Archive of Our Own

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Chapter 1: Number 3

July 3

Stargate Command

Be-beep. Be-beep. Be-beep.

Daniel pushed the stem on his watch to turn off the alarm and swore softly in Flemish. “Never enough hours in a day,” he muttered to his empty office. With a sigh, he jotted down one last note on his tablet, tossed down a couple of Tylenol for his pounding headache, and grabbed his briefing folder and laptop. He was almost to the door when he remembered he’d left a document open on his desktop computer, so he went back to save and close the file.

SG-13 and General Landry were already in the briefing room when Daniel arrived. He took a seat at the far end of the table and started setting up his laptop, accessing the proper file and the slides he wanted while the General brought the meeting to order. Daniel split his attention between listening to the opening chatter and connecting his computer to the projector. By the time he was done, Landry was just finishing up.

“This planet lies at the furthest reaches of our galaxy, farther away from Earth than any other Stargate,” he stated, his eyes scanning a report in his hands, then making eye contact with each of the assembled SGC staff. “It’s a long way from home, people. From all appearances, the area around the ‘gate is deserted, but we’re planning a UAV survey once you’ve got a camp established and an initial recon completed. Doctor Jackson has information on what makes this world of interest to the SGC.”

Daniel stood up to address the team, putting up the first slide on screen. “P9X-1017 has several unique features, in addition to the extra number in the planetary designation,” he began, adjusting his glasses. He brought up an image from the MALP survey, showing the DHD and a large object behind it. “As you can see, there’s an obelisk on this world similar to the one built by the Asgard on Cimmeria, which was used as a defensive device against the Goa’uld.”

He pushed a button on the remote control and brought up an image of Thor’s Hammer from SG-1’s first visit to the ancient Viking world. Using the laser pointer on the end of the remote, he cast a red dot on the circular base beneath the Cimmerian DHD and returned to the previous slide. “There appears to be a landing platform on this planet, too, though it’s mostly covered by a fine powder initially identified as some kind of biological ash. A road extends past the obelisk as far as the MALP cameras can record, cutting straight through the landscape and continuing for miles. Most interesting, though, is what’s been done to the Stargate itself.”

The next slide showed a partial view of the alien 'gate.

Nobody spoke.

“The inscriptions on this pillar are completely different from those on Cimmeria,” Daniel continued, bringing up a photograph of the obelisk on the new alien world. “It has similar dimensions, but the writing on the face of the obelisk is in numerous ancient languages. So far, we’ve counted seventeen different scripts.” 

He turned to face the General. “Sir, I think this could be really important. If this obelisk was, indeed, made by the Asgard, we have no record of it in their data banks. I think we should take a closer look, and since Colonel Carter isn’t available at the moment, I recommend Captain Jennifer Hailey as the best candidate to determine what this other device is.”

SG-13 had recently lost Lieutenant Simon Wells to a permanent base assignment in security, and Captain Kimura Satterfield had taken his place on the team. Daniel had helped with testing both Hailey and Satterfield before putting them into the field when they were green lieutenants, and both young women had acquitted themselves admirably, advancing in rank, responsibility, and accomplishments. He had every confidence in Satterfield as a developing linguist and knew that Hailey, as Sam’s protégé, would be able to handle any challenge alien technology might present, just as her mentor would have.

Landry cocked his head, considering. His gaze shifted from Satterfield to Daniel and back. “Doctor Jackson, I’d like you to accompany SG-13 on this one, since Doctor Balinsky is still in the infirmary. You have the most extensive expertise with ancient languages of anyone at the SGC, with no disrespect intended to Captain Satterfield.” He gave her a polite nod.

She flashed a brief smile, followed by an expression Daniel read as relief.

“If this discovery is as important as you and the rest of our experts seem to think, we’re going to need our best on this mission.” The General flipped his briefing folder closed, signaling the end of the meeting. “I’ll make arrangements for you and Captain Hailey to join the team’s roster temporarily, and will see to it that your schedules are cleared accordingly. SG-13, you have a go.”  He stood up. “You’ll be heading out tomorrow at 0900 hours.”

As the military personnel around him got to their feet out of respect for their commander, Daniel sighed. This was an unexpected development. He glanced at Satterfield, whom he’d expected to tackle the team’s linguistic duties during Balinsky’s recovery, but she just grinned at him and shrugged, hurrying out of the briefing room.

The General took his folder to his office and shut the door.

“Well, Doc,” drawled Colonel David Dixon, taking his time gathering his papers, “looks like you’re ours for a bit. I always wanted to take your brain for a test drive, see how you work. Jack used to tell some wild stories about you. Did you really throw a tantrum over fairy tales?”

Irritated, Daniel shot back, “I was under an alien influence at the time.”

“Riiiiiiiight,” said Bosworth with a chuckle. “This is gonna be fun.” The team’s second-in-command strolled out of the briefing room with a cocky strut.

Daniel sat back down, temporarily overwhelmed. He stared at the computer and his report, then started disconnecting the projector and shutting his laptop down. A stream of unspoken curses in several languages scrolled through his mind as he gritted his teeth, slamming his briefing folder on top of the computer.

“Never enough time to get it all done,” he grumbled, stowing his things under his arm and stomping toward the corridor and the elevator. “I don’t get paid enough for this.” He stepped into the lift and punched the button for the eighteenth floor that housed his office and lab. “And I need a vacation!”  Frustrated, he slammed the heel of his hand against the elevator door as the car started to ascend.

As soon as he reached his office, he sent out a barrage of emails to rearrange his schedule, then stared at his desk for a few minutes, thinking of all the things he had to do, including some pleasurable things, too. Then he pulled up a time-off request from the forms database, printed it out – in quadruplicate – filled in the appropriate dates, signed it, and put the papers in a folder for routing to General Landry for approval.

If the rest of his team could have a few days off, then so could he. The SGC wouldn’t fall apart if Daniel Jackson weren’t there every day, and he needed a little distance to get his perspective back. He was tired, his brain was fried, and he wanted to just do nothing for a little while and see how that felt.

Once he got back from this mission and a sabbatical, he’d be ready to take up the yoke again and serve the greater good of humanity. His teammates would understand if he didn’t say goodbye but just disappeared as soon as he got back to the base.  The work would wait; it would always be there, even if he weren’t.

That was part of the problem. No matter who came and went on what team, the fight went on endlessly. Daniel had been the one to open Pandora’s Box, and he had yet to find the promised gem of Hope in the ancient myth. He was beginning to think his journey through the Stargate would never end, that he might be caught up in some electronic dream or endless loop that kept him fighting, wearing him down, with no resolution in sight.

Part of him wanted out, and it was getting hard to resist. 

July 4

P9X-1017 

“Never seen a Stargate with a halo before,” mused Captain Bosworth, squinting up at the brilliantly glinting crystals attached to the outer ring of the alien wormhole generator. “How ‘bout you, Doc?” He turned to address his temporary teammate.

Daniel Jackson was standing on the far side of the DHD, examining the tall gray stone pillar he had come to investigate.  “Nope. First time,” he replied distractedly, turning to catch the eye of his new commanding officer. “Colonel, this pillar has characters from each of the scripts of the Four Races.”  It was covered with runes, hieroglyphs, and other ancient scripts.

His every step around the tall stone sent clouds of white ash into the air around his feet, making him sneeze. The thick carpet of powder covered most of the landscape, wisps of it blowing away on the breeze, carrying it off past the gray and brown stones and boulders marking the perimeter. 

“Yeah, but what does it say?” Dixon shot back, finishing his walk around the immediate area, eyes searching for possible threats.

“As far as I can tell, it’s just the number three repeated in every language,” Daniel answered. “That’s just a first-glance finding, though. Maybe it means something different taken as a whole. I need to study it some more.”

“ ‘Course you do,” said the Colonel with a wry grin. “Bosworth, set up camp so Daniel can do his thing. I think we’re gonna be here a while.”

“Yes, sir.”

Bosworth, Hailey and Satterfield knew their assigned duties and performed them with practiced precision. The ash was too deep to get good purchase to set the tent pegs, so a site was chosen on higher ground, about a hundred yards from the ‘gate. In short order, the encampment was assembled with tents and sun-filtering awnings, gear had been placed, and the junior members of the team returned to their CO for additional assignments. 

“Okay, let’s see what’s at the end of the yellow brick road,” said the Colonel lightly. “Hailey, you eyeball those crystals to see if you can find out why this ‘gate has a crown.” 

“Just from the similarities to the Cimmerian ‘gate,” Daniel interjected, finally turning away from the stone, “I’d say it’s likely that this is some sort of scanning device.” He pointed to the pillar behind him with his thumb. “Maybe it activates when someone’s dialing out, rather than arriving.” He gave the chevron-shaped top of the device a wary glance. “I’d suggest caution when contacting the base, anyway.”

“Right. I’m gonna send the MALP and FRED back and report in. Let’s get to it, people! Chop-chop.” Dixon clapped his hands with a glance at his 2IC, and Bosworth positioned the Field Remote Expeditionary Device they’d used to carry the heaviest gear for a return trip through the Stargate. Captain Satterfield drove the MALP up beside the FRED, and everyone cleared the paved circle between the DHD and the ‘gate, just to be safe.

Dixon’s face was tense as he dialed the coordinates for Earth, then pressed the red crystal dome in the center.

As Daniel had predicted, a brilliant green light shot out of the top of the obelisk, continuously sweeping the area between it and the Stargate, back and forth, passing harmlessly over Dixon and the equipment. Once the wormhole stabilized, he pressed the button on his comm unit while Satterfield sent the team’s IDC through her GDO. 

“SG-13, reporting in,” Dixon called through the radio to the base. “Sending MALP and FRED back home. It’s a balmy seventy-five degrees here on P9X-1017, not a cloud in the sky, and a mild breeze blowing our skirts up. No sign of natives.  Daniel says the pillar has the number three carved all over it, and it appears to be a scanner that activates on outgoing dialing. Everybody’s still here and A-OK. Looks like whatever it is doesn’t have a problem with us or our equipment.”

“That’s good news, Colonel,” General Landry’s voice returned through the speaker.  “Prepare for UAV launch once the wormhole shuts down. We’ll expect a preliminary report from your team in forty-eight hours. Expect further orders once we’ve examined the additional data from the UAV survey. Landry, out.”

“Roger, sir.”

Daniel watched the two vehicles disappear through the event horizon, and shortly afterward the watery surface vanished. Moments later an incoming wormhole established and a small drone flew out of the center of the Stargate. It tracked the evenly paved road that led away from the ‘gate – made of yellowish tan stones, just like the one in L. Frank Baum’s classic tale – and disappeared into the horizon.

“Sir.” Captain Hailey was looking up at the sky.

Everyone else followed her gaze, including the Colonel.

“Whatcha got, Captain?” Dixon asked easily.

The azure vault of atmosphere was dominated by a single large moon slightly larger than Earth’s, but vastly different in appearance. It was blue, hinting at the possibility of vast oceans on its surface, with icy white caps at each pole.  Spinning around its center were several slender Saturnine rings in an orderly rainbow of color. Glimmering in the sky between the planet and its moon were numerous other tiny points of light, shimmering like daytime stars, but rather than a random scattering, they were evenly spaced. That meant they weren’t naturally occurring, but artificially placed.

“Okay,” said Dixon, still looking at the tiny lights, thinking it through. “They don’t appear to be moving.”

“No, sir,” Hailey verified. “I spotted a few earlier, when we first arrived, and they seemed to disappear. Now there are more of them, but they don’t stay on very long.”

Daniel glanced at the lights’ position in the sky, then turned his back to them, shading his eyes as he looked toward the sunrise. “Maybe it’s just a reflection,” he observed, “following the path of this sun.”

Hailey glanced toward the position of the yellow star. “That would make sense. The objects are too regularly spaced to be a natural formation, so maybe it’s some kind of planetary shield or defense mechanism.”

Dixon nodded, his expression tense. He took out his binoculars and studied the glimmers. “Okay. Boz, you keep an eye on the sky. We don’t want any surprises here. Whatever they are, they’re too far away to make out.”

“Yessir.” Bosworth took up a position, both hands cradling his P-90.

Hailey and Daniel returned to their separate studies, while Bosworth, Satterfield and the Colonel watched the perimeter for potential threats.

“Lookit the size a that bug!” Satterfield gasped, pointing to a wind-sculpted rock formation about ten feet away.

Following her finger, Daniel spied a dragonfly-like thing lifting off and speeding away from them. It wasn’t close enough to glean any details, just its approximate shape and size. It disappeared over the crest of the rocks into the clear blue sky.

“Big as my hand,” Bosworth murmured. He shot a nervous glace at his CO. “You don’t think they’re bloodsuckers, do you, sir?”

“How the hell would I know, Boz? Just keep your eyes open, everyone. Don’t let ‘em get too close, just in case. I’m sure everyone remembers what happened to Teal’c when that alien bug stung him a few years back. Don’t take any chances.”

Daniel glanced into the pockets of his tactical vest. “Do we have mosquito spray in here?” he asked, half teasing.

Instantly, Bosworth started searching his pockets, too, which was precisely the reaction Daniel had been expecting. He grinned and gave the Captain a playful push on the shoulder when everybody chuckled. “I doubt they’d have the same response as an Earth mosquito, Boz. Just messin’ with you, man.”

“Not funny, Daniel,” the other man said with a glare, which broke a beat later into a good-natured grin.

As Daniel returned to his study of the carvings, Satterfield was already busy setting up the monitor and joystick for planet-side control of the UAV. The drone could travel 75 miles per hour, and with recent upgrades from technology provided by the Asgard, its range had been expanded from only one hour to eight, which was important because the road they were tracking ended three hundred miles away from the Stargate.

What lay at the end of it was a step pyramid, the stones on its sides and each of the four levels covered with writing; however, the images captured by the UAV weren’t clear enough to show anything recognizable, merely tantalizing suggestions of characters in the languages of the Four Races.

Daniel stared at the pictures on the view screen, almost salivating with the desire to take a look at the structure, to run his hands over the carvings and see it in person. They’d never had another find quite like this one – an unusual combination of Four Races and ancient Earth writing, Asgard technology, architecture similar to ancient Mayan, and a uniquely enhanced Stargate. He turned to Colonel Dixon, eyebrows raised in a silent plea, hoping he could make all that clear.

Before he could say a word, the older man gave him a knowing smile and shook his head. “Looks like we’re gonna be here a while.” He turned to Satterfield. “Dial up the base, Captain. Let’s see if we can get some of those hot new toys the SGC just acquired and take ‘em for a spin.”

“Which ones, sir?” she asked expectantly. 

“A couple of Polaris ATVs and that hot little Kawasaki mule. Don’t know about you, but no way I’m walking three hundred miles, even if the scenery is pretty further down the road. Get Landry on the horn. We’ll need extra provisions, too.” He grinned at Bosworth. “And maybe they’ll even throw in some mosquito spray for Boz.”

Everyone had another chuckle, and Daniel wandered over to the camp to take a break and have a little something to eat.

By nightfall, there were two newly outfitted ATVs and a 4X4 mule parked behind their tents, fully loaded with plenty of supplies for the long trek ahead of them. These vehicles had been converted to use naquadah power cells rather than gasoline, enabling them to travel long distances without carrying extra fuel. Each ATV could carry enough supplies, food, clothing, and shelter for two for as much as two weeks, and the mule would haul four passengers, equipment and provisions for the rest of the team. Traveling lightly was important, and the less they carried, the faster the vehicles could transport them.

What had been originally planned as a one-day mission would now stretch into a week or more, but Daniel was stoked for the trek. This planet had a lot to offer, and so far there seemed to be nothing to fear. Appearances were often deceiving, though, as many an SG team had learned from experience, so as night fell, each of them took their turns at watch and prepared for a long but hopefully fruitful mission to this alien world.   

Chapter 2: Captive

 July 5

P9X-1017

The vibration from an unexpected activation of the Stargate pulled everyone from their bedrolls in the wee hours, reaching for whatever weaponry they carried. Most of the team had been sleeping; the night had been utterly quiet and still until the Stargate awakened them.

The wheel was still spinning up when they gathered outside their tents.  Hailey had been on watch, but the moment Colonel Dixon emerged from his tent, he was in command.  “Get your weapons and take cover in the rocks!” he ordered. “Nobody make a sound. Radio silence, till you hear from me. Let’s see who’s coming and find out what they want before we take action.”

Daniel knew they weren’t expecting anyone from the base. He returned to his tent, boots still unlaced but on his feet, fetched his Beretta and two extra clips of ammo, and paired up with Satterfield. They took cover behind some boulders that gave a good view of the camp but hid them from sight.

An alien raced out of the event horizon at a dead run, roaring and armed. He was Teal’c’s size and build, but far from human. Small silvery scales glinting in the moonlight covered his face and arms, and a mane of dark brownish hair sprouted from the back of his head, around his throat, and down his chest. His face was something out of a nightmare, werewolf-savage with sharp teeth and glowing yellow eyes.

Dozens more followed him.  The creatures began to hunt for them; noses lifted in the air, they followed the human scent and headed directly for the rocks that hid Captain Hailey. From Daniel’s point of view, the tiny woman was invisible, but the aliens found her with little trouble, dragging her out from behind her cover by the collar of her jacket.

She screamed as one of them swung at her with a powerful fist and her face caved in, blood splattering everywhere. She died instantly, crumpling like a rag doll to the ground.

Daniel was horrified; he couldn’t believe what he’d just seen.

Then Dixon squeezed off a burst of fire with an order to attack crackling through the radio.  Bosworth took out two of the creatures, but there were so many, and they just kept coming.  Satterfield cried out, taking aim with her P-90, her muzzle flashes in the darkness lighting up her tear-stained face.

Several of the aliens fell, but more and more exited the watery portal, an army of them filling up the area around the Stargate, climbing into the rocks where the team had made camp. They carried weapons similar to the Jaffa staff but with a shorter stick, almost a baton, that they could aim and fire with one hand. Discharges of bright yellow flame roared into the stillness, striking the rocks shielding SG-13 from view.

Bosworth was the next to die. There was no hope of winning against those numbers, and in a matter of minutes, the survivors were surrounded. Dixon ordered their surrender, and the team laid down their arms. One by one, they were dragged back to the landing pad in front of the Stargate.

Daniel watched in dismay as Satterfield was summarily executed, tears streaming down her face. One blast to the forehead and she fell backward, her body crumpled and lifeless, her pretty face covered in blood, tears and gray matter. 

The leader of the aliens strode up to Colonel Dixon and snarled, “You de Yaks’n?”

Dixon frowned. “What? I don’t understand.”

“Yaks’n,” the beast tried again. “Dan-el Yaks’n.”

The Colonel glanced at Daniel and straightened. “Yes,” he replied. “I’m Daniel Jackson.”

Dixon was protecting him, Daniel knew, only he wasn’t so sure that was a good idea. Still, that look Dixon had given him had told him to keep silent. If they were looking for Daniel, maybe they’d take Dixon and leave Daniel behind, alive, so he could return to the base and report what had happened. It was a slim chance, but a chance nonetheless.

The alien commander pressed his weapon against the Colonel’s forehead, this time speaking in rough, growling Latin. 

Another of the aliens spoke in the same tongue, his tone of voice hesitant, almost apologetic, his body language supplicating.

Daniel understood them, and he was certain he was the only one who did. They were talking about his glasses, the subordinate reminding the leader that Daniel Jackson wore a contraption with two small lenses on his face. They looked around at the two survivors, both on their knees, hands clasped behind their heads, not moving. 

It had been an automatic reaction for Daniel to reach for his glasses in the tent as he’d groped for his gun. He’d put them on by reflex, so he could see to shoot accurately. None of the others on the team wore them but him. They were on his face, in plain sight.

“I’m Daniel Jackson,” Daniel blurted in Latin. “Please, let him live! I am the one you want.”

“Shut up, Doc,” Dixon growled. “I don’t think they mean to ask for your autograph. I’m tryin’ to save your ass!”

The leader glanced at the Colonel with his bare face, then back at Daniel. With a snarling grimace that might have passed for a smile, he squeezed off two shots, executing Dixon without mercy. 

“Bring him,” the alien commander snarled, heading for the DHD.

“Oh, God,” Daniel breathed, his eyes filling with tears as he surveyed his teammates’ bodies. They were all dead now, all but him. “I’m so sorry.” 

Two of the alien soldiers yanked Daniel to his feet, bound his hands behind him, and marched him toward the ‘gate.  Others carried their own dead and wounded, leaving the human bodies behind.  One of them dialed a ‘gate address, but Daniel couldn’t see all the glyphs.  Moments later, the obelisk scanner passed harmlessly over them as they approached the event horizon.

At the other end of the wormhole, they arrived inside an enclosed metal structure populated by more of the bipedal aliens. A vibration through his boots told him there was a powerful engine at work nearby, and Daniel’s first thought was that they were inside a spaceship.  It wasn’t the typical Goa’uld/Egyptian hybrid he was accustomed to seeing, however; the design elements were Greco-Roman, with lots of white marble and elegant columns.

He was forced down a short corridor to a small cell with smooth metal walls, ceiling and floor, the interior closed off by a force field that his captors activated once they’d shoved him inside the little room. His only comforts were a metal shelf that might serve as a sleeping platform, complete with a sliding panel in the middle that opened to a toilet hole. Inside that was a screen that would let waste pass through, but nowhere near big enough to consider as a possible avenue of escape.

No one spoke to him. He had no idea why he’d been singled out from the team and everyone else killed. He had no intention of cooperating or giving them anything; he’d rather die than help them.  As far as he was concerned, they’d destroyed any possible leverage they might have had over him by killing his friends. 

The SGC would be returning to the campsite when SG-13 didn’t report in on time, and his teammates’ bodies would be discovered and returned home for burial, but no one would know what had happened to him. No one from Earth had ever seen aliens like those who had captured him, and he had no idea where they had originated; neither would anyone else. There was no way they could track him, so he was on his own.

He had no idea how these aliens had found him, and hoped it hadn’t been through a traitor in the midst of the SGC.

He simmered with rage as he examined his cell for every possible avenue of escape. If he could manage to free himself, he might be able to get home. And just maybe, if he were lucky, he’d be able to find a way to avenge his murdered teammates.

That idea fueled his hope, but he found that was all he had left.  

 The People gathered at the camp, surveying the carnage around them. This attack had been unexpected, but was not yet cause for alarm.  After all, those who had been struck down might well have deserved their fate.

The bodies of the visitors were gathered up and carried off to await dissection and analysis.  The alien’s shelters, weapons, and transportation vehicles were given a cursory examination; it was determined they might require further study, but they were dismissed as unimportant for the moment.  Meanwhile, the items would be protected from ravaging beasts and made invisible until the inquiry was completed, in case the attackers returned for whatever the first visitors had brought with them. 

In due time, in the city of Shahr, the council of elders met to determine a course of action once all the necessary information on the aliens had been acquired.

“They were only primitive beings,” Mountain announced. “They cannot be of those whom we called ‘Friend’ in the long-ago.” 

“Their tools and machines are crude,” agreed Forest. “We have been able to glean some information from them, but not enough to piece together a complete language reference. They seem to have no knowledge of us.”

“Have we been so completely erased from the universe?” asked Sky. “Is it possible no one knows we are here?”

Grass grunted and scratched his bearded chin. “Is why we here. To be lost.”

“But they are not The Ones?” asked Mountain. 

“No,” declared Sky. “We do not believe so.”

“No,” agreed Forest.

“Must observe rites,” stated Grass firmly, steepling his fingers over his lap.

“Agreed.” Mountain rose and led the procession out of the council hall.

The bodies of the dead strangers were cremated, their ashes returned to the base of the portal through which they had come, blended with the dust of all the People who had passed in every generation since they had arrived on that isolated world.

The People mourned them as their own and, when the ceremony was over, they returned to their respective places in their world.  Nothing had changed; for them, things were no different than they had been before the Wheel of Worlds opened to admit their visitors and those who had taken the life force of all but one of them.

If others came, the People would be waiting, always watching and waiting, as they had done for millennia. 

July 6

Somewhere In Space

Outside his cell, two of the scaly aliens stood guard.

Daniel’s belly growled. The one meal he’d eaten at the camp had been just enough to keep him going, but he was slowly dehydrating from lack of water. He was exhausted, but he dared not lie down and sleep with no one to keep watch. This kind of treatment was designed to break him down, but he’d been through worse.

By his chronometer, he knew that almost 24 hours had passed since his arrival, and no one had bothered to speak to him or interact in any way. Soon the communication deadline with the SGC would pass, and a contingent of Marines would be sent to investigate what had happened to SG-13. Their bodies would be discovered and taken back to the base for burial, their supplies gathered and returned home. Daniel would be listed as MIA; no one would know what had happened to him or where to attempt to mount a rescue. Even he didn’t know where he was.

Pacing, looking around, thinking, keeping one eye on the doorway in the anteroom outside his cell, he examined his prison for the bazillionth time, looking for any weakness he might exploit, thinking and calculating all possibilities, trying to cement in his mind the path from his cell to the Stargate; he’d need to remember that, if and when an opportunity for escape presented itself.

Finally, a visitor arrived, an old woman – a human – and Daniel felt a slight sense of relief at the sight of her. A small black lightning bolt was tattooed on her forehead, marking her as a Jaffa. This was a symbol he hadn’t seen before, but he knew instantly whose it was. Earth mythology told him that detail.  She was a servant of Zeus.

She handed him a tray laden with food and water, passed through a slot in the wall on one side of the energy barrier that served as both door and window.  He took the tray and set it down on the shelf in his cell. Since his alien captors had spoken to him in Latin, he guessed his visitor might use the same language.

 “Greetings,” said Daniel with a smile. He touched his chest with one hand. “My name is Da—“

“I know who you are,” the woman whispered in Latin, fear in her eyes as she meaningfully glanced at each guard. “For your own sake, I beg you to give Zeus whatever he asks.” She dropped her gaze, gave him a slight bow of respect, and started to turn away.

“Please!”  Daniel beseeched her.  “Wait!”  He reached toward the door, wanting to grab her arm and hold her, but was zapped for his trouble by the force field.  “Do you know what he wants with me?”

“Such important things are not for a slave to know,” she replied meekly, eyes downcast. “You must cooperate, or the price you pay will be terrible. Zeus has great power. We must not question him.”

Daniel felt his opportunity slipping away. “What is your name?” 

“Zera. I am to see to your meals.” She bowed again and hurried away.

With a sigh, Daniel sat down and examined the food and drink, sniffing suspiciously at the contents of the large metal tankard he’d been given.  In the end, his thirst won out, and he gulped down the cool liquid, his eyes closing in utter bliss.  The food was simple and filling; a bowl held a plain stew with meat and vegetables, and two slices of bread lay alongside it.  The meal would hold him for another day; at least now he had hope that they didn’t intend to starve him to death.

He knew the Earthly mythology of Zeus, son of Cronos, father of the Greco-Roman gods. His symbol, marking the woman’s forehead, was the lightning bolt. Zeus had a reputation for infidelity, whimsy and great wrath, but how much of that would hold true in this alien culture remained to be seen.

Daniel assumed this was yet another Goa’uld who had enslaved both human Jaffa and these beastly aliens, whatever they were.

He waited for the woman to return for the empty tray, and when she did, he thanked her with a warm smile. That eased her tension a little, softening her expression, but she didn’t smile back.

He decided to try for more information.  “Zera, are we on a space ship?”

She gave him a little nod. “I cannot tell you more. You will learn all you need to know when Zeus arrives, and you are presented to him.” She hesitated, met his gaze with a pleading one of her own, and bowed.

He let her go without more questions, sensing he might be putting her in danger for the interaction. He hadn’t missed the narrowed gaze of the scaly werewolf guard to his left, who had obviously monitored their conversation, its head turned toward the doorway.    

Daniel decided to try another tack. “What are your people called?” he asked the creature in elegantly precise Latin.

“Ting-sha,” it replied in a frosty growl. It turned away, steadfastly refusing to answer any of Daniel’s other questions.

At least he had an identity for his captors now.  That was something.  

Chapter 3: Death

July 7

Somewhere in Space

A Ting-sha soldier, splendidly bedecked in golden armor, swept into the anteroom with a snarl that jolted Daniel’s guards into a half-crouch of submission.  “Bring de Yaks’n,” he ordered, his pronunciation of Latin mangled by the lack of oral dexterity of his animal mouth. “Zeus has come.”

The guards hurried to obey him, unlocking the cell door and holding Daniel by each arm. Their grip was painful as their claw-tipped fingers poked into his skin through the tough BDU jacket.

As the group passed by the ‘gate room, Daniel confirmed he’d remembered the way correctly.

He noted numerous Jaffa passing through the corridors and at work in various rooms. All the technologically advanced positions were held by Jaffa; all the guards and military were Ting-sha. There was a distinct air of subservient fear expressed on the faces of the humans, along with distrust and hatred in the eyes of the alien soldiers.

“Go dere,” ordered the Ting-sha officer. It pointed into a luxuriously decorated, spacious room with a high ceiling. At first glance, the chamber reminded Daniel of the throne room on Ra’s space ship, but this place had Roman touches with an overabundance of gaudy gold and crimson velvet.

The guards brought him up to a dais poised before an enormous window looking out into the black of space, ribbons of light passing by that he recognized as the current of hyperspace travel. At the center of the dais was a grand throne with its back to him.

Standing on either side of the chair were Jaffa priests, the mark of Zeus emblazoned on their brows, golden garlands set on their heads. Their white Roman robes were draped with cloaks fastened over one shoulder with gold brooches. One priest held a censer, which he swung slightly to perfume the air; the other had his hands pressed together in prayer. All around them, additional worshipers were stationed near the walls, keeping the area around the dais clear, their voices mingled in a pleasant subtle murmur of praise.

The throne began to turn as Daniel was pushed down to his knees.

One of the priests announced, “All hail Zeus, mightiest of the gods.”

Soft chanting echoed louder in the room, a Latin prayer of adoration to the ancient god.

Daniel’s face was pushed down to the floor, preventing him from getting a look at the Goa’uld. The guards knelt with him, making sure he stayed bent over.

“Well, well, so this is the famous Doctor Daniel Jackson,” called a merry voice above him speaking Latin, like his minions. “Let me have a look, shall we? But keep him on his knees, where he belongs.” A note of malice laced the last phrase.

The guard’s hand moved from the back of Daniel's head and he sat back on his heels, lifting his gaze to finally meet his captor’s.

The being on the throne was a human male. His eyes flashed with the white light of Goa’uld possession, dimming down to reveal pale gray irises. The host was quite handsome, with fair skin and golden blond hair.

“I expected you to be a smaller man,” Zeus quipped. “Softer, perhaps. You don’t quite fit the picture of the academic I’ve heard so much about.”

Daniel didn’t say anything, biting back the retort that came instantly to mind.

“Not taking the bait, I see.” The Goa’uld smiled coolly. “No matter. We shall get down to business, then. I need a password from you. Something Colonel Carter would use to protect important information.”

“Sorry. If you know so much about me, you know I don’t cooperate with false gods or tyrants.”

“I expected as much.”  Zeus held out a hand to the praying priest, who reached into his cloak and retrieved a small circular gadget.

“This device,” Zeus turned it to display it to Daniel, but brought it no closer, “was once in the possession of Baal,” Zeus explained. “Your Colonel Carter did him the great favor of downloading the Stargate Command database into it for him. Do you remember that?”

Daniel lowered his eyes, embarrassed by the reminder of his teammate’s blunder, an act admittedly committed under duress, with Baal holding SGC personnel hostage and threatening their lives in exchange for the data. At least Daniel had the comfort of knowing she’d managed to password-protect the information so the system lord wouldn’t have easy access to it.

Only Baal didn’t have it anymore. This Zeus character apparently had taken it from him and was now trying to use Daniel to hack into it.

“Sorry, but I don’t know Sam’s passwords.”  He lifted his chin in bold rebellion, giving Zeus a small, defiant smile, showing him just how sorry he wasn’t.  “They’re unique to each individual. We aren’t permitted to share them with anyone.”

Smirking, Zeus replied, “Ah, but you know Colonel Carter well.  You have worked closely with her for ten of your years. You are both scientists, with like minds.  You can make educated guesses that my people cannot.”

“You’re a god, right?”  Daniel shrugged. “You figure it out.”

The guard at his right reacted instantly to this affront, using his weapon to crack Daniel across the back of his head. He saw stars as he fell to the floor, momentarily breathless from the pain. He sucked in a ragged gasp as soon as he could manage it, not moving until the ocular disturbance began to fade, and his skull settled down to a pounding throb.

“My children do not appreciate your—” Zeus paused, as though searching for the proper phrase, “attempt at humor,” he observed lightly with a small chuckle.

Daniel rolled onto his side, one hand instinctively clutching the back of his head, and made eye contact, watching as the priest tucked the device back into a fold in his white robe.

The Goa’uld’s expression turned angry, gray eyes flashing a warning as he leaned forward on his throne, his elbows on his knees. “I want this information, Doctor Jackson, but I do not need it. You will give it to me, or you will not. I do not care. I have more than one reason for bringing you here, as you shall soon see. Your people would benefit greatly from your cooperation, but the reprieve would only be temporary, I assure you.”

What Zeus was hinting at didn’t make sense.  “I’m not going to help you,” Daniel told him firmly.

The Goa’uld relaxed in his chair and smiled. “Perhaps not today, but eventually…” He clasped his hands over his lap. “Everyone has a breaking point, Doctor. Even you.” He glanced at the Ting-sha officer. “Take him away. Inquire every hour to determine if he has changed his mind.”

The alien inclined his head and gracefully dropped to one knee, then rose and growled an order to the guards, who hustled Daniel back to his cell.

Once again inside his bare prison, Daniel asked, “What is he planning?” He hoped one of the aliens would answer out of reflex; they were loyal to their god, but didn’t seem too bright.

No one answered him.

The energy barrier on his cell door activated with a low-pitched hum, and Daniel settled down to a long, tiring stay in jail. 

July 8

P9X-1017

After Colonel Griff surveyed the landscape one last time, he glanced at the smooth, trackless ash surrounding the Stargate. He pressed the button on his comm unit, squinting at the rippling event horizon of an active wormhole. “No sign of SG-13 or any of their equipment, General Landry,” he reported. “No tracks, no response on the radio, nothing. It’s as if they were never here.”

“How much territory did you cover, Colonel?”

“We know they would have headed down that road behind me,” Griff replied, wary eyes still shifting to the surrounding territory. The place made him uneasy; he felt as though they were being watched, but all they’d seen around them were a few big bug things hovering around the rocky perimeter. “Given the elapsed time involved, we know they couldn’t have gotten more than halfway to that pyramid, and we went past that point. There’s absolutely nothing here, General -- no evidence of campsites, detours or anything else.  The place gives me the creeps, but we haven’t seen any aliens or anything else that could account for their disappearance.”

“Might have something to do with that pillar, or the corona on the Stargate,” Landry told him. “If that’s the case, then we’ll want to be very careful how we approach studying that site. We’ll put it on the list for Odyssey to explore on their way back from Atlantis. Meanwhile, report back to the base, and we’ll discuss how to handle further search and rescue for SG-13.”

“Roger that, sir. We’re on our way back now.” Griff gestured for his team to proceed ahead of him through the event horizon.

He glanced over his shoulder at the empty landscape behind him, watching a giant dragonfly lift off from one of the boulders above the ridge surrounding the ‘gate area.

The place had spooked him, and he couldn’t get out of there fast enough. He turned and stepped through the watery surface of the wormhole, in a hurry to get home.

Whatever had happened to SG-13, he knew it wasn’t good, but he’d be first to volunteer for a return trip to find them, once they had more information. He didn’t want to leave anyone behind in that place; it smelled of death to him, and he didn’t like it. 

 July 8

Somewhere in Space

Daniel’s knees protested the way he’d been shoved onto them by the Ting-sha soldiers at his sides. He tasted blood from the split lip one of them had given him just before being brought into the audience chamber. It had been a long night, since Daniel hadn’t slept in a couple of days; he’d just started to nod off from exhaustion when the hourly inquiries began.

He glared up at Zeus, who was staring haughtily down at him from his enormous gilded marble throne.  Lack of food and sleep were making Daniel a little confused, and his emotions were set to a hair-trigger by the ordeal, but there was one certainty he still held.  “I won’t tell you a damned thing,” he growled between clenched teeth.

“I grow weary of your resistance to my commands,” said the Goa’uld, his voice unnaturally deep and throaty, “and I warned you of the price you would pay if you refused me.” He lifted his elegantly chiseled chin and smirked at his captive.

“Then why haven’t you killed me already?” demanded Daniel. “I’m never going to help you.” 

“You shall bear witness to my power, Doctor Jackson, and you will learn that it is futile to resist my will,” said the haughty being. “For too long, the Tau’ri have been a thorn in the side of the Goa’uld. I have been patient, waiting as the System Lords made war on each other; as they killed one another off, I absorbed many of their territories. I have watched the Tau’ri destroy them one by one, seen great weapons stolen from their grasp, and at last, it is time to make my presence known.”

“What about the Ori priors, and their armies of converts?” Daniel snapped. “You planning to take them on, too?”

Zeus chuckled. “I have the means,” he assured his prisoner, “as you shall see.” He flicked a hand at his First Prime, giving a silent, pre-arranged command to the Jaffa standing beside the dais. 

The warrior’s hands moved over a control panel on the bridge of the ship, and the white marble wall behind the throne began to divide into two halves, separating to reveal a panoramic view of black, starry space.  In the center of the view screen glowed the jewel-like beauty of a familiar blue-green planet.  Earth.

Zeus’ ship had to have some sort of cloaking device, making it completely undetectable, because instead of any sign of spacecraft rushing to fend off an attack, there was only peaceful, silent space.

Daniel’s heart beat faster, harder; his mouth went dry.

“Behold,” announced Zeus, “the measure of my wrath against the Tau’ri. Your people shall plague me no more.” He stood and placed his hand on a blue crystal sphere set on a podium beside his throne. The sphere lit up, and Daniel could hear and feel an eerily familiar deeply pitched hum vibrating through his body as a weapon charged up somewhere in the ship’s core.

A frisson of alarm nudged him closer to full-fledged panic.  Zeus was going to attack Earth! He was going to destroy it, and no one knew it was coming.

“No!” Daniel cried.  He struggled against his captors as he lurched to his feet and tried to throw his body at Zeus to stop him, but he was too late, his effort too small; there were too many guards keeping him in place. “No, please!  Stop! I’ll do anything you want! Just don’t—“

A bright flash drew his gaze back to the massive window, and as he watched in mind-numbing horror, a brilliant pulse of energy shot out from the ship, directly into the area of the Pacific where the volcanic island chain of Hawaii ought to be. A massive beam of power flowed into the vent through the Earth's crust, exciting the thermal energy inside the active volcano, tunneling into the molten core. The planet fractured along a major fault line and shattered into flaming chunks, and the force of the blast expanded outward, quickly engulfing the moon and demolishing it as well.

In the space between one heartbeat and the next, Daniel’s world was gone, his people utterly destroyed.  Glowing debris left a fiery trail, marking the place where so much life had once flourished.

Daniel stopped struggling.  Still and silent, he stared at the screen, unable to fully process what he’d just seen; it wasn’t possible that Earth had been obliterated. He couldn’t imagine such a thing; he couldn’t wrap his mind around it. Time ceased to tick away for him as that memory replayed over and over until it was seared indelibly into his soul.

Then, there was nothing. 

 Zeus watched his prisoner’s expression of horror turn to a blank mask dominated by glazed, unseeing eyes. The Goa’uld strolled down the steps of the dais and waved away the guards, reveling in the emptiness he saw in the famous Doctor Jackson’s eyes. He leaned in close to the human’s ear and whispered, “Such is the price to be paid for rejecting the rule of the gods.”

He smiled, his heart filled with contempt and cruel triumph, and pulled away, waiting for a challenging snarl or capitulation, but Jackson didn’t move.

Slowly waving one hand before the human’s eyes, Zeus saw there was no reaction to his remark at all.  Doctor Daniel Jackson seemed to be gone, only the shell of his body remaining behind. Apparently, the shock of seeing his home world destroyed had been too much for the man to bear.

Zeus’ victory was a little hollow now, but still satisfying in its own way.  The Tau’ri would no longer be a constant source of irritation.  The Jaffa nation was still shaky enough in its infancy to be toppled with application of the right force, at the right time, in the most important places. Only Baal stood in Zeus’s way now, and with weapons like this one, combined with his newly acquired toy from Baal, there were few obstacles left to conquer.

There remained, of course, the matter of the Ori incursion, but that was simple enough to solve; any planet that fell to those religious zealots would be destroyed. After losing enough worlds, it would become obvious to the Ori’s that any attempt to conquer this galaxy was futile; in a few months, it would all belong to Zeus.  His patience had paid off handsomely, and ultimate domination would soon be in his grasp.

He pushed Jackson’s shoulder, watching him wobble and instinctively adjust his balance. Zeus lifted the man’s right arm and moved his supporting hand away, chuckling as the limb remained where he had placed it, floating in mid-air.

“Put that back in its cell,” he ordered with a last scathing stare at his captive. “When the famous Doctor Jackson recovers from his shock, put him to work unlocking the database device. See to it that he survives long enough to fulfill his purpose.”  The Ting-sha guards nodded and hustled Jackson off, dragging him by both arms, his feet barely moving.

Zeus turned away to return to his throne.  He gazed out the portal at the fiery fragments, which were still moving away from the explosion.

He glanced at the priest standing by his throne. “You may accompany me to Olympus through the chaapa’ai,” he announced. Turning to his Jaffa First Prime, he ordered, “Tell the ship’s master to send word to all my high priests when Doctor Jackson has returned to himself. Until then, the ship is to maintain a course to Olympus. A celebration of my victory against the Tau’ri will be held there.”

“The word of Zeus,” said the priest, bowing to his god.

As he strode out of his audience chamber, his personal guard accompanying him as he headed for the Stargate room, the Goa’uld laughed softly to himself.  The destruction of Earth was something everyone in the galaxy would be talking about forever.  All would tremble at his name!  The galaxy was his… or soon would be.

It was a good day. 

Chapter 4: Escape

August 1

Not unlike surfacing from submersion under water, Daniel’s consciousness rose up from a sheltered place in his soul, and he realized his eyes were open. From somewhere came a vague awareness of a significant passage of time, but he had no idea how long it had been since he’d been in sync with the world around him.

A vague sensation of loss clung to him like a second skin, making it difficult to breathe; he couldn’t remember what had happened to him, or how he’d come to be in that unfamiliar place.  His first tentative effort to search his memory brought a sharp stab of pain; he decided not to explore that at the moment. Some buried instinct told him there were things to be done, action needing to be taken, but he didn’t have a clue what that was. He would have to figure it out, and that would take a little patience. He would know the right moment to move, but he’d have to be patient until it came.

He knew instinctively that he should observe his surroundings for some indication of what was happening. The room in which he lay was bare, cold metal, including the shelf beneath him, just barely warmed by his body heat.

Then he realized he was naked, lying down over a hole just beneath his buttocks.  The stink of his filthy body was strong enough to make him gag, and he became aware of a slow, burning sensation along his buttocks and thighs, where his skin was chapped from being unclean.  From his physical condition, he guessed he’d been reclining there for some time, relatively unattended. 

No guards were in view, but he could hear them talking, just out of sight, probably right past the perimeter of his tiny prison. He listened closely, taking care to keep still, eyes focused on the ceiling above him. He would play along with whatever his captors wanted, checking their reactions for cues to his recent behavior.

His empty belly growled. 

“You turn to wash de Yaks’n, Darek,” said a male voice in rough Latin.

“I did last time,” argued another, deeper voice from the opposite side of the doorway. “By Zeus, he stinks!”

Oh, yes, please, Daniel thought. A bath would feel wonderful – and it would get him out of that cell.

A heavy sigh sounded to the left. “Zeus should kill him. Would be merciful.”

“Shhhh!” hissed the guard on the right. “You want his wrath, K’kez? Tell a god, be merciful? You brain-sick.”

Soft beeps sounded, and a moment later the door to the cell unlocked. The one called K’kez showed himself, stepping into the open cell. His wolfish face relaxed a little, and he sighed. “I not see dis one ever right again.”

Darek eyed his companion. “If he wakes,” stated the Ting-sha guard grimly, “he as strong as Jaffa say; I not see our home gone and live.”

At the alien’s words, Daniel felt some huge black thing rise up inside him, threatening to engulf him again. He fought it, refusing to think about it, about why he was there, and what he might have seen. He had to concentrate on here and now, and finding a way to escape. He didn’t know what these creatures were talking about and didn’t want to, not now. The holes in his memory would probably fill in later; if they didn’t, he thought he might be okay with that, too. He had the sense that it was something horrible, something he didn’t want to know.

The two guards pulled Daniel to his feet. One wrapped a cloth around him, roughly tying it over his chest, and then they pulled him along in a stumbling walk, using the fabric as a leash.  He concentrated on where they were going, remembering every step. He’d need to be fast, moving from place to place, whenever the time came to leave.

They took him to the nearest showers, where they stripped his covering off, unceremoniously shoved him under a spigot, and turned on the spray. It was instantly a warm, soothing temperature, a soapy mixture alternating with clear rinse water. Closing his eyes and swallowing the blissful groan of pleasure as the dirt, oil, and waste were sluiced from his body, he stood still beneath the jet, letting the stream force his head down. He dared not move to scrub himself, just let the water do the work.    

Nearby, the guards chatted amiably. Daniel struggled to hear them, carefully adjusting his stance to keep his ears clear of the downpour. What he heard didn’t provide him with anything useful, so he would need to be patient. For the moment, he just enjoyed the water and what cleanliness he could get. When the shower shut off, K'kez wrapped a clean blanket over his shoulders and towed him back to his cell.

The guard sat him down over the toilet hole and draped the blanket over his lap, then returned to its post outside the cell, activating the invisible barrier over the doorway.

A few minutes later, Daniel was pleased to see an old woman appear.  She kept her eyes downcast and bowed to the guards, waiting for them to shut off the force field sealing off his cell. As she shuffled toward him carrying a food tray, he sat very still, keeping his gaze fixed on the far wall.

She sat down beside him and scooped up a spoonful of gruel, touching his lower lip with it.  “Come on, now,” she cooed gently in soft Latin. “Open up. Be a good boy.”

He opened his mouth and accepted the bland-tasting food, swallowing it automatically. As long as she shoveled it in, he ate until his stomach was blissfully full. Once the bowl was empty, she wiped his face with a damp towel, kindly patted his shoulder, and took her supplies away.

K'kez entered the cell as she left and grasped Daniel by the shoulders. The Ting-sha twisted him and pushed at him, guiding his unresisting body into a supine position, then lifted his legs onto the shelf into a fully reclining position.

A moment later, Daniel heard the force field activate, sealing him inside the tiny room again.

Later, eyes closed and on the edge of sleep, glimmering memories of long hours spent uncovering fragments of pottery with fine brushes slowly appeared, bits of his past reminding him of a career as an archaeologist. Language was another love, and he let the sounds of Latin, Greek, Phoenician, and other ancient tongues provide a musical soundtrack to the images floating through his consciousness, spreading out like roots, grounding him to who and what he was. His name appeared – Daniel Jackson – and more pieces fell into place, old memories that gave him comfort and peace.  

Where he was and why he was there still eluded him, but he knew that information would come. He was a patient man; his profession had demanded it, requiring long hours of research and slow, delicate work to uncover a buried past or a fragment of meaning in long-dead scripts. Daniel would watch and listen, and learn everything he could of Zeus’s plans for him, waiting for just the right moment to slip away.  They’d passed other humans in the corridor, so he might be able to blend in with them, if he could find the proper clothing. 

Above everything else, he knew how to wait, and he would stay as long as it took to escape. 

 August 7

K’kez was snoring, asleep on his feet. His usual partner was absent, and there was no one else guarding the door… but the electronic barrier was still in place, flashing with an occasional spark of energy. Escape eluded Daniel for another day, even though all his ducks had politely lined up in a neat row, and most of his memories had returned, including how he'd used his skills for the last ten years. He'd been a part of an organization called Stargate Command, and his mission had been to protect his people from alien threats.

This was obviously one of them.

There was a Stargate on board, housed in one of the cargo rooms nearby. Daniel had felt the rotation rumbling through the decks, and he’d heard it activating. Through it, he could go anywhere, as soon as he was free.

He now also knew why Zeus had captured him. The stolen device was being kept in a laboratory on the way to the showers; he'd heard two Jaffa scientists talking about it while they were bathing, and he’d seen them afterward as they worked on it. Daniel was connected to it somehow and knew that it was valuable, which meant he had to either destroy it, or take it with him.

Daniel had also learned where to find clothing, weapons, and a handful of supplies.  He knew the rhythm of the society that lived on board the ship. He knew the best time to move. All he needed was an opportunity… and then he’d go.

Gotta get out of here. Get back ho—

No, can’t go home, because…

No GDO, that’s it.

That was why he couldn’t go back, he told himself. He couldn’t go to Earth or the Alpha site, because he didn’t have his GDO. That was the problem. He’d have to go somewhere else, then.

But where?

Every time he pondered his destination, his mind shied away from familiar places, edging toward panic. The allies he’d met in the past might have become converts to the Ori or turned against the Tau’ri. Every familiar place led him inexplicably back to the same idea.

The last mission.

He fixed on the latest work he’d been doing, and decided that was where he ought to go. It was the last place Zeus and his people would look for him. There were supplies on that planet, too. He’d been taken from camp, and there were stores of rations and survival gear packed into the vehicles they’d been planning to use to travel to the distant ruins SG-13 had gone to explore. If he could just slip quietly away, he could hide there for a while before moving on to someplace else.

With that destination firmly in mind, he resigned himself to waiting a little longer for his moment. 

 August 20

Somewhere in Space

Time passed. Daniel had no idea exactly how long, but the span seemed like weeks. He sat perfectly still, day after day, meditating and planning, daydreaming and remembering distant history lessons and details of long-ago archaeological digs. Eventually he grew bored, and his commitment to the plan waned. Sometimes he thought he would go mad from the inactivity, but every time he sat on the verge of screaming out loud, he summoned up a memory of Zeus’s face, smiling at him, smug and cruel.

Daniel’s mind would quiet then. Hatred filled him up with steamy heat, slow and deadly. He would contemplate his revenge, picturing all manner of horrible fates visiting themselves upon the Goa’uld. Sometimes the creature’s end would be the result of some disaster, but more often, it would involve torture and slow death at the hands of the aliens who served him.  Either way, Daniel would be standing by, watching with satisfaction.

Never did he imagine killing Zeus with his own hands, but always, in every scenario, it was the result of something Daniel had inspired. That was how he craved it; not as murder, but as justice on a grand, cosmic scale. The vengeance Daniel wanted carried out had to be bigger than just one man; it needed to be something no one would ever forget.

Ba’al stood on the bridge, glowering at the swirling rainbow of hyperspace outside the ship. Ten ha’taks had been sent to this quadrant of space to search for Zeus’s ship, and Ba'al was spoiling for a fight. He’d killed half a world as penalty for allowing the Hub to be stolen from him, and he was determined to get the device back. It hadn’t taken long to ferret out who had purloined it, and only a few weeks to acquire a possible location of the thieves.

That upstart Zeus had been lurking in the background for millennia, sniffing at Chronos’s skirts, currying his favor, sucking up to him. Once the Tau’ri had killed Chronos, Zeus had disappeared into the background, but now he was making his move.

Stealing the Hub had been the first play of his game.  Then he’d sent out ships with his wolfish Ting-sha armies, taking Ba'al's most recently acquired territories, flexing his military muscle, making Ba’al look weak. Zeus might be greatly outnumbered by Ba’al’s forces, but his weapons were impressive, and his cunning keenly felt.

“We have found him, my lord!” announced a voice behind him.

Ba’al looked over his shoulder and spared a haughty glance for his First Prime. “You are certain it is Zeus?”

“Yes, Lord of the North.”  Down on one knee, pale-faced and trembling, Para’c stared intently at the polished black marble floor. He was tall and powerfully built, his golden tattoo gleaming against his forehead. A black moustache and beard framed his mouth, but he kept his jaw line neatly shaved, clearly revealing his handsome face. Para'c was a powerful man, feared throughout the galaxy, yet now he uncertainly knelt before his god.  “He has come to this area of space from the First World. He—”  Para'c swallowed hard.

“You are afraid,” Ba’al sneered. “Do you fear Zeus more than me?”

Para'c's dark eyes shifted back and forth, as if seeking some avenue of escape. In perfect subservience, he dipped his bald head lower. “N-no, my lord. Ba’al is the most powerful—”

“Then why do you shake like a frightened child?” Ba’al sneered as he turned to face his minion, staring down his nose at the weakling. 

“Forgive me, my lord.  It is said… Zeus has destroyed the First World! He has smashed the resistance of the Tau’ri. If he has such power—” Para’c choked on his words. His hands were raised in supplication, but he dared not meet his god's gaze. He was truly terrified and bent so low, his forehead almost touched the floor. 

Ba’al dared not show his surprise. He narrowed his gaze and clenched his teeth, hating Zeus even more. If true, an event of this magnitude would not go unnoticed. It could very well swing the balance of power between the gods, winning voluntary converts who would believe Zeus were the more powerful of the two.

“Call every ship,” Ba’al ordered. “Coordinate the attack so that all appear at once as we drop out of hyperspace. Target the ship's weapons and engines first to disable it, but take no chances, and leave no survivors. If we can question his crew and retrieve the Hub, so be it. If not, it will be destroyed along with Zeus and his ship.”

He turned his back on the slave, hatred boiling inside him.

Zeus would regret the day he’d chosen to reach for what belonged to Ba’al.

Ba’al would see to that personally.

Zeus’s mothership shuddered violently, a deep roar echoing down the corridors. It took a few seconds for Daniel’s body to react to the event, but his guards instantly raised their weapons and growled. Either their vessel was under attack, or some other object had hit it, and the impact was somewhere near the brig.

Another violent quake, and Daniel was sure the ship was under attack. The ceiling in Daniel’s cell buckled slightly, and the barrier at the door shorted and went out.  Out in the corridor, people were scrambling everywhere. Both guards left their posts as a call came over the PA system for damage control.

As soon as the room was clear, Daniel forced himself to action, wrapping his meager blanket around himself, and heading for the opening to his cell.  He’d lost significant muscle tone, and weakness made his head spin.  His heart was racing as he eased through the doorway, grateful when his guess that the barrier had been deactivated proved correct.

He hurried out into the corridor, but no one seemed to notice one more body among the shouting, frenzied crowd. Someone down the hallway started firing, but the shots weren’t directed at him. Even though he was filthy and practically naked, Daniel was ignored as he headed for the armory to fetch a zat, which he secreted in the folds of his blanket. He ran for the storage rooms, hurried into clothing and boots that would further help him blend in, gathered up some field rations, a zat and a water canteen.  He put everything into a kind of shoulder bag he found, and then headed for the lab.

The device that had been so important to Zeus was fitted into a machine connected to a Goa'uld computer station. It was running some kind of program, but the characters were in Ancient script rather than hieroglyphs. Daniel didn't waste any time trying to figure out how to turn the computer off or whether improper removal might damage the device. He simply pried it out and yanked it free, dropped it into the shoulder bag, and ran for the cargo hold.

In minutes that seemed like hours, Daniel waited in the bay where the Stargate was kept, squeezed in with dozens of others who had been shoved aside as panic-stricken Ting-sha soldiers and Jaffa abandoned ship.

He needed a way to dial his own destination, and to make sure no one followed him. For that, he’d have to make use of the high emotion surging through the corridors.  “We’ll never get out in time!” he shouted, pleased to feel the level of panic in the room jump up several notches. Turning to a Jaffa standing beside him, he grabbed the man's arm. “Bar the door! It’s the only way we’ll make it.” 

Hysteria in the Jaffa's eyes sent him into action. The alien fought against others pushing into the room and grabbed a few more Jaffa to help him. They were manually closing the door panels, forcing everyone in the corridors back, closing them out. A few Ting-sha helped them, and one jammed its baton weapon between the ornate door handles to keep the passage closed. 

The ship continued to shake and shudder, but Daniel waited, backing away from the commotion, hiding himself as those who had helped lock the room departed through the 'gate. Finally, only a small group of Ting-sha were left in the room as the doors began to open, the baton starting to bend. He wouldn’t have much more time. He had to act now.

With practiced precision, he aimed his zat at the last five Ting-sha warriors and took them out, dodging their weapons fire with the last of his strength. He stepped up to the DHD and punched in the coordinates from the last mission, glancing over his shoulder as the doors groaned open a little further. Someone started shooting at him, and he ran out of the line of fire, getting as close as he could to the ‘gate while avoiding the forming kawoosh.

As soon as the event horizon stabilized, he made a mad dash and darted through it. He rolled onto the other side, breathless and exhausted, while weapons fire came through and kicked up dust all around him.  As soon as he could get to his feet, he stumbled behind the ‘gate, shielding himself with one side of the great wheel, ready to shoot anyone who followed him, but none of the alien soldiers took the risk of coming after him.

After a moment, the wormhole shut down.

It was quiet on that alien world, the sun just beginning to rise. 

Daniel surveyed the rocky, barren, gray landscape all around the Stargate, and found it empty, save for the occasional large dragonfly. He waited to see if anyone would redial his destination, but the portal remained still and silent. He sat down to catch his breath, maintaining his position of using the Stargate as a shield, and searched through his bag for something to eat and drink.

The SGC camp was only a few hundred feet away, right where they'd left it. He squinted and could just make out the blurry images of the vehicles, but the tents were piles of canvas lying on the ground. He knew there would be additional food and water there, as well as weapons and an extra pair of glasses, but he needed to stay in that protected spot for just a little longer, to rest and make sure he hadn't been followed.

Hours later, there was still no sign of pursuit. Daniel was getting drowsy; the constant state of alertness and his weakened physical condition had exhausted him. He remembered the previous survey data from this world; there had been some concerns about large predatory mammals, so he thought he should search for some sort of shelter where he could recover a bit. He couldn't sleep in a tent, since there was no one to stand watch while he slept, and the camp was too close to the Stargate. If anyone came after him, he'd need to be out of sight, away from there. He decided he could come back tomorrow to search through the supplies, pick out a vehicle, and put some distance between himself and the Stargate.

All around him, there was little but rocky ground and powdery ash. Pinnacles and boulders rose and fell in wind- and water-sculpted twists and curls, dotted with loose pebbles, fringed with short, hairy-looking brown grass. It was starting to get hot, now that the sun was fully up, and not a single cloud offered the possibility of shade or rain.

The mission to that planet had been to travel down the yellow brick road to the step pyramid that lay three hundred miles distant. It would be a long journey on foot, but Daniel had his choice of the ATVs or the mule at the camp whenever he was ready to travel. He vaguely remembered some crevices nearby where he might take shelter, providing no alien creatures had beaten him to it. Picking up the canteen marked with Zeus’s lightning bolt, he took a swig of water and started off at a slow walk, keeping watch on the surrounding terrain for native dangers and seeking a suitable place to rest.

He was stumbling by the time he found shelter, a mostly horizontal fracture in the rock.  The crack was barely big enough to admit him, but he wedged himself into it.  He pulled his pack in after him, pushing it up by his head, where it would be easy to reach and provide him a little padding. He surveyed the brightness outside and, seeing nothing moving in the mid-day heat, he fell instantly, deeply asleep.

 Chapter 5: Grief

PX9-1017

The First Night

The People crept stealthily into the opening of the crevice, keeping toward the walls, hugging the shadows, almost invisible in the darkness. The leader gave signals to two others, who moved into position near the visitor’s head. They created a field to induce and hold him in an alpha state, while another conducted a full-body scan. When they had finished, they retreated from the cave and gathered together on a cliff top facing the opening, far enough away that they could not be heard.

“He is not one of the Ancients,” said the leader, scanning through the data. “There are anomalies.”

“His companions were also not Ancients,” another observed. “They were primitive. Their crude tools and weapons prove his people were no threat to us. That is why we removed the cloaking field on their campsite after the second group return to their world."

"Might those who died here have been in the service of this one? He was most important, the one the invaders took.” The first speaker's data readout needed a boost, and she brightened the glow of the screen inside her visor to make it easier to read the information. She looked closer, then removed her helmet in surprise. “He is in possession of the Ancient’s device! The council must be informed. They will want him watched closely.”

“He is an enigma that bears studying before we decide what to do with him,” a third agreed.  “He is more advanced than his companions were, yet more primitive than the Ancients.”

“We will test him to determine what threat he may pose to us before we show ourselves,” the first decided.

“He has seen us already,” another observed, “and paid us no mind, as if he did not recognize us.”

A shuffling sound drew their attention to the canyon floor outside, and the group watched a scritchna amble across the stony path, sniffing the trail where the traveler had walked, poking its elongated nose into the crevice to take a deeper whiff of his scent.

They watched, judging the Ancient-who-was-not-Ancient on his reactions, in an effort to determine his nature. If he could not protect himself, he might be killed or eaten, and they would never know his true purpose in visiting their world. They would not interfere unless it appeared that something might be gained from a relationship with him.

“We might let him disappear without his ever knowing we exist,” the leader declared.

“But he has the Hub, and may take it with him.”

The first shrugged. “We cannot use it. Only one such as he can unlock the Wheel of Worlds. It would be useless to us.”

“Then that is good reason to earn his trust, if we can.”

The first crossed her arms, cocking her head in consideration. “We will see what he knows of us. If he brings a message from the Ancients, we will hear it. If he does not know us, we will test his character and determine if he can be trusted. If he believes he can gain nothing from us, his actions will be true. Send word to the council to advise us. We will learn what his purpose is on our world, and if he has come to hunt us, we will finally have our war.”

The People were not as innocent and accepting as they had once been. They had learned too late not to trust easily, but they had understood the lesson well. The stranger among them would be scanned and tested, his memories searched, recorded, and studied, and soon they would have the truth of who he was and what he wanted.

After that, they would decide if he should live or die.

The sound of rolling pebbles awakened Daniel, pulling him unwillingly from sleep. When he opened his eyes, he saw only darkness for a moment, realizing the rest of the day had passed and night had fallen outside his tiny cave.

But he was no longer alone.

A snuffling sound sent his senses into full alert. As his eyes adjusted, he could see the landscape outside, faintly lit by the stars. Tiny lights flickered on and off in the distance, the faint illumination in constant motion, swooping down and rising out of sight. He thought the luminescence looked like fireflies, but their swarming also alerted him to the presence of something else outside the cave, the source of the noise that had awakened him.

It had four stubby feet, and one of those limbs reached in where he lay. Long, sharp, curved claws scratched at the rock right in front of his face, and he jerked backward, wedging himself further into the crevice. The creature’s claws were scraping along the rock floor, coming out empty, looking for prey.

Daniel took that moment to reach for his supply bag, digging out his stolen zat with trembling fingers.

A long snout pressed into the crack, searching for him. A light-colored tongue licked toward him, slurping along the rocks he had squeezed against.  The animal apparently liked the taste of him, and licked some more.

He shot it.

With a squeal of surprise and alarm, the thing crumpled and thrashed on the ground for a moment, then lay still. Knowing it was either playing possum or actually stunned, Daniel shot it again to make sure it was dead, then one more time to disintegrate the carcass. He didn’t want it attracting more predators to the area.

He crawled to the entrance of his hiding place and slowly, carefully peered out, glancing around for any other night hunters. The fireflies remained distant, nearly invisible against the night sky and the rocky landscape, but they seemed to pose no threat. The night was otherwise quiet as Daniel wedged himself back into his little hidey-hole.

After a few minutes, the firefly light show faded to blackness, and he decided the bugs had gone off somewhere else. That gave him some peace of mind, so he took the time to eat and drink a little before returning to much-needed sleep.

 August 21

Until he made it back to the camp the following morning, Daniel didn’t let himself think about anything but survival. The SGC transport vehicles were still there, but the bodies of his slain companions were gone. The supplies that had been unpacked were also missing, probably carried off by some of the local fauna, but the items stored in the ATV lockers were still there, as was the stuff that had been packed in the 4X4 mule.

He now had stores of fresh water, purification tablets, MREs, extra clothing and boots, survival gear and medical supplies. He located an extra pair of glasses he’d packed as a back-up, a journal and pen, and a few precious reference books. There was also a spare laptop, complete with a naquadah power cell that would last for two years, extra small arms and a supply of ammo.

He could survive with these tools at his disposal.

There was still no sign of pursuit, but he kept watch on his surroundings as he explored the camp for provisions and cleaned up a little, aware that he also needed to defend himself against wild animals, such as the anteater-thing he’d killed the previous night. He sat down and made himself comfortable with the device he’d stolen to see if he could crack Sam’s code. He wasn’t sure what it actually did, but he’d either figure it out or destroy it, just to keep it out of enemy hands.

The device was plate-shaped, about five inches in diameter. It looked to be made of raw naquadah, the same dark grayish material that formed the Stargate. Inscribed on its face were all 39 glyphs on the ‘gate, arranged in three concentric circles just like a DHD, with a small blue stone in the center, rather than a red one like the actual devices carried. Around those three circles were additional keys inscribed with the characters Daniel had come to recognize as the writing of the Ancients.

He examined the edge of the device and found several holes he thought might be ports for downloading or uploading data. On the back of the device was an alphanumeric arrangement of keys, inscribed in Ancient characters. Above that was a view screen in the shape of a half-circle.

It took him a few minutes to figure out how to turn it on. Once activated, the screen lit up with a dark blue background and azure lettering, a faint hum emanating from the device. A message popped up in English, accompanied by a single chiming note, requiring a user name and password, along with a warning that all data would be destroyed after three attempts to access the information without the correct cipher. 

Daniel smiled. “Good girl, Sam,” he murmured quietly. He leaned his head back against a low cliff and thought of her, trying to figure out what she’d use for this password. He’d learned some of her others through their close association of the last ten years, because they’d all been aware that death was a constant companion, and they’d never known when they’d leave the base and not return.

Fishing was one of them, a private joke between Jack and the rest of SG-1. Indian was another, for her beloved motorcycle. But what would she have used to protect the SGC database?

As he pondered that, remembering all they’d been through in the past ten years, tears welled up and spilled down his cheeks. He set the device on the ground beside him and pushed the heels of his hands against his closed eyelids. He didn't want the distraction of memories and the emotions that accompanied them; not now. He just wanted to do his job.

Daniel gripped his head in both hands as the unwanted conclusions pushed themselves into the forefront of his mind. 

Jack was dead. He had been at his newest post in Washington DC, serving as head of Homeworld Security. Sam had been at Area 51, researching an alien device that had been brought back on SG-1’s last mission, so she was gone, too. Mitchell had been vacationing in Vegas, and Vala and Teal’c had been at the base. They had all died while he was on his last mission. No one was left, because…

The brunt of the memory hit him like a staff blast.

Earth was gone, vaporized in an explosion of light.

Daniel sucked in a deep, sharp breath and roared in soul-deep agony. This time, as the shattering loss ripped through him, there was no sheltering darkness rising up to offer him a place to hide from the truth. He wept and keened, thrashing against the rocks, trying to hold himself against an anguish so massive it threatened to tear him apart.  

Deep in a paroxysm of grief and loss, his body shuddered, and he flung himself onto hands and knees. His stomach rebelled, and he vomited from the violent spasms. Reeling, lost, he crawled away from the foul smell and wiped reflexively at his mouth.

“No!” he sobbed, assailed again by the memory of what he’d seen, his face wet with tears, head hanging. “It’s not true! Earth is still there. It has to be. It has to be! This can't be real.”    

Only he knew it was. In the core of his soul, he had felt it when his planet exploded. His people were gone, all but a handful of them who had been off-world on missions, at the Alpha base, on board the few space ships elsewhere in the galaxy, or in Atlantis.

Now he was alone, and he would never again go home.

“Oh, God,” he sighed wearily. He sat down beside the low cliff and curled up into a ball, resting his shoulder against the rocks. He closed his eyes and tucked his chin against his chest, arms wrapped around his belly, rocking himself, his lament erupting from the very center of his being, “My world is gone. Billions of people, all gone.” 

He covered his face with his palms. No more tears fell, because he had none. He was exhausted from grief, but couldn’t sleep. Finally, he put his hands down and sat there quietly, staring at the camp, watching night fall, remembering.

“All that history,” he whispered brokenly, “gone.”

He would never again see the Great Pyramids or the Sphinx, the Roman Coliseum or Stonehenge. He would never stand in awe of Michelangelo’s enormous David or the small but delicate painting of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. The Magna Charta and Gutenberg’s Bible had vanished, along with the US Constitution and the Dead Sea scrolls. Every ancient treasure that he had seen and touched, every book he’d read, every record of dead civilizations he’d studied on his home world – all of it had vanished forever.

He bowed his head, his heart aching all over again. 

Daniel had lost everything. He had nothing now. His reason for living was gone.

Closing his eyes, he lay down on the ground and stretched out, positioning himself for death. He told himself he would just lie there until he stopped breathing. Dying would be easy now. All he had to do was wait for death to arrive.

“He sleeps again,” observed the leader.

The People moved in and gathered around their visitor’s head.

Another induced the alpha state and began recording his brainwaves, as they had done the previous night.

“We do not have enough language data to communicate with him in his tongue,” the leader stated, a note of sympathy in her voice. “He appears to be in severe emotional distress.”

“He has not raised weapons against us,” offered another, “though we have been in plain sight. He remained wary until he began to search the Hub.”

“What has he found in the data?”

“The reaction we observed has nothing to do with the Hub,” stated the one conducting the brainwave recording. “Look at this memory.” With one hand, he downloaded the data into the communication link between all the team members.

For a moment, there was only silence.

“His world!” whispered the leader in horrified awe. “He mourns the loss of his world.”

“As we do ours,” murmured the third. “It is something we have in common.”

“He wishes to die,” said the first. “I see no threat here. The only one at risk is the being who killed his people.”

She turned to the third, saying quietly, “Send word to the council. We will continue to record his memories as he sleeps, and study his language. If the elders give permission, we will greet him properly. We await their command.”

Her subordinate gave her a bow of understanding and respect, and then she watched him fly off into the night. 

She sat down on a small stone and studied the moonlit profile of their visitor.  His eyes were closed, face turned up to the sky, the strange contraption with the clear lenses still perched on his nose. “He is no stranger to grief,” she observed to her remaining companion. “His has not been an easy life.”

“No, but it has only strengthened him,” said the other with a nod. “He has no fear of death.”

“He has a good heart. Perhaps he will choose friendship with us.” She smiled and cocked her head. “I would like to become better acquainted with him.”

Her teammate chuckled. “He is not your size, friend.”

She shrugged, grinning hugely. There had been stranger relationships in the past. He was pretty, after all, in an alien sort of way. “I will wait to see how things turn out. Let me see more.”

Adjusting the speed of the download, she began to watch the memories scroll across her visor in real time, enjoying the glimpses into this alien's life, as well as the view of an alien world she would never see.

 Chapter 6: Sky

August 22

One Day Later

P9X-1017

For as long as Daniel could manage, he kept still. Boredom settled in, so he turned his mind back to the memories of Earth’s destruction. He replayed the vision over and over, but the more he thought about it, the more he needed to move. He got up to pee, and then he ate a little something before pulling out his journal and starting to write.

As the sun rose higher in the sky, the need to act pushed Daniel into a decision. He had to get busy, and that brought him back to the reason he'd returned to P9X-1017. He studied the three vehicles still parked at the perimeter of the camp.

There were two Polaris ATVs, just the right size for one or two travelers, and a Kawasaki 4X4 mule that ran on a modified naquadah power cell. It would have carried four members of an SG team and the bulk of their supplies, most of which were still stored in the trunks. He unpacked anything he wouldn’t need and added other items from the trunks of the ATVs that he could use, including some clean BDUs in his size. He put those in the top of one of the storage bins on the mule.

He hadn’t put on fresh clothes yet because he wanted a bath first. There was a river not far away where he intended to wash up and store some extra water for his trip. Daniel climbed aboard the mule, started it up and drove off.  The simple thought of getting himself truly clean for the first time in weeks lifted his spirits.

When he arrived and parked the vehicle, he doffed the shapeless gray tunic he’d stolen aboard Zeus’s vessel and left it in reach on the rocky river bank. Carefully, he stepped into the water with a precious cake of unscented military-issue soap, and lathered himself from head to toe. He soaped up his hair and scrubbed his skin raw, cleaning away all the sweat and filth from his captivity, then washed his face and shaved with the sharp edge of his field knife. He cleaned his glasses and rinsed them, carefully drying off the lenses with a corner of the discarded tunic, then used it to dry himself off a little.  Not wanting to litter the pristine landscape, he tossed the damp tunic onto the mule.

After dressing in a fresh uniform and finger-combing his hair, he tied a black bandana on his head to help keep the sweat out of his eyes, since the day promised to be warm.  He opened and unhurriedly ate a sun-heated MRE, enjoying the familiar bland food as he sat and thought over his plans.

The pyramid was another three days’ journey from the Stargate, and he remembered from the UAV survey that water would be scarce until he arrived, so he filled the extra canteens, dropping water purification pellets into them.

He was preparing to mount up and ride away when movement in the water caught his attention. A dark spot was floating toward him, caught in the current and being swept away. He thought it might be one of the alien dragonflies, and wanted a closer look at the bugs. 

This had been exactly the sort of behavior that had tried Jack O'Neill's patience, Daniel recalled with a fond, fleeting grin. Daniel's natural curiosity outstripped his fear, and he could almost hear Jack's voice in that familiar impatient snap, "Damn it, Daniel! Don't touch that thing."

But whatever else the creature was, it was now helpless.

Stepping onto a flat rock, he watched it drift closer, moving weakly, its four clear wings flapping in faint flutters, its six-inch-long black body flailing about in the current. He squatted down and reached for it, scooping it up carefully in his palm. Holding it up in the air near his face, he studied it closely, giving its sleek body a delicate nudge with one fingertip. 

Its anatomy made no sense. No eyes were visible on the glossy, dark head, but there was a shiny, visor-like slice across the front that might be some sort of visual apparatus. The long tubular black body was covered by a hard shell on the back, to which four long, clear, iridescent wings were attached. The underside appeared soft and shiny, and two appendages dangled limply from just under the head.

A gradually approaching buzzing sound caught his attention; when he glanced upstream, he saw a cloud of more of the big dragonflies heading his way.  “Looks like your buddies have come to rescue you, little guy,” he said quietly.  He gently laid the insect down on the dry top of another rock and stepped away.

He didn’t wait to see what the swarm’s reaction would be and hurried to mount the mule and get back to the journey ahead.

Daniel felt much better, now that he was clean. He decided he’d keep heading for the pyramid at the end of that long road and see if he could figure out who had built it, for what purpose, and what the carvings could tell him. He might as well make himself useful, if only to satisfy his own curiosity.

Somehow the idea of going to Alpha Base wasn’t very appealing. He couldn't put his finger on why, exactly; just that it didn't feel right, and all he had to trust at the moment were his instincts, shattered as they were. Daniel was aware of remaining gaps in his memory, but events were filling in as memories slid and locked into place. He'd get it all back eventually, he was certain. For now, he didn't intend to waste time just sitting around. He needed something to do, and traveling down that wide, straight path seemed to be moving in the right direction.

He zoomed off at the Kawasaki’s top speed and enjoyed the scenery, steering clear of weighty thoughts for the moment. There would be plenty of time for that, he decided, because he was unable to just lie down and die. 

Stopping periodically to eat and relieve himself, Daniel spent most of the day traveling. The mule covered a lot of distance, the hum of the engine the only sound Daniel heard for hours. He spotted birds in the distance and the occasional flash of movement from creatures on the ground, but there appeared to be no immediate threats.

He had to work hard to keep his guard up. His mind would drift with the hypnotic vibration of the Kawasaki motor running through his body, until he was driving via a lifetime of practice and only a flicker of conscious attention.

Without warning, a vision of a blond man's face suddenly popped into Daniel's memory, and he dodged it, startled. The vehicle veered on the road, following his instinctive reaction, jolting him out of his reverie. A sense of heart-pounding terror followed by cold hatred was attached to the memory, but Daniel couldn't place where he’d seen the man, or put a name to the face.

He corrected his course, then glanced around the surrounding terrain for potential danger, but there was nothing in view aside from rocks and canyon under the bright, merciless sun. As the journey continued, Daniel remained wary, steeled against further distractions. The day came and went, with pauses in the trek for meal and bathroom breaks, long hours passing beneath the mule's black rubber tires rolling down the long, precisely straight, paved road.

As the landscape began to change from arid, stony desolation to rolling grasslands dotted with low trees, Daniel decided to stop and rest for the evening. He'd been driving all day and needed a change of pace while there was still some light left, something that might allow him a chance to relax a little. He chose the place he'd spend the night with care, seeking some kind of cover where he'd be shielded from any prowling predators.

He made camp at the edge of the grasslands and retired to the shelter of a tall spiny-leaved tree, its gracefully draped branches making a naturally protected spot at its gnarled base.  Daniel made an effort to keep his attention focused on his surroundings as he meticulously groomed the area beneath the limbs for a small fire pit. He gathered dead wood and tinder and built the fire, chose the MRE he'd have for dinner and dessert from the mule's storage lockers, mentally shying away from what had happened to him, to his world. 

Time for that later, he promised himself. The loss was still too fresh, too painful. Remembering agonized and befuddled him and he needed to keep his wits about him, all alone in that strange place. He'd made his camp, and now it was time to rest.

Daniel sat cross-legged beneath the tree and pulled the plate-shaped device he'd stolen from his captors out of one of the storage bins in the mule. Having nothing better to do, he decided to see what the costly little item might do. There had to be a reason it was shaped like a DHD; perhaps it served as one, in case the dialing device on the planet were broken or missing.  His people had encountered that situation enough times to know that an Ancient probably wouldn’t want to get stuck on a hostile alien world. This device would make a handy backup, if that were indeed what it did.

He got out his journal and started copying down the characters on the DHD side of the keys outside the ‘gate glyphs, translating them literally first, then attempting to deduce the actual meaning of the functions. What he found was amazing. Not only was the little object apparently a portable DHD, it also functioned as a lock. It could override access so the DHD keys wouldn’t work to dial in or out, requiring access from the hand-held device to activate the Stargate.

“No wonder they wanted this so badly,” he murmured aloud.

He studied the PDHD, as he had decided to call the Ancients’ device, fiddling with it until he figured out how to turn it on. Then he began to consider Sam’s password puzzle, and what she might have chosen as the key to access the information this machine might contain. 

He thought about dates: her birthday, the day she’d received her promotion to Lieutenant Colonel, or the anniversary of her mother’s death. He considered special events in her life, such as her astrophysics degree, her numerous commendations, her ill-fated engagement to Pete Shanahan, but all of those seemed too simple somehow. Sam’s password to information this valuable would by symbolic but unexpected, something an alien might never guess. This was the most important thing in her life.

Gazing down at the characters, he typed in a word: survival.

A prompt appeared.  Access denied. Second attempt invalid.

That meant that someone had already tried and failed to unlock the device. Daniel wasn't sure how many more chances he'd have before the failsafe she'd programmed would activate, destroying the information forever. If he didn’t get it right, then the device would be useless, and he could smash it in good conscience.

A fond memory slipped into his thoughts, and he found himself smiling again. Sam had been a good friend to him. She had truly cared about him as a person, and they had shared a long, deep friendship, as had every member of SG-1. December had been Sam's favorite month. Buying holiday gifts for her brother’s children would always make her light up inside, and he had always loved seeing her so happy.

He took a chance and typed in Merry_Christmas. 

The password field disappeared for a moment as he held his breath.

Access granted, the screen flashed.

Information began scrolling in English, describing the data for each ‘gate address that had been entered into the SGC’s system. He stopped the scroll and entered a specific set of glyphs, the ones for this world. The only information recorded included the SGC designation, P9X-1017, and indication that the Stargate on this planet was working. It was all old data, with nothing useful to offer.

Next, he tried looking for the coordinates for Dakara. If he could dial the planet where the Jaffa High Council met, he might find a way to other survivors of Earth. It seemed like the best place to try as a first stop, whenever he returned to the Stargate and prepared to leave the world where he was now encamped.

Unhappy to discover he didn’t know how to utilize the search function, he began reading the various entries to see if he could find Dakara manually. There were hundreds of thousands of Stargates in the database, accessible only by keying in the glyphs, and Daniel couldn’t remember the address to the sacred Jaffa world.

This was going to take him a while. 

How long? he asked himself. Daniel thought about how much time had already passed since… then. The Jaffa who didn’t have symbiotes would need regular doses of Tretonin, and those sources were dwindling with the dissipation of the Goa’uld throughout the galaxy. Now that Earth was gone, production of most of the drug would be lost, too. The Jaffa and the remaining Tok’ra were not on good terms, and no cure had been found for Jaffa dependence on either symbiotes or Tretonin.

Their time was limited. Daniel wasn’t sure how much had passed since his capture, and it might already be too late for the Jaffa. The reign of the Goa’uld was steadily diminishing by impending extinction, and they were taking the Jaffa with them by default.  Daniel decided he didn’t want to think about that, either; there were more than enough tragedies weighing on his mind.

Daniel set the device into his lap, staring at his campfire as he considered what he’d discovered so far. He made note of his findings in his journal as the sun sank lower toward the horizon.  A zat at his side, he glanced up every minute or two to check the perimeter for beasties.

It occurred to Daniel that there might be additional information stored in the device aside from the SGC data, so he began a search using the characters inscribed in Ancients' text. Checking into the logs for P9X-1017 by the glyph address, he discovered there was already a partial lock in place for it. Notes briefly mentioned some kind of protective order, but the only identifying remark as to who it referred to was the number three, the same information that had been carved into the stone pillar near the DHD.

He deduced that the Ancients had wanted to contain something here, and had somehow locked the Stargate to prevent the enigmatic Number Three from leaving. No one else had been barred from coming and going, though, evidenced by Colonel Dixon’s successful dialing of the SGC base, and the departure of the aliens who had ambushed SG-13 and taken him prisoner.

If something were here that the Ancients had feared, then Daniel had stepped into a place where there was great potential danger, very powerful, and very old.  He needed to be careful, if he were to survive.

That thought struck him as ironic, since he'd so recently been contemplating lying down to wait for death, and he chuckled.  “What the hell,” he said, getting to his feet. “I don’t have anything better to do. Might as well go out to meet my doom and find out what was so scary here it had to be locked up.”

He decided to disable the Stargate completely, denying access to all users. Daniel wasn’t certain what sort of range the device had, if he were too far away, or if it would even work the way he had guessed, but it wouldn’t hurt to try. He could always unlock it later, if he didn’t get eaten or killed along the way. He set the lock, turned off the device and returned it to the mule's storage locker for the night.

As dusk settled into twilight, the fireflies he'd seen the first night from the little cave came out again, and he paused to watch them. He could barely see the bodies of the big bugs in the near-darkness, but he found they bore a remarkable similarity to the dragonfly he’d rescued at the river. The lights they flashed were cleverly placed under the middle of their bodies, instead of at the tip of the tail like Earth’s fireflies. Rather than the pale, yellow-green or light blue of natural phosphorescence, their glow was a brighter white, providing excellent illumination of the landscape just below them.

The insects maintained a respectful distance, and that satisfied him. They didn’t seem like bloodthirsty creatures, but he thought it wise not to fall asleep while they were nearby, just in case. He put aside his journal and watched them until they flew off into the distance, all but one.

That one bobbed closer, hesitant, and he studied it with interest. He decided these were the same creatures as the dragonflies, able to light up in darkness. If they weren't the same species, then they were closely related.

One bug fluttered around the low-hanging branches above his head, threading among the spiky leaves. At last, it chose to settle on a branch not far from his face, off to the right, away from the rising heat of the fire, clinging to the branch with its two appendages. For a moment, it was perfectly still, its rounded head angled right at him.

He smiled, admiring its shiny black streamlined form, gleaming with amber firelight.  “You don’t look like any bug I’ve ever seen,” he commented to it. “Pretty.”

The dragonfly’s head cocked to the left. It released its perch and buzzed up into the air, then hovered at eye level about two feet from his face, as if it were studying him right back. Its wings beat the air so fast, they were just a blur against the dark leaves and faintly glowing sky. The light on its underbelly was focused on Daniel's knee.

He sat very still, ready to swat it if it looked like it was about to sting or feed on him. He started noticing details then, and what he saw made him even more curious, far less certain if this might be a bug of any kind. He leaned a little closer.  “I wonder what you are?” he murmured.

The creature’s head tilted the other direction, then the pitch of its humming wings changed. Its body angle tilted, slowly lowering from horizontal to vertical. Its light went out, and it descended until it deftly landed on a rock right beside Daniel’s knee. What had initially appeared to be an elongated abdomen separated into two black-clad legs, and two arms bent outward, settling gloved hands on narrow hips. The wings stilled, and the being rested fully on its feet atop the stone.  Its anatomy looked amazingly humanoid now, except for the smooth, featureless head.

One hand moved across its chest, tiny fingers dancing in a precise pattern of movement, then touching a spot at the base of its neck. Its head – or rather, a helmet – clicked open, then folded back into the collar at its nape, similar to the way the Horus and Anubis guard’s intricate headdresses had vanished on Abydos, almost like magic.

Daniel’s heart started beating faster as he watched this transformation. “Oh,” Daniel whispered, his eyes widening. “How beautiful you are!”

The alien’s head was obviously not human, but damned close. Big green eyes were about twice the proportion of a human’s, and its nose was delicate, slender, less defined. Dark blue tattoos swirled over its golden skin, and short, spiky, lavender hair framed its appealing face. 

“A fairy,” Daniel told himself with an awe-struck grin. “I wonder if you’re where the Earth legend came from?” He started to reach out to touch it, then put his hand back down. He didn’t want to scare it, but needed to find a way to communicate. He thought it would have spoken to him already if it knew English.

“Antquietas?” asked the being. Its first try had been barely audible, but it touched something on its chest that amplified its voice before repeating the question.

“Ancients?” he translated stupidly, then realized it was asking him if he were an Ancient. He replied in that language. ”No, I am not an Ancient. I am a human; a Tau’ri from the first world, which we called Earth.”  A lump rose in his throat as he spoke the name of his lost world in the past tense, and tears filled his eyes.  “My planet was destroyed.”

“Ah.” It nodded, its expression sober. “Welcome. We have been watching you for some time.”

He realized the truth of that statement with a little start. SG-13 had seen them almost since the moment they had stepped through the Stargate. They had been watching his every move, following him wherever he went, hovering and darting benignly through the air, studying him without giving away the fact that they were intelligent beings. He and his people had ignored them, as if they were… well, insects.

The thought embarrassed him that he’d taken for granted that intelligent alien life would never come in such a diminutive size.

“My name is Daniel Jackson,” he told it cordially, pleased that he was being accepted.  He glanced up at more dragonflies now hovering nearby or clinging to the limbs of the tree all around him, each of them opening their helmets to reveal their faces. The lights fixed to their chest-plates shone on him and the alien ambassador, illuminating them clearly.

The aliens laughed at his introduction, the sound like a whisper of breeze, except for the enhanced voice of his host. Not understanding the source of their humor, he smiled a little self-consciously. ”Did I say something funny?” he asked.

”Names have power,” explained the fairy, hands spreading wide. “You give yours too easily. Even our children know better than to give their true names to anyone.”

“Oh.” Daniel knew of other cultures that had similar beliefs, so he was intrigued. "Then how do you call each other?”

Its answer was a soft chuckle, modified by the booster. “We know who is being addressed, always.”

Memory dawned suddenly. “The one like you whom I pulled from the water, is he all right?  Or she?” He was suddenly very pleased to have rescued it, and wondered if that gesture was why these people had chosen to interact with him.

The fairy placed both hands on its chest and gave him a slight bow. “I am well. Thank you for my life. Your response to my distress was a true expression of your character, since you expected nothing from us in return.”

“I am pleased to have helped you,” he returned formally. “I would enjoy getting to know you and your kind. Who are you?” 

“We are the People," said the fairy politely. "You may name each of us whatever you wish.”

More of them began to alight all around them, removing their helmets so he could see their faces. There were a multitude of skin tones, from pale to dark. Hair colors were a rainbow of shades, and eyes had just as much variety. Every figure was lean and fit, every face symmetrical and delicate. This was the most lovely race Daniel had ever seen – and by far, the smallest.

“Wow,” he breathed in wonder. He couldn’t possibly name them all, and decided he would wait until he got acquainted with them to decide what to call them. “I am honored to meet you. All of you.  Please call me Daniel.”

“As you wish.”

Another thought struck Daniel as he studied the People. They were all rather androgynous, and he couldn’t tell any particular differences in their body shapes. “Um, do you have genders? I wouldn’t want to offend you by mistaking one for another.”

The fairies all looked positively startled by that admission.

His host bent forward, head angled in obvious curiosity. “Would you be offended to be called by the wrong gender?” it asked him incredulously.

“Well, I suppose many of my people would be unhappy to be mistaken for the opposite sex, yes.”

“If there is such division, how do you manage to reproduce?” The lavender-haired fairy’s brows scrunched down in confusion.

Daniel chuckled. “Well, that’s actually not much of a problem,” he answered lightly, then remembered with a jolt that Earth was gone. He sobered. “My species is scattered throughout the galaxy, and we are many.” Glancing down at the fire, he felt his grief touched with a sense of hope. The human race hadn’t really disappeared with Earth’s destruction, not at all.

Lavender-hair smiled. “We have many shades of gender, determined by biology, identity and attraction,” it told him sagely, “and we will not be offended if you choose incorrectly. Each has its part to play, and none is more or less important than any other.”

“That sounds like woman’s wisdom,” he joked, smiling broadly. “I’ll call you Claire, after my mother.”

A look of shock flashed across the fairy’s face, then grew suddenly grave. “This is a great honor. Not only have you saved my life, you have also paid me a great tribute, to carry the name of the one who gave you life.” 

“What can you tell me about your people, Claire?” He rested his elbows on his knees and leaned closer, gazing down at his new friend standing on the rock between him and the campfire. 

“We live in the sky,” she answered, gesturing upward. “We have watched you since you came to our world the first time, with the others of your kind. Your loss touches us, but we must learn more about you before we may share our secrets with you.”

Another fairy with pale pink hair and sky-blue eyes flew closer, hovering directly to his left. “We will stand watch while you rest, friend. You were wise to take shelter your first night here. There are many dangerous creatures that walk the night, and you have not been secure.”

“Now you are no longer alone,” agreed another fairy, one with pale green hair and turquoise eyes.

“Thank you,” Daniel told them sincerely. “I’m grateful for your protection, and for your friendship.” He wasn’t sure they’d be all that formidable against an animal the size of that anteater-thing that had hunted him, but they could at least wake him up so he could defend himself.

He was tired, but the excitement of discovery wouldn’t let him sleep just yet.

“Could we talk a little while longer?” he asked hopefully. “Maybe I could answer some of your questions, tell you about my people. That would help us get to know each other better.”

After all, he had nothing left to lose.

“Yes, tell us,” agreed Claire. “We wish to know what brought you here, who attacked and killed your people, and why.”

Daniel tried to start at the beginning of the mission to their world, but his story began to get jumbled up because he had to keep starting over and explaining details of cause and effect, and by the time he started getting really sleepy he was so confused, he didn’t know where he was in the narrative. The aliens didn’t seem to mind, but finally they gently encouraged him to lie down and rest, with his promise to continue the tale in the morning.

These people, whatever they were, seemed nice. He hadn’t realized how very lonely and isolated he’d felt since his capture, and being in their company had been a comfort to him.  He thought he might enjoy getting to know them, and looked forward to the experience.

For the first time in weeks, when he closed his eyes, he slept deeply, and even his dreams were peaceful.

Chapter 7: Grass

"His race is so very young," declared the elder sympathetically, gazing from her perch in the tree branches at the human's sleeping form. "This one has endured great suffering."

"So would anyone who has lost their world," observed the one called Claire. "They have dangerous enemies, it would seem."

"As we once had dangerous friends," added the elder. She combed her pale green hair back with her fingers, her expression thoughtful. "And he has the Hub."

"We could take it from him," suggested another of the People.

"None of our kind can unlock it.  We cannot even touch the device," Claire countered with a shake of her lavender head.  "We must wait for him to choose.  If we suggest that he do it, he might become suspicious and leave without unlocking it. We cannot allow that."

"Then we should earn his confidence," said the one with pink hair.

The elder agreed. "He trusts easily, but he must still be tried. The Council will determine if he will be accepted among us. I will fly ahead and make the request. We will meet at Shahr."

"I will observe him and begin the inquisition," agreed Claire. "Who will stay with me?" She glanced around, making eye contact with the others.

Two of the People nodded. The rest of the Sky Clan flew off into the night to make preparations for the trial, and Claire settled on the ground beside the fire that dwarfed her. She raised both hands and the flames began to sputter and die, extinguishing to glowing coals, then going completely out as she brought her arms downward. It would be better not to attract any curious wildlife to the light of the fire, making the job of watching over the People's visitor a little simpler.

After all, there was no need to advertise Sky's presence there as they left the canyons and advanced into the meadowlands. Grass Clan would undoubtedly have watched them coming and would be prepared. Until the Council determined how much to interact with the human, Grass would remain unseen. They were not as bold as Sky, but had a great cunning that set them apart from their smaller relatives.

Somewhere out there, many eyes were watching both the visitor and Sky Clan, messages were being sent, and Daniel Jackson's fate hung in the balance. The People had been fooled once, but they would not be caught off-guard again.

August 24
The Next Morning

Daniel sat up and blinked, gazing around at the unfamiliar landscape, looking for his new friends. Most of the crowd that had gathered around him the previous night was gone; only three of the aliens remained nearby. The one he’d named Claire sat on the rock beside the cold fire pit, the others perched on branches in the tree above him, keeping watch.

He thought about names for the other two, reaching for his glasses and putting them on as he considered what to call them.

One had rosy pink locks. Another had longer hair than the others he'd seen, royal blue at the roots fading to pale blue at the ends, and all the way down to the fairy's shoulders. He wondered if they artificially colored their hair or if the rainbow of shades was natural, but he decided not to ask. The subject might come up in conversation later.

"Good morning," he greeted them with a slight smile. It was getting much easier to converse in the language of the Ancients, and he was glad he'd been able to find a communication bridge with these intriguing little aliens.

"You rested well," observed Claire. "The kill did not disturb you?"

Daniel's smile disappeared. "Kill?"

"A ghidan was hunting as you slept." Claire turned away from Daniel and clasped her hands behind her. Her clear wings, glistening with iridescent color in the morning sunshine, folded down against her back and thighs with an audible snap. "Would you like to see it?"

"Um." He needed to pee, but decided to go with the invitation first. He didn't want to be rude. "All right, if it's not far. Lead the way."

Claire's wings flicked up into position, and she zoomed off, with Daniel following at a brisk pace. Twenty feet away, Claire hovered in mid-air above the grass, and Daniel stopped when he could see the dead creature, hidden by the knee-high blades.  

"Reminds me of a warthog, only uglier," he observed, staring down at the tawny body marked with light brown vertical stripes. The coloring would camouflage it well in the tall vegetation. The animal had big, mean-looking tusks erupting from its elongated muzzle and small, evil eyes. "What does it eat?"

Claire looked pointedly at Daniel, one fine lavender eyebrow arched. "Whatever it can scavenge or kill," she replied with a shrug. Her meaning was clear; if they hadn't gotten to the beast first, it would likely have attempted to make Daniel its next meal.

Deep wounds had been gouged into the animal, and there was a lot of blood on the carcass and the surrounding area. Daniel decided he had seriously underestimated the fairies' ability to protect him.

"I suppose we are even now," he said softly. "Thank you for protecting me."

Claire chuckled. "We did not save you from the ghidan. We killed it for you to eat."

Blue-hair zoomed into view, performing a lovely aerobatic twirl. "And we do not keep a tally of debts. Your food supply is limited. This will feed you for some time."

"Oh. Um. Thank you." Daniel stared at the dead animal. He didn't quite know what to think about this gift, but his other need was becoming more urgent. "Excuse me. I have to go. Um." He pointed to nothing in particular and moved away from the carcass and his camp, looking for a little privacy to relieve himself.

He didn't get any and had to endure being studied while he urinated, his face flaming. Then he had to explain why he had turned that fancy shade of bright red, after a lengthy account of what he'd intended to do and that he wanted to do it alone, then being flatly denied discretion. They wanted to learn about him and found his customs interesting; apparently, they had no familiarity with the concept of privacy.

"Do your people not make waste?" he asked, feeling slightly irritated as he buttoned his trousers. He didn't look at any of them as he walked purposefully back to the camp to restart his fire and make coffee. Breakfast would wait.

Pink-hair patted the shiny black suit encasing its body, which Daniel now noted in the daylight had broad shoulders, narrow hips and a distinctly generous male package. "This garment, which we call s’resh, converts our waste to fuel for the khemba."

"The what? I do not know that word."

The fairy spun around quickly in mid-air, putting his back to Daniel. "The vest that houses our wings and flying apparatus. It is called khemba."

Daniel looked closer and noticed the tiny joints attaching the buzzing wings to a small, slightly bulging casing on the being's back. He'd thought the wings were natural features, along with the firefly light, but now realized that both of those devices were cleverly designed machines.

He had ignored these aliens in the beginning, when he'd believed them to be merely insects, likening them to dragonflies of Earth. Now he understood they were anything but such simple creatures.  These people were far more advanced than he had initially assumed.

"Wow." Daniel searched through his memory for an appropriately expressive word in Ancient. He grinned and shook his head, thinking how foolish his articulation of wonder would sound in a language other than English. Slang just didn't translate properly. "The s'resh is a fascinating device."

"Yes. It gives us shelter from the elements, protects us from injury, and offers many tools for our use. We take it off only to mate, or when we return to--"

Claire buzzed into the speaker's view and hissed at him, cutting him off. She looked furious. "Enough! You are too free with your mouth."

The pink-haired one growled back, obviously irritated at the command, and the two tangled in a mad swirl of too-fast-to-see movement. Claire darted at him as soon as they separated, intent on driving him back, and finally Pink flew away to a higher branch of the tree, sitting down in a sulky huff.

As Claire turned back to face Daniel, her face was composed in a mask of triumph, green eyes half closed but glittering with leashed anger. "We are a passionate people," she said in a low growl. "Apologies." She offered Daniel a contrite bow.  "Sometimes we forget ourselves.  We have had no visitors for many generations, and our manners have lapsed."

"All is well," Daniel assured her. "Forgive me if I ask too many questions. I only want to learn, but I understand there may be things you do not want to share with me yet."  

He smiled, looking for a change of subject. "I will now make a drink my people favor, called coffee. Would any of you like to try some?"

"I will," the blue-haired one volunteered gaily, flying past his face.

"Female?" he asked cautiously, reaching into one of the storage bins on the rear of the Kawasaki mule for the items he'd need to make the brew.

The fairy nodded and gave him a bright smile.

"I will call you Lapis, after a beautiful semi-precious stone from Earth.  It was often used in ancient Egyptian jewelry." He explained a little about Egyptian culture and history while he started a new fire and made himself some java from his dwindling stores.

He considered names for the other fairy.  Daniel wanted something manly for the pink-haired guy, who was scrappy but friendly, and obviously didn't like being reined in. Daniel's eyes misted a little as he decided on another commemorative name.  "My best friend's name was Jack O'Neill," he called up to the top of the tree. "You remind me of him a little, so I will call you Jack. Do you approve?"  

The pink fairy stared down at Daniel, and his scowl morphed into a wry, satisfied smile. "Honored," he returned with a bob of his head. "You must tell me all about this Jack."

"He was a great warrior," said Daniel thickly, swirling the black coffee around in his cup to cool it, "and my best friend. He was a simple, yet very complicated man. He loved certain animals on Earth called dogs, children, our country, and our world, not necessarily in that order. And an intoxicating drink we call beer. And The Simpsons." The fairies wouldn't get that last reference, but there was no translating the name or the premise of the animated television series.

"He was very entertaining. I think you would have liked him immediately. Or else he would have infuriated you at first contact and started a war."  Daniel smiled, his grief easing a tiny bit as he remembered all the things about Colonel Jack O'Neill that he loved and would miss. "There was not always a middle ground with him."

Maybe Jack would have been a little perturbed by Daniel tacking his moniker onto a fairy with pink hair, but since he wasn't around to make his objection known, Daniel decided to stick with his original choice.

The newly-named Jack swooped down, artfully dodging the branches, and plopped onto Daniel's shoulder. "I believe I would like this friend of yours. What were his skills?"

"He was a great pilot of our flying machines.  And a commander of many warriors."

Glancing up at Claire with a smug smile, Jack challenged, "A commander. Hah!"

"So you dream," said Claire dryly with a shake of her lavender head.

Daniel took a sip of the coffee to test the temperature, then offered the cup to Jack. "Careful, it's very hot." He held it still, the cup braced against his shoulder, but realized that wasn't going to work; the rim of the cup was much too big to fit into the little guy's mouth.

He dipped his finger into the warm liquid and held it up, offering up a tiny bead to try.

Jack licked at the drop. He immediately made a face and stuck out his tongue with distaste. "Ehhh. Bitter."

"I suppose it is an acquired taste," Daniel agreed. Lapis landed on his other shoulder to sample the brew and had two laps from his fingertip, but Claire chose not to give the drink a try, so Daniel finished the cup by himself.

Later, as he skinned and dressed the ghidan carcass they had so obligingly killed for him, he answered their never-ending questions about him and his life back on Earth. He put a haunch near the cold fire pit, intending to cook it for dinner that night, slicing the rest of the meat into thin strips and hanging it on low tree limbs to begin drying. He was halfway through deciding what to do with the surplus remains, taking a moment to rest both his body and his vocal cords, when a cool flicker of shade passed over him.

It was a big shadow, and he looked up immediately.

The closest approximation to any animal he'd ever seen was an artist's recreation of Archaeopteryx. The flying creature was as much lizard as bird, and Daniel couldn't decide if it was covered in feathers or scales. The underside of its body and wings were light blue, close to the color of the sky, but the top was dark blue with red and yellow patches, as bright and bold as a macaw, barely glimpsed as it banked into a turn high above him. Its beak was sharply hooked, indicative of it being a carnivore or scavenger -- some kind of raptor -- and its wingspan was at least twelve feet, certainly big enough to think of a half-starved human as a suitable dinner.

Alarmed now, Daniel watched the bird-like thing wheel and come back toward him.  Instinctively, he squatted down, his field knife clutched in his blood-slicked grip. If he ran, he might attract the creature's attention, but it might also have been interested in the carcass he was handling. He hoped that was what the predator wanted, and would gladly give up the ghidan without a fight.

He stepped away from the carcass, moving slowly, keeping his gaze on the circling bird, stealing a glance at the last place he'd seen Claire and Jack hovering.  That was when he noticed his companions were gone.  

"Where did everyone go?" he called warily, trying to hide in the tall grass and still look around for his new friends.

A rosy streak flashed by him, buzzing in his ear, causing him to turn almost in time to dodge the talons of a second bird that had come up behind him in stealthy surprise. Razor-sharp claws raked his left shoulder, cutting through the tactical vest, BDU jacket and T-shirt, digging into the meat of his muscles as he clamped his teeth down on a scream.  

Whirling around with his right hand, he stabbed upward into the base of the creature's leg, just as he was hoisted a couple of feet into the air by the raptor's momentum.  With a harsh squawk, the thing released him, flapping wildly, knocked out of its flight path by his strike and unbalanced by the sudden release of Daniel's weight. Startled and hurt, the lizard-bird unsuccessfully struggled to regain its equilibrium and increase altitude in an effort to flee the attack from its intended prey.  

Falling back to the ground, Daniel's full weight landed hard on his left foot, which turned underneath him, sending spears of bright pain up his calf and into his knee and hip. This time, he did cry out as his leg crumpled, his momentum carrying both him and the huge predator to the ground. Daniel collapsed hard onto his wounded shoulder, landing half on top of the bird.  Screeching its protest at this unexpected assault, frantic wings beat about his head, knocking off his glasses.

The creature lashed out with its sharp beak, raking it down Daniel's back as it tried to haul itself out from under him. Half blind with pain and panic, he managed to jerk his knife free.  He was instinctively aware the bird would go for his eyes, so he closed them tight, tucking his chin down to his chest and swinging his arm back and forth over his head, slashing and stabbing with the blade, not daring to look for a target.  He felt its beak tearing at his hand, but he couldn't risk getting off the bird or letting go of the knife handle.

"Roll back!" called a small voice not far from his ear.

Without thinking, Daniel obeyed, flipping onto his back on top of the bird, effectively pinning its writhing head to the ground. Another quick swipe with his blade, this time with a more deliberate target, and the thing was dead, still jerking and flopping, but silent now, and no longer attacking him. He lay still, panting, bleeding and sweating, trying to decide just how badly he'd been hurt.

He rolled to his right, using that hand to help him get to his knees, still clutching the knife in a desperate grip and gasping as he fought to drag some air into his agonized body.  He'd sustained deep cuts in his upper left shoulder, and his left ankle was either badly sprained or broken.  Blood from his own wounds, or the bird's, or both, was gluing his T-shirt and jacket to his torso.

He knew he couldn't be distracted by his injuries or pain, not yet.  There had been two of the creatures, and he'd killed only one of them. The other was probably still nearby, and so were the fairies.  Tears stinging his eyes, he blinked and scrubbed at them with his sleeve, then lifted his head to look for his friends.  

He spied Jack hovering just above the knee-high grass surrounding him, pink hair the only recognizable feature Daniel could see without his glasses.  "Is everyone all right?" he called out.  He squinted at the blurry dot that was Claire a little further back, coming up from the direction of the warthog kill, Lapis trailing her by several feet. A brief search of the surrounding ground found Daniel's lost eyewear, and he ducked down to scoop them up and push them onto his face, then aim his worried gaze back at his tiny friends.

"The other sh'khan!" cried Claire, zooming toward Daniel, pointing behind him. "It is attacking Grass Clan!"

The other lizard-bird, thought Daniel.

Claire whizzed off in the direction she'd indicated.

"You cannot reach our brother in time!" called Jack, who sped off after her, a pink blur of blinding motion.

Daniel struggled to get to his feet, carrying his weight on his uninjured right leg and shakily using his left only for balance. Not far away, he saw the first lizard-bird swooping down like an eagle, wings folded back to reduce drag, legs extended and claws open, reaching for its intended prey. Its target was a barely-visible tuft of silvery hair sticking up above the top of the tawny grass.  

Claire was only halfway there, and so small against the massive bird.

After only an instant spent weighing his options, Daniel dropped his knife and reached for the holster on his right hip. He unsnapped the Beretta and drew it, thumbing off the safety as he raised it to aim.  He drew a bead on the bird's body and squeezed off one shot.  The recoil jerked his arm upward, sending a shockwave into his body and making him clench his teeth against the pain. The flying predator jerked in the air as the bullet hit home, and Daniel quickly put another into it, just to make sure he'd killed it.

When it crashed to the ground without touching its mark, limp and lifeless, Daniel collapsed, landing hard on his buttocks. Stunned and shaken, he gazed down at himself, at the blood seeping through his jacket, trickling over his left arm hand. His wounds were still sharp with pain, making it hard to catch his breath. His damaged right hand wouldn't open and he had to pry his pistol out of his grip with the other one, gasping as his injured flesh flexed with the movement.

He pushed the safety back into place with his left hand and laid the Beretta on the ground, glancing around for his companions, then off into the distance toward the horizon, trying to see if the newcomer might be approaching. The silver tuft had disappeared, its owner no doubt shocked by the roar of the pistol and the sight of a sh'khan dropping dead in front of it. The fairies' Grass Clan friend was safe; that was all that mattered to Daniel.

Lapis floated into his line of sight. "Well done, friend," she said with a congratulatory smile.

Daniel just nodded.  Still panting and gasping for breath, he studied his left foot, where his boot was constricting him.  He wasn't sure he'd be able to get it off without some cutting, but he didn't have spares in the mule. He didn't even know if he could make it back to camp in that shape. He decided it would be better to try to get it off before it swelled even more, so he bent his leg to begin unlacing the footwear. Every movement was infused with bright pain, but he had to get this done immediately.

He let his left arm dangle until he had the laces worked free with his bleeding right hand, trying to give himself as much of a chance to rest as possible. The warm sunshine was making him sweat, and tears mixed with the salty droplets running into his eyes and down his face as he struggled to get the boot off his swollen foot.  Both hands gripping the leather uppers, the boot finally slipped free, and he fell backward with a cry of agony, rolling quickly onto his uninjured right side.

Keening softly and concentrating only on breathing, he didn't move when the sea of tall, tawny blades parted and a member of what had to be the Grass Clan made an appearance.

Squinting from the throbbing pain, Daniel was more than a little surprised at what he saw.

The alien was about three feet tall, with the same oversized eyes, delicate nose, and small mouth as the fairies, but he was many times their diminutive size and much stockier in build. He seemed to be male, since his mouth was framed with a wispy mustache and a long, silky beard.  Some of his silvery hair had been pulled up into a tufted ponytail on top of his head, the rest draping down his back in a long mane. Faint lines, probably indicative of advancing age, creased his face, and his oversized irises were a remarkable shade of purple.

He had a distinctively different style of dress from his smaller fairy cousins; the black jumpsuit, helmet, and mechanical wings were noticeably absent. This fellow wore a tan tunic, brown pants with lots of pockets, and tan boots. He wore a brown and green striped cape thrown over his shoulders, and riding on his left hip was a pouch fastened to his belt.

He gave Daniel a rather stilted bow.  "I thank you for my life," he said formally.  His voice was gravelly but pleasant, another hint at his age. He spoke the language of the Ancients with a lyrical accent, more like chanting than speaking.

Daniel just nodded against the flattened grass, lying still on his side. "Welcome," he panted, then pointed at himself. "Daniel Jackson." Talking was just too much effort at the moment.

"Yes, friend."  The newcomer clapped his small hands together in a show of impatience, eyeing Daniel's obvious need for assistance.  "Now, we fix you. Sh'khan make nasty wounds." He regarded Claire, grunting disapprovingly and waving a hand in her direction, as if to dismiss her from their presence.  "Sky Clan too slow," he muttered.

"Hah!" crowed Jack. He crossed his arms over his chest, hovering over Daniel in a distinctly Peter Pan pose. "We killed the ghidan."

"Anyone can kill ghidan, even child! Earthbound be better hunters." The bigger alien swept the fairies with a smug grin and waggled elegantly arched silver eyebrows at them.

"You sit up," Grass commanded. "Must get wounds cleaned and give remedies before fever comes."  

"I have my own medicines in my camp," Daniel assured him, grunting with pain as he moved slowly into a more upright position. "A white pouch with a red symbol on it. The drugs inside it will help me fight off sickness."  

The Grass Clan alien shrugged. "From your world, yes. Maybe not from this one. We see. I return soon." He fixed Claire with a firm gaze and shook a warning finger at her. "You watch new friend. Keep safe."

"Perhaps you should mind the sky as well as you do the ground," Claire shot back, tilting her chin up and raising her lavender eyebrows. "Your hunt will be more successful if you are not dead."

"Bah!" The hunter pivoted on his heel and ambled off toward Daniel's camp to fetch the medical kit packed into the mule, at Daniel's request.  

Daniel had to smile at their contention over his care and keeping. There didn't seem to be any real animosity between the races, just a sense of one-upmanship that kept them jockeying for any scrap of superiority -- much as he and Jack had always done. There was cooperation when it counted, concern for one another's welfare, exhibited by the Sky Clan's immediate reaction when one of the Grass Clan had been threatened, but once the danger was past, the teasing began.

He thought he might grow very fond of these people, and hoped they were becoming friends.

Chapter 8: Friends

August 23

Late Afternoon

Compounded by his recent imprisonment, the blood loss from the lizard-bird attack was making Daniel light-headed and weak, sending his body into shock. He fought it, struggling against the pain of his wounds, concentrating on breathing and the concerned looks on the faces of the three fairies hovering around him. He'd been hurt worse in the field, but there had always been the promise of returning to the SGC’s infirmary for recovery.  Now that option wasn't available; he'd have to survive with these people's help, or not at all.

Daniel's camp was less than a hundred feet away, but it felt like hours went by as he waited for the Grass Clan alien to come back with his medical kit and two canteens. As soon as Daniel saw the tuft of silver hair moving back toward him above the tall grass, he forced himself into a sitting position. It was an exercise in agony; every part of him hurt with the movement.

“May I call you Hunter?” he asked, unbuttoning his BDU jacket. He grimaced as he pulled the gear vest and jacket off together.  “Or do Grass Clan feel differently about sharing their names?”

“Hunter,” the alien repeated approvingly from beside him, pawing through Daniel’s med kit. “Yes, you call me Hunter. Is strong name.  Who your clan? You look like Forest.” 

The opened medical kit and one of the canteens were close enough that Daniel could reach them now. Mumbling his thanks, he picked up some ibuprofen and broad-spectrum antibiotics, tore open each packet and swallowed the tablets with a mouthful of water from the second canteen. After another long swallow, he capped the container and set it down.

Daniel didn’t understand Hunter's clan reference but tried to answer the question anyway. “Um, my given name is Daniel,” he explained, reaching for the hem of his black T-shirt. He sucked in a preparatory breath and pulled the garment off over his head, grunting as some of the cloth stuck to the drying blood surrounding his wounds. He panted a moment, gripping the ruined shirt in his right hand until he could speak again. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, already dry once more from exertion and blood loss, which was carrying him rapidly toward dehydration.  “My family name is Jackson, so I guess that would be my clan. The Jacksons were originally from England, but I am second-generation American on my maternal side. Her family was Dutch, called the Ballards.”

“Two clans? Bah! You Forest.” The old alien opened the spare canteen and gave the treated water a sniff. He shuffled closer and began to slowly pour the liquid over the punctures in Daniel's shoulder, daubing the blood away with a spare pair of clean white underwear retrieved from the mule.

“Not from here,” Daniel reminded his newest friend through clenched teeth, shivering as the cool water poured over his clammy skin. He dug a small bottle of hydrogen peroxide out of the med kit and handed it over to the alien, showing him briefly how to use it and explaining what it did.

Hunter grunted, dismissing Daniel's retort, concentrating on cleaning his injuries. He was thorough, using up all of the peroxide and half the water in the extra canteen. Daniel now had the other container and was drinking from it, taking in as much as he could hold.

“Grass Clan are notoriously stubborn,” observed Claire with a shrug, hovering in Daniel’s line of sight. “You will not be able to convince him you are not Forest Clan. You are the right size, though your eyes are too small and your nose is… uh, big.”

Looking up at Claire, Daniel asked in amazement, “So Forest Clan is an even larger race of your people? My size?”

“Yes,” answered Hunter, working behind Daniel now, cleaning the punctures over his shoulder blade. “Mountain even bigger. You see soon, if you live.”

“If I live?”  Daniel returned with a slight sense of alarm.  He eyed his swollen left foot, which was turning purple and black with bruising from the fall.  “These aren’t exactly life-threatening wounds, you know.”

“You not from here,” the Grass Clan alien repeated back to him. “Could be many strange sicknesses you not know. Injury makes entrance for all manner of ugly.”

 “True.” Daniel sat quietly while Hunter finished cleaning and dressing his wounds, then came around to examine his ankle.

“Not broken,” the alien declared after a thorough prodding and lots of squeezing, through which Daniel kept his jaws clamped to avoid screaming. “Only sprained.” Hunter pulled a small roll of fabric from his pouch and wrapped up Daniel's ankle with obvious healer's skill.

The older alien made eye contact and finally sat down on the ground beside Daniel’s booted right foot. “You hungry?”

All Daniel wanted was more water and just to lie still until the ibuprofen kicked in, and he could rest. “Not really. I—”

“You hungry,” Hunter decided with a nod. “I cook. Grass Clan good cooks.”

“If you can call that cooking,” sniped Jack, who flew between them, dancing on the air and rolling his eyes. “Truly, they use so many spices and seasonings, you cannot taste the original essence of the dish. Some ingredients are so hot—”

“Sky Clan like bland,” Hunter shot back with a dismissive wave of his hand. “You roast everything, or eat raw. Grass Clan like flavor. Mmmmmm, good!” He rubbed his belly with one hand and licked small, rosy lips. “I cook for you. You like.”

Not far from where Daniel lay on the flattened grass, Hunter built a cooking fire, the pit carefully lined with stones and cleared of debris that might accidentally spread the flames. From a pack hidden beneath his cape, he pulled a small, shallow pot, filled it with water, and set it on the blaze to heat. He selected several tiny leather bags from his pouch and sorted through them carefully. Each was marked with a symbol but, while some of the writing looked vaguely familiar, Daniel couldn’t place where he might have previously seen the script. His mind was getting clouded from his recent exertions and shock, and he thought he might be running a slight temperature.

The older alien opened one tiny bag and sniffed it, made a ghastly face and pulled it quickly away from his nose.  “I make you tea,” he said with a chuckle, a mischievous twinkle in his purple eyes. “You drink. Help you with fever.”

“Um, no thanks,” Daniel returned politely, not sure he wanted any of the stinky brew. “I will use my medicines. But I appreciate everything you have done for me.” He struggled to sit up, in need of more water and wanting to check his stores of medical supplies. The movement made his wounds flare with fresh pain.

“Is good for pain, too,” Hunter told him sagely, dropping a pinch of the powder into the pot of water to steep. "You drink tea. Will help you feel better."

Daniel didn’t argue further. He had morphine in his pack, but that was for wounds far more severe than he had sustained and he needed to save it, just in case. A dose of acetaminophen on top of the ibuprofen he'd had a few hours ago might help with the fever and creeping ache in his bones. There were differences between his physiology and that of these aliens that might entail far more than eye size and the shapes of their noses, making him wary of their medications which might do him more harm than good, but he didn't have the strength to refuse.

Hunter waved the cup under Daniel's nose, and a smell that was an unpleasant cross between sweaty socks and vomit made him instinctively turn his face away, swallowing against the bile rising in his throat. He held up a hand. “No, thanks! Gah.” He almost gagged.

"Drink fast," Hunter urged. "Taste not as bad as smell." He was insistent, continuing to push the cup toward his guest.

Daniel finally accepted it, held his breath, and downed the disgusting liquid in three long swallows. "Ugh! That's the single most horrible smell I've ever encountered," he blurted in English.

Apparently, the comment needed no translation. His companions all laughed and nodded in agreement.

"Now, we feed you," Hunter announced, and went to fetch the warthog haunch Daniel had left at his camp.

Claire hovered watchfully over Daniel, while Jack and Lapis buzzed off to begin collecting herbs and berries, delivering them to the new campsite before darting off to look for more. Hunter built a spit for roasting the meat and set it to cook, then went to rummage through the mule's storage lockers for additional cooking utensils. He seemed delighted at the finds, and quickly set about combining the various ingredients Sky Clan provided, arguing with them good-naturedly over the composition of the dishes.

Whenever he temporarily roused himself from his exhausted dozing, Daniel couldn’t help grinning as he watched the two races interact. “There seems to be plenty of that warthog-thing,” he suggested, rolling carefully onto his right side with a grunt. “Maybe you can just cook a little of it plain for Sky Clan, and I'll try it both ways.”

“Many mouths to feed now,” said Hunter with a nod to his left. “I cook ghidan and both sh’khan. All will share feast.”

Following Hunter’s gaze, Daniel noticed more of the Grass Clan appearing at the edges of the flattened meadow enclosure, likely lured there by the savory cooking smells that wafted up into the air. All of them were about the same size as Hunter, but with a wide variety of attire. Some wore tunics and pants, others long robes, and a few were clothed in elegantly detailed gowns.  They looked like children playing dress-up, he thought, their genderless faces wide-eyed and innocent.

Three of them came to haul off the two sh’khan carcasses, and several others brought rolled-up carpets, poles, coils of rope, folded tarps, cooking pots, and more of Daniel’s supplies from the camp. In short order, a large awning had been put up over him, the grass flattened beneath it and covered with the carpets. They built a crude but sturdy bed for him of lashed-together saplings, rope, and a tough, soft fabric, and several of them helped him carefully onto it.

The move was agonizing, but once he'd settled, the discomfort faded quickly to a deep throbbing. Daniel turned his attention to the activity around him, studying his hosts and their behavior for a little distraction. He nodded off for a few minutes here and there, waking to drink more water, and then returned to his napping and observing the little People as they worked.

Setting up the camp was a noisy affair, with the Grass Clan shouting and squabbling with each other or arguing with the Sky Clan, who had taken up supervisory positions, directing the others and alternately being consulted or ignored.

Claire hovered possessively over Daniel, scrutinizing everyone who came to offer him anything, sampling everything and approving it before allowing the snacks or drinks to be accepted. She argued with Hunter over seasoning at the nearby cook-fire, darting back and forth to ask Daniel’s opinion and serve as mediator in determining what would or would not go into the meal.

A blessed sense of contentment filled Daniel as he lay on his cot, watching the industrious little people taking care of him. The camp was a cheerful place with an air of merriment, and Daniel felt his spirits lifting despite his pain. He continued to doze on and off until Hunter announced that his meal had been prepared, and helped him into a sitting position beneath the canvas awning. 

As the sun slid behind the distant mountain peaks, Daniel tasted more dishes than he could count by the light of scattered torches and campfires, set to chase away the coming darkness. The ghidan tasted similar to pork, flavored with something like mint and pepper, both hot and cool at the same time. The sh’khan had a strong citrus tang, yet it was quite oily and spiced with something so hot he could barely get it down. The Grass people all laughed at his reaction, but the Sky Clan fairies simply gazed at him with silent but smug self-assurance, reminding him that he had been warned. 

A celebration started once the food was cleared away, complete with music and dancing, and everyone seemed to enjoy it. Daniel watched with heavy eyelids, smiling contentedly from his horizontal position on the bed, while Hunter sat nearby at a cook-fire, chewing on a plant stem and listening to what Daniel guessed to be a storyteller, though Daniel couldn’t understand a word of the monologue. His gaze wandered as he listened to the hypnotic voice of the narrator, searching the perimeter of the camp out of long years of habit, concerned about the dangerous wildlife he'd encountered, and wanting to make sure his new friends would be protected.

When he saw that Grass Clan had already posted sentinels, keeping watch on the surrounding sea of grass as well as what he could see of the star-lit sky, he decided they didn't need him to look out for their safety. Seeing the sentries brought Daniel reassurance, and he longed to put down a few notes in his journal.

He tried to sit, but was too weak from exhaustion, injuries, and the ordeal of his recent imprisonment. After a little more observation of his lively new friends, Daniel's eyes began to burn from fatigue, and he decided he'd done enough for the day. The temperature was dropping and it was getting a little chilly, so he asked for a blanket from his stores in the mule. Hunter fetched it and helped him cover up, giving him a final pat once he was comfortable.

Daniel took a second dose of his supply of antibiotics and swallowed them with another long gulp of water, then set his med kit on the ground and lay back, desperately in need of rest. Claire descended from her hovering post above him where she'd been keeping watch, and settled on the framework of his cot for the night. Daniel wished his hosts a good night, rolled onto his uninjured right side, and closed his eyes, sinking almost instantly into an exhausted sleep.

 Chapter 9: Fever

August 24

The Next Day

The visitor's body was burning with fever.  He lay keening in agonized delirium, with several members of Grass and Sky Clans watching him, and waiting.

“He has a benevolent nature,” Claire declared firmly, hovering above the bed in the faint early morning light. “He is kind and did not hesitate to rescue another, even though he had been injured himself.  Our test was successful.”

“Is brave,” agreed Hunter, stroking his beard thoughtfully with finger and thumb.  “Wait and see.  Will sacrifice himself.”  He crossed his arms over his chest and lifted his chin in satisfied self-assurance. 

“He will have to heal before he goes further,” said Jack, alighting on the edge of the bed. He leaned wearily against Claire, making no effort to stifle a huge yawn.

“You were not supposed to warn him,” the lavender-haired one reminded her subordinate with a frown, nudging him with her elbow. “We were to watch his reaction to another in danger, not to interfere.”

Jack sat upright and shot her a glare. He crossed his arms over his chest, but made no retort.

“Sh’khan would have taken our visitor's head off,” countered Hunter in a low mumble.  “Is good this one helped,” he gestured toward Jack, “but should have lured smaller adversary.”

“We are at the edge of the grasslands,” Lapis pointed out with a wave of her hand toward the direction they had come. “Not many predatory creatures overlap the lands between Sky and Grass, and the sh’khan was the best we could do on short notice. Perhaps Forest will have better luck, when we reach their territory.”

“No need to see him fight more animals,” Hunter shot back emphatically as he shook his head and waved one hand dismissively. “Need to see reaction to conflict, how he choose sides. This will tell us much.”

“Agreed,” said Claire. She nodded at Jack, who prepared to begin the nightly scan of the visitor’s memories.

He moved to stand near the top of Daniel's head, balanced on the framework of the makeshift bed, and extended his arms, activating the controls in his black s'resh uniform.  Once an alpha state had been induced and was being maintained in Daniel, Jack monitored the alpha cycle and initiated a brainwave scan, feeding it into the system and downloading the data into the proper catalog for study and storage.

Daniel’s early memories had been reviewed, and now those with the highest emotional resonance were to be sought out and examined. The analysis was conducted at advanced speed until the images were verified as significant. Claire ran the first one back at slightly faster than real time on the inside of her visor, describing to Grass the events as they unfolded. Her voice changed from factual reporting to breathless wonder as she finished the narrative.

With trembling fingers, she opened up her helmet and made brief eye contact with the larger alien. Then all eyes turned to regard the stranger as he lay shivering and whimpering in his feverish dreams.

For a long time, no one spoke.

“This changes everything,” Claire declared gravely. She turned her attention to the elder from Grass Clan. “Have we heard from the Council?”

“Soon,” Hunter stated with certainty. He eyed his patient, who was trembling and pale beneath the blankets they had put over him. “He must drink more taimin tea now. Everyone help. We must not lose him.”

Roused to semi-consciousness, a delirious Daniel tried to shake them off as they propped him into a sitting position. He jerked away from their touch, complaining and whining in his own language, but Claire spoke softly into his ear, offering comforting words, while Hunter stroked his hair and gently poured the brew into his mouth, a few drops at a time.

Getting the vile liquid down required some time, but they were a very patient people.  They had learned to wait for generations, the price they had paid for the trust and passion of their past.

Perhaps soon, their exile would be over.

Two Hours Later

Three of the elders sat in the Council chamber, watching the playback of the latest of their visitor's holographically recorded memories.

"This is unexpected," observed the Sky elder. She turned wide turquoise eyes up to the senior member of their group. "What does it mean?"

The Mountain elder's gaze did not waver from the images radiating with light in the center of their circle. He waved a hand over the controls, running the second event back a little, then starting it up again. "We should make ready for a great journey," he rumbled quietly.

Seen through their visitor’s perspective, they found themselves looking into the large, intense, blue eyes of a golden-haired female of a similar mold to the one called Daniel Jackson. He and she were engaged in a conflict, though at the moment they both stood still, just staring at each other. The female wore the face of a familiar friend, but he did not allow the affection he felt for the original affect his feelings about the duplicate, for this one was his enemy. She was not human, as he was, but had been made to look like someone he knew. This being was a machine, and the battle between them was taking place inside him, in his mind.

He pushed and strained at the direct force she applied, while a small, subtle part of him wormed its way into her consciousness, searching for a key. 

"Gotcha!" he whispered harshly at the moment of triumph.

She knew instantly that she'd been beaten. Furious, her arm formed into a sharp, pointed blade and she thrust it into him, piercing his heart. He crumpled to the floor, his victory complete, his sacrifice made willingly.

This conflict had not been about power, or about winning for the sake of conquest. It had been about saving others, giving his friends time to take the actions necessary to vanquish a dangerous, deadly enemy, one that threatened all life in the galaxy.

He’d given his life to save billions of others, staring his enemy down, looking his own death in the eye and acutely aware of the price he would pay before the battle had even begun.

Then, at the last moment, as he lay dying on the floor, his body disappeared in a flash of light.

Mountain held the image there, thinking about what he'd seen.

"This one has an important destiny," the Forest elder observed, a note of wonder in his voice. "To have been offered such power and then to relinquish it speaks greatly about his character."

"He has given his life many times," agreed Sky. "He thinks nothing of sacrificing himself, if it is for the good of others.”  She cocked her head, studying Mountain.  "Yet he loves life and learning.  Perhaps our veil of tears may finally be lifted."

"Or perhaps they are just beginning," he returned sagely. "With great destiny comes greater sacrifice. Are the People truly prepared for such a journey?"

Forest straightened, lifting his chin. "We have been preparing for millennia, friend. We are ready."

Mountain met his steady gaze, eyes narrowing. "This path will return us to our past, and lead us to our future. The quest will be a terrible one, filled with danger and death. It is ironic that this journey should be guided by one who is not of the People."

"The weight of an entire race is a heavy burden for one being to carry," Sky cautioned with a sorrowful sigh as she gazed down at the frozen image, "especially when he has carried so much already."

"If we do not tell him," Forest suggested sympathetically, "perhaps he will not notice the extra burden on his soul."

Mountain ran through the images one more time, for the benefit of the Council. The human had once suffered a violent, agonizing death through radiation poisoning, in order to save the lives of an entire world, a people he barely knew, fully cognizant of the consequences of his actions as he did so. Years later, he had fought the one-on-one battle for control of a tide of alien machines, stopping them just long enough for a weapon to be activated that would destroy them, once again ensuring the safety of countless other lives at the cost of his own.

He had suffered other deaths as well, but these two were most significant to the People. With these, he had shed his body and become light. This was a great warrior, indeed; one filled with cosmic purpose. It was the People's duty to offer him aid.

The decision of the three elders was unanimous; they would befriend him and support him in his quest, whatever that might be, for his footsteps would shake the cosmos.

Sky turned off the recording. "I will carry a message to Grass, instructing him to bring our new friend to the city of Shahr."

"I will make a place ready for him when he arrives," volunteered Mountain, "and see to it that preparations for the journey are made in Ahmega."

"I will meet the travelers and guide them here," Forest added. "He will be welcomed among us as one of our own." The elder paused, head cocked, thinking. Then his lips curled as he asked the others, "Should he be given the jing? Only the greatest among the People are allowed that privilege."

"Perhaps the jing might keep him with us longer," suggested Sky. "If we are in agreement, I will carry it to him."

"It shall be done, by and for the People, and also for the All," said Mountain gravely with a nod of agreement.  "And so it begins." 

The elders vanished from the council chamber, and one by one they departed on their various missions to make the one called Daniel Jackson at home among them.

 Chapter 10: Forest

August 27
Three Days Later 

“Feel better?”

Daniel groaned a little, lifting his hand to rub at gritty eyes. He scratched at an itch on his cheek and found several days’ worth of stubble growing there. Vaguely, he remembered being sick and some damned strange dreams. The People had apparently taken good care of him while he'd been so ill, seeing to all his needs, helping him hydrate and relieve himself, but he was desperately dry. 

“Thirsty,” he rasped in a parched whisper, struggling to remember to speak in the language of the Ancients.

“Good,” Hunter replied with a wry grin. “Have more taimin tea.”

The foul odor brought back fuzzy memories of a lot of the disgusting brew being poured into him over the last several days. He instinctively turned his face away, swallowing against the bile rising in his throat, and held up a hand. “No, thank you! Gah.” He almost gagged.

“Nasty, yes,” the little alien cheerfully agreed, pushing the steaming cup back at him, “but also saved life. Drink. Then go to bushes.”

Trembling and weak, Daniel sat up, held his breath, and downed the cup of liquid in three noisy gulps. Fortunately, it didn’t taste quite as bad as it smelled, but the aftertaste was bitter and made him shudder. He handed the empty cup back and mumbled, "How long have I been ill?"

"Long enough. We give you our medicine, you get well. Other injuries better, too."

Daniel glanced at the gash on the back of his hand, noting that it was only a dark pink, scabby line now. He tested his shoulder and found it was just a little sore. Whatever the People had done to treat him had repaired his body at a remarkable rate, far faster than any human being could heal on his own. What should have taken weeks had apparently only taken a few days to accomplish.

He suddenly realized he wasn't wearing his glasses -- they were nowhere in sight -- but he could clearly see the forming scar on his hand. To verify his visual acuity, he glanced around the area beneath the awning and the rest of the camp outside it, and was stunned to take note that his eyesight had somehow been miraculously repaired.

"The corrective lenses I wore," he said, pointing at his face and drawing circles in the air over his eyes, brows twitching together in confusion.  "I no longer need… How is this possible?"

"Good tea," Hunter answered with a gravelly chuckle.

"I guess the hell," Daniel murmured in astonished English.  He put his feet on the floor and automatically shifted his weight in an attempt to get up. Very quickly, he sat back down, grimacing and wishing he’d been a little less in a fog and paying more attention before he’d tried to rise.

“You better,” Hunter chuckled, “not fixed. Will need these.”  He held out a pair of crutches made from sturdy tree limbs, just the right size for him.

“Thank you,” Daniel ground out as he heaved himself onto them.  He hobbled out from under the awning and toward the nearest appropriate spot to relieve himself. 

When he was done, he limped back toward the canopy, where Hunter served him a breakfast of a bowl of fruit, roasted ghidan, and some kind of oatmeal-like concoction. Daniel ate until he was stuffed and washed everything down with a floral-scented, spiced sweet tea. When he had finished, he felt much better, clearer-headed, and far healthier than he should have been.

"That tea is amazing," he admitted to Hunter, trying to get information as well as being conversational. "My people do not normally recover so quickly."

Hunter made a non-committal noise just as two of the Grass Clan folk brought a big leather bag stretched across a pole, filled with water that had been gently heated over a fire.  "You bathe now,” Hunter announced. “Important to stay clean."

Daniel nodded, suddenly aware of his sweaty body. His BDU was crusty with salt from the fever, and he knew he'd feel even better with clean clothes. This time, he didn't hesitate to strip down and wash himself off with a cake of soap Hunter provided from the supplies in the mule. The aliens gave him a small cloth to use as a meager towel, and when he was clean, he carefully donned a fresh uniform that Hunter brought him from the storage compartments.

By the time he finished cleaning up, he was exhausted, so he stretched out for a nap on his makeshift bed, which had been freshly covered with a clean blanket by Grass Clan.

Throughout the day, Hunter interrupted Daniel's peaceful recovery to ply him with more of the terrible tea, refusing to accept Daniel's polite attempts to decline it. The more of the nasty stuff he swallowed, the better he felt. As the hours passed, he found himself sitting up, moving with little pain and starting to truly enjoy himself.

His companions chatted with him whenever he was awake, but ever the scientist, Daniel was enchanted to listen to the clans speaking to each other in their native tongues, which were different from the Ancients’ language that they used when speaking to him. Sky Clan's dialect featured elements of whistling and lovely trills, similar to bird-song, while Grass Clan’s vocabulary was punctuated with clicks, croaks, and chirps resembling animal calls.  It appeared they used two vastly different languages, yet neither race seemed to have a problem understanding the other, apparently completely bilingual.

The disparity in speech patterns between Sky and Grass was as distinctive as their clothing and size, but it was apparent to Daniel that they were simply two races of the same species. Grass Clan was energetic, easy-going, but egotistical. The people of Sky Clan were more aloof and cautious, secretive but assertive. Their tempers were quicker, and they also seemed very protective of those they chose to embrace, as evidenced by Claire’s close attention to him during his recovery. 

Another marked difference between the races was their coloring. Where Sky Clan had fair skin decorated with tattoos, Grass Clan was darker. Their hair, too, represented earthy tones, from silver and gold to muted green and brown, while Sky Clan had tresses in all the colors of a pastel rainbow, like tiny, delicate flowers. Both races were fit and beautiful, each one a pleasure to Daniel’s eyes. 

He wondered what environmental imperative had created such a huge difference in size and build. There was so much to learn about these people. His curiosity was definitely piqued, and he looked forward to additional study of the various races as he encountered them.

The camp became much quieter as twilight fell, and he noticed more Sky Clan buzzing about the edges of the gathering, their night-lights shining on the distant grass, keeping watch for any predators. Daniel began to carefully shuffle about without his crutches, chatting with several of the People, inquiring about various activities he observed. His sprained ankle still pained him a little, but not enough that he couldn't bear weight on it for a few steps. He estimated he'd be hardly favoring his injury at all by morning.

When he began to grow weary, he limped back to the awning for a long night's sleep, downing another cup of the disgusting tea without protest.

"Sleep well," Hunter told him, wrapping up in a blanket on the ground beside the cot. "We journey with sun."

"We leave in the morning?" asked Daniel. Sometimes the Grass Clan's syntax made them a little difficult to understand.

"Mmmmmh." Hunter's eyes were closed. He lay very still, his breathing deep and even.

Daniel thought that might have been an affirmative answer, but he wanted to be sure he'd understood correctly; he had some concerns -- he didn't know where they were going, or what the People intended to do with him. He glanced around for someone else to ask, but his Sky Clan companions weren't in sight, and everyone else was too far away to call without disturbing Hunter.  Deciding his questions would wait till dawn, Daniel closed his eyes with a grateful sigh, sliding instantly off into peaceful sleep.

Soon after sunrise, after Daniel had finished a hearty breakfast, Hunter rinsed out the bowls and packed them into the mule, which was parked not far away.

The rest of Grass Clan was already taking down the shelter, packing up camp. A blessed sense of contentment filled Daniel as he watched the industrious little people, comparing what he knew of these two races and wondering about the other two he hadn’t yet seen.

Hunter motioned to him, ambling toward the mule and the abandoned camp Daniel had set up days earlier.  "Come," the elder alien called to him. "We go now." 

Daniel walked gingerly over to the mule, relieved to find his ankle almost completely healed. The three Sky Clan fairies -- including a fourth with pale green hair and turquoise eyes that Daniel vaguely remembered from his first meeting with the flying aliens -- joined them and hovered above the hood until he'd taken his seat inside the roll cage of the transport.

“Um, where are we going?” Daniel asked, leaning on the steering wheel as he surveyed the quickly vanishing community.

“That way!” called the fairies.

Three of the four were pointing in the direction of the road, but Jack was indicating – well, nothing Daniel could see, except for more grass. Claire spotted Jack’s error, and, with a roll of her green eyes, she gave his arm a little shove to indicate the proper direction. Jack grinned and winked at Daniel.

“Okay,” Daniel returned, unable to keep an amused chuckle from slipping out. “What is that way?” He stowed his makeshift crutches in the open cab -- just in case he might need them -- and put his foot on the brake, preparing to start the mule's engine. 

“Rest of journey.” Hunter climbed up next to Daniel stretched out his stubby legs, only his feet and ankles hanging off the seat. "We go now."

"Safety first." Daniel put his seat belt on, demonstrating for Hunter how to fasten his own belt and waiting until the alien buckled himself in.

Daniel took a deep breath and let it out slowly.  He was still tired from his illness and injuries, but ready to get going and see what lay ahead. He was about to ask about their destination when Hunter leaned over the dash, pawed at the controls impatiently and pushed several buttons, as though to hurry Daniel and get the vehicle started.

"Cut that out!" Daniel blurted in English, giving the offending hands a frustrated shove. He frowned down at Hunter and told him carefully in Ancient, "Please sit still and allow me to operate this. It can be dangerous."

“Bah! Child’s plaything.” Hunter eyed Daniel's hands on the steering wheel suspiciously, and he waved at him, pointing toward the road in the distance. “We go.”

“As long as you keep your mitts to yourself,” Daniel grumbled, again in English.

The older alien raised a curious eyebrow and crossed his arms over his chest. "Someone is irritable today," he mumbled under his breath.

Ignoring that comment, Daniel sighed and glanced up at the fairies hovering just outside the vehicle. “Do you think you can keep up?”

“We are very fast,” Jack assured him with a broad grin, darting around in elegant arcs and loops. He paused in the air long enough to activate his helmet and adjust the visor, then gestured toward Daniel to lead the way.

“What about everyone else?” he asked, glancing around the rapidly disappearing camp.  Already, most of those who had come to attend him were gone. Only a few were left, taking down his shelter and obliterating most of the evidence of their encampment. Even the grass had somehow been restored to its upright stance, and the aliens were quickly fading into the sea of tawny blades.

The fourth fairy also flew off, heading alone in another direction.

“Only our journey, now,” said Hunter. “We go.”

Daniel lapsed into English again.  “All rightie, then.” He pushed the starter button on the dash, put the vehicle into gear, and headed off across the meadow toward the road. The mule bounced over the uneven ground, giving Hunter a good jostle, which made Daniel grin in amusement. Once they were on the smooth stone surface of the alien highway, Daniel glanced around at his airborne companions to make sure they were still with them and, after allowing Hunter a chance to grab onto the roll bar for a little extra security, Daniel took off at top speed to see just how fast those little wings could fly.

August 30

Three Days Later

As the hours passed, rolling meadows slowly became dotted with occasional trees.  Daniel’s companions were quick to point out the great diversity of birds, animals and insects as they flew, plodded or scurried past the mule. He felt as if he’d been dropped into a Walking With Dinosaurs documentary.  The wildlife was generally of gigantic proportions, either in the size of individual animals or of their herds; everything flourished on this world.  It was beautiful and exciting, as well as occasionally terrifying.

They had just arrived at the edge of the grasslands, where the meadows merged with a leafy canopy of huge ferns and broad-leaved trees, when there was a sudden movement to their left.  Hunter’s warning cry made Daniel glance over just in time to see a huge animal charging toward them.  He swerved, slamming on the brakes as he tried to maneuver around the creature, but it was galloping right across the road in front of them. The mule skidded, its rugged all-terrain tires screeching as it slammed sideways against the enormous legs of the beast.  The vehicle tipped up onto its two right wheels before it bounced back onto all four, sliding around in a circle as Daniel fought the steering wheel for control. 

“Run!” Hunter shouted as he scrabbled at his seat belt, tearing it open, and leaping out of the vehicle. “Run!”

Claire launched herself out of Daniel's breast pocket, careening through the air and out of the mule's open cab.

That was when Daniel caught sight of another animal bearing down on them, one of the same species but easily three times the size of the long-necked giant with which they’d already collided. The 4X4 had barely slid to a stop when he threw himself out of it, landing hard on his belly and automatically rolling onto his side. He scrambled to hands and knees and pushed up into a stumbling run, hot on Hunter’s heels, heading for cover in the trees.

As soon as they were safely under cover, Daniel turned to look back at the mule, now being attacked by the second, larger animal. “What is that?” he panted.

“Zannu,” Hunter whispered breathlessly. “Baby startled by our noise. Mother not happy.”

The “baby” was twice the size of an adult elephant, with thick, heavy legs and mottled tan and brown fur, looking like some bizarre crossbreed of giraffe and Apatosaurus.  The mother could have easily looked into a sixth story window of any high-rise building back on Earth.

With a sinking heart, Daniel watched as the gigantic adult used its long tail to take a final swipe at the mule, flipping the insignificant vehicle upside down onto its roll cage and swatting it down the road with a screech of metal scraping against stone.  When the zannu was satisfied the mule was no longer a threat, it herded its offspring into the trees on the far side of the road without a backward glance. 

After a few moments, silence returned, and Hunter stood up, ambling slowly back toward the road with Daniel in tow. The Sky Clan fairies were already at the vehicle, inspecting the damage.

Daniel stared down at the wreck, hands on hips, sighing heavily. “What exactly is a zannu?” he asked, glancing at the trees where the creatures had disappeared. He and his friends had barely escaped intact. The mule hadn’t been so lucky, and most of his supplies now lay stomped and scattered along the stone road and in the vegetation that lined it.

“Eats tops of trees,” said Hunter, bending to pick up an unopened MRE packet, giving it a curious squeeze and sniff. “Mostly harmless.”

“You should see what feeds on them,” Claire commented climbing back into the breast pocket of Daniel’s BDU jacket. The little fairy had made herself at home in Daniel’s clothing for most of the trip, choosing to ride rather than fly. She yawned and stretched, kicking around in the pocket to create some additional space for herself.

“I would rather avoid that, thank you,” Daniel replied with a trace of impatience. He glanced at the surrounding terrain, not sure if he was pleased to finally be hitting the woods. Back in the grasslands, they could see large animals coming at them for miles around, but with the foliage encroaching against the pavement and crowding in close, it would be easy for wild beasts to suddenly leap out at them, like the baby zannu had done.

Squatting down next to the crumpled mule, he began to retrieve his provisions, starting with a backpack he tugged free of the wrecked storage compartment. His laptop -- strapped into a case fastened to the back of the seat -- was fortunately unscathed, and Daniel tucked it lovingly into the bottom of the knapsack before continuing to rummage through the spilled gear and supplies. Numerous silver MRE pouches lay scattered over the pavement, some whole, others crushed into oblivion. His last clean uniform was wedged into the wreck, and the one undamaged canteen dangled from the steering wheel, inside the upside-down cab. 

Tucked just under a messy pile of MREs was the little round Dial Home Device, also completely unharmed. Daniel put it in the thigh pocket of his uniform pants and collected as many of the unopened meal pouches as he could carry. He stood up, intending to lay the packages in a single pile on the roadside until he could get everything he needed gathered up and stuffed into the backpack.

When he turned, however, he found himself face to face with what could only be a member of the Forest Clan.  He was definitely male, with broad shoulders, a powerful chest, slim waist and hips, his body draped in a loose-fitting tunic and pants, girded with a wide leather belt. Suede boots reached up to his knees, and everything he wore was of an alien camo design, mottled green and brown, colors that would blend perfectly with the woodsy background. His long, dark green hair was gathered above his ears and put up into a ponytail, and dark golden eyes ringed with burnt orange stared back at Daniel with cool interest.

The Forest Clan male’s approach had been totally silent, surprising Daniel into dropping about half of what he’d collected, most of it sliding to the pavement with a noisy patter. “Oh, hello,” he said, backing away, trying to gather his wits. “Um, I’m Daniel.”

“This will be a scout of the Forest Clan,” Claire told him, crawling back out of his pocket and up on his shoulder. She took a seat there, holding onto Daniel’s utility vest with both hands.

Daniel held very still to keep from shaking her loose. “Scout? Oh. More are coming, then?”

Sidestepping the human-sized alien, Daniel bent over to set the rest of the MREs on the side of the road next to the open backpack, freeing his hands, which he wiped nervously on his trousers. He smiled, mesmerized by those arresting alien eyes. The scout was striking, like a work of art come to life. 

“We have been watching you for some time,” the alien told him in a rich, resonant voice, his speech marked by a strong accent, elegant and fluid.

Daniel wondered if each Clan had a unique dialect of their own, suggested by the differences in the way they spoke the Ancients’ language.  “I have been anticipating meeting Forest Clan for many days now,” he assured the stranger. “Are others of your people nearby?”

He nodded, gesturing around himself. “Always. Wherever there are trees on this world, among them you will find my Clan.” He bent to begin helping gather Daniel’s things, turning some of the objects over in his hands for a quick examination before putting them into the pile with the other items already collected.

Daniel glanced around, looking for others like the scout, but saw nothing, not a shadow or flicker of movement among the trees.

“Forest Clan shy,” Hunter explained. He nodded toward the stranger. “Scout is bold, not like rest of clan.”

“Scout,” Daniel repeated, glancing up into the alien’s amazing eyes again as he retrieved a box of ammo for the Beretta. “May I call you that?”

He shrugged. “If it pleases you.” A hint of a smile played around his mouth.

“Thank you.” Daniel went back to picking up the mess, wondering at these people’s remarkable ability to avoid the use of each other’s names, including his. Interestingly, not once in the days he’d been there had anyone spoken his name, but as Claire had told him in the beginning, there was never any question who was being addressed at any given time.

"You not need all that," Hunter told him, nodding his head toward the amassed goods at the roadside. "Travel light, friend."

Daniel glanced at his companions, who were apparently carrying very little in the way of survival gear. Whatever they did to stay alive, he could do as well. They'd already shown they would help provide for him. "Oh. Right."

Stowing only the bare necessities into the backpack, Daniel loaded a canteen, a supply of water purification tablets, extra ammo and his last clean uniform on top of the laptop.  He made sure his Beretta was in its place in its holster, checked to see that the zat was in a side pocket, and strapped his field knife to his hip. He clipped the pack into the shoulder clasps of his utility vest, adjusted the weight comfortably against his back, and fastened the stabilizing straps at the bottom, tightening them on each side to keep the pack from shifting.

Once he had everything ready to go, Daniel made eye contact with Scout and smiled at him.  "Ready. Thank you for your patience."

The alien nodded, but instead of continuing down the road, he stepped off into the trees.

“Wait, I thought we were going that way, to the pyramid?” Daniel pointed down the untraveled road.

“We cannot go there,” Scout corrected with a shake of his head. “Not yet.”

“More zannu?” Daniel asked, taking a step to follow him. “Perhaps we can go around—”

“Not zannu,” Scout told him with a half smile.  “The council of elders wishes to speak with you. We are to take you to the city of Shahr.”

Startled, Daniel stopped again. “Is it far? We saw no cities in our survey.”

“With your primitive tools, that is no surprise.”  Scout turned away, continuing off the road into the trackless woods.

Daniel glanced down at Hunter, now passing him to follow Scout. “You told me nothing about a city.”

“You not ask,” Hunter said enigmatically, his face unreadable. He shot Daniel a glance, along with a tiny grin, that said plainly enough that there would be many more revelations in store for the newcomer to their world.

 Chapter 11: History

August 30

Daniel hurried to catch up to his companions, heedlessly snapping twigs underfoot, and brushing against leaves and limbs in his path. He lamented the loss of the mule, but realized he'd have had to leave it behind for this trip into the forest anyway. The fairies zoomed past him into the woods, disappearing ahead of Daniel and the two larger aliens.

Scout glanced down at Hunter, with a nod over his shoulder to indicate their human friend. “Noisy, is he not?”

“We teach him to walk soon,” the little alien replied nonchalantly.

“I know how to walk,” said Daniel in his own defense. He slowed his pace a little and took more care to step quietly. “See?”

The aliens chuckled and shook their heads as they exchanged an amused look.

Daniel listened and watched the two as they moved with the easy grace of big cats, avoiding debris on the ground, carefully choosing where to place their feet, swaying and dipping their bodies to keep from touching anything in their path. He barely heard Hunter’s small boots padding the soft, damp forest floor, and the only sound of movement from Scout was the almost-indiscernible rustle of his clothing; their stealth was impressive.

Another of Scout’s people joined their party, suddenly appearing not far from Daniel's left elbow, as if he'd been traveling with them for some time. In short order, a third member of Forest Clan caught Daniel's eye, then a fourth. None of the other travelers seemed to consider their unexpected emergence, seemingly out of thin air, as noteworthy.  Daniel had seen some damned strange things in the past, so he made an effort to shrug off the sensation of uneasiness their growing numbers were causing him as they trekked through the trees.

He studied the newcomers, curious about Forest Clan. As with Grass Clan, their coloring seemed to match their surroundings, with hair in darker shades of green, brown, gray, or black, and skin tones varying from tan to chocolate brown. They were an elegant people, uniformly attractive, some recognizably male or female, others enigmatically androgynous.

As they moved through the vegetation like shadows, Daniel waited for them to speak to one another, since he was anxious to hear their language, but they kept silent as they walked.  After a few minutes, the hush started to feel a tad creepy, so he turned to the nearest member of the Forest Clan for a little conversation, making an effort to keep his voice down.  “Is your clan always this reticent?”

The female sidled up to him, matching his stride. Her skin was caramel colored, her light brown hair streaked with mahogany, eyes a piercing gray. “Beware the Sadeesh,” she whispered, and laid her fingertips on her lips to indicate Daniel should be quiet.

“What is that?” Daniel murmured back, leaning closer to hear the answer.

Scout held up a hand in a familiar gesture, and Daniel stopped in his tracks, as did everyone else.

The female pointed, and Daniel squinted at movement in the distance.

His eyes widened when he got a good look at the thing that had caused the party to halt. It was as big and dangerous-looking as a Tyrannosaurus Rex, but covered in short gray and black mottled fur. Large triangular ears swiveled all around as it paused and listened for movement, its huge, ugly head turning from side to side.  Finally it seemed satisfied that nothing interesting was nearby, so it continued through the trees, making lots of noise in the underbrush.

The party stood frozen until the sadeesh stalked away, disappearing in the distance. Daniel let out a sigh of relief.

“That must be what eats the thing that stepped on my vehicle,” Daniel mused quietly.

“Us, too, if catch us,” said Hunter with a nod. “Stay quiet. May be more.”

They walked for hours through the seemingly trackless woods. Daniel was surprised at how fit he felt, amazed yet again by his miraculous recovery. His energy level was good, and he had no trouble keeping up with the others.

When Scout suggested they stop to eat, the Forest Clan climbed up the trunk of a giant tree, then dropped a vine down for Hunter to help haul him up. Daniel decided to show his agility, so following their custom, he climbed up by himself, using the hand- and foot-holds he’d seen the others use.

“Did we come up here for a reason?” he asked, settling astride a large limb, resting his back against the trunk.

“To be safe, while we rest,” answered Scout. “We have far to go yet, and must travel quietly to avoid more sadeesh. High in the trees, we may eat in peace and enjoy quiet conversation for a little while.” 

That made sense. “Tell me about your city. How far away is it?” Daniel pulled out his canteen and one of the MREs, tearing the pouch open with his teeth. He opened the body-temperature packet of macaroni and cheese and tucked the rest of the contents of the pouch into his jacket breast pocket for later. 

Scout grinned, his merry eyes dancing. “On the other side of the world.”

Daniel almost choked on the first bite of his food. “Excuse me? And you plan for us to walk all the way?”

Everyone laughed so good-naturedly, Daniel found himself smiling.

“You see soon,” said Hunter. “Not far now.”

“Ohhh-kay,” Daniel drawled in English, more for himself than his hosts. He didn’t get the joke, but hoped someone would explain it to him eventually. He studied his hosts, ever curious about the difference in size between races. Some were only six inches tall, others six feet. He dug into the silver entrée pouch for another bite, hoping his next question would be answered and not put off, as many had been so far.

“Why are the Clans so different from each other?”

Hunter and Claire looked to Scout, keeping quiet, waiting for a cue from their larger cousin before responding.

“In the long-ago,” Scout told him, accepting a handful of dried berries from Hunter, “the People were one race, all one size, all alike. We traveled to many places through the Wheel of Worlds, roaming everywhere – forest, grasslands, deserts, lands of snow and ice.”

“The Wheel of Worlds? We call it a Stargate,” Daniel told them, doing his best to translate the English word into Ancient.

With a slight nod, Scout continued. “We made our homes everywhere, and over many eons, we adapted to the lands in which we lived. Some became small. Others very small.” He smiled at Claire and Jack, seated comfortably on each of Daniel’s shoulders, before meeting Daniel’s openly curious gaze. “Still others became giants.”

Sadness seemed to settle over him like a heavy weight. “In those days, we were still innocent, and we sought to make friends wherever we went. We trusted easily and shared our gifts generously, but in time, those we believed to be our allies betrayed us. They plotted against us, attacked us, and most of the People were killed. The rest were brought here, where even more died from exposure, starvation and disease. We were left here with nothing -- no tools, weapons, or food, to survive or die, however the All decreed.”

Scout defiantly lifted his chin, gazing at Daniel through narrowed eyes that now glimmered with anger. “When the time comes, we will fight those who imprisoned us in the long-ago time. Until then, we train and prepare for when we meet our enemies once again.” 

Daniel nodded, saddened by this tale of woe. “Many humans would do the same,” he agreed. “Some would try to negotiate for peace, though I have learned that doesn’t always work.” 

A memory flashed through his mind, and he smiled a little. “An advanced race we once met in our travels through the Stargate told my people we were ‘very young’, and that we did not always do as we were told, which was true. Like you, we also wanted to learn, which is why we went through the Stargate the first time, just to see what was out there.”

He sobered, remembering why they had begun regular ‘gate travel in the first place. “An alien race called the Goa’uld attacked us and kidnapped one of the team guarding the Stargate. Our soldiers went after her.”  Suddenly, he wasn’t hungry anymore. He stared at the MRE pouch as more memories fueled his buried rage. “The Goa’uld killed her. They came to the planet where I’d made a home with my wife, and they took her, too.”  Emotion choked him, constricting his throat.

“They also kill her?” asked Hunter, popping a few more berries into his mouth. There was curiosity in his open gaze, along with a flicker of grim sympathy in his purple eyes.

Swallowing his anger down, Daniel nodded. “We fought them for many years, but they finally destroyed my world. Destroyed it.” He didn’t know what else to say. Holding back tears, he felt his chin trembling as he met Scout’s sympathetic, understanding gaze.

The alien turned on the tree limb beside Daniel, his knee just touching Daniel's thigh as he reached behind his guest to pluck a bunch of grape-sized blue berries from a stem sticking out of the trunk. “You wish to kill them, these Goa’uld?” he asked flatly.

“Yes,” Daniel rasped. He was ashamed by how much he wanted vengeance, but comforted himself with the belief that Earth deserved justice, too.

He straightened as the face of a handsome blond man seared suddenly through his memory.

Zeus, Daniel realized, another hole in his memory suddenly filled. That was the being who had destroyed his planet. Daniel owed Zeus retribution; the debt had to be repaid.

“All of them?” Scout glanced up from beneath his dark lashes, his golden eyes flashing, sparking with some fiery emotion, his expression unreadable. He popped several of the berries into his mouth, his tongue stroking along his lower lip to catch a dribble of juice. 

“Yes.” Daniel directed his gaze guiltily at his hand, the silver food pouch trembling in his grip. He shrugged. “No. Maybe. I do not know. I want justice for my people. I want freedom for those who live under the unjust rule of the Goa’uld.”  He explained about the relationship between the symbiote and its host, the difference between the personalities of Goa’uld and Tok’ra, and the dependence of the Jaffa on the Goa’uld for their lives.

“Do I want to destroy them?” he continued, at war with himself.  “That is a hard question, because it has no simple answer.  I do not know how to kill all the Goa’uld without killing their hosts or causing the extinction of the Jaffa,” he admitted, “but if I could, I would do it. Definitely.” He sighed and shook his head, then made eye contact with Scout. “I do not know how the People feel about that, but if you are also at war, maybe you can understand.”

“We do,” agreed Scout with a nod. “Perhaps you might join us in our fight for freedom.”

Daniel shrugged. “I would need to know more first. I must speak with your elders and learn about you and your enemies before I make any decisions.”  He'd learned many hard lessons over the last ten years, and had come to trust his instincts about aliens. These seemed like good people with values similar to his own, and if their tale of genocide were true, then it would be right to help them. If they had lied, he would eventually discover the truth.

“We not take war lightly,” Hunter warned him.

“Nor do I,” Daniel agreed. “I have been in battle many times, and have seen firsthand the horror and ugliness, all the suffering it causes.” Memories swept him away, his body remembering the smell of burned flesh and gunpowder, the sound of P90 and staff weapon fire, the fear and chaos that had set his heart pounding and his nerves on edge. He closed his eyes as a shadow of remembered agony gripped him in the seconds before ascension, then carried him back to the moment he’d handled the naquadria core that had killed him.

He’d cheated death over and over again in the last decade. He didn’t particularly want to live a long life now, anyway. His home was gone, as were his friends and family. He was rootless, a nomad who would never belong anywhere again.

“You have been wounded in battle,” observed Scout, his head tilting with curiosity, his expression gentle, respectful.

“Many times.” He lifted his weary gaze after a moment to Scout’s unusual amber eyes, then dug in the pouch for another bite of food he didn’t particularly want to eat. 

“You must have been a great hero on your world,” said Jack into his right ear.

Daniel chuckled bitterly and shook his head. “No. Not really. I was rather a nobody.”

“Then your people must have had very high standards for heroism,” deduced Scout with a grin, “or else they were fools." He gestured to his comrades, who began to pack away their refreshments. The Forest Clan leader turned back to his guest. "Come, friend. We will continue our journey.”

After several more hours of walking, Daniel knew he was utterly lost in the woods. He’d been buried in his thoughts for some time now, depending on his new friends to warn him of any danger and keep him safe. Daniel did his best to pay attention to where they were going, but his mind wandered during the long spans of quiet, tumbling over old memories, examining his life.

He’d improved his combat skills over the last decade, but had never really applied himself to truly developing his effectiveness in the field. He studied how these aliens moved and did his best to emulate them, taking care to follow in Scout’s footsteps as closely as possible. His efforts didn’t go unnoticed, and as soon as Scout announced they had passed out of the territory of the predatory sadeesh, the air of silence and watchful tension lifted from the entire party.

“You are learning to walk well,” observed Claire from her perch in his pocket.

“Sometimes I am a little slow,” he whispered dryly. “Do you know how much further we have to travel? I did not quite understand the joke you all thought was so funny when I asked earlier.”

“You are not enjoying the journey?” Jack asked, a smile in his amplified voice as he buzzed near Daniel's ear. “I have not often visited Forest Clan. I find this place much more lovely than the rocky lands that are Sky Clan’s watch.”

“It is beautiful, yes,” agreed Daniel, “and this has been a pleasant trip – except for the nearly-being-eaten-or-trampled parts.”

He sighed, inhaling a deep breath filled with the scents of rich earth, thick greenery, damp and flowers. “So why do you not travel much? Why not live here with the Forest Clan, if you prefer the woods?”

Claire jiggled against him, shifting her position in his pocket. “Sky Clan watches the Wheel of Worlds. It is our sacred duty to all the People of Far Lands.”

“And you warn the others when visitors arrive? That would make your race the first line of defense.”

“Sky watch Wheel.”  Hunter’s voice floated up from behind him. “Grass defend. Forest attack. Mountain destroy.” 

Scout chuckled, his rich voice floating over his shoulder. "Yes. Hope you never meet any of the Mountain Clan in battle, friend."

“You are alive only because the People allow it,” Claire assured him.

Those statements were made with such nonchalance, Daniel didn’t doubt their veracity. A little shiver of respectful fear shimmied up his spine, then faded away with Daniel's confidence in their friendship. “Um. Thank you. May I ask why you chose to let me live? Not that I am ungrateful, only curious.”

“An admirable trait,” declared Scout, “and the very reason why you are here. We wished to learn about you and your people. Like you, we are curious, and cannot abide a mystery. We had to know what you are.”

As a thought struck Daniel, he stopped in his tracks. “What happened to my teammates who were killed?”

“You walked in their ashes when you returned,” Scout told him, a touch of compassion in his voice. “We did not know the traditions of your race for the dead, so we honored them with ours, and mourned their loss as family.” He paused, turning to make eye contact, genuine sadness etched into his beautiful face.

Daniel choked up, a sudden rush of tears blurring his vision. He swallowed down his grief, blinking to clear his eyes. “Thank you,” he growled huskily.

He contemplated that, trying to imagine what it must have been like from the People's perspective when SG-13 had come through the Stargate, and all the events afterward. Then another idea occurred to him. "Did others of my kind come through the Wheel of Worlds, searching for my team?"

"Yes," answered Claire from his pocket. "We were still studying your companions and the equipment left behind, so we hid your camp from them. The searchers found nothing, and left through the Wheel. We believe they did not know your friends were killed, or that you were taken. We were not ready to show ourselves to any of you, then. Perhaps we were in error in that decision, but it is done."

With a nod, Daniel agreed. The aliens had actually performed a valuable service by keeping the camp intact, because those supplies had given Daniel food, shelter, clothing, and survival gear he wouldn't have otherwise had. Considering the weakened state he'd had been in when he’d returned to that world, he might not have lived without their indirect assistance.

Still, all that was history now, and the SGC was gone. It would be best to concentrate on the matters at hand and leave the reminiscing to another time.

They traveled quietly until the golden shafts of sunlight cutting through the leaves of the massive trees surrounding them attained a long afternoon slant. Some of the trees were as lofty as sequoias, others broad and leafy, with huge trunks and gnarled roots and branches spreading a thick canopy above their heads. Daniel felt as if he’d suddenly stepped into a scene from Lord of the Rings, to a place peopled by alien fairies, dwarves and elves. There was something surreal about the experience, both magical and perfectly ordinary. Daniel had walked in hundreds of forests, traveled and talked with many aliens in the last decade of his life, and there was little about this trek that was any different from all those other missions, save the fact that he was the only human among them.

“We have arrived,” announced Scout, coming to a stop in the mossy landscape.

“Where?” Daniel glanced around them and saw nothing but forest.

Everyone else in the party had also halted.

Facing the expanse of woodland ahead of them, Scout held up his left hand, and the air seemed to ripple around his palm.  Sun-dappled trees began to shimmer and fade before him, and after a moment, part of the forest landscape just ahead of their party vanished. 

At first, what lay before them was so bright, Daniel was temporarily blinded. As his vision adjusted, he saw a twenty-foot ring cut into the forest floor, completely cleared of trees and vegetation, lit by the unbroken glow of late afternoon sunshine. Geometric shapes and symbols he didn’t recognize were scored onto the floor, and the circular pavement gleamed with what appeared to be precious metals and gems, glittering in the daylight.

The Forest Clan escort stepped onto the platform, heedless of the materials on which they walked. Hunter followed them, and the group turned to wait for Daniel. Even Claire extricated herself from his pocket and flew off to join them.

“Are you not coming?” she asked with a grin, flying backward so she could see him.

“Oh, yes, of course I am.  Sorry.” He stepped onto the disk, unable to take his eyes off the design beneath his feet. "Are we really going to the other side of the world?"  As he spoke, the golden disk under his boots promptly disappeared as he felt a suspiciously familiar tingle, something like the sensation that accompanied an Asgard transporter beam.  The floor appeared to turn to silver, the design repeated in a plain base metal that was no longer in the midst of the woods.

"We already have," Scout confirmed, a touch of wry humor in his resonant voice.

"Well, Toto," Daniel murmured aloud in English, strictly for his own amusement, "I don't think we're in Kansas anymore." 

Chapter 12: Shahr

August 30

Daniel glanced up from the circular platform, realizing that they had, indeed, been transported, out of the middle of the forest and into an enclosed space. He found himself inside an enormous dome, hundreds of feet high. The architecture was amazing, filled with artistic detail and organic embellishment. Earthy colors at the base of the walls became sky colors in the dome, filling the gigantic room with light.

If his new friends had told him correctly, their party was now standing on the other side of the planet.

He turned wide eyes to the others, now exiting the arrival platform, and spied a creature that Daniel could only assume was a member of the Mountain Clan, and quite obviously male.

This being was a giant in every sense of the word. Daniel guessed his height at somewhere around ten feet tall. Where Sky Clan were delicate in build, Forest were lean and Grass on the stocky side, this being was massively built, with a broad but benevolent face and thick, muscular limbs. He was dressed in a burgundy leather vest and loincloth, with red metal gauntlets on his forearms and fingerless gloves on his sturdy hands. Metallic greaves of dark burnt orange covered his hairy shins, but his feet were bare.

Long gunmetal-blue hair framed his dark brown face, and his eyes were steely gray. He smiled at Daniel, his expression filled with kindness. “Welcome to Shahr, first city of the People,” he rumbled, his voice a deep bass, as befitting his great size, but surprisingly gentle.

“Wow,” breathed Daniel, awestruck at the sights, both his surroundings, and the alien who had come to greet them. He gathered his wits and stepped right up to the big guy, the top of his head just about even with the giant's chest. “I’m pleased to meet you. My name is—”

“All the People know who you are,” the huge alien assured him with a kind smile. “The city has been preparing for your arrival for many days now.” 

“Oh. Thank you.”

Scout, Hunter, and the three members of Sky Clan followed the Mountain Clan male, whom Daniel decided to call Denali, the Native American name for Mount McKinley. It meant "Great One," and this fellow was decidedly impressive.

The others of the Forest Clan dispersed through several arched doorways leading into brightly lit areas. Additional openings were darkened and quiet, still more leading out into what looked like busy urban streets. There must have been fifty different passages leading away from the arrival center.

Daniel watched some of the Forest Clan move away from them, while following his party toward a different destination. “Where are they going?” he asked no one in particular.

“Home,” replied Scout. “Their Hunt is finished. They have learned to live in harmony with the All, and thus have earned the right to live as adults. They may now choose mates and bear children. Those who have not yet fulfilled the Hunt may not.”

“It is a rite of passage,” Claire added, darting about his head. “All of the People must do this as they mature. It is necessary to spend time learning to survive without the aid of any of our tools, with only what they know, before they truly belong to their Clan. It is a living lesson of our history that we must never forget.”

Daniel pondered that information, comparing it to what Scout had told him in the forest, of how their enemies had relocated them to this world without provisions or technology. This was an echo of the far past, but he suspected the tradition had become much more than that now. The People used the experience not only to test their young’s knowledge of survival, but also to learn to be in harmony with nature, to observe and respect the rhythms of life in the wild.

An event of great tragedy had become a lesson in wisdom.

“What about those who don’t succeed?” he asked thoughtfully.

“The All takes them,” replied Hunter, his gravelly voice thick and rough with emotion. The little Grass Clan male kept his eyes straight ahead. His meaning was clear.

Survive or die. The lesson was a harsh one.   

They approached one of the unlit arches and a soft amber glow illuminated the interior, which proved to be a small room.

Daniel realized suddenly that he couldn’t see outside, regardless of where he looked. There were no windows in sight, no breezes. He looked at Scout. “Are we underground? And really on the other side of the planet?” 

“We are,” the Mountain Clan male answered with a slight nod of his head. Denali held up his left arm as if checking a watch, his thick fingers dancing over sparkly bits set into the metal gauntlets. Then he rotated his left hand palm-up and held it out toward Daniel.

Above the pad of Denali's fingerless glove, a holographic image of a planet appeared. A small green continent about the size of Australia sat in the southern hemisphere in a vast ocean, a long ridge of mountains curving up the northern coast past the equator and fading into a string of islands that disappeared over the top of the globe.

“Here is the Wheel of Worlds,” said the giant, touching a portion of the continent with his fingertip.

Instantly, the image zoomed in to show a tiny rocky landscape with the crystal-crowned Stargate and the long, straight road stretching away from it. Daniel could see the step-pyramid in the distance, ringed by the mountains that formed the northern coast. Not far from it, off to the west, he could see the location of the transporter pad they’d hiked through the woods to reach, glimmering with gold and jewels.

Denali grasped the image of the globe between two fingers and rotated it to show Daniel the other side of the planet. A second continent, twice the size of the first, connected to it through the island chain. 

“Here is the city of Shahr,” the alien giant explained, touching the southern coastal mountains.

A map spread out from his fingertip beneath the illuminated surface of the hologram, expanding to an area so enormous Daniel’s eyes widened and his mouth formed a small “o” of surprise. The city of Shahr appeared to be the size of the entire state of California. 

Daniel tried to swallow, his mouth suddenly dry. “Do you have other cities?” he asked.

With a smile and nod, Denali touched two other spots on the same continent. “This is Zhwahyu,” he said, pointing to another spot near the western polar cap, “and this—” His fingertip illuminated a small city on the northern coast that extended in long, wide spears beneath the ocean.

Claire zipped between Daniel and the hologram. “The elders are waiting,” she interrupted. She didn’t look too happy, either, her mouth drawn up tight, emerald eyes flashing up at the Mountain Clan guide. 

Scout gently touched Denali's arm with a warm smile. “Yes,” he agreed. “We should be on our way. There will be plenty of time for geography lessons later.”

“Of course.” The giant gave Daniel an apologetic smile and turned the projection off. He bowed a little. “This way,” he said politely, leading them into an anteroom.

Daniel glanced around the room for a moment before he realized they had stepped into another transporter. By the time he’d turned to face the doorway where they’d entered, the big domed room was gone. In its place was a darkened corridor, leading off to either side. Claire flew up to perch on the giant’s shoulder and gave Daniel a smile, staying right where she was. The rest of Sky Clan landed on a small shelf on the wall and took seats on a padded bench that seemed to be made just for them.

Mountain stood at parade rest, his wrists lightly clasped behind him, obviously not going anywhere.

“Come,” said Hunter, tugging on Daniel’s sleeve.

He followed the little alien to the left into the dark corridor. Hunter stepped into a small booth with a pillow on the floor, just his size.

Daniel started to follow him inside, but Hunter grasped a black curtain at the doorway and nodded to his right.  “You next,” Hunter advised. Then he pulled the curtain closed between them with a jerk.

“This way,” Scout offered, easing past him in the hallway. He gestured into another small booth, where a larger cushion awaited. “Please sit here. When the council has assembled, we will speak with you.”

Daniel thanked him and sat down on the thick pad. He heard the curtain close behind him and Scout’s near-silent footsteps retreating further down the hallway. Daniel flinched as a red light passed over him in a precise grid. When it shut off, the booth plunged into complete darkness. An instant later, he appeared to be sitting in a room with a member of each of the Clans, easily recognizable by their build and coloring, but all miraculously the same height.

Holograms, he told himself, to make everyone equal in this forum.

He couldn’t help smiling at a six-foot-tall Hunter seated at his right.

Scout was seated to his left, and Daniel exchanged a glance between the two aliens he knew, smiling. “I’m honored to have traveled with two of the elders of the People,” he said with genuine pleasure.

“We welcome you, friend,” said the human-sized Sky Clan representative. She was the lone female in the group, a mane of pale green hair framing her delicate face, big turquoise eyes staring back at him. Daniel recognized her as one of the fairies in the tree when they had first approached him at the edge of the grasslands, and he had seen her again during his recovery after the sh'khan attack.

“I thank all of the People for the hospitality you have extended to me,” Daniel returned politely, shifting right into diplomat mode. “I would not have survived without your assistance. I owe the People my life.”

“Perhaps,” said Mountain with a shrug. Of all the People, this one showed his age far more than any of the others, with tiny lines around his mouth and eyes. His black hair was liberally streaked with silver, and there was significant wisdom in his rust-colored eyes. “You should know, friend, that much of what has happened to you here has been by design, to test your character.”

That was a little surprising. Had they somehow controlled the animals that had attacked? He considered that idea and measured his response. “What did you learn?”

“Kind,” stated Hunter with an approving nod. “Good fighter. Noisy like child.”

“You are honest,” Sky observed. “You have not lied to us.”

“How would you know?” blurted Daniel, then almost wished he hadn’t said anything. Then again, that might have been the response they sought.

Scout’s amber eyes narrowed slightly. “As I told you, the People do not trust easily. We have gone to great lengths to study you, your reactions, your language, habits, and memories.”

“I haven’t really told you that much,” Daniel returned, resisting the urge to shrug, “and I could’ve been making things up.”

Mountain shook his broad head. “Long ago, we learned not to trust what we were told by those who claimed to be our friends. We learned to look deeper, and so we have seen the truth of who you are.” He waved a hand over the space in the center of the circle around which they sat, and another holographic scene appeared.

Daniel found himself looking down at an image of the device Ernest Littlefield had studied during the fifty years he’d been marooned after the first use of Earth’s Stargate in 1945. SG-1 and Catherine Langford, Ernest’s lost love, had rescued him from that planet, but Daniel had been sorely tempted to stay behind and study the machine. Only Jack’s friendship and counsel had brought him home safely.

The next image showed his first sight of the Asgard in the testing chamber on Cimmeria. Another showed Lya, one of the xenophobic Nox, smiling up at him. Every vision had been from Daniel’s point of view, as if they had been seen through Daniel’s own eyes, as if…

Daniel’s stomach clenched. “Those look like…” He cleared his throat and tried again. “Are those my memories?”

Hunter nodded, his expression sober. “Yes.”

"Ohmygod," he whispered in English, bowing his head, covering his face with his palms. He struggled to breathe, shocked and horrified beyond belief. These people had looked into his thoughts, into his mind! They might have seen everything, every dark moment, every unsavory memory, all the stupid, hateful things about himself that he believed or knew. They had the capability to view his most intimate moments, the experiences that he most treasured and feared. They could look at what he knew about humanity as a whole and make their own determinations, simply from what he had seen and heard as he had lived his life.

He lifted uncertain eyes to search their faces, dreading their reaction to this intimate knowledge of the human being in their midst. He had failed more often than he'd succeeded in almost everything he'd attempted, but he'd kept working, kept trying to make a difference. In the end, he'd failed spectacularly, because his world was now gone. His head and heart ached, and he put his head down for a moment in shame. 

Daniel held his breath, mentally preparing himself for their reaction, and lifted his gaze to the holographic faces assembled around him. There was no judgment in the alien eyes cast upon him in curiosity, seeking only understanding and knowledge. Their expressions were kind and open, simply waiting for his response.

Sky Elder leaned forward, her mint-green eyebrows drawn together in confusion. “We find your people's concept of privacy interesting. You appear distressed that we have witnessed your past, yet we have found that you have lived an honorable existence. What is the purpose of keeping secrets, when so much of your time has been experienced and shared with others who have participated in it? Does that not make each life public?”

They thought he was honorable? After all they might have seen in his memories, they still welcomed him? Daniel was astonished. He pushed past the embarrassment he felt and tried to put his best diplomatic face forward, saving the self-recriminations for later.

“It is cultural, really,” he told them, keeping his tone of voice positive, upbeat. “There are many other Earth societies that do not embrace the idea of privacy to the same degree. Many others are much more open than mine.” 

He wondered how much of his past they’d been privy to, what deeply personal details they might have seen. He decided he didn’t want to know. What had been done was done, and as they had said, the review of his life was educational material for them. 

Lifting his chin, he made eye contact with Scout, seated to his left. “I take it these tests, whatever they were, have helped the elders come to a decision about me?” He was hurt, embarrassed, angry.

“They have,” declared the Forest elder. “You will be welcome among us as an equal, a full citizen of Shahr. We will teach you our languages and customs as you wish, and give you access to our library of knowledge. We ask only that you contribute what you can, that you and your people might be remembered.”

A sudden rush of gratitude filled Daniel, chasing away his doubt and embarrassment. “I would be honored,” he told them with pleasure. He wanted that monument to his people and their rich history, and if he were the last remaining source of information, he’d gladly give them everything he knew.

“Then there is only one matter left to address,” stated Sky, her expression suddenly shuttering closed. “Something of prime importance to the People. We have seen in your memories the destruction of the Asgard by their own hands.”

Daniel started slightly in surprise. "You know the Asgard?"

Mountain nodded. "Long ago."

Looking down at his lap, Daniel played with his fingers as a wave of subdued grief pulled at him, the destruction of the Asgard home world reminding him of the sight of Earth being blown apart in similar fashion. “Yes. They faced evolutionary extinction and chose to engineer their own end, rather than die out slowly. They chose to leave the legacy of their technology to us, along with a history of their culture. It covered millions of years, far more than we might have studied in our lifetimes. I was in the process of researching it, when I could spare the time.”

He sighed and shook his head, drowning in sorrow. "All that may be lost along with the rest of my world. I do not know."

Scout’s handsome face darkened and Daniel saw a similar reaction in the other elders’ expressions. A tingle of intuition crept across the nape of his neck. “May I ask why you want to know about the Asgard?”

“We wished to know if there was mention of the People in their history.” Mountain’s eyes were cool, glittering with leashed anger.

Warning shimmied with cool fingers up Daniel’s spine. “Not that I know. They never mentioned ‘the People’ and I heard no reference to the history the Forest elder told me in the woods.” He simply couldn’t believe the Asgard could have participated in such a ruthless extermination of any race as these people had suffered in their past. 

Hunter expelled a weary sigh and shook his head, sadness in his gaze as he eyed the other elders. “We are forgotten.”

“What of the Ancients?” asked Sky.  “And the Nox?”

The question, and the frigid tone of voice with which it had been asked, made gooseflesh rise on Daniel’s forearms and nape. “The Nox keep to themselves and have had little dealings with us, because they think we are too primitive and violent. The Ancients…”

He felt a little shiver run through his body. “A plague struck them long ago, and no colony was left untouched, even in other galaxies. They either died or ascended. We do not know exactly when the last colony on other planets disappeared, but on Earth, the Ancients vanished a million years ago, as we measure time. We suspect the last of them may have met their fate several thousand of our years earlier.” 

At this news, astonished looks flashed all around the circle, and the elders began talking in their own dialects, none of which Daniel understood. Voices rose in pitch and volume until everyone was shouting. Hands sliced through the air. Fists were raised and shaken.

Finally the furor died down to utter silence.  Defeat and hopelessness was written on every sad, shocked face.

“Plague?” asked Hunter, his voice calm now, touched with sorrow. “Ancients all dead? All?”

Daniel shook his head. “Some ascended to a higher plane of existence,” Daniel reiterated. “They exist without physical bodies, as pure energy, in a state of enlightenment. They have strict rules against interfering with those on the mortal plane.”

“Enlightenment. Bah!” Hunter shook his head, frowning. “Ancients not capable of this.”

Daniel frowned, considering, and then deciding on full disclosure, since they might have recorded other memories of his, ones he couldn’t reach on his own. “I speak from first-hand knowledge, since I was among them for a time. There was an accident.” He swallowed hard, pushing past his memory of the reactor overload on Kelowna and the agony that had followed. “I was dying, and one of the Ancients had been watching me. She showed me how to ascend.”

Every eye was fixed on him. No one moved or spoke. The aliens’ collective astonishment was palpable.
Daniel sighed, fiddling with his hands again. “I remember none of that time, not whether it was my choice to return to mortal form, or if the Ancients exiled me.” He shrugged. “Later, I made a second attempt at ascension, which was obviously not successful, but I suspect that was my last chance to become one of them. I am at peace with this.”

He searched the faces of the elders for some sign of how that confession had been received.

Scout gazed down at the center of the circle, which Daniel guessed was actually some kind of control panel.  He manipulated the holographic display and the image of Daniel's first ascension materialized, seen through the bandages wrapped around his head as his body collapsed, surrounded by the faces of his friends. The Forest elder watched as the view was blotted out by a brilliant white light when the soul of Daniel Jackson floated up into the air, then crashed what appeared to be moments later onto mossy, soft earth in the form of a naked, shivering man.

Daniel glanced away, wishing he hadn't seen even that much of the images stolen from his mind. He was mortified, horrified, a sense of violation seeping through him, making him feel utterly naked and vulnerable. He struggled to remind himself of the importance of remaining in the moment, concentrating on the matters at hand. There would be time to experience the emotional repercussions of this mind-rape later. 

Sky sighed, speaking to the other elders, but in the language of the Ancients for Daniel’s benefit. “This explains why he seemed more advanced than those who came with him, but marked him as more primitive, different from the First.”  

“The First?” asked Daniel. They were talking about him, and he needed to pay attention, especially since they were often cryptic in their speech.

She nodded. “In the long-ago, two races met when they came to this galaxy to explore. The Asgard were the oldest race, travelers and mapmakers. The Second, Antquietas, were also very old. They built colonies and began to settle on many worlds. They met many other alien races during their exploration of the galaxy, but none who were close to them in development, not until they discovered the People.

“We were a young race then, brilliant and vibrant, full of promise, already living on many, many worlds and traveling among the stars. We introduced the Nox to the others, and an alliance of four great races was born.”

Mountain took up the narrative. "The Ancients gathered representatives of the four Clans from the many worlds we had settled, taking only a fraction of our numbers under the ruse of friendship. Their attack on our colonies was swift, executed with precision at the same moment all through the galaxy. We had no warning, no chance to fight back and, once the destruction was complete, a few survivors were sent here through the Wheel to bear witness to the others, as a warning. We were not to attempt escape from this world, and so we have been forced to remain here in exile." 

"We know the Nox did not participate in the war because they were pacifists, and violence was not their way," added Scout. "We are not as certain about the Asgard, but they did not come to our aid, and so both races bear some responsibility by default for our imprisonment." 

In that moment, everything clicked into terrible place in Daniel’s mind.  He was horrified by what he was thinking, hoping he was wrong.  His stomach rolled.  “In your languages, what is the word for ‘the People?’” he asked thickly, his throat constricting.

"Same in all Clan tongues. People of Far Lands." Hunter’s chin tipped up proudly. “Furlings.” 

Daniel flinched as if he’d been struck. He bowed his head in grief, trying to get a grip on both his emotions and his thoughts. His eyes prickled with tears, and he pinched the bridge of his nose, struggling to make sense of this mess. Finally, he sighed and made eye contact with Sky.

“The Asgard were never comfortable talking to us about the Furlings,” he told them, looking at them one by one. “The Nox told us nothing about anything.  And the Ancients… Perhaps you are the reason why they now refuse to interfere with other cultures. Perhaps they felt guilty about what they had done to your ancestors.” He shook his head, still failing to grasp the enormity of what had happened to these people, his mind and heart reeling.

“All I can tell you is that we were told the Furlings existed. We were never able to find any trace of you except in two places: one we called Heliopolis, which you saw in my memories. There were four languages written on the walls of a great meeting place, but the building crumbled into the sea, taking the language translator with it. The other place was a world where my people found Furling writing in some ruins, inviting others to come to their utopian paradise. The only remains found were human and Goa'uld, and they had all been dead for some time.”

The aliens were all staring at the floor, stunned defeat and unimaginable loss written on their faces.

“Our enemies are gone,” observed Mountain. “Only the Nox remain. Perhaps they can tell us why the others turned against us. It is something we must know."

"The Nox have buried their Stargate," Daniel informed them sadly, also needing to understand why the Furlings had been condemned to this place, hunted down and destroyed by the other races. It made no sense to him. There had to be something he was overlooking, something really important.

Maybe the Nox had the answers.

"We have tried to contact them by sending a ship to their world, but they can make themselves invisible. They would not speak with us.”  Daniel studied the shocked, angry faces surrounding him. "They might not with you, either. They might be afraid of you."

"We would not harm them," snapped Sky. "There is no honor in fighting cowards.”

“No justice,” agreed Hunter.

“The Third Race,” murmured Daniel, studying their alien, almost-human faces. He sympathized with them easily, understanding their grief and loss, but found a sense of wonder forming in his heart.

He’d found the Furlings!

Then he remembered something else.

Number Three.

The scanner in the pillar at the Stargate only operated when dialing out. The portable DHD had a lock in place for Number Three – the Third Race, preventing them from leaving the planet.

“They meant this world to be your prison.” 

Scout straightened his shoulders and lifted his head, his mouth pressed into a firm, angry line as he composed his thoughts. “We were never told what crime we had committed. We were simply relocated here or killed.” 

Hunter’s purple eyes gleamed intently, his gravelly voice deeper, darker. “People innocent then. Trusted too easily.  But lesson not wasted.  We learned.”

Daniel wondered if this tale were a hundred percent truthful, or engineered to engage his sympathy. It might also have changed over eons of retelling, embroidering upon reality with drama that might eventually have been considered fact. He had no way to know how much was history and how much was fiction.

Then again, a truly advanced race would have had more than one way off this rock.

“Do you not have spacecraft?” he asked. “You could have built ships to return to your travels and find the Ancients. The Stargate is not the only way to explore.”

Scout passed a hand over the holograph control and brought up a view of the planet in the center of their circle. Completely encompassing the globe were scores of tiny, brilliant dots glittering with light.

Daniel remembered Captain Hailey, shortly after their SG team had first arrived, pointing them out in the sky, reflecting the morning sunshine. 

“We cannot launch any such craft until the Hub releases the Wheel of Worlds. To do so would be to destroy the ships and those who pilot them. We have already tried.”

“The Hub?”

“The Ancient device you carry,” explained Mountain quietly, his deep voice rumbling. “You can operate it. We cannot.”

“You have earned our trust, friend,” said Scout with a gleam of joy in his amber eyes. “Now it remains for us to earn yours. If we succeed, perhaps you may choose to release us from our prison.” His expression grew sober, uncertain. “If we do not, then perhaps the others were right to lock us away.”

Daniel wondered how this race could make such a judgment about themselves. He thought he might have found a truly honorable, noble people here, and felt privileged to be among them.

Scout's somber expression melted into a tiny, hopeful smile, respect and a little wonder gleaming in his amber eyes. He extended both hands toward Daniel, palm down, then palm up, as if to show that he was unarmed. “My true name,” he intoned with great formality, “is el-Mikha.” 

Sky made the same gesture. “My name is el-Riel.”

“el-Rafa,” said Mountain.

Hunter chuckled. “el-Ur, honored guest. Welcome to Shahr.”

Daniel felt a lump forming in his throat. He thought he should say something weighty and important, but nothing came to mind. "Thank you, friends. You have made me feel at home." He guessed the hand gestures they had all made were similar to a handshake among his people, meant to reassure, and so he repeated the sign to each of them.

Everyone was smiling now, a sense of relief lightening the mood in the council chamber.

“I have questions,” Daniel said, leaning forward eagerly. “There is so much I need to know.”

“In time,” el-Ur advised with a paternal grin. “For now, you rest, eat, sleep. Then you learn.”

Glancing down at his dirty clothes, Daniel sniffed, his skin prickling with dirt and sweat. “A bath and clean clothes would be nice.”

“Such comforts are easy to provide and already await you,” Scout assured him. “Come. We will see a little of the city on the way to your new home. Whenever you are ready, you are free to explore. Nothing will be beyond your access.”

Daniel was stunned. Such wide-open acceptance was unheard-of in his world. “Thank you. I’m eager to learn about all the People. I have been for a very long time.”

One by one, the holographic images of the elders winked out and subdued lighting came on in the booth where Daniel sat, trying to take in this turn of events and fully grasp what had just happened.

Smiling, Scout opened the curtain and led him and Hunter back to the transporter room, where their Mountain escort and Claire still waited for him. An instant later, they stepped out into a busy metropolitan street, with the city stretching out in all directions from them. Passages were filled with lithe Forest Clan and Grass Clan, with Mountain giants stepping carefully around them. Sky Clan zoomed about in their flight gear above everyone else’s heads, most in plain clothes and piloting various types of flying machines.

There were young and old, children and adults, as far as he could see. In many ways, Shahr resembled other cities he’d seen, with buildings, people, potted flowers, shops and markets everywhere, but there also was a sense of serenity here that he’d never before experienced.

Shahr also had features that set it apart from every other urban center Daniel had visited. There were no animals in sight -- no pets on leashes, no livestock, no working or service animals. The city was entirely underground, level upon level in staggered terraces, stretching up, down and away in every direction. Buildings weren’t just functional definitions of space; they were individual works of art, painted and carved right out of the living stone of the planet with breathtaking embellishments and decoration. Great rock arms and arches reached out in massive shapes of trees, gigantic representations of various Clan members, and soaring birds or beasts. Even the walkways beneath their feet were gloriously paved with mosaics. Balconies made of gem-encrusted metals connected levels or lined terraces. Intricately patterned grates and bridges were placed above flowing streams contained in canals of various sizes, some flowing into waterfalls that provided a soft white-noise background to the burble of voices all around him. 

Sometimes Daniel was so dumbstruck he stopped walking, just staring at some magnificent detail he encountered. His eyes were wide with wonder, his mouth hanging open, his breathing shallow and halting as his gaze cast all around, and then he would force himself to keep moving, following his guides. He wanted to explore, to touch and talk and listen, but he was also exhausted and hungry. He’d need to rest before he could fully appreciate this beautiful place.

Daniel felt as if he were walking down the golden streets of Heaven itself.

They rounded a corner and stepped into a small courtyard, clean and open, the stone floor decorated with gold and silver swirls that reminded Daniel of stylized symbols of air currents used in many ancient Earth cultures. A waterfall flowed over the edge of a balcony above the roof of a small building set apart from everything else by sheltered walkways. The upper balcony was upheld by a tall statue of a Sky Clan female, head bowed gracefully, arms holding up the stone channel of the waterway, reminding Daniel of ancient Greek columns. The fairy's body was set as the corner pillar for the building, and the wings were made of iridescent glass, providing windows for the dwelling. At the statue's feet, the walkway curved around and out of sight, forming an inset balcony beneath the overhanging level, under the streaming fall.

A notched gothic archway was set into the stone wall toward the back, away from the damp spray.

Daniel realized there were no doors on any of the buildings he’d seen; not a single door anywhere in the city. Everyone had access to everyone else. That spoke of a remarkable level of trust among their society, as well as an utter lack of privacy.

Scout gestured to the opening. “These rooms are yours. There is clean clothing made especially for you inside, and fresh food. Nari will stay with you to see to your needs.”

“Nari? Why do some names have the prefix 'el' and others do not?” 

"El is our word for the All," explained Scout. "Only those whose lives are lived in direct service to the All add the prefix to their names, as a reminder that we are here to serve." The Forest elder gave him a polite half-bow.

"Like priests and priestesses?"

Scout chuckled. "Not as you know them, no. We are something quite different. There is no direct translation that we have found in your language, or that of the Ancients that we now use. Perhaps one day, you will understand, but for now, you must rest."

Claire did an aerial pirouette two feet from his face. “You may continue to call me by your honored mother’s name, if you wish, but my true name is Nari.” She sped away into the apartment, and the lights came on as she entered.

“Thank you,” said Daniel to no one in particular, everyone surrounding him as he strolled into a spacious sitting room in his new apartment. Many furnishings were carved directly out of the rock in a clean, simple arrangement. Fabrics were sumptuous and soft-looking, and the view out the fairy-wing windows was peaceful and relaxing.

The others who had been traveling with him offered gracious bows at the doorway and then left, all except Claire.

“Come,” she said brightly. “I will show you the rest of your new home.”

On to the Next Chapter