Chapter Text
“No regrets?” asked Sam, as she finished signing witness. She gathered the pages of the NDA together, tapped them once against the desk to even the edges of the stack, and stuck them in the file folder.
“Hell yeah. I’m not crazy, of course I wish...” Hardison trailed off, looking wistful. And very young. He was only twenty-five years old, Sam remembered. But then, with all the benefit of years more experience, Sam couldn’t say that she didn’t still feel a thrill every time she stepped through the Stargate. It had that effect on you. “I just... I wish it didn’t gotta be like this.”
Landry had killed Hardison’s deal as soon as Ford had offered a different one. Sam had protested—the kid was brilliant, with a natural knack for goa’uld programming unlike anyone else she’d ever seen—but Landry had held firm: if Hardison was loyal to his crew of criminals, then he would forever pose a security risk. And with his talents, any security risk was a massive security risk.
Sam couldn’t argue the latter. She wasn’t sure about the former.
“I wanted to,” Hardison said, and it sounded like a confession. “If it just meant leaving the team... I’d do it, I’d try it. But I can’t do it when it means leaving the team in a hole, you know? That’s not—that I can’t do.”
Sam thought about nine years of teamwork, crazy missions and crazier rescues, of knowing other people so closely you would step in front of a bullet for them, would count on them to step in front of a bullet for you. Nine years of never leaving anyone behind.
“I understand,” she said. “For what it’s worth... I’d think less of you if you had.”
He looked at her, startled.
She smiled and stood. “See you in a few years, maybe, Mr. Hardison.”
Teal’c ran across Mitchell standing in the hallway outside of Smithe-Patel’s cell, flipping through the pages of the NDA with a thoughtful look on his face.
“Is there a problem, Colonel Mitchell?”
“If none of these are her real name, is this still legally binding?”
Teal’c watched Spencer walk down the hall toward the elevator, escorted by a pair of Marines. Spencer was still in handcuffs; on Landry’s order, he’d remain that way until he was off NORAD property. Teal’c held no illusions that it would have prevented him from taking out his two guards, had it come to that. No, Spencer was held in check by the sheer number of armed military in this facility, and the very, very limited options he had for getting out. The security breach in the shaft had been sealed, and no amount of combat prowess would enable Spencer to punch through a blast door.
But, perhaps, he was also held in check by concern for his teammates. Teal’c could not be sure. His mannerisms seemed very much the same as those of the coldly collected monster Teal’c had met eight years ago.
Spencer nodded to him as he passed. There was neither diffidence nor disrespect in the action.
Teal’c watched him go, and hoped that General Landry was not making a grave mistake.
Mitchell stepped into Ford’s room, and was disconcerted to find Vala there before him, sitting across the table from him. Between them, the chessboard that Ford was so fond of lay open, a game in progress, although Mitchell couldn’t tell who was winning at first glance. He took a second, and frowned. He wasn’t sure that was actually chess.
“Well, well,” said Vala, sitting up and throwing Mitchell a wink. “Looks like your ride to a life of freedom is here.”
Ford raised his eyebrows slightly, looking between the two of them, and nodded. “Thank you, Ms. Mal Doran.”
“Please. I told you, it’s Vala.”
She rose smoothly, sashaying her way to the door. Mitchell paused her with a hand on her shoulder. “What,” he muttered, “was that about?”
“We’ve got similar interests, that’s all,” Vala said, voice low and amused. “Do you know, there are a number of fascinating aspects to your planet that Daniel’s never told me about? Or you, for that matter.”
Mitchell closed his eyes with a brief prayer for strength, and Vala slipped away. When he opened them again, Ford was studying him.
“Time to go,” said Mitchell, not bothering to conceal his weariness.
If Interpol’s file was right about Ford, it’d be a useless attempt, anyway.
Mitchell went in the car himself. They were dropping Ford at the Colorado Springs Airport—and he could have left it to the young airmen assigned to the vehicle, should have, maybe, but he found he wanted to see this was done. And, possibly, he was a little bit nervous about leaving those young airmen alone with Ford, or Ford’s people.
Teal’c came along, a comforting presence, at least until he started playing chess with Ford, which Ford somehow made seem a vaguely sinister activity. It turned out Ford’s dinky little chess set, along with being able to fold up, also had magnetic pieces: it’d been designed for travel, and it held up perfectly fine as the car wound its way down the mountain. Mitchell wondered who had given it to him, or if he’d just stolen it, though how he’d have managed to steal it under the noses of everybody who’d been watching him for the last couple days, Mitchell had no idea.
But then, he’d sat through all the interviews as each of the four thieves had explained exactly how they’d gotten into the base, and parts of that seemed pretty far-fetched, too.
And they still hadn’t found Parker, though Mitchell was favouring Walter’s theory that she’d escaped up the primary shaft.
Ford’s debriefing had taken an extra two days, because he’d insisted on confirmation that his team was free and clear before he’d been willing to go into any details about Ba’al or Bes. The deal Landry had cut had been solid: Ford had given them half a dozen safe-houses, and four times that many companies that Ba’al had been involved with in some way or another, complete with bank account numbers and passwords. They were going to be following up on those leads for months—but if they could finally root out Ba’al machinations on Earth, this whole embarrassing episode would be well worth the trouble.
When they pulled up at the airport curb, Spencer, Hardison, and Smithe-Patel—or whatever her real name was—were all waiting for them. Ford’s gaze became fixed out the window.
“Perhaps we can finish our game another time,” Teal’c said graciously, opening the door on his side.
“Yeah,” Ford said, distracted. “Yeah.” He snapped the board shut with one hand and stuck it in his coat pocket.
“Don’t say that,” Mitchell muttered to Teal’c, as he got out of the car himself. “Please don’t.”
Teal’c gave him an unreadable look as Ford stepped forward, slowly, toward the rest of his team. Forget chess, Mitchell thought—the man had a hell of a poker face. His teammates’ expressions were universally relief. The three of them stepped forward as one, and then Smithe-Patel-Whoever closed the distance between them and pulled him into a hug. He clung back to her like she was a rock, and the other three piled on, making it a group affair.
Wait.
Other three?
Mitchell blinked at the blond woman clinging to the rest of them. “Where did she come from?”
“I believe she may have been on the underside of our car.”
He turned to stare at Teal’c. “What?”
“It is merely a hypothesis,” said Teal’c, unperturbed, as the five thieves—or whatever they were—detangled themselves, and began to walk into the airport. Only Spencer looked back, and his eyes never met Mitchell’s. He wasn’t really looking back, Mitchell realized after a moment. Just around. Scanning for threats, while the rest of his team was distracted and caught up in giddy relief.
Mitchell rubbed his face. “Let’s go home.”
Boston, Nate’s Apartment
Later
“You’re sure they don’t have any bugs.”
“Yeah, man, I’m sure,” said Hardison. “I sweep this place daily.”
Nate stared at him, jaw working, and Hardison held up a hand to forestall him. “I swept it twenty minutes ago, Nate.”
Nate turned away and picked up his coffee cup, and yeah, that was a thing, too. Hardison would have expected the first thing Nate would want to do would be to bury himself in a bottle. Hell, if Hardison had had a giant alien snake living in his brain, the first thing he’d have wanted to do would be to get blackout drunk, once he’d finished curling up and screaming like a little girl. But Nate hadn’t drunk anything except coffee—at the airport, on the plane, again at the airport, at the apartment—and it was freaking Hardison out.
When Nate had had a giant alien snake curled up in his brain (ahhhh, went Hardison’s, considering it) he’d acted more like Nate. He’d been drinking and he’d been a bastard in all the usual Nate-ways, and Hardison hadn’t noticed. None of them had noticed. Hell, even Sophie hadn’t noticed, and she was supposed to be sleeping with the guy, and, y’know, the best of all of them at this.
Now that the brainsnake (ahhhh) was gone, Nate was acting weird.
“I owe you all an apology,” said Nate. Parker sprayed out her mouthful of popcorn. Hardison knocked over his bottle and nearly got orange soda all over his keyboard. He yelped, lifting his laptop out of the line of fire.
“Nate, it wasn’t your fault,” Sophie said, standing and abandoning her own snacks (Hardison’s snacks. She’d been stealing Hardison’s snacks, which was Red Flag Numero Uno that she was just as off-balance from this as Nate. But then, she had been sleeping with the giant alien brainsnake (ahhhhhhh) so Hardison figured she could have all the snacks she wanted.)
“No,” said Eliot. “No, that gloating thing you do? That’s risky, and that’s stupid, and that’s not happening again.”
Sophie glowered at him. “Eliot, that’s not fair—”
“And we’re all wearing cameras from now on,” said Eliot. “All of us. There could be more goa’uld on Earth—”
“Thank you, I was trying not to think about that,” Hardison said, a little shrilly.
“—and burying your head in the sand will help? Cameras,” Eliot repeated. “And we’re getting MRIs on the regular from now on.”
“That does make sense,” said Sophie.
“Yes. Yes it does,” said Nate, and they all exchanged an oh, shit, what’s up with Nate glance again, because that was definitely an I have a plan voice.
“At the end of the day all those reasons I gave you for breaking in to the SGC—”
“Reasons it gave us,” said Sophie, firmly. And then, more uncertain: “It was it, wasn’t it?”
“My plan, it... driving,” said Nate, and for a moment his face went blank in that particularly scary way, because that was Nate angry enough to dismantle someone down to constituent parts and leave the bloody pieces screaming in a pile behind him. “I—that’s the apology bit. It was my plan. But, you know, it wasn’t a bad plan.”
Sophie was looking at Nate too intently; she missed out on the next round of Jesus, Nate looks. It was Eliot who said, quietly, “Seriously, man?”
“We got caught,” said Parker, voice small.
“You got caught because you were betrayed,” said Nate, going over to his keurig and setting his mug in it. By Hardison’s count, that would make his fourth just since they’d got back. Dude was gonna give himself a stroke. “But you went in there—you went in there for good reasons. To save lives. Millions of lives. Lives that the SGC would let... slip away, because they’re more concerned with maintaining the illusion.”
“Nate,” said Sophie. “We can’t go back.”
“They know our faces,” said Eliot. “We told them how we beat them, it won’t work again. They won’t let us go a second time.”
“They don’t even have a sarcophagus,” said Hardison. “I mean—okay, Colonel Mitchell could’ve been lying when he told me that, but the dude seemed pretty frustrated at the time.”
“They don’t,” said Nate. “They’ve had at least two, at different points in time, but they managed to blow up or otherwise lose both.”
They all stared at him.
“Week-long debriefing, come on, you pick stuff up,” he said impatiently.
Eliot pointed at him. “You’re going for an MRI tomorrow.”
“Tonight,” said Parker.
“Whatever,” said Nate. “Listen to me. They don’t have a sarcophagus. But we do.”
The staring this time was more intense.
“No,” said Sophie.
“You didn’t really think I’d tell them about all of Bes’ caches, did you?” Nate circled the counter, smirking over the rim of his coffee cup.
“No,” Sophie repeated.
Hardison sputtered, “There could be alien brain-worms in there!”
“So we invest in chainmail. Look, I gave it to you as a two-stage plan: we find the sarcophagus, then we figure out a way to make sure it’s used for the public good. Stage one was a ruse but we did get a sarcophagus. Now—now, we figure out how to make it so the SGC can’t stop it from being researched.”
“They’ll be watching for us now,” said Sophie. “They’re going to be extra-aware of anyone who seems to be—to be working on alien technology—”
“So we vet and we plan very, very carefully. Maybe it takes a while. Maybe it takes years. We take as long as we need, this time.”
“That’s a change.”
Nate stared at her. Hardison could feel Eliot shifting beside him, tensing. “That,” said Nate, “was not me.”
Oh.
“I’m not out here to get us caught, guys. I know, this is—it’ll take time. But... eight years ago, the SGC—they had a sarcophagus. They had a machine that could produce miracles, and they let it get blown up. And then they got another, and—they lost that one, too. They’ve had their chances, and they don’t... it’s not a priority to them. It’s never been a priority to them. I wasn’t lying about that. They’re wrapped up in weapons, in defence, and—and maybe they do a good job at that, but that’s their entire focus. They’ve had a decade of the active program, and they’re still no closer to going public, to sharing any of this technology, than they were ten years ago. They’re too focused on keeping it secret, keeping the Earth... safe.”
He looked down at his coffee, staring into his mug as if it might hold answers. “But it’s not safe. That’s just an illusion to pacify the masses, one big lie. And in the meantime... people are dying. Adults. Kids. And they don’t see it.”
Slowly, Sophie asked, “What exactly are you suggesting?”
Nate’s smile was dark and razor-sharp. “Let’s go steal... a global conspiracy.”