Memories & Dust

[strangepromises]

Title: Memories & Dust
Author: strangepromises
Cover Art: yvi
Genre: Team/gen/adventure
Rating: PG13
Characters: Season Two team
Warnings: None

Summary: Immediately after the incident with Jolinar, the team are off on what should be an easy mission, which becomes more complicated after they discover what might be a valuable weapon in the fight against the Goa'uld, only to have it snatched out from under them. As Sam tries to come to terms with the aftermath of sharing her body with Jolinar, she finds herself having to navigate a strange planet and culture alone after the rest of the team are captured.

Author's notes: Many thanks to killing_rose for incredibly helpful beta work (and in particular for putting in the effort to get feedback to me during the very limited times I've been online in the last month!), and to yvi for the lovely artwork. This is the longest thing I've written by a factor of about 15, so it's been a bit of an uphill struggle at times! I started writing when I was halfway through Season 2; you can just about fit this in with later-S2 canon if you squint a little, but I won't comment further for fear of spoilers (ask in comments if you want my justification!).

"This is really fascinating," Daniel's eager voice echoed slightly ahead of Sam in the narrow space.  "It looks a lot like Khmer temple architecture of the Angkor period, but that was only about a thousand years ago and as far as we know, so far as we knew, the Goa'uld were off Earth long before that."

"What it looks like to me," Jack said, "is about to fall down. Couldn't they build a proper roof?"  He waved a hand upwards.

Sam listened to them bickering as she followed them through the low-ceilinged temple corridor, heading from the main entrance towards the centre.  She could hear Teal'c's heavier footsteps a little behind her, but beyond that and Jack and Daniel's conversation, the temple was as quiet as the rest of the planet had been since they arrived.  Bird noises were filtering in faintly from outside.  She glanced back over her shoulder towards the entrance, past Teal'c, but her line-of-sight to the hot semi-jungle outside was blocked by the huge statues which sat at every main corridor intersection.  They'd passed a couple of those by now, climbing carefully over the plinths.  At least it was cooler inside the temple than outside in the heat of the sun. 

She'd tuned Jack and Daniel out again -- the tones of their voices were enough indication that it wasn't a conversation she particularly needed to pay attention to.  She felt oddly distant, disconnected, behind the automatic pilot of watching and listening for any potential threat.  Of which there was no sign at all: the place, the planet, seemed fairly comprehensively deserted.  They hadn't even encountered any village, even the ruins of one, between the Stargate and the temple, although she assumed there must be one somewhere, if the temple was here.  But there was no sign of people, either on the MALP or once they'd got there; not even any indication of a real path away from the Stargate.  It had been clear even at the pre-mission briefing, that General Hammond was deliberately sending them on what should be a nice calm, quiet mission (walk round a deserted planet, see if anything useful had been left behind, drag Daniel bodily away from anything that he found interesting but that Jack didn't think was useful).  They, especially General Hammond, were obviously aiming to get her back in the game gradually, after -- after her brief time out.  

Not that that was necessary.  She was fine.  Jolinar -- even thinking the name made her stomach lurch slightly, but hey, that was hardly surprising, that was normal, surely? -- was gone, she was back in charge of her own body, and she was fine.  Time to get on with her job again.  

She shook her head slightly, took a deep breath, and tuned back in to the conversation in front of her.

"Ah, that's a corbelled roof." Daniel was still in full excitable-archaeologist mode.  "That's what I mean about Khmer architecture -- they built some incredible temples but kept to this really very straightforward, though I grant you a bit primitive, style of building roofs.  You see -- "

"Does 'primitive' mean 'about to fall down', by any chance?" Jack asked, interrupting what was showing every sign of becoming an extensive architectural monologue.  Sam grinned to herself, consciously trying to allow the familiar rhythms of their interactions to relax her.  She was back with her team, doing the job she was supposed to be.

Jack glanced back over his shoulder, checking on her and Teal'c, then turned back, and for a second she was back in that cell, watching from behind eyes that weren't under her control as Jack turned and walked out and the door shut behind him and she was on her own but not on her own, without her team but with that alien consciousness...  

No.  No.  She was back with her team.  That was then.   It was gone.  She looked at the corridor walls, focussing hard on the now, on what was around her, banishing anything else.  They were as primitive as Daniel was claiming the the roofs to be: made of stone blocks, tightly packed together, but piled, rather than alternating like she'd expect a brick wall at home be.  She glanced upwards, at the roof under discussion.  Blocks piled inwards with no visible support.  Her inner physicist noted automatically why it worked: the centre of gravity of each block was over the one below, so each balanced and supported the next one up, with the cap-stone supported by each side.

She could see Daniel's roll of his eyes even from behind him.  "Relax, Jack.  It's clearly stayed up for centuries.  It's not about to fall down just because we've arrived."

"Mostly stayed up," Jack corrected.  "It would be pretty clear from these big piles of stone at intervals, and, oh, I don't know, the odd hole in the ceiling, that it hasn't entirely stayed up."

There hadn't really been that many piles of stone, Sam thought; but she wasn't quite up to volunteering a contribution.  Daniel did seem to be correct, though: it was largely intact, and obviously had been there for a long time.  And abandoned for a long time too, judging by the inroads that the vegetation had made.  

"If we just tread carefully, I'm sure it'll be fine," Daniel insisted. "And really, this could be very valuable.  I suppose it could be an example of parallel development, the Khmers were strongly influenced by Brahminism and that's certainly pre-Goa'uld..."  He started moving forward again, talking as he went.

"OK, fine," Jack interrupted him, following, "but for God's sake be careful." He turned slightly and addressed Sam and Teal'c over his shoulder.  "And that goes for both of you, as well."  He paused, and turned back to Daniel.  "I'm guessing that 'very valuable' doesn't have any military connotations?" he asked, almost wistfully.

"Jack, you know that's not our only directive now..."

Sam glanced up again at the low roof, and frowned as she heard a slight creak from overhead.  

Underground, a low stone roof, and a noise from overhead.  The man next to her yelled something and shoved and she went flying, just as the roof began to crumble where she'd been standing...

She reacted to the memory without thinking, swinging round and opening her mouth to shout at Teal'c, a few paces behind her.  "Teal'c!  Get back!"

Teal'c stopped dead behind her and she shouted again, scrambling backwards away from the space between them, away from the creaking noise that had intensified.  "Get back!"

As he started to move -- away from her, thank god -- there was a series of crashes as the roof fell in, then silence.  As the dust cleared, all Sam could see was a pile of stones blocking the corridor.   She felt a moment of absolute searing panic.  

"Teal'c!" Jack barked into his radio from behind her.  "Are you OK?" 

"I am fine, O'Neill," she heard Teal'c's voice come through the radio.  "But I appear to be cut off from you."

Sam's panic died back from 'nearly overwhelming', to be replaced immediately by nausea, churning in the pit of her stomach.  That memory wasn't hers.  She couldn't, knew immediately that she couldn't, call it anything but memory; but it wasn't hers.  She'd never been in that place, never seen that man before: and yet she recognised both of them.  Not possible.  Not possible, she told herself fiercely.  Jolinar was gone.  She'd felt it -- him -- die.  She'd had the MRI -- lots of MRIs -- to prove it.  Her mind was her own again, all hers, and what in the hell was she doing with someone (something) else's  memories in there with her.  

For a moment she couldn't breathe, couldn't move.  

"Yeah. Apparently, this place wasn't all that stable after all," Jack said into his radio, and her brain snapped back into the moment.   

Okay.  Teal'c was fine.  Whatever had happened had meant that she'd been able to prevent him being buried under half the roof, which symbiote or no would have been bad.  Maybe very bad.  She could worry about exactly what had happened later.  She swallowed hard, and let her training take over, bending down to look at the rockfall.  Was it going to be possible to move it from their side?  Or was it unstable enough, still, that they needed to get the hell away as quickly as possible?  She straightened up and turned round, to find Jack looking grimly at Daniel.

"Sir," Sam said, "I don't think we're going to be able to move it from here.  That pile doesn't look all that stable, and if we start trying to shift it, there's the risk that we'll trigger another fall.  In fact, I'd suggest that we back up a bit more. I expect it'll be the same on Teal'c's side -- he should really back up a bit as well."

Jack nodded, and they moved further up the corridor, cautiously.   The rockfall was right in the centre of a long, unbroken section of corridor.  Neatly cutting off their direct route out, and no obvious paths to either side nearby.  Good job there didn't seem to be anyone else on this planet.  There weren't even any doors through to other rooms or halls nearby, which they'd seen intermittently in the corridor nearer to the main entrance. 

"Teal'c," Jack said to his radio, "did you hear that?  Carter says this side is too unstable to move, and recommended that we back up a bit.  It's probably the same on your side."

There was a pause.  "I fear Captain Carter is correct.  I too am moving back."

"And anyway, sir, even if his side isn't unstable for some reason, as soon as he got through to our side it'd be just as unsafe as if we started from here," Sam added.  She still felt faintly sick.  Quite apart from the issue of where exactly that memory/not-memory had come from, not having Teal'c there felt -- incomplete.  Unsafe.    Separated from her team again...

Jack nodded, glancing around him.  

"OK. Teal'c, can you still get out by retracing your steps back to the main entrance?"

"I believe so, O'Neill."

"Right.  You do that, and let me know when you're there.  We'll try to find another way out and meet you there."

He snapped the radio off and turned to Daniel.  

"Any ideas about exits?" he asked. 

Daniel was looking pale and shaken, but visibly pulled himself together.  

"The alignment is east-west, so I'd expect there to be another exit if we just keep going through here."  He frowned.  "It's odd, though -- I haven't seen any side doors for a little while.  Khmer architecture is usually fairly open -- lots of halls and rooms and doors."

"Right, we'll just keep going, then," Jack said.  "But this time I'm going ahead."

Daniel opened his mouth to protest, then caught Jack's glower and thought better of it.  They moved forwards, Jack keeping a careful eye on the walls and ceiling.  Sam followed behind, trying not to think about what else might be lurking in the corners of her brain, or what it might mean.  Surely just -- an aberration of some sort.  Delayed shock?  

"How did you know that was going to happen?" Jack asked her curiously.

There was no way she wanted to talk about this right now.  Or at all, really.

"I heard something, sir," she said instead.  "Noises from the roof, and -- I pretty much just reacted, sir."

Jack nodded, obviously treating it as one of those back-of-the-skull impulses that they both knew to pay attention to, even if you never quite knew at the time why it had been triggered.  "Good job you did."

"We should be nearly at the centre," Daniel offered slightly tentatively, as they came to a left-hand bend in the corridor, "though really I'd expect another door here..."

Jack grunted; and then stopped, as they came to another rockfall.  This one, Sam noticed, was piled mostly against the left-hand wall of the corridor, with enough room for them to pass next to it.  Assuming they wouldn't trigger more collapse.

"Very, very stable, yes," Jack said conversationally. 

Sam automatically moved forwards past him and Daniel to take a look. 

"That door, the one that's blocked, should lead to the central hall," Daniel said, and she could hear the frown in his voice.  "Although given that bend, maybe we're moving around the central hall...  That looks like it could be a doorway under there, though..." He trailed off, and as she turned back to them he was bending forwards to look at some of the inscriptions on the walls around the rockfall, before feeling in his pockets, pulling out his notebook and camera.

"Daniel, this is not the time!" Jack sounded increasingly annoyed.  "This lot is going to come down on us at any moment..."

"Actually, sir," Sam's voice sounded a little odd in her own ears.  Maybe the rockfall was doing something peculiar to the acoustics.  "I think it's OK -- this looks pretty stable.  Almost unusually stable -- it's like it was deliberate."  She frowned slightly.  "Anyway, we should be OK to pass it, if we're careful."  

"Let me just take some photos, Jack," Daniel was moving back along the corridor.  

"Carter, you're sure they're not about to come down on us?  Fine, you have two minutes, Daniel, and then we are leaving."

Sam trailed after Daniel and Jack, as Daniel clambered past the rockfall, carrying on along the corridor as it took left-hand bend after left-hand bend.  She mapped it in her head: it must be looping around something, but there were repeated rockfalls against the left-hand wall.  Blocked entrances?  All the falls looked like the first one -- stable.  Almost planned.  Halfway round, there was an unblocked doorway in the right wall, and then another one after the next bend, both of which Jack eyeballed, glancing pointedly at his watch.  Daniel ignored him in favour of more photographs. 

"Two minutes, Daniel!" Jack said finally.

"I think maybe if we go north through that last doorway," Daniel said, reluctantly putting his camera away.

"You said east earlier."  Jack sounded sceptical.

"Well," Daniel said.  "If this is a culture based on pre-Hindu beliefs..."  

"Fine, north," Jack cut him off, and turned through the doorway.

"You know," Daniel said, following Jack, leaving Sam to bring up the rear, "that roof really shouldn't have come down, Jack.  And for all four of those doorways to be blocked...  There must be something in that central area.  If I can translate those engravings..."

"I'm sure the fact that it shouldn't have come down would have been very reassuring to Teal'c when he was buried under half that ceiling," Jack said, and even from behind him Sam could see Daniel's shoulders twitch as he winced.  "Now, we are leaving."

They followed yet more narrow corridors through the temple, in silence.  There were more rooms on each side, and more corridors branching off, each of which Daniel tried to peer into, Sam nearly running into him each time he paused.  Sam didn't want to speak, to hear herself; she sounded wrong, in here.  Maybe it was the echoes.  Maybe it was inside her head -- no.  Her head was fine.  She was fine.  It was just the acoustics in here, and maybe a little perfectly reasonable worry about Teal'c.  (Teal'c was fine.  They'd be back together soon.) 

The northern exit was there, as Daniel had suggested.  The humid jungle heat hit them as they left the cool dark of the temple, and they headed through the undergrowth back round towards the main temple entrance.  Despite the intermittent effort of pushing their way through the patchy undergrowth, it was only another handful of minutes before they were reunited with Teal'c, patiently waiting by the main entrance.  Sam felt the tension in her shoulders drop, just a little; and then it was straight back to the gate, despite Daniel's complaints that really he could do with a few more notes, that there was something odd about those inscriptions.

"Well, then, you can send an archaeology team back there sometime.  Maybe with hard hats," Jack said.  "We are going home, now.  Carter, dial the gate."

She'd feel a bit more herself once they were back in the safety of the SGA, she assured herself as she dialed.  There was only her inside her head now. It was fine.  

#

Once back through the Stargate, it was straight off to Janet for all the usual blood tests and an MRI apiece.  Sam carefully tried to avoid thinking about anything (why they'd changed the protocol again, what they were looking for...) while it was happening, but the nausea that hadn't quite left even when they found Teal'c again was still there, curling inside her as she lay in the machine.  At least, she supposed, she'd know now if she had been taken over -- know what it felt like.  She swallowed hard and did her best to blank her mind again. 

Then off to the conference room for the post-mission briefing, which was short and to the point.  Jack reported tersely that they'd seen no sign of anyone living there, no sign of anything else that might be of ("practical", the unspoken word) use, no reason to hang around a dangerously unstable building; and Sam looked down at her hands and tried not to think about anything complicated.  

"But the inscriptions," Daniel insisted.  "And those rockfalls -- Sam agreed, they looked like they might be deliberate.  Didn't you, Sam?"

He glanced over at her for support, and Sam blinked, startled out of the slight daze she'd fallen into.  What was wrong with her?  She needed to snap out of it, concentrate. She rewound the last few seconds in her head, and nodded slowly in slightly tentative agreement.

"I'm sure I saw some very odd wordings there," Daniel carried on, looking back across the table at General Hammond and leaning forwards, "but I need some time..."

"Well," Hammond said, "let me know if you manage to get anything more concrete out of them.  Captain Carter, how are you doing?"

The depth of her immediate reaction to that surprised her, even as she knocked it back down before it could show.  She hated the idea of being checked up on like this.  Being singled out for special treatment, being separated from the others.  Like she'd been separated the moment she came back with Jolinar in her head: first only by that other presence running her body; then physically, shut in the cells.  However much she understood and approved of everything they'd done, the feeling of being cut off was still searing inside her, and to have them all looking at her, assessing her, was more than enough to bring it back up.  As if it hadn't been difficult enough right at the start, convincing everyone (convincing Jack) that she was competent at her job; just like every other damn assignment since she'd joined the USAF.  She didn't want to be treated like she was different, like she needed looking after.  There was nothing wrong with her.  

"I'm fine, sir.  Glad to be back out there."

She gave him her best cheerful, competent, smile, the one she'd learnt way back in high school, and perfected in college, long before she'd ever seen active service.  Capable, competent, Carter: no need for concern, no need for special treatment.  Nothing to see here.  

Hammond smiled back at her, and nodded.

"Glad to hear it, Captain.  Very good to have you back."

She smiled brightly at him again.  Back.  Yes, she was back, now.  Had she ever really left?  

She stood, automatically, as Hammond dismissed them, and then followed Jack out of the room.  She could go down to the lab until it was time to leave.  Plenty to occupy herself down there; to settle back into herself.  Not that she'd ever really gone anywhere.  

#

Sam woke the next morning feeling thick-headed and less than rested.  Snippets of her dreams rose and fell in her awareness as she showered and drove to the Mountain; but they felt strangely alien, out-of-place.  It felt like the first couple of nights after Jolinar had -- she grit her teeth, shut her eyes briefly.  After Jolinar had died; when she had dipped in and out of the shallows of sleep, no longer sure which parts of her thoughts, of her self, belonged to her.  She'd thought she was past that; that anything Jolinar left had faded away, lasting no longer than Jolinar had spent sharing her body.  Surely that would make sense; like what they say about getting over exes: takes as long as the relationship lasts.  (She shuddered slightly at the memory of that sharing, of being more-than-one-person in her head, and pushed it firmly away again.)  The odd sense of detachment that had settled on her during the previous day's post-mission debrief clung around her, mixing with the out-of-place feeling left by the dreams.    

She passed through the various security checkpoints between the gate and the lift on autopilot, smiling at the guards on duty, exchanging the usual chit-chat without really being aware of any of it.  She left the lift, as usual, on the floor which held the commissary, then slowed suddenly as she turned the first corner.  Maybe she would skip breakfast.  Maybe getting stuck into the work awaiting her in the lab would be the best thing to ground her.  Although she was all too aware of what Janet's likely reaction would be if she heard that Sam was skipping meals.  (She pushed aside the thought that maybe she should talk to Janet about all of this.  She was fine.  Just a bad couple of days; nothing she shouldn't be able to cope with.)

"Sam!"

She jumped, and tensed slightly, at Daniel's voice from behind her.  Why was she suddenly feeling awkward around Daniel?  She turned, shaking her head briefly to clear it as he came towards her. 

"Breakfast?" he asked cheerfully.

"I was just on my way there," Sam said, even as she kicked herself for not detouring to the lab faster.  "I'm not really that hungry though -- don't know why, but I didn’t sleep all that well last night."

He looked sympathetic.  "Coffee might help?  Not that the stuff in the commissary is what you'd call coffee, exactly…"

Sam smiled in reflex reaction, but wasn’t quite up to joining in with their usual banter about the quality of the coffee -- and indeed everything else -- in the commissary.  He was probably right, though.  Coffee would wake her up a bit, shake off this peculiar fogginess.  And maybe chatting to Daniel would help settle her a bit.  She tried, consciously, to let go of the tension in her shoulders.  She was in the Mountain, with her teammate and friend.  Safe.  Another morning like any other morning when they weren't offworld being shot at. She told herself that it was working even as she felt the muscles lock up again. 

It was still early, and there were only a small handful of people in the commissary when Sam scanned the room as they entered.  A couple of soldiers, probably just off their guard shift and prioritising food over sleep, were chatting idly at a table near the coffee pot; a few scientists were scattered around other parts of the room, staring into space or frowning over papers and laptops.  No one she knew particularly, no one other than Daniel she needed to be able to interact with, and interacting with Daniel was fine.  Should be fine. Would be fine.  No staff visible, just clanking noises and voices coming from the kitchen where they were doubtless preparing for the breakfast rush in half an hour or so.  Sam poured her own coffee and snagged one of the muffins that were already laid out, and headed for a spare table on the far side of the room, where she could keep an eye on the door.  Not that she had any reason to, she told herself, even as she pushed her chair slightly further back towards the wall, giving herself a little more space.  

"What is it you're in so early for today?" Sam asked, once Daniel had sat down opposite her.  "Those inscriptions from yesterday?"  That should be safe territory.  It wasn't that uncommon for him to be here early, but it usually meant he was hooked on some project or other.  They both had a tendency to do that: get engrossed in a problem and spend more time than was wise in the Mountain. Being ticked off about it by Janet (not that she was so good herself at clocking off on time) was one of the things they'd bonded over, early on, and Sam clung to the memory of sitting with Daniel in the infirmary, both looking at their fingers like Cassie when she'd been caught out, while Janet frowned at them, and Sam caught Daniel's eye and tried not to giggle.  That was her memory; her friend.  

"Yes."  Back to the here-and-now, and Daniel was leaning forward, gesturing with his muffin, obviously enthusiastic to share with someone.  This should feel normal, she reminded herself.  This was normal; where she belonged, letting her friend bounce ideas off her.  This was her, where she should be.  She tried to relax her shoulders again, concentrated on summoning more memories to anchor herself with: memories of all those other mornings, coffee and muffins and conversation.  

"Sam, I'm sure there's something important there."  Daniel was continuing, oblivious.  "Monuments like that, writings like that -- well, it's really about cultural memory.  You write down what you want to keep, what you want to pass on.  What's important to you as a culture.  Well -- okay, sometimes it's more about a form of graffiti, you get all sorts of things on monuments.  But inscriptions like those ones, those were very deliberate."  He smiled at her enthusiastically.  "You can almost say it's like an externalised form of human memory -- the way that cultures construct and continue themselves, like people construct and continue themselves.  Humans, cultures -- we're all the sum of our memories, really.  You construct your self from what you remember, from the connections you carry forward from moment to moment; and a society constructs itself from what it chooses to pass on from generation to generation.  I mean, a lot of that is ephemeral, it's spoken or recorded in ways that haven't survived.  But you can piece some things together from what does survive, start to generate something..."  He got a slightly self-conscious look.  "And, okay, in this case I think maybe there's something more important from the SGC's point of view, as well.  Not just archaeologically."

You constructed yourself from your memories.  What if not all of your memories were yours?  The memory from yesterday (or was it the memory of the memory?  what did that even mean? god, she really was losing it) rose back up in her head.  A place and a person she knew but didn't know; a memory that felt like memory but which she didn't recognise, couldn't place.  If you constructed yourself from your memories but then you had memories that weren't part of your self, what did that mean?  Was there after all that still someone else in her head, somehow?  But Jolinar was gone, she'd felt it, she'd seen the scans.  Just her in here.  

In which case did that mean that the memories were hers?  That by acquiring more memories you became the sum of those memories instead.  As well.  If there was more there, if it wasn't just that one little image -- would they return and change her?  Would she become -- someone else?  Something else.  

She carefully, neatly, put her half-eaten muffin down on the plate, struggling to swallow the bite she'd just taken.  She was slightly absently proud that her hands were steady as she picked up her mug and took a sip of coffee, trying to chase the muffin down.  Her head was throbbing slightly, the muscles in her jaw too tight.  

Daniel had sat back and started on his own muffin by now, and was pulling a face as he chewed, still clearly oblivious to anything that might be showing on Sam's face.  "I just -- can't quite work out what it is that it's saying," he admitted, then waved his hands.  "But there's some kind of reference to the gods, I think, which I'd expect to mean the Goa'uld, of course, but then the timing doesn't work right.  I really think it is that, though -- maybe there was a later Goa'uld presence on Earth, just much lower key.  One of those lower-ranking Goa'uld that Teal'c's mentioned, maybe."  He took another bite of muffin and talked through it.  "I just can't quite make out what it is they're saying about them.  Assuming it is the Goa'uld.  It does seem to be related in some way to Ancient Khmer, but it obviously didn't develop in quite the same direction as modern Khmer, though I think there are similarities.  And the script is different again from both..."

Sam was concentrating on listening, trying to ignore the questions roiling at the back of her mind.  "Where did you learn Khmer?" she asked.  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Jack over at the coffee machine. 

"Oh, I spent a month helping out a team at the Angkor temples one summer a few years ago," Daniel said. "It was a bit of a break from Egypt, and a chance to broaden my knowledge, make some more comparisons.  I really liked Cambodia, actually."

"Surprised you'd have wanted a break from Egypt," Jack said from a few feet away.  He put his tray onto the table and pulled a chair up.  "What's with Khmer and anchors?"

"Angkor, Jack -- it's a 9th to 14th century temple site in Cambodia.  The nearest modern city is Siam Reap, if you know Cambodia at all?"

"Ah.  This is about the stuff from yesterday, right?" Jack said, ignoring the issue of Cambodian geography, ancient or modern.  

"I really think there's something important there, Jack -- " Sam, clinging to the familiarity of her teammates' conversation, nearly smiled: Daniel was obviously winding up to explain things all over again now that he had a new person as audience.  

"Well, I'm sure you'll tell us all about it when you work it out," Jack said.

Daniel deflated slightly, then rolled his eyes.  "Fine, fine, I'll shut up.  I'm going back to my office, anyway.  I'll see you later."  He got up, taking his half-eaten muffin but leaving his coffee mug.  Obviously planning to get stuck into the good stuff he kept in his office, and on any other day Sam might go find him and demand a mug but today, somehow, the idea made her tense.  More tense.  

"Callously abandoned," Jack said lightly, taking a bite of pie.  "You going to stay to keep me company, Carter?"

It was almost tempting -- listening to the bizarrely soothing rhythms of Daniel on the track of something, of Jack playing dumb, she had felt briefly calmed.  But what Daniel had said about memories and identity was still churning in her head, and she didn't feel quite right around them (and that churned in her head too), and...  The lab.  The lab would be straightforward.  

"Afraid not, sir.  I've got to get going, as well," she told Jack.  "Lots to get going on, after," she paused, fractionally, then forced herself to continue, "after I was out last week."  Wasn't like there wasn't always too much to work on, even if you didn't spend the best part of a week either with someone else in your head or recovering from it.  

"Want to get me another piece of pie to keep me company, then, while you're on your feet?" Jack said hopefully, with no apparent reaction to the reference.  

"Get your own pie, sir," Sam said with a grin, able to fall into at least the overt rhythms of their interactions.  Even if it did feel a little hollow underneath.  She would be fine.  She was fine. 

"No respect, that's the problem here," Jack said, shaking his head.  He dug back into the pie as Sam left for the lab.  She still couldn't make her shoulders relax.

#

Sam reached the -- thankfully empty -- lab and sat down at her desk, looking over at the pile of things on the next table that were awaiting her attention.  More than enough to get on with, to keep herself occupied.  No lie told there.

She became aware, suddenly, that she was staring at the backs of her fingers, eyes unfocussed, with no idea of how long she’d been doing it.  The pit of her stomach twisted, jolting her upright, as she remembered the feeling of having someone else in her head, of being out of control of her body…

No.  This wasn’t like that.  She’d been aware every second that Jolinar had been there.  Fully aware of what was happening, even of some of what Jolinar was thinking (not my memories, not me, she thought fiercely).  She just hadn't been able to control what was going on.  Her spine crawled slightly, and she took a deep breath, trying to calm herself.  That wasn’t what was happening here.  The only person inside her head was her, now, she was sure of that.

She was tired, that was all.  She hadn’t been sleeping well even before this, other than when she was so tired that it overwhelmed the whirring of her brain, which only really happened after a mission.  There was too much to do, too much to investigate, too little time to wind down and allow herself the space to sleep.  It had just been worse recently, as she tried not to think about the idea of what her brain might do to her, might throw up at her, when she was asleep.  She could control it when she was awake: push down anything that she didn't recognise.  They weren't her memories.  Whatever Daniel's comfortably abstract theories might say, it wasn't her.  

She hadn’t been able to talk to any of them -- to anyone -- about what it had been like.  That level of knowledge of someone else, the forced intimacy.  She knew that Jolinar had been telling the truth.  Or at the least, a truth he fully believed, her internal scientist noted.  She’d always clung hard to her internal scientist, but she found herself clinging even harder, this last week.  That still small voice of logic, of sceptical doubt, of reason, of curiosity.  It was the only thing that she’d been able to use that first night after Jolinar had died -- after he had chosen to die, and however hard it might be for her to fit that with the rest of the experience, she somehow couldn't allow herself to forget the choice he'd made then -- against the maelstrom of fear and horror and confusion.  The self-doubt of questioning everything around her.  The scientist in her could cope with the questioning, could push aside the emotion and think about what she’d learnt, reassess where she stood now.  

What if Daniel was right?  What if whatever Jolinar had left behind did make her a different person?  God, what would that do to her gender, even, if she was sharing memories that belonged to a man.  She heard herself snort slightly, almost hysterically.  Bad enough to be surrounded by guys, to always be the only damn woman on the place.  Now even her alien possession was by a guy.

She shut her eyes for a moment, forced herself to take a deep breath.  It was fine.  She was still her, still Sam.  She opened her eyes again and found herself looking at the photo of Cassie, Janet, and herself that was pinned up on the wall next to her desk.  Cassie was the one person, the one thing outside of herself, that she had been able to cling to after it was over.  

Cassie’s reaction had been straightforward, during and after.  She knew that it wasn’t Sam -- wasn’t entirely Sam -- in there, and she knew what it was that was sharing her skin.  Her terror had broken Sam’s heart, but it was straightforward.  Simple.  And afterwards, she knew it was Sam again, and all was as it was before.  

The others had come back, as well, her team.  And she understood, really she did, how and why they’d reacted as they did.  She understood that Jack couldn’t save her.  That they couldn’t know -- as she did, as she couldn’t not know -- that Jolinar was telling the truth.  Jack couldn’t trust what he was hearing, and he couldn’t let the security risk out, and she was a soldier.  She knew the deal, and they both knew that.  She’d known that as he spoke to her -- not to Jolinar, but to her -- and she’d seen how it affected him.  And afterwards, once they knew she was better, was back to being her, his relief was as little spoken as his distress and regret had been, and as clear.  

Teal’c -- well, Teal’c must have seen this often enough before.  No wonder Jaffa cultivated that apparently emotionless state.  She knew Teal’c wasn’t really emotionless, knew that he cared deeply about all of them.  But also that, like Jack, he was a soldier, and soldiers make sacrifices when needed, both of themselves and of their comrades.  So it goes.  She was brought up Air Force.  She understood that.  

It wasn’t that Daniel treated her any differently afterwards, either.  But the memory of his inability to look at her/Jolinar, and then the reaction when Jolinar used Sha’re’s name, that still hurt.  She took another deep breath, trying to get herself past that sharp ache, trying not to let it hurt any more.  She knew how painfully Daniel still felt about Sha’re.  She knew that he had little to no tactical judgement on the subject, that any possibility of getting Sha're back knocked out his reasoning -- it wasn't like they hadn't seen that in the field often enough But it still hurt, that he could write her off so quickly, not even come in to see her until he was forced to; refuse to meet her (Jolinar's?) (her) eyes.  And then jump so eagerly at the possibility of getting Sha’re back.  

Sam clenched her knuckles on the desk, feeling disloyal, unfair for thinking that.  For blaming Daniel for his attachment to his wife.  And feeling even worse for allowing Jolinar access to that at the time.  It was her, Sam's, fault, that Jolinar had tried to use Daniel’s pain against him, for an alien agenda.  Surely she should have been able to resist more than that?  To keep things back?  Should have been able to avoid betraying one of her team?

Dammit, surely she should be over all of this by now.  She should have been able to get herself past her emotional reactions to what she knew must have been an awful experience for everyone involved.  Not just for her. 

It wasn't just that, though.  It was the feeling that they’d cut her out of the team without looking back.  That despite their relief when things were resolved, that the implication was she wasn’t really necessary; wasn't really a part of the team.  That she never had been, even; that this had just revealed it.  Sure, her abilities were useful, and sure, of course they cared about her, her team.  But the willingness to let her go, to close ranks and move on…

Dammit, she was a combat officer.  She knew about this.  She'd been there herself, before, and she knew how it worked.  You mourn your comrades and you move the hell on.  You can't operate on the front line otherwise.  (What about Daniel?  He wasn't military.)

But just as much, she couldn't bear the idea that they -- that any of them -- might still be treating her differently now.  Might doubt her abilities or her strength; might be thinking that they didn't really need her, that she was a liability.  The same thing that Jack had thought the first time around; that half her commanding officers had thought.  (You could see it in their eyes, in little giveaways, the ones who didn't think that women should be out in the field.  Nothing you could call anyone on, but it was there.)

God, she needed to get a grip.  She was still here.  She was still with her team.  None of them had done anything wrong.  The only one who’d screwed up here was her, and carrying on screwing up wasn’t going to help anyone.

“Get on with it, Samantha,” she said aloud, bit her lip, hard, and pulled the box marked “artifacts: unknown” towards her.

#

A couple of hours later, she was investigating the artefact that SG-5 had brought back from their latest mission -- a box that intermittently glowed neon green, but didn't appear to do anything.  Or at least, not anything that they could detect that wasn't directly related to the plain fact of glowing neon green.  Her frustration was beginning to get the better or her when Jack appeared in the lab doorway.  Sam looked up and smiled, checking her internal barometer as she did so.  Feeling OK, in fact.  Maybe the lab work really had helped.  

"Carter," Jack said in greeting.  "General Hammond wants us back in the briefing room.  You doing anything you can't put down?"

She grimaced at him.  "I'm not getting anywhere with this, so no, not really.  I'm beginning to think that all it does is glow."

"An alien glowstick?" Jack offered.

"I'm beginning to seriously consider that option," Sam said with a sigh.  She disconnected the current instrument, put the artefact back in its container and followed Jack out of the lab. 

She looked sideways at him as they walked along the corridor.  "You know, sir, we do have phones here at the SGC.  You don't have to physically come and find me."

Jack shrugged.  "I can always do with the exercise."  What he really meant, Sam was fully aware, was that he could always do with any excuse to leave his office.  The feeling of things-as-normal was reassuring.  

"Do you know what General Hammond wants?" she asked.

Jack rolled his eyes.  "Daniel thinks he's got something important.  He wants to tell us all, and it definitely can't wait.  He says."

His tone was slightly more than standard Daniel-impatience, Sam noted, but didn't have time to pursue it as they turned in at the door of the briefing room.  Daniel, Teal'c, and Hammond were already there, Daniel clutching a coffee mug and obviously twitching with impatience to start talking. 

"I dragged Carter away from playing with shiny things," Jack announced, dropping into a chair.  "You sure you weren't a magpie in a previous life, Carter?"

Sam grinned at him and settled into another chair.

"Very well, then," Hammond said.  "Dr Jackson, you wanted to talk to us about something?"

"Yes.  Yes."  Daniel put his mug down on the table and started gesturing excitedly.  "I finally managed to work out the meaning of those carvings from P5X-273. The language is related to Ancient Khmer, but -- as I was saying to Sam this morning -- it developed in a very different direction from modern Khmer, and the script changed to reflect that."

Jack looked deeply unimpressed.  Hammond was obviously patiently waiting for Daniel to get to the point.  Sam tried to avoid thinking about the other details of their conversation that morning.  Her stomach was already churning again.  So much for the lab work helping. 

"Anyway.  They appear to be talking about something important that's within the temple -- something to be protected, safeguarded."  He pointed at an enlarged copy of one of his photos of the carvings.  "Here, this part, this is related to ideas of danger but also of protection.  Something that was, or that could be, intensely valuable to these people, from what the rest of this is saying.  And possibly just as valuable to us."  He shuffled through the papers and pulled out another one.  "Here -- this is the bit that I can't quite put together. It's missing the final section -- we left too quickly for me to finish recording that part of the wall."  He carefully avoided looking at Jack.  "But I think -- it seems to translate as something meaning 'killer' or 'destroyer', and then over on the other side there's something that means 'giants' or 'gods'.  And 'gods' in this context pretty much has to be the Goa'uld."

Sam looked at the printout and felt a faint ping of recognition, followed by a much stronger flare of anxiety.  She must just be recognising it from having seen it at the site itself yesterday, even if she hadn't really registered anything at the time.  She couldn't possibly have any other memories of it.  (And once again, it didn't really feel like her recognition, her memory, either, a part of her brain noted.  Sam swallowed and ignored it.)  She looked around the table.  Everyone was frowning at Daniel, trying to work out if he really was saying what he seemed to be.  Daniel was looking at them equally expectantly.  

"I think it might be a weapon that's in there," he clarified, after no one said anything.  "Something maybe that belonged to the Goa'uld."

There was silence for a moment, then Jack said in slightly disbelieving tones "You mean, you've actually found me a space-gun?"

"Well.  I don't know exactly what it is, and as I say, I really don't quite have enough of this to make a full translation.  I need to go back and finish reading it, make sure I'm not missing anything.  But if they pulled the central sections of the temple down to, I don't know, to keep it locked in there, to, to hide it, maybe -- and I really think that that must have been deliberate -- then it's going to be something fairly important."

"A space-gun," Jack said again, leaning back.  "Well."

Sam frowned, ignoring her worries about memory to focus on the matter at hand.  "But if it's a weapon belonging to the Goa'uld, why would it be shut up in the temple like that?  Who did that? And what about the fact that there's no sign of anyone else on the planet?"

"I don't know," Daniel admitted.  "Maybe it was the people on the planet who wanted to keep it away from the Goa'uld, but that doesn't make sense..."  He tapped his finger on the table pointedly. "That's why I need to go back there and check the rest of the carvings. Maybe that extra bit, or something else there, will explain what happened, what this is."

"Maybe the Goa'uld put whatever-it-is in the temple which then just fell down around it," Jack said.  

Daniel waved a hand.  "It's possible, Jack, but I really think that destruction looked far too planned.  Every single one of those doorways blocked in the same way?"

"As opposed to the destruction elsewhere in there, which as I recall looked pretty unplanned," Jack said, but Sam could see that his heart wasn't entirely in the disagreement.

Daniel waved an impatient hand.  "Look, the important thing is that this might be something we can use.  Which I thought was what you're after."  He glared at Jack.  "We need to go back so I can finish looking at it and we can work out what to do next."

"Take some C4 and blow all those fallen walls away so we can dig it out?" Jack suggested.

"I don't think that blowing walls up near a weapon of unknown power is such a good idea, sir," Sam said.

"Aw, Carter, you spoil all my fun," Jack pouted.  

"And, as I keep saying, I need to look at the temple in more detail to see if there's anything else written there that might be helpful, rather than just blowing it up," Daniel was obviously winding up to launch into a rant about the iniquities of the military approach to other planets.  

"Very well," Hammond interrupted, rather to Sam's relief.  "Colonel O'Neill, did you see any reason not to go back to that planet.  Or to be wary about going back with a single team?"

"Other than the masonry falling on our heads thing?  No sir, it seemed pretty deserted, and deserted for a long time."  Jack was clearly itching to get on with the mission.  

"Which is a bit worrying, in terms of any weapon, isn't it?" Sam asked.  "I mean, what happened to the people?"

"Look, if I can just get the rest of these carvings, then we might have more idea."  Daniel was bouncing on his heels slightly impatiently.  

"Very well, SG-1, you have a go," Hammond cut in again.  "Back to P5X-273 for Doctor Jackson to see if he can find out if this weapon, or whatever it is, actually exists.  Unless any of you have a reason otherwise, I suggest you take yourselves back there this afternoon.  We may as well get moving on this as quickly as possible."  

He looked around the table, eyebrows raised, and everyone shook their heads.

"See you in the gateroom in -- let's say, half an hour, then."  Hammond stood up in dismissal, and they filed out.  

#

Sam was running over her pre-mission checklist in her mind as they walked along the corridor away from the briefing room, Teal'c beside her.  Had she put everything away fully in the lab?  Was there any of her kit she needed to check?  At least that awful fog from this morning seemed to have dispersed, so memories or not, the lab had helped a little.  Maybe all that she needed to feel a part of the team again was another mission or two.  Get back into the swing of things, and get rid of all the leftovers from the last week through a bit more activity.  After all, it was about the longest downtime she'd had that wasn't spent entirely in a hospital bed since she'd joined the SGA.

"What do you think, Teal'c?  You were pretty quiet in there," Jack, walking ahead of her, turned round to ask.

"I think that a potential weapon against the Goa'uld is worthy of investigation," Teal'c said calmly. 

"You haven't heard of anything like this before?" Sam asked.  The vague hint of memory surfaced in her brain again, and she ignored it.  Just deja-vu.

"I do not believe so.  But if it were successful, the Goa'uld would not spread the news of its existence."

"True enough," Jack agreed. "Well, let's hope that we come up with something useful, then, and this isn't just an excuse for Daniel to go ga-ga over some lumps of falling rock."

Daniel gave him a slightly hurt look, while Jack beamed at him with a look of dangerous innocence.  Everyone else was back to normal, Sam told herself.  She was surrounded by her team, acting as they always did.  She had no reason to be on edge, no reason to feel this tense, or this left out.  She just needed to get back into things.  

#

It was mid-morning local time when they got back to P5X-273, warm and a little humid.  They'd all been issued with hard hats in case they needed to go back inside the temple, and those and their packs were in an untidy pile by the outer temple wall. Sam sat against the wall a few feet from the pile, scanning the patchy forest from time to time; although they'd still seen no sign of any life beyond insects and the odd small mammal.  Through the trees and undergrowth, she could see one of the side-buildings that Daniel had referred to earlier as 'libraries', before explaining that the similar buildings at Angkor Wat back in Cambodia on Earth had been labelled as that despite probably never actually having held any books.  There was one on the north side and one on the south side of the temple, both a little in front of the temple itself.  Sam squinted idly at the northern one, trying to judge by eye whether it was on the line of the diagonal through the centre of the temple.  Close to it, certainly; and they seemed fond of their geometric constructions here.  Daniel would probably know.  The Stargate was further beyond that, although she couldn't quite see it through the trees from her.

She glanced sideways along the wall, towards where Daniel was balanced on one of the balustrades, staring into an alcove at what she presumed was another set of inscriptions or carvings or some such, and muttering to himself while he juggled camera, pen, and notebook.  Jack slouched against the wall beside her, head back against the wall, cap pulled down against the sun's glare.  Sam carefully nurtured the feeling of similarity to any one of their more archaeologically-oriented missions.  

"Fancy a game of poker, Carter?" Jack asked without moving.

She looked over at him.  "Two isn't much of a game, sir, and if you're planning to ask Teal'c to play then we may as well just hand him our shirts straight away and save the trouble."

"I am happy to give either of you, Captain Carter, O'Neill, the opportunity to regain your previous losses at any point," Teal'c said from where he stood slightly away from the wall, also scanning the forest.  

"You may have a point, Carter," Jack agreed.  He sighed, and turned his head slightly.  "Daniel?  How're you getting on there?"

Daniel jumped down from the balustrade and came back towards them.

"Well, I really need to sit down and work on a full translation -- it's a strange dialect -- but I don't think these outer inscriptions add much to what we already know.  They seem just to confirm that there's something very important in there, or," he waved a hand, "possibly information that is important.  There's something though -- whatever it is, it's sort of dangerous."

Jack frowned, and Daniel turned to him.

"I don't think it's a warning, exactly, though.  Dangerous, sure, but it's a slightly different form -- I think maybe it's dangerous to others, not to the people of this culture.  And so probably not to us, if these people are another human cultural transplant.  Which I really think they have to be, whenever they were taken."

"Right we are then.  Let's get back to the SGC," Jack said cheerfully, pushing himself to his feet.

"Hang on, Jack.  I want to look inside again, before I head back."

"How?  We already know that the bit in the middle, which is what you say we're interested in, has big piles of rock all round it.  If there's rock-shifting to be done, we need to go back to the SGC and bring back a team of -- "

"Archaeologists," Daniel agreed.

"I was going to say Marines, but yeah, whatever.  People with shovels.  Not us, is my point, and thus, time to go home."

"I want to check first to see if I missed anything else around that central area inside.  Since you were in such a hurry last time," Daniel said stubbornly. 

"Hold on a minute," Sam said, before Jack could react.  "Do you have any idea from what you've got so far why there's all those piles of rock there?"

Daniel grimaced.  "No.  I haven't seen anything yet that might explain it.  Like I say, there's something that I think translates as a  'dangerous treasure', or possibly 'treasure of danger'.  But all I'm getting from everything out here suggests that it's just inside the temple somewhere."

"Trying to keep the 'dangerous treasure' out of unsafe hands?" Sam suggested doubtfully.

"But if they wanted to do that, wouldn't they have walled it in properly?  Why go to all of that trouble building a temple with doorways and then pulling half the roof down, when you could have just built a plain wall around whatever's in there?  It looks like something done later, for some other reason.  Anyway -- I want to have a look before we go back.  There might be some way of finding out if there's anything at all inside there before we start moving rocks around."

Jack sighed.  "OK, fine.  In we go, then.  Hard hats on, people, so that when we get crushed by falling masonry it'll only be up to the neck."

"That seems to me to be preferable to the alternative, O'Neill," Teal'c noted impassively, putting on his hard hat.

#

They cautiously entered the temple, and moved towards the centre, all, even Daniel, keeping a close eye on the ceilings.  They had to go around the rockfall that had separated Teal'c the day before, but the rooms and corridors were structured in a predictable way, and they were able to make their way through the side-passages to come out on the far side of the centre and then double back towards that loop of corridor that apparently surrounded the central hall.  Daniel stopped to look at the walls in various places as they walked, but the only things to be seen were decorative sculptures of dancing girls -- nothing of any practical use for their purposes.

"Now what?" Jack asked Daniel, when they reached the first of the blocked doorways.  

"I want to go round this corridor again, find that bit I missed last time, and check if there's anything else."

Daniel was already moving around the corridor, and the rest of them trailed after him.  Sam was beginning to feel slightly surplus to requirements again, and it didn't help to remind herself that this was a situation she was more than familiar with.  Although fairly often Jack had rebelled and dragged them all away by this stage of a normal mission. 

"Right, it's this piece here," Daniel said, already frowning at it, and looking down to check against his notebooks.  They were next to one of the blocked doors, which had that same sign above it that had tweaked something in Sam's mind when Daniel had shown it to them in the briefing.  Obviously it was just that she'd seen it the first time she was here, and hadn't registered it, she reassured herself.  

"Oh wow," Daniel breathed, gazing at the inscriptions in front of him.

"You got something?" Jack asked.

"It's not a weapon belonging to the Goa'uld," Daniel said slowly.  "It's a weapon against the Goa'uld.  These people developed something to use against the Goa'uld, and then they shut it away in here, it doesn't say why, but that must be what happened..."

Sam caught Jack's eye.  Something developed against the Goa'uld...  She could feel her heart-rate speeding up.   They needed this.  

"But what happened to the people, if they had something they could use to take out the Goa'uld?" Sam asked.  "Why is there no one here?"

"It doesn't say," Daniel said absently.  "I suppose it might say inside the central room..."

He looked at the rock pile covering the doorway next to them, and then upwards at the hole in the ceiling where the rocks had apparently fallen from.  The hole seemed to continue over where the doorway was, through into what they were assuming was the central hall.  

"Oh.  But hang on," he said, sounding both thoughtful and enthusiastic, and pointing upwards at the hole.  

Sam got what he meant first.  "You want to climb up into there, and see if you can get in over the top?" she asked.  

"Daniel, you are not deliberately doing something that's likely to generate more falling rocks," Jack said firmly.

"Actually, sir, I still think this one is stable," Sam said, looking over the pile again more carefully.  "And it really does look deliberate -- far too well-arranged to be an accident."

"Jack," Daniel said, "if part of the central roof is fallen as well -- look, see, up there, it looks like it is -- I may be able to see if there's anything still in there.  Or at least confirm our guesses about why the doorways are blocked.  Or, or maybe even get some kind of look at the inscriptions there are."  He was pulling his flashlight out of his tac vest as he spoke.

"OK," Jack said reluctantly.  "But it'll be better if I'm the one to go up." 

"Jack, that's ridiculous.  What if there is something in there that needs to be read?" Daniel asked.  "Even if there isn't, you won't be able to get any information from the layout of the place."  Without waiting for Jack's answer, he started to climb.

"Daniel -- !"  Jack's jaw was clenched as he watched Daniel moving upwards, flashlight between his teeth.

"I really do think it's stable, sir," Sam repeated.  "But we should probably move back a bit, anyway -- he might dislodge some of the smaller stones."

They moved back away from the rockpile, all three of them anxiously watching Daniel as he reached the top of the pile and tried to peer through the hole into the central chamber, muttering as he tried to fit the flashlight through without blocking his view.

"Dammit, I'm not sure I can see anything -- most of the roof is still intact in the central area.  There's a bit of a hole into it, but it's only just big enough to see through," Daniel said from above them.  "I can see in the other direction, though," they saw him turn round as he spoke, "towards the outside of the building, over the roofs."  He turned back again.  "Ah, hang on, there's something over there..."  He was wriggling a little further up into the hole and through into the central area.

Jack was looking increasingly irritated.

"Daniel -- "

"There's something in here!" Daniel called, sounding muffled but jubilant.  "It's on the floor, I can't get to it, but there's something here!"

"O'Neill," Teal'c said suddenly.  "I can hear something else.  Not Daniel Jackson -- there is someone else in the vicinity."

"Daniel, you need to come back here now.  Teal'c says he can hear someone else.  Daniel!"

Daniel made an aggravated noise as he pulled himself back from looking into the central hall.  "It's deserted here, Jack!  I'm sure it's nothing.  I can't get at the thing itself but I could see a bit of the wall..."  Sam saw him turn again as he spoke, to look back towards the outside of the temple, over the roof.  "Shit!" Suddenly, he was sliding back down the rockfall in a clatter of boots and a shower of small stones.  "A Goa'uld.  And half a dozen Jaffa."

Sam swore under her breath and grabbed for her sidearm.

"How the hell is it that there's no one here at all for however many years and then the damn Goa'uld show up right when we happen to be looking around?" Jack demanded of them all.  "Which direction, Daniel?"

"From where the Stargate is.  Heading towards us.  They were just passing the library on the north side."

"If we could get that weapon out..." Jack said.

"Not enough time to move the stones, sir," Sam said.

"We could triple-zat them," he said slightly hopefully.

"You can't just obliterate -- you don't even know if there's anything written on them!" Daniel said angrily.

"I don't know how much exactly the zat would take out, sir, and things are only stable as they are now," Sam said firmly.  

"Right, fine."  Jack squinted for a moment, taking a breath in through his nose.  "OK.  Much as I really hate to stand back and allow this Goa'uld to wander round here, I'm not really up for a firefight in an unstable building either, if we can avoid it.  Daniel and I will stay here, see if we can find out what the snake's up to.  With a bit of luck it doesn't know what's here. Carter, Teal'c.  After they've done whatever they've come over here for, I'm guessing they're going to head back to the Stargate again.  See if you two can get to somewhere you can see the Stargate being dialled.  If we can get where they're going to that gives us more options."

"Yes sir," Sam said.  Teal'c nodded.

"The library, maybe..." Daniel said, looking between them.  "There's an exit from the temple over on that side -- I saw it when I was looking at the outer walls earlier.  Just a bit west of where we left our packs."

"Just -- don't get caught," Jack said.  "That's an order, Captain: if it's too risky to see the gate address, don't try."  He looked annoyed.  Sam could sympathise -- the idea of just letting the Goa'uld go away again didn't sit all that well with her either.  

"Yes sir," Sam said again.  "Teal'c?"

"I am ready when you are, Captain Carter."

They headed to the next junction along, and took a right-hand turn, heading in the direction that Daniel had pointed.  Sam glanced back as they turned, and saw Jack and Daniel disappearing round another corner.  Her stomach lurched suddenly, a sudden spike of anxiety at seeing them vanish.  She shook her head to dislodge it, and moved quickly towards the exit at the end of the corridor.  Now was not the time; she needed to concentrate.

#

The corridor ended at a T-junction, with the doorway to the outside set in a colonnaded wall just in front of them.  Sam and Teal'c ducked behind pillars at each side of the junction before peering cautiously outside, but there was no sign of Goa'uld or Jaffa through the gaps between the pillars.  

"At the speed I saw them moving at, I think they will already be inside the main entrance," Teal'c said quietly.  Sam nodded, and looked along the corridor again in both directions before crossing it to the doorway.  Then, from behind her -- within the temple, not outside, it, she heard footsteps.  Oh god, of course -- they would have had to detour round the blockage, as well.  Shit.  She glanced round desperately for cover.  Plenty of places to hide from someone outside the temple, but the angles were all wrong for anyone looking from inside...  and the footsteps were getting closer.  She managed to fit herself behind the big statue by the doorway just as the first Jaffa came into sight, turning out of one of the side rooms into the corridor.  Teal'c had vanished -- further down the corridor, she thought.  

She could just see round the edge of the pillar as another Jaffa came through into the corridor, and then the unmistakable figure of a Goa'uld, with the customary overdone ornateness.  As she watched, he turned and snapped an order that she couldn't quite make out to the Jaffa following him, and she could suddenly feel that voice in her own throat, the feeling of someone else using her vocal chords, of things coming out of her mouth that she couldn't control...  It was vivid enough that she put her hand to her mouth in horror before she registered that she wasn't making any noise, however much her throat might ache from the vividness of the memory.  The Goa'uld and the Jaffa -- five of them, she noted even through the dizziness of the flashback -- carried on down the corridor without looking back.  Sam's knees were trembling slightly, and she felt a sudden, visceral, absolute hatred for the thing that she'd just seen pass her.  She couldn't...  She found her hand going to her weapon, and she was starting to move out of her hiding place, to aim down the corridor, when she remembered her orders.  She was faintly surprised, through the white heat of fury filling her head, at the effort of will required to stop herself.

"Captain Carter?" Teal'c was there again, and glancing down the corridor, the Goa'uld and the Jaffa were out of sight.  She breathed in deeply and forced herself back to normal, or at least to a semblance of it, steeling herself to nod at Teal'c, who was regarding her with a very faint frown.

"Okay, let's try this library, then," she said.  

They stopped again, hidden by the doorway, to check outside.  Sam could just see the library through the trees, on a diagonal from the front corner of the main temple, so further still from where they were halfway down the wall.  Sam constructed a map of the area in her head.  The library would be visible from the main entrance... Daniel had said half-a-dozen Jaffa, and she'd seen only five, so there was a fair chance that one of them was on guard at the main entrance.  If they took a straight line from where they were, they'd be in sight of that guard for at least some of the time.  She looked round, assessing the terrain.  If they took a slightly longer route, they should be able to use the forest and the undergrowth as cover, and come at the library from the other side.  They couldn't avoid altogether being in the sightline from the main door, but they'd be further away, where the forest was a little thicker, and they could get the bulk of the library between them and any potential guards more quickly.

"I believe we must assume that there is a guard on the main entrance," Teal'c said.

Sam nodded.  "If we head out and to the left a bit from here, we should be able to use the forest as cover.  Come round the library from the far side."

Teal'c nodded, and Sam led the way out.  

They reached the library building without incident, and hunkered down on the floor, staying out of sight through the big windows cut into the wall.  Sam cautiously peered over the ledge of the window, and saw that there was indeed a Jaffa standing by the entrance.  At least that implied that the Goa'uld -- she forced the surge of fury down again -- hadn't left yet.  She couldn't see the Stargate from that window, but when she went to the other side, furthest away from the temple, she could just about see it.  But -- no, the angle was going to be wrong for them to be able to see the symbols.  Dammit.  She squinted at the angles...  maybe if she was right at the edge of the library building, the side nearest to the temple.  Without being spotted.  

There was a sudden sound of the blast a Jaffa staff weapon not far away, and Sam's stomach went into freefall.  She dropped and crawled back across the floor as fast as she could, to peer out of the window again, as she heard more blasts.  

"What the hell happened?" she asked Teal'c.  Smoke was rising from the centre of the temple building.

"I am unsure," Teal'c said.  "I think the explosion came from the central hall -- the one which we were unable to access."

"They've blown up one of those rockpiles to get at whatever's in there," Sam said.  "Damn."

"I am sure that O'Neill and Daniel Jackson will be unharmed," Teal'c said.  "The smoke is limited to a very small area -- there would be no need to blow out more than one doorway."

He was, doubtless, right, but that knowledge wasn't particularly helping her, apparently.  They both watched the temple, waiting, but there were no more staff blasts.  Or any other noises, so maybe that central area was more stable than Sam had feared.  After only a few more minutes, Sam saw the Goa'uld exiting the main temple entrance.  A couple of the Jaffa behind him were carrying a largeish box -- the way they moved indicated that it was heavy.  Damn.  Dammit.  So much for the SGC finally getting hold of something actually useful for once.

She could feel the searing fury rising up again, the desire to kill, but this time she clung firmly to her orders.  The Goa'uld and his entourage were moving away from the temple, without looking back (so either Jack and Daniel had stayed out of sight, or they'd been killed...).  Time for her to move, if she was going to get the gate address.  

"Teal'c -- I can't see the Stargate well enough from over there," she said.  "Once they're out of sight from this side, I'm going to have to circle round outside to that corner there."

Teal'c pursed his lips slightly.  "O'Neill said we must not be seen."

Sam shook her head.  "It's fine.  I'll stay out of their line of sight.  It doesn't look like they're expecting anyone to be here, so they won't be looking for anything suspicious.  But you need to stay in here -- it's going to be tight as it is, and you're bigger than me."

Teal'c nodded.  "Very well."

Sam peered out again, just in time to see the last of the Jaffa vanish from the view through the window.  She stood up and moved across to the door, out and round to the corner, flattening herself against the wall, before peering cautiously round it.  This was just about a good enough angle, but -- shit, one of the bigger trees was in the way. She could see half of the Stargate, but only half.  She could also see the Goa'uld and Jaffa moving through the trees a little further away -- still no sign of them looking behind them.  The problem tree wasn't far from the library, and if she could reach that, she should be able to see fine.  No time to update Teal'c -- she'd just have to move.  She took a breath, and then moved quickly and as quietly as she could to stop behind the tree.  It was old, and more than wide enough to conceal her.  Carefully, she peered out around it, just enough to see the Stargate.  Yes: perfect view from here.  And she could see the Goa'uld and the Jaffa nearly there.  Getting away.  Bastards.  No; she had to focus.  

She eased her binoculars out of her tac vest pocket as the Goa'uld reached the Stargate and directed one of the Jaffa to dial.  Again she had to fight back the memories of someone else in her body, the thought of that Goa'uld's host trapped in there; nausea rose again, mixing with the rage she was still holding back, and she gritted her teeth and ignored it, squintin through the binoculars.  She had her orders.  And yes: from here, she could get all seven symbols.  Maybe it wasn't altogether hopeless, then. 

The wormhole formed, the Goa'uld and Jaffa went through, and Teal'c appeared beside her as the wormhole collapsed again.

"I see that they have gone," he said.  "Were you able to see the address?"

"Yes," she nodded, handing him the piece of paper as she stowed her binoculars away again, the adrenaline from her reactions starting to drain away.  She could feel her knees wanting to shake, but that at least she'd dealt with before.  She couldn't let any of them see this -- couldn't cope with the idea of being stood down again, of looking less than competent.  She was fine.  Hating a Goa'uld wasn't exactly a problem, after all, she thought, and her lips quirked wryly.  

When she looked back up, Teal'c handed her back the piece of paper.

"Not one you know?" she asked.  He shook his head.  

Sam shrugged.  "I guess not an important world, then."

"Or not one in which Apophis had an interest," Teal'c said, then glanced over at the main temple entrance. "I see that O'Neill and Daniel Jackson have emerged."

#

Sam and Teal'c made their way through the trees towards the main entrance to the temple. 

"C'mon, back to the Stargate," Jack said as they got there.  "Let's not hang around here waiting for another batch of snakes to show up."  He started towards the Stargate, and the others fell in behind him.  

"Whatever was there, they took it," Daniel said, sounding defeated.

"Did you have time to find anything else?" Sam asked. 

"I have footage of the stones from around where the weapon was -- we were able to get in after they blasted through one of the doorways.  There's lots of information there -- some of it was in a really strange format, though..."

"That's if it was a weapon," Jack interrupted.  "Which we still don't know, because that damn snake walked off with it."

"I have the gate address they went to, sir," Sam said.

"Good work, Carter," Jack said, and Sam felt a pleased flicker of reassurance.  She was still doing, still trusted to do, her job. 

"I think some of the inscriptions might be -- they looked like some sort of schematics, Sam," Daniel said urgently from beside her, skipping a step or two to keep up as he flipped through the pages of his notebook.  "It wasn't anything that made immediate sense to me, but maybe if we both look at it when we get back..."

Jack pulled a face.  "Daniel, can this wait?  I don't think I can face sitting through all these thrilling speculations twice in one day when you repeat it for Hammond at the debrief."

Daniel ignored him.  "It's all on the camera so I can't show you right now, but really, Sam, I think this might be important.  It looked -- totally out of character for any Earth Khmer civilisation.  I mean, they're not a, a technologically advanced civilisation..."

"Or they'd have learnt to build roofs properly," Jack put in.

"Well -- okay, yes, I suppose so.  But that's really not the point.  The thing is, they're certainly not -- this stuff really was totally out of place.  Especially given what we know about Goa'uld attitudes to technological development on the planets they rule.  And I found one word -- " he flicked through his notebook, "that was repeated several times.  Here, yes.  I'm not sure how to pronounce it, really."

Sam glanced over at the notebook, and nearly tripped as she felt another jolt of recognition.  But -- oh god, not again -- the memory associated with it wasn't something she recognised, wasn't a memory of hers.  There was excitement in it, though, tempered with caution; and nothing more that she could get to grips with before she pushed it away.   She swallowed on a sudden return of her nausea, concentrating suddenly on where she was putting her feet.  This wasn't her memory.  She didn't want this.  Jolinar was gone, it was just dreams and leftovers...  

"But I think it might be mitanastra," Daniel continued, oblivious to what was going on in her head.  She was ready this time, pushed the thought away faster.  Not.  Hers.  

Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Teal'c tip his head slightly to one side.

"Could you say that again, please, Daniel Jackson?" he asked.

"Mitanastra," Daniel repeated.  "I think.  I might be wrong -- I'm kind of guessing on the pronounciation, really.  Why?"

"I think -- I am not sure.  But I think I recognise it."

Teal'c recognised it too?  Then maybe she could get away with not dealing with this.  Maybe she could just put it down to after-effects.  Temporary after-effects.  Not anything that anyone needed to know about.  

"Teal'c," Daniel started, eyes lighting up, but they had reached the Stargate, and Jack cut in.

"Daniel.  Seriously.  This can, and will, wait until we get back to the SGC.  Dial us home."

Daniel looked reproachfully at Jack, but went over to the DHD, and moments later, the wormhole whooshed into existence.  Sam couldn't work out if she felt relief, or anxiety.  She wasn't altogether sure she could separate them any more.  

#

Back in the debriefing room at the SGC, General Hammond was less than happy to hear about their near run-in with the Goa'uld; and just as frustrated as the rest of them to learn that whatever had been in the temple had been taken away. Sam forced herself to concentrate on the debriefing, to ignore the recollection of that flash of recognition when she'd seen Daniel's notebook, and the cold anger still lurking at the back of her mind.

"So, whichever Goa'uld it was -- " Jack said.

"Rudra," Daniel interjected, putting down on the table a sketch of the glyph that he'd been able to catch sight of on the foreheads of the Jaffa who'd come through the gate.  

Teal'c nodded.  "He is a very minor Goa'uld.  When I was in the service of Apophis, I remember encountering him only once."

Daniel had gone back to staring down at the pen in his fingers, turning it over and over, obviously keeping only a tiny part of his attention on what was being said.  

"Right," Jack said.  "Well, this Rudra went back through the gate with whatever it was he dragged out of there, which is whatever Daniel saw through that hole in the ceiling, and we came back here.  So we can't be absolutely sure about what it was -- no way of knowing if all that writing is still valid -- but in the circumstances I'd say it's a pretty fair bet."  His tone was clipped and frustrated. 

Hammond sighed and pursed his lips.  "And you say that you recognise this word, Teal'c?" He looked across at Teal'c, who nodded.

"Indeed.  I believed it to be a myth -- as I think did most Goa'uld.  I do not remember it being taken seriously."

Somewhat against her will, Sam found herself wondering whether the Tok'ra had taken it seriously.  No way of knowing, she told herself fiercely.  Whatever it was was going on in her head, it was just echoes.  Nothing reliable; nothing worth talking about.  Nothing worth admitting to.  

Hammond sighed again.  "Well, I think we have to accept that whatever it is, it's out of our reach now.  There'll be a meeting tomorrow at 11 hundred hours to discuss your next mission."

Sam winced.  This had looked like such a good opportunity, as well.  Missing it by inches like that was infuriating -- more than infuriating -- and they did have the address that Rudra had gone to.  She was sure that there was more to this whatever-it-was than Teal'c's recollection indicated, even as she struggled to separate the feeling of the not-memory from her own memory of the parts of the information on the temple that Daniel had managed to translate already.  Those schematics...

There was something else nagging at her, as well.  Maybe they were moving too fast?  

She couldn't, could not bear to let Rudra just walk away with this.  The hatred filled her chest as she saw again the image of that thing walking past her, arrogant, amoral.  Parasite.  Her jaw clenched.  

"Sir, wait," she said, looking up to General Hammond at the end of the table.  "I think we might be missing something."

Hammond frowned slightly, but not in a way that indicated disapproval.  "Yes, Captain Carter?"

Sam spoke slowly, still turning things over in her mind, trying to focus on the logic, not her emotions.  "Well -- OK, Teal'c remembers this being treated as a myth.  That no one was concerned about it, or went looking for it.  Which -- if it had been taken seriously, you'd expect them to.  It wouldn't be like the Goa'uld to leave something like that in the hands of the people on one of their worlds.  So what's changed?  And why do the Goa'uld want a weapon that works, that they believe works, anyway, against them?  Why not just destroy it?"

Daniel looked up, suddenly alert again.  "And why Rudra, rather than one of the stronger Goa'uld?"

Sam frowned again, chasing a memory.  "Teal'c, you said when we were on Apophis' ship that the Goa'uld often fight among themselves," Sam said.

"That is correct, Captain Carter."

"Well -- might it be that this Rudra is seeking an advantage against the System Lords?"

Teal'c considered, his head slightly on one side.  "It would be most unusual for a lesser Goa'uld to attack one of the System Lords."

"What about those -- Tok’ra guys?"  Jack asked.  "Like Jolinar.  Might have been one of them?"

All four of the others looked across expectantly at Sam.  She felt a sudden tension in the back of her neck, the urge to hide, to get away from them; the urge to insist that she didn't know anything.  How could she know anything?  It wasn't her.  She wasn't Jolinar.  Then she realised that all they were asking was for her recollections from when the Tok'ra had still been inside her.  Nothing about what was happening now.  She swallowed hard.  

"I don't think so, sir.  What I got from, from Jolinar, when…  I don’t think a Tok'ra would treat Jaffa the way we saw that one doing."  It was the best she could do, and hard enough to say anyway.  But she mustn't let it seem that she was still being bothered by this.  She was fine.  There was nothing for her or anyone else to worry about.  They needed to concentrate on defeating Rudra, on getting the weapon back, on not letting that bastard get away with it. 

Jack grunted, arms crossed as he slouched in his chair.  There was a moment’s silence.  Sam looked across at Daniel, battling the mess of emotion and impulse churning inside her (the deep desire to get out of here before they asked anything more; the feeling of dissociation from her team that she was still trying to ignore; the almost primal urge to chase Rudra down) and saw him frown and blink absently.  Then he started to wave his pen in the air, suddenly excited.   

"And, wait, there's something else, as well.  Look, I haven't had a chance to look at any of this properly yet, but look at these."  He'd found the time to make some printouts from a couple of the photos he'd taken inside the central hall of the temple.  "That's not what I'd normally expect inside a temple of that sort of era, indicating that sort of level of technology.  Still less what I'd expect from a Goa'uld-ruled world -- they seem very unenthusiastic about any of their subject worlds developing any sort of technology."

Sam looked at the printouts.  Daniel was right -- they were oddly arranged, and she couldn't quite work out how to read them, but this looked -- technical.  The word she kept thinking was 'schematics'.  And wildly out of place with the rest of the temple: that primitive style of building.

"So, what happened?  Did they manage to develop it in secret somehow -- keep it from the awareness of the local Goa'uld until they could use it?"  Daniel was waving his hands around.  "Some kind of secret inner culture, which didn't seep outside into other areas -- areas like architecture -- because they were deliberately avoiding that?"  

"But if they killed their local snake, why didn't they let things into the open after that?" Jack asked.  "And why isn't there anyone there now?"

Daniel shrugged, deflating slightly.  "Hard to be sure. The culture of secrecy might have been too well developed by then -- people with knowledge have power, in that sort of situation, and they might not want to give that up.  Something else they developed might have taken them out; or, well, sometimes cultures just die out.  But what they consider important -- that's what they record.  And that's what's recorded here -- the memory, part of the identity, of a culture that believed that it had found a way to get rid of Goa'uld."

There was a brief silence in the room as they all considered the matter.

"And if it was just a minor Goa'uld that they got rid of, and there was no obvious technological advancements otherwise -- maybe they were just left to their own devices after that," Sam said hopefully.

"More likely is that the other Goa'uld will have discovered the event, if not the mechanism behind it, and wiped out the population," Teal'c said.  

Sam winced.

"I suppose that might explain why the temple was built as it was," Daniel said thoughtfully.  "There's nothing in the outer temple to indicate technical advancement, unless you go to the trouble of translating it.  The strange stuff is all in that inner room.  Maybe they built the temple with the intention of preserving the knowledge, while they were waiting for the local Goa'uld to come back.  Then after they killed him -- or her -- retaliation came before they had a chance to develop their society further, and they had just time enough to pull the walls down to block off the central area, so that the weapon wouldn't be obvious."

"Would a Goa'uld destruction party bother looking through any of the buildings on a planet?" Jack asked Teal'c.

"If they even came down onto the planet's surface -- unlikely, unless they had reason to look for something.  They would not look hard, I think," Teal'c said.  "They might well have assumed that if the population were wiped out, there was no need to investigate further."

There was another silence.

"OK, so, we've got an exterminated population, a weapon trapped in a temple, and maybe a rumour among the snakes that something really dangerous was out there somewhere," Jack summarised.  "Does this get us anywhere?"

Sam bit her lip in thought.  "Well," she said, slowly. "Teal'c, you said that usually a lesser Goa’uld wouldn’t challenge a System Lord.  But what if that lesser Goa'uld thought he had a major advantage?  Or could get hold of a major advantage?"

"Then it is possible that he might try an attack, yes," Teal'c agreed.

"So Rudra puts this and that together, locates the temple, and comes in to grab the weapon.  And takes it to -- wherever this planet is," Jack suggested.

"I looked it up before I came here," Sam said.  "It's way out on the edge of Goa'uld space -- very little else around it."

"So why would Rudra go such an out-of-the-way world?" Daniel asked.  "Wouldn't he want to attack straight away, to reduce the risk of one of the other Goa’uld finding out what’s going on?"

"But he doesn't know how it works," Sam pointed out, the churn of internal discomfort subsumed in rising excitement.  They were getting somewhere.  "Or even if it works.  He needs somewhere private to make sure it's functional, fix it up if need be, test it."  She frowned briefly.  "Although if it's Goa'uld-specific I don't know how you'd go about testing it..."

"Most probably on Jaffa, at least initially," Teal'c said matter-of-factly.  "As with the Thor's Hammer device we encountered.”  He paused.  “A Goa’uld would not be overly concerned about another Goa’uld interfering.  They do not tend to interact with each other unless absolutely necessary.”

"Friendly bunch," Jack commented.  "OK, kids, that's great, but where does it get us?" he said, leaning back in his chair, fingers tapping on the table.  "We've got a weak Goa'uld, with a device that may or may not work, planning to take out a System Lord or two.  We could just let 'em go at it.  Do our job for us."

General Hammond was watching them, obviously considering whether Jack was correct.  Sam clenched her jaw.  They couldn't let Rudra get away with this.  

"But our best chance of getting the weapon is now, sir," she argued.  "Once he's got it working and defeated a System Lord, he'll be far stronger and the weapon will be far better protected.  Or it'll be destroyed."

Jack raised an eyebrow.  "You think we have a chance of getting it, Carter?"

Sam shrugged.  "I don't know for certain, sir.  But if Rudra has limited strength right now, and is likely to be focussing on getting this thing working, then I'd say yes, we do.  And if it does work -- think what we could do with it.  Surely it's worth taking the risk?"

Jack looked thoughtful, and General Hammond was nodding very slightly.  

"The Gate on that planet might well be watched," Hammond pointed out.

"Our experience to date is that the Goa'uld have a history of being very lazy about that sort of thing," Daniel said.  "They don't seem to automatically guard the Gate, as a rule."  He shrugged.  "Pride, or egotism, I guess.  They don't expect to be disturbed -- they've had the Gate system to themselves for a long time now."

"It might be guarded if Rudra is worried about other Goa'uld coming in, though," Jack pointed out.  Sam could tell that the argument was more for form than anything else; or possibly to convince the General.  There was no way Jack wouldn't want to go after something like this if he thought there was any hope of getting away with it.

“But according to Teal’c he’s probably not too concerned about that,” Daniel argued.

"We'd be sending a MALP through first anyway -- we'd find out if there were guards to deal with," Sam said.  She really, really wanted to get the go-ahead for this mission.  It wasn't just -- or even, she had to admit, mostly -- the military desire for a weapon they could use against the Goa'uld.  Or even the scientist's desire to find out how it worked (might it be something on the same principle as Thor's Hammer?).  She wanted, very badly, to have the opportunity to take out Rudra.  

"Maybe it's related to one of the Asgard devices," she said aloud.  "If it's Goa'uld-specific.  Like Thor's Hammer.  I mean, it's not that likely if it was developed on that world, but maybe the Asgard helped them -- that might be another explanation of the discrepancy between the primitive stuff and the technical."

Both Hammond and Jack's eyes sharpened further.  

Hammond took a breath, held it for a moment, considering, then let it out. "Fine.  We'll send a MALP through and if it's clear, you can go through after it and see what can be retrieved.  This afternoon."

"Sir, I'd recommend waiting until tomorrow," Sam said, suppressing her -- relief?  Jubilation?  "I'd say it's more likely by then that any initial concern that Rudra may have about being followed will have died down, and there's less likely to be a guard on the gate."

Jack nodded in agreement.

“Also I have film of the stones that were around the device when it was removed,” Daniel said.  “They’re cracked in places, but I should be able to piece them together -- and there was some stuff that looked like schematics, or instructions.  Sam and I could take a look at it now, give us a better chance if we get hold of this thing.  I think in the circumstances, the more information we can get together, the better.”

"Very well then -- tomorrow morning, oh-nine hundred hours."  Hammond stood up.  "I'll see you all then.  Dismissed."

#

As they stood to leave the room, Sam blinked suddenly.  This anger, this wish to do something about Rudra -- was that all hers?  She remembered, suddenly, when Jolinar had faced the Goa'uld assassin: watching/feeling Jolinar's cold fury and disdain.  Was that -- was she reacting to that, to memories of the Goa'uld that weren't even hers?  She felt the excitement of working through the possibilities drain suddenly away, to be replaced by that cold sick feeling that she'd been struggling with since the first flashback on P5X-273.  Worse, this time, amplified by yet another suggestion that something was wrong, and by the fact that she'd been looked to in the debriefing for insider information on the Tok'ra.  Maybe even her team, even General Hammond, thought, somewhere inside themselves, if not consciously, that she was part-Tok'ra.  That those memories made her -- not herself.  Maybe that was why she wasn't feeling quite right around them, quite like she still fit where she should.  

You construct your self from what you remember.  She could see Daniel in the commissary, talking about culture and identity and memory.  Maybe he knew...

No, that was ridiculous.  She hadn't mentioned the memories to anyone.  They weren't memories, anyway.  They were leftovers, another artefact of the post-trauma.  The sort of thing that Janet warned them about repeatedly, after every mission that went south.  She'd seen some of Jolinar's memories when they were both sharing a body -- when Jolinar was sharing her body, she corrected herself, shuddering away from the near-implication.  That was all it was.  Even if she hadn't registered seeing those memories at the time.  She'd been under a lot of stress, after all.  

"Sam, those engravings from the…  Sam?"

She'd shut her eyes for a moment, walking on autopilot, and opened them again to see Daniel walking beside her, looking at her with concern.  

"Sam, are you OK?"

"Fine.  I’m fine," she said automatically, instinctively.  Of course she was fine.  "Just tired."

"Aren’t we always?" Daniel agreed ruefully.  "Tell you what -- come along to my office so we can get started on those translations, and I'll make a pot of coffee.  The decent stuff." 

He smiled at her, unguarded, happy, trying to look out for her.  Almost as if he really did care.

"You're offering me the good stuff?" Sam asked, managing to smile back at him.  She even thought she made it look genuine -- she saw the concern still lingering in his eyes fade further.  "I'm flattered.  I'll be along in a sec, OK, just got to -- " She pointed at the door of the women’s bathroom that they were just passing.

"OK, sure," Daniel agreed.  "I'll start the coffee going."  

He raised a hand in a wave and then turned to head towards the elevator and his office.  Sam heard him starting to ask Jack something, and the slightly sharp tone of Jack's response, as she opened the bathroom door.

There was no one else in there.  Sam leant over the sink, staring at herself in the mirror.  Still there.  Still herself.  

Still not quite right.

It wasn't (it wasn't) that she believed, really, there was anything left of Jolinar.  There were nothing more than memories.  Someone else's memories -- no.  Someone else's memories, but she'd experienced them once, second-hand, so now she was remembering that.  That was all it was.  Only fragments, and maybe even useful fragments.  The bare thought of trying to explain the memories to her team, to General Hammond, to Janet, though, made her shudder.  Maybe there was another way she could use the information.  

She was a soldier, dammit.  She was a damn good soldier, and she could and should use whatever abilities she had in the service of her country.  Of her world, now, as well.  

She took a deep breath, and straightened up again.  It was hardly surprising, she told herself firmly, that she still felt a little freaked out by the whole business of having a Goa'uld in her -- even one that apparently wasn't evil, wasn't in it for the sadism and the world-domination.  Even one that was prepared, in the end, to sacrifice himself for Sam.  She shivered slightly again.  

Normal.  She was fine.  She just needed to get on with her job, let the memories continue to fade, accept that she'd remembered some things from that time that might come up.  It wasn't that she had anyone else's memories, not really.  It wasn't that she was anyone, anything other than herself.   Your memories make you, okay: but this was just memories of an experience she'd had.  It would all be fine.  

She shook her head again, briskly, took another deep breath, and walked back out into the corridor.  Back to work. If she just kept on plugging away at normality, it would all be fine.

#

There had been a moment, back on P5X-273, when she'd been concentrating on getting the information from the Stargate, on not being seen, when the worry had gone away.  Until that memory/not-memory (not her memory and she had to keep telling herself that, had to make it true) had been triggered again, when she'd heard Daniel talking about the weapon, and she was fighting again to keep clear on who she was.  There had been a moment, in the debriefing, when she'd been concentrating on finding a way around the current problems, when the anger (her anger?) had been back under the surface, and once again, everything had felt smooth, as it should, just briefly.  A moment when she'd been able to ignore all the other things.

Maybe it would keep working like that: maybe all she had to do was to keep on going, keep doing the job, and rely on that to hold her together while everything -- shook down, or something.  Maybe getting on with her normal daily life of dealing with people who sometimes want to kill you on faraway planets (she was ruefully aware of just how weird it was to think of that as 'normal life'), would fix it all back up.  Maybe focussing on the next planet, the next problem, the next mission, would do the trick. 

Right now the next problem was laid out in front of her on Daniel's desk, while Daniel himself moved around his office, pulling out textbooks and speculating alternately on what Rudra's plans might be and on what the previous inhabitants of PX5-273 might have been trying to achieve with the temple, and the weapon, and the inscriptions.

"It's impossible really to separate culture and writings, if you've got a culture that uses writing at all" he said, dumping another pile of books on one corner of the desk and picking up another pile from the opposite corner to put them on a bookshelf.  "It's back to what I was saying earlier: the writings and monuments are one, even if it is only one, of the ways in which cultures define themselves by choosing what they pass on.  And," he added, slowing suddenly and looking down at the books he'd just put down, "that's the only access we have to anything about this culture, of course."  He muttered a word Sam didn't understand, but which had the flavour of a curse, and she glanced over at the books he was looking at, before he turned away towards another shelf.  She knew enough now to recognise them: Egyptian.  Abydos, where Daniel still had people he considered family.  

Another flashback, this one to Daniel staring at his clipboard in the holding cell in the SGA, then the flash of desperate hope, his suddenly looking at her -- but it wasn't her, and it wasn't the way he looked at her.  The knowledge that this really was her memory didn't help in any way.  Her skin crawled again, as she thought of Rudra's host, locked away in his own body; and she felt alone again, desperately alone, as Daniel sat down beside her and started separating paper into piles.  It was all she could do not to move away from him, to echo her mental separation.  

She was still part of the team, she reminded herself.  She was.  Whoever she was now.  

"Uh -- Daniel, could I have a look at the film you took, then?"  Something to distract herself.  She hoped that he wouldn't notice that her hands were shaking.  

"Sure," Daniel said.  "I only had time to print out a couple of the shots before the debrief just now, just enough to show you all what I meant. I'll need to hook the camera up again."

"It's OK, I can handle that."

Sam took the camera from him, nearly dropping it as their hands came into contact and she pulled instinctively away.  

"Oops, sorry, butterfingers," Daniel said, giving her an absent smile as he turned back to the piles of paper and notebooks across the desk.

Sam carefully hooked up the camera, and then stared, nearly unseeing, at the images.  It was a moment before she could force herself to look at them properly, to start to think about anything.  Daniel was right, they did look almost like schematics, or at least that was what her mind was telling her (was that hers, even?  It must be, Daniel saw it too, she argued, and shoved the idea away again.)  It wasn't any type of schematic she was familiar with.  There was something weird about the way the line drawings were arranged; she couldn't quite see how anything would fit with anything else, and it didn't follow any of the patterns or styles she was used to.   She snorted softly: of course it needn't.  Different culture.  This was what Daniel meant about needing to understand the culture at the same time as understanding the writings.  

Daniel pulled a chair in at the other corner of the desk and frowned.  "I just can't work out how the words match up with the drawings.  I mean, it looks almost like, I don't know, an instruction manual, that's what my instinct's saying.  But it doesn't make sense like that, from the bits I can read right now."  He sighed.  "OK, how about if I start translating what I can from these, and you can give me any insights you have.  Maybe the translation will start shaking things loose a little."  

Sam forced a smile.  "That sounds good, yes.  Though I'm not sure how far we'll get before it's time to head through the Gate again, if we're going first thing tomorrow -- there's a lot of this to get through."

Daniel smiled cheerfully at her.  "Yes, and I suspect that I'll have to keep going on the writings from the other areas of the temple, as well -- try to get more information to put all of this together.  I can take the printouts with me tomorrow -- we can keep going once we're there, if there's any opportunity.  But I'd like to get as much as possible done while I have proper reference books to hand."

Working together was both easier and harder than Sam had expected.  Easier because, well, there was a problem, and she could focus on that.  Harder because of the subtle sense of wrong.  She and Daniel had spent so long like this, on one thing and another: they worked well together.  They shared the same eager interest, the same curiosity, even if their areas of knowledge differed.  She normally enjoyed these sessions (at least when it wasn't fate-of-the-world urgent), trying to put the puzzle pieces together.  Which made it that much harder that she couldn't quite bear to look at Daniel properly; that she was constantly fighting down that slight nausea that, god, seemed to have been present for days now.  

She couldn't talk to him about any of it, either.  She couldn't admit what was going on with her memories; couldn't admit that she couldn't deal with this.  And she couldn't bear to discuss what had happened at the time.  She couldn't bear to hear him confirm what she'd seen, see him squint a little and push his glasses up his nose and say, well, of course we'd have missed you Sam, but...

She dug her fingernails into her palms under the desk, and focussed again on the images on the screen, on Daniel's scribbled notes on the papers littering the desk.  Maybe if she printed these out so she could shuffle them around a bit, that might help piece things together.  Maybe it was just that the order wasn't what she was used to.  She bit her lip, hard, and forced herself to block everything else out in favour of the task at hand.  

#

Sam left the Mountain fairly late that night, leaving Daniel still working on the problem.  When she got back early the next morning, he was still in his office, halfway through another pot of coffee, and looking a little rumpled.  She'd grimaced at her own tired reflection that morning when she'd finally given up on sleep: another restless night, dominated by snatches of memories that she still didn't recognise and which slid away each time she awoke, leaving behind them only the unsettling feeling of unfamiliar familiarity.  She  had the vague feeling that one of the dream-fragments had featured the weapon-symbol, or the word that Daniel had used, but she couldn't remember anything more than that.  And in all honesty, she admitted, she really didn't want to.  Her eyes itched. 

"Did you go home in the end?" she asked Daniel as she reached for the coffee pot herself.

"Hm?  No -- I had a bit of a nap on the couch.  Bad habit I got into when I was a grad student."  He was still frowning down at the papers.

"Jack isn't going to think that that's terribly good preparation for going offworld," Sam noted.

"Which is why I'm not going to mention it to him," Daniel agreed, shuffling through more pieces of paper.  "Ah, here we are.  Look, what do you think about this bit here?  I think that translation's reasonably accurate -- does it help any?"

It was very nearly 0900 when Sam finally convinced Daniel that it really was time to go and get themselves kitted up for the mission.  Jack and Teal’c were already ready and geared up when Sam and Daniel reached the locker-room.  

“Ah, there you are,” Jack greeted them cheerfully.  “I was starting to think about a search party.”

“Sorry sir,” Sam said automatically, opening her locker to get at her kit.

“We’re not late, Jack,” Daniel contradicted, frowning at Jack and pushing papers and notebooks into his pack.

“But you will be if you don’t get your kit sorted out in the next, ooh, three minutes,” Jack said.  “Come on, time to go looking for shiny snake-nuking devices.”

When they reached the control room, a technician was fussing round the MALP on the Stargate ramp down below, and General Hammond was looking over Walter’s shoulder as he started to dial.  

“See? Not late,” Daniel hissed to Jack, who pulled a face at him.

The wormhole engaged and settled, and the MALP trundled up the ramp and through.  There was quiet in the control room as they waited for the telemetry data to start being sent back. 

“Atmosphere’s fine, temperature’s fine,” Sam muttered to herself, scanning the screens as the data began to come through.  Then the cameras came online.

“Looks clear,” Jack announced, as the MALP’s camera swung around to cover the area around the Stargate. 

Sam was concentrating on the rest of the data, and felt a surge of relief.  “It looks like everything checks out, sir,” she said to Hammond.  “From this, anyway, I can’t see any reason for us not to go.”

Hammond nodded.  “Very well then.  SG-1, you have a go.”

“C’mon kids, let's head out,” Jack said, heading down the stairs towards the gateroom.

#

All of them had their weapons up as they stepped out of the Gate, but as she scanned slowly around the clearing, aware in her peripheral vision of Jack and Teal'c doing the same thing, Sam saw nothing out of the ordinary.  No movement, no sign that someone had been here recently, nothing.  Cautiously, she relaxed a little, as the wormhole vanished again, and brought her weapon down.  

"OK," Jack said softly.  "Looks like we’re clear here, but let’s stay alert."

He looked around the clearing. The trees here weren't the intermittent jungle of P5X-273; this was more like a standard softwood forest.  The sort they kept coming across on missions.  They sometimes amused themselves on dull missions by speculating as to why trees seemed so similar the galaxy over.  

"There's a path over there, sir," Sam said, pointing to the north side of the clearing.  So there must be some kind of settlement here -- on P5X-273 everything had been overgrown.  "I can’t see any other exit."

Jack nodded slowly.  "Then I guess that’s where we'll go.  I'll take point.  Teal'c, you take our six."

Sam kept scanning the forest around them as they moved cautiously along the path.  Even allowing for the probability that Rudra neither had sufficient forces to mount a proper guard on the Gate, nor expected to be followed here, the quiet set her nerves on edge.  Up ahead, Jack stopped suddenly, and Daniel, between her and Jack, nearly cannoned into him.  Sam's hand went to her sidearm.

"Someone coming towards us," Jack said curtly.  "Off the path."

The nice thing about softwood forest was that there did tend to be low cover available.  Safely crouched behind assorted nearby bushes, Sam looked out at the path.  She too could hear something now.  Then could see it: four Jaffa soldiers, and Rudra in the middle of them.  They were walking quickly, and Rudra didn't look particularly pleased, but they obviously weren't expecting to need to look out for anyone.  

None of them moved for a good couple of minutes after they'd stopped hearing the footsteps, then Jack jerked his head towards the path.  

"Come on, let's keep going, but quietly," he said.  

"They weren't carrying anything," Sam pointed out, after another couple of minutes had passed and none of them had heard any sounds of Jaffa coming back along the path.  "So presumably the weapon, or whatever it is, is still up here somewhere."

"Yeah, but I'd kind of like to know why the snake's wandering backwards and forwards," Jack said.

"It's a good thing they weren't ten minutes earlier, or we weren't ten minutes later," Daniel commented.  

"Luck on our side for once," Jack said.  

They walked for about another half an hour before Jack stopped again.  

"I can hear something," he said quietly, "but it's not anyone coming towards us this time.  Something up ahead."

"A village, sir?" Sam asked equally quietly.

Jack nodded.  "That'd be my guess, yes.  OK, let's take this nice and easily."

They set off again, and before long Sam could also hear noises.  Domestic noises, the bleat of a goat -- village noises that they'd heard on planet after planet.  Jack gestured for the rest of them to stay back as he moved to the next bend in the path and tucked himself behind a tree.  He peered cautiously around it, then came back to them.

"OK, it looks like there's still no guards on the path, but you can see the village from that bend, which means they can see us.  If we go through the forest," he indicated to their right, "we should be able to come out a bit closer to whatever's going on."

Cautiously, they pushed through the undergrowth, before Jack stopped them again, as the trees thinned out.  He signalled to her to go forwards, and she worked her way into the bushes at the edge of the trees.

The clearer ground in front of her sloped down to the village, with a river on the other side of the small collection of houses and huts.  A couple of goats were grazing between them and the village, but she couldn’t see anyone that looked like a guard or even a goatherder in the area.  She supposed that it must be near enough to the village that one wouldn't really be necessary.  There were a few women in checked headscarfs moving around by a couple of houses at the edge of the village, but she couldn't see anyone else around the streets.  Further down, nearer the river and set a little apart from the village, was what looked very much like the temple they'd seen on P5X-273.  This one was smaller, although it still had the library-outbuildings, but it was clear of undergrowth and looked to be intact.  On the other side of the river from the temple were a collection of tents.  Visitors to the village?  Sam frowned a little.

She wriggled backwards again slightly, until she could gesture the others forward.

"I don’t see any guards or Jaffa around the village itself, sir," she said quietly, when Jack, Daniel, and Teal'c were beside her in the bushes.  "There's hardly anyone at all there, in fact.  But look -- over there, that temple."

"The same architecture as the one on P5X-273," Daniel said, peering at it.  "At least from the outside.  It looks smaller, though..."  He looked like he couldn’t wait to go look at it, wriggling forwards slightly.

"Ahht," Jack said, raising his finger in Daniel's direction.  "We are not just sailing straight in down there."

He looked down again, towards the temple. 

"I believe that is a Jaffa coming around the corner of the temple," Teal'c said.  

Sam narrowed her eyes slightly, squinting to get a better view, then pulled out her binoculars.  "Yes, sir, Teal'c's right."

"Right." Jack was silent for a few moments, then said, "OK, so it's a fair guess that this weapon, along with Rudra and whatever Jaffa he has, is somewhere down in the village, and probably down by the temple if that's where the guards are."  He frowned.  "I'm really not keen to just go in there without any more information, though.  And we’re not exactly inconspicuous.  I'd like to know where the rest of the villagers are."

"Out in the fields?" Daniel suggested.

All four of them scanned the area around the village, before Jack pointed across to some fields a couple of miles away, where there were figures moving.  

"Far enough away not to worry about immediately," he noted.

"I could go down, sir," Sam offered. 

Jack looked across at her.  "No offence, Carter, but just because you’re a couple of inches shorter than the rest of us, that doesn’t make you any less conspicuous."

"The women down there are all wearing headscarves," Daniel said.  "Look -- right round head and neck.  And long sleeves and trousers.  That’ll make Sam a lot less conspicuous than the rest of us."

Sam nodded.  "That was what I was thinking, sir.  The only people left in the village seem to be women -- I'm guessing that all the men are out in those fields." 

"Or in the temple," Daniel said absently, binoculars to his eyes again.

"Yeah, I’d noticed that too," Jack agreed.  He looked back out at the village, then nodded slowly.  "And assuming you haven’t got one of those nice checked tablecloths in that pack, I’m assuming that the next step is going to involve one of those washing lines?"

Daniel snorted slightly, and Sam grinned at Jack.  

"Yes sir, that was my thought."

"Stealing from washing lines," Jack said with slight disgust.

“We’re a classy outfit,” Sam agreed, deadpan.  This was how and where she did feel comfortable -- out in the field, behaving like the competent officer she was trained to be.  

"Okay then.  Carter, I think we're going to have to go with this, but I don't want you taking any risks, and I don't want you staying down there too long.  Get as much information as you can, get out."

"Yes sir," Sam agreed, and slung her pack on the ground, tucking her radio into her belt.  "I'll take my radio, but I'll have it turned off unless I need to get in touch."

"Two hours, Carter."

Sam nodded, and started to work her way further to the right through the bushes, towards the place where the forest extended closest to the village.

#

There was a washing line out behind one of the houses nearest to where they'd been looking at the village, with a fence  between it and the field where the goats were grazing.  Military training and the necessity of it notwithstanding, stealing -- she would like to think ‘borrowing’, but on the evidence of all their previous missions, the likelihood of having to make a run for the Gate and not having time to return anything was, realistically, just too high -- clothes still made Sam just a little morally uncomfortable.  But needs must...  She grabbed one of the checked cloths that she'd seen the handful of women wearing, a pair of long baggy trousers, and a shirt/tunic, then ducked into a lean-to outhouse-shed that was against the back of the house.  It smelt a little peculiar -- of goat, quite probably -- and an alarmed chicken ran out as she came in.  

After a moment of internal debate, she concluded that, baggy or not, wearing the skirt and shirt over her BDUs wasn’t going to work.  The boots would be far too conspicuous, as well.  Slightly reluctantly, she bundled up her own clothes and stuffed the bundle under a pile of scrap wood at the back of the shed, strapping her sidearm back on again under the skirt .  Bare feet were unlikely to cause much comment in any peasant culture she’d encountered, and the ground was dirt, so she should be able to cope.  She wished vaguely for a mirror to check the headscarf, but did her best by feel to get it wrapped round her hair and face as thoroughly as she could.  

She took a deep breath, and ducked back out of the outhouse, then around the corner of the house and into the little street.  At the end, it gave onto a slightly wider street, though still one made of dirt.  Ahead of her, a couple of women were just turning a corner, but otherwise the street was empty.  That direction -- that was where she'd seen the only other people in the village.  She ran over what she'd seen of the village in her head, doing her best to construct a mental map.  Where those women had gone was in the direction of the temple.  And where she was now was what looked like the main street, where she'd seen people moving around.  Best to move away from here as soon as possible, then -- and anyway, it was the temple that she really needed to investigate.  

She headed in the direction of the temple, trying to look as if she knew what she was doing and where she was going.  As she walked towards the junction she'd seen the women take, another woman appeared from one of the houses.  She looked up and down the street, frowning, before her gaze fell on Sam.

"Ah!  Come here, I need someone to take the next pot up to the temple!"

She sounded like she was used to people doing what she told them to.  

"Quickly!  Before it cools!"

Sam desperately cast around for a possible response.  Voluntarily blowing her cover this early on didn't sound like a good idea -- surely in a village this size everyone would know each other?  But the woman hadn't immediately recognised her as an interloper, and her frown was intensifying.  Refusing was going to blow her cover as well -- and the woman had said "up to the temple", so this might actually be a good opportunity.  There didn't seem much option but to go, and to hope that the scarf would work to conceal her, or that strangers were after all in some way unsurprising here.  With trepidation, Sam started towards the woman, who nodded sharply and turned to head back into the house, obviously expecting Sam to follow.  

Sam ducked under the doorframe into the house.  Inside, several women were busy around the fireplace, and the room smelt of cooking food.  The woman who had called her in was over with them, then turned, and Sam found a large bowl thrust into her hands, then covered with a plate of flatbread.  

The woman frowned at her.  "You're from Osdoa?  I didn't see you yesterday."

Osdoa?  Sam remembered the tents on the outskirts of the village, on the other side.  Another village, and they'd come here -- for trade, maybe?  

"I was helping with the tents," she improvised.  

The woman nodded, apparently satisfied.  "I'm Phary.  Take that up to the temple -- follow Chenda if you don't know the way yet."

She looked over Sam's shoulder, to a younger woman coming through from a back room.  Phary turned back to the stove again, and turned back with another pot.  

"Chenda -- take this to the temple.  This one is going with you."  She gestured at Sam, then turned away, dismissing them both.  

"I'm Samantha," Sam introduced herself.  Judging by the names she'd heard so far, and overheard from the women nearby talking amongst themselves, her full name would go down better than 'Sam' would.

"Chenda," the other woman said, then nodded to Sam to precede her through the door.  

Sam tried to keep her face at least a little turned away from Chenda as they walked up the street in silence.  The other woman was looking at her a little curiously, and her gaze was entirely too sharp for Sam’s liking.  The village, as Sam already knew, was small, and after only a couple of minutes, and some twists and turns that Sam concentrated on mapping mentally, the temple came into view.  Chenda headed around the back of it, towards a flimsy and very temporary-looking structure which came into view, built leaning against the back wall of the temple, and Sam followed.  

#

In the lean-to structure, there were tables with a couple of large bowls of food on, and a small handful of tired-looking elderly men, squatting on their heels around the edges of the room and shovelling food into their mouths.  There was no conversation, and no one looked very happy.  Chenda tensed up as well, hurrying to the middle of the room to put the food down, head down.  Sam followed her, keeping her head down as well, but not before she noticed the Jaffa standing in the far corner of the room.  That would explain the tension, then.  There looked like more food had been provided than would feed just those few men (and what were they doing here, anyway?) -- maybe the villagers were expected to feed the Jaffa, as well?  

No sign of the weapon in this room and Chenda was already hurrying back out, forcing Sam to follow.  Chenda relaxed and slowed down as they left, and Sam noticed her involuntary shiver.  All was not well, apparently, with these people and their god; or at least with what was going on here.  Another piece of information to file away.  

What Sam really wanted was an opportunity to look inside the temple, but Chenda was walking back across the square at a fair rate, and she couldn’t think of any immediate way to get away -- especially not without attracting the attention of the Jaffa guard she could see just inside the temple entrance.  Dammit.  She lagged as much behind Chenda as she dared, looking round as surreptitiously as she could, and doing her best to add what further information she could see from ground level of the temple layout to her mental map.  As soon as they were out of the square, Chenda turned into a narrow side-street.  Not the way they’d come.  Sam stopped, and Chenda turned with a raised eyebrow. 

"Is this the way we came?" Sam asked, feeling slightly awkward.

"No," Chenda said.  "This is a better way."

Shit.  

"I think I'm supposed to go back to the other house -- to Phary," Sam tried.  She was all too aware that they were still within sight of the temple, and therefore of the Jaffa guards.  

Chenda rolled her eyes in what looked like frustration -- and maybe still some fear?  "I think it's better that you come with me right now."

"I'm -- "

Chenda cut off further conversation by grabbing her by the elbow and pulling her down the street.  Shit.  Again.  Sam battened down the urge to use violence -- not remotely justified, not yet, and anyway, that could only draw the bad kind of attention from the guards -- and went with her.  Chenda dragged her into a recessed doorway, and turned to face her. 

"So, you're from Osdoa?"

It was pretty clear at this point that Chenda was, at best, sceptical about this, but she hardly knew enough about the culture to try any other cover story just yet.  God, this sort of thing was Daniel's speciality, not hers.  

"Yes!" she said, putting shocked surprise into her tone.

"Osdoa people have taken to theft, then?" Chenda asked.  

Sam blinked.  "We -- of course not!"

"Odd that this looks exactly like one of mine, then.  My own weaving, no less."  Chenda flicked the corner of Sam's tunic.  Her expression made it clear that she wasn't about to back down.  Shit.  Sam cursed her luck.  OK, well, at least this was happening in private -- maybe it wasn’t a total clusterfuck yet.  Worst case, at least she had some information, and she could surely get away from one young woman if she needed to.  And maybe she could get a bit further yet -- maybe it was better luck to have this happen here than with more people around.  Maybe Chenda would be open to helping her out -- she hadn't seemed happy around the Jaffa back there.  Sam gave Chenda her best, most open, slightly rueful smile, and said, hands carefully open and in front of her:

“OK, I'm sorry.  You're right, I'm not from Osdoa.  I'm -- from elsewhere.”

Chenda frowned.

"A further village?"

Sam took a deep breath, and made a split-second decision.  "No -- from another planet."

Ten minutes later, courtesy of some really bad drawings-in-the-dirt of the Stargate, a lot of handwaving, and Rudra's insignia, Sam thought, hopefully, that she and Chenda might be getting somewhere.  The fact that Chenda had spat, forcefully, in the dirt when she mentioned Rudra's name and drew his sigil seemed like a good sign.  

"When did he get here?"

"Yesterday," Chenda said.  "We had not seen him for -- some years, before that."  Her face tightened and she winced.

"For some years?"

Chenda looked down.  "The last time he came was when he took my brother as his new host."  

The bald words caught at Sam's heart, magnified by her knowledge of what it was to be a host, her recollections of Skaara, and another not-memory: of the horror of the idea of an unwilling host, of Jolinar's distress at the temporary occupation of Sam...  Sam started to murmur sympathy to Chenda even as she fought to manage her own emotions.  

"My brother is dead," Chenda cut her off in final tones, and carried on, obviously wanting to leave that subject. "He was here yesterday, and he took the elders into the temple.  They're working on something in there -- I don't know what exactly.  I haven't been in there.  Something he brought with him.  He left after that, but the Jaffa stayed.  He was here again a little while ago.  He said they're not working fast enough, and he said if he comes back tomorrow and it's the same, someone will die."  Chenda's face hardened again. 

Sam winced inwardly again -- Chenda had seen what looked like her brother doing this.  No wonder she preferred to see him as dead; and she couldn't even start to think right now about talking to Chenda about what she knew about Goa'uld and their hosts.  Such as it was.  God.  At least Daniel had only seen Sha're from a distance since the Goa'uld took her.  No time to worry about any of that now, though -- she needed to work out what to do next.  

Her head was aching.  She wasn't sure how much to tell Chenda, how much to rely on her obvious distaste for Rudra, how much to ask her about that, or anything else.  From what she said about her brother, she clearly didn't see his selection as host as some kind of family honour.  Even so... god, this was definitely Daniel's job, not hers.  Which -- actually wasn't a bad idea.  Chenda seemed amenable enough to discussing this with her, Sam, and didn't seem to be about to denounce her to Rudra or his Jaffa.  Maybe they could go back up to the others, and Daniel could do the communicating thing.  And she wouldn't be down here by her damn self any more, but would be back being part of her team.  Making herself part of the team again.  

"OK.  Chenda, look -- I'm here with my team.  My friends.  There are four of us -- all from another planet, as I am.  We fight against the Goa'uld.  Would you come with me to meet them?  And then maybe we can talk about what's been happening here since yesterday."

Chenda frowned for a moment, then nodded slowly.  Okay.  They were in business.  Sam stood up again, wincing slightly from the strain on her thighs from the unaccustomed position, and beckoned to Chenda to follow her.  

They were halfway back to the street closest to where she'd left the others, when she heard voices in the distance. Familiar voices.  Oh shit. 

She grabbed Chenda's shoulder and hauled her into another of those recessed doorways, as the voices resolved into words.

"Look, I'm sure we don't need to do this…" Jack.

"…Peaceful explorers…" Daniel. 

"Be silent!  You will come before the god when he returns."  And Rudra's Jaffa.  Perfect.  

Sam resisted the urge to slam her head into the doorpost.  She heard them coming closer, and leant forward very slightly.  The Jaffa didn’t spare her a glance, but she saw Jack's eyes flick barely and very rapidly towards her, then back again as he continued arguing with the guard.  OK, so at least now he knew that she knew that they were caught, and really that was all she could do right now.  At least they knew that Rudra wasn't around at the moment, and from what Chenda had said, he wouldn't be back till tomorrow.  Following immediately was out of the question as well as unnecessary, unless she wanted to get both herself and Chenda into the same situation the others were already in; there was time to think about it, at least.  

How had this turned into such a clusterfuck already?  Another SG1 Special.  

#

Sam shut her eyes for a moment and took a deep breath.  OK.  Find the weapon, rescue the others, except possibly not in that order.  Mission priority?  Depended on what the weapon was, really, and she wasn’t likely to be able to figure that out, or even to get it back through the Stargate, on her own.

The horror of being alone gripped her, suddenly.  

You can’t do any of this on your own.  Not strong enough.  

She swallowed, convulsively.  She didn’t have time for this.  Her team didn't have time for this.

They left you before.  You were alone then, you’re alone now, and there’s no one else in your head to save you now; to sacrifice themselves for you.

Christ, she should never have come on this mission; should have got herself signed off until she got over this shit, even if it did mean playing into all those damn stereotypes of women and overemotional and oh god, I'm alone. 

She felt a touch on her arm, and opened her eyes to see Chenda frowning at her.  Sam did her best to paste on her reassuring smile, but judging by the deepening of Chenda’s frown, with limited success. 

"Those were your friends?" 

It was barely a question, really.  

"Yes.  Yes, those were my friends."

And whatever the rights and wrongs of the fact that she was there in the first place, and however little she trusted herself right now, that meant it was down to her to sort this out.  She took another deep breath, and blew it out again, hard, focusing on bringing her logical brain back into play.  Right.  She could either try to do this herself, or head back to the Stargate and call for reinforcements.  So the next job: find out as much as she could about the situation so she could make that decision.  

"Chenda -- do you know where they will have been taken?  Is there a -- a gaol, or a prison, here?"

"There is a gaol, yes, but I don't think that's where they are going.  The Jaffa would not know it.  I think they'll go to the temple."

“Is there any back route we can take to have a look at the temple?” she asked.

Chenda looked doubtful.  “I suppose -- come with me, we can at least reach it without directly following the Jaffa and your friends.”

They looped round, via another couple of alleys between buildings, and came out behind a building that Sam recognised as one of the 'library' temple outbuildings.  Sam motioned to Chenda to stay put, and walked round, as casually as she could, to take a look at the main temple.  With a sudden shock, she saw a Jaffa standing only a few feet away, guarding the door into the library, looking away from her.  She ducked back behind the corner again, and jumped to find Chenda coming after her.

"Samantha.  I believe your friends are in there.  She tells me," Chenda pointed at another woman, just passing the corner of the library and heading across the temple courtyard, away from them, "that prisoners were brought in there just a few moments ago."

Sam considered the matter.  Taking out at least one Jaffa -- and there had been two escorting Teal'c, Jack, and Daniel, so it was a fair bet that at least one more was in the near vicinity -- in full view of the others around the temple, and in broad daylight, wasn’t a realistic option unless she thought that her team were in serious and immediate danger.  The Jaffa had said that they would come before the god; and Chenda had said that Rudra wasn't due back until the next day.  Right now, from the sky and the fact that it was obviously somewhere around a mealtime, it was only a little while after noon right now.  So she had -- nearly a whole day to work out what the hell was going on here before there was any real risk.  And the others knew that Rudra wasn't around at the moment either, and they knew that she'd seen them, so they would probably be sitting tight for now as well.  Okay.  

Applying thought to this was keeping the panic, the surge of terror at being left alone, at bay.  So: did she try to break them out herself?  Or did she call for reinforcements?  Either option would pretty much ruin their chances of getting hold of the weapon, unless she could manage to retrieve both that and her team at the same time.  Bringing in a full-on firefight would just mean that Rudra would abscond with the weapon -- their track record on hanging on to Goa'uld wasn’t great, after all -- and massively increase the risk of injury to the villagers.  Besides, she really should be able to break them out of a pile of stones guarded by only a single Jaffa.  Just as soon as it was dark and she wouldn’t automatically be seen.  The entrance to the library was at least on the side, facing away from the main temple.  She should be able to drop them with the zat without making too much noise.  And then she and the others might even be able to get at the weapon while everyone else was asleep, as well.  Hopefully.

"Chenda -- those men we brought food for, what is it exactly that they're doing in the temple?”

"The elders?  I don't know exactly.  The -- " she made a gesture that reminded Sam of the gestures she'd seen on Earth used to ward off the evil eye -- "brought something with him when he came yesterday.  He summoned the elders -- here and from Osdoa, who are here for the festival.  Not that we can have the festival now."  She seemed bitter.

"And -- what, they've been in that little building since?"

Chenda shook her head.  "I think they are working in the temple -- we bring the food to that room instead.  It is usually used for storage."  

"Did they stop work overnight?" Sam pressed.

"Not last night.  The -- " that gesture again.  Sam couldn't be sure whether it was a word-taboo or Chenda's own distaste for Rudra, "seemed -- angry.  In a hurry.  Even more so when he was here today."

They might not be able to work two nights in a row, however angry Rudra was, but it sounded like she would have to assume that at least someone would be awake.  Dammit.  So much for that plan.  They were going to need to do it the hard way, which meant she really had to get into the temple and have a look around first.  

"OK.  Um.  Is there any way I can get inside there," she pointed at the temple, "before dark tonight?  Or maybe just after dark?  Just to look around."

Chenda considered, nodding thoughtfully to herself.  "Someone will need to refresh the lamps before tonight.  You could go in with them, help with the oil."

Sam suppressed her sigh of relief.  "That would be incredibly helpful, if it's possible," she said earnestly, smiling at Chenda.  

Chenda nodded.  "Come with me.  If we return to Phary's house, I will find out who is responsible for the lamps tonight."

"Phary's house -- that was where we were before?" Sam said.  She knew she was sounding faintly nervous.

Chenda looked at her and smiled.  "Yes, but you needn't worry.  I know Phary seems formidable, but she is really very nice.  There will be food, as well, for us, now that we have delivered the food to the temple."

Sam's stomach growled in response to that information, and she suddenly realised that she hadn't eaten anything since breakfast in the Mountain.  Chenda's smile broadened, and she stood up.  "Come -- let us get some food before you start trying to do anything for your friends."  She looked at Sam sympathetically.  

Sam nodded gratefully, and followed Chenda back away from the temple, towards the alleyway that would lead back to Phary's house.  

#

Phary may or may not have been nice; what she was, when they got back, was deeply uninterested in Sam, for which Sam was equally deeply grateful.  Chenda helped her with a bowl of rice, and a little stew ladled over it, then took her over to meet the friend of hers who was apparently responsible for dealing with the temple lamps, a young woman called Makara.  It sounded like Makara shared Chenda's disbelief in Rudra, and Sam found herself wondering how far this stretched.  Who else among this village or the other was unconvinced by their 'god'?  She was uncomfortably aware that, at least according to the mission aim, she wasn't there to start a revolution.  Just to get hold of this damn weapon and get out.  

But she couldn't do anything about that right now; so while she was waiting she might as well try and find out something about the place.  

"We're going to my house -- we both have other things to do," Chenda said, with Makara standing by her.  "Do you want to come with us?" 

"Sure," Sam nodded, scrambling to her feet.  "Of course."

The other things in question turned out to be something that looked rather like knitting.  Sam interlaced her fingers a little uncomfortably, suddenly feeling the absence of anything productive to do.  

"I have some spare yarn, I think," Chenda offered.  

"Um -- no, that's fine," Sam refused, deciding not to admit that she had no idea how to knit even as it was done on Earth.

It was, however, she told herself, a good opportunity for asking some questions.  

"So -- do the people from the other village, um, Osdoa, come and stay here very often?" she asked.

"About twice a year," Chenda answered.  "There is a festival -- they are a little further north in Osdoa, so they can harvest a little earlier, and then they come to help with our harvest.  There is a feast, and trading, and sometimes marriages."

"I came here from Osdoa three years ago," Makara put in.  

"And does the Goa'uld often come at the same time?"

Both women shook their heads.

"No.  It means this time -- I don't know.  No festival, probably.  The -- " that sign again, and Sam wished she could get a better look at exactly what Chenda's hand was doing, " -- demands that we provide crops.  Tribute.  So nearly everyone is out in the fields -- only a few of us left to manage feeding the others."  Chenda looked rebellious, and worried. "This year hasn't been such a good one for food -- I don't know how much this 'tribute' will leave us with."

Sam nodded sympathetically.  Maybe if they could stop Rudra from leaving with this weapon, they might be able to do something about him leaving with the harvest, as well?  Mission aim or no, getting rid of Goa'uld was kind of an ongoing objective.  Jack would certainly be in favour.  

"Do you know how long you -- your people -- have been here?  On this planet?  Do you have any stories about how you came to be here?"  She'd heard Daniel asking these sorts of questions often enough.  Maybe if she got some of this information it would help him to get something more from the translation; might help with understanding what they needed to know about the weapon. 

Chenda and Makara glanced at each other, almost covertly.  "We have stories," Chenda said, after a pause.  "Children's stories, really.  You wish to hear them?"

Sam nodded enthusiastically.  The story that Chenda told was not quite what she'd expected.  It told of two beginnings, on different planets.  One here, on this planet, where 'all is as it is now, and the seasons and the harvests are as it is now, and those-who-rule come when they please as it is now, and all is as it is now'.  Another somewhere else: somewhere warmer, wetter.  Where certain other sorts of knowledge were developed, 'which was and is not as it is here'.  Sam couldn't quite follow all of the details: not all of the words were ones she recognised.  Was the implication that this knowledge was no longer needed or wanted?  But something, "some great disaster," Chenda said, after another moment's hesitation and another glance at Makara, caused the people of the second planet to flee through the Stargate (which here was apparently called chappa'ai as well, Sam noted), and to come here.  Where they joined with the people already here, and shared their knowledge and their stories and their memories.  (A blend, two into one...  Sam pushed the thought away.)

"And all is as it is now," Chenda finished, with the tones of a formal story-ending. 

The cadences of the story had been slightly odd -- present and past tenses mingling in ways that Sam found slightly confusing, and the odd repetition of particular phrases which fit in one place in the story, but which recurred in others where they didn't seem quite to belong.  She found herself wishing, again, that Daniel could hear this.  Still, she could at least do her best to remember the way things hung together.  It was obviously some kind of formal way of conveying information -- a normal form of story-telling -- from the tone that Chenda had used.  

"Where did you learn this story?" she asked.

Chenda shrugged.  "From my mother.  It's a children's story, like I said."

Not much to go on there.  What Sam did wonder, however, was whether this meant that the people of P5X-273 had at some point fled to here -- and brought their style of temple architecture with them, maybe?  In which case: might these people also have stories telling about the weapon?  Might the leaving have been something to do with the weapon?  Or with the Goa'uld reprisals?  Sam was fairly sure that Chenda had been leaving something out at a couple of points in the story.  Maybe later she could try again to convince her to pass on more information -- but probably best to leave it for now.  Maybe she'd get a chance to talk to Daniel about it first.

"Thank you," Sam said sincerely, "it's really interesting to hear that."  

Chenda smiled at her, and began to talk to Makara of something else.

#

A little while later, Makara stood up. 

"We must go fetch the oil, Samantha."  

Sam followed Makara back to the temple area, and across to the library building opposite the one where Jack, Daniel, and Teal'c were -- she devoutly hoped -- still being held.  There was certainly a guard still there, at least, which boded well.  There was a guard outside this second library as well, and Makara spoke briefly to him, eyes on the floor, before he nodded and let them inside.  There was a little room just inside the door, with jars stacked in it, and the corridor went off in the other direction and rapidly turned a corner.  

"Is there someone being kept in here?" Sam asked Makara under her breath as she picked up a jar and handed it to Sam.

Makara glanced over her shoulder at the Jaffa, but answered quietly "Yes, but I don't know anything about him.  He was brought with the Jaffa and the -- " she made the Goa'uld-sign, "yesterday."

Sam, considering whether this was something she should investigate further, found herself laden down with a jar of oil clutched in each arm, feeling very uncomfortable with the knowledge that she couldn't easily go for her sidearm.  Makara led the way out of the library and back across the bare ground to the temple entrance.  

The entrance to the temple was very similar to the one on P5X-273, but this one had a Jaffa standing on each side of it.  And, Sam noted with a frown, no decoration at all -- no sculpture, no inscriptions or writing at all.  The Jaffa guards ignored the women, and to the extent to which Jaffa ever allowed their expressions to show, they looked bored.  Sam, busy making tactical observations, noted that they were probably not likely to be too hard to overpower, although despite the boredom, they were still alert.  And there was always the risk of making too much noise and rousing others...  

Makara stopped to fill and light a lamp in an alcove just inside the door, and Sam shut off the tactical speculations in favour of watching closely, all too aware that operating oil lamps wasn't actually within any of her areas of expertise.  Daniel, now, Daniel would know all about this.  And quite possibly Jack, as well, with all the camping he claimed to have done.  And Teal'c had probably had to do this sort of chore as a child...  She realised that Makara was frowning at her, and jumped a little. 

"Samantha?  There is a lamp behind you."

"Right, sorry," Sam turned and attempted to duplicate what Makara had done, with reasonable success.  Well: the lamp lit when she was done, although when she turned round again, Makara looked a little like she regretted bringing Sam along.  Thankfully there were a couple more lamps to fill in the corridor, so when they reached the central hall, Sam was noticably more proficient.

The corridors in this temple were more straightforward: a single corridor straight towards the centre of the temple, with a couple of unused-looking rooms off each side.  There was no corridor surrounding the central hall, as there had been on P5X-273: just a doorway at the end of the corridor, in what must be the centre of this one of the central hall's walls.  There was a Jaffa guard stood by it, who again paid no attention to Makara and Sam.  As they entered the hall, Sam glanced around and saw another door in each of the four walls.  She'd already seen all round the temple from the outside and knew that there were no other external entrances to the temple as a whole, so these doors must lead to interconnecting corridors that ran inside the temple -- perhaps via some of those unused rooms.  A guard per door seemed a little like overkill, in the circumstances, but then Goa'uld usually liked to have a few Jaffa to hand when required, and judging by the reaction of Chenda and Makara to being around the Jaffa, they were doing the job of intimidation quite nicely.

In the centre of the room, several elderly men in the hitched-up skirts that Sam had seen in other desert cultures were sat on the floor, looking tired to the point of exhaustion, and more than a little nervous.  Sam was fairly sure these were the same men she'd seen earlier when she'd taken the food to that lean-to shed.  It looked like they were trying to piece something together...  Sam tried to work out what was going on, and where the weapon was, without drawing attention to herself.  She nearly dropped the lamp she was filling as she realised: that was the weapon.  It wasn't just not working, it was in little pieces.  Maybe extracting it by blowing it up hadn't been such a good idea after all.  She ducked her head a bit, trying not to grin as she contemplated Daniel's likely smugness about that.  Not that he was always all about the archaeological technique himself -- it might not be her speciality, but she'd been interested in history as a kid, before her father's subtle pressure to focus on the sciences was intensified by her own stubborn wish to prove herself better than the boys, and she knew that Daniel's curiosity sometimes ran ahead of him.  Not to the extent of explosives, though.

As she turned the corner of the room and reached for the next lamp, she could see that the pieces didn't look like they'd been exploded.  More like they'd been broken down into components -- like it had been disassembled.  She frowned.  Maybe the previous inhabitants had taken it apart, after all?  And stored it like that so it couldn't easily be used?  She briefly tried to visualise the tablets she and Daniel had been working on -- maybe that was why it looked like a schematic? -- before shaking her head a little and reminding herself to focus on the task at hand.  The room layout was distressingly simple, though.  Four guarded doorways, an empty dais (where Rudra had been earlier?) a few feet in front of the doorway at the back of the room, the locals huddled in the middle.  Doubtless none of them had any knowledge of this, and they hadn't been in the temple on P5X-273 for long enough to copy any of the inscriptions on the temple, even if anyone here would have been able to read them, so what, were they just doing it like a jigsaw puzzle, by trial and error?  It looked like they were getting there, though: there were several larger pieces sitting on the floor, and Sam could see even from where she was how they might fit together.  She didn't think they'd get it together before her other deadline, though: the need to get the others out, and therefore to do something about the weapon as well, before Rudra came back tomorrow.    

Makara, working faster than her, had already filled the lamps on her side of the room and was moving over to Sam's.  Not much time left, but she knew the layout now, at least.  She filled the final lamp, and walked back across to the door with Makara.  The Jaffa, thankfully, hadn't paid them the slightest bit of attention.  Well, if you were used to having servants, Sam supposed that you stopped noticing them after a while.   

As they left the temple, Sam glanced over towards the library where the others were being held.  Yes, as she'd thought -- the angles were different here from the setup on P5X-273.  The library doorway wasn't quite within eyeline of this doorway, and so the guard here couldn't quite see the guard there.  It was about time she caught another break.  

#

It was getting towards dark by the time they'd returned the jars to the library building.  Sam managed to have a quick look round the corner of the short corridor while Makara was still in the storage room, but the corridor turned again almost immediately and she couldn't see anything.  As soon as they were outside again and out of sight of the temple, Sam stopped, and explained that she would be staying there for now, rather than returning to the main part of the village.  Makara was clearly less than enthusiastic about this idea, but there was no way that it was a good idea to get anyone else involved in her investigations.   

Sam found an alleyway at the back of one of the houses near the temple area, and leant against a wall to think things over a little.  The thing was, she didn't think that actually getting them out right now was going to be the best move, unless there was a good reason to.  (Such as, for example, the expectation of immediate execution; but unless things had changed, that wasn't an issue right now.)  She'd have to at least stun, and probably kill, the Jaffa guarding the library, which would be an excellent way of creating an enormous fuss, and who knew what that might trigger?  They might be able to hide up somewhere nearby and still manage to get at the weapon, but one of the Jaffa might go for Rudra early, and at the least they would be far more on guard -- and that without raising the possibility of retaliation against the villagers.  The question was, however, what the alternative options were.  She needed to talk to the others; see what they could work out between them.

Of course, she might not be able to get to the rest of her team at all without getting rid of the Jaffa guard, in which case she might not have any options.  But the libraries looked a lot more dilapidated -- and in fact, rather more shoddily built -- than the temple itself was.  She might be able to find a space somewhere that she could get through.  She had the impression that the Jaffa thought the villagers were thoroughly cowed -- they wouldn't be expecting anyone to break in.  

 But she definitely needed to go back up into the trees and look for her pack, first.  She'd only counted three packs with the Jaffa who'd been dragging Jack, Daniel, and Teal'c along the street, so hopefully hers, tucked behind the tree, had been overlooked.  If she did have to shoot anyone, she wanted to be using a nice quiet zat rather than her sidearm.  She pushed herself off the wall she'd been leaning on, and went to scout round the edge of the village and back up into the forest.  And get a little bit more knowledge about the layout of the village while she was at it -- not that it was all that complicated.  

The pack was indeed still where she'd left it, and by the time she'd rescued the zat (she reluctantly concluded that she still wasn't going to be able to conceal the P90) and returned to the temple, the sun had set fully.  There was still a little ambient noise around: children being called in, women and men wandering around, with those who had been working in the fields back in the village now, and people obviously trying to enjoy at least some of the socialising that the annual festival would normally entail, even if they looked more than a little nervous.  No one was within sight of the library, though, so it was time to move, before things quietened down further as it got darker.  She wanted to be doing her initial wandering around while there were still other people in the streets, so that she wouldn't stand out to the Jaffa guards as she walked round the edge of the square.  

She resolutely pushed out of her mind all the ways in which this could go horribly wrong, and skirted round the edge of the square, doing her best to look unobtrusive and uninteresting, until she was as close to the back of the library as she could be. 

Crossing the open space between the edge of the square and the back of the library building had her nerves on edge, but when she reached the building without hearing any alarm being raised, she relaxed a little.  Even better: loose stones in the wall next to one of the main pillars.  Heavy, but not load-bearing, so she could remove them safely.  She sweated through moving enough to make a gap she could squeeze through, if only barely -- she had to take her sidearm off and pass it in ahead of herself.  

She found herself in a corridor that ran around the edge of the building, and mentally flipped a coin.  Left.  As she came round the far corner, she could hear muffled voices from further down.  They were still there, at least.  Halfway down this side she found an intersection with another corridor, and halfway down that, a doorway.  She could hear voices.

"They might have left a guy some books.  Maybe with pictures."  Jack.

"I did say already, Jack -- it's not actually a library," Daniel.  

"I do not think it is possible to read with this level of light, O'Neill."  Teal'c.

She came through the doorway to see the three of them, sat against a wall, hands and feet tied, their packs leaning in an opposite corner.  Jack had a bruise on his cheekbone, and Daniel's shirt was torn.  Teal'c looked calm, as ever.  

"Ah, Carter," Jack said cheerfully.  "Good to see you."

"You too, sir," she said with a smile.  She went over to start untying their bonds.  Easier to hide than cutting.

"Sam!" Daniel said.  "Are you OK?"

"I'm fine.  How about all of you?"

It was amazing how reassuring it was just to see them again.  

"Little bit of pins and needles," Jack said, grimacing slightly.  She passed him her zat as soon as she'd untied his hands, and moved to start untying Daniel as Jack took care of his own feet.  "Teal'c took a zat blast, but he says he's fine."

"I am well," Teal'c confirmed.  

"So, Carter, what've you got for us?" Jack asked.  He'd moved to the door once he'd untied his feet, and was looking round the frame, scanning the corridor, zat in hand.  

"Well, Rudra's not due back till tomorrow -- which is one of the reasons I waited to come and find you.  The weapon's here, but it's not functional yet -- it's in pieces."

"Ha!" Daniel said.  "I said that a staff weapon wasn't a good excavation tool."

"Rudra has some of the locals trying to put it back together, in the temple, but obviously none of them have engineering training, so it looks like it's slow going.  It looks like he's recruited the elders -- I don't know if he thinks they have some knowledge about this.  They seem to have some legends about it."

Jack squinted at her.  "You mean they're basically sitting around doing a giant 3D jigsaw puzzle, but without the picture on the box to help?"

"Well -- yes, basically, sir."

Jack rolled his eyes.  "The ways of the Goa'uld, they are not as our ways."

"I suspect that Rudra would not be able to gain access to technical specialists without alerting the other Goa'uld of his discovery," Teal'c said.  

Sam nodded.  "Yes, that was my guess, as well.  Apparently he figures he can motivate them into it -- he's going to start killing people tomorrow if they've not made more progress."  She winced.  Another good reason to move before then.

"But did you see it?  The mitanastra?" Daniel broke in eagerly. 

"Yes -- it's in the temple, and I was able to get in and take a look."

"Good work, Carter," Jack said approvingly.  "How did you manage that, then?"

"Well, actually I was filling oil lamps."

"Engineer and oil-lamp filler.  You want to put that on your resume."

"I'll think about it, sir."

"Shouldn't we be getting out of here?" Daniel asked.

"Well -- the thing is, I'm not sure whether that's such a good idea," Sam said, a little apologetically.

"Why not?" Daniel demanded.

"I got in here without alerting the guards, and we might be able to get you two out that way," she nodded at Jack and Daniel, "but it's too small for Teal'c.  Even if we could, they'll notice you missing, assuming they're bothering to check on you at all."

"Occasionally," Jack confirmed.  He didn't look surprised by what she was saying.  

"And then at best they're much more on guard, and at worst, we're chased back to the Gate.  And they'll shoot, this time," Sam finished.  

"So we hide our weapons again, fake the whole being tied up thing, and sit tight for as long as we can," Jack said.

"That was my thought, yes, sir."

Jack nodded.  Daniel looked a little pissed off, but accepting.  

"OK, so, do you have a plan for getting hold of this weapon, then, Carter?"

"Well, I think the most time we have is a couple of days," she said, "and really that would be cutting it pretty close.  And tomorrow's when Rudra starts killing people.  And possibly you, while he's at it.  I don't think it would be a good idea for you to still be here then.  And as far as the weapon goes: they may not know what they're doing, but from what I could see it looks like they're getting there through sheer persistence.  Fear can be a great motivator.  I don't think we want to be around at all once Rudra starts looking to test it.  Even if none of us are Goa'uld -- it might not be as specific as all that."

"But just from looking at it when we were being taken in here, a firefight in that temple is going to risk civilian casualties," Daniel interrupted, leaning forwards and frowning.

"So is them still being around when Rudra starts pointing that whatever-it-is at people," Jack said.

"The thing is, sir, that I think maybe they do know a bit more about this than they're letting on.  I was talking to some of the women today, and they told me one of their stories -- it talks about some of their ancestors coming from a different planet, bringing some things, some practices, from there and mixing them with the culture that was already here."

Daniel looked interested.  "That might explain why the temple is a totally different style of architecture from the houses," he said.

"I'm pretty sure that Chenda was leaving out some information when she was telling me the story today.  And Rudra's current host is from this village.  I wondered whether maybe they do have some knowledge about this weapon.  Maybe it was P5X-273 that they came from, and there's something passed on from there.  And that's why Rudra came here to try to make it work."

"That all sounds like a lot of speculation," Jack said, frowning.  

Sam spread her hands.  "I know, sir.  I want to try talking to Chenda again tonight -- maybe tell her a bit about what we're doing, and see if I can get some more information from her.  If they do know more than Chenda suggested to me, then the elders in the temple aren't letting that on to Rudra either.  As I said -- they looked like they were still working pretty much at random."

Jack chewed at his lip thoughtfully.  "OK, so, where does this get us, though, in terms of the mission?" he demanded.  

They discussed the possibilities as quickly as possible, all four of them on edge for noises from down the hall.  Daniel was tying loose loops in the rope as they spoke.  Eventually, Jack nodded.

"OK, that seems reasonable.  Tomorrow when Rudra comes back, then, sounds like the best time to make a move.  Leave as little time as possible for anyone to do anything about us getting out of here.  Do you think you'll be able to get back in here again, keep us updated?"

"I doubt it, sir," Sam said.  "Unless I can just before sunrise -- it's too much of a risk in daylight."

Jack nodded.  

Daniel, finished with the ropes, was pursing his lips.  "Do you think I can get away with keeping a notebook out?  I can shove it in my shirt if one of the Jaffa comes."

Jack shrugged.  "They don't seem particularly given to being quiet, so I guess we'll hear them -- it's a bit of a risk, though."

"So is not having a full translation of these inscriptions, especially with what Sam's just told me," Daniel insisted.  "If we can work out what this does -- there's some suggestion of a warning, something to be careful of..."

"OK, OK," Jack said.  "But you'd better not get caught at it."

"Sir -- I'd better leave," Sam put in. 

"Hang on," Daniel said.  "I could do with your input on a couple of things from the inscriptions, that I was looking at before we were found."

Sam bit her lip.  She really should go as soon as possible.  On the other hand...

"Oh, Daniel, that reminds me: there were some really weird ways of talking in the story they told me."  

Sam repeated as much as she could of the things she'd noticed, while Daniel nodded slowly.  Suddenly he snapped his fingers.

"That might explain some of the problems I've been having with the translations.  If the tenses are erratic, and there's expectation of repetition, or partial repetition...  maybe that would make sense after all..." he started muttering to himself as he went to rifle through his pack.  

"Carter, you should get out of here," Jack said.  

"Just a couple of minutes," Daniel said.  "We really need to understand this warning..."

Sam looked over at Jack.

"I doubt they'll be in to check on us yet," Jack said, slightly reluctantly.  "And there's space to hide there, in an emergency."

Daniel dug a couple of notebooks out of his pack.

"Was there one of those that looked like it might be a schematic of some sort?" Sam asked.  "If there's anything that looks remotely like a schematic or a diagram, now I've had a glance at the thing, even in pieces, I might be able to get something out of that."

"Hmm."  Daniel flipped through the pages.  "How about this?"

Sam squinted at the drawings, turning them over inside her head, while Daniel hmmed a bit, looking over her shoulder.

"Hang on, I was thinking about this just now, and I wonder if..." he leaned over to point at a couple of runes.

"Hmm," Sam said, staring at the drawings, "do you have a spare piece of paper and a pen?"

"Sure," Daniel flipped one of the notebooks to a blank page and handed it over with a pen.  

Sam shut her eyes for a moment, thinking back to what she'd seen of the disassembled weapon, and then opened them to try to sketch it.  Then again, racking her brains to work out how the pieces would have looked from the side, and underneath.

"That's it!  That shape there!" Daniel said suddenly.  

Sam looked between her drawing and the copy of part of the inscription that Daniel was pointing at.  

"Yes!  So...  if that's that, then what about this bit?"

They were silent for a moment, both staring at it, before Sam said "Ha!  They've got it wrong, that's what.  You can't see from my drawing here, but I think -- " she sketched hurriedly again, breaking one of the pieces into two parts -- "that comes into that part and that part, and look, here..." 

Daniel nodded.  

"Well, hopefully that means we get a bit more time," Sam said.

Daniel was still staring at the copy of the inscription.  "So if this is a schematic, the next thing is, what about the rest of all of it?"  He flipped through the pages demonstratively.  

"Instructions?  Warnings?" Sam suggested.  

Daniel frowned, and started jotting things in the middle of one of the pages.  

"Daniel -- I really do have to go now."

"Okay," Daniel said absently.  

Jack nodded.  "OK, Carter -- good luck, and we'll see you tomorrow evening."

There was something else nagging at the back of her brain as she left -- a different sort of familiarity about one of the symbols near the schematic, but she couldn't quite reach it.  She was fairly sure it was one of her own memories, as well, not -- one of the other things.  Maybe it would come back to her in time.  

#

Sam slipped back out the way she'd come in, and carefully replaced the loose stones.  Moving round to the edge of the building, she checked for signs of patrolling Jaffa.  All seemed clear, but she hesitated before she started to move back towards the village.  Might it also be worth investigating the other library to find out who it was who was being kept in there?  She worried a corner of her lip between her teeth.  On the one hand: possibly something, or even someone, of value to them.  On the other hand: if she was caught and thrown in with the others, chances were they'd be checked over thoroughly and the weapons she'd returned to them taken away.  Worse, it might be another Goa'uld in there.  

She went back to the other corner of the library to look at the layout of the area.  From where she was, the corner of the temple itself blocked the guards' view of her.  If she went round the back -- there would be a brief moment on the other side where she would be visible, but if she kept her head down and maybe faked carrying something... The guards hadn't looked twice at her earlier, when she was with Chenda and later Makara.  And then maybe there'd be some way of getting in at the back of the other library.  After all, if not, she could just go back round.  

The couple of seconds she spent crossing the small exposed space felt incredibly uncomfortable, but she made sure to go when both guards were looking the other way, and as far as she could tell, they didn't even glance in her direction.  The corner of this library was much more intact than the other one, but halfway along the back wall, one of the pillars supporting the roof had crumbled, and the gap left between the pillars on each side was just large enough for Sam to squeeze through.  She checked around again, but there was still no one in sight, and she couldn't see anyone or anything in the corridor on the other side.  She squeezed through, and dropped to the floor once she was in, to be unseen over the waist-high lower walls.  

She concluded that the chances were very strong that the inside of this structure was a mirror-image of the other one, so she turned to the right and crept to the next corner.  Still no one in sight -- obviously these guards too felt that whatever they were guarding here wouldn't be able to get itself, or themself, out.  

She rounded the final corner to see a man, sat against the wall of the little inside room, and chained hand and foot.  He looked up as she came in, then stood.  He was a little taller than her, dark-haired, and as their eyes met his glowed slightly.  She took a step backwards in horror -- Goa'uld, shit, what had she got herself into -- but then just as suddenly the wash of sick horror was overlaid by a rush of memory, equally or even more intense.  She knew this man.  No.  She didn't.  Not my memory.  Jolinar did.  Jolinar had known him.  Not Goa'uld -- and Sam was certain now, as she had been when she was briefly Jolinar's host, that the Tok'ra were not the same as the Goa'uld.  Or at least, her inner scientist noted, that Jolinar believed that to be the case.  She noted absently to herself that she really needed to talk to General Hammond about that, and then realised that for the first time, the other-memory hadn't come with that rush of nausea, of disgust.

Chenda's words, when telling the story of her ancestors, came to her.  They who came and they who are here are one and separate, and this is as it is.  Maybe Jolinar's memories needn't change her any more -- or any less -- than any other of her experiences had done.  Maybe she could keep things separate, but part of her.  This is as it is.

Still staring at the man in the corner, for the first time she deliberately thought back to those few days when Jolinar had been there.  Jolinar hadn't deliberately shared many of his memories -- which was part of why it was such a shock when they'd begun to arise anyway.  He hadn't shared any at all, at first, when he just took over, and Sam shuddered again at the memory, biting the inside of her lip.  But when they were... when both she and he were dying, before he gave up to give her the chance to recover, he'd shared some things then.  They'd both been confused, in pain -- she hadn't known then why he did it, what he was doing.  She still didn't really know or understand -- she'd been trying too hard just to ignore it, to hold on to her idea of a self who had only ever been her, who hadn't had that experience.  But some of what he'd shared was about a wish to be remembered, to have his memories carry on.  And maybe some of it was an attempt to forge some sort of bond between the Tok'ra and the Tauri.  Or at least to begin to build a bridge.  Maybe.  

Whatever Jolinar had wanted, whatever he'd been trying to do, this person -- she knew him, knew him with Jolinar's memories.  She struggled for the name, couldn't quite get it (and would that be host, or symbiote, she wondered).  She remembered that Jolinar was fond of him -- they'd been friends, worked and fought together, at some point in the past.  (How long did the Tok'ra live, anyway?)

She was still staring at the man, wide-eyed, and he was still looking calmly back at her, without saying anything.

"Kalesh?" she stammered, the name coming to her suddenly, the memories still vividly present.  "You're Kalesh.  Of the Tok'ra."

The man -- Kalesh -- frowned. 

"And who are you to know that?"

"I'm -- I was,"  Sam stopped.  "I'm Captain Carter, of the Tau'ri.  I -- I knew Jolinar."

Kalesh's eyebrows shot up, then he frowned again.  Sam was fairly sure that he was going to work out fast enough that, to recognise him, she couldn't just have known Jolinar, but he seemed prepared to take her statement at face value.

"Knew?" he asked.  "Then Jolinar is dead?" 

Sam nodded, dropping her gaze, and he closed his eyes, just briefly, before opening them to stare directly at her again.

"What are you doing here?" he asked.

"I'm -- my team and I are peaceful explorers," she fell back on the usual form of words, unsure how much to reveal to this man.  "How are you here, like this?  What happened?"  She gestured at the chains.

Kalesh's chin rose.  "I was found working against the System Lords, and Rudra intends to execute me as an enemy of the Goa'uld.  I assume to curry favour with the System Lords."  He sneered slightly.  Obviously no one took Rudra particularly seriously.  Or maybe the Tok'ra were just as haughty and sure of themselves as the Goa'uld could be.  Jolinar had certainly shown signs of that. 

"You're the test subject," Sam realised aloud, then cursed herself for revealing that without thinking it through.

"Test subject?"  He looked briefly confused, before his face returned to its haughty impassivity.

Sam let the question hang for a moment while she considered her options.  She didn't have to let him know any of what was going on.  She had only his word, and Jolinar's shared memories, that he was who he said he was.  But on the other hand, an ally when it came down to a fight could be valuable.  And -- the bottom line was that she was sure.  That was the thing.  They might not be her memories, but they had the flavour of memory, the flavour of truth.  They weren't something she could doubt.  

Not only that, either.  She could admit to herself now: there was something, some memory, something about this weapon that Jolinar remembered.  She could try to dig through that herself, but she was far from sure that even if she was feeling calmer about what had happened to her, about what was still happening, that it would be a good idea to start investigating further in her current precarious position, far from home and with her friends still trapped.  If Jolinar had known something about it, maybe Kalesh would too.    

She took a breath, and said "The weapon.  Rudra has a weapon he is trying to reconstruct, a weapon that can be used against the Goa'uld.  We think he must be -- aiming for promotion, I guess."  She smiled slightly ruefully. "I couldn't work out how he was going to test it -- I thought maybe one of the Jaffa, but it's not quite the same, so I wasn't sure.  But now: it's you. You're his test subject."

"He has this weapon already?" Kalesh asked urgently.

"He has it, but only in pieces.  It's not working yet," Sam said. 

"Do you plan to stop him?"

She'd given away enough already by now that it wasn't worth hiding that.  "Yes."  Although anything else -- anything about what they planned to do with the weapon, for example, she didn't want to tell him.  He didn't seem interested in that question, though, gazing at her intensely.

"May I assist you?  I know," he moved his hands slightly, chained still behind his back, "that I am of limited use right now, but if you help me escape..."

Sam shook her head.  "I can't.  Not now.  It'll raise suspicion.  But -- maybe you know something about this.  The word we've seen for it is mitanastra.  Do you know...?"

Kalesh's eyes had gone wide.  "You mean it actually exists?  We were -- we thought."  He stopped.  "The Tok'ra have been looking for this for a long time. We thought it, really, to be a myth, but nevertheless -- our position is desperate enough that any kind of possibility must be looked into.  We never looked so very seriously, though," he spread his hands, as best he could in the chains.  "We thought it a myth."

"Not a myth," Sam said.  "Or if it is, it's a myth with a very real physical component.  Rudra has the local elders trying to put it together in the temple.  I think he thinks they know something about it."

"Do they?" Kalesh asked.

"I don't know.  I'm trying to find out.  If they do, they're not sharing it with Rudra -- I saw it earlier today and it's still in pieces.  Do you know anything?"

Kalesh shook his head.  "All I ever knew was that it might -- just possibly -- exist, and that if it did, it was sufficient to destroy a Goa'uld, even one who is protected.  And that it is dangerous."

"Well, yes," Sam agreed.

Kalesh shook his head.  "No, not just that.  More dangerous than just that it is enough to kill a Goa'uld.  I know no more than that, though.  Do you?"

Sam grimaced.  "We're trying.  We have some information from the place where it was found -- but Rudra just beat us to the thing itself."

She saw Kalesh mirror her own slightly despairing slump of the shoulders. No further forward, not really.  Still: he might still be a useful ally.  And at the least: Jolinar had wanted more trust between the Tok'ra and the Tau'ri, and Sam was beginning to think that he might have been right.  This could maybe help that.  

"I can't help you escape now," Sam said again.  "But I can give you this."  She hesitated briefly, then handed over the zat, knowing that it might be a risk.  But he would be of very little use unarmed and still chained.  She trusted him.  She was going to have to gamble on that.   

Kalesh looked down at the zat and then back up at Sam.  "Thank you," he said simply.

Sam nodded, and began briefly to outline what they had planned, even as she kept her ears open for the sound of the Jaffa guard coming into the building.  

#

It was fully dark now, and Sam knew she had to find somewhere to spend the night.  Going back up to the forest was one possibility, but she couldn't really set up camp with no one else to share watch with, and sitting up all night on her own really didn't appeal.  The other option was of course to go back and find Chenda and see if there was somewhere in the village where she could stay.  She wasn't entirely enthusiastic about that, either, but it seemed the best of a bad lot.  And maybe she could get some more information.

As she reached the centre of the village, she heard muffled sounds coming from a house which she recognised as belonging to Phary.  Sam wasn't quite sure what role Phary played in the village structure, but she'd certainly got the impression that she was someone of some importance.  The door stood slightly ajar, and cautiously, Sam peered in round the corner of it.  She saw a room full of women talking quietly, with a fire going at one end of the room, and someone sat on a stool near it, singing.  It wasn't a sort of melody that Sam recognised, and the words were unfamiliar, but the rhythm was compelling.  And more than anything else, she admitted to herself, the very apparent warmth of the scene tugged at her.  She scanned the room -- maybe Chenda was in here?  This looked like a social gathering. One of the women with her back to Sam, squatting on the floor in a group by the door, turned to glance over her shoulder, and Sam identified her as Makara.  She spotted Sam in the doorway, and nudged the woman next to her, who glanced round as well and then stood up.  With a rush of relief, Sam realised it was Chenda.

Chenda came towards the door, smiling.

"Samantha!  Come in, join us.  All is well with your friends?" 

"Yes," Sam agreed.  Best not to go into any detail at this point.

"They are still under guard?"

Sam nodded, as she was drawn towards the group of women Chenda had been talking to, who shuffled round a little to accommodate her.  She looked doubtfully at the way that they were squatting back on their heels, and decided not to emulate it, sitting cross-legged instead.  Chenda forbore to introduce her, dropping back into her conversation instead, for which Sam was grateful: she wasn't sure if Chenda would identify her as from off-world and what might happen if she did.  

The conversation between Chenda and her friends seemed to consist mainly of discussions about other acquaintances and recent events -- it sounded like maybe these were people from Osdoa.  (Which would explain why Chenda hadn't wanted to introduce her.)  Sam let her attention drift, to focus instead on the other end of the room.  Makara had taken over from the previous singer, and was singing something different.  Sam somehow had the impression that it was older, although she couldn't identify any reason for thinking that.

The rhythms were intricate, and repeated in odd ways.  After a while, Sam began to compare the repeats to the way in which Chenda had told the story earlier.  She couldn't be sure, but the patterns seemed -- well, definitely similar, if not the same.  She couldn't make out the words, though -- the enunciation was unclear, and muffled by the changes in pitch.  She concentrated a little harder -- maybe this too was something that Daniel might be able to use, if she had the time to take the information to him.  Then, suddenly, she caught the word mitanastra, and started slightly.  Could it be that they did know something here?  Or maybe she'd misheard.  She concentrated again.  Another of those odd repetitions, and -- yes, it really was the same word.  She bit her lip.  Maybe it was worth asking Chenda about this.

"Chenda," she said to her, quietly, in the next lull in the conversation.  "Could you tell me something?"  She didn't wait for an answer, but carried on.  "The singer, there -- I can't quite hear what she's saying, but I think I heard the word mitanastra.  Is that right?  What does it mean?"

Chenda's eyes widened slightly, and she looked worried.  "I -- I can't tell you.  I didn't think -- you shouldn't be listening to this."  She shook her head, and looked towards the door, shifting her weight in preparation for moving, obviously torn about what to do.  

Sam was suddenly sure that she really was onto something important here.  

"Chenda, please," she said urgently.  "I think I may already know something about this.  Please.  I really need to find out what information you have."

Chenda was clearly unsure.  Sam turned things over in her head -- could she, should she, explain to Chenda what SG1 were doing here?  They needed more information -- and they needed, or they might well need, support.  Chenda was clearly not particularly enamoured of Rudra, so...  She made up her mind.

"Can we go somewhere private?" Sam asked.  "I want to talk to you about this.  About what I'm doing here."

Chenda looked at her sharply, then nodded slowly.  "Come with me."

They stood up, Chenda saying something apologetic to her friends, with a smile, then took Sam's arm companionably and walked out with her into the other ground floor room of the house, then out into the space behind the house.

"If we sit out of the light here," Chenda said, walking around the little kitchen garden at the back, and stopping by one of the stone walls that Sam had seen behind other houses, presumably as protection from the goats, "no one else should see us unless they come to look."  She squatted down on the ground, and Sam sat again beside her.

"Now," Chenda said.  Sam could barely see her expression -- the moon was half-full, and they were sitting in the shadow of the wall.  "What is it, then, that you're doing here?  And how do you know about mitanastra?" 

Sam took a deep breath and began to explain, hoping very hard that she was doing the right thing.  She left out, for now, the Tok'ra parts of the story (both her own experiences and Kalesh's comments -- even Kalesh's existence) but she covered the temple on PX5-273, their discovery of the inscriptions, and their following of Rudra to this planet.  

"I think maybe -- that story you told me earlier.  I think maybe that planet is where some of your ancestors came from," she finished.  "And so maybe -- maybe you have some memories, some stories, that might help us?"

Chenda hadn't spoken while Sam told the story.

"I don't know," she said finally.  "I think -- well, it's possible that you're right.  I didn't..."  She paused, obviously torn again, then came to a decision. "I didn't tell you all of the story earlier.  The mitanastra was part of why we left to come here.  But we don't talk very much about it.  A few songs, a few stories.  It's not safe."

"You used it, and the Goa'uld took revenge?" Sam asked. 

"No," Chenda said.  "We left before it was used.  It was too dangerous to stay near.  A few stayed, to destroy the Goa'uld.  Most came here.  That's what the story says."  She shrugged, a darker shadow against the wall.

Sam blinked.  That wasn't what she'd expected to hear.

"None of the stories say how it was done, though," Chenda continued.  "There are pieces in some of the songs -- pieces no one understands any more, words that don't make any sense.  I think maybe when there and here came together, some parts were lost.  Or left."

Sam couldn't help but think of herself and Jolinar.  Losing memories, losing parts of self...  

"Do you know those songs?" Sam asked.  Maybe Daniel could make use of the part-forgotten sections.

"No," Chenda said.  "I only know the usual stories.  You'd need Makara for that.  She knows more than I do.  That song you heard earlier -- that's only sung very occasionally."

Sam leant her head back against the wall, considering.  She cursed the fact that she didn't have any kind of recording equipment with her -- Daniel had all they'd brought of that sort of thing.  There was no way her own memory was good enough to listen to Makara and then report what she said -- what she sang -- sufficiently accurately to Daniel.  But Daniel was the one who needed access to this information.  She turned things over in her head.  She couldn't break out all three of them permanently right now -- but maybe she could break out Daniel just for tonight.

"Chenda," she said, slowly.  "If I could bring my friend here, would Makara be prepared to tell him the stories?  The songs?  He has information about the, the mitanastra but he can't quite understand it yet.  I think maybe this would help him."

"Will this help us get rid of the thing that took my brother?" Chenda asked bluntly.  "Will you help us, if I help you to understand it?"

Sam had to stop and consider the matter for a moment.  She wasn't even sure that this lay within her power to promise.  But they needed the weapon, and they had a plan, an intention, to retrieve it. And they needed this information to make any use of the weapon.  From the sounds of it, they needed this information to avoid the whole thing turning into a disaster.  And -- she owed Chenda something anyway.  She owed her the chance to get her brother back.  

"Yes," Sam said, flatly.  "We'll help.  We might need more help than just the stories from you, though."

"That can be arranged," Chenda said confidently.  

Sam stood up.  "I'm going to go and get my friend.  Where should I meet you?"

They arranged to meet at Chenda's house, where Chenda would bring Makara.  Chenda went back into Phary's house, and Sam went up the alleyway beside the house, back to the street, to stay in the shadows as she made her way back to the temple.  

#

Second time around, it was surprisingly easy to get back into the library, although she'd still held her breath as she slipped across the open space at the back of the building.  The Jaffa guard hadn't moved, though.

"What the hell are you doing here?" Jack hissed.  "Has something gone wrong?"

"Not exactly," Sam said, and explained as succinctly as she could what had happened.

Jack was deeply unimpressed by the concept of Daniel leaving their prison, even temporarily.  They all kept their voices down as they discussed the problem.

"All the same reasons apply as did before -- if you're found gone, then everything gets escalated, and everyone's going to suffer," Jack pointed out. "Including us."

"He needn't be there for long, sir," Sam said.  "Just long enough to listen to Makara and take some notes."

"From what this friend of Sam's said about the danger, and why they left the planet in the first place, we really need this information, Jack," Daniel argued.  He was already shoving things into his pockets.

"There is a blanket in the corner," Teal'c said.  "We could pile it over something to make it appear that Daniel Jackson is present but asleep, should the guards come to look."

Jack eyed them all with disfavour, then sighed.  "OK, it sounds like it's necessary.  But don't be gone long, Daniel."

"It seems a little odd to break out of prison only to return again," Daniel complained lightly.  

"Yes, well, we'll do it properly tomorrow," Jack said.  

#

The journey back was just as straightforward as the trip in had been.  Sam was getting an increasingly low opinion of the competence of the Jaffa that Rudra had along with him, however helpful it might be.  When Sam and Daniel got to Chenda's house, Chenda and Makara were already there -- along with a couple of other women and a young man.  

"This is my other brother," Chenda introduced him.  "While your friend is talking to Makara, we can discuss how we will get rid of that thing, when you take the mitanastra.  Our ancestors did this."  She shrugged.  "I always thought it was just stories, but now, with the mitanastra here, and from what you say you've seen on this other planet...  They did it.  We can do it too."

"But not with the mitanastra," Sam cautioned.  "Not if the planet had to be evacuated before it could be used."

"Then another way."

Chenda was, it became clear to Sam, a very determined individual.  Still.  She'd promised.  She introduced Daniel to Makara, and then sat across the other side of the room with Chenda, her friends, and her brother, to talk about plans and tactics.  She wasn't entirely sure how much Jack was going to like this, but she was at least clear in herself: this was the only option now.  She'd promised.  

A couple of hours later, Daniel was finished with talking to Makara, and Sam went back with him towards the temple.

"Did you get anything useful?" she asked quietly.

"It's hard to be certain, but yes, I think so.  Makara managed to remember some really old things for me -- it sounds like the culture that came here from P5X-273 got pushed aside in favour of the local culture, mostly, but there's bits and pieces here and there.  And the way things are said, and some of the older forms of words...  I'll get going on it when I'm back."

Sam nodded, then remembered something.  Why hadn't she mentioned Kalesh when she was back in the library with Jack and Teal'c?  They needed to know about him before tomorrow or he would wind up shot on sight.  She had a sneaking suspicion that she hadn't mentioned it because she didn't want to get into a discussion about Jolinar and the Tok'ra.  She really needed to deal with this...  but for now, Daniel could take the message.

"A Tok'ra?" Daniel asked.  

"He seems interested in working with us.  I'm pretty sure he's on the level," Sam said.  Daniel looked sceptical.  "I've -- it seems like I've got a few memories left over from when -- from Jolinar."  She carefully avoided looking at Daniel, ostentatiously scanning the area instead.  "I recognised him when I saw him.  It was a bit unexpected."

"Huh," Daniel said -- but he sounded interested, not concerned.  "That's interesting.  OK, I'll tell Jack and Teal'c."

They'd nearly reached the temple square, and it was time to be quiet for the last dodge around the edge.  There was a moment of terror when the Jaffa guard had seemingly heard a sound and turned to look straight at them.  They both froze in the shadows, and after a long moment, he turned back again.  Sam sent Daniel through the space in the wall -- it was really barely big enough for him -- and then headed back to Chenda's, with the vague hope of getting a little rest before sunrise.  

#

Rest proved elusive, however.  Sam lay wrapped in a couple of blankets on the floor in the corner of the main room in Chenda's house, but she kept going over the details of the plan in her head; wondering whether it would be better to bring it forward.  Get it over with.  Take out the Jaffa now so that they could take out Rudra later, when he came back through the Gate -- except that they didn't know for certain if all the Jaffa on the planet were here in the village, and if any of them were able to get to the Stargate and get a message back to Rudra, he'd doubtless come back in full force.  This way they had a chance at a surprise attack.   

She was concerned as well about the involvement of the villagers.  She was aware that it was going to be important, psychologically speaking, that they had some direct involvement in getting rid of Rudra -- because being rescued without doing anything, without being able to do anything, is no basis to reconstruct your life on. She shook that thought away.  They should be involved, yes, but she didn't want anyone getting hurt if it could possibly be avoided -- and she was dismally aware that even that small handful of Jaffa was more than enough to do a great deal of damage.  These people weren't soldiers.  They weren't even armed.  And the tiny amount of guerilla fighting tactics Sam had been able to pass on wasn't really enough to protect anyone.  She sighed, and opened her eyes again to stare at the ceiling.  At least that little could be passed on to others while they were out in the fields today.  Another good reason to delay things till Rudra was due to arrive.  She wondered whether it would be useful for her to go out there as well -- but she really needed to be close at hand in case anything changed.  She sighed again and closed her eyes for another attempt at sleep. 

When the sun finally rose she gave up and went to find Chenda.  

"Is there any way of getting back into the temple this morning?" she asked bluntly. 

Chenda considered.  "Someone will be taking water in there, I think.  You could do that."

Sam nodded.  She really needed to see what was going on in there.

It turned out to be Makara, again, who was taking water over to the temple, so laden with a wooden bucket, Sam once again followed her in past the uninterested guards.  She spared a moment to be grateful that they didn't use their heads for water-carrying here: she didn't think she could manage that.  The elders hunched over the weapon looked to be pushed to the limits of their exhaustion; and Sam noted a few bruises and other marks.  Obviously the Jaffa were enforcing Rudra's demands in his absence.  She couldn't see that they were making much progress, though.

Makara, over the other side of the room, was humming something under her breath.  Unconsciously, it seemed, one of the men sat on the floor near to where Sam was, began to echo the humming, as he stared at the litter of parts on the floor.  Then, suddenly, he sat more upright, reached over across his next door neighbour, and grabbed at a couple of pieces, slotting them together.  The neighbour stared uncomprehending for a moment, then suddenly nodded, his face lighting up.  Sam was desperately trying to see what they'd managed to do, without giving herself away to the guards, who had started watching more intently, when she caught Makara's eye from across the room, unquestionably indicating that it was time to go.  She swore internally, but meekly followed Makara out, glancing briefly back over her shoulder as she did.  Shit.

"Makara," Sam asked when they were a little further from the temple, "what was that you were singing?"

Makara frowned, obviously thinking back. "Oh -- one of the songs your friend wanted to hear yesterday."  She shook her head.  "It's very obscure -- I haven't heard it sung in a long time.  Maybe not since I was taught it when I was a child."

"What's it about, though?" Sam pressed, with a sinking feeling.

"About the mitanastra," Makara said, offhand.  Then stopped dead in the street, and looked at Sam in horror.  "You mean -- it actually means it?  That it's actually relevant?"

"If you mean that it's information about how it works?" Sam said grimly.  "Then yes, I think it is relevant.  Come on, we'd better get back."

#

Sam sat in Chenda's house, worrying even harder now.  She had no idea how much help the song would be, but if there were stories and songs that had information -- which certainly seemed to be Daniel's belief -- and if the elders had just made that connection...  Things might be about to move a little faster after all.  Would Rudra be summoned early if the Jaffa thought that there'd been a change?  

Of course, that also begged the question of why the elders would be helping if they knew what this was, what it did.  Why would they act for the Goa'uld like this?  Straightforward fear, she supposed.  Alternatively, maybe they too hoped for some possibility of rebellion, for the possibility of turning it on Rudra...  Which would confuse things even more, of course.  Great.  

Bringing things forward still didn't seem to be an option, though.  Most of both villages were back out in the fields; bringing them back again would give the Jaffa far too much warning of what was going on.  And they still needed to wait until Rudra returned, if they wanted to get rid of him as well.  So: midday today.      

That was, of course, the moment when two of the Jaffa came around the corner, looking purposeful.  They stopped in front of the house.

"The weapon is complete," the taller one announced.  "You will come before your god to witness his success."

Shit.  Surely they couldn't have gotten that far, that quickly?  Maybe they had been nearly there after all, just enough that the song had been enough to get the last little bit.  Maybe it wasn't correct, in which case they might still have time to stick to the original plan -- but if it was put together incorrectly, it might just as likely do something catastrophic as it might simply not work.  Especially given the warnings.  She still had no clue what it did or how it worked, unless Daniel had managed to get something, but then she wouldn't be able to contact him in advance either.  Shit.  

Come before your god -- how then was Rudra back here already?  She knew she'd been sitting and turning things over in her mind for a while since she got back from the temple, but surely he wasn't due just yet?  (Of course, if he was going to return early, that implied that the Jaffa were able to communicate with him, and so that at least it had been the correct decision not to move early and risk retaliation in more force.)

There was extensive running around going on around her, while the Jaffa told them to hurry, and someone was sent up to the field where the rest of the village was working.  Sam managed to find Chenda and tell her that they were to be ready to move at her, Sam's, mark.  Chenda promised to pass the information around, and Sam ducked out into the back yard to use her radio, tense while she did so with listening for one of the Jaffa coming through.   Using the radio now was a risk, but Jack needed to know that it was time to move.  

"Colonel?"

"Sam?  What's up?"  Obviously nothing had happened at their end yet.  Maybe the prisoners would just be left while Rudra was showing off.  

"They've finished the weapon.  We're being taken down there to watch it be tested.  I think Rudra's here again -- I haven't seen him, though, so I don't know where he is exactly.  I have no idea what it -- what the weapon -- will do."

"If it does work, Rudra'll be taking his snake ass straight off through the gate."

"I'm not sure, but I don't think we can risk that, sir.  So..."

"So we need to move now.  OK, Captain.  We'll get ourselves out of here now."

She faintly heard Daniel in the background, saying "Tell Sam I really need to talk to her about...", and then she heard heavy footsteps, and had to hurry to get the radio off and hidden and to slide back round the corner, head down as she passed the Jaffa. 

#

Sam managed to catch up with Chenda, who'd noticed her absence and had been dawdling as much as she could without being obvious.  They both hurried forward a little, out of the earshot of the Jaffa behind them.

"We need to be ready to move," Sam said quietly, and Chenda nodded.  "There's a problem, though -- Rudra's going to be here, and if the weapon's already working...  I don't know what it'll do, and I don't know how Rudra's going to use it."

Not a situation she was remotely happy about, but Chenda seemed to take it in stride.

"We'll respond to what happens," she said.  "What about your friends?" she asked.  

"I was able to contact them -- they're on their way."  She decided against trying to explain the concept of radios.   

Chenda nodded again.  "We'll be ready for your signal."  

Sam swallowed nervously and hoped that the Jaffa weren't looking out for signs of rebellion.  Although given the earlier killings, they probably assumed that they were in control now.  Especially if the elders had actually constructed the weapon.  Dammit.  The idea of going into an uneven battle, with the other side possessing a weapon of unknown power, was not one she was particularly keen on.  

#

When they got there, Sam managed to hang back enough to get a view of the layout.  The group of elders were sat on the ground just outside the temple, looking pale and exhausted.  As they reached the courtyard area, a couple of the women ran over to them, pantomiming concern that Sam was pretty sure was unfeigned.  That was one problem out of the way, anyway -- the Jaffa weren't making any moves to prevent the conversation, so at least everyone on her side would have some idea of what was happening.  She tried not to watch too obviously -- there were some reactions of surprise, and even what looked like anger, but the women talking to them -- Makara seemed to be one of them -- were keeping it under control.  She was fairly sure that if you didn't know what was going on, that from the distance of, say, one of the Jaffa guards, nothing would look out of the ordinary.  She hoped.

In front of the temple was a large open space, with another couple of Jaffa.  That must be where Rudra, and the weapon, were going to be.  Sam frowned slightly -- he really did seem to be understaffed on the Jaffa front.  She could only assume that he really was quite low-down the totem pole -- and having fewer Jaffa to worry about could only be a good thing, surely.  But the discrepancy niggled at her.  What exactly did he believe that this weapon could do, if someone this apparently weak had what had to be very grandiose plans for it?  Not that a certain amount of hubristic self-confidence was unusual in a Goa'uld, of course.

She glanced round again, and suddenly saw Daniel, half-hidden behind a corner of one of the houses by the temple, and gesturing frantically.  Her relief that they had gotten out already -- she couldn't see Teal'c and the Colonel, but if Daniel was here then they were as well, and that meant that she could move the plan along whenever suited her, or more accurately, whenever Rudra turned up -- was tempered by a combination of worry: that they might yet raise the alarm too early by their escape, and irritation that he could be trying to talk to her at this point.  She glanced round to make sure none of the Jaffa were watching her, then turned back to Daniel and shook her head, frowning fiercely at him.  His reaction was to nod violently, and redouble the beckoning, stabbing his finger at the notebook he was holding.  

Shit.  It had to be something he'd worked out about the weapon -- whatever he'd been asking Jack to say before she had to turn the radio off.  Obviously some of the information Makara'd given him had been useful after all.  And presumably Jack had agreed that it was important, or he wouldn't have let Daniel wander off like that, not in this situation.  That was of course if Daniel hadn't just taken off of his own accord.  But if she carried on ignoring him, he was quite capable of trying to make his own way over to her, which really would be disastrous.  And any more information about what they were facing would be useful.  Shit.  She could, suddenly, understand why Jack got quite so fed up with Daniel on occasion.  She turned back to him and nodded quickly, holding up a finger to wait there, and looked around again to find Chenda.

"I'll be back in a moment -- my friend is here with information we need," she said quietly.

Chenda nodded, and, with another glance round -- the Jaffa still weren't really paying attention to the group of women -- Sam started to make her way backwards to the nearest street, so she could double around and reach Daniel.  This was going to put her in totally the wrong place for a while.  It better had be important.

#

She reached him without incident -- thankfully he'd had the sense to retreat out of sight of the courtyard once he'd signalled her.  After a year and a half of this, she knew that his instincts were pretty good, and they'd never been that bad even right at the start -- but she also knew that he was capable of doing some catastrophically dumb things, especially when he thought he had something more important to worry about. 

She wasn't sure whether to hope that this was something important, or not. 

"Where are the Colonel and Teal'c?" she asked as soon as she reached him.  

Daniel waved a slightly dismissive hand.  "They're fine -- they're over behind the library over there.  Jack seemed to think that that would be good cover for taking out the Jaffa nearest the temple."  

Sam exhaled in relief, but Daniel was still going.

"That's not why I came over, Sam."  He opened one of the notebooks, pages now decorated with multicolour notes, underlinings, and arrows.  "Look -- here.  I'm almost positive that this is the bit explaining the danger.  See that group of words there?  I translate them as "be wary", and those ones there, those are about the price paid.  It took me a while to get that, there's a similarity to the forms used for recording financial matters, but this is an abstract form..."  He glanced up at Sam, and her tight-wound impatience obviously showed -- normally she would listen to Daniel geeking about his work till the cows came home, but this was really not the time.  Daniel shut his mouth again, and she could see him mentally regroup.

"OK, so, the point is, I think this is the important bit, but I can't make any sense of this -- I've got some rough guesses at translations here, but I think it's something about the mechanics of it, or even the physics.  I'm not totally ignorant there, but this is beyond me -- I don't know anything well enough to translate it like this."

Sam frowned at the page, then took the notebook from him.  Something about bonds, and separation, and what was that diagram trying to show?  

"Hang on," she said.  "Do you have that other book -- the one where we were working on the schematic, yesterday?" 

"Sure!"  Daniel passed it to her, and she flipped through it to the part with the schematic.  

"OK," she said slowly.  "If this is how they think of a schematic, then maybe we need to think of this part as flipped over...  I think maybe it's an atomic diagram, and look, this is maybe a representation of it coming apart..."  She squinted at it again, ran Daniel's question-marked translations through her head...  "Wow.  I -- look, I have no idea how it works, but then we don't really know how the zats work, either.  But it looks like it -- well, basically like it pulls apart any living cells within its range.  And assuming I'm reading this bit here right, its range is huge."

"So -- destroys anything living within range?" Daniel asked.  

Sam nodded, eyes wide.  "I can't work out how they did it exactly -- I mean, look at these people, the technology here, there's no way that a society like this should be able to do this, and we didn't see any evidence of high-level tech on P5X-273."

"From what I got from Makara, I think maybe they chose to keep it secret initially -- which is what I was speculating after P5X-273 -- and then when they came here, it got abandoned.  Subsumed."

"We can't do what I think this claims on Earth," Sam said, still doubtful.  "Maybe it just doesn't work."

"But if it does," Daniel said slowly. 

"If it does, then we're all going to die," Sam said flatly.  "Which, hey, would explain why they evacuated the planet before they used it.  And I suppose it would explain why the jungle wasn't thicker than it was -- it would have had to regenerate itself from outside that range.  "

"The price to pay," Daniel said, nodding at the notebook in her hand.  "That's what it said, in the warning.  The price to pay."

"Right," Sam said.  However unlikely it seemed, they'd seen far too many more unlikely things by now.  They couldn't take the risk.  "So it's not so much about getting hold of the thing any more, as it is about stopping Rudra from testing it.  That moves things up a bit.  Daniel, you need to get back to Teal'c and the colonel.  I'll go talk to Chenda and the others."  She thrust the notebooks into his hand.  "And we'd better hurry."

She didn't wait to see Daniel go before she'd turned and started to make her way back to the courtyard, as quickly as she could without attracting attention.  This was turning into enough of a clusterfuck as it was without her being spotted. 

#

She watched Daniel disappearing into one of the back alleyways, then looked round the courtyard again.  She needed to get back to where Chenda and the others were, and let them know about this, before Rudra got here.  The ideal time to move would be as he was arriving, while things were still at least a little chaotic.  She was still nervous about drawing the attention of the Jaffa warriors in advance, though.  The villagers were scattered in loose groups around the courtyard, and she counted four Jaffa standing just in front of the groups.  There was still another guard in front of the right-hand library: did that mean that they thought that Jack and Teal'c were still in there?  Presumably in Rudra's absence they didn't like to do anything with the prisoners without explicit instructions. Jack would be waiting for her signal before moving, anyway. 

The guards stood by the villagers looked barely alert -- and the locals weren't doing anything to encourage them to pay any more attention, standing with their heads down, and shuffling slightly.  They weren't backing away from the Jaffa, though -- and as Sam watched she noticed that the shuffling was tending to move them slightly closer.  Good -- things going as planned there.  She had better not move too fast to get back to them, or she might draw unwanted attention -- or would it draw more attention to be spotted away from everyone else?  

Then she saw Rudra march out from the main street, two more Jaffa in front and two behind him.  She felt the hatred/anger uncoil in her again, but it felt under control this time.  She realised, suddenly, that she could feel the distinction: that there was something in there from Jolinar's memories, the implacable enmity of the minority.  But there was also her own visceral hatred of the Goa'uld, and the loathing of a species that took their hosts unwillingly like that.  There wasn't time, now, to look at that further, but the part of it that wasn't 'hers' no longer felt so terrifying.  Maybe this was all going to be OK.  If she didn't get herself and everyone else destroyed from the cells up, of course.  

The villagers parted in rapidly in front of Rudra, and Sam noted them taking advantage of the opportunity to move a little closer to the Jaffa.  Good.  What was bad was that now was when they would really want to move, but she was in the wrong place to give the signal.   She was at least able to take advantage of the fact that everyone -- Jaffa guards included -- was watching Rudra to move to the back of the nearest group.  Unfortunately not one in which she knew anyone.  She needed to get to Chenda, or maybe Makara, but they were over the other side of the courtyard now.  Shit.  This was moving faster than she liked -- and it was looking less likely now that she'd be able to talk to Chenda about the weapon, either.  

Rudra stopped in front of the temple and said something to the Jaffa who were with him.  One of them went into the temple; another two went towards the left-hand library (Kalesh, of course...).  Sam waited, heart in mouth, for him to gesture over to the guard in front of the other library -- that would be one way to start things off, even if it would be much more ragged like that -- but nothing.  Maybe the Jaffa hadn't bothered to mention the new prisoners when they told him the weapon was ready.  

The Jaffa emerged from the temple carrying the weapon.  Shit.  Did she need to try to signal now even from here?  But Rudra didn't move to take hold of it.  Sam squinted across at it, trying to work out if it matched the pictures from the temple walls.  She wished she could get out her binoculars.  (She wished she had her binoculars.)  It didn't look obviously wrong in the way it had yesterday, so maybe...  But then again, even if it were wrong, that didn't necessarily mean that it wouldn't be just as disastrous if Rudra tried to set it off.  Damn the whole business.  She hastily lowered her head again and tried to move slowly a little further around the back of the group of villagers.  

Then, from the library, the other two Jaffa, with Kalesh between them, hands still tied behind his back.  He looked up, suddenly, and straight at Sam.  Once again she felt that shock of recognition like a punch to the stomach, but more complicated this time, because overlain with the memories that really were her own, from their conversation yesterday.  And yet -- somehow, that felt OK, she realised.  The two sets of knowledge coming together -- and both with their own feeling, so they were mixed but yet identifiable.  Strands, rather than soup, she thought, and felt an inappropriate giggle threatening to break through.   

She'd halfway expected him to use the zat already.  Either to break himself out and get out of there, or to take the Jaffa out when they came to get him out.  She hadn't, not really, expected him to be prepared to help them, but obviously he was -- he was going along with the plan as she'd outlined it.  He might only be doing it to get at Rudra, rather than for any feeling of solidarity with them or with Chenda's people, but that was good enough for her.  

It was clear to her, the sort of clear that you couldn't argue with, that placed itself as certain knowledge within you, that she couldn't let him die.  She owed this to Jolinar -- for saving her, for the distrust (however reasonable, however justifiable) that had led to his death because they couldn't leave the SGC.  

Which, on the face of it, seemed straightforward.  Kalesh was clearly there to be the test subject; she and Daniel had established now that whatever happened they couldn't let the thing be tested.  So the test had to be stopped anyway, and both objects would be achieved.  But her awareness of that division of priorities wasn't entirely comfortable.

Rudra had started talking: the standard sort of Goa'uld self-aggrandisement, mixed in with some rhetoric about how Kalesh was a traitor and would, roughly speaking, now get what was coming to him.  And a bit more about Rudra's own ambitions.  Everyone was paying attention, or at least seeming to, and a careful look around showed the Jaffa all watching Rudra as well.  Sam moved quietly further round towards Chenda.  Maybe she might just about have time to talk to her  before she had to kick things off.  Rudra seemed quite fond of the sound of his own voice, but soon it would be onto the main business of the afternoon.  Everyone was pretty much in place -- at least, she had to assume that Jack and Teal'c were ready to go as well -- and if she delayed much longer they were all going to be at far too much risk from something unexpected going wrong.  Like all of them winding up very, very dead.  That would, after all, be a fair waste of Jolinar's sacrifice, she thought with slightly black humour.  

#

She noticed one of the Jaffa guards scanning the crowd, and stopped where she was again.  She wasn't going to be able to make it.  Rudra was still talking, but Sam doubted that they had much time left before he moved from the demagogic ranting and progressed to the "blowing them all up" stage of affairs.  Daniel must have managed to get back to Jack and Teal'c by now, so they should be updated at least.  There was no way she'd be able now to explain things at this end, not without attracting attention they really didn't want.  It was just going to have to be time to move.

She looked over at Chenda, who had turned slightly, and was scanning the crowd as well, head still lowered.  She caught Sam's eye, and raised her eyebrows very slightly.  Sam took a deep breath, and glanced round again, carefully.  She was going to have to go straight for Rudra, before he had a chance to use the weapon.  If it worked.  Even if it didn't.  God, there were so many ways in which this could go horribly wrong; but they really didn't have any other options.  The price to pay -- well, she wasn't prepared to sacrifice everyone here in exchange for allowing one Goa'uld to take himself out.   She felt under her tunic for her radio, and carefully slid it off her belt, thumbing it on.  Chenda was still looking at her.

"Now, sir," she said into the radio as she nodded sharply at Chenda.  

#

For a few moments after that, everything happened both very fast and very slowly.   The villagers had moved close enough to the Jaffa guards that three of them were down, straightforwardly swarmed under, within a surprisingly short while.  Someone else was hustling the exhausted elders out of the way behind the temple -- good.  She saw one flash of a Jaffa staff weapon as she moved as fast as she could through the crowd -- for a small village there suddenly seemed to be a lot of people here.  Up ahead of her, Kalesh had his hands loose -- good -- and one of his guards went down to a zat blast.  The other was slightly faster, but Kalesh managed to duck his staff blast, and then something from across the courtyard knocked the other Jaffa down.  Teal'c, at a guess -- her team must have made it round into the courtyard area.  She risked a quick glance over to confirm that.  Yes, all three of them there, and Jack in the middle of taking down the other Jaffa who'd been guarding the crowd.  That left the two Jaffa by Rudra -- one of them was still up, and was firing at another of the villagers, but Kalesh zatted him, too, and he went down.  That should mean that the fighting part of things was very nearly over -- the only hope they'd ever really had was to strike as fast as possible.   

But Rudra was still there, and Sam ran towards him, dodging the last little group of villagers.  Rudra was looking around himself, suddenly shaken, but with his personal shield already up.  Of course.  Sam couldn't help but compare him to Apophis, or the other Goa'uld of their acquaintance, who would surely have done something by now.  Not that, exactly, she wished to complain.  Still: she was increasingly unimpressed with his lack of competence.  

She saw Rudra's eyes narrow, and he moved towards the weapon, lying on the floor beside the Jaffa who'd been holding it.  Sam had a moment of sudden, gut-clenching, horror.  She was the closest person to him, and she wasn't going to be close enough to get to him before he could pull the trigger.

It might not work.  They might not have it correctly together.  It might just -- do nothing.  

'Might' wasn't really good enough, here.  

Rudra swung the weapon up into his hands, and brought it round to point it at Kalesh.  It seemed to indicate something of a one-track mind -- but then, Rudra was shielded, so maybe he felt he could afford to focus on this one thing.  Kalesh stared coldly back at him.  Sam was still feet from them, bringing her own weapon up, but she knew that bullets weren't going to be of any use here -- not through the shield.  Nor was the zat, even if she could get it from Kalesh fast enough (which was of course why Kalesh wasn't using it himself) -- and god knew what the zat would do to the mitanastra.  Rudra would have to bring the shield down -- wouldn't he? -- to use the thing, but that was barely going to be enough time to do anything.  

She searched desperately through her mind, trying to think of an alternative.  Any alternative.  Something to stop this, even to slow it, to make space for something else to happen.  The memory was there, suddenly, of how it felt when Jolinar had spoken through her, that voice.  You will obey.  Not her, not her at all -- but it was her throat, her vocal chords, her lungs, so it must be possible for her to do that too.  Maybe it would be enough to buy them a few extra seconds, that space for something -- anything -- to change and for them not all to end up smeared all over the atmosphere.  

She saw Rudra's hand go to the control of his shield as she broke through the edge of the chaotic crowd, into that space around Rudra and Kalesh.  The shield fell away as Rudra's hands went back up to steady the weapon, and Sam pulled her head up and back, spine straight, putting as much pride and authority into her bearing as she could.

"Stop."

It certainly didn't sound like her own voice, not from inside.  But it didn't sound like Jolinar had either (of course not, her mind whispered, the difference between volition and lack of it), and for a moment she had no idea whether she'd done anything useful at all.  But Kalesh's eyes flickered towards her, and Rudra's head jerked backwards, bringing the weapon down just that little bit.

"Who?" he demanded, swinging round to face her.  

Could she claim to be Jolinar?  She didn't think that she could keep it up for more than a word or two.  So she copied Kalesh, called on the muscle memory from being a passenger with Jolinar (ignored the way that felt, no time for that now, just use it), narrowing her eyes at Rudra and keeping that position of arrogant pride, of conviction that he would obey her.  Did she have time to go for her gun before he could move?  She was horribly aware that the Goa'uld were faster than humans.  

For a moment, the silence hung between all three of them.  Then Rudra laughed, and brought the weapon back up again, this time pointing at her.

"I will do no such thing," he said.

Sam's stomach clenched again, and she started to move, even while she knew that there was no way she would be fast enough -- but suddenly Rudra was being bowled sideways, Jack hurling himself at his knees in a bastardized rugby tackle.   Sam, just on the point of pulling the trigger of her her sidearm up, had just enough time to register what was happening and to jerk the barrel upwards even as she couldn't quite stop herself from firing, so that the shot went harmlessly up; and she saw the weapon skitter out of Rudra's grasp and along the ground.  Then, a staff blast -- Teal'c, running up to aim over Jack's shoulder -- and Rudra slumped.  

Sam took what felt like her first proper breath since she'd spoken into the radio, and became consciously aware, rather than just battle-aware, of what was around her.  Jack and Teal'c in front of her; Daniel arriving just behind them, blood on a sleeve but otherwise unharmed.  Dead Jaffa -- she counted quickly, and yes, all accounted for.  Rudra stunned.  The locals standing round, looking shell-shocked.  Some human bodies, and people on their knees, mourning already for their loved ones.  Sam felt slightly sick.  The cost, always the cost of fighting.  Even if the other options were worse.  

Kalesh was still standing, unmoving, but he was looking at her, and his eyebrows were drawn slightly together.  

"What did you say to him?" Jack asked, standing up and stepping away from Rudra's body.

"I said -- stop," Sam answered, almost absently.

"Stop?" Jack said incredulously.  "You said, stop?  As opposed to, say, shooting him."

"He'd only just dropped his shield, sir.  I didn't have time to do anything else."  Sam was trying to find the words to explain.  

"Still, but..."

"But you are human," Kalesh interrupted, eyes locked on Sam now.  "You -- you did not just know Jolinar, did you?"

"I was his host," Sam said, bluntly.  "Briefly.  Just before he died.  He -- I would have died too.  He sacrificed himself to save me.  I'm -- I didn't want to talk about it, earlier."  She paused briefly, then said, firmly.  "I don't want to talk about it."

Kalesh's frown deepened slightly, but he inclined his head towards Sam.

"Yeah, and what do we do with this one?" Jack asked, raising his weapon slightly.

"No," Sam said quickly and vehemently.  "Sir," she added, almost as an afterthought.

Jack's eyebrows climbed, but he lowered the weapon slightly.

"He's Tok'ra.  His name's Kalesh," Sam added.  "I -- Jolinar knew him.  I -- I didn't just say stop.  Well, I did, but -- I remember how it -- how it felt, Jolinar speaking through me, and I," she waved a hand.  "I did that.  It threw him, Rudra, briefly.  I thought maybe it would be long enough for something else to happen."

"As indeed it was," Teal'c said calmly.  "O'Neill reacted very quickly."

"Carter, you never mentioned that you still had any of Jolinar's memories," Jack said, voice flat.

"Can we talk about this later, maybe, sir?  I've been kind of struggling with it.  I didn't have anything at first, and then the last couple of days...  It's not all one piece, it seemed to get triggered by certain things.  I've been trying."  She stopped.  "Sir, with respect, I really don't think this is the time to discuss this."

"Situation-dependent memory," Daniel put in.  "It's a known phenomenon."

"Yeah, but what else might he have left in there?" Jack sounded suspicious.

Sam felt suddenly sick, again.  

"Sir, I can assure you that I was in full control of my actions.  Daniel told you -- we can't risk that weapon being used.  And the Tok'ra can be our allies, really they can -- we shouldn't be executing them out of hand."

She looked up at Jack, but instead of the mistrust that she'd expected to see, there was only concern there.  Concern for them, for her.  She took a sharp, relieved, breath. 

"Okay. Carter, we'll discuss this later.  Everything seems to have worked out OK, so let's prioritise getting us and this weapon thing out of here.  And we should just let this -- Tok'ra -- head home?"

"I think so," Sam started.  

Then, behind Jack, Rudra stirred.  Sam heard Chenda shriek.

"Look!  He's not dead.  I'll kill him."

They all swung round.  Across the courtyard, Chenda was picking up the weapon which had skittered halfway across the floor, and was coming across the courtyard, aiming it at Rudra.

"You misbegotten slime, false god, liar, murderer.  You stole my brother.  You killed my brother.  You will not walk round wearing his body any more."

"Chenda!  No!"  Sam knew she sounded desperate, but Chenda was quite obviously neither listening to nor even hearing anything around her.  

God, no, not to stop Rudra doing this and then to have it happen anyway.  Why the hell hadn't they secured the weapon immediately?  Jack was moving towards Chenda saying something in calming tones, arm outstretched, but she ignored him too, eyes fixed on Rudra.  

Sam still had her sidearm in her hand.  She could take the weapon out from here, she was close enough, the angle was good.  One shot to the middle and it would take the whole thing out.  What it would do to Chenda she didn't know.  It might even take the rest of them out as well.  But -- it was a lower risk than if Chenda pulled the trigger.  

She hesitated for a split second, raised her arm, sighted, and shot.  

The weapon clattered to the ground, and Chenda crumpled backwards.  Jack was already kneeling over her.  

"She'll be OK.  Sprained wrist, maybe, from the recoil," he reported after a moment.  Daniel had gone to the weapon -- something about stable doors and horses ran through her mind.  

From the corner of her eye, Sam saw movement, and swung back to see Kalesh bringing his arm up, something in his hand.  There was just enough time for a jumble of panicked thoughts to go through her head -- had she misjudged this?  was he about to shoot Daniel, or Teal'c, or Jack?  Was that the zat he still had? -- as she brought her own gun back up, but before she could squeeze the trigger, she saw where Kalesh was aiming.  

Rudra, still halfway through sitting up, jerked backwards and fell to the floor as the zat hit him, twice.  Kalesh lowered his arm.

Sam halfway expected an apology.  Rudra had been their prisoner, after all, and surely it was kind of rude just to shoot him like that.  But Tok'ra were still Goa'uld, and Kalesh's arrogant bearing didn't change as he turned back towards Sam.  

Jack was on his feet again, looking down at Rudra's corpse, and then back at Kalesh.

"Well, I'd have preferred a little consultation first, but really I find it kind of hard to care all that much about Rudra there, so I guess we're just gonna let this go," Jack said finally.  

Kalesh nodded again.  "I will return to my home."

"Through the Stargate?" Sam asked.

"The chappa'ai?  Yes."

Jack had one of his bland expressions on, and had shifted his weight slightly.  "Y'know, I'm still not sure that that's entirely going to work out well for us."

Kalesh stared haughtily at him.  "You will not keep me here.  I will return to my home."

"Well, y'see..." Jack started.

"Ah, Colonel?" Sam interrupted.  "A quick word?"

Jack nodded, and she walked over to him.  "Colonel, I don't think it's a good idea for us to try to keep him here.  To be honest, I'm not even sure we can."

"Captain, you know we have standing orders to try to bring a Goa'uld in."  Jack didn't look entirely happy about the idea, though.

"He's not a Goa'uld, sir.  He's a Tok'ra."

"He looks awfully like a snake to me," Jack said flatly.

"Sir -- they're not the same as the Goa'uld.  Jolinar saved my life."

"Which was only in danger in the first place because of him," Jack pointed out.

"Yes, but..."  I owe something to him, from that.  And Jack would have understood that, but it wasn't something she could say.  But she could see the same thought reflected in his eyes.  "The Tok'ra could be a valuable ally.  We shouldn't -- we can't afford to -- give them cause to take against us.'

Daniel had appeared over Jack's shoulder.  "Sam's right, Jack.  If Kalesh goes back unmolested, that's a very good point in our favour with the Tok'ra.  I think we really need that.  We haven't got many allies right now..."

And we can't take on the Goa'uld by ourselves, not in any kind of force.  They all knew it, even if none of them wanted to say it out loud in public.  

Jack was nodding slowly.  "Okay."  Sam breathed out in relief.  

Jack jerked his chin at Kalesh across the space between us.  "OK, then.  Off you go home.  Travel safe."

Kalesh nodded back, then turned to Sam. 

"Jolinar -- will be missed.  Thank you for the information."

He looked round at all four of them.  "Thank you all for your assistance."

At least that was one thing the Tok'ra had.  Sam couldn't imagine that a Goa'uld would ever say thank you, however stiltedly.  

They watched Kalesh leave, heading towards the Stargate.  Jack sighed and rubbed his eyes briefly.

"On the side of good and right or not, I'm not sure I'm ever going to find it straightforward to talk to a snake like that."

#

Sam shut her eyes for a moment, then opened them again and turned to Chenda.  Makara was kneeling by her, now, and Chenda was sitting up, her face still contorted in grief and anger.  Sam squatted down beside her and Chenda looked at her, narrow-eyed.

"Chenda, I'm sorry, but..."

"You defended that false god, that monster, from me?  You stopped me from killing him?" Chenda said in disbelief.

Sam winced. 

"He's -- Rudra's dead, now.  Your brother's free."

"My brother was already dead," Chenda said flatly.  "That thing died anyway.  You could have just let me kill him!  You've hurt me," she brandished her wrist at Sam, "and I couldn't avenge my brother, and even then it happened anyway!"

"The weapon would have killed you," Sam started.

"I would have been happy, more than happy, to pay that price," Chenda said.  Sam could empathise with that cold anger, but...

"Not just you.  All of us.  Everyone here.  It's not..."  She searched for the way to explain it.  "It doesn't discriminate.  It kills the Goa'uld, sure, but only by saturating the whole area."

The price to be paid.

Chenda blinked, then looked away for a moment.  When she looked back at Sam, she looked slightly calmer, and Sam tried hard not to sigh with relief.  

"But why didn't you tell us?  Make sure we knew how important it was to stop that thing from using the weapon?" she asked.  "Surely it was more by good luck than anything else that we're all still here, in that case?"

"I didn't know in time," Sam said simply.  "Daniel -- my friend, over there -- Daniel and I didn't work it out until just before we had to start things up.  I didn't have time to explain it -- if we'd delayed any further Rudra certainly would have used it."

Chenda nodded, and sighed.  She shifted slightly on the ground, & obviously jostled her arm, hissing between her teeth.  Sam looked round for her pack.  

"Look, let me -- I have medicines, in my bag.  I can help you with your arm."

Chenda shook her head.  "No.  I'll go to Phary.  She deals with our injuries."

"But..." Sam started.  Phary's medicines and experience might be great, but she was fairly confident that some ibuprofen and maybe a decent sling wouldn't go amiss.  But Chenda was already pulling herself up off the ground, with Makara's help.  

"Thank you for your help," Chenda said, in obvious dismissal. "I understand what you were doing, now.  I don't hold it against you."  She turned away, about to head over to where the rest of the villagers were standing.

"Chenda -- wait," Sam wasn't entirely sure what she wanted to say.  "I -- thank you. For helping me.  For your bravery in all of this.  And maybe we can come back here, sometime, visit you?  Maybe trade?"

Chenda tilted her head slightly, then she sighed.  "I'd like that, Samantha; but I think maybe it would be better if we just shut down the chappa'ai.  Our ancestors -- from the other place -- wanted to free us of the false gods, and we've done that now.  But if we leave it open, maybe another one will arrive, and maybe we won't be able to do it again.  I'm not sure we could have done it this time without your help."

She shrugged slightly.  "But the memories we have from the other place -- we've let those slide, let the memories from here drive us.  Maybe it's time to rebuild that, to bring both of them together a bit more.  Our ancestors were able to develop this weapon -- maybe we can use some of the memories we have to rebuild those abilities.  But I think it's better to do it on our own."

Sam nodded, slowly.  "I understand.  In that case: what you need to do is to bury it.  That way, no one can come through, but if your people do someday want to use the gate -- the chappa'ai -- then it'll still be there."

"Thank you," Chenda said.  "We'll discuss that.  We need to make some decisions, I think, about how we want to go on from here.  On our own."

She turned away, more conclusively this time, and Sam watched her go.  She heard footsteps behind her, and turned to see Daniel.

"Forgiven for shooting her?" Daniel asked. 

"Yeah," Sam said.  "They don't want anything to do with us, though.  I mean, she was polite about it, but she wants just to bury the Gate and keep people out."  She felt oddly, indefinably sad -- she hadn't spent long with Chenda or any of her people, but the idea that the options were isolation or being taken over...  She sighed.

"They're probably right," Daniel said.  "I sometimes wish..."

That he'd never unburied the Gate on Abydos, Sam suspected was what he left unsaid. 

"I know," she agreed.  "I just wish that wasn't the only option, you know?"

He nodded, slowly.

"Come on, you two," Jack's voice came from behind them.  "Time to be packing up."

#

The villagers didn't seem exactly elated at the overthrow of their god; more slightly bemused and quiet.  There was a weird, slightly strung-out feeling to the place.  Partly due, Sam supposed, to the handful of deaths during the fight (though, she reminded herself at the stab of guilt, fewer, far fewer, than it might have been even without the risk of the weapon discharging.  And fewer than would probably have been the case anyway had Rudra continued to rule here, even without the weapon).  Maybe also partly due to the fact that the information was already clearly spreading that what had been at stake here was the mitanastra.  Having old stories suddenly appearing in reality is an alarming experience in any circumstances, as Sam herself was all too aware.  She remembered the shock of finding out that the Egyptian gods she'd learnt about as a kid were actually real, just -- not quite what she'd thought.  These people were having the same experience of reassessing their stories, their histories.  Resurrecting old memories...  And the subdued atmosphere was also doubtless partly due to the fact that it was clear that changes were on their way.  Even change for the better is alarming, Sam reflected with a sigh.     

"Time to go home, kids?" Jack asked.  He seemed a little subdued as well.

Sam considered the matter for a moment.  

"I'd like to stay for a while and help check over the injured, sir.  Although I'm not sure if they'll take any help.  Chenda didn't want to.  But I don't want to just leave without..." she gestured wordlessly, trying to indicate the sense of responsibility she couldn't help but feel for some of what had happened here.  

Jack nodded, not needing her to explain any further.  "OK -- go talk to whoever's responsible for that sort of thing.  See if we can help at all.  I've got a medical kit in my pack as well if it's needed."

Sam found Phary, who was bandaging people up.  She, like Chenda, was polite, but distant, and insisted that they would be fine, thank you.  She accepted some of the sterile bandages from Sam's medical kit, but any further help was clearly unwanted.  

She reported as much to Jack, who was standing by the scattered handful of charred pieces that were all that was left of the weapon.

"Right, then, in that case I think it's time to get back to the SGC.  Any use in taking this stuff back with us?" he asked, gesturing at them.

Sam frowned down at them.  "I'm not entirely sure.  I mean, we could; I don't think it's all that heavy, and maybe there's something I can get out of it back at the lab.  But I'm pretty sure that all the working bits overloaded and were destroyed when I shot it."

Jack nodded.  "Murphy's law, as ever," he said.  "Still -- maybe better to take it back with us than leave it lying around here, if that's not going to cause problems with the locals."

Sam nodded.  "I can ask.  It was theirs, once; or at least, it belonged to people who they were once, partly."  She cut herself off: no point in going into the details of a cultural ancestry that she still didn't altogether understand herself with Jack.  "Still, I don't think they'll mind.  Chenda said something that suggests they want to look at rebuilding some of their technical ability, but I don't think this is the sort of thing she had in mind."

Jack nodded again.  "OK, then, Carter, if they're OK with that, pack it up and we'll ship it back home with us for you to play with."

"The word is research, sir," Sam protested with a slight smile.  

"Whatever," Jack proclaimed airily.

Investigation revealed that the villagers were more than happy for SG1 to take the thing back with them -- the general attitude seemed to be that, cultural history or not, they would be quite happy never to see it again.  Sam, looking again at the charred slag of the inside of the thing, still didn't think it would be much use to anyone; but maybe she could find something useful out.  

On the other hand, maybe it would be just as well if they never managed to work out what was in there.  If the schematics had been correct -- if Daniel's and her interpretation of them had been anything like correct -- Sam tended to think that it might be just as well if Area 51 never got its hands on this.

"What were they thinking, though?" Daniel asked, as they were walking back from the village towards the stargate.  "I mean, why leave something intact that could cause so much destruction -- that you couldn't use without annihilating yourself?  That you had to evacuate your planet before using?"

"Because no one on Earth has ever stockpiled nuclear weapons," Jack said drily.

Daniel pulled a face.  "Yes, OK, good point.  But even then, the idea is to aim them at someone else, right?  The hope is that you get the enemy before they get you."

Sam sighed.  "When they first used it, they did evacuate, though.  Maybe the idea was to come back again later, once they'd got rid of the Goa'uld.  Maybe they didn't realise that the Goa'uld were all over the galaxy.  So really in that case you're just looking at suicide bombers, or a group of people willing to sacrifice themselves to win a war.  And -- "

"And, again, it's not like we don't have those on Earth," Daniel finished.  "I guess you're right."  He sighed.

"Maybe they just really, really hated the snakes?" Jack said.  "Which, y'know, I could understand."

"If it really could get through a Goa'uld personal shield," Sam said slightly wistfully, "it would be a fascinating technology to study."

"Well," Jack said, "if the choice is between 'loss of fascinating technology' and 'us being reduced to a big pile of atoms', or whatever the hell it is you think that was intended to do, I think I'm happy with the way things panned out."

They rounded a corner in the path, and came to the clearing where the Stargate stood.

"Hometime," Jack announced.  "Dial us up, Daniel."

#

Sam found herself smiling as they stepped through the wormhole and into the familiar SGC gateroom.  Home again.  She took a deep breath and felt her shoulders drop, just a fraction, as she lost the tension of being offworld.  She could feel the others relaxing beside her as well, and she smiled slightly as she realised that she really was starting to feel that she was back in touch with all of them: that they were a team again.   

"Welcome back, SG1," General Hammond said.  "How did it go?"

"Well, the galaxy is down by one Goa'uld, and we managed to avoid it also being down by one SG1 and a bunch of ex-Cambodians," Jack said, "but I'm afraid the weapon isn't really what you'd call functional any more."

General Hammond nodded with resignation.  "Debriefing in half an hour, then, unless Doctor Fraiser comes across any reason to delay it."

"I think we're all fine, sir -- half an hour it is," Jack assured him. 

They all went down to the infirmary to see Janet for the standard batch of post-mission checks and tests.  MRI, blood tests, all the standard diagnostics...  Sam barely paid attention as she went through the familiar procedures, turning over everything that had happened over the last -- only just over 24 hours since they'd left the SGC, and only a couple of days since first being on PX5-273.  She shook her head a little in slight disbelief.

She and Daniel were finished with the tests before Jack and Teal'c were, and they both sat in the empty waiting room just outside the infirmary.  No point in going down for the debrief without the other two.  They sat in silence for a few moments, and Sam rested her head back against the wall and closed her eyes for a moment.

"Are you..." Daniel started, then hesitated, and Sam turned to look at him.  He was frowning down at the pen he held, turning it between his fingers.  "Are you OK?  I mean -- after what happened with Jolinar.  Dealing not just with a Goa'uld, but that Tok'ra -- Kalesh? -- as well.  It -- can't have been easy for you, especially not being able to talk to anyone about it.  With none of the three of us there."

Daniel's bluntness could still sometimes take her by surprise.  She was unsurprised this time when the flashback hit: Daniel standing in front of her cell, staring down at his clipboard, refusing to meet her eyes until Jolinar had mentioned Sha're.  She breathed in sharply, then breathed out and back in, slower.   She was aware how much easier it was now than it had been two days ago.  The memory of sharing her body with Jolinar was -- odd now, but really barely any more than that.  A thing that had happened, that had left slightly more complicated mental traces than she'd thought, but still.  Something she could manage.  The recollection of Daniel's reaction still hurt slightly, but she understood, and working together again -- it had helped.  As she'd thought it would.  It would keep getting better, she was confident now.    

Daniel was looking at her now, waiting to see if she wanted to say anything.

"Not entirely," Sam said, "but I knew I was going to see Rudra.  Not Kalesh, true, but -- it helped, actually.  Even if I only ever get Jolinar's memories in patches, having that happen helped us.  Today would have been harder without Kalesh.  It's -- " she waved her hands, then stopped.  She wasn't sure she was quite ready to try to explain how she was coming to terms with what had happened, the way she was thinking now about the Tok'ra.  "I'm fine.  Really."  

She met Daniel's eyes, and she could see the concern there.  The love.  Another reminder that things were OK.  They were still a team, all of them.  

"I meant to say."  He stopped.  "Sam, I -- I don't think I've ever been so glad as when Janet said that the Goa'uld -- that Jolinar -- had died but you were still with us.  I'm sorry..."  He looked down again.  "I'm sorry I handled it so badly, when you were locked up."

"Daniel, it's fine -- of course it was hard for you, I understand that."  She put a little finality into her tone.  Team or not, however much she might be starting to feel better, this was really not a conversation she particularly wanted to have.  

"Not half as hard as it was for you," Daniel said bluntly.  He took his glasses off and began to fiddle with them.  "I just -- I couldn't bear to see that happening, happening again to someone I care about.  It was cowardly of me.  Seeing Ska'ara like that was bad enough.  I'm almost -- god, I'm almost glad I haven't seen Sha're since... since.  I couldn't cope with seeing you that way as well, not when I couldn't think of anything to save you."

Sam blinked.  "I -- I just assumed that you didn't want to be reminded of Sha're," she said, surprise jolting her into the confession.

"No," Daniel said immediately, then amended, honestly, "I mean, yes, that too.  But mostly just that I didn't want to -- not to see you in there.  Like I say.  It was cowardly, not to be able to face up to it.  I don't know -- I hope it didn't make it worse."

Sam couldn't work out whether to give him the reassuring lie or the bald truth, or just to say nothing at all, but Daniel was carrying on, looking back down at his hands again, turning his glasses over in his hands.

"I kind of jumped at the idea that there might be a way out of it, as well -- that there might be some kind of deal I could try to sell Hammond on, to give you a chance out there."  He smiled slightly ruefully.  "Not very military of me, I guess.  Jack was pretty clear on that afterwards, and that you wouldn't expect us, or even want us, to do that.  So, I guess I'm sorry for that as well.  I don't really take the military mindset well."  He looked up with a half-smile.  

Sam was reeling again.  "It's OK -- Daniel, it's not like you aren't pretty clear about the fact that you're a civilian."  She tried to smile.  "I kind of assumed that that was Sha're as well."

Daniel shook his head again.  "I'd be lying if I said I didn't want that information, as well, you know that.  But -- god, Sam, what I remember feeling right then was desperate hope that we might be able to save you after all."

Sam's throat tightened.  "Thanks, Daniel," she managed.  

He looked up and smiled at her.  "I know I'm a bit obsessive sometimes, but -- I do care about you, you know?  About Teal'c and Jack as well, but hey, without you around, who am I going to have to gang up with me against Jack's anti-geek attitudes?"  He grinned at her teasingly, and she grinned back, and he leant over, bumped her shoulder with his, and gave her a slightly awkward hug.  She turned her head into his shoulder for a moment, and felt the final relaxation of the tension she'd been trying to conceal from him since Jolinar had died.  

"So, try not to get snaked again?" Daniel said to the top of her head.

She pulled back out of the hug, and nodded at him.  "It's on my things-not-to-do list, yes."

Daniel's smile turned into a yawn, and Sam yawned in turn.  

"God, I hope Jack and Teal'c get a move on, or I'm not sure I'm going to make it as far as the debrief," she said, pulling a face.  "And you were up listening to Makara all night as well."

"It was really fascinating, in fact -- the way that the two cultures have interacted, and how they prioritised things," Daniel said enthusiastically.  

Sam smiled at him, and decided against trying to explain how she'd related that to her own memories.  Some things didn't need to be shared.  

"A few pints of blood lighter, but all clear," Jack said, walking into the waiting room with Teal'c behind him.

"I do not think Doctor Fraiser took more than a few test-tubes," Teal'c said mildly.

"Really big test-tubes," Jack said firmly, heading for the door.  

#

Daniel and Teal'c were ahead of Sam as they headed to the debriefing room, and Jack fell back a little to walk beside her.

"You did good there, Carter," he said abruptly.  "It's tough working on your own like that."  He rolled his eyes.  "Pretty careless of us to get ourselves caught, really."

"Thanks, sir," Sam said, slightly surprised.

"I'm guessing that the whole thing with the snake, and the other snake, and what happened last week..."

Sam looked over at him, and he pulled a face. 

"It was a pretty shitty situation," he said.

Sam swallowed.  "Yes.  It was a difficult position for you to be in.  I'm sorry, sir."

"Sorry?" Jack asked.  "Carter, unless I missed the part of your debrief where you said 'Hi there snakey, come on in', I'm pretty sure it wasn't actually your fault.  I don't mean it was a shitty situation for me, I mean it was a shitty situation for you.  Although, yeah, for the rest of us too."

Sam grimaced slightly.  "If I'd been paying more attention it wouldn't have happened."

"You didn't know any more than the rest of us that we should be looking out for snakes-in-hiding," Jack said.  She looked across at him & he raised a rueful eyebrow.  "Another one on the list of Things We Found Out The Hard Way, huh?"

Sam gave him a half-smile. 

"Anyway.  It was a tough situation, and you did a good job then.  And you did a damn good job here, as well.  Not that I'm ever surprised when you do that."  He nodded at her.

Sam had to swallow again.  "Thank you, sir."

"You're going to need to talk to Hammond about these flashbacks or memories or whatever," he added.  "But maybe not today.  It's been a long couple of days for all of us."

"I'm OK to talk about them," Sam said.  "It -- it was pretty weird at first, but I'm getting used to it now."

"Sooner you than me," Jack said bluntly.  "Bad enough having your own memories without someone else's as well."  

And they were someone else's memories -- she could tell that, still, but that was OK. And sure, they might affect her, because that was what experience did.  But it was her that they were affecting, whatever traces of someone else's past she might be carrying with her, and she knew she could cope with that now.

#

When they reached the briefing room, General Hammond was already waiting.  Jack gave a succinct description of their arrival and journey to the village, then handed over to Sam to report on her time in the village.  She described meeting Chenda and getting to have a look at the temple site, and the discussion on the way back.  

"And then I saw four Jaffa dragging Colonel O'Neill, Teal'c, and Daniel along the street, sir," she said. 

General Hammond looked over at Jack, who pulled a face.  

"We had a lookout, but when we pulled back to avoid the two we spotted, we ran straight into the other two.  Careless."

"So, I managed to get a look at what was going into the temple, and then after dark, I got into where they were being held, without being seen," Sam picked up the story again.  "But we felt that breaking them out there and then would mean we'd have to get out of the village immediately, no chance of getting at the weapon.  And there was no sign that they were in immediate danger, since Rudra wasn't due back till the next day."

General Hammond nodded in agreement.  

"Chenda said earlier that the other library -- "

"Library?" Hammond asked.

"Well, they're not really libraries," Daniel put in, his eyes lighting up.  "It's just a label, used for historical reasons..."

Jack coughed slightly, and for once Daniel actually noticed.

"Which, anyway, the point is that really they're just buildings, on each side of the temple.  No books -- ancient Cambodia wasn't really a literate culture...  anyway."

Hammond nodded again, his gaze returning to Sam. 

"It was guarded, and Chenda had said that there was someone in there.  So since it was pretty straightforward getting into the first one, I thought that it was worth looking there as well. I found -- there was a Tok'ra there, sir.  His name was -- is -- Kalesh.  Jolinar knew him."

"Jolinar knew him?  The Goa'uld that was -- "

"That I was the host for, sir?  Yes.  But they're not -- they're not regular Goa'uld, sir.  I'm sure of that.  Jolinar was telling the truth -- they call themselves Tok'ra.  They oppose the Goa'uld."

Hammond was frowning.  "You said Jolinar knew him -- but how do you know that?"

Sam spread her hands.  "I'm -- it's complicated, sir.  I think..."  She swallowed.  She might be coming to terms with this, but explaining to General Hammond that she might be carrying something not hers in her head was still a bit alarming.  "It seems like I have some of Jolinar's memories, still.  But I can't necessarily access them just when I want to.  They seem to need to be triggered by something.  Seeing Kalesh triggered the memories of him.  I've had a couple more, as well -- there was a memory of the weapon, but only the name of it, nothing useful.  And I've had a few dreams.  I'm going to talk to Doctor Fraiser about it, see if there's a way of maybe accessing them under more control.  We might be able to get something useful out of this.  But I'm sure that they're genuine, sir."

Hammond nodded slowly.  "Okay.  We're going to have to discuss this further, Captain, but not right now.  Go on."

Sam explained coming to an agreement with Kalesh, then breaking Daniel out temporarily, Chenda's insistence that they wanted help to get rid of Rudra, and then the change of situation the next morning.

"We were anticipating something happening then, except we expected to have fewer people around, and we didn't expect the weapon to be ready. And then when I got to the courtyard, I saw Daniel."

Daniel explained what he'd found out about the weapon, and Hammond's eyes widened.  

"So we had to move straight away," Sam finished.

"It went very well," Jack confirmed, "and Kalesh did help us to get Rudra knocked out.  But then one of Carter's local friends tried to use the weapon on him, and Carter had to shoot it.  Which is why -- no weapon.  Just little fried weapon bits."

Sam grimaced slightly.

"It was the correct choice," Teal'c said firmly.  

"Yes," Hammond agreed.  "In the circumstances, it was clearly the correct thing to do.  Good work, Captain Carter, even if it is a shame that that's how it went down.  But what about this Goa'uld, Rudra?"

"Well -- the Tok'ra shot him," Jack admitted.  "I can't say I was that devastated by the loss, sir."

Hammond frowned at Jack.  "The NID are very enthusiastic about the possibility of getting their hands on a Goa'uld, Colonel."

Jack raised an expressive eyebrow, but all he said was, "Yes sir."

"Well -- I'm assuming that your Tok'ra acquaintance left after that?"

Sam nodded.  "He was keen to leave, and we didn't really feel we had any reason or right to keep him.  He did fight on our side, sir."

Hammond nodded.  "Very well.  It's a shame that you weren't more successful, but it sounds like you did everything as well as the circumstances allowed.  Full written reports as soon as possible, please.  And you all have 48 hours downtime now -- we'll discuss your next mission after that.  And we'll talk about these flashbacks after that as well, Captain Carter."

Sam smiled in relief.  She was feeling better now, but the idea of 48 hours to relax, to sleep, was very appealing.  More appealing, even, than going to look at the remains of that weapon now that they should be in the lab.  Well.  Slightly more appealing, anyway.

Hammond stood up, and they all followed suit.  

"Dismissed, then.  Oh, and you may be interested to know, Colonel O'Neill, that there's pie in the commissary today -- very good pie, I thought."

Jack's eyes lit up.  "Thank you, sir," he said, then turned to Sam, Daniel, and Teal'c as they left the room.  "Everyone up for pie, then, before we go take our downtime?  And for the record, Carter, Daniel: that means leaving the Mountain.  Not 'going back to my office for just five minutes'."

Daniel rolled his eyes, but they all followed Jack down towards the commissary.

#

Sam put a spoonful of pie into her mouth -- she'd considered Jello instead, but Jack had been insistent that they should all have the pie -- and silently agreed with General Hammond.  It really was very good.  The kitchen staff invariably seemed to do better with desserts than with anything else.  Especially vegetables.  She shuddered, thinking about their attempts at vegetables, and ate another bite of pie.  Across the table from her, Jack was digging happily into his own pie, with Daniel, at the end of the table, between Jack and her, prodding a little absently at his own.  Teal'c was already on his second slice.  

"It's a shame we couldn't get it back in one piece," Sam said with a slight sigh.

Jack looked across at her and shrugged.  He started to speak around a mouthful of pie, and Daniel frowned.

"Jack, honestly."  He poked Jack in the ribs, and Jack pulled a face and paused for a moment to swallow.  

"You have pieces to take apart, Carter, that ought to keep you busy for a while.  Anyway, they couldn't even build a roof properly, I'm just as glad that no one got to test out their idea of firepower."

"OK, really, that was a perfectly good roof!" Daniel protested.  "It's absolutely a physically sound principle.  Look -- " He looked around the commissary, then got up and went to the serving hatch, returning with a stack of empty Jello cups.

"Right, imagine these are stone blocks."  He was moving into full lecture mode, with Jack remaining admirably straight-faced as he watched Daniel set up a line of cups.  Sam smiled to herself and settled back in her chair with another spoonful of pie.  She caught Teal'c's eye and saw his lips twitch imperceptibly.

"See," Daniel was carefully putting more little Jello cups on top of the first ones, "as long as you keep the centre of gravity on this side of the edge of the first row, you're fine.  It's an entirely sound principle."

He finished on that row and started to do the same again just opposite the first stack.  "And then you do the same on the other side... and then you put a capstone on it, to finish it all off."  He sat back slightly, gesturing at the Jello-cup roof.  "See?  Nothing wrong with it at all.  I mean, yes, people have developed more aesthetically pleasing systems since then, and it uses quite a lot of stone -- "

"Or paper cups," Sam said, and saw Teal'c's lips twitch again.

"Yes, or paper cups," Daniel agreed, caught up in his argument, "but it's architecturally sound."

Jack leaned forwards slightly and inspected the paper-cup roof, but didn't say anything.

"Do you see what I mean?" Daniel asked, leaning towards Jack and waving a hand.  The top row of paper cups wavered slightly in the breeze he caused, and suddenly the whole lot fell in on itself.  

"Completely architecturally sound, yes," Jack agreed, straight-faced.  

Daniel glared at him for a moment, before Sam couldn't stop herself any more, and began to laugh.  Daniel looked momentarily outraged, then began to grin, and soon all four of them were laughing. 

"Really though, it does work!" Daniel managed, controlling himself for a moment. "Sam, back me up!"

"The physics is sound," Sam agreed, "but I think maybe it works better with stone."  She giggled again.  

Daniel put on his best mournful expression, and picked up one of the cups with an air of wounded dignity. 

"Ooh," Sam said, "were you going to put some Jello in one of those?"  She grinned at him hopefully, and Daniel smiled back.

"Just for you, Sam," he said, getting to his feet.  

"Oh, you could get me another slice of pie, while you're there," Jack said.  

"I would be happy to join Captain Carter in some more Jello," Teal'c added. 

Daniel glared at them theatrically and muttered about packhorses, but when he went to the serving hatch, Sam could see him balancing a plate of pie along with three Jello cups.  She smiled again, and caught Jack's eye as he leaned back, still looking tired and slightly rumpled around the edges, but relaxed.  Which was exactly how she felt as well -- relaxed.  With her team, but also with -- and in -- herself.  She blinked slightly.  She really was fine.