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Part One:  Bad Penny

It seems like some folks never do get a break – or when they get one, they’re so used to it not working out that they let it slip right outta their hands.  My buddy Jack Dalton’s like that.  He’s tried more new schemes and made more fresh starts than I can count, but the only ones he sticks with are the ones that don’t go anywhere.

He turned up one day with a treasure map.  Well, not exactly a map; he’d been hanging out online with the nutjobs on Usenet, and something he picked up on alt.conspiracy.area51 led him to meeting some shady type in a bar on the bad side of LA.  Okay, one of the bad sides of LA.  I never did get the details straight, but I know money changed hands more than once, and Jack talked to a whole string of people whose names all seemed to be Smith, and next thing you know he was at the marina, hammering on my door, too excited about his great scheme to answer questions about where he’d been, why he smelled so bad, and who had messed up his face and given him a black eye this time.

What he had was an old handwritten journal, which was supposed to have a map in it.  We worked our way through the entries that were supposed to be clues, solved the puzzles, and ended up with nada.  No map.  Jack handed me the journal and went back to Usenet hoping for a new golden goose, and I gave the journal to my archeologist friend Dr. Lacie Najjar.

Two weeks later, she was pitching an exploratory mission to the Phoenix committee for Research Funding.  Six months after that, Pete was helping her patch together enough grants for a dig in the hills inland from Palaepaphos, in southwest Cyprus – the Greek side of Cyprus, that is, not the Turkish side.  By early 1998, she’d got the first reports published on their finds, her professional cred had hit the stratosphere, and getting funding for the next season was a heck of a lot easier.  Jack Dalton was mentioned in the footnotes with having ‘provided invaluable assistance leading to the original discovery’, but since they weren’t finding gold coins or jeweled doodads, he wasn’t real interested any more.

By the fall of ‘98, when Dr. Najjar cabled me asking me to come right now please, Dalton had gone back to doing his stage magician act, which gave him plenty of time to hang out online.  I didn’t tell him I was going out to Cyprus.  I didn’t think he’d want to hear about it.

The first thing MacGyver noticed, waking up on his fourth day at the dig, was that it was quiet.  As in, way too quiet.  Empty quiet.  Bad quiet.

He stumbled out into the bright October morning sunshine, blinking and running a hand through his already wild hair.  The night before, Lacie had started dropping hints that she was really glad to see him, and that she thought friendship wasn’t at all what she had in mind, and Mac had decided it would be safer not to go back to his tent.  Some hints get dropped lightly, others land like a bowling ball on the toes.  Harry hadn’t said that, but he should have.  The temperature at night was still mild, so he had snagged a spare blanket to pad the hard ground, wadded up his unneeded jacket for a pillow, and found a nice quiet corner well out of the way.

Mac shook his head, trying to clear it.  It was a shame that the dig site was up in the hills, miles away from any body of water.  If they’d been working in Palaepaphos, the ocean would have been nice and handy.  A quick swim would’ve been nice – although, the way this trip was going, he’d probably end up with mermaids or sea-borne nymphs or something like that.

The camp was still completely quiet, and there should have been noise.  There should have been activity:  with the tourist season over, Lacie had hired help from Pachna, the nearest town.  It was too early for the local help to arrive, but they were expecting supplies to be delivered that morning.  At the very least, the graduate archeology interns – three Greek Cypriots from the University of Cyprus in Nicosia – should have been getting breakfast ready and grumbling.

MacGyver was beginning to wonder if he’d stumbled into a Twilight Zone episode when he spotted Lacie, the only other person in sight.  She was sitting at the foot of the escarpment that bounded the camp to the north, in front of the passage that opened into the hillside, the heart of the dig.  She didn’t seem to be doing anything:  just sitting and staring at nothing, her hands hanging slackly in her lap.

Behind her, the passage was swallowed in darkness after only a few feet, the bright sunlight ending in a sharp line of shadow where the passage seemed to end.  It was a false wall, concealing an abrupt turn that opened into a whole series of chambers, passages, and twisting corridors:  that had been the critical discovery, much bigger than any unlikely artifacts they’d found, the one that had lifted the obscure site from a minor spot on Cyprus’ crowded archeological map to a ‘potentially major find’.  The tomb – if it was a tomb – was a complete aberration:  in the wrong style for the locale and the era, and in the wrong location, miles from the ancient capital city and seaport of Palaepaphos, up in the twisty hills beyond the cultivated areas, even beyond the ever-spreading tide of development that was beginning to turn Cyprus into a shallow, glossy imitation of every other resort haven in the world.

Mac looked hastily around the dig.  Nothing seemed to be broken or missing; even the tools were still where they’d been left at the end of the previous day.  They hadn’t discovered anything that could be stolen, anyway, not unless there were antiquities thieves capable of stealing an entire hill.

He hurried over to where Lacie was sitting, his shadow falling across her face and etching a dark line on the light stone and earth of the hillside behind her.

“Dr. Najjar?  Lacie?  You okay?  Are you hurt?”  She didn’t look hurt, just dazed.  She shook her head and blinked at him, her eyes coming into focus.  “Lacie, don’t you think it’s about time you filled me in on what’s goin’ on?”

She looked around and frowned.

“When you sent that cable, you said it was important.  You asked me to come right away.  Then, when I got here, you said it was ‘hard to explain’.”  Best not to mention the previous night’s awkward exchange, unless she brought it up.

“MacGyver – ”  Lacie stood up, shakily; he caught her arm and steadied her.  “What the hell am I doing out here?”

“You don’t know?”

“A minute ago, we were cleaning up after that awful dinner Ioannis made, and you said something about the moon rising.”  She scowled at the sun.  “It’s morning.  Where is everyone?  What the hell happened?”

“You don’t, um, remember?”  Mac felt his neck reddening.  He told himself it was relief.

Lacie narrowed her eyes.  “Is there something I should be remembering?”

The question was unanswerable, and Mac felt a new wave of relief – cooling instead of warming this time – at the sound of a Jeep approaching at the highest speed the dirt road could manage safely.

The driver wasn’t a local; he was a massively tall black man with an impassive face and an incongruous straw hat pulled low on his forehead.  The passenger was anything but impassive; he peered around at the trenches, the worktables and sieving station, and the passage opening, as if familiar with the sights of an active dig.  He hurried up to where Mac and Lacie stood and held out a hand.

“Hello, I’m Doctor Jackson . . . ” his voice trailed off as he peered up at Mac, seeming suddenly confused.

Lacie broke in.  “Dr. Jackson – as in Daniel Jackson?”  He turned to her and held out his hand; she folded her arms.  “I’m Dr. Najjar.  What the hell do you think you’re doing on my dig site?”

Dr. Jackson shifted from gaping at Mac to gaping at Lacie.  “Excuse me?  I didn’t think we’d met.”

“We haven’t.  I read part of one of your so-called papers, a few years ago – although that was probably the last time you published anything, right?  Unless you’ve found a good agent for fantasy novels.  If you’re barging in on my dig looking for evidence for your so-called theories – ”

“Whoa!”  MacGyver broke in.  “Wait a minute, awright?  Lacie, who is this guy, and what’s the problem?”

“You don’t know?  Well, you never did get into the Egyptology side of the field, did you?  Daniel Jackson here is the Erich von Däniken of the new generation, except he actually reached a respectable academic height before falling into a vat of alien Kool-aid.  He had all these crazy ideas, which he managed to publish, about space aliens building the pyramids to use as spaceships . . . ”

“Excuse me.”  Jackson seemed to have snapped out of his bemusement; he was suddenly focused, gesturing emphatically and speaking rapidly.  “You can laugh at my theories, but that doesn’t mean you should misrepresent them.  I never implied that anyone but the Egyptians built the actual pyramids.  The Egyptians were a wonderful race with a highly advanced Bronze Age technological culture, fully capable of building megalithic stone monuments with basic tools alone, but yes, some of the pyramids were landing platforms for spaceships.  You could at least entertain, in theory, the possibility that both of these things might be true.”

Lacie looked on the edge of an explosion that might have buried the camp deeper than Pompeii.  Jackson interrupted her before she could even start to speak.

“Anyway.  I’m not here because of any academic theories, okay?  And, if you don’t mind my asking – well, even if you do – it seems to me that your camp’s awfully empty.  It’s not Sunday.  Today isn’t a holiday.  Where’s your staff?”

Lacie looked too angry to reply coherently, so Mac stepped in.  “Fact is, we’re not sure.”

Jackson studied him with a strange intensity.  “I’m, um, sorry – what was your name?”

“MacGyver.”  Mac shook the man’s proffered hand.

“Daniel Jackson.  And this is Teal’c.”  Another handshake, and Mac braced himself for the kind of brutal squeeze that usually came from men with something to prove to strangers.  When the grip was a precisely measured firm clasp instead, he was startled but relieved; ‘Teal’c’ looked like he could do some real damage.

“So what brings you out here, Dr. Jackson?” Mac asked.  “We’re kinda out of the way.”

“Yeah, no kidding.  It wasn’t easy to find you out here, you know . . . ”

“Oh, give me a break,” Lacie snapped.  “All you had to do was ask for directions in Limassol and then ask again in Pachna.  For a few lira, you could even have hired someone to drive you.  Or are you too hard up for that?”

The black man spoke for the first time.  “We were unable to secure a local driver.  They refused to assist us.  They seemed frightened to approach this place.”

“Oh, give me a break already!” Lacie snapped.  “This isn’t some damned cliché of a benighted backwater where the locals are wallowing in superstition.  This is Cyprus.  My graduate interns are locals, for god’s sake!”

“And they’re gone, too,”  Mac said slowly.  “It looks like they ran away in the night.”

Daniel Jackson was staring at MacGyver again.  “This is really hard to take in,” he murmured.  “Um, Mr. MacGyver – ”

“Just MacGyver.”

“Okay.  MacGyver.  I don’t suppose you have any – relatives – in the military?”

“Me?”  Mac blinked in astonishment.

“He hasn’t got any relatives at all,” Lacie interrupted.

“Um, well, I do, kinda.  I’ve got a cousin who’s in the Air Force, or who was.  I haven’t seen him in years.”  Mac shrugged.  “We never had much in common.”

“Make that never had anything in common.” 

In the heat of discussion and frayed nerves, none of them had noticed when the second Jeep had arrived.  Mac whirled and stared at the man in BDUs who was now sauntering towards them.  Behind him, another figure in field uniform, a woman, was clambering out of the vehicle.

“Hiya, Mac.  You still goin’ by ‘Mac’?”

MacGyver found his voice.  “Hello, Jack.  You still goin’ by ‘goon’?”

“I don’t get it, Jack.”  Daniel and Teal’c were helping Jack unload the gear from the Jeeps.  “You’ve never mentioned him.”

“Ya know that whole not-liking-geeks thing of mine?”  A nod and an eyebrow twitch replied.  “You don’t think it started with Daniel, do you?”

“Did you grow up together?”  Daniel never did know when to stop pushing.

“No.”  Jack hauled out a heavy pack and handed it to Teal’c, who took it one-handed with no apparent effort.  “We started that way, but my family moved around a lot.  His stayed put.  For a while, my folks would send me back to Minnesota for the summer.  I liked Minnesota.”

“What happened?”

“Look, I don’t wanna talk about it, okay?”  Jack slung another heavy pack over his shoulder.  “We got along all right for a while, till he went all knee-jerk on me.”

“I don’t get it, Mac.”  Lacie and Mac were figuring out, quickly, where the new arrivals would stay and where their gear should go.  The other Air Force officer from the second Jeep, Captain Sam Carter, was with them, but she had fallen several paces behind.  “I thought you didn’t have any family.”

“Colonel Jack O’Neill, United States Air Force, doesn’t exactly count as family,” MacGyver growled.  “He sure doesn’t count me, anyway.”

“Is it the gun thing?”

“Mostly.  I guess.  Heck, I don’t even really know any more.”  Mac glanced over his shoulder.  Carter was studying him with the same astonishment that Dr. Jackson had shown.  C’mon, stop staring, willya?  We don’t look that much alike, do we?  But at least she was giving them some space – she seemed the only one of their uninvited guests who had any awareness of how unwelcome they were, or any sympathy. 

“How long did you say it had been?  Your cousin – he’s got no idea just what you’ve been doing with your life, does he?”

“Look, I don’t wanna talk about it, okay?”

The gear from the second Jeep turned out to include some unexpected scientific apparatus:  chemical testing equipment, soil and gas sampling and testing kits, a radio frequency transmitter and a collection of radio frequency amplifiers that made MacGyver’s eyes widen.  Mac helped Teal’c and Carter unload it all, while he tried to find out why an Air Force captain thought all that shiny equipment was going to be needed at a dig site.  He briefly wondered if the miniature invasion was a cover for some other activity, but he couldn’t think of any kind of covert operation that would fit the circumstances.  The scientific gear was all wrong, for starters.

He could see a hurricane of gesticulation on the other side of the camp, as Lacie finished a heated discussion with Dr. Jackson and stalked away.  Mac made his excuses, tearing himself away from the top-of-the-line spectrum analyzer with genuine reluctance, and hurried to catch up with her.

“It didn’t go well.”  He didn’t need to make it a question.

“It looks like we’re stuck with them for a while.”  She made a face.  “The paper I just published on the dig.  Can you believe it?  He read it.  Damn him.”

“Yeah, but that’s good, isn’t it?  It was a great paper . . . ”

“Oh, it’s just terrific.  I barely skimmed his old papers, but he apparently read my recent one in depth, and then went back and reviewed most of my older work.  I feel like I just sat through my dissertation defense all over again, only worse.”

“But didn’t you say his field’s Egyptology?  Why is he here?”

Lacie seethed.  “The worst part is that I can’t think of any way to make him leave.  You saw the kind of muscle he brought with him – and they’ve got authorisation from the government at Nicosia.  A letter personally signed by the Director of the Department of Antiquities, no less.  God knows how Dr. Spaceballs got it.  Connections, I bet.”

Mac grimaced.  “You want me to call Pete at Phoenix and try to get Jackson’s License to Meddle pulled?”  He frowned at Lacie’s expression; she didn’t seem to have heard him.  “Lacie?”

“What?”  She shook her head, blinked, rubbed her temples.  “No.  No, that would take days and probably just make trouble . . . I could lose my own excavation license if I cross the wrong person . . . all he says he wants to do is check out the tomb and the labyrinth, and take his best shot at translating the inscriptions.  I hope he isn’t lying.  It sounds like the fastest way to get rid of him is to let him do just that.”

“Aw, man.  You’re gonna have to put up with him for – how long?”

Lacie looked almost sheepish.  “God, Mac, I really, really hate having to admit this – but Daniel Jackson can probably walk in there and translate the whole thing in less time that it would take me just to transcribe it.  With his help – who am I kidding? – with me helping him, we could have most of it done in a few days.”

Mac stared.  “You’re kidding me.”

“Do I look like I’m kidding?”

“He’s that good?”

“He’s the best.”  She made a face.

“But he’s an Egyptologist!  That isn’t hieroglyphics in there – ”

“Damned right.  It’s all Cypriot Syllabary.  But Jackson’s a linguistic wünderkind.  That’s why the whole crackpot business is so embarrassing.  He was so goddamn brilliant.”

*

It wasn’t just the faces, Sam Carter told herself, although that was eerie enough.  The hair was the big thing, of course – MacGyver’s hair was sandy and shaggy, with a lot of grey streaks, and long enough that it made her twitch.  She’d been around military men for most of her life, after all.  But if she squinted a little, enough to be able to overlook the length and shagginess – well, the Colonel’s hair had started to show plenty of silver also, lately.  Maybe it was an effect of all the Gate travel in this last year and a half, or the razor-edge precipices of the political infighting, or the constant state of alert against incipient alien invasion.

In some lights, one face looked more weatherbeaten; then they’d turn down another street in their tramp through the town of Pachna, the angle of the sun would change, and the creases and furrows would shift and equalise.  No, it wasn’t just the faces.  It was the voices which were much, much too similar, so much that it bordered on creepy.  Similar timbre.  Identical accent.  The vocabulary was a big difference, but the tone was the biggest.  Most of O’Neill’s comments had that acid edge, with a needle hidden in every sentence.  It was a tone of voice that she knew well by now, and it meant real trouble.  MacGyver’s tone was easier, or had started out that way; every so often a needle would get through, and his voice would sharpen and a hidden edge would gleam.

“Aren’t we gonna need a translator?”  Jack’s tone made the innocent question seem impossibly barbed.

“This is Cyprus, not Somalia.  Pretty nearly everyone here speaks English.”  MacGyver’s bland tone made the answer seem impossibly pedantic.

“Somalia, huh?  Been there recently?”

“No.”

“Oughta be easy to find out why your morning crew never showed.”

“Easy enough that you didn’t need to come along.”

Sam felt a sudden urge to smack them both and send them to their rooms.

“I’d just be underfoot at the dig.  Daniel’s a geek, but he knows his business.”

Three inquiries and three closed doors later, nothing was looking easy.

The shopkeeper who had arranged to provide regular food supplies slipped out the back of his shop when he saw them coming.  His son, who was supposed to have brought everything in his truck, along with fresh water, reverted to an unintelligibly heavy accent and poured out a meaningless torrent of explanation that explained nothing but seemed to indicate that the truck wasn’t running.  His father then drove away in the truck, but the son ignored the lack of corroboration.

At their next stop, the woman who’d been baking for them, who was vaguely related to one of the graduate interns, tried to slip out the back as well, only to run into Sam.  She sullenly admitted that her cousin’s nephew-in-law had been there the night before, with his university friends Demetris and Ioannis, and they were all long gone.  Where they’d gone, she didn’t want to know and thought they shouldn’t either.  Back to Nicosia, she supposed.  Where else?  She’d been garrulous and inquisitive when Mac had first met her, three days before; now, her replies were clipped monosyllables, delivered with folded arms and a stony expression.  As they turned to go, MacGyver glanced back and saw that her hands were shaking as she closed the door.

“Nice people,” Jack drawled.

“They’re scared,” Mac said.  “I don’t understand why, though.”

“I think you’re right,” Sam said slowly.  “What could have scared them like that?”

“I don’t think they know themselves.”

Jack climbed back into the Jeep and slouched in his seat.  “Might as well head back.  We’re wastin’ our time here.”  He scowled when MacGyver settled into the driver’s seat and headed, not back towards the dig, but north towards Troodos.  “What the hell do you think you’re doin’?  I said we should go back to camp.”

“You can give all the orders you like,” MacGyver said through set teeth.  “I bet you can find someone who has to follow them.  I don’t.”  He spun the wheel and headed down a side road.  “If you don’t like it, fine.  Take the Jeep – it’s your Jeep, anyway – and I’ll hitch a ride or something.”  He began to brake and pull over.

“Excuse me.”  Sam’s voice cut through the noise of the roughening road and the rapidly rising hostility.  “Sir, MacGyver does seem to know the area better than we do.”

“Okay, fine.  Mac, whatta ya got up your sleeve this time?”

“My arm.”

*

“So you’re absolutely certain about the wording?  The text really did call it the Tomb of Aphrodite?”

“You think I’d make a mistake that obvious?  That stupid?”

Daniel Jackson turned to Lacie Najjar and pulled off his glasses.  His eyes met hers with a frank openness that she found difficult to face.  “Dr. Najjar, I know you don’t like or respect me.  You think I’m a crackpot and an intruder, and I suppose you’re right about the second, and I’m sorry, because I really do understand how rotten it must be to have someone like me turn up and shove himself into your dig.  You’re probably worried that I’ll try to publish something you think is crazy or demented or embarrassing, and it’ll undermine your own professional standing and maybe cast doubt on the importance of your find here.  Have I got all that right?”

“Uh . . . yes.”

“Well, this probably won’t help much, but maybe you can back off just a little bit with the whole chip-on-your-shoulder business.  I’m not here to steal your thunder, or taint your discoveries, or damage your reputation.  I’m not going to publish anything I find here – well, not publicly – and I wish I could tell you what I’m looking for, but I can’t.  I can tell you that, although it might not mean anything to you, since you probably have no professional respect for me, I have tremendous professional respect for you.  I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have complete confidence in the work you’ve done so far.”

“Uh.”  Lacie blinked.  “Dr. Jackson, do you always talk like that?  And wave your hands like that?”

“Well, no.  Sometimes I’m worse.”  He replaced his glasses.  “How about calling me ‘Daniel’?  Maybe then you can forget I’m the same guy who got drummed out of the holy academic shrines for publishing crap.”

“Okay . . . Daniel.” 

The worktable held a detailed plat map of the site.  He gestured towards it.  “Can you show me where you found the copper disk?”

Lacie bent over the map, bemused.  “As you know from my paper, the journal that gave us the original lead wasn’t the work of a trained archeologist – ”

“Obviously.  He found the first disk in 1927, dug it up and took it with him, and didn’t take the time to record its location and provenance correctly.”

“And he didn’t publish his find, or return to the site.  That disk is in the vaults at the British Museum – it isn’t interesting or significant enough to be put on display – but I did manage to get a look at it, after we found the second one, here.”  She indicated the spot on the map.  “Our trench cut right into it.  I just about had a heart attack.”

“You couldn’t have expected that there would be a second one – ”

“I know.”  Lacie had forgotten that she was talking to a maverick who’d been effectively excommunicated from their profession.  “The copper was so damned thin.  The shovel sliced right through it.  It had the same glazing on it as the other one, and the glass cracked and broke.”

“But you were able to recover most of the disk intact.”  Daniel’s voice was soothing, reassuring, as he studied the pictures of the peculiar artifact.  “No markings at all?  No lettering, no inscriptions . . . ?”

“Not a damned thing!  There’s the glass coating – but the greenish colour of the glass is just from the mineral content.  No attempt to make it decorative or anything like that.  Chamberlain St. Johns – the dilettante who wrote the journal – thought it was a ceremonial shield.  At a meter across, it’s a reasonable size for that, but there are no handles.”

“What do you think it was?”

“Damned if I know.”  Lacie scowled at the photographs.  “Ioannis – he’s one of my graduate assistants – called it the Bad Penny.”  She glanced at Daniel, looking embarrassed.  “You know.  It’s a disk of copper, and it’s not really worth anything.  And it showed up when we didn’t expect it.”

“Where is it now?”

“At the University of Edinburgh.  The big boys at Phoenix thought the archeology department there had the best lab facilities for analysis, so I took it there myself after the spring season wrapped up.  I sure as hell didn’t want to keep it here, where it might get stolen.”

“And you haven’t found any other artifacts?”

“Nothing significant.  Just as well.  I haven’t had to worry too much about security in general so far.”  She glanced up, startled, as Teal’c ducked his head under the edge of the canopy that shaded the worktable.  She couldn’t get used to how quietly the giant could move.

She couldn’t figure out what his role was, either.  She had assumed he was a bodyguard of some kind, but every so often Daniel would turn to him and ask a question, as if the man was a professional authority of some kind.  Even now, they were at it again:  Teal’c studying the photographs of the two copper disks, his face impassive, but somehow speaking volumes in its silence.

He handed the photos back to Daniel.  “I have never seen anything like this, Daniel Jackson.”

“Not even remotely?”

“No.”

Well, that was that.  Daniel stood up and turned to Lacie.

“Can you give me a tour of the labyrinth now?”

*

After less than twenty minutes, MacGyver pulled up in front of a low-slung, rambling farmhouse on a hillside overlooking swathes of terraced fields and olive groves.  Jack gave a sardonic look at the chickens clustered in front of the door and indicated that he’d stay with the Jeep.

The man who answered the door was blue-eyed and white-haired, with a broad face terraced with wrinkles.  He peered at Mac, glanced at Sam, then turned back to Mac again with a broad smile and an expansive gesture.  “MacGyver!  My friend!  You return at last!  It has been too long, much too long.  Come in, come in!  You and your lady friend – your wife, perhaps?”

Mac looked too alarmed to speak, merely shaking his head vigourously.  Sam held out a hand.  “Dr. Samantha Carter.  Glad to meet you.”

Real sharp, Mac thought.  The military rank wouldn’t go down so good, but where there’s archeologists piled up in every corner, a doctorate won’t raise any flags.

The farmer shook her hand heartily.  “Costas Kyriazis.  My house is yours.  Come in, come in!”

Sam looked around the farm kitchen as Costas bustled around, fetching glasses of cold water and dishes of food for his guests.  They could hear the sounds of a fretful baby in the next room, but the home was neat and clean, obviously prosperous.  “So, um, you know each other.”

“I did him a favour a lotta years ago,” MacGyver said diffidently.

“A favour, he says!  Ha!  My friend, God loves a humble man, but he loves you enough already.  You don’t need to push it.” 

Sam looked questioningly from one to the other.  Mac settled into a kitchen chair, waving at Costas to go on.

“My sister Annitsa,” Costas declared.  “So pretty, so clever, so willful.  She married a Turk – back when we all lived mixed, you know, before the fighting, we had many neighbours who were Turks.  She married one, my stubborn sister.  When the fighting began, he was forced to flee to the north.  She chose to stay here.  Later, she changes her mind.  But it is too late then!  Ah, no.  My friend MacGyver helps her, he takes her north, he sees her safely to her husband’s new home.  Without MacGyver, my sister would still be neither widow nor wife.”

“How’s that worked out?” Mac asked.

Costas’ smile grew even larger.  “Very very well!!  I have three nephews and a niece.  I do not see them, no, but one day, who knows?  Annitsa writes.  She sends the letters through a cousin in Athens.  They are all in school, they do well, and Rauf is a striker on his football team.”

“So how’s your own family doin’?”

The baby in the next room began to wail.  Costas’ smile became visibly ragged.  “My youngest grandchild.  She will have many fine, healthy teeth.  The rest of us may be dead of exhaustion by then, but God has always called on us to make sacrifices for the children.”  There were dark smudges under his eyes.  “Now, my friend.  Tell me there is something you need.”  He looked eager, even hopeful.

Mac gave him a long, measuring look.  “I know that face, Costas.”

“What face?  This face?”

“Lemme guess.  There’s something you need too.”

Costas shrugged.  “Perhaps, perhaps.  The new pump for my well.  She does not go so good these days.”

“Costas, that pump wasn’t new when you got it, and that was fifteen years ago!”

“It is newer than my old pump was!”

“Not any more!”  Mac hauled himself out of the chair.  “C’mon, let’s take a look.  Capt – um, Doctor Carter, you know much about pumps?”

As it turned out, Sam knew a fair amount about pumps, although MacGyver knew this pump already.  Half an hour later, the old pump had a new gasket made from heavy felt impregnated with beeswax, and Sam was wishing that she could somehow manage to drag Mac back to Cheyenne Mountain and introduce him to Sgt. Siler.  She had also recognised what a priceless resource Costas was:  the man was an affable, garrulous busybody, an ideal source for local intel.

“Yeah, that’s right.  This morning, no crew and nobody in town willin’ to talk about it.  And now you’re tellin’ us that ‘nobody ever goes there’, not really.  Why not?”

Costas shrugged.  “Why should they?”

“Even though that one guy found that copper disk, way back before the First War, nobody local ever went pokin’ around lookin’ for more?”

The farmer waved a hand.  “It is interesting, yes, but it is hardly a fine artifact.  It was not valuable or even beautiful.”

“You said nobody goes there,” Sam broke in.  “Is the place supposed to be bad luck?  A curse, maybe, or the Evil Eye?”

“No, no.  Who believes in the Evil Eye these days?”  Costas made a surreptitious warding gesture.  “It is nonsense.  Nobody goes there.  Nobody ever has.  That is all.”

“So there really aren’t any local stories about ‘Aphrodite’s Well’?”

“Ha, that is not even a story.  It is a tradition.”  Costas made a derisive noise.  “It is all foolishness.  There could never be a well there.  There is no water.  You know that!”

*

Before leading Daniel into the subterranean complex, Lacie switched on the portable generator that fed current to the inner chambers where Mac had rigged electric lights.  The lights were dim, mostly pointed at blank corners of solid rock, so that the illumination bounced back from the pale stone and didn’t risk damaging anything.  Their shadows swooped wildly as they walked, shooting up to mammoth size and then winking out as they passed from one half-lit section to another.  She clicked her flashlight on and indicated a brightly decorated wall.  “Here’s where the discrepancy starts.  The text plainly called it Aphrodite’s Tomb, but when you get to the first inscriptions, they’re all calling it Aphrodite’s Well.  Then, over here – ”

Daniel trained his own flashlight on the wall, and the painted letters sprang into clear focus.  “ . . . let none but the Goddess herself bind with the Girdle of Aphrodite, for it makes any woman impossible to resist.  It is the deepest wish of every mortal woman to serve the Goddess, and to walk in Her path and breathe with Her lips.  For this is the will of the Great Ones, that only the most perfect shall serve Her . . . ”  He glanced up as the entrance to the passage was briefly eclipsed.  Teal’c had followed them in and was studying the inscriptions, his eyes gleaming.

“The Well of Aphrodite.  There are stories of this amongst your people?”  The deep voice resonated in the stone chamber.

“Yes, there are a lot of myths about Aphrodite.  She was called the Cypriot – she was supposedly born here – ”

“Not here,” Lacie interrupted.  “She was born from the foam of the ocean, and stepped onto land for the first time at Aphrodite’s Rock at Petra Tou Romio.  That’s just off the coast to the southwest, only a few miles away.”

Daniel nodded.  “Some theories claim that her worship originated in Asia Minor and spread to Greece via Cyprus, but the older myths all point here.  The early stories about her were positive – she was the goddess of love and beauty, she blessed lovers, granted virility to men and fertility to women – but later myths represented her as insanely jealous, punishing any mortal who might be a rival – sound familiar?”

“It does.”

“Anyway, she was supposed to bathe regularly in a sacred spring or river, where she ‘renewed her virginity’.”

“That does not sound comfortable.”

“Well, no, not if you’re taking it literally.  Look at this inscription – ”  He waved the light.  “It’s describing a regular tribute of ‘seven perfect youths and seven perfect maidens’ – ‘They shall be mourned as dead, but honoured amongst the Immortals’ – there are myths about that too . . . some versions portray it as every year, but Diodorus makes it clear that it was every nine years.”  He glanced over at Lacie and lowered his voice so that only Teal’c could hear him.  “Robert Graves called that a Great Year, but suppose it’s an actual year – only in a different solar system?”

“It is possible.”

Daniel turned back to the inscription.  “ ‘Perfect youths’ and ‘perfect maidens’ . . . that’s a bit like the Book of Esther, where the most beautiful virgin from each province was sent to the King – Teal’c, what if they were taken as hosts?  Or as Jaffa?”

“It does sound like a Selection, but with the conquered tribes forced to choose from amongst their own.”

“We already know that the Goa’uld were willing to use humans for genetic experimentation.  Cross-breeding the finest available, um, specimens at regular intervals would be one way of getting a lot of results . . . ”

“Excuse me?”

Lacie pushed herself between Daniel and Teal’c, glaring from one to the other.  “What the hell are you two talking about?”

The two men looked at each other.  Daniel was opening his mouth to speak when Lacie hurried on.  “I can’t hear a word you’ve been saying with all these damned echoes.  Do you want to see the next set of chambers or not?”

Daniel and Teal’c carefully looked away from each other’s eyes as they followed her into the next passage.

*

Sam and Mac took their leave at last.  There was a wooden bench in front of the farmhouse; a young woman was sitting there, her head slumped backwards against the wall behind her, sound asleep and snoring.  A platter of food sat on the bench beside her; she had clearly come out to make sure the third guest didn’t starve to death.  On the ground in front of her sat Colonel Jack O’Neill, holding a baby about six months old.  Sam realised they hadn’t heard any crying for quite some time.

The baby’s face was streaked with dried tears, but she had obviously forgotten her misery as she stared in astonishment at Jack’s hands.  He was making his fingers magically appear and disappear into his fists, or his ears, or his hat.  The child was absentmindedly sucking on the spoon from Jack’s mess kit, which was probably the only metal object Jack carried that wasn’t sharp or poisonous or explosive.

Sam was carefully hiding her grin when she saw the look on MacGyver’s face, and had to swallow hard.  They don’t know anything about each other, do they?

As Mac put the Jeep into gear, he glanced sideways at Sam.  She was looking at him oddly.

“That trick with the gasket was very clever.”

“Um, thanks.”

“I just realised – your name’s MacGyver.”

“We already established that, Captain,” Jack drawled from the rear seat.  “What’s your point?”

“The name.  At Cornell, whenever anybody did that kind of trick – solving a problem like that – everybody called it ‘macgyvering’.  I’ve heard it used in a lot of places since then.  Nobody seemed to know where the word came from.”

“Mac here always did that kinda stuff.  He had a reputation for it.”

She tried to catch Mac’s eye, but he was resolutely staring at the road.  “Could it have started with you?”

MacGyver winced and shrugged.  “Yeah, I think it did.  I guess.  Did you say Cornell?”

“Yes, I got my doctorate in astrophysics there.”

“Aw, man.”

MacGyver drove in silence for the next several minutes, concentrating on the loops of dusty road snaking through the hills.  The autumn rains hadn’t started yet, and the midday sun was baking warm smells from the scrubby vegetation.  Mac breathed deeply as they drove past a stand of carob trees in bloom.

“So this isn’t your first visit to Cyprus,” Sam remarked.  “When did you meet Costas?”

“Oh, way back – must be over twenty years by now.  My son would say he’s part of the Legions of Yafod.”

“Yafod?” Sam asked.

“Your son?” Jack demanded at the same time.  His voice was harsh.  “You’re married?”

“No.”  Mac replied.  He smiled warmly at Sam.  “It’s an old joke with him.  ‘Yafod’ stands for ‘Yet Another Friend of Dad’s.’ ”

“That’s great,” Sam said warmly.  “How old is he?”

“Twenty-four.  He’s finishing up college right now.  And he’s also called Sam.”  Mac glanced at Jack in the rear-view mirror and made a visible effort.  “How ‘bout you, Jack?  Are you married?”

For an instant, there was a crack in the armour:  a faint gleam of something, almost like wistful regret, glinted in Jack’s eyes.  Almost human, MacGyver thought.  Then the window snapped shut again.

“Divorced,” Jack said, one curt word that left no room for more conversation.

Mac gritted his teeth as the sense of camaraderie evaporated into dust.  He hoped Daniel Jackson had been making progress on the translations in their absence.  Really fast progress . . . it couldn’t be fast enough.

 *

“It must be talking about Selection, Teal’c.  Look at this.”  Daniel’s voice woke murmuring echoes as he moved to the next section.  “ ‘At the Hour of the Goddess, the Handmaiden shall be summoned to make ready the Blessed and Glorious Ones.  The Eyes of Argus shall open and the Goddess shall come to choose Her consorts’ – and ‘consorts’ is definitely plural.  And the whole thing is definitely strange.  The story of Argus is part of the mythology of Hera, not Aphrodite.”

“Is Argus another of your ancient gods?”

“No, not exactly.  More like a Jaffa.  Argus was the hundred-eyed guardian who served Hera.  He was killed by Hermes, on a mission from Zeus, and then turned into a peacock – it’s kind of a long story.”

“It is a strange story.  I do not know the name ‘Argus’.  But the other names – Hera and Aphrodite – ”

“Goa’uld System Lords?  Or Queens?  Can they be the same?  Hathor said she’d been the consort of Ra, but she didn’t seem to need a male Goa’uld at all.”

“It varies.  Some Goa’uld Queens are System Lords in their own right.  Some System Lords take a Queen as a consort, or an ally.  Without a Queen, there are no young symbionts, and the Goa’uld cannot increase the hosts of their Jaffa.”

“They must need a big supply.  I get the feeling that mortality’s pretty high in the Jaffa hosts.”

“It is.”

Lacie had been making a sketch of the decorative patterns framing the doorway that led back out towards the open air, while Daniel examined the inscriptions.  She set the sketchpad down and glanced at her watch.  “You’d think Mac would be back by now,” she said.  “Can’t be much longer.  Do you want to see the inner chamber now, or wait till after lunch?”

“The inner chamber?”

“MacGyver only got the lights rigged up to it day before yesterday, and we spent all day yesterday photographing.  Come on.  There aren’t any inscriptions, but it’s worth seeing.  We dubbed it the Throne Room.”

The other rooms had all been square or rectangular; this room was circular, high-ceilinged, and large enough to hold a good-sized crowd of people.  As Lacie had said, the walls bore no writing, but were elaborately painted with brilliant murals, abstract patterns of flowers, fruit, twining vines and wavy lines, birds, seashells, and assorted fauna.  The floor was a mosaic of small glassy tiles that glittered in the dim, indirect light – Daniel was relieved to see that the electric lights had been rigged with filters to keep the delicate paintings from fading.

Dominating the centre of the room was a large stone chair, also inset with mosaic tiles.  Daniel studied it intently.  “Wow.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty damned spectacular, isn’t it?”

“I’m especially impressed by the condition.”  He walked around the throne slowly, playing his flashlight over it.  The mosaic sparkled under the light, throwing green and blue and gold reflective sparks that played across the walls and ceiling like handfuls of glitter.  Teal’c gave the throne a long, thoughtful stare, then turned his back on it and began a close scrutiny of the chamber walls.

“You’re not kidding,”  Lacie replied.  “Every tile is in place.  You’d think it had only been finished yesterday, wouldn’t you?  Except for the dust.”

“There isn’t even much of that,” Daniel said absently.

“Yeah, that was another funny thing.  From the beginning of the explorations, the farther we’ve gone into the labyrinth, the less dust there’s been, but there’s always been some.  In here, it’s damned near swept and garnished.”

Daniel shone his light on the seat of the chair.  “Not quite scrubbed clean, but . . . ” he leaned closer.  “No, not wiped clean, either – Lacie, there’s an impression here.  Somebody’s been sitting here, and recently.”

“What!?”  Lacie looked incensed.  Then a wave of confusion crossed her face.  “Oh.  No, I remember now.  That was me.”

“What?”  Daniel stared at her.  Teal’c turned from his study of the walls and studied her instead.  “You sat on an artifact?”

She walked up to the throne, blinking when Daniel pointed his flashlight at her.  “It was right at the end of the day.  Ioannis and MacGyver had already gone outside.  Demetris insisted – he thought it would be funny.”  Lacie frowned.  “I’m sure I told him no, but I also remember sitting on the throne, looking around . . . looking around at everyone, seeing it all . . . ”  She swayed, her face momentarily blank.

“Lacie Najjar?” Teal’c’s voice could have penetrated a brick wall, but Lacie barely seemed to notice.

She reached out and ran a hand along the arm of the throne.

Daniel made an outraged noise and moved to stop her, but Teal’c was suddenly beside him, catching his arm and holding him back.  “Daniel Jackson.  Do not touch her.”  His soft voice seemed to raise more echoes that a shout would have.

Under Lacie’s hand, the tiles of the throne began to gleam, lines and waves of light and colour flowing out and away from her touch.  A wave of greenish light washed up her arm.  Her eyes widened, and her mouth opened as if to shriek; instead, she began chanting in a sing-song voice, a phrase of only a few words, repeated.

Daniel shook off Teal’c’s grasp.  “ ‘The Handmaiden shall be summoned’ – Teal’c, hurry before she gives away Earth to the Goa’uld!”  The light was brighter every instant, and had begun to pulse in time to Lacie’s chanting.

Teal’c had provided himself with a massive multi-celled flashlight, nearly a foot long.  He took a single step forward, bent one leg to lunge very low, and hooked Lacie’s leg behind the knee with the flashlight.

She lost her footing, stumbled, lost contact with the throne, fell heavily.  The light flared and died, and her chant ended abruptly in a cry of pain.  The electric lights arced and popped, and the room was plunged into darkness except for the faint double star of Daniel’s and Teal’c’s flashlights.

Teal’c scooped Lacie up from the floor and ran out of the room, retraced the maze of passages, not stopping until he’d reached open air.  He looked back, frowning, his eyes growing wider with alarm as he waited for Daniel to emerge.  The camp was silent; the others hadn’t returned yet.

Daniel came out of the passageway, blinking in the bright sunlight.  He looked at Lacie, slumped in Teal’c arms.

“Is she all right?”

“She is unconscious but still breathing.  I think she is unhurt.  Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.  I waited for a couple of minutes at the entrance to the throne room.  It stayed dark and quiet, and the lights in the other rooms are still lit.”  Daniel walked over to the generator and shut it down.  “Whatever that was, I don’t think she managed to turn it on.”

“Perhaps not.  We must not permit her to enter the tomb again.”

“That’s gonna be pretty awkward, Teal’c.  It is her dig.”

“She does not possess this ‘dig’, as you call it.  The dig is possessing her.”

*

Chapter Text

Part Two: Penny Wise

Having Lacie’s dig invaded by mystery men with military backup didn’t seem like a great way to start the morning.  Based on past experience, that kinda thing usually seems to end with me getting locked up, or beaten up, or arrested, or worse.  I never thought I’d still be using the ‘bomb defusing’ section of my resumé this late in life, y’know?

But we didn’t get armed posturing and attempts at intimidation.  Not even from Jack, unless you count his personality, which I suppose isn’t being real fair.  I’ve got a little trouble being fair around Jack O’Neill.

“So whatcha been doin’ since high school, anyway?”  Jack’s question broke the silence in the Jeep.  “I didn’t hear anything about you getting a Nobel or anything, but I haven’t exactly been following that kinda stuff, if ya know what I mean.  How many doctorates didja pile up?”

“None.”  MacGyver tried not to look in the rear-view mirror at his cousin.  The last section of the road from Pachna back to the dig was a battered and twisted washboard, a good excuse not to look.  “There wasn’t much money after Dad died.  There was even less after Harry left.”

“Crap.  I figured you’d be playing the mad scientist in a lab all this time.”  The silence thickened again.  “What about the hockey?  Hell, I thought you’d make the Olympic team –

“I broke my arms.”

Even without looking, Mac could hear Jack wince.  “Both of them?”

“Yeah.”

“So what’d you do?”

And just how was he supposed to answer that one?  “Oh, a buncha stuff.  Wandered around.  Lots of odd jobs.  I ended up working for the Phoenix Foundation.”  Mac braced for some kind of diatribe about Phoenix – left-wing lunatics?  Enviro-Nazis?  Anti-government anti-American peacenik freaks? – but Jack didn’t say anything at all.  Sam Carter, however, turned and gave Mac a look that had him sitting up straighter and feeling a bit better about the whole morning.

The others – well, my son likes to kid me about how many friends I’ve got, and how quick I seem to make them when we’re traveling.  Although he’s a fine one to talk – his mom was always the best at that, and he’s got her mojo plus mine, which is real unnerving when you think about it.

Dr. Jackson – Daniel – was real easy to talk to.  Actually, I think it must be hard to get him to shut up sometimes.  Not that I had much of a chance for chatting.  By the time we got back from visiting Costas, he was getting along way better with Lacie – I’d’a given a lot to know how he pulled that one off – and all that conversational energy was directed at her.

Seems she’d had some kinda dizzy spell while we were gone, and he wanted her to get it checked out at the hospital in Limassol.  It’s only about thirty miles by road, but it woulda taken over an hour each way, and she wasn’t having any of it.  She did agree to hydrate a lot and spend the afternoon working outside in the fresh air at the canopied worktables, instead of in the stuffy underground passages.

And then there was Teal’c.  He wasn’t chatty at all, but that wasn’t a problem; that was obviously just the way he was.

I absolutely could not get a line on him at all.  That was the problem.

I didn’t think English was his first language, even though he had no accent other than a flat American non-accent you could cut with a knife.  I couldn’t place the name, although that’s nothing unusual; it seems like half the kids at the Challengers Club these days have names that’re exotic, or imaginative, or just plain weird.  And that’s not even mentioning the would-be DJs and rappers.  Teal’c wasn’t a rapper, of course, whatever else he might’ve been.  He was obviously military, or maybe a cop; something about him made me wonder if his involvement with Jack’s unit might be just a bit unofficial.  Of course, that brought me right back around to wondering what the heck the Mystery Team was doing there in the first place.

I figured out pretty quick, after we got back to the dig, that they were trying to get me out of the way so they could talk amongst themselves.  They finally sicced Teal’c on me – he asked me to show him around the area near the dig, and I couldn’t resist the chance for a little one-on-one time, even though I knew it was a ploy.  Not that we did much real talking while we were hiking around the folds of the dry hills.  Like I said, he wasn’t much for talking.  But what he did say made you listen.

“Mac’Gyver.”

“Yeah?”

“Do you notice something unusual about this area?”

“Yeah, a few things.”  Mac rubbed the back of his neck, trying to dismiss an uncanny sense of unease.  “How about you?”

“Are there no birds on this island?  Or small animals?”

MacGyver mentally crossed ‘urban kid’ off his shrinking list of possible personal backgrounds for Teal’c.  No inner-city kid would have spotted that.  “There are a lot, or oughta be.  And I haven’t seen any around the camp at all – not even tryin’ to get into the trash – and no signs anywhere nearby either.  Nothin’.”

“Remarkable.”

“You could put it that way.”

Teal’c cocked his head fractionally.  “I believe I just did.”

They were walking on the flat bed of a dry watercourse that snaked between two ridges, but MacGyver felt his skin crawling, as if he was balancing on a narrow ledge above a sheer fall.  The eerie silence didn’t help – no birdcalls, no scratchings in the brush.  The afternoon was bright and still.  The creeping sense of wrongness faded, returned, faded again. 

During one of the respites, Mac broke the silence.  “Y’know, you might be more comfortable without the hat.”

No reply – in fact, no response.

“Is the mark on your forehead something you’d rather cover up, or are you just trying to keep me from seein’ it?”

Teal’c stopped moving abruptly, as if a landslide had suddenly dug in and become a mountain.  He regarded Mac.

“I only got a glimpse, but I can see there’s something there.  Is it a gang marking?  Or some kinda tribal tattoo?”

No reply.

“I’ve been wonderin’ if it’s something you’re ashamed of, or proud of in a private way, or maybe it’s just something most people won’t understand, and it’s not the kind of thing you explain.”

Teal’c raised one hand and slowly removed his hat.

They followed the trail back towards the dig in companionable silence.  Teal’c replaced his hat just before they came in sight of the work area where Lacie Najjar and Daniel were bent over an enlarged photograph of one of the decorative murals, vigourously debating the symbolism of the images.

Like most of the real smart women I know – and I seem to know a lot of them – Lacie’s real stubborn.  I think it comes with the territory of being a woman, and being real smart, and having to make sure nobody shoves you off onto a sideline.  Speaking of real smart, as soon as we got back, Captain Carter dived right into samples and measurements and readings with all the analytical equipment they’d brought, right after she’d packed up the samples she’d taken in Pachna while she didn’t know I was watching.  With her other hand, she wasn’t above accepting a little help rigging their fancy comm setup.

Me, I wanted a nap after the hike and all the food Costas had piled into us, but it was worth shaking off the grogginess for the chance to work with her.  Sam, Carter that is, must be the smartest woman I’ve ever met, period.  Jack would probably say she blew the others all out of the water.  That’s just the kinda thing he’d say.  Problem is, he’d be right.  I couldn’t keep up with her, and it was a real stretch just to keep her in sight, and it was the kind of real hard stretching that leaves you worn ragged but feeling good all over.

“You work for the Phoenix Foundation?  That’s amazing.  They do incredible work.  What do you do for them?  R&D?”

“Man, I wish.  No, I work with our R&D sometimes, but mostly I’m in Operations.  My buddy Willis is the head of Research – ”

“The Willis?  Wow!”  Sam Carter had a really, really nice smile.  “Your people have made my work a lot easier more times than I can count.  Some days, you’ve made it possible.”

“No kidding?  I’m glad to hear that.”  Mac gave her what he hoped was his most charming smile.  “And that kinda work would be . . . ?”

“Deep-space radar telemetry analysis.  My unit’s based at Cheyenne Mountain, with NORAD.”

Mac looked over from where he was repositioning the wide microwave uplink dish for the satellite communications rig, and raised his eyebrows.  “Isn’t this kind of a long ways off your beat?”

The really nice smile disappeared.  “It’s hard to explain – ”

“Try me.  I’m pretty good at understanding stuff.”

“Yes, I’m sure you are.  And you’re a civilian, and it’s classified.”  Sam studied MacGyver’s expression.  There was a particular quality to that mulish look that she’d seen before.  Probably on Jack O’Neill, although Mac was making a good show of being reasonable and easygoing on the surface.  She wasn’t fooled when his next question was a change of subject.

“So how long have you and Jack known each other?  He’s your CO, isn’t he?”

“We’ve been serving together about a year and a half.”

“And he’s at Cheyenne too?”

Sam nodded and tried to be very deeply absorbed in calibration. 

Mac continued.  “Kinda overkill, isn’t it?  Two Air Force officers at a little dig in Cyprus?  Or even at NORAD.  They need colonels there?  I’d’a figured Jack was the type to be runnin’ covert ops in the Middle East, not babysittin’ scientists.”

Sam’s eyes flicked to behind MacGyver just as he heard the crunch of boots approaching on the hard ground.

“Carter, haven’t you made any progress on our little communications problem there?  We need to report back to Hammond.  We coulda sent a carrier pigeon by now, except I didn’t bring any carrier pigeons.”

“I’m doing my best, sir.”  Sam gestured at the microwave uplink dish.  Her hair was plastered to her face by the heat of the afternoon.  “It’s not the equipment.  We’ve checked it all out.”  MacGyver poked his head up from the other side of the dish, and saw Jack’s face twitch; his hair must have looked even worse than Sam’s.  Not to mention being longer.

“There’s some kind of interference, and we just can’t punch through it for long enough to get a link established.  Mac here had an idea to try blocking the interference by rigging a kind of Faraday cage around the antenna, but it didn’t work.”

“All we’ve got is chicken wire, and the holes in the mesh are too big to attenuate the interfering signal enough to make a difference,” Mac added helpfully.  He looked at Jack’s face and realised that it was the wrong kind of help.

“You shoulda used smaller chickens.  Can’t you boost the signal with some of those other doohickeys?”

“You mean the RF amplifiers for the spectrum analyzer?  They’re for received signals.  The output power’s much lower than the output of the transmitter.”

“That’s just terrific.  They’ll be all worried about us at home, and when we turn up late for dinner, they won’t let us have dessert.”

“I know, sir.  Request permission to go to the Western Sovereign Base Area at Akrotiri to report in.”

Jack frowned at her.  “You want dessert that much?”

“I need to send them the data we’ve collected as soon as possible so they can start running analyses, sir.”

He nodded.  “Get back here as soon as you can.  And no pickin’ up hitchhikers.”

After Sam headed out, I thought about trying to get Lacie alone and find out if she’d noticed anything funny, with the dig or with our visitors.  And I still didn’t know why she’d sent for me in the first place.  But Daniel kept her pretty well sewed up all afternoon.  And, to be honest, I was a little uneasy about being alone with her, after the way she’d acted last night.  I suppose the good part about the extra people was safety in numbers – although the bad part was that Lacie and me were outnumbered.

MacGyver watched as Teal’c drew Jack O’Neill aside for a few moments of quiet speech.  The two men left camp immediately afterwards, heading back into the hills where Mac and Teal’c had been reconnoitering.  Mac ground his teeth and considered trying to shadow them – but he didn’t think he could pull it off.  Not against those two.

*

Jack pulled his sunglasses off and peered around at the unpromising landscape.  “You’re sayin’ the whole area has some kinda perimeter defense in place?”

“It does.  The effect can be felt in at least two areas along every possible approach.  I have counted eleven locations so far where the sensation of anxiety can be felt.”

“I noticed we didn’t have any rats or crows around camp.  And the locals don’t like the place either – it’s pretty clear it creeps them out.  So how come the dig staff was okay till now?”

“The answer may lie in the throne room.  Lacie Najjar and her people were working there yesterday .”

“And sometime in the night, they all bugged out.”

“Indeed.”

“ ‘Cept for Doc Lacie.”

“And your kinsman.  He did not remark on it, but he was clearly affected.”

Jack ran a hand along the back of his neck.  He had to fight the urge to whirl around, to check his back for unseen enemies creeping up behind him.  He experimented and found that if he took a few long strides, the sensation faded, and he could think rationally again, although he swore the skin between his shoulderblades was still twitching.  Danger.

“ONeill.”

“What?”  Jack’s voice was harsh.

“Why do you dislike him so much?”

“What?”

“Your kinsman.  Mac’Gyver.”

Jack fished his sunglasses up on their lanyard and put them on again.  “In case you haven’t noticed, it’s mutual.”  Teal’c didn’t answer, in that very eloquent way Teal’c had of not answering because he was waiting for you to finish, even though you thought you had.  The usual result of that non-answering was that you ended up saying more than you’d planned.

As usual, Teal’c won the silent standoff.  “Mac thinks I’m a baby-eating murderer.  He’s thought that since we were kids and I told him I was gonna join the military as soon as I was old enough.”

Teal’c raised an eyebrow a fraction of an inch.  “You are certain of this?”

“Yeah.  He told me so.”

“And your opinion of him?”

“MacGyver?  He’s a sanctimonious know-it-all.  And a treehugging eco-freak.  And a peacenik wimp.  That about covers it.”

Teal’c frowned.  “A ‘wimp’?  Why do you call him that?”

“ ‘Cause he’d rather get his ass kicked than fight back.”

“Indeed?”

“Geez, T, what’s got into you?  And don’t give me any crap about how important ‘family’ is.  We haven’t been ‘family’ for thirty years.”

*

By the time evening was falling and dinner was being prepared, Jack was remembering all the other reasons he’d found Mac so annoying when they were younger.  And it had only gotten worse in the intervening years.

There’d been the instant camaraderie with Captain Carter, and the unexpected advocacy from Teal’c.  Back at camp, Daniel was still managing to keep Doc Lacie out of the tomb, but he’d been charmed into the MacGyver cult as well.  Mac was inside the rock maze, apparently doing something clever with the electric lights and reflectors made out of aluminum foil.  Any minute now, Jack was expecting to hear one of his own team members start to say something like “He keeps asking questions – are you sure we can’t answer any of them?” and they’d have another big argument about need-to-know and civilians without security clearances and the insane danger of clever guys who asked lots of questions in a way that made people like Daniel want to answer them.

Dinner looked like being even more aggravating.

They’d brought rations, of course, but that wasn’t good enough for the archeologists.  Costas had loaded them up with food supplies when he’d found out that the groceries hadn’t been delivered, and now Daniel and even Teal’c were cheerfully helping Lacie set up the groaning board.

Jack stood by the fire, where Mac was doing something clever again with a contrived grill and scavenged metal fittings for shishkebab skewers.  He’d shown Daniel some trick or other in building it that yielded a nice bed of coals in record time.

“Better save some for Carter.  She’s gotta be back soon.”

Mac waved an absent-minded hand towards the table.  “Don’t worry, Daniel made sure that Lacie set aside plenty for Sam.  I hope she likes lamb.”

Half a day, and the guy was on a first-name basis with everyone.  Jack squatted next to the fire and positioned his own loaded skewer.  “I’d’a figured you for a vegetarian, Mac.  And here you are eating cute little baby sheep.”

That got him a glower.  “You can’t always pick and choose what you eat in the field.  And those ‘cute baby sheep’ are yearlings, and they weigh about sixty pounds.  And they’re raised naturally, without any chemicals or hormones – ”

“Thank you, Professor – ”

“Would you two knock it off?”  Lacie had turned around from the prep table, where she’d been cutting the rest of the lamb into skewerable chunks.  “Hell, Colonel, I didn’t invite your gang to this party.  The least you can do is be civil.  You should be thanking MacGyver for making the grill work so well.  Without him, we’d be eating boiled lamb, which is just plain nasty.”  Behind her, Daniel was wincing.  Teal’c’s eyes were gleaming with concern as he followed the argument.

“Well, of course,” Jack drawled.  “Good ol’ Ang – ”  Mac made a harsh noise in his throat, and Jack smirked.  “Good ol’ Brainy-Mac.  Straight A’s, Eagle Scout badges, and he could even fix the toaster.  ‘Why can’t you be more like your cousin?’ ”  Jack stood up, a single sudden movement.  “Some problems can’t be solved with duct tape and paper clips.”  He stalked away, off into the shadows where the firelight didn’t reach.

Behind him, he heard the soft crunching of Mac’s sneakers.  He sidestepped and turned in time to keep MacGyver from putting a hand on his shoulder.  “S’matter, Mac?  You don’t like my party manners?”

He’d been afraid that Mac would have a let’s-talk-this-over look on his face.  He welcomed the glare he got instead.  Glares were good.  He could deal with glares.

“I suppose I should be glad that you didn’t just shoot her, huh?  Or punch her out?  Isn’t that your answer to everything?”  Mac rubbed his chin.  The scar there was barely visible, and the gesture was probably unconscious, but Jack had to suppress a wince.  He’d given Mac that scar during that last fight when they were teens, the one that had left them both bruised and bleeding and half-stunned, Mac sobbing and Jack boiling.  The fight that had meant the end of summers in Minnesota, the end of fishing in the lakes, rambling in the woods, camping rough and feeling free.  Ellen MacGyver had enough on her hands without having to deal with the O’Neill boy, if he was going to be unpredictably violent.

“There’s some things that do need shooting, whether you like it or not.  Ever think of that?”  Night had fallen, and the first stars were beginning to show, glints against the darkness of space.  The moon was rising, glowing like a burnished penny.  Jack remembered a time when he’d been able to look at the moon and not see a potential tactical strongpoint for an enemy attack.

Jack thought about space, and the metallic gleam of Goa’uld warships in Earth orbit, and the oblivious idiocy of people who should be smarter than that.  Death in the skies and fools on the ground.  “Naw, who’m I kidding?  I bet that when soldiers get back from war zones, you hang out in the airports and spit on them.  I bet you’ve been doin’ that since Vietnam.  Or were you in Canada then?”

Dark eyes locked onto dark eyes.  If Jack hadn’t known better, he’d have sworn the other man was getting ready to take him apart.

Jeep headlights cut a bright line through the darkness; both men looked away, to save their night sight from the dazzle.  Carter had returned, hopefully with word from Hammond.  Jack had made his recommendation that a full scientific team be sent in to take that damned throne room apart and ship the pieces home, with or without Doc Lacie’s consent.  Teal’c believed there was another chamber hidden behind the walls, and Jack wanted to get the civilians out of the way ASAP before something nasty crawled out of it.  He turned his back on Mac and walked away to meet the Jeep.

“Took you long enough, Carter.”

Sam didn’t seem to notice the acid tone.  Maybe she’d heard it too many times to notice.  “Sir, there’s something you should know about your cousin.”

*

MacGyver watched Jack walk away and wished he could plant a boot in the middle of that arrogant backside.  Hopefully, the goon squad would leave in the morning, assuming the fascinating and very attractive Captain Carter had finished her assessment of whatever she was really assessing.  He was pretty sure by now that her mission was the real point of the visit – although he had to admit, using a noisy and notorious archeologist for cover was a pretty nice ploy, especially in a place like Cyprus.  It was a shame Sam would have to leave; heck, it was a shame she was stuck with a jerk like Jack O’Neill as a CO.

He turned to head back to the fire and the evening meal.  The full moon was well above the horizon, bright enough to cast shadows on the pale sandy earth.  It was a shame they weren’t in sight of the sea, where the water would be catching the moonlight and reflecting it even more; or maybe not.  The seaside cities were sprawling farther every year, and the light pollution would drown out starlight and even moonlight.  Up in the hills here, well away from the cities, the night sky was still clear and the air was still fresh.  He could hear Lacie and Daniel laughing about something.

The laughter suddenly turned to shouts echoing across the camp, and the sounds of a scuffle beside the campfire:  the clatter of metal on stone as the grill tipped over, a sudden crackle and shower of sparks from the fire, and the smell of scorching shishkebab.  Then Lacie shrieked, a long scream with words that Mac couldn’t make out.  He broke into a run.

The firelight threw wild orange flares and confusing shadows.  MacGyver saw Lacie slumped in Teal’c’s grasp, and realised in horror that the big man was holding her arms behind her.  Daniel was holding her face between his hands, trying to make eye contact; she was shaking her head, trying to fight off both of them.

Mac’s mind started racing down a mental list of the objects in the food prep area.  He really didn’t want to have to take Teal’c out – he’d thought the intruders were well-meaning, he’d been a fool –

Daniel stepped back from Lacie, turned and saw Mac running towards them.  “Aw, crap.”  He held up a hand.  “Mac.  Wait.  This isn’t what it looks like – ”

“Lacie Najjar is not hurt,” Teal’c broke in, his voice deep and emphatic.  “We are trying to keep her from harm.”

Mac skidded to a stop.  “What?!”

“She is unhurt.”

“Then let her go!”

“I cannot.  We must not allow her to enter the tomb.”

Lacie stirred, opened her eyes and stared at MacGyver without recognition.  She began to speak, but Mac didn’t understand a word:  he couldn’t even recognise the language.  He hardly recognised her voice:  the words were a mystery, but the tone was haughty, harsh, demanding, dripping with contempt.  Mac took a half-step back without realising he’d moved.

She shut her eyes hard and blinked, and for a moment looked like herself again.  “MacGyver, help me . . . ”  Her face was bathed in a weird light that cast her features into sharp contrast.  Not firelight:  the light was coming from under her shirt.

“What the heck – ”

“Aw, crap.”  Daniel stepped up, dipped a hand into her shirt even as Mac began to splutter another objection, and fished out a pendant on a fine chain around her neck.  Mac winced at the blaze of light; he couldn’t see the pendant clearly, but it didn’t look like anything from the local shops.  Or from anywhere else he’d ever been.

“It must be from the tomb,” Teal’c rasped.  “Remove it from her!  Quickly!”

At his words, Lacie exploded into movement as if every cell in her body had been flooded with adrenaline.  She twisted in Teal’c’s grasp, so furiously Mac heard a bone crack – not in Teal’c’s hand; she had snapped a bone in her own arm trying to free herself.  Teal’c’s eyes widened in horror at the sound, his grip loosening involuntarily.  She pulled the undamaged arm away, grabbed a fistful of Daniel’s hair and yanked him off balance, half-spun to deliver a roundhouse kick to Teal’c’s stomach, then shoved Daniel again so that he began to topple towards the fire.  Teal’c had no choice:  he released her to catch Daniel before he landed in the blazing bed of coals.

Mac saw her turn towards the black mouth of the tomb entrance.  He sprang forward and intercepted her as she began to run; she collided with him hard, knocking the breath out of him.  She should have cried out in pain from the shock jarring her broken arm, but she was silent except for deep gasping breaths.  “Lacie!  Stop it!  What’re you doin’?”

Her eyes met his, but now he didn’t recognise her.  She tried to pull away from him, panting, bumping into the food prep table behind her.  She reached behind herself with her good hand and scrabbled for a moment.  When she raised her hand again, the firelight gleamed on the blade of the big cutting knife she’d used on the meat.

Mac yelped with alarm and tried to jump back out of her reach without actually letting go.  It didn’t work.  The knife came down, and his left leg erupted into blazing agony and crumpled underneath him.  Lacie leapt over his fallen form and ran for the tomb.

Pain was roaring in Mac’s ears.  Far above the clamour, he could hear Jack’s voice, also roaring.  “Carter!!  Get after her!!”  Teal’c was bending over him, turning him so the bright moonlight fell on the gashes, the solemn face concerned.

A huge hand clamped on the pressure point in Mac’s leg.  The pain went on and on.  MacGyver tried to focus on the hard ground under him, Russian verb conjugations, the multiplication tables, what people were saying, anything other than the howling demon that was his leg.

“What happened, Daniel?”  Jack’s voice, clipped, no-nonsense.  “From the beginning, damn it, not from the end, I can see how it ended!”

“Um, we saw the moon rising – Dr. Najjar was watching it – and, ah, suddenly she had her arms around my neck and was, well, she started coming on to me.  Big time.  Then she turned to Teal’c and started giving him orders.  In Goa’uld.”

Teal’c spoke.  “She commanded us to kneel and join her in worship of the Most Powerful and Glorious Goddess Aphrodite, or suffer the most terrible consequences.”

“You know, the usual – ” Daniel put in.

“We tried to restrain her – ”

“Yeah, I can see how that ended.”  The harsh sound of metal sliding against metal – MacGyver knew the sound without looking, the sound of a magazine clicking into place in a firearm.  Jack, no –  “Teal’c, look after Mac.  Daniel, you’re with me.  Let’s go.”

Booted feet jogging away.  Mac dug his fingers into the ground, tried to push the ground away before it swallowed him in more waves of pain, tried to sit up.

“Help me up . . . ”

“You should not move.  You are hurt.”

“Yeah, I noticed that . . .”  Mac made himself look at his leg, where dark blood was welling up from two long, deep gashes.  “I’ve had worse . . . she missed the arteries anyway . . . ”  He gritted his teeth and told himself the pain really wasn’t all that bad.  He knew he was lying.  “Teal’c, please, I gotta get in there before they kill her, she’s my friend, help me – ”

“I will help you.”  At the quiet words, a wave of relief washed through Mac, strong enough to help him push the pain a little ways away.  “Perhaps you can stop her if Captain Carter cannot.”

“I don’t get it – how could Jack send her in alone after a crazy woman – ?”

“If there is a Queen within the tomb, Captain Carter will be immune.”

“What?  What are you talking about?”

“Later.  You must save your strength.  Come.”

*

Chapter Text

Part Three: In For a Penny

The entrance to the underground maze yawned in front of Teal’c and MacGyver, a toothless black mouth.

“The generator – the lights – ”  Mac gestured with his right hand; Teal’c was holding him up by the left.

“If ONeill wanted the lights, he would have turned them on.  But I do not think they will work at this time.”  Teal’c didn’t stop to try.  He hurried on, unfazed by the dark and the twisting passages, surefooted and certain of the route.  Somehow, Mac wasn’t surprised.

Light ahead of them, but not the glow of the electric bulbs:  the light wavered and pulsed, blue-green and molten gold, like a throbbing nightmare in Las Vegas neon.  And sound, a deep thrumming that seemed to resonate through the passages as if they were organ pipes.  They rounded a corner and saw Jack and Daniel standing outside the entrance to the inner chamber – the throne room – flanking the opening where the light shimmered and rippled.  Waves of light, gold and sea-green, threw the lines and furrows of Jack’s face into deeper contrast, and gleamed on the pistol in Daniel’s hand.

Aw, man – so much for the meek civilian – Daniel held the gun, a Beretta 92, with the smooth expertise of a trained guerrilla.  Jack was armed as well, of course, another Beretta.  He glanced towards Teal’c and Mac as they approached and flashed a hand signal.  MacGyver recognised it and responded without thinking as he and Teal’c slipped behind Daniel.  He saw Jack blink at the move – whups, giveaway – and file the moment away for later consideration.  Heck.  Blown.

Mac looked over Daniel’s shoulder into the throne room, and stiffened.  The room had more than doubled in size:  the entire back wall had opened up to reveal an inner chamber.  Its walls were covered in the same glittering mosaic tiles, except that the tiles weren’t just reflecting light:  the walls were actually glowing, cascades of light and colour streaming along the tesselated lines in patterns weirdly reminiscent of printed circuits.  MacGyver squeezed his eyes shut, shook his head, opened his eyes again:  the scene was still there in front of him, with the insane light show that looked impossibly high-tech.  If this was a dream, a hallucination triggered by the leg injury – he’d had some doozies in the crazy-dream category – it wasn’t going away just yet.

“Lacie – ” he said softly, hopelessly.  He could see her, lying crumpled like a dropped dishrag on the floor at the entrance to the inner chamber, in front of a low dais.  Inside, there was some kind of boxlike structure, a bit like a coffin, dull gold where it wasn’t covered with symbols.  Sam Carter was standing next to the box, bent over it, dappled light pulsing on her face.

“I’m pretty sure she’s still alive,” Daniel murmured.  “I just saw her take a breath.”

“The sarcophagus is opening,” Teal’c muttered.

Sarcophagus?  Whaddya mean?  That’s Egyptian!  This is Cyprus.  Although the symbols on the box looked a lot like hieroglyphs, which made no sense either.

A harsh grinding noise, and the lid of the coffin split and slid aside.  A slim hand emerged from within, caught Sam’s hand in a firm grip, and a young woman sat up, opened dark eyes, breathed deeply.  She turned to Sam and spoke; Sam shook her head, a helpless smile on her face, but responded to a gesture from the girl, helping her rise to her feet and climb out of the sarcophagus.

“Aw, crap, Carter shoulda been immune – ”  Jack’s grunt was barely audible.  “What gives . . . ?”

“The Girdle of Aphrodite,” Daniel said softly.  “It ‘makes any woman impossible to resist’ – that’s what the inscription said.  And it didn’t say it only applies to men.”

“Just great.  A snake who isn’t sexist.”

“Um, you know, the most famous of Aphrodite’s worshippers was Sappho of Lesbos – ”

“I so don’t want to go there.”

The girl was standing on the dais now, her fingers still resting in Sam’s hand as she surveyed the room, a young queen examining her domain.  She wore a heavy gold necklace and elaborate bracelets, and not much more:  her face and figure were staggeringly beautiful, and the scraps of white fabric that passed for clothing did little to conceal the rich curves of her body.  On her forehead, MacGyver could see a stylised seashell mark:  it looked like the same kind of raised metallic tattoo that Teal’c bore.

Mac stared at her in horror.  On her bare stomach, two crossing slashes formed an X:  he could see, with hideous clarity, the edges of the flaps of skin.  There was no blood, but the girl shouldn’t have been able to stand upright with that kind of mutilation, let alone hold her body straight and her head high.

“She is not a Goa’uld,” Teal’c murmured.  “She is Jaffa.”

Huh?  “I don’t get it – how can she even be alive after being carved open like that – ”

“A sarcophagus can hold an occupant in suspended animation for years – millenia if necessary,” Daniel said.  “She’s probably been lying there for at least three thousand years, maybe four thousand, based on the archaic variations in the inscriptions . . . ”

What?!?

The girl was speaking again, and her voice echoed in the throne room.  Jack glared at Daniel.  “What’s she sayin’?”

“Who stands at the threshhold of the temple of Aphrodite?” Daniel murmured.  He stiffened; the girl gestured peremptorily, and a fresh wave of light washed over him from inside the inner rooms.  “Speak, scholar, since you understand me.  Repeat my words so that all may know my will,” Daniel repeated mechanically.  “Approach me.  Let all approach who await the Goddess’ return.”

MacGyver found his legs moving, or trying to move:  the left leg was attempting to obey as well as the right one, and it couldn’t.  Teal’c had swayed, caught in a struggle of will, fighting against each step as his feet dragged themselves into the throne room, one after the other.  Mac staggered and gasped with the pain that shot up his thigh.  Jack stepped over, hauled his cousin’s arm over his shoulders and helped him forward.

In the throne room, the girl was taking her seat on the shimmering chair, her exquisite face curving in a smile.

She turned to Sam, still standing beside her.  Daniel continued to translate, helplessly, as she spoke.  “Tell me who has gathered here in worship.”

Mac could see the struggle in Sam’s face, trying to resist the command.  Loophole – no worshippers here, ma’am –

“Tell me the names and titles of these men.”  The girl’s order was crisper; her face took on a sly air.  She cupped Sam’s face in a quick caress.  “Come, tell me.  In the name of the Goddess, I command it.”

“This is Colonel Jack O’Neill and Doctor Daniel Jackson, of SG-1.”  Sam spoke through clenched teeth.  “And MacGyver, principal field operative for the Phoenix Foundation.”

Whoa, how’d Sam find that out . . .

“In the name of the goddess?”  Daniel interrupted his own ongoing translation.  “Ara ei thea Aphrodite?”  Mac’s Greek was way short of Daniel’s, and the question didn’t make any sense anyway.  Whaddya mean, is she Aphrodite?

The girl frowned at him.  “Would you accuse me of hubris, scholar?  I make no such claim!  I am Hebe, the Handmaiden, most loyal and devoted servant and priestess of the Holy One, the Fairest of All.”  Hebe turned back to Sam.  “What of the Jaffa warrior?”

“Teal’c, former First Prime of Apophis, now also a member of SG-1.”

“Ah!  Former First Prime?”  She looked from Sam to Teal’c and back again.  “Is the upstart Apophis dead?”

“Upstart?” Jack muttered.

Hebe slipped off the throne and glided over to where Teal’c stood, studying him like a starved gourmet examining a full case of pastries.  Sam took a step forward, but froze in place at an unequivocal gesture to remain by the throne.

“How long has it been?  The world has changed much – your speech is strange, your clothing is stranger.”  Hebe ran a hand along Teal’c’s chest, and his posture grew even more rigid than before.  “My mistress knew Apophis for an arrogant fool, but he was ever well-served by his warriors.  She will be most pleased to take you into Her service.”

“I serve no false gods.”  Teal’c spoke through gritted teeth.

“Very wise.”  Her voice was still soft and sweet, but her eyes were hard.  “Apophis was always better served than his due.  Kneel now, Teal’c, proud warrior.  Bend your knee in honour of the Goddess.”

She had to reach up to touch Teal’c’s shoulder, but as her hand pressed down against it, MacGyver saw beads of sweat break out on the man’s face as he fought to stay upright.  One leg shifted, shuddering like a tree about to fall.  Teal’c battled through every agonizing vertical inch of that long, slow obeisance.  When his knee finally touched the glowing tiles of the floor, his shoulders were still rigid, his hands clenched, refusing surrender.

Hebe’s smile was smug and radiant.  “Aphrodite, wondrous and holy, is beloved of all, men and women alike.  Only a fool would deny Her power.  Only the heartless would disdain Her blessing.”  She grasped the heavy bracelet on her left wrist and twisted it around so that it rested in her palm; when she raised her hand, Mac saw a fierce light flare in the big jewel.  “Must I teach you all that the Goddess will be served, and served well?”

“Aw, crap,” Jack muttered.  “Here we go.”

“ ‘It is the deepest wish of every mortal woman to serve the Goddess, and to walk in Her path and breathe with Her lips.  For this is the will of the Great Ones, that only the most perfect shall serve Her . . . ’ ”  Daniel’s voice echoed in the chamber, shifting from ancient Greek to English and back again.

He had everyone’s attention now, especially Hebe’s.  “You have read the sacred writings?” she demanded.

“ ‘. . . let none but the Goddess herself bind with the Girdle of Aphrodite’, ” Daniel persisted.  “You’re usurping her power by using the Girdle – that’s hubris, isn’t it?  Does she know what you’re doing here?”

The question hit the girl hard; her face contorted, first in fear, then in fury.  She turned her back on Teal’c, reached Daniel in three quick strides, and slapped him hard across the face.  He continued to translate, compulsively, as she stormed at him.  “How dare you accuse me?”  She raised her left hand, and the bracelet started glowing again.

Daniel stood his ground.  “Hebe.  You’re remembered as the goddess of youth and health.  But the stories say you’re Hera’s daughter, not Aphrodite’s – how did that happen?  And if you misuse a healing device like that one – ” the flow of words was choked off as scarlet light flared in the girl’s palm.

“Down on your belly, scholar – if I did not need your skills – ”  Her next words went untranslated; Daniel was writhing on the floor, unable to speak.

“Smooth going there, sister.  Real smooth.”  The mockery in Jack’s voice cut across the chamber.  Hebe turned away from Daniel and glowered at Jack; Daniel raised his head, his face still racked with pain, and began to translate again, between gasps.

“Ya know, I betcha Mama Bear’s gonna be pretty pissed off when she finds out you were sitting in her chair.”

Mac wondered, hazily, how well ‘pissed off’ was going to translate into archaic Greek.  Way too well, it seemed from Hebe’s expression.  In his current position, draped over Jack’s shoulders, he couldn’t back away and neither could Jack, even if it had been a good idea.  They were the same height, which only made it more awkward.

It didn’t help that, in spite of her glowing beauty, he could see that she was terribly young, still in her teens.  Her eyes were old, with that look of too much experience that he’d seen way too many times, in too many teenagers, even pre-teens, boys and girls alike.  There was something even worse than that here, but he couldn’t put his finger on it – a depth of jaded knowledge that felt as if it stretched back through centuries of debauchery.  Mac tried to shake off the feeling as the girl stalked towards them, but the pain blazing through his leg made it impossible to concentrate.

Hebe’s expression changed as she studied Mac and Jack, her eyes widening and warming as she examining them.  “So alike and so different,” she cooed.  Mac felt Jack flinch with obvious disgust.  Urk.  Shopping for a matched set or something?

“My mistress will be most pleased by Her new consorts.  Ares and Hephaestus were always Her favourites.”  She turned to MacGyver and tilted her head, considering him.  “Your leg pains you, Master of Craft.  It is not good, that the body should fail when its strength is most wanted.”  She raised the hand with the bracelet cupped in her palm, and it glowed, so bright he couldn’t see clearly.  She laid the glowing hand on Mac’s left thigh, and warmth rippled out from her touch, erasing the pain as if it had never existed.

The shock of the change was almost too much; he staggered and heard her low laugh.  She ran her other hand up his body to his chest; he tried to pull away from her and couldn’t move.  Her mouth curved in a sensuous smile, and a sudden erotic flood slammed into him, painfully intense.  His vision was eclipsed with an image of herself, naked and welcoming; an image of himself, naked and triumphant – god, no – not his imagination.  Not his choice.

MacGyver fought against the vision, sickened at his own response.  She’s a kid for god’s sake, she can’t be a day over sixteen . . . Hebe seemed aware of the struggle; her mouth changed, the purring smile twisting into malice.  Spikes of red-hot pain stabbed into his thigh, and he let out a strangled cry and collapsed as the leg buckled underneath him again.

Hebe laughed again.  “Hephaestus was always so very easy to control.  But Ares, now . . . ”  Mac saw her glide over to Jack and press herself against him, saw his cousin’s shoulders and back stiffen and his jaw clench.  He guessed it was Jack’s turn to find out about that instant-erection trick.

Jack was fighting, hard; his hand tightened on his sidearm.  Hebe smirked.  “Oh, show me your weapon, Master of War.  It is a weapon, is it not?  How does it work?  Tell me!”  She lifted Jack’s hand in both of hers, examining the gun with interest.

“You aim and pull the trigger,” Jack said through gritted teeth.  “The person at the other end dies.”

“Such a small thing?  Explain.”

“You pull the trigger and ignite a small explosive charge in a contained chamber,” MacGyver found himself answering.  He fought to stop the flow of words.  “The projectile is propelled out of the barrel at high speed.  The person at the other end . . . dies.”

“Like this?”  Hebe smiled sweetly.  She placed the end of Jack’s Beretta in her mouth, pursed her lips around the barrel, looked up and met his eyes with a wide-eyed expression devoid of any innocence.  Sweat beaded on Jack’s face and the blood vessels in his neck stood out like cords with stress and revulsion.  Mac wondered, distantly, if he was fighting to pull the trigger, or to drop the gun and pull away.

The girl removed the pistol from her mouth, almost daintily, and let Jack’s hand fall limp at his side.  Her mocking laugh needed no translation.

Jack stirred, lifting his left hand to run it down Hebe’s body.  She raised surprised eyebrows, but allowed him to continue, her smile deepening.  His long fingers reached her bare stomach and caressed the hideous slashes.

MacGyver choked back a cry of horror as the mutilated skin suddenly rippled.  One flap of raw skin shifted, as if pushed from within.  The girl’s expression turned rapturous, and she placed both her hands flat on her stomach.

“Soon, soon, my darling – ” Daniel translated the murmured words.

A dark gap had opened, and some – thing – an impossible horror, snakelike, the questing mouth of a blind bird and the frilled crest of a lizard out of a fevered nightmare – emerged.

“She bears a mature symbiont.”  Teal’c’s voice was an anguished rasp.

Jack’s hand still lay on Hebe’s stomach, just below the ghastly X that marked the place where normal reality had completely disintegrated.  He glanced down, and Mac saw his set jaw twitch – he was still fighting hard to control himself.  Hebe closed her eyes, tilted her head back in abandon.

Jack moved like a striking snake, seizing the monstrosity just behind the blind gaping mouth, yanking it right out of the girl’s body.  Her piercing scream was drowned in the roar of his pistol as he threw the thing to the floor and shot it pointblank.  It squealed, an even more horrible sound to Mac’s ears, and Jack blasted it again.  Mosaic tiles shattered and glass shards sprayed up around the oozing pieces of the dead creature.

Hebe had collapsed, moaning and sobbing and clutching her stomach, and the others sprang from where they had been locked in place.  Sam ran over to where Lacie lay, while Teal’c erupted to his feet as if a pressure valve had been opened and hurried over to Daniel.

“I honour your courage, Daniel Jackson.  But that was foolhardy.  She could have easily slain you.”

“She didn’t.  How’s Lacie?”

“Still alive, but she’s hurt pretty bad,” Sam answered.  “How’s MacGyver?”

“Kinda freaked out, I think,” Jack said.  He was scrubbing his left hand hard against his pants leg, over and over, his face screwed up in disgust.  “Get Doc Lacie into the sarcophagus.  Now.”  He holstered the gun he still held in his right hand and hunkered down next to Mac.  “Still with us, Brainy-Mac?”

Mac took the risk of sitting up.  His head was swimming, but his leg didn’t hurt at all.  “Jack . . . how much longer before I just wake up and find out that I fell asleep watching a really bad sci-fi movie?  I don’t even like sci-fi.”

“No waking up this time,” Jack said gruffly.  “Not for any of us.”  His expression confused Mac; he looked . . . sad.  “You remember last June, when there were two great big unexplained fireballs in the night sky?”

“Well, of course.  The UFO junkies went nuts.”

“And ya know all that guff about Area 51 and a big government conspiracy to cover up alien invasions?”

“And UFO abductions and little green men being held for study at Roswell?  You’re sayin’ that’s all real?” Mac spluttered.

“No, that part’s still crap, far as I know.”  Jack looked over his shoulder at Teal’c with a questioning eyebrow.

Teal’c tilted his head very slightly to the side.  “To my knowledge, ‘Roswell’ has never been used for a landing site.”

“Give ‘em time.  Anyway, Mac, the aliens are out there, and they’re not friendly.  Well, Teal’c’s real friendly once you get to know him – ”

“Wait, you’re sayin’ Teal’c – ”

“Excuse me?”  Daniel was looking jittery.  “Jack, what the hell?  After that last lecture we got on security breaches – ”

“Relax, Daniel, Sam had his credentials checked while she was off at Akrotiri.  Turns out Mr. Rogers here has a clearance level only slightly lower than God.”

Sam had joined the cluster by now.  She nudged Jack.  “Sir, there was a lot more that I didn’t have time to tell you.  Did you ever meet Colonel Jim Taylor?  You remember – he was shot down over Mongolia, back in ’85, and reported KIA – ”

“Colonel Taylor?” Mac interjected.  “He was a Captain then – oh, yeah, he was Air Force, I’d kinda forgotten that . . . ”

“Waitaminute – you’re saying he’s the one who came back with Crazy Jimmy?  After the brass had written him off?  Carter, I thought you said Mac was in Intelligence.  That stunt was Crazy Stupid.”  Jack was studying Mac with a bemused expression.  “He brought one of ours home?”

MacGyver gave Sam an aggrieved look.  “You couldn’t’a been at Akrotiri for more than a few hours.  Just what kinda pull have you folks got to dig all that up so fast?”

Sam was beaming that really great smile again, but it wasn’t making Mac feel the same way this time.  “Your file makes great reading.  Apparently your boss and our CO go a long way back.”

“Aw, man.”  MacGyver pulled his legs up so he could sit tailor-fashion and prop up his hands to bury his head properly.  After a moment in that position, he suddenly remembered that he shouldn’t have been able to move his left leg at all.  He raised his head slowly to peer at the unoffending limb.  “What the . . . ”

“C’mon, Mac, pull yourself together,” Jack said breezily.  “I think Snake Girl healed you, then just gave you a nice big zap to keep you in line.  Better take a look and get it over.”

MacGyver hesitated, then reached out a slow hand towards the leg of his jeans.  He pushed aside the tattered fabric, stiff with blood, and stared at where Lacie’s knife had carved those two long deep gashes down the muscles of his thigh.  One slash had driven clear to the kneecap; the other, he was pretty sure, had severed a tendon.  He had been sure . . .

The leg was whole, the skin showing only faint traces of faded pink marks where the damage had been.

“That’s impossible.”

Jack shrugged.  “The aliens have healing gizmos.”

“But – the pain came back – ”

“That was probably direct nerve stimulation, with no actual tissue damage,” Sam said reassuringly.  Mac didn’t find any of it reassuring.  “The healing’s real.”

“What I don’t understand is how she was able to use the healing device at all,” Daniel said.  He was frowning thoughtfully.  “Teal’c, have you ever heard of any Jaffa being able to do that?”

“I have not.”

“She wasn’t just a Jaffa,” Sam said.  “She must have been a host herself at some point.  I could feel it.”

Daniel snapped his fingers.  “The Well of Aphrodite.”

“What?” said Jack.

“That’s what this place is supposed to be – where Aphrodite ‘renewed her virginity’ – ”

“Ewww.”

“What if a Goa’uld Queen changed hosts frequently?  Like, every few years?  And then made the ex-hosts into Jaffa?”

“Every nine years, for example?” Teal’c looked intrigued.

“Yeah, exactly.  And used the Selection process to cull the best of the herd, so to speak, and cross-breed them.  Um, that whole business with Ares and Hephaestus – ”

“Whoa, Daniel.  Maybe the chick had a twins fetish, but trust me, it was just creepy.”

“No, no, you’re not listening – ”

MacGyver met Sam’s eyes.  “Are they like this a lot?”

“All the time.”

“Think of the Ares and Hephaestus myth as a metaphoric pattern.  The fertility goddess chooses two consorts – one for physical prowess, the other for intellectual achievement – it’s not such a bad set of criteria for rapid genetic advancement, is it?  Sam?”

“I’m going to go check on Lacie,” Sam declared brightly.  “It shouldn’t take too long to fix a broken arm.”  She helped Mac to his feet.  “You see, the sarcophagus is primarily a healing chamber; the statis effect is a secondary usage – ”

“Once Lacie Najjar is able to move, we must return Hebe to the sarcophagus.  Without her symbiont, she will soon begin to die.”  Teal’c looked around.  “Where is she?”

Jack’s head whipped around at the question.  “Aw, shit – Teal’c, grab her!”

Hebe no longer lay where she had fallen.  She had been still for so long that they had assumed she was unconscious, but she had either revived or had been biding her time.  She had dragged herself onto the dais and up to the foot of the throne.  One hand was stretched up to the right armrest, methodically pressing a long series of tiles.  Each one flared as she touched it and continued to glow; patterns of light were beginning to flow down the side of the throne and ripple across the dais to the floor.

Teal’c reached her in a few long strides.  She evaded his grasp for a moment, long enough to reach up to the back of the throne and hammer on the tiles there with her fist.  Raw power forked out from the chair, silhouetting Hebe for a hideous moment and catching Teal’c in a shower of sparks.  The others tried to shield their eyes as a terrible smell of burnt hair and scorched flesh filled the chamber.

Teal’c pulled her away from the ruined throne and bent over her, his great hand cupping her face.  She glared at him with malice and triumph in her eyes.  “You cannot stop it now.  I have failed my mistress, but I die knowing She will return.”

“You are free.”  Teal’c sounded as if he was pleading.  “You need not die a slave.  You need not die at all, if you have the will to live.  The sarcophagus is still here.  It will sustain you, possibly even free you from the need to bear a prim’ta – ”

The lovely face contorted with fury and hatred.  She made an effort to spit at Teal’c, but only a little blood oozed at the corner of her mouth.  “I am the servant of the Great One.  Would you steal even that from me?  When my time drew to an end and She chose a new vessel, I pleaded with Her, I begged Her, if She must leave me, to allow me, somehow, to serve Her still.  She granted my wish.”  Hebe laid her hands tenderly on her mutilated stomach.  “Never before had a woman been given the honour of bearing the seed of Olympus.  And now – ”

She glared at the others as they gathered around.  “Remain here, murderers, defilers of the temple, and wait.  Or flee!  It matters not.  Soon, the Eyes of Argus will open and speak to the Goddess.  She will find you then, all of you, and kill you for your blasphemy . . . ”

Her hissing voice faded.  Her eyes rolled up, and she slumped in Teal’c’s grasp.  He picked up the still form, his face solemn, and carried her to the inner chamber.

“Aw, crap.”  Jack ran a hand through his hair.  “Carter – ”

“We’re on it, sir.”  Sam was already hunched over, examining the dais around the throne, looking for signs of control panel access.  MacGyver crouched beside the throne, running a hand along the portions of the mosaic designs that were still intact.  Daniel watched them both for a moment, then started studying the hieroglyphs on the sarcophagus.

“This is crazy.  Argus was a myth.”  MacGyver looked around the chamber, ran a hand down the bloody shreds of his jeans leg, and winced.  “Okay, never mind, so’s Hebe and Aphrodite.  Okay.”  He took a deep breath.  “So what the heck did she mean?  Is it actually a problem?”

“Wait, wait, there was something about the Eyes of Argus in the inscriptions, I remember . . . ” Daniel closed his eyes in concentration.  “ ‘At the Hour of the Goddess’ . . . that was the one, something about consorts . . . ”  One hand circled in the air, as if he was trying to wind up his memory.  “ ‘The Handmaiden . . . the Handmaiden shall be summoned to make ready the Blessed and Glorious Ones.  The Eyes of Argus – ’ ” he squeezed his own eyes even more tightly shut.  “ ‘The Eyes of Argus shall open and the Goddess shall come to choose Her consorts.’ ”

“Oh, that’s just great,” Jack snarled.  “What, she had her boss on speed dial?  Sam, how do we turn off the phone?”

“Is anyone likely to be there on the other end to pick up the call?” asked Daniel.

Sam looked up with a frown.  “I don’t know, sir.  Teal’c, is Aphrodite still alive?  Is she one of the System Lords?”

“I do not know,” came the grave reply.  “Many of the Goa’uld Queens are secretive about their movements.  Many of the System Lords cooperate to keep this secrecy.”

“She could still be out there, or she could have an ally who is.” Sam poked at several tiles that seemed promising, and scowled when nothing happened.  “Hebe seemed pretty confident that it meant trouble.”

“Daniel, you said this complex was three or four thousand years old,” Jack said.  “What’re the odds that the phone’s still workin’?”

“The Girdle was,” MacGyver observed drily.  “I guess these aliens of yours build stuff to last.”  He stood up, stuffed his hands in his pockets, and turned around the chamber slowly, frowning.

Jack looked at him, looked imploringly up at the shadows on the chamber’s ceiling, then held up his hands in an expansive gesture.  “Spit it out, Mac.  Whatcha thinkin’?”

“Um, exactly what is the danger here?”

“That’ll depend on what the Eyes of Argus are.  Or is,” Sam replied.  “We really don’t know all that much about their technology yet.”

“We do know that if they can get at us, they will,” added Daniel.

“Wait.  They’re a threat right now, but they also go back thousands of years?  Long enough to have built this place?”

“They live for thousands of years.  They’re parasites.  Even their technology is mostly stolen from other races.”  Sam had finished her circuit of the dais and stood up.

“And – you made it sound like they’re not united, right?  They might be at cross purposes?  Keeping secrets and hiding stuff from each other?”

“You got it,” said Jack.  “Biggest buncha backstabbing double-crossing two-faced fat-cat cutthroats you’ll ever find, outside of Congress.”

“So maybe the Eyes of Argus could be something that the – what did you call them? – Goa’uld?  Something that a highly advanced race wouldn’t easily find, or maybe won’t recognise – ”  MacGyver’s eyes suddenly opened very wide.  “The Eyes of Argus will open – Sam, think.  No birds or small animals anywhere nearby, and every so often you get a creepy feelin’ – ”

“Subsonics?  How?”

“The Bad Pennies!  The copper disks – solid copper, a meter wide, topped with glass – heck, that’s right, you didn’t see the dig records – they were buried only a few inches under the surface, in sandy soil.  On a bed of sand and powdered mica four inches deep, in fact.  The sand isn’t the native stratum, of course; it was laid in place.”

Sam’s eyes lit.  “Antennas.  They’re antennas!  Sand insulation underneath and on top, and the glass top layer also keeps water off, so it won’t corrode or ground out and lose the signals.”

“Yeah.  Low frequency signals will pass through rock, so you can transmit signals, say, oscillating between half a hertz and eight hertz – keeps the critters away and gives the locals the shivers.”

“But why?  What’s the point?”

“We wondered why this site was so far away from the seaside and the port towns – I think your Goa’uld gal wanted a base that the rest of the aliens would overlook.”  Mac was talking very quickly now.  “Multiple antenna segments running on high power will just look like random radiofrequency noise, especially if the signal switches between them fast enough.  There’s no single point of radiation you can triangulate on.”

“Multiple segments – oh, god, you mean there are more of them . . . ?  Of course.  The Eyes of Argus.  Plural.”  Sam grimaced.  “Oh, crap.  If the array can be activated so that it switches from the subsonic keep-away signals to ultra-high frequency bursts – ”

“Whoa.  What’s it signalling?  Nothing’s gonna get anywhere quick enough to whistle up your aliens – no matter how spiffy their spaceships are, an ordinary electromagnetic signal can’t go any faster than the speed of light.”

“MacGyver, moonrise.  Things start happening at moonrise!  There has to be a relay station of some kind on the Moon.”

Daniel had been looking from Sam to Mac to Sam and back again, and had finally fallen behind.  Teal’c had stopped looking at either of them and was gazing straight ahead.  Jack’s eyes merely looked glassy.

“Wonder Twin powers, activate,” Jack drawled.  “Are you two done yet?”

Mac looked around the chamber.  “But it’s gotta have a power source.  Otherwise – hold on.  How come nothing’s happened yet?”

“No power?” Sam mused.  “If there’s no power – or not enough for whatever – we should be okay.”

Jack winced.  “Bad move, Carter – jinx – ”

The walls seemed, for a moment, to ripple; the floor shimmered, and several mosaic tiles cracked with faint glassy tinkles.

“Okay, we’re not okay,” Daniel said.

“Aw, man.”  MacGyver grabbed at the back of the throne to steady himself.  “It’s – ”

He and Sam finished the sentence in the same breath.  “ – geothermal!”

“Sir, we need to get the hell out of here.  Daniel, can Lacie be moved yet?”

“I think so – um, just what are we doing?”

“We gotta put blindfolds on Argus before he phones home,” Mac said.

Jack winced.  “That is the worst mixed metaphor I’ve ever heard.”

*

Lacie Najjar was still unconscious, but her broken arm had knit and her breathing was deep and regular.  Teal’c laid the still form of Hebe in the sarcophagus and watched expressionlessly as the twin wings of the lid slid closed and hid the exquisite face.

Jack glanced at the moon as they emerged from the passages.  It felt as if days had passed, but the moon lay serene in the night sky, its position showing that Lacie had stabbed Mac and run into the labyrinth barely an hour before.  The moon would remain in sight for hours – in line-of-sight, just waiting to relay betraying signals from the mother planet and bring down burning wrath from heaven.  And he’d thought it’d been bad when it was just a potential foothold for hostile troop movements.  Shit.

“Where’s Mac got to?”

MacGyver had run over to one of the tents and began scrabbling in the camp supplies.  Sam was digging through their own gear.

“We only brought one magnetometer with us – ”

“Fer cryin’ out loud, Carter, not magnets again?”

“It’s a metal detector, sir.  We’ve only got one, and it’ll take hours if we only look for one disk at a time.  We can send to Akrotiri for a flyover, but that’ll take time also.”

Jack shook his head.  “We gotta do better than that.  And we can’t wait for daylight.  Teal’c, when we were out in the hills earlier, you caught the places where the creepout effect was happening – ”

“Indeed.”

“Think you can find them all again?  In the dark?”

“I can.”

“Someone needs to stay here with Doc Lacie.  That’s you, Daniel,” Jack said decisively.

Sam handed Daniel a shortwave radio handset.  “There’s probably an even number of the disks.  Can you keep count if we call in each time we find one?”

“Just what the hell do we do when we find ‘em?” Jack demanded.

MacGyver grinned.  “That part’s easy.”  He had emerged from the supply cache carrying hammers and mallets from the toolbox, and a sheaf of metal spikes:  tent pegs, guywire stakes, shishkebab skewers.  “All we gotta do is ground’em.  Hammer a metal stake through the disks, and it’ll kill the signal.”

Daniel sighed.  “God, I hope Lacie doesn’t wake up and see what we’ve done to her dig.”

The ground rocked and swayed like a raft in a rising sea.  Jack caught his balance again and swore.  “C’mon, campers.  We’ve gotta hurry.”

Sam hefted the metal detector.  “If anyone has a cell phone, leave it here.  One pulse from any of the disks will fry them.  MacGyver, is there any aluminum foil in the cooking supplies?”

“Right here.”  Mac tossed her a roll.

She began to tear off sheets.  “Everyone except Daniel, wrap your radios in these.  Don’t unwrap them except for right after you’ve grounded out one of the disks.  After you check in, wrap it up again.  Otherwise they’ll fry too.”

Jack gave Mac a long look.  “I didn’t know you were contagious.”  He dug into his pockets, hunted out a cell phone and tossed it into the welter of gear.  “Anything else we oughta know?”

“Um, yeah.”  MacGyver was pawing through another pile of supplies, hunting up anything that could be used as a shovel.  “When a disk switches to the ultrahigh frequency pulse, it could ground from any ambient metal right into the human body.  But that kinda arcing should only happen if you’re in range when the signal switches to that particular antenna disk –  ”

“Carter?  Translate, please?  That’s not one of Daniel’s languages.”

“You know what happens when you put metal into a microwave oven?  Well, just imagine that happening to metal items on your body.”

“Yeah.  Right.  So if our dog tags start zapping us, that’s bad.  If we feel them starting to cook, that’s real bad.  Except it’ll mean we’ve found one of the giant alien Frisbees, so that’s good.  And for once, we’re dealing with something that can’t shoot back.”  Jack hefted a folding shovel, a mallet, and a handful of metal stakes.  “Anne Rice, eat your heart out.  This oughta be a piece of cake.”

*

It was a nightmare.

The moonlight on the pale ground might have provided enough light to see by, but the trails wound through the hills and ducked under the shadows of bluffs.  The moonlight was deceptive, deepening and thickening the shadows, hiding rocks and rough patches so that mishaps were frequent.

The earth continued to shiver, the tremors coming with ever-increasing intensity, at ever shorter intervals.  Jack gritted his teeth and kept going.  Stumble along in the dark till your skin starts crawling and every nerve screams at you.  Then stagger around till you find the place that feels worst.  Hack downwards with the shovel into the pale packed sand and hope you get lucky.

Really bad luck was when a disk sent out a signal.  Jack remembered when he and Sara had just gotten their first microwave oven, and he’d carelessly tried to reheat coffee in it, using the closest handy mug.  Sparks had showered and arced from the decorative gold metal replica of the Air Force emblem on the coffee cup.

That had been hard on the nerves, but at least it had been behind a glass window.  Now – who ever thinks about how much metal there is on ordinary clothing?  When the first pulse hit, every metal eyelet on both of Jack’s boots crackled and zapped, sending dozens of fiery needles into his feet and shins.  He practically levitated off the spot, and then had to go back and tackle it again with his nice metal shovel.

The disks were no more than half a foot under the surface.  The powdered mica in the sand glittered in the moonlight like fairy dust once the top layer of dirt was cleared away.  The coating on the ‘pennies’ didn’t look like glass; it looked like a diseased crust on a moldy fossilised pizza.  Setting the metal spike against the centre and pounding down made the nerves scream even louder, but then the tension would pop like a soap bubble and you knew you’d got it.  Die, you ugly suckers.  Die.

After several eons, a welcome sound overhead – the surveillance plane they’d requested from Akrotiri had finally made it.  A moment later, the radio buzzed with Daniel’s welcome voice and an even more welcome message.  “Jack, the guys from the plane just signalled to say there aren’t any signals.  I mean, other than theirs.”

Teal’c’s voice, just after that.  “ONeill.  We have now disposed of the disks at all the locations I noted previously.”

And Sam’s voice after that.  “Sir, I think we’ve got them all.  Mac just checked the satellite communications gear, and there’s no further interference on any of the upper frequencies.”

“How many were there?”

“Sixteen, counting the two the archeologists found.”

“Nice round number.  Okay, campers.  Time to pack it in.”

The ground didn’t stop quivering as they made their way back to the camp; if anything, it got worse.  Practice didn’t make it easier to deal with, either.  Jack tried stopping and standing still, feet spread wide, when a tremor hit; then he tried slowing down, but still walking – that really didn’t work – and, finally, he simply hit the dirt every time, before the dirt hit him.  He figured the dirt had scored so many points by then that he might as well take a dive.

Back at camp, it looked like the others had all made the same decision, except for Teal’c, who wasn’t wearing any more dirt than you might expect from having to dig in it.  Damn him.  Even Daniel, who hadn’t been out for the fun nighttime stroll, had apparently been knocked down a few times also.  MacGyver was hobbling again, although not badly; one of his falls had been a bit harder than the others.

“Carter, Mac, how much longer is this crap gonna go on?”

“Hard to say, sir – we don’t really know how it’s being controlled – ”

“Hang on!!”  That was MacGyver, grabbing at Daniel’s shoulder and pushing him to the ground, as a massive wave seemed to hump itself up under their feet.  The earth growled as falling rock crashed somewhere, much too near, and then the ground yanked itself away from underneath and even Teal’c lost his balance.

Jack could hear Mac’s voice, counting out seconds as they lay there through an eternity of the sick, unnatural roiling.  Clever of Mac.  Mac had always been clever.  Count out the seconds, and hang on to the thought that really, it hadn’t been forever at all, it wouldn’t take forever before it finally quieted down . . . one thousand nineteen, one thousand twenty . . .

When they picked themselves up, the landscape lay quiet and peaceful, bathed in soft light from the westering moon.  The watchful eyes of hostile alien forces had closed again in sleep – maybe just a short nap, but it would do for now.

The terrain around them was mostly unchanged; not bad, compared to the aftermaths of some of the quakes Jack had been through.  The hillside in front of them, though – the passage opening was still there, a dark gap in the pale stony wall, although sand and stones had slid down and were littered on the ground in front.  Immediately around the opening, the solid rock looked the same.

Beyond and above that, there was a crumpled depression in the hill, as if a giant thumb had pressed down on a hollow spot underneath and pushed it inwards.  Jack drew a mental image of how the labyrinth had been laid out.

“That’s the throne room, isn’t it?  Or was . . . ”

“Probably,” Sam said.  “I think that last thing Hebe did activated some kind of self-destruct.”

“Good thing we got Doc Lacie out when we did.  How’s she doin’, Daniel?”  Jack didn’t say anything about Hebe.  He could see, in Teal’c reserved face, that he didn’t need to.  Teal’c remembered, and they all understood, and nobody needed to talk about it.

“Still unconscious,” Daniel said.

“Lucky her.”

MacGyver was bending over her.  “I don’t get it – what’s wrong?  Why hasn’t she woken up?”

“I gave her a shot out of the medical kit,” Daniel answered.  “I’m sorry, Mac, but trust me, we can’t let her wake up until we’ve got her somewhere safe, somewhere she can be examined thoroughly.  I just hope to god it’s still her when she does wake up.”

Sam laid a hand on Mac’s shoulder.  “It’s just a precaution.  I’m pretty sure she’ll be okay – I don’t sense a Goa’uld in her.”

“I don’t understand – ”

“The snakes,” Jack said, as if that explained everything.

“The Goa’uld use living humans as hosts.”  Teal’c’s deep voice, a simple statement with no false effort to reassure.

MacGyver pulled at Lacie’s shirt, baring her stomach to check for the nightmarish X slashes.

“Not there,” Sam said.  “That’s just how the larval form survives.  The adults burrow into the brain stem and take over the central nervous system . . . ” her voice trailed away.  There was too much to explain, all at once, and she was tired, and the look on Mac’s face hurt.

“We need to get her to that base – there’s a hospital there, right?” Daniel asked.  “Don’t worry, Mac.  She might not even remember much of what happened.  Well, you and I can worry about what to tell her when she starts asking about all those holes we’ve been digging and why we didn’t document anything properly.”

MacGyver glanced around at the four people who had been strangers, or worse, that morning.  He knew what a really tight-knit team looked like, even though he’d never been part of one himself.  Not this kind of team.  He’d had that with Pete, before the creeping blindness had done what age couldn’t, and stolen Pete away from field ops.  Since then, he’d tried to keep moving fast enough so he wouldn’t notice how badly he missed it.

He shook his head.  “Okay, so she’ll wake up and be all right . . . ”  Lucky her.

*

Chapter Text

Epilogue: Penny Lane

Jack nodded to the airman on duty outside the door of one of the rooms at the RAF hospital on the base at Akrotiri.  The base was sovereign territory of the United Kingdom, and the base commander, Major General Pearson, had made it clear that he would offer courtesy accommodations to the Americans as long as they didn’t get in the way or make a nuisance of themselves.  Since their most immediate need had been medical facilities for Dr. Najjar, they’d been glad to accept whatever was available, and improvise as needed.

It just figured that they’d had to improvise what to do with MacGyver.

“Sir, let me unlock that for you – ”

Jack quirked a smile that had little real humour in it.  “Don’t bother.”

“Sir?”

“Tell ya what.  I’ll betcha a case of the best local beer that it’s not locked.”  Jack didn’t wait to see whether his bet would be taken; he turned the handle and went in.  Behind him, he heard the airman emit a choked sound.

Inside, the windowless room was small, neat, furnished comfortably although not lavishly.  The medical equipment had been cleared out of the room altogether when it had been pressed into service as temporary quarters.  MacGyver was sitting at a small table, chin propped in his hands, avidly studying a computer screen full of text.  The table beside him held a small stack of books and half a dozen file folders.  Jack recognised Daniel’s handwriting on some of the scattered papers.

Jack cleared his throat.  “The door was unlocked.”

Mac didn’t look up.  “I suppose this is your idea of payback?”

Jack didn’t answer.  After several minutes, Mac looked up at him, glowering.  Jack gestured at the books and papers and computer screen.  “Looks like Sam and Daniel gave you plenty to read while you’ve been waiting.”

This time, it was Mac’s turn to not answer.  Jack rolled his eyes.  “C’mon, Mac.  Locking you up wasn't on my orders. It wasn't my idea.  In fact, I told the base commander it was stupid to even try.  You wanna cut me a little slack here?  It’s partly your own fault, you know.  How’d you manage to get yourself declared persona non grata in both Syria and Turkey anyway?”

“Oh.  That.”  MacGyver looked chagrined.  “You mean – I thought all this – ” he waved a hand around the tiny room and the guarded door that should have been locked.  “ – I thought it was, you know, because of being a civilian.  Since your unit’s so top secret it doesn’t even exist.”

“Well, yeah, I think the commander was thinkin’ about that too.  Only he was wrong about you.  Anyway, thanks for hangin’ around . . . since I’m guessin’ that you coulda waltzed right off the base any time you wanted to.”  He jerked his head sideways towards the door.  “Anyway.  You got a minute?  My CO finally got here.  He’s waiting to meet you.”

As they left the room, Mac cleared his throat.  “They haven’t let me see Lacie since early this morning.”

“She seemed to be coming round when I looked in on her about five minutes ago.”

MacGyver looked at him with surprise and unspoken gratitude.  “Have they figured out yet just what happened to her?”

“I’m not sure.  But she’s bein’ looked after by the best.”

“Your Doctor Frasier seemed real sharp to me.”

“Best doctor I’ve ever had sticking me full of pointy things.  And that’s sayin’ a lot.  We keep her pretty busy.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet.”

They rounded a corner and nearly ran into Sam.

“Whoa!  Watch it, Carter!”

“Colonel!  Mac!  I was just looking for you – Lacie’s recovered consciousness, and Janet’s confirmed she isn’t carrying a Goa’uld or any other ugly surprises.  She says she thinks she’ll recover fully.”

Mac’s face lit up, but Jack’s expression turned serious.  “Have they got any idea how much she remembers?”

“Not much, so far anyway.  She doesn’t even remember finding the throne room.”

Mac looked from one to the other, the pleasure in his face ebbing.  “That oughta make your cover-up a lot easier.”

Sam winced.  Jack gave an eyebrow shrug.  “Well, yeah.  Daniel and Teal’c have gone back there with a couple of airmen, to check out how much of a mess was left and try to clean it up.”

“I suppose you’re gonna destroy all the photos and records?”

“Just from the throne room,” Sam replied, her heart sinking at the look on MacGyver’s face.  “They’ll collect the other Bad Pennies and fill in the holes – ”

“We figure we can put out a story that somebody was tryin’ a little freelance treasure hunting.”

“And are you collecting the graduate assistants also?” Mac demanded.  “And digging more holes to put them into?”

Jack threw up his hands.  “Aw, crap, Mac, would you lighten up?  We have to make sure they aren’t carryin’ passengers either.”

*

As they approached the ad hoc briefing room, Mac could hear two voices in animated and jovial conversation; although he couldn’t make out any words, he knew one of the voices well enough to identify the speaker just from the patterns of the vocal tones.  His face broke into a broad grin.

As they entered, the second man was just asking, in an unmistakable Texas accent and a tone of complete incredulity, “How many camels?”

“Four!” Pete Thornton replied, laughing.  “Three purebred racing camels, with gilded saddles and halters and all the fancy trappings you can imagine, and one incredibly cranky male camel – I think that was in case Mac wanted to set up a camel-breeding operation.”

“Good to hear the sheik was so appreciative.”

MacGyver poked his head into the room, with Jack peering behind him.  “Pete – did you hafta tell that darned story again?”  He was grinning from ear to ear as he crossed to the old man in a few quick strides and embraced him.  “I can’t believe it!  They dragged you all the way out to Cyprus?”

Pete gestured towards the other man.  “MacGyver, I’d like you to meet someone very special:  this is General George Hammond, US Air Force.  You can trust him and rely on him.  And there aren’t a lot of generals I’ll say that about.”

“Yeah, no kidding.”  Mac eyed General Hammond thoughtfully.

Hammond was looking from MacGyver to Jack and back again, carefully.  “Well, I’ll be damned.”

“And he isn’t even a robot double in a wig,” Jack said.

Mac rolled his eyes.  “Yeah, right.  And I’m not a clone, or a shapeshifting alien, or Jack’s twin from another dimension, or . . . that was a joke, right?”

“Son, you better sit down,” said Hammond.

“Is that an order?”  Mac’s eyes narrowed.

“No, it’s a suggestion.  In fact, I’d say it’s a recommendation.”  He turned to Pete Thornton.  “It really is like seeing double.  Except for the hair, of course.”

Pete smiled.  “It’s like hearing double.”  He peered at Jack, shaking his head.  “So, Mac, that’s what you’d look like if you ever actually got a real haircut?”

“Pete, don’t you start on that – ”

“After this, I swear I’ll stop nagging you about it.  Never again.”  Pete shuddered theatrically.

“Hey,” Jack spluttered.

Mac perched on the table next to Pete’s chair.  He was grinning like a small boy.  “It’s not that I’m not glad to see you, Pete, but what the heck are you doin’ here?”

“Oh, just drumming up a little extra business for us.  I hope.”

“Colonel Thornton has been briefing me on the Phoenix Foundation’s extensive portfolio of defense contract work,” said Hammond.  “Including a good many projects so top secret that I didn’t know they’d even been involved.”

“I could’ve told you about some of them, sir . . . ” Sam started.

“Colonel?” Jack interrupted.

Pete held up his hands in a deprecating gesture.  “Long since retired.”

“How’d you make it stick?  I never did figure that one out.”

*

As Jack and MacGyver left the briefing room some time later, they could hear Hammond asking, “One other thing, Pete.  Just what did your man do with all those camels after all that?”

Mac winced.  Jack looked at him thoughtfully.

“What?” Mac said irritably.  He couldn’t figure out Jack’s expression.

“I’m still tryin’ to imagine you in Vietnam,” Jack said slowly.  “It’s not working.”

“And Afghanistan,” Mac said.  “That was a bit later, though.”

“How?”

Mac waved one hand noncommittally, as if he could sketch the answer in the empty air.  “I had this chemistry professor – he knew I wanted to do something.  There was so much killing going on, so many people dying . . . he had some contacts, he pulled strings, they pulled strings.  Next thing I know, I’m on a plane to Saigon, talkin’ to this skinny black kid barely older than I was, just as crazy, with a headful of crazy ideas for out-thinkin’ bombmakers.”

“Crap, Mac, you musta seen actual combat before I did!  And I can’t wrap my head around how you ended up with Special Forces.  At that age?  You do not just go skipping a grade with those guys!”

Mac shrugged.  “I was attached to their unit in ’Nam.  My bomb-busting partner and I weren’t military, and after all the trouble it took to get us out in the field, the brass got nervous.  We got a reputation pretty fast, and I guess they thought we were gonna get targeted.  Anyway, after a while, the SF guys kind of adopted me.”

“Adopted you?”  Jack’s voice was incredulous.

“Well . . . we’d just cleaned up our twenty-third bomb, and on the way back to Saigon, I made the whole unit stop and wait in sauna heat and a cloud of stinging bugs while we checked out a wrecked bicycle that somebody had dumped by the road.”

“A bicycle?”

“Yeah.  That was number twenty-four.  After that, they didn’t treat us like unwanted baggage.”  Mac’s eyes had taken on a faraway look.  “There were some real good guys in that unit.  They taught me a lot.”

“Yeah,” Jack murmured.  “I’ll just bet.  You ever see any of them these days?”

Mac smiled, or grimaced.  “Kinda.  Every time I’m in Washington, I stop at the Wall and thank them and tell them I’m still okay.”

*

Jack could hear MacGyver’s voice clearly from well outside the open door to Mac’s temporary quarters.  “Wait a minute – you’re sayin’ these people – ”

“The Tollans,” Sam prompted.

“Yeah, the Tollans – they’d trashed their own planet so completely that they’d never even seen so much as a cat, and then they came all superior about being ‘highly advanced’?  Where’d they get off?  Did they think it’s ‘highly advanced’ to sterilise your whole planet?  The heck with whatever their technology is.  You’d think they coulda figured out they could learn a few things from us!”

Jack leaned against the doorway.  “Y’know, Carter, I never thought of putting it to them that way.  Maybe we should try that if we ever get a chance.  Good thing we didn’t give them a dog.”

“I did think about that, sir.  Cats are pretty good at looking after themselves.  I actually named him Schrödinger because he always managed to get at food even when it was inside a sealed box.”  She cocked her head at Jack.  “How are the debriefings going?”

“What debriefings?” Mac asked.

“Lacie’s graduate assistants.  Didn’t the Colonel tell you . . . ?” she looked at Jack’s expression and made a face.  “Sorry, sir.”

“Permission granted to extract foot from mouth, Carter.”  Jack held up a hand.  “No need to go ballistic, Mac.  We’ve been all nice and fluffy with them, and they’ve been very cooperative.”  Jack smiled, a false flat smirk.  “I’ve just been chatting with them while Janet runs a jillion tests and deprives them of bodily fluid samples.  But she’s nice even when she’s sticking pointy things into you.  Much nicer than me.”

“We’re telling them the same cover story we told Lacie,” Sam explained.  “We’re attributing her memory lapses to the ‘mysterious high fever’ she had – which is also a very good cover for all the medical tests and the extended observation period.  She’s been asking about you – we told her you’ve been kept in isolation till we could be sure you didn’t get it too.”

“We got the grad students all nervous about the fever being contagious, and then they calmed down and felt way better because they were out of danger,” Jack said.  “They were kinda confused once their minds stopped being messed with – they couldn’t even remember leaving the dig, and poof, there they were back in Kansas.”

“You’re kidding me,” MacGyver spluttered.  He was scowling.  “After running out on her like that, they don’t even remember doin’ it?”

Sam held up a hand.  “Mac, they probably couldn’t help it.  Janet has a theory – she suspects the Goa’uld who was posing as Aphrodite programmed an aversion response into the DNA of the original local population – a variation on the methodology of the subsonic broadcasts from the Bad Pennies.  They’re all Cypriot, after all, and the gene pool’s been relatively contained for centuries, except in the Turkish regions.”

“What?!”

“And since the native population was impacted much more profoundly than anyone who wasn’t from the area – Janet and I think the archeological team must have triggered a security protocol when they were in the throne room the first time.  We know that Lacie activated something, and we don’t know just where she found that amulet, or what else happened in there.”

“No, no, hang on a second here – Sam, are you seriously talkin’ about genetic manipulation?  Genetic experiments on humans?  Four thousand years ago?”

“Yes, exactly – ”

“Slow down, Carter,” Jack said.  “You just pegged the needle on the Outraged Ethics meter.  He’s gonna take a bit to calm down now.”  MacGyver glared at him.  “All true, Mac.  The Gooulds can do it, they’ve done it before, they’ll do it again and think it’s fun.”

Mac looked from Jack to Sam, speechless.  Sam swallowed at the look on his face:  the light had gone out of his eyes completely, as if the entire night sky had gone into eclipse.

“Anyhow, the kids are gonna be okay.  By the time they’re all back sifting sand, they’ll think nothin’ bad happened.”  Jack jerked his head in the direction of the door.  “You coming?  I thought you’d like a chance to check in with Doc Lacie.  And your boss wants to talk with you before he leaves the base.”

“MacGyver,” Sam called as he was leaving.  He turned to look at her.  “Are you doing all right?”

Mac glanced over his shoulder to make sure that Jack was already far enough down the hallway to be out of easy earshot.  He shrugged.  “I’m – it’s just that it’s a lot to deal with – Sam, I’ve spent most of my life tryin’ to save just a few of the people in a few corners of this one planet . . . and now you’re telling me that the whole galaxy’s full of planets of people who need help.”  He buried his hands in his jeans pockets.  “Whole constellations of slave worlds . . . how’m I supposed to go back to stargazing now, knowing all that?”

Sam met his look with a brittle smile.  “I bet you’ll find that the wonder is still there.  It’s just . . . well, different.”

Mac smiled faintly.  “Do you really have ray-guns that stun people without killing them?”

“Uh, yeah.  But they hurt like hell.”

“Oh.”

*

Mac caught up with Jack easily, and raised an eyebrow when Jack slowed down and took an unnecessary turn.  Figures.  He can’t actually say that he wants to talk.

“Teal'c and Daniel just checked in,” Jack said casually.  “They’re on their way back from the dig site.  Daniel says it doesn’t look too bad there – well, expect for the place where the roof fell in on the throne room, of course.  That’s toast.  The rest of the spooky tunnels are there, and your guy Thornton is gonna go into Nicosia and talk to the guy in charge of digging up ruins – ”

“You mean the Director of Antiquities?”

“Yeah, him.”

“Her.”

“Whatever.  Anyway, he – Thornton, I mean – he’s gonna make sure Lacie doesn’t lose her shoveling license or anything.  I guess since she doesn’t even remember finding the throne room, she won’t miss it too much.  There’s a season for digging stuff up, right?  We’re gonna wait till it’s over and then send in a crew to see if they can retrieve any of the stuff from what used to be the throne room.”

“Nice of you to give Lacie a chance to finish her work,” Mac said drily.

“Well, if we try to muscle her aside, it’ll just draw more attention.  We really don’t want that.  Daniel’s gonna give her a bunch of notes about the inscriptions – I guess he’s better at reading that stuff than she is.”  Jack cleared his throat.  “You know you’re free to leave any time . . . if you want to go back to shoveling sand yourself.”

“You tryin’ to get me out from under foot?”

“Well . . . ”  Jack shrugged.  “I gotta admit I’m not sure about the idea of you and Carter being alone in the same room.”

Mac glowered at him, and Jack swore he could see his cousin’s neck reddening.  “Why not?  You afraid I’ll try to take advantage of her or something?”

“Whoa, get a grip.  Nothin’ like that.  I just get a bit nervous thinkin’ about what might happen if both of you put all your brains to work on the same thing at the same time.  I’m not sure the galaxy can handle the strain.”

Mac tried to punch him in the shoulder.  Jack smirked and evaded the blow easily.  “You never did learn how to fight, did you?”

“Depends on what kind of fighting.”

“Yeah, I guess it does.”  They walked for a few steps in silence.  “But what about the guns?  You musta had to deal with the guns.”

MacGyver shrugged.  “Yeah.  I dealt with them.”

“Yeah?  How?  Take ‘em apart and use the bits for other things?”

Mac shrugged and gestured vaguely.  “Well . . . yeah, sometimes . . .”

“Well, you can keep your damned mitts off my P90, thang kyew.  And the rest of it – gettin’ your wings?  And your pilot’s license?  Mac, my memory sucks on some things, but I coulda sworn you hated heights.”

“I did.  I do.”

“Look.”  Jack stopped dead.  “I got Crazy Jimmy Taylor good ’n drunk after he got back.  The ‘head case’ from Special Forces that he said brought him home had to parachute in, free-climb a nice sheer cliff about a mile high, and then jump off it again.”  Jack gestured emphatically, stretching his arms as far up as he could.  “Crap, maybe I shoulda figured it was you all along – I remember now, he said the guy had a Swiss Army Knife.”

“And a paper clip,” Mac said brightly.  “I had a real good paper clip with me that day.”

Jack stopped walking, turned and frowned at Mac.  He’d caught the false note in Mac’s voice.

MacGyver thought about changing the topic – Jack would probably let him get away with it – or simply turning another corner down another unnecessary hallway.  Instead, he found himself saying, “The mission in Mongolia – the one where I found Captain Taylor – it was kind of a mess.  They didn’t tell me he’d survived the plane crash, even though they had to have known.  Anyway, things got real hot real sudden.  I grabbed an AK-47 and put holes in half a dozen guys’ hats.”

He swallowed.  “Later on, I started thinkin’ about what woulda happened if my aim had been off, or if the sights hadn’t been just right.  Jack, I had the shakes for a week.  I haven’t fired a gun since then.”

He was studiously examining the nearest wall, hands in pockets, not looking at Jack as he braced for the inevitable acid comment.

The comment didn’t come.  After several minutes, Mac looked up to see his cousin studying him with an unreadable expression.

“Mac . . . that last visit of mine, when we were kids – ” This time it was Jack who stuffed his hands in the pockets of his BDUs and turned away, looking at everything except MacGyver.  Finally, he blurted out, “I said a lot of things I shouldn’t have.  I know that now.”

Mac rubbed his chin and didn’t answer.

“I didn’t know about your buddy getting shot.  Your mom told me afterwards, when she was reading me the riot act and kicking me out and telling me not to come back – ”

“I never asked her to do that, Jack – ”

“Fer cryin’ out loud, I know it was my fault.  You don’t have to rub it in, Mr. Sensitivity.  Anyway, she told me about the accident.  I didn’t say anything to you after that – ”

“You hardly had a chance to.”

“Wouldn’t have helped.  I was way too full of shit that whole decade to apologise for anything.  Your mom told me about how Jesse died, but I really didn’t get it even then.  I had to learn the hard way – look.  Thing is, you’ve still got a kid, and I don’t, and that’s why.”  He finally looked at Mac.  “And if you go all fuzzy-wuzzy on me now, or say you totally understand, or ask me why I’m still in the military after all that, I swear I’ll knock you sideways again.”

Jack looked away again, quickly.  “Anyway.  Hammond wants me to make sure you’re clear about all the non-disclosure items.  Saving the planet’s a lot like covert ops, but I bet you already figured that out.  Nobody gets to hear about it.  Kinda sucks.”

Mac made a face.  “I thought I’d gotten away from all that.”

“It never goes away, Mac.  It comes back and hides under the bed.  Anyway, like I said, you don’t have to stay here on the base.  You’re free to go any time.  You’ll be cleared to come back and check on Doc Lacie, of course.  Hell, about the only thing you’re not cleared for is offworld travel, and that’s only ‘cause you haven’t had all your shots yet.”

Jack saw the glow that leaped into Mac’s eyes at that remark, and hid his smug triumph.  Gotcha, Brainy-Mac.  Hook, line, and sinker.  After a moment, he added, “Hammond asked me what I thought about having you on my team.”

“He . . . did?”

“Yeah.  I told him it was a really bad idea.”  He had to swallow a smirk at the reaction he saw.  “C’mon, Mac.  It’d be just too weird.  Besides, there are some pretty heavy guys out there already who don’t like my face.  You’d have to deal with that.”

“Jack, I’m pretty good at dealin’ with stuff, just in case you hadn’t figured that out yet – ”

“Mac, it could get you killed.  Real fast.  And real messy – the Buying It menu offworld runs from explosive decompression to alien torture gizmos, and it doesn’t stop there – ”

The rest of SG-1 finally found them, several minutes later, still deep in heated discussion.  “Hey, guys.  We’ve been looking for you all over,” Daniel began cheerfully, but Sam shushed him, a gleeful look in her eyes.  Teal’c was already listening avidly.

“You gotta admit, it could really mess with some minds out there.”

“The hair’s the big problem, though.”

“Not too bad.  You’d have to get a haircut is all.”

“No.  You grow yours.”

“Hell, no.”

“Okay, okay, fine.  So that’s out.  Although . . . I bet we could find you a wig . . . ”

~ fin ~