Sabine C. Bauer - Stargate SG-1 #7: Survival of the Fittest

Daniel shuffled over to Jack who seemed to be coming round, his face bone-white under a mudpack.

"Love what they've done with the gate room." Jack blinked up at the canopy. "Where the hell are we? Mato Grosso?"

"Doesn't look like Brazil to me." Daniel sniffed, squinting at the blur of a monumental structure behind them. High in the wall, the gate formed the third eye in a stone-carved mask that placidly gazed down at him. "My money's on Angkor Wat."

"What encore?"

"You know. The Khmer temples in Cambodia."

"Didn't know they kept a Stargate there."

"Uh, they don't, I guess. If they did, somebody'd have found it by now." Glancing at fuzzy walls and reliefs again, Daniel said, "This is amazing. We definitely need to check out this place. It could-"

"Daniel!"

"Hmm?"

"We don't know where we are, we're hogtied, we've got no weapons or supplies, and we- Holy buckets!" Jack had finally turned his head to get a spectacular view of Daniel's face. "You know, you're... Nah, I won't say it."

"Won't say what?"

Uh-uh."

"Jack?"

"I'm not gonna say you're a sight for sore eyes."

"Very funny."

"That's why I didn't say it."

To Tanya-beta extraordinaire and the one who's responsible for Everything!

SABINE C. BAUER

he childlike face-she'd been a child, first and foremost, a smart, needy, tantrum-throwing teenager who'd made an awful mistake-never moved Jack reached for her neck as if to feel a pulse they both knew had never been there. It wasn't the pulse he was after, Daniel realized Below her right ear a hidden catch activated and released the energy cell that had powered her. The crystal fizzed briefly and winked out, looking dull and dead, its removal a clear case ofoverkill. Nothing would revive her now. After all, Jack O'Neill, ex-Special Ops, was a crack shot.

"You stupid son of a bitch!"

"Hey, you're welcome."

Daniel wanted to hit him, for the glib reply alone.

Someone up in the control room gave the all clear. The klaxons stopped their wailing, and the gate room fell quiet enough to hear the soft clickety- click and clatter as all throughout the base Reese's `toys', bereft of the lifeforce that had fuelled them, disintegrated to a harmless rain of metal wafers.

Rain or tiny needles of snow. Daniel felt cold Another difference not made, for Reese and for an entire race of beings who were getting their little gray asses whupped by the offspring of her `toys'. Too many differences not made. Maybe it was time to leave. No point in staying and pretending things were just fine when everything had changed Or perhaps nothing had changed

He heard himself start up an argument, because he was Daniel and Daniel always argued, pitting the ever-same reasoning against the ever-same justifications and with the ever-same results.

"Look, I'm sorry," Jack said finally. "But this is the way it had to go down, and you know it."

Now brush your teeth and go to bed!

He stopped short of that. Instead he turned away, muttering into his radio, and began walking off toward the blast door. He'd still be holding the gun, always would. No difference.

Daniel didn't look up, afraid of what he'd see, of the decisions it'd force on him.

Convergence: The development of similar features in distantly related lineages due to the effects of similar evolutionary factors.

he subject, strapped to a gleaming metal table inside a gleaming surgical lab, opened his mouth for a scream. Thankfully that particular audio channel had been set to mute. The scream was enduring and heartfelt, which didn't come as any great surprise. Suddenly the subject's eyes rolled up, and he stilled. The solemn face of a white-clad doctor interposed itself between camera and surgical table. The doctor shook his head. Another failure.

How many had there been? Eight? Nine?

It was high time to consider the alternative. Frank Simmons switched off the aftermath of the experiment and turned to the central monitor bank. Each screen showed the same image, just from a different angle. The backgrounds varied. French doors and a glimpse of a garden or pristinely starched curtains or a blank white wall. However, all of them showed bars in the foreground and, behind the bars, a man. Or what looked like a man.

He was dark-haired, tall, and heavily built, and he moved with a curious absence of grace, as though mind and body hadn't really connected. Which might be the case after all. Some of the guards called him Herman. The likeness was indisputable, but Simmons discouraged the joke. Herman Munster was a cretin. This... thing... on the screen was highly intelligent and commanded the entire knowledge and viciousness of his species. Prettifying him would be lethal.

Until quite recently the man-thing had been a person called Adrian Conrad. Obscenely rich and incurably ill and unwilling to appreciate, let alone accept, the irony of it. And so he'd paid a large amount of money for a larval Goa'uld and let it infest his body. The alien parasite had cured the disease but usurped the host's mind in exchange when the removal process had run into a hitch. Tough luck.

Good luck for the NID. Thanks to Simmons, the secret government agency owned the Goa'uld exclusively. Right now, the thing that had been Conrad sat inside his cage leafing through a textbook. Genetics. Suddenly, and with all signs of disdain, he leaped from his chair and flung the book against the bars.