Well, this chapter hasn't been delayed too much, despite the fact that I've been podcasting for work, and successfully not getting food poisoning from throwing shrimp on the barbie for the first time, and oh, also wearing my first kilt and getting ready for our wedding, now just three bloody months away. Ahem. Ok, here's the latest chapter. Enjoy. The next few ones will get a bit hectic.
When the radio fell silent Giles looked at it with a combination of surprise and bemusement, before turning to look at Olivia, who returned the look and then shrugged slightly. "It sounded odd from the start," she murmured, before opening her book again and snuggling down in the crook of his arm.
"Yes," mused Giles thoughtfully. "Peppo the dwarf sounded especially odd. And that ending – particularly where the twins had to stand back to back to get shot – well, that was just surreal." He paused and then turned the radio off entirely. "Never mind."
He started slightly as the phone rang, and he leant over to answer it. "Hello?"
"Hi Giles," said Buffy breezily, "I've got a question for you. Identification thingy sort of. You busy?"
"Not just now Buffy," he told his Slayer, leaning back on the sofa and allowing Olivia to reengage with his arm. "We were listening to a play on the radio, but it seems to have ended early."
There was a bemused silence on the other end. "Sorry, you were what?"
"Listening to a play on the radio. It does happen occasionally."
"A play… on the radio?"
Giles closed his eyes and restrained the need to sigh heavily. In the event that Buffy ever made it over to Britain, Radio Four would come as a great oddity to her. "We're able to pick up a station called KACL from Seattle sometimes. Tonight it was doing a 1940's-style play. A murder-mystery. You know, actors at microphones, with special effects from a sound studio."
Olivia snorted slightly. "Didn't sound that professional."
"Yes, well, it was all a bit odd. Especially when one of them kept going on about his boyhood in Surrey before being repeatedly shot."
There was another bemused silence on the phone and then Buffy rallied. "Riiiight. Ok. Identification thingy now?"
"Oh yes, sorry Buffy. What did you want to know?"
"I just met something that was about 7 feet tall, had blue horns, yellow eyes and really bad dress sense. Had a knife that wouldn't cut paper and kept telling me that the Great Orm would come for me in the night and wind my entrails around a stick. Should I be worried, or should I chase him down from the tree where he thinks he's hidden and chastise him?"
"Good god, not that Great Orm twaddle again. He's a very small god in a separate dimension. And the demon sounds like a Cungark. Nothing to worry about at all."
"Oh goody! Thanks Giles, just checking." Her voice sounded a bit muffled, before being drowned out entirely by the ear-splitting sound of a chainsaw being started. Just before it went dead Giles heard Buffy say something on the lines of "Chopping time!"
Replacing the phone on its cradle Giles frowned slightly. Where on earth had she gotten the chainsaw? And did he really want to know?
It was very quiet in the van as they drove down the highway. They'd been delayed a lot by a few events that were out of their control, like the Tok'Ra turning up with some urgent news, not to mention the fact that the Goa'uld stood still for no man, but at last they were on their way back to Sunnydale. Sam had taken over the driving from Jack about ten miles down the road, with the leader of SG-1 now doing the map reading. Teal'c was sitting in the back with Bra'tac, who looked very uncomfortable in civilian clothes, but who at least no longer looked as if he was about to wet himself in excitement, as Jack had put it when the old Jaffa had been the other side of the base. The two Jaffa were talking quietly about something that Daniel couldn't quite hear. Not that he wanted to. He had other things on his mind.
Vampires. What a strange and terrible thing for a rational archaeologist to wrap his mind around. It sounded mad – hell, the entire concept was mad – but that proof, the very visible, very realistic, very fiery proof… It meant that his world had taken another 90-degree turn from what he had thought was normal. He smiled dryly for a moment. Surely he should be able to take such things in his stride these days? There was the Nox, after all, and their regenerative powers as well as the little matter of their being able to make things invisible. The Tollan, with their technology. The Asgard. The entire concept of the Stargate. Why should vampires on Earth be any different?
Well, for a start they were on Earth. His home planet. The place that he thought was normal – or at least as normal as he had thought.
And now they were headed back to Sunnydale, a place that made him feel uneasy. He had no idea why, but the place just did. There was something about it, something that made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end.
"Penny for your thoughts," said Jack suddenly, causing Daniel to start slightly.
"Nothing but dark ones," he replied after a moment. "I don't like this place. And I don't know why."
The parts were finally ready. It had taken him a while to get them into the right place, let alone start to plan to assemble them, but at last it was done. Carefully he laid each one over the plan that he has created. They matched perfectly. And he knew that they would come together perfectly. He knew that it was right. At last.
Graham's woozy head had gone away by now and although Forrest was still out of action due to his leg wound, it was almost business as usual at the Initiative. Almost. For a start there was the horrible fact that 11 men – two and a bit whole teams – were dead. That left a horrible gap in the line up of operatives, specifically those experienced enough to know how to detect an HST, how to hunt an HST and above all how to deal with one. The dead had included the cream of the Initiative, operatives that had been hand-picked, carefully trained (once they had gotten over their shock at finding out about HSTs) and then done their time on the mean streets of Sunnydale.
Riley leant over the railing and sighed slightly as he surveyed the latest batch of recruits who had been winnowed out of various military bases. The four men and three women looked as if someone had just walloped them on the back of their heads with a 50-pound salmon. They looked… well, unready.
Footsteps sounded to one side and he looked up as Graham joined him at his vantage point. "Hell," said his friend wryly, "Did we ever look that young and dumb?"
"I seem to remember a mantra on the lines of 'are you kidding?' being used a lot," replied Riley dryly. "We got over it. So will they. I hope. We need them – HST sightings are up a lot. And captures are running higher with every night now."
"Well they'd better be ready to cope, or Adam's going to have some more notches carved in his gun barrel. If it still works. And you sound a bit morose."
Straightening up Riley took a deep breath and then ran his hand through his hair to reach the back of his own neck, which he scratched briefly. "I don't like the way that things are developing," he said quietly. "We're dealing with Adam here. He's way off the reservation, playing to a rulebook that we've never even seen, let alone read the cover of it. I feel like… like we're groping through fog. A fog that that son of a bitch can see straight through."
Graham just stood there for a long moment, looking down at the new recruits with unseeing eyes. Then he nodded abruptly and looked up at his friend. "We need help to see the field better. The odd kind of help that you know about. I'd like to meet them if possible. I'd like to be able to trust them as much as you do. Because you obviously do," he said in a barely audible voice.
Riley just looked at him and then nodded slowly. "I'll see what I can do."
"Thanks. Don't worry about Forrest. Guy'll come around. He's stubborn, but he can see things clearly. Eventually." Nodding briefly he continued along his way. Riley watched him go with another sigh, before leaning back over the railing and continuing his observation of the new recruits.
Setting up in the main room of the small hotel complex that they'd hired – or rather effectively taken over - was the easy part. Carter wired up her laptop onto a screen, Daniel unpacked the three thousand books he'd apparently brought with him, and Jack himself had taken a quick nap. The hard part had been stopping Teal'c and Bra'tac from going out loaded for bear and staking out one of the many cemeteries in the damn town. Pointing out that it was mid-morning and that apparently vampires hated daylight had been a good start. Adding that they needed to reconnoitre the ground first had also helped, as the old Jaffa had gone slightly red about the ears at having this pointed out and had then gone very quiet.
The problem was that that the ground had literally been pulled out from underneath their feet – that the moment that that vampire had exploded into a million fiery fragments, their entire reasonably safe (if you could take into account the threat from the Goa'uld, the replicators, random craziness and big rocks that dropped out of the sky) world had vanished to be replaced by something else. Something very new and strange and, well, completely fricking crazy.
How the hell were they supposed to quantify that? How the hell were they supposed to make sense of it all? Vampires for Christ's sake! And according to Maybourne said bloodsuckers were just the tip of the iceberg. What else was out there? Oh wait. Wasn't there a cross between Robocop and Frankenstein's Monster running around there as well? Something that had knowledge about the Stargate Programme? Whoopsie!
And then there was the little loose end that had dragged them to this damned hellhole in the first place. Alexander Harris. Jack had a nasty feeling that Harris was connected to all this somewhere. He didn't know how or where or why, but he had a feeling in his gut that there was something going on with that kid.
Well. Perhaps it was time to do something about it. Jack turned around to his team and took a hard look at them. "Ok," he said eventually, "Here's the deal: we need answers. We need to find said answers. Therefore we need to rattle some cages."
"Rattle some cages?" Bra'tac raised his eyebrows as he pronounced the words carefully. "What cages?"
"It is a metaphor," answered Teal'c. "O'Neill means that we should apply confrontational methods and other stratagems to get the information that we require."
Bra'tac considered this for three nanoseconds and then snorted. "Then why did he not say so?"
"Hello? Still here?" pointed out Jack, waving a hand for emphasis. Then he lowered it again. "Daniel, I know that you've been working yourself into a frenzy of guilt at not getting that book back to the library. Take it back – and see if you can track down this Giles guy as well. I know that Maybourne suggested that you get the book, but the fact that the librarian knew exactly where it was, not to mention you said that he knew what it was about, seems to be a bit of a coincidence. I hate coincidences, they make my teeth ache.
"Carter, I want you to keep trawling through the records of this damn place. And recent events too – if this Project Lazarus-like thing is lurching around people might have seen it. They probably don't know what it is, but we do, so go look.
"Teal'c and Bra'tac – look, it was hard enough persuading Hammond that you could be allowed off base without your armour, Bra'tac, so work with me a little here, will'ya? We need to work out where's good and where's bad in town. Look for likely places where vampires and other things that go bump in the night might… hang out, or hang from, or just generally go bump in the night at. In other words take a look around, don't hunt anything just yet, and be back here by nightfall. If all goes well then we can arrange to find a vampire later on for… I don't know, research purposes or something.
"As for me, I'm going to try and do what we should have done first the last time that we were in town. I'm going to talk to Harris and ask him about this damned energy cell. Any questions? No? Good. Go to that voodoo that you do. So well!"
Finding a quiet place to meditate could be a bit of a pain sometimes, as Giles would have put it. Meditating at home could be problematic. While his father was far happier with his life than he had ever been before, thanks in various parts to being promoted, having a working marriage again, having a son who seemed to be doing something with his life, and not having an intimate relationship with Jack Daniels and Jim Beam, he tended to treat meditation with a combination of incomprehension and well-meaning bumbling. Being offered a coffee every five minutes would have put even Yoda off his stride.
The need to find a quiet place to do some serious meditation was the reason why he was sitting on a tree stump on a hill overlooking the park. He liked it there and the few vampires that had ever bothered him had discovered the error of their ways rather quickly.
He took a deep breath and then let it out again as he submerged himself in the Force and let his mind go still. He could feel the currents out there, the shifting patterns. Sometimes an eddy here, or a parting of the way there could hint at the existence of something hidden under the surface. And Sunnydale had a lot hidden away under a façade of normality. If the place could ever be described as normal that is.
After a long moment he paused. He could sense something… to the north. It seemed a bit familiar, or rather it felt alien but something that he had sensed before. Not quite human and not quite demon, but odd enough that he…. Oh. Tall dark and freaky was back in town. Which meant that there was a good chance that the others were with him and… oh, wait a moment. Tall dark and freaky had a friend. Someone who set off a similarly odd feeling in the force, not all the way human despite appearances. Great, he thought, the Air Force are back. Just great. Shaking his head he continued meditating. He had an hour to kill before going back to work.
The library was quite quiet when he entered it. It was a bit late in the day admittedly, but he had to return this book or he was going to go a bit mad. Jack might scoff a bit, but he wasn't academically inclined. Frankly the thought of leaving a gap on a library shelf made Daniel's brain twitch.
He smiled slightly as he looked around at the books and then sniffed slightly. He could smell old paper. No dust, which was the sign of a good library. There were the odd gaps here and there on the shelves, but nothing too bad – certainly nothing that might deform the spines of the hard-backed books.
Looking around he checked which part of the floor he was on and then strode forwards to an intersection, where a larger corridor through the bookshelves met the one that he had been walking along. At the far end he could see a door, with a window by it. It looked like an office, and he started to stride down towards it.
As he got closer to the door he suddenly had the feeling that he was being watched. He stopped suddenly and then looked about sharply. The feeling persisted, but he couldn't see anyone, and he shuddered for a moment. He hated the feeling that could best be described as 'sixth sense'. Most of the time it signified nothing, but there were other times when it did. The problem was that he couldn't distinguish between the two. Certainly there were times when he wasn't sure if he could or not.
When he looked back again Alexander Harris was standing in front of the door. He was holding a small pile of books and he was looking at Daniel with a look of total unsurprise. Then he put the books down on a trolley to one side and stepped closer. "Dr Jackson. Can I help you?"
"Um… maybe," said Daniel looking at him slightly sideways. "I'm sorry, but I was looking for Mr Giles and I thought that he might be around here. I couldn't see anyone. Anyone at all."
"I was filing books off to one side," replied Harris with a small smile. "Giles is at a meeting of the faculty heads right now. Or rather he was – I think I hear him coming now."
There was a moment's silence, during which Daniel craned his head around in an effort to hear footsteps. Hearing absolutely nothing after a minute or so he was about ask what was going on when all of a sudden he heard footsteps and low voices. Turning he saw Rupert Giles and a younger man dressed in a light suit with a crisp shirt and a green tie walking down the corridor. They both stopped at the sight of the two figures in front of the closed door, before exchanging a look and then continuing down, this time in silence.
When they got closer Daniel held up the book. "I thought that I'd return this. I've sorry to have taken so long."
Giles reached out and took it. "Ah, yes. Thank you. I trust you found it of interest?"
"You might say that, yes," said Daniel feeling a bit awkward all of a sudden. Well, even more awkward than before, oddly enough. Harris was looking at him as if he was a very interesting species of bug, while the other guy was busy polishing his glasses on a handkerchief and subjecting him to the odd piercing gaze.
"Oh, where are my manners? Dr Daniel Jackson, this is my faculty colleague Wesley Wyndham-Pryce." Giles paused to allow the two to shake hands. "And my fellow librarian Alexander Harris."
"Most people call me Xander," said Harris as they shook hands. From the way that his fingers moved he was trying not to exert too much pressure – Daniel had received similar handshakes from Teal'c in the past. "But we have met before, haven't we, Dr Jackson?"
"Uh, yes. Last year. About your… invention."
There was another slight pause. Then Harris raised an eyebrow. "I take it you're here to ask me about it again?"
"Uh, yes. I mean no. I mean… I'm in town on business and I had to return this book. Which has such interesting subject matter."
"In a word, vampires," stated Giles, who had been carefully flicking through the pages of the volume in question. "Thank you for bringing it back in such good condition as well."
There was a brief moment of silence that was broken by the trill of a cell phone. It belonged to Harris, who answered the call with a nod of acknowledgement and then walked over to one side, where he exchanged a few terse words with the person on the other end. When he'd finished he walked back over to Giles. "Lindsey," he said enigmatically. "I have to go. I'll talk to you later, guys. Goodbye Dr Jackson."
"I have to go as well," said Wyndham-Pryce. "Goodbye Dr Jackson. I'll talk to you later Rupert."
"Goodbye," muttered Daniel and then Harris was gone, striding off quickly down a side corridor, while Wyndham-Pryce vanished in the opposite direction. Daniel watched them go, blinking slight as he did. Harris had seemed a lot less surprised at seeing him than he might have thought. Almost as if he had known that he was in town. Which was crazy.
A sudden clearing of a throat reminded him that he wasn't alone. "Well, thank you for returning the book, but I really must be getting back to my duties and-"
"You know about the existence of vampires, don't you?" asked Daniel suddenly, before blinking slightly. Hello, his brain screamed at his mouth, try and clear these kinds of things with me first, remember?
Interestingly enough Giles didn't even blink at that. He just took off his glasses and proceeded to polish them carefully. "What a fascinating suggestion," he said eventually, replacing his spectacles carefully. "Given the fact that you work with the United States Armed Forces, why on Earth should I give you an honest answer?"
This sparked a bigger blink from Daniel. "What does my involvement with the US Air Force have to do with anything?"
Giles just looked at him for a moment. "It depends on what you intend to do with any information on the arcane that you might pick up. Sunnydale is a dangerous enough place as it is, Dr Jackson. Please don't involve yourself unless you have all the information. Now if you will excuse me, I can see my deputy approaching with a no doubt very mundane problem. If you wish to ask more questions I suggest you return at another time. Of course, whether or not I'll answer them is another matter. Goodbye." And with that he strode off, leaving Daniel staring after him. After a moment he closed his open mouth, raised and lowered his eyebrows briefly and turned for the exit. He had a great deal to think about and no idea what it all signified.
The egg hung in mid-air, suspended by… well, it looked like nothing at all, except maybe air molecules and they had a bad track record when it came to standing up to the effects of gravity. What was more interesting was what was describing a tight orbit around it. Namely a green bowling ball. It wasn't a very fast orbit, but it was enough to keep it swinging around the egg in a uniform fashion, which was the whole point of the exercise.
Xander looked at the two objects carefully and then nodded slowly before looking over at Lindsey. His latest Padawan was sitting cross-legged on the ground with his arms folded slightly defensively and a distinct sheen of sweat on his forehead. This was understandable. Lindsey had been lifting the two in the air with the Force for the past… 3 minutes and 15 seconds, which was already twice his previous best time. It wasn't an easy thing to do, as controlling something as heavy as a bowling ball at Lindsey's stage of training wasn't easy. One mistake and the egg would be crushed just before the bowling ball went straight through the nearest wall.
3 minutes 50 seconds. A slight wobble with the bowling ball, but then it was back in orbit around the egg. 4 minutes 10 seconds. Another wobble, but again a good recovery. 4 minutes 35 seconds. This time it was the egg that quivered in mid-air, but then returned to its proper place. Lindsey had a trickle of sweat running down his face now, and a slight tightness around his eyes, but the bowling ball swung around on another orbit.
5 minutes. "Release," said Xander firmly.
The bowling ball stopped, quivered, sank slowly down to the floor, before dropping the final three inches with a clunk. The egg sank more gracefully into Lindsey's outstretched hand, before he let out a deep breath and then slumped, resting his back against the chair behind him. "Wow," his Padawan said after a long sigh. "That left me feeling like someone stuck a straw in me and sucked out most of my strength."
"It should have," rejoined Xander with a smile. "That was the hardest you've ever been pushed before. Well done – that wasn't easy but you did it. Using the Force to defy gravity is never easy at first – you're trying to go against what you 'know' – by your old standards at least – what is possible and what isn't possible. In the old days you would've thought that it was impossible to do that. Crazy to think that you could have. But now you know better. You need to take that and grow it – expand it. The sky's the limit now, Lindsey. We might not have an X-Wing to lift out of a swamp, but we need to push the boundaries of what you feel you can lift."
Lindsey laughed suddenly. "Please don't dump my car in the river and tell me to fetch it out. I don't think that the electronics are as robust as the X-Wing's seemed to be in the film."
"We'll find something," grinned Xander. Then he turned, grabbed a practice sword from the set piled by the wall and tossed it over to Lindsey. "Ok. Next lesson. More Form 1. Shii-Cho."
"More of the basics, right?" asked Lindsey with less of a challenge and more of a certainty in his voice than in previous sessions. That was good. The man was recognising that he needed to walk before he could run.
"You got it," Xander replied. "Let's go."
When Buffy opened the door to her room she paused once she was over the threshold. Willow was in front of her computer. Or rather she was having an attack of the naptimes there, slumped in her seat with her head at an unbecoming angle and the occasional snurfling sound emerging from her open mouth. Buffy shook her head fondly. It was a good thing that Oz wasn't around – Willow did not look at all attractive in that position.
Placing her bag on her own chair she walked over and then carefully reached out and put a hand on her roommate's shoulder. "Willow?" She muttered at first, but once that failed she upgraded it to a low call, along with a slight shake.
It worked. Willow snapped upright, her eyes fluttering open, whilst a hand came up, with a tiny blue glow starting to flicker on her palm. "Wasn'tsleepingwusrestin'myeyes," she slurred.
"Whoa, Willow, turn the mojo off!" said Buffy as she sprang back from the chair.
Her friend blinked at her muzzily, looked down at her hand with its glowing blue light and then started a bit. "Oops," she muttered sheepishly. "Sorry, Buffy. I got back from classes and started working on this, and I didn't sleep a lot last night, not that you heard that from me, I mean Oz and I… no never mind, I was working on this and I'm getting very annoyed about it because I can't quite crack it all the way and… I should probably take a breath around now, shouldn't I?"
"Breathing is usually a good thing Will," smiled Buffy as she walked back to her bag and started to unpack her folders and books. "What's got you so annoyed? Not that stuff that you've been looking into for Xander?"
"The database from hell," said Willow gloomily. "I know that from what Xander told me, the guy works for something called the 'SGC'. The problem is that the computers belonging to what I think is the SGC are ferociously protected. It's a real challenge just to make sure that my infiltration attempts aren't backtracked." Her eyes gleamed as she said this, leading Buffy to conclude that she was enjoying the whole thing.
"But I have a few tricks up my sleeve, and some magic as well, plus some ideas from Oz and if this works out I should be able to slip between the bricks of their firewall and have a look around."
"What do you and Xander expect to find?" asked Buffy with a frown.
"Oh, some reasons why they're following him around so much, all of them, plus maybe an explanation of what this Goa-uld thingy they mentioned is. Work out what they're doing and either stop it or run away from the explosion, as Giles said." She looked at her computer, hit a key so that the screen lit back up again from the screensaver and then drooped a bit. "Oh. It's gone from 11 access to 14. Wow. This is going to take a long time at this rate."
"You'll work it out," said Buffy reassuringly, "You're better at this sort of thing than anyone I've ever met. Right. I need a shower and then I have some shopping to do with my mom and Olivia, and then I have a date with Riley, my favourite soldier!"
Her findings made no sense at all. The more she looked at the scrap of skin and muscle tissue the more it baffled her. The chromosome count was way off for a start, the DNA still made no sense at all and the less she said about the scales the better. The estimated size of the creature was still bang on her initial findings.
The horrible thing was that she was starting to suspect that it was, possibly, a fragment of flesh from… a demon. A demon. She mouthed the words and then shuddered. No, it made no sense. Except that she'd been told that they existed. By a superior officer. Ok, a retired, rather sexist superior officer who apparently had a small blue imp in his pocket, not that she'd seen it, although she had heard the sound effects during the one time that the General had visited the SGC with copies of some files that he'd basically purloined, but… she drooped in her chair a bit and passed a tired hand over her brow. She was exhausted.
Dr Janet Fraiser was starting to think that unless she received some information that the whole thing was a hoax pretty damn soon, she was going to have to come to the conclusion that vampires and things that she had told Cassie did not exist in this world…. Did. That was going to be an interesting conversation and one she made a mental note to try and put off for as long as possible, until it had to be done. God forbid. Probably after the conversation about where babies came from, although she suspected that Cassie had already worked that one out from observing life.
Speaking of Cassie, it was time to go home and give her adopted daughter some mothering. After everything she had heard recently she needed some sanity back in her life. So she got up and went home.
"A pint of Caffreys please," he said with a deep sigh. The barmaid gave him a cheery smile and then went off to get his beer. It had been an… interesting day. He really needed to have a word with Xander about how to handle these people in town, the ones from what he had said was called the SGC. He ran the letters through his head again and then shrugged internally. The acronym didn't mean a thing to him. The letters could have stood for anything, although if he had to make a guess – and given the fact that they were from the US Air Force and were interested in the energy call – it might have been something to do with the shuttle programme. Shuttle… Ground Command? Sounded a bit laboured. Shuttle Gear Crew? Sounded far too simple. Also sounded like a bad rap, or rip or whatever it was band. Besides, what was Dr Daniel Jackson, a noted if admittedly rather controversial, archaeologist doing working with them?
Star something perhaps. Question was, what? Or Space something. Space… Ground Communications? More plausible, but again Dr Jackson's presence remained unexplained.
Susie returned at that point and Giles smiled at her, paid for the drink that she had brought him and then wandered over to a vacant seat. A taped game of rugby was being shown on a screen on one wall and he kept a vague eye on it, while his brain chewed on the day's events and he whiled away the time before Olivia arrived from her shopping trip with Buffy and Joyce. The three of them seemed to be getting on quite well together. He just hoped that the events of the night of the police car bonnet never turned up in casual conversation.
"I never put you down for a Stout sort of bloke, Giles," said a sardonic voice to one side.
Giles winced visibly at the bad pun. "They don't have Caffreys very often, Spike. Guest beers are very hard to come by in this neck of the woods. What do you want?"
The blond vampire sat down opposite him with a smirk and a wave of his half-empty pint of lager. "Can't a bloke chew the fat with a fellow subject of her majesty?"
Giles smiled briefly and then leant forwards. "I hate fat. And besides, you were born and sired during the reign of Queen Victoria." He leant back. "Here for the rugby? Or the beer?"
Spike took a long swallow of the contents of his glass and then waved at the barmaid, who beamed at him. In the process of this signal for more beer he had also been able to sweep the room with his eyes, something that made Giles sit up slightly and look around lazily himself.
"What's wrong?"
"Just making sure that I wasn't followed. I hate being sodding followed."
"Who would follow you?"
"I don't know," sighed Spike as he drained his glass. "I've just got an odd feeling my water, as it were. Like I'm being watched. Probably because I am. Seen a few old… acquaintances around sometimes in the other bars of Sunnydale. You know what I mean."
Ah. Vampires. Or other human-looking types of demons. Which begged a very important question. "Why would they follow you?"
A shrug. Then: "Because I'm untrustworthy. A vampire who can't harm a human. Something to be made fun of. Except that I can hurt them. I dunno exactly why." He sighed deeply, smiled at Susie as she ferried his new pint over, paid for it and then waited until she had scurried off. "I've got some information for you," he said gloomily. "Adam's still recruiting."
Giles put his pint down on the table and swallowed carefully. "Interesting. How wide is he casting his net?"
"Oh, pretty bloody wide. If it has a pulse – well, I mean if it moves - and maybe stuff like odd horns he's extending an invitation to talk to it. I dunno about what, but he's been talking to a lot of things. If I had to guess, I'd say that he was up to something. Problem is, I don't know what."
He mulled this over for a long moment, stroking his chin as he did so. "I see." Then he looked up. "Spike, can I be cynical and ask why you're telling me all this?"
There was a moment of silence, followed by a few glugs as the vampire threw a third of his pint down his throat. "Good question. Whilst I'd love to get this bloody chip out of my head and then make balloon animals out of your intestines, I… well, I…" He stopped and glowered. "I hate the Initiative for what they put in my brain," he muttered in a low and very intense growl. "I hate what they can do. I never liked mind control, and frankly when Dru did her woogie-woogie thing with her eyes and her fingers it always made my skin crawl. Having the ability to put something in your brain and change you on that level is the most horrible thing I think of. And they did it to me. I've seen the plans, Giles. Adam is the logical extension of what they can do. He represents something so horrible that I don't want to think about it. That's why I'm telling you what he's up to, or who he's recruiting. The fact that he doesn't give a toss about what happens to the people he recruits is another."
"Did you?" asked Giles mildly.
"Well, no, but then I never wasted a good minion. Never a good asset. Besides," shivered the vampire, "Using technology the way that he does creeps me out. I've got no intention of ending up with an arm that needs to be plugged into a car battery every ten minutes. Urgh."
Spike slumped back in his chair. He looked tired and drained and for a split second Giles felt the tiniest flash of sympathy for him. It wasn't a lot of sympathy and it vanished in a nanosecond, but for that moment he pitied the vampire for what had been done to him. That said, he wouldn't hesitate for a moment to stake the bastard if he ever got that chip out of his head.
Spike seemed to sense that, because he abruptly threw the remains of his pint down his throat and then started to get up.
"Wait," said Giles, raising a hand after a minor internal struggle. "One more beer."
Spike looked at him sharply, before looking down and weighing both the beer glass in his hand and the thought of another one. "You're buying?" When he received a nod he sat down slowly. "Christ I feel like I'm sitting on Checkpoint Charlie."
Having waved at Susie again Giles smiled briefly. "I belief that's in a museum now."
"You know what I mean."
"Yes. Greyness instead of black and white."
The vampire looked at him. "Oh sod it, bring on that beer. I've got some television to watch. Tell your Slayer to see her mum more often by the way. Joyce misses her. Any prat could tell you that."
"Duly noted," said Giles dryly, and then drained his own glass as the barmaid approached. "She's shopping tonight with Joyce and Olivia. Being a sensible member of the male species I decided to go to the pub instead and think deep thoughts about very little. Although the Initiative, Adam and everything else does tend to intrude on the mind."
The beers were put down on the table and the two reluctant allies each picked one up. "To what passes for a quiet life," suggested Giles. Spike nodded briefly.
"Xander, there's someone for you at the door."
The Jedi looked up at his father, who was standing at the doorway still clutching the application form that he'd been agonising over for two days.
"You're going for that promotion then?"
"What? Oh, yes. What the hell, they've already said that I'm on the fast track, so I might as well push myself forward a bit. Anyway, never mind that, there's a guy for you at the door. An air force colonel I think, judging by the little birdy thing on his shoulder. What's going on? Please don't tell me you're enlisting, your mother will just freak out."
"Don't worry Dad, I've no intention of joining up. I'll go and see what this guy wants." Xander stood up from his desk, slipped his little book of Jedi lore into an inside pocket once his father's back was turned and walked downstairs. The book was getting rather full now, and he made a mental note to buy a new one soon. Volume Two – The Lore Strikes Back. Thing was, he wasn't going to run short of observations about the Force anytime soon. If ever, come to that. There was the Corellian Jedi stuff for a start. He was starting to suspect that their way of thinking might have been the way to go about Anakin's training. Close to home, protect the area, love your family… and marry. He thought of Neeja Halcyon for a moment and smiled.
Then he straightened up and walked into the living room, where an equally straight figure dressed in air force blue and with his hat under one arm was peering at a picture on a table to one side. It was a snap taken by his bemused mother on graduation day, outside the house and well away from all the sirens and smoke at the school. Buffy, Willow, Oz and himself, all in the graduation robes that they'd retrieved from the school. They looked a bit smoke-stained, but they looked good. Wesley and Giles were off to one side, smiling in relief at being alive, whilst Faith squatted at the side, a free and easy smile of her own on her face and the hilt of her knife peeking out from behind her back. It had been a day to enjoy life.
O'Neill seemed to sense his eyes on him, because he turned sharply away from the picture and looked at the door, before blinking a bit at the sight of Xander. "Alexander Harris?"
"Yes," said Xander, trying to sound wary and uncertain. "Well, I prefer to be called Xander."
"Colonel Jack O'Neill, US Air Force," said the officer with a slight smile as he walked over and held his hand out. Xander took it and the two men engaged in a brief trial of hand strength, before the colonel seemed to remember that he was there to be nice or something. He certainly flexed his now-free hand slightly, in a way that showed that Xander had possibly won. Not that he cared.
"Take a seat Colonel," said Xander, closing the door behind him and then walking over to an armchair and sitting. He was getting the oddest feeling of déjà vu, with faint echoes of the Jedi Temple in Coruscant. How interesting. "How can I help you?"
O'Neill looked at him closely and then sent a thin smile across the room from the sofa where he was now sitting. "I think you can guess why I'm here."
"Enlighten me anyway," asked Xander stretching out with the Force a trifle. The man was… tense. There was a certain amount of suspicion about him, as well as a certain amount of uncertainty. That was equally interesting.
"I believe you talked to some colleagues of mine a month or two ago," the Colonel said, leaning back in the sofa as he did so. After a moment he frowned, shifted in his seat and then reached back and pulled a book out from behind the cushion he had been resting against. The cover announced it to be a rather curved copy of the collected works of John Donne.
"Sorry," Xander apologised, "My mom is doing a lot of reading at the moment. Just put it to one side. I think you were about to mention Major Carter and Dr Jackson?"
This bought him a hard blink of the eyes. "Not to mention the energy cell that you designed, Mr Harris. Specifically the blueprints for it where you somehow forgot to include the part that makes it work. We're very interested in that energy cell Mr Harris, and I'm here to ask you about that missing part and what it'll take to add to the blueprint."
Ok, so far it was 100 what he had been expecting. He narrowed his eyes and looked at the figure dressed in blue in front of him. "Why do you want it?" He asked sharply.
"I'm afraid that's classified," came the answer zinging back. "All I'll say is that the Government of the United States of America would like to purchase the full plans for that energy cell from you. You would be fully compensated. Very well compensated I might add."
Meh. As if the money counted. Maybe this guy thought that it did. But the fact that he'd been in Sunnydale before, following him around, not to mention getting to see the office of Wolfram & Hart blow up in front of him, also meant that O'Neill had some sort of suspicion about him. And the place in general.
"I'm sorry," he said, "But the energy cell… I'd need at least a hint at what it was used for. The shuttle?"
He had to give the guy credit for being, well, probably a very good power player. "Mr Harris, that still comes under the term 'classified.' All I can say is that the Space Programme would benefit from it."
Aha. Vague but interesting. And indicative of what the SGC was involved with. He had suspected that, but confirmation was always nice. He suppressed the sudden need to just use the Jedi Mind Trick and ask O'Neill outright what the hell he was involved in and why they needed the energy cell, and by the way what the hell was a Goa'uld? Given the fact that the Mind Trick had not precisely worked all that well on the other members of O'Neill's team, he had a nasty feeling that the man was strong-minded enough to fight it off. He certainly didn't want to try just yet. Wonderful. How the hell was he going to get out of this conversation any time soon? Well, he was a Jedi. He could always try a bit of honesty.
"Colonel O'Neill can I ask you why on Earth I should believe you? Why should I agree to hand over the information you need to the US Air Force? What will they – you – do with it? What guarantee can you give me that it won't be misused?"
This knocked O'Neill back on his heels a bit for a second. "Misused?" he repeated, as if testing the word out. "What do you mean 'misused'?"
Xander tilted his head to one side and narrowed his eyes. "Misused as in used to bomb the hell out of someone two continents over. Misused as in manipulated in a way that might win a skirmish, or a battle, or even a war, against another country on this planet, a place that I might point out already has more than enough death and destruction in all kinds of places as it is. Misused as in used for the benefit of the United States of America and not for the benefit of the human race as a whole. Can you give me a promise about that kind of misuse?"
By the way that O'Neill's eyes tightened slightly, the man was annoyed. However, he was obviously a good poker player, because he kept any potential explosion inside himself and repressed what he had obviously been about to say. "No," he said after a long drawn out moment, "I can't give you that promise. I wish that I could, but I can't speak for the entire US Air Force, let alone the US Military. All I can do is to tell you that my people need it. We'll try and keep it to ourselves, but we need it Mr Harris. We need it for something that you can't even imagine, something that you can't even comprehend. We can save lives with it – by giving those lives something they can use. That's all I can say."
Well, damn. The guy not only sounded honest, but he fairly exuded righteous anger and sincerity. Perhaps he meant it. Actually, Xander was pretty sure that he did. He certainly gave off the right vibes with the Force. He wondered for a moment if he should try the Jedi Mind Trick after all, but then dismissed it. The guy was twanging with tension.
"You mean it," he replied after a long moment. "How classified is this information?"
O'Neill shot him another sour smile. "Anything marked as classified is secret. This is secret enough to get me court-martialled and you arrested for accepting classified material. As I like my life as it is right now, I can't tell you a damn thing. All I can say is that it's important."
Interesting. Xander stroked the line of his own jaw for a moment, caught himself doing it and then rubbed his chin. The temptation to grow a beard so that he could have something to stroke in the first place was quite strong at times like this. "I'll think about it. That's all I can promise you. How long will you be in town and how can I contact you?"
O'Neill stared hard at him for a moment and then nodded slightly. "I'm in town for a few days at least. You can reach me on my cell phone," he said quietly, passing over a card.
Taking it, Xander looked down. It was a very plain card, with no hint at all of O'Neill's unit. Certainly no mention of the SGC. Just his name, his rank, his cell phone – and that was it. "Thank you," he said quietly. "I'll be in touch when I've made up my mind."
O'Neill nodded at him, stood up, placed his hat under his arm and opened the door to the hall, which led him to the front door, which Xander opened for him. As soon as the Air Force Colonel was out of the house he placed his hat carefully on his head and walked away briskly. He did not look back.
"What was that about?" came a voice from behind Xander. His father was standing there, absent-mindedly pulling a pen from behind his ear and frowning at it.
"He was asking about something that I'd been working on a long time ago, dad. He was misinformed as well. The Air Force… doesn't have all the information it needs sometimes. Probably not their fault." He turned around and smiled. "Nothing to worry about," he said, stressing the words with an added bit of the Force.
"Nothing to worry about. Right," repeated his father with a rather glassy-eyed expression. Then he stopped and shook his head slightly. "Um, what was I saying? Oh, never mind. Xander, can you take a look at this damn form? I think I have it nailed down, but I'm not sure just yet and your mother isn't back from the bookshop yet."
"Sure dad," he smiled, and walked into the kitchen. His mind was, however, on something else. What exactly were the SGC people, whatever the hell that stood for, doing back in Sunnydale and how long were they going to be there for?
The problem with living in a crypt was that television reception was very hard to get right. Hell, it was very hard just to get, period. Which was why he'd climbed onto the roof with a bit of wire attached to a very old antenna, tied it carefully into the bowl-shaped stone thingy on the roof and then camouflaged it by bending it so that it fit inside the damn thing. The last thing he wasted was those pillocks from the Initiative wandering past in the middle of the day and wondering just why someone had a TV aerial tied onto a crypt, before putting two and two together and getting him staked in his sleep.
All he had to do now was to connect the aerial to the telly. Which would have been easier if he hadn't removed the right connecter thingy earlier on, as he hadn't thought that he would need it. Sod.
He walked over to the pile of assorted things at the far end of his snug little hovel and went through them carefully. Luckily he hadn't thrown it that far, so that all he had to do was blow the fluff off it, connect it up and hey presto, instant TV. Well, that was the theory anyway. There was also the little matter of hoping that his jury-rigged power cables worked. The fact was, he'd usually had minions to do that kind of thing. But it was good to keep busy and to use his hands, and it felt good to….
Spike sniffed the air slightly. Interesting. He finished the connection, plugged in the aerial and then straightened up. "I don't have cable down here by the way. Just the usual channels. Sorry if that's a disappointment to you."
"Not at all," said a rather amused voice from the shadows of the other side of the crypt. Bugger, he'd been meaning to install some booby traps on that door. He knew that the passage it led to went to the surface in one direction, but he really should have investigated where the other end went to. Some moved in the darkness and then Adam stepped into the light. The thing looked around the place and then raised an eyebrow. "Your living accommodation looks to be a bit substandard. And you seem to know who I am. Interesting"
"I take what I can get these days," replied Spike, watching the walking advert for not paying the military any money carefully. This was not a good sign. "And I'm very well informed these days."
Adam looked around at the tired chair with its sagging cushion, the small pile of books to one side, the mound of dirty laundry in the far corner and the bed sheets on what passed for a bed. "What a place you have here. You used to be a force in Sunnydale, a power. Now you're reduced to living down here." He looked at Spike. "What a waste."
"Yes, well, that was before Angelus tried to end the world. Oh yes and that was when we just had the one Slayer. Oh and Harris hadn't declared himself as a full Jedi then. When he did all hell broke loose here." Spike took out a packet of fags, shook one loose from the crumpled mess, looked at the squashed thing sadly and then shrugged and lit it up. "Problem with being a 'power' here in Sunnydale at the moment is that it tends to make you rather high profile, whereupon people start queuing up to hack you off at the knees. Ambitious underlings. Contempories who think that because you're in charge, they have to catch you up. Oh yes, and Slayers and Jedi. Being staked, or having your head chopped off by a glowing light bulb sword is a bit hard to come back from. Unless you've been a master vampire for so long that you look like Nosferatu, or whatever the hell his name was.
"In short, I've reconsidered my career option here on the Hellmouth and I am now hoping to survive long enough to plan and then make my escape at some point."
Adam tilted his head to one side and just looked at him in a way that made him feel highly uncomfortable. Not that he was going to give any hint about that.
"You're not going to leave just yet, because you still have hope that something will happen at the Initiative," the construct rumbled after a long moment. "You're hoping that the chip in your brain will be taken out."
"How do you know about that?" asked Spike, surprised for once.
Adam just smiled at him. "I know a great many things about the Initiative and what they did. Not to mention what they do. I know all about the invasive surgery that saw the insertion of the violence inhibitor chip into your head. I know exactly where it is and how they put it in. And I know exactly how to take it out."
Spike took a deep drag on his fag and did his very best not to exhale too quickly or to show too much emotion. "Right," he said, using a finely-gauged level of sarcasm in his voice, "Like I'm going to believe you."
"Why would you not?"
"I'm sorry but I've made it a rule never to trust strange demons, or whatever the hell you are."
This last jibe got him a slow smile from the walking amalgamation of flesh and metal. "I'm the future," it said with a certain amount of relish.
Not as far as I'm concerned, thought Spike grimly. Christ, what a… thing.
"And I can remove the chip."
This made him narrow his eyes and look at Adam carefully. "You can, can you? And why would you do that?"
"I require information. About the Slayers. How they fight. How I can beat them."
Good luck with that one, mate, thought Spike pessimistically. You're going to need more luck than I've ever had, along with more better technique. "You want the gen on the Slayers? Just the Slayers? Why not the Jedi as well?"
Adam just looked at him for a moment. "I have my own methods when it comes to the Jedi. They will die. I'll kill them myself. But I need some more data on the Slayers. They seem to have a habit of appearing where they are least expected and disrupting things. Buffy Summers appears to be particularly good at that."
It's not all luck, thought Spike grimly, it's also good planning and the ability to rely on friends. That's the key to Buffy Summers, and that's why I could never beat her. "Slayers are tricky," he said slowly. "Killing a Slayer is never an easy thing to do."
"I will do it," stated Adam in a matter-of-fact tone of voice. "You need to decide if you will help me on this. I can detect a great deal of uncertainty on this matter. I will just say this – when I win, when I take over this place and start to expand eastwards and upwards, I will be generous to my allies. If one of them needs a violence inhibitor chip removed from their brain, I will carry out the procedure." He looked straight at Spike. "You need to decide if you want the chip out enough to help me. To be my ally and earn my help. Because… no-one else can or will do this thing."
And with that he turned and walked away, back into the shadows and through that damn door. Spike watched him leave thoughtfully. Bugger. This put the cat amongst the pigeons.
Showing great forbearance he refrained from pacing or fidgeting. Instead he walked to one side, grabbed a bottle of scotch from a moderately clean shelf, selected the cleanest glass that he could find and then poured himself a modest slosh, which he then took great pains to sip. His initial instinct had been to throw it down the back of his throat, but he restrained himself and sipped instead.
At the same time his brain was going at a mile a minute. The chip was the bane of his bloody existence. He hated it in a way that could not be put into words at all easily. Smashing it into a million billion pieces probably wasn't physically possible, but if he could ever see it on the ground in front of him he'd make a good attempt at doing so. Having it removed would be bloody brilliant. The problem was that he didn't trust Adam even a tiny bit. The thing was…too clinical. Too mechanical, heh, that was a pun and half. Adam, he suspected, regarded people as pieces on a chessboard. In other words expendable. Plus, he seemed to be ambitious in a very dangerous way. Take over Sunnydale first? But then where exactly. Eastwards he'd said. And upwards? What the hell did that mean?
He drank the rest of his scotch and brooded darkly for a bit. This was a classic case of being dropped in the shit because he would have been better off doing something else. It was a case of the what-ifs. What if he'd caught Dru before she'd started batting her eyelids at that bloody chaos demon? What if he'd just given up on that bloody Ring, instead of meeting the world's worst vampire, Harmony, getting the crap beaten out of him by both Slayers and then getting pinched by the Initiative? What if he'd admitted defeat and gotten the hell out of town at any point before, during or after all of the above?
Simple answer – he wouldn't be sitting there in a crypt, drinking bloody awful scotch, with a behavioural modification chip embedded in his skull, being talked down to by a creature that looked like a bad combination of random body parts assembled by Baron Frankenstein on a really terrible day at the office.
It was at this point that things took a hard swerve towards the surreal. Seeing movement out of the corner of his eye he whipped around as two figures leapt down through the hole in the ceiling. One was big and black, while the other was bearded and old. Both were dressed in clothes that didn't quite seem to fit and both had black woven caps pulled down over their foreheads. And both looked triumphant.
"You see," said the older one, "I told you that could sense the stench of a Mar'tyun, as according to the old tales!"
"Who the hell are you?" blurted Spike, getting ready to make a dash for the door. Then he paused. "Stench? What stench? I'm very hygienic thank you very bloody much."
"It is immaterial," said the tall bloke, before raising his hand, which contained something. It looked like no weapon that Spike had ever seen. There was a sudden snapping noise, a bit like an electronic squeal, and the bloody thing suddenly expanded, as if the top bit popped up like a cobra getting ready to spring. Spike drew the correct conclusion that this was a bad thing, turned and sprang for the doorway.
Unfortunately the big guy simply tracked him with the whatever-the-hell-it-was and fired it, because there was a sort of prolonged zappy noise then Spike convulsed as things-
Teal'c watched the still figure for a moment and then looked around carefully. "It would seem to be unconscious."
"Yes, it would," agreed Master Bra'tac with a certain amount of chagrin. "I was hoping that it would give us more of a challenge. But, O'Neill was adamant. Capture not challenge." He snorted. "It would have been an adventure to discover how much of a fight this thing could have given us."
Teal'c nodded gravely. Then he pulled out a cell phone, hit a speed dial number and waited, as Master Bra'tac cautiously approached the unconscious Mar'tyun and bound its hands behind its back. After a moment the other person finally accepted his call. "Yeah, T, what have you got?"
"We have a specimen, O'Neill. We tracked it down to a crypt in a cemetery. We are returning to our rooms now."
"Great, Teal'c. See you there soon. We're RTB ourselves."