Chapter Text
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*~ Do you know what we call opinion in the absence of evidence? We call it prejudice. ~ Michael Crichton, State of Fear*
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Teyla Emmagen, daughter of Tagan, had been a leader long before the people of Earth arrived in the Pegasus Galaxy to stand everything they thought they knew on end. It was her wisdom, her strength of character, her calm determination and experience, and yes, her special gift to sense the Wraith, that had often made the difference between survival and disaster for her people. She had always known she held the potential to be a Protector, as well as a leader, but it was only upon her union with Veralin Tony DiNozzo that those latent abilities had risen in her. She was used to relying on her instincts, even those that came with her taint of Wraith blood.
But now, in this moment, she was fighting as hard as she ever had to resist those instincts.
They were telling her to grab the biggest-ass gun John had in his armory, run screaming through the stargate to Earth, and make bloody war on anyone and *everyone* who stood in the way of her getting back her mate and her missing children! She would *EVISCERATE* Leroy Jethro Gibbs! She would *EAT THE HEART* of Anthony DiNozzo Senior! She would rend the flesh of Eli and Ziva David into bits *SO SMALL* even one of Rodney’s scanners wouldn’t find them! Her Protector instincts were *demanding* she get her family *back*! The Protector in her was *HOWLING* in rage!
And it was bleeding all over the city in fiery waves, revving their surprisingly numerous sentinels into a like ferocity. Ronon and John were right beside her. Anne and Dusty had come running, and so had Cameron.
As soon as they erupted onto the Atlantis Command Tower Operations Deck, Sam Carter knew they were fucked.
“Like I need this right now!” she complained aloud. She tapped the Atlantis comm circuits to call up reinforcements. “Teal’c, Daniel, Rodney, Reid, Kusanagi, Hartley, Zelenka, all of you zeds, get your asses up here to Ops, now! Dr. Porter, you too!”
Eyes blinking in stunned amazement, Woolsey emerged from his office to stare at the seething group of people bearing down on them. “Colonel Carter?”
Carter huffed. “Agent DiNozzo has been abducted, with Tali, and we’re not sure where baby TJ is. From the description, Hennessey at the SGC is pretty sure it was an Asgard transporter beam. *Apollo* is looking for some trace of a cloaked ship in orbit over Earth, but no joy so far. If they know what’s good for them, whoever they are, they’re already out of System Sol by now. And I don’t have *time* for this shit, because someone back home has leaked *everything* about the Stargate, and POTUS is going to launch Operation Seventh Seal, like, *now*. Which means I’m going to have to go back, likely Daniel and Rodney too, at the very least, for Declassification and the First World Defense Initiatives... and you tell *me* how I’m supposed to deal with a bunch of enraged sentinels screaming for blood?”
Woolsey turned alarmed eyes on the mass of people arriving on the operations control deck.
It didn’t help that Rodney came with a loud presence in his chest sling, Meredith Joy reacting to the emotions around her with a face purple from her angry screams.
So Carter called up a page from the Jack O’Neill Play Book, and stuck three fingers in her mouth to whistle, screechingly loud, enough to bend the ears of any sentinel in range, and drive them into a splitting headache.
Once she had them halted and standing at a shuddering gasping standstill, she announced, “Conference Room! Everyone! Now! Teyla, you *have* to calm yourself. These guys are a step away from going feral, and we can’t get anywhere like that!”
Teyla was struggling to control her breathing, and it wasn’t working. “I know, I’m trying, but my children…”
“I know. I understand. I do. And we’ll do everything we can, as soon as we can, but you aren’t any use to anyone like this.”
Then Spencer stepped up, and reached to hold Teyla’s trembling shoulders. “Teyla? Listen to me. I can contact Tony. I can find out where he is, how he is. I can find out about Tali and TJ too. Right? Do you hear me?”
Wordlessly, Teyla nodded. With the touch of the Veralin, she was finally able to get hold of her roiling emotions, to see the way forward when all before had been a red haze of animal outrage. And once Teyla was able to hold onto a modicum of control, the other sentinels managed to come out of their near-feral funks as well. It helped that there was a zed hanging to each one. Or, in Anne Teldy’s case, her beloved and guide, Alison Porter.
“Before you do that, Dr. Reid,” Carter warned, “we need to get a sit-rep. Earth seems to have chosen this special time to go completely off its collective rocker, and unless I miss my guess, and I don’t think I do, it’s probably all related. General O’Neill thought there was something bad brewing… turns out he was right, and he didn’t get back there a moment too soon.”
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Plan A had been for Jack to get some airman to drive him out the gates of Cheyenne Mountain, and through the growing crowd of hysterical people amassing there, then over to Peterson Air Force Base. He was supposed to catch a lift to Washington on a conventional aircraft. Even if it was some milk-run cargo flight, that would give him ample time to read through reports piling up in his email in-box and assess just how bad the situation was. Well, no surprise, Plan A got blown all to hell. Plan B had *Apollo*, their one BC-304 deep space carrier currently in orbit, beaming him straight to the White House Oval Office, and the middle of chaos.
Usually, any meetings of the full cabinet and Joint Chiefs were held in a larger conference room, at a big ol’ table with seats enough for everyone. Not this standing-room-only crush on the Presidential Seal carpet. The mob seemed to include half the senate and congress, most of the Pentagon, not to mention directors of half a dozen federal agencies, including, but not limited to, the FBI, CIA, Homeland, FEMA, and, this one had Jack scratching his head and wondering what-the-hell, the FDA. The Food and Drug Administration? Did someone mean to get ATF or DEA and misdial?
He sidled up to Tom Morrow and gave a heavy sigh. “So, Tom. How’s it hangin’?”
Tom gave him a wry lifted eyebrow. “I hear you lost one of the best investigators I’ve ever seen. You got a line on DiNozzo yet?”
Yeah, that was annoying the hell out of Jack, too. He thought DiNozzo and the Reid kid had anticipated all the likely scenarios and planned for them.
“Chalk another one up to Eli David and his murderous daughter. They knew this mess was coming and took advantage of us all being too distracted to notice them right outside our door. I have no doubt DiNozzo and his kid are half way to Alpha Centauri by now, or wherever the hell Eli is hiding out with his Lucian friends. But at least we have the baby safe and sound.”
“He with Gibbs?”
“For the time being, until we can figure out how deep the Gunny is in the rest of that plot. For sure he knew Ziva was on US soil when she wasn’t supposed to be. But it was the Davids who called in DiNozzo Senior to create trouble. I think that surprised Gibbs as much as anyone. We got Gibbs, DiNozzo Senior and TJ at the SGC under heavy guard. And we’re attempting to make contact with our Agent Afloat.”
Tom raised both eyebrows at that. “If he’s half way across the galaxy by now…”
Jack shrugged. “We got a way to contact him. The Reid kid is handling that. Once we’ve got some kind of location we *will* go get our people back. But for now… we got more immediate problems.”
Morrow huffed. “No kidding.”
Since the President, seated behind his desk, seemed to be fielding at least four different phone conversations at once, and one was an irate Secretary General of the United Nations, Jack felt it was time to get this circus under control. Unknowingly echoing the scene on the Atlantis Operations Deck, he stuck three fingers in his mouth and blew hard.
That seemed to freeze everyone, including the itchy-finger secret service agents present, and all faces turned his way. Including a vastly relieved POTUS.
“Jack! Thank God… Sorry, Secretary General, I’ll call you back… Yes, Mr. Prime Minister, you too… Everyone, I’ll call back in a few. Jack, we’re in a *situation* here!”
“So I see, Mr. President. But we’ve got plans in place. All we have to do is start implementing them.”
He pushed through the crowd to the big desk, and slapped down a pile of folders with red covers. He turned around to address the entire hubbub. “Come on folks! Those of you who were already read into Project Bluebook must know… it was only a matter of time before *someone* noticed that we aren’t exactly alone in the Universe. We’ve had at least four near misses in the past ten years – Apophis and Klorel way back in the beginning, then Anubis over the Antarctic, and most recently the Ori plague and the Wraith Super Hive that blew holes in the Nevada desert.
“And yeah, I understand that international treaties for the Antarctic made it necessary to move the Outpost Weapons Chair to Area 51, but, come on, *that* was an accident waiting to happen, and almost lost us the Chair altogether, along with the state of Nevada. *Anywhere* we put that thing makes a nice big target for our enemies. Thank God our people were able to patch it up, and wiser heads prevailed in letting us stick it back under the ice at the South Pole. And how some cruise ship didn’t crash into Atlantis while it was anchored off San Francisco Bay, I’ll never know, but it was only a matter of time before the Lucian Alliance landed a ha’tak on the White House lawn. We’ve been undeservedly lucky to get away with the secrecy this long.
“And, I gotta say this at least once, Mr. President, everyone, but… I *told* you so! The International Oversight Advisory board has been a disaster waiting to happen for years now! But… water under the bridge. Spilt milk. Now we tie a knot and carry on. Because this is our chance to turn a media nightmare into a new world order. We planned for this, people. It’s time to implement Operation Seventh Seal.”
President Henry Hayes, looking a lot more relieved than he had before Jack arrived, gestured to the General in charge of HomeWorld Security. “Go ahead, Jack. Brief the folks on Seventh Seal, because they won’t listen to me.”
Jack cocked an eye at his Commander-in-Chief. “Oo-kaay then, Mr. President. For those of you still hung up on ‘aliens, what aliens’, get over it. I still don’t know exactly what those IOA flunkies have spilled, but I imagine there’s a lot of missing and mis-information out there, enough to create exactly the kind of panic we don’t want.
“But now that the cat’s out of the bag, we have a documentary, by Emmett Bregman, that gives the 411 on Stargate Command. He updates every year or so, so it should be good to go, and we can’t do much better as an introduction to the Universe. Colonel Davis from my office has a power point briefing, a sort of Aliens 101, and a lot of you have been through it. We edit out the Wraith, and we can feed that to the masses, too. Then there’s over fifty hours of accumulated briefing videos that Dr. Daniel Jackson has made over the years, all of them suitable for family viewing, and almost all of them come with his personal translations into some thirty or forty different languages. I say we issue the whole lot of them, in order, on public television, BBC World, the internet, fucking YouTube… fight rumors with the truth, the way we want to tell it.”
He slapped his hand on the red folders. “And we do this, ASAP. In here is the First World Defense Initiative. It’s something we’ve been working on from the beginning, starting with General Hammond and all our smartest advisors, and that’s a whole lot of brain-power right there. Daniel has always claimed that the Stargate should *never* have been kept the secret of just one nation, but should be representative of the entire planet. Even keeping it the private business of IOA countries wasn’t good enough, as far as he’s concerned, and I fully agree. If the Secretary General of the United Nations is upset at being left out of the loop all this time, and who can blame him, I say we hand him this hot potato. Let him get as many countries as he can read in and signed up, as soon as he can.”
“Seventh Seal?” someone muttered. “‘And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven… And I saw the seven angels which stood before God; and to them were given seven trumpets… And the seven angels which had the seven trumpets prepared themselves to sound...’”
Jack nodded. “Exactly. Area 51 is crammed *full* of stuff we’ve been sitting on for years because of the secrecy around Project Bluebook. Advancements in medicine, agriculture, clean energy, tech of all kinds… stuff that can be of serious benefit to the entire world. Every single member of our scientist cohort have *years* of papers just waiting to be published, on medicine, bio-tech, agriculture, mathematics, sociology, history, anthropology, archeology, not to mention the virtual bombs our physics and astrophysics sections are about to drop on an unsuspecting academic community. Now, at last, we have the chance to get it all out there, do some good.
“Not to mention the systems we can now get into place for protecting the planet! Arthur’s Mantle, the satellite weapons platforms… if we’ve been incredibly lucky not to have the Stargate and aliens secrets blown wide before now, we’ve *also* been incredibly lucky the Lucians or the Wraith haven’t attacked. The Goa’uld, the Replicators, the Ori… there always seems to be another big bad guy on the horizon, who looks at our little blue marble, with its resources of air, water, food, energy and slaves, and *drools*. Daniel’s little effort at a world-wide diplomatic treaty, The First World Protection Pact, can address that problem. And about time, too.”
“So,” the President declared, looking invigorated and even a little enthused, “We baffle them with science, flood all the media with information, *our* information, and come clean on the Stargate. SG teams as heroes, look at all the dead false gods, look at all our allies, look at our nifty spaceships… oh, and, those of you who have laughed at Dr. Jackson all this time, guess what, he was right! Want a space adventure? Here’s where you apply. And, oh yes, if you thought *Wormhole X-treme!* and Thom E. Gemcity’s latest might just be the truth packaged as fiction… hell, you’re right too! I like it. I’m excited about this plan. We’re going with it.
“So while I call the Secretary General back, and some of you other guys make yourselves useful and call the leaders of the countries that were part of the now-defunct IOA, Jack, you get Bregman on the line. I want his documentary run tonight, every channel, and I’ll address the world after. And prepare to call Colonel Carter back to Earth. She’s in charge of the First World Defense Initiative and getting our satellites in the air, as soon as the UN gets us enough signatures on our Protection Pact. Declassification is a go, people. Right, team? Any questions? Then go to it!”
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In a back corner of the Oval Office, taking advantage of the chaos with some assurance that they were being completely ignored by everyone around them, Generals Hank Landry and Ulysses Stahl, both with the Joint Chiefs, were huddled with Senator Aubrey Evans, chairman of a number of influential committees, including Senate Appropriations.
“Jesus… he was ready for this,” Stahl complained bitterly.
Hank cocked him an eye. “You thought he wouldn’t be? You realize you may have just played straight into Jack’s hands? Far as he’s concerned, not only does he get to ditch the IOA, something he has *dearly* wanted for years, but he gets to push through his planet defense plans, all of which would be impossible without Declassification. I think I may have mentioned it once or twice…” Yeah, Hank was *loving* this. “And once they get the Mantle up, or whatever other barrier Carter and McKay have up their sleeves, there’ll be no getting through it. Not from our friends out there, or if anyone on our end needs to do a quick retreat in the face of overwhelming forces…”
Military man Stahl might grimace at that, but Evans merely shrugged. “If our so-called off-world friends can’t breach it, no big loss. We didn’t actually plan to honor our promises to them anyway, did we? As for escape routes… that’s what the gate is for, surely.”
“Only if you can get through it,” Hank admitted. “And with all of the attempts to do an end run around SGC security lately… including way too many spies, double agents, rogue agents, not to mention symbiotes and that bloody bomb… well. The big boss might have a bit of a challenge, there. I can pretty much guarantee they’ve started scanning for naquadah and X-raying for symbiotes again.”
Evans looked particularly shifty… not a stretch for the politician. “And… this would be a bad thing, why?”
Stahl looked sour a moment, before he seemed to fall into agreement.
Hank chuckled, shaking his head. “So much for loyalty among allies, eh, gentlemen?”
“You tell me, General,” Evans snapped back. “If we go through with our plans, how many of them would honor their deals with *us*, or be satisfied with an equal slice of the pie? You watch *‘Survivor’* at all? You need strength of numbers in the beginning, when it’s team work and skills that gets you furthest. But as you get closer to the goal, you need to ditch any alliances that don’t serve your own interests. The very things that make someone of value to you in the beginning, make them a threat the closer to the end-game you get. It’s not a case of *if*, but *when* to cut ties. And that’s the tricky part.”
“So that’s your political platform and personal strategy? The snake versus the rat?” Landry asked, mildly amused.
“You are perfectly free to disagree. But I don’t notice you sticking by your old buddy Jack. He certainly cut you loose soon enough.”
Landry smiled and held up his hands. “True enough. Jack isn’t one for sharing the wealth, either.”
With a face like thunder, the Secretary of Defense, Raphael Dante, paced out of the throng, seeming to need to get as far from others as possible, while unable to bear leaving the room entirely.
“Bloody, stubborn, short-sighted, annoying...” he muttered as he brushed against Stahl to stand and stare at a portrait of some past president or other.
“Trouble, Rafe?” Landry asked lightly. Landry hadn’t worked with the man very much before he had been re-assigned to the Pentagon JCS, and hadn’t been overly impressed with what little he had heard on the grape-vine. Dante had never been in uniform, but he had been the CEO of a major defense contractor, supplying support staff to the various branches of the military. Word was he had bought his way onto the Cabinet, supported by a number of major lobby groups who shared and wanted his hard-line conservative views to be represented. Medium height, stocky, swarthy and olive-skinned, his most remarkable features were shrewd beady black eyes that could pierce you at twenty paces.
Dante glared at Landry, Stahl and Evans. “I guess our Commander in Chief has forgotten who his Secretary of Defense is. Who should be the one to make the decisions on what defensive strategies we need to deploy. I’ve never even *seen* that plan O’Neill dropped on Hayes’ desk, but suddenly... that’s what we’re going with. Big-ass orbital guns? Shouldn’t I have been informed we even *had* anything like that? And since we do have them, why the hell haven’t we used them before this?”
Landry had to work hard to bite his tongue on that one... No one at HomeWorld had *ever* wanted someone firing the kind of weapons they had acquired over the years, not on *anyone* on Earth.
But Stahl actually commiserated. “They shut out the whole JCS on that one, too, Rafe. There’s going to be a lot of hurt feelings around the Pentagon for the next little while.”
“It’s subverting the proper hierarchy and trashed chain of command! I should have damn well been informed! *Before* we started to move on any of it! Did you see that, though? It was like there was nobody else even in the room! It’s like O’Neill has already taken over.”
Stahl and Evans shared a shudder with Dante, much to Landry’s amusement.
Adding fuel to the fire, Landry commented idly, “Well you all saw it. The only one who had a plan coming here this morning was Jack. The rest of you were all running around like chickens with the heads cut off, so what do you expect? And that includes you, Rafe. So is it any wonder, the only one Hayes listened to... Jack. I don’t expect that situation to change much, do you? And if you ask me, the only one the world will be listening to for the next little while will be Jack O’Neill. And that’s only going to get worse when they find out what a big fat hero the man is... once some of his mission reports get spread around, and people realise how many times he and his team have *already* saved the goddamned planet…”
Evans groaned. “He’ll have the world on his plate.”
None of Hank’s companions liked that idea... not one bit. Hank could only chuckle, and wonder how long it would take them to figure out what Hank already knew... their plans for global domination, or even US control, were for shit... unless they took Jack out of the picture first. Yeah, good luck with that. And even then, once the First World Defense Initiative was launched, that door would be slammed shut good and proper.
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It was easier to slip into the Spirit Plane during sleep, but Spencer had found it possible to get there with meditation as well. Teyla and Teal’c had both taught him some useful skills in that area, of much benefit in stilling his often over-active mind. Again, it was easier at night, somehow, when the bio-rhythms of those around him had quieted and slowed, when the city itself quieted and slowed… something about silver moon light, the hush of waves lapping at the feet of the towers, the gentle, almost undetectable sway of the floating platform beneath the city, like barely-remembered rocking in a cradle, or in warm arms in a rocking chair… yeah, there were times and places where it was easier. And with all the tension and upset on the city right now, only adding to his own sense of alarm and urgency, it all meant getting into the proper frame of mind would take some doing.
So he retreated to the Aquarium. Luckily, it was deserted right now, so he didn’t have to toss anyone out. And as he looked out into the blue shadows of the surrounding ocean, he thought he saw huge, dark shapes drifting out past the clarity of the water… he thought it might be the alien whales Rodney had told him about.
As he sat and folded his legs into a lotus, he closed his eyes… and thought maybe he could sense a curiosity, a concern and sympathy, just drifting on the edge of awareness, too. But he resolutely shut his mind to that, just as he had to the distress of a mate and mother, and a lot of furious and half-feral Protectors. He waited for Bast to crawl into his lap, so he could clutch at her soft fur and let her rumbling purr settle him…
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…and stepped into the blue jungle glade. Cougar Bast growled and padded before him. A rustle of bushes, and lioness Oma joined them on the right. Another rustle, and coyote Luke loped out of the shadows to take their left flank.
Spencer let the spirit familiars lead, as he listened, and occasionally called, for Tony and little Tali.
The familiars led him further into the jungle, rather than out to the sentinel plain, or the haunted jungle beyond. They were hunting, just as he was, casting left and right, sniffing the air, seeking…
Spencer stood still and just… listened.
And then he heard it. Or maybe felt it. Oma’s head swiveled toward the noise, the faintest echo of sniffles and soft sobbing. She roared out defiance, anger, challenge, and began to run, her cat-like body sprung and coiled and charging flat out, as if she had scented an antelope and was starving. Bast’s cougar form managed, barely, to keep pace. Coyote Luke was smaller and better able to dodge through the undergrowth to keep up. Spencer ran as fast as he knew how, but he soon lost all three familiars in the jungle tangles. So he stopped and listened once more… and managed to triangulate.
She was hidden under a large flowering bush, huddled into an almost fetal ball, head buried in her little arms, shuddering and struggling to keep silent. But her little shoulders were shaking with it, and she could barely hold in the sobs. The sniffles came louder and wetter all the time.
“Tali? Sweetheart? Can you hear me? Can you see me? It’s Uncle Spencer, baby. I’m here.”
Green eyes peeked over her arms at him, almost blind with tears. “Unco ‘Pen?”
“That’s right. It’s me.”
He sat by her bush, and opened his arms, waiting for her. She rushed into his lap with a convulsive cry, then began crying in earnest, wailing out her fear and grief and upset. Luckily, on the Spirit Plane, things like little kicking feet or pointy knees digging into his swollen stomach or groin didn’t have much impact. She might have tried to use her words, but mostly wasn’t succeeding, barely able to gulp out a few “Daddy!”s. He just had to wait her out. Soon enough, Oma, Bast and Luke found them there. Luke looked over his shoulder once or twice, anxious, but then huffed and settled next to the other two familiars, acknowledging that Tali was the priority right now. His human would be the first to insist.
Tali was a bright and precocious child, it was true, but she was still only three and a half. Spencer wasn’t sure how much help she would be in determining a location to search. He would at least be able to reassure Teyla that the child was alive and well, and his hope was that she was still with her father. If he could reach Tony, even if the man was unconscious, the agent would be able to tell them where the pair was.
It took a while... in this spirit place time was a little hard to determine, but eventually, Tali’s sobs quieted. She stuck her thumb in her mouth and sucked for comfort as she soaked up the reassurance of Spencer’s arms. Oma, a calico kitten once more, shoved into Spencer’s lap to get her human’s attention, and Tali began patting her pet.
“Tali? Sweetie? Can you tell me what happened?”
Green eyes threatened tears once more. “It was my eema. My Daddy was so mad to see her… She took us to a gold room... Then the scary man came. Daddy fell down and the scary man grabbed me. I didn’t want to leave my Daddy! But my Daddy fell down, and the scary man made the other men put us back.”
“Put you back?”
Tali sniffled and nodded. “Me and the scary man and my eema. He tol’ them he had things to do, my eema had things to do... and then there was a white light and it was all trees. My eema went away... I called to her but she went away... and it was just me and the scary man.”
Spencer could see it in the tiny girl’s memories, clear, if vague, her limited understanding of what she saw coloring her impressions. A shadow-darkened forest, surrounded by tall thick stands of north-west pines, and Ziva, still in a blonde wig and business suit, hefting a canvas bag to one shoulder, long, heavy… A sniper case? With a nod to her father, no attention whatsoever to her daughter, turning and disappearing into a break in the trees…
“The scary man took me to a car, and the car took me... I dunno. A big house.”
A car. Familiar architecture on the busy streets of a moderately sized town… Definitely Earth, almost certainly North America…
“I tol’ him I wanted my Daddy! But the scary man didn’t listen. He tol’ me to be good. He tol’ me to be quiet. He tol’ me not to cry. He said I should call him Zaydeh. I want my Daddy! I want my momma Tey!”
“I know, baby. I do. Listen, Tali. Listen, okay? Can you shut your eyes for me? Good. Now... I’m going to do something with you that I’ve never tried before. But if you can sit quiet, and let me see with your eyes, maybe I can tell where you are in the waking world. Okay? Can we try that? It might feel a bit weird for a moment, you might feel me inside your head... but can we try it?”
Tali nodded, looking trustingly up into his face. “Uh hunh.” Then she closed her eyes and waited.
Gingerly, Spencer felt his way inside the little girl’s head... it was like dipping into pure, cold, clean water. The emotions were pure, too, elemental, fear and anger and outrage, and grief at the loss of a strong presence that had given her little life love, stability and a sense of security for months now. It was almost as overwhelming to him as to her. He shivered with it.
“Okay... now let’s open our eyes, and I’ll see what you see.”
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Eli David, the ‘scary man’, the more scary in his thick black beard, streaked with white, long curly iron grey hair and glasses, was somewhere on Earth. That much was clear from what Tali said, and the décor of the room bore that out. It was a hotel suite of some kind, somewhere, judging by the floral patterns in curtains, wallpaper and furniture upholstery. Nondescript still life prints were framed on the walls, the tasteful accessories, bedside lamps, framed mirrors, dried flower vases, all displayed a lack of personality. The ubiquitous small coffee maker sat on the dresser next to the dark TV screen. Spencer didn’t note any writing anywhere to give him an idea of language. Tali was lying on a sofa, under a woven plaid afghan, well big enough to cover her.
There was a knock at the door, and Eli went to open it. A woman entered, middle aged, salt-and-pepper hair pulled into a bun at the nape of her neck, dressed in a pant suit of dark navy with a white blouse, minimal jewelry and minimal make-up. She would disappear into any crowd. She said nothing, merely nodded to him, almost a salute of respect and obedience. It wasn’t anyone Tali knew. Eli whispered to her, but neither Tali nor Spencer could make out any words. The pair kept glancing around at Tali. Then Eli gestured, and both adults approached the sofa.
“I have much to do, and I need a safe place to keep my granddaughter hidden, until I am ready to call for her.” Eli spoke in English… that was something of a clue, anyway. “All the paperwork and identification you will require are in the package I gave you, all forged of course, but excellent forgeries. There is an account in your name with your fee and more than enough to cover any expenses you may incur. There is bound to be a hue and cry for her… but if you dye her hair black and dress her as a boy, there need be no suspicion as to who she really is. On no account allow her to be examined by any medical professional. Her zed status must not be revealed. You know how to contact me should you encounter any difficulty, or need more money.”
“Yes, sir,” nodded the woman, her accent definitely Israeli, but she spoke English all the same.
“Tali. This is a good friend of mine. You will call her Dodah Irene. She will call you Tamir, and care for you while I am busy elsewhere. You will behave yourself and be good for her.”
“I want my Daddy! I want my momma Tey! I can be good for them.”
An angry snarl escaped the ‘scary man’. “You will not see DiNozzo or his woman again. You will not mention them again. They are as dead to you. You understand, Talia? You do not mention them, you do not even *think* of them, ever again! And your new name is Tamir.”
For a moment, it seemed the angry and stubborn daughter of Tony DiNozzo would launch into a screaming fit, rejecting this demand. But Spencer put a cautioning mental hand on her shoulder, urging her to accept and obey, for now at least. When Tali’s eyes watered and her breathing started coming in gasps, Spencer tried to soothe her. But her upset and grief, her fear of ‘Zaydeh’, without the strength her anger and resistance would have lent her, overcame her, and Spencer felt himself being abruptly kicked out of her small head.
Tali was on Earth, and Eli was already passing his granddaughter off to someone else. But maybe that was just as well, all things considered.
Spencer tried to console the little girl when she was back in his arms in the blue jungle, having cried herself out of the waking world once more.
“Hush, sweetie. Hush now… look, here beside you, do you see this?”
Oma was back in her large lioness form, looking every inch the queen of beasts, savage and strong and equal to any challenge. The little girl should have been terrified, but her sobs and gasping dwindled quickly, her pretty green eyes opened wide, and she was able to smile a little, those DiNozzo dimples showing.
“You know who this is.”
“It’s Oma.”
“Yes it is. And she’ll be with you all the time, awake and asleep. If you get frightened or angry or lonely, you just remember Oma is there, and so are we. Me, your daddy, momma Tey, all our friends on the city. Right?
“We’ll find a way out of this. I’ll find your daddy, and he’ll be able to come and meet you here in the sleeping spirit world, okay? You be good, do what they tell you, but don’t you worry about your daddy or momma Tey. We’ll find you, sweetie, and we’ll get you back home. I promise.”
Maybe it was unwise of him to make such a promise… maybe it bordered on a lie… or at least, a promise he had no way to guarantee… but as long as he could maintain this connection to Tali, so could Tony. Together they would find a way to rescue an innocent little girl who didn’t deserve to be made a pawn of a ‘scary’ man’s ambition.
When Tali was sleeping soundly in this realm too, Spencer settled her back under her bush, with Oma a large and intimidating presence protecting her. The lion gave him a nod and a promise to guard her precious human. Spencer went his way, Bast and Luke on either side.
He still had one missing person to locate, if he could.
Å
Tony went straight from unconscious to awake, with a jangling, burning, skin-jumping electric itch, as if he had stuck his wet finger in a power socket, or been struck by lightning. Those damned zats…
The last face Tony expected to wake up to was Bas’er of Netu, the jaffa Lucian Alliance prisoner who had escaped from Atlantis custody in the wake of the rogue Genii invasion. But maybe that was just him being stupid, because, of course, the guy would still be circling in Eli David’s orbit. Although the guy still had that black tattoo on his forehead, he had managed to score some new clothes and armor. Oh yeah, and quite a bit more attitude.
But maybe the guy was entitled because, yes, it was now Tony in a six-by-six foot cell. Three walls were a fetching but over-done gold-plate, covered in Egyptian symbols Daniel would no doubt love, with a sparking sci-fi force field across the front. Tony groaned as he levered himself up off a narrow and hard-as-a-board cot, not long enough for him to stretch out, taking note that Luke was sitting large as life in a corner of the cell.
His kids. Oh god, his kids… Tey was going to *kill* him for this, and he would never hear the end of the ‘told you so’s from *everyone*. And desperate as he was to dive into the blue jungle spirit plane to make contact and see what the hell had happened to Tali and TJ, he knew that until he had shaken off the effects of the zat, there wasn’t a hope in hell.
So he was left with just one source of urgently needed information, and he seriously doubted the guy was willing to cooperate.
“My daughter? Tali?” he asked at once.
“With Eli David,” Bas’er smirked happily. Oookay. So, one over-the-top Bond villain willing to spill the big evil plan to the captured hero. Good, then. Or maybe it was just the bastard could torture Tony more with the brutal truth, so there was no incentive to hide it from him. “He’s back on your planet, as is his daughter, scheming their schemes.”
“My son? TJ?”
The jaffa frowned briefly. “We only brought Eli’s daughter, the child and you on board.”
Yeah, that rat bastard Gibbs had been holding TJ… that *utter and complete bastard*! Oh, he was so massively, sincerely, *pissed* it defied description! How could he? How *could* he? No matter how bad things were between them, no matter what else had happened… he would *never* have thought Gibbs could betray him so… so thoroughly! Not even for Ziva, the schmuck, the utter gullible *schmuck*! And calling in Senior? That *utter and complete bastard*!
“That was all we intended to bring up,” Bas’er continued chatting idly, leaning on a big staff thing… staff weapon, Teal’c called his similar lance-like contraption. “The child was our true target, to satisfy our agreement with Eli, to secure his granddaughter for him. You were a pleasant bonus. He thought you might be difficult to separate from the child. But no matter. Eli was prepared for this. He cares little what we do with you, as long as you are out of his way. And you have a value, zed. You can operate the gate-builder tech with ease, and you have much experience, gained on the lost city itself.”
Yeah, Tony got that.
Bas’er’s grin only got wider, however, when he added, “And you have caught the eye of Nun.”
Okay, Tony needed a moment to process that one… He’d caught the eye of none? “So, what, I’m invisible now? You seem able to see me just fine.”
Bas’er frowned briefly again, before he huffed and rolled his eyes – very un-jaffa-like. You’d never catch Teal’c rolling his eyes like that, even at O’Neill’s worst jokes. The lifted eyebrow of doom, maybe…
“No, zed. The Goa’uld Lord Nun. He wears a host body too old to be comely, and too notorious to be safe walking on your Earth, or go undetected. He needs a new form, and he has chosen yours. This time tomorrow, you will be but a memory in your own mind, your body possessed by another.”
Oh *hell* no!
This whole thing just kept getting worse and worse. Carson had told them this, hadn’t he? That rat- bastard, the ex-Vice President of the United States and Trust sympathizer, Robert Kinsey, was currently walking around as a meat suit for a goa’uld… Yeah, the name was Nun. Stupid name. So stupid it was way too easy a target for jokes… but he needed more intel.
“And where are we right now?”
“In Lord Nun’s tel’tak, on approach to Jorac. He has ordered us to prepare the claiming ceremony, while he makes himself… presentable.”
Tony lifted one eyebrow. “Shouldn’t that be, making *my*self presentable? If he’s just going to drop his old body like last year’s Armani, why should he care what it looks like?”
Bas’er snickered. “Your cat attacked him. He bears claw marks across his face.”
“Ah.” Luke found his way to Tony’s lap, and the agent congratulated the familiar. “Good going, Luke. So showing up with bleeding wounds won’t exactly up his street cred, I guess?”
“He will be a laughing stock. Already the story has spread to everyone on this ship.”
“Uh hunh. I bet he isn’t too happy about that. Well…”
There was an alarm over whatever ship-wide address system the tel’tak had, in Goa’uld that Tony could now understand because he had been through the gate system so much. It ended with a barked out, “Jaffa Kree!”
“Well, I guess you better get going then,” Tony advised glumly.
Bas’er seemed a little reluctant to give up his taunting of the prisoner, but jaffa were passing the open door to the prison section, so Bas’er reluctantly joined them. They weren’t going far. The tel’tak was a smallish vessel, and the cargo deck where they’d been ordered to congregate was right next door. Tony could even see a slice of it from his cell when he stood as close as possible to the tingling of the force-field barrier.
The crew and staff of the ship assembled, ranged in orderly rows, armor clacking in one loud explosion of noise as they came to rigid attention on command… but then there was a livid sputter of blue-white light, a moment of waiting, baited silence… then another simultaneous clacking of armored plates, as all twenty-odd men fell to the floor. Then one more flash of electric staticy light… and a third. And all he could see from his vantage was shiny polished floor.
Empty.
Okay… harsh. Tony could only speculate what the hell that was all about.
Then he heard distant shouts, the grinding of a gang-way lowering, soldiers marching in. Two peeled off to enter his little hallway, one guy pressed some control on the wall, and the force field dropped. With a curt gesture, no words, Tony was pulled out and prodded out of the tel’tak and onto another ship. The tel’tak runabout had evidently been landed inside another much larger ship, on its cargo deck.
Luke seemed to have no trouble following closely behind, and none of the numerous crew and staff of this ship gave him a moment’s notice.
It was another vessel coated liberally in gold and hieroglyphs, with maze-like hallways going every which-way. Tony didn’t bother trying to memorize the route for a return. His guards escorted him to one hall, opened a door – he missed how they did that – and pushed him inside. Luke bounded in to slip around at his ankles.
Then, before he had properly taken his bearings, he heard a familiar voice with a Scottish lilt to it announce, “Tony! Fancy seeing you here!”
“Carson?”
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Colonel Samantha Carter’s day was showing no sign of slowing down, at all. And since this was the Pegasus Galaxy, where barely-suppressed panic was the order of any given day, why should it be different today?
Jack wanted her back on Earth ASAP, along with Teal’c, Daniel and Rodney, and no one was happy about that. If you take Rodney, you had to take Sheppard and Meredith Joy, and Rodney did *not* want his kid anywhere near a recent zed-child-kidnapping site, let alone to a zed-unfriendly country like the United States. And if Sam, McKay and Sheppard were leaving the city, that left Woolsey, Major Lorne and Radek Zelenka in charge of the admin, military and sciences divisions, and that might prove to be a problem. It wouldn’t be so bad if Teyla was in her right mind and fulfilling her unacknowledged role as ranking Pegasus native, but… well, Teyla was *not* in her right mind, and wouldn’t be, couldn’t be, until DiNozzo and the kids were returned safe and sound. As for Daniel, he was reluctant to leave Vala, and even more reluctant to jump into the media feeding-frenzy that would be going on back home for the foreseeable future.
And then Chuck announced an unscheduled off-world activation of their stargate.
Terrific.
“It’s the Travelers’ IDC, ma’am,” he supplied.
With a gesture to the gate guards to be on their toes, Sam nodded, and Chuck dropped the gate shield. And Captain Kysol came through, along with Commander Larrin at her side. Larrin might not be too popular with Sheppard, since she lost no opportunities to remind him of the time she had held him bound to a chair and at her mercy as she flirted wildly with him… so she wasn’t too popular with Rodney either. But Sam liked and respected the Traveler leader well enough. She had certainly longed to have a few of her own male cohorts tied to a chair and at her complete mercy…
Standing between the two women was a scruffy, tattered-looking male who seemed a little…
Suddenly, Dr. Reid was there at her side, frowning, Cameron rushing to catch up from whatever sprint the FBI profiler had made to get up here. Last she had heard, their second agent afloat was still trying to connect with his boss. Little Tali DiNozzo was somewhere on Earth, alive, if shaken and terrified, but had been separated from her father, so they still had no idea where he was, or what his condition.
“Any luck?” Sam asked, hoping for a brief answer even as she prepared to meet their guests. It was almost unprecedented, that Travelers would leave their ships to travel by stargate, so this could not be good news.
At least the agent was brief. He merely shook his head, then pointed to their guests. “But that man is… *devastated*.”
Yeah, he had that shell-shocked look to him.
“Captain, Commander. Welcome to Atlantis. May I offer refreshments?” Manners first.
“No time,” Kysol answered. “May we use your conference room? You need to hear this man’s story.”
Larrin was peering around as more and more expedition members seemed to appear out of nowhere. “I don’t suppose Sheppard is around? He should join us.” Her smile was definitely predatory, and Sam could understand, after having read the reports of this woman’s… interaction with her fellow Colonel. And yes, Sheppard was suddenly there, smirking at Larrin, even as Rodney shoved him away.
“No touching,” Rodney commanded sternly, holding Meredith Joy to his chest and glaring at the Traveler Commander.
Amused, Larrin bowed to the will of a Veralin. “Cute baby,” she commented to Sheppard. “Yours?”
“Oh yeah.”
Those present with any excuse crowded into the conference room and quickly sorted to seats, while Kysol gently guided the shaken man. He was tall, dark blonde hair, and would be good looking after a shower, shave, a meal or three and a good twenty-four hours sleep.
“This is Varro. We found him in a damaged little ship he called a ‘death glider’, says he was lieutenant of a man named Masen, leader of clan Hauhet of the Lucian Alliance.”
There were gasps all around at this.
Sam frowned sternly. “You serve the Lucian Alliance, Varro?”
The stricken man swallowed and shook his head. “No longer. There is no one left to serve. My clan… they are all dead. Masen thought to make an alliance with the Wraith… we met with one hive, when six more appeared… seven hives… all seemed peaceful, until… they attacked. We were overwhelmed by numbers… no chance… their culling beams sliced through every shield we had… I could see the numbers of living bodies disappearing on my scanners… I gave the order to run… only I was lucky enough to escape.”
Sam felt her stomach lurch. “Did your leader know the location of Earth? Did any of your clan?”
Varro looked her in the eye with despair. “They all knew it. As do I.”
Kysol nodded. “Then so do the Wraith.”
Terrific…
Clutching his baby daughter protectively to his chest, Rodney stuck out that pugnacious chin of his, and said, “Then it’s a good thing we have the First World Defense Initiative on the table, isn’t it? Sam, I guess I’ll be coming with you to Earth after all. You’ll need my help, if we’re to get it up and running in the shortest possible time-frame.”
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