#4 in the Life's Little Problems Series
Color Outside the Lines
A Little!Danny fic by: Maj. Cliffhanger
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Part 23
Jack drummed his fingers on the back of
the technician's chair as the man called up the requisite security
footage. They knew Dr. Lee had left his lab around 1100 and that the
partial note had been written between then and 1200 when he returned.
It was a heck of a lot better starting point for tracing their
movements than starting at the infirmary at 0700 hours.
"There she is!" Dr. Lee was
quick to point out the obvious. The technician stopped the footage
and deftly rewound it to the point where Sam and the kids had entered
the lab.
Jack had stopped drumming his fingers
and instead gripped the back of the chair tightly. Of course Carter
had taken the kids into a highly sensitive and potentially dangerous
laboratory with her - what was she thinking!? He noted the kids both
had their hands stuffed in their pockets but he doubted that had
lasted long. Just the still image he was looking at brought up
visions of potential disaster. "What else was in the room beside
the ... not-communication thingamajig you mentioned before? Do we
even know what it is?"
He could see the device Lee had been
talking about and it didn't much look like anything. If Jack had to
describe it, he would have said it looked like a big ol' clunky
boomerang made out of rock.
"Yyyea ... no," Lee answered
reluctantly. "We think it might be a data storage device of
some sort, kinda like an Ancient laptop or PDA – but we're not
sure."
"'Ancient laptop'?" Jack
cocked his head to the side. The security file footage resolution
wasn't good enough for him to make out if it had any kind of a
keyboard but he certainly didn't see anything that resembled a
monitor.
"It's ... one of several
theories," Lee admitted unhappily and quickly changed the topic
back to Jack's first question. "As for anything else in the
room? Um, no; not really. I had been working on this really cool--"
Jack's look quelled the man's obvious
enthusiasm before it could distract him entirely.
"―but I couldn't get it to work,
so I sent it down to the linguistics lab for translation."
Jack bit his tongue to keep from asking
what the hell the scientist thought he was doing playing with any bit
of alien technology without having any writing on it translated
first.
"So, uh--" Bill suddenly
waggled his head back and forth at some sudden thought, "―well,
you know, I was running a number of experiments on my own machines,"
he admitted, "but those were mostly theoretical in nature and
there's no way--"
Jack shot him a quelling look – he
had this little problem with other people using absolute statements.
"―uh, almost no way...."
The scientist cringed and quickly folded his arms as he turned back
to the waiting security technician with a nod. "Let's just see
what happened," he decided defensively. "I mean, we don't
know anything did!"
Carter and two kids in a laboratory –
one of them Danny – and Lee thought nothing had happened? Jack
offered the man a less-than-happy smile and turned back to the
technician as well. "Fast forward." he ordered simply.
The video recording distorted slightly
as it showed the motion of the three of them entering the lab and
looking around. Sam went over to her laptop but Jack kept his eyes on
the kids. They rapidly shifted their weight foot to foot and
obviously offered comments to which Sam apparently responded, but to
his surprise their hands stayed in their pockets.
And then suddenly the screen turned to
static.
Jack blinked and frowned, straightening
as the technician checked his equipment. "What just happened?"
"Looks like the camera went off
line," Maj. Gaffeny noted from where he stood a few feet removed
from them. "Probably a power surge."
"Aren't you supposed to be
monitoring the other cameras while the sergeant works on this?"
Jack reminded him.
The man, who'd already received a
serious reprimand from Jack for his failure to properly respond to
the disappearance in the first place, all but blushed and quickly
jerked his eyes back to the various other monitors that lined the
security station on level 16. "Sir," he acknowledged the
rebuke with obvious chagrin.
Jack offered him a scowl and slight
shake of his head. How the hell had the guy managed to become second
in command of SGC security? Jack made a mental note to review his
personnel file and dismissed him from thought once again as he turned
his attention back to the problem at hand.
The static on the screen had turned out
to be short lived. As the scene came back up, he found himself
viewing an empty room.
"They're gone!" Lee offered
in apparent surprise.
Well, d'uh! Jack thought, but knew the
footage didn't mean this was where they'd disappeared from. He'd been
watching Danny closely and the kid hadn't touched a thing. "Pull
up the camera for the corridor outside the lab," he ordered.
Just because they hadn't seen anyone enter the lab didn't mean
someone hadn't used some sort of jamming device from the corridor
before stepping in to spirit the three away in some impossible five
second long ... 'coulda had some sort of homing device and used an
Asgard beam like Ba'al had the day before. 'Course the SGC had
special dampeners on base that were supposed to prevent-- No one
wanted a repeat of the incident in which the NID had stolen the gate
right out of the gate room! Jack's mind raced with possibilities as
he watched a second monitor come to life with the requested footage.
"Sync 'em up," he ordered unnecessarily as the technician
quickly did exactly that, "...and play them simultaneously."
No one in the hall.... Jack had a
sinking feeling he knew what he was going to see even as the
technician hit play for both cameras at the same time.
Again they watched the trio enter the
lab – this time at normal speed. Sam moved to the laptop; kids
stopped in the middle of the lab, hands in pockets; obvious
discussion taking place.... There was no sound recording in the labs
- perhaps that policy was due for review too. Jack watched as Sam
turned from starting to leave the note to say something to the kids,
and then back to the laptop.
Hallway still empty.
She did something to her laptop and the
screen suddenly filled with static. Jack winced and forced himself to
watch the corridor footage. Hopefully ... hopefully.... The
static-filled screen once more resolved itself back into the empty
laboratory and Jack's hopes were dashed. He offered a mental sigh to
go with the physical one he couldn't contain: Danny was supposed to
be the trouble-magnet here, not Sam!
"Okay," he forced himself to
address the frowning scientist beside him who was supposed to be able
to answer questions like this. "Even I know there's only one
door to that room. If they obviously didn't use it...." He left
the question open ended, but all Bill Lee could do was shake his head
and stare at the two empty screens in confusion.
* * *
His world 'blinked' – at least that
was the best description he could give it.
Cam had seen the Ancient obelisk that
was the Sodan transporter device in operation before and he knew
there was generally a bright flash of light that accompanied it's
activation, but from his point of view that was the exact opposite of
what he experienced. For him, his vision grayed out for a long
instant before abruptly returning, leaving him to discover he was
somewhere else. Sam would no doubt have some explanation about the
physical deconstruction of his visual cortex versus the energy burst
required to produce the effect, but she wasn't here ... and Cam
needed to ignore that fact and concentrate on the job at hand!
Worrying over Sam and the kids when he
should be looking around for bad guys was a damn good way to get
himself killed. Not for the first time on this mission, he shoved the
niggling thoughts of his missing friends to the back of his mind and
swept the area with his P-90 as SG-12 spread out to help secure the
immediate area.
Once again, they were met with nothing
more than the normal, casual response of a deciduous forest that
found their sudden appearance 'less than impressive, thank you!'
He only waited for a five count this time before dropping
his defensive stance and moving forward to examine a scorch mark on a
nearby tree. Hadden and Teal'c both followed him as the rest of SG-12
maintained a more vigilant posture.
The major shook his head. "More
staff blasts, just like back at the gate," he observed.
And no sign of any other kind of
weapons' fire; that's what had Cam worried.... He had to wonder
suddenly if they were walking into some sort of civil war? Had one
segment of the ancient warrior clan decided to follow the Ori
teachings and tried to destroy those who didn't? Haikon had seemingly
decided against it when last they saw him, but that didn't mean all
of his people had agreed.
"Stay sharp," Cam ordered
quietly. A glance and nod at Teal'c saw the Jaffa with his highly
honed senses taking the lead this time as they set out again for the
village proper.
Cam judged it to be late summer, and
fairly early in the morning here; the sun slanting through the trees
as they made their way along a fairly well defined path through the
sparse undergrowth and scattered narrow trees. It would actually be
hard to walk into an ambush here – if it weren't for the
invisibility cloaks the Sodan liked to use. The crunch of leaf litter
underfoot was muffled and muted by a heavy morning dew as Cam kept a
look out for any hint of movement that didn't quite belong.
Nothing caught his eye, but the acrid
stench of smoke alerted them all something wasn't right long before
they stepped beyond the final heavy screen of forest and caught sight
of the smoldering ruins of the village ahead.
"My god..." Hadden exclaimed
softly behind him. There were two bodies laying not far down the path
and they could see more in the distance. Several of the larger
buildings were clearly missing their roofs. The major quickly turned
to issue orders to his men. "Conway. Stevens: get back to the
Gate on the double." He turned back around to view the
devastation before them. "Tell them we need med teams."
He hoped they needed med teams, Cam
thought. He braced his P-90 with his bad hand and quickly knelt to
check a pulse. Nothing and cold to the touch: he'd been dead a while.
He quickly straightened and moved to
catch up with Teal'c. If there were any survivors, they'd likely be
holed up somewhere in the village proper tending the wounded. The
team moved quickly forward, checking bodies and scanning the area for
friend or foe, but were met with only more death and more
destruction. An unnatural stillness and silence seemed to entomb the
once proud village, slowly eroding the hope of finding anyone still
alive.
It was what he didn't see that
disturbed him the most: this level of destruction should have been
accompanied by evidence of a large number of ground troops – but
there was none. The ground was hard packed, but not that hard. No
enemy bodies, no evidence of mass defense, no looting.... The watch
fires from the night before were burned down to cold dead ashes
beneath cauldrons of morning stew.
Teal'c had paused to kneel by a young
warrior: Mazal, if Cam remembered right. He was one of three
apprentices to the master blacksmith, Tor'oq. Cam winced as he
glanced toward the older Jaffa's workshop and recognized the man's
heavy soled boots sticking out the doorway. He might have been an
older man but he would have gone down hard. All of them would have,
Cam knew! They were fierce warriors whose fighting traditions went
back more than five thousand years! The idea that someone had been
able to wipe them out to a man....
He banished the thought as premature.
This had been a village of over a thousand. They might have been
forced to flee, but some of them had to have survived....
He turned his attention back to where
Teal'c was holding his hand over Mazal's stomach and, for a second
Cam thought they might have found a survivor, but realized his
mistake as Teal'c dropped his hand and glanced up at him.
"Whomever did this knew well the
most efficient way to kill a Jaffa," the one-time First Prime of
Apophis stated, surveying the destruction around them with the look
of a man who has seen too many similar scenes in the past. "Their
symbiotes have been targeted. They were shown no mercy."
A soft groan suddenly pierced the
silence, instantly drawing Cam and the rest of the team to the right
where they saw a dark-skinned Jaffa laying half-collapsed against a
charred wooden pillar about fifty feet away.
"Haikon!" Cam whispered,
instantly recognizing the Sodan leader. The dark head shifted
slightly before his chin collapsed back on his chest again.
Teal'c quickly knelt and held his hand
over the man's symbiote pouch. Glancing up, he shook his head. "He
will not survive long," he answered Cam's unasked question. "His
symbiote is dead."
Cam had suspected as much but looked up
to wave Hadden and McKenzie forward. "Get him into one of those
huts over there." He indicated a low row of small homes that
were still mostly standing. "We need to get some tretonin into
him, STAT."
If given the choice, Cam suspected the
once-proud Jaffa leader would refuse the treatment but Cam didn't
plan to ask him. He and his people had not deserved to be slaughtered
like this. Cam intended to find out who had done it and why. To do
that, they needed answers and they needed them soon. Haikon was the
only one who could supply them.
* * *
Daniel was a bit surprised when Sam
by-passed Dr. Lee's lab and continued down the hall holding both of
the boys by their hands. Jason frowned as well and pulled back
slightly, thinking she'd made a mistake. "Isn't that where we're
supposed to go?" He turned to point back at the door behind
them.
She grinned. "Nope!" she told
them easily and gave their hands a light tug to get them both moving
again. "Come on. I've got an idea."
Danny glanced back up at her, realizing
belatedly that they must be headed for her lab. "What kind of
idea?" he asked. Sam and ideas went hand and hand, but he was
starting to get bored and frustrated. He'd much rather go back to the
device in Dr. Lee's lab and at least try to translate whatever was on
the display screen. He'd been able to understand parts of it. Maybe
if he tried again, really hard, more of his memories would return and
he'd be able to read more of it.
Sam grinned down at him. "An idea
to communicate," she answered with barely contained excitement.
Communicate? That would be good, but
communication was supposed to be his specialty and he couldn't think
of anything. You take away sight, sound and touch and all you had
left was taste and smell. And although he knew there were several
species of animals that used smell to communicate, he didn't think
the three of them actually had any more chance to interact with their
friends via those senses than with the others.
What did that leave?
"Here we go!" Sam interrupted
his thoughts as she lead them through the door – literally. He
shuddered slightly as the feeling passed and then glanced around her
lab, which was far more interesting than Dr. Lee's had been.
"Wow!" Jason exclaimed in
surprise, seeing test tubes and beakers and microscopes. It looked
like she had a number of ongoing experiments running. "Now
this is a lab!"
"Whoa, there! Hold on!" Sam
quickly reined him in before he could drop her hand and go take a
closer look at everything. "We have to be careful in here,"
she warned them both very serious. "Some of this stuff is
dangerous--"
"--We can't touch anything!"
Danny reminded her, rolling his eyes.
"Ah, but we don't know that!"
she suddenly corrected him. "That's why we're here. If I'm right
and the reason we aren't falling through the floor is based on mass,
then it's just possible there's something in here we can touch."
"Like what?"
"Like lead," Sam answered,
glancing around.
Jason, whom she was still holding onto,
made a little lunge to his right and swiped his hand through the
table beside him. Sam and Danny looked at him in surprise.
"Nope," he told them simply –
and indicated the pencil he'd tried to grab.
Sam smiled. "Although it's called
a 'lead pencil,' it isn't actually made with lead," she told
him. "The core is made of something called graphite – which
looks like lead, but it's not."
"Oh." He blinked and then
frowned up at her. "How do they get the ... whatever-it-is
inside the pencil? I always wondered."
"I'll let Danny explain that one,"
Sam decided. "Sit down on the floor and don't touch ... don't
try to touch anything."
The two boys rolled their eyes but
chose to comply. "I'm bored," Jason told Danny as he
plopped down on his butt. "Being a ghost isn't as much fun as I
thought it would be."
"We're not ghosts," Danny
corrected him, assuming his own cross-legged position beside him.
"We're almost like ghosts,"
Jason pouted, "except even ghosts can sometimes be seen by other
people and we can't. It's boring!" he repeated with a whine.
"Yeah..." Danny sighed,
before suddenly glancing up. "Sam?"
She was busy frowning as she moved
around her lab. "No, you can't help me, Daniel," she told
him as she searched her desk. Apparently she didn't know where she'd
put the lead. "Lead has a relatively high atomic mass which is
why I'm hoping we'll be able to touch it, but there are other things
in here that have higher numbers. Unfortunately, most of them are
quite dangerous. Not that lead is particularly safe, but--"
"--That's not what I was going to
say!" he complained. Why did adults always think they knew what
he was thinking? He shook his head at the thought.
"Okay..." she allowed with a
pensive frown, but it was clear she was concentrating on something
else. "What then?"
"Just we should'a known Jack was
in a different dimension than this one right off," he told her.
"He could still talk to us and touch things when he went
invisible, couldn't he?" The memory of it was a little vague....
"You're right," she agreed,
frowning at a locked cabinet before turning to offer him an
encouraging smile. "We still had to try."
She turned back to the cabinet before
shaking her head and spinning on her heel to face them again. "I
think I put the lead shielding away after I used it last." She
shrugged. "Sometimes it doesn't pay to be a neat freak."
Danny lifted a brow and glanced around
again at the apparent clutter that was her lab.
"Don't give me that look!"
she declared. "It's better than your office."
Danny frowned, not really remembering
exactly what his office was like – but he didn't think it was that
bad!
"...Your office?" Jason
echoed, and glanced at Danny.
The two members of SG-1 froze as they
realized what Sam had said.
Again!
"She meant my Dad's office,"
Danny offered hurriedly.
Jason was frowning and this time shook
his head. "No, she didn't...."
Sam offered him a patently false smile
as she hurried around the desk again. "Come on, Jason!" she
laughed lightly. "You don't honestly think a five year old could
have a real office in a place like this, do you?"
"He could if he wasn't really five
years old. Or human," Jason argued, clearly regarding Daniel
with renewed suspicion – and a little sadness too, Danny thought.
He didn't like the idea that Danny might have lied to him.
Danny didn't like it either.
Sam quickly knelt down next to both
boys. "Jason--"
"―Sam," Danny interrupted
her. She glanced at him and gave him a warning look. He sighed and
kept his mouth shut.
Sam turned her attention back to the
other boy. "Jason," she addressed him seriously. "We
haven't lied to you. Danny is a five year old boy from Earth, the
same as you."
"I'm six!" Jason
automatically corrected her.
"Um ... yeah," she nodded,
"but otherwise he's the same as you. I swear." She actually
paused to cross her heart for him.
Jason frowned and locked his arms
together across his chest, not believing a word of it.
With a sigh, Sam relented a little.
"Something happened to him a few weeks ago," she admitted.
"Something we can't tell you about."
"Something that made him really,
really smart?" Jason asked, not sure if he should believe that
or not.
"Uh..." Sam glanced at Danny
and read his frown to mean that he wanted her to stay as close to the
truth as possible. "No," she admitted. "He's pretty
much always been that way." She suddenly grinned and held out
her hands to both boys. "Come on. The infirmary has lead lined
vests for taking X-rays. I'm sure we can find one of them laying
around somewhere."
"What good will that do?"
Jason asked, reluctantly taking her hand and letting her help him to
his feet again.
"Well," she grinned, "can
you imagine what kind of reaction we would get if someone saw a lead
lined vest floating down the hallway?"
"The SFs would probably try to
shoot us!" Danny protested.
"No they won't," Sam denied,
then amended the thought, "as long as we don't give them reason
to. They'll call someone to figure it out and then we'll be able to
communicate with them."
"How?" Danny asked, still not
seeing the solution here.
Sam held her hands up at chest level,
like she was holding something in front of her, and lowered and
lifted it. "Yes..." She then swung it side to side. "No."
She grinned, then shrugged. "Admittedly, it'll be a bit limited,
but it's a start - assuming we can actually find something other than
the floor we can touch." She held out her hands again only to
have Jason offer her a sudden frown and take a large step away.
"Wait." He ordered and turned
to give Danny an accusing look as a completely unrelated thought
occurred to him. "He wouldn't have an office here if something
happened only a few weeks ago. You're still lying!"
The look hurt.
Danny turned to frown at Sam. "He
needs to know," he declared firmly.
She frowned at him in turn.
"He's going to try and run away or
something if we don't tell him the truth!"
Sam glanced at Jason again, but this
time she saw what Danny had already seen: a little boy who was angry,
hurting and frightened. And who didn't trust either of them.
It was a dangerous combination.
She sighed and closed her eyes.
"He needs to know," Danny
repeated quietly.
She nodded and opened her eyes to
regard the other boy soberly. "The IOA is going to love this
one," she offered sarcastically.
"I think the IOA is going to be
more upset that we've disappeared," Danny replied. "Again!"
Sam winced, not wanting to think about
what the aftermath of this was going to look like. Jason was eying
them both suspiciously. Danny turned back to him and bit his lip,
just hoping the other boy would still want to be his friend after he
knew the truth.