It's strange to be in uniform again, and Jack hasn't traveled in anything faster than a car for four months. The jolt into hyperspace puts him off balance. It's pretty cool to see the stars spin like that again, though.
Within the tel'tak, it's not so cool. Jacob says no more than seven words about the mission and retreats to the pilot's chair, staring at the whirling stars. Carter, on the other side of the cockpit, turns to look forlornly at Jack. So he makes a command decision. "Carter, with me. We can at least prep the gear."
She gives him a look that's a lot like the one he got when he bought her 2% milk instead of skim. But she follows him toward the ring room, where they have a hell of a lot of crap for three people.
Jack stops in the doorway. "Hey, Jake, wanna tell us what kind of planet this is? You know, so we know what to pack?"
"Wet," Jacob says, without turning around. "Don't forget the crystals, Sam."
Carter doesn't answer. Jack says, "We won't forget, Jacob," and mostly keeps the annoyance out of his voice.
The door slides shut behind them, and Carter falls back onto the wall beside it, sighing.
"You okay?"
"We've only been on this thing for half an hour, Jack."
"It'll get better," he says. "It has to get better."
"Stupid planet needs a stupid stargate," she mutters.
Jack takes a chance and pulls her into a hug. She hugs back, tightly. He really shouldn't be surprised, he realizes; she spent the entire night glued to him, in her bed.
She buries her face in his chest and, he thinks, breathes him in. "We can do this," she says.
"We can."
"Preferably as a united front."
"United would be good."
They stay like that for a couple minutes, Carter's hands locked behind his back, Jack smoothing down her hair.
"Jack?" she says into his shoulder.
"Mmm?"
"If you pick a fight with my dad while we're stuck in here, I will kill you."
"When did I ever --" He stops. And then he says instead, "Right."
*
The waiting was always the worst part of space travel -- hours and hours of nothing. Jacob stays sullen in the cockpit, though the ship is flying itself. Jack is still content with his Gameboy. But for Carter, fun and games is a spaceship engine.
They're only ten hours out, and she's already opened the crystal casing and started futzing. Jack half-watches her while he beats his own high score in Battletoads. He trusts her not to blow them all up, but it can't hurt to mention it.
"Carter? Is that a good idea?"
"You worry about saving Mario, I'll worry about the engines."
"Hey! This is way cooler than Mario."
She peers at him over the casing and goes back to work. There's a clink of glass, and then the lights dim. Carter winces, slides a crystal back into place, and watches the lights come back up.
A hint of phosphorus wafts over to Jack. "Carter?" It's his old warning voice. He used to use it mostly on Daniel.
"It's fine."
"You'd better give it a rest anyh --"
"Sam!"
"Oh, great," Jack says. Carter winces again.
Jacob storms through the door. "What the hell are you doing?"
"I'm trying to optimize --"
"It's optimized! Now leave it alone. The last thing we need is to be dead in the water."
Jack suspects this scene played itself out regularly in the Carter household, and the way she juts out her chin, her eyes round and defiant, tells him he's right. He sets his toy aside and prepares to run interference.
"I'm not that stupid, Dad."
Oh, there's no way that can lead to something good. "Ooo-kay," Jack says, clapping his hands together as he stands. "Chow time. Carter, grab some MREs. Any requests, Jacob? No? Good."
"Jack," Jacob says, voice low.
Carter doesn't move; she's still by the crystals, staring at Jack.
"And while we eat, you're going to brief us, aren't you, Jacob? Carter? Dinner?"
She squints at him, then turns and sifts through one of their transport containers. Her prize is three orders of beef stroganoff. Jack finds one tossed at his chest and barely catches it.
"What?" he asks.
She just shakes her head, and Jacob looks at each of them. "Nothing," she says, glancing at her father. "Just eat."
It's a less hostile meal than last night's, but that's only because nobody talks. Jack wants to get some food in their stomachs before he starts interrogating Jacob, so he chews and swallows while studying them both. Carter's seated against the wall, one knee pulled up to her chest, taking tiny mouthfuls. Jack settles down next to her. Jacob stays standing and attempts to swallow the whole thing at once.
Jack has so not missed eating from a bag.
"Okay, Jacob," he says before anybody can bolt, "come on now. Tell us why you guys left that thing on a Goa'uld-infested planet."
Carter looks up. He knows she's heard some of this -- she's even told him some -- but he needs to get it from the source. That, and a mission brief is safer for everybody than another lesson in Carter family dynamics.
He wonders if she'd pass this on in her genes, and then decides he's better off not knowing.
Jacob shrugs. "We do that sometimes." He crumples up his MRE pouch and tosses it in the box they've designated for trash. "When we don't have time to get all the supplies out, sometimes we collapse the tunnel around them and come back later. The chances of anybody finding them in the meantime are pretty slim."
"And you didn't have time because ...?"
Jacob looks at Jack as if he were a mental patient. "Anzu showed up. Ra had absorbed his former homeworld, so he went looking for a new one. We don't think he even knew it was a Tok'ra base. But we had to bug out fast."
"And," Carter adds, assembling the pieces, "no one knew what it did, anyway. So you assumed that if Anzu found it, he couldn't make it work, either?"
Jack nods. It makes sense, though it's damned inconvenient now.
"It was a pretty safe assumption," Jacob says. "He was never the brightest bulb in the box." He shrugs again. "There are some other supplies in with it. Zatnik'tels. A few staff weapons."
"Well, that's something," Jack says. Assuming they're not all dust by now. "They in some sort of protective box?"
"Plastic, or a polymer like plastic, nothing you'd recognize. It's shielded."
Carter cocks her head and shoves her unfinished meal aside. "You never told me where the Tok'ra found it in the first place."
"On a planet that had once been held by Thanos."
Ah, well. That explains a lot. "But Thanos never figured out how to stabilize naquadria, right?" Jack says. "And he nearly destroyed Kelowna -- Langara, whatever -- trying."
"That is going to be the hard part," Jacob says wryly. "But Sam and Selmak together are smarter than he was."
She perks up, leaning forward over her crossed legs; her elbows land on her knees. Jack glances at her. "But if it never worked," he says, "then why can't you just fiddle with the part you've got in your lab?"
"Because she's been trying that for months," Jacob says.
Oh, way to lose the points you just scored there, Jacob.
Her jaw tightens, but Jack has to look pretty closely to see it. "And because this could be the power source," she says.
"And you wouldn't want to try powering it with a naquadah generator," Jack says. "Might blow up the planet?"
"That would be bad," she says.
He holds her gaze, pretending, for the moment, that her father isn't in the room. "So ... when you do get both pieces together, where the hell do you plan on tinkering with it? I'm guessing Hammond won't be too happy if you incinerate Earth."
"We haven't figured that part out yet," she says.
"Yeah." Jack rests his head on the wall. Even if they survive this mission without killing each other, going offworld to play with a potential doomsday machine will become part of her job description. Great.
"So," he says, "basically, we land, avoid some Jaffa, find this site Selmak remembers from 300 years ago, and start burrowing Tok'ra tunnels?"
There's a pause, and Jacob scrubs a hand over his non-existent hair. Oh boy.
Jack raises an eyebrow. "Jacob?"
"Actually," Jacob says, "Selmak never visited that base."
Carter sits up. "Selmak's never been there? You might've told us that, Dad."
See, now this -- this is exactly why Jack needs to be clued in before takeoff. Exactly. "For Christ's sake, Jacob!"
"I'm telling you now," Jacob says. "And it doesn't matter, anyway. We have the coordinates."
"Oh, well, if we have the coordinates ..."
"Jack," she says. He doesn't like the reproach in her voice.
"What?" he says. "You agree with me."
She ignores him. "Anything else you left out, Dad?"
"Only the part about the flesh-eating monkeys," Jacob says. "Are we done?" He doesn't wait for an answer. The door slides shut behind him.
The flesh-eating -- what?
Jack opens his mouth.
"Not one word," Carter says, standing. She marches back over to the crystals.
Jack reaches for the Gameboy, but he's not so interested in it anymore.
*
He jolts awake when the door from the cockpit opens. Carter doesn't move; she sleeps like a log when she's with him, though in their SG-1 days she shared his field officer's ability to pick up every sound, analyze it, and drop back to sleep when it proved to be nothing.
They're lying on one of the giant Goa'uld cargo containers, and his chest is serving double duty as her pillow, his arm wrapped around her shoulders. It's the second night.
Jacob heads for one of their storage units and starts sifting through it. Jack cranes his neck to see better.
"Whatcha looking for, Jacob?" he asks cautiously, and not only because he's afraid he'll wake Carter. She doesn't react, her breathing still low and even.
"Backup unit for the handheld," Jacob says. He shoots them a look over his shoulder, gestures minutely with his chin. "Little inappropriate, don't you think?"
"She's a close sleeper sometimes, Jacob." Jack occasionally wishes she weren't; he likes to sprawl, after eight years of sleeping alone. But he figures she'll calm down when she stops freaking out. "Nothing I can do about it." No particular reason why they should hide it, either.
Jack's neck hurts. He drops back on the blanket folded up under his head, but only for a second. He looks at Jacob again. "You know, these last few months haven't been easy on her. You might want to cut her some slack."
The sifting stops. "Maybe she should have thought of that before ... " And he makes some hand motion that must be the universal Tok'ra sign for carnal relations.
Jack shakes his head. Unbelievable. "It's scary how much like you she is, do you know that?"
Jacob rifles through the plastic box again. "Do you have any idea what kind of career you ruined?" he asks.
"I wrote her last evaluation, remember? I know exactly what kind of career I ruined." But he also remembers that Jacob was furious when she didn't want to apply to NASA, only a few years ago. In Jack's opinion, Jacob was out of line then, too. "And if you would just get off her ass for two seconds, this mission would be a hell of a lot easier on all of us."
Jack works his jaw, trying not to let the tension take over his body, trying not to raise his voice. Too late: he feels her breath shift and knows they've woken her, though she doesn't move. He rubs her shoulder, but he's too deep into this with Jacob to stop now.
"I'm disappointed in her, Jack. I'm disappointed in both of you."
"I know that. She knows that. What I don't think you know is how much your opinion matters to her. Do you have any idea how hard it was for her to tell you?"
Jacob half turns, and narrows his eyes. Jack had surprised him with that. Well, good. And maybe Jack can gloat a little, silently, that he knows her better than her father does, in some ways.
"Just give her a break, will you?" Jack asks. "Go after me all you want."
Jacob's head tilts almost imperceptibly. Jack can't tell if it's a challenge or a surrender or if he just needs to stretch his neck. Jack definitely needs to stretch his. He lies back and listens as Jacob starts digging again.
"Find your thing yet, Jacob?" He doesn't bother hiding his exasperation. He's getting tired of telling Carters that the past is not something they can change.
Of course, knowing Carter, she could have the specs for a time machine all worked out in her head, and just be waiting for a spare weekend to build it.
Jacob ignores him for a few seconds, then starts walking back to the door, into Jack's line of vision. "Yes," he says. He holds a small metal thing in his hand -- the backup whatever for the whatever. "You can get back to what you were doing."
"You mean sleeping?"
He gets an ironic smile for that -- one he knows too well -- and watches Jacob leave, the door sliding closed behind him.
Carter rolls onto her stomach, which takes some jostling to keep them both on the crate, and perches on her elbows. She still looks sleepy, but there's fire there, too.
Jack has his arm back now, and he uses it to straighten out her hair. "Chicken," he says.
"What did I tell you about picking fights with him?"
What? She's pissed at Jack? Oh, he is so going to kill a Carter by the time this is over. He doesn't know which one yet, but that's a minor detail. "You've got to be kidding me. I was defending you."
"Jack."
He throws up his hands. There is no way all three of them are going to make it off this ship alive. "Is it me you're mad at, or him?"
She squints thoughtfully, the way her father did a couple minutes ago, and then her eyes dart away. Jack is happy to take that as an apology. Okay, not happy, exactly, but he's less interested in tossing her out the airlock.
"What was he looking for?" Her voice is back to a register he approves of. Well, hey, if they can shorten all their little disagreements down to just a few words, that'll be progress.
"Batteries," he says. "Us. I don't know."
"You were defending me?"
Jack thinks she might have a go at him for being a sexist pig, but no, she doesn't seem to think standing up for her is an entirely bad thing.
"Well, it ticks me off," he says. "You're --" He stops himself from mentioning her age. She turned 40 a few weeks ago, just before Teal'c left, and she's still twitchy about it. "A grownup," he says instead. "You're a grownup, and he's treating you like a teenager who got caught necking with the class stoner."
Her lips quirk. "That'd be you?"
"It's not a perfect analogy."
"Well, you are unemployed." She pokes his ribs with her elbow.
"Oh, ha ha."
"And nobody necks anymore, Jack."
"I'm old, Carter. You tend to forget this."
She chuckles and turns back onto her side, which requires more jostling. "I didn't hear all of it," she says, settling her head on his chest again.
"I know."
"You ruined my career, you said."
"I did say that."
"You know that's no better than me beating myself up, don't you?"
"Yeah, but I'm not making a second career out of it."
She levers herself up on one elbow, to stare down at him. "Making a second -- no. Never mind. I see right through you, you know." Jack oofs as she squishes his diaphragm, crawling over him. "Go play solitaire on my computer or something. I'd better go talk to Dad."
"Shout if you need help jettisoning him into space," Jack says.
*
"I spy something beginning with a C."
"Jack."
"Come on, you've been staring at your laptop for hours." Or days, more like. Jack's asked to look a couple times, but it's always the same -- schematics, notes, pictures, all of that gizmo she's got back in her lab. Yesterday he made the mistake of asking if the computer was Goa'uld-proof. He won't be doing that again.
"Gameboy dead?" She's facing away from him, her back against the crate he's lying on.
Jack tosses his water bottle into the air and catches it. He can't remember how he used to put up with missions like this on a regular basis, though he does remember having three teammates to entertain him. "I can't see straight anymore," he says.
She glances at him over her shoulder. "You should bring books," she says. "You like books."
Well, that's true. "Oh, right, because I plan to make a habit of interstellar travel again."
Carter just rolls her eyes, looking down at the screen again.
Jack tosses his water bottle some more. "Come on, Carter. I spy --"
"I don't want to play I Spy, Jack. Why don't you go bug my father for a while?"
"I could order you to," he teases.
She stiffens. "You wouldn't dare," she says. The keyboard is on her lap, her legs crossed under it. She pounds out a few words.
"But Car --"
"Fine." The typing stops, and finally, finally, she turns around. "You want to talk. Why don't I tell you about my chemical analysis of the naquadria stabilizer?"
"Um."
"The housing is made of trinium, a very particular type of trinium, by the way." Jack groans. "I ran a dozen different tests. I think it must have been mined on P4 --"
"Carter! Are you trying to kill me?"
"Oh, don't pretend you don't understand."
Jack frowns. He might have given away his best defense when he confessed, a couple months ago, that he got most of the science stuff. She laughed, said, "No shit," and stole one of his fries; it was cute at the time.
"You can play with that when we get back," he says. "You'll have planets to destroy and everything."
She looks up, briefly. "I'm moved by your confidence."
"Come on, you know I didn't mean it like that."
"Hmm," she says.
Jack starts peeling the label off the bottle. That's some serious glue, there. After a while, he sits up and takes a long drink.
"Hey, Sam?"
"What?"
There's a lot to read on a water bottle label. Source, mineral content, Bottled for the United States Air Force by PepsiCo, Inc. "Maybe you shouldn't work on that naquadria thing," he says. "When we get home, I mean."
"What, we're going to find the power source and leave it all sitting in storage?"
Now who's playing dumb? "You do still have underlings, right?"
Carter angles her head to see him better, her lips in that tight line that pisses Jack off. "Haven't I already given up enough for you? You want more?"
"Hey, I gave up something too, you know," Jack says. "I guess if you go boom, I can just get all that back."
She gapes at him, but then he can see her muscles begin to relax, and she lets out a disbelieving laugh. "You know, Jack, instead of taunting me, you could just say, oh, 'I'm afraid to lose you,' maybe? I've heard women like hearing that."
Jack tries not to squirm. "Not my style, Carter."
"No kidding," she says. "You like blowing things up too much."
"Not planets. Especially not ones that you're on."
"That's almost sweet, Jack. I'm impressed."
He finishes his water, and pitches the bottle into the trash box. "Look, I know the work is important. But will you just think about it, please?"
She sighs, her face softening a little. "I'll think about it."
"How about Hangman? I'll even let you use the big words."
"Three letters," she says. "Starts with A."
"That's not how you --" He can tell by her face, though. "I'll take an S and an S," he says. "Clever."
Carter gives him a sarcastic smile and goes back to the gizmo, but that only lasts a few seconds. She stretches her neck and frowns. "I've lost my concentration now, anyway," she says.
"I'm sorry."
"No, you're not."
Well, no, he's not. He watches her rub her temples, rotate her shoulders. She arches her back, bracing her arms on the deck. "I wasn't just trying to get rid of you," she says. "I really think you should talk to my dad, Jack."
Oh, great segue, there. He moans, more vehemently than he needs to. "I will, I will," he says. It's only been three and a half days: he still has time.
*
When Jacob announces that they'll be dropping out of hyperspace in four hours, Jack decides his time is up. Carter's hunched over one of her mini-computers, doing God knows what to it. She doesn't even notice when he goes to face his doom.
Jacob's back in the pilot's chair, where he's spent most of the trip, playing with his own Palm Pilot–type thing. Jack slides into the other seat.
"Whatcha doin'?" he asks.
Jacob doesn't look up. God, so alike, the two of them. "Recording everything Selmak knows about the naquadria stabilizer. For Sam."
"Smart," Jack says, not even trying to kiss up.
"She asleep?" Jacob asks. He lifts his head, glances over his shoulder.
"No, she's doing pretty much what you're doing. Lost to the world."
Jacob nods. Jack stares at the blur of stars. For a while nobody says anything.
"Jack," and Jacob is staring at stars now, too, "you were married once, right?"
"Fourteen years," Jack says.
"So what happened?"
Jack turns, surprised. He's always assumed Jacob heard this story years ago. "My kid died," he says.
"Jesus, I'm sorry, Jack. I didn't know." Jacob looks truly shaken. He's certainly come close to losing Carter, many times.
"How is that possible?"
Jacob shakes his head. "I don't know. Sam never mentioned it, and George wouldn't let me read your service record."
"Yeah. Haven't paid off the bribe for that yet."
Jacob puts down the handheld computer. "I can't imagine, Jack. I'm sorry. Selmak, too."
"It's okay," Jack says. Jacob studies him curiously. "I mean, it's not okay. You never stop thinking about it. But it gets easier to remember the good stuff."
"Do you ever see her?" Jacob asks, swiveling the chair so he faces Jack. "Your wife?"
"Sure. A few times a year." He's been helping Sara with the house, now and then, since her father died. He feels like she shouldn't have to do it all herself, when she and Jack originally bought it together. "Why'd you ask me about her, Jacob?"
"I don't really know. It seemed important at the time."
Jack tracks the pattern of blinky lights on the instrument console, while he discards a dozen different ways to say this. "Jacob, this thing with Sam ... I'm not just fooling around here."
"Your intentions are honorable?" That might be the beginning of a smile. Jack can't tell.
"My intentions are not to fuck this one up. Look, I don't know what would have happened if we'd stayed on SG-1. But I've gotten pretty good at accepting the way things are." Well, better than he used to be. Better than Carter, too. He taps out a quick rhythm on the armrest. "She's not so good at it," he says.
"Wonder where she got that?"
"No idea."
Jacob meets Jack's eyes, and nods again. "What I saw the other night. Is that how it is?"
"Sometimes. We argue a lot, I won't lie to you about that. But it's good, too. Most of the time."
Jacob picks up his work again, and Jack thinks the conversation is over. But a few minutes later, Jacob asks, "Have you ever met my son?"
"No. Talked to him on the phone a few times. When he's called Sam."
There's a pause, and then Jacob nods. "My grandson was a mistake," he says. "They'd only been on a handful of dates."
Yes. Jack knows this. He thinks he sees where Jacob is headed. "Were you as mad then as you are now?"
"Close," Jacob says, ruefully. "I guess the only real difference is that we didn't talk much back then."
"And maybe that Sam's your girl?"
Jacob offers a crooked, self-deprecating smile. "Maybe."
Jack thinks of the Christmas-card photos Carter's got saved up, in labeled, acid-free boxes. "Mark and Kristin seem to be doing okay now," he says.
"Yeah, they are. And I got two grandkids out of it. And a daughter-in-law." He pauses, looks sideways at Jack. "I like my daughter-in-law."
"I like your daughter-in-law, too," Jack says. Kristin usually pelts him with questions until he panics and hands her off to Carter, who thinks this is hilarious. But Jack likes her. She's happy for them, and that's okay.
"Jack," Jacob says, "I was in the Air Force a long time. I'm not sure I'm ever going to get used to this."
"Yeah, well, anything short of full-blown rage works for me at this point."
"I think I can manage that," Jacob says.
They stare at the bluish-white blur outside for a long time.
***
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