SALT OF THE EARTH
by
ELG

TITLE: Salt of the Earth
AUTHOR: ELG
AUTHOR PAGE: ELG
CATEGORY: Action/Adventure, Angst.
SPOILERS: Major spoilers for ‘Between Two Fires’ and ‘2001’. Minor Spoilers for other S1-S5 episodes up to ‘2001’.
SEASON / SEQUEL: Season 5, second half. Takes place after ‘2001’.
RATING: R
CONTENT WARNINGS: Whumping of member of SG-1. (Sorry, Daniel). Mention of persistent emotional cruelty to member of SG-1. (Not my fault as the show writers did that, not me. I actually like Samantha Carter and would let her keep all her attractive men friends rather than ascending them or murdering them right, left and centre). Mention of previous minor character(s) death(s). Some possible romantic implications in Sam’s feelings for Narim.
SUMMARY: Deeply affected by the events of ‘2001’ and ‘Between Two Fires’, Sam begins to question everything, including her own judgment. When SG-1 find a breakaway community of the Tollan who have apparently sabotaged the crops of the indigenous population Sam is ready to believe the worst. But are her suspicions justified?
STATUS: Complete
AUTHOR'S NOTE: This fic was released from the charity zine Mercy in Action put out by Jmas on her site Ancient’s Gate and edited by Scribe to benefit www.mercyinaction.org.uk, a charity which Scribe works tirelessly to support. Thanks to the zine producer and zine editor contributing all their valuable work for nothing, all the proceeds of this zine go to charity. Scribe is editing submissions for a multi-fandom gen zine to benefit Mercy in Action again this year. The zine will be released this summer; fandoms to include Stargate SG-1, Angel, Good Omens, Lord of the Rings, and Without A Trace.
DISCLAIMER: Stargate SG-1 and its characters are the property of Stargate (II) Productions, Showtime/Viacom, MGM/UA, Double Secret Productions, and Gekko Productions. This story is for entertainment purposes only and no money exchanged hands. No copyright infringement is intended. The original characters, situations, and story are the property of the author. This story may not be posted elsewhere without the consent of the author.

Salt of the Earth

To save your world you asked this man to die:
Would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
Epitaph for the Unknown Soldier (1955) W.H. Auden

Prologue

Carter wondered if it would drive her insane in the end. Like Malakai, lured on by that image of his wife turning to smile at him, thinking the solution must lie in the next experiment or the next, while all the while a hundred worlds were trapped in a perpetual yesterday-and-today that never quite made it to tomorrow. She knew as well as any of them what deceptive things images could be. She could hold her mother's photograph in her hand a dozen times a day if she wanted to. Smile at that smile she still remembered creasing the corners of blue eyes that loved her; but she would never feel those arms around her again. She could never ask her for advice. Never call her up and cry down the telephone because her father was a thousand light years away and would never be entirely human again; could never tell her she'd killed an enemy today, or left another friend to die alone.

Colonel O'Neill had pictures of his son in a box he wouldn't let her look inside. Daniel had a photograph of his dead wife on his desk. She'd seen pictures of his dead parents too. They all knew being able to see those faces didn't make the people they depicted any less dead.

So why was this any different? Carter opened her hand and there he was again. Narim, semi-transparent and shimmering, yet perfect in every detail. There was his face, his voice. She could literally hold him in the palm of her hand. There were times when that was enough to convince her he must be still alive. But she couldn't feel anything - not a hint of warmth, the barest memory of flesh - and she knew he was probably just as intangible as he seemed; only a fingertip away and yet unreachable forever.

Like Martouf whose body heat she had felt draining away into hers along with his blood...until the Tok'ra had snatched his corpse away from her to try to save the symbiote inside him. She wondered how the Tok'ra of all people hadn't realized they couldn't truly save Lantash without saving Martouf as well. They knew what it was like to be blended. Surely they also knew how it felt to be ripped apart. Had Lantash tried to reach him as the zatarc blotted out everything else but its own treacherous message? Had he screamed when they tore him from his dying host? She didn't know how Roshar had died. It might be inside her somewhere, but perhaps it was a truth with which she would never be able to cope. Perhaps there were some things one should never have to know. Like what the Aschen had done to Joseph Faxon after she'd left him there with no possible route home.

By comparison it was only a minor ache in her heart to wonder if Orlin had remembered her after he ascended or if, now his loneliness was cured, she had receded from his memory like an old dream.

When she felt the dampness on her cheeks, Carter looked up at the ceiling in shock. Was there a tile off the roof? Why hadn't she heard the rain? But the ceiling was white and blandly unmarked; not a hint of moisture. She touched her skin and felt the wetness against her fingertips. Cautiously she touched her damp finger to her tongue, tasting salt. She hadn't even known she was crying. She had to stop doing that. It was going to happen in the SGC. People would start talking about Doctor Mackenzie again. The Colonel would look at her sideways waiting for her to start seeing more invisible people or hearing imaginary voices. Teal'c would hide his concern behind an impassive gaze as he followed her like a bodyguard, wanting to hurt whatever was hurting her, while all the time knowing as well as she did one couldn't do more than shadowbox with grief. Daniel would worry, and look hurt if she brushed him off when he asked her if she wanted to talk about it. But what was there to talk about? What was the point in talking about any of it? She wanted to kill the Goa'uld who had killed Martouf; demand Hammond relented and allowed her to lead a team back to the Aschen world; find out which Goa'uld Tanith served and make him pay for what he had done to the Tollan. But most of all she wanted to take a dead woman by the throat and shake her as she screamed: "How could you do it!"

Complacency was one step away from stupidity, and the Tollan had been guilty of both. They had relied on their technology so completely that when it had failed them they had been left with no other resources. Apparently not even their own integrity. Only Narim had shown that - and paid for it with his life. He had done the right thing, and his people and planet had been ripped apart by a maelstrom of deadly Goa'uld fire. Just as Teal'c had done the right thing and Daniel's wife had died. And she had done the right thing and Martouf had died. Why was it that doing the right thing always carried such a high price?

The sound of the phone ringing made her jump. Carter slipped the hologram Narim had given her back into the box in which she kept it and hastily wiped her cheek on the back of her hand before she snatched up the telephone. "Yes?"

"Sam...?"

Daniel. Concerned and trying not to show it but failing dismally. What was the point in having your only brother living all the way over in San Diego where he couldn't see how lonely you were if fate insisted on supplying you with an adopted brother you hadn't asked for, didn't want, and couldn't now live without.

She sighed. "Hello, Daniel."

"Want some company?"

His question hung in the silence while her mind answered: Yes. Yes, please. Don't leave me alone with the dead for one more night. "Really, I'm fine." She didn't want someone checking up on her. She needed to get through this alone, and she would, the same way she always did.

"Well, I'm bored and lonely." If she'd had a videophone he would have been giving her the big blue eyes treatment and she would crumble at once. Even with just his voice to use against her it was difficult not to give in.

"Where's the Colonel?"

"He's taken Teal'c to the movies."

"He didn't ask me." Carter wasn't really hurt but she tried to sound it.

"It's not that kind of movie." Daniel's disapproval could have given points to a maiden aunt. After a slight pause, he added in mild perplexity, "He didn't ask me either."

Carter grinned despite herself; trying and failing to imagine Daniel sitting in the furtive darkness of some sweaty movie theater, three red Xs neon-glowing on a sign outside while tributes to the plastic surgeon's art writhed mechanically onscreen. She could just imagine his commentary on the mythic archetypes the moviemakers were unconsciously utilizing, not to mention the inadequacies of the plot. "I bet he hasn't really taken Teal'c to see a dirty movie."

"They might have gone to a strip joint. Jack said they hadn't decided."

Carter shook her head. "They're probably lagging some pipes, Daniel. They just want you to think they have a more interesting life than you do." She sometimes thought Daniel had gotten off lightly not having the Colonel as a big brother when he was growing up. No doubt any playground bully who had ever picked on Daniel would have regretted it very soon afterwards but she could also imagine the fraternal teasing would have been merciless.

"I could lag pipes." He still sounded hurt.

"But why would you want to? Come over." She carried the phone into the kitchen as she spoke, checking her supplies. "I have imported chocolate. A brand new box."

"Belgian chocolate?"

"The best. And good movies. No bumping or grinding guaranteed."

"Okay." He sounded happier already. "I'm leaving now. I'll get some wine on the way. Don't start on the chocolates until I get there."

"I promise."

It was only as she put down the phone, still smiling as she did so, that Carter realized she had just given Daniel the invitation he'd been angling for and she'd been determined not to extend. She shook her head in disbelief. "How does he do that?" She caught a glimpse of her reflection and realized those tear tracks were a dead giveaway. Just time to wash the traces from her face and put on some make-up. Daniel would bring wine, probably more than one bottle, and within a couple of hours she would be baring her soul to him, the way she always did, but for the moment at least she was going to make an effort to tell herself she could get through this alone and without sharing her feelings with Daniel, or anyone else, about exactly how angry she still was with the system that had failed the Tollan people and cost Narim his life...

***

One

As he stepped through the 'gate to a dust-dry welcome from a barren landscape, O'Neill wondered if Daniel had gotten a chance to talk to Carter yet. It was a matter of weeks since they had 'gated home from Tollana at a sprint while that world went up in flames behind them; since Narim had been lost in the maelstrom of vengeance Tanith's unknown boss had unleashed upon the Tollan. He had been trying to ask Daniel how Carter was doing for the last couple of days but Daniel had been caught up in some translation he wanted to get finished before the mission started; a set of circumstances that always made him absent-minded and tetchy, not to mention prone to pulling caffeine-fuelled all-nighters at the SGC.

Those were the occasions when if Daniel let him into his office at all, he never listened to anything he said. Daniel would just make vague noises of agreement, pretending he was paying attention when he obviously wasn't. On the last occasion, as a test to see if he was being listened to, O'Neill had asked if it was okay if he started pimping Daniel's favors to the marines to raise money for the Christmas raffle. When Daniel murmured distractedly, "Good idea..." he'd decided this conversation was officially a waste of time and had given up.

He cast a sideways glance at Daniel now but the man was oblivious of him, turning a slow circle to take in the desolation. The sparse patches of vegetation were withered to straw-colored skeletons. A miserable wind wailed in from the east, throwing dust in their eyes. O'Neill reached for his shades as Carter crouched down to take a soil sample. He wondered if there was a way to know just by looking if the loss was still gnawing at her. With Carter it was hard to tell.

"It looks like drought," Daniel said before she finished shaking the earth into the solution. He looked across at O'Neill then. "We might be able to help."

O'Neill cleared his throat, feeling the dust clawing at it. "Maybe. If there's anyone left to help."

They followed a road whose clay surface had cracked into crazy paving past more withered vegetation, more skeletal trees. O'Neill associated drought with heat but it was chilly here; a landscape sandblasted by a perpetual wind. When he took off his shades to wipe the film of dust from their dark surface a piece of grit flew into his eye, causing an outbreak of industrial language.

Daniel pulled O'Neill's hand away as he rubbed at the offending grit, holding his head to peer into his watering eye. "Damnit, Jack, hold still. Stop blinking."

"I'm not blinking," he protested, blinking.

Daniel tilted his head over and sluiced out O'Neill's eye with the water bottle Carter wordlessly handed him.

"That's wet!" O'Neill protested as it ran down his neck.

"Water generally is." Daniel blotted his face with a handkerchief O'Neill really hoped the guy hadn't sneezed into recently. "Stop fussing."

"You try having a pint of freezing cold water tipped down your neck and see how enthusiastic you are."

"You want to spend the rest of your life with a piece of grit in your eye?"

Before he could come up with a suitable rejoinder, Carter shone a light in his eye, peering at his retina to check for scratching, before pronouncing him unharmed. "You're fine, sir. I can't see any damage. But you should probably keep your sunglasses on from now on."

He glowered at her. "Ya think?"

She and Daniel exchanged one of the long-suffering looks that always twanged his guilt string. He muttered a 'thank you' at them and they exchanged a little smile. Damn, but they knew him much too well sometimes. He shoved his sunglasses back on. "This planet sucks."

Looking around at the bleak landscape he wasn't entirely surprised when even Daniel didn't argue with him.

***

Night was falling when they saw the light up ahead. Teal'c wordlessly pointed to the hollow and O'Neill made out the red-gold glimmer of a smoky fire showing through the flapping door of a beehive-shaped hut. They approached cautiously, he and Daniel exchanging a glance as they did so, Daniel giving him the 'let me go first, I'm a linguist' look while he gave Daniel the 'what if they're armed and they kill you?' look. As usual, they compromised, Daniel calling out from some distance away to ask if there was anyone there while O'Neill, Teal'c and Carter all primed their weapons in readiness. O'Neill made sure he stayed close enough to give Daniel a decisive shove onto the floor if anyone looked like shooting first and asking questions later. When the door flap was twitched back to reveal a small girl in a ragged dress, followed a second later by a haggard but decidedly unarmed man in his thirties, Daniel didn't give him even the glimmer of an 'I told you so' look, too busy smiling and holding out a hand to the newcomer while trying out various languages in which to assure the man and his daughter that they were peaceful travelers from the Planet Earth. It was at times like this O'Neill was reminded there was a good reason why he was quite as fond as he was of Daniel Jackson.

Daniel was smiling in gentle invitation as he said, "My name is Daniel Jackson. This is Jack, Major Carter and Teal'c..." The mobile hands pointed to each of them in turn. They had done this so many times now but Daniel always sounded as though the moment of meeting each new people, encountering each old civilization, was as exciting as the first. To him it probably was.

The man was holding a hand to his chest in imitation of Daniel's gesture. "Rudiju." He pointed to the child. "Sitabana."

O'Neill had long since given up trying to impress upon Daniel that he should really introduce him as 'Colonel O'Neill' with emphasis on his rank. He just made up for Daniel so often casually demoting him by standing up extra straight and looking every inch the leader. In nine cases out of ten it obviously worked as few of the new people they encountered assumed Carter was the one in charge, although he suspected Carter always got a bit of a kick out of it on the occasions when they did. He just knew that if they ever did encounter some Amazonian warrior women civilization she was going to have a whale of a time looking mock-regretful and explaining it was just the local custom that they had to go and eat old turnips with the yaks or whatever while she got to dine in style at the head table. He liked to think she would draw the line at them being used as sex-slaves to perpetuate the Amazonian warrior women species though, even if only because he, Daniel, and Teal'c might actually enjoy that part.

Rudiju invited them in with a beckoning gesture and a few words O'Neill couldn't understand. Daniel nodded in gratitude, turning to make sure O'Neill was on the same page, before making to step after the man. O'Neill touched Daniel's arm, a brief pressure, holding him back, then moved in front of him so that he was the first one to step through that doorway to whatever welcome awaited them on the other side, just in case. He felt Daniel's sigh gust against his ear as he walked past him, reluctantly allowing O'Neill to go ahead of him into the smoky dimness of the hut but clearly thinking it was an unnecessary precaution. O'Neill found the smile tugging at his mouth before he could stop himself. The man really had not changed.

The smile died on his face as his eyes adjusted to the light from the campfire. He counted twelve people huddled inside the hut, attempting to warm themselves on the smoke from a few burning sticks: three men - one very old, one in his forties, the one who'd beckoned them inside; four women - two in their twenties, one with a baby at her breast, one in their forties, and one in her sixties; and four children - the eldest of which was no more than eight. All looked as if they hadn't eaten in days; hollow-eyed; clothes all ragged; and with a look about them of people who had been stunned by misfortune. They seemed to have passed desperation to reach a kind of numbed acceptance at which O'Neill immediately chafed. Even if it was only the weather that had done this to them rather than a deliberate action on the part of other human beings, he still felt a flash of anger at it; at anything that had not just sapped their bodies, but their spirits to such a degree that they all looked very close to the point where there was nothing left to them but to lie down and die.

When Rudiju held out a bowl to O'Neill containing a tablespoonful of thin gruel, O'Neill automatically went to shake his head, but Daniel's hastily whispered 'Take it' stopped him in his tracks. He looked at Daniel in disbelief and saw the familiar blue eyes pleading with him to just do what he was told. Forcing a nod of thanks, O'Neill reached out and dipped his finger in the food, licking it from his finger and smiling as if it was the best thing he'd ever tasted.

Daniel murmured, "They've shared their food with us, so now we can..."

The brief hand gesture towards their vests was all the hint O'Neill needed. He passed the bowl to Daniel, very aware of the children's dark eyes watching the food move away from their own stomachs, and dug hastily into his vest, pulling out PowerBars while Carter and Teal'c did the same thing. He unwrapped the first one and offered it to Rudiju.

Daniel spoke quickly, "Thank you. Now will you share with us?" He repeated it in a different language which Rudiju evidently understood.

O'Neill had thought the man might not realize what a PowerBar was, but he clearly smelt that it was food at once, taking it from O'Neill with a nod of thanks, before beginning to break it into pieces and hand it out to the children. Carter and Teal'c also handed their rations over to Rudiju for him to distribute. Daniel licked a mouthful of the gruel from his finger and gave the young woman O'Neill had also assumed to be Rudiju's wife a smile of gratitude, making an expression of pleasure and murmuring something complimentary. When Daniel introduced himself she nodded her head and pointed to herself saying "Abana", then pointing to the baby in her arms and saying "Rudiju-ta-sherit".

"'Little Rudiju'." Daniel's smile was almost too sweet sometimes, reminding O'Neill of how rarely he saw it. He wondered if there was a Daniel in an alternate universe somewhere who had never lost his parents, never been rejected by his grandfather, never lost his foster parents, never felt unwanted and unloved, and so who smiled all the time, reached out and touched people instead of waiting for them to touch him, maybe even belly laughed, rich and loud and confident.

Oblivious of O'Neill's scrutiny, Daniel was pointing to Rudiju, holding his hands a foot above one another to show a small size. Abana smiled and nodded and the old woman leant forward to nod as well, pointing between the baby and Rudiju, saying something O'Neill didn't need to be a linguist to know translated as saying that her son had been just like her grandson as an infant. He had a jolt of recognition of his own grandmother holding out embarrassing photographs of him as a baby to Sara on a visit and then insisting on showing her a sepia picture of his father as a baby as well; both of them bald and toothless and unashamedly naked. A picture of Charlie as a baby in the same pose had sat on his grandmother's mantelpiece next to the others for ten years. And now he was the only one left of those toothless, grinning babies, and he was going to have to do something spectacularly positive with his professional life to make up for the misery he had wrought in his private one.

Daniel held out a finger to the baby and it gripped it at once. As Daniel smiled down at the baby and it gazed back at him with unblinking curiosity, O'Neill felt that familiar pain which always stabbed at him when he thought of Daniel's losses. His hatred for Apophis was still so sharp it sometimes took his breath away. Daniel should have been the father of a child he could hold; not stepfather to a son born of rape, and doomed to be an exile of the system lords. He should have been father to an ordinary child, not some mystical creature who spoke in riddles and taught with dreams, and whom Daniel loved but might never see again. Except no child of Daniel's would ever have been ordinary. Damnit, that was something else Apophis had stolen from the universe, the children Daniel and Sha're should have had; strong and brave and brilliant and beautiful; children to grow up into extraordinary and dazzling adults who could baffle and madden and enlighten people like him. His own mistake had robbed him of the chance to be a father to his own child; but the system lords had robbed him of the chance to be godfather to Daniel's, and he resented them for that as well, because he would have been the best godfather to Daniel's kids any children ever had. He could have been a bad influence in all the best ways... Or maybe he just wanted a time machine so he could go back and adopt Daniel at the point when he had been abandoned for the third time by the death of his foster parents.

He thought about that alternate universe Daniel again, but there was also always the worry that perhaps that Daniel, the one who had only ever known love and security, might not have needed Jack O'Neill the way this Daniel Jackson did. Perhaps only a Daniel who had lost as much as Daniel had would take so much reassurance from the occasionally testing friendship of a crabby old soldier with shot knees and a gaping hole in his heart where his son should have been. He had gotten so used to being needed by Daniel that the thought of losing that was almost as painful as the thought of Daniel's losses.

Daniel was still looking at the baby; the dark-haired, dark-eyed son this fair-skinned, blue-eyed American could well have been the father of if his beautiful wife had been left to have a life with the man she loved instead of taken by the Goa'uld. O'Neill wondered if he would ever tell Daniel that half the time when he and Hammond did things Daniel disapproved of, like edging down the road of gaining alien technology by whatever means necessary to try to ward off the Goa'uld, it was of Daniel they were thinking.

Looking around at the interior of the smoky hut, O'Neill could take pride in the way his team had gone into action without needing a single word from him; seeing to the needs of the starving while at the same time gaining all the information they could. The children were chewing on the PowerBars but they looked as if they could do with something hot; he gestured to Rudiju to ask if he could use their fire to heat coffee and broth. He doubted anyone here would be turning their nose up at even USAF macaroni and cheese. The man nodded, much less wary now. Carter was encouraging the women to eat, smiling at them in a way that banished all doubts despite her short hair, strange clothing, and the P90 in her arms. Daniel was talking to Abana while the baby still held onto his finger, and she was responding to his smile with less shyness now. O'Neill caught the word 'Abydos' and then 'Ra'. Rudiju had turned back to Teal'c. It occurred to O'Neill that if Daniel and Teal'c could both speak their language, these people must be descended from ancient Egyptians, like the people of Abydos.

"Ra brought them here?" He looked at Teal'c enquiringly.

Teal'c gave him a brief nod and then went back to talking to Rudiju and the other adult men who were drawing the pattern of Teal'c's tattoo on their foreheads in obvious enquiry. Daniel seemed to be telling Abana about food on Abydos; she and the woman next to her, who O'Neill thought might be her sister, chiming in with what could well have been recipes, while Carter quietly handed food to the oldest woman.

O'Neill dug out the orange drink and began to dissolve the crystals into a beaker which he handed to the bravest of the children, a boy a few years younger than Sitabana, fascinated by the process of the crystals fizzing into liquid color. The child wrinkled his nose at the sweetness but swallowed dutifully before passing the beaker to his sister so she could take one sip before passing it on. The concept of drinking a whole glass of anything was clearly alien to them and O'Neill felt a spasm of guilt just for not having been hungry or thirsty in a while. He had to remind himself forcibly that he had known starvation in his time, not to mention all kinds of other things he never wanted these children to have to find out about.

Every time Daniel saw Jack with children, he felt another pang of loss on the man's behalf that he was no longer a father, and a pang of loss on Charlie's behalf too because not only had Jack lost the chance to see his son grow up to adulthood, Charlie had lost all those days and years with a father who loved him. Daniel had seen enough of Jack's parenting skills over the years to know the man was a natural, and despite the many injustices in the galaxy which Daniel had been forced to accept over the years, Jack losing his son was something to which he could never truly reconcile himself. It was just so unfair that the part of him which still believed in cosmic justice puzzled over it in disbelief, trying to find a justification for it, a pattern that made sense, but he never could. It was just wrong that Jack should have lost his son, and if he'd believed in an omnipotent deity Daniel would certainly have wanted to take it up with Him the second he was inside the pearly gates to demand an explanation.

Teal'c was explaining how the MRE's worked with the air of someone to whom these things were as strange to him as they were to them so that there was no possible loss of face on the part of Rudiju and the others for not having encountered such food before. Sam was quietly getting the women to rehydrate themselves with energy drinks, while Jack had taken on the task of feeding the children. He didn't even seem to be doing it consciously; he had at least one ear on the conversation Teal'c was having with Rudiju; clearly trying to make sense of a quite complicated dialogue with only approximately four words of Ancient Egyptian he recognized; so he was wearing his baffled and vaguely aggrieved expression. But he was also pouring orange liquid down the throat of a toddler while automatically pretending that he was going to eat the chocolate cookie on offer if the four year old didn't grab it, with the air of someone who had spent so long trying to get small children to eat strange new foodstuffs they weren't too sure about that he could do it in his sleep. The children were starving but wary and the food was so unlike food as they knew it, they kept looking to Jack for reassurance that this really was edible and not some particularly cruel trick that was being played on them.

After he had seen Jack with the crystal Charlie and his understandably distraught ex-wife, Daniel had dreamt that it was Jack who had come to collect him from the orphanage; except Jack had been the same age he had when Daniel had first met him, while Daniel had been a child of eight. When he'd tried to get Jack to listen to his explanation about something Egyptian, the man had asked him how long it was since he'd eaten; given him a worried lecture about skipping meals; refused to let him have any coffee because the caffeine would stop him sleeping but handed him a mug of hot chocolate before showing him to Charlie's old room and telling him it was bedtime. There had still been the bloodstain on the carpet; all of the posters on the walls, the model airplanes hanging from the ceiling, and Charlie's books in the bookcases. It had still been a room completely occupied by the dead boy, with nowhere for Daniel to find a place for himself.

When Daniel had said he didn't want to sleep there, Jack had looked so sad and tired, that Daniel had started to cry, and said he would if Jack wanted him to, but he wasn't Charlie and if they wanted him to be they were never going to love him as much, because he couldn't play softball, and he'd never hit a home run. He'd woken up with the scent of blood and chocolate in his nostrils, still pleading with Jack not to blame him because he wasn't Charlie, and decided straight away that was one weird dream he was never telling Mackenzie.

Jack was trying to persuade the kids that the crackers were food and were even better food with the jam on them while he waited for the MREs to heat. Daniel privately thought Jack deserved an Oscar for those 'yummy' faces he was making as he had never known Jack to get any of those crackers down yet. He always gave them to Daniel with a disgusted wrinkle of the nose and told Daniel he could buy him a pizza when they were back on Earth to pay him back. The kids were asking Jack if it was bread but as Jack had no idea what they were asking him, he was just miming eating it with many expressions of delight while mixing some more orange drink with his free hand.

The last time Daniel had suggested that it might not be a bad idea for Jack to learn some Goa'uld, Jack had gotten snappish and said that it might not be a bad idea for Daniel to learn how to handle a P90 either but he wasn't insisting on it, so why didn't they just both stick to what they did best? Daniel had quietly gone off with Sam and asked her to teach him how to use a P90 to certificate level so the next time he had this conversation with Jack he would be bargaining from a position of strength. But the next time he'd brought it up, Jack had given him a reproachful look and said that he'd always sucked at languages and what was the point of keeping a linguist and then jabbering yourself? As Daniel had given him his best narrow-eyed glare, Jack had said with an apologetic wince that he meant 'jabbering' in its most positive sense. Daniel had told him that for his first lesson he could go and ask Teal'c what 'Ha'taaka' meant, before stomping off to his own office.

Later Jack had come around and got underfoot a lot so Daniel couldn't ignore him and would have to talk to him, if only to tell him to put that artifact down now before he broke it. There were times after they'd had what Ferretti annoyingly insisted on referring to as a 'little spat' when Jack really reminded Daniel of a Labrador who having thrown up on the couch wanted to be reassured it was still going to get its evening walk. Then there were other times when Jack felt like the rock which was the only thing Daniel could cling to when the tempest of life was doing its damnedest to drown him.

Jack evidently noticed Daniel watching him with the children because he gave him a look of confusion as he fished the first MRE out of the water. "What?"

Daniel smiled. "Nothing." He turned back to Abana, asking her more about the newcomers in the West, all the time aware of Jack ladling broth out to hungry children while darting Daniel the occasional questioning glance.

When enough food had been distributed to give everyone a good meal and the children were curled up by the fire to sleep O'Neill beckoned to the rest of his team. He relied on Daniel to make the polite explanation and farewells, and the man didn't let him down. O'Neill satisfied himself with a quick nod at Rudiju before leading the way outside. They made camp in the next hollow but, not wanting to take any of the little firewood in the area from Rudiju's family, did without a fire. The soil was thin and grayish; wind-stripped of any goodness. When O'Neill bent and crumbled a handful it trickled through his fingers as dry as dust.

They pitched two tents; one for Carter and Teal'c, the other for O'Neill and Daniel. O'Neill had long since put a ban on Carter and Daniel sharing a tent as they immediately reverted to acting like naughty schoolkids and even if they didn't actually read under the covers with a flashlight, did whisper theories to one another for most of the night. Both of them had a bad habit of forgetting the time when they were working on something and he had lost count of the occasions he'd had to pack them off to bed at three a.m. because they'd got wrapped up in some damned alien gizmo. Carter did at least look abashed and do as she was told when he pointed out the hours remaining before their next mission, but Daniel would generally argue, and was not averse to using pouting, pleading, and occasionally the whole big blue eyes 'Please, Jack...' performance to try to get his own way.

Thinking about all the times he'd caved under the influence of Daniel's technique, O'Neill shifted uncomfortably and wrapped his space blanket around his shoulders more warmly. He looked across at Daniel who was shivering in his own blanket and gazing longingly back at the comfort of the hut. O'Neill knew Daniel would have happily curled up amongst a bunch of total strangers and slept the night away with them, but O'Neill had never felt that it was a necessary part of a first contact team to go native three steps over the threshold.

"So..." He touched Daniel's ankle lightly with his booted foot. "Spill. How did they get here? Who's the local Goa'uld...?"

Between them Teal'c and Daniel seemed to have uncovered a lot. Ra had brought these people to the planet and ruled over them with the same tyranny as he had the people of Abydos. But then another god had come and told them Ra was not the only god, he was a false god, but if they followed the teachings of their new god instead they would be protected from false gods like Ra. Then had followed a period of prosperity for Rudiju's ancestors.

"Sounds like the Asgard." O'Neill looked at Daniel enquiringly. "Wouldn't you say?"

"The name he gave them was 'Heimdall' who was one of the Vanir, so I'd say, yes, definitely. But they don't speak any Norse, they still speak a variant of Ancient Egyptian. Heimdall doesn't seem to have asked them to adopt any of his customs, just to break free from their slavery to Ra. The land is called Tadesh and they are the Tadeshi. Which I think is just a variant of 'Ta' meaning 'land' and 'desher' meaning 'red', but..."

"No Thor's hammer as we came through the 'gate."

Daniel gave him one of his best 'must you always state the blindingly obvious' looks. "We noticed."

O'Neill resisted the urge to stick his tongue out; reminding himself in time that without a campfire Daniel wasn't going to be getting any more coffee that evening. "I'm just saying if this place is under Asgard protection there should be a hammer."

"This world is no longer under Asgard protection, O'Neill." Teal'c politely handed the water canteen to Carter as he spoke. "Another race recently came through the Stargate, who were not Goa'uld but were able to dismantle the hammer."

O'Neill shook his head. "The Asgard really ought to put some kind of burglar alarm on those things."

Carter took the water canteen with a brief smile of thanks but her voice sounded brittle. "I think we've seen evidence of every advanced race getting over-confident about how failsafe their technology is."

Daniel nodded. "Which is fine when it's the Goa'uld. Not so good when it's the Asgard or..."

As he seemed unwilling to finish, she said it for him: "Or the Tollan."

Thinking about Narim, O'Neill winced, and darted Carter a quick look to see how she was taking things. He knew he was probably being something of a coward about it, but he'd long since decided that Carter's emotional problems were probably better dealt with by someone else, like Fraiser, or Daniel. Or even Teal'c. He shared the talking to Teal'c burden equally with the other two, but he took full responsibility for taking care of Daniel, even though he sucked at the up close and personal stuff, because he happened to be better at it than anyone else. And as Daniel was easily the most difficult person on the team, as well as having probably the worst emotional baggage, he reckoned that exempted him from being the person Carter confided in. Not that she'd ever shown a lot of interest in wanting him to be the person to whom she confided her innermost whatevers, so he hadn't exactly bailed on her. He just got the occasional guilt twinge on occasions such as now when he was reminded that he hadn't really asked her properly how she was doing since the loss and presumed death of first Narim and then Faxon.

Teal'c looked briefly at Carter and then continued evenly. "The other race is more technologically advanced than that of Rudiju and his people."

O'Neill cocked an eyebrow. "As in...weaponry?"

"From Rudiju's description it is possible."

He made the mistake of glancing across at Daniel for his reaction so saw that disappointed headshake. He returned his gaze unblinkingly. "What?"

Daniel shrugged. "Nothing."

"Our standing orders are to..."

"I know." There was a flash of warning in Daniel's eyes. "I just don't happen to think what guns they have is necessarily the most interesting aspect of every new people we meet."

O'Neill hesitated. Memories of Euronda made him swallow the retort which first came to his lips. After a brief pause, he looked back at Teal'c. "Did Rudiju mention how long the drought has been going on for? How many people are involved? Is it just this area...?" Yes, Daniel, I do know all those questions too. I do care about the humanitarian aspects of our job, believe it or not. And maybe if you didn't jump all over me about the humanitarian aspects of our job on every damned mission I wouldn't play the hardass military guy quite so often.

The information came in between snatches of what wasn't quite a disagreement with Daniel but at times came perilously close. Sometimes he couldn't resist trying to get in the last word on the subject himself. He really should have learned by now that Daniel was never going to allow that.

"...and while it might not always be the most interesting aspect of the people we're meeting, Daniel, it's still something we need to know..."

"Yes, and what does that say about us?"

He really hated those sarcastic little smiles Daniel gave that went nowhere near his eyes. Better to ignore him when he was in this mood or they'd just end up fighting. God, sometimes going on a mission with Daniel was like going to a dinner party with Sara. The 'I can't take you anywhere' looks could come just as thick and fast. And he wasn't being influenced by Daniel, he really wasn't. He wanted to know how many people were poised on the brink of starving to death as much as he did. He just couldn't be unaware of Daniel, that was the trouble. Every time he said anything now he was aware Daniel was hearing it, either nodding in agreement, or wincing, or preparing to murmur 'Jack, don't you think...' in his ear. It was like having a freakin shadow who was also second cousin to Jiminy Cricket. Anyone would think that before he had Daniel attached to him by an invisible thread all he'd done was blunder around knee deep in blood killing people and laying waste to every country he visited. Well, if Daniel was in this mood he was just going to talk to Teal'c. So there.

"So there could be thousands of people affected by the drought to the east?"

"Indeed."

"So how come the other race with the technology in the west aren't doing anything about it?"

Daniel glanced across at him. "Because advanced races with advanced technology don't have anything to gain from helping primitive people who are starving to death?"

Carter was looking anxious. She hated it when they fought. Come to that O'Neill hated it when they fought too. Her tone was conciliatory. "Daniel, there might not be anything they can do. If Rudiju's people are wrong and the drought is just as a result of climactic change..."

"Is there a possibility it isn't because of...climactic change?" O'Neill enquired, looking between them.

Carter nodded at Teal'c. "Hard to say. But according to Teal'c's conversation with Rudiju, some of his people are blaming the strangers."

"Well, that always happens, doesn't it? Or do Rudiju's people think they did something to make the rain stop?"

Teal'c shrugged gracefully. "According to the account of Rudiju, O'Neill, the rain was far heavier this year than ever before. Rudiju said 'The strangers came and the rains came with them.' At first Rudiju's people thought they brought great fortune upon them for the crops bloomed with the rainfall but then the crops died as if poisoned."

"What?" Daniel leant forward. "I didn't realize there was more rain. Abana told me the crops withered and died before they could harvest them."

"Rudiju asserted the rain must have been poisoned because the crops were dying in the ground. He said this has always been a dry country, ever since Ra brought them here. But in the past although their lives were not easy, there was always enough to sustain life. Only with the coming of the strangers had their crops been poisoned from the skies. Some of them are very angry."

Carter shook her head. "It doesn't make any sense. I can understand a more technologically advanced society that might have access to some kind of weather control trying to increase the rainfall per annum..."

"Wouldn't they have to have one of those touchstone things...?" O'Neill looked around for confirmation.

"I wish we could have worked out from which culture the Medronian people evolved," Daniel said wistfully.

O'Neill gave him a look of disbelief. "Yes, that keeps me awake at night as well."

"It would have been useful to know whether the touchstone was Goa'uld technology or Asgard technology or Ancient technology or someone we haven't encountered yet," Carter put in.

O'Neill really hated the way she did that subtle backing up of Daniel without actually coming right out and admitting that was what she was doing. Of course it wasn't quite as annoying when she did it on his behalf but all the same...

Teal'c said calmly. "The significant questions in this case seem to be whether or not the strangers did indeed affect the weather patterns of this planet, and if they did so if their intentions were benevolent or malign."

O'Neill shot him an approving look. "What he said. Let's work out what actually happened here instead of all this speculation without...data." That sounded pretty scientisty, he was moderately proud of that.

"And how are we supposed to do that exactly, Jack, without talking the matter over?"

O'Neill darted Daniel a glance that would have cowed a marine but Daniel didn't even blink. He'd have done better to go with hurt rather than angry. His hurt look usually made Daniel crumple in double quick time. O'Neill decided to stand on his dignity and ignore him.

Carter jumped in quickly. "From what we know so far I don't think we can really come to any conclusions although..."

Back and forwards, facts and speculations. Daniel talking about the need to discover the cultural roots of the other race who had landed here; where they'd come from; how long they'd been here; what their intentions were towards Rudiju's people. "Presuming the rains coming just after they arrived is just a coincidence, they don't seem to have had a lot of contact as yet. They're not oppressing Rudiju's people in any way, but they're not actually assisting them either. It could be something as simple as a language barrier..."

"They could really want to help but the fact they don't speak the same language is stopping them?" O'Neill made no attempt to disguise his cynicism.

"Yes." Daniel gave him a level look. "It could be that simple. Or they could just not care. But I hope that's not the reason."

O'Neill certainly wasn't a historian like Daniel but having Irish ancestry he knew all about the potato famine. A million and a half men, women, and children left to starve to death just the other side of the Irish Sea from the relative wealth of Britain. Even when food had been sent over from England too much of it had been hijacked by greedy landlords to do a lot of good. Whole villages had died of hunger. His ancestors were among those who had fled across the sea on a coffin ship to try to escape the famine. Daniel might know more things than he could ever imagine but O'Neill still felt he knew better than Daniel did what the human race was capable of.

O'Neill rose to his feet. "Okay. They may have technology we want. We may have skills they could use. Either way it would better if they averted the crisis on their own doorstep rather than ignoring it, so we should let them know what's going on, for their sake as well as Rudiju's, if the locals really are blaming them."

It was just his bad luck that it should be Carter's turn to take first watch, meaning he and Daniel had no excuse not to retire to their tent. He had often thought they were too cramped in these tents; when things were less than wonderful between them, they felt positively claustrophobic. The cloud-sooted stars outside were sending a chilly blue light through the flap, making Daniel look ghostly, his breath still visible as he blew on his fingers and darted O'Neill a sideways look that might well spell trouble.

To head Daniel off from the usual lecture, he said: "How's Carter doing anyway?"

"She's angry."

"Angry?" That hadn't been the response he expected for some reason.

Daniel turned over in his sleeping bag, lowering his voice. "People she cares about keep dying, Jack. Sometimes she gets to be the one to choose whether or not they die. Wouldn't that make you angry?"

"I'm not a..." O'Neill thought about Carter accidentally overhearing this conversation and grimaced at the direction of the tent flap. "You know."

"Soldier?" Even in the dim blue lighting he could see Daniel giving him that level look which meant he wasn't going to let him get away with anything. "Someone who thinks they should always keep the civilians safe but who also always has to do their duty even if their duty means pulling the trigger or following orders or saving the planet at any cost?"

O'Neill narrowed his eyes at him. "I was going to say 'woman'. They're different from us." He looked Daniel up and down. "Different from me anyway."

Daniel's withering look would have stripped paint. "They still get angry."

Don't get mad, get even. The Goa'uld had killed Martouf and Narim. They were the reason Orlin had been exiled for all those years. He could even make an argument to say they'd killed Faxon. The SGC sure as hell wouldn't be cozying up with people like the Aschen, trying to make treaties with aliens for their technology, if it weren't for the threat of the damned Goa'uld hovering over their world like a storm cloud. Aloud he said only, "Remind me not to take her parking space for the next few months."

"Jack..." Daniel looked genuinely pissed with him now. And yes that had probably sounded crass, but he couldn't cope with it, that was the bottom line. How the hell did one cope with a 2IC who'd lost so much in such a short time and yet just said 'I'm fine' whenever anyone asked how she was doing?

"She won't talk to me about it, Daniel. Okay? I asked Hammond if we could go back for Faxon and the answer was no. I don't know if she blames me or..."

"She doesn't blame you." Daniel sighed. "She blames herself."

"Well, that's just dumb."

"She cut the line. She left him there. She had no choice but she still did it." He read the challenge in Daniel's eyes, the reminder that he'd had no choice when he'd left Daniel to die on that ship but he hadn't actually shrugged the action off with a light laugh either.

O'Neill rubbed his eyes. "Carter knows she did the right thing. Like you say, she's a soldier. It comes with the territory."

"So does feeling lousy about it afterwards." Daniel said it quietly, not arguing with him for once, just wanting some acknowledgment that they were allowed to grieve, to be irrational, to cry, break things, and rant against the unfairness of it all.

O'Neill sighed, shrugged, and conceded the point. He didn't really want to be having this or any other kind of conversation with Daniel right now. If he started thinking about all the wounds they all carried he'd never step through the 'gate again. Sometimes you had to live in denial just to live at all. It didn't mean you were callous; it just meant you didn't want to end up in a padded cell. If you went around feeling everything as deeply as Daniel did you tore yourself to pieces on the general unfairness of life. Sometimes you just had to simplify things for yourself. Apportion blame to an enemy you could kill then find a way to kill them. Otherwise you'd just go nuts. He knew how that felt. He knew how it felt to hurt so much inside with self-hatred and grieving he couldn't even draw a breath without it feeling as if it was searing his heart from within, and he never wanted to step into that particular abyss again. Sometimes the only way to survive was not to care so damned much or at least to narrow the focus of the people you cared about to the ones you had a reasonable chance of keeping safe. If you kept bleeding for the whole universe, sooner or later you were just going to end up with empty veins. He couldn't say any of that to Daniel though. He'd never be able to explain it and even if he did he'd never get Daniel to agree. Much easier to close his eyes and pretend to be asleep.

"Jack...?"

O'Neill sighed. Ten minutes of pretending to be asleep and Daniel clearly wasn't fooled. He raised his head, feeling the nylon rustle against his skin. The starlight was just as chilly but the inside of the tent was noticeably warmer from all the heat they were throwing off. When he spoke his words were barely visible. "Daniel...?"

"What are the objectives for this mission?"

"What they always are."

"Explain it to me."

"To make a difference."

He saw Daniel blinking at him in the bluish light, confused, perhaps actually wrong footed. O'Neill shrugged, trying to pretend he didn't care about Daniel's answer to the question he was about to ask. "You don't believe that?"

"Yes. I believe that. I just wasn't sure if you still did."

O'Neill wondered why he would ever have assumed that Daniel would stop surprising him. "Some days I remember it better than others."

There was a pause before Daniel said quietly, "I never think of you as the person who stops remembering that, Jack. Or Hammond. It's just..." He waved an arm expressively and O'Neill knew what the gesture encompassed. Paperwork and secret orders; red telephones and red tape; Kinsey, Simmons, and Maybourne; the three stooges of professional paranoia. "Don't you feel sometimes the Pentagon spends as much time preventing us doing our job as it does helping us to do our job?"

"They're the ones funding the project. If they pull the plug..." He shrugged. "I don't want to ever see the Stargate under a dust cover again unless it's because the Goa'uld are all deader than jellied eels."

"I know. Me too." Daniel sighed and lay back down. "But we shouldn't have to justify maintaining something so...incredible. Do those idiots at the Pentagon really not understand how lucky we are? It was a gift to us from the Ancients and we're the first people on this planet to get the benefit from it. A gateway to all those worlds, all those cultures. There's so much out there and we haven't even scratched the surface yet."

"It costs seven and a half billion a year, Daniel. The only justification the Pentagon can give Congress for spending that money is because of the ongoing threat to the Goa'uld and our assurance that the Stargate program is the best way to prepare a defense against that threat."

Daniel shook his head. "No one wants to defeat the Goa'uld more than I do, but even if the Tok'ra wiped them out tomorrow, the Stargate Program should still continue. Think of all we've learned. All we've still got left to learn."

"I know." O'Neill closed his eyes. He never wanted Daniel to lose that excitement; that mule stubborn conviction that knowledge for its own sake ought to be enough; that ache in his voice he got when he was talking about the sheer wonder of the universe out there; impatient that Jack couldn't get it, but unable to believe that he didn't, because who wouldn't be inspired by it, seduced by it? But it still scared him how easily he could lose Daniel to the lure of that thirst for knowledge even now. He had too vivid memories of watching him slipping through his fingers, deaf to all reason, seduced by a shimmer of swirling lights: a universal language; the key to all understanding; the fatal anchor binding Daniel to a crumbling castle above a pitiless sea. He thought of Daniel summoning fire from sand, spinning the MP-5 in his hands, like the world's most wayward child with the universe's most deadly new toy. In another universe Daniel was probably the leader of a cult of dangerous dreamers on the FBI's Most Wanted list. In too many other universes he was probably very dead; it wasn't only cats killed by curiosity.

"Jack...?"

Daniel's anxious voice. O'Neill rolled over to look at him. Judging by his expression, Daniel was concerned for him and perplexed by him in equal amounts. A frown dented his forehead. "Are you okay?"

O'Neill sighed. "You're a one-man migraine."

Daniel blinked at him. "I'm just afraid we've been given this incredible gift and we might be squandering it."

"You know what I'm afraid of?"

"What?"

"That one day that Great Unknown you're so damned fond of is going to kill you right before my eyes."

There. It was said. After all those years it had come out of nowhere and was spoken in the faintly rustling nylon-scented darkness.

There was a pause before Daniel said, "Every new discovery carries an element of risk. Every time we step through that 'gate..."

"I know."

"Then why me especially?"

"If no one had ever stuck a fork in a light socket and we found a fork and a light socket, Carter would really want to know what would happen if you put the two things together, but if I gave her an order not to try it, she'd do as I said. But you'd just wait until my back was turned and tell yourself I'd be glad you'd done it later, because we really needed to know what happened when you pushed that fork in there."

There was a pause before Daniel said in a small voice, "No, I wouldn't."

"Yes, you would."

"I would not."

"You would too." O'Neill gave him a look of exasperation. "You know damned well you would!"

"Wouldn't." But it was a very muted and somewhat worried retort.

"Would." O'Neill said it firmly.

There was a long silence before Daniel said defensively, "I can't change who I am."

"I don't want you to!"

O'Neill's emphasis made them both start. He growled and reached for his flashlight, switching it on to get a close-up of Daniel blinking at him in confused compassion, clearly shocked by the depth of feeling in his tone.

O'Neill scratched his jaw in embarrassment. "I really don't want you to change. I just don't want you to die."

Daniel looked distressed by his distress. He shrugged helplessly. "Jack, I don't know what you want from me."

O'Neill growled again, thumping his sleeping bag to try to make it more comfortable. He doused the flashlight, muttering irritably, "I just want you not to scare the crap out of me. Is that too much to ask?"

He heard Daniel sigh in resignation. "No, Jack."

Great, now he felt as if he'd kicked a puppy. Daniel was so damned long-suffering with him. He understood O'Neill better than O'Neill understood himself. He put up with his unreasonable days, his bad tempered days, his determinedly ignorant days, his impatient days, his downright evil bastard days and still stuck by him, supported him, sometimes even when he thought he was wrong, and always, always, always gave him his friendship, without restraint, not to mention his knowledge, his courage, his affection, and his loyalty. And perhaps all he'd ever asked in return was that O'Neill should be the guy Daniel knew him to be capable of being, but whom O'Neill thought had died with Charlie. "I don't want you to stop getting excited by swirly things and squiggles, Daniel. I just don't want you to be so fascinated by them you don't notice if they're on the wrong side of a bottomless ravine."

"I know." Daniel sighed again.

O'Neill felt like a heel. "Just - come and tell me you want to take a better look at them first and if it's feasible and won't endanger all of us too much I'll try to find a way across the ravine. Okay?"

He saw the flicker of Daniel's rare smile in the darkness; the man shaking his head at him but smiling too. "Okay."

He felt the fist around his chest unlock its grip a fraction. "Promise?"

"Promise."

O'Neill lay back down. "Thank you."

"What brought this on anyway?" Daniel asked as he snuggled down sleepily into his nylon cocoon.

O'Neill thought of all the times Daniel had terrified him and decided there was no point in even starting to enumerate them now. "Nothing."

Daniel tugged his sleeping bag up around his ears before saying drowsily, "Jack, sometimes I think the most intriguing mystery in the universe is you."

O'Neill was obscurely flattered but he tried to keep his shrug casual. "Well, if you can't unravel me, Dannyboy, no one can."

But Daniel's regular breathing told him that his fascination was clearly not enough to ward off sleep. O'Neill sighed, shook his head, then reached across to twitch across the mosquito netting. One thing he had learnt from wandering the galaxy in quest of brave new worlds was that some insects were universal, and all shared the same talent for finding their way through the smallest gap to human skin.

***

The new dawn came in slowly, a gradual lightening from darkness to monochrome before the distant mountains were edged with flame. The morning was no less chilly and arid than the night; their words white smoke in the feeble daylight; Daniel shivering and wrapping his arms around himself as he trudged along in caffeine-deprived misery. He seemed ridiculously young, the way Charlie had looked at the soccer practice he'd insisted O'Neill took him to sometimes. Charlie's breath silver mist in the gathering darkness; body too small for the kit he'd never gotten the chance to grow into.

Carter's hair was turning the most beautiful shade of red-gold in the sunlight while even the fact a tuft of Daniel's was sticking up like a cockatiel's crest didn't alter the way he looked - which was exactly the way O'Neill would have preferred his teammates not to look if they were likely to be encountering another Hadante situation any time soon. O'Neill glanced between the two of them in mild disbelief. How could they look so damned fresh-faced and clear-skinned after the miserable night of sleep they'd both had? How could they look so damned young? Carter and Daniel, the poster children for geekdom. No wonder Alar had thought the Tau'ri were all freakin Reichskind back on good old Mother Earth. Was it fair that people as good-looking as those two should also have been first in the queue when the brains were being handed out? Probably not. He briefly tried to envisage Carter as a Miss Small Town America in a swimsuit with a toothpaste commercial smile stuck on as she told the judges how much work she did for charity. The snort of laughter was ripped from him before he could stop himself.

Two pair of blue eyes looked at him in confusion.

"Jack?"

"Colonel?"

He could see Carter poised on the brink of testing the air for some hallucinogenic or demanding a blood sample pronto. Daniel was just frowning at him. O'Neill wiped the grin off his face as best he could. "It's nothing." He toyed with saying 'Was just picturing you in a swimsuit, Carter' but then remembered in time that underneath the combat uniform Carter was still a woman and what's more a woman carrying a P90. He made the mistake of meeting Teal'c's eye and got a full Jaffa withering glance. He glared at him defensively. "What, I can't think now?"

Teal'c raised an eyebrow in what was a clear 'huh' gesture and stalked majestically past. Carter and Daniel were exchanging pitying looks, no doubt mentally bringing forward their plans for his retirement home by a few more years. He suspected them of looking at brochures when his back was turned. One day Daniel was going to tell him he and Sam were taking him for a nice drive in the country before depositing him in some grimly cheerful holiday camp for old folk in Florida. Well, not if he had anything to do with it they wouldn't.

Glancing between them he wondered if they ever did discuss what was going to become of him when he was too old to go through the 'gate and too bored to sit behind a desk. What were they planning to do themselves? Marry and have kids? Be lab rats? Write papers on incomprehensible things that no one but they and a handful of others would ever understand? Retire off world? On world? Become Tok'ra?

He glanced back at Carter. Surely once had been enough for her. Or would the lure of that knowledge prove too much for her to resist? She could be with her father for the next few hundred years. Perhaps that would be a bribe she wouldn't be able to resist when age started to make itself felt in her joints; the fear of her mind becoming woolly began to prey on her; the realization that she still had so much to do.

He wrinkled his nose, not liking the idea of Carter as a Tok'ra but having to admit it seemed to be working out fine for Jacob. He turned to look at Daniel who was gazing around in search of interesting buildings that had not yet materialized. Was he always going to be like this? Or was he going to lose that sense of wonder? O'Neill moved closer to him, automatically checking the landscape as he did so. It was empty and cold and there was nowhere for anyone to hide. The mountains were distant still, the road rutted but clearly enough defined that there was no difficulty about choosing their route.

"Daniel..."

The man turned to look at him. "Jack?"

"What do you see yourself doing once you leave SG-1?"

Daniel blinked at him in mild surprise. "You're assuming we're going to live to retirement age and that the Goa'uld or the Aschen won't have annexed the planet by then?"

O'Neill shrugged. "Hey, always prepare for the worst but plan for the best. So, would you go back to academic...stuff?"

Daniel gave him a wry smile. "How? 'Well, here's an interesting artifact I found on... Actually I can't tell you where I find it because that's classified. But what it told us about the Minoan culture was fascinating because... No, actually I can't tell you that either, because that's classified too...' I think I've emptied enough lecture halls in my time."

"What then?"

Daniel shrugged. "I always figured I'd be too busy taking care of you."

O'Neill felt obscurely warmed by that. He darted him a quick look. "You and Carter aren't just going to...dump me in a retirement home then?"

Was that a guilty glance exchanged between the two scientists? Then Daniel was shaking his head. "Wouldn't dream of it." Damn. Daniel was wearing his butter-wouldn't-melt innocent look. That was the way he'd looked at Arris Boch when saying: 'We're sorry. Is this deal still on the table?' Except O'Neill obviously didn't warrant an eyelash bat to sweeten the deal.

"Huh." O'Neill glowered between them. "You've already picked out the damned home."

"No, sir." Carter had her wide-eyed look. "Daniel's promised not to put you in a home." There was a pause before she wrinkled her nose apologetically. "Well, not unless you become really..."

As she didn't finish the sentence he raised an eyebrow interrogatively. "Really...what?"

Teal'c gave him a pitying glance. "I believe the phrase Daniel Jackson used was 'ga-ga', O'Neill."

He gave Daniel a look of accusation. "You three actually talk about this stuff?"

Daniel was definitely looking both shifty and guilty now. He glanced at O'Neill from under his eyelashes, employing a hundred watt 'don't be mad at me' expression. "We were just...planning ahead."

"I'm only nine years older than you." O'Neill strode in front of them, picking up the pace so Daniel would be made very aware that he might be fit but O'Neill was fitter. "And my head isn't so full of...stuff it could go 'pop' any minute. It's more likely you two will be the ones packed off to the retirement home to dribble into your cornflakes while I'm still happily fishing the lakes of Minnesota."

Daniel caught up with him, darting him another look to see how mad he was. He moved in closer, nudging O'Neill with his shoulder, re-establishing contact. "We were kidding."

"You'd better have been." O'Neill could still feel himself bristling with all the indignation of a cat that had walked under a lawn sprayer. He made the mistake of looking at Daniel and got a full whammy pleading look. Turning to glare at Carter who was also looking full of remorse didn't help his resolve at all. He growled under his breath and said to Daniel, "I want it in writing that you're going to take care of me when I'm old and difficult however old and difficult I get. And I want it witnessed by Hammond and Jacob so it's good on any world we end up on."

Another remorseful look from Daniel. "Yes, Jack."

He was aware of the mountains away to the right, the flat lands away to the left, the chill plains behind them, grass eaten down to the roots; a part of him always alert for danger that might come from the skies, the ground, thin air, even as he demanded confirmation he was going to be properly taken care of by his long-suffering teammates.

O'Neill glared at Carter to avoid the guilt pangs glaring at Daniel was giving him. "And if anything happens to Daniel you get custody instead. And if you're married with three kids by then - tough, you'll have to convert the garage."

Carter looked dismayed. "I have my Harley in there."

"It can sleep on the damned sidewalk. You coddle that bike."

O'Neill could actually see Daniel trying to envisage Carter having a happy domestic life with an old and difficult Jack O'Neill lodged in the garage. Daniel winced as the chill breeze blew dust against his cheek. "I'll take care of him, Sam."

The look of heartfelt relief Carter shot Daniel was downright insulting. As O'Neill marched on at a pace which he sincerely hoped would cause Daniel to break out in a sweat, he thought about that last annoying report Simmons had submitted to the Pentagon with a malicious CC to Hammond. Among the many accusations leveled at his unit, the SGC, and Hammond's leadership of it, had been the claim that SG-1 'bears less resemblance to an efficient military team than it does a dysfunctional family unit'. Simmons had gone on to recommend that they were all separated and no longer allowed to play with one another as they were clearly all a bad influence. He had also said that Carter's Tok'ra memories needed to be extracted and he suspected her of having an insubordinate attitude. Attagirl, Carter. Simmons had also written that Daniel should never have been on a military field unit in the first place and was unquestionably insubordinate. That's my boy. Simmons had finished the character assassination of O'Neill's team by remarking that the loyalty of 'The Jaffa' was questionable and his attitude was 'hostile'. Go, Teal'c. There had been other complaints but they had mostly focused on them being too emotionally connected to one another; Hammond's judgment being undermined where they were concerned because of his emotional ties to them; O'Neill 's judgment as a leader being affected by his inability to accept that losses in a military environment were occasionally inevitable. Well, no shit, Sherlock. Daniel, Carter, and Teal'c's judgment being affected by their emotional attachment to O'Neill... Yadda, yadda, yadda.

When he'd passed on the gist to Daniel, the archaeologist had blinked at him in bemusement. "He's saying it's a problem that we don't want each other...to die?"

"Apparently."

Daniel had puzzled over that for a minute before shrugging helplessly. "Is it?"

O'Neill had scratched his jaw. In his heart of hearts he knew Simmons had a point. And he knew Hammond knew it too. But he was damned if he was going to admit that out loud. "Not as long as we don't let it interfere with the integrity of the mission."

"Well, we don't do that, do we?" Daniel had sounded fairly confident, turning back to some piece of linen with faint markings on it, which was apparently fascinating to those who understood hieroglyphs.

O'Neill thought about the time he'd left Daniel on Klorel's ship. He hadn't let it interfere with the mission there. The time he'd tried to stay with Carter when he'd thought they were both going to die. Okay, possibly not the most professional behavior ever but the mission was over and there was no threat to Earth. And damnit he'd zatted her. Twice. How much proof did Simmons need that he was capable of Doing The Right Thing even if it did involve the loss of one of his teammates? Okay, bullying Hammond into letting him take Carter, Teal'c and himself to P4X-347 because Daniel was dying in the infirmary was another gray area, but he'd only risked their lives, not the planet, and he hadn't messed up a mission. The devastating pain it had cost him to leave Daniel behind, zat Carter, think Teal'c was dead, well, that never made it into his reports so Simmons could hardly pin that on him.

"Jack...?"

He'd looked up to find Daniel gazing at him with a puzzled expression.

"What?"

"We don't let it interfere with our missions, do we?"

O'Neill sometimes had to remind himself that this was the only unit Daniel had ever known. He thought this was the way things were in the military: you bonded like superglue with your teammates and they became your whole world. He didn't know it wasn't always like this. That you trusted these people with your life and would risk your own life for them, fought with them, knew you might die with them or might have to zip them into a body bag, tried never to leave them behind, but they weren't generally people you loved.

O'Neill grimaced. "We do the best we can. I don't see they can ask any more of us than that."

"Me neither." Daniel had given him one of those searching looks. "Not of any of us." The including you had been silent but O'Neill had heard it all the same and been grateful for it.

O'Neill had noticed Daniel was trying out that dumb hairstyle where a bit stuck up again. Most people got this stuff out of their system when they were teenagers, but Daniel was as slow on some things as he was fast on others. Carter and Janet had both told him it was fashionable and looked 'cute' on Daniel but he just thought it made him look like Daffy Duck. And anyway Daniel wasn't a puppy and had no business looking 'cute' at his age. O'Neill reached out and ruffled Daniel's hair out of any semblance of fashion.

"Jack...!" Daniel swatted at his hand too late, trying to comb his hair back into some semblance of order with his fingers. Daniel gave him a reproachful glance. "Don't do that."

"Couldn't resist." O'Neill patted him on the shoulder. "Come on, I'll let you buy me a cup of coffee to make it up to me for wearing that damned hair gel."

"How is it hurting you exactly?" But Daniel had put down the artifact and got to his feet albeit with a long-suffering sigh.

"Hey, I'm the one who has to look at it..."

O'Neill looked across at Daniel now. He was shivering despite the pace they were making, long legs covering the ground easily, not even slightly out of breath. "Any idea how long these new guys have been on the planet?"

"Only a few months."

"And they've made no attempt to contact Rudiju's people?"

"No."

"And Rudiju's people?"

"Too busy trying to deal with the effects of the crops dying to have the time or the energy. Although from what Teal'c says that could change..."

O'Neill thought about that and couldn't make it sound like anything other than a plan that would get a lot of people killed. "Let's hope it doesn't come to that."

"Let's hope Rudiju's people are mistaken about the newcomers being to blame."

"But the newcomers have good technology?"

Daniel gave him one of those sideways looks that always made him want to throw a book at him. "They have advanced technology, Jack, there's nothing to say that any of it will be 'good'."

There were days when O'Neill wished he could go back in a time machine so he could whisk the small boy who had once been Daniel away from a childhood of abandonment and isolation. And there were times when he just wanted to go back so he could drop beetles down the back of his neck, shove him into the nearest puddle, and say "sez you, Geekboy!" without seeming childish. Now was definitely one of those times.

O'Neill resisted the urge to look around for beetles but made a mental note to make sure Daniel delivered on that 'taking care of Jack' pledge in the future, and to be especially difficult at regular intervals just to pay him back for days like this.

***

Daniel felt his heart jump in his chest as he saw the pyramid; towering, majestic and all-too painfully familiar; past and present worlds colliding in one breath-stealing instant. He was a child in Egypt playing beneath the shadow of Giza; a graduate student staring in hungry fascination while the echoes of that child's laughter intermingled with memories of his parents' screams. He was standing in the dazzling Abydonian sunlight realizing he was truly on a new world and had no way to get himself or anyone else back home again.

"The structure appears to be of Goa'uld design."

Teal'c's emotionless appraisal jolted him back into the present and he darted a glance at the Jaffa. The chilly sun was glinting off Teal'c's staff weapon, gilding the gold brand of Apophis on his forehead. Teal'c was always so implacably calm; as maddening in his matter-of-factness as he was comforting. Daniel was sometimes afraid that he might also forget that beneath that stoic surface were all manner of half-healed wounds. The Goa'uld symbiote in Teal'c's pouch might fuse his broken bones, repair his flesh, staunch his severed veins, but it had no ability to heal the loss of a murdered father or a murdered lover; nor to fill the gap a family had left.

Daniel knew how it felt to have a relationship end badly, the bitter sense of failure that left in its wake. He and Jack got drunk together every year on the anniversary of Jack's wedding day while Jack said he was over it, or looked at old photographs, or threw an empty bottle through a window. Teal'c never did that. Daniel didn't even know on what date Teal'c and Drey'ac had been married. After all the time they had spent together, Teal'c was still something of an enigma to him. So he didn't know now if when Teal'c looked up at that Goa'uld-designed pyramid he was thinking of the Tau'ri slaves who had probably died laboring at its construction; or of the Goa'uld he had once served; or of some world and some event Daniel knew nothing of, another wound that none of them had glimpsed yet.

Daniel felt a hand on his arm and turned in surprise to see Jack looking at him. "Okay?" The man was trying to seem and sound casual but there was unmistakable concern in his voice; the hand on his shoulder staying where Daniel could feel its warmth. No difficulty knowing what Jack was seeing when he looked at this pyramid; Daniel could practically see the sands of Abydos reflected in his shaded eyes.

Daniel found a reassuring smile for him although it hurt to think of Sha're and he knew Jack knew it. They could lie to one another about being 'over' things but they both knew the pain only lessened with time, it never really went away. "I'm fine."

A brief squeeze of his shoulder, a briefer touch on his back before the hand was withdrawn. "So, big Goa'uld structure then?"

"Looks that way." Daniel turned to Teal'c. "Don't the Asgard usually remove Goa'uld architecture when they annex a planet?"

"Apparently only if the structures are of military significance."

Sam took off her forage cap to run a hand through her hair. "Teal'c, isn't it a landing platform for a Goa'uld warship?"

Daniel looked at Sam's stance; curious but wary; gun ready but eyes assessing not just for danger for but every piece of information she could glean; scientist and soldier locked in eternal conflict? Or perhaps, unlike Daniel, she had found a way to marry the two sides of herself. Perhaps he just had to face the fact that she was a career soldier every bit as much as she was an astrophysicist, whereas this damned gun was never going to feel comfortable in his arms. Sometimes when he thought about his companions' chosen careers he supposed he should feel isolated; cut off from them and their ideologies; but he never had. The more he knew of them, the more he had it confirmed that they were all very similar under the skin.

If Shifu's dream had taught him nothing else, it had taught him there were a hundred paths to reach the same destination. He had it in him to be a murderer every bit as much as Jack did. He had killed helpless Goa'uld symbiotes which Sam had shirked from destroying because of a hatred she could understand but didn't feel. He had forgiven Teal'c for murdering a wife he loved and missed more easily than he had forgiven Jack for appearing to become someone he didn't know. He knew Jack thought he was a good man - positively needed to believe that Daniel was a good man - could still remember the shocked disbelief on Jack's face when he had turned into that spoiled tyrant-in-training who had giggled while Jack collapsed to his knees in exhaustion. It had probably exactly matched his expression of shocked disbelief when Jack had revealed himself to be another Makepeace who trashed their friendship with a malicious smirk while swigging down another mouthful of ice-cold beer.

Teal'c was telling Sam the various ways the Asgard might have booby-trapped the pyramid so that any Goa'uld attempting to land their ship there would meet their end; that he had heard of such things on abandoned planets before now; it was one of the reasons the Goa'uld did not like to leave worlds unattended for too long.

Jack was gazing narrowly at the pyramid as though he suspected it of trying to play some trick on them, assessing possible dangers as every step made them smaller and the pyramid larger, towering above them higher and higher as though to point out their utter insignificance.

"They really needed a place this big to stick one bandaged stiff?"

Daniel blinked in surprise as Jack's nudge in his ribs.

"There was a bit more to it than that."

Jack waved a hand at the structure, clearly unimpressed. "Which Earth one is this one like again?"

"The Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza."

Jack looked at the pyramid and then looked back at Daniel. "And that tells us...?"

"About Ancient Egyptian civilization or...?"

Jack glared at him in his best 'Will no one rid me of this turbulent archaeologist' fashion. "Well, given the fact we're approaching a possibly hostile new race I was thinking more on the lines of what-are-we-getting-into-now...?"

Daniel returned his gaze levelly. "A really big pyramid, Jack." As the man narrowed his eyes murderously Daniel held up his hands in defeat. "Jack, it's a Goa'uld structure. It tells us as much about these people as it would have told them about us when we were using Cronos' tel'tak."

"It was in fact a 'Hatak', Daniel Jackson."

Daniel darted Teal'c a glance but the Jaffa's face was impassive. He exhaled. "Whatever..."

"Whatever."

He and Jack exchanged a glance as they realized they'd both said the same thing at the same time. It was always a little embarrassing when that happened.

O'Neill cleared his throat. "It would have told them we were smart enough to steal it."

"Or that we'd got lucky."

Daniel realized Jack was glaring at him again and busied himself scraping at a stain on his jacket, pretending total absorption in the task while Jack lasered him from indignant brown eyes. He just thought it was odd that every time SG-1 went on a mission without him they apparently had some life and death struggle against the odds with either murderous Jaffa or flesh-punching pixie dust. When Daniel went on a mission without SG-1 he usually had a nice quiet time excavating an archaeological site.

Daniel had a sudden memory of a snarling Unas coming towards him at speed; of that light matrix hologram dazzling him with its beauty... Well, okay, not every mission he went on without Jack was a cakewalk but it did seem to be that every mission Jack went on without him was a life and death struggle. Surely every now and then Jack, Sam and Teal'c ought to just go to a planet, have a look around, and then came back again? Jack was always complaining about Daniel's habit of getting damaged but at least Daniel had never gotten himself beamed up onto a bug-infested Asgard ship while on leave.

He'd just gotten himself hand-deviced half to death by a rogue banished System Lord which had murdered his old tutor and taken his ex-girlfriend as a host while supposedly safe at someone's funeral. Okay. Touché.

Daniel blinked as they passed under the shadow of the pyramid, the sun blotted out; so similar to the one on Abydos that Daniel was sure that Jack as well as he was probably getting flashbacks with every pace. He could remember standing outside the entrance looking down at a Jack on his knees. The feel of that staff weapon in his hand, knowing he was going to have to take life, that he'd probably die afterwards but knowing all the time it was the right thing to do. Remembered his exasperation with Jack later because he needed the man to come up with some strategy to save them all and instead he was ready to die, and to kill innocent people right along with him, for nothing and no one, some stupid order from the military when life was so incredible and so precious, and why couldn't the man see that...? He darted a sideways glance at him, needing the visual proof this wasn't the same man who had no more use for life, reassuring himself with Jack's solidity.

Jack was looking unenthusiastic about passing into a dark tunnel; holding his gun with that deceptively casual air which Daniel had come to recognize meant the man's trigger finger was itching and the hairs on the back of his neck were probably standing up. Daniel could see the silver glint of his hair under his forage cap, the scar bisecting his eyebrow, the darkening of his jaw from a faint sprinkling of stubble. Jack looked wary and tough and ready to be hostile but he certainly didn't look suicidal. Daniel wondered if Jack was just being careful or if something was tripping his soldier's instincts; something intangible in the air which Daniel, not being a military man, wasn't getting.

They passed into the main chamber; Daniel's eyes soothed by the torch-lit dimness but inwardly flinching from this painful familiarity. He exchanged a glance with Jack and swore that just for a second he saw those Anubis guards reflected in the mirrored lenses of Jack's sunglasses. Then Jack was nodding at him to make their presence known while moving a little in front of him to protect him from whatever might answer his call.

As they took another two steps a light flashed each side of them. Jack immediately tried the reload mechanism on his P90 then swore under his breath. He raised his weapon, looking incredulous. He glanced at the other three in disbelief. "Did that just...?"

Sam looked around in confusion. "Yes, sir, it did."

"What?" Daniel peered at Jack's gun in confusion.

Teal'c held up his staff weapon, expression wary. "We appear to have been disarmed by a device very similar to that employed by the Tollan."

Jack was already examining a wall panel. He slapped a rectangular object on the wall angrily. "Exactly like the one employed by the Tollan."

Daniel looked around at the interior of a pyramid which was unmistakably of Goa'uld construction. "Are you sure?"

"Hey, take it from the guy who stole one. I know what these babies look like."

Sam straightened up from examining the device, flinching as the sunlight from the entrance raked across her eyes. "The colonel's right, Daniel. This is definitely Tollan technology."

"But the Tollan are..." Daniel tried to think of a tactful way to phrase it and finished with a lame, "on Tollana."

Sam looked across at him, weary resignation warring with the gratitude in her eyes. She was probably tired of them pussy-footing around her, not mentioning Martouf, Orlin, Narim, Joe. Dead. Gone. Presumed dead. Believed gone. But for all their inept attempts at tact she seemed grateful they were thinking of her feelings.

"Some of them must have managed to escape from Tollana when the armies of Tanith attacked."

Teal'c was looking at Sam as he spoke but to Daniel's surprise he saw no flicker of hope in her eyes. She massaged her temple with her free hand, wincing a little. "I doubt it. But when Narim and I were going through the public records on Tollana I found references to a time in their history when there was a fundamental disagreement within the Curia."

"About?" Jack prompted.

"Manifest destiny." Sam looked apologetic as Teal'c turned to her for an explanation. "It's an old justification for the act of...perennial expansion, often into the territory of others."

Daniel sighed. "'The fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.'"

"This sounds very similar to the philosophy of the Goa'uld."

Jack looked stung by the comparison. "Hey, we only wanted Texas." As Daniel opened his mouth he held up a finger. "Don't tell me 'it's the same principal'. I know it's the principal and I don't care. We're still not Goa'uld." He glanced across at Sam. "And neither are the Tollan."

"No, but apparently their population projections told them that if they continued to breed at their current level then they would decimate the sustainable resources of their world. They either had the choice of voluntarily restricting their own reproduction to remain within sustainable levels or expanding their territory to include other worlds. There was a major disagreement on the subject." Sam pressed a hand to her forehead, rubbing it as she spoke. "Some argued that because of the Goa'uld and Asgard habit of 'seeding' planets that could sustain life with humans 'harvested' from Earth most planets that could sustain human life would already be occupied, that the resources involved in finding planets that could sustain human life that weren't occupied would be too great to justify, and that there could be no justification for settling on words that were already occupied. The other side argued that given their superior technology, the benefits they could offer to a population already in residence for peaceful co-habitation outweighed any disadvantages and should be explored." She shrugged. "When the vote went against them, a splinter group stole two Tollan vessels and went in search of other worlds. That was the last the Tollan heard of them."

Jack was looking less than happy. "I don't care who they are. I don't like people who disarm me without so much as a by-your-leave."

"Well, whoever is living here we need to talk to them." Daniel raised his voice. "Hello? Is there anyone home? We're peaceful travelers from the planet..."

"Who are you?"

Daniel jumped and wheeled around to see a gap opened up in the stone wall that hadn't been there previously and several men standing there observing them. He blinked in surprise. "We're explorers. We came through the Stargate." He made the explanation automatically, as he'd made it so many times before, while the welcoming committee stepped out into the chamber to observe them more closely.

They seemed as anachronistic in these surroundings as did SG-1, clean-shaven, well fed, and dressed in the same modern lightweight clothing he associated with Narim. Darting a quick glance at Sam he saw her wince at the sight of them, a still open wound obviously being twanged by this reminder of the friend she'd lost, then she was rubbing her forehead again. She obviously had a headache. He wondered if it was stress causing it, or just the shock of seeing more Tollan reminding her too painfully of the loss of Narim.

"I am Councilor Tomar, this is Commander Altan..."

Daniel shook hands automatically, noting as he did so that while Tomar wore dark grey, Altan was dressed in pale blue. A civilian and military hierarchy clearly, one that would understand the same dualism in their team. "I'm Doctor Daniel Jackson. This is Colonel Jack O'Neill." He stressed his rank. "Major Samantha Carter and Teal'c."

He saw Jack give him a look of mild surprise and wondered why. He did know Jack's rank after all, he just didn't happen to think it was the most interesting thing about the man, or think that stressing they were a military unit, which might suggest aggression to some people, was a very good idea when meeting new people with whom one wanted to set up a dialogue.

Tomar looked enquiringly at him as Altan was looking at Jack. Daniel turned to look at Jack as well, trying to indicate tactfully that the military man was the leader here however they did things on their world. Tomar nodded to him before addressing Jack. "You have arrived in a time of...flux for our people. We are only newly arrived on this world ourselves and still attempting to establish our presence here, but we are always willing to meet with others of our kind."

The look on Tomar's face was less convincing than his words and Daniel could see Jack wasn't a hundred percent convinced himself. His question was nothing if not to the point. "Are you Tollan?"

Daniel ducked his head to hide a grimace, deliberately not meeting Sam's eye so they wouldn't exchange one of those 'oh boy' expressions that always got Jack so cranky when he caught them doing it. He would personally have said something about how grateful they were for the welcome and that they liked meetings others of their kind as well but Jack had always been a pretty direct kind of guy.

Tomar's eyes widened in surprise. "You know of Tollana?"

"Yup." Jack wasn't giving a lot away. "Old version and new one."

Altan took a step forward. "Then we have much to discuss."

Tomar beckoned to them. "Come, let us dine together. We can exchange what we know."

Jack pointed a thumb back through the entrance doorway. "One thing we know and I reckon you should too is that half the population of this planet seem to be about to starve to death."

Tomar nodded gravely. "We are aware of the situation and are attempting to find a solution to relieve the problem, although there are still some..." He darted a glance at Altan. "Some matters are still being discussed by the Curia."

Daniel felt the familiar surge of irritation he had felt so many times in the past when a course of action was crying out to be taken because it was the only right and sane thing to do and people were quibbling about paperclip requisitions. "Well, I hope you're planning to discuss them pretty quickly because those people aren't going to last more than a few weeks without some help." He was aware of Altan darting him a venomous look but ignored it. Military men did that whenever their authority was questioned; that wasn't a good reason for not questioning their authority. He turned to look at Jack only to find the man returning Altan's hostile glare with interest.

Jack gave Altan another quelling look and then turned back to Tomar, jerking a thumb at Daniel as he did so. "What he said."

Daniel blinked in mild surprise, unable to stop that warmth spreading through him because Jack had just backed him up so emphatically in public. He darted the man a quick grateful look and got a brief nod back. He had to admit life was a lot more pleasant when he and Jack were being nice to one another than when they were fighting like cat and dog. The necessity for fighting like cat and dog just seemed so pressing at times.

"Colonel O'Neill, you must trust me when I say that we are intending to do all that we can to help these people." Tomar beckoned to them again and this time they followed him through an archway that led into a second smaller chamber, the walls completely covered with Goa'uld inscriptions.

Daniel was dimly aware of the other Tollan exiles, many wearing darker versions of the uniform Altan wore and carrying some kind of weaponry which didn't interest him much. What did fascinate him were the inscriptions on the walls. Row after row of them, and not simply decorative. He couldn't resist going closer for another look.

He could hear Jack, Sam and Teal'c all conversing with the Tollan in the background. Jack was being pretty forthright about the state of Rudiju's people and his irritation about having his gun rendered useless. Sam was being more conciliatory, breaking the news about the fate of the first Tollan homeworld gently. Daniel wondered who was going to tell them about the fate of the second one. Teal'c was interjecting the occasional comment about the Goa'uld.

The Goa'uld. Daniel ran his fingers across the hieroglyphs. Ra. An angry and triumphant Ra staking his claim to this world and this vengeance. The gold relief seemed to leave no doubt as to what had happened here. A weapon of great and terrible power; used and then discarded...

He suddenly became aware that everything had gone very quiet, and looked over his shoulder to see why. Everyone was staring at him, Tomar in disbelief, Altan with disconcerting concentration, gaze riveted on Daniel as though Daniel had just become the most fascinating thing he had ever seen in his life. Daniel automatically looked to Jack for an explanation. The man briefly laid a finger across his lips and then pretended to scratch his jaw just as Altan darted a look at him to check for his reaction.

Tomar started forward, eyes full of hope, holding out a hand to indicate the walls. "You can read this script? You understand it?"

Daniel darted another glance at Jack who was giving him a look of fixed intensity. Daniel stalled, unconsciously copying Jack as he scratched his jaw. "Well...um..." He darted another look at Jack whose expression was clearly saying 'No' to someone who knew him as well as Daniel did.

"No." Daniel gave an apologetic shrug. "Unfortunately on Earth the Ancient Egyptian script and language parted the ways a long time ago. The language as it's now spoken bears no resemblance to the language as it was written in hieroglyphs, leaving scholars with no means of knowing how to pronounce it or read it." He was trying to lie without lying and it was tricky. "To...transcribe written hieroglyphs we would have needed a reference of some kind in a language already known to us and...um...we don't have many inscriptions left because of erosion and grave robbing and...things..."

Okay, he sounded lame and unconvincing and he knew it, but until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone that had been the state of play on his planet as far as translating hieroglyphs went, and until he'd traveled through the Stargate to Abydos no one from Earth had heard Ancient Egyptian spoken in several thousand years. It was a lie for this time and this history but in countless alternate universes it was probably still the truth, so on a pan-dimensional scale that made it more like a white lie.

He risked a look at Jack who gave him a smile that looked a little forced; more of a 'well at least you had a go' expression than a 'you did good' look but still more positive than negative. Tomar was looking disappointed; Altan suspicious.

Tomar turned to Teal'c. "You surely must know how to...?"

Teal'c said imperturbably, "The Goa'uld ban all forms of writing from those who serve them. It is forbidden for any servant of the Goa'uld except a holy scribe to write in the medu netcher."

Daniel had to admire the way Teal'c had just answered the question honestly without actually answering the question. He needed to take lessons from Teal'c on that one day.

"'Medu netcher'?" Tomar prompted.

Daniel had his mouth open to answer before he remembered that he shouldn't. Teal'c answered impassively. "The language of the gods."

Tomar concealed his disappointment with a sigh and beckoned them to the table. He murmured an apology for the benches upon which they were forced to sit. Daniel tried to get a seat opposite Jack in case any more tricky questions came up and they needed to communicate without arousing suspicion but Altan firmly directed him to a place further down the table. It was only as he sat down that Daniel realized this was the same seating plan Alar had used on Euronda when he had physically and ideologically tried to drive a wedge between Daniel and Jack.

As the glass was placed by his elbow, Daniel flinched from it and darted a glance at Jack for reassurance.

The man was putting a hand over the top of his glass and saying 'No' firmly. The 'Thank you' was very much an afterthought. He looked up and across at Daniel, gaze very intense but for once too difficult for Daniel to read.

Then Tomar was asking what they did and Jack explained that they traveled to new worlds in search of technology to aid them in their battle against the Goa'uld and the defense of their planet.

Daniel waited for him to add that they also sought out other things but when Jack seemed to think that was enough of an explanation sighed and added that they were also trying to make contact with the scattered people of Earth harvested by the Goa'uld to be hosts so many centuries before. That they wished to learn more from these people about their own past and also to forge new bonds of friendship with them.

Jack shrugged when he finished. "Yeah. That too."

"So you are seekers after knowledge as well as weaponry?" Tomar enquired.

"You could say that." Jack sounded carefully non-committal.

Daniel resisted the urge to glare at him but said with much more emphasis, "Yes, exactly."

Altan looked between them, face unreadable. "Are those not contradictory objectives?

Daniel had his mouth open to response when Sam spoke quickly. "We think of them more as complementary. In the past a Goa'uld tried to destroy our planet and although we're protected by the Asgard from Goa'uld attack at the moment, we have no way of knowing how long that treaty will hold. A treaty was made by the Asgard with the System Lords on our behalf, but the System Lords change as their power increases or wanes."

Teal'c added impassively, "Of the three Goa'uld who came to negotiate with the Tau'ri, one is dead, one is an exile, and only one is still a System Lord. In the past one Goa'uld has sometimes gained ascension over the other System Lords. So, for their planet to be defended the Tau'ri also need to find ways to defend themselves against any Goa'uld who might threaten them again."

"And knowledge is also power," Daniel put in crisply, shooting a defiant glance at all three of his teammates in case they looked like contradicting him. He could feel the straps of his pack digging into his shoulders, the weight tugging at him noticeably now that he wasn't moving. When they were walking he hardly noticed it any more but as soon as they stopped he suddenly became aware of that dead weight sitting on his back like a corpse. Casting a glance around at his teammates he saw none of them had taken off their packs so sighed and resigned himself to feeling like a tortoise for the rest of the meal.

He darted another glance at Jack, wishing there was some way to tell him that although he'd just backed him up on this strategy he didn't approve of it and he was going to expect a damned good explanation from Jack later as to why he wasn't allowed to tell Tomar what exactly was written on those hieroglyph covered walls...

***

The gold walls were shimmering at her spitefully; indecipherable symbols swirling while the lighting glistened across plastic-feeling plates and cold cutlery. Carter had never known a headache like it. As they'd entered the pyramid her temples had started to throb and now it had built up to the point where she felt as if someone were beating a great brass cymbal on the inside of her brain. She glanced at her teammates to see if it could be something in the pyramid that was affecting them too. Daniel was looking shifty but that was because he didn't like lying. The Colonel was looking unreadable but if he had a headache the world usually got to hear about it pretty fast so she presumed he was also fine. Perhaps it was just coincidence this pounding in her head had started as they entered the pyramid. She rubbed at her temples again, trying to assess these Tollan objectively yet knowing her judgment was affected by more than this pain in her head. So far she had only seen things that made her mistrust them.

There was the way they had become so excited when Daniel was examining the wall panels that seemed to depict some kind of weapon. The fact Colonel O'Neill had told Daniel to lie was a clear pointer that something seemed wrong to him too. She'd always trusted the Tollan in the past. It hadn't bothered her when they'd been disarmed by those devices the colonel had later pretended to steal. The place was safe. Their technology superior and apparently infallible. She had hated Narim's use of the word 'primitive' but she had been able to understand Omac's reasoning. If she had given technology to a planet which had proceeded to blow itself up then she probably wouldn't have wanted to make the same mistake twice either. She had allowed herself to be seduced by that society; relating to its clear logic and reliance on science in a way she would never admit to either Daniel or the Colonel. And she'd been wrong. When their technology had failed them, so had everything else. She'd lost more than Narim; she'd lost another piece of herself; the one that believed in the purity of science. All their knowledge had availed them nothing at all when it came up against something it couldn't solve, and when they'd been destroyed that knowledge had been destroyed with them. Why hadn't they asked for help? Why had they arrogantly assumed that because they couldn't solve this problem no one else could either? Because the people of Earth were too primitive to be able to help them? Yet the people of Earth had driven off the Goa'uld while Tollana had burnt like old newspapers.

Carter rubbed her temples again. She felt not just sick with the pain in her head but furious too. She wanted to pick up this perfectly formed glass and hurl it at those shimmering gold walls. How could clever people have been so stupid? And how could she have been stupid enough to believe in them in the first place?

"Major Carter...?"

She turned to see Teal'c looking at her in concern. She touched his arm gently. "Hey, Teal'c."

"Are you unwell?"

"Headache," she murmured back. Tomar was explaining how they had come to travel there to the Colonel, who had that bored look on his face, but she could see Altan focusing on Daniel; like a wolf closing in on a lone deer.

Teal'c shifted in his chair, wincing as he wrapped his arm around his guts. She increased the pressure on his arm. "Teal'c...?"

"It's nothing." The bead of sweat trickling down his face contradicted his words. He conceded the point with a sigh. "My symbiote is growing increasingly restless."

The clamor in her head was getting louder and louder. She wished vainly for Tylenol and for Daniel to have been seated close enough she could ask for a couple of his migraine tablets again. She didn't even care what Tomar was telling the Colonel now. Whatever it was, she suspected it was probably another lie. They weren't helping the Tadeshi even though they had food enough to share; they were letting those people starve in their mud huts because they were afraid of them. The Tadeshi were primitive after all. What possible communication could there ever be between them...

"Major Carter..."

She tried to find a smile for Teal'c even though she still felt more like smashing something. "It's just a headache and...it's a bad time of the month."

The Colonel would have looked embarrassed and probably told her that was too much information but Teal'c just nodded sagely and then patted her gently on the arm.

***

Daniel darted Sam an anxious look. Her face was closed off; angry; but her eyes were full of pain. If they hadn't been on a mission he would have suggested they got very drunk together and bitched about the general unfairness of Life, the Universe and Everything. But as he seemed to be in the middle of having to lie to a suspicious Tollan military commander he hoped she would understand the sympathetic looks he was sending in her direction and what they signified.

Altan said smoothly, "It would surely be of great assistance to all those of us threatened by the Goa'uld if we could find a means to understand their language."

Daniel busied himself with his food. It seemed to be of some kind of corn or wheat-based food, nutritious no doubt, but not particularly tasty; still food that he felt a little uncomfortable eating when he thought of Rudiju's people starving in the barren landscape outside.

"You'd think," Jack put in.

Altan's gaze didn't waver from Daniel. "You are the one with the knowledge of the ancient cultures of your planet?"

Daniel couldn't pretend his meal was so exciting he hadn't heard that question and looked up. "That's right."

"So there are ancient languages you can translate?"

Daniel tried to keep his expression as blandly innocent as possible. "Yes. Some."

"So, if we could provide you with a text translated into several different languages one of which was one you recognized and one of which was Goa'uld, you might be able to understand the Goa'uld alphabet at last?"

"We don't think they have an alphabet, as such." Daniel took a sip of the liquid with which someone had half-filled his glass to give himself an excuse not to meet Altan's eye. "We think it might be more...symbolic. It's a language where it's very difficult to determine if it's ideographical or phonetic..."

Altan's gaze was unblinking, like a hawk who had sighted prey. "But if we provided you with a Goa'uld text accompanied by a transliteration in a tongue you can read...?"

"Yes." Daniel had to meet his gaze at last. "In theory then yes, I could."

"Are you familiar with any of these languages?"

Altan pushed a small box forward that looked not unlike Daniel's laptop and a screen slid up noiselessly. The images on it were obviously playing both sides of the small screen because he could see the reflection of them laying odd shadows across Jack's face as well as on the table top.

And suddenly he was back in that underground chamber with Ernest Littlefield beside him and incredible revelation making his veins sing with the promise of knowledge only a tantalizing fingertip away from his grasp. The old man's desperation as he tried to make Daniel understand that even this was meaningless if there was no one with whom to share it. Jack's fingers on the back of his jacket yanking him down those stairs and jolting him back into reality. Jack had scared him for a second. It was too soon after the man had pounded him; too recent a reminder of how much stronger than him Jack was. He'd had to believe their relationship was more than this; more than Jack being older and stronger so ultimately Daniel had to do what he said. That he had enough respect for Daniel as an adult and an equal to respond to his plea to be treated like one. The look on the man's face as he'd let him go that told Daniel Jack wasn't going to leave him here, which meant if Daniel elected to stay and be stranded here then Jack would be stranded too...

Runes. Asgard runes. Jack speaking Latin to him. Cruvus, what is that...? Nu ani aquinatus, ic quabi de un... Feeling so helpless because he was the only one who could help him and he wasn't helping him. Jack trying to make himself understood while his brain was taken over by something he couldn't control or understand, eyes shadowed with exhaustion. Jack standing on the ramp while Daniel tried to tell him if he did this, if he left, he might never be able to come back. Jack just looking at him with that odd mixture of compassion and knowledge while Daniel had no idea if he understood a word he'd just said to him, and had even less idea as the man walked up the ramp and away from him into the Stargate if he would ever see him again. The waiting had been endless. The relief at getting him back had been like having every vein in his body suddenly start running with brandy instead of blood. He still remembered how patient Jack had been as Daniel followed him around for days afterwards asking him if he felt okay, if his head hurt, if he remembered anything, anything at all?

The Asgard. The Nox. The Furlings. The Ancients. The meeting place of four alien races who between them must surely hold the secret which would defeat the Goa'uld and more than that must know so much it made Daniel's head spin just to think about it. And Altan was saying that there was an inscription the Goa'uld had copied into their own tongue.

He reached out, trying to trace the inscriptions with his fingers. Good grief this was incredible. The Goa'uld hieroglyphs were telling the story of Ra. The legend of the destruction of mankind so mangled by Budge in his 1912 translation. And this was the Asgard and Ancient transliteration? And what was that other language? The one he hadn't seen before? He tried to read the runes but they were out of focus, the video footage of them very faint when compared with the hieroglyphs. Older, they were older. Then this had been an Asgard world first. Taken by the Goa'uld then taken back by the Asgard. Layers of history. Layers of knowledge.

Daniel turned to Altan, unable to hide his excitement. "Where is this from? Is this inscription somewhere in the pyramid?"

"No."

He knew Altan was watching him closely, had recognized his excitement, and was probably suspicious, but he didn't care. This was an astonishing find. "Where then? Somewhere near here?"

"Daniel..."

He could hear that hint of warning in Jack's voice and okay, he was trying not to look too much like a kid in a candy store but didn't Jack get what this meant? He looked across at the man and saw from his expression that whatever it meant to Jack wasn't what it meant to Daniel. Jack was looking decidedly underwhelmed.

"It was uncovered in a temple a few hours walk from here." Altan touched something and the image vanished, the screen sliding down, taking the inscription with it. "Would you like to examine it more closely?"

"Yes." Daniel didn't hesitate.

"No." Jack's voice held more than a hint of warning in it now. "At least not yet. We have more important things to focus on right now."

"Jack...?" He looked at him in disbelief. Didn't Jack get what this meant? With a text translated into the Ancient they could make so much headway on translating other Ancient texts and if they could learn to understand the language of the Asgard which Thor had so persistently refused to teach them...

"Daniel..." Jack looked him in the eye, voice warning and pleading at once; gaze a mixture of 'don't make me come over there' and 'please, just this once don't be difficult...'

"But..." He gave Jack a full begging look, trying to convey in a glance just how important this was; what it could mean; how the secret to saving the planet and destroying the Goa'uld might not lie in ion cannons and naquada reactors but in ancient script; in the power of words.

"Not now."

Because I say so... Just because... plant boy... It's never over with you and it's always the same damned thing...

Daniel curled his hand around his fork.

Shut up, Daniel, is that clear enough for you...?

When he looked back at Jack the man was talking to Tomar about the people caught up in the famine. What was being done for them? What was the hold up? His voice was even and calm but every few words he was darting a glance at Daniel to see what mood he was in. Daniel gave him a look to show that he didn't agree with this decision and he thought Jack was missing the point.

Altan said with a shrug, "It's up to you, Doctor Jackson, of course, but there is a small group of my men heading out to the tomb tomorrow morning so if you wanted to accompany them you would be guaranteed protection on the way."

Daniel looked at Jack hopefully. Jack gave him a 'will you please quit it?' look, half pleading, half bullying, but aloud he said, "I'm going to need Daniel here with me tomorrow. Right now we're all a little more concerned about the people on this planet who are starving to death. Right, Daniel?"

He met the man's gaze for a moment. The wanting was still there, the need to know, his resentment that something so revealing could be whisked away from him just by the military and its damned protocols, but hand in hand with that came the weight of their friendship; all they'd been through together; all they owed one another because of it; all those times of near-death and actual pain; times when they'd watched the other one hurt in front of them; or sat on uncomfortable chairs in the infirmary and waited for the other one to wake up. Daniel sighed in defeat, feeling sick with the thought of having to let yet another vital piece of information slip through his fingers. He couldn't keep the resentment and disappointment from his face as he looked across at Jack. "You're the colonel, Jack."

As if from a long way away he could hear Tomar explaining about the difficulties of producing the excess food quantities necessitated by the crisis affecting the previous inhabitants of the planet when their food production was based on a hydro-ponic system.

Sam was the only one who was following the conversation. "But surely your food production isn't affected by the drought? Narim told me that..."

She broke off then and Daniel saw the raw pain flicker in her eyes. She feigned a cough and Teal'c patted her back very gently, going along with the play-acting. Sam took a moment to sip some water and in the gap Tomar had smoothly filled the silence.

"No, our resources are not wholly dependent on the rainfall of the planet, however, the levels of salts even in a non-recirculating system does eventually become a problem which only reverse osmosis can solve..."

Something about rainwater being of great importance to the system. He couldn't follow it. He kept seeing that script in his mind's eye. Asgard runes and Ancient script...

Jack standing on the ramp looking so damned tired and possibly lost to all of them forever. Willing him to come back to them with all his might; knowing that nothing else mattered, not even the language of the Ancients as long as Jack came back. He looked across at the man then to find Jack looking at him. Jack's questioning expression. Jack had been following his thought process okay and getting ready to be defensive or conciliatory or overbearing, however Jack was intending to play it this time, then he'd seen Daniel change mental tack and lost the thread.

Daniel sighed in defeat. He seemed to have lost the ability to hurt Jack's feelings. He hoped it was a temporary problem but for the moment at any rate, the Asgard language was just making him remember how close he had come to losing the man forever and how devastating that had felt.

He looked up to find Jack looking at him curiously and mouthing 'You okay?' in concern.

Daniel sighed and shrugged. He gave a reluctant nod.

Jack gestured around the table in a 'well, join the hell in the conversation then' way and Daniel sighed again. Jack always looked weirdly and comfortingly anachronistic in this kind of setting. If Daniel walked into a different culture a different environment it seemed logical to him to adapt to it. To wear the clothes of those people, adopt their customs. Jack wouldn't. Jack was a pioneer, and he would stand out like a sore thumb in a different environment until that environment accommodated him. If another world didn't have C-Span Daniel would have accepted that he would have to find a different hobby. Jack wouldn't rest until he'd found someone who knew how to mess with electronics and would keep describing how great hockey games were until they built him an intergalactic satellite dish just to get some peace and quiet. People like Jack had built places like Las Vegas. Man's ultimate triumph over a nature whose limitations he was not prepared to accept. Jack denied this. He insisted that when he'd been on Edora he'd fit right in but Daniel didn't believe it.

Jack did however fit into that uniform in a way Daniel never could. He'd complained to the people handing him his BDU that the damned thing wasn't made right and couldn't he have one like Jack's until at last in exasperation the guy handing out the uniforms had told him it was nothing to do with the clothing just the way it was being worn. Daniel had retired chastened and the next time he'd pulled on his BDU to find it was two sizes too big and baggy in all the wrong places while Jack's had fit him like a second skin, he'd just sighed and accepted it.

Jack didn't look at home in a pyramid with golden hieroglyphs glinting from every inclining surface. He looked resolutely and deliberately out of place but managed to do it in a way that made the pyramid seem wrong. Daniel squinted across at him speculatively. He'd always really wanted to show Jack some of Ancient Egypt but he had a horrible suspicion that if he took Jack to the Valley of the Kings, the Valley of the Kings would start looking subtly shabby and out of scale as it tried and failed to accommodate the resolute twentieth century North Americanness of Jack O'Neill.

As a fierce glare from the object of his thoughts made Daniel notice how long it was since he'd joined in the conversation, Daniel realized Teal'c was talking:

"If this world is only of sufficient fertility to be able to sustain its existing population would it not be wiser for your people to seek a different world in which to settle?"

"There are things about this world which make it very attractive to us."

Jack scratched his jaw. "That wouldn't be trinium by any chance, would it?"

Daniel saw Tomar's eyes widen in surprise. "You are aware of this element?"

Jack gave him a level look. "Oh, it's amazing what people as primitive as us are aware of."

Sam cut in quickly. "We know it's a vital component in Tollan technology. But I agree with Teal'c. However technologically advanced you are, you still need to eat, which means you still need to grow food, and although I haven't had a chance to analyze the soil samples I took yet, the earth here seems very poor to me."

"Our environmental surveyors assure us that with a higher rainfall there will be a great increase in fertility here. The land can sustain our two cultures as long as the weather patterns are more favorable."

Jack drummed his fingers on the table lightly. "So it was you messing with the rain then?"

Tomar looked a little abashed but faced Jack with dignity. "We need a supply of fresh rainfall to guarantee the efficiency of our hydro-ponic food production and also to guarantee that the existing population gain a good harvest."

Daniel leant forward, intrigued despite himself. "You can do that? You can change the weather?"

"With our technology it is not difficult," Tomar assured him. "From experiments on other planets we know that even a desert landscape can be restored to greenness and fertility with sometimes only a slight increase in the annual rainfall."

"So you were just trying to help them out?" Jack wasn't making much of an effort to keep the cynicism from his voice. If he'd been closer, Daniel would have kicked him under the table. Jack never seemed to have realized there was a better way to go than confrontational.

"Yes," Tomar responded with great emphasis. "We hoped to bring them a fine harvest which would help to cement the bonds between our two cult