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“I am never going out in the field again,” Janet said, pain making her voice shake more than the building around them.
“It probably wouldn’t help to tell you that, as far as firefights go, this one isn’t so bad, would it?” Sam asked, focusing on the window she crouched next to, waiting for a break in enemy fire to take her own shot. She needed to get Janet out of here and back to the city. She had no idea where the rest of her team was, but at this point, getting the wounded doctor back into friendly territory and out of the line of fire had to be her most important consideration.
“No, it wouldn’t,” Janet replied testily, getting loose a groan as she shifted.
Sam looked over at her and worried some more. Janet had been lucky she wasn’t killed outright by the wall that exploded beside her, but it had done enough damage to drop her unconscious with a speed that had terrified Sam and sent her running for her friend, to hell with the danger posed by the guns in the near distance.
Sam could carry Daniel a fair distance if she had to, so slinging Janet over her shoulder and sprinting for cover required little effort. The real effort had come in steeling herself to check for a pulse.
Janet was a mess, but she’d woken up about fifteen minutes ago and been with it enough to complain about the quality of Sam’s first aid, even if she didn’t quite have the wherewithal to do anything to fix it yet. That had given Sam hope.
And so did the brief pause in the gunfire outside. Sam ducked carefully into the window and fired twice, three times. The gunfire started up again, but her fourth and fifth shots brought down the last of their three attackers, and she crouched there a moment, looking for any gunman she might have missed and listening to Janet breathe.
“I think we got them,” she whispered. Night had fallen, and she had no idea where she was in relation to the gate. She keyed on her radio, knowing it was probably futile.
“Carter to SG-1,” she announced. “SG-1, please come in.” As expected, only static greeted her.
“The iron,” Janet offered weakly.
Sam nodded. The planet had a very high concentration of iron in the crust. The humans here were fully adapted to what would have been a poisonous level of the metal back on Earth, and that was one of the reasons Janet was here.
Unfortunately, the team’s radios weren’t nearly so well-adapted. “The magnetic fields are scrambling transmission,” she agreed. “We knew that coming in.” She took a deep breath and turned back to Janet, who was little more that a silhouette in the post-dusk gloom. “Compasses are useless, too, so until I can climb a tree and see the gate, we’re stuck.”
Janet smiled tightly. “How long are the nights here?”
Sam didn’t have the heart to tell her. “I think we can risk a lamp,” she offered instead, glad that the planet’s weather was balmy, even during the 17-hour nights. A small lamp was one thing when it came to keeping a low profile, but a fire would have been a beacon they didn’t need.
She moved over to where Janet half-lay in the dust of the bombed out building and dug around in her pack, coming up with her camp light and first aid kit. She looked Janet in the eyes once the light was on. “How are we doing?” she asked, in a mockery of the medical staff.
“Funny,” Janet replied, but it got Sam a smile, pained and exhausted though it was. The doctor moved again with a hiss and tried to get a look at her left hip. “I’m pretty sure it’s not broken, but I don’t think I’m walking out without help,” she murmured. “Can you get my medkit? I need to take a better look at this head wound.”
“That’s your head, Janet,” Sam said gently, though she did turn to Janet’s huge pack. “It’s not like you can sew it up yourself.”
“Someone might have to,” Janet warned.
Sam shook her head. “Don’t look at me. I can’t even darn socks.”
“Do you even know what darning socks means?” Janet asked as Sam set the large box beside her and Janet started unwinding the quick-and-dirty field dressing Sam had slapped on to slow the bleeding. There was a warmth to her voice that said she knew Sam was trying to help keep her mind off the situation.
Which Sam figured was pretty screwed up. The cease fire between the ruling Jira and the minority Ka here on PK6-M88 had been holding for months, according to the Roulian minister SG-6 had been in talks with. The two sides were, in the estimation of Dr. Barker, the team’s anthropologist, equally to blame for the aggressions, but it did seem as if they were close to making some sort of decision regarding Ka self-rule. The situation seemed stable, so Dr. Fraiser was allowed to visit the planet to study the effects of excess iron in the ecosystem. SG-1 tagged along because Barker had been filling Daniel’s ear with tales of the archeological sites there.
Which had all been well and good until a Ka terrorist cell blew up a Jira religious building in the main city and set off a seemingly instant civil war, with SG-1 and SG-6 seen as enemy combatants by the Ka, because of their discussions with the Jira leadership.
“Well,” Janet declared brightly, a mirror in one hand as she prodded the cut that went from above her left eyebrow across her forehead to her right temple with the other. “You’re in luck. No darning required.” She started to pull out disinfectant and gauze and Sam batted her hands away.
“Let me play doctor this time,” Sam scolded, smirking at Janet because she knew exactly how that sounded and she didn’t care. And again, it took Janet’s mind off the situation.
“Where—ouch—where do you think the others ended up?” Janet asked quietly. The cut on her head was messy, and cleaning it got it bleeding again, if sluggishly.
Okay, didn’t take her mind off of much, I guess. “I don’t know,” Sam replied candidly, staunching the flow of blood. “Daniel, Barker, and Hillary might have been able to hole up in the ruins. I don’t know if the Colonel and Major Girden were even in the city proper when everything went crazy.”
“Teal’c and Lieutenant Han?” Janet prompted almost silently.
Sam sighed. She’d seen the two of them run into the courthouse just before the crowd carried her and Janet away toward the Ka-held outskirts of the city. And she’d seen the courthouse explode moments later, the column of smoke visible for miles, probably.
“I don’t know,” she replied, her hands still for a moment. “But we both know better than to count Teal’c out. Ever.”
“True,” Janet agreed, trying to buck up. She looked like her head was killing her, though.
Sam finished bandaging the long wound and looked at her friend’s drawn face and squinting eyes. “What pills am I giving you?” she asked pointedly, hoping she wouldn’t get the kind of argument out of a doctor that she usually got out of a certain colonel.
She didn’t, thankfully. “Tylenol and ibuprofen for now,” Janet whispered, her energy flagging. “Probably shouldn’t risk getting too doped up.”
Sam grinned as she handed over the pills and helped Janet down them with a bottle of water. Janet stayed conscious for almost two whole minutes after that.
“Yeah,” Sam murmured fondly as the doctor slept. “Wouldn’t want to fall asleep in the middle of a war.”
She sat back and turned the camp light to its lowest setting, reaching into the second pouch down on the right of her own pack and pulling out an energy bar in the near darkness. Fifteen-plus hours to go until daylight, stuck behind enemy lines in a bombed out building with an injured medic and no idea whether the rest of her team was alive or dead.
Okay, maybe this was worse than your usual firefight.
She unclipped her radio and fiddled with it, knowing she’d get no better reception than she had a few minutes ago. She clicked the button and listened to the static. Clicked it again and listened to the echo of the click from Janet’s radio…
There was no reason they needed two radios, right? Not when one souped-up one would do.
Smiling to herself, she turned the lamp back up slightly and dug into her pack for her tool kit. It probably wouldn’t work, but anything to pass to the time...
*******
“ ... come and … you up ,” Colonel O'Neill was saying, his voice ripped apart by static. “ Just stay ... wait for him to get … Doc okay? ”
Janet smiled at that and blinked her eyes open. She felt sore and muddled and her head was throbbing painfully. Her vision resolved slightly to show her Sam sitting close in very dim light, a grin on her face as she saw that Janet was awake.
“She’ll be all right, sir,” Sam replied, talking into a skeleton of a radio, its entrails spilling out to puddle in the carcass of a second one. “We’re defensible.”
“ ... nearly there by now … ” O'Neill’s voice said brokenly. “ ... find Daniel and his crew … ” Sam’s eyes went a little sad at that, so they must still be missing. “ ... back to the … O'Neill out. ”
Sam put the frankenradio down gently and turned her attention to Janet. “How are you feeling?”
Janet would have rolled her eyes, but it would have hurt too much. “I get it. I won’t ever ask you that again when you’ve been blown up.”
“Well something good is coming out of this then,” Sam teased with a smile, though Janet could see the worry in her eyes. She did a quick self-assessment.
“Actually, I think I might live,” she offered casually, trying to ease her friend’s mind, though she was positive she wouldn’t be able to put weight on that hip when the time came to move. “I hear the cavalry is coming?”
“Teal’c and Major Girden,” Sam confirmed. “The radio’s spotty, but it sounds like Han is hurt. I don’t know how bad.”
Janet nodded. “And no sign of Daniel?” she asked, trying to rein in her headache.
Sam shook her head. “We’ll find out more when we—”
“ Major Carter. ” Teal’c’s quiet call was clear through the frankenradio, which must mean he was close by. “ We are approaching your position. ”
Sam keyed on the radio. “All known hostiles accounted for,” she told him. “We’ll be ready to go when you get here.”
She made good on the promise and started quickly packing away everything around them. Still in the dark.
“How long have I been asleep?” Janet asked suddenly, confused. It felt like she’d been unconscious a while.
“About twelve hours,” Sam said without turning from her work. “It took some time to boost the radio enough to get through to Colonel O'Neill.”
Janet looked up at the pitch dark sky she could see through the damaged ceiling. Twelve hours…
“You never did tell me how long the nights were here,” she pointed out.
“Too damn long,” Major Girden answered quietly as he and Teal’c slipped in through the ruined doorway. “Come on, Major, Doctor,” he said, taking stock of the two of them while Teal’c split his attention between them and the street outside. “Let’s get back to the capitol building before the sun comes up.”
Janet tried to lever herself up as Girden hefted her medical pack over his shoulder. She gasped loudly and fell back down as the pain in her hip threatened to drive her back into unconsciousness.
“Dr. Fraiser,” Teal’c said, at her side instantly. “Do you require assistance?”
Janet didn’t laugh, and again, rolling her eyes would have hurt. “Thanks, Teal’c,” she said instead, as he pulled her to her feet and slung one of her arms over his shoulder. It made the world spin disgustingly for a few moments, but she rode it out. All she really wanted to do was get back to Stargate Command.
“We’re clear out the front,” Girden declared quietly. Sam smiled at Janet and hefted her gun, while Teal’c hefted Janet.
“Let’s get out of here then,” Sam said brightly.
Then it was all just pain and shadows for a while, and Janet was glad to be laid down to rest in the capitol building forty minutes later.
*******
“How’s it going, Doc?”
Janet looked up from the book she was reading to see Jack O'Neill sauntering into the medical bay, a smile on his face.
He deserved it. Of the nine Stargate personnel caught in the battle, only Janet herself was badly injured. Han had a broken arm and had been released to heal up on his own the same day they got back to the SGC. That had been four days ago and Janet was still in a bed, going crazy.
“I’m bored,” she admitted, shifting uncomfortably. Her hip wasn’t broken, but it was painful, and the rehab left her exhausted and cranky. Her head was finally recovering, the post-concussion syndrome easing. She had made it clear that she was going home as soon as she could walk with some stability, but for now, she was looking forward to just moving into standard crew quarters tomorrow.
“Yeah, I remember that,” O'Neill commented. “Sort of.”
“Given how much time you and the rest of your team spend in here, I’d hope you would,” she griped good-naturedly.
“We came up with a cure for that.” The colonel held up a box she’d become familiar with over the months she’d been in charge of Stargate Medical. O'Neill was a master at backgammon, even moreso than chess, apparently. She supposed to him it was all strategy, though, wasn’t it?
“Pull up a chair, then,” she said gamely, putting the crime novel off to the side. It wasn’t very well written anyway. She watched him open the box and begin setting up the board and wondered what he was doing here, really. Sam had been visiting regularly since they got back, keeping her from going stir-crazy, taking her mind off of the pain after a particularly bad physical therapy session, just… taking care of her. She smiled suddenly. “Where’s Major Carter today?”
O'Neill shrugged. “I don’t know,” he lied. “Probably off playing with an alien artifact that’ll blow us all up eventually.” He looked her in the eyes and let her know he knew she was aware of why he was here and who had sent him. “I was bored, too. Figured I hadn’t beaten you yet.” He finished setting the last pieces in place and plopped a cup and a pair of dice in front of her. “Person trapped in the bed goes first.”
She chuckled at that. “What happens when you’re both trapped in the bed?” she asked, shaking the dice in the cup and tossing them into the board. Double sixes. A good start.
“Then we play poker,” he said blandly. “Anything to pass the time, right?”
Janet smiled gratefully and proceeded to beat the pants off of him.
Anything to pass the time, all right.
**********
the end