Harsh light woke the three members of SG-1. Jack sat up quickly and looked around. Their situation hadn’t changed.
“I’d say ‘good morning,’ but it’s hard to find things that are good about it, and I’m not entirely sure it’s morning,” Daniel said.
Sam offered him a weak smile.
Around half an hour later, by Jack’s best estimate, the man who had spoken to them before strode in, this time trailed by four guards. For a moment, Jack expected to see them dragging Teal’c in with them, but there was no sign of the Jaffa. So he’s still loose, Jack thought. Unless he was telling the truth…no. Not gonna believe that.
The man stopped in front of Jack’s cell. “You will come with me.”
Jack made a show of studying the guards. “You think you have enough men to drag me out of here?”
The man barked an order, and two of the guards drew sidearms from their belts. Rather than pointing them at Jack, however, the two men aimed at Sam and Daniel.
“Believe me when I tell you that these weapons are set to kill,” the man sneered.
Jack raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Drag away.”
One of the guards who wasn’t holding a weapon flipped the switch on the pole, and the other approached Jack’s cell door. Mindful that his teammates’ lives were on the line, Jack walked calmly into the aisle and stopped in front of the man who had done all the talking. The guards quickly locked a pair of metal cuffs onto his wrists, then fastened some kind of metal cable to the cuffs. The other end of the cables they attached to their belts. Jack raised an eyebrow as he inspected their precautions. Although the cables were long enough to allow him to walk easily between the two guards, if he made any hostile movements, the guards could move apart, pin him in place, and have enough room to shoot him. Once his restraints were in place, the other two guards lowered their weapons.
“Come.” The commander led the way. Jack’s human tethers followed, and he obediently went along. Just before they reached the door, he glanced over his shoulder and shot Sam and Daniel what he hoped was an encouraging look.
Jack’s escort led him down a corridor painted a dull shade of grey. What do these people have against color? he wondered. He counted doors almost automatically, wanting to be able to find his way back to Sam and Daniel if he had to. Four doors down and across the hall, they led him into a square room painted the same shade of grey.
Knowing he was going to be interrogated, Jack expected to be tied to a chair or fasted to the wall or something. But, although he did notice several clips in the wall that looked as if they would attach nicely to the cuffs on his wrists, Jack’s escort led him to a device that resembled a medical examination table. The surface was a reflective metal, dotted with tiny indentations. A few feet above the table hung a metal board, similarly covered in dents. Cables of varying sizes and colors ran from the upper piece into the ceiling.
I’m really hoping that’s a medical scanner of some kind, Jack thought somewhat nervously as he studied the device.
A tall, white-haired man stepped around the machine. “Hello, Colonel Jack O’Neill. Such a long name. May I call you ‘Colonel?’”
Jack shrugged. “Whatever you like.”
“Good. I am Shirell. Put him in.” The last comment was directed toward the escort.
With an efficiency that told Jack how often they had done this, the two guards forced Jack onto the table, fastening his wrists by his sides. They pulled a strap tightly across his ankles and eased another one over his forehead. Jack flexed his muscles unobtrusively, but found the restraints strong.
The guards retreated, but with his head strapped down, the metal plate above him filled his vision, and Jack couldn’t tell whether or not they left the room.
“There.” Shirell’s face moved into Jack’s peripheral vision. “Now we may begin. We have been studying the items you and your people brought with you from your planet. Most of them are of no use to us. But one item of yours confused us. This.” A GDO unit was shoved in front of Jack’s face. “We had already identified your communication devices, so what could it be?”
Jack said nothing.
But Shirell continued. “But we reviewed your conversation with Kreb.”
Jack cursed silently. The tent must’ve been bugged.
“You mentioned a defensive device you called an ‘iris.’”
Jack closed his eyes and cursed again.
“My theory is that this device is used to send a security code that allows you and your teammates to pass this ‘iris.’ Am I close?”
Jack remained silent. He wouldn’t give this guy the satisfaction of knowing he’d guessed right.
“I didn’t think you’d say anything. You see, I’m an excellent judge of people. But I don’t mind your being uncooperative, Colonel. It gives me a chance to show off my machine here.”
A strange sinking sensation appeared in Jack’s stomach. It took him a moment to recognize it. Anxiety, shading quickly into fear. He shoved the emotion down ruthlessly.
“This,” Shirell continued, “is the NSD – Neurological Stimulation Device.”
What is it with militaries and acronyms? Jack wondered. The SGC certainly had more than its fair share.
“I’ll save you the detailed description but, in laymen’s terms, this device sends impulses to the nerves in your body – impulses that tell your brain that the nerve is in pain. By varying the speed and variety of the impulse, it can imitate any sort of pain, from a dull ache to overwhelming agony. And all without causing any actual damage.” Shirell’s voice was gleeful. “Now, being the judge of people that I am, I’ve already determined that you won’t tell me anything, no matter what I do to you. But that’s not important. Right now, I just want you to experience this.”
Jack had no time to ponder the meaning of the man’s cryptic words, because Shirell immediately began pushing buttons. A low hum began, and the table vibrated slightly.
Then the pain began. At first, the dull throbbing in his legs was easy to block from his mind. But the pain spread up his body as it increased in intensity. By the time it reached his chest, Jack was struggling frantically against his restraints. The pain-sticks the Goa’uld used didn’t even hurt this much! Then the pain reached his head, and Jack fought his restraints with strength he didn’t even know he possessed as he ferociously held back a scream. Just as blackness began to seep in at the edges of his vision, the agony vanished. He slumped on the table, breathing as hard as if he’d just finished a ten-mile run in full gear.
Shirell said something, but Jack couldn’t understand it through the ringing in his ears. A moment later, the straps on his ankles were released, then his right arm. The moment his left arm was free, he rolled off the table, shoving the man there out of his way. But his knees buckled, and he dropped to the ground. The guards quickly grabbed him and dragged him across the room. They pulled him to his feet, spun him around, and clipped his wrist cuffs to the walls. At a nod from Shirell, they left. Jack again tested the restraints, but found them as secure as before.
“You must have known you could not escape,” Shirell’s words were clear now.
“Had to try.” To Jack’s surprise, his voice sounded hoarse.
“Now we can get to work. All I really need from you are two pieces of information, Colonel. The Stargate symbols for your world, and any codes you must use to bypass your security systems.”
“So you can what? March an army in?”
“Essentially, yes.” Shirell approached him, stopping just out of range of a kick. “You see, our people are outgrowing this world. We have explored a few nearby planets, but none are capable of supporting life. Then you appear and offer us access to an entirely new world, with existing structures and services, only a few steps away through the Stone Circle!”
“The fact that this planet is already occupied doesn’t bother you?” Jack asked.
Shirell shrugged. “It is not my concern.”
“Well, I’m certainly not going to hand over my planet to you.”
“We shall see.”
Jack braced himself for the next trick, but nothing happened. Shirell glanced at the door and sighed. “So slow.”
Jack’s eyes narrowed. What was he waiting for? Shirell had proven that he had no qualms about torturing information out of people, so why wasn’t Jack strapped into that machine, screaming?
The door opened again, and it made perfect, agonizing sense.
“Carter,” he whispered.
Jack stood perfectly still, frozen in near-panic, as the guards strapped Sam into the machine.
“You see, Colonel, I believe there are two main types of men. One type of men will willingly sacrifice others to save themselves. The other type will willingly sacrifice themselves to save others. You are the second type. And, so, I think this will be simpler than putting you into the machine.” Shirell let his fingers hover over the controls. “Shall I begin?”
Jack couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. Although his mind was racing, he couldn’t form a single thing to say that might stop Shirell from pushing those buttons.
“Oh! I nearly forgot.” Shirell’s dark eyes bored into Jack’s. “If you lie – if you send us to a hostile world or give us faulty security codes – I will put this woman into the device, turn it all the way up, and walk away. Eventually, the overload will kill her.” He sneered. “Eventually.” With that, he stabbed at the controls.
Immediately, Sam’s hands bunched into fists as she fought the pain. A few moments later, she began jerking back and forth, fighting the restraints as Jack had done. As her movements became more and more agitated, her face contorted into a mask of pain. Suddenly, she stopped thrashing, and Jack realized that Shirell had turned the device off.
“You have an excellent tolerance for pain,” Shirell said to Sam. “That level of intensity would cause most men to scream.” He looked at Jack. “Perhaps your motivations for having a woman on your team are not what I first thought.”
Catching his implication, Jack growled. “You sick…” he spit out as many foul names as he could come up with.
Shirell waited until he had run out of curses, then pushed a single button. Sam’s body arched off the table as far as the restraints allowed, and a sound halfway between a scream and a gurgle came from her throat.
Jack continued to glare daggers at Shirell, but kept his mouth shut. The man had made his point.
“What are the symbols for your world?” Shirell asked.
Jack said nothing.
Another punch of the button sent Sam off the table again. This time, the sound was definitely a scream.
Jack locked his jaw closed. He could not betray Earth. Billions of lives depended on him doing the right thing.
But that was a difficult thought to hold onto while listening to Samantha Carter scream.
* * * * *
Jack could not have said how much time had passed when Shirell called for the guards to take them back to their cells. Sam had finally passed out, and even the short, sharp blasts from the device did not wake her.
“We will continue when she awakes,” Shirell said.
Jack simply dropped his head and allowed the guards to lead him away. A voice deep inside his mind urged him to fight, to defy his captors, but he couldn’t. His wrists throbbed from where the cuffs had cut into them as he pulled and fought his bonds. A glance down told him that blood oozed slowly from the wounds he had created with his struggling.
But that pain was miniscule when compared to the pain in his chest. Watching helplessly as Carter was brutally tortured had broken things inside him he hadn’t even realized he had.
He fell as the guards shoved him into his cell but rolled to one side, coming to his knees facing Sam’s cell. “Carter? Carter?” He let his face rest against the bars that separated them, wishing he could touch her, comfort her, hold her… Finally he realized that Daniel was calling his name.
“Jack!”
Reluctantly, he turned to face his friend. Daniel’s eyes were soft, concerned. “Jack, what happened? I heard…I thought I heard screaming…” He glanced at Sam’s limp body.
“You did.” Woodenly, Jack explained the machine and what the aliens wanted.
“You…” Daniel swallowed. “You didn’t…”
Jack shook his head. But it was close, he said silently.
“How is she?” Daniel asked gently.
Jack looked back at his fallen teammate. “I dunno. She blacked out.” He laughed bitterly. “And that should tell you something. Can you imagine the amount of pain it would take to knock out Carter?”
Daniel winced. “Jack, I’m sorry.”
“They’re the ones who are going to be sorry,” Jack growled. “Just as soon as we get out of here.”
Daniel sighed. “I hate to bring this up, but…”
“What?”
“If Teal’c made it back to Earth and was able to get a rescue team…they would have been here by now.”
Jack nodded, but said nothing.
Both men sat in silence, staring at the blonde woman sprawled on the floor of the far cell. Perhaps half an hour passed, the quiet broken only by the rustle of cloth as one of the men shifted position. Finally, a soft moan cut the silence.
Immediately, Jack pressed his face against the bars again. “Carter?” he hissed.
Slowly, Sam’s eyes fluttered open. “Sir?”
“Don’t try to get up,” Jack advised softly. “I don’t know how closely we’re being monitored.” He hesitated for a long moment before asking, “How are you feeling?”
Another pause before Sam answered. “All things considered, not bad.” Her voice was little more than a whisper.
Jack nodded. He hadn’t expected anything else from her. “Try to get some rest. Daniel and I are going to work on a way outta here.”
“Yessir.” Sam’s eyes drifted closed again.
After a long moment of staring at her, Jack crossed his cell to where Daniel waited.
“How is she?”
“Hard to tell,” Jack replied. “Now, you’ve had more time than me to think. How are we getting out of here?”
“The only chance we have is while you’re being moved,” Daniel replied. “And they usually have a gun pointed at somebody’s head as insurance.”
“We’re going to get out of here,” Jack said firmly. “We have to.”
But, try as they might, neither man had come up with a single idea by the time the door swung open, admitting the guards.
“Enough rest!” the commander barked.
As they had predicted, one guard held a weapon on Daniel while Sam and Jack were retrieved from their cells. Jack waited patiently until they were safely in the hallway before making his move. Feigning a stumble, he grabbed the cables connecting him to the guards and pulled, sending the guards crashing into each other. But before he could get his wrists free, pain exploded from the back of his skull, and he found himself sprawled on the ground. Then the ground dropped away as he was lifted and dragged by the two guards who had been behind him. Jack realized that his wrists were now free from the cables and tried to struggle, but his muscles refused to obey him. More pain as he was flung roughly against the wall and his wrist cuffs clipped to their restraints.
The world spun alarmingly, but Jack could just make out the guards strapping Sam back onto the table. “No…” He let his head drop as he tried to force the world back into focus. When he looked up again, Shirell was standing by the device, watching him.
“That wasn’t very smart, Colonel,” Shirell said. “You must have known by now that an escape attempt would be useless. And we must discourage that kind of thing.” He poked at his controls, and Sam’s body jerked.
“No…please…no…” Jack realized that Shirell had succeeded in breaking him. And, at that moment, he didn’t care. He could tell Sam was fighting the screams, but eventually the pain won and she cried out.
Finally, Shirell turned the machine off. “Now that our little demonstration is over, we can get back to business. What are the symbols for your world?”
Jack fixed his gaze on a crack in the floor and refused to open his mouth, afraid that if he did, he would tell Shirell everything he wanted to know.
Shirell sighed. “Still so stubborn.” Again he touched his controls, and again Sam screamed.
Time dragged past. It could have been minutes; it could have been hours. Shirell asked his questions over and over, while Jack refused to look away from the crack in the floor. He leaned forward against his restraints, allowing the physical pain to offer a slight distraction from the inner pain.
Noises from the hallway caused Jack to look up.
Shirell heard them too. “Now what?” He strode to the door and flung it open.
Gunfire…people yelling. Shirell jerked back as a head peeked around the corner. Then a familiar voice yelled, “In there!” A male voice responded, “Go! We’ll hold ‘em!”
Jack thought that the two people bursting through the doorway were the most beautiful sight he had ever seen – Teal’c, brandishing his staff weapon, with Daniel right behind him.
Shirell shrieked and ran to the far side of the room. “Please don’t kill me!”
Daniel rolled his eyes and shot him once with his zat.
Teal’c scanned the room. Seeing no other threats, he lowered his weapon and stepped toward Jack. “O’Neill.”
Jack shook his head. “I’m fine. Get Carter out of that thing.” His voice sounded oddly thick and rough.
Daniel and Teal’c quickly removed the restraints. The moment they were loose, Sam shoved herself free, rolling off the table and landing in a heap on the floor. She looked around with wild eyes, hands twitching.
“Sam?” Daniel knelt beside her.
Sam didn’t react.
Gently, Daniel placed his hands on either side of Sam’s face and turned her toward him. “Sam, it’s me. It’s Daniel. You’re all right. You’re safe now. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”
Sam stared at him, seemingly seeing nothing. Then her eyes rolled back and she went limp.
“Uhm…” Daniel looked at Teal’c nervously. “We’d better get her back to Janet as fast as we can.”
Teal’c nodded. He leaned his staff weapon against the table and carefully scooped Sam into his arms. Daniel ran the few steps over to Jack and set to work unfastening his restraints from the wall.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” he asked softly.
Jack nodded curtly. “Fine.” He touched his face with his freed right hand and realized why Daniel was so concerned.
There were tears on his cheeks. Brushing the moisture roughly away, Jack followed the others into the hallway, where SG-3 and SG-15 were waiting. The group picked their way carefully through the hallways of the building and out into the open air, encountering surprisingly few patrols.
“How far are we from the Stargate?” Jack asked.
“A little under an hour if we run,” Major Pierce replied.
Jack bit back a groan. He’d hoped they were closer than that.
However, with Jack and Daniel’s weakened states, Teal’c’s burden, and the necessity of avoiding groups of soldiers, it was nearly two hours later that the group approached the Stargate. A group of ten soldiers guarded it.
The SG teams took up positions behind rocks and trees and opened fire, Jack using Teal’c’s staff weapon. Taken by surprise, the guards didn’t stand a chance.
General Hammond and Dr. Frasier were waiting at the bottom of the ramp. “Welcome home,” Hammond said with a smile.
A few hours later, Jack lay in a bed in the infirmary, staring at the ceiling. He had insisted that Dr. Frasier take care of Sam first, but there wasn’t much the doctor could do for her, other than dress and bandage the places where the restraints had dug into her fair skin. Her scans hadn’t shown any brain damage, which made everybody relax a little, but Sam remained unconscious.
As for Jack, Janet had informed him that he had a mild concussion from being hit in the head during his escape attempt, and white gauze now sheathed his bloodied wrists. He’d given General Hammond the short version of the mission report, and the general had ordered him to rest, saying that a full debriefing could wait another day. But Jack didn’t figure he’d get much sleep with Sam unconscious in the next bed.
Janet puttered around the room, seemingly oblivious to her two patients. But when Sam twitched, Janet was by her side in seconds. “Sam? Sam, can you hear me?” she called quietly.
Slowly, Sam’s bright blue eyes opened. She blinked a few times before focusing on her doctor’s face. “Janet?” she whispered.
Janet nodded. “Yes, it’s me.”
“Where…”
“You’re in the infirmary, back at the SGC.”
“Others?”
Janet smiled gently. “They’re fine. I forced Teal’c and Daniel back to their quarters to rest, and Colonel O’Neill is right here.”
Sam tipped her head so she could see Jack, now standing behind Janet. “Sir…”
Jack shook his head. “Don’t try to talk, Carter.”
Sam nodded.
Janet patted her arm. “Try and get some rest. We can talk later.”
Sam nodded again and closed her eyes.
“She’s not the only one who needs rest,” Janet said firmly, turning around. “Back in bed, Colonel.”
Jack gave Sam’s still form one last look, then obediently climbed back into bed.
“And sleep,” Janet ordered, “or I’ll drug you.”
Jack didn’t doubt for a second that she would follow through on that threat, so he closed his eyes and tried to relax. But sleep was a long time coming.