Archive of Our Own ^beta

I popped out of the open wormhole like a third rate human cannonball at the circus and hit the ground rolling. That's the odd thing -- okay, one of the many odd things -- about the Gates. Sometimes you can walk through an open wormhole and step out the other side like you were walking from the lounge into the den. And sometimes it doesn't matter how hard you try, you lose your balance somewhere in transit, and you emerge with as much grace as last place in a junior ice-skating contest.

I think I flipped over about twice -- it couldn't have been more than that: I was wearing a pack, and that stopped the rolling within the space of a few bounces once I was on the ground which, incidentally, was hard and cold, thank you for asking. I lay on my side, mentally running through the satisfying list of obscenities I keep on hand for these occasions. When they were done, I made a brief pass through the reserve list too.

"Everyone okay?" I called out. The replies rang out in the darkness.

"Yes, sir."

"I am uninjured."

"I think I broke my glasses. Wait, no, I didn't."

That last was from Daniel, the best argument in favour of contact lenses you'll ever meet.

I sat up and felt around for my flashlight, which had easily survived the tumble and was still clipped to my belt. I unhooked it and flipped it on. Around me I could hear the clicks and grunts as the others did the same.

We'd had a good idea of the kind of environment we were Gating into, and we'd come prepared. SOP with Gate exploration was to send a remote unit, usually one of the MALPs, ahead of the field team. The MALP would take atmosphere and temperature readings and, if we were lucky, might send back visuals. In the case of our current destination, Carter had spent the best part of an afternoon puzzling over why the unit wasn't transmitting any pictures, and talking about wormhole instability and distorting gravitational fields until someone -- oh all right, me -- had pointed out that the reason could just be that it was in fact dark on the other side. Carter had at least had the good grace to look embarrassed over that one, and we'd fitted the MALP out with infrared and sent it back.

You have to remember that this was right at the beginning of the Stargate exploration programme, and we were all on a pretty steep learning curve.

I held up the torch and made a sweep of our surroundings, which confirmed the information the MALP had given us. We had arrived in a large cave whose black walls sparkled very slightly in the bright light, indicating, I guessed, some kind of mineral thread running through the rock. Water splashed down from a crack high in one sheer rock wall, filling a small pool in the most distant corner. A dark passageway at the far end of the cavern led presumably to the extended cave system.

The Gate at our backs and the DHD in front of us -- it stands for Dial Home Device (yes, I know it's a stupid acronym but I work for an organisation which calls a glorified Jeep a Highly Mobile Vehicle or Humvee so go easy on us) -- were the only apparent signs of civilisation. The cavern was unlit, undecorated, unoccupied and un- a lot of other things too. It was cold, dank and generally not a fun place to be.

Nevertheless, it was a first. It was SG-1's first exploratory mission as a working field unit, now that Teal'c was officially among our number. It was the first time people from Earth had been here. Probably, judging by the look of the place, the first time anyone had been here, full stop, for a very long time indeed.

Exploration, as I would gradually come to understand, has its good days and bad days, just like everything else. Sometimes you arrive through a Gate to meet sunshine and smiling natives who want to feed you and generally be nice to you, and sometimes you hit the galactic equivalent of a wet Tuesday night in Butthole, Arkansas. Nevertheless, we were pushing back the boundaries of human knowledge. As the saying has it, we were boldly going where no man, woman, archaeologist or genetically altered human had been before. I felt obliged to say something meaningful. Something significant.

"Well, this is a dump."

Yeah. That covered it nicely.

***

While Carter broke out her field kit and began to take samples of the local air, water and soil for later analysis, Teal'c stood watch and Daniel and I went exploring in search of evidence in his area of expertise -- that is, writings, symbols or other sorts of alien graffiti. Even at that early point, I didn't hold out much hope of finding any. When you've been on as many recon missions as I have, you start to develop a knack for knowing the difference between a permanently and a temporarily deserted location. I could tell already that PX-0005 fell firmly into the former category, even the air smelt dead and stale. If there ever had been natives here, I was confident that we hadn't simply turned up while they were out shopping at the neighbourhood Wal-Mart.

"Wait," said Daniel suddenly: "What's that?"

I shone my torch over the same patch of rock he was looking at, and frowned. "It's rock that's a slightly different colour to the rock over there."

"Oh." He sounded disappointed. "It is."

He looked crestfallen, and I felt sorry for him, in much the same way as I'd felt sorry for Carter when it had become clear that our very first venture into uncharted territory was going to result in absolutely no astounding discoveries whatsoever. It was pretty obvious that both the Captain and Daniel were more than a little disappointed that planet number one on our galactic visiting list wasn't everything it might have been. Carter wanted to push back the boundaries of science; Daniel wanted to find wherever the slugs had taken his wife.

I had a few reasons of my own for going Goa'uld-hunting, but it seemed fairly clear that everyone's favourite parasites had either long since been and gone from PX-0005 or had never arrived in the first place. Consequently my current mission objective was to make as short a sortie into this unfamiliar territory as guidelines permitted, and go home.

I had worked out what was still dawning on Carter and Daniel: we had got lucky on Abydos, when Ferretti had managed to stay conscious long enough to memorise the co-ordinates for Chu'lak. From now on we were on our own, punching in random destinations and seeing what was out there. The answer so far appeared to be, not much.

We walked on up the corridor, making a steady pace against the steep upward incline. "I don't understand," remarked Daniel, puffing slightly: "Why put a Gate on this planet if there's nothing here?"

I didn't know, and I didn't have much interest in finding out either, but Daniel warmed to his topic and for the next ten minutes I was treated to a monologue on the subject of possible Gate location strategies.

I had just about had enough when we reached the mouth of the tunnel and got our first good look at the surface.

Daniel's words died away on his lips. I didn't feel like saying much myself.

We had emerged on to a thin ledge at the entrance to the cave system. Even if we had wanted to look around more, we weren't going to be able to, because the ledge petered out several yards to either side, and where it ended at our toes there was nothing but a very, very steep drop. The only advantage of our position was that we were high up relative to the plains below, and had an excellent view of several hundred square miles worth of alien landscape.

PX-0005 was as desolate and ugly a wasteland as you could ever hope not to have to spend any time whatsoever on or near. Black dunes of powdery, dead soil filled the landscape from horizon to horizon, rippling in the harsh, hot breeze. The wind was picking up clouds of the foul material and throwing it up into the air, creating dark curtains which turned the light from this world's sun from bright golden warmth to a soupy orange-red hue.

"I'm building my holiday home right over there," I said, pointing.

"You were right," said Daniel flatly. "It is a dump."

He turned to head back into the mouth of the tunnel and back to the others.

What happened next was significant for two reasons, although I didn't know it at the time. Daniel slipped to one side and very nearly pitched forward off the lip of the precipice and down the nearly vertical side of the cliff below. I grabbed his arm just in time to stop him falling and pulled him upright with a massive sense of relief. I really didn't want to lose a man on our very first proper field excursion.

However, as I reached out for him, I counterbalanced myself by making a grab for the nearest handhold I could reach. It was a particularly jagged outcrop of rock, and I gave myself a nasty gash on the heel of my hand as I took hold of it.

"Are you okay?" I asked Daniel.

He nodded, grey-faced. "Yes. God. That was close."

I agreed, and pulled him up. And that, in a nutshell, was my introduction to Daniel's phenomenal capacity for getting himself injured, hurt, bruised and yes, even killed just about everywhere he went. It was also, although I had no way of knowing it as I examined my cut hand and winced, the beginning of my soon to be legendary reputation as SGC's resident damage magnet.

I was glad he hadn't fallen. I had already bought all the ingredients for the dinner I was planning to cook my new team that night, and I hate wasting food.

***

I was dicing beef into small chunks when the doorbell rang, and I had to grab a slice of kitchen towel and wipe my hands before answering it, cautiously avoiding the bright white bandage one of the base medics had placed on the cut I'd given myself. Our new project Doctor had apparently arrived at some point during the day, but I hadn't met her yet.

Daniel stood in the porch, wearing a sweatshirt and jeans which were so new the creases hadn't worn out of them yet and nervously jangling the keys to the Ford which gleamed in my driveway. The military is nothing if not efficient, and Hammond's exec, the ever-pleasant Major Samuels, had been highly efficient about rehabilitating Daniel into consumer society.

He held up a bottle. "I brought wine."

I would have preferred beer, but I thanked him anyway and took him inside. He sniffed the air appreciatively. "Smells good. What are we having?"

"Italian," I told him. "From an old family recipe, passed down through generations of O'Neills right back to the old country."

He looked at me. "O'Neill is an Irish name."

"Okay," I amended: "That branch of the family from Padua, Limerick."

He smiled, the first real smile I'd seen since we'd come back from Chu'lak and it had hit him that his wife was, in the meantime at least, gone, and I showed him through to the lounge. I had lingering reservations about the wisdom of what I was undertaking, but now I was committed, and I was determined to make the evening a success.

I had decided that SG-1 needed to bond.

When General Hammond initially offered me command of an SG team, the one proviso I made was that I got to choose my own people. In the tradition of fine military leaders throughout the ages, he completely ignored me, and through a mixture of Hammond's unerring human resource skills and a sequence of events much too complicated to go into here, I found myself leading an SG-1 which consisted of the three people I would have been least likely to pick myself.

There was Daniel, who by any reasonable standards should have been serving in a consultation capacity on the project's non-field staff, Carter, with whom I had singularly failed to get off on the right foot, on account of her interpreting my natural animosity towards scientists as a natural animosity towards officers in skirts, and Teal'c, who we'd just kind of picked up on the way and who no one, least of all me, really knew what to make of. And since it was probable that before very long each of us would be putting our safety very much in the hands of the others, I had come to the conclusion that we'd better damn well try to get to know each other a little better before the brown stuff hit the fan.

Ordinarily, I would have simply taken my new team out and got them all drunk. That had always worked before. This time it wasn't really an option. Teal'c had already made it clear than alcohol was a no-no on account of the puritanical little worm he carried in his gut, which seemed to have more dietary preferences than my diabetic Aunt Renee, and I already knew that Daniel had about as high a tolerance for alcohol as the average twelve year old girl. Carter didn't exactly strike me as the hard-drinking type either. So I had invited them all round for dinner, on the basis that an appreciation of O'Neill family cuisine is one of life's fundamental levelling experiences and that we needed to have some sort of common frame of reference outside work.

We were going to bond if it killed me.

"So what have you been doing for the past year?" Daniel asked me. I could see him prowling around my living room as I scraped chopped carrots into the pot and checked the pasta.

"Getting my head showered."

"Excuse me?"

Thank you Great Aunt Renee for an expression which never fails to confound the listener. "Taking an extended break," I elaborated. "Spending some time by myself. Working through stuff. All the usual cliches."

"Developing new interests?"

Daniel had stopped moving around, and I could tell that he had found my bookshelves. "That too."

"I wouldn't have had you figured for an astronomer."

"Contrary to what you may have heard around the base, I did graduate high school." I didn't mention the telescope on the roof. SG-1 already had two science geeks; we didn't need a third.

The doorbell rang again and I let Daniel get it. I heard him welcoming Carter and Teal'c in the hall and followed him out. Carter was wearing cords and a long sleeved top and would have passed easily as a civilian -- it might seem an odd thing to say, but a lot of career officers mysteriously lose the ability to look comfortable out of uniform after a certain point. I was glad Carter wasn't one of them, and mentally revised my opinion of her up a couple of notches. Teal'c, similarly attired, looked odd. Well, no, maybe he didn't. Maybe it was more the case that when you know someone's habitual day-wear has been until very recently chain mail and a helmet shaped like a giant snake's head, a pair of Levis are going to look weird on them no matter how good the fit. The hat which he was wearing to cover the tattoo or whatever it was on his forehead would not have looked out of place outside on this chilly Fall day. We were going to have trouble if we wanted to take him out places come the spring, though.

Meanwhile, I was displaying my white-hot fashion sense in the form of my apron, which was black and white checked and bore the legend Head Chef across the front. Carter looked at me with something between amusement and outright shock. "You're cooking," she said.

It seemed that I had a knack for amazing my new colleagues with my hidden talents. "I am reasonably domesticated," I told her, and took the apron off. As I went to hang it up, I saw Carter make similar motions with Teal'c's hat, casting about in the hall for somewhere to put it. She almost knocked over the photo I keep on the hall table of Sarah and Charlie, the one from his fifth birthday party. She straightened it, and then lifted it to take a closer look. I then watched her replace it, looking about my hall and obviously noticing the distinct lack of evidence of familial activity. Carter was smart. I felt mildly relieved that I wouldn't have to go through yet another round of awkward explanations.

"Dinner smells good," she said, this apparently being the compliment of choice tonight.

"Give it five minutes and it'll smell even better." I showed them into the living room and played dutiful host, opening the wine for Daniel and Carter, pouring a soda for Teal'c -- he eyed it doubtfully but I held my ground: he was in America now, he would just have to learn to like Coca Cola, and offered the nuts and potato chips around. This done, we sat and looked at each other.

We had, I realised suddenly, absolutely nothing to talk about outside of work. We were a soldier, a scientist, an archaeologist and a Jaffa (and SGC hadn't even come to a definite conclusion on how to spell that last one yet). We had completely different life experiences. We were variously divorced, single, separated (pending a swift reunion, hopefully) and God-knew-what. One of us had been on another planet for the past twelve months, and one of us wasn't even human, under the strictest definition of the term. What the hell were we going to talk about for the next four hours, if not work? Whose dumb idea had this been anyway?

Oh yeah. Mine.

"So," I said to Carter conversationally, giving up and breaking self-imposed rule number one: "Has the lab processed the results from the tests you did on PX-0005 yet?"

She gave me a look which was grateful in the extreme. "The first ones were coming through just as we were leaving. They weren't very interesting, though. The planet seems to be sterile."

Daniel took another handful of chips. However much he had settled on Abydos, he had obviously missed that staple of the civilised diet, snack food processed to within an inch of its life. "What, not even a microbe?"

"Doesn't look like it. The swabs I took from the caverns are all clean. And we didn't see any evidence of an extinct civilisation either. It looks like PX-0005 is just Mars with a higher surface temperature and a breathable atmosphere." She looked unhappy. "Frankly, I'm beginning to wonder if we haven't all been wildly over-optimistic about the potential of the Stargate project."

"What do you mean?"

"All the teams have been out once now, and none of the planets surveyed has been inhabited or even particularly different to Earth. The only major discovery we've made so far is that there are a lot of pine trees in the universe, which is bizarre but hardly worth several hundred thousand dollars a day." I nodded. I'd noticed the pine tree thing in the mission reports too. "We're like children playing with the telephone, dialling numbers at random and finding no one at home."

"But there are people out there," said Daniel. "We've seen them."

Teal'c agreed. "Many worlds have been touched by the Goa'uld."

"Yes," said Carter, "but how many is many? Hundreds of populated worlds would get lost like so many needles in a haystack if the Gate network consisted of thousands or tens of thousands of Gates. And it might very well do, we just don't know. We could do this for years and not get lucky again."

"Let's eat," I said, which wasn't the smoothest conversational switch I've ever accomplished, but which was a tactical necessity, judging from the nearly suicidal look on Daniel's face as Carter completed her "ten reasons to be miserable" speech. I could have shaken her.

I moved them over to the dining table and began to serve the food. It was, if I say so myself, a fine effort, although I did have family tradition on my side: Granny Fitzpatrick's recipes never fail to work (all right, so I was lying about the Italian connection). If you want the secret, and this is just about the only one I can give away without getting myself court-martialled, the key ingredient isn't the beef, but is in fact the fresh chorizo sausage. It's Spanish, which is how come you wouldn't expect it to pop up in an Italian dish. Buy it fresh, not cured, but if you have to use the cured version, only cook it for five minutes, maximum.

I had just finished serving Teal'c when a ping from the oven alerted me that the garlic bread was done. Carter offered to get it, and while she vanished into the kitchen, I spooned out the last of the beef and chorizo mixture on to my own plate.

"Enjoy," I said, and began to mill black pepper over the pasta. Which is why I wasn't looking when Daniel threw up.

Okay, he didn't technically throw up. Technically, he failed to swallow what he was chewing, and didn't make it to the door before he couldn't keep it in his mouth any more and had to spit it out before he really did vomit. One Daniel-sized mouthful of beef in spicy tomato sauce landed on my carpet and lay there, steaming slightly. A single fragment of chorizo sausage poked out forlornly from under a bay leaf.

"Well, gee," I said with sarcasm, "you might have mentioned being a vegetarian."

"I'm not," said Daniel, returning to the table and taking a drink of water, which he swilled around his mouth for a second before speeding in the direction of the kitchen. I looked at Teal'c, and saw that he was smelling the lump of food on the end of his fork with a certain trepidation. Realisation began to dawn. Cautiously, I dipped a finger in the sauce at the edge of my plate and licked it.

Urghh.

I reached for the water as quickly as was polite. Anything to wash the taste away.

Carter was standing in the doorway to the kitchen. I could hear Daniel hawking and spitting over the sink behind her. "Uh, sir..." she said.

I got up and followed her into the kitchen. She pointed at the remains of my preparatory work from earlier in the evening. It wasn't necessary. Even I could see that the beef which I had chopped but had not used was off. Very off. A thick layer of blue-tinged mould over all the meat and half of the chopping board is usually a good indicator in these matters.

"It was fine before," I said defensively, as if she had just accused me of trying to poison them all.

What the hell was going on?

***

Carter prodded my chopping board for some time, before pronouncing herself concerned that the lab results had been wrong and that we had in fact accidentally brought some hostile little bug back from PX-0005 with us. Dinner was cancelled, and we drove back from Fort Carson to the Cheyenne complex. Teal'c came with me, holding the offending chopping board and its cargo of spoiled animal flesh with what I took to be extreme distaste. He was probably wondering what kind of weirdoes he'd hooked up with, and mentally drafting a letter of apology to Apophis.

The SGC was a twenty-four hour operation, but the laboratories weren't, at least not then, and the various biologists, biochemists and suchlike had all gone home for the night. The only person we could find was our new project Doctor, who had arrived sometime after I'd had my hand dressed and who was busily arranging the infirmary office to her satisfaction.

"Hi," she said cheerily, "Janet Frasier. Can I help you?"

"How are you on moulds?" asked Carter without preamble, holding out the remnants of my cooking like it was a biohazard.

Frasier looked at us. "Moulds are good," she said cautiously.

"No," I corrected. "Moulds are not good."

"Okay. Not good." Her expression was somewhat confused, and I recalled that we were all out of uniform. "And you people are...?"

"We're SG-1," I said.

"Aha," said Frasier, like that explained a lot.

And we'd only been working together for less than a month.

***

While Carter and Frasier pored over a variety of stupefyingly dull mould-related books, I maintained the evening's Italian theme and ordered a take away pizza. That's not as difficult to do from a top secret government installation as you might think. Generally the best approach is to have the delivery boy leave it at the gatehouse, then go up to where you have to change elevators to leave NORAD and get into SGC, at sub-level eleven, where one of the guys on gate duty (small "g") will bring it down to you. It's a great way to avoid having to tip, and the only downside is that Cheyenne is sufficiently distant from Colorado Springs that the pizza is invariably cold when it arrives.

I was really hungry, and was slightly peeved at the way Daniel wolfed down more than his fair share of the ham and pineapple deep pan. Pizza had obviously been one of the other things he'd missed while he'd been away.

"If you'd like coffee, help yourselves," said Frasier.

Now that was the best idea I'd heard all night. I found the kettle and mugs without difficulty, but the coffee itself, not to mention the milk, proved trickier to locate.

"Wait," said Frasier, "I'd better get that." She went to a cupboard behind the desk and lifted down a sealed jar, whose label read Sodium Nitrate. Opening it, she spooned brown powder into the cups, not looking up and therefore not seeing my dubious expression. The next jar she lifted was marked Danger! Toxic!

"Sugar?"

No one wanted sugar.

"I'm never letting you cook for me," I told her, and Daniel raised an eyebrow in a manner which suggested that he was having exactly the same feelings at that precise moment. He reached for the last slice of pizza.

Frasier smiled. "I used to work with grad students. You learn to guard the coffee. The milk's in the specimen fridge, Colonel."

I retrieved the milk, the refrigerator was brand new and had not yet been used for its true calling, and made the coffee. I gave Teal'c half a cup, and I was in the middle of explaining to him the role of coffee as our society's sacred, life-restoring elixir, when Frasier made a gargling, choking noise and spat her life-restoring elixir into the nearest sink.

This was becoming monotonous.

I lifted her cup, and grimaced at the white lumps floating like dandruff in the dark liquid. "The milk's off."

"Can't be," said Frasier. "I bought it on the way in, and it's been in the fridge all day."

"Mine's fi--," began Carter. "Oh. No it's not."

I lifted the milk carton and tipped it experimentally over the sink. What came out bore more than a passing resemblance to yoghurt. And it smelt rancid.

"Keep a sample of that," said the Doctor. "I want to take a look at it."

"D'you think it's related to the meat?" asked Daniel through the last of the pizza. Oh fine. My home cooking made him nauseous, but slimy cold takeaway was putting up no resistance whatsoever.

"It's certainly a little strange," said Carter: "I mean, twice in one evening."

I was about to make the case for the power of coincidence, but when I opened my mouth to speak nothing came out. The reason was the white-hot stab of pain which had suddenly shot through my stomach like lava through an ice floe. I felt like John Hurt in the first Alien movie -- I swear I could feel the pizza making a break for freedom through my stomach lining. I gasped, more out of surprise at the intensity of the pain than anything else, and slid ungraciously to the floor.

"Jack?" said Daniel.

"Oh God," I managed, "I feel, I'm going to be --"

And then, instead of saying the word "sick", I did it. Copiously and messily, all over Dr Frasier's pristine new infirmary. After the first couple of heaves, Carter and Frasier helped me to my feet and held me over the sink, which must have been wondering what it had done to deserve this, while I retched and retched. The violence of the first wave receded after I'd transferred the contents of my stomach from the inside of my body to the external environment, and I was just beginning to feel very slightly better when I made the mistake of opening my eyes and saw a lump of pineapple floating in the metal basin. That set it off again, and by the time I had finally finished, my stomach muscles ached and I was shaking like I'd suddenly developed Parkinson's.

"It's all right," Frasier was saying. "It's all over now. All over."

They helped me to one of the ward beds, and I sipped the glass of water Daniel fetched, feeling fragile.

"Oh God," I said when I could speak again. "Food poisoning. What a perfect end to the evening."

"Umm," said Daniel, in that really annoying tone he gets when he's right and doesn't want to be too obvious about it: "We're all fine."

I looked at him, and suddenly realised that I had chopped the meat, and poured the milk. I could tell from the expressions on the faces around me that Frasier and the rest of my new colleagues were thinking much the same thing. It was at that point that I began to suspect that I might have more of a problem than a simple failed dinner party come bonding session.

"I think you'd better stay in overnight," said Frasier. "Just in case."

"Right," I said thickly. I wanted to go home, but I felt far too grim to argue.

The Doctor gave me a comradely pat on the shoulder. "Congratulations, Colonel. You're my first patient here."

And that made me feel so much better.

***

I slept, and woke up feeling not so much hungry as empty.

I rolled over in the bed and found my watch sitting on the bedside locker where I had taken it off the night before. It was just after eight a.m., probably the most civilised time to get up at and the time I had become accustomed to during my extended career break. But I was back in the military now, which meant I'd better get used to keeping odd hours again.

I could hear the murmurings of a conversation coming from Frasier's office. I got up and staggered in that general direction, noting how the smell of half-digested pizza had been ineffectively masked by the smell of extra-strength disinfectant.

"...noticed it in the shower this morning," Carter was saying.

"Yes," said the Doctor, rolling up the sleeve of her lab coat. "It is the same thing."

"Comparing tattoos?" I asked brightly. I nearly added, "...ladies," but thought better of it at the last minute. I didn't know what Frasier's sense of humour was like, but I'd already had one run in with Carter over gender issues and didn't intend to repeat the experience.

"Comparing rashes," said Frasier, and held up her arm to the light. Her left arm was mottled and blotched with an ugly red scale which looked painful. Carter was wearing a T-shirt, and I could see that she had the same complaint on her right arm.

Hold on a minute. Hadn't Carter held me up on the left side while I had thrown up the previous evening, and Frasier on the right? I didn't like that thought at all.

"How are you feeling this morning, sir?" enquired Carter.

I shrugged. "Good, I think. I'm hungry."

Carter frowned. "The canteen isn't up and running yet. We could send someone up to NORAD, I guess..."

"Hold on," said Frasier, digging around in her bag and pulling out a tupperware container. She levered it open and I caught a glimpse of plastic-wrapped sandwiches and a chocolate bar. Cute. Resealing her lunch, she straightened up and threw me a yellow-green, slightly under-ripe banana. "Eat it slowly," she advised. "I'd rather not have to clean up the floor again." And with that she disappeared off into the ward.

I leaned against the bench opposite Carter, absently turning breakfast over in my hands. She rubbed at the rash on her arm. "I guess we did bring something back," I said.

"That's the weird thing," she said: "All the evidence is that we didn't."

I looked at her, and she continued: "The mould on the meat was Cladosporium."

"Oh," I said knowingly: "Cladosporium."

"It's very common," explained Carter, seeing through my apparently not particularly convincing deception. She held up her arm: "So is this, and so was the bacteria growing in the milk. There's nothing alien about what's happening, what's strange is the speed at which it occurred in each instance. There must be some common vector at work."

She turned around to lift one of the very boring mould books from the night before, presumably with the intention of trying to extend my education a little, and I started to peel my banana. Or tried to.

"Hey, Carter," I said slowly: "Can I ask you a scientific-type question?"

"Uhh, yes, sir. Of course."

I held up the brown, shrivelled fruit in the air between us, and attempted to sound calmer than I felt.

"Would you say that's normal?"

We'd found our vector.

I was it.

We, or more precisely I, had a problem, the problem being that anything organic which I touched rapidly spoiled, decayed or exploded with furry blue spots, depending on its mood.

A number of small experiments quickly established a few fundamentals. Number one was, I was fine. There was nothing growing on me, I didn't have so much as athlete's foot. The same could not be said for anyone I'd gotten tactile with recently, and both the Doctor and Carter needed anti-fungal creams for their rashes. Frasier had to put on two pairs of gloves while she examined me.

For once, I was actually glad that my sex life had taken such a downturn since the divorce.

Observation number two was more worrisome. It took less time for anything edible to degrade at my touch than it did for me to chew and swallow it. We tried a number of different tactics, first with Frasier spoon-feeding me to minimise physical contact, just like I had used to feed my kid when he was in his high chair, and when that didn't work we substituted fresh food with alternatives which didn't spoil so easily. I ate the candy bar from Frasier's lunch, and kept it down for, oh, at least fifteen minutes before it returned for an encore.

Breakfast was going to be way trickier than I had originally thought.

Tap water became cloudy with algal blooms after the first few sips, but distilled water held out better. Black coffee lasted pretty well too. I hate black coffee.

Carter drifted in and out all morning, usually with at least two of the lab geeks trailing behind her. Hammond arrived about ten, and I gave him a quick demonstration of my new-found super-powers. Daniel and Teal'c were rounded up, and Frasier ran a few tests on them too, just for form's sake, but it was fairly evident that the rest of the newly-created SG-1 was just hunky-dory, thank you.

Except for me, and no one had a clue in hell what was up with my metabolism.

Obviously the cut on my hand, and the possible exposure to some biological hazard on PX-0005 it could have allowed, was the focus of most of the investigations, but that was all we had to go on, and it wasn't much. Carter ran a repeat analysis of the substances she had brought back the previous day, and turned up something the first tests had missed: the rock and the water from PX-0005 were threaded through with tiny filaments which looked like macaroni but which were, she assured me, fragments of fossilised DNA. I was about to inform her of my distinct lack of interest in ten-thousand year old alien toenail clippings when she silenced me by switching the image to one of my most recent blood samples.

The picture was grainy, but the Captain helpfully pointed out how the half-complete strands of alien proteins were zipping about like itty-bitty heat seeker missiles, locating and latching on to the sterling examples of fine American, true-blue O'Neill DNA floating defenceless in my cells. I wanted to line my white corpuscles up and tell the little suckers to quit lounging about and start doing their job, but short of yelling down the microscope lens, I wasn't sure how I was going to get them to listen.

"It's incredible," breathed Carter: "The DNA fragments in my samples are still dormant, but the ones which entered your bloodstream through the cut on your hand are active and doing -- this." She trailed off, and looked at me with something near awe. "This is a whole new branch of genetics."

Great. It seemed that on top of all my other problems, Biology majors with approaching mid-terms were going to be cursing my name a few years hence. "As fascinating as this is, Captain," I said irritably, "I'd be more interested in hearing what we're going to do about it."

She turned off the image on the VDU. "Well, we're, ahh, still working on that, sir."

What she was trying to avoid saying out loud was that although we had a fair idea why I was suddenly a public health inspector's nightmare, we didn't know how it was happening or, more importantly, how to correct it. And I didn't have time to wait around while Carter and company developed a new branch of science on my account.

I was starting to get seriously unnerved.

Don't get me wrong. I don't scare easily. I'd had, up to that point, a long career which had involved more than the average citizen's exposure to dangerous situations. But until now, they had all been dangers I could get my head around. Iraqi prisons and really pissed soon-to-be unemployed KGB operatives had been comprehensible threats. Even my initial experience of the Gates and that first trip to Abydos had basically been nothing more than a rather unique military confrontation. This was in a whole new league. I had been to another planet, it had screwed me up somehow, and we didn't know what we were going to do about it.

I realised, probably for the first time, just how deep in over our heads we were with the Stargates.

Too late now.

***

The syringe sat on the table between myself and Frasier. "You want me to talk you through it again?" she asked.

I shook my head. As the day had worn on, what was now being tactfully referred to as my "condition" had worsened. The first thing I had noticed was that my watch had stopped, just after midday. Then Frasier pointed out that my clothes were looking somewhat the worse for wear, and not just because they were the same ones I had been wearing the night before.

It appeared that my party trick was extending itself to substances other than foods and liquids. I could now rust metal and warp plastic, and cause paper to yellow and blacken as if it had been left in the sun for several years. I was more than a little sad to see my favourite pair of jeans bundled into a bright yellow bag and taken away for incineration, but at least the fresh uniform I was given wasn't rotting and falling into holes. Yet.

The gloves which Frasier had been using to protect herself from me simply weren't lasting long enough to do the job any more, so the latest round of blood samples were going to be my solo project.

I really don't like needles.

I lifted the syringe and pushed it into my forearm as Frasier had demonstrated to me, as quickly as I could. I pulled up on the plunger.

"Oww," I said. "Oww, oww, oww."

I withdrew the needle and quickly placed the full syringe back on to the centre of the table. The tip was brown-red with rust.

"We'll need a few more syringes," said Frasier. "We'll just repeat until I have enough samples to...."

The plastic bore of the syringe buckled and burst, and my blood spilled out on to the wooden table top. It didn't lie there for long, though: within a couple of seconds, the wood was blackening and perishing as it absorbed the liquid.

Frasier and I watched the whole process. When it was finished, I looked her in the eye, daring her to say anything reassuring, cheerful or positive. If she did, I might be forced to kill her.

"All right," she said quietly: "That was bad."

"Y'know," I said to her: "It's probably not too late for you to transfer out of here."

She gave me a small smile. "Colonel, I knew what I was getting myself into when I accepted this posting."

"I doubt that," I said. "I didn't."

She shrugged. "Okay. I didn't. But I'm here now, and I'm not going anywhere."

I decided I liked Janet Frasier. A lot.

"Colonel."

I looked up in time to see Carter, Daniel and Teal'c come into the infirmary, evidently having just got back from the return trip to PX-0005. It was a risk, and one which Hammond had tried to minimise by insisting that they go over in full environmental isolation suits, passing through a hastily constructed decon chamber on the passage out and back. I knew why the measures were being taken, but didn't see the point: every swab and sample we had brought back from the planet only served to confirm that it was completely without even the most microscopic form of life. And, while the DNA fragments which had made it into my bloodstream were having the time of their lives, their more staid cousins in the other samples remained boringly inert.

"Hey," I said. "How'd you cope without me?"

"Oh, we muddled through somehow," said Daniel.

"Find anything?"

"We took some more rock and soil samples," said Carter. "We'll know when the lab runs through the next batch of tests." So that was a no, then.

Frasier carefully lifted the ruined syringe and excused herself while she went to dispose of it and presumably locate something a little more sturdy for the next round of extractions. The infirmary ward was empty apart from me -- we had nine four-man teams, and I was the only person to have done something sufficiently grave to myself to warrant hospitalisation so far -- and my three visitors.

"Guess I should apologise for dinner."

Daniel shrugged. "You can make it up to us. We'll go out some time."

I nodded, like I really thought that was going to happen, and we stood around for a few more minutes, awkwardly. Then Carter took a step backwards, towards the door.

"You're going?" I said. It came out sounding, well, to tell you the truth, I'm not sure how it came out sounding. In my head, I asked the question in my usual calm, measured demeanour. I suspect that in reality it came out a little more lost and desperate than my memory has chosen to record.

Carter looked at Teal'c and Daniel. She yawned.

"You're tired," said Daniel, bang on cue. "You shouldn't drive home right now."

"Maybe I will stay," she said, making a decent stab at feigning capitulation.

"I too will remain," said Teal'c, which was less subtle, but made the point.

My team was okay.

***

They stayed, and we -- there's no other phrase for it -- hung out.

If I'd thought about it, I might have realised that Daniel, Carter and Teal'c probably all had better things to do than sit around in an empty hospital ward killing time with the most dangerous biohazard within a hundred mile radius. I didn't think about it, and so contented myself with feeling profoundly grateful to them that I wasn't in this by myself.

Now that sharing a meal was out, we sat around engaging in the only communal activity still available to me: drinking coffee. This time it was black for everyone (except Teal'c, who stuck to water -- I think his experience the previous evening must have put him off, which was a shame) due to the fact that my destructive abilities now seemed to extend beyond my fingertips, with the result that I could curdle milk at several paces.

I discovered that there are a lot of things which four people with absolutely nothing in common can talk about, after all.

Daniel got the ball rolling with a couple of really pretty funny anecdotes concerning life on Abydos, and his attempts to adjust to it. My initial suspicions concerning his ability to attract physical danger were confirmed as he described how he had nearly killed himself about half a dozen times in his first months there, in a variety of interesting and unusual ways. There was the time he had gone out exploring and got lost in the desert, followed by the time he had fallen off one of those ripe-smelling pack animals the Abydonians used for transportation while the village boys were trying to teach him to ride it, and not forgetting of course the time he had contracted the worst bout of dysentery he had ever experienced. I think he was trying, in his own way, to make me feel better.

He was also telling me something else, although I guess he didn't know it. His deep affection for his adopted home and its inhabitants came through in every sentence he spoke. I recalled the way the natives on Abydos had reacted when he had told them he would have to leave to look for his wife, the way they had gathered round and reached out to touch him, to make a final gentle contact before he vanished, literally, from their lives.

I'd read the personal file on Daniel at the time of the original mission. I knew he had no family, and I guessed that before Abydos he'd probably been so absorbed in his work that his relationships were pretty insubstantial as well. He had made the transition from isolated academic to husband, son-in-law and generally highly valued member of the community remarkably smoothly. It was quite an achievement. And now he wasn't just missing his wife, he was missing the life he had probably just been beginning to enjoy.

I wasn't the only person who had lost a family in the recent past.

Carter was fascinated by Daniel's experiences on Abydos, although the kind of questions she asked him were exceptionally dull ones, like, how long were the days? And, how had he gone about decoding the star map he had found? To get the conversation moving again, I asked her about her work on the Stargate project at the Pentagon.

I had been meaning to for a while, as she had said at the first briefing with Hammond that she'd been involved with the Stargate project for two years, and I had been surprised I hadn't met her at the time of the original mission. It emerged that she'd been in Egypt a few months prior to it, following up on a second object which had been recovered at the site which had coughed up the Stargate. The artifact had been just another lump of rock, and Carter had contracted malaria for her troubles. She had been in hospital while Daniel and I were getting to know Ra. She must have been pissed about that.

I said as much, and she replied that there had been times during those two years when she had been a whole lot more pissed. She had spent most of that time lobbying various decision makers, trying to keep the whole project alive. In the year before we successfully went to Abydos, she was trying to get funding for a scientific experiment which no one believed would work, and then after Abydos she still had to fight for the money, because everybody knew the Gate worked but couldn't see any point in going back.

Midway through this, she mentioned quite casually that one of the politicians she had talked to had promised her full funding, no questions asked, if she would sleep with him. She had refused, and the Gate project's funding had been cut to within fifty cents of viability. She told us this like it was irritating but nothing special, as if it had happened more than once.

I think Daniel was shocked. I wasn't, but suddenly Captain Carter's prickliness was a whole lot more understandable.

I swilled my cooling black coffee, trying not to pay attention to the way the plastic around the rim of the cup was beginning to yellow and flake at the onslaught it was receiving from my saliva, and idly complained that I was missing a really good hockey game on cable. The Black Hawks, my home team, were playing the Detroit Red Wings and I'd been looking forward to taking the phone off the hook and collapsing on to the couch with a cold beer. Although right now I probably didn't need to buy the beer, all I would have to do would be mix the sugar, water and hops and ferment it myself.

"Hockey?" asked Teal'c.

"Ice hockey," said Carter. "It's a sport."

"It's not a sport," I corrected: "It's the sport. Hockey is... hockey is a metaphor for life, Teal'c. It's about speed and strength and grace, about keeping your balance when you're getting beat up on all sides, knowing when to barge on through and when to step aside, when to use skill and when to use brute force." Wow. Yeah. I nodded to myself. That had been pretty good, even for me. "Didn't you play sports on Chulak?"

"We did. We played a'tal-ha-ne." At least, I think that's what he called it. I didn't quite follow all the rules which he proceeded to outline to us, but if I tell you that the final day in the annual competition the folks back home held was divided equally between prize giving and funerals, you'll get the general idea. I swear Daniel had gone several shades paler by the time he'd finished.

"This weekend," I promised Teal'c, "I am introducing you to the thrills of NHL." And right as I said it, the plastic cup I was holding disintegrated in my hands, allowing the dregs of my cold coffee to soak into the already musty, fading fabric of my shirt.

"I'll get you another, sir --" began Carter, and I started to tell her that wasn't necessary, but my words were drowned out by the siren which had suddenly started.

"What's that?" asked Daniel, raising his voice over the incessant wail.

"Red alert," I shouted back. I was half way to the phone to call the control room downstairs when I remembered that it wouldn't work for long enough in my hands to get the necessary information. I stood to one side and allowed Carter to make the call.

"This is Captain Carter," she yelled into the receiver. "What's happening?" She listened, frowned, and put one hand over her free ear. "You'll have to speak up, I can't hear you...."

Well that was one for the suggestion box. We had an alert system which made finding out what the alert was about impossible. I found the speaker set into the ward wall which was throwing out the racket and put my hand over it. After less than thirty seconds it succumbed to the inevitable and crackled into lifelessness. At least I was still useful for something.

Carter looked at me with gratitude and finished her conversation. "Yes. I see. Okay, don't touch anything." Now there was a motto for the day. "Try a nitrogen flush. Right." She put the handset down.

"Captain?"

"The cooling system sprung a leak. It's not too serious, but the chemicals are toxic, that's what set the alarms off. The Gate level will be off limits for a couple of hours, but it should be all right."

"Sprung a leak?" repeated Daniel.

She shrugged. "We're still getting set up, remember. It's probably just teething troubles."

"Or not," I said.

I hate having a suspicious, doubtful mind, but I've spent long enough in covert ops that it's second nature. Right now the person I was feeling suspicious and doubtful about was me.

Carter looked me in the eye for several long seconds, then shifted her gaze to the infirmary floor. "The main duct runs right under here. But it would be at least a couple of metres below us. So far it's only been things you've touched, or at least been very close to...."

"So far," I said. But then, I was coming on by leaps and bounds.

Carter was scanning the walls as if she had X-ray vision, and I realised she was trying to work out which other essential services I might potentially have disrupted. Actually, X-ray vision would have been a more normal explanation than the alternative, which was that she had, at some point in the past month, sat down and committed SGC's wiring plans to memory. If I came through this, I was going to make sure she got out more.

"Oh hell," she said faintly.

"What?" asked Daniel.

Carter pointed at one corner of the ward. "There's a tunnel behind there which carries the main link between our computer system and NORAD's. Colonel, if NORAD's systems were seriously disrupted...."

She didn't have to carry that thought any further. I had no intention of being remembered as the man who accidentally started a thermonuclear war. And just when the global village had been getting along so swimmingly too. I made for the door.

"Where's safe?" I asked.

The others followed me, Carter looking around herself with an air of increasing desperation. "Down here? Nowhere. There's wiring, cable everywhere...."

We were in the hallway now, where the alarms resounded as loudly as ever, not having had the misfortune of a close encounter of the me kind. The only thing below us was the Gate level, in the deepest section of the SGC, and the atmosphere there was somewhat frigid at the moment. Staying where I was was no longer an option. "Up it is, then," I decided, and we headed in the direction of the elevators.

I let Daniel call a car -- I couldn't imagine the keypad holding out against my touch for long enough to register the summons -- and waited the age it took to arrive, flanked by Daniel, Carter and Teal'c. I would have liked to believe that they were protecting me from the environment: I think the truth is more likely that they were protecting the environment from me.

The doors slid open, and I started to have second thoughts about the wisdom of this mode of transportation to the surface. If I could reduce a plastic beaker to dust, what chance did several thousand dollars' worth of metal and technology have?

But it was the fastest way out.

We got in, and Carter hit the button. The doors shut, the alarms faded, and I breathed a sigh of relief. I stretched out a hand and supported myself against the inside of the elevator, and shut my eyes.

"Jack," said Daniel.

I opened my eyes, and registered with bleak, bitter disgust the handprint of rust spreading out from under my fingers.

I took up a position in the centre of the car, hands at my sides, feet close together. The others stood as far away as was both polite and possible. I suspected that anyone who came into direct physical contact with me now would get more than a nasty rash.

We reached sub-level eleven and changed elevators, ignoring the startled marine who was on guard duty. The second part of the ascent would not take as long; we had made it this far, we should be all right now...."

There was a clank, and the lift jolted to an abrupt halt. Then it fell rapidly for a couple of feet before coming to a shrieking, shuddering stop.

Daniel looked around anxiously. "What was that?"

"The cable must have snapped," said Carter. Then, more reassuringly, she added: "It's okay, there are rubber stops below us. The car won't fall."

I checked the display panel on the inside of the doors: we were just one level below the surface. The elevator had a hatch in its roof for easy maintenance access. All we had to do was climb out and up.

I reached up and banged on the hatch, which loosened and fell inwards much more easily than the designers could have intended.

The elevator car shuddered again, and slipped downwards several more inches.

"What the hell --" said Carter. I was ahead of her on that one. Rubber didn't like me any more than metal, plastic, food or flesh. The stops holding us up weren't going to last much longer.

We had a dilemma. If I climbed out first, there was a chance that I would render the service ladder unsafe for the others as they came behind me. On the other hand, if I waited while they went ahead, it was equally possible that I would cause the elevator to fall all the way to the bottom of the shaft before we all had time to get out.

I'll have door number two, please, Bob.

"Daniel," I said: "You first. Go. Now."

"But --" he began.

"Move!" I barked. He moved. I couldn't help him as he struggled to make it out of the service hatch in the ceiling, but Carter and Teal'c did a pretty good job between them. I waved Carter through next, then Teal'c.

Then I climbed up and through myself.

I knelt on top of the elevator car, watching the others ascend ahead of me. I wanted there to be some distance between them and me before I got on to the service ladder as well.

Beneath me, the elevator car trembled and sank a little more. I kept perfectly still. If it would only hold for a few more seconds....

It didn't. It fell away from under me, and I made a desperate leap for the lowest rung of the ladder.

I almost made it.

I caught the metal frame and swung there in an ungainly manner while the elevator car whistled through the darkness below me and reached the end of its journey with a distant whump.

Daniel, Carter and Teal'c froze.

"It's all right," I called, which was possibly the least convincing thing I'd said lately. "Keep climbing."

Daniel and Carter cautiously began to move once more. Teal'c, directly above me, hesitated.

I could feel the metal bar I was holding on to beginning to warp and rupture under my hands. There was a high-pitched creak, closely followed by that shrieking noise which metal makes when it has reached the limits of its tolerance.

Carter must have guessed what was happening. "Colonel!" she shouted from above: "Hold on. We'll come back down...."

"You will not come back down, Captain!" I yelled back. "That is an order!" The only coherent thought running through my head was that they had to get up to the surface and off that ladder as fast as possible.

I wasn't going to make it, but that was a given.

The ladder rung which I was gripping twisted and cracked. It would only hold a few more seconds.

"Climb!" I ordered. "Keep climbing!"

The metal bar broke. I began to fall.

And Teal'c, who had not at any point recommenced the climb since the car had fallen, reached down and grabbed hold of my arm.

He caught me. I gasped at the sudden jerk which nearly dislocated my shoulder. Teal'c, however, got the worse side of the deal. He made a noise which I hadn't even known was in his repertoire, a kind of strangled grunt, and pulled me up, supporting all my weight until I found a foothold on the shaft wall.

I broke contact with him as soon as I could. It was precious little, but it was all I could do.

"Are you all right?" I asked.

"I will be..." he said slowly, "...all right."

Future tense, I noted. Nothing about how he was feeling now. For someone who'd only been using English for a couple of weeks, he was doing well at picking up the nuances of the language.

We completed the climb to the world above in silence, and I had nothing to do except watch Teal'c steadily scaling the rungs above me, using one arm only while the other, which even in the dimness I could see was slick with blood and damaged flesh, hung uselessly at his side.

***

I lay on the damp dying grass on the side of Cheyenne Mountain and looked up at the stars, silently naming and cataloguing the constellations. They were sufficiently far away that I couldn't harm them.

We had been joined, shortly after our emergence into the bright but thin sunshine of a fine Colorado Fall day, by Hammond and Dr Frasier. They had taken the other elevator after one of the SGC employees we had practically knocked over in our frenzied rush to get me out of there had alerted them to what was going on. We sat around on the grass like out of season picnickers, trying to figure out what to do with me now. Everyone politely refrained from commenting on the effects I had on the vegetation.

Going home was out of the question, at least, if I wanted my house to keep any of its re-sale value. Outside, with no technology for me to destroy and nothing alive more sophisticated than the trees for me to kill, seemed like the safest temporary solution. An isolated spot on the mountainside was found for me, and I sat down in it and watched as Teal'c was taken away to have his arm seen to. I hoped the restorative powers of the larva he was host to were as effective as he had told us they were, or he was going to be out of action for a very long time.

Of course, there was always the possibility that it was only the protective, healing powers of the larva which had prevented me from killing him outright.

Thank God it had been Teal'c directly ahead of me on the ladder and not Daniel or Carter. I might have....

I stopped that thought dead in its tracks.

I heard the footsteps approaching on the open ground and, assuming that it was one of my gaolers returning to ask me if I wanted anything, didn't look up. Okay, perhaps that's unfair -- I wasn't exactly a prisoner of the two marines who'd been assigned to me, but it was a fair bet that one element of their orders was to make sure I didn't wander off anywhere by myself. Although if I had, the trail of drooping, decaying vegetation and spots of slimy mould I left in my wake would have made tracking me a pretty straightforward task. After a couple of hours, I had asked them -- nicely, I promise -- to go away, and although I knew they hadn't, they were at least exhibiting a degree of tactfulness by keeping themselves out of sight.

I really didn't want any company.

The footsteps got closer. "I thought I told you to go away?" I called loudly.

"I don't believe you did, Colonel. Please feel free to at this point, if you wish."

It was the General. I pushed myself up, ignoring the way the already dying fungal blooms on the ground under me squelched at my touch. "Sir."

"May I join you?"

There are some questions which, when they are posed to you by your immediate superior, you just don't respond to with the negative. I waved at a patch of grass a couple of yards off which was still clinging to life. "Be my guest. But I wouldn't sit too close if I were you."

He sat down awkwardly in the slime, trebling his dry cleaning bill in one easy step. I could tell from the look on his face that he hadn't come to tell me everything was going to be fine. "How are you doing, son?" he asked.

I nearly laughed. I had long since considered myself out of the age range for which son is an appropriate term of address. "Just peachy-keen," I told him. "Apart from the fact that everything I so much as breathe on curls up and dies. This constant rejection is doing nothing for my self-confidence."

"I'm told that the Joint Chiefs spent over eight hours in meetings devoted to you today."

What, that was supposed to make me feel better? Actually, the thought that I'd made my ultimate employers work for their salaries for a change was the one tiny bright glimmer in my otherwise pitch black mental landscape. "And ....?" I prompted.

"Well, there are a couple of options," he said slowly. "The preferred one at the moment is to transfer you to a secure medical unit and study this, ah, phenomenon further."

That was a joke. As if the SGC infirmary, fifteen storeys below ground level, wasn't secure enough. What he meant was that they were planning to take me away and disappear me, just like they'd wanted to do with Teal'c. After that, the rest of my life would follow one of two routes: either they would fail to keep me alive, and I would starve to death within a couple of weeks, or they would find a way to prolong the suffering, in which case I would simply die from the inside out, as I spent the rest of my life in biocontainment, not touching anyone.

I wasn't even thinking in terms of a cure.

"I don't want that," I said. I thought that was pretty restrained, considering.

"No," agreed Hammond. He knew what the euphemisms were covering for as well as I did. "The second possibility, as I see it," he went on after a moment, "would be to send you back to PX-0005."

It wasn't much of an alternative; I would die there as surely as I would if I remained. But I could see that what he was offering me was the opportunity to control my own fate, and to go out with a little dignity. For that at least I was grateful.

Then I picked up on the "as I see it" in that last sentence.

"Would that be a sanctioned alternative?" I asked.

He didn't say anything. Suddenly, the General coming to talk to me in the middle of the night with the guys in white coats from Area 51 or Langley or wherever due to turn up in the morning made sense. I was under his command until they came to take me away. And if, when they arrived, I was simply nowhere to be found...

I had no problems with the fundamental aim of the Stargate project -- that is, to locate and retrieve alien technologies and weapons which could help us defeat the Goa'uld. What I did have a problem with was me being one of the weapons.

"There is a third option," I said.

He looked at me.

"You could just shoot me."

He shook his head. "No."

"Oh, come on!" I spread my hands wide, indicating the bubble of death and decay in whose centre I sat cross-legged, like the Buddha of destruction. "I'd do it myself if a gun would last long enough in my hands to load and fire. If I'm going to die, I'll take fast over slow any time."

He said nothing for a long while, and at one point I thought he was going to get up and go without another word. Then he looked at me, and said, "I don't know if you're aware of this, but my wife died not so long ago. It was cancer."

I hadn't known. I waited for him to continue.

"Once the terminal prognosis was made, we talked about ending it. Methods, means, the best lawyers for me to hire afterwards. And then we didn't. We didn't want to give up. Not ever, at any point. We took all the days that were left and I can truly say that if she had died a day sooner we both would have missed something valuable and irreplaceable." He paused. "I am not ready to give up on you, Jack."

I took a deep breath and shut my eyes, trying to commit to memory the fresh scent of the Colorado night air. The living air of a living world. I wouldn't breathe it again.

I nodded.

"I'll go back," I said.

***

After that, it was easy.

The elevators were out of the question, of course, so an alternative route was found which took me from the surface down to SGC keeping as wide a berth as possible of all the clusters of wiring and essential services which I would have an extremely detrimental effect upon if I so much as walked near them.

The planned route involved trekking through the sewers (how appropriate, I thought) which served the complex for nearly two miles before taking a service hatch down into the air conditioning system, which had been turned off for the hour or so the descent would take. Hammond had ensured that the usual controls and alarms which prevented access to the base by this route had all been disabled, and our passage -- me and my two marine pals -- was uneventful, although we did have to pause right at the beginning while I swapped places with the guy behind me. I brought up the rear for the rest of the journey. It seemed that wading behind me through water was none too pleasant an experience.

We dropped out of an air-conditioning vent on the level above the Gate Room, as planned. I lost the marines and gained Janet Frasier, who provided me with yet another fresh uniform. I thought grimly that it was a good thing I was going: the Air Force would probably have wanted to take my exceptional clothing costs straight off my salary. I put on the jacket and stepped out of infirmary office. The General was waiting to escort me downstairs.

"We're opening the Gate now," he told me. "I've had Stores put together a few things for you...."

"No," I said. Actually, the mere thought of food was enough to make my stomach do flip-flops, but there wasn't much purpose in what he was proposing, and he must have known it. The only useful thing that sending me through the Gate with food I couldn't eat and water I couldn't drink would achieve would be to salve the consciences of the people I was leaving behind: that way they could all pretend that I was going to live a little longer over there than was realistic. I had nothing against Hammond and all the others feeling less guilty -- I know all about guilt, and I don't wish the emotion lightly on other people, but neither did I want to spend my last conscious, wasted hours salivating over army rations which I wouldn't be able to digest.

He nodded. "As you wish."

I staggered very slightly as we approached the Gate Room, a couple of days without proper nutrition were beginning to exact a toll on me and I was becoming weaker. The General didn't say anything, but he waited while I steadied myself against the vault door. I was glad that I would be walking out of here in uniform on my own two feet. That was the final image I wanted to leave the colleagues I wasn't going to get a chance to know.

Daniel, Carter and Teal'c were waiting by the open Gate.

I adjusted my uniform jacket, noting how the material was already fraying at the edges. I walked forwards, until I was standing opposite them.

Daniel was blinking so fast behind his glasses that his eyelids were a blur. Beside him, Teal'c was standing perfectly still, holding his bandaged arm stiffly at his side. Carter was keeping the attention pose like her life depended on it.

I have this defence reaction in emotionally stressful circumstances. I make really bad jokes. I don't even think about it, I just open my mouth and out they come. Call it an instinct or a character flaw, there it is.

I wanted to say something now, something that would make this easier for everybody. Something that would take even a little of the dreadful edge off this moment and make it okay, if only for half a second.

I couldn't think of a single thing to say.

There's a first time for everything.

I saluted. Carter returned it, Daniel tried to and Teal'c inclined his shaven head towards me in an action that I took to be a bow.

Then I turned and walked up to the Gate and through the event horizon, before I lost it completely.

PX-0005.

Of all the planets in all the universe, I had to go and choose this dump to die on.

The wormhole shut behind me, and I hit the cold cavern floor with a thud and rolled over on the sharp gravel which was scattered across it. Apparently there was no way to do this particular transfer with grace.

Not that I was ever going to be doing it again.

I was going to die in exile. The General had declared PX-0005 a biological hot zone, and placed a restriction order on travel to it. For the same reason, I hadn't been given a signaller, although how long one of the devices would have survived in my hands was debatable anyway. No one was coming for me, and I wasn't going home. If I was exceptionally lucky, in about twenty years' they would remember about me and someone would be sent to retrieve my body.

I sat up and rubbed at the bump on the head I had given myself, smearing blood all over my face in the process. The rough landing had re-opened the cut on my hand, and it was bleeding freely. A dressing would have protected it, possibly, but sometime about when my watch had stopped working, it had also become impossible for an adhesive bandage to stay on my skin without withering to flaky nothingness.

I blotted the wound dry on the edge of my rapidly decaying uniform. Understandably, infection wasn't my chief concern right then.

I stood up and surveyed my tomb. This was possible only because of the lamp which Carter had left here on her return trip with the rest of SG-1 the previous day. It was switched on, and if I went nowhere near it, there was a possibility that it might keep working for just long enough that I wouldn't have to die in the dark. Like that was going to make it so much better.

The cave was perfectly still, apart from the tiny stream-like waterfall which poured from a crack high in one cavern wall and fell into a shallow pool which drained through some hidden channel. It was the source the Captain had used for her water samples when we had first arrived.

I listened to the water bubbling and splashing, and thought about how thirsty I was. Then, without really thinking about it, I went to the pool, knelt down, and drank.

When I was done, I sat back on my heels and considered how stupid I had just been. I had touched the water; now it was polluted. All I had achieved was to postpone death by dehydration by a couple of hours.

Sure enough, as I watched the water filled with long, grey strings of mucus, and the quick splashing noises slowed to a series of turgid plops.

I had killed the water.

I had killed the water just like I had killed every Goddamned fucking other thing in my life.

In my head, I made a checklist of all the things whose deaths I was accountable for. There was my son -- let's start with the biggies, why not -- and of course my marriage. There was Daniel's marriage, and any chances of happiness he might have had, which I had killed by allowing myself to be sent back to Abydos when I should have left well enough alone. There was Ska'ara. There was Kawalsky and, standing in legion behind him, all the other men who I had allowed to die through inaction or bad judgement. There were those I had killed in the line of duty, only because someone higher up the chain of command than I was said they were my enemies.

Well, it was going to stop right here, in this barren, sterile place.

I stood up and exited the cavern, taking the same passage I had explored with Daniel a few days earlier. I walked through the darkness, feeling my way by touch where I had to, until at last I saw the faint glimmerings of PX-0005's sickly daylight ahead of me. I stepped out on to the ledge above the empty plains, and made ready to jump.

It would be so simple, so easy, so quick. And I had always wondered what it felt like to fly.

I don't know how long I stood there. Like I said before, my watch had long since given up on me, and I had no way of measuring time's passage by the arc of the sun over this alien land. I just know that I stood, arms outstretched, making ready to end it all.

And in the end I didn't.

Don't ask me why; I don't know. Perhaps it was the same instinct that had made me drink the water in the cave below, that bizarre human compulsion to keep going, keep pushing forward, no matter how grim the outlook, how bleak the circumstances.

Perhaps it was General Hammond telling me about his wife.

Perhaps it was Frasier saying she wasn't going anywhere.

Perhaps it was even the memory I had of the remaining three members of SG-1 standing at the bottom of the embarkation ramp in the Gate Room.

Like I said, I don't know, and I can't afford the sort of money that a good psychiatrist would charge to help me find out. All I know is that when the distant, red sun finally sank below the dirty, wind-swept horizon, I turned around and went back into the caves below.

I sat down on the cold stone floor, clearing gravel out of the way with wide sweeping arm movements. As I moved, I saw my shirt, which had lasted well, considering, fall away from my skin, the blue-patched and threadbare material shredding like tissue paper. Well, I had no reasons to be modest now. I stripped and threw the festering heap of cloth in a corner. I sat there in the dim light thrown out by Carter's lamp, which I didn't dare move any closer to, naked and cold, hungry and thirsty.

Eventually I curled up on the hard floor and did something I hadn't done since I was twelve, and would not have permitted myself to do now if I had not been entirely alone and dying on a world a thousand light years from home.

I cried myself to sleep.

***

I woke up in bed. At least, that's what it felt like.

I was lying on something soft and warm. For several half-asleep seconds I thought it was my couch. Then I recalled why it couldn't be my couch, and woke up fully.

The cavern was warmer. Well, it would be more correct to say that I was no longer cold, but since I hadn't grown clothes overnight, the cavern having warmed up seemed a fair conclusion to draw.

What had grown overnight was underneath me, cushioning me against the cold stone floor.

I was lying on a thick carpet of moss.

I leapt to my feet and stared at it. It was certainly a bizarre sight, this thick, soft explosion of life which had sprouted out of the floor and which mimicked my shape as if a passing homicide detective had decided to use greenery rather than yellow tape to mark where the victim had fallen. I could see where I had flung one arm out to the side somewhere in the night hours.

There was something else strange. I couldn't quite work out what it was.

The water. The water was running. Gurgling. It sounded...normal.

I hardly dared to look, but I had to know. Tentatively, cautiously, I crossed to the pool at the side of the cavern and peered in.

The water was fresh, and clear.

I think I almost cried again, with joy. I knelt and drank, and when I had drunk, I rolled over on to my back beside the pool and laughed.

And then I saw that there was something else growing in the cavern.

Its shoot was tall and slender; there were several stalks, clustered together. It was not growing straight up, but was leaning towards the lamp in the far corner of the cave.

I approached the plant with something like reverence, and sat down beside it. Gently, and fearfully, I reached out and touched it.

I watched it for several minutes, while it stayed alive.

And why shouldn't it stay alive? It had everything it needed. Water. Light. Blood.

Yes, blood. There was a red stain on the ground beneath it, where I had bled on arrival.

And the moss was growing where I had wept.

I blinked. I made the connection.

I went back to my bed, and examined it carefully.

And on the second day, Jack created moss?

Okay, maybe I wasn't ready for deification just yet, but I was starting to get a handle on what was going on. PX-0005 had been sterile when we had arrived. But it had not been dead.

It had simply been waiting.

***

All things considered, my situation was looking up. I had water I could drink, which was a big improvement on the past few days by itself, and if those vegetable-like things growing over by the cave's entrance matured any time soon, I might even have food. Okay, it wouldn't be haute cuisine, but I wasn't fussy.

It was just a pity I wasn't going home any time soon.

Now that the prospect of imminent death had receded, I had started to think about my isolation. I had considered using the Gate, dialling home and simply taking my chances, but had rejected the idea as being as certain a route to suicide as throwing myself off the cliff would have been. With no signalling device, SGC would assume I was an incoming hostile, and I would very quickly find out just what hitting a pure titanium disk at a little less than light speed felt like. I was willing to bet it wasn't pleasant.

In the meantime, there was more than enough activity on PX-0005 to hold my interest.

Everywhere I looked, things were sprouting, seeding, growing, blooming and throwing out small puffs of grey spores with vigorous enthusiasm. What was more, this sudden profusion of life was very clearly centred around me. Although the native flora was propagating without my help now, it was clear that the patches where the lushest, most verdant growth was occurring coincided exactly with the areas of previously barren soil which I had touched, walked over or sat on. Where I breathed, flowers bloomed. Where I had lain down, thick carpets of moss erupted from the sterile soil. And where I had urinated, green stalks pushed their way upwards out of the loam and towards the light.

The cave, and ultimately the planet, was coming to life around me.

The other weird thing was that the greenery seemed to be changing as well as growing. Let me explain. The bed of moss which had appeared under me as I slept was thrusting its way upwards and was now producing long thin leaves which looked more like reeds than anything a moss was likely to grow. My knowledge of biology was pretty rusty, like everything else in my immediate vicinity lately, but I was fairly sure that grasses, reeds and similar were more developed forms of life than simple mosses. At the same time, the moss carpet was most evident near the expanding limits of my little kingdom.

It was as if life was not only creating itself around me, but was simultaneously hell-bent on evolving itself away from its humble origins as fast as it could, like white trash with a college education. At this rate, we'd have trees and bushes within a couple of days, and after that, well, who knew? Insects? Arthropods? Animals?

People?

Well, okay, so maybe I shouldn't hold my breath waiting for someone to talk to, but it had taken millions of years for Earth to evolve sentient life, and PX-0005 looked like it was pretty determined to beat the standing record. We'd gone from nought to moss in sixty seconds, on a geological scale, and at this rate, I felt quite confident in predicting fire and wheel type discoveries within the century.

I wondered what the indigenous life would be like when it appeared. Then it struck me that this world had been sterile before we arrived, and that the only currently available source of complete DNA, the gasoline in creation's engine, was right now standing about scratching its head and looking dumb.

There was a fair chance that whatever developed out of this primordial soup would be a lot like me.

This was O'Neill's Planet. Literally.

I could imagine, centuries hence, the boys at home (and girls, I tacked on, in deference to Carter) finally getting their act together and inventing a ship that would get them here. And the explorers would step down on to the soil of a living, verdant world, and be met by tribes of people who had independently invented ice hockey, and who used the phrase "for crying out loud" a lot. I was sorry I wouldn't be around to see it.

Intelligent life was going to evolve from me, God help it. Daniel would have found that very funny indeed.

Daniel. I felt a quick stab of loneliness as I sat down against a padded, mossy cave wall and looked at the Stargate. Considering that Daniel had exactly the sort of personality type which usually irritated the hell out of me, it was a little odd that if I had had my pick of anyone from back home to be marooned with right now, he would have been high up on the shortlist. Or maybe it wasn't odd. I had known him for about a week in and around the Abydos mission, and now for a couple of weeks at home before making my own unscheduled emigration. And in between, I had spent more time than I would have comfortably admitted staring through the telescope on my roof and hoping that he was doing okay out there.

I had begun to suspect that we had the makings of a friendship. Friendship wasn't a recreational activity I'd partaken much in over the last couple of years, and I had been getting used to the idea of tentatively trying it out again.

I was also beginning to think that I would have quite liked Carter and Teal'c as well.

Except that now I wasn't going to get a chance to find out. Daniel would find Sha're, Carter would learn to loosen up and maybe go on a few dates, Teal'c would get inducted into the finer points of American culture, and I wouldn't be around for any of it.

I fell asleep thinking that it was a damn shame.

***

I was having a very vivid dream about Daniel. He was leaning over me, staring at me and saying my name loudly and repeatedly.

I opened my eyes and found Daniel standing over me. "Jack? Jack, wake up."

I woke up with a start and clambered to my feet.

"Are you all right?" he asked worriedly.

I thought I was all right, but then I thought I was still going through a particularly odd patch of REM sleep. "Yeah," I said, "...Daniel?"

He hugged me.

And yes, I was relieved to see him, and yes, it was great to be rescued from my very own version of Robinson Crusoe, but please bear in mind that I was absolutely butt-naked, and being hugged exuberantly by Daniel Jackson when you're naked and perfectly comfortable with your heterosexuality, thank you, is unsettling to say the least.

"Jackson, what the hell are you doing here?" I yelled, firmly disengaging myself from him and feeling so rattled that I temporarily resorted to that redoubtable masculine defence mechanism, the surname.

Then it hit me. He had hugged me and he was still standing. He wasn't screaming in pain, and he wasn't dying.

"We've come to take you home," he said.

"We...?" I focused on the shapes in the murk over his shoulder. Teal'c turned on his torch. Carter waved.

Oh God. Did we have to do the goodbyes twice? Just because I wasn't toxic on PX-0005 didn't mean I wasn't still toxic on Earth. "I don't think I can."

Carter grinned. "No, you can, sir. Definitely. Teal'c remembered something and I came up with a theory."

I couldn't help but think that she had taken her sweet time over it, but to say as much seemed ungrateful. "Go on."

"The Goa'uld have the ability to change dead worlds so that they may support life," said Teal'c.

"They have terraforming technology," elaborated the Captain. "Or, more likely, biotechnology. I'd bet that this world is a project that was started but never completed for some reason. It's a petri dish planet: sterile by itself, but capable of supporting exceptionally fast development once an external stimulus is introduced."

"Like me," I said.

She nodded and shone her torch around her. "You've seeded the planet, Colonel. The same effects which were so dangerous on Earth were just what this place was waiting for. It's gotten what it needed, and you can come home."

"How do you know?"

"Because we were working on your blood samples and they..." she shrugged: "...just changed. The alien DNA fragments unbonded and dissolved. You're back to normal. It's over."

I wanted to believe her. I wanted to believe her a lot.

"We brought a test," she said, evidently tuned in to my thought processes, and produced a small sealed bottle from her backpack. She threw it to me, and I unscrewed the lid and sniffed it experimentally. It was milk. I looked at Carter. "Fresh this morning," she said.

I shook it. I smelt it. I stuck one finger into the mouth of the bottle and waggled it around. When I had exhausted all the non-consumption exploratory possibilities and could no longer postpone the real test, I took a sip.

"Sweet," I said, and meant it literally, for once.

I was going home.

Daniel stepped to one side, and I performed a sort of awkward parallel shuffle, conscious that he was the only thing blocking Carter's view of me. All of me. "Did you bring clothes?" I asked.

"Umm," said Daniel. "We were kind of in a hurry when we left. We'll get you some as soon as we get back. Sorry."

Oh well. Maybe I'd arrive home a committed nudist. "How did you get permission from Hammond? I thought this whole planet was off limits..."

I stopped. Kind of in a hurry when we left? Carter fingered the barrel of her MP-5 with something like embarrassment.

Teal'c was carrying his staff weapon. Even Daniel had a handgun. But they all knew that the only thing on this side of the Gate was me, which meant that....

"Oh hell," I said, as the penny plummeted earthwards. "You held up the SGC, didn't you?"

"I wouldn't say held up," said Daniel. "Not held up as such. Temporarily interfered with the normal operating procedures of, maybe, but not held up."

"It's like this, sir," said Carter defiantly: "We had to come back. Losing the mission commander on the very first field mission looks bad on a girl's record." And she smiled at me.

I stared at her. On a girl's record? Could that have been... a joke?

Daniel was smiling at Carter, who was grinning back at him. Even Teal'c had raised one eyebrow in a manner which I might almost have described as warm. And they had come back to get me.

My God. I'd done it.

We were a team. We had bonded.

And yes, it had nearly killed me.

"Well then," I said: "Let's Gate the hell out of here."

It was a very bad joke. I didn't care.

***

General Hammond was pleased to see me. I think.

"Colonel O'Neill," he said cordially as we reached the bottom of the embarkation ramp. "SG-1."

"Hi," I said. "Look, sir, whatever they did, it's...."

He held up a hand. "Colonel, I am glad that you are back. I am glad that you are recovered from, well, whatever the hell that was. But I would prefer it if you would get dressed before we begin this conversation."

Oh yeah. I'd forgotten about that.

"Dr Frasier is anxious to get you checked over. I suggest you go find her. And as for you," He eyeballed the rest of my team as if they had just crawled out from under an extremely slimy, unattractive rock: "As for you, I want you all in my office in fifteen minutes ready with fifty reasons each why this will never, ever happen again. Is that clear?"

God. Why didn't he just have done with it and slap their wrists? A brief chewing-out was a mild punishment to say the least for directly disobeying orders. They were lucky they weren't all up on charges. Well, Carter was lucky. I didn't know what kind of discipline was appropriate for Daniel and Teal'c.

Then I thought of Hammond sitting on the mulch which remained of the grass I'd killed and saying that he wasn't ready to give up on me yet. He would pretty much have had to put that restriction order on PX-0005. But maybe he hadn't tried too hard to stop my team when they'd decided to come after me.

I owed him.

The General stalked away. One of the technicians from the control room upstairs appeared with a towel, trying to suppress a smirk. I wrapped it around my waist and sat down on a convenient packing crate. It wasn't particularly dignified, but at least it meant I could now have a conversation without rigidly maintaining eye contact at all times. I could see the tech's shoulders shaking as he left the Gate Room, and I suddenly remembered that cameras recorded everything that went on in there, as a matter of course. So there was one for the Christmas party already. I'd get a reputation if I wasn't careful.

At least I would be at the Christmas party.

I looked round at Daniel, Carter, Teal'c. My people.

"Thanks for coming back," I said.

Daniel shrugged. "I was getting really sick of losing people."

There wasn't much I could say to that. Except perhaps: "Listen -- when the General is through with you, what say we get something to eat? I haven't had a decent meal in days."

Teal'c noticeably brightened.

"Thai?" suggested Carter hopefully.

"Mexican," said Daniel.

I stood. "Great. A steak house it is, then."

And I left to find Doctor Frasier and a uniform, ignoring the chorus of disapproval which drifted out from the Gate Room behind me. Rank has its privileges.

It was good to be home.