Stargate SG-1: Sacrifice Moon (4 page)

Jack nodded to her, to Teal'c, and fastened a weather eye on Daniel,
who looked keen as a new recruit. "Got your Kleenex?" he asked.

"Even better," he said. "Prescription allergy pills." Then, inevitably, an uncertain look. "And, ah, tissues. For backup."

"Good plan." Jack turned to look up at the control room, where
General Hammond stood at a loose parade rest, staring out. "Radio
test."

They each confirmed their radio reliability, and he made a crank it
up gesture at the little guy in the glasses, the one seated at the console
next to Hammond. Need to find out his name, he reminded himself.
Probably a good guy to know, considering he has his finger on the
button to close that iris thing and smash us into little particles so
small even Carter couldn't measure them...

Then he settled in to watch the Stargate begin to dial.

Something awesome about that, watching the massive bulky thing
fire up, the inner ring begin to grind its way around. Chevrons locked,
each in turn, with heavy metallic chunks. This close to it, he felt a
surge of electricity sweep over him, not exactly static, not exactly
anything he'd felt anywhere outside of this room. His skin shivered
into gooseflesh.

When Chevron Six encoded, the room started to shake. He rode the
turbulence with practiced ease, watched the seventh symbol lock in.

Plasma boiled toward them in a furious explosion, reaching nearly
twenty feet straight out, and then collapsed back to form the glittering, liquid-silk entrance to the rest of the universe.

"Wow," Carter breathed. "Just doesn't get old."

"Hope." Jack adjusted his hat. "Carter, take point, move out of the
line of fire when you arrive. Daniel, you're next. Teal'c, behind me."

At his nod, Carter strode up the incline of the ramp, heading for
another world.

t was like falling, just for an instant, into a sea of stars that blazed
and froze and tore him apart and put him back together, and then
he was falling as gravity took hold and rolled him painfully, two or
three feet.

Jack landed flat on his back, staring up at a really bright white sun,
and heard Daniel sneeze, hard, two times.

A black shadow occluded the sun, and Carter reached down and
hauled him to his feet, then gave the same assistance to Daniel, who
was blowing into a tissue nearby. Teal'c was up, hell, he'd probably
never even gone down.

They were the center of attention.

You could have heard a pin drop. The scrape of their boots on stone
sounded ridiculously loud, because nobody else was moving. There
were more people than probably even Daniel had been expecting - at
least thirty or forty in the near vicinity of the team on the landing, and
another hundred or so in the large open square below the steps.

Jack's first tactical instinct kicked in, scanning for threats, and
came up with nothing. No weapons in evidence, nobody making hostile moves.

Kind of a nice surprise, actually.

The people had on a wide variety of colors and styles - long tunics,
short ones, in blues and greens and golds and prints like tartans; some
looked like silk, some like cotton. Gold trim. Sandals. Nice hair.

Civilized sort of place.

Everyone was standing in neat little carefully roped lines, under
canvas canopies. There were desks set up in rows in front of the lines,
too, fancy curlicued things with backless stools for chairs and men
perched on them who were writing on what looked like sheets of pale
paper.

People had bags. Carrying bags, with handles. Some even had
wheels. There was a pallet full of bags stacked nearby, with a large sign on it in symbols that seemed to be - and this was just a guess on
Jack's part, because he'd seen enough fraternity shirts in his day -
Greek.

"Oh my God," Daniel said numbly. "Do you see this? This is...
incredible!"

Jack turned and looked for the MALP. The bulky robot was
parked over on the side, labeled with another sign, tucked in a corral
full of battered-looking luggage.

"Daniel," he said slowly, "Tell me what that sign says."

"Lost and found," Daniel translated.

They all stood in silence and contemplated the strangeness.

After a few seconds, the natives started talking. Loudly. Mostly
commenting to each other, pointing, but some getting argumentative
with the - staff? - sitting behind the desks. One of the functionaries
got off his chair and ran up the steps, looking anxious and harried;
he had ink-stained fingers, and his toga - tunic? - was yellowed and
frayed at the hems. Knobby knees. Definitely a working-class man.

Jack backed off from the frenzied gestures and resisted the impulse
to swing the MP5 into a firing line. "Daniel? Little help?"

Daniel was focused intently on the man's fast-firing speech. He
made the universal gesture for slower, looking uncomprehending,
and the man took a deep breath and evidently started over. Annoyed.
How exactly had SG-1 gone from the locals bowing and scraping
and hailing them as gods to some bureaucrat being annoyed at their
arrival? Jack felt robbed.

"I was right, it's a derivation of Ancient Greek. Ah... he says
we're off schedule," Daniel interpreted. "There aren't supposed to
be any incoming travelers right now. This is the departure hour."

They all stared in silence at the lines of people, the bags, the
paperwork. One guy getting searched by a burly-looking man in a
dark tunic, who confiscated what looked like a belt knife.

The lost luggage corral.

"It's an airport," Jack said, resigned. "We're at a freakin' airport."

"All we need are the vending machines," Daniel agreed, and
then pointed to a vendor at a cart handing out drinks and paperwrapped snacks.

"Okay, now that's just weird."

Their harried bureaucrat upped the volume on his complaints.
Daniel focused on him again. "He's asking us to get off the, ah, I
guess for want of a better word it would be runway," Daniel said.
"Apparently, we're holding up the scheduled departures."

The guy was making furiously animated shooing gestures. Jack
led the way down the steps, then followed the air-shoves off to the
left. Behind them, a group of people queued up near the DHD, chattering and staring at SG- l's strange gear.

Dark-tunic guys ahoy. Ah. Airport security. Figured. One of them
flexed his muscles, but next to Teal'c he was nothing to write home
about. Not that Jack hoped it would come to hand-to-hand, because if
it did, well, there was Daniel.

One of them made an unmistakable give it over kind of gesture,
and pointed to Jack's MP5.

"They're not touching my weapons," Jack said pleasantly. "Might
want to tell him that before we get into the shouting and hitting part
of diplomacy."

Daniel was deep into his Hi, we're peaceful explorers speech,
which he seemed to reel out with practiced ease. Prepped it before
we came, eh? He could well imagine Daniel standing in front of the
mirror, trying out non-threatening expressions. Well, fine, that was his
job. Jack's was to look dangerous, though probably not as dangerous
as Teal'c, who had that frozen cold distance thing down pat. Probably
had a class in it at Apophis University.

Carter was... fascinated. Looking everywhere at once, taking in
more than Jack would probably ever see if he spent a week with a
camera. Hammond had warned him she was way smarter than him,
and he was strongly reminded of it in the cogent way she surveyed
the layout of the place. He decided to take advantage of it, at least.
"Captain Carter? Thoughts?"

She could barely tear her eyes away from her appraisal. "Apart
from their understandable confusion, I don't see anybody panicking,
sir. They're used to visitors here, though we're out of the ordinary.
Dr. Jackson would be able to say for sure, but it sounded to me like
a number of languages being spoken out there, which means a very
multi-cultural sort of place." She paused. "Have you ever seen any thing like this before?"

"In my vast experience? No. Which means, oh, exactly zero,
Carter. I've been to Abydos. Even Daniel will tell you it wasn't the
crossroads of the universe."

"Sir, I just can't see this kind of industry springing up under
Goa'uld rule. They strike me as anti-trade, unless it's to their benefit.
And this isn't exactly slave labor. It's more like..." She nodded at
a family of five clustered nearby in one of the lines. Baby in arms,
three-year-old squalling and clutching at Mom's skirts, Dad looking
harried, an older boy trying to appear haughtily disinterested. "This
sounds crazy, sir, but that looks like vacation, sir. Holiday travel.
Something like that."

"I'm still adjusting to the fact that they have a lost and found."

"Sir, these people look, well, normal."

He couldn't dispute that. The more he looked past the costumes -
and truthfully, they weren't as wild as all that, he'd seen stranger
things walking around Times Square - the more he saw people who
might not have been out of place back home in blue jeans and sneakers, kicking their heels at LaGuardia or LAX. A few were sitting on
their baggage, reading scrolls or sipping drinks.

Drinks... he followed the lines and saw a building off to the side.
With a built-in counter. And high, three-legged stools with patrons
firmly in place. More tables and chairs inside, in the shade.

Of course. What was an airport without a bar? The resilience of the
human spirit never failed to amaze him. You plunk a few people down
in alien terrain, give them nothing to do, and within a few weeks, one
of them would master home brewing...

"Jack!" Daniel was back, glowing with enthusiasm. "This is les-
tos, he's, well, I guess you'd call him a ticket agent. I've explained to
him we came through the Stargate."

"And?"

"And he gave me a list of three planets we could have come from!
Delphi, Sikyon, Mycenae - Jack, they're names of ancient Greek
city-states! This is incredible - apparently each of these worlds has
trade routes through the Stargate to this place and - "

"Vacation travel, yeah, we got that." Daniel's enthusiasm was contagious. Jack had a hard time keeping his necessary pessimism intact. "You made him understand we didn't just get separated from our tour
group, right?"

"He understands that we're from a world outside of their normal
routes - it's called the Helos Confederacy, apparently - and the name
of this world is Chalcis, by the way." Daniel took a deep breath and
visibly calmed himself. "He's sending a message to his superiors.
We're supposed to wait."

The dark-tunic guys -who didn't need Security badges to identify
them, the body language was unmistakable - were looking nervous
about all the talking and gesturing. Jack tried a friendly smile. None
of them smiled back. "So? We wait?"

"Yes."

Jack let a brief silence go by. "Right here? In the sun? `Cause it's
going to get toasty."

"Well..." Daniel looked around and focused on the building.
"There's a place to wait in the shade over there."