push up against Dumais again, who moves aside as much as she can. Her ponytail is in Daniel's face. Angling his head and spitting out the hair, he looks over her shoulder and tries to make sense of things.

At the far end of the "debarkation area" there's an open space in the crowd. In the middle of that space are the colonel and Dr. Weir. In front of them is a guy in jeans and a Green Bay Packers t-shirt and he's pressing the muzzle of a gun to Dr. Weir's forehead.

"What the hell?" Daniel says.

"Don't make me ask again, Colonel. Identify the adept and the linguist and Dr. Weir gets to keep her cortex."

With a ripping sound – one universe shearing away from another – the wormhole disengages and the blue, wavery glow is replaced by the thin, low-angled light of dawn – or maybe sunset – that seems to sluice in at knee-level, leaving the rest of the room, that wide balcony, the corridors leading away under it, in shadow. There are shapes in there, darker shadows.

The colonel doesn't answer, but Daniel can tell from the way he angles his head that he's pretty much saying, "fuck you."

The stranger sighs and bites his lip, then looks into the crowd. On the balcony, there's a sort of electric crackling sound and a dozen sparks in the darkness. The colonel raises his head. Daniel's pretty sure he's counting. Weir stands very still.

"I need Daniel Jackson and Major John Sheppard," the guy calls out clearly.

"Why?" the colonel asks.

When they guy opens his mouth to answer, there's a whining sound – it comes from outside, not from him, even though for a second it seems like it – and a sudden concussion that rocks the floor a bit. Dumais steps backward into Daniel and he steadies her with a hand on the small of her back.

"That's why," the guy says. "That's a very unfriendly thing called a Wraith. There are about a hundred more of them on their way in little fighter ships and behind them are three carriers and they are gonna bomb the fuck out of this city and suck the life out of all of us." He flexes his fingers on the gun and Weir's head leans back a bit under the new pressure. "We've intercepted the data stream from one of the ships and we need to read it and if Daniel Jackson doesn't step – "

"Who the fuck are you?" the colonel demands, cutting the guy off.

"Waitaminute!" It's Rodney, stepping around Grodin and up beside the colonel, his finger pointing accusingly. "I know you. I know you! You're – " He snaps his fingers rapidly. "That guy from Systems? Zelenka!"

"No," comes a weary, irritated voice from behind a stack of medical supplies. "I'm Zelenka."

"Oh. Right. Sorry." Rodney turns toward the voice, his eyes pausing on Daniel, before he spins back to not-Zelenka and the gun. "Zewicky!" he says with a little jump as he hits on it. "You went – " a flutter fingers next to his temple, " – and bailed out of the program."

"I didn't bail," Zewicky objects sourly. "I found somebody with a bit of vision and a fast ship – " He cocks his head toward the balcony behind him. " – who made me a much better offer."

There should have been some kind of music sting, Daniel thinks, but there isn't. Still, it's kind of impressive when up on the balcony the shapes resolve into men, a lot of men in rustling chain mail and leather, and long staffs aimed down at the crowd. And front and centre, coming out of the shadows to lean on the railing, there's a guy in a long, black fitted jacket, high in the collar, a clean, elegant silhouette, sort of Demagogue GQ. He's got dark hair and a neat goatee and a strong chin and black eyes that are squinted up a little because he's smiling down at them. Part of Daniel's brain goes, "Hel-lo" and the rest of it cringes, because that smile is not a good smile. So not a good smile. Still, the renegade part of his brain isn't quite backing down, even when Rodney turns toward him and gives him a "Don't even think about it" glare. Daniel ignores him, because the dark man is laughing softly and now there's something wrong with the eyes, like for a second they're reflecting the light from a sun that hasn't yet broken the horizon.

At the front of the crowd on the floor, the colonel stiffens and then slumps just a little. "Oy," he says, and rubs his temple with his fingers.

On the balcony, the dark man straightens and lifts a hand to signal the soldiers around him, but before he can speak, the colonel interrupts.

"No, please. Allow me." Pulling himself to attention and sucking in a big breath, the colonel bellows, "Jaffa! KREE!"

– – –

"Stop!" Daniel shouted at Ba'al, who was doing...something...terrible to Rodney. Daniel wasn't sure what; it had something to do with the metal gauntlet on his hand. Rodney wasn't screaming, which somehow made it worse.

The tall, dark man closed his hand, and just like that, the beam that had been battering Rodney's head shut off. Rodney collapsed backwards, and Daniel caught him, slowly lowering him to the floor. Another pair of arms grabbed Rodney from the other side to help.

"Why do you always get between me and the bullies?" Daniel asked softly.

Rodney let out a couple of short, gasping breaths. His forehead was red and hot, and his body was shaking. "You have no idea what you're dealing with. Don't go with him."

"He'll kill you if I don't," Daniel said, pressing his cheek against Rodney's. He pressed his mouth against the other man's ear and whispered, so low that it was more a breath than a sentence, "And you can't help me if you're dead."

Rodney gasped, and sagged some more, but Daniel could feel his slight nod.

Daniel pulled away then, looking up at the other man who had caught Rodney. It was the grey-haired, flint-eyed colonel - only now his eyes were soft and wide, as if the scene before him had broken some sort of shell. "Take care of him for me," Daniel said, in a tone that brooked no argument.

The colonel nodded, and Daniel rose and turned to face Ba'al. "Sorry to keep you waiting," he said.

"Kree!" Ba'al said to two of his soldiers, who immediately grabbed Daniel by the arms and marched him out of the control room. He glanced over his shoulder just before he rounded the corner to see the colonel slowly helping Rodney sit up. Rodney looked after Daniel, his eyes full of despair.

Daniel looked away, clenched his teeth, and began to write a definition of the word "Kree" in his head.

As they walked down the hall, the armored soldiers moved him double-time until he was even with Ba'al. He thought about asking questions, but the earlier cultural questions he'd tried to ask of the Jaffa had been received with shoves and careless cuffs about the head. The clouts were hard enough to sting, but not hard enough to leave bruises, and Daniel had wondered, after what was done to Ford and Zelenka, if they'd had special orders regarding one Dr. Daniel Jackson.

The handsome man turned his head to look at him. "You care for him," he said in that eerie, vibrato voice.

"He's my best friend," Daniel replied. "And you need him. I don't care what that scientist you brought along says - if he were as smart as Rodney, y-y-you wouldn't have needed Rodney to solve your defense routing problem."

His captor smiled slightly. "Oh, I believe he will be very useful to me."

Somehow, Daniel didn't think they were talking about the same kind of useful.

They came to a door - beautiful, in a Frank Lloyd Wright kind of way. It slid back to reveal a large room decorated with curtains, carpets, and opulent jewel-toned fabrics, with an enormous bed in the center. Next to the bed knelt Major Sheppard; one of Ba'al's soldiers stood behind him, both hands on his shoulders, holding him there. From the blood trickling from the corner of the Major's mouth, it was obvious that it had taken some effort to get him into that position. Sheppard looked up at him, green eyes narrowed and jaw tense, everything about him a complete reversal from the relaxed, kind man he'd met less than twelve hours ago on Earth.

Ba'al smiled, a self-satisfied smirk that sparked a thrilled trembling deep in Daniel's gut. He pulled off his tailored jacket, and began unfastening the clasps on the vest beneath. "So," he said, some sort of wry humor making his smile broader, "I imagine you both are wondering why I brought you here tonight."

As Ba'al's broad, muscular chest was bared, his soldiers began to pull Daniel's jacket from his body. Sheppard tried to fight when the soldier holding him did the same. Ba'al lifted his hand - the one with the metal on it - and waved it, with one sharp gesture causing the Major to slump, stunned.

Daniel looked from Ba'al to Sheppard to the bed. His stomach flipped. This was awful. This was horrible.

And that little voice inside his head that Daniel had tried to train himself not to listen to said, This is what porn movies are made of.

As Ba'al moved toward him, it occurred to Daniel that this was the most excitement he'd had since...well, since Rodney had left Cambridge, actually. Whatever happened next, at least he wasn't going to be bored.

Dammit, Jackson, he thought to himself, you need to have your head examined.

–

In the commissary line, McKay took a swing at Kavanagh. The crack of his fist against the other scientist's jaw was audible, even from across the room. As the Jaffa moved in to break up the fight, Jack made a break for the transporter door. Who knew McKay could throw a punch like that? Jack thought as the doors slid open. Then again, there was supposedly no love lost between the two scientists, and after only one conversation with Kavanagh, Jack couldn't blame McKay for throwing himself a little too earnestly into the role he was playing.

The Jaffa were slow to move, slow to turn, even slower to shoot. "You must be new," Jack shouted as the doors closed behind him, the singing heat of a staff blast hitting the floor near his feet just before they snapped shut. Ba'al was understaffed and overextended, too many of his men killed by the Wraith, and it was working in Jack's favor. On the screen, he touched the north pier.

Dr. McKay says the sensors are out there due to flooding, Weir had told him, drawing the map in maple syrup on her military-issue flapjack like a stylized flower. Ba'al needed the Atlantis crew if he was going to keep the station running, and little things like good food went a long way to making the captives think the captor was an ally, not an enemy. He logged your biosigns. He wrote a virus. Once you vanish into this section, Atlantis will never register you on its internal detection sensors again. Ba'al won't be able to find you.

The doors opened. The corridors were dark. Jack ran, ignoring the throbbing twist in his right knee whenever he took a step.

I can't abandon my troops, Jack had whispered to Weir through gritted teeth.

She had looked at him, jaw set. He'd seen Carter look like that a few times; there was no moving her when she did. You have to. You're the only one who has been trained for this. And Zewicky doesn't know you have the Ancient gene. Then she'd paused, and glanced across the room at McKay, who'd given her a little nod and gotten up to stand in the commissary line, behind Kavanagh. Besides, Ba'al remembers you, she'd said then. He won't leave you alone forever. And we can't afford to lose you.

He rounded a corner at full speed, the pain still spearing through his knee. He'd forgotten, in his time retired, that he could run this fast. A staticky feeling crawled over his skin, and he looked behind him to see a pale blue, shimmering energy field forming across the hallway in his wake.

He could hear the sound of the door to the transporter sliding open. He pulled a little bag out of his pocket, reached through the irritating energy of the force field, and quickly scattered the contents on the floor. The energy field wavered, suddenly looking more dense.

He sprinted down the hall again, sliding into an alcove, and waited. Moments later, the Jaffa ran down the hall, following his path. The one on point hit the force field at full speed.

He didn't come out the other side. A cascade of ashes, like a special effect from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, fell to the floor.

The next Jaffa managed to stop before he fully hit the shield, but he was leading with his head. Jack winced reflexively as he saw the results, his muffled hiss covered by the shouts of Ba'al's other soldiers.

McKay rigged an energy field. Weir had pushed something, a tiny cloth sack, into his hands beneath the table. Beckett used your blood samples to create this. When they analyze it, they'll think you were disintegrated.

The Jaffa called frantically for reinforcements, for a science team. Eventually Kavanagh and McKay came down, both looking angry and under Jaffa guard.

McKay thinks there's something down there. Something we can use. Weir's voice whispered through his head.

He'd signed on to explore new places, after all. There was just a lot less Gate travel involved this time around.

Help us.

Jack slipped back into the shadows.

–

Daniel sat on the sarcophagus, naked and shivering. Ba'al kept his chambers warm enough that clothes weren't necessary; the chill came from inside.

Ba'al had more uses for the hand device than torture, Daniel had discovered. He'd set fire to all of Daniel's nerves with it, making him shudder with pleasure, cry out until he was hoarse. He kept Daniel on the edge for what seemed like hours before taking him.

And as Daniel lay on the bed, spent and sated and barely able to move, Ba'al had brutally raped Major Sheppard on the floor. Daniel had tried, sluggishly, to come to the other man's defense, but Ba'al had thrown him aside with the ribbon device. Daniel had watched, wide-eyed and dazed, as the false god casually snapped the pilot's neck.

He listened to the low hum of the sarcophagus, feeling the slight vibrations pass through him. He'd known what it was as soon as the Jaffa had dropped John's body into it like a sack of garbage; Rodney had given him a whispered briefing on the Goa'uld while they'd been working together on the Ancient equipment.

Daniel wondered what it would be like to die as John had. It was the same curiosity that made him hesitant to stand on the edge of a cliff, or against the railing of a balcony, or on the lip of a subway platform when the train was coming. He wasn't suicidal, but if he wasn't careful he knew his inquisitiveness would override his self-preservation instinct, and he'd step off the edge just so he could know what it was like.

The hum stopped, and after a quiet click, the lid of the sarcophagus began to open. Daniel slid off it, then stood at the foot, waiting. If he were rising from the dead, he'd want to see a friendly face when he came back.

The major lay in the sarcophagus, naked, skin a little paler than Daniel had expected. He looked unmarred, the livid bruises left on him by the Jaffa vanished as if they'd been rubbed out by an artist's eraser. His eyes opened, vividly green in the eerie light, and locked with Daniel's almost instantly. There should have been some sort of a transition, Daniel thought, a few of those soft slippery moments that usually came with waking up, instead of instant clarity.

Sheppard's face barely moved, but a tumult of emotions passed through his eyes. "Where's Ba'al?" the major asked after a moment, sitting up.

"Gone. I don't know where; his Jaffa pulled him out of here in a rush," Daniel responded.

A little tension seemed to leave the man's shoulders. "O'Neill?"

"O'Neill?" Daniel replied, confused.

"The colonel."

So that was the gray-haired colonel's name. "When I last saw him, he was taking care of Rodney," Daniel said, reaching out to help Sheppard out of the sarcophagus.

"Still alive. Well, that's something." the major replied. "Who's Rodney?" He ignored Daniel's hand, standing up and climbing out with the slow movements of a man who expects everything to hurt.

"Dr. McKay. The head scientist."

"Oh," Sheppard said, looking around the room. "Is he..."

"I think he'll be okay," Daniel said, trailing after the major as he left the antechamber for the bedroom. "Ba'al used the same hand device on him that he used on you."

"Hurt like a son of a bitch," Sheppard replied in a distracted tone. "Hey, where's our clothes?"

"I don't think we get any while we're in here, Major,"

The major looked at him then, and smiled wryly. "I've watched you have sex, and you've seen me die. I think you can call me John."

Daniel reached out his hand for a handshake, reflexively. John took it before Daniel realized the awkwardness of it, and the very normalcy of the moment, with both of them standing naked in the false god's bedroom, made everything more surreal.

"I did die, right?" John said, looking at the spot where he'd been kneeling when Ba'al snapped his neck. "I mean, that really felt like..."

"I'm pretty sure you did," Daniel said, in a low voice.

"Wow," John said, glancing through the doorway at the sarcophagus. "Wish we'd had one of those in Afghanistan." He turned back to Daniel. "No clothes."

"It's a technique used by some captors in order to put their victims into a mindset of helplessness..."

John shook his head. "I got the lecture on all this in OCS." He frowned and walked over to the wall. "Although I think I skipped the day when they told us about getting killed and resurrected by an alien god."

And raped, Daniel thought. John seemed to be avoiding that part. If John wanted to deny it, Daniel wasn't about to bring it up; he'd learned over the years that a little denial could be a healthy thing, no matter what Rodney said.

John touched a cube that sat on a side table; above it, two gold panels, not dissimilar in design from the sarcophagus, slid back to reveal a screen. "Now we're getting somewhere," John said, looking at the symbols spilling over the panel. "What does this say?"

Daniel looked at the symbols, then looked closer.

"Well?" John asked, a little impatiently.

Daniel shook his head, fascinated. "It looks - I think it's a little like Linear A," he said excitedly.

"Linear A. Wasn't that the Babylonian alphabet?"

"Minoan, actually," Daniel murmured, his eyes drifting down the screen.

"You mean, when this guy says he's Ba'al..."

"Well, Ba'al was worshipped by the Canaanites and the Phoenecians, not the Minoans. " Daniel said, tapping a button. More symbols flashed on the screen. The surface was slightly glossy, and Daniel could see his own image over the symbols, John a ghostly presence behind him. "I - the whole problem we've had on Earth is that there's nothing like the Rosetta Stone for it. We haven't had a context for the symbols."

"But now you do. See? You're getting somewhere," John said.

Daniel reached out and underlined some of the symbols with his finger. "Not really. Not unless someone tells me what a few of these mean." It was the old archaeo-linguist's nightmare - a civilization with a vast library, none of which could be understood.

"I don't suppose Ba'al moves his lips when he reads," John said.

"It wouldn't be in English, anyway. I'd need a translation," Daniel said, as the slippery little beads of mercury in his head, all reflecting tiny indecipherable images, suddenly came together to give him the full picture.

It was a really bad idea.

It would give him the chance to learn about a new culture - and wasn't that why he came halfway across the galaxy?

It could save them all.

Rodney was going to kill him.

Daniel licked his lips and met John's eyes in the dim reflection of the computer screen. "He might explain it to me. If he...trusted me."

"That's a really bad idea," John said.

"There's a long tradition of enslaved former enemies becoming secretaries to their new leader," Daniel said.

"Yeah, and there's a long tradition of enslaved former enemies killing their new leader! I saw Spartacus," John countered.

Spartacus? Daniel thought, startled, but John continued, "Besides, isn't it a little too cliche?"

"Rodney said that cliche and Goa'uld go together like -" Daniel heard the door slide open; as one, they spun around.

The woman who came through, carrying a tray of food, was wearing a long, fitted dress, a reddish hue that showed off the cafe au lait color of her skin - Ba'al's taste, Daniel suspected. Her reddish-brown hair fell straight to her shoulders, and her almond-shaped eyes tensed with worry as she saw the two of them. There was something about the set of her shoulders, the way she looked at them, that made Daniel want to find out what was wrong, and help fix it.

Daniel suddenly remembered that he was naked, He automatically began to clasp his hands in front of him, then decided that limited coverage was probably worse than no coverage at all. "Ba'al said the two of you would need to be fed," she said, her voice a pleasing low alto.

"What are you, his servant?" John asked.

But she didn't move like a servant, Daniel thought. She moved like a leader. She began to draw herself up. "I -" Then she looked around the room, and her shoulders slumped, just a little. "Yes. I suppose I am, now. My people serve Ba'al in exchange for protection from the Wraith."

She serves Ba'al to protect her people, Daniel thought. She's the competition. He took the nascent flame of caring that had lit in his chest, and carefully blew it out. He couldn't afford to care about her problems, not if he was going to try to protect his own people. Not if he was going to try to protect Rodney. Rodney came first.

"I'm John," the major said, and held out a hand to her.

She reached out, clasping his forearm with her hand. After a second's startlement, John returned the gesture. "My name is Teyla," she said.

– – –

Sergeant Bates had a gun.

On any other mission, he would have laughed at the pea-shooter he was holding. It wasn't even a .38; Parker had apparently decided that the little DA Colt Diamondback .22 was of enough sentimental value to be his personal item. But Parker was dead, and the Jaffa hadn't gotten around to searching half the stuff the Atlantis team had brought with them, and now Bates had a gun. A .22 didn't have much shock power, but it would fragment inside the body and cause a lot of damage. And the dark storage room he crouched in was right next to one of the Jaffa dormitories.

Bates knew the moment he saw Ba'al that he wasn't going to make it out of this one alive. And within a day, things just got worse. Colonel O'Neill was dead, Ba'al had taken a personal interest in Major Sheppard, and Lieutenant Ford -

He didn't want to think about what had happened to Lieutenant Ford. He went back to checking the gun.

Six rounds. If he aimed well, that was six Jaffa down. It wasn't much, but it was something - and something was better than nothing. He checked the chamber, and clicked the safety off.

"Sergeant," a low female voice said behind him. He whirled around.

For a moment, all he could see was her silhouette, framed in the light streaming in from the corridor. She quickly stepped in, and the door slid shut behind her. His eyes hadn't adjusted, but he didn't need to see - he recognized Weir's soft alto. "Ma'am," he replied tersely.

"What are you planning to do with that?" she asked.

What do you think? he thought to himself. But respect for his superiors had been drilled into him by the Marine Corps, and even if she was a civilian, she was technically the leader of this now-doomed mission. "I need to do something, ma'am."

"I understand that," she said. "But firing on them - now - gets us nothing. In fact, it gets us less than nothing. If you shoot them, how long do you think they would let us move around the station without being under constant guard?"

Bates was filled with a rush of anger. He wasn't supposed to be here, making the big decisions. But all of the officers were out of action and the command structure, never clear in the first few days of a multi-branch operation such as this, had gone straight to hell. There was no one left to take orders from. "So that's it. We suck up to them? Let them enslave us?"

"No," Weir said, and the full force of her steely intensity was suddenly turned on him. In the gate room at the SGC, it had been enough to make him sit up and take notice; here it was like she had grabbed him by the throat. His spine suddenly straightened. "We wait. And we plan." She looked at the gun in his hand. "How many more of those do you think you can find?"

Bates shook his head. "I have no idea, ma'am."

"Sergeant Bates," she said, and he tried not to show his shock - he'd been the military's pick for the mission, not hers, and he didn't even think she knew his name. "I'm putting you in charge of finding out. Find every weapon you can, and hide them. I'll tell them you're our supply specialist. That should give you plenty of opportunity to search."

"Ma'am - my records say I'm military security," Bates replied.

His eyes had adjusted enough now to see the curve of her lips. "All our personnel records were lost. Apparently, an undetected computer virus came through the gate with us. Doctor McKay was quite upset at the incompetence of the SGC." She leaned closer. "Sergeant Bates, you're an expert in military security. Does that mean you know something about terrorism?"

Bates remembered bombs, and blood, and screaming. "I did a tour in Afghanistan, ma'am," he said.

She folded her arms. "Good," she said. "Because it's time for you to start thinking like the people you used to protect the bases from."

The people who a naive Marine corporal decided to trust. The people who operated in cells, who didn't let the left hand know what the right hand was doing, who seemed helpful and kind until the day they walked through the gates with a bomb strapped to their belly. The people who wouldn't give up information on the big plan no matter how much pressure you applied, because they didn't have any. He clamped his mouth shut for a moment as his stomach heaved convulsively about the thought of becoming one of them.

And between one breath and the next, the heaving stopped - because he had his orders, and he would be damned if he flinched at carrying them out. "Yes, ma'am."

– –

"Does it work?" Elizabeth whispered to Rodney as they walked down the empty corridor.

Instead of answering, he slid an arm around her waist, pulling her toward him in an affectionate motion that blocked the pair of Jaffa behind them from seeing between their bodies. His other hand slipped inside his jacket, pulling out something about the size of a palmtop computer. Four dots were at the center of the display, two of them almost on top of each other, the two just below the first pair a bit further apart. Like in a videogame, architectural line drawings of walls passed by the dots on either side. He slipped the device into her right hand, and as he let go of it the display turned dark.

She glanced up at him, flashing him a quick smile before she turned her head enough for the Jaffa to see. She brushed her lips against his cheek, and as she did breathed, "You have the Ancient gene now."

"And so will you," he murmured in reply. "Find some reason to stay with Carson when we're done. Make up an illness. He's got a syringe prepared for you. He's bringing it here."

She started to hand the device back to him; he pushed it toward her. "I've got one. Keep it. A friend sent it for you."

O'Neill, she thought, tucking it in her inside pocket as they stepped up to the door of the lab. Rodney's hand slid over her spine as he drew slightly away from her. The door slid open.

Inside stood Carson, his already creased brow sliced with deep furrows of worry. Next to him, leaning comfortably against a table, was Ba'al, a Jaffa at his side and a cool, cruel smile on his face. Elizabeth wondered what he'd said to make Carson look so scared - or if he'd terrified the doctor with his smiling silence.

"Dr. Weir," Ba'al said in his smooth, eerie voice. "Please go to the console and translate the readout as it appears."

"Why isn't Daniel here?" interrupted Rodney as Elizabeth crossed the room. "He's better than Elizabeth at translating Ancient."

Don't antagonize him, she thought, as if she could send it out over a psychic link. Rodney's forehead was a constant red from his repeated encounters over the past week with the ribbon device. His instinctive reaction to being scared seemed to be to snipe at the people he considered responsible for the situation - and Ba'al didn't take such speech lightly.

"He is otherwise engaged," Ba'al responded, with a slightly condescending smile.

Rodney licked his lips. "Is he -"

"He is unharmed, and will continue to be so long as you cooperate," Ba'al said. He gestured to the object in the center of the room. It looked like an altar, with depressions on the left and the right side of the flat surface moulded in the shape of hands. "Dr. Beckett will begin operating the device. Dr. Weir will translate the readouts. And you, Rodney, will devise a way to interface it with my computers."

Elizabeth got a sick feeling in her stomach as she heard Ba'al's use of Rodney's first name. He was singling Rodney out. We can't afford for Ba'al to kill him, she thought. Not when he just got the Ancient gene. She could see the tension at the corners of Rodney's eyes; his poker face was terrible.

Carson got just a little paler as he slowly stepped up to the mechanism. He put his hands on the surface.

Nothing happened.

They all stared at him for a moment. Sweat formed on his forehead.

"We're waiting," Ba'al said quietly.

Carson squeezed his eyes tightly shut. The console flickered to life for a moment, then died.

Rodney reached toward the surface. Elizabeth suppressed a sharp inward breath. Don't touch it, she thought. If it activated at his touch, Ba'al would know, and they were all doomed.

Fortunately, Rodney seemed to remember at the same time, and changed the motion to a touch on Carson's back. "Come on. Focus for a minute."

"I am focusing!" Carson said, his eyes flying open, full of anxiety. "You know I'm terrible under pressure."

"Are you saying you cannot do it?" Ba'al said silkily.

Carson turned around, and Rodney took a step back. "Look, I'm a doctor, not some sort of Ancient-device-activation object!" he pleaded. "If you want me to treat someone who's sick or hurt, I'll be happy to. But there are other people on the mission much better for this work than I am."

Ba'al looked at him for a moment, then nodded slightly. "Kree," he said to the Jaffa that stood next to him.

Unflinching, the Jaffa whirled his staff weapon. Elizabeth's brain raced as she saw him aim, throwing out ten ways to diplomatically defuse the situation as the active end of the weapon opened up, glowing. From across the room, Elizabeth saw Carson's soft blue eyes go wide as the Jaffa fired, hitting him full in the chest. Carson was flung back against the console by the energy; his lifeless body slid to the floor. The whole thing hadn't even taken a second; she hadn't had time to move.

Rodney dropped to his knees next to the doctor. He reached down for a moment, as if he could do something to fix the other man's broken body, then looked up at Ba'al, an angry snarl on his face. "What the hell are you thinking? You need him. He's a doctor. What are you going to do if someone gets hurt? Or sick?"

Ba'al shrugged slightly. "That is why we have the sarcophagus," he said.

The entire room seemed to waver; Elizabeth grasped the console behind her, and she wondered if Ba'al had planned this all along.

"Take his body," Ba'al said to his Jaffa, gesturing with his chin at the doctor. "Throw it in the ocean."

"No!" Elizabeth exclaimed. Carson had the syringe in his pocket - the one with the Ancient gene for her. "Please - let us bury him according to the customs of his people."

Ba'al smiled. "His body will be disposed of according to the will of his god," he said. The Jaffa threw Carson's body over his shoulder, taking his body - and the syringe - away. "We will meet here tomorrow, when Major Sheppard will accompany me," he said.

Rodney looked up at her, his blue-gray eyes enormous in his pale face, as Ba'al swept out, telling the Jaffa at the door, "Escort them back to their quarters."

She reached down, helping Rodney to his feet. "But...but..." he stammered. "The sarcophagus - it can't treat more than one person at a time! What if there's an outbreak? Or an accident?"

"Then the people who are in Ba'al's favor will get treated first," Elizabeth said as they moved into the hall.

"Oh, no," Rodney whispered, deducing the rest. "You mean anyone who doesn't suck up might not get treated at all."

"Withholding medical treatment is one of the best ways to keep a rebellious population in check," Elizabeth said, gazing down the corridor as Ba'al rounded the corner, his black coat flaring behind him. "He knows what he's doing."