Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

General Hammond, Colonel O'Neill, Major Carter, and Teal'c are there.

Daniel Jackson is not there.

O'Neill looks at his watch. They've been waiting ten minutes now.

"Late," he says succinctly. The briefing is for 1330, not 1340, or 1345, or 1400, or...

"I'll have Sgt. Harriman phone up to his office, Colonel," General Hammond says.

"No, General. I'll go get him." Daniel will take the call, say he's on his way, and then there will be just one more thing...

He heads out of the conference room.

Twenty-four languages and 'punctual' isn't one of them.

She looks around.

Weren't they just on PHX-1138?

As in, on PHX-1138?

Obviously not. This is her office. She shakes her head. She supposes she'd better tell Janet.

She hates telling Janet things like this. And Janet just hates hearing that members of SG-1 have had Missing Time events.

She looks around some more. Frowns.

Someone has been in her office.

Everything's been moved around.

Things are missing.

Where's her shrunken head collection?

Somebody's idea of a joke? Somebody urgently looking for something? They haven't been gone that long.

"Dammit," she mutters, starting to clear off her desk and carry books back to the shelves.

She forgets all about PHX-1138.

"Daniel--"

She looks up.

Jack is standing in the doorway.

"Jack, do you have any idea what's...?"

Her words slow. She doesn't finish the sentence.

He doesn't look happy. He's staring at her as if he's never seen her before in his life.

They've been on SG-1 together for five years.

When he gets to Daniel's office the door is open. There's someone behind the desk, and for a heartbeat he thinks it's Daniel.

And then she looks up and says his name.

She.

She looks enough like Daniel to be his twin sister. Same glasses. Same mop of hair he had the first time O'Neill saw him. She's wearing an SGC uniform. The shoulder flash says SG-1. All the details are perfect.

Her expression, her body language, everything says she's completely at home here. Not expecting trouble, even when she sees him.

"Who are you?"

The flat hostility in his voice fills her with a sudden surge of alarm.

"Jack?" She sets down the book she's holding. Slowly. She doesn't want to startle him. Has he gone crazy? The grim truth of their job is that it does happen. Has happened. Probably will happen again.

He reaches out and slaps the panic button beside her door, never taking his eyes off her. She doesn't relax, but in a moment the SFs will be here and they can start to fix this. She tries to remember where they just were, and to her alarm, she can't. She has the sickening feeling she's forgotten something terribly important, something vital.

"Jack, what's going on?" She starts to move out from behind her desk.

"Don't move, whoever you are."

The SFs arrive.

"Found her in Daniel's office. Lock her up until General Hammond figures out what to do with her."

He's speaking to them, not her.

"What? I-- What? Jack, this is my office! It's mine!"

But the SFs regard her with no recognition at all.

She backs away as the SFs advance. They're pointing their rifles at her. She hates having guns pointed at her.

"Your office?" Jack says, feigning grossly exaggerated disbelief. In reality, she knows he's listening closely, probing for information.

As if she's the enemy.

The SFs have her backed into a corner by now. She knows it's useless to fight, but they're crowding her, not giving her the time she needs to relax and cooperate.

"And you are?" he adds.

The SFs have their hands on her now, slinging their weapons out of the way. She's shaking with the effort it takes not to struggle.

"Danielle Jackson," she says, answering him as they march her out. "Doctor Danielle Jackson. And just in case you've forgotten, Jacky Boy, I've been a member of SG-1 for the last five years."

O'Neill stands in the doorway to Daniel's office for a long moment after the SFs have removed the woman.

She's shorter than Daniel is.

Otherwise, it's a great act.

She sounds just like him.

However, she isn't him, and that means Daniel's missing.

He picks up the handset of the phone on the wall and dials the Conference Room.

"General? O'Neill. I'm in Daniel's office. We have an intruder in custody. And we need to start looking for Daniel. He's missing."

There are a number of different guest accommodations in the SGC. This is one of the least attractive: a set of bunk beds in a small dark room.

She's a prisoner.

Jack has had her imprisoned.

The SFs would have done it even if they recognized her -- he's a Colonel, after all -- but she's willing to swear they didn't know who she was. And of all the accusations Jack could have laid against her, it hardly made sense that all he could come up with was that she was in the wrong office.

Who's Daniel?

She wants to understand this better before she starts making a real fuss. She thought at first that something was wrong with Jack, but ... why was everything so disorganized in her office? Jack doesn't know anyone named Daniel. Her name is Dani. Jack knows her.

Only Jack doesn't seem to know her.

Two hours later Jack comes back. General Hammond is with him. She feels a pang of relief. She'd trust Jack with her life and everything she holds dear, but she has an abiding faith in General Hammond's ability to fix things.

"General Hammond!" she says, getting to her feet.

"You recognize me?" General Hammond says doubtfully. He glances at Jack.

"She says her name is Daniel Jackson," Jack says. There is a clear note of derision in his voice.

"Yes, I recognize you, General Hammond," she says, ignoring Jack. She searches for signs of a similar recognition in his face. There are none.

"And your name is Daniel Jackson?" General Hammond asks.

Despite the seriousness of the situation, she makes a face.

"My name is Danielle Jackson, General Hammond. Who is Daniel Jackson?"

Hammond ignores this question, which doesn't surprise her. "How did you get into this facility?"

"Through the Stargate. We just came back from PHX-1138." It's disturbing how long it had taken her to retrieve that memory, and she's still not quite sure of it. But this is not the time to bring something like that up.

"'We'?" Jack speaks at last.

"SG-1," she says. "You, me, Teal'c, Sammy. It was a routine mission. We found some interesting ruins. I took notes, I took film, I took samples, we came back."

"I don't know who the hell you are, but..." Jack begins. His eyes have narrowed, and he's regarding her with outright hostility now.

"Colonel," General Hammond says. "We'll get to the bottom of this."

Jack subsides, but she can't understand why he's so angry.

Daniel Jackson?

"Dr. ... Jackson," General Hammond continues, turning back to her. "I'd like you to accompany Colonel O'Neill to the infirmary so that we can run some tests. Can we count on your cooperation?"

She nods, unable to stop herself from glancing toward Jack for reassurance. It isn't forthcoming, and that adds to her sense of impending disaster. Only the disaster has already happened, and she just doesn't understand it yet.

"Yes. Of course. General, what's going on?"

"Just bear with us, Dr. Jackson," General Hammond says.

She follows Jack down to the infirmary. Two SFs are right behind them.

She doesn't even bother trying to question Jack. She knows that right now it wouldn't do any good. He's in a rare mood.

The doctor he hands her over to is unfamiliar. Her name is Brightman.

Where's Janet?

She's had many workups here in the infirmary, and been hospitalized here for a number of things, including an emergency appendectomy, but this is by far the most thorough going-over she's ever had.

Do they think she's a Goa'uld?

Is there a possibility there is a Goa'uld? That she was infested on PHX-1138?

She feels faintly nauseated at the thought. She knows the Goa'uld can hide from their hosts as well as from observers. She knows the Tok'ra have a method for removing Goa'uld from their hosts, but that it's far from foolproof, and can kill the host.

If Jack suspects that's what was wrong with her, he wouldn't have told her, in case it causes the larval Goa'uld to try to take control immediately.

When Brightman is finished, Dani dresses and sits on one of the beds. No one has explained anything to her. Some of the tests will take hours to show results, like the DNA sequence. What is it supposed to show?

Are they comparing her DNA to someone else's? Whose? (Who is Daniel?)

"The woman in my infirmary is Daniel Jackson," Dr. Brightman says.

"Ah... no?" Colonel O'Neill says.

Brightman sighs. "She's completely human. From Earth, in fact. She's not a Goa'uld. Aside from the essentially minor differences occasioned by a set of XX chromosomes rather than an XY set, she's genetically identical to Dr. Daniel Jackson. And more to the point--"

Major Carter and General Hammond lean forward, sensing that the doctor is about to tell them something important. Teal'c remains impassive. O'Neill leans back, slouching.

"--whoever she is, she has the same allergies that Dr. Jackson has. She has the same medications in her bloodstream. She takes the same optical prescription. She has the same dental records. I questioned her about her medical history, and she gives the same one that I have in Dr. Jackson's file, starting with childhood diseases and continuing right down to two years ago. Including offworld locations."

"Thank you, Doctor," General Hammond says. "You've been very helpful." Sounding as if she's been anything but. "Dismissed."

Dr. Brightman leaves, looking troubled.

"This does not provide us information on the current location of Daniel Jackson," Teal'c says.

"Is it possible that this woman is Daniel?" Sam Carter's voice is tentative.

"Carter, if the woman was Daniel, she'd say she was Daniel. She says her name is ... 'Danielle,'" O'Neill says, sounding disgruntled.

"But she does claim to be a member of SG-1," General Hammond says.

Carter frowns, on the trail of a new puzzle.

"Why would her information be two years old?" she asks.

"She should be required to explain this," Teal'c says implacably.

Hammond asks the SFs to bring their guest up from the infirmary.

She strides in ahead of them. She doesn't gawk at anything, though by rights what she's seeing should be strange to her. Apparently it isn't. Her eyes go immediately to Carter and Teal'c. Her eyes widen at the sight of Teal'c, as if there's finally something she didn't expect to see.

Hair. Two years ago, Teal'c didn't have hair.

This is stupid. Why would somebody infiltrate the SGC with a perfect copy of Daniel from two years ago and make it the wrong sex?

"Sammy! Teal'c..?"

The inflection is Daniel's. The body-language is Daniel's; the same half-gawky nervous energy.

"You don't ... recognize me." The woman's voice is flat with disappointment.

Carter shakes her head apologetically.

"Sit down ... Dr. Jackson," General Hammond says. She steps forward, puts her hand on the back of a chair. Daniel's chair. Hesitates.

"No. Tell me what's going on, General. Why don't any of you recognize me? What happened to my office? Who is Daniel? And where's Janet Fraiser?"

The last question startles all of them, though it shouldn't, given the two-year gap she's done nothing to conceal. Janet Fraiser died almost six months ago. Daniel knows that. He was there.

"Sit down, Dr. Jackson," General Hammond repeats.

"Sit!" O'Neill barks, as if calling an unruly dog to heel.

She pulls out the chair and flops into it, folding her arms across her chest, glaring down at the table. The perfect imitation of Daniel in a sulk.

"Perhaps she is another Asgard clone," Teal'c suggests to the table at large.

"But in that case, her memories ought to be perfectly up-to-date," Carter says. "Colonel O'Neill's were. And she'd know--"

"Hey, Sammy? Still here," the woman says, raising her hand.

"Sorry," Carter says.

"Maybe you'd better start by explaining who you are," O'Neill says.

The woman lowers her chin, rubbing the bridge of her nose and pushing her glasses up.

"My name is Danielle Jackson. Dr. Danielle Jackson. I am a member of SG-1. You may have heard of it." The sarcasm in her voice is cutting.

"Perhaps you'd better start at the beginning, Dr. Jackson," General Hammond says.

She runs her hand through her hair, and then tugs on it. The body-language is Daniel's. Exactly.

"I'm a specialist in ancient languages and cultures," she begins, in a tone suggesting she's decided they've all lost their minds. "My primary field is linguistics. The study of languages. In 1996 Dr. Catherine Langford came to me for help in decoding some symbols on an artifact that an archaeological team had dug up in Giza. It was the cover stone for the Stargate, and her team had been working on it for two years. When we got the Stargate to work, General West put together a mission to Abydos -- Jack, Kawalski, Feretti, Brown, Freeman, Mankiewicz, Porro, a large bomb. And me, to get us back.

"We went through. We found the Abydans, who were enslaved by a Goa'uld called Ra. We blew up his ship, killed him, I sent Jack, Kawalsky, and Ferreti home, I stayed behind."

"And you -- what? Stayed and married Sha're?" O'Neill asks.

The woman is on her feet so fast that everybody around the table tenses. O'Neill is regarding her, eyebrows raised, the picture of innocent inquiry.

She locks eyes with him. "Sha're was my sister. Skaara is my brother. Kasuf is my father. Yes, I stayed. I was adopted into the royal house of Abydos."

Was. Is. No one here misses the tenses she uses.

"So ... you're a princess," O'Neill says, with feigned delight.

Her hands clench into fists. She turns her back to the table and seems to address the ceiling. "A year later you threw a box of Kleenex through the gate to see if it was safe to go back to Abydos. You and Sam and Kawalski and Feretti and a commando team came through. You came because a Goa'uld named Apophis had come to Cheyenne Mountain. We'd all thought Ra was the only one, but he wasn't. While I was showing you and Sammy the Abydos Cartouche Room, Apophis came to Abydos. He took Skaara for the Choosing."

Skaara. Not Sha're and Skaara.

"And then what?" O'Neill says.

"No! That's enough!" She whirls and slams her hands, palm down, on the table in front of O'Neill, glaring into his eyes. "I've told you who I am! If you are SG-1, you know the rest of the story! Now what's going on?"

"Fraiser's dead," O'Neill says, his voice harsh. "She died six months ago. If you really were Daniel, you'd know that."

She rears back as if he's hit her.

"She's--? You're... Don't. I just saw her. She checked us all out before we left for PHX-1138. This morning." She backs away from O'Neill, as if he's suddenly become something alien. Dangerous.

"Major Carter, has SG-1 ever been to PHX-1138?" Colonel Hammond asks. There are so many missions nobody can remember all.

"I think so, sir, but it would have been a while back. I'll check." Carter gets up and leaves the table.

The woman is standing in the middle of the room. Her arms are wrapped tightly around herself. Her head is down, her mop of light brown hair falling forward, obscuring her face. "How did she die?" she whispers.

"Doctor Fraiser went offworld to tend the victims of a Jaffa ambush," Teal'c says. "She died bravely and well."

The woman nods, a quick jerky motion. "What about Cassie?" she asks. No one answers her.

Carter is back. "Sir, we did go to PHX-1138. Two years ago. We'd been planning to return for a follow-up, but..."

"Dr. Jackson," General Hammond says to the woman standing in the middle of the room. "Was -- your -- SG-1 scheduled for any missions after PHX-1138?"

She nods again, obviously forcing herself to focus. "Yes. We're supposed to go to P3X-4C3. Tomorrow."

Everybody at the table remembers where that is. P3X-4C3 is Kelowna. Langara. Carter glances at O'Neill. He shrugs, giving permission, and she speaks. "We went to Kelowna two years ago. Daniel... died."

"He got better," O'Neill says.

Janet is dead -- they say she's dead -- and they say PHX-1138 is two years ago.

Is this a lie, a trick, a trap? There are parallel universes. She's visited one, seen Jack go through to another. But that was through a quantum mirror, and she hasn't seen or touched one.

That she remembers.

Sammy said the parallel universes they reached through the quantum mirror should all be at the same point in time. The two she knows of were. If this is a parallel universe, she is two years behind this one's reality.

They say.

"Who is Daniel?" She forces herself to ask the question.

"Daniel Jackson is who you're pretending to be," Jack says. "And we want him back."

"Daniel Jackson?" she says, unable to comprehend the stunning enormity of the idea. "I'm supposed to be ... a guy?" No wonder Sammy had been talking about cloning. But a clone would be genetically identical. The same sex as its donor.

"Oh, I don't think you could manage that," Jack drawls. Jack at his most irritating.

"It doesn't make any sense," she says, bewildered. "If there is a ... Daniel ... Jackson -- here -- then where is ... he?"

"I think we'd all like to know that," General Hammond says.

They go around the table for most of an hour, getting nowhere. All they establish is that Daniel Jackson was supposed to attend a briefing three hours ago. He arrived on base as usual this morning, signed in, and -- sometime after that -- vanished. General Hammond is having the security cameras checked now to try to determine when and where he was last seen.

And she...

She remembers PHX-1138. She remembers being in the SGC, in what they say is Daniel Jackson's office. But she doesn't remember anything in between. She isn't sure how long she was in that office before Jack showed up, either. Less than half an hour?

"This isn't getting us anywhere," Jack growls, sitting forward.

They've been through every possibility -- transfer between alternate universes, shared hallucinations, intervention by advanced yet enigmatic aliens. All of them are equally possible, actually, but it doesn't explain the substitution.

"You take something, you put something in its place. You take something, you put something in its place ... guys, it almost sounds like somebody's trying to trade with you. It would be a prelude to actual trading, really. A series of formalized, ritual exchanges, to see if both sides are interested."

"Noooo..." Jack says, drawing out the word. No, they aren't interested.

She wants to slap him. She fantasizes about slapping Jack O'Neill fairly often, actually. The thought of it now makes her heart beat faster. Under the table, she rubs the palm of her hand against her trouser leg.

"Obviously," she says, focusing on General Hammond. "So you take back your 'trade goods,' and return theirs, whoever they are. That should send a clear message."

Which is only restating their problem.

"It would perhaps be helpful if we knew what entity is attempting to negotiate with us," Teal'c says.

"I don't know what you've been doing in the last two years. But we found the remains of a Furling city on PHX-1138," she says. "At least that was my guess. I'm fairly sure that the Furlings are the ones who built the quantum mirrors. Even if yours was destroyed, they could certainly build another one if they wanted to. Which would account for..." Finding herself in a universe where there is a bizarre impossible unnecessary male version of her, she doesn't say.

She isn't completely sure that the Furlings built the mirrors. In fact, it's a wild guess on her part, but one she hasn't been able to shake.

Jack and Sammy exchange looks.

"There was nothing like that on -- our -- PHX-1138, General," Sammy says. Sammy has pulled their mission file on PHX-1138. It's on the table in front of her. That, at least, is familiar.

"Still, maybe PHX-1138 is where we should start looking," General Hammond says. "I'm authorizing you to go back there and take another look around."

"I can--" she begins.

"Not you," Jack says.

The SFs take her back to her cell.

Three hours later, they're all back around the conference table. Only this time, the Alternate SG-1 has just gotten back -- again -- from PHX-1138 and found exactly what they did the last time: an untouched pastoral planet with no signs of life. No Furling ruins. And no Daniel Jackson.

"So if he isn't there, where is he?" Jack turns his attention to her. It's like having a loaded gun suddenly pointed at her. "Back in -- your -- universe?"

"Not necessarily, Sir." It's Sammy who answers. "Even if he could be taken there, there wouldn't be any need to. She and Daniel aren't absolutely identical on a genetic level. Entropic Cascade Failure wouldn't be a factor."

So they could both be in the same universe without her dying. Nice to know.

The similarities to -- and the differences from -- the real world are maddening. There, Jack would be just as intent on demanding answers from her. But the man staring at her would not be radiating such hostility, an anger bordering on hatred.

He blames me for whatever happened to Daniel Jackson.

"I'm guessing," she says. "But if this is some kind of a trade overture, they won't take their side of the transaction very far away until they're sure the terms are acceptable. So it has to be some place you can easily reach." 'Easy' being a relative term.

"'Guessing.'"

"If ... Dr. Jackson ... is right, then the differences between her reality and ours might provide a clue on how to begin looking for Daniel. I mean, whoever chose to substitute her for him in the first place must have had a reason for choosing her," Sammy says. All of them, she realizes, find it hard to speak directly to her, or include her in their conversation.

"Okay. Good. We can start with a list of everywhere she's been since she came back from Abydos," Jack says.

She doesn't for a moment think he's joking, but it doesn't occur to her until he speaks how angry she's getting. They know she's ... well, a member of the SGC at least. They know she's the counterpart of their -- male -- Danielle Jackson, and he's a member of their SG-1.

The Dream Team. The Elite Squad. The Flagship Team. Less printable names when the brass isn't listening.

But they're treating her as if it was her idea to kidnap their damned linguist and hide him -- she's sure he isn't dead, so sure it doesn't occur to her to consider that the others aren't so sure at all -- as if she is responsible for all of their problems. The enemy, to be punished.

She slouches further down into her chair. "Let me get this straight. You want me to list, off the top of my head, every planet we've -- I've -- been to in the last five years?"

"If your theory is correct, it might be the first step to finding the address the Furling -- we'll assume it's a Furling until proven otherwise -- is using as a base," Sammy says helpfully.

If you closed your eyes, O'Neill thinks, the Xerox sounded just like Daniel. Daniel in a really bad mood. Daniel singing soprano.

"It'd be a nice gesture on your part," O'Neill adds. He's irritated, frustrated, worried, and, frankly, doesn't see why the Xerox shouldn't reap the benefit. If she didn't exist, Daniel wouldn't be missing.

There's a long pause.

"Fine. I'll need access to your mission reports. All of them."

"Out of the question," he snaps automatically.

"Ja-a-a-ck..." Outrage, indignation, and Daniel's patented whine. But she isn't Daniel. Daniel is missing. Daniel might be dead. She has no right to act as if she's Daniel.

"That's COLONEL O'Neill to you."

There is a sudden shocked silence. She stares at him as if -- what? He's hurt her feelings?

"Look. COLONEL O'Neill. I've been with this program as long as you have. Longer. Okay, maybe not here, but all I want to do is find my -- copy -- so I can go home. I wrote half those damned reports. I don't understand why you don't want to let me see them. If you're questioning my loyalty after five years--"

"Eight," O'Neill says, unable to stop himself. "It's been eight years."

"Fine. Fine-fine-fine." The Xerox pushes herself to her feet. "I'll be in my jail cell. Whenever you decide to stop being pissy, just let me know."

The SFs look at General Hammond. He nods. Right now it's a choice between wrestling her to the floor and letting her go. She stalks out, followed by two SFs.

O'Neill stares at the rest of the table.

"'Pissy'?" he finally says. "'PISSY'?"

"You might have been a little hard on her, Sir," Carter says, sounding tentative. "From her point of view, she is Daniel."

She isn't Daniel. Daniel's slightly-androgynous prettyboy good looks ... well, why don't they just say they come across entirely differently on an actual female?

She makes Carter look butch.

"Is there any reason to suppose that her -- loyalties and interests -- are different from those of the Dr. Jackson we know?" Hammond asks at last.

"I do not believe so, General Hammond. She is Daniel Jackson. She is simply not our Daniel Jackson," Teal'c says firmly.

It is not, after all, their first experience with alternate universes, or their alternate selves. Kawalsky had been just the same.

"Colonel O'Neill? Major Carter?"

"I agree, Sir." Carter's voice is neutral.

Everybody is looking at him. He doesn't really think she's going to try to take them down. Teal'c's opinion counts for a lot. But Daniel has no idea of military necessities and he doesn't expect his Xerox -- if she really is -- to have any more of one.

They'll watch her like a hawk.

"Yeah, okay, sure. Give her what she wants."

He knows it's probably their best shot at getting Daniel back. If Daniel's still alive. But the deep-seated sense of annoyance refuses to fade.

She races the SFs to her cell. It isn't as if she doesn't know the way. Everything here in Looking Glass Land is exactly the same, except the people. She's a member of SG-1. She puts stranger things than this on her breakfast waffles.

She slams the door in the guards' faces and begins to pace.

Someone took a man named Daniel and substituted her. They are close analogues, but not identical. There are ruins on her PHX-1138 but not here. The planets are close analogues, but not identical.

Find all of the differences between Daniel's experience -- Daniel's universe -- and hers, and the differences will make up a code, a language. Deciphering languages is what she does best. Perhaps this is not about trade, but about communication.
The trouble is, incredibly advanced aliens often overestimate one's capabilities. The only one likely to know Daniel Jackson that well is Daniel Jackson. She can't compare their differences if she doesn't know them. She'll have to concentrate on the gross differences, the one his friends know, and hope it's enough to lead her to him.

If they'll cooperate.

She wants to get out of here.

She misses her friends.

Sammy is the one who comes, along with an airman with a dinner tray.

No. It isn't Sammy. It's someone called Major Carter, who just happens to look like her Sammy. She has to remember that.

Jack's rejection still hurts. It shouldn't. She tells herself it isn't Jack, not really. It doesn't help.

"What can I do for you, Major Carter?" she asks. The airman places the tray on the table, and departs. She hears the door being locked again.

"I thought you might be hungry, and..."

Daniel would look at her with exactly the same expression, when he didn't believe a word she was saying, but wasn't going to say so. She decides to be honest. Somewhere, in some unimaginable universe, there's an SG-1 missing this woman as much as Sam misses Daniel right now.

"General Hammond has authorized us to give you access to SG-1's mission files. The idea is to compare them with what you remember, and ... maybe we'll find some clues."

The woman -- Danielle Jackson -- has picked up the cover off the tray and is investigating the contents. "Tuna." There's a pause. "My favorite, too." Another pause. "Major Carter, I just want to go home. Even if I am going to ... die."

On Kelowna, because Major Carter said that Daniel died there, and Jack -- COLONEL O'Neill -- said he got better. Which does she believe? Are both statements true? After all, she's died, by all modern medical standards. Goa'uld sarcophagi (among other things) brought her back.

She doesn't think a sarcophagus is involved in this case.

"It won't be too bad," Major Carter says, puzzlingly. "And it might work out differently in your universe. There are differences, aren't there?"

"Back there, in the conference room, Colonel O'Neill implied that Daniel Jackson married Sha're." Married my sister.

"Yes. They lived together on Abydos for a year, then Apophis came and took Sha're to host his bride Amaunet and her brother Skarra to host his son, Klorel. Apophis also conceived an harceisis child with Amaunet. Daniel delivered her baby and hid it with the tribe in the deep desert. But a few months later, Amaunet returned to Abydos. She claimed the baby and executed those who had cared for him. But when Heru-Ur landed on Abydos, she gave the baby to her personal handmaid to take to Kheb. Eventually we located Kheb, where Daniel saw the baby again and realized Shifu was safe with Oma Desala, an Ascended being from whom Daniel learned how to Ascend as well."

The woman is shaking her head. "Major Carter, if Apophis were idiotic enough to father a harceisis, all we would have to do is get a message to the System Lords, and no more Apophis, no more Amaunet, and no more whole royal house back to the Goa'uld Queen who spawned him. As for keeping a harceisis alive, or protecting it, what you've got with a harceisis is essentially a Goa'uld without the snake. Everything I've ever read about them in the Tok'ra archives indicates that they're completely evil. Beyond redemption."

"Maybe," Carter agrees neutrally, a little offput by the stranger's un-Daniel-like cold-bloodedness. "But Daniel wanted to save Shifu, because he was Sha're's child."

"No." A flat denial. "My sister never hosted a Goa'uld, Major Carter. I saved her from that. I was told that Amaunet's host was a sergeant Apophis had kidnapped from The Mountain. I don't know if it happened here too, but he took a woman from the Base in my world back with him through the Stargate."

Yes, that much is true. Sgt Hayward is still listed as 'Missing In Action,' but she's almost certainly dead.

"How did you save Sha're?" Carter asks. She doesn't want to know, but she thinks she'd better find out.

The woman sets down half a tuna sandwich untasted. "I shot her with an M-60."

Sha're had died, dancing on lead, the bullets bouncing harmlessly off the Serpent Guard armor of the Jaffa who held her. Teal'c's armor. She gazes directly into Major Carter's eyes, daring her to show pity or disgust.

Carter does neither. She's never had to shoot one of her own people on the battlefield rather than leave them alive in the hands of the enemy, but considering the enemies they all face daily, it's a decision she expects to have to make some day. Colonel O'Neill, she is sure, has made that decision in the past. It is not something you discuss.

"If she could, she'd thank you," Carter says softly. "Here, Sha're was a host for four years. Teal'c killed her as Amaunet was trying to murder Daniel."

The woman shakes her head. "We should have buried it."

There's nothing to say to that. Daniel's seen that future. Apophis brings a fleet to Earth, and everyone dies.

"But if we had, Apophis would have destroyed the Earth," Dr. Jackson says, in an uncanny echo of Carter's thoughts. "I've been to alternate universes before, but... I've usually had some idea I was going. Or that I'd gone. And I've usually been the same ... sex."

Carter smiles faintly. It's a feeble joke, but it's a joke, and right now they can all use a little humor.

"You're being moved to A3 Quarters. I could take you there now."

"No, I'd like to get started. It would be a help if I could work out of ... Daniel ... Jackson's office. I don't know what I'm looking for, but it might be there." She runs a hand through her hair, an achingly familiar gesture. Daniel's gesture.
"Sure," Carter says. The last hour or so has been spent working out the details. "And you'll need this."

She digs in a pocket and pulls out a 'Guest' ID. Without it, Dr. Jackson will be stopped everywhere she goes. She won't even be able to get into the commissary.

"Yeah, I guess I will," Dr. Jackson says, her voice flat. She takes the pass and clips it to her pocket.

"And--" Carter mimes tearing off shoulder insignia. "You can't wear those here," she says, as gently as she can.

For a moment she thinks Dr. Jackson will refuse. But the woman reaches up and tears them off, first the SG-1 patch, then the SGC patch. She drops the embroidered disks on the desk. Carter picks them up and puts them in her pocket.

"Let's go."

She doesn't need to be told where Daniel's office is. though she has to wait while Carter unlocks the door. Once inside, though, she moves tentatively, as though her surroundings are strange to her, and once again Carter feels a reflexive flare of suspicion. Maybe this is some impostor, some ringer, sent to infiltrate the SGC, designed with a cover story so improbable, so downright bizarre, that they'd have no choice but to believe it. Maybe this whole thing is a scenario designed to buy somebody time to interrogate Daniel. There are things that he knows that would be valuable to their enemies -- not the alien ones, but the ones they have right here on Earth.

But she's settled herself behind his desk and turned on his computer, adjusting his chair to compensate for their difference in height while she waits for the system to come on-line. She raises her hands over the keyboard and pauses, looking at Carter.

"You know, at a moment like this the thing that's running through my mind is that this is all some kind of long elaborate hoax to gain access to my security codes and passwords, and just because I can't imagine what use they'd be to anyone with the technology to pull a masquerade like this off doesn't mean..."

She's right. Carter knows this. It was part of all of their security briefings, the possibility that any of them might be captured and interrogated, possibly with elaborate scenarios designed to convince them that they are among friends.

Hathor did that once.

In a way, it's as important for them to convince her that they are real as for her to convince them that she is real.

Impasse?

"Daniel has fish," Carter says.

There is a long baffled pause from the woman behind the desk.

"Koi?" she says at last.

'Coy?' Oh, KOI...

"No. Tropical fish. A big tank of them."

Dr. Jackson mulls this over, staring at the screen.

"I had a dog. It was this little brown ... one of the students brought it to UCB one semester and just dumped it when she went home for the summer, so I kept it. I named it Anubis. I took it to Abydos with me."

There is a long pause.

"When they thought I wasn't going to be able to get them home after all, one of Colonel O'Neill's men shot him."

Carter's eyes go wide with shock. She doesn't know what she'd expected to hear, but it wasn't this.

"I can't imagine Colonel O'Neill..." she begins.

Would do that. Would let it happen. Would let it go unpunished.

"I... He's very--" What can she say about the man she trusts with her life?

Danielle Jackson's eyes go flat and opaque.

"Let's get down to cases here, shall we, Cupcake?" she says. Her voice has suddenly deepened, roughened, developed a strong West Texas twang.

General Viorst, Carter realizes with a sudden thrill of discovery. That's General Viorst to the life. I worked under him at the Pentagon on the Stargate Program. He called me 'Captain Cupcake' when he thought he could get away with it. I never told anybody about that except Daniel. Not even the Colonel. And Daniel met him once, a few months after he came back from Abydos.

"I believe you," Carter says suddenly, impulsively. "I don't know how it's possible, but--"

"I don't actually care what you believe, Major Carter," Dr. Jackson interrupts her brusquely. "Right now all I'm interested in is finding out where the Furlings have stashed my doppelganger so I can get back to the real SG-1."
"Look. I'll give you the access codes," Carter says. "That way--"

"I don't need them," Dr. Jackson says, and begins to type.

It is several hours later when Colonel O'Neill appears in the doorway.

"Carter?"

Carter is seated at the second desk in Daniel's office, working at her laptop. She glances at her watch as she looks up. After midnight.

"Sir?"

The tension level in the room has risen sharply. She slides her eyes sideways. Dr. Jackson hasn't moved from her hunched-over-in-front-of-the-computer position, but she's frozen in place. Like a deer in headlights.

"Progress?" Colonel O'Neill asks.

A shouting match is hovering on the horizon. Carter can sense it. Daniel and the Colonel have gotten into some memorable donnybrooks. The one brewing between Colonel O'Neill and the alternate universe Dr. Jackson will be far worse if it is allowed to happen.

"Ah, Dr. Jackson doesn't have fish, Sir." Sometimes it is possible to derail an approaching storm -- to mix metaphors -- by burying the Colonel in a mountain of inessential facts. She sometimes wonders if he ever catches on to what she's doing.

"I had tuna," comes the sullen voice from behind the other computer.

Colonel O'Neill digests this set of nonsequeters. "Well, don't stay up too late. Ladies."

He withdraws. Three precisely-timed beats later the coffee cup beside Dr. Jackson's computer comes sailing through the air to shatter by the door, accompanied by a fervent phrase in Russian. Carter has heard it from Daniel. Something about the devil.

"Nice shot," Carter says.

"It was cold. Look, there's no reason for you to baby-sit me all night. I've got SFs just outside the door. There's a lot to go through here. It's going to take a while."

"How long?" Carter hates to ask, but Colonel O'Neill and General Hammond will want to know.

"A while. Look, I want to go home probably as much as you want to get rid of me. And I'm sure you want Daniel Jackson back."

She doesn't sound completely convinced.

"He's a good friend," Carter says.

"I'll get him back for you. Now go home, okay?"

When O'Neill signs in at 0800 the next morning, the first place he goes is Daniel's office. Daniel still isn't there, but the Xerox has apparently pulled an all-nighter. There's a tray full of thermal carafes from the commissary on a side table, and the blackboard is covered with scrawled notes in a slightly unfamiliar handwriting. She looks up as he enters. Her skin is pale with exhaustion, and there are deep blue shadows under her eyes.

"Carter?" he says.

"I sent her home around one, I think." She rubs her eyes. The gesture is Daniel's, exactly. It's disturbing. In a Goa'uld way, not a Mary Steenburgen way.

"What time is it?" the Xerox asks.

"Oh-800. The start of another beautiful day at the SGC. Any progress?"

"So far, the only place I'm completely sure that you've visited that I haven't is a place called Kheb, and apparently that's related to the fact that in your world, a Goa'uld called Amaunet took Sha're for a host, and in mine she didn't. And I'm guessing the Ancients aren't interested in either talking to you or trading with you."

"I'd have to say... no."

"Then I'll keep looking." She turns back to the screen, ignoring him completely.

She's already begun by looking for places she went to that they didn't -- and the reverse. From there she'll go on to missions out of order from what she remembers. After that, she'll look for internal differences between the missions, hers and theirs.

She's found pictures of Daniel Jackson. She's found his whole personnel file, actually.

It's like looking at herself, but different. They look like fraternal twins -- closer, really -- but of course men always have the advantage. Nobody expects men to wear lipstick and mascara, for example. Or high heels and pantyhose. So he looks great. And she looks like... a geek.

She grits her teeth. Nobody hired her for her looks. They hired her because she could read pre-Dynastic Egyptian.

His hair is shorter than hers. But in the earliest photos, the ones taken when Catherine hired him, he is wearing his hair the same way she is now.

There are sound files; his recorded mission notes. His voice is deeper, of course. But he sounds like her, too. Carefully neutral Midlantic vowels, over a faint blurred sound that speaks of a dozen languages learned by the age of eight. As a result, his English -- their English -- is sometimes fussily overprecise.

He did die on Kelowna.

They've given her everything she asked for, so she has access to the mission reports that lie in her 'future' -- in fact, to all of the mission reports of every member of SG-1 up to the present day. He went to Kelowna. He died. He became an Ascended Being.

She's familiar with the Ancients. Builders of the Stargates, Elder Race, once-inhabitants of Earth, creators of a maddeningly subtle and complex language. They even found the remains of an Ancient outpost in Antarctica, so she's had something to work with.

Daniel Jackson contracted terminal radiation poisoning on Kelowna, and died. Because he met Oma Desala on Kheb, he was offered the chance to Ascend, a condition from which he later returned -- Descended?

So, in essence, he's cheated Death.

She's never been to Kheb. When she goes home, her next mission is to Kelowna.

It's highly unlikely anybody is going to offer her the opportunity to Ascend if she is also exposed to a lethal amount of naquaadriah radiation there.

"Better not go to Kelowna, then," she says aloud.

But while this is a fascinating side-trip, it isn't getting anybody any closer to finding out where Daniel Jackson is.

She can't focus on the screen. She can't think straight. She looks down at her watch and can't make out the numbers, with or without her glasses.

She needs food and sleep.

She leaves her -- no, Daniel's, -- office, heading for the commissary. She really ought to take all their carafes back, but right now she's pretty sure she'd drop them. She's trying to make out when she ate last, or slept. It's hard, because of the transition.

I got up, showered, drove to The Mountain, had breakfast, briefed, Janet checked us out, we went through to PHX-1138...

Janet is dead.

Her eyes fill with tears. Exhaustion. Stupid.

But if she doesn't get home, she'll never see Janet -- or Jack, or Sammy, or Teal'c -- again.

She leans against the wall.

"Doctor Jackson, are you well?"

"Teal'c." She blinks at him. She can't get used to the ... hair. Acculturation, she supposes. "I'm just tired."

"May I assist you?"

He sounds the same. Of all of them, he treats her the same. She feels like throwing herself into his arms and bursting into tears.

Yes, she's tired.

"I'm just going down to the commissary."

"I will accompany you."

He waits for her to stand up straight again.

"Have you made any progress in your researches?" Teal'c asks, as they walk.

"Not really. I have questions. Nobody to ask, though."

"Perhaps you could ask me, Doctor Jackson. Daniel Jackson often told me that it helped him to ask questions aloud."

"Right. Yeah." I said that. "Well, okay, why isn't this an even swap?"

"I do not understand. You are both Daniel Jackson."

She knows Major Carter believes it, but Teal'c is the first one who has actually said it. It makes her feel better, even though he should have said that they're both Danielle Jackson. She's the original. Daniel is the bizarre copy.

"Yes, but- Okay. Why is he two years older than I am? Why aren't we from the same point in time? Why didn't we find another mirror on PHX-1138? Why didn't you?"

Why doesn't she remember anything clearly after standing in the middle of the ruined Furling city? She was there. Then she was ... here.

Teal'c cocks his head. "I do not know, Doctor Jackson."

"Right."

Teal'c sits with her while she eats. The Air Force cuisine is exactly the same, which is somehow soothing. She loads up on carbs: banana pudding, spaghetti piled on toast. The food gives her a burst of energy that she knows will be brief. She's going to crash soon.

"Major Carter said I'd been assigned A3 Quarters, but I don't know which ones," she says.

"I am aware," Teal'c says, inclining his head magisterially. "I will conduct you."

She feels a sense of relief as the door closes behind her, partly from the fact that she's been given A3 quarters -- visiting guest accommodations -- another indication that General Hammond believes at least some of what she's told him.

Also, A3s have an attached bath. She drops her clothes in a heap in the middle of the bathroom and stands under the hot water in the shower until it numbs her.

There are clothes in the drawers, close to her size. She pulls on sweatpants and a t-shirt and falls into bed.

Sometime later she awakes, sitting bolt upright. A moment ago she was dreaming, but she can't recall her dream.

But she has the answer to one of her questions. They aren't from the same point in time because there is no contemporary 'her' to exchange. She doesn't want to believe it, but it's logical.

Daniel Jackson disappeared now because Now is when the Furlings -- for convenience, she's going to call the architects of their misfortune the Furlings until proven otherwise -- want to open a dialogue with this SGC. But they didn't have a contemporary her to offer in exchange, because there isn't one.

Or perhaps her universe is the one in which the Furlings are opening negotiations, and they were showing her her own future so that she could change it. Because if she doesn't...

She stumbles out of bed, looking for pen and paper to make notes. Along the way, she knocks something off a desk. A card-key and a slip of paper. Someone has been in here while she slept.

"Thought you might need this. Maj. Carter."

It's a key to Daniel's office.

Her days become a nightmare of work. It's like the very beginning, when she was trying to crack the coverstone, only she doesn't even have something tangible to try to decipher. She's alone most of the time; they're trying not to pull the other SG teams into this -- not that it would help; they know even less here than they do back in her universe about the Furlings, which convinces her that the Furlings are the key.

They've never cracked the Furling language.

They visited a Furling city on PHX-1138 -- which doesn't exist here -- and she was taken. Out of her own place and time.

She isn't finding anything that will help.

Major Carter is approaching the problem from a technical angle, trying to trace energy signatures through the Stargate here and on PHX-1138 to see if someone has taken Daniel through it, and where, and when. It's a slightly more potentially-fruitful line of inquiry than the one she's told Colonel O'Neill is pursuing, which is to simply check every hospital, jail, and madhouse within a thousand miles, in addition to pressuring his contacts in the various alphabet agencies. From what Major Carter doesn't say, Danielle gathers he's being a lot less diplomatic than General Hammond has to be in his inquiries.

For Jack O'Neill, that's saying a lot.

Thinking of that is the one bright spot in her days. She works twenty hours out of the twenty-four. Some days she doesn't even bother to leave the office; she's brought blankets and a pillow in from the A3 and catnaps under her -- Daniel's -- desk.

The days blur together in a surreal fashion. She's sure there's an answer somewhere here amid the hundreds of facts she now has at her disposal.

She can't find it.

"Jack! Colonel! O'Neill! We have to go back to PHX-1138 and we have to go now! Right now! We might already be too late! Oh, god, what time is it?"

She comes barreling into his office looking completely demented, her arms full of books, and, astonishingly, a calendar. He hasn't seen her for two days. She looks as if she hasn't slept in three.

"It's 1130-hundred."

"No! The date!"

"Ah... March 21st?"

"Not here! There! You were just there! When is it there?"

She looks like she's going to have a complete meltdown right in his doorway. She's trying to gesture, to explain, and all that happens is that her armful of books goes flying. She makes a sound like a cat somebody's stepped on.

"Look, Doctor... Jackson--" He'll never get used to calling her that.

"He's there! The city's there! Don't you see? You went at the wrong time! God-god-god, I finally found it! We went in the summer -- you went in the fall -- it's only there in the summer because of what they are but if it's summer there now it will be there now you've got to go back there'll be a cave I'm sure there'll be a cave it's underground don't you see--"

"Sit. Down."

He walks over to her, stepping over the books, and takes her by the shoulders. He drags her over to the nearest chair and pushes until she sits.

"We checked PHX-1138," he reminds her, picking up the phone.

"Wrong time," she says again, bouncing out of the chair to gather up her books.

Daniel's books.

"Sit," he says, punching Carter's extension.

"It has to be that because there aren't any other things that match. They'd leave us a clear indication, because that's the way their minds work and that's where I was it's not about Kelowna at all; it's about PHX-1138. It's about the Furlings. And he'll be there because this is an overture, a dialogue--" She's ignoring him, picking up the books, but she's dropping as many as she gathers.

"Sit down!" It's the voice that has stopped hardened Black Ops commandos in their tracks, and it finally gets through to her. She clutches the books in her hands to her chest and goes back to the chair.

"Sir?"

Carter heard that. He can tell.

"Carter, we need to know what time of year it is on PHX-1138 right now. Is there any way to find that out? Summer, winter, shopping days till Christmas?"

"Midsummer," the Xerox says, almost whispering. "It has to be Midsummer. It has to."

"I can ask General Hammond to send a MALP through. We should be able to get an idea," Carter says. "It seemed like summer when we went, though."

"Apparently we need to know the date. See what you can do."

He hangs up the phone.

"Now. You want to explain?"

"We have to go there. If we don't go, they'll think we -- you -- approve the exchange. And we have to go when we can get there."

She isn't making a lot of sense. But then, half the time Daniel doesn't make a lot of sense either, and he's usually right.

"The short version? With little words?"

She takes a deep breath.

"On Earth, there are legends of places that are only visible -- accessible -- on certain days of the year. Tir Na Og. The Fairy Hills."

"Brigadoon?" O'Neill suggests.

That wins him a pained smile, but it's better than the potential hysterics of a moment before. He's seen Daniel work himself to the edge of a nervous collapse more than once over a problem that's impossible to solve, solving it. He recognizes the signs.
"Brigadoon," she agrees. "Okay. We went to PHX-1138 in summer -- its summer. Your original visit was in its autumn. The usual time for invisible places to become -- accessible -- is Midsummer."

"We were back there six days ago. Carter says it was summer. We didn't see any invisible city." He hates to push, but he has to.

"The timing has to be ... close. And I don't think you're looking for surface ruins actually. They're only a marker. They might not even be there -- well, they aren't, are they?. I think you're looking for an entrance to an underground complex of some kind. It would be easy to miss."

"And you know this -- how?"

"Because there aren't any other possibilities. We've gone on the same missions, visited the same places, done the same things, up to P3X-4C3 -- I died on Kelowna, obviously, which is why I'm two years behind, and that's what makes PHX-1138 the obvious--"

"Whoa! Wait! Back up! What do you mean you died on Kelowna? You haven't been to Kelowna yet. You said so."

"No. But we we're going there next. If I go back to where I left. If we go there next... What am I going to do, Colonel? Ascend?" She shakes her head. "I've never been to Kheb."

"Yeah... Well... Don't go to Kelowna."

She isn't listening.

"But we have to go now! Look, everything I know about them says that the Furlings communicate by the ritual presentation of symbolic tableaux -- visual riddles -- which is what this has to be. You have to see--"

Carter steps into the office. "They're prepping the MALP now, Sir." She looks from Colonel O'Neill to Dr. Jackson, and frowns inquiringly.

"There's an invisible city on PHX-1138," O'Neill says helpfully.

Dr. Jackson puts her head in her hands. "We have to go now," she mutters through her fingers.

Her explanation to General Hammond boils down to 'he has to be there because I can't think of anywhere else to look,' but SG-1 backs her up.

Colonel O'Neill backs her up.

By the time she's finished her explanation, the MALP is sending back telemetry. Cross-checking it with the records from their two previous visits, they can be sure of the season -- summer -- and that the days are still getting longer, which implies it's getting closer to Midsummer, at least -- but not much else.

General Hammond authorizes them to proceed.

"I have to go with you," she says, as they rise from the table.

Colonel O'Neill looks at her, but this time he's just waiting. Give me a good reason, his expression says.

"If they're trading, you have to give them back what they've offered you in order to get back what they've taken. And I want to go home."

"Are you sure that's what's going to happen?" General Hammond asks skeptically.

"I'm sure you won't get him back unless I'm along," she says. It's the truth.

Colonel O'Neill nods.

Janet would never okay her to go offworld in the condition she's in. Brightman doesn't want to let her go either, but the trouble is, the time they have to locate something that may only exist in Dani's imagination is short. They can't wait. Hammond overrules Brightman.

She goes to get her gear.

The others are already in the gear-up room by the time she arrives, her arms filled with new issue from Stores to replace items lost a universe away. They've had to struggle to come up with her sizes. Daniel's backpack was in his office, and she's filled it with what she thinks she'll need.

It makes her late.

She looks around at the row of lockers automatically, realizing she's searching for the one with her name on it.

It's there. Dr. D. Jackson. But it's not hers.

"Are you going to be all right?" Major Carter asks her in a low voice.

She glances up, but Colonel O'Neill and Teal'c are at the other end of the room, checking each other's gear.

"Fine," she says briefly. She drops an armload of equipment on the bench and begins to gear.

What is Daniel Jackson like? If they find him, she'll know. She's seen pictures and video of him. She's heard his voice. She's seen him reflected in the faces of his friends.

She thinks he's ... soft, actually. It's the word she'd use to describe him. He was unemployed and homeless when Catherine found him, an academic laughingstock. At least she'd been a TA. He takes crazy chances for strangers. She doesn't know whether she envies him, or despises him.

She re-laces her boots, and clips her -- his -- backpack into place on her vest. Carter clears her throat.

"You'll probably need these. In case you go back."

She turns around. Carter is holding out her shoulder patches. SGC. SG-1.

She takes them and presses them into place.

The four of them go through the Gate. Heat washes over her the moment she steps through. She smells flowers, the scent of grass and trees. Smell is the oldest and most evocative sense; suddenly it's a week ago and everything's fine.

One look at Colonel O'Neill's face convinces her this isn't true.

"I think we should start by going back to the ruins ... that aren't there," she says. Her voice is flat with exhaustion. He isn't going to take her suggestion, and she has nothing more to give.

"And then?" Colonel O'Neill asks, his voice neutral.

"Look around?"

"Lead the way."

It takes her a while to find the place where the ruins had been. She doesn't have her notes, her sketches, the tape she'd shot ... nothing that would guide her to the right area except her memory.

And why is that? She'd had the contents of her pockets when she'd arrived, after all -- miscellaneous things that they took away from her when they searched her, including an All Access keycard, two loose 9mm bullets, three pens, and half a candy bar. If she'd just come through the Gate from here, her pockets should have been full of scraps of paper with worknotes in addition to everything else. But they hadn't been. Because she hadn't come straight to the wrong SGC from here. Something had happened in between.

Hadn't it?

Find Dr. Daniel Jackson. Then worry about that later, when you're home and Jack can laugh at you.

When they reach the city -- there's no city here, or any trace there's ever been one, but she's positive she's in the right place -- she takes off her pack. Rummaging through its contents, she locates a ball of kite string and a tiny bar-magnet. As the others watch in silent interest, she ties the magnet to the string and pays out a four-foot length. The magnet circles, hanging straight down at the end of the string, then pulls strongly in one direction, until it's hanging a solid fifteen degrees out of true. She feels a surge of relief bordering on faintness. This is the first proof she's had that her theory is right.

"High tech," O'Neill comments to Carter.

"Magnetic fields," Dani says. "If the Furlings are actually responsible for the phenomena I believe that they are, it's characterized by strong electromagnetic fields."

"But we can track that," Carter says excitedly. She digs in her own pack, pulling out an EM meter. Dani clips her pack back into place one-handed.

The magnet continues to hang, angled in space.

"It's dead," Carter says disgustedly, a moment later.

All of their electrical equipment -- everything that runs on batteries, anything electronic or magnetic -- is completely dead. O'Neill checks their radios, which don't work.

"We must be within the area of affect," Dani says.

"So that's good?" O'Neill asks.

It means she's right. It means he's here. She nods and walks off, coiling up the string. Every few paces she stops and tries the magnet again. It continues to lead them in the same direction.

"Nice trick," Colonel O'Neill says, coming up to her.

It may simply be that she's gotten so little sleep lately, but she can hear the sudden undercurrent of unvoiced suspicion and distrust in his voice. Why didn't she tell them their equipment wouldn't work here? Is she leading them into a trap? Is this all an elaborate charade? She could be Other-Daniel and still be a traitor. She knows it's not something the Colonel can afford to rule out. Stranger things have happened.

"You can try it yourself. It will work for anyone." She offers him the string and magnet. "I wasn't sure we'd find the magnetic anomaly." Actually, she didn't remember it at all until she arrived. She hurries on, trying to explain everything. "It's a good sign. I think it means the doorway will be there. I think the doorway must be open to be affecting the electric equipment so strongly." But she should have known whether it would or wouldn't be here from her last trip here. Sammy was the one who found it then; she remembers now. She should have warned them.

She doesn't remember.

She doesn't remember anything about PHX-1138 after finding the ruins of the city.

She didn't remember this.

She brought the magnet and the string without remembering why she'd need them until she got here.

She glances up into his face, knowing he sees realization and horror in equal measures.

Is she a trap after all?

"Are we there yet?" O'Neill asks blandly.

The string slips out of her fingers. The magnet goes flying into the distance. The ball of string bounces as it unrolls, unspooling string.

They follow the string.

There's an opening in the side of a hill. It looks so much like a cave it looks fake, like something on a soundstage. Her string-and-magnet has disappeared into the opening, leaving the end of the string outside. She's about to walk into the cave when O'Neill puts a hand on her shoulder.

"Now, now. Is that the way we behave at home? Carter, let's go."

Colonel O'Neill and Major Carter head into the cave first. She follows them. Teal'c brings up the rear. Inside the complex there is power. Light. They try their radios again. Now the equipment works. The Colonel sighs in exasperation. It's a good thing, but she knows he hates mysteries.

The complex is ... magnificent. It looks as if the builders have just stepped away moments before. She can see echoes of the shapes of the ruined city here. But she can't take pictures, can't record notes. She stops and stares, trying to etch every detail into her memory. Teal'c urges her gently forward, forcing her to catch up with the others.

The ceiling is engraved with constellations. The City Under The Summer Stars.

The corridors are curved, sections of arc that intersect, not quite a spiral, leading them toward a center. The design allows for a number of radiating dead-end corridors as well, a combination of sunburst and spiral motifs, she thinks. If she could only map it properly.

In the center they find the Stargate.

The MALP is sitting in front of it.

"Good," she says, walking up to the MALP before anyone can stop her. It's theirs -- the other SG-1's -- at any rate.

She looks at the other three. "They moved the Stargate," she says quietly. In awe. "They're talking to us now."

"Okay, Doc, now what?"

Jack -- her Jack -- called her that on Abydos. She takes a deep quick breath.

"We need to find Daniel Jackson. They'll want to talk more wherever he is. There will be ... things like riddles."

"But not riddles?" Colonel O'Neill asks, as if trying to make sure.

She grabs her hair in exasperation. There's too much to explain, and no time.

"Fan out," he says. "Search. Doc, you're with me."

"Daniel!" O'Neill shouts. "Daniel!" In the distance, she hears Carter's and Teal'c's voices as well, shouting Daniel's name.

"I don't think he can answer, Colonel," she says.

O'Neill rounds on her as if she's suggested Daniel Jackson is being tortured. She raises her hands in the universal gesture of peace, realizing that now is not the time to explain the Legend of King Arthur, Sleeping Knights, and Arthur Come Again.

"I think he's been placed in some sort of suspended state," she says. "It should be easy to awaken him, because this exchange has got to be designed to be terminated from our side and oh my god--"

She starts forward. O'Neill grabs her.

"No -- Jack -- look -- hieroglyphs!" In her excitement she forgets, and calls him by name.

He lets go. She runs to the wall and runs her hands over the delicate incised carvings. "They don't belong here," she says, delighted by the paradox. "They don't belong here at all. We need to look for more."

She heads off down a side passage. The hieroglyphs tell her where to go. Of course. If they're trading, they have to trade her back and she can read them.

She can go home.

"Come on!" she calls, starting to run. She hears the Colonel swear as he follows her, calling over the radio for the others to close up.

The corridors are all sections of arc, and meet at nothing like right angles. There are more hieroglyphs etched into the walls, just at her eye-level. She reaches a doorway unlike any of the others, and steps through. And stops, staring.

It looks like a giant snow globe, actually, down to the fact that it's standing on an ornate pedestal. Spherical, the same shade of purple that flint glass turns in the desert sun. Large enough that it can hold a person standing upright in the middle.

Daniel Jackson stands inside. He looks as if he's asleep.

Colonel O'Neill walks up to the edge of the globe and taps it experimentally. A sheen of lightning moves across its surface, and there is a crackling sound. It is some kind of energy field, not glass.

Daniel Jackson doesn't respond.

"Carter, Teal'c. We've found him," the Colonel says into his radio. He looks at her.

"They wouldn't lead us to him if he weren't alive," she says, though the man inside the globe looks like a wax statue and not a living man. "This is ... a form of communication."

"One of your riddles," the Colonel says dubiously.

With an effort, she stops herself before she starts explaining again about symbolic presentation of objects in Furling communication. They're only theories. The Furlings themselves have been highly elusive. She has little to go on: samples of writing she can't decipher, some artifacts she can't definitely attribute, some sites she isn't entirely sure about. None of it will get Daniel Jackson out of that snow globe.

She looks around the chamber, but sees little that might help. The entrance seems as if it can be closed with a door -- she sees what looks like a triggering mechanism -- and opulent glittering desirable objects set out on tables and standing in corners. The whole room is filled with ... loot.

No. Objets d'art.

Dr. Daniel Jackson is an objet d'art.

What if -- oh, god, what if the Furlings can't tell the difference between her and Daniel Jackson? What if they thought they were leaving a copy that would fool his friends?

Why is he the one they took, and she the one they moved?

She walks around the globe, looking for writing, any instructions that will tell her how to open it. There's nothing. A few minutes later, Major Carter and Teal'c arrive.

Major Carter walks up to the globe, touches it as the Colonel did, with the same result. Carter kneels down to examine the base, looking for something that will open into a control panel, and finds nothing.

"Some kind of force-field, Sir," she says. "Probably a stasis bubble."

"Can you open it?" the Colonel asks.

Carter glances around the room, then at Dani.

Dani shakes her head. "Even if it has an instruction book, I won't be able to read it," she admits reluctantly. "But considering the hieroglyphs, there might be something about it in one of the other chambers that I can read."
"It looks like we can move it, Sir. If we can get it back to the SGC I might have a better chance of figuring it out."

"Carter, phone home and get what you need to move it. Teal'c, Doc, let's take a look around and see if we find anything useful."

They move out of the chamber.

She follows the Colonel until his attention is on the contents of one of the other chambers, then doubles back.

Removing the globe is a bad idea.

They have to trade.

Closing the door is easy -- how many ways are there to close a door, anyway? She can't find the lock, but she picks up a statue -- she can't identify the culture, but it's heavy and it's metal -- and smashes the mechanism. Sparks fly, and the panel goes dark.

That should buy her a little time.

She goes back to the bubble, unclipping her pack and dropping it to the floor.

"Hi, Daniel," she says aloud. "I'm Danielle." She places her hand against the bubble's curved surface.

She expects the same light-show the other two got, but it doesn't happen. Instead, the surface is warm and rubbery beneath her hand. She pushes and it gives.

She shoves.

There's a flash of light. She's flung backward as violently as if she'd run full-tilt into a Goa'uld force-shield. She flies through the air, and hits the floor hard, sliding.

She has a pounding headache.

The blank spot in her memories is gone.

Images cascade through her mind, like a movie run fast-forward.

"I need a Threat Assessment, Doc. Is this safe to take back to the SGC or not?"

"Jack, I didn't spend my childhood playing with guns. I don't even know what a Threat Assessment is. You have to give me more than that."

"'Give you more.' What the hell does that mean?"

"Teach me."

"Indiana... Dani... You do know we're -- dying -- down there?"

"So this whole friendship thing we've been working on in the past few years is..."

"In all the time you were ... looping ... were you ever tempted to do something crazy? Jack?"

"Come on kids. Nothing more to see here on beautiful PHX-1138. Let's go home."

"But, Jack, I want to--"

"Indiana. Now?"

She sits up.

Tomorrow is yesterday.

She remembers coming back from PHX-1138, walking back into her own SGC. The debriefing. They'd all gone out that night to O'Malley's. Sammy had coaxed her into shooting a few games of pool, and -- of course -- beat her thoroughly. They'd all gone home. She'd come to work the next day and been briefed for Kelowna, a post-industrial planet that had recently re-discovered its Stargate and was interested in opening diplomatic relations with Earth. They'd been sent in to do a meet'n'greet so that SG-9 would have something to work with when they settled in to the inevitable treaty negotiations.

They'd gone to Kelowna.

"No," she whispers, curling into a small ball on the floor.

On Day Two, Sam had gone off to see the big machines, Jack and Teal'c had been off doing something with the Kelownan leaders, and she had been spending more time with a Kelownan attaché; named Jonas Quinn. The Kelownans were creating bombs in the name of peace, so they said, and she was trying to explain to Jonas what an incredibly stupid idea that was.

Jack and Sammy and Teal'c are dead.

They're all dead.

She's dead.

That's why she's here.

She could be removed from her own universe without changing anything there because she's dead.

And Jack is dead.

She remembers the feel of Jonas Quinn's body on top of her, holding her down. Her fury and desperation. The feel of the radiation, like strong sunlight. Knowing it's too late to stop the chain reaction that in moments will level all of Kelowna City in a naquaadriah-fed nuclear explosion.

The Furling steps out of nothingness.

He throws Jonas aside, lifts her from the floor as if she weighs nothing.

Things happen that are simply too alien for her mind to retain.

And then she is standing in Daniel Jackson's office, in another world.

Suddenly there is a hammering at the door behind her.

"Doc! Jackson! Open this door!"

She gets slowly to her feet, ignoring the Colonel.

All dead, and she'll be dead in seconds once she's returned to the place she was removed from. Kelowna City will be radioactive for a hundred thousand years.

The hammering on the door gets louder. She suspects the Colonel is kicking it.

Time to wake the Sleeping Prince. This is a mission. Jack would expect her to complete it, no matter what.

She approaches the bubble again. This time, when she touches it, she moves slowly, pointing her fingers and trying to sink them beneath the bubble's surface. Her hand eases through. No shock comes.

Next, her arm. The slow stately motions are like dancing underwater. The projections on the ornate pedestal serve as steps, and she climbs up. She slides her foot through the wall of the bubble. It's tricky; there's little space to stand inside, and she's not sure what will happen if her head goes through.

The bubble is buzzing now, a persistent sound like badly-tuned fluorescent bulbs or the resting note of a mosquito zapper. She can touch Daniel Jackson's jacket now -- the material feels waxy, unlike itself -- but she can't shift him. He's as immobile as if he were a statue fixed to the floor of the globe. She clings to him to brace herself.

She slides her foot as far over inside the bubble as she can, and starts shoving her other leg into the globe. She's twisted around backward by the position, and can see the door. There's a black line at the edge. They're forcing it open. They have the C4 to blow it, but they won't risk damaging the stasis bubble. Still, she doesn't have much time. She has to hurry.

But if she moves any faster, the globe will only throw her out again. She thinks that when they're both inside it may trigger the appearance of the Furlings. Or the globe might collapse. It sounds as if it's going to do that. The buzzing has taken on a desperate note.

And if she doesn't fall into a stasis state herself once she's inside, she can try to push Daniel Jackson out again. She'll have the leverage then.

At last only her head and one arm are outside. She's wrapped herself around Daniel Jackson as much as she can. It's now or never. She pulls her head inside. Slowly. The world is purple and buzzes. Everything outside is distorted past recognition.

She can't breathe.

She grabs at Daniel Jackson with her free hand. The movement is too fast for the globe's stasis field. It explodes, flinging them both free.

She scrabbles across the floor on hands and knees toward where she thinks he might be almost before she's stopped sliding; still stunned and more than half-dazed, but desperate to know that he's alive. Insanely, her glasses have remained in place through all of this.

"Ow," she hears. "You know, when I find out what's actually going on I really don't think I'm going to like the explanation much." The voice is calm, rueful, matter-of-fact. She pushes her hair out of her eyes. He's sitting up, looking around for his glasses. She sees them.

The floor shakes. It isn't the first tremor, actually, but it's the first one she can't pretend is an illusion, a hallucination, or her own body shaking.

"You were kidnapped by aliens. We've been looking for you for over a week." She hands him his glasses.

"Ah... 'we'?" He settles his glasses on his nose and peers at her.

"SG-1."

"Daniel?" Colonel O'Neill shouts through the door. They've opened a gap of several inches now, but the door isn't going anywhere soon, and the bad news is that the tremors are increasing in intensity and frequency. She's gotten Daniel Jackson out of the bubble and trapped them both in a collapsing underground complex.

"Jack? I was gone for a week and you replaced me?" Daniel goes over to the door and peers through the gap.

"Long story. Look, can you get the door open?"

"No, somebody's smashed the lock mechanism on this side. Jack, what's going on?"

Dust is sifting down from the ceiling now, fine as flour. The next tremor makes her stagger as she gets to her feet.

"Get back. I'm going to blow it."

Daniel Jackson runs back to her, putting an arm around her shoulders to hurry her to the far side of the room, using the base of the globe -- all that's left now -- for cover. Almost before they get there, an explosion rocks the room.

The explosion goes on and on, a long sickening shimmy, and she knows it isn't just the C4, that the complex is going now, all the way. Smoke and dust fill the air, and she hears Colonel O'Neill shouting.

"Daniel!"

"Over here!" He takes several steps toward the door before he realizes she isn't following.

He stops and looks back at her. He just looks ... confused. He knows from her uniform she's SGC. He can't imagine she'd just stand here. And if she does, if she delays his escape, he'll die.

She stumbles forward. It's the last thing she wants to do. SG-1 is dead.

The Colonel appears through the smoke. He grabs Daniel and shoves him through the door. "Follow Teal'c! Get to the Gate!" Then he grabs her arm and doesn't let go.

They head at a dead run for the Gate. Around them, the Furling complex is ... dissolving. Side passages are sliding into the earth, and cracks are opening everywhere. The destruction is moving fast.

She stumbles keeping up with the Colonel, but he doesn't slow down at all. She doesn't know how she manages to keep her feet. She knows she's going to have bruises. Undoubtedly for the rest of her life.

The air is thick as mist and she can't see, can barely breathe. One wrong turn and they will be lost in the labyrinth, and die. But then the blue glow of the active wormhole lights the fog ahead. Cracks are opening in the ceiling and floor of the main chamber, and the Gate could disappear into one of them at any moment.

Teal'c is standing at the edge of the Gate, waiting.

"Go!" the Colonel shouts, but Teal'c waits until they're on the platform itself before stepping through. The Colonel shoves her through ahead of him. There's a long moment of ... disruption ... and they're home.

No.

Not her home.

Behind her, the wormhole destabilizes with a soft sigh. Just at the edge of the Safe Zone, Major Carter and Daniel Jackson are standing, waiting for them..

"Welcome home, SG-1," General Hammond says. "I'm glad you were able to find Dr. Jackson."

"Yeah. He was in a ... soap bubble."

"Stasis bubble," Carter supplies.

"But what I want to know is, why is she still here? Because we were supposed to, you know, swap, and all we ended up doing was blowing up their house," O'Neill continues.

The General doesn't look very happy about it. Well, she isn't happy either.

"Wait-wait-wait," Daniel Jackson says. "Will somebody tell me what's going on? Where have I been? How did I get there? And who is..."

Colonel O'Neill grins with innocent malice. "Dr. Daniel Jackson, meet ... Dr. Danielle Jackson."

"Wait. She's -- you're -- me?" He looks from her face to the Colonel's, uncertain of whether or not this is an elaborate joke.

She nods.

"She doesn't have a problem with Temporal ... Castanets," the Colonel clarifies.

"Dr. Jackson is from SG-1 in a parallel universe that seems to run about two years behind ours," Carter says. "Her last mission had been to PHX-1138, where we found you. And because she's female -- and therefore genetically distinct from you -- Entropic Cascade Failure doesn't affect her, which is probably why she was chosen for the transfer. Her theory is that the Furlings were attempting to open communication with us by exchanging the two of you," Major Carter says.

"The Furlings have established communication with us? But that's--" Daniel Jackson seems to notice his clothes and his surroundings for the first time. He attempts to brush rock dust from his fatigues without success. "--dusty."

"SG-1, Dr. Jackson, why don't you go get cleaned up? We'll do a full debriefing in one hour," General Hammond says.

She doesn't know why the trade didn't happen. She doesn't know whether or not to tell them about remembering Kelowna. From the looks the Colonel is giving her right now, he'd be more than happy to send her there if he could. But he doesn't say anything.

They're leaving the Gate Room when the warning klaxons sound.

"Unscheduled Offworld Activation!"

"Close the iris!" the General orders.

It doesn't help. The creature walks right through it. The Gate Room fills with armed SFs.

It's definitely alien. Taller than a human -- seven, perhaps seven and a half feet tall -- slender as an Art Deco drawing. Its height and etiolation, she realizes, are the only things that are clearly defined about it: no matter how hard she tries to concentrate on the details of its features and its dress, they seem to constantly be changing, or else it's as if she can't look at them directly.

"Wait! Wait!" she cries. "General! It's the Furling!"

It smiles and inclines its head graciously. Somehow she can tell that, even though she can't make out its features. It has every face and none, and they're all beautiful.

Enchanting, in fact.

She takes a step forward. The Colonel puts a hand on her arm, pulling her back. It's right over the fresh bruise, and the sudden pain jars her to her senses.

Enchanting. Dangerous.

She looks away from the Furling's face.

"Hold your fire," the General says. "I'm General Hammond. Welcome to the SGC."

"We are welcomed," the Furling answers. "Danielle Jackson, you have solved our riddle. Now we will speak to your master and bring him gifts. And we will speak with those who have aided you here as well, once the pattern is completed. Perhaps we will also bring them gifts. Now come. We are prepared to return you to the place from which I removed you to play your part in this pattern." The Furling holds out its hand.

She shrugs out from under the Colonel's hand and takes a step forward.

"Wait." It's Daniel Jackson. "Just where is that, exactly?"

The Furling inclines its head. "You wish to play again. Very well. Danielle Jackson returns to Kelowna."

"You told me you hadn't been there yet," Colonel O'Neill says to her under his breath.

"I ... forgot." It's the truth, and it feels like a lie.

"Nice place?"

She blinks hard and turns away.

"Wait. You can't do that. If she's been gone a week, what happened there while she was gone?"

"Do you forbid me to take her?" the Furling asks.

"No!" She takes another step forward. Daniel Jackson lunges forward and drags her back. She tugs against him. His grip is surprisingly strong.

"Yes! Yes I do! You can't take her back to Kelowna!"

"Yes he can! Daniel, let go of me! I'm going to be--" She can't manage the lie.

"There's a bomb on Kelowna," Daniel Jackson says to her, his voice urgent. "If you aren't there to stop it, it's going to explode and take half the city with it--"

"Let me GO!" The Furling is waiting.

"Tell her, Jack!"

"She knows, Daniel." The Colonel's voice is quiet.

"She will be returned to the time and place from which she was taken. Only thus can the pattern can be completed satisfactorily."

"Send her back to her SGC instead!" Daniel demands.

"Danielle Jackson must accompany me to her place of origin to complete the pattern. If she does not, communication is impossible," the Furling says.

"But you can't take her back to Kelowna! I won't let you just kill her!" Daniel insists.

She's pulling at him now with all her strength. She's exhausted and her head is spinning. She breaks free for an instant, but Daniel drags her back against his chest, his arms pinning hers to her sides. She kicks back and misses.

She has to make him let her go.

"Stop it! Let me go! I won't die on Kelowna! I've already died there! I killed SG-1 on Kelowna because I wasn't good enough!"

His grip loosens enough for her to twist in his arms. She can get free in another moment. She has to.

Tears are running down her face now, fogging her glasses, but it's not enough to keep her from seeing the look of horror on her doppelganger's face, as if she's opened a door to his own private hell. Not good enough. Never good enough.

Behind the closed iris, there is the sudden glow as the Stargate re-engages.

"If you will not complete the pattern satisfactorily, I will not speak to you until you do."

She finally breaks his hold, but it's too late. The Furling has vanished back through the iris before she has taken more than a few steps.

He's kept her from going home. She turns back to him and shoves with all her strength. Not the most elegant move, but he isn't expecting it and he goes down hard. She's moving on instinct, reaching for the sidearm she isn't wearing -- when they go down you cover them, Jack always said that -- looking around to see where the weapons in the room are, and only belatedly does she register the sound of the weapons of the SFs in the Gate Room being racked.

They're being pointed at her. She backs away. They're all looking at her as if she's a stranger once again, and it's unbearable.

Colonel O'Neill raises his hand, just a little, and she stops. She stares at her boots, wishing she were anywhere but here. She wouldn't have shot Daniel Jackson. But why wouldn't he let her go?

"Take her back to her quarters," she hears General Hammond say. They hustle her out. Behind her she sees Major Carter bending over Daniel.

"Are you all right?" Sam says.

"Fine," Daniel says automatically.

Somebody hit him. No, his doppelganger hit him.

Sam helps him sit up. Jack hands him his glasses, looking as if he'd be amused if the situation weren't so serious. Daniel feels a faint distant sense of indignation. He saved her life and she hit him.

Apparently she wasn't very grateful.

"People," General Hammond says, after a moment's thought, "we have a problem. It looks as if we have two Dr. Jacksons. Permanently."

"The Furling wanted her," Jack points out.

"He was going to kill her!" Daniel protests indignantly.

"He was going to put her back where he got her from," Jack protests, but his heart isn't really in it.

"On Kelowna -- right before the explosion that killed me is about to go off. Or just after." He thinks for a moment. "It makes sense they'd remove her from somewhere she wouldn't be missed. If she and all of SG-1 were dead..." But why would the bomb go off? He'd defused the explosion. Wouldn't she? Hadn't she? Why is she so sure her SG-1 is dead?

"Theory doesn't solve our problem," General Hammond points out.

"She told me she'd never been to Kheb," Sam says. "So she wouldn't..." Sam makes a 'throwing confetti' gesture. It's hard for any of them to talk about Kelowna and what came after. Not because it was tragic, but because it's still unbelievable.

"Well, we can't just keep her locked up forever," General Hammond says.

Jack doesn't look like he agrees.

"If anyone has any bright ideas, I'll be in my office. Dismissed."

It's her assigned quarters, but it's different now. Now it's a prison cell. She's actually seen the inside of prison cells -- inside the SGC and elsewhere -- more often than she'd like to. It's getting to be a motif of her life.

She pulls off her jacket and the rest of her gear and goes into the bathroom. She's covered in dust, and her sinuses are starting to swell. She strips and turns on the shower taps. When she steps into the shower the water runs brown-grey for a moment with grit. She soaps herself quickly, trying desperately not to think, forcing her attention to the conjugation of verbs; a habit she has when trying to distract herself. When she's rinsed the shampoo from her hair she turns off the hot water and stands beneath the cold, letting it numb her until she can't stand it any more.

And she's sure she's managing, handling things, coping, until she comes out into the bedroom again to pull out a set of clean BDUs and sees her worknotes scattered all over the table and her books, no, Daniel's books stacked everywhere and he'll be wanting them back, because his life is resuming and hers is thoroughly over--

And all she can do to stop the pain is hit the nearest wall as hard as she can.

The pain jolts all the way up into her shoulder and makes her gasp in surprise. Stupid. At least it's a distraction. It makes dressing awkward, though. If she'd been going to be childish and theatrical, she should at least have waited until she'd gotten her boots back on. She can't manage to lace them one-handed, so she settles for stuffing the laces inside. At least now when they come to drag her back out of here again, she'll be dressed.

Her hand is swelling, and it hurts. She suspects she broke it. Hardly fair, but entirely typical. Thank god she doesn't have to explain this one to Jack.

She curls up on the bed, trying to make sense of disaster.

Her family is dead and she is marooned.

Her knuckles are puffy indents in her hand now. Definitely broken.

She's not going to see Jack again. Or Sammy, or Teal'c. They're all dead.

She's had the leisure to think about that now, and wishes she didn't. The memories of the last two days of her life are sharp, because they're recently returned. Coming home from PHX-1138. Going to Kelowna.

Her mind shies away from what happened next. Her fault. All her fault. If she'd shot Jonas Quinn first, it would have worked. Now, knowing what happened next, she thinks she could have done that.

She waits.

Two hours, maybe a little more, have passed since they returned from PHX-1138. SG-1 will have debriefed without her. What she knows hardly matters, now that they have what they wanted.

She hears a sound at the door and gets to her feet, bracing herself, as if she were a prisoner of her enemies. In truth, it's hard to impute any good motives to these doppelgangers just now.

Daniel Jackson walks in, carrying two lidded paper cups.

"I just wanted to talk," he says, setting the cups down on the table.

"I speak a number of languages. Converse away," she says, turning her back. She's ashamed of losing control so thoroughly, so publicly, but she can't manage to be sorry that she knocked him down.

"What's wrong with your hand?" he asks.

"I think it's broken," she says, surprising herself. She feels almost guilty for not breaking down completely, but she has her pride. Even if Jack is dead, she's not going to do anything -- else -- to make him ashamed of her.

"You should have told the guard," he says. But he doesn't really sound surprised that she hasn't. He doesn't ask how she broke it, either. That surprises her a little.

"Dr. Jackson -- whatever your name is -- in the past nine days I have been scanned, analyzed, sampled, and psychologically dissected. I don't want to see another doctor."

"It's going to need setting," he says, ignoring this. He's standing beside her now. He takes her hand carefully. It still hurts, and she feels an odd sense of unnaturalness when he touches her, although they fought in the Gate Room and he'd had his hands all over her then.

"Yeah, I'd say broken. Wait here." He goes to the door.

As if I'm going somewhere? she thinks caustically.

Dr. Brightman is there in a matter of minutes. She wants an X-ray, but it takes a call to General Hammond before Dani can be taken to the infirmary. Her doppelganger follows, as if prepared to offer moral support.

Thinking about him is like probing a sore tooth, so she does. She'd wondered what he'd be like in the flesh. The material in the files hadn't given her the truth, just an image of an odd distorted version of herself.

She'd thought he was soft. She'd misjudged him. Somehow. Even though he's her.

"What did you want to talk to me about?" she asks as they walk.

"It can wait," Daniel Jackson tells her.

"It's broken," Dr. Brightman confirms ten minutes later, when the X-rays come back. "Nothing serious, just a hairline fracture. I'm going to put it in a light cast. Try not to use it for the next week or so, all right?"

Dr. Brightman is brisk and efficient as she injects Dani's hand with Novocain in a dozen places prior to setting it, but she's not Janet Frasier. Dani misses Janet's presence, though Janet-here would only be someone else who didn't recognize her.

"Now just rest here for a few minutes while that takes effect, and I'll be back to wrap it up."

"They told me Janet's dead," she says, when the two of them are alone.

Daniel Jackson looks surprised for a moment, then makes the connection: everything in her universe is the same as in his – two years behind -- except for her.

"Yes. She died a few months after I got back from Vis Uban." He answers her blank look. "That was a year after Kelowna."

"We should never have gone there," she says.

Daniel lets this pass. "I'd wanted to ask you. Sam says you didn't go to Kheb--"

She nods. "She said you went there looking for the harceisis child. That never happened." It's an effort for her to keep her voice level.

"You did go to Abydos?" Daniel asks.

She knows him. He doesn't know her.

"Yes."

"That must have given Jack fits," Daniel suggests. He wants her to talk to him. Talking is better than hitting. Better than silence. If Jack hadn't wanted him going to Abydos, hadn't wanted Sam on the team (and he hadn't, not at first), then...

He remembers the first time he met Jack. Crazy, suicidal, and vicious would have been a reasonable description. Part of him enjoys the idea of having given Jack fits, even by proxy.

"Colonel O'Neill was completely professional," Danielle Jackson answers flatly.

Jack had been set to make her trip to Abydos hell. He'd threatened to kill her before they'd even gone through the Stargate. When he'd found out she'd brought Anubis with her it had been the next to last straw. But she couldn't leave her dog behind. There was nobody back at the facility to take care of him. And it had just been supposed to be there-and-back. Anubis went everywhere with her. Finding out she couldn't just turn around and send them right back had been the last straw.

They'd been setting up shelters out on the sand outside the Pyramid. Anubis had wandered off. Came running back toward her over the sand.

Mankiewicz had shot him.

The image has always been conflated in her mind with Sha're's death, the bodies exploding in blood.

Mankiewicz had laughed.

Jack had come running at the sound of gunfire.

Looked around.

Told her to bury her dog.

She remembers dumping her books out of the suitcase she'd brought, scooping fragments of flesh and bloody sand into it, down on her knees, determined not to miss anything, digging and scooping with her bare hands until the sand was clean again. She remembers the silence of the men behind her. She'd gone over the dune with the suitcase to dig a grave.

Was that when her relationship with Jack had begun? Or changed? Or was it later? When she'd taken a staff-blast meant for him?

Or when she'd sent him -- sent them all -- home to life?

She'd stayed to one of her own. To take care of the people he'd come to love. She'd come to love. There was nothing on Earth for her to go back to -- in the most literal sense. It had been enough. Or it had been until the day Jack the Lad had thrown that damned Kleenex box through the damned Gate.

Dr. Brightman and a nurse return to splint and bandage her hand. When they're done, only the tips of her fingers protrude from a cocoon of flesh-colored bandage. She gives Dani a pain pill. Dani slips it into her pocket when they aren't looking.

"Come on," Daniel says. She thinks he's taking her back to her quarters, but to her surprise he heads for the changing rooms.

"Look, why don't you come home with me for tonight? Nothing's going to happen until tomorrow, and this place always depresses me at night. And I've got a guest room."

"I know," she says. She refrains from pointing out that it's her damned guest room, and she leased the loft downtown herself. She hasn't seen it in the last week, of course. For a reflexive moment, strategies of escape and evasion play themselves out in her mind. Once she's out of The Mountain, she could run, get away. But there isn't any place to run to. And she's curious about her double. He's the only person whose face and voice don't give her painful feelings of almost-familiarity. And she doesn't want to think about the dead. "That sounds great."

She wonders if he can actually manage it.

He makes sure the locker room is empty, and then beckons her inside. He changes quickly while she tactfully gazes elsewhere. This is a high-security facility. They're all supposed to enter the base and leave it in civilian clothes. Especially, of course, when they're civilians.

"Colin's going to be off-world for the rest of the week. This won't fit, but it should help."

Collie Mendoza is the archeologist on SG-13. Dani's jacket is back in her quarters; the rest of her uniform will pass on the outside if nobody looks too close. Mendoza's jacket is black leather, and hangs halfway to her knees, but the length of the sleeves helps disguise the cast on her right hand.

She has no civilian clothes.

She follows him out. Daniel signs for both of them at the checkpoints. Her cast is her excuse. Their handwriting is similarly illegible.

It takes an effort to remember to get into the passenger side of the Jeep. They drive through three more checkpoints, and they're out.

He needs to know the whole story.

He needs to know if he's just killed SG-1 -- another SG-1, but still...

If she was sent back to the right point in time, she could stop the chain reaction, but she'd die. If there's no harceisis child in her universe, she can't be a candidate for Ascension, because she would never go -- or have gone -- to Kheb, never speak to Oma Desala.

But she said SG-1 was already dead...

"The bomb on your Langara -- Kelowna -- went off, didn't it?" he says. They've left the Base road now, but it's still another couple of miles to the highway.

For a long moment he doesn't think she'll answer. It's two years ago for him. It's still her 'now.' He thinks about how he'd feel if Jack, Sam, and Teal'c were all dead. They've thought he was dead, more than once. Oannes, Kelowna, Apophis's ha'tak. Lost him. Mourned him. They've all lost each other so many times, in so many ways. Not like this.

"I couldn't get to it in time," she finally says.

Were the two universes that different? He'd been standing right outside the lab with Jonas. "I don't understand."

"The Kelownan culture was roughly at the level of 1940s Earth. I read your mission reports. You know that. They had a hard time with the idea that Sammy and I weren't just there to go for coffee. I should have figured things out from that, but I didn't."

Sam -- Sammy? -- never mentioned that.

"I saw everybody start to panic. I knew if I could pull the core out I could stop the reaction. The door was locked. I shot out the viewing window."

So far it matches his memories of that day.

"Jonas... I guess he wanted to protect me. I don't know what he thought. He threw himself at me and knocked me down. We struggled. I'd almost gotten loose. We ran out of time."

The silence is painfully loud.

Because she's a woman, her Jonas Quinn tried to protect her from the explosion, costing her the chance to do what he had done: save the rest of the team and the Kelownans. It all has a horrible logic.

"And don't tell me they might have survived. The explosion would have -- will -- does -- take out the entire city. The Gate's probably gone too." Her voice is flat, expressionless.

All gone; the naquaadriah bomb the Kelownans had been building that day would have made anything even in Earth's current arsenal look like a wet firecracker. He has no reason to think the two bombs weren't identical.

In her world, nothing survived.

"So what are you going to do with me now that you've got me?" she asks. He can hear the faint tone of bitter accusation in her voice, though she tries to hide it.

"We, uh, haven't decided yet," Daniel says awkwardly.

"Do let me know."

She expects him to drive all the way into town, to the loft on Mainland Street, but instead he heads into the suburbs and stops in front of a nondescript suburban bungalow. That's right. There was a different home address on his file. She just hadn't paid attention.

"After I, um... died… they closed out my apartment. I bought this place after I came back."

It's odd to imagine a version of herself who can speak so casually about coming back from a death more final than any she's ever experienced.

"I know that sounds a little odd. I wasn't dead, exactly. I was Ascended--" He pulls into the driveway and parks.

"I read the mission files," she interrupts.

He blinks at her, apparently finding that as odd as she does his talk of being dead.

"You do know they're classified?" he asks.

"I know all the same access codes you do. I have the same SGC ID code." I am you. "I had full access while we were working out how to find you."

"And, ah, thanks for that, by the way."

She doesn't answer. Anything she might say would be a lie.

They go inside. Nothing she sees is familiar. Not the furniture. Her sword collection is missing. The artifacts she bought and collected over the years are gone. There are far too few books in sight. There's a large tank of tropical fish in the living room.

'Daniel has fish,' she remembers Major Carter saying.

She looks at Daniel, appalled.

He shrugs. "Well, I was dead. They got rid of my things."

All her possessions. Gone. Or even more gone, in some complicated metaphysical way. At home, she's dead, too. General Hammond will send someone to clean out her apartment. Sanitize it.

But her things were to go to Jack, to Sammy, to Teal'c. To Janet and Cassie. A few other people. Some things were to go to museums. Will go to museums.

"I guess I should offer you something to drink."

She remembers that she didn't get her coffee earlier. Beer would actually be better. She follows Daniel into the kitchen. He's preparing coffee. He takes a mug down from the cabinet, offers her a second one with an inquiring expression. She ignores him and opens the refrigerator as if this were her own home.

But there's no beer in the refrigerator. In fact, it doesn't look like hers at all -- it's filled with food and things that can obviously be turned into food.

Is Daniel Jackson living with someone? Someone who happens not to be here now, but has stopped by to fill his refrigerator with groceries?

"Where's the beer?" she asks, not turning around. He can't be doing his own cooking. She can't cook to save her life. Jack O'Neill is a better cook.

"Well, I don't, ah, actually..."

Romaine lettuce and no beer. Terrific. "Scotch?"

"Sorry."

She closes the refrigerator door and turns to regard him in pained disbelief.

"Here, try this." He holds out a bottle of wine. Apparently, in this universe, she keeps wine under the sink.

"Sure. Tell me, all this ... lettuce..."

He stops in the middle of opening the wine. "You don't cook," he says, sounding faintly disbelieving.

"No."

She finds a water glass and fills it with wine. It's awkward with the bandages, but she doesn't care. It's red wine. She isn't much of a connoisseur, of wine at least. She takes the pill out of her pocket and knocks it back with the first swallow.

"Wouldn't you like something to ...eat?" his voice trails off as she drinks half the glass as if it were grape juice. He's just staring at her now, with open and absolute curiosity.

The wine hits hard on top of emotional shock, barbiturates, and (at least) three days of no sleep.

"So. What do they ... call you?" she asks.

"Um... Daniel?" He doesn't actually sound sure. "You?"

Jack called me 'Indiana.' "Dani. Sometimes. Why didn't you go for the Doctorate in Anthropology?" Her tone is aggressive, bordering on contemptuous.

"What?" He's opened the refrigerator again, and is removing things. Eggs. Vegetables.

"Linguistics, Anthropology, Archaeology, History. I have four. You've only got two."

He regards her mildly, thinking it over for a moment.

"This may be the first time in my life I've been called 'stupid' for having a double PhD," he says mildly.

He speaks 24 languages. She speaks 32. That isn't counting the offworld ones, like Goa'uld or Abydan.

"Look. Dani. I'm ... sorry about what happened to your friends."

"No. You're not." The wine and the pill make her as bluntly truthful as an oracle. She crosses the kitchen to refill her glass.

"I'm not." The tone in his voice is not quite a question.

"Yours are still alive." It's awkward pouring with her left hand. She's very careful.

"I can't help that." His voice is very quiet. "Killing yourself wouldn't have changed things. You don't want to die."

She presses her broken hand against the counter, making it hurt. The hell of it is, he's right. She already knows that, and hates herself for it.

He takes the bottle out of her hand and sets it back on the counter, takes the half-full glass and sets it out of her reach. "Why don't you have something to eat before you finish that?" he suggests.

For some reason she thinks of Sammy. They'd clung to each other for support when Jack was lost on Edora, both refusing to believe he was dead -- or lost to them forever. Fighting to get him back. In a strange way, the memory comforts her now. She nods reluctantly.

"Did you go on the dig to Peru in '87?"

She knows all of his history. He knows none of hers. They don't match. Not quite. He's curious. Questions fill in the gaps.

"My grant wasn't approved." It was easier to collect useless degrees than to buck the glass ceiling, the expectation that women didn't go to dangerous places. Women didn't play Indiana Jones. Women stayed in the ivy-covered halls and catalogued the finds their male colleagues brought back.

He's made omelettes. He's a good cook.

"Valley of the Kings?"

"Which year?" The smile almost brings tears.

She'd loved Egypt with a passion. She'd grown up there. It was considered 'safe.' They always needed more hands on the digs, and people who could speak some of the fifty languages of Alexandria.

And drink the water.

He's fascinated by their differences, drawing her out. He's easy to talk to – he's her, isn't he? The wine insulates her, gives her the vague sense that none of this is happening at all.

"…the quarterstaff is the perfect close-combat weapon. You can make one anywhere if you have a little time. You can adapt its principles to a Jaffa staff weapon. It's simple."

He winces faintly. She shakes her head. She's not going to apologize, though she feels like doing so now.

"…so Catherine recruited you to decipher the coverstone?" he asks.

"I was teaching at Berkeley. Actually, I was a TA."

His pointed look says it all. A TA with four doctorates. Not even an untenured professor.

"At least I had a job," she says.

"It took me two weeks," he says. A truce offering.

"Yeah. Me, too."

"How did she find you?"

"I ... posted to a listserve." A bad idea, foolish, she'd been under review for it by the college when Catherine arrived. Conduct Unbecoming. She didn't know who'd outed her and passed copies of her posts up the line. (Later, she could have found out easily, but by then she didn't care.) She'd gotten so annoyed with the know-nothing yahoos on Archaeology-L that she'd just snapped. Told them how wrong they were, how ignorant. It had felt good at the time.

He smiles faintly. "Probably better than a public lecture."

They talk into the late -- early -- hours. By morning, she's resigned herself to living. Her people are dead. She can't help them now. Becoming sati will change nothing.

She'd always expected to die on one of their missions. She'd come close more times than she could count -- crossed the line, and come back. So had Jack, Sammy, Teal'c. There'd been times when General Hammond had given them up for dead -- individually and as a team -- and times when they'd nearly given up on each other. But not like this.

It's going to be hard, but that's nothing new.

Daniel has a spare toothbrush. And there's coffee before she leaves.

It's too much to hope for that Daniel can get her back onto the base as easily as he removed her last night. Colonel O'Neill is waiting for them when they get out of the first elevator.

"Daniel," he says meaningfully. "Glad to see you're still in one piece," he adds, a tacit acknowledgment of her presence.

They take the second elevator ride in silence.

"Daniel, I think Carter is holding your usual table," Jack says when the doors open.

"Okay, Jack, but I was just going to--"

"You don't want to keep her waiting."

She sees Daniel finally get the hint, consider arguing, change his mind, and retreat.

"I'll see you later," he says.

She wonders if he will, or if she's simply going to disappear sometime in the next few hours.

"So. Have a nice time at Daniel's?" The words are casual, but she knows that tone and that mood.

"We talked, Colonel. I wanted to get out of here for a while, that's all. I'm back now."

"Well that's good," O'Neill says without a trace of sincerity. "And I'm sure you won't mind being back in here."

She walks into her cage without looking back. She hears the door lock behind her. The things she left here last night are gone.

"It's really hard to imagine that we're really ... versions ... of the same person," Daniel is saying tentatively. "We're so different."

He's told her something about the 'alternate history' Danielle has related to him, mostly in bafflement. Danielle has told Daniel more and different things than she ever told Sam, but Daniel has always had that effect on people.

He's looking a combination of outraged and fascinated. It's cute, really. Sam supposes you'd take the differences more personally if it was your alter ego -- after all, Dr. Carter from the SGA had certainly bothered her at first -- but at least Dr. Carter had been another woman. She wonders how much it bothers Daniel to confront a female version of himself.

They are different.

Danielle Jackson's behaviors makes a lot more sense to Sam, another formidably bright woman who's had to deal with male preconceptions all her life.

"Maybe not really," Sam says. "Maybe you'd be just like that, if--"

If you'd been born female, and dealt with the 'glass ceiling' all your life -- and had people tell you over and over that you couldn't do things not because you weren't smart enough, or strong enough, or even because your theories were wrong, but because 'girls don't do things like that.'

She thinks of Danielle attacking Daniel in the Gate Room.

Not to mention that half the population is bigger and stronger than you are, and sometimes they take it really personally when you show them that you're smarter than they are...

Daniel is shaking his head doubtfully. "She shot Sha're," he says, which seems to settle some point in his mind. "And I don't think she likes Jack very much."

Sam nearly chokes on her coffee. "What gives you that idea?" she says weakly. It's perfectly clear to Sam how Danielle feels about Jack O'Neill -- at least, about her own Jack O'Neill -- and she is equally certain that in Danielle's home universe, Samantha Carter is neither a threat nor a rival in that regard. Either that, or Danielle Jackson is the greatest actress who ever lived.

And that is something Sam doubts very much.

"Well, she said their relationship was 'very professional' -- and you know what that means. Jack can be a real pain in the ass sometimes. And she can't even stand to be around him," Daniel says, as if these unrelated statements constitute conclusive proof of something.

"Well," Sam says diplomatically, "the people we are in her universe might all be very different."

But she doubts it.

O'Neill is in General Hammond's office. There are always problems to deal with at the SGC, but right now the problem they're discussing is five foot six and locked in a cell.

"We can't let her go," O'Neill says. He's sure of that. "And ... apparently ... we can't just send her back."

He also knows what General Hammond is going to suggest. It's logical. It's reasonable. It's going to be an unmitigated disaster, and he can't put his finger on just why.

"There have been a lot of times over the last eight years when I've wished that Dr. Jackson could be in two places at once," General Hammond says. "And we've offered asylum to your counterparts before. I'm waiting on authorization now, but I really don't think it won't come through. If she agrees, I'm going to offer her the chance to stay with the SGC. Unless you can think of a reason I shouldn't?"

Her behavior in the Gate Room doesn't count against her, and they both know it. General Hammond has seen every form of reaction from the survivors of Gate Teams in the first moments when they realize that they are just that: the surviving members. Laughter, tears, violent hysterics... It's what she does now that matters.

"Would you be sending her offworld, sir?" O'Neill asks neutrally.

"I don't expect her to join SG-1, if that's what you're asking, Colonel. But -- if she stays -- I don't see why she shouldn't be allowed to join one of the other SG Teams. It's hard to get qualified archaeologists for the program, as you know -- not to mention linguists of Dr. Jackson's caliber."

"We're going to have to call her something else." Buffy, maybe. Or Indiana Jane.

"We've provided identities for people before," General Hammond reminds him. O'Neill is stalling and they both know it. "Colonel?"

"I think it's a fine idea, sir." It bites, but General Hammond's right. And Daniel's still in one piece and the Xerox walked back in this morning, two points in her favor.

The phone rings. General Hammond picks it up, listens. There's a short conversation.

"That's the final authorization from the Pentagon, Colonel. Now it's up to us. And to her."

O'Neill sighs deeply. "Let's see what she says, General."

The General picks up the phone again. "Would you have someone escort Dr. Jackson -- the other Dr. Jackson -- to my office?"

She's been expecting this. A summons to the General's office. To be told ... what?

"Thank you for your help, and we'll be getting on with our lives now."

"We're transferring you to some place where they'll have to pipe sunlight in, and where nobody will ever find out about you."

Why the hell couldn't Daniel Jackson have left well enough alone?

Because she wouldn't have in his place. If he'd been an interloper in her world, she'd never have let him try to go off with a megalomaniac alien trickster to certain death.

But she had the odd certainty he wouldn't have made that choice. He'd actually resigned from the SGC once. And on Kelowna, he'd done what she couldn't -- saved SG-1 -- but he left again. He'd chosen Ascension (she's read about it) over the chance to live.

When Jack had gone undercover on that NID sting, he'd actually believed the cover story. She never had.

She follows the SFs to the General's office. No point in saying she knows the way. No point in protesting that she doesn't need armed escort.

But it's humiliating.

When she walks in, Colonel O'Neill is there, regarding her with a blank gaze just short of actual hostility. She wants to slap him. Hard. She turns away, focusing on the General.

All right. I'm not 'your' Dani Jackson. But I got him back for you, Colonel Jack O'Neill. Isn't that enough for you? Isn't anything ever going to be enough?

"Dr. Jackson. Sit down," General Hammond says.

She sits.

"Dr. Brightman tells me you seem to have hurt your hand."

She feels herself blushing, and hates it.

"I, um, I--" What is she supposed to say? That she punched out a wall because she wasn't allowed to commit suicide? "It's fine. Will be. I'm, um, sorry about, ah, my behavior in the Gate Room, and, um, Dr. Jackson. Yesterday. I was--"

"Under a great deal of stress, I understand. Dr. Jackson -- our Dr. Jackson--"

Behind her, she hears the Colonel snort faintly.

"--explained that you feel responsible for the events that led to the death of -- your -- SG-1 on Kelowna."

Daniel had saved them. Why couldn't she have? She isn't sure how to respond to General Hammond. Yes sir? No sir? Neither one seems quite right.

"Sir, with respect--" it's one of Jack's favorite phrases when he's about to be especially insolent. She hears it coming out of her mouth and flinches inwardly. "I ... you asked to see me, sir?"

"I was wondering what your plans were?"

Plans? Her mind careens wildly for a moment. They're going to let her off the Mountain? She supposes she could find a job somewhere -- her qualifications are good...

Reality brings her up with a jolt. She has no qualifications. In this universe, she doesn't even exist.

"I hadn't actually had time to make any, General."

She feels Colonel O'Neill hovering like the Angel of Death, and forces herself to concentrate on General Hammond. Why is the Colonel here? Does he think she's going to attack General Hammond next?

"I was wondering if you'd consider ... continuing with the SGC?" General Hammond says.

Yes! No. He can't be offering her a place on SG-1.

"My options are limited, considering that I don't exist."

"I'd rather be dead. I'm supposed to be dead. Or at least, I'd rather be in my General Hammond's office explaining to him why his Jack O'Neill isn't there."

She says neither of these things. The Pentagon must have authorized this, or else he wouldn't be making this offer.

"Dr. Jackson?"

"What sort of responsibilities would I have?" Play for time. Jack always said that. Play for time, and don't make any assumptions.

"Essentially what you've been used to." There's an awkward note in General Hammond's voice now. He's getting to the part he doesn't like -- or thinks she isn't going to like. "We'd try to find you a position on a Gate Team just as soon as one is available. And as soon as you're certified for offworld travel, of course."

"Of course." She's written half the certification protocols!

"It's just a formality."

"I understand, sir." Not SG-1. Some other SG Team. As if she were somebody else. She takes a deep breath. "Thank you, sir. I'd appreciate the chance to ... continue my work with the SGC."

"Good." General Hammond sounds satisfied. And relieved. "Colonel O'Neill will help you get settled in. Oh, and Dr. Jackson?"

She's getting to her feet. She freezes.

"Sir?"

"It would probably be best if you ... chose another name. For the paperwork."

She nods, unable to speak. It's unfair to think that they've taken everything else away from her and now they're taking away her name, but she can't help it. She is not going to break in front of Jack O'Neill.

She just isn't.

"So? Name?"

They're heading for the Documents section. She'll need a real pass and ID card, just to begin with. She supposes the SGC will provide the entire package -- birth certificate, Social Security Card, driver's license -- eventually. They've done it before. She has to hurry to keep up with the Colonel. That hasn't changed.

"Ballard." That's easy enough. She's even entitled to it.

"Just 'Ballard?' Because, you know, that's going to look a little funny, and Payroll always gets screwed up with these single names..."

Like Teal'c's. God, he's trying to drive her crazy. This is Jack O'Neill in an innocent playful mood -- except it's actually Jack O'Neill pissed off about something -- not that it's hard to guess what, right now -- and doing his patented white mutiny routine.

And it isn't the real Jack.

Sometimes she wonders how he made Colonel without getting fragged.

"Dan-- uh. Dana. Dana Ballard." Dana Scully, like the X-Files. Sammy and Janet had both been addicted to the show, and forced her to watch it more than once. Suitable, considering that her entire life has become an X-File. And she knows she'll answer to it, because on Abydos, they called her 'Dana're'. Flatter 'a' sound, accent on the last syllable, the female royal suffix, used by those who were not the actual head of the clan. She was entitled to it. And she's always hated 'Danielle.' It's girly.

On the first Abydos mission, Jack had called her 'Doc.' Later, he'd started calling her 'Indiana.' That had stuck, memorably.

She'd retaliated, of course. Called him Jack-the-Lad and Jacky Boy and Saucy Jacky. She wonders if there's anyone to do that here.

She wonders if Major Carter still has the nickname Sam-I-Am because of her ability – discovered on one memorable occasion – to recite the entire text of Green Eggs And Ham while falling-down drunk.

She wonders if anyone calls Teal'c 'Mr. T.' If anyone does, it won't be her. Because they aren't her friends any more.

They round a corner and nearly run into Daniel. Or the other way around, really. Does the man never look where he's going?

"Oh, uh, hi, Jack."

"Danny Boy, meet the newest member of the SGC -- Dana Ballard."

That's her, now.

Jack calls him 'Danny?' Him?

"Ballard?" Daniel sounds surprised.

"I'm entitled to the name." She's tired of being nice.

"Well, uh ... so you're staying? With the SGC, I mean? Our SGC?"

Somebody hand her a weapon. This time she is going to shoot him.

"Unless somebody wants to offer me a way home, Daniel, yes: I'm staying," she says with what she feels is more than adequate patience. Daniel casts a speaking look over her shoulder at Colonel O'Neill. She keeps herself from turning around to see his face.

"Well, then, congratulations. I guess." He juggles an armload of books and papers and holds out a hand. She takes it -- awkwardly -- with her left hand.

"Thank you, Dr. Jackson. It will be a pleasure working with you," she says with unconcealed irony.

It is really, truly, bizarre how much his alter-ego sounds like Jack. If you close your eyes. Just what they need here. Two Jack O'Neills.

Of course General Hammond would want her to stay. It's the best available solution. And she'll have her -- his -- their work. Maybe it would stop piling up so much if there were two of them.

But ... god. What kind of a universe is it where he can turn out to be like Jack O'Neill?

And ... Dana Ballard? That's just weird.

Documents and Records is a nightmare.

The computer won't take her fingerprints or retinal scan because they're already on file. Eventually, the Colonel just tells the sergeant to override the computer.

"Date of birth?"

"July 8, 19.." she's two years behind Daniel here. "..67."

"You don't look it," the Colonel says. "Make it 1972."

At least he lets her keep her birthday.

"Parents' names?"

Claire Ballard and Melburne Jackson. "John and Mary," she says blandly.

"Mother's maiden name?"

"Smith?" the Colonel suggests.

"Parradine," she says. Eventually he'll look it up, if he's anything like the real Jack.

The list of questions goes on, general personal information for the basic record. She doesn't bother to remember the answers she gives, knowing she'll see the file later. She'll have to memorize it then.

Photos are taken.

"Your ID will be ready in just a minute," the sergeant says. "Ah, Dr. Ballard, we don't seem to be able to find your Personnel File...?"

"Her paperwork was lost," the Colonel says easily. "She's going to have to fill it out all over again."

The sergeant retreats, and returns with a one-inch thick stack of forms. Schooling. Special Interests and Abilities. Why I Want To Join The SGC And See The Universe. Please attach copies of diplomas and certificates, vaccination records, all the paperwork she doesn't have. She has no idea what she's going to put down. They can't confirm any of it and none of the dates will match her new birthdate.

The sergeant goes off again in search of her ID.

"Why'd you jam the door?" the Colonel says when they're alone. It takes her a moment to track back to what he's referring to.

"I couldn't let you move him. It would violate their rules. It would be theft. They'd respond violently. The globe let me in when I touched it."

And she'd remembered Kelowna.

"General Hammond wants a full debrief when we're done here."

It's just the three of them in the General's office. It's one of the less-pleasant events of her SGC career, but she knows it's the price of staying. She explains everything: what she knew, and guessed, and when, and why she tried the idiotically dangerous stunt that nearly killed them all. Why the events come in this order -- the invitation to join and then the final debrief -- is something only Jack could explain to her. But Jack is dead and she's stuck with this evil ghost.

"When the globe threw me out the first time, I remembered being on Kelowna. The Furling took me from there when the naquaadriah core went into meltdown. I think I'd already taken a lethal dose; that would make sense, anyway. It erased any trace of that, obviously -- because you didn't find radiation when you examined me -- and suppressed everything I remembered after the time I'd been on PHX-1138, before it exchanged me for Daniel Jackson."

"And you think it did that in order to ... talk?" General Hammond says doubtfully.

She sighs. "In order to see if we were worth talking to yet is my guess. You might get something out of the Asgard; they once had an alliance with the Furlings. I only have theories. The Furling communicate with younger races by ... riddles."

"And if we'd brought the Furling device back to the SGC?" General Hammond asks.

"Would you really want to make people like that angry, General?" she asks. That's all she's sure of: that the results wouldn't have been ... nice.

"So you solved the riddle and get the door prize, and we don't," the Colonel says.

She closes her eyes for a moment. "I don't know."

"Some prices are too high to pay," General Hammond says firmly. "I'd like you to write up a report on all this as soon as you …can," he finishes, looking at her hand. "Dismissed."

Outside General Hammond's door, the Colonel hands her over to Walter. "See that Dr. Ballard has everything she needs."

She needs quite a lot, and by the end of the working day, she isn't finished collecting items yet.

She already has a few articles of clothing, but now she needs a complete set of uniforms. Not gear -- she isn't going offworld any time soon. Just BDUs for every occasion. Underwear. Socks. Toiletries. A passkey to her new office.

She leaves the clothes back in A3 Quarters -- she'll be living on Base for the foreseeable future, but fortunately, not in a prison cell -- and goes down to her new office. It's on 18, of course, in Geek Row. Daniel's office is just down the hall. It feels strange to pass that door, but it's no longer hers.

Dana Ballard's new office is utterly barren. There's a desk and a long table and bookshelves and lamps. A computer. A printer. A fax machine. A phone. Stacks of office supplies: pads of paper, boxes of pens, of paperclips, of rubber bands, of file folders.

It is as impersonal as a hotel room.

Walter leaves her a stack of requisition forms. "Anything else you need, just fill these out. We can have it to you within the day."

She nods, feeling the buzzing lightheadedness of utter exhaustion. All her books are gone. Her notes, her basic reference texts, gone. Her entire library.

She needs a laptop. A chalkboard.

She sits down behind the desk and turns on the computer. She can't type with the bandages on her hand, and it hurts to try. But she's stubborn enough to log in with her new ID and her new password, typing slowly and awkwardly, left-handed. The familiar screens come up; she clicks on her internal email account (she can use the mouse right handed and it only hurts a little) and sees much of the same familiar junk mail that she's used to.

There's an email from Daniel.

She recognizes the originating account, even though it's just the first four letters of the last name and a string of numbers. It's hers. Was hers. She deletes the email unread.

In the morning, in the Commissary, she sees the others sitting together at a table.

It's simply impossible for her not to see them, as if SG-1 were her secret crush. Today's just another working day for them. Their lives have gone on.

She takes her tray to a table as far away as she can get. She's barely picked up her fork before someone sits down opposite her.

"Hi. You're new here."

Everything about him screams 'Lab Rat.' He looks familiar -- she's seen him before -- and after a moment she places the name. Mike Feinberg. Not her department. Sammy's?

She isn't supposed to know him anyway.

"Yes. I just started. Dana Ballard."

They shake hands -- even more awkwardly than normal, since she offers him her left hand.

"Slammed it in a car door," she lies, waving the bandaged one.

"Mike Feinberg. You must be so proud to be here. I knew you were one of us the moment I saw you. Those military guys, they all stick together, but without us, the SGC would just be a big hole in the ground. What's your specialty?"

'One of us.' No. She's a member of a Gate Team. She's a member of SG-1.

"Archaeology and linguistics," she says. She's going to have to tell somebody sometime.

"Oh, like Dr. Jackson. I guess you're hoping to learn a lot from him."

"Dr. Jackson is the heart and soul of the Stargate Program, and a finer human being never lived and breathed," she says with fulsome venom. As she suspected, the ambiguity is lost on Feinberg. She gives up. "What's your specialty, Doctor? I assume it's 'Doctor?'"

For the next twenty minutes she listens to something bordering on the incomprehensible. He's either a physicist or an engineer. She can't tell which. He's paged to his lab, which interrupts his explanation. He pats her hand as he leaves, and she makes a mental note to avoid him.

She glances across the room. SG-1 is gone.

Her mornings used to be filled with briefings and prepping for offworld missions. This morning is spent trying to figure out how to hold a pen in her bandaged hand well enough to fill out requisition forms. It doesn't prosper. She gives up.

"Hey, are you the new linguist?"

It's Lieutenant Tucker from SG-19. They've been on missions together. She's not supposed to know him, either.

"Yes."

"Do you know any offworld languages?"

She gets up. Anything is a welcome distraction. "What have you got?"

"We aren't sure, and we were hoping you could take a look at it for us."

It's a set of golden tablets, inscribed in ornate and nearly undecipherable script. The amount of gold brought from offworld and archived here at the SGC would probably offset the National Debt. It's a common metal -- offworld -- and easily worked. The Goa'uld are fond of it.

SG-19 are gathered in Captain Cavendish's office. Cavendish is their archaeologist -- and barely competent at it in her opinion, at least if his doppelganger runs true -- and he's certainly no linguist.

"It's a Goa'uld artifact," she says, barely bothering to give it a glance. "It was probably installed in a temple, which means it could be a number of things: identification of the Goa'uld worshipped there; a prayer to be said, a curse upon specific enemies, and so on. It's written in an ancient Goa'uld dialect, which either means it's very old, or it belongs to one of the more ancient Goa'uld overlords. Do you want it translated?"

"Are you sure that's what it is?" Cavendish says dubiously.

"That it's Goa'uld, gold, was originally installed in a temple, and is written in an ancient dialect dating back to at least the time of Ra? Yes. Do I have any idea of what it says? No. Translation takes time."

The four members of SG-19 all look at each other. They aren't buying it, though it's the honest truth. She should probably have taken longer before identifying it, but she's seen dozens like it over the years. And she can't translate it, unless she burgles Daniel's office. She needs to see what worknotes of his she can download from the mainframe. They should match hers. They'll be better than nothing.

"Well, thanks anyway, Dr. Ballard," Cavendish says. "I guess we'll wait for Dr. Jackson to get back and take a look at it."

"Do that," she says.

She goes back to her office. She can't write, but she can use the mouse and the printer, and the computer has an Intranet connection and an Internet gateway. First she prints out Daniel's notes on archaic Goa'uld forms -- if she's going to have to reconstruct her workbooks, she'll start here. Then she goes on-line, cruising the internet bookstores for the other reference volumes she needs.

Eventually she checks her email. She's got an assignment. She'll be working in the Cataloguing and Translation Section. She starts tomorrow.

She winces. There's a huge backlog there, and if there's any place in the SGC that's a dead-end, it's C&T. Nothing urgent or important ends up there. She was always being threatened with it...

Back home.

There are other messages. She has an appointment with Dr. MacKenzie this afternoon. 'For evaluation.' There's also a memo from the Special Projects Department -- which is where they hide things like papertripping Cassandra -- telling her they're working on her documents, as well as on getting her an advance against her salary so that she can establish herself here in the outside world. Both the documents and the advance will take time.

She's not in a hurry.

She doesn't want to see MacKenzie, either, but once again, it's non-negotiable.

It's the Vernal Equinox. It's snowing. An airman drives her over to the hospital. She still hates this place. MacKenzie locked her up here after she came back from P3C-599 implanted with Ma'chello's Goa'uld-killing devices. They all thought she'd gone mad.

"Dr. Jackson. Sit down."

"It's Dr. Ballard now, I think."

"Still," MacKenzie says. "It must be a difficult adjustment for you to make. How are you doing?"

'Fine' is definitely the wrong answer. She knows this. "It's a little awkward. I'll manage."

"I want to help you, Dr. Jackson," MacKenzie says. "You've just lost your entire team. I know how close the members of SG-1 are."

SG-1 is still alive. She saw them at breakfast.

"It must be even harder, seeing them still alive, and not having them recognize you."

"I know I'm in an alternate universe, Dr. MacKenzie. The SG-1 I see here isn't my SG-1."

Apparently that isn't the answer he wants. "How do you feel about Daniel Jackson?"

"Daniel? My... double?" It's the most neutral word she can think of, and it takes her a moment of searching to come up with it.

"When you realized you were trapped here, you attacked him." He nods at her bandaged hand.

He thinks she broke her hand in the Gate Room, she realizes. She's about to correct him, but decides that probably sounds better than the truth.

"I'd just recovered my memories of Kelowna. I was in shock. I'm... You know, I'm really sorry it happened, but I don't..."

"You wanted to die, didn't you?" he says, when it becomes obvious she isn't going to say anything else.

She stares at the floor. "I wasn't really thinking clearly. There wouldn't be a lot of point to that, would there? Dying? It's not going to change anything."

"Tell me about Jack O'Neill."

That question catches her completely by surprise. She stares at MacKenzie wildly.

"Colonel O'Neill? Why?" She shakes her head.

"He was in command of SG-1."

"He is in command of SG-1," she says, confused and wary.

"No. I want to hear about your Colonel O'Neill."

Jack. She isn't going to talk to this stranger about Jack.

"They... They're the same person, Dr. MacKenzie. You've got his file. You do his psych evaluations."

"I'd like to know about your relationship with him. With your Colonel O'Neill."

"It's probably just about the same as this one has with Daniel Jackson, Dr. MacKenzie," she says, keeping her voice carefully neutral.

"But I'm sure there have to have been differences. You're a woman. Don't you think Colonel O'Neill would treat you differently?"

"'Differently'?" She thinks of Jonas Quinn on Kelowna. "No. He would never do that."

"Do what, Dr. Jackson?"

She has to give him something. He'll never leave her alone if she doesn't. "He would not make an issue of my gender. I was the archaeological and linguistic specialist for SG-1. That was all I was to him. He treated me no differently than he treated Sammy or Teal'c."

"So you would say your relationship wasn't close?"

He's laying a trap for her. "Dr. MacKenzie, you've just told me you knew how close the members of SG-1... are." Were. Because her SG-1 is dead.

"So you'd say that you were close to Colonel O'Neill?" MacKenzie probes.

She's had enough. "Doctor, do you want me to tell you I was laying him in rows? Or him and Teal'c? Or maybe him, Teal'c, and Sammy? Believe me, we heard every variation on that and some you probably can't even imagine. We were close. We were a field team." Her hands are shaking. She wraps her arms around herself and rests her chin on her chest.

"Dr. Jackson, I don't want to upset you. I just want to help you," MacKenzie says.

She grits her teeth. "You want to know if I'm going to go crazy." Again.

"You're under a lot of stress."

Stress? You haven't seen stress. "I just need time to adjust."

"Everyone understands that. I know this is difficult for you, especially being asked to give up your own identity. But it's my job to determine your fitness to continue with the Stargate Program."

"Sure," she says, not moving.

"I'd like to take a complete personal history. It will be completely confidential."

Of course it will. Only half-a-dozen people will see it, probably including the Colonel. Oh, and any NID agents who happen to steal the file.

"I understand there are several points at which your personal history diverges from that of Dr. Daniel Jackson's."

"Yes. I think so." She knows it for a fact.

"We can start next time. I'm afraid you'll be seeing quite a lot of me over the next few weeks. And there are some basic tests I'd like to run."

"Oh, hey, haven't had those in a while," she mutters.

"I really do want to help you," he insists again, getting to his feet. "But I can't do it without your cooperation."

She rises as well, feeling as if she's escaping, knowing she isn't. "Of course I'll cooperate," she says. I'm sure this will be a fascinating case study for you, Dr. MacKenzie.

There aren't any swear-words in Goa'uld. But you can put together some fairly scurrilous phrases if you know the language well. She's doing her best, muttering under her breath as she searches the Internet for more books she'll need.

"Hey, you'd better be careful. Someone might understand you."

"Nobody on Earth can--" she begins automatically. She looks up. Daniel is standing in the doorway. He has a bundle of books and papers under his arm. He gives her a half-salute and a small smile.

Nobody on Earth but him. Okay, and Teal'c. It's actually impossible to hate Daniel. She wonders if this is some perverse form of narcissism on her part.

"Ah... what was that last one?" he asks.

‹"S/he who is badly-spawned/insane enough to choose as host/be forced into a diseased Tau'ri corpse, "› she repeats out loud. The Goa'uld syllables are short and barking.

Daniel blinks, obviously storing this up for future use. "Um. I just came by to tell you I told Cavendish that you were right about those tablets. They didn't find them in place, so SG-19 is going to need a translation to figure out which Goa'uld's temple was looted. I brought you my notes." He walks into her office, glancing around. "You're going to need a lot of ... things."

"Starting with every book you have," she says with a despairing sigh.

He sets the pile he's carrying down on her desk. She recognizes her field journals -- his field journals -- and the golden tablets. She sets the tablets aside and picks up the first journal. It's awkward. She thinks -- not for the first time -- that hitting that wall wasn't one of her brighter ideas.

Daniel sits down on the edge of her desk.

"So. You saw MacKenzie today?"

She nods, staring at the book. She's going to have to copy all of this out as soon as she can use her hand.

"Was it fun?"

She looks up. Daniel is regarding her quizzically. It's a joke, she realizes. Sort of. A black one.

"We made a deal. I tell him all about my life, and he doesn't lock me up in a padded cell."

"Yeah, sounds like fun," Daniel agrees with himself, grimacing. "Look, I'm--"

"I really ought to get started on this," she says quickly. "Thanks for the reference."

He takes the hint, getting up and heading for the door. She turns back to the journal.

She works late into the night on the tablets -- as she'd suspected, they're a dedication-piece but without the rest of her library she's having trouble isolating the name of the Goa'uld involved -- and reports to Cataloguing and Translation in the morning. Instead of putting her to work, they waste four hours of her time with an orientation lecture she doesn't need. But she can't tell them she was one of the people who set this place up five years ago.

They'd say she was crazy.

She grabs a sandwich in the Commissary and takes it back to her office. She can get in at least another forty minutes on the tablets before she has to report back to C&T for the exciting afternoon tour of the holdings. Maybe tomorrow they'll let her get some work done.

When she gets there, she stops in the doorway, staring. Her worktable is stacked with boxes. There's a blackboard in the corner.

She hasn't ordered anything yet.

She opens the first box, then the next, then the next.

Books.

Halliwell-Phillips. A concise Latin Dictionary (four volumes). A Greek lexicon. Mackey. Cirlot on symbols. Budge (that has to be a joke.) An enormous copy of The Book of Coming Forth By Day. The unabridged Frazier. The complete OED. Her books. Her library. Not the rare ones, the out of print ones, but the ones that can be quickly found. If you have the resources of the U.S. Air Force. And know exactly what you're looking for.

Daniel has done this. She picks up The Book of Coming Forth By Day and goes back to her desk. She's an hour late getting back to Cataloging and Translation. They have to call her office to find her.

"I need--" she says. Daniel points silently at the shelf, staring intently into his computer. She finds the book she needs. It's one of the rare ones. They haven't been able to locate her a copy yet.

She's been here two weeks now. She's still living on-base. The sessions with MacKenzie haven't gotten easier. The man seems to be obsessed with how her life differs from Daniel's. At least she's managed to get him off the subject of grief counseling.

She glances over Daniel's shoulder at his monitor. She recognizes the writing.

"Furling," she says. For a moment, her own translation project -- it has something to do, she thinks, with ancient Chaldean, hence her visit to Daniel's office -- is forgotten.

"When we checked, apparently the Stargate had ended up back at its original location, so General Hammond sent SG-13 back to PHX-1138 to try to excavate that underground complex," Daniel says absently. "They were only able to retrieve a couple of pieces from near the surface, though."

She turns and flees.

Three weeks. Her first paycheck will be coming through today, along with her 'loan'. Her documents package came through a few days ago. She exists.

This weekend she's going to sign out a car from the motor pool and drive into Colorado Springs. She needs civilian clothes. She should look for an apartment.

She's reluctant. She knows it's because it feels like an admission that she's here, really here, forever. But she has to do it, because hey, it's another signpost on the road to mental health, right?

MacKenzie will be so thrilled.

Her office has taken on a messy lived-in look by now. It's filled with books, stacks of papers, projects she's working on. Her mornings are still spent down in C&T but she handles the priority jobs here and there are always plenty of those.

I am Dr. Dana Ballard and I have no life. Every morning for the last three weeks she's repeated that mantra to herself. It almost helps.

"Hey." Daniel is in the doorway. He's geared up for a mission.

It's odd. Of all of the doppelgangers, she supposes her own double should bother her most of all, but he doesn't. There are no memories attached to him, simply the odd and interesting sense of seeing a Might Have Been. She's careful to avoid the others -- and has so far been successful in that -- but Daniel...

Well, she couldn't avoid him if she tried, so it's just as well.

"You can't want to borrow a book."

He smiles at that. "No. But we're going offworld, and it might be a while, so I thought you'd like to have this while I'm gone. It's a copy. General Hammond okayed it."

He walks over and puts it on her desk. A plastic card. It's a key to his office. She ducks her head, not certain of what to say. Him giving her the key is an oddly intimate gesture.

"Thanks." She doesn't ask where he's going. Dr. Ballard isn't cleared for that information. "Be careful." She doesn't know why she says it. He'll be as careful as she would.

There's a brief awkward pause.

"I'm probably late," Daniel says.

She makes shooing motions. Of course he's late. There's always one last thing to pack. She was always the last one to get to the Gate Room.

Friday night she goes to the mall. It's the first week of April, and Colorado Springs is in the middle of a late-season storm. It doesn't affect the number of end-of-week shoppers. She's shopped here before -- it's the nearest one to the Mountain, and she's often stopped here on her way home -- but now it feels as if she's just Gated to an alien planet.

Her boots and fatigues don't raise any eyebrows -- she could be anything from actual military to a slumming student -- but she'll feel better once she's in mufti. She heads for Sears.

Tan khakis. Sweaters. Sneakers. Gloves. Hat. A stadium coat, guaranteed to keep her warm to twenty below. Things she can buy quickly without worrying about trying them on. She pays for her purchases -- Special Documents has set her up with everything she needs -- and changes in the mall restroom, bundling her other clothes into the shopping bags. She feels better and worse once she's dressed as a civilian. As if she's irrevocably severed some tie.

She wanders around the mall until closing time, feeling as if she's looking for something, though what it is, she isn't sure. Instead of driving back to the Mountain that night, she rents a hotel room. A Best Western. It occurs to her she should have bought luggage to put her shopping bags into, but by the time she's at the front desk, it's too late. They let her check in anyway. She drinks in the hotel bar until closing.

The next day, she rents the first apartment she sees.

She'd gone back to Mainland Street, intending to rent her old apartment. There are vacancies in the building, but she realizes she can't bear to live there. Too many memories. Too much temptation to believe she might be home. She drives around until she sees another apartment building. New. Units for rent. She parks.

The building manager shows her a vacancy. It smells of fresh paint. One bedroom efficiency, the woman calls it.

"Fine. I'll take it."

"Don't you want to know how much the rent is?"

"I don't care."

The nearest Ikea is in Centennial, about an hour away. They have everything there from furniture to linens to dishes. Her old loft had been filled with artifacts from digs all over the world. With books. With her family's furniture. It had all gone to Nick when they'd died, and he'd kept it for her.

All gone now.

She goes straight through the departments, buying only the basics. For an extra charge, they'll deliver and assemble the furniture. It can be delivered next week; a workday, but she won't have to be there for that. She can ask General Hammond to have an airman wait for the delivery. That's one of the perks. Shopping takes her less than two hours. The apartment isn't going to be where she lives, after all. She lives at the SGC.

In a hollow hill, never seeing the light of day, lives a race of beings like, and yet unlike, humanity, a race whose daily concerns are a world away from those of mortalkind…

The rest of her purchases -- dishes, towels, linens, lamps -- she loads into her car. By the time she drives back to the apartment and carries it up the stairs, she's running on nothing more than nervous energy.

She's forgotten to buy curtains.

She needs groceries.

She needs more clothes.

Saturday night she sleeps on the floor of her new apartment, making a bed from her newly-bought blankets and pillows. The apartment comes with all utilities, so there's light when she wants it and heat, which she needs. April is cold. She hates the cold.

She dreams she's bivouacking offworld.

The grey light of dawn, coming through the uncurtained windows, half-rouses her. She rolls over to touch the body sleeping next to her. It's usually Jack, unless he's on watch.

Her hand comes down flat against carpet.

Jack is dead.

Her throat closes on a sob. There are no cameras here. No one will see if she cries for her dead.

Dead because she couldn't do what Daniel did.

MacKenzie is circling around this central fact like a shark. Trying to drag the admission out of her. She can't see how saying it aloud will help anyone, including her. She rubs her eyes angrily and gets up to make coffee -- she made sure last night that she had the necessities; Scotch, peanut butter, and coffee -- and checks her watch. It's around six. Much too early to hit the stores. She showers, dresses, puts more things away. Eventually she can leave the apartment.

She spends the rest of the weekend shopping to fill out a life she doesn't want.

There are six people at the conference table. General Hammond, SG-1, Dr. MacKenzie. Of all of them, only Daniel looks uncomfortable.

"I can't complain about her work here," General Hammond says. "But I need to know. Do I consider putting Dr. Ballard into one of the offworld teams or not?"

"On the surface, she's making a good adjustment to her unusual situation," Dr. MacKenzie says. "There's a lot of guilt there, of course. And more than a little hostility."

"Hostility?" General Hammond says, surprised. "Toward whom?"

"Mostly toward me," MacKenzie says. "She seems to think I'm prying into her personal life."

"Well, aren't you?" Daniel asks, sounding cross.

"It's my job, Dr. Jackson."

"Yeah, well, is she going to snap or not?" Colonel O'Neill asks.

"She isn't, Jack."

"Daniel--"

"She blames herself for the death of her SG-1. That's clear and obvious. It's complicated by the fact that she knows that in an identical situation, her counterpart was able to save his SG-1," MacKenzie says. There's a faint note of triumph in his voice, as if this is a valuable contribution to the sum of human knowledge.

"It was a different situation," Daniel says angrily.

"Was it?" MacKenzie asks blandly.

"Yes! Yes, it was! She knew at the time that the Kelownans had a strong gender-bias. We've talked about it. She accepts that."

"Then maybe you should be doing my job, Dr. Jackson."

Daniel sits back with a stifled snarl of frustration. "You couldn't do mine," he mutters.

"I still need a recommendation, people," General Hammond says.

"She will not fail any task you entrust her with, General Hammond." Surprisingly, it is Teal'c who speaks first.

"Colonel? Major?"

O'Neill waves at Carter, indicating she should go first.

"I haven't seen much of her since we got back from PHX-1138 the last time, sir. But if it was Daniel ... I'd say 'go', sir."

"She'll have to requalify first," O'Neill says. "If she gets through that..." he shrugs. "I guess Teal'c's word is good enough for me."

MacKenzie shakes his head, indicating he thinks they've lost their collective minds. "I can't absolutely disqualify her. But I recommend against it. General, you'll have my full written report on your desk by tomorrow."

The General nods. MacKenzie gathers his papers and leaves.

"Is this a mistake?" General Hammond asks, after the psychiatrist is gone.

"Qualifying just puts her in the pool," O'Neill reminds all of them.

There's a long waiting list for Team assignments.

Two months, now. Only a few people on the base outside of General Hammond and SG-1 know that she's The Other Daniel, though she suspects that people wonder about their close resemblance. She has a cover story, and she's stuck to it. In a top-secret facility, people don't ask too many personal questions.

Any day is a good day when she doesn't see them or hear of what SG-1 is doing. When she can bury herself in work to the point she doesn't know what time it is. When she can forget that she's been...

Abandoned?

Marooned.

...in a world full of strangers wearing the faces of friends.

One morning there's a priority message in her email. Report for Special Group Orientation and Training at 13:00.

She's getting a team assignment?

No.

She might, though. SGO&T is the first step. Combat preparation, mock offworld scenarios, oh, and don't forget the endless lectures. It's a four-week intensive course, at the end of which -- assuming she passes -- she can join the pool of qualified candidates waiting for places on teams.

She already knows all this stuff.

Is this somebody's idea of a joke?

Yes, and she knows who, too. Colonel Damn-His-Eyes O'Neill. Probably wants to see if she'll go yelling to General Hammond, demanding special privileges.

She's damned if she will.

There are twenty people in the room. A third of them won't make it through the next four weeks, though there's nothing physically difficult involved. Just to get this far, they've won medals, passed tests, been screened half-a-dozen ways. Whatever the outcome, they'll never be able to tell anyone on Earth of what they learn here.

She's the only civilian in the room, the only woman, and the only one guaranteed of a position at the SGC whether she passes or fails, because she already has one. They're always desperate for scientists, and she's more likely to find a slot on a team than the regular military, but there are more grunts than geeks on the teams, so those are the places they usually need to fill. It's the luck of the draw.

Half the men here, brush-cuts and all, probably have at least a Master's in something useful. The SGC doesn't recruit morons.

She does get some special treatment after all. In the second week, while the brush-cuts are getting extra hours on Alien Races and Technology, she gets Guns for Geeks and Basic Self-Defense, neither of which she needs. They're the courses designed to bring the civilian specialists up to speed.

She walks into the room she's been sent to. It's just her and a Master Sergeant who looks as if his stomach has hurt since before they learned how to activate the Stargate. His name tape says 'Harrison.' On the table are a number of weapons, both Earthly and alien.

"Good morning, Dr. Ballard. My name is Master Sergeant Harrison. I'm going to teach you about the basic weaponry the Gate Teams use, and what you'll probably encounter on the other side."

She walks over to the table. "M16. It fires a fifty-shot clip single-shot, semi-automatic, and full-automatic. It's no longer used by the Teams, but was used on the first Abydos mission. I know how to fire it. The P90 is the weapon the SG Teams currently carry. Its settings are single shot and full automatic, though it can also fire short bursts on the Automatic setting. It takes a 100-round clip. Civilians are not allowed to carry the P90 in the field. This is the Colt 1911, which is a .45 automatic. It takes a ten-shot clip. It was used on the first Abydos mission, and I believe is still carried by SG Teams 3 and 5. I've fired one. The handgun next to it is a Beretta 9mm pistol. Thirteen-shot clip, current official issue side-arm of the SGC. I'm qualified with that weapon, but I'm not that good. The zat'nik'atel is of Goa'uld manufacture, used by the Jaffa and often used by the Tok'ra as well. One shot stuns, two shots kills, three shots disintegrates. I'm familiar with the zat. Next to that is a Goa'uld ribbon weapon. Nobody without naquaadah in their blood can use one. On the end is a Jaffa staff weapon. It's powered by liquid naquaadah. I'm expert with that."

Harrison doesn't say anything for a moment. Then he walks over to the table and picks up the zat and the Beretta. He snaps his fingers. The airman standing by the door begins gathering up the other weapons, packing them back into a storage box.

"Let's go up to the range, Doctor."

On the range, they go into a shooting booth. There are two sets of ear protectors and shooting goggles waiting. They put them on -- it takes her a few moments to work the goggles into place over her glasses -- and she proves to Sgt. Harrison's satisfaction that she can fire a Beretta and hit a paper target at a distance which qualifies her to carry the weapon in the field. Barely. She shrugs.

"I didn't say I was good," she repeats, hanging the earphones around her neck. He's had her fire several clips worth of ammo -- at least partly to see her change clips and reload, she realizes.

He hands her the zat. She thumbs it open automatically and fires down the range. A moment later the shredded target coruscates in blue fire.

Sergeant Harrison is regarding her with an odd expression.

"Excuse me, Doctor Ballard, but why are you here?" In Guns for Geeks, he means, not the SGC.

"Because somebody hates me, Master Sergeant."

The airman has brought the rest of the weapons from the lecture room -- with the exception of the staff weapon -- up to the range. She loads and fires each of them in turn: the Colt, the M16, and the P90. On Full Auto, the P90 shreds the sandbags at the end of the range. The destruction gives her a sense of satisfaction.

The demonstration buys her half a day of freedom, which she glories in as if she were being forced to take these courses.

The next morning she reports to her assigned section of the gymnasium for Basic Self Defense.

Teal'c is waiting for her. There's no one else here. He's wearing workout clothes, and holding a set of wooden training staffs.

"I have been told you are expert with the Jaffa staff weapon, Danielle Jackson. I will examine you now to see if this is true."

No possible slip of the tongue goes unpunished. She bows, and reaches for one of the staffs.

"You will require protection," he tells her.

She sighs, and goes to put on the head and chest pads. It takes her a while to find the right sizes.

She comes back, takes the staff. Hefts it. Finds the balance point. They face each other. He's larger, stronger, faster. But he's the one who taught her how to use the weapon. She bows again. Teal'c bows in return. There's no need for talk.

Circling. Feinting. Clash and disengage. She tries for a disarm and fails, but manages to keep her staff; a victory. She retreats. She's lost the element of surprise now, and it will be over quickly.

He blocks her head-blow, but her attack was a feint, a set-up for her strike at the vulnerable symbiote-pouch. She reverses the staff and drives it forward, but Teal'c brings his own staff beneath hers and up, striking the staff from her hands and then spinning his weapon to take her high on the side of the head. She goes sprawling. He's done her the courtesy of fighting all-out. Without the padded headpiece, she would have been knocked unconscious. Even with the protection, she sees stars.

Teal'c helps her to her feet. She shakes her head, still slightly dazed, and spits out the bite protector.

"Against another of your own kind, I believe you would prevail," he says, handing her the wooden staff again.

"I was taught by a great warrior," she says.

Teal'c raises an eyebrow. She hardly needs to draw him a map, now, does she? She goes over to a bench and sits down. The dizziness will pass in another moment or two, but she suspects there will be bruises in the morning. She pulls off the headpiece and picks up her glasses. The world comes into sharper focus. She starts removing the chest protector. The Velcro tabs come free with tiny ripping sounds.

"Daniel Jackson does not possess these skills," Teal'c remarks, as if this might be news to her.

"Daniel Jackson isn't ... short." Short. And effeminate. No. Female. Herr Doktor Daniel Jackson didn't have to fight off debauched warlords, degenerate alien princes, crazy bounty hunters, and all the rest of the attentive K-Mart shoppers they'd run into every time they'd gone through the Gate. Sammy had always attracted the polite advanced type of aliens, like the Tok'ra and the Tollen, who'd admired her for her mind, but if there'd been a sex-crazed power-mad barbarian within a hundred thousand light-years...

She wrenches her mind out of the past.

"Daniel Jackson is indeed taller than you are, Danielle Jackson," Teal'c agrees. "Both of you are within the acceptable range of height variation for your respective sexes among the Tau'ri."

She glances up at him. His face is completely expressionless, but she's knows this is some form of subtle Jaffa humor.

"So, do we arm-wrestle now?" she asks.

"We do not. There are others awaiting your presence."

"We just assume I can fire this thing and hit what I aim at?"

"We do, Danielle Jackson."

Too bad.

Introduction To Unarmed Combat is a separate track from the SGO&T courses, and it runs constantly. She takes time to shower and change into a fresh set of workout clothes before joining it. She's missed the first day and -- by now -- a half of this session, anyway. Which should just be the orientation lecture and the start of the hands-on work.

The course is being held in another one of the workout rooms. The floor is covered with padding. One wall is covered with charts showing strike zones. The room holds a dozen nervous lab-rats in various states of physical fitness and three instructors, their expressions ranging from bored to actively malicious. Two men and a woman. She recognizes one of the men from The Other Side. Colonel Nathan Stewart. They borrowed him from the SAS. He's rumored to be able to kill with a paperclip.

As she comes in, the female instructor is helping one of the lab-rats -- Feinberg -- to his feet. Feinberg wants to go offworld? Good luck.

"Glad to see you finally decided to join us, Miss..." Colonel Stewart consults his clipboard. "Dr. Ballard."

"I don't think I'm supposed to be here," she says, walking into the room. "I have an Intermediate rating in Unarmed Combat."

"Now where would you have learned something like that?" Colonel Stewart asks. 'Where would you have learned something like that?'

In five years with SG-1.

"I'm afraid that's classified, Colonel," she says. She's gotten very tired of that phrase in the last two months, but she can't tell the truth.

"Well, you're surely not going to expect me to take your word for it?"

Born near London. Schooled at Eton and Oxford. Has a number of languages, including Arabic. The voice never lies.

‹"Thy servant stands ready to assist thee in thy quest for illumination,"› she answers in Arabic, placing her hands together and bowing slightly. She sees the skin tighten around his eyes, and knows she's just gotten herself into more trouble.

"Why don't you come up here? If you want to test out of Introductory, I'm sure we can arrange something."

She walks up to the front of the class and turns to face the woman.

"Oh, no," Colonel Stewart says. "If you're that good, Dr. Ballard, I'm sure you deserve the best." He sets the clipboard on the table.

"Now, class, Dr. Ballard is going to demonstrate the techniques you will master in the Intermediate course, assuming, of course, you test out of this unit and the next. But perhaps she would like to remove her glasses first?"

Dani takes off her glasses and sets them on the table. There are demonstration items on it -- a rock, a knife, a gun, a baseball bat. She files the information away in hopes she can use it.

Colonel Stewart motions to the other to instructors to clear them a space. A large space. She suspects he intends to beat the living hell out of her. Everything short of broken bones. There's no doubt going in who's going to win this fight -- assuming it's to be a fight with a winner and a loser.

They start with falls, breakaways, and disengages. Simple and correct, and in three minutes they've covered everything in the Introductory course. They move on to Basic.

And out of it in about thirty seconds as his counters become more brutal. She tries for a throw, but he blocks her, and she barely escapes a badly-sprained ankle as he wrenches her foot up high and twists. The move dumps her on her back -- hard -- and she rolls backward onto her shoulders, jerking her foot out of his grasp, scrambling onto her feet and out of the way as he lands just where she was. She's already gone three rounds with Teal'c today and she's tiring. He'll have his hands on her in a minute and it won't be pretty. She ducks under the table and grabs the gun. It's rubber, but she points it at him anyway.

"Game over," she says, gasping for air.

He gets to his feet. Chasing her around the table now would make him look ridiculous, and they both know it.

"The course is Unarmed Combat, Dr. Ballard," he says.

"The course is staying alive," she says. She doesn't lower the dummy gun.

"Put the bloody toy down, duckie, if you would be so kind. Ladies and gentlemen, please note that Dr. Ballard assessed her terrain and available assets and took advantage of both. These are skills that will keep all of you alive in an actual live-fire situation, should any of you progress to the point where you encounter one."

He writes a pass for her into an Intermediate course, where she spends the rest of the day -- and the week -- collecting a spectacular set of bruises and polishing her skills before rejoining the brush-cuts.

"You get to be the ringer," Daniel says, coming into her office and closing the door.

The final exam for SGO&T is coming up. The last week has been devoted to real-time training scenarios. She's been excused from the scenarios and given essay questions -- of stupefying inanity -- instead, though nobody among the class knows it. Each team's been told she's off training with another one, and they haven't been encouraged to compare notes.

Her involvement would skew the results too far. They've made at least that much of a concession to who she really is.

"You pulling another Jennifer Hailey?"

Daniel nods, looking pleased.

"Who will I be with?"

"York, Pike, Chambers, and Bukowski. The best of the best."

Men In Black was always one of their favorite movies...

Back home.

"Pike is crazy, and York can't make up his mind between chocolate and vanilla if you give him half an hour," she says.

Daniel waves this aside. It's not entirely true, anyway; she's just feeling grumpy. "This is going to be ... great."

"So ... another 'Foothold' situation?"

His enthusiasm is infectious. He probably came up with the scenario. She'd always worked on them.

"Better. A sleeper cell inside the SGC composed of rogue NID agents has taken over the base and Gated most of the SGC personnel to an offplanet site where a sun is about to go nova and then dialed the Gate into a planetary anomaly that overcomes the 38-minute limit so no one can dial back in to escape. Your team has to figure out what's going on, overcome the NID agents in the Base, search the armory and find an explosive device to send through the wormhole to disrupt it, discover where the SGC personnel have been sent, and open the Gate again so they can all come home before the sun goes nova."

She thinks about it for a moment.

"You're all going to die. Unless you plan to be a sleeper agent?"

"This time I'm going to be on Chulak with the observation team," Daniel says smugly. "And that's why we need somebody in on this who knows how the dialing computers really work. A couple of the SG Teams will have escaped the initial NID sweep, too. Come on. I'll show you the bomb."

He takes her down to the armory. It's a very realistic-looking bomb.

"You send it through to Chulak," Daniel says. "When we see it come through, we'll know you've completed Part One. The Alpha Site is the nova-world. When you dial that, you're done."

He's not sure if Daniel's going to forgive him for this. Sure, he's lied to Daniel before -- and will again if the mission demands it. But he suspects this time may be unique.

Ballard isn't the ringer.

Or to be precise, she isn't the only ringer.

They need an acid test to get MacKenzie to clear Ballard for offworld.

So they're going to make the Live Fire Scenario go wrong -- it always does, but this time they're going to orchestrate it carefully. They're going to do their best to duplicate Kelowna for her.

And see if she can handle it.

He wasn't sure Daniel would go along with it. Daniel's a little too emotionally committed. And he'd needed Daniel to brief Ballard on her part of the scenario, convince her that she was the ringer, the one who would sell the scenario to the rest of the trainees. He trusted Daniel not to give anything away intentionally -- at least if he'd given his word he wouldn't. But O'Neill suspects Daniel's Xerox would guess anyway.

Ignorance is the best defense.

Since eleven o'clock this morning they've infiltrated the SGC, (supposedly) figured out what was going on, and interrogated some rogue NID agents. The wormhole is open to Chulak -- Walter opened it just before they got to the Gate Room, because scenario aside, the 38-minute window still applies. She's 'confirmed' that the coordinates lead to the 'planetary anomaly.' She's 'found' the coordinates to the 'nova world.'

They're doing fine until Pike and Bukowski come back into the Gate Room.

They aren't carrying the dummy bomb.

They're carrying a real Goa'uld explosive device. She recognizes it. It's one of the ones she catalogued. And now it's armed. It will take out an area of at least ten square miles.

SG-1 is on Chulak, along with thousands of innocent people.

She takes the stairs down from the Control Room three at a time.

"No!"

They're heading up the ramp. She draws her sidearm; she lost her intar a while back. The handgun is the one she got in the Armory. It fires blanks. All of theirs do.

"Pike! Damn it!"

He stops. Looks at her.

"Where did you get that?" She looks at the counter on the bomb. It has less than five minutes left to run and she has no idea of the disarmament sequence.

"We went up to the Artifacts Room instead," Pike says, sounding pleased with himself. "This should work better than one of ours."

"You can't use that! This is a training scenario! The Gate is dialed in to Chulak! You'll kill thousands of people!"

Four minutes. "Grab her," Pike says to York. "The Doc's snapped under the strain." He starts moving forward again. He's halfway up the ramp.

She aims her gun at York. Pulls the trigger and fires off the entire clip. York recoils in shock, but he's unhit. "Blanks!" she shouts. "They're all blanks! This is a training exercise! But that's a real bomb!"

Pike stares at her in horror, starting to understand.

"We have to get it out of here!" he says frantically. Incredibly, he starts toward the event horizon again, pulling Bukowski after him.

She throws away the useless gun, runs after him, grabs him. He's bigger than she is, and undoubtedly stronger, but she digs her fingers into his neck in an irresistibly painful comealong grip. He drops his end of the bomb. It hits the ramp with a thud. She twitches -- but it doesn't explode -- and drags him away from the bomb.

"Bukowski! Drop it! Clear the Gate Room! Move, damn you! We have to destroy it here!"

Bukowski sets his end of the box down gently and backs away. He looks sick.

Two minutes. She runs back up the stairs, into the Control Room. If the bomb goes off, everyone in the SGC is dead. If they send it through, they kill everyone on Chulak. If she can establish an incoming wormhole, the vortex might destroy the bomb. Sammy would know. She can only guess.

The others follow her. It won't make any difference where they are.

"Close all the blast doors in the Base!" she tells them. She only hopes they know something -- anything -- about these consoles.

Wormhole disengaged. She hits a panic button, calling for evacuation. It won't help, but it's procedure. Klaxons go off all over the complex. The blast-shield begins to lower over the main window. It won't shield them at all.

She dials Chulak again. It doesn't matter what address she uses, actually, but she knows that one off the top of her head. The establishing vortex is what she needs. The Stargate spins, chevrons locking with merciless slowness.

Thirty seconds to detonation.

There's a flare, visible through the bottom of the glass, and she jumps, but it's only the incoming wormhole.

The blast-shield is down now and she can't see the Gate Room. But if the bomb were going to detonate, it would have by now, and it hasn't. She gets to her feet and turns on Pike.

"Idiot -- unmitigated -- grandstanding--" She can't think of anything suitable to call him, but she's sure she'll find the words.

"Hey, Doc, don't hit him. You might develop a reputation."

A voice behind her.

Jack O'Neill. The Colonel is supposed to be on Chulak with the Observation Team.

Pike is looking remarkably calm.

"You were a ringer," she says.

Pike grins, rubbing the side of his neck. She can see the imprint of her fingertips, dark and bloody-looking. "Yes, ma'am."

At least York and Bukowski look satisfactorily sandbagged.

She turns around. Colonel O'Neill and General Hammond are there, along with several military observers she doesn't recognize. She takes a deep breath.

"Do I pass?" she asks levelly.

"I think she passes," the General says. "Colonel?"

The Colonel nods. "But you're still gonna have to send that other bomb to Chulak, you know."

She and Pike go and get the dummy bomb, the one they were originally supposed to send.

"So you knew it was faked from the beginning?" she asks Pike.

"No. I didn't know until after we were inside. Remember when you were in the security station on Level 16 with Bukowski trying -- supposedly -- to find out where everyone had been sent and York and I were scouting?"

She nods.

"Colonel O'Neill found me and briefed me then. He told me to substitute the dummy Goa'uld device for the bomb you 'found' in the inventory. He said I was to do my best to get it through the Gate, no matter what you did. But..." He rubs the side of his neck again.

If she'd had a real gun--

If she'd thought of hitting him in the larynx--

If she'd used the knife still strapped to her leg--

They reach the armory. The dummy bomb is as heavy as a real one would be. They wrestle it onto a cart and head back for the elevator.

"You didn't do any of the earlier exercises at all, did you?" Pike asks. "The scenarios?"

She looks at him and doesn't answer.

I could have killed you.

She wonders if Daniel knew.

They send the 'bomb' through to Chulak without trouble and are trying to dial the Alpha Site -- just the five of them, finishing the exercise, really more for form's sake than anything else, but it's procedure, and she knows the military's a big fan of that. The system is glitching. The iris closes and won't open. In the scenario, the NID has sabotaged the computer system with a virus. There's no NID and no virus, but the exercises are run as realistically as possible.

The iris operates on a palmprint lock. Only the Command Staff's palmprints can override it.

The manual override down in the Gate Room has been 'sabotaged' as well. Or at least -- in the scenario and in reality both -- it isn't working. They look at each other. Dani shuts down the wormhole and checks her watch.

"In ten minutes the sun goes nova in the scenario," she says. "Do any of you geniuses think you can override the lock and open the iris in that time despite the 'NID virus' in the system?"

Bukowski is their tech-head. "There's an override in the backup Command Center on 19 with a digital passcode."

"Go," Pike says. Bukowski and Chambers take off running.

She sits down in the chair again, ready to dial. Suddenly there's a flare of an establishing wormhole behind the iris. The monitors in the Control Room -- blanked for the scenario -- waken to life. She gets up from the chair as Walter slides into it. There's a IDC Code on the screen. SG-9.

"Not due back until next week," Colonel O'Neill says.

"General Hammond, this is Captain Jeffries! Open the iris! We are under attack! We are coming in hot!" Over the radio, she can hear the familiar sounds of explosions and staff-blasts.

The General nods. Walter types in a string of numbers and places his hand over the palm-lock.

Nothing happens.

"Sir--" Walter says.

"Crap," O'Neill says softly.

The Mountain is running on a skeleton crew today because of the training exercise. By the time the techs can get to their stations, SG-9 could be dead. She takes off flying after Chambers and Bukowski. Pike and York are right behind her.

"SG-9, hold your position! Repeat: hold your position!" she hears the General say behind her.

It's the end of the Live Fire exercise, of course, the final question on the final exam. And she's taken in completely, even though she's set up a dozen of these things herself. Her team gets as far as heading for the Main Generator with a load of C4 to shut down all power to the Base and force a restart of the systems before Colonel O'Neill stops them.

Which is a good thing.

Because of course this time it's real C4.

The debriefing for the exercise is entertaining in a Rashomon sort of way, between what they actually knew and what they were supposed to know at any given moment. Major Carter sits in.

Eventually the question is asked.

"Major, would what Dr. Ballard tried to do with the 'Goa'uld device' have worked in reality?"

Major Carter hesitates. "I'm not sure, General. We know a wormhole vortex disintegrates everything in its path, so it might have worked. I think it was probably the best of the available options."

It's six o'clock -- or 1800 -- by the time everything is finished up. There will be final paperwork, of course. There always is. But she's done for the day, and done with SGO&T. The next stop may -- or may not -- be a Team assignment. It should be, but she isn't going to make any assumptions. There are no guarantees.

Daniel's waiting in her office, reading a book. She'd given him a copy of her key when she'd started training, since half his books are still there. He glances up when she enters, sets the book aside. He looks angry and upset.

"I didn't know."

That answers one question.

"It doesn't matter. We all had a great time. I got to--"

Choose between blowing up the SGC and killing everyone on Chulak.

Killing SG-1.

Again.

She's tired. No, beyond tired. Weary. It's been a long time since she ran on that knife-edge adrenaline high of seconds making the difference between life and death.

She misses it.

She's not used to it anymore.

"It was educational," she says.

"I'm going to talk to Jack." Daniel gets up, his face set and stubborn.

"And tell him I deserved special handling?" She wants to comfort Daniel -- it's a bizarre idea, just to begin with -- and she isn't sure how to do it.

"He lied to me."

"No. Daniel. He just didn't tell you the whole truth. I was a ringer. I just wasn't the only one. And if he'd told you about Pike... I would have known."

Daniel looks surprised, as if the thought of that had never occurred to him. But it's true. She's the world's worst liar -- Jack told her that a thousand times -- and Daniel is as easy to read as she suspects she always was.

"And you're okay with that?" He's still angry, but his anger doesn't express itself in physical ways. She'd be looking for things to break. His turns inward.

"Not a lot. But if they didn't think they had to do it, they wouldn't have done it."

"You shouldn't have had to go through that," Daniel says stubbornly, and suddenly she feels as if she's just spun through -- another -- strange distorting mirror. She wonders what it would be like to be Daniel.

Really be Daniel.

Have always been Daniel.

She tries to dismiss the thought, but it won't leave.

She laughs raggedly. "Yeah, that really cuts it offworld." That wins a smile from him in return. She feels as if she's succeeded at something.

"You look kind of dead," he says, actually focusing on her for the first time. Another victory.

She thinks back. "I think we missed lunch when the rogue NID agents started shooting at us out at the motor pool."

"Dinner?"

"I think I can make it as far as the Commissary."

It's shift-change for a lot of the Base, so the Commissary is crowded. They find a table in the corner. Their shop-talk is the stuff of science fiction. Underneath it all, her mind won't let go of the same idea MacKenzie has been returning to for weeks: that Daniel's relationship to Colonel O'Neill has to be different in some profound way than hers and Jack's was.

"Daniel, when you go off with women on the other side of the Gate--" she begins.

He spills his coffee, just a little.

Oops.

"I don't go off with women," he says quietly, setting the cup down. "I'm -- I was -- married."

Sha're.

Her sister.

"I'm... I don't mean intentionally." She means when transplanted Mongol warlords on alien planets try to kidnap him as a concubine? That happened to Major Carter here.

"Never mind," she says.

"Happen to you a lot?" he says after a pause.

She chuckles. The sound surprises her. She can't remember the last time she actually laughed. "Not women. Usually."

"So you were wondering...?" he prompts.

"How it's ... different ... here." How being Daniel Jackson is different.

Daniel thinks honestly about that for a long time. "I'd guess that would have to be ... Jack. Because, you know, there are times when I think the whole thing amuses him a little too much, like on P3X-797 when--" He stops, looking at her face. "And I'd have to say you're going to tell me yours wasn't amused."

In the Land of Light, when she'd fallen prey to the histiminilitic virus that caused her to devolve into a primitive creature victimized by the enclave of larger and stronger males on the Dark Side of the planet, Jack had been so furious that the SGC nearly had to send a second SG Team in to finalize the treaty negotiations with the Royal House of Light. Fortunately, she doesn't remember much of her experience as one of the Touched.

"He wasn't a happy camper," she says simply.

"Yeah, well, sometimes I think he enjoys watching me make an idiot out of myself," Daniel says.

"Well I guess that's the universal rule: we can, or he can, but nobody else can," she says. The pronouns are a little muddled, but there isn't much choice about that.

"And he does," Daniel says in agreement. "And has. And did, especially today. Well, here's to Jack." He raises his coffee cup.

She raises hers, and they touch cups. To Colonel Jack O'Neill.

Alive and dead.

In the days after the scenario, her nightmares get worse, as if they're punishing her for some dereliction. She prefers the nightmares to the happy dreams, the ones where she's sure she's home and everybody's alive and they never went to either PHX-1138 or Kelowna. Waking up from those and discovering that they aren't true is harder than watching her friends die again and again.

She doesn't remember most of her dreams, anyway. All she knows is that she keeps getting jarred awake by something the books call 'night terrors' -- a formless dread that wakens her frequently, sometimes several times a night. She doesn't mention that to MacKenzie, whom she's still visiting, though by now the visits are only weekly. She's sure it will pass.

Apparently Daniel never has his threatened showdown with Colonel O'Neill, because she never hears any gossip about it, and SG-1 is a major subject of on-Base gossip. She does hear that she's dating Daniel, but then, she's also heard that she's his cousin, his sister, and an Asgard clone. Also his daughter, artificially-aged by nanite technology.

She doesn't see Daniel himself. He's offworld again, apparently. It's for the best. She needs to keep her distance from SG-1.

Almost three months now.

A hundred days is the prescribed period of mourning on Edora.

"...until you do."

The nightmare -- the same nightmare she's had for the last week, and she's damned if she's going to MacKenzie with it -- wakes her up, and she realizes she's fallen asleep at her desk again. Not that anyone would notice. Dr. Ballard isn't a people person.

She pushes her glasses up onto her forehead, rubbing her eyes. The Gate Room. The Furling.

"If you will not complete the pattern satisfactorily, we will not speak to you until you do."

The pattern.

Completing the pattern is returning her to her own time and place.

"...until you do."

The Furling's words echo in her head.

Oh, god.

"Until you do."

It had been right there in front of them the whole time, and they'd all missed it.

Until.

It was another riddle. The Furling had been offering them a second chance. There had to be another way to 'complete the pattern.' She checks her watch. 0230, but the SGC is a 24/7 facility. She thinks SG-1 is back onworld. If they are, Major Carter might still be here.

She hasn't seen Major Carter since they debriefed from the SGO&T Graduation Day Scenario. She doesn't actually want to see her now. But if anyone can solve a riddle involving interdimensional travel, it's Sammy's doppelganger.

It's almost three o'clock in the morning, but Major Carter is still in her lab. Looks like she's got a new toy, too.

Dani knocks quietly on the doorframe.

Major Carter looks up. There's a pause. "Dr. ... Ballard."

"Major Carter. I'm sorry to bother you. Can I, um, talk to you?"

"Sure," Major Carter says, sounding wary. "I'm not getting anywhere with this."

Dani comes over and looks down at the object on Major Carter's workbench. "Goa'uld," she says unnecessarily.

"And this time we've even got the technical manual," Major Carter says, perking up and gesturing at the crystal plugged into her computer. "But it's going to take weeks to get it translated properly."

Dani looks at the screen. Rows of Goa'uld symbols fill it. "It's a fairly simple dialect," she says tentatively.

"Well, sure. But it's full of technical terms, and--" Major Carter stops.

And Daniel can't read a tech manual. Well, she hadn't been able to either -- at the beginning. But Sammy and Mr. T. had spent painstaking hours working with her on the basics of Goa'uld engineering, explaining how the machines worked -- explaining how machinery worked -- until she could work back from that to a fairly solid grasp of Goa'uld technical dialect. And Jack had suggested that the Goa'uld were the people responsible for writing the programming instructions on his VCR.

She blinks back memories, and decides not to offer her help. It would look too much as if she were trying to worm her way into the Alternate SG-1's good graces. The thought makes her cringe inwardly. How about not?

"I was ... look, it's about the Furling."

Now Major Carter really does look wary. Dani plows on. "I don't want to bother you--" since you're all getting on with your lives so nicely "--but everything we know -- knew -- know -- about the Furlings indicates that they're extremely precise users of language. Now, that day in the Gate Room, the Furling said that it would not speak to you -- here -- until -- you had completed its pattern satisfactorily. I don't think it would have said that if there was no way for you to complete its pattern."

She waits.

"Which would involve...?" Major Carter asks. She's interested, though. Dani can tell. She chooses her next words with care and an utter lack of sentimentality.

"Originally it would have been for me to go back with the Furling to my Kelowna to the day of the explosion. But that can't be the only answer, because we can't arrange it. It won't be back until we've -- you've -- completed its pattern. But it's said there is a way to complete it."

"So what is the answer?"

Major Carter looks relieved that Dr. Ballard isn't still contemplating suicide. Actually, that hasn't been an issue for a long time now. But if Dani has a choice, she'd rather be alive in a universe where Jack is dead than alive in one where he looks at her as if she's an unwanted stranger.

If those are her only two choices.

"I have no idea," Dani says heavily. Go home to her own future? Even assuming they could manage it, could the answer be that simple?

"The quantum mirror that we discovered on P3R-233 permitted interdimensional travel. In the quantum mirror, interdimensional points are more-or-less temporally equivalent. It allows you to travel across 'Nows' -- at least between mirrors -- not to other 'Whens.' But ours was destroyed. Let me think about this," Major Carter says.

"Sure," Dani says.

She goes back to her office and spends the rest of the night preparing a long memo on Goa'uld technical dialectic forms for Daniel. Somehow that's not the same as talking about them to Major Carter.

Three months.

"Wake up."

Someone's shaking her. She sits up, wincing. Fell asleep at her desk again. She looks at the clock. 0930. She should have been down in C&T an hour and a half ago, but SG-14 had found a book. An actual paged book; it looked as if it were written in a variant of Goidelic....

"Daniel."

"I checked and you hadn't signed in, so I decided to check your office. I knocked, but..."

"I was asleep." Stating the obvious.

"You know, you should, um, go home more often," Daniel says, smiling down at her.

"Oh, sure, home." It's not like I have a life. Or even a team assignment. Maybe it would be better if I did. Getting shot at, bad food, unfriendly aliens...

"Well, I just... If you want to talk about it..."

About what? That she spends more time here than General Hammond? That she's been known to hide in supply closets to avoid being in the same hallway with Colonel O'Neill? That she's finally succeeded in shaking the dust of Dr. MacKenzie from her feet?

That she's been avoiding Daniel and she doesn't know why? He never said anything about the memo. She didn't sign it. She slipped it into the papers on his desk. Maybe he never saw it.

"Daniel? Did you wake me up to see if I wanted to 'share?'" Talking to Daniel is dangerous. It tempts her to believe she's alive. And that would actually hurt too much.

Oh, god, coffee. She needs coffee.

"Well, no, actually. General Hammond has called for a briefing in two hours and you're supposed to be there. I thought you might not check your email first thing in the morning, because I don't check my email, and..."

And Jack always has to come get you and drag you to the Briefing Room.

Don't think about that.

"About what?"

"The Furlings."

"...the question is, is it a good idea to pursue contact with these people?" General Hammond asks.

The question's already been around the table once. They've watched the Gate Room tapes of the Furling's visit, too -- not the most fun she's ever had, but she's done less pleasant things around this table, or a version of it. They all have. The Furling doesn't show up on film, but they can hear every word spoken. She makes a note to get a copy of the tape.

Daniel has given them what he knows -- and guesses -- about the Furlings. His take on them is fairly close to hers, which shouldn't surprise her. Major Carter has pointed out that if the Furlings are actually willing to cooperate and share their technology even as much as the Asgard have, it would be to Earth's benefit.

"Or they could be like the Tok'ra. Or the Tollen. And we all know how helpful they are. Or even the Aschen. In which case -- with all due respect, General -- we are much better off not knowing them," Colonel O'Neill points out.

She hasn't said much. Being here isn't just awkward, it's surreal. But she can't help butting in now. "With all due respect, Colonel, the Furlings are one of the Four Great Races, along with the Asgard, the Ancients, and the Nox. It's unlikely they'd be like the Aschen."

"They put Daniel in a bottle. Okay, they could be like the Nox. Great folks, the Nox."

"Jack, I think you're being unfair." Daniel this time. "The Nox--"

"--had very limited contact with Earth, nothing later than the Neolithic period," she says firmly. Jack hates -- hated -- the Nox, and apparently Colonel O'Neill does too. If they start talking about the Nox, this meeting is never going to get anywhere.

Everybody stares at her. Including Daniel. Dammit, is she about to fall into another one of those black holes where their two pasts don't match? She knows Daniel has met the Nox. Why shouldn't she visit the Nox? She's an anthropologist.

"Could you explain that statement, Doctor?" General Hammond says.

"I believe all four of the Great Races have visited Earth. We have proof of three: the Asgard, the Ancients, and the Nox. We know that the Nox visited Earth -- at least my Earth -- because when I visited Lya and Nafrayu last year, I asked them about it, and we unearthed some corroborating petroglyphs here. They stopped during the New Stone Age, just previous to the Goa'uld arrival."

Hasn't Daniel ever told them this? No, he's looking just as puzzled. But at least he's interested.

"Visited the Nox," Colonel O'Neill says. "Did you pack a lunch?"

The Nox are vegetarians. Jack ...wasn't.

Isn't.

"So what about the Furlings?" Daniel asks. "What would they have to do with Earth?"

"Start at the beginning," Colonel O'Neill says with feigned enthusiasm.

"There are four 'Great Races'," she says, taking him at his word. "It's my contention that all of them visited Earth at various times. The Ancients, so far in prehistory that if ... you ... didn't have the Antarctic base, there would be no indication that they'd ever been here at all. Their influence on our legends is too diffuse to isolate. The Asgard, up to the present day. Throughout history, we've mistaken the Asgard for elves -- Asgard sightings are the source of many of the Fair Folk legends in mythology, at least in the West -- but they're best known to us -- now -- as the Norse Gods, in which personae they fought the Goa'uld dominion of Earth. In that guise, they're regarded as universally beneficent gods."

"The Asgard are not gods," Teal'c says, just to make sure everybody's on the same page here.

"Of course not. I'm sure you don't want the complete details of how the relationship between the laandvolk and the Aesir and Vanir differs from that of the Eastern Gods of antiquity -- most of whom were impersonated by Goa'uld at some point--"

"That would be a nice change," she hears the Colonel mutter under his breath.

"But my point is that the Furlings also visited Earth frequently," she says, talking faster. "And until comparatively late in our history -- possibly as late as the 11th century in the Old World, and conceivably as late as the 14th or 15th century in the New World. I base this on the congruence between the various Earth mythologies, the offworld legends I've found in the cultures of other races, the few iconographic artifacts we recovered -- which were supported by the imagery on PHX-1138, by the way -- and of course, the Furlings' own behavior." She manages to get past that without a bobble, and is immensely pleased with herself. "When they appear in our mythology, they--" oh, god, if she says 'Trickster Archetype' the Colonel may just fall out of his chair. "Um. They're not as much the good guys as the Asgard, but they're far from being evil. They test Mankind, and when he is deemed worthy, they give him gifts."

"So if we're worthy, they'll give us gifts, like the Furling said in the Gate Room?" Major Carter says doubtfully.

"Exactly!" Daniel takes the mythological ball and runs with it. "Jack, the Trickster Archetype is found in all cultures -- Raven, Coyote, Hermes, Prometheus, even the original Aramaic Satan was a Trickster type."

"Satan?" the Colonel says, sounding bored and baffled. "Met him."

Daniel ignores this. "The Trickster always takes an active interest in Mankind's welfare, and is always responsible for giving him gifts that advance his civilization. But to gain them, Man has to solve riddles or pass tests to prove his worthiness first."

"So you feel that pursuing -- or attempting to pursue -- a relationship with the Furlings is something that we want to do?" General Hammond asks, wading manfully through the wodge of Introduction to Comparative Religion.

"Yes," Daniel says firmly.

"If Daniel's right, it could be to our benefit," Major Carter says.

"So... what?" Colonel O'Neill says. "We phone them up?" He's looking at her now.

"We solve its riddle and complete its pattern," she says. "If I'm right, once we've done that, the Furlings should resume contact with ... us." You. Us. Whatever.

"If it involves sending you back into the middle of a nuclear explosion, I'm thinking we're not going to be doing it," Colonel O'Neill says. His tone is light and disinterested, even bored. She isn't fooled. If that's her answer, this is the end of the discussion.

"No," she says, staring fixedly at the top of the table. "In the Gate Room, when Daniel questioned it, the Furling asked if you wanted to play again. The solution can't be the same one it initially proposed. That's simply not the way their culture is designed, from everything I've been able to figure out. They work in spirals, not circles." She concentrates on stating the problem in small words. "This is a different puzzle, with a different solution. It's just ... similar."

"'Similar'," the Colonel says, sounding exasperated.

"Solving the original puzzle wouldn't be a challenge for you, according to the Furlings. You already know the answer."

"So we don't have to do that any more?" Colonel O'Neill asks hopefully.

"Actually, you do," she says apologetically. The Colonel slumps down in his chair and begins playing with a pen.

"I do not understand," Teal'c says. "The solution the Furling proposed was to return you to your own time and place, just previous to the naquaadriah bomb exploding on your own Kelowna. Now you say that this is not the answer."

"If I'm right, you still have to return me to my own time and place. But I'm not interested in suicide, and the Furling knows you don't want to let me die, so there has to be another right answer. Another destination -- that I'll survive -- that the Furling will also accept as my 'own time and place'."

"Oh, for the love of Mike," Colonel O'Neill groans.

"No, Jack, she's right," Daniel says. "It's a riddle. Solve the riddle and we know where to send her to complete the Furling's 'pattern.'"

"Leaving aside the problem of finding another one of those ...quonset mirrors," Colonel O'Neill says.

Daniel waves that problem aside.

"So -- Daniel -- where's home?" the Colonel asks, even though they haven't got a quantum mirror and no hope of getting or building one.

She wonders what he'll say.

"A place the Furlings would accept? Abydos, probably." He winces slightly, and looks at her. "It's still there in your universe."

It's been destroyed here.

"It was when I left." It's not even a joke. Is it still there now, or has Anubis destroyed it there as well, two years in her world's future? If they do find a quantum mirror, is 'Now' the proper time? The Furling specified home and proper time and proper place: three requirements. And all incredibly subjective. Who decides when the criteria are met?

"Very well, ladies and gentlemen, we'll leave it there for now," General Hammond says, getting to his feet. "Dismissed. Dr. Ballard, if you'd remain?"

She gets to her feet, refusing to watch as SG-1 leaves the room. But she can see their reflections in the Plexiglas wall across from the briefing table.

"Dr. Ballard?"

She turns her attention quickly back to General Hammond.

"Captain Sandford was injured last week on a mission to P43-918. Dr. Brightman tells me he can't be re-certified for offworld duty. His position is yours, if you want it."

He's offering her a Team assignment. Sandford means SG-7 here.

"SG-7 is a good team." And damned unlucky -- they've gone through more archaeologists than Spinal Tap has drummers. The rumor back home was that Major Hightower shot them himself. "I'd be honored, sir."

General Hammond hesitates. Obviously there is something more to say.

"I understand that you want to go home, Dr. Ballard. But you have to understand ... this puzzle of yours could take years to solve."

"Yes, General. I understand that. And I'll do my best for you while I'm under your command."

"I can't ask for anything more. Dismissed."

She walks slowly back to her office. She'll probably have to meet SG-7 sometime today. Maybe she can pull up personnel files on them, see what she's in for. Thank god she'd never known them well on the Other Side. She hadn't known Sandford at all; the last archaeologist on SG-7 she remembers had been Horace Bateman.

But ... offworld. Again! At last! And now this SGC knows there is still a Furling riddle to solve. The General has decided that contact with the Furlings is worth pursuing. That has to count for something.

Her steps slow. Stop.

But the Furlings are talking to her SGC.

Right now.

It's been almost two months since he sent SG-1 to Kelowna. They'd missed their scheduled check-in. When they were ten hours overdue, he'd sent a MALP. Apparently it didn't even survive long enough to send back any signals. It took them 48 hours to prepare an armored probe capable of withstanding severe conditions, and by the time it was ready, they couldn't get a lock on Kelowna's Stargate at all.

Jacob went looking for his daughter -- by ship -- immediately. He'd sent the SGC pictures of a crater over five hundred miles in diameter centered on Kelowna City. The planet's entire atmosphere was radioactive; whatever had happened there had triggered a chain reaction in veins of naquaadah buried far below the planet's surface.

Nobody could have survived that.

SG-1 is dead.

A bizarre paradox: there's a mission report in his file indicating that SG-1 -- safe, alive, whole -- has yet to make a rendezvous with the future. Perhaps they'd all gotten sloppy because of that, assuming somehow that this guaranteed them some kind of immortality.

Obviously it did not.

Over the course of his career, George Hammond has sent men -- and women -- into harm's way many times. And nobody said Gate travel is without risk. But Kelowna was supposed to be a relatively peaceful mission, to a world that had rediscovered its own Stargate only a few years ago. What in God's name happened there?

General Hammond resigns himself to knowing he will probably never know. But he misses SG-1's special talents keenly -- all the more since, ten days after the Kelowna mission, the Furlings finally made contact with the SGC. They'd been one of Dr. Jackson's special obsessions, and General Hammond only wishes she'd been here to see them in the flesh.

They brought gifts.

Hyperdrive, shield generators, cloaking devices, Earth-to-space missiles. All powered by a new element the Furlings called naquaadriah. The Science Department said naquaadriah was apparently an unstable variation of naquaadah, and vastly more powerful.

He wished Major Carter had been here to make sense of it all. The Pentagon had been pressuring him for years to pull her out of the field and put her in a research position somewhere behind a desk. And Dr. Jackson too, for that matter, arguing that their skills were wasted in the field.

Wasted, no. SG-1 had pulled Earth's chestnuts out of the fire a hundred times precisely because both of those women were in field positions. And neither one of them would have given up following Jack O'Neill wherever he led them, as if the man were some sort of Pied Piper for the highly-educated.

He could have ordered Major Carter to comply, of course. Dr. Jackson, he felt sure, would simply have walked out. And they'd been immeasurably valuable right where they were.

But they'd also been at risk, and it had been inevitable that some day their luck would run out. He only wishes it hadn't been when it did. He could use them both. Especially now, when the Furlings are offering them their entire defense against the Goa'uld wish-list on a silver platter.

Why?

SG-9 is the Diplomatic Team, the closest thing to a textbook First Contact Team that Earth possesses. In the five years the Stargate Program has been running, they've conducted delicate negotiations with hundreds of alien cultures -- and a few alien races as well.

Colonel Hopewell has never had to deal with anything like the Furlings.

Usually when it comes to obtaining advanced technology, it takes months of negotiation, treaties, promises of trade -- and a long hunt for desirable trade goods -- before they get anywhere. The Furlings -- a man and a woman who said their names were Coyote and Raven -- had simply walked into the SGC and opened their goodie bag.

"It is the custom of our people, when we are offered great gifts for reasons we do not understand, to ask what the giver wishes in return. I mean no disrespect to your ways in asking this," Hopewell says. Again.

As always, the statement seems to amuse Coyote and Raven highly. They lean away from the table, whispering together. It would be easier if he could actually see them. All he has is dreamlike impressions of tall incredibly beautiful creatures. Raven is dark-haired. Coyote's hair is silver, though perhaps not with age. All of this is guesswork. Dani's guesses would be better, if she were here. If she were still alive.

After a moment, Raven leans forward. "Shall I tell you a secret?" she asks throatily.

"It would gladden me greatly," Colonel Hopewell says. "Secrets are shared between friends. And I hope we can become friends."

Raven's eyes glitter with mirth. He's sure of that, and doesn't know how he knows. The Furlings are only blurs to the cameras; the human observer seems to collect stronger, though subjective, impressions. At least their voices record clearly and precisely.

"Indeed, we are already friends, though you are young and innocent still. You do not think we bring gifts, but commodities requiring payment." The emphasis she places upon the word makes it sound as if it comes from a foreign language.

"I mean no offense," Hopewell repeats. Yet again. He keeps his voice neutral and even. They do not pay me enough for this, he thinks to himself.

"I will set your mind at ease. No I will not. All the treasures we bring you are paid for."

Again, that strange emphasis. Do the Furlings not use money in any form? It's possible. Steve will know; he's their anthropologist. Hopewell can talk to him after their latest session; he'll be watching it on the closed-circuit. Seeing Colonel Hopewell and two blurs.

"Dr. Danielle Jackson has paid for them all. Indeed, she is paying still, in good measure." Raven sounds so tolerantly amused that it takes a moment for her words to penetrate.

"Wait. Excuse me. You said Dr. Jackson is alive?"

"All things live," Raven says happily.

Great. Here we go again.

"Yes. Forgive my ignorance, but you do speak of us as a young race. I only wish to understand. When you say that Dr. Jackson is alive--"

"Any progress, Major?" General Hammond asks.

"Well, sir, not progress, exactly. But something unusual did come up today. I'm still trying to pin down exactly why the Furlings would come to us and simply give us all these things. And today the female, Raven, apparently decided to be a little more forthcoming. She said that Dr. Jackson paid for these gifts -- and is still paying for them." I'd rather deal with the Asgard High Council. No, I'd rather deal with the System Lords. All of them. At once.

General Hammond sits silently for a long moment. "That would mean that Dr. Jackson is still alive."

"Yes, it would, sir -- if the words 'alive' and 'now' mean the same things to the Furlings as they do to us."

General Hammond sighs and nods.

"I understand, Major. But ... if they do have Dr. Jackson -- and the rest of SG-1 -- I want you to make it a priority to find out how to get them back."

Major Hightower is all right -- if you like vicious sexist bastards with poncy Back Bay accents.

He'd called her 'dear lady.'

'I do hope you'll be able to keep up with us, dear lady.'

She desperately needs to kill something. She can't ram her offworld qualifications down his arrogant throat because she isn't supposed to have them. On paper, tomorrow will be her first offworld mission.

'I think I can guarantee that, Major.'

Captain Sherwood had cleared his throat in a way that indicated he was trying not to laugh. Sergeant Christopher had done her best to look completely blank, in the fashion of good airmen everywhere.

'Dear lady.'

Dear god.

"Jack, I can't do this," she whispers to her dark empty office.

'Come on, Indiana. Don't fold up on me now.'

She can hear him saying it. He'd teased her, bullied her, badgered her. He'd trusted her with his life, and she failed him. He's dead, and she'd never told him.... She doesn't know what she would have said, but whatever it was, she can't say it now.

Because he's dead.

Even if she manages to get home, he'll still be dead.

Where is home? Home is at Jack's side, waiting to go through the Gate. Can you send me there, Major Carter?

The lights in her office come on suddenly. She spins around. Daniel is standing in the doorway. He's the only one who walks in on her like that, as if being Alternate Her gives him special privileges. Whatever he sees on her face makes him draw back for a moment, then come in and close the door.

"I came by to offer my congratulations," he says, digging his hands deep into his pockets. "SG-7."

"Thanks." Gee, I wonder how long Hightower can keep his latest archaeologist alive? "Major Hightower was..."

Apparently Daniel already knows what she's going to say. "He just needs to get to know you."

And apparently Daniel knows Hightower better than she knew Hightower's counterpart on The Other Side.

"He will." And if Hightower's lucky, the ensuing stay in the Infirmary -- for whichever of them -- will be short.

"And there's a--"

"Party." There always is, when a new member joins one of the Teams. Punch and cookies in the Commissary for all SG teams on base. A celebration to offset all the funerals and memorial services.

"I just wanted to be sure you'd--"

"Be there with bells on. Agog with the wonder of going offworld for the very first time. Thrilled that I, the humble and insignificant Dr. Dana Ballard, have been chosen for an undertaking of such cosmic significance." The bitterness in her voice could etch glass.

"I know this isn't easy for you," Daniel says quietly.

She takes a deep breath. This isn't his fault. It isn't even actually his problem. He's being kind. He's actually nicer than she is, she suspects.

"It will get easier," she says. Liar. "I'm sure that Major Hightower and I will get along just fine."

There's a cake. She's impressed. Cake is a step up from cookies. She's been to a lot of these parties. This is the first one there's ever been for her. She circulates, greeting everyone and accepting congratulations. She knows the part she's supposed to play. After three months in C&T, she knows almost everyone here -- as Dr. Dana Ballard -- personally. She still isn't 'one of them,' of course. After all, she hasn't gone through the Gate, yet.

She should have made the connection, when Daniel came to her office. Did she think they'd stay away? It would look damned odd if they did.

SG-1 is here.

The party is more of a strain than she thought it would be. She isn't used to being the center of attention this way. There are only about thirty people here but she hasn't spoken to anyone except on SGC business in over three months. She sees Lt. Pike. He's with SG-15 now. He got a Team assignment right out of the, well, gate.

"Dr. Ballard!" He comes over and greets her with the cheerful camaraderie of mutual survivors of Hell Week. "You made it!"

She transfers her cake plate and coffee to one hand in order to shake his with the other. "SG-7."

"That's great. You'll be okay. Gating isn't so bad. Don't worry."

She realizes after a moment that he's trying to reassure her. About going through the Stargate. Her.

"Thanks. I see Major Hightower. I'd better..." she leaves the sentence unfinished, leaving him to fill in the blanks, and moves off.

As she approaches Major Hightower, she catches the phrase 'lady archaeologist' in the conversation and decides on more coffee instead.

"Congratulations." Major Carter comes up to her while she's at the coffee urn. She smiles. It seems genuine enough.

"Thanks, Major."

"You know, my friends call me Sam."

Dani knows the Major sees her flinch.

"I never thanked you for helping Daniel with the translation on that technical manual. He told me about those notes you gave him. It was a real help. We cracked the whole thing in a couple of days."

She nods, unable to think of anything to say. Major Carter touches her companionably on the arm and moves away.

Not Sam. That is not Sam. Sammy is dead.

She slips out of the party a few minutes later -- without, thank god, having to actually come face-to-face with Colonel O'Neill -- and goes to change for home. It's nearly the end of June in the outside world now. She wears khakis and a safari jacket, a t-shirt with a print of the Rosetta stone on it. Birkenstocks. Backpack. She'd fit in on any college campus on earth.

She's even managed to buy a car, an amazing feat of logistics considering how much time she allows herself off-Base for shopping. It's another Jeep, of course. At least it isn't orange. It takes her a major effort some nights to keep from trying to drive Daniel's vehicle home.

She checks the corridor carefully before she leaves the Women's Changing Room. It's empty. She wonders what she was expecting. She makes an efficient dash for the elevator and gains the surface without incident.

The light is flashing on her answering machine when she gets back to the apartment. Two messages. If it were something vital, she would have been paged, or they would have called her cell. She deletes the messages without listening to them.

"I'm sure that Major Hightower and I will get along just fine."

She held out that hope to herself all through the morning briefing. The man can't hate having women on the teams. Christopher is a woman. And Hightower is the best of the best (as they say in the MIB) or he wouldn't be here.

She's half right.

Hightower doesn't hate women.

Hightower hates civilians. And scientists. And a civilian scientist on his team -- who also happens to be a woman, and obviously, as a female civilian, prone to hysterics -- is apparently just about the worst thing that Major Hightower can conceive of.

They're going to P9X-430 on a routine recon. He sends her back out of the Gate Room just before they are about to go through to get a helmet. He makes her leave her quarterstaff behind. He says it's non-regulation. She's carrying a full pack plus recording equipment. A quarterstaff makes a difference in her ability to cover ground. The General has okayed it.

Team leaders have the final say.

"Are we moving too fast for you, dear lady?"

The Major's overridden every opinion she's expressed, until she wonders why he's even brought her along. He ignores her requests to take a side-trip to take a look at a site that might contain ruins, and barks at her when she stops to film it from a distance, hoping the film can be enhanced later to give her a real clue as to what might be there. He explains she's here only in case they encounter natives. As if she's nothing more than a glorified translator. They've covered at least ten kliks since they came through the Gate, and the Major hasn't stopped moving once. He's undoubtedly the kind of man who thinks that visiting fifteen European cities in ten days counts as a leisurely vacation.

And Daniel had known that when he'd congratulated her. He'd known all of Hightower's charming little quirks in advance. She knows it. And he hadn't warned her. Her back hurts. Her neck hurts. She hates the helmet; she always did. She decides to hate Daniel, too, while she's at it. Group rates.

"Why no, dear Emory. But it is sweet of you to ask."

That brings a stifled laugh from the Captain. Sgt. Christopher has a sudden coughing fit. All the pollen in the air, no doubt. Without another word, Major Hightower turns around and picks up the pace.

They reach the far point of their sweep by local noon, four hours out of the Gate. All they've seen are trees, meadows, flowers -- all very pretty, but of course they haven't stopped to take any samples -- and a few more indications -- in the distance -- of what might be ruins.

Of course they haven't taken a closer look.

They stop to rest and eat in a grove of trees at the edge of a meadow. The meadow's completely filled with white flowers; the effect is like looking at a snowfield. She's desperately glad of her heavy-duty antihistamines; and pops a few extra pills just to be sure. The flowers extend all the way up to the base of the trees.

She drops into the shade of the nearest tree as soon as Hightower gives the order to halt, unclipping her pack from her vest and pulling off her helmet. The crushed flowers give off an intense perfume, as intense as roses. She has no idea what they are. Earth-descended? Most of the Goa'uld colonies -- which contain descendents of Terrestrial flora and fauna as well as colonies of humans -- are on planets where naquaadah is found, but neither the MALP or the UAV reported any signs of naquaadah radiation in the preliminary survey.

The other three are sitting together. Comfortable. At ease.

Shutting her out.

She starts to rummage through her pack for an MRE and gives up. She's too tired to eat, anyway. She leans her head back against the tree and falls asleep.

She startles awake what seems like only a few seconds later. The position of the sun has shifted measurably. She looks at her watch. She's been asleep for two hours. Her mouth is dry from the extra medication.

She sits bolt upright.

The others are gone.

She swears feelingly, switching to Russian where obscenity has real flavor, then to German for the jawbreaking consonants. They've left her.

No.

General Hammond would have their skins for that. Even better, Colonel O'Neill would have their skins. Along with choice portions of Hightower's anatomy. The first rule of the SGC is that no one is left behind. Ever.

So ... they have to be around here somewhere.

And this is undoubtedly Hightower's idea of a hazing. Scare the Gate-virgin by leaving her all alone on an alien planet and see how loud she screams. They've got to be somewhere close by. Probably gathering the botanical samples for the mission.

She thumbs her radio. "Sierra-Golf Seven-Niner, this is Sierra-Golf Seven-Four. Come in?"

Silence. Static. She tries Sherwood and Christopher. Same response.

If this is a joke, it's getting out of hand. What if she actually were in trouble? This is an alien planet, and all she has is a pistol with two spare clips.

"Sierra-Golf Seven-Niner, this is Sierra-Golf Seven-Four. Answer back, I say again."

More silence. Is the receiving channel open or not? Oh, if they think she's leaving this out of her report, they're so wrong.

"Sierra-Golf Seven-All. Having failed to establish radio contact, I am calling a Code 14."

Code 17 is a suspected Goa'uld in The Mountain. Code 9 is a Foothold situation. Code 14 is SGC Personnel Missing/Unable to Respond.

That should fix Hightower's little red wagon.

She should head directly back to the Gate and phone home. She's called a Code 14, and as far as she knows, she's alone here. By the mission schedule, SG-7 isn't supposed to Gate home for another four hours. Just enough time to get back if she hurries. But General Hammond will call once they're thirty minutes overdue. Her radio's well within range of the Gate. And she's sure that the others must be around here somewhere.

If I were a hashak, where would I hide?

She gets to her feet, clipping her pack into place, and walks away from the tree. Meadow with white flowers. Grass-covered tumuli in the middle distance, maybe with ruins. Too far away to go for a prank, though. Mountains in the far distance. Trees behind her. A nice dense hardwood forest, perfect for playing Robin Hood. She starts there.

She spends an hour working through the forest in a semicircle around SG-7's last known position.

Nothing.

She comes back to her starting place. She's marked the tree, even left them a note. The note is still there.

She starts out across the meadow. She's only taken a few steps before she stops. The flowers only come up to the top of her boots. There's no way they could be hiding here. She looks back. The flowers have sprung up behind her. Durable little suckers. If SG-7 had crossed the meadow, they'd leave no trace.

The sun is heading west. If she leaves now, she'll be lucky to reach the Gate by dark. Face it, she'll be lucky to find the damned thing, even with her GPS.

She tries her radio one more time. Nothing. This is no longer a joke. SG-7 is in trouble. Protocol says when you run into something like this, you head straight for the Gate and dial home.

Jack O'Neill says that when people go missing, you look for them until you find them, dead or alive. From the nearest tumulus, she'll be able to see a good deal of the surrounding area. She might spot them. There are flares in her pack. They might spot her.

She starts walking.

"Major Hightower, this is General Hammond. You are thirty minutes overdue. Report."

At M+10 hours her radio crackles to life just as she reaches the foot of the nearest tumulus. The flowers stop at the foot, just as if some mad gardener planted them here. She grabs for her 'Talk' button.

"General Hammond, this is--" a moment of paralysis: she's forgotten her fake name "--Dr. Ballard. The rest of SG-7 is missing." Her voice wavers slightly.

"Missing? What--"

"O'Neill. What the hell happened?" Over the radio, it isn't Colonel O'Neill's voice. It's Jack's. She bites her lip.

"We stopped for lunch six hours ago, about twenty kliks from the Gate. I fell asleep. When I woke up two hours later, they were gone."

Everything she should have done differently comes crashing in on her in the silence that follows. Not fallen asleep. Headed immediately for the Gate. Never taken a Team assignment at all.

"Where are you?" General Hammond again. The Colonel is probably looking for a leather strap to chew through.

She peers at her GPS and dutifully reads off the coordinates. "I've been looking for them. I couldn't raise them on the radio." And you thought they were playing games. So you didn't call for help when it still could have done them some good. You've killed them, just the way you killed SG-1. "There's some high ground up ahead. I think there might be ruins there. I'm going to climb up and see if I spot them."

"Negative." O'Neill again, and apparently he hasn't found that leather strap. She can hear how furious he sounds, even with the poor quality of the sound through her radio. "You stay right where you are, Dr. Ballard. Do you understand me? We're sending a team."

"Yes, Colonel, I understand you. Sierra-Golf Seven-Four out."

The link goes dead.

Half an hour to scramble a team. Three hours to get here -- the tumulus is closer to the Gate than the edge of the meadow had been -- maybe four; by the time they come through the sun will be setting, and they'll have to move across unfamiliar country in the dark. But she still has two hours of light. Enough time to keep looking. She might even be able to get up to the top, look around, and back down before they get here.

Okay, so it isn't the first time she's disobeyed orders. She starts up the side of the tumulus.

Damn Hightower for making her leave her quarterstaff behind, anyway.

It isn't very high, but from the top she has a splendid view back down the valley to the Gate. She can even see the Gate if she uses her binoculars.

There are ruins here. Cyclopean blocks of stone -- marble? -- weathered by centuries of exposure. She has no time for them now. Looking up the valley, she also has a splendid view of the rest of the meadow. And the forest.

And a ... house ... in the forest?

That hadn't been on the survey.

She can barely make it out through the trees. She hadn't gotten anywhere near it when she was searching the forest -- it's a couple of kliks, at least, from where she'd been looking. But definitely of artificial construction.

They're there. She knows it. And it would be stupid beyond permission to go walking in there without waiting for backup. She turns around again just in time to catch the flash of an incoming wormhole up the valley.

Sighing, she climbs back down the side of the tumulus to wait.

General Hammond has sent SG-1. Of course. And they've made it up the valley in two hours. They must have come at a dead run. She gets to her feet when she sees them, turning her light on herself. It's full dark by now. Colder than SG-7 had come prepared for. Nice stars. A full moon. Two full moons, in fact, filling the valley with a bright silvery light. The flowers close at night. The meadow is almost black.

"You want to tell me again what happened?" Colonel O'Neill says without preamble.

"We came up the valley. We stopped over there--" she points at the other side of the meadow "--at the edge of the trees to eat. We'd made good time up the valley. From the position of the sun, it was local noon, or near that." She grits her teeth. "I fell asleep. When I woke up, they were gone."

"And that didn't strike you as unusual enough to head back to the Gate and dial home?" Colonel O'Neill asks. It's Jack's voice. Jack at his most poisonously sarcastic.

"I thought they might be gathering samples of the local flora." It's a flat lie, but it's better than the truth. "We hadn't stopped for samples on the way up. I tried to raise them on the radio, but none of them answered. So I went looking for them."

"Yeah, you two are definitely related," Colonel O'Neill says to nobody in particular. "And you didn't think it was in the least odd that they'd just walk off and leave you?"

I thought Hightower was just trying to scare me. No, they definitely aren't going there. "I think I know where they might be. In the forest over there, there's a house. Some kind of a structure, anyway. It didn't show up on the overflight."

Colonel O'Neill looks around. Nothing is visible from their position. "And you know this how?"

"You can see it from the top of the hill." Since he's going to have her killed as soon as they get back anyway, she might as well tell him the truth.

"I told you--"

Major Carter clears her throat.

"Yeah. All right. We might as well start there. Everybody got your night goggles?"

He reaches into his jacket and hands her a pair. She slings them around her neck. They don't need them here in the meadow, but the forest is dark.

"Let's go."

They start off, fanning out in a wary pattern.

"And Ballard? Lose the helmet."

She pulls it off and hangs it from her belt.

The structure is dark and quiet. Wooden. Windowless. Ornamental carvings over much of its surface.

"Russian," she whispers to Daniel. "Eighth century."

He nods, looking as puzzled as she feels.

"There were ruins at the top of the tumulus. This isn't consistent with them." The ancient Rus built in wood, not stone, which is why so little of their work survives.

"What were--?"

"More Greco-Roman, at first guess. But much older than--"

"Quiet," the Colonel tells both of them.

They circle the building cautiously. No windows. Only one door. Colonel O'Neill motions them all to stand back, then strides up to the door and knocks loudly.

"Yoo-hoo? Anybody home?" No answer. But the forest feels as if it's listening. He tries the door. It doesn't open. "Daniel?"

"It looks like an eighth-century Slavic chief's house. We know the Goa'uld were taking people off Earth as late as the eleventh century. But Doctor, um, Ballard says the ruins she saw on top of the tumulus were inconsistent with a Slavic derivation." He looks at her, passing the conversational ball.

"I didn't examine them closely. But probably Classical Mediterranean. The tumuli are probably artificial as well, and neither culture built tumuli."

"Those big hills," Daniel says helpfully, as Jack looks determinedly blank.

"Celtic," Dani agrees. "And Meso-American, of course."

"Is any of that going to get us inside?" the Colonel demands plaintively.

"The door should be barred from the inside. You might be able to lever the bar up with a knife," she says.

When the bar clatters to the floor on the inside of the house, the sound makes all of them -- except Teal'c -- flinch. By now they're all on edge; there's just something about being here -- in the forest, at night -- that's spooky, whether you believe in ghosts or not.

The Colonel pushes the door open.

They're staring into ... a witches' cottage. It looks like something out of an old woodcut, and it takes Dani a moment to understand that the proportions of the room they're seeing don't match the proportions of the chief's house they've just broken into. There's a hearth -- but they saw no sign of a chimney outside -- herbs drying in the rafters. Moonlight shining in through open windows. But the chief's house didn't have windows. And even if it did, it's dark in the forest.

Colonel O'Neill moves in, walking like a cat crossing fresh butter. Major Carter covers him. Daniel follows, looking for clues. What is this place, who built it, when? Information that can save their lives.

Dani stays by the door, staying out of their way, gathering what information she can from there. The interior walls are carved in a traditional pattern of animals common to a number of ancient northern cultures. She looks higher. The ceiling is covered in a pattern of stars. She starts to pull out her camcorder, and stops as she hears Major Carter's voice.

"Sir."

She looks back down. Hightower, Sherwood, and Christopher are lying in front of the hearth. Their packs and weapons are gone. O'Neill steps back to cover Major Carter as she kneels down quickly, checking for a pulse.

"They're alive," Major Carter says.

At her touch they stir, wake, start to sit up. Confusion is replaced by concern-verging-on-horror when they see SG-1.

"What--?" Hightower says.

"We can discuss that later, Major," Colonel O'Neill says. "Right now I think we'd better get back to the Gate."

They're in the middle of the meadow, moving fast. SG-7 doesn't have night-sight gear, but now that they're out of the forest, it won't slow them down. It's almost as bright as day out here. Major Carter's on point, with SG-7 behind her and the rest of SG-1 following.

The ground begins to shake. Rhythmic pounding, like giant footsteps. Dani looks behind her. They all do. The wooden house is following them. It's sprouted an enormous pair of chicken legs and it's chasing them.

"Baba Yaga!" Dani yelps.

"Teal'c!" Colonel O'Neill shouts.

Teal'c fires. The bright flash of the Jaffa staff weapon blinds Dani for an instant. Major Carter runs back to Colonel O'Neill. They both begin firing their P90s. Teal'c fires again. Again. The noise is deafening.

The hut catches fire. Splinters fly from it. But it keeps coming. There's no point in running. It's faster than they are. And there's no cover. It's too far away for her to shoot, and there's nowhere to run. It's going to land on them in a minute.

It will stop if you know the right words, her mind insists. But that's a fairy tale for god's sake!

No time to second-guess herself now, and what can it hurt? She says the words. Screams them at the top of her lungs. Daniel catches on quickly, and there they are, the two of them, shouting at it in Russian in the middle of a firefight like a couple of lunatics.

The hut falls to the earth with a crash that shakes the ground. The door swings open invitingly.

"Grenade!"

Even before the hut settles to the ground, Colonel O'Neill lobs a couple of grenades through the open door, and they run. Five seconds, then down. She lands on top of Daniel, rolling off him to seek the lowest available point.

Light and fire.

Don't think of that don't think of that don't think of that--

The sky rains splinters. Her ears are ringing. Daniel helps her to her feet. They look at each other.

"Coincidence," they say, nearly in chorus.

"Carter, tell me we didn't just kill a house with giant chicken feet," Colonel O'Neill demands.

"Yes, sir," Carter says dutifully.

They head out, reforming again. SG-1 takes point this time. SG-7 follows. Dani falls back to SG-7; it's where she belongs now, after all. This is the first time she's seen SG-1 all together in the field. It's odd, like looking at yourself in a mirror.

Except--

Major Carter is up where she always walked, just behind Jack -- Colonel O'Neill. And Daniel is back where Sammy walked, in front of Teal'c.

She watches them. Major Carter stumbles on a patch of uneven ground, and the Colonel puts out a hand to steady her -- just a quick touch. She sees Major Carter smile. She feels one of those unsettling epiphanies, seeing SG-1 from the outside, seeing how different this world is from hers.

Major Carter and the Colonel?

Major Carter and the Colonel.

Oh, god, no. That's ridiculous. Even without the fraternization guidelines, Sam-I-Am is the last woman on Earth Jack would be interested in that way. She reminds him too much of his ex-wife Sara. Dani's seen pictures of Sara. She and Sammy could be sisters.

Jack respects -- respected -- Sammy. He loves -- he loved -- her the way he loves Teal'c. But this isn't Sammy and Jack. Things are different here.

Her mind refuses to leave the revelation alone, conjugating relationships the way she would conjugate verbs. She loved Jack. It's safe to admit it now. She'd loved him.

Major Carter loves her Colonel in more than a line-of-duty way. Call it women's intuition if you must, but Dani is sure of it. Sam-here loves Jack-here.

And O'Neill? Does O'Neill...?

If Carter loves O'Neill, and Dani loves Jack; if O'Neill ... loves ... Carter, did Jack...?

Her mind shies away from completing the thought. Even if she finds out the truth about Colonel O'Neill and Major Carter, it won't answer the question about Jack.

And besides, it's too late for it to matter.

They reach the Gate without further incident.

Doctor Brightman finds a residue of pollen on Hightower, Sherwood, and Christopher that none of the rest of them have on their clothes. It can't be from the meadow flowers. They all rolled in those. The only theory that anyone can come up with is that the other three were taken because they were awake and she was ignored because she was asleep. Hightower, Sherwood, and Christopher don't remember anything useful. Hightower says they never went out of sightline of her while they were gathering samples. It could be true.

They don't remember being taken.

Exposure to weird alien psychoactive drugs is an automatic 72 hour removal from active rotation and daily check-in for tests. Even if they all feel fine, they aren't going to be going anywhere soon.

They finish the after-mission debriefing. She sticks to the facts, and leaves out her opinions. Hightower sticks to his story. Now come the detailed reports. And a minimum of three days off the line.

She likes writing reports, actually. And maybe they'll get a chance to go back and take a real look at the place. And the ruins.

"Are you sure that's what really happened?"

"No, Daniel, I lied to General Hammond just for the hell of it." He's in her office again. She'd throw him out, but he's brought coffee. She wonders if he knows the truth about Major Carter and Colonel O'Neill. She mustn't ask. He mustn't tell.

"I just can't figure out--"

Oh god. She's done the same Columbo act a thousand times. He won't go away until she satisfies his curiosity, because she wouldn't either.

"--what took me so long to call for help? Daniel, I was four hours away from the Gate. We were supposed to be back in four hours. I could either cut and run, or I could go looking for them. You do the math."

"God, you sound just like Jack."

She drinks her coffee. She doesn't sound anything like Jack. She isn't anything like Jack. Jack wouldn't have gotten SG-1 killed. Jack wouldn't have been the only survivor.

"You thought they'd be somewhere nearby. Somewhere easy to find."

She looks up. Daniel is leaning over her, staring down into her face as intently as if he might be able to read her thoughts.

"What do you want, Daniel?"

"The truth."

"I told the truth at the debriefing. The truth is going to be in my report."

"No it isn't." He sounds very sure. "You stayed because you thought they were hiding from you, not because you thought they were in trouble."

Shared pain. It occurs to her suddenly that people have treated Daniel the same way they've treated her. As an overeducated annoyance. Someone underfoot and in the way.

"Jack would never do that," she blurts out without thinking. Never pretend to abandon a member of his team, even for a joke.

Daniel leans forward. He's so close now she can feel his breath on her mouth. All she has to do is straighten in her seat, and their lips touch. It's hard to say which of them is more surprised.

He starts to pull away as soon as he realizes what he's doing, and long before she's ready for him to. She puts a hand on the back of his head and pulls him back; he yields to her easily. His hair is soft. The skin beneath it is warm. He tastes of coffee.

It isn't as if this counts. If they had sex, it would be more like masturbation. Wouldn't it?

"Da-- ulp!"

They spring apart. Major Carter is standing in the doorway, looking horribly embarrassed. Dani wonders which of them Major Carter was looking for.

"Sam," they say in chorus. "Major Carter," she corrects herself. It isn't Sammy. It's Major Carter.

"Colonel O'Neill is looking for Daniel," Major Carter says. She's got her game face on. This is the Air Force. Don't ask, don't tell. Major Carter backs out into the hall.

Daniel follows her, not looking back.

Dr. Ballard spends her mandated downtime catching up on paperwork and handling overflow work from the other teams. It's her job. She loves her job.

My name is Dana Ballard and I have no life.

Certainly not one where someone might kiss her.

It isn't as if she's a nervous virgin. She lost that distinction at seventeen. She'd never thought she was in love, not with any of them. Not until Simon Gardner. She and Simon kicked that to death pretty thoroughly over her refusal to put Simon before her work. She actually hadn't completely noticed they were over until the day Simon brought his new girl into the archives. Marian Fordham had been all makeup and perfume and high heels, and could barely read simple hieroglyphs.

Simon had looked … triumphant. And guilty.

Simon is the Goa'uld Osiris now. But that happened years later.

When she and Simon broke up she swore she wouldn't let something like that happen again. It was easier -- safer -- to live a monastic life. No ties, no entanglements.

On Abydos, both she and Kasuf had assumed she'd become Skaara's concubine, once he'd taken a suitable wife. Such a connection was obvious. Traditional.. It would protect her after Kasuf was gone, and she was fond of Skaara.

She's been to the dark side of the Land of Light.

When Shylac addicted her to the sarcophagus on P3R-636, he'd turned her every which way but loose, and she'd … enjoyed it.

All of which is very much beside the point.

Refusing to think about things is a skill she's honed to perfection over the years. She uses it now. PX9-430 is a more immediate puzzle. Solving it is her job. Dana Ballard's job.

Why was Baba Yaga on PX9-430?

In Russian fairytales, Baba Yaga is a wicked witch. But that's only her last and most diminished aspect. To the pagan Rus, she was a Trickster Goddess, who gave gifts if you solved her riddles. Among the goddess's favorite gifts was a mirror.

Dani can't help but feel that there's a message here meant only for her. Trickster gods with mirrors.

SG-1 is at the top of the rotation. It's a week before she sees Daniel again.

Neither of them refers to what happened in her office.

"Raven is adamant about the fact that Dr. Jackson is alive," Colonel Hopewell tells General Hammond. "But I'm not sure we're really communicating. I've tried her on the rest of SG-1. She seems to know exactly who they are. And she says they're 'less alive.' Sometimes she says they're 'potentially alive,' and just for a change of pace, 'unmanifest'." He rubs his forehead in frustration.

"They're speaking English, but they're not thinking in English," Dr. (Major) Stephen Saunders clarifies. "I'm not entirely sure the Furling see time and causality the same way we do. A lot of cultures don't. The Sarawak--"

General Hammond holds up his hand, derailing what promises to be a lengthy anthropological footnote. "If Dr. Jackson is alive, tell them to produce her," he says.

"I've tried that," Colonel Hopewell says, sounding as miserable as an Air Force Colonel would ever allow himself to sound. "They say that she has to come back by herself."

"What if we tell them they can have their gifts back; we want Dr, Jackson and the others instead?" General Hammond asks. The Joint Chiefs will have his stars -- and his head on a plate. The mission of the SGC from Day One has been to discover offworld technology to aid them in the fight against the Goa'uld. The Furlings are offering them their entire wishlist. Risking that deal is playing ducks and drakes with his career.

But this is all too easy. And they don't leave their people behind. No matter where they are.

"I can tell them that," Colonel Hopewell says, sounding uneasy.

"Go ahead, Charlie. You like a challenge," Major Saunders says.

July. She will have been here four months exactly on the 12th. Her birthday is the 8th. It falls on the weekend, for which she's grateful. There's nobody to take notice of it here.

When she arrives in her office on Monday, there's an Egyptian footed bowl on her desk, and a silly birthday card. Unsigned.

Daniel.

She hasn't exactly been avoiding him, but she's disturbed by him. She feels something for him. She doesn't know what. And she knows she doesn't want to feel anything at all.

But she feels guilty being rude to the person who's been kindest to her here. She puts it off as long as she can -- two hours -- and goes down to his office.

He's packing for a mission. She stands in the doorway, watching. Eventually he notices her and smiles.

"Thanks for the…" she gestures back toward her office.

"Well, it was looking kind of barren in there."

At home her office was like his is here: filled with artifacts from a hundred missions and various treasures of Earth as well. Here, her office contains nothing but books and files and whatever items she's working on at the moment.

"I forgot your birthday," she says. It's the truth, but he seems to think she's making a joke.

"You can make up for it," he offers. "Feed my fish?" He holds up a set of house keys.

"You're going to be away for a while." Not a hard guess.

"Going to play games with the Tok'ra."

Colonel O'Neill must be thrilled.

"It's a spare set."

"I'll try not to lose them."

"Well--"

"Daniel, we are late." Colonel O'Neill brushes past her, picks up Daniel's pack, dumps the last few items on the table into it with no consideration for packing, and heads out the door with it at a brisk walk.

"Hey!" Daniel chases after the Colonel and his pack. "Jack! Give me that!"

"Now, Daniel, you know how much it costs to keep the lights turned on around here…"

Their voices -- still bickering -- fade into the distance. She walks over to his desk and picks up the keys, then turns out the lights in Daniel's office and walks out, closing the door behind her.

SG-7 averages three missions a week. Hightower is still a pain in the ass, but Robbie and Allison have warmed up to her a bit. She pulls her weight. She doesn't complain.

She's been allowed to stop wearing the helmet on missions. He still won't let her carry her quarterstaff. Maybe someday. Sure. And Hell will freeze rock-solid first.

Five months. It's August outside the Mountain.

SG-7 is coming in hot: Jaffa ambush on P3X-4259. General Hammond opens the iris at the last minute. Hightower and Christopher go through first, carrying Sherwood between them. He's taken a direct hit from a staff weapon. He's a big man. It takes two of them. A medical team is already standing by.

She follows them through a second later. The Gateroom is full of SFs in full armor and she can hear Hightower shouting for her. She has a Jaffa staff weapon in her hand, firing back through the Gate. She was covering their retreat. She couldn't lift Sherwood, and somebody had to watch their six.

Her uniform is on fire.

She drops the weapon and falls, tumbling down the ramp.

Agony drags her back to consciousness. She sees a familiar ceiling go by. They're taking me to the Infirmary. She feels the heaviness of morphine, but it only clouds her mind, and does nothing for the pain.

Where's Jack?

He had to be right behind her. He's always the last one through the Gate. If she's been hit, what happened to him?

"Jack!" She tries to get off the gurney. She has to go back. They can't leave him there. "Jack!"

Two of the nurses are holding her down. She hears someone call for sedation. It's not Janet. Where's Janet? Someone's calling for Dr. Ballard. She doesn't know who he is.

Janet?

She has to go back. She can't leave him there. Burning.

Darkness.

She wakes up in the Infirmary. The lights are dimmed for night. She manages to see that much, in a long blink, but she can't keep her eyes open. She has the dry disassociated feeling of too much sedation. She's been hurt. (How?) She drags memories into consciousness, but they're fragmented, nonsensical. She forces her eyes open again. Someone is sitting in the chair beside her bed. She feels a spasm of relief -- he made it, Jack made it -- before she realizes it's someone she doesn't know.

She looks at him, confused.

"Doctor Ballard? Dana?"

"Major Hightower." Her voice is scratchy, but when she names him, her memories fall into place with a sickening thud. P3X-4259. SG-7.

"Glad to see you're awake. We were worried about you. Dr. Brightman says you're going to be fine. You just have to take it easy for a few days."

He's just set a new record for the most consecutive sentences addressed to her during their entire two-month association.

"Captain Sherwood?"

Robbie didn't make it. Major Hightower's face says it all.

"I'm sorry." Her tongue feels thick. She's thirsty. There's a cup of water with a straw beside her bed. He helps her drink. It hurts to swallow.

"You saved our lives back there. I just wanted to… Thank you."

I didn't save Robbie.

"I think I'll go back to sleep now," she whispers.

"I'll see you later." Briefly, awkwardly, he touches her shoulder in valediction.

Allison Christopher comes to see her the next day, bringing chocolate walnut cookies -- 'Dana's' favorite -- and news from the real world. Allison isn't hurt. That's usually the way when you're up against a Jaffa cadre. You're either fine or dead. 'Dana' was lucky to take nothing more than a glancing blast to the left side. Her ribs were cooked -- they've got a new ceramic armor here that saved her life -- but most of the damage came from her burning uniform.

Allison looks faintly puzzled as she gazes down at her. Dani wonders what happened back on 4259 to make Allison look at her that way. It seems like too much trouble to ask, and her memories of the firefight are still fragmentary.

She makes arrangements for someone else to take care of Daniel's fish. She hopes they're still okay.

Robbie's funeral will be at the end of the week.

She's allowed out of the infirmary to attend the funeral. At least there's a body to bury. She refuses a wheelchair. That would attract too much attention. It's a quiet military funeral.

She has to lean on Hightower's arm to make it to the gravesite. Her legs are still shaky, and the bandages encasing her burned ribs make her torso feel as if it's dipped in fire. The sultry weather doesn't help. Percodan lends a haze of unreality to the situation. But she's damned if she's going to let him see her cave.

"You don't give up, do you, Ballard?" he says to her, low, under cover of the service.

'Come on, Indiana. Don't fold up on me now.'

"No." It's hard to breathe.

All of the SG Teams who are on world attend. SG-1 isn't there.

Two weeks medical leave, then she'll need to be recertified for offworld missions. She goes home; rediscovers the joys of solitary drinking. If Brightman knew she was mixing Scotch with the pills she'd have kittens.

But Brightman isn't here. And it blurs the edges of everything nicely.

I don't want Dana's life. I want Dani's life. It's my life, and I want it back.

All of her books are at the SGC. But her laptop is here, and her files are on it. She spends her time doing research.

Fairy gifts.

The nightmares are worse now, as if Robbie's death has torn down another wall she'd built. She isn't sleeping much, or well. But she's gotten a lot of work done.

Fairy gifts. We've been looking in the wrong place. Again.

Every culture has legends of the Fair Folk: heartless, manipulative, tricksey. They pose riddles and offer gifts, but woe betide the mortal who accepts a Fairy Gift. In all the legends, it leads only to disaster. To get anything from the Fairies that you actually want, you not only have to solve their riddle, but insist on paying for what they offer you. If you take something without paying for it, the gift will inevitably turn on you somehow.

But successfully paying for a Fairy Gift is the hard part. In all the legends, the Fairies did their best to avoid payment, because that would allow them to turn the gift against the recipient.

She has to tell General Hammond.

She sits back on her couch with a groan. She can't tell General Hammond. The General Hammond who desperately needs this information isn't here. He's in her universe, and Charlie and Steve and the rest of the Real SG-9 are probably already deep in talks with the Furlings, who are selling them an elaborate bill of goods marked "Free Gift."

Which will be a disaster.

She has to get home. She not only has to get home, she has to get home to before the Furlings contact her SGC.

Which would be… Oh, god. When? She gets up unsteadily and pours the rest of the bottle of Scotch down the sink. This isn't helping.

If 'now' here is tied to 'now' there, her information is exactly two years, five months, and ten days too late to do her SGC any good, because the Furlings would have contacted the SGC just after Kelowna, where SG-1 died. There'd be no reason for them to delay. But if the point had been to negotiate with her SGC, and not this SGC, why wasn't the transfer temporally equivalent? Why send her to an alternate future? If she'd come here to the same point in time here as it was there, it would have been…

It would have been on the same day that Daniel Jackson lay dying in the infirmary of radiation poisoning. And Ascended.

They didn't want me to arrive at that 'when.' So they brought me across, and forward, to a point here where Daniel was alive again -- oh that just sounds weird -- because the whole point was for me to chase Daniel, and find him.

Was finding Daniel the point? The Furlings could have accomplished the same thing by sending her here to before this SG-1 went to Kelowna. They'd suppressed her memories of Kelowna, after all. It wasn't as if she could have warned the Alternate SG-1.

Except that I got my memories back when we found Daniel. And I could have warned them then.

If she had, this SG-1 wouldn't have gone to Kelowna -- or, if they had, Daniel wouldn't have Ascended. Because he wouldn't have died. Would that have mattered?

She doesn't know.

But -- either way -- the game with her SGC is over. It's two years in the past. Now the Furlings are playing against this SGC. That must have been their intention -- or hope -- all along. So the Furlings wouldn't transfer her to or from a point where she could bring this SGC anything it could use. And the Furlings wouldn't risk playing while Daniel was Ascended.

Why?

This is tied up with the Ancients. The Ascended. Somehow.

More untestable hypotheses. Interesting, but not terribly helpful.

Frustrating, in fact.

Her medical leave is over. She's allowed back on Base. SG-1 is still offworld. She knew that anyway because as soon as she was well enough to drive she called and got Daniel's keys sent over to her. She's spent more time in his house than in her apartment. His fish are doing fine.

She isn't certified for offworld yet -- SG-7 is making do with one of the floats when the mission actually requires her specialty. Lieutenant Timothy Shawcross has replaced Captain Sherwood; she meets him the first time she sits in on a briefing. Even if she can't go, she still needs to know what her team is doing. Shawcross is young, adorable, not fresh out of the Academy, but almost. He regards the entire idea of offworld travel with a combination of wide-eyed enthusiasm and steely patriotism that she's sure is going to get old really fast.

When they're introduced, he regards her with a kind of dubious awe, as if she's The Legendary Dr. Ballard.

She used to get that a lot -- The Legendary Dr. Jackson -- but she's gotten used to the idea of being incognito in the last several months, and now it's just unsettling. She did not, for crying out loud, hold off an entire contingent of Jaffa shock troops with a captured staff weapon (she's heard entertaining, if nearly-unrecognizable rumors about her last mission) so that SG-7 could make its escape. All she did was buy them a few seconds after Sherwood was hit to get through the Gate. Not that it did Sherwood any good.

But P3X-4259 seems to have made some peculiar difference to everybody here. It's as if she's crossed some invisible line and is somehow more here.

She doesn't know whether she likes that or not.

Sally Brightman stubbornly refuses to certify her for offworld until the burn is healed to her satisfaction. Dani splits her days between physical therapy, paperwork, playing catch with what the other teams bring in…

And a private research project.

As a member of an SG Team, she has clearance for a number of reports and files that she couldn't access as a mere member of Anthropology and Linguistics, and never thought she'd need when she was first searching for Daniel Jackson. Now she brings up everything she can find on naquaadriah explosive devices, plowing doggedly through the incomprehensible technical language. She wants information on core overloads and time to detonation, and can't tell whether it's there or not.

Home to the right time and place. That's the Furling's riddle. She's starting to think she may know what the answers are.

Home is her own universe.

The right time is before the Furlings begin their negotiations with General Hammond.

If she goes back to her own universe, she can't -- in the sense of mustn't -- go back to a point before the Furling removes her. Even if it's possible. But how long is it between the time the radiation became lethal in the lab on Kelowna -- and she was removed by the Furling -- and the time of the detonation of the bomb?

Is the right place Kelowna?

Is there a window of opportunity?

Where, exactly, were Jack, Sammy, and Teal'c that day?

Is there still a chance to save the rest of SG-1?

She sits back in her chair, dazed with the sheer insanity of what she's thinking. And the hope.

They're dead.

She accepts that they're dead.

"I do, Jack," she says aloud.

The ghost in her mind doesn't believe her. "You always were a stubborn pain in the butt," she says to him.

He doesn't argue with that. Being stubborn keeps you alive, he says.

"I know."

The point is that the Furlings have brought Fairy Gifts to her SGC, and General Hammond mustn't accept them. She has to warn him.

How?

If she goes to General Hammond-here with this, he will think she's snapped. Right now the information -- which is only a hypothesis on her part -- is useless, anyway. To do anything about it, she'd need a quantum mirror and a time machine. She doesn't have either one. And if she suggests that the first step to solving the Furling's riddle is going back to her Kelowna to rescue her SG-1…

She decides she won't tell anyone about this yet.

On her first mission after she's finally recertified, she sees that Shawcross is wearing a helmet. As she steps up to the foot of the ramp, Hightower hands her her quarterstaff.

"You'll be wanting this, Doctor."

She guesses Hell just froze over. "Thank you, Major."

It's now almost six months to the day since she's been marooned here.

"A-a-a-nd, we're back."

He must have just come through the Gate. She checks her watch. 2200. She should have gone home … oh, about five hours ago. From the smirk on his face, Daniel knows this already, and knew he'd find her in her office anyway.

"You really need to get a life," he says to her.

"Hey, your fish are alive. Don't push your luck." It's absurd how glad she is to see him.

"You know what I missed? Actual food."

The Tok'ra prefer concentrates. He'll have been living on MRE's. "Don't expect to find any in your refrigerator. I threw it out."

He sighs. "I'm going home. You should go home."

"Keys?" His spare keys are in her locker with her clothes.

"Tomorrow."

Their paths don't cross until lunch the next day, and by then, apparently, he's heard about P3X-4259. They share a table.

"I'm sorry about Captain Sherwood," he says.

"I ought to be used to this by now," she says without stopping to think. She never has to worry about what she says around Daniel. It's not like MacKenzie, where she has to guard every word. Or everyone else she works with, where she has to be careful to pretend to be … somebody else. Daniel knows exactly who she is. Still, he winces slightly.

"It doesn't get easier, though. Does it?"

She shakes her head. "I liked him. I think we'll beat Shawcross into submission soon, though."

'We.' Her team.

"Settling in with Major Hightower?"

"He just needed to get to know me."

Daniel smiles reminiscently. "He's probably afraid you'll shoot him if he says something you don't like."

"It's time he had an archaeologist who could fight back."

Major Hightower passes their table. "Doctor. Doctor. I'm certain it will come as a charming surprise to you, Dr. Ballard, to discover that we have a mission briefing at 1430. You'll want to be certain to pack your wooly stockings." He walks on.

"For a briefing?" she asks the empty air.

"Ah… I think you're going to Thule," Daniel says.

They're doing an entirely routine -- and mercifully quick -- survey of an ice world. It's named Thule -- Daniel tagged it after the initial MALP contact, and it's always nice to have a name instead of a string of letters and numbers. Dani thinks Thule could be particularly interesting because for some reason, they've always discovered a lot of Ancient artifacts on ice worlds. Either the Ancients liked ice or they had consistent bad luck predicting climate changes. They're all wearing their warmest Artic gear, but the mission is still only going to be two hours, and that's pushing it.

They don't find anything. She's arguing for an extended UAV survey as they head back to the Gate, but they're expensive, and there's no real reason to send one. Too many planets, never enough time.

But why put a Gate on a planet if there's nothing here and never was? Major Hightower agrees with that, at least enough to say she should include the question in her report, but neither of them thinks it will come to anything.

When they get back to the Gate, it doesn't work.

She dials Earth, the Alpha site, every address she can think of. Any place is better than here. It's high noon at what they think is local summer, and it's twenty below zero. The temperature will undoubtedly drop at night.

None of the addresses work. The DHD stays dark. They can't dial out. Nobody dials in, either.

Either Major Carter or Sammy would be taking the Gate apart to find out why while Teal'c managed to build a fire out of ice cubes. Allison isn't in Sammy's league -- she's a nuts-and-bolts jackleg engineer -- but she turns up the MALP's heating elements to keep them all warm while they wait to see if they're going to hear from the SGC. That runs its battery down fast, but at the moment, survival is more important. They have shelter halfs in their packs, but they're not enough to protect them in this weather.

After half an hour, Hightower orders them to find better shelter. The problem doesn't look like it's going to go away soon, and even with the MALP for heat they're going to die if they stay out here in the open.

Dani thinks there might be caves in the ice wall. It's the only geographical feature for miles, a sheer cliff rising straight up out of the ice. It's their only chance for shelter: they're standing on an ice mantle at least a hundred feet deep (and why isn't the Stargate buried?) but they have no way to cut blocks out of it to make a shelter.

The ice wall is three kilometers away.

They leave the MALP behind. It would slow them down far too much if they took it with them. Even so, it takes them an hour to get there, with the temperature dropping all the time. They're all freezing by now. Hypothermia isn't far off.

It takes another hour to find a fissure in the ice large enough to hold all of them. They go as far back as they can, block the opening with two of the shelter halfs. The temperature slowly rises to around freezing. They have rations for two days, a little Sterno, their blankets and their shelter halfs. Standard survival kit for a day, at most, in these conditions.

At night, the temperature outside drops fifty degrees.

Dani wants to go back and try the Gate again the next morning. Major Hightower overrules her, saying the best thing for all of them to do is sleep and conserve energy and body heat while they wait for rescue. They're all huddled up together -- she's the smallest, she loses body heat fastest. They've put her in the middle. When she wakes up later, Hightower is gone. Allison tells her he's gone to try the Gate.

When he gets back, he says he tried all six of the most likely addresses she'd tried the day before and the DHD didn't do so much as blink. A six klik walk in arctic conditions after spending the night in a below-freezing ice cave have taken their toll. He's cold and they can't warm him up. The four of them huddle against each other, too cold to talk. They've turned off three of the radios to conserve power. They try the fourth at two hour intervals. Nothing.

It's a long night.

Their Sterno runs out in the middle of the second day. That means no more water. They eat ice chipped from the walls. They've stretched their food as far as they could, but in an environment where calories mean the difference between life and death, excessive rationing could be tantamount to suicide. Major Hightower makes the call. Dani's glad it isn't her decision.

He's running a steady fever now, and Captain Shawcross has finally admitted to pain in his feet. She and Allison get him to take his boots off. He doesn't want to. They all know what they're going to find.

If it were warmer in here, Dani's sure she could smell the gangrene.

On the third morning, Allison insists on making another try for the Gate. If nothing else, she says, she can bring the MALP back, though it means spending longer out in the cold, because the MALP moves slowly. There should be enough battery power left even after moving it to heat water, and they can use it to block the cave entrance further, conserving warmth. They can't keep eating ice. It wastes body heat, and by now the Major is delirious. He won't eat the ice at all.

Hours pass. Allison doesn't come back. The MALP is slow, but not that slow.

Dani bullies Shawcross into coming out with her to look for Allison. He's vague and feverish, and partly she's afraid that if she leaves him behind he might simply wander off. He's too bright-eyed. Flushed. Blood poisoning. They've given him everything they have in their packs to try to slow it down, but Dani knows that what they have with them isn't enough. She held back some of the T3s for the Major, but there's no way to get him to swallow them now. She's debating giving them to Shawcross when they get back.

They reach the Gate. Allison is lying on the ground. Her body is covered with frost: it's too cold to snow here. Dani's fingers are too numb to feel for a pulse at her neck.

The MALP froze up; small wonder after three days in the Devil's Icebox. Dani can't get it to work. She dials the Gate, hoping. Still nothing.

They carry Allison back to the cave. Drag her really. Dani can't lift her by herself and Shawcross keeps stopping and staring out at the whiteness until she screams at him to move. But they get her back.

When Dani strips off her gloves, there are white patches on her fingers. She forces herself to take off her boots and pummel her feet until returning circulation is agony. But she's been in this situation before, when an energy blast to the Gate split SG-1 and dumped her and Jack at the second Gate in Antarctica. She got a crash course in Arctic survival then. She lived through that. They can all live through this if they just try.

It takes her a long time to admit to herself that Allison is dead. But at last she gives in and strips the body, covering the Major with Allison's parka and putting the rest of Allison's clothes on over her own. Nothing there will fit Shawcross, and if she keeps him between her and the Major he'll be warm enough.

Her tears -- what there are of them -- freeze on her face.

All night long the Major raves and mutters. His fever is probably enough to melt ice all by itself. Toward morning he finally shuts up and she can get some sleep. She's too exhausted to think straight. When she wakes up later, he's dead. She's too exhausted to care.

She redistributes the clothing again. Shawcross can wear the Major's equipment, and now they've got double blankets and shelter halves. And when Shawcross dies, I'll have everything, and I'll finally be warm.

She hates the fact that she's able to think that.

She's painfully thirsty. Her lips are bleeding, and her nose won't stop running. The last time she took her gloves off, her hands were a bloody mess as well. Chilblains, she thinks it is. The skin cracks open and bleeds from cold.

Shawcross doesn't look good. He lies in his blankets and stares, and it's hard to get his attention. Dani lies down beside him and puts her arms around him, and then describes the pornographic frescoes in the Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii to him in great detail.

But he doesn't respond to the sound of her voice.

She doesn't know how much time has passed. Shawcross is asleep and he won't wake up. She knows he's asleep, not dead, because his breathing is loud and hoarse.

She wants him awake.

She picks up the Major's weapon. She means to walk to the doorway of the cave, but instead she crawls. She's as light-headed as if she were drunk. Maybe the cold is freezing the oxygen out of the air. It seems reasonable.

It takes her several tries to set the P90 on 'Full Auto' but she finally manages it. The noise will wake up Shawcross, she thinks.

She fires the weapon across the ice.

She can barely hold onto it. Aiming is impossible, not that she's shooting anything. It bucks and sprays like a fire hose, exhausting 100 rounds within seconds. She drops the empty weapon on the ice, her ears ringing.

She crawls back inside. Shawcross is still asleep. "Okay," she mutters. "Okay."

Her mouth is full of blood.

"Egypt," she says aloud. She's an Egyptologist. It's never this cold in Egypt. Not even in Hell. She curls up next to Shawcross, pulling the blankets back over both of them.

I'll sleep for a little while, then I'll think of something else.

"Christopher! Christopher! Wake up!"

"That's Ballard. Where's Christopher?"

"Ballard! Dr. Ballard!"

"Shit. Jesus."

Someone is pulling her into a sitting position, holding a cup to her lips. It's hot -- too hot -- and the liquid inside burns her cracked lips like lemon juice poured over a cut.

"Drink this," someone says.

"Good thing the Major fired off that clip. We never would've found them this fast."

"Lucky guy." Another voice.

She gulps the liquid, gagging on it.

"We found Major Hightower."

"Captain? The Major's dead."

Hot sugar courses through her body. She can finally focus her eyes. The cave is full of people in parkas. She can't see much around them. The cup is refilled, put to her lips again. She wants to hold it herself but she can't move her arms. Her body aches as if she's been beaten.

"Lieutenant Shawcross!" someone is saying behind her.

"Gangrene," she manages to croak. "Frostbite."

"Dr. Ballard? Stay with me. I'm Captain LeBeau, SG-14. You said frostbite. Do you have frostbite?"

SG-14. The medical unit. Medics with guns. "Tim," she croaks.

"Dr. Connor! Ballard says Shawcross has frostbite. You have to drink all of this, Dr. Ballard. We're going to move you soon." There's a babble of voices echoing off the ice. She feels feverish. But there's something important she has to remember. "How … long?" she finally asks.

LeBeau knows what she's asking.

"Four days. The Gate system has been down for four days."

They call for more equipment, and finally the cave is warm enough for her to start shivering. She feels lucid but exhausted. They keep feeding her hot orange-flavored glucose as Dr. Connor works on Shawcross. Captain LeBeau keeps talking to her, keeping her awake, trying to get the story. She explains, wondering if they think she killed Allison and Emory for their clothes. I would not do that. I would never do that. I would not kill somebody for their clothes. She hopes she's speaking English. Sometimes she mixes up her languages when she's this tired. Captain LeBeau's first language was French. She can hear it in his voice. Is she speaking French?

"We went to go back and the Gate didn't work. None of the addresses worked. I couldn't fix it. Sammy could have fixed it, but I couldn't. Allison couldn't. Major Hightower went out the next day to check. I wanted to go, but he wouldn't let me. He was sick when he came back. Then Allison went--" When had Allison gone? She can't remember. "After our food ran out." Yes, that's it. When was that? "She didn't come back. Tim and I went to find her. We brought her back but she was dead." Was she? Had she died later? "Major Hightower died that night." She's sure of that. He and Allison died together. Had he loved Allison? Had he ever told her? "Can't do that," she mutters. "Fraternization."

"Doctor Ballard? Dana?"

No. That isn't my name. "Yes. I … yes." This has to be English. A mongrel dialect: Saxon sentence structure with Latin-derived grammar. English. "Tim was running a fever. We used up all our medical supplies on him." Did she give him the last of the T3s? Oh, god, she can't remember now.

"You're okay now, Dr. Ballard. You're going to be okay."

Some say the world will end in fire. Some say in ice. She doesn't tell LeBeau that. He wouldn't understand. Her world has already ended in fire. That's why she's so cold now.

SG-3 arrives with travoises to transport the living and the dead. She'd rather walk, but she can't. The wind is full of ice. They cover her in blankets. They're heavy.

"This is the last of the offworld teams," someone is saying as she's brought through the Gate. Her body is starting to itch, like sunburn, but she's too muffled up to scratch.

She wonders where her glasses are.

"Major, I don't want anything like this to ever happen again." General Hammond sounds utterly furious.

"Is she all right?"

She recognizes Daniel's voice but she can't turn her head to see him.

"She's alive," LeBeau says.

It's too much trouble to stay awake.