Translations (6/19)
Title: Translations ( Table of Contents)
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Nothing you recognize is mine. I gain nothing of material value from this.
Pairings: Gen.
Chapter1 Chapter2 Chapter3 Chapter4a-- 4b Chapter5 Chapter6
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Chapter 6: Naquadah
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23 October 1997; P3X-593; SGC, Earth; 1400 hrs
"You're a very lucky man, Hagman," Colonel O'Neill said in a dangerously casual tone as they made their way toward the Stargate on P3X-593.
"Colonel," Lieutenant Hagman replied, sounding genuinely upset, "I'm sorry, sir. It was a misunderstanding--"
"If you keep talking, Lieutenant, you're going to get a lot less lucky," the colonel told him. Once at the DHD, Sam reached for her MP5 and stood guard while Teal'c did the same several meters away. When several seconds passed without anything happening, she heard, "Oh, for cryin' out loud, Hagman! What the hell are you waiting for?"
Her patience having now dissipated as completely as the colonel's, Sam dropped her gun and turned. "I'll dial it up, Colonel," she said, hitting the glyphs for Earth.
"I--was I supposed to do that, ma'am?" Hagman asked her in an undertone.
"Never mind, Lieutenant," Sam snapped, slamming her palm down on the central crystal harder than strictly necessary. "Just get your GDO out."
The colonel was still muttering when he disappeared into the wormhole, Teal'c on his heels. Hagman only needed another glare from her before he followed, and Sam's last thought before she stepped through was that, with their run of luck on this trip, she wouldn't be surprised if the man had sent the wrong IDC.
Which would be unfortunate but, actually, probably the best, or at least most painless, possible way to die, since they'd hit the iris before their neurons reintegrated enough to tell them that they were dead. Unless, of course, there was some kind of sequence to the reintegration process that made the pain receptors materialize first, making it the most painful possible way to die. It would be interesting to test, but she suspected it might be hard to find volunteers, not to mention collect reliable data afterward.
As it turned out, Hagman was better at using the GDO than he was at communicating with the Shavadai people, so they emerged whole and fully materialized on the ramp of the SGC, which was nice.
"Welcome back, SG-1," General Hammond greeted them. "Was your mission successful?"
"Oh, was it," Colonel O'Neill said with a fake smile that made Sam want to cringe, even if she agreed. "Carter got sold into slavery, which sparked a women's rights movement that collapsed in flames--well, rocks, actually--about twenty-four hours later. There was also this nifty plant--what did it do, Carter?"
"Looked like an anesthetic, sir," she said.
"An anesthetic!" he said brightly. "We were going to bring some back with us, but they didn't really like us too much after an interesting incident of misunderstanding"--Hagman winced--"so, you know, empty-handed. And by the way, if you do decide to send someone back to P3X-593 to try again, I'd advise using a different translator and not bringing up Captain Carter's name. Sir."
Something about Teal'c's eyes looked very faintly amused at this, and he hadn't moved his gaze from Lieutenant Hagman, which Sam took to mean he was feeling some serious schadenfreude where the man was concerned. She would have felt bad, except that she almost had her carotid unwillingly introduced to the sharp edge of a knife--her hands were not shaking; it was just adrenaline and annoyance--so she only cleared her throat embarrassedly.
"Right," the general said, scowling in a way that said he wasn't sure if Colonel O'Neill was mad or just mad. "You're going to have to walk me through this one. We'll debrief at 1600 hours. I expect you all to have cooled off by then. Dismissed."
The colonel left the embarkation room without another glance at their translator, who hadn't been able to translate directly and had instead ended up messing things up when he'd thought he understood another language that someone on the other side spoke--
No. The colonel had ragged on Hagman for hours, and he'd probably be getting flack from people for a while. He'd screwed up, but rationally, they couldn't keep him out in the cold forever. He'd tried his best in a situation he couldn't have been prepared for, and he'd figured it out eventually, more or less.
Of course, Sam had had to wear a ridiculous dress and gotten sold like property to a psycho who had actually stoned his daughter nearly to death...
Okay. Walking away would be best this time.
"Lieutenant," she said evenly as she passed, then followed Colonel O'Neill's path out of the 'gate room.
O'Neill hadn't gone far. The fake smiles and sarcasm were gone, and now he was just Very Pissed Off. "Carter," he acknowledged.
"Sir," she answered cautiously. He was pacing, which wasn't totally unusual, except that he didn't usually do it in the hallway. This restricted him to about two paces in either direction, made her a little dizzy, and also served to block the hallway, although she was relatively certain neither of those was actually his intention.
"We're getting a new guy," he told her.
"Sir?" she repeated.
"Hagman, Carter."
"We're getting a new Hagman?"
"Yes," the colonel barked, then whirled on her. "No! We're getting a new not Hagman." At least he wasn't pacing anymore. Stalking toward the gear-up room was an improvement. Probably.
"Right. Sir..." Sam said.
"He screwed up," the colonel told her.
"Yes, sir, but he also managed to save Nya's life."
"Which wouldn't have been in danger in the first place if he hadn't accidentally promised a member of my team in return for sample of the magic plant! How does that even happen? Have you somehow forgotten the part where you were sold and almost got your throat slit? Because I sure haven't!"
She hadn't gotten her throat slit because Hagman had finally worked out a few words in some language that a couple of the Shavadai understood, and he'd tried to tell them it was all a mistake. No one had really cared to listen to him; it had, however, distracted Turgan long enough for Sam to fight her way away from the knife at her throat so they could run like hell, which had given Abu time to free Nya and carry her to safety before she could be killed.
"He made a mistake, sir," she said carefully. "Ultimately, he saved my life. Maybe Hagman isn't the one we want leading negotiations for us, but it doesn't mean he's not a good soldier." Frankly, Sam wouldn't want the colonel leading negotiations for them, either, but she thought it would be prudent not to mention that.
Colonel O'Neill was staring at her as if it were the most senseless thing he'd heard all day. "Between you, me, and Teal'c, I don't need another soldier. He's supposed to lead negotiations. He's the anthropologist."
Which definitely made much less sense than what she'd said. "He's a translator," she said, "and he's not a trained diplomat. All due respect, I'm not sure it's fair to act like he should automatically be our...negotiator, at least in cases when any of us is equally capable of communicating with the natives." Or equally incapable, as the case had happened to be.
There was a pause as he shrugged out of his tac vest, and then, "Huh."
"Colonel?"
His anger died down a little. "You know," he said, sounding more casual again, and thankfully, this time it was the I'm-very-ticked-off-but-not-mad-enough-for-homicide sort of casual, "this is the first time I've gone through the Stargate to establish a peaceful relationship with the people on the other side since Abydos. And even that wasn't strictly a meet-and-greet type of trip."
Sam wondered what that was supposed to mean, and then realized--"So, because the Jacksons acted as the linguists, diplomats, and cultural experts on that trip and were in charge of the DHD..."
"Yeah. Took care of all the non-combat stuff, basically."
"Maybe we shouldn't have expected Lieutenant Hagman to be able to do all that, sir. He probably didn't even realize we expected it of him," she added, a little more cautiously, because it was too close to direct criticism of a superior's management of the situation.
Teal'c was coming into the room as well. The colonel looked up at the Jaffa, then back to her, and instead of taking offense, he said, "I still don't want him with us."
Surprisingly, since Teal'c seemed to like staying on the sidelines during debates, at least when he wasn't looking to kill Goa'ulds, he commented, "I am in agreement with Colonel O'Neill."
Sam turned to face both of them at once. "I realize that mission didn't go down like it should've, but don't you think it's a bit much to expect someone to be able to handle all non-military aspects? We might as well pick out a civilian, multilingual diplomat, then. Maybe the Jacksons did it, sir," she directed to the colonel, "but we're not likely to find someone who can replace them."
"True," he said, though the triumphant finger in the air told her that this didn't mean he was backing down. "But the point of a fourth member was to have someone who could take point in meeting the natives. If he's not going to be able to do that, why should we keep him?"
"He's another pair of eyes and arms, sir," she suggested, though she knew the lieutenant's skills in combat paled beside O'Neill's, not to mention Teal'c's. Even Sam, who had flown support planes in the Gulf but spent most of the rest of her service in a lab, had more combat experience--and was a better shot under pressure, which they all knew firsthand now--than Hagman.
"It's not worth the trouble," O'Neill decided.
She glanced at Teal'c to see what he thought; he simply stared back.
Actually, Teal'c had been standing a little closer to her than usual since that near-execution experience in Turgan's tent; in fact, the colonel had, as well, after the first fifteen minutes when he'd growled and walked about twenty feet ahead of everyone. A big part of her was tempted to agree with them; another part thought that Hagman should be given a chance, and that he shouldn't be tossed out because his mistake--which had had bad consequences but hadn't been malicious or even careless--had affected her.
Part of what Sam hated the most was that she'd been the one tied up and held helpless, and dressed like a piece of property for sale all the while. She was a capable officer and damn good in a fight, and if she was going to prove it among the men here, some of whom were already muttering about sending a woman through the Stargate and into combat...
"Carter," the colonel said exasperatedly, "one of our team could have died because of that mistake. He sold you out. Literally."
"Not on purpose, sir," she said, which sounded silly but was, in fact, a perfectly reasonable point.
"It's unacceptable. I want to know that if someone on my team gets screwed over, it's not by the guy next to him. Or her." He paused. "Not that I want my people to get screwed over. But if it happens, it better be by someone I can shoot without facing court-martial."
"I came out of it fine, sir," she maintained.
Colonel O'Neill kicked his locker. "Dammit, Captain, this isn't about you! I need to trust you all implicitly. I don't care if his heart was in the right place. If he can't do the job, I don't want him on my team, and if that's not fair to him, I don't care. The same thing could have happened to Teal'c and I'd still say Hagman's gone. And I'd expect you to feel the same way."
In fact, the same thing could not have happened to Teal'c, because, for one, he would never have fit into that dress. The point was clear, anyway, besides which it was nice to hear the unspoken implication that neither she nor Teal'c was someone the colonel would fight to keep off the team.
"Yes, sir. I understand," Sam finally acknowledged. Teal'c nodded once in agreement. She still thought Hagman was a good man, but the truth was that she wouldn't be terribly upset to lose him from SG-1.
"P3X-593 was only the first of many planets to which we must eventually travel," Teal'c said. "It is best to know of any weaknesses now."
"Exactly," Colonel O'Neill said.
Sam closed her locker. "I understand," she repeated, "although General Hammond may not be as pleased." She sighed. "I almost want to go back to the planet," she started.
"Because...you're nuts?" O'Neill said.
"No, sir," she replied, "but I am disappointed that we couldn't bring anything back."
"Yeah, well," he shrugged, clapping them both on the shoulder. "Can't win 'em all."
"Thus far, we have not won any at all," Teal'c informed him.
"Chulak was a win. Sort of. Look, we'll do better next time," the colonel assured him.
"I have also overheard that SG-2 was able to find several stone tablets whose writing greatly interests the researchers," Teal'c said.
Colonel O'Neill looked rather more sour at that.
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23 October 1997; SGC, Earth, 1530 hrs
SG-2's tablets were all being hoarded by the archaeo-linguistics department, which had increased its numbers from one to four (or five, depending on whether Daniel was counted) with the addition of three philologists and translators specializing in various language families, with more likely to join pending security clearance. Sam was itching to look at these rocks and do some tests on their composition--if there were new minerals to be found on other planets, they needed to know.
From what she could see in Dr. Rothman's office, however, quantitative science wasn't a great concern at the moment. She wasn't surprised to see Daniel sitting cross-legged on the floor, using a wooden chair (which looked like it might have been stolen from an adjacent office) as a table. Interestingly, Dr. Rothman was also chair-less, probably because the other two chairs in the room had stacks of books on them and the two of them clearly hadn't taken the time to either straighten up the room or steal another chair.
"So," she said, amused as both of them startled, "I see the stereotype of military tidiness isn't rubbing off on you."
"Sam!" Daniel put down a pen and jumped to his feet. He started toward her, then stopped, an uncertain look flickering in his eyes, and stayed several feet away. "Hello," he said, excitement muted but still there.
It was good to see him animated as she hadn't seen him since they'd exchanged knowledge about wormholes and mythology on Abydos. Maybe working with Rothman was a good idea. It was a matter of being active, she suspected--she knew how it felt to turn toward studies in order to feel useful.
"We got back less than an hour ago," she told him, noticing the glasses perched on his nose for the first time she could remember, then included Dr. Rothman in her gaze to ask, "Are these the tablets SG-2 was talking about? What exactly is so special about them?"
"Captain Carter," Rothman said, "the information this could give us about naquadah alone is...is..."
"Naquadah?" she asked.
"It's what the Stargates are made of," Daniel told her. "That's the name the Goa'uld gave it."
"Naquadah," she repeated. "Sounds better than 'the Stargate element,' anyway." If she'd thought of this sooner, they could have asked Teal'c about the element. He had to know something about it, since it was being mined under Goa'uld rule, and probably under Jaffa supervision.
"It's not just the 'gate element," Rothman was saying. "This is a manufacturing record of some sort--it lists different places they went to find naquadah, where not to go, and what to make, but apparently, the Goa'uld use naquadah in practically everything. There's even mention of...well, I'm not certain, but we think it says that it's in their blood..."
"I'm not sure that's literal," Daniel put in, pushing his glasses up. "It could be an expression of how important the element is to their civilization."
"Also possible," Rothman conceded. "But that's not the best part! Captain, it's a source of energy, and there are references to...to a lot of different applications."
Sam stepped in closer to study the stone on the chair Daniel had been using. "What kinds of applications? Ones we can use or replicate?" The writing on the tablet itself was incomprehensible to her, but there was English scribbled messily onto a legal pad on the floor, and she bent to pick it up. "What language is this, anyway?"
"Well, that's one of the problems," Rothman said. "Obviously, it's a hieroglyphic system, but it took us a while to string graphemes together to make meaningful words. And then we realized that part of the problem was that we...well, weren't reading it right," he finished with a chuckle. Daniel snickered, too, making Sam suspect she was missing a joke somewhere.
"You were...reading it wrong?" she tried.
"No, we were reading it left," Daniel said delightedly. "Because it looked Hieratic!" They grinned at her together, looking for all the world like they'd been working together for months and not just days. "The Goa'uld must use some variant of it we've never seen before."
Sam experienced a brief but frightening moment of understanding how Colonel O'Neill must have felt when she'd tried to explain the dialing system's backups to him and had to resist the urge to say, 'Just bottom line it for me, Jackson.' It was her own fault for asking about the language. "So..."
"At first I thought it was some form of Greek, just with a different writing system," Rothman said, "because some of the words sound similar. But then Daniel found several words that sounded like Goa'uld--"
"Some of them definitely are Goa'uld," Daniel corrected, "but I don't know nearly all of them, which means it's still just a guess for the rest."
"But a good one, until we can get verification," Rothman said, "considering that there are clear signs of Goa'uld rule in the past on the planet, and considering the Goa'uld technology that this thing mentions."
"Technology such as...?" Sam prompted.
They exchanged a look. "We're still working on that," Rothman admitted. "There's a mix of Greek and Goa'uld roots, which we'll need time--and help--with, and then there's the unknown time period--it took a while just to work out their equivalent for 'electricity'--"
"We think it's electricity," Daniel cautioned.
"We're pretty sure it's electricity. They've made power generators, explosives, and weapons that emit energy, but we're working on the rest."
"I'm still...are you sure they're talking about naquadah in all of those cases?" Daniel said, bending down to look at the stones again.
"Yes," Rothman told him, emphatically enough that Sam suspected they'd been over that before. "It's definitely the same word."
"And there is always a one-to-one correlation between lexicon and semantics, yes?" Daniel shot back. Sam decided he sounded sarcastic, which she took to mean the answer was 'no.'
"Why would you think it's not talking about the same thing?" Sam asked.
Rothman huffed. "Well, there are inconsistencies...it's a solid metal in one passage, and then a liquid in another...but it's definitely the same word. Which is significant--yes it is, Daniel! A lot of cultures would give two different names to two things with different properties, but it suggests there's something...I don't know, special about this thing. Some common property to both the liquid and the solid, you know?"
"It's possible for something to exist in different physical phases," Sam said. "Maybe the working conditions were different. Or it could just have different allotropes." She looked again at the tablet and picked it up. "I can't believe this rock--"
Daniel winced, looking warily at Rothman, who indignantly corrected, "Artifact. It was made by people."
"I can't believe this artifact," she amended, "is so intact--it's like it's never been scratched or chipped. Is that common, Doctor?"
"No, you never see that in something as old as I suspect this to be," Rothman said, excited again. "It could be because the planet seemed abandoned, but even then there should be wear from weather. They're running tests on it downstairs to see if they can determine the composition, but they do know already that there's naquadah in it. We're still working on a way of dating them."
"It looks like a missing page, doesn't it," Daniel said, frowning. "They're all the same shape, so they must go together, but there are only parts of the whole thing. I keep wanting to turn the page, but they don't all fit together."
"That's how it works sometimes in this business," Rothman told him. "Missing pieces. We're lucky to have found this much." Daniel didn't look happy with that but nodded in acceptance.
Sam carefully put the tablet back down, thinking aloud, "This is what we should be looking for when we go off-world. Imagine if we could find Goa'uld power generators or weapons and managed to reverse-engineer them--we could be using naquadah for ourselves."
"And you should test for naquadah in the soil or surroundings, wherever you go," Rothman suggested. "If we do learn how to recreate those weapons or power generators, you'll need enough of the mineral to work with. Planets with large deposits nearby are more likely to have traces in the environment."
She nodded. "I'll let the general know, so we can make sure all the teams are aware of that. God," she said, the implications starting to seep in, "this could open our first real, new area of scientific study from this program." Rothman nodded at her, then grinned approvingly at Daniel, provoking a proud smile. "Good work. How are you two settling in?"
"Good, fine," Rothman said, lowering himself into a chair, which caused the books on it to topple while he stumbled out of the way. "Uh, I haven't...finished putting everything away, yet."
"Glad to hear it, Doctor," she said, biting the inside of her cheek to prevent a laugh. "How about you, Daniel? Is your room okay?" A thought struck her. "You don't have any clothes and things, do you?"
"Oh, it's fine," he assured her, his fingers beginning to fiddle nervously with the hem of his jacket. "An airman found clothes for me, like these." He gestured to his standard black T-shirt and olive drab trousers. "It's...strange to get used to them, but they're fine."
He certainly made a strange picture, dressed like a military employee, smaller than the average man on base but with hair far from regulation and an excited bounce in his stance that would have made any drill sergeant snap at him to stand still and straight. "Well, let us know if you need anything. Either of you," she added. "I need to get down to our debriefing."
As she turned to go, Daniel called, "Sam, do you think Teal'c would help us with the Goa'uld translations afterward?"
"It wouldn't hurt to ask; I'd like to ask him about naquadah myself. We're all planning on going to the gym--the gymnasium," she added for Daniel's benefit--"for some physical training, though, so it might be a while." An odd look came over his face at that, so she reassured, "You can probably find him to ask afterward." After all, Teal'c was the only person guaranteed to be on base at all times, except when they were off-world.
"Okay," Daniel agreed. "And, your mission...uh, how did the mission go?"
She frowned. "Well, not very well, but we weren't hurt and we didn't quite start a civil war, if that's what you're asking."
Daniel looked dubious at that. "Jack looked...a little..."
"You saw the colonel?"
"He stopped in to say 'hi' before you came."
Since the colonel had little probable interest in the tablets, Sam thought that was sweet of him to have come to check on Daniel, but neither of them would want to hear it. "Well, there were some problems on P3X-593, so, no, he's not very happy. I wouldn't call it a success, exactly, but we all made it home." The curiosity in his face didn't quite disappear, but he nodded. "I've got to go or I'll be late," she told them, really leaving this time. "Nice going with the tablets."
As she left, she paused in the hall when she heard Daniel ask in a hushed tone, "Everyone goes to the...gymnasium together? The men and the women?"
"Sure? You know we don't segregate work by gender, mostly..." Rothman's confused voice answered slowly, and then he added hurriedly, "Oh, you're thinking gymnos! Uh, no. Gyms here--I mean, everyone wears clothes. You should definitely wear clothes when you go to the gym."
Shaking her head, Sam continued to the elevator, deciding she didn't really need to know.
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23 October 1997; SGC, Earth, 1830 hrs
Hand-to-hand practice that day consisted of Sam and the colonel's trying to overtake Teal'c together. It soon became clear why Teal'c had been the First Prime. Superior skill aside, his strength alone gave him enough of an advantage to win most rounds, but they'd gotten past his guard a few times as well, once they got more used to each other's styles. Eventually, the colonel suggested that Teal'c take a break so he and Sam could train together one-on-one--the only fair one-on-one match-up among the three of them unless Teal'c held back a lot--which at least let her show them that she could hold her own. She wondered whether Teal'c's strength and ability was something he got from the symbiote or from Jaffa training, or whether it was a fundamental difference in the composition of his muscles or something. Maybe all three, she decided.
The showers and lockers were shared, with a rotating schedule for men and women, so Sam left to clean up and change while the other two were still in the gym, trying to give each other pointers.
She found Daniel wandering the halls when she stepped out. Most people had left for the day, except for those on the night shift, and he was looking in the other direction when she spotted him. "Daniel," she called.
"Hello, Sam," he said, snatching back his hand from where he'd been poking at a card swipe.
"Looking for something?"
He shook his head. "I'm trying to learn where everything is," he explained, "so I won't get lost."
"You've only been here for, what, a week now? You'll learn--there's no rush."
Daniel didn't look appeased and confessed, "I got lost going to the infirmary the other day. I'd been there so many times, and I still got lost just because I was...in a hurry. I don't usually lose my way so much, but I usually have a sun to tell directions apart, too."
"If it helps any," she offered, "I'd be lost in seconds if I ever tried wandering around Abydos, so maybe it's just something you'll get used to."
He made a face. "I've lived in Nagada my whole life. I used to leave the village with people whenever they let me travel with them, but I suppose that isn't very far at all by your measure. Or by the Stargate's measure."
"I can imagine," Sam said sympathetically, even though she couldn't. She'd lived on both coasts of the country and in between by the end of high school, she'd flown in combat halfway around the world, and she'd been studying intergalactic travel for years, even if she'd only recently experienced it for the first time. Her sense of distance was very different from someone whose most fastest form of transportation had always been riding an Abydonian mastadge.
But Daniel was distracted and looking at the card reader again. "How does this work?" he asked, tilting his head to squint at it.
This she could answer. "The ID cards have a magstripe on the back with specialized, iron-based particles. By adjusting the magnetism...of..." She trailed off at his blank expression. "Well, basically, uh, the stripe on the card stores information that the reader interprets, so it knows whether or not to open the door."
Looking embarrassed, he said, "It's too complex for me to understand, yes?"
"Most people on this base wouldn't know how it works," she assured him. "If you want, I'll lend you some books on more basic physics. You can't study electricity and magnetism without knowing fundamental mechanics." It was a good thing she tended to hoard her textbooks; she might still have an introductory one floating around somewhere. "Besides," she added, "it's always a good idea to have some basic understanding of physical principles."
"You don't mind?" he said uncertainly. "Okay. Thank you."
When he shuffled his feet restlessly, though, she looked down and noticed he was standing in his socks. "Daniel! You can't walk around the base without shoes. You'll step on something sharp." Sam tried to think back, but while she knew he'd been barefoot on Chulak, she couldn't remember if he'd been wearing footwear when she'd seen him on other occasions.
Daniel winced. "I know, I know. Jack told me once before, and I'm getting used to it, but I really just forgot this time."
"Well, where are your boots?" she said.
"Uh, that's the problem."
"You lost your boots?"
"No, no. I know exactly where they are." He fidgeted sheepishly. "I took them off while we were working in Robert's office, just to rest my feet, because they feel hard and strange, and then I forgot to put them back on, and he had already gone home by the time I thought of it, so...now they're locked inside. Oh! Sam, I thought of something really interesting after you left, about the naquadah weapons we were talking about, and I was...just...what?"
She stared at him for a moment until his suddenly eager face had faded back into a questioning frown. "You're wandering around a military base in your socks, thinking about naquadah-based weapons, that's what. And for the record, I'm not sure Dr. Rothman's office floor is any safer than it is out here."
"I'm being careful about where I step," he insisted.
"You're nearsighted and not wearing your glasses."
"I'm not that nearsighted--" He cut off his protest at the look on her face, then said, "I would have gone back for them if I could have gotten in. I was going to just stay in my room, but..."
"Bored?" she guessed.
"Well, I have plenty to read, but I just wanted to walk around a little. Sk--" He paused, stared at her for a second, then looked away and continued, "Skaara often tried to make me stop reading and explore with him, but now I can't seem to sit still."
Daniel didn't talk much about his family. Not to Sam, anyway; they discussed Abydos in general, but this was an offering, she thought. As much as she appreciated it, though, she didn't have the first clue how to address the issue of his missing brother and sister.
Fumbling to answer in a way that wouldn't step into anything she didn't know how to handle, Sam said, "Well...well, this is a big base, to be fair, so there's a lot to explore. My brother could never sit still at your age, either." Mark was a safe enough topic while still acknowledging what Daniel had just said. Not safe when she was talking to her dad, but Daniel wouldn't know about any of tensions that normally made talking about her family off-limits at work. "Besides, I take it you've spent most of the day studying with Dr. Rothman. You must be learning a lot from him."
"He showed me how to use the computer while SG-1 was away." He wrinkled his nose slightly. "He doesn't let me look at the keyboard while I'm typing, though. He says it's good practice. I'm very slow at transcribing words."
"You'll pick it up fast enough," she assured him. "It's a useful tool."
"I am learning a lot, though," he said, his face lighting up excitedly. "He knows Greek--the ancient, not the modern--and he lets me read any of his textbooks when I'm done with my part of the translation assignments. It's very interesting to see how it differs from the bits of modern Greek I learned from my parents."
Sam had to laugh. "First hieroglyphs, then naquadah and now more languages. And the colonel calls me a geek."
"My parents said he used to call them that, too," Daniel confided with a lightning-quick smile. "And Robert calls me a geek sometimes."
"Now see, when a guy like Rothman calls you a geek, you know it's gotta be true," Colonel O'Neill put in. Sam turned to see him and Teal'c leaving the lockers, the former in khakis and a leather jacket and the latter in BDUs. "Carter, Daniel. We need to stop meeting in hallways like this." He paused, glancing down. "Daniel..."
"I know, Jack, shoes, but I forgot them, and they're locked inside the office," Daniel explained.
"Uh huh," the colonel said. "So, you were...hoping to find another pair on this floor?"
"No," he protested.
"You were bored."
"No, not exactly, I..." Daniel squinted up at him, then cocked his head. "Wasn't Lieutenant Hagman with you? I didn't see him in the linguistics office. I thought you were trying to train as a team."
"Yeah, well, Hammond's reassigned him to SG-4. He's going to let us operate as a three-man team for now. Three-person," he corrected with a nod in Sam's direction. "Or one-man, one-woman, one-Jaffa, one-symbiote team, so it's kinda four." Sam held back from pointing out that the symbiotic relationship meant they acted as one entity for all intents and purposes and that no one was comfortable with even the suggestion that the symbiote counted as a sentient fourth who could influence their team. "And are you changing the subject on me?"
"I was just wondering. You don't have a linguist anymore," Daniel pointed out.
"Carter speaks French."
Sam rolled her eyes. "Which I doubt we'll find off-world. And I can say 'Bonjour' and, uh... 'nous sommes votre amis'. I don't think that'll cut it."
"It's 'vos amis,'" Daniel corrected.
"My point exactly, sir."
"Junior will be our front man," O'Neill said with a straight face, as if he didn't speak Arabic himself, which had undoubtedly been more useful to him in combat than French had ever been to Sam.
"Actually," Sam told Daniel, beginning to understand that she was expected to ignore most of the silly things the colonel said, "what it really means is that, if we find...things of archeological or linguistic significance, we'll send them back here for Dr. Rothman and the rest of you in the department to analyze. Other than that, we can be assigned a temporary translator for specific purposes or collaborate with another team if we need more manpower."
It also meant that she, Teal'c, and the colonel would be stuck juggling the diplomacy most of the time. The colonel's version of diplomacy tended to involve offensive witticisms. Teal'c's mostly just involved his staff weapon, but he would be helpful for interpretation sometimes, especially on Goa'uld planets, as long as people didn't run from him just because he was Jaffa. She hoped they'd get a few easier missions before having to put their roles to a real challenge.
"But, Daniel," O'Neill said, "why don't you stop wandering around for now before you cut your foot on something and end up having to find your way to the infirmary again."
Strangely, both the colonel and Daniel kind of froze after he said that, but then Daniel shook off whatever it was and said, "I wanted to tell Sam and Teal'c, about the naquadah..."
"You're like a dog with a bone, you are," the colonel told him.
"No, I'm...what?"
The colonel sighed. "Never mind."
Daniel was apparently also learning to ignore the colonel when necessary, and he turned back to her. "Uh...okay, well, Sam, you know how Robert and I said they made energy weapons using naquadah? Well, what it actually said was something about a 'bashaak'olo.'"
Sam looked to Teal'c, who explained, "A bashaak is a wooden staff used for training Jaffa warriors. I have never heard the term bashaak'olo."
"That was confusing us, too," Daniel said, "so I thought maybe I'd parsed the words wrong...anyway, I still might be wrong, but it's so close that I think it's referring to a staff-like weapon that shoots energy."
Sam caught on. "Jaffa staff weapons. You're saying staff weapons are powered by naquadah, which would mean we have some of the material here, in the SGC, that we can analyze without scraping at the Stargate. Teal'c?"
"That is indeed the case," was the answer. "A Jaffa is forbidden to create his own weapon. However, we know that our weapons' power comes from naquadah, though there is not enough within to cause my symbiote to react in the same way that it would in the naquadah mines or near the Stargate."
"Your symbiote detects naquadah?" she asked him, dumbfounded at the idea.
"When the naquadah is present in very large quantities," he said, as if it were totally normal.
"Such as a mine or the Stargate."
"Indeed. The same occurs when I am near a Goa'uld."
"Well, I'll definitely have to examine some of the staff weapons in the lab," she said happily. They had to let her now, and if they didn't, they would once she told them the potential uses of the research.
"That'll keep until tomorrow," Colonel O'Neill said firmly. "Go home, people." Teal'c bowed and went toward his quarters. Sometimes Sam wondered if people realized he was still acting like a First Prime, just to a different commander. Granted, it was a better commander who'd give his own life before seeing Teal'c dead, but it was there, nonetheless, and the parallel made her a little uneasy at times. Maybe it would fade as they became more familiar with each other and with their own place on the team.
"Carter, don't you dare go back to your lab to play with staff weapons on your own tonight," the colonel warned her.
"No, sir," she said. "Straight home."
"Good. Daniel, you're with me."
Daniel raised his eyebrows. "I beg your pardon?"
"I'll walk you to your room," O'Neill said.
"Jack, I can--"
"I have something I should give you, kid. Just go with me, here, okay?" He ushered a bewildered-looking Daniel toward the elevator, calling over his shoulder, "C'mon, Carter, elevator's closing. Unless you want to wait for the next car?"
XXXXX
24 October 1997; SGC, Earth, 1030 hrs
The lab on sublevel 21 was getting crowded, with physicists, electrical engineers, chemists, linguists, archaeologists, a biologist, and a Jaffa warrior gathered there. Dr. Forder, an inorganic chemist who'd arrived while Sam had been on P3X-593, was overseeing the experiments, but just about everyone wanted to watch.
Well, Teal'c was mostly there just to make sure they didn't kill each other with the staff weapon they were examining, but Daniel was taking advantage of his spare moments to ask him about words that he didn't understand on the tablet.
They'd worried for a moment about breaking the crystalline encasing that held the fluid in the staff weapon, which was, in all likelihood, their first sample of liquid naquadah that they had available for study. The main problem was actually not a concern for destroying the item--though she'd seen Teal'c's eyebrows twitch a little when they'd started talking about it--but rather that they didn't know how to contain the liquid.
Would the weapon discharge if it was broken? Would it corrode a plastic container? Was the staff weapon pressurized a certain way for it to remain a liquid? Would it react with oxygen in the air? Would it react with something else? Was it toxic?
Sam pointed out that it couldn't be fatally toxic upon exposure to air if the material was mined by humans--cruel as the Goa'uld might be, it would just be impractical and inefficient if their slaves died every so often. Someone else had countered that it could be slightly toxic--not enough to kill whole populations of slaves in a short time when it was just trace amounts, but more dangerous in higher concentrations.
And then there was the question of whether they should leave it intact. It was a power source, after all; if they could harness it and use it like...like an alien battery, they should try it.
In the end, since they didn't have a clue, and since Dr. Rothman and Daniel's translations hadn't had a lot of technical information (the Goa'uld hadn't been kind enough to provide an MSDS), they'd extracted the naquadah core of one weapon and left it unbroken. From another weapon, they put the naquadah core into a glove box and stood back while someone chipped carefully at it until a crack formed, making a collective flinch ripple through the lab. The naquadah flowed out to be caught in a glass flask that was immediately sealed. When it didn't do anything interesting within the first ten minutes, it was taken into the fume hood.
Daniel murmured something, but too quietly for Sam to catch. "What was that?" she asked him.
"'Naquadah in the blood,'" he repeated. "That's what one of the tablets said. I didn't think it could be actually in the blood, but..."
Sam kept an eye on the technician who was pipetting the naquadah into test tubes for assays. "It still seems unlikely," she told him. "Just being liquid doesn't mean it can flow in our blood vessels, or that it's compatible with the body at all."
"In fact," one of the chemists said, "if it is in the blood, it's more likely to be existing as an ionic compound or a complex, not a pure liquid. It's still a heavy metal, and most of the time, that's something we don't want in our bodies."
"But there are metals that exist in the body," Rothman pointed out.
"And there are other metals that are poisonous even in tiny concentrations," the chemist replied.
"Well, Teal'c said his symbiote can sense naquadah, like in the mines, and it can also sense Goa'ulds," Daniel added. "Maybe that's how. Naquadah in the blood. It makes sense."
"This stuff comes from mines?" one of the other scientists asked. "Not on Earth, surely."
"We haven't discovered any on Earth, and the mineral kind might be a different allotrope," Sam answered. "As far as we can tell, the first mine--or at least a major one--was off-world, in an area called..."
"Nagada," Daniel interrupted abruptly.
Rothman sat up in interest. "Yes! The city of Nagada on Earth--Naqada in the Arabic, which might be closer to how this element's name is pronounced. Maybe the town on Abydos was named for its mines. It's really too bad we can't go back there and look for more information, not to mention a hefty supply of the material."
Daniel's shoulders stiffened at the reminder, but he nodded. "Too bad," he echoed.
The technician turned from the hood, holding up a tube. "From the way it reacts with our chemical indicators, it definitely looks like the same material as what's in the Stargate," she reported. "I'll want to do spectroscopic analysis to be more certain that the reaction caused the same color change, but I think it's safe to assume this is what we think it is. It'll take a while to learn more about its properties, though, and its exact composition if this isn't the pure element."
"It might be best for everyone not working on this to clear the area," Sam advised. "We don't know much about how reactive it is or how dangerous it might be."
"It can be used to make explosives," Rothman put in helpfully.
Several people took a step backward. Dr. Forder ordered, "Okay, everyone not directly handling reagents or equipment, please give us some space to work." He stared pointedly at Daniel, who looked conspicuously young among the crowd and left the room first with a grimace. Bill Lee, one of the new researchers who had experience as both an engineer and a geologist, quickly claimed the other naquadah core and took it to the electrical engineering lab.
"So Daniel," Sam said when they were outside, everyone having dispersed to various parts of the complex, "what did Colonel O'Neill want to show you last night?"
"Oh...he gave me two of my parents' journals," Daniel said, sounding confused but awed. "I thought everything got left behind when we were taken, but he had them. I had thought they were surely lost."
"I'm glad he did," she told him. "I'm sure they'd have wanted you to have them."
He pulled his glasses from his pocket and idly turned the frames around in his hands, looking troubled. "Sam...you didn't go to Abydos the first time, did you? With Jack and Major Kawalsky, and Colonel Michaels?"
"No, that was before my time. I was just starting to think about college, then." She hadn't even been sure she wanted to join the Air Force, at that point. "Why do you ask?"
"No reason." He replaced the glasses, then folded his arms as if to stop his fingers from finding something else to play with. "Do you know if...if Jack knew my parents well?"
She'd asked the colonel that same question herself, but she wasn't sure she should be the one to answer it. "The colonel went through a lot with them," she said carefully, "but if you really want to know, you need to ask him about it."
"I suppose I knew that," he admitted.
"If it helps, I don't think he'd mind."
Daniel nodded. He looked as if he wanted to say something else, then changed his mind. "What are you guys going to be doing today?"
"We're not up for a mission for a while," she told him. "I'll be in the lab or my office most of the day. The colonel has paperwork to finish, too, so...he may or may not be in his office doing that," she told him with a grin. "I'm not sure about Teal'c."
"Okay. Thank you."
"No problem. And, Daniel, let me know when you and Dr. Rothman finish working with those tablets. I'd love to examine them and pick your translations for more information." She watched fondly as he flashed her another quick smile of pride and agreed.
She turned back when he was gone, pulling the lab door open again just as she heard an explosion and saw what appeared to be a small fireball being sucked into the vents of the hood.
"What happened?" she asked, quickly noting that no one appeared to be hurt. There was smoke in the area, but no more fire that she could see. "And is that a bomb calorimeter? You know...they're not supposed to be used as actual...bombs."
"That wasn't my intention," Dr. Forder said, sounding stunned. "Well, liquid naquadah is combustible."
"I can...see that," Sam said, willing her heart rate back to normal once it was clear no one was hurt.
"That was only a very small volume of the total sample," the man told her. "We'll have to be careful with this stuff, but even if we don't learn anything else, it could always be used to make a crude bomb. We just need to find a better environment to test it in."
"Is it safe for transport?" she asked, considering the flask of liquid warily.
"Oh, the combustion reaction has a very high activation energy," he assured her. "We...might have been a little overzealous. It'll be okay unless something blows up right next to it."
A smoke alarm sounded belatedly. One of the technicians ran to turn it off.
"And," Forder added, "this hood might be out of commission for the time being."
From the next chapter (" Chal'ti"):
Teal'c remained where he sat and bowed his head, but this time, he left his eyes lowered. "I am to blame for the abduction and deaths of your kin," he said. "Were we on Chulak, you would be fully within your rights to take my life as payment."
Daniel shivered, unsettled by the even words, and swallowed. "We are not on Chulak," he pointed out, then shivered again, even more horrified by the realization that a very tiny part of him was disappointed about that.