“Spring fever,” he said. “Just lie still, Carter. I’ll get you a painkiller.”
Muscles aching, creaky, feeling as old as he’d become on Kynthea’s planet, he fetched Tylenol and a canteen for Carter. Helped her sit up. Helped her swallow the pills.
Nodding her thanks, she blotted her face dry. “Daniel? Colonel Dixon?”
“They’re fine,” he said, settling back onto his own sleeping bag. “Completely unaffected.”
She stared. “How is that possible?”
“Dumb luck, I guess,” he said. “You should lie down again.”
“No, no, I’m — ”
“Carter, lie down! Casper the ghost has more color than you do!”
“Yes, sir,” she said, wincing, and eased herself to the floor. “Wow. I feel spectacularly bad.”
“You’ll be fine,” he said automatically.
Her lips quirked. “Is that an order?”
Crap, she was trying to joke with him. She was lying there so sick, whiter than a ghost, and she was trying to joke with him. Not even the glowing lamplight could wash a semblance of health into her face. Her bloodshot eyes looked strangely sunken and her pallid cheeks had taken on a waxy sheen. And her arms… her arms… something — not blood, but something wet and glistening — had seeped through the gauze bandages on her bruised and scraped arms.
Carter saw him staring and looked down. “Holy crap. What’s
that?”
“I don’t know,” he said, his heart banging his ribs. “Sit tight. I’ll be right back.”
With an effort he stood again and went outside. Adjo’s single, Earth-like moon had risen. Full and fat, it draped pale yellow light over the lush green landscape. Dixon was sitting on the grass some little distance from the building. He was smoking.
The scent of burned tobacco lingered on the air, stirring nicotine
memories in the blood.
“I know, I know,” said Dixon, exhaling. “It’ll kill me.” He stubbed the cigarette out on the grass. “Have to give it up anyway, with a kid in the oven.”
Oh yeah. Dixon’s wife was pregnant. He’d forgotten about that. Crap. He didn’t like the guy, but it was still a tough break.
He stood awkwardly silent for a moment, then shoved his hands in his pockets. “You need to take a look at Carter’s arms. I can’t. Don’t want to cross-contaminate her by mistake.”
Dixon turned. Frowned. “Yeah. Okay.”
They went back inside. As Dixon fetched the medkit he sat down again. Crap, how much did he hate feeling this old, this decrepit? Tiny bonfires of pain burned in every joint. Roman candles ignited sporadically behind his eyes.
He watched as Dixon cut the mucky bandages off Carter’s arms. The man’s touch with the scissors was deft, delicate. There was no urgency about him, he was calm and self-contained, giving Carter confidence.
She’s scared. She doesn’t show it, but she’s scared. At least that makes two of us.
Dixon peeled away the gauze wrappings. The flesh beneath them was raw and suppurating a revolting yellow gunk. A flash of sickness crossed his face, swiftly suppressed. His hand was gentle on her shoulder.
“You’re not in screaming agony with this?”
Carter’s expression was odd, a fascinated revulsion. “It’s hard to say,” she replied. “I’m kind of hurting all over.”
O’Neill, his guts rebelling, glared at Dixon. “Enough with the chitchat, just fix it already. Put another bandage on it, give her more antibiotics.”
Dixon smiled at Carter. “Teal’c came back from the SGC with a whole back-pack full of goodies. Hang tight a minute, I’ll see what I can rustle up.”
For a moment Carter just lay there, staring at the gross wounds on her arms. Then she shifted her gaze. Looked at him, unflinching. “So. I guess we’re in trouble, sir.”
If he showed her he was worried, it’d be a kind of betrayal. “We’ll be fine, Carter. Fraiser’s on the case. A couple of hours and she’ll have come up with a wonder cure. You’ll see.”
“That sounds great in theory, Colonel,” Carter replied. Already her recuperated strength was fading, her voice a slushy whisper, her eyelids fighting to close. “But not even Janet can heal people from across the other side of the galaxy.”
“She won’t have to. By lunchtime tomorrow the only thing separating Fraiser and us will be an open wormhole.”
Carter couldn’t hide her relief. “We’re going back to the gate, sir?”
“Yes. We are.”
“But… not back home.”
He made himself look at her, as she’d looked at him. Her eyes were overbright. Her lips not quite steady “No. Not yet,” he said.
Maybe not ever.
But he didn’t have to say that aloud, because she knew what she’d signed up for. Knew better than most, the risks.
But Christ, it still sucks. Someone get us out of here.
Before things could get fraught, Dixon returned with an armful of stuff and proceeded to slather Carter’s gross arms with triple antibiotic ointment, rewrap them with fresh gauze bandages and fill her with pills. By the time he was finished she looked half-dead.
“Okay, nearly done,” Dixon promised, then eased an arm behind her shoulders. “Just drink some more for me. A few mouthfuls. Come on.”
She swallowed feebly, coughed, and swatted the canteen away. “No,” she muttered, her voice slurring. “I’ll be sick.”
“Come on,” he said sternly. “Three little mouthfuls. Come on, Sam. You can do it.”
Like a fretful child she swallowed. Dixon patted her shoulder. “Good. That’s good. That’s enough for now.” He slid his arm from underneath her, settled her back in her sleeping bag, then stood. In the lamplight his face was grave, preoccupied, as he stared at the canteen he still held in one hand. “Hell,” he said, almost to himself. “Getting back to the gate is going to be interesting.”
Watching him, resentfully grateful, O’Neill shrugged. “We’ll manage. You and Teal’c can carry Carter on a stretcher. If Lotar survives the night, Daniel and Bhuiku can carry her on another one. I’ll walk. It’s all good.”
Dixon looked up. “Goddammit, you’re cold.”
“Actually, I’m hot. Got a fever, remember?”
“That’s not what I meant. You — ”
“Thanks for helping Carter,” he said. “I’m going to take a nap.”
Now Dixon’s face was baffled. “I don’t get you, O’Neill. I just — I don’t get you.”
He slid himself horizontal. “Yeah. Right. Because
that’s
my life’s ambition. Making sense to Dave Dixon.” He closed his eyes, and a moment later heard the door open and bang closed.
“You should cut him some slack, sir,” said Carter’s weak, drowsy voice. “We’re lucky to have him here, the way things have turned out.”
O’Neill bit back an acid reply.
The woman’s delirious. She doesn’t know wh
at she’s saying.
“Shhh. Rest.”
But of course she ignored him. Stubborn to the last. “I’ve been thinking. I hope there’s a way we can get Adjo’s naquadah. It’s beautiful naquadah and we really, really need it.”
He should’ve asked Dixon for more Tylenol: the Chicago Bears were holding team practice in his skull.
“Carter,
go to sleep
. Let somebody else worry about the damned naquadah.”
She sighed. “Yes, sir.”
Silence. Abruptly he was reminded of Antarctica, and fear. “Sam…”
“Yeah?”
“We’re getting out of this.”
“Is that a promise, sir?”
“Yeah.”
Another sigh. “Okay.”
He closed his eyes. Tried not to imagine microbes and bacteria and viruses percolating in his blood. Tried to sleep.
And couldn’t.
“Oh my God,” said Daniel, and nearly dropped the lamp. “Oh — oh my
God
.”
He was standing in a cave, Mennufer’s shrine of rebirthing, where Elder Khenti and his colleagues sprawled in stinking, putrefied death. At the most they’d been dead forty-eight hours but already their bodies had swollen and burst, as though death had claimed them weeks ago. Never in his life had he seen anything so virulent.
Is this what’s going to happen to us?
Stomach heaving, bile flooding his mouth, Daniel turned away from the ugly sight. All his muscles were twitching, demanding that he run. Any sane, sensible person would run. Who knew what kind of pathogens were crawling over every surface or hanging in the air?
Except… except…
Lamplight played over the nearby cave wall… and the tainted air caught in his throat. “Oh my God…”
Did Howard Carter feel like this, discovering Tutankhamen’s
lost tomb? Feel awe, feel disbelief, feel the champagne in his blood?
He must have. It’s incredible. There’s no feeling like this
.
The wall was covered in paintings, as fresh in this moment as
the day they were made. There were the Goa’uld motherships, crudely represented but recognizable. There were the Goa’uld: Ra and Setesh. There were the humans stolen from Earth. The story beckoned, he was desperate to read it —
But first things first.
Lamp held high, the back of his other hand pressed hard to his mouth, he subdued his treacherous stomach and picked his way between the bloated, stinking corpses of Mennufer’s Elders, to see what else the cave contained.
The lamplight fell across a carved human figurine set into a niche in the wall at the back. Three feet high, he thought it was made of raw naquadah. It had diamonds for eyes and smiled with lips of gold. All over its wildly misshapen body erupted boils of solid ruby. Emerald pustules disfigured its face.
The thing was grotesque.
Daniel glanced at dead Khenti, Madu, Sebak and Panahasi, again at the painted wall and then the figurine. “You fools,” he whispered. “Your secrets killed you. If only you’d told us. If only you’d let us
help
.”
Head aching, tears burning his eyes, he thrust their folly from his mind and instead lost himself in the paintings on the wall. Right to left, in fourteen distinct panels, with brutal brevity and breathtaking detail, they told the story of Adjo’s terrible, incredible history.
He read it twice, to be certain he was right, his heart pounding so hard it felt bruised against his ribs.
Oh God, oh God, please let me be wrong.
But he wasn’t. He was
good
at this… and the paintings didn’t lie.
“Oh, God,” he whispered at last, stepping back. “Teal’c was right. Adjo’s a death trap.”
He had to tell Jack.
Running down to the valley floor in the dark was beyond crazy, it was suicidal, but that didn’t stop him. Somehow he managed to keep his feet, somehow he managed not to break a leg, or his neck. Sweating, panting, he reached the Elders’ retreat and slammed the door open.
“Jack! Jack! I’ve figured it out and oh boy, oh boy, we are well and truly
screwed
!”
Dixon looked up from reading a dog-eared paperback. “O’Neill’s asleep. What do you mean, we’re screwed?”
“In a minute,” he said, and dropped to his knees beside Jack. Shaking his shoulder he said, “Jack. I’m sorry. Wake up.”
With a querulous, protesting moan, Jack opened his eyes. The blisters on his face had darkened almost to black. “
What
? Daniel, so help me…”
“Khenti’s dead, Jack. So are the rest of them. I found their bodies in the shrine.”
That got Jack’s attention. Gritting his teeth, he sat up. “
All
of them? They’re
all
dead?”
“’Fraid so,” he said, and let himself bump to the floor. “Whatever disease they contracted, it took them down fast. They’ve been spending so much time in that cave, I guess they infected each other. And then, without medicines, they thought they could save themselves with prayer.”
“Poor bastards,” said Dixon, and put his book aside.
“Jack…” Daniel took a deep breath. “This isn’t an ordinary epidemic. It’s bioterrorism.”
Jack stared. “It’s
what
?”
“Bioterrorism,” he repeated. His voice was shaking. There was sweat on his skin. After all he’d seen, all he’d experienced, still the enormity of the Goa’ulds’ evil was almost more than he could comprehend. “Viral warfare. Ra and Setesh, they unleashed some kind of plague — or plagues — on Adjo. When they realized neither one could defeat the other with regular tactics they — they infected it with diseases. Jack, even their
Jaffa
died.”
“
Jaffa
don’t get sick, Daniel.”
“Maybe not now, but they did back then. Jack, I’ve
seen
it. The whole story’s painted on the walls of the shrine. Ra and Setesh tried to poison Adjo, wipe out each other’s
Jaffa
and human slave populations, make the place uninhabitable. I guess the idea was they’d continue fighting somewhere else until one of them was finally dead, or conquered. Then, once the viruses had died out for lack of hosts, the victor would come back to Adjo and pick up where he left off plundering the planet of its natural resources.”
Jack pointed to his disfigured face. “Hello! I think I found the flaw in their plan!”
“Not the plan,” said Dixon. “Its execution. For whatever reasons not all the humans died, so the viruses survived too.”
“Survived and mutated,” Daniel added. “Because that’s what viruses do. I’m guessing one of the original diseases they used was smallpox. It’s been around forever. Rameses V died of smallpox in 1196 BC. And — and — polio. Yeah, there was polio in Ancient Egypt. There’s a hieroglyph from — ha! Memphis! — it shows a temple priest called Siptah with all the typical clinical signs of paralytic poliomyelitis. And there are people in Mennufer today showing similar signs.”