If he was worried, and he was, then it was for good reason.
“Okay,” she said, helping herself to beef and black bean sauce. “So if we’re stuck with Dixon we’re stuck with him. I don’t see how talking about him’s going to help.”
“I told you,” said the colonel. “I just want to make sure we’re all on the same page. And I want to make sure you’re keeping an eye on him to identify his agenda.”
“What agenda?” said Daniel. “I haven’t noticed any agenda.”
“Then get your glasses checked, Daniel,” said the colonel. “The man’s got an agenda.”
“As have you, O’Neill,” said Teal’c. “As is witnessed by our gathering here without Colonel Dixon.”
“You bet your sweet Jaffa ass I’ve got an agenda,” said O’Neill, scowling. “And it hasn’t changed in three years. Go through the gate, get the job done, come home again in one piece.”
“And you think Dixon’s agenda is different?” said Daniel, chopsticks and garlic chicken halfway to his mouth. “Why?”
“Because in all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, he walks into mine,” said Colonel O’Neill. “
That’s
why. Sheesh, do I have to spell it out?”
“Yeah, Jack, I think you do,” said Daniel. “Unless this is about Frank Cromwell.”
The colonel’s glare should have lit Daniel on fire. “
No
. And the next person to mention that name ends up skewered on a chopstick, I swear. Come on, campers, isn’t it obvious? Dixon’s Pentagon. He’s Washington. He’s an outsider, and Hammond’s under pressure to produce results.”
Sam choked. “You think he’s here to
spy
on us?”
“Could be. All I’m saying is watch your step.”
“Okay,” said Daniel, after a stunned silence. “We can do that. Now can we please enjoy the meal? For all we know it could be our last.”
And on that cheerful, typically Daniel note they abandoned the subject of David Dixon and ate. A lot.
The next day was crammed full of pre-mission business. Final physicals, final briefing, equipment checks, gear checks, one last MALP assessment of the gate and surrounding terrain. Then it was time to gear up. O’Neill, looking for his unwanted fifth wheel, found Dave Dixon sitting alone in an empty office staring at the phone on the barren desk.
“Hey,” he said, slapping his palm on the door. “You ready?”
“Yeah,” said Dixon, but he didn’t move. Just stared at the phone.
O’Neill swallowed a groan. Was there a problem? He wasn’t interested in problems. He wasn’t interested in hauling this man halfway across the galaxy where there was a better-than-even chance he’d do nothing but get in the way and ask stupid questions… or find something to nitpick that’d cause trouble for Hammond. Probably Dixon would end up having to be rescued, too, because that was the kind of luck they’d been having lately.
He was the team leader. He was paid to deal with problems.
“Something up?”
Dixon lifted his gaze. He looked stunned. “I just said goodbye to my wife.”
“Ah… yeah?”
“We’ve only been married six months,” said Dixon, and rubbed his hand across his face. “We’ve been married six months, turns out she thinks she might be pregnant and I’m about to take a hike to another planet which may or may not be a hot zone, depending on how much credence you give to alien fairytales. Man. When did my life get so weird?”
Well, terrific. A fifth man on his team that he didn’t want who was a
newly-wed
, for crying out loud, and also an expectant father. How much more crap could the universe throw at him?
“Hey, Dixon… you can always change your mind. I’m sure we can find an airman to drive you back to Petersen so you can hop the next flight home.”
“And that’d suit you just fine,” said Dixon, eyes and voice sharpening. “Me gone? That’d make your day, wouldn’t it, O’Neill?”
Dixon was a bird colonel. His equal. No way of pulling rank on the bastard. “I don’t have time for this crap,” he said flatly. “You’ve got fifteen minutes. Be in the gate room by 2250 or don’t bother showing up at all.”
“Crap?” said Dixon, and pushed to his feet. “It’s not crap, it’s the truth. You don’t want me here.”
You got that right
. “What I want or don’t want is irrelevant, Dixon. I’ll see you in the gate room, or not. Your call.”
Dixon took a step closer. “O’Neill, we can’t pretend he didn’t exist.”
O’Neill felt his guts cramp, cold and tight. “Okay. I’ll say this just once, so listen up. Frank Cromwell’s not up for discussion.”
“Oh, come on,
Jack
,” said Dixon. “We’ve been dancing round him from the minute I got here.”
“I’m not dancing round anyone,
Dave
,” he said. “Because I
don’t dance. If I had something to say to you about — well —
any
thing
, I’d say it. I don’t. Now gear up or stand down. I don’t give a rat’s ass either way.”
He walked away, then, before cold anger got the best of him and he said or did something that couldn’t be excused. He found his team — his
real
team — or at least its male members, in their locker room, methodically dressing for their adventure to Adjo.
“Sam’s done,” Daniel greeted him, buckling his belt. “She’s in the control room running a final gate diagnostic.”
“The gate’s hinky now?” he said. “For crying out loud.”
“No,” said Daniel, cheerfully. “But you know what she’s like. Where’s Colonel Dixon?”
He stripped off his base fatigues. “I don’t know. But if he’s late we’re leaving without him.”
“Is there a problem, O’Neill?” said Teal’c, looking up from tying his bootlaces.
He kept his face carefully averted. Teal’c and Daniel knew him too damned well. “No. No problem. Now can I get dressed?”
“Sure,” said Daniel, after a moment.
“
Thank
you. Too kind,” he muttered.
If Dixon screws us I’ll never let Hammond fo
rget it. Never in a million years
.
Adjo smelled like Yosemite: clean and fresh and wild.
A brisk breeze was blowing as they stepped through the gate, cool enough to cut through vests and fatigues. Dixon, his heart pounding, sucked in a deep breath as he emerged from the wormhole. Carter had warned him it was better to exhale just before crossing the event horizon and he’d taken her advice without hesitation. Only an idiot ignored the wisdom of an experienced native guide.
Of course, if
O’Neill
had told him the same thing…
Carter was looking at him now, concern in her eyes. “You okay, sir?”
He nodded, pushing down the red-hot anger. This wasn’t the time, and it sure as hell wasn’t the place. “Yeah. Sure. That’s… quite a ride.”
She glanced back at the Stargate, smiling. “Isn’t it?”
His body was tingling. Prickling on the far edge of pain. Almost an echo of a zat gun blast. “Is it normal to feel…”
“A bit hinky?” said O’Neill, his expression bored, his tone noncommittal. All signs of his own temper vanished. “Yeah. It’s normal. You get used to it.”
He counted to three. “You could’ve said.”
“No, I couldn’t. You’re supposed to be coming into this without preconceptions, remember? No tainting the experience for the rookies, that’s the rule.”
And even if it wasn’
t you’d’ve kept your mouth shut
. Dixon swallowed a sigh. Had he really expected anything different? If so he was an idiot. “Fair enough,” he said, and took his first good look around.
Huh. I thought the place would look more… alien.
But no. On closer inspection Adjo looked disappointingly Earth-like. Blue sky. Brown earth. Greenish-purple grass dotted with little pink flowers. Trees, tall and spindly, covered in blue and yellow foamy blossoms. Not like any kind of tree he’d seen at home, true, but still they were recognizably trees. Rocks of a reddish hue, sparkling with silver flecks. Some kind of silicate, probably. Or silver maybe. Did you find silver like that? He had no idea. He wasn’t a geologist.
Damn. Why doesn’t it look more alien?
“I know, sir,” said Carter. She was still watching him closely. “Somehow the whole ‘travelling to other worlds’ thing would seem more real if the other worlds didn’t look so much like home.”
What, she was a mind-reader as well as a genius? “And why do they, Major?”
O’Neill, who was checking the status of the three previously deployed MALPs, muttered something under his breath. “Because when the Goa’uld traded up from the Unas to humans as overcoats and slaves they needed simpatico planets with comparable Earth conditions. And what they couldn’t find they terraformed using home as a blueprint.”
Of course there was a logical scientific explanation, but somehow that didn’t ease the sting… “I guess I was expecting to see… I don’t know…” He grinned at Carter. “Tangerine trees and marmalade skies.”
Her answering smile was warm and surprised. “Maybe if the Goa’uld ever start with the funny mushrooms we will.”
“And if
I
ever start with the funny mushrooms maybe this conversation will suddenly seem useful,” added O’Neill. “But I doubt it.” He straightened out of his crouch. “Any sign of trouble, Teal’c?”
Not surprisingly, Teal’c had taken up a defensive position ten paces from the gate. His face was expressionless but his body language suggested he was on high alert. “Not yet.”
“Ever the optimist,” said O’Neill. He turned to Jackson, who had shrugged out of his pack and was completely absorbed in getting his digital camera up and running. “Hey. Spielberg. Dial the SGC so we can send these MALPs back.”
Dixon tried a tentative smile. “Waste not, want not?”
“I guess,” said O’Neill, shrugging. Indifferent.
No. Bastard wasn’t about to give so much as an inch. Man, this was going to be one long deployment.
Once Jackson had the wormhole back to Earth established, O’Neill warned the SGC that the MALPs were on their way and confirmed that everything seemed peaceful. “At least for now,” he concluded. “We’ll touch base again with a progress report ASAP. O’Neill out.”
As Carter herded the MALPs through the wormhole Jackson finished fiddling with his digicam, scrambled down off the rock plinth on which the gate and DHD stood and started filming the shrine the second MALP’s footage had revealed.
It was made of slabs of the silver-flecked red rock, weathered yet somehow timeless looking. Maybe six feet high and four feet across, with a bunch of symbols or letters deeply carved into each facing edge. Almost hieroglyphs, but not quite. Within the shrine were shelves of something that might have been slate, crowded with offerings: purple and black flowers, lumps of unprocessed minerals, bird feathers, impossible to identify small animal skulls bleached by the sun or time or both. Long blades of grass dyed bright scarlet and dark green and vibrant yellow, intricately plaited and threaded with glass beads.
Alien artifacts, even if they had been created by human hands. Amazing.
“Watch your battery life,” said O’Neill, eyeing Jackson with an expression muddled between amusement and impatience.
Jackson flapped a hand at him. “Don’t need to. I brought eight spares this time.”
“Eight? Battery hog,” said O’Neill. “How much longer?”
“I’m done,” said Jackson, lowering the camera. “What I need to do now is think about this.”
“
Think
about it?” O’Neill glared. “Daniel, in case it’s slipped your mind we have a thirty klick hike to that village the UAV found.”
“Exactly,” said Jackson. “It’s a long way, so why would the villagers build a shrine here?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care.”
Jackson sighed. “Yeah, but I do,” he said, and sat himself down on the ground in front of the shrine. “Jack, just — give me a minute, would you? There’s plenty of daylight left and we were planning on camping out the first night here anyway.”
Dixon watched, intrigued. Civilian or not, Jackson’s behavior was close to outright insubordination. How would O’Neill play this? Bite Jackson’s head off? Order him to fall in line? Send him packing back to the SGC?
As it turned out, none of the above.
Interesting
.
“Fine,” said O’Neill, scowling. “But we’re not hanging around here all day.”
“I don’t need all day,” Jackson murmured, his gaze fixed on the shrine. “I just — I need…”
“Daniel?” said Carter. “Is something wrong?”
Knees crossed, elbows planted and chin in his hands, Jackson
shrugged. “I’m not sure.”
Teal’c turned. “In my experience, Daniel Jackson, that usually means yes.”
Abruptly O’Neill’s impatience morphed into suspicion. “Daniel? Is that what it means?”
“Sam, you have a look,” said Jackson, ignoring him.
“At the shrine? What am I looking for?”
Jackson shook his head. “No. If I tell you what I think I see I’ll — ”
“Prejudice my perceptions,” she finished for him. “Yeah. Okay.” She dropped to the rocky ground beside Jackson, which had O’Neill rolling his eyes and muttering under his breath again. “Daniel, those carvings,” she said. “Am I going crazy, or — ”
“Yeah,” he said. “They’re the glyphs for Ra and Setesh. Same ones you’d have found on the foreheads of their Jaffa. Never mind them for now, Sam. It’s the contents of the shrine I’m worried about, not the shrine itself. Focus there.”