Chapter Text
“Good morning, campers!” said one Jack O’Neill quite cheerily as he walked into the briefing room of Stargate Command. He was the last one to arrive, which did not surprise any of those present. After all, Teal’c lived on base, while Daniel and Sam both had rather unhealthy work habits. Despite his casual demeanor as he slid into his seat, it could not be denied that planet Earth had no greater defender from its interstellar enemies.
“Where are we going today?” he asked.
“Well,” Daniel said eagerly as he activated the Briefing Room’s projector, “we sent a MALP to P7X-914 yesterday, and the probe’s camera recorded some fascinating inscriptions on a wall near the gate. It appears to have been a former holding of Ra…”
Jack nodded along as his friend eagerly described the potential significance of the abandoned Go’auld site. He was pleased to see that the dynamic of his team seemed no worse for the wear after his hundred-day absence on Edora and then his undercover sting operation. Being trapped in cages together by religious zealots was good for something, at least.
It was only when Daniel had finished his lecture that Teal’c spoke up. “I believe I am familiar with this world,” the stoic Jaffa said, causing all eyes in the room to turn toward him. “It is indeed a former holding of Ra, a world called Khnum.”
“Khnum,” Daniel echoed, the archaeologist quickly dredging up everything he knew about that name. “A ram-headed god, worshipped as a flood-bringer, the creator of human life force, and as Khnum-Ra, an aspect of Ra.”
Teal’c nodded in agreement. “When he held the post of Supreme System Lord, Ra used Khnum as a neutral meeting ground, a place where the System Lords under him could come to resolve disputes. I once traveled there with Apophis, long before I became First Prime, to guard him during a meeting with Olokun.”
“But I thought that Ra kept his power by keeping the System Lords fighting each other instead of challenging him,” Sam pointed out. “Why would he give them an outlet to make peace?”
Daniel acknowledged her point with a brief gesture as he replied, “Well, think about it. Every meeting that took place there was under Ra’s authority – and supervision.”
“Meaning,” Sam deduced, “that he would know about every deal being made between his underlings.”
“Indeed,” Teal’c agreed. “With Ra’s fall, Khnum is now used as a place of trade between different System Lords. It remains unclaimed, for one System Lord to claim it would draw the ire of all the others.”
“Well, it sounds like we could gather a lot of intelligence there,” Sam proposed, “so we don’t have to rely on the Tok’ra to know who’s being allied with whom out there.”
“Or we might be able to stop an arms deal and get a big honking space gun,” Jack piped in, causing everyone to roll their eyes at him. (Yes, even Teal’c.) “Or intelligence,” he said a bit meekly, backing down. “Intelligence is good.”
“You have a go, SG-1,” declared General Hammond, cutting through his flagship team’s usual antics with a voice of command that earned the respect of even the indomitable Master Bra’tac.
Thirty minutes later, the motley group of space explorers were assembled at the base of the ramp leading up to the Stargate, the wormhole-creating device’s inner ring already spinning as the ever-faithful Master Sergeant Harriman dialed up Khnum’s gate address.
“Chevron six, encoded,” he called. “Chevron seven, locked.”
With a mighty fwoosh, the water-like event horizon of the outgoing wormhole formed and shot momentarily outward from the Gate, only to retreat as always into its placid stable appearance. Without delay, Jack led his team up the gate ramp and through the Stargate, not even breaking his stride as he took one step on a metal grating deep beneath a mountain on Earth and the next step on an arid plain, an alien sun beating down upon the back of his neck. He instinctively brought his submachine gun up and began to sweep his surroundings, which were as lifeless as the MALP images had indicated. Behind him, he knew that Major Carter was doing the same on the other side while Teal’c and Daniel both had weapons drawn and ready to fire at a moment’s notice. Stepping through a Stargate was never an easy or safe proposition, after all.
“The architecture here is… quite extensive,” said Daniel in amazement as he looked around.
“You can take Carter and check it out. Teal’c,” he ordered as he gestured his team into formation, “you and I will set up a guard on the Gate. Stay alert, everyone. If this is an active trade world for the Go’auld, I don’t want to be surprised by any visitors.”
He and Teal’c traded off watching the Stargate and watching their surroundings for a few hours. Periodic check-ins from Carter and Daniel were promising – the archaeologist had apparently identified what seemed to be a well-used meeting room among other interesting (for him) finds, and Carter was taking the opportunity to plant some bugs throughout the complex. Eventually, though, he had to call his team back in.
“It’s getting dark,” he said. “We can explore more in the morning – and maybe check out the village that Teal’c says is nearby.”
The human inhabitants of Khnum had apparently made the choice to give the place where Go’auld regularly got into negotiations and fights a wide berth. A rather wise decision, in Jack’s opinion, but one that would mean a good deal of walking for all of them the next day.
“Let’s find a place to bunk down,” Jack ordered.
“I found some bedrooms in one wing of the complex,” Daniel offered, but Jack immediately shook his head.
“I don’t want to sleep in the same bed that some snakeheads were sleeping in,” he argued.
“There are some unused rooms that we could roll out our sleeping bags in,” Carter offered. “Large enough to give us space, small enough to be defensible.”
“Better.”
But before Jack – or anyone – could say more, the Stargate began to rumble as it awoke.
“Incoming wormhole!” he shouted, rather unnecessarily. His weapon, previously being held to his side in a loose grip, he now lifted up and aimed at the Gate even as he and his team all scrambled for cover. He gestured for them to hold their fire – they didn’t know, after all, exactly who or what was coming through. But if the new arrivals were a threat, they would still have the tactical advantages of surprise and well-chosen positioning.
When the wormhole formed, it was quiescent for only a few moments before a brown-haired woman, rather young-looking all things considered, came running through the Gate backward, a weapon in her hands pointed in front of her. The weapon itself was the first thing Jack evaluated; it seemed to be similar in shape to an Earth handgun, for what little that told him. Moving on to the rest of her, he noted that she was wearing rather loose-fitting clothes – Jack would almost call them robes – but they did not seem to impede her movement as she immediately spun around, swinging her gun in a 360-degree arc. She clearly noticed them because she halted her motion to aim warily at them.
But she was not alone. An older-looking man, also armed and showing signs of premature graying in his hair, followed by a redheaded man the same age as the woman, carrying a figure over his shoulder that Jack couldn’t get a good look at, and finally a black-haired young man who was wielding not one but two weapons of the same basic design as the others. He continued to fire off energy blasts toward the Stargate, though whatever they were aimed at did not come through the Stargate before it shut down a few seconds later.
“Harry!” cried out the girl, and the dual-wielding man (clearly named Harry – a banal name for an alien, Jack thought) spun around and immediately noticed SG-1. He had one gun trained on Jack and the other on Teal’c as he walked forward to join his companions in a defensive line, and despite the man’s youthful appearance, Jack had a feeling that he would not hesitate to shoot at either of them – or miss.
“Are they Oppressors?” asked probably-Harry.
“The dark-skinned one has a First Prime mark,” reported the older man, “but the other three are human. I think. And none of their weapons are Oppressor.”
Were Oppressors their name for the Go’auld, Jack wondered. Probably. It was time for a little Daniel Jackson diplomacy, which was far better and more successful than Jack O’Neill diplomacy. And his spacemonkey was going to speak up in three… two…
“We’re not Go’auld – Oppressors!” Daniel shouted even as he stood up. He even lowered his weapon, which made the other group relax just a hair. Not a lot, but it was certainly a start. “We fight them,” he said, “and I think that you do, too. There’s no reason for us to be pointing guns at each other.”
Unfortunately, when nobody on the other side moved, it seemed that Daniel Jackson diplomacy had failed this time. Except… the fourth (conscious) member of their gang had finished setting down whoever he was carrying and walked forward, his hands clearly visible in a gesture of placation.
“He’s right,” said the red-haired alien. “We should all put our weapons down and talk this out.”
Slowly, SG-1 and the aliens lowered their weapons to the ground in unison, neither side quite willing to give up an advantage over the other.
“Ooh,” noted Harry as he looked more closely at Jack’s weapon. “Is that a propelled projectile weapon?”
“You have a problem with that?” Jack snarked. So many aliens had looked down on Earth weaponry, thinking their energy weapons were oh so superior to guns. But it was guns that had let them survive three years out in the galaxy, kicking Go’auld ass right and left.
Instead of being confrontational, though, Harry began to smile in a way that Jack would almost call giddy. He was curious what the alien would say, but before Harry could speak, his red-haired friend spoke up first.
“Before you start that conversation,” he said, “we should start with names. I’m Ron Weasley,” he introduced himself. “This is Hermione Granger and Remus Lupin, and the one who’s about to obsess over your slugthrower is named Harry Potter. We’re from the planet Eriu.”