Jack tried not to fidget, but the sweat trickling down his temples was getting really annoying. He wanted his baseball cap back.
Getting off this stupid Sacrificing Rock and actually having the use of his hands might be helpful, too.
It had been one of those missions. Hot desert planet. Long sandy trek to a set of ruins three klicks from the Gate. Angry natives a little too good at ambushes. Bone-headed beliefs that anyone who came through the Standing Water had to be bad news. Daniel had gone off on some rambling tangent about the oddity of water being used as an evil omen in a desert culture, and if he hadn't had his hands tied behind his back, Jack would've probably thumped him.
They'd been stripped of everything: their weapons, their tac vests, even their headgear. But Teal'c had managed to escape capture, even if he'd lost his staff weapon in the process, and Jack hoped he'd made it back to the Stargate for backup. In the meantime, the rest of them were stuck.
Sourly, Jack took stock of their worsening predicament. Bumps and bruises for them all, and a black eye for Daniel. Hands bound, and the knots the natives used were so complicated that even Sam hadn't been able to work out how to undo them. Stuck on a sloping slab of granite-like stone that went by the cheerful name of Sacrificing Rock. Twelve guards with spears, standing in a loose semi-circle around the rock, and a little too alert for Jack's liking.
On the plus side, their feet weren't tied together, and the ropes around their wrists weren't cutting off circulation completely. Not much of a comfort at the moment.
Oh, yes - and add one swaggering guy dressed in elaborate robes, holding a very sharp, very large, alarmingly shiny knife in his left hand.
"Priest," Daniel said quietly into his right ear.
"Thank you, Daniel," Jack muttered back. "So good to have you here to explain these things."
The priest clambered onto the sacrificing rock, ceremonial beads jangling, and marched toward them, waving the knife in slow circles over his head. He began to declaim in a loud, ponderous voice - some blah about evil invaders and water the sands with blood and great worms of the desert...
Uh oh.
He felt Sam, standing on his left, stiffen a bit at that last one. Yeah, bad feeling all round.
"So, snakes?" he asked loudly. "We've got lots of those where we come from."
"Only they're not all that great," Sam added, picking up her cue with her usual smooth ease. "They're just parasites that take human beings for hosts."
"So you don't want to worship them," Daniel finished, his voice pitched at just the right tone for earnest appeal.
The priest stopped waving the knife and gave them a long, considering look.
"The great worms are not parasites," he said, his voice dripping scorn. "They are the masters of the sands! The eaters of the desert! They rule the darkness with fear and terror! They have claws of metal and teeth of crystal!" He waved the knife under Jack's nose. "Do you see the sh'br'kw'trt, evil traveler? It is shaped with a single tooth of a great worm, obtained at great risk by one of our mightiest hunters, and anointed with the holy oils that seal the blade forever!"
Jack tried to picture a worm big enough to have a mouth full of teeth that big and winced.
"And now," the priest shouted, his voice rising to a crescendo of triumph, "I will use the sh'br'kw'trt to cut the throats of the evil invaders and -"
"Ooooh!" Daniel bounced on his heels, his face suddenly alight with excitement. "It is, isn't it? It is!"
The priest halted his diatribe, arm frozen in dramatic mid-wave. Scowling at the interruption, he demanded, "What?"
Daniel, unfazed, bent forward to squint more closely at the sharp blade in the priest's hand. His hair flopped into his eyes and his glasses slid halfway down his nose, but with his hands still tied behind his back, there was nothing he could do about it.
"That's a crysknife," he announced happily, straightening up. He turned to Jack and Sam, practically beaming as he repeated, "It's a crysknife!"
"A what?" Jack said blankly.
"Wow, Daniel, is it really?" And now Sam was leaning forward almost as eagerly as Daniel, and Jack wondered when his teammates had decided to go nuts.
The priest blinked, looking from his knife to Daniel and back again. "This is a sh'br'kw'trt, as I said before," he said coldly. "A great and powerful trophy, obtained at great risk by one of our mightiest -"
"We call them crysknives," Daniel explained.
"Except they're fictitious," Sam amended.
"This," the priest tried again, "is a sh'br'kw'trt. It is -"
"You said it's made out of a worm's tooth, right?"
The priest opened his mouth, then paused. His grip on the knife tightened, but his other hand began to fiddle nervously with the beads around his neck.
"And you treated it with something after you got it, right?" Daniel pressed. He was practically nose-to-blade by now, and the priest hurriedly pulled the knife back. Jack was more than a little glad about that.
"The sh'br'kw'trt is shaped with a single tooth of a great worm," the priest recited again, but the tremor in his voice and the slight slump to his shoulders told Jack that the man was losing his enthusiasm. "It is obtained at great risk by our mightiest hunters and anointed with the holy oils that seal the blade forev-"
"Crysknife," Daniel said, oozing smugness.
"Looks like Lynch didn't do a very good job of visualization," Sam said critically.
"The shape of the blade isn't bad," Daniel countered. His shoulders twitched, as if he wanted to wave his hands around in argument.
"Did you hear that they're making a mini-series next year? Maybe that one will be more true to the -"
"Wait a minute." Jack looked from his captain to his archaeologist, and wondered when this disastrous mission had taken the left turn into the Twilight Zone. "Are you two talking about Dune?"
"Crysknives and sandworms, sir," Sam shrugged against her bonds.
The priest had lowered his knife completely, and was now looking from one prisoner to the next with an expression of utter bewilderment. Deciding that he preferred the current situation to watering the sand with their blood, Jack tried to keep the conversation going.
"Wasn't that movie a big cult geek thing?"
Sam eyed him. "Yes, sir," she said in that polite tone that carried a wealth of impolite meaning just beneath the surface. "Daniel and I are geeks, sir."
"I preferred the novels anyway," Daniel said. He sidled a few inches to the left so he could squint at the knife again. The priest actually hid it behind his back. "I always found it interesting that Herbert chose to use so many Arabic references and concepts as the basis for his world-building, but he went to classical Hebrew for the central term of Kwisatz Haderach," Daniel continued idly. "And from an anthropological point of view, the sheer scope of ecology was absolutely -"
"Don't talk to me about anthropology," Sam muttered. "The treatment of women was sick."
"I remember the women being pretty powerful," Jack offered, trying to dredge up a memory or two about a movie he'd seen over ten years ago.
"Oh, please," Sam said, rolling her eyes. "Everyone hated the women, and whatever power they had was used to advance the men's agendas! They spent their whole time trying to get a man into their system, because obviously women aren't good enough..."
Jack watched and listened as Sam and Daniel argued about gender issues and power struggles in a series of novels back on Earth. So far, it was working - the priest was too busy listening to the argument with a horrified sort of fascination to remember that he was supposed to be sacrificing them. Of course, there was still those twelve guards...
Hmmmmm.
Make that nine guards.
Jack gave Daniel a casual nudge with his shoulder, turning forty-five degrees with the movement so he could scan the area more thoroughly. Yeah. Only nine guards, now. Three were missing. And the nine guards left were more interested in watching the show on Sacrificing Rock than keeping an eye on the perimeter for any -
A figure rose up silently behind one of the remaining guards. A dark arm snaked around the native's neck, choking off his air supply and his vocal cords in one smooth, economic movement. Moments later, the guard sagged into the figure's arms.
Even from a distance of thirty feet, Jack could see the single eyebrow raised in cool amusement.
Aha.
He schooled his features with the ease of long practice and turned back to the priest, who seemed to be recovering his composure. Time to inject a little more confusion into the mix, then.
"So you've got big honkin' sandworms on this planet," he announced, interrupting Sam and Daniel's conversation. "And sharp knives made out of their teeth. Have I got that right?"
The priest drew on what little was left of his dignity and huffed with indignation. "The fearsome worms do not honk," he declared.
"Oh! What sound do they make?" asked Daniel.
The priest tried to glare. "They come in terrible silence in the blackest nights, heralded only by the surging of the sands and the screams of agony from their victims!"
"Maybe the victims honk," Jack suggested, offering his most deliberately infuriating grin.
The priest actually stamped his foot and shouted, "There is no honking!"
"Shame," Sam said with a regretful shake of her head.
Jack threw out a few more comments at random, but he was more preoccupied with keeping a surreptitious eye on Teal'c's progress out there at the perimeter. Until all the armed guards were down, Teal'c couldn't risk a direct attack. And the priest needed only seconds to take that crysknife of his and slash a few Tau'ri throats.
Five guards left. Four. Three...
The priest suddenly shook himself, and the confusion and frustration in his face vanished into lines of determined anger. Jack stiffened, watching the man's left hand and the knife he was aiming in Sam's direction.
They couldn't run out of time. Not now, not like this!
"Just one more question, please," Daniel said hurriedly, a desperate attempt at a last distraction.
"Enough of this," the priest snarled. "You are evil invaders from the Standing Water, and your blood shall drench the sands to pay for your crimes!"
He grabbed Sam by her hair, yanking her head back to expose her throat to the vicious blade.
Sam kneecapped him. Hard.
The man shrieked and collapsed in a jangle of beads, and Jack leapt forward to plant his right foot on the priest's knife hand. Daniel didn't try for finesse, especially with his hands tied behind his back; he just plopped down and sat on the priest's legs to keep him immobilized. And then Teal'c was leaping effortlessly up onto the rock from the desert floor, the last unconscious guard still twitching in the distance.
"Are you all right, Captain Carter?" he asked.
Sam looked a bit shaken at the near miss, but she smiled. "I'm fine, Teal'c. Thank you."
"Knife," Jack said economically, nodding at the blade lying inches away from the priest's spasming fingers. Teal'c inclined his head in reply, scooped up the knife, and made quick work of their bonds.
"Nice work, T," said Jack, rubbing some circulation back into his wrists. "Couldn't get to the Gate?"
"I did not try, O'Neill," Teal'c replied, even as he tied the priest's hands with the remnants of the ropes.
"Oh?"
"I overheard enough conversation to know you would be sacrificed before I could bring reinforcements."
"Oh. Well." Jack cleared his throat. "Good, then." He prodded the priest with his toe, making the beads rattle. "What about the sandworms? Do we need to worry about getting attacked on our way back?"
"Doubtful, Jack," Daniel said. "He specifically said the worms attack at night, and it's midday. The natives are probably more dangerous than nocturnal predators right now."
"I do not think so, Daniel Jackson," Teal'c said. "I could not locate our weapons, but we may make use of the guards' spears. Since we shall have the advantage of surprise this time, I suspect we shall encounter little difficulty."
"These guys are good at making ambushes, but not very good at avoiding them," Sam agreed. "We can probably - wait!"
Daniel, who had retrieved the knife from Teal'c, looked up at her indignant shout. "What?" he said defensively.
"I want to take that back for analysis."
Daniel clutched the handle a little more tightly. "It's a cultural artifact," he protested.
"A worm tooth treated with chemicals to make it permanently sharp? I need to study that."
"It's a crysknife, Sam! It's part of my department!"
"And you can have it, after I study it!"
"Hey!" shouted Jack across the argument, effectively shutting them both up. They looked at him sullenly.
"Hey," he said again, and he pinned them both with his official colonel stare - the one, he had to admit, that had precious little effect on either one of them. "All that geek talk - it was just to distract the priest while Teal'c took out the guards, right?"
Sam and Daniel exchanged glances.
"We're certainly glad we were able to help Teal'c avoid detection, sir," Sam said after a moment.
"We needed to talk about something, Jack," Daniel chimed in, his expression all earnest and innocent and guileless. Jack didn't trust that face for a second.
"But it was a ploy, right? Right?"
Twin smiles flickered for a brief moment.
"Of course, sir."
"Whatever you say, Jack."
They hopped down from Sacrificing Rock, leaving the whimpering priest and his unconscious guards behind. Sam and Daniel trotted ahead, passing the crysknife back and forth and arguing in vociferous whispers about who got first dibs on the blade back at the SGC.
"Look at them. Pair of geeks," Jack muttered disgustedly to Teal'c, who only gave him an amused head-tilt in reply.
Jack hefted his purloined spear and felt his mouth twitch into a crooked smile of his own.
Geeks. Yeah. Gotta love 'em.
Heliopolis Main Archive
A Stargate: SG-1 Fanfiction Site
Attitude of the Knife
by Fig NewtonStory Bemerkung:
Birthday fic for Holdouttrout, who asked for the team and swords and got... well, this. :) Set in late S2 for continuity reasons, but absolutely no spoilers. Thank you, Random, for your faster-than-light beta!
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