Fic: The Raggedy Edge (4/9)
Title: The Raggedy Edge
Author: Annerb
Summary: During a rescue mission gone awry, Sam and Jack end up stranded in another galaxy where they find themselves passengers on a ship called Serenity.
Wordcount: 40,000+
Rating/Warnings: Older teens for swearing in multiple languages, violence, torture, and such.
Categorization: SG-1/Firefly Crossover, AU, Action/Adventure, Drama
Pairings: BOB. Sam/Jack established relationship, hints of Daniel/Vala, Kaylee/Simon, Mal/Inara, and Jayne/Everyone (at least in his mind).
Season: Post-BDM for Firefly, early season 9 for SG-1
The Job
Four days after Jack and Sam boarded Serenity, the ship touched down in the crowded, dirty urban sprawl of a border transport hub. From the brief glimpse Jack managed to get of the city, it was the same bizarre conglomeration of too many unwashed bodies, questionable cuisine, and bright neon signs that he and Sam had seen on any number of border planets during their long game of hide and seek with the Alliance.
Mal had informed them that in order to ensure Sam access to the prison on Shanxi, she would have to arrive by transport from a neighboring planet, mostly to lend credence to the entire hoax. Of course, this was just another part of this entire plan that Jack did not like. There was far too much chance that someone might recognize Sam from the bounty lists in such a centralized place. Not to mention that she was going to be traveling with only Jayne as companion.
No, there were a hell of a lot of things Jack hated about this plan. Not the least of which that he was still stuck in bed with stitches holding his insides together, watching Sam get ready.
“Creepy,” Jack said, his eyes trailing over the standard Alliance uniform Sam was wearing. She had her hair slicked back into a tight bun low against her neck. The severe hairstyle seemed to sharpen the planes of her face, the grey of the uniform washing out her skin. She almost looked like a stranger. “I think I prefer the skirt.”
She rolled her eyes and at least that looked familiar. “Well, I still have it. You can borrow it anytime you like.”
Jack opened his mouth to protest, but snapped it shut again, realizing there was little point. Sam was firmly in mission mode, which usually took her sense of humor and whimsy as its first victims. Plus, the vision of him wearing her skirt was just mean and now firmly entrenched in his mind.
“I still don’t like the idea of you going down there with them alone,” he said against his better judgment. Letting her go alone made his gut twist, went against every fiber of his being. He knew she didn’t want to do this, but still he couldn’t help harping on it, no matter how much he knew she didn’t want to hear it.
“And that might mean something if you were able to stand for ten minutes all together, but as it is, I don’t see that we have much of a choice,” she said, her back tense and her motions jerky as she finished filling a small matching grey pack with the necessary tools.
Shit. Jack didn’t need her to tell him to know he was in no way helping the situation. Once again.
“Hey,” he said, snagging her hand as she passed by, not really wanting to leave it like this. “Sam.”
She closed her eyes, letting him tug her down next to him and leaning slightly into him as his arm went around her shoulders. He pressed his lips to her temple, but the tension in her shoulders just refused to leave.
“Just…be careful, okay?” he whispered against her hair.
She nodded, her fingers reaching out to tangle with his. “I promise.”
+++
Mal shifted his weight to his other foot, grimacing at the explosion of pins and needles in his newly unburdened leg. Settling once more behind the rock, he glanced at his watch yet again, and lifted the binoculars to peer at the building down in the valley below.
Shanxi. The Holy Grail of jobs, something few had even been able to dream of pulling off. It was enough to bring a smirk of pride to Mal’s face.
The Shanxi job had popped up in various smuggler’s grapevines over the last few months, a challenge passed from mouth to mouth, shared over campfires and whispered about in bars, more as a fairytale than anything. The job seemed that insurmountable to most folks. For Mal though, it had always been something more. There was a time he would have avoided this sort of high profile score like a starved Reaver with a bone to pick, but Serenity had been hurting since their run in with the Agent, hurting in a way he wasn’t sure how to fix. A successful job and a huge pay off could go a long way, even if it was more distraction than rehabilitation in the end. Stability was a place to start at least.
Most days, carrying on was the only therapy Mal knew.
He focused the binoculars down on the scene below. The administration building sat adjacent to the bulk of the prison, an imposing solid grey block of a building that looked a bit like it had always sat there, having grown out of the surrounding scrub.
It was like this on some rim planets, where the place just refused to accept terraformation, at least not quietly. The air was just a little too dry, bitter on the tongue, and the brittle plain was prone to sandstorms. One was just beginning to build around them as the appointed hour neared.
Sam had gone ahead to the local depot, her arrival there cementing her cover as just another Alliance gopher gaining access to the facility under the guise of upgrading some of their systems. They’d paid a pretty penny for her false credentials, but if they pulled this off, it would be more than worth it.
The decision not to send Sam on her own was easy to make, it was the question of who to send along as her chaperone that was a might trickier.
He’d ended up sending Jayne to watch her, trailing a careful distance behind. Mal knew he didn’t have to spell it out to Jayne; he was as self-serving and paranoid as any of them. He would make sure she made it to the planet, before hooking back up with Mal and Zoe. From there, they would just have to trust Sam on her own, as they didn’t have the resources to smuggle two people inside the compound.
Now they just had to hope she was as good as River claimed.
Once inside, Sam was to access the systems and shut off the exterior locks and alarms on a small service door. Then Mal and Zoe were to go inside, find the correct box, grab it, and go. Simple. Easy.
In theory.
Through the growing haze, Mal caught the flicker of the exterior lights, once, twice, and then a third time.
“Sir,” Zoe said, making sure he caught it.
Mal nodded. “She’s in place.”
Despite himself, Mal felt a beat of optimism. This just might be it, the ultimate score. Next to Zoe, Jayne pulled out Vera, wrapping the weapon carefully with cloth against the swirling dust.
“Let’s go,” Mal said.
They slipped out into the growing storm.
+++
So far things had gone smoothly. It was a bit nerve-wracking to stroll into an Alliance detention facility, especially since Sam had spent the last six months trying to avoid ending up in a place just like this. Despite any lingering nerves, she managed to keep her cool. She’d become pretty adept at pretending to be someone else. It was Sam she lost sight of some days.
For the last hour she’d been crouched in a small auxiliary control room, ostensibly upgrading software for the sanitary systems. The strange thing was the fact that the mundane systems like sanitation and ventilation and lights were no different than any other standard Alliance technology she’d seen. It was only the security systems, particularly the ones in the storage area and prison cells in the lower subbasements that demonstrated anything remotely related to Ancient technology. It was a weird system, the one underlying the other, almost hidden. If Sam hadn’t known what to look for, if she was really the low level tech she was pretending to be, she might not have seen it at all.
But she did know it was there, so after clearing the way for Mal and the others to get in to the storage facilities, Sam spent the rest of her hour poking around the hidden systems, trying to make sense of it. The integration of Ancient code and technology was clumsy at best. There was only the occasional use of a crystal as a cobbled together power source, but most of the circuitry was still silicon based, even if a more advanced application than they used back home on Earth. Other than that, there was simply a thin veneer of not-quite-right Ancient base code adding an extra level of protection, like whoever had implemented it had been flying blind, using a technology they didn’t quite understand.
Sam just couldn’t quite make heads or tails of it. She jotted down some notations before turning her attention back to the surveillance cameras. She was also making a copy of the Alliance mainframe in hopes that she might find some mention of Daniel when she got the chance to comb through it later.
Like the security system, some of the surveillance was on a separate circuit as well, in particular the ones dedicated to the sub-basements. Sam flipped through the available camera angles, most of which revealed nothing but empty chambers or the occasional staff member in white lab coats rather than Alliance guard uniforms.
She flipped through the last ten cameras, only to freeze.
Was that?
She clicked back to the previous view as her brain began to process what, or rather who she’d just seen.
“Shit,” Sam breathed.
Vala Mal Doran.
Other than Daniel’s near murderous descriptions, Sam had only ever seen photos of the woman, but there was no mistaking her sitting in that tiny cell. Of all the prisons on all the planets… Sam couldn’t quite decide if this was a stroke of good luck or a really, really bad sign of things to come.
Like they really needed any more bad luck.
With her heart in her throat, Sam queried the computer mainframe, searching for Daniel’s name among the list of prisoners. She was more disappointed than she should have allowed herself to be when the query returned negative. Pull it together, Sam, she chided herself. They were not going to just trip over him one day.
Vala Mal Doran and the memory core would have to be enough for now. At least it was a trail to follow, which was a hell of a lot more than what they’ve gotten so far.
Sam stared at the video feed of Vala, her fingers dancing out a staccato on her knee. By her calculations, the files shouldn’t take more than five minutes to finish cloning. Which left her at least fifteen minutes until rendezvous time. She just might have time for both. There was just the small problem of how Mal would react to finding himself with yet another passenger.
Sam needed Mal and his continued latitude to get off this God-forsaken rock.
“Screw it,” Sam said. Pulling up a schematic of the lower floors, she tracked the path to Vala’s cell. The fact that she was in one of the lowest levels, held separate from the main population of the prison, would make a break out at least possible. It wouldn’t take much to disable the isolated circuit in the lower floors. Of course, making an exit would be another thing all together.
Once it was done, Sam yanked the memory core, and quickly repacked her bag. She just might be able to get there and out again without getting caught.
She could deal with Mal Reynolds later.
+++
From her perch in the corner, Vala heard the scrape of metal on metal as someone pulled open the observation peephole into her cell. She didn’t glance up to see who was looking in on her, just continued to stare at the small square of light on the floor as it made its long progress across the floor, marking yet another day.
She’d learned only too well how to make herself small and uninteresting since she arrived in this godforsaken place.
She only looked up when the lock groaned and the door pushed reluctantly open. She drew her legs into her chest, her fingers digging into her shins. The figure that entered the cell was unfamiliar to her, Alliance uniform or not.
“Vala?” the specter said, stepping into the room with the door still partially ajar.
The woman’s next words went unheard, Vala’s entire attention riveted on the small slice of open space behind the guard, the sloppy, lax behavior suggesting that enough time had passed since her last attempted escape for the guards to get lazy.
Shifting onto her feet, Vala crouched unobtrusively, judging the reaction of the guard. The woman was still moving cautiously across the room.
Fool.
Vala sprang into action the moment the other woman was close enough. She got one good hit in, low in the belly, before her opponent sidestepped, using Vala’s own momentum against her, slamming her into the opposite wall.
There was the clear click of a weapon arming in the silence that followed, the press of metal against Vala’s skull unmistakable.
“Vala Mal Doran,” the guard said, the words low and clear. Out of the corner of her eye, Vala could still see a sliver of the hallway through the door. The voice continued, a heavy whisper against her ear. “I know you have no reason to believe I am who I say I am, but what are your senses telling you?”
The guards didn’t usually talk. Psychological warfare was too sophisticated for their meager intelligence. So despite her skepticism, Vala quieted for a moment, just long enough to absorb the hushed keen of the storm outside, the rough stone under her cheek, and there, right underneath, something else entirely. Something she hadn’t felt for well over a year, not since before she came to this galaxy.
The fact that this galaxy seemed Goa’uld free might just be the only thing going for it.
The gentle tingle up her spine cleared Vala’s head, momentarily erased the mindless urge to escape. She relaxed against the stone in front of her, and felt the gun leave the back of her head.
“Now, why don’t we try those introductions again,” the woman said, letting up just enough for Vala to turn and see her face. “I’m Sam Carter.”
If it weren’t for the undeniable sensation telling her a Goa’uld had once possessed this woman, Vala would have assumed it was some trick. “Daniel’s friend,” she said, words thick on her tongue.
“Yes,” she confirmed, still looking wary, but backing slowly away.
Vala let her eyes close, just a moment of sheer, crawling relief. Daniel had always said his team would come, but she hadn’t believed him. Apparently she had been wrong. And if Sam Carter had come here for her…
“Daniel?” Vala asked.
Sam shook her head. “Not yet,” she said, her hand disappearing momentarily behind her to pull clear with another weapon, which she handed to Vala. “What do you say we get out of here?”
Vala nodded, hefting the comforting weight of the weapon in her hand. Just leaving the cell was enough to bring some semblance of control back. Each step she took brought a surge of energy into her limbs, her mind whirring back into motion.
Vala followed behind Sam, reassured by her steady, competent movement through the halls. Vala glanced at the cameras lining their path, but all of them seemed to be off. Apparently this was not Sam’s first prison break out, as she seemed to know what she was doing.
Two levels up, they reached what looked like an emergency exit that hadn’t been used in centuries, if the rust was any indication. Wrenching a nearby panel open, Sam fiddled with it while Vala kept one eye on their back. With a crackle of sparks, the entire section went dark as the door groaned open, just enough to let a shaft of natural light into the hallway.
Next to her, Sam grimaced. So much for a stealthy exit. “Crude, but effective,” Sam said, pulling a few beige pieces of fabric out of her bag, handing one to Vala.
They both wrapped the cloth tight around their heads, leaving a small slit of space to see out. Outside, the storm still had not blown itself out completely, a lucky break that would cover their retreat. Sam pulled a device out of her pocket, a slow beeping noise coming to life, guiding them in the right direction of their escape, Vala could only hope.
Together, they pushed out into the storm. After ten minutes struggle against the winds and sand, the dark outline of a vehicle of some kind began to grow in the weak protection of a low bluff. There was already one man standing next to it.
He shouted something at them Vala couldn’t quite make out, but Sam just ignored him.
“Get in,” Sam yelled in her ear.
They didn’t have long to wait in the partial protection of the vehicle, as another group of people approached just as she took a seat.
“Who the hell is this?” one of the new arrivals demanded, his eyes taking in Vala’s prisoner garb.
“She’s with me,” Sam said, her hand tight around Vala’s upper arm.
The man looked like Sam had started talking in tongues. “Are you completely insane?”
“She comes with me,” Sam repeated with unbending stubbornness that reminded Vala of Daniel. Maybe it was a Tau’ri trait. Might explain how they managed to finish off the Goa’uld.
The man’s face seemed to split with rage and Vala thought he was dangerously close to shooting Sam. Or leaving them both behind.
“Captain!” another woman shouted.
He glanced back between the two women, letting out a long string of Chinese.
“You plan on taking off at any point?” Sam asked. “Or are we just waiting for the Alliance to figure out what just happened?”
The man nodded at the woman behind him, a tight, angry gesture, and the woman dropped into the driver’s seat. Then he leaned into Sam, his voice gravel above the ferocity of the storm. “You and I are going to have some serious words when we get back to Serenity. You got me?”
Sam didn’t back away from the assault, simply shifted slightly in front of Vala and shouted back, “I can’t wait!”
The roar of the vehicle kicking into a stumbling trot killed off any further opportunity for yelling and Sam settled back into the small space next to Vala, one arm still reaching across her as if making a visual claim.
Vala stared through the small slit in her wrap and watched each of the people in the small vehicle.
It was pretty clear to her that she’d left one prison for an even stranger one.
:: next::
Author: Annerb
Summary: During a rescue mission gone awry, Sam and Jack end up stranded in another galaxy where they find themselves passengers on a ship called Serenity.
Wordcount: 40,000+
Rating/Warnings: Older teens for swearing in multiple languages, violence, torture, and such.
Categorization: SG-1/Firefly Crossover, AU, Action/Adventure, Drama
Pairings: BOB. Sam/Jack established relationship, hints of Daniel/Vala, Kaylee/Simon, Mal/Inara, and Jayne/Everyone (at least in his mind).
Season: Post-BDM for Firefly, early season 9 for SG-1
The Job
Four days after Jack and Sam boarded Serenity, the ship touched down in the crowded, dirty urban sprawl of a border transport hub. From the brief glimpse Jack managed to get of the city, it was the same bizarre conglomeration of too many unwashed bodies, questionable cuisine, and bright neon signs that he and Sam had seen on any number of border planets during their long game of hide and seek with the Alliance.
Mal had informed them that in order to ensure Sam access to the prison on Shanxi, she would have to arrive by transport from a neighboring planet, mostly to lend credence to the entire hoax. Of course, this was just another part of this entire plan that Jack did not like. There was far too much chance that someone might recognize Sam from the bounty lists in such a centralized place. Not to mention that she was going to be traveling with only Jayne as companion.
No, there were a hell of a lot of things Jack hated about this plan. Not the least of which that he was still stuck in bed with stitches holding his insides together, watching Sam get ready.
“Creepy,” Jack said, his eyes trailing over the standard Alliance uniform Sam was wearing. She had her hair slicked back into a tight bun low against her neck. The severe hairstyle seemed to sharpen the planes of her face, the grey of the uniform washing out her skin. She almost looked like a stranger. “I think I prefer the skirt.”
She rolled her eyes and at least that looked familiar. “Well, I still have it. You can borrow it anytime you like.”
Jack opened his mouth to protest, but snapped it shut again, realizing there was little point. Sam was firmly in mission mode, which usually took her sense of humor and whimsy as its first victims. Plus, the vision of him wearing her skirt was just mean and now firmly entrenched in his mind.
“I still don’t like the idea of you going down there with them alone,” he said against his better judgment. Letting her go alone made his gut twist, went against every fiber of his being. He knew she didn’t want to do this, but still he couldn’t help harping on it, no matter how much he knew she didn’t want to hear it.
“And that might mean something if you were able to stand for ten minutes all together, but as it is, I don’t see that we have much of a choice,” she said, her back tense and her motions jerky as she finished filling a small matching grey pack with the necessary tools.
Shit. Jack didn’t need her to tell him to know he was in no way helping the situation. Once again.
“Hey,” he said, snagging her hand as she passed by, not really wanting to leave it like this. “Sam.”
She closed her eyes, letting him tug her down next to him and leaning slightly into him as his arm went around her shoulders. He pressed his lips to her temple, but the tension in her shoulders just refused to leave.
“Just…be careful, okay?” he whispered against her hair.
She nodded, her fingers reaching out to tangle with his. “I promise.”
+++
Mal shifted his weight to his other foot, grimacing at the explosion of pins and needles in his newly unburdened leg. Settling once more behind the rock, he glanced at his watch yet again, and lifted the binoculars to peer at the building down in the valley below.
Shanxi. The Holy Grail of jobs, something few had even been able to dream of pulling off. It was enough to bring a smirk of pride to Mal’s face.
The Shanxi job had popped up in various smuggler’s grapevines over the last few months, a challenge passed from mouth to mouth, shared over campfires and whispered about in bars, more as a fairytale than anything. The job seemed that insurmountable to most folks. For Mal though, it had always been something more. There was a time he would have avoided this sort of high profile score like a starved Reaver with a bone to pick, but Serenity had been hurting since their run in with the Agent, hurting in a way he wasn’t sure how to fix. A successful job and a huge pay off could go a long way, even if it was more distraction than rehabilitation in the end. Stability was a place to start at least.
Most days, carrying on was the only therapy Mal knew.
He focused the binoculars down on the scene below. The administration building sat adjacent to the bulk of the prison, an imposing solid grey block of a building that looked a bit like it had always sat there, having grown out of the surrounding scrub.
It was like this on some rim planets, where the place just refused to accept terraformation, at least not quietly. The air was just a little too dry, bitter on the tongue, and the brittle plain was prone to sandstorms. One was just beginning to build around them as the appointed hour neared.
Sam had gone ahead to the local depot, her arrival there cementing her cover as just another Alliance gopher gaining access to the facility under the guise of upgrading some of their systems. They’d paid a pretty penny for her false credentials, but if they pulled this off, it would be more than worth it.
The decision not to send Sam on her own was easy to make, it was the question of who to send along as her chaperone that was a might trickier.
He’d ended up sending Jayne to watch her, trailing a careful distance behind. Mal knew he didn’t have to spell it out to Jayne; he was as self-serving and paranoid as any of them. He would make sure she made it to the planet, before hooking back up with Mal and Zoe. From there, they would just have to trust Sam on her own, as they didn’t have the resources to smuggle two people inside the compound.
Now they just had to hope she was as good as River claimed.
Once inside, Sam was to access the systems and shut off the exterior locks and alarms on a small service door. Then Mal and Zoe were to go inside, find the correct box, grab it, and go. Simple. Easy.
In theory.
Through the growing haze, Mal caught the flicker of the exterior lights, once, twice, and then a third time.
“Sir,” Zoe said, making sure he caught it.
Mal nodded. “She’s in place.”
Despite himself, Mal felt a beat of optimism. This just might be it, the ultimate score. Next to Zoe, Jayne pulled out Vera, wrapping the weapon carefully with cloth against the swirling dust.
“Let’s go,” Mal said.
They slipped out into the growing storm.
+++
So far things had gone smoothly. It was a bit nerve-wracking to stroll into an Alliance detention facility, especially since Sam had spent the last six months trying to avoid ending up in a place just like this. Despite any lingering nerves, she managed to keep her cool. She’d become pretty adept at pretending to be someone else. It was Sam she lost sight of some days.
For the last hour she’d been crouched in a small auxiliary control room, ostensibly upgrading software for the sanitary systems. The strange thing was the fact that the mundane systems like sanitation and ventilation and lights were no different than any other standard Alliance technology she’d seen. It was only the security systems, particularly the ones in the storage area and prison cells in the lower subbasements that demonstrated anything remotely related to Ancient technology. It was a weird system, the one underlying the other, almost hidden. If Sam hadn’t known what to look for, if she was really the low level tech she was pretending to be, she might not have seen it at all.
But she did know it was there, so after clearing the way for Mal and the others to get in to the storage facilities, Sam spent the rest of her hour poking around the hidden systems, trying to make sense of it. The integration of Ancient code and technology was clumsy at best. There was only the occasional use of a crystal as a cobbled together power source, but most of the circuitry was still silicon based, even if a more advanced application than they used back home on Earth. Other than that, there was simply a thin veneer of not-quite-right Ancient base code adding an extra level of protection, like whoever had implemented it had been flying blind, using a technology they didn’t quite understand.
Sam just couldn’t quite make heads or tails of it. She jotted down some notations before turning her attention back to the surveillance cameras. She was also making a copy of the Alliance mainframe in hopes that she might find some mention of Daniel when she got the chance to comb through it later.
Like the security system, some of the surveillance was on a separate circuit as well, in particular the ones dedicated to the sub-basements. Sam flipped through the available camera angles, most of which revealed nothing but empty chambers or the occasional staff member in white lab coats rather than Alliance guard uniforms.
She flipped through the last ten cameras, only to freeze.
Was that?
She clicked back to the previous view as her brain began to process what, or rather who she’d just seen.
“Shit,” Sam breathed.
Vala Mal Doran.
Other than Daniel’s near murderous descriptions, Sam had only ever seen photos of the woman, but there was no mistaking her sitting in that tiny cell. Of all the prisons on all the planets… Sam couldn’t quite decide if this was a stroke of good luck or a really, really bad sign of things to come.
Like they really needed any more bad luck.
With her heart in her throat, Sam queried the computer mainframe, searching for Daniel’s name among the list of prisoners. She was more disappointed than she should have allowed herself to be when the query returned negative. Pull it together, Sam, she chided herself. They were not going to just trip over him one day.
Vala Mal Doran and the memory core would have to be enough for now. At least it was a trail to follow, which was a hell of a lot more than what they’ve gotten so far.
Sam stared at the video feed of Vala, her fingers dancing out a staccato on her knee. By her calculations, the files shouldn’t take more than five minutes to finish cloning. Which left her at least fifteen minutes until rendezvous time. She just might have time for both. There was just the small problem of how Mal would react to finding himself with yet another passenger.
Sam needed Mal and his continued latitude to get off this God-forsaken rock.
“Screw it,” Sam said. Pulling up a schematic of the lower floors, she tracked the path to Vala’s cell. The fact that she was in one of the lowest levels, held separate from the main population of the prison, would make a break out at least possible. It wouldn’t take much to disable the isolated circuit in the lower floors. Of course, making an exit would be another thing all together.
Once it was done, Sam yanked the memory core, and quickly repacked her bag. She just might be able to get there and out again without getting caught.
She could deal with Mal Reynolds later.
+++
From her perch in the corner, Vala heard the scrape of metal on metal as someone pulled open the observation peephole into her cell. She didn’t glance up to see who was looking in on her, just continued to stare at the small square of light on the floor as it made its long progress across the floor, marking yet another day.
She’d learned only too well how to make herself small and uninteresting since she arrived in this godforsaken place.
She only looked up when the lock groaned and the door pushed reluctantly open. She drew her legs into her chest, her fingers digging into her shins. The figure that entered the cell was unfamiliar to her, Alliance uniform or not.
“Vala?” the specter said, stepping into the room with the door still partially ajar.
The woman’s next words went unheard, Vala’s entire attention riveted on the small slice of open space behind the guard, the sloppy, lax behavior suggesting that enough time had passed since her last attempted escape for the guards to get lazy.
Shifting onto her feet, Vala crouched unobtrusively, judging the reaction of the guard. The woman was still moving cautiously across the room.
Fool.
Vala sprang into action the moment the other woman was close enough. She got one good hit in, low in the belly, before her opponent sidestepped, using Vala’s own momentum against her, slamming her into the opposite wall.
There was the clear click of a weapon arming in the silence that followed, the press of metal against Vala’s skull unmistakable.
“Vala Mal Doran,” the guard said, the words low and clear. Out of the corner of her eye, Vala could still see a sliver of the hallway through the door. The voice continued, a heavy whisper against her ear. “I know you have no reason to believe I am who I say I am, but what are your senses telling you?”
The guards didn’t usually talk. Psychological warfare was too sophisticated for their meager intelligence. So despite her skepticism, Vala quieted for a moment, just long enough to absorb the hushed keen of the storm outside, the rough stone under her cheek, and there, right underneath, something else entirely. Something she hadn’t felt for well over a year, not since before she came to this galaxy.
The fact that this galaxy seemed Goa’uld free might just be the only thing going for it.
The gentle tingle up her spine cleared Vala’s head, momentarily erased the mindless urge to escape. She relaxed against the stone in front of her, and felt the gun leave the back of her head.
“Now, why don’t we try those introductions again,” the woman said, letting up just enough for Vala to turn and see her face. “I’m Sam Carter.”
If it weren’t for the undeniable sensation telling her a Goa’uld had once possessed this woman, Vala would have assumed it was some trick. “Daniel’s friend,” she said, words thick on her tongue.
“Yes,” she confirmed, still looking wary, but backing slowly away.
Vala let her eyes close, just a moment of sheer, crawling relief. Daniel had always said his team would come, but she hadn’t believed him. Apparently she had been wrong. And if Sam Carter had come here for her…
“Daniel?” Vala asked.
Sam shook her head. “Not yet,” she said, her hand disappearing momentarily behind her to pull clear with another weapon, which she handed to Vala. “What do you say we get out of here?”
Vala nodded, hefting the comforting weight of the weapon in her hand. Just leaving the cell was enough to bring some semblance of control back. Each step she took brought a surge of energy into her limbs, her mind whirring back into motion.
Vala followed behind Sam, reassured by her steady, competent movement through the halls. Vala glanced at the cameras lining their path, but all of them seemed to be off. Apparently this was not Sam’s first prison break out, as she seemed to know what she was doing.
Two levels up, they reached what looked like an emergency exit that hadn’t been used in centuries, if the rust was any indication. Wrenching a nearby panel open, Sam fiddled with it while Vala kept one eye on their back. With a crackle of sparks, the entire section went dark as the door groaned open, just enough to let a shaft of natural light into the hallway.
Next to her, Sam grimaced. So much for a stealthy exit. “Crude, but effective,” Sam said, pulling a few beige pieces of fabric out of her bag, handing one to Vala.
They both wrapped the cloth tight around their heads, leaving a small slit of space to see out. Outside, the storm still had not blown itself out completely, a lucky break that would cover their retreat. Sam pulled a device out of her pocket, a slow beeping noise coming to life, guiding them in the right direction of their escape, Vala could only hope.
Together, they pushed out into the storm. After ten minutes struggle against the winds and sand, the dark outline of a vehicle of some kind began to grow in the weak protection of a low bluff. There was already one man standing next to it.
He shouted something at them Vala couldn’t quite make out, but Sam just ignored him.
“Get in,” Sam yelled in her ear.
They didn’t have long to wait in the partial protection of the vehicle, as another group of people approached just as she took a seat.
“Who the hell is this?” one of the new arrivals demanded, his eyes taking in Vala’s prisoner garb.
“She’s with me,” Sam said, her hand tight around Vala’s upper arm.
The man looked like Sam had started talking in tongues. “Are you completely insane?”
“She comes with me,” Sam repeated with unbending stubbornness that reminded Vala of Daniel. Maybe it was a Tau’ri trait. Might explain how they managed to finish off the Goa’uld.
The man’s face seemed to split with rage and Vala thought he was dangerously close to shooting Sam. Or leaving them both behind.
“Captain!” another woman shouted.
He glanced back between the two women, letting out a long string of Chinese.
“You plan on taking off at any point?” Sam asked. “Or are we just waiting for the Alliance to figure out what just happened?”
The man nodded at the woman behind him, a tight, angry gesture, and the woman dropped into the driver’s seat. Then he leaned into Sam, his voice gravel above the ferocity of the storm. “You and I are going to have some serious words when we get back to Serenity. You got me?”
Sam didn’t back away from the assault, simply shifted slightly in front of Vala and shouted back, “I can’t wait!”
The roar of the vehicle kicking into a stumbling trot killed off any further opportunity for yelling and Sam settled back into the small space next to Vala, one arm still reaching across her as if making a visual claim.
Vala stared through the small slit in her wrap and watched each of the people in the small vehicle.
It was pretty clear to her that she’d left one prison for an even stranger one.
:: next::