CHAPTER TEN
Daniel was in the office that had been set up for him, neck-deep in translations, when Jack came in.
"Busy?" he asked as he wandered around the room, looking at things.
"Need you ask?" Daniel studied the colonel. "Bored already?"
"Well, there's not much for me to do around here, you know."
"Should have brought the paperwork with you."
"I came here to avoid doing the paperwork. Now, I'm beginning to think I should have stayed in Colorado and just suffered through it."
"I'm sure that Doctor Weir could find something for you to do."
"Yeah, like digging holes in the ice." Jack picked up some kind of gadget. "I was going to go get some lunch. Care to join me? Maybe we can drag Carter away from her toys and come, too."
Daniel was tempted to refuse, but his stomach had been making noises for the past hour. "Sure. Let's get Sam."
The two men found her with McKay, bent over some device and arguing about what it was. Sam's face lit up as she saw Daniel, something that McKay did not fail to notice, which succeeded in heightening his jealously.
"Hey, Carter," Jack said. "We're going to get something to eat. Take a break and come with us."
"I really shouldn't, sir. There is so much to do."
"Come on, Sam. If I can drag myself away from my mountain of work, so can you," Daniel told her, smiling.
Unable to say no to that smile, Sam said okay.
They all moved toward the door, but Daniel halted and turned around to look at McKay. "Oh, by the way, Sam's right about what that thing is. It is a power regulator."
McKay glared at him. "And how would you know?"
"I had the entire knowledge of the Ancients downloaded into my brain, Doctor McKay. Sometimes, things leak back into my conscious mind. If I had access to it all, I could build everything that's in this outpost, including the Stargate that used to be here before we took it."
Leaving McKay to think about that, Daniel left with his teammates.
"Thank you," Sam said to him. "He kept insisting that he was right and I was wrong. Nothing's changed from the last time we worked together. That time, he almost got us all killed. This time, he's just being a big pain in the butt. At least he hasn't made any passes at me. Actually, he sometimes acts like he's sulking."
Daniel smiled. "I told you, Sam. He's mourning the loss of his dream about being with you."
"Fantasy, you mean. It would never have happened."
"McKay has the hots for you?" Jack asked. "The guy's an ass."
"Agreed, sir."
The three left the outpost and went to the building housing the personnel quarters. They got themselves some lunch and sat at a table. As they ate, Daniel told them about what he'd found out from Doctor Weir.
"So, they're already making preparations for the expedition to Atlantis?" Sam questioned.
"Yes. They have been for several weeks now, ever since we found this place."
"No, you are not going!" Jack said firmly, glaring at Daniel. "I don't care how much you beg and plead, I'm not letting you go to Atlantis."
The archeologist decided to have a little fun with him. "But Jaaack," he responded plaintively.
"No. I don't wanna hear it. Nothing you say is going to change my mind."
"It's General Hammond's decision, not yours."
Jack glowered at him. "Daniel, I'm not kidding you. Don't you go asking Hammond for permission to go. If you do, while you're in Atlantis, I'll turn your place into a halfway house for homeless ex-cons or something. I swear I will."
Daniel just looked at him. The colonel saw a tiny spark of humor in the younger man's eyes.
"You never had any intention of asking to go, did you," he guessed.
The corners of Daniel's lips turned up. "Nope."
"You were just yanking my chain."
Daniel's smile got a wee bit bigger. "I liked the homeless ex-cons threat." He was rewarded with a glare from Jack.
"I will get even, Daniel."
"I'm sure you will."
They returned their attention to the food.
"How come?" Jack asked after a couple of minutes.
Realizing what Jack was asking, Daniel replied. "Because my place is here, Jack, fighting against the Goa'uld." He looked at the woman he loved. "And being with Sam."
She took his hand, smiling at him.
The teammates finished their lunch and returned to the outpost. As Sam went back to her work – and dealing with Rodney McKay – Jack walked with Daniel toward his office. As they passed by the control chair, Jack stopped to look at it.
"I missed all the excitement when you sat in this again, but I sure did hear about it," he said. "Also found out about that whole gene thing."
"Want to try it out?" Daniel asked, already knowing the answer.
"No thanks. I'll pass."
They went the rest of the way to Daniel's office.
"So, what are you going to be up to today?" Jack asked.
"As soon as I finish these translations, I'll be meeting with my staff."
"Your staff?"
"Uh huh. Doctor Weir has assigned a team to work with me to try and find Atlantis. It's going to be quite a job. There is so much information here that it could take months to go through it all."
"You're not staying here that long," Jack stated firmly. "Though it's sometimes easy to forget these days, we are an SG team, which means that we're supposed to be going through the gate on missions."
"I know that, Jack. Don't worry. I have no desire to stay here that long."
"So . . . you're going to be pretty busy, huh."
"Yes, very, very busy."
Resigned to boredom, Jack said, "I guess I'll see you later, then."
Feeling kind of sorry for him, Daniel thought of something. "Hey, you might want to ask Doctor Weir if you can help out with some of the Ancient technology. From what I understand, some of it won't work for people who don't have the gene, and there are only a few people here who have it, not counting you." Seeing the look on Jack's face, he added, "Or you could go back to your room and count the knots in the plywood walls."
"I'll talk to Weir," Jack decided and left.
Smiling slightly, Daniel got back to work. As soon as he finished the translations he was working on and got them to the people who'd been waiting for them, he went in search of and found the four people who would comprise his team. The two men and two women had varying backgrounds and training. The only thing they all had in common was that they could read, write and speak the Ancient language, though not with the fluency that Daniel could. Of them all Sandra Kensing, a pretty African American woman in her late twenties, had the greatest skill with the language, though Edward Chen, a slender Asian man of thirty-two, wasn't far behind her . . . although hearing Ancient spoken with a Chinese accent was more than a little odd.
Once introductions had been made and Daniel got to know each of his staff a little better, they got to work on the task of finding out where Atlantis was. Daniel learned that the team had actually been working on finding Atlantis since just a few days after the outpost was discovered, before all the scientists were forced to leave the outpost because of the disagreements going on between the individual nations involved in the program. Before leaving the outpost, they had taken with them as much data and records as they could so that they could continue their work while waiting for permission to return. They admitted to Daniel that they hadn't made much headway in finding the lost city of the Ancients.
Every one of the four people had heard about Daniel and knew that he was supposed to be quite brilliant. They were not prepared, however, for the archeologist's astronomical leaps of logic. At first, whenever Daniel came up with some idea that seemed to have no evidence to support it, some of them were skeptical, but when his ideas kept leading them in directions that proved to be right, they lost their skepticism. In the end, they just watched in amazement as Daniel somehow figured things out that none of the rest of them could see. By the end of the day, the four people were in utter awe of him.
At dinnertime, Daniel told his staff to go get something to eat and relax for the rest of the evening, telling them that he was pleased with how far they'd gotten today. The four people didn't say that the "we" Daniel used wasn't really accurate since most of the progress was thanks solely to him.
Daniel had been working by himself for about half an hour when Rodney McKay came in.
"I need a translation," he said rather stiffly, placing a laptop on the worktable. The linguist did the translation without comment, writing it down on a piece of paper.
"Here you go."
McKay took it and the laptop. "Thank you," he said curtly. Then he left.
A few seconds later, Jack came in. "I see that someone is being an even bigger ass than he was before."
Daniel shrugged. "He's jealous and angry, Jack. I can understand how he feels. I remember how I felt when I found out about Pete."
"No, there's more to it than that. Something else is bugging him."
"Well, whatever it is, I'm sure he'll get over it. I rarely have to deal with him anyway. Sam's the one who has to put up with him constantly." Daniel smiled. "I'd say she's going to be needing a neck massage tonight."
"And I'm sure you'll be happy to give her one."
Jack sat down and began toying with something on the worktable.
"So, did Doctor Weir put you to work?" Daniel asked.
"Yes, I spent the day running back and forth, touching this thing and that and thinking very hard about turning it on. All very exciting, definitely a chapter for my memoirs."
Hearing the heavy sarcasm, Daniel said, "Well, maybe you should consider going back home."
"Been thinkin' about it," Jack admitted. "There's a supply helicopter that comes in from McMurdo once a week. I could catch a ride on it, then beg Hammond to send a plane to pick me up from McMurdo. So, how long do you think you'll be here?"
"I have no idea, Jack. We only got here today. We made some good progress in finding Atlantis, but it's still going to take a while, and then there's all the translations they need help with."
"So, you just about done for the day?"
"I'm going to keep at it for a while longer."
Jack got to his feet. "Just don't stay all night. Carter'll be lonely without you, that is unless she works all night, too."
"Have no fear, Jack. There won't be any all-nighters tonight. I'm still adjusting to the time zone." He glanced at his watch. "Right now, it's nearly 2 a.m. in Colorado."
"So? If you were in Colorado, you'd probably still be working."
"You do have a point," Daniel admitted. "See you later, Jack."
The archeologist put in another hour, then went in search of Sam. He found her hard at work on a complex looking device that Daniel couldn't give her any information on. He dragged her away from her work, and the two of them headed up to the surface. They discovered that the commissary also acted as the place where off-duty personnel hung out and, after dinner, spent some time getting acquainted with a few people.
It was going on ten o'clock when the time zone difference suddenly caught up with Sam, and she decided to go to bed. Daniel had gotten into a conversation with one of the other linguists and told her that he'd be there in a little while.
Sam had been in their quarters for perhaps ten minutes when there was a knock on one of the doors. She answered it to find McKay on the other side.
"Hi. I wasn't sure which room was yours," he said. "I must have guessed right. I wanted to discuss those last test results with you."
"It's late, Rodney. It can wait till morning."
"Actually, I'm going back over there. I don't need much sleep."
Sam sighed and let him in. McKay stopped when he saw what had been done to the room. He looked into the other room and saw the twin beds pushed up next to each other. It really drove home to him that Sam and Daniel Jackson were lovers.
"Okay, I'm sorry, but I just have to know." McKay turned to her. "Why him?"
Sam frowned at the tone of his voice. "Excuse me?"
"You are the most brilliant woman I have ever met, a true artist of the scientific world. He's . . . an archeologist. Don't get me wrong. I know he's intelligent, but he's not even close to being in your league."
Sam shot right past "irritated" and went straight to "totally pissed off". "You don't know what the hell you're talking about," she said angrily. "Daniel is one of the most brilliant people I have ever met. He can speak over thirty languages and can read and write dozens of dead ones. Don't you have any idea of the significance of that? And then there's the staggering amount of knowledge he has of archeology, anthropology and the history of languages. He has three Ph.D's, all of which he earned by the time he reached his mid-twenties. But that's not even half of it. Daniel is capable of these . . . these enormous leaps of logic that, many times, have left me in the dust. He doesn't think linearly. When everyone else is still on A and B, he's jumped completely over the rest of the alphabet and reached Z. He's the kind of person who can think outside the box with ease, and, quite often, he's out there all by himself." She glared at him. "If he'd gone into our fields of science, if that's where his talents lie, he'd make you look like an idiot."
Before McKay could say anything in reply, Daniel came hurrying in. "Sam? Are you okay?" He then subjected McKay to a glare that made the man hastily back up a step.
"Yes, Daniel. I'm okay," Sam assured him. "Doctor McKay and I just got into a little disagreement."
"I'd say it was more than little." Daniel had sensed Sam's fury and come running. He turned back to the other scientist. "I would suggest that you leave. Now."
McKay didn't have to be told twice. He exited the room, pausing when he saw Jack leaning against the wall a few yards away. Slowly, he approached the colonel.
"You know, for an intelligent man, you really are stupid," Jack drawled. "Pissing Daniel off is not a wise move, and pissing Carter off is a surefire way of getting on Daniel's bad side. And trust me. You do not want to be on his bad side. Very unpleasant things can happen. I've seen it firsthand."
"He's an archeologist!" McKay objected.
Jack studied him. "You don't know, do you."
"Know what?"
The colonel shook his head a little. "Just mark my words. If you get Daniel mad enough, you will be sorry."
Daniel rubbed Sam's arm. "Are you sure you're okay?"
"Yeah. He just said something that really made me mad."
"I know. I could feel it." He smiled. "It's a good thing you can't control fire. McKay would have been toast, literally."
Sam laughed a little. She hugged Daniel around the waist.
"Wanna talk about it?" he asked.
"No. Let's just go to bed. I'm tired."
After using the bathroom down the hall, the couple got dressed for bed. As Daniel had suspected, the muscles in Sam's neck were tight from stress. He gave her a long massage, then snuggled under the covers with her.
"Have I ever told you how much I admire and appreciate you?" Sam asked in the darkness.
"Yes, you have. Why are you asking? Has this got something to do with whatever it was that McKay said to tick you off?" Sam didn't reply, her silence telling him that he was right. "Do you want me to have a talk with him?"
"No. It'll be all right. If the subject comes up again. I'll deal with it."
The next morning, when Sam met with McKay, she gave him the cold shoulder. In fact, the temperature outside felt warmer than it did in the room. After twenty minutes of feeling like he needed to put his coat back on, The Canadian scientist finally decided to say something.
"Okay, so maybe I was out of line last night. I just never pictured a woman like you being interested in a guy like Jackson."
"And what kind of guy have you pictured me with?" Sam asked in irritation. "Someone like you?"
McKay started to get flustered. "Uh . . . well, I um. . . ."
"You want to know why I'm with Daniel?" Sam asked. "It's because of a heck of a lot more than his mind. Contrary to what you might think, brains aren't everything. Daniel is the most compassionate, courageous, beautiful person I have ever known. No, he's not perfect. I wouldn't want him to be. But he is perfect for me. We fit so well together. We always have, even before we became a couple. He is my best friend, has been almost from the very beginning. He changed my life, changed me. He made me see what really matters, what's really important, and I will always be grateful to him for that. He is my rock, the person I turn to when life gets hard. And I love him more than you could ever understand."
McKay didn't know what to say in response to that, so he chose to say nothing, returning his attention to work.
After Sam left a while later, McKay's thoughts returned to her and the man who was her lover. Despite what she had said, he was still bugged by it. He had always pictured Sam to be a woman who could only be happy with someone who shared her interests, a fellow scientist, the hard sciences, not the soft sciences that Jackson was an expert in.
McKay admitted, though, that he didn't really know Daniel Jackson. They'd never met before yesterday, and he'd never seen the archeologist and Sam interact with each other as colleagues. He had been hearing things about the man, though, especially lately. He didn't know the whole reason why, but Daniel Jackson had become the golden boy of the Stargate Program. Every time McKay turned around, someone was talking about him. Apparently, he had saved a lot of lives several times in the past few months and had also been directly responsible for the capture of two Goa'uld. McKay had heard something about Jackson having some kind of special ability. He had been tempted to find out what everyone was talking about, but the truth was that he was jealous of the praise and attention the archeologist was getting, so he'd tried to ignore it. The problem was that he couldn't ignore that Jackson had succeeded in getting the most mentally stimulating woman McKay had ever met, a woman he had to admit that he felt more for than he should.
But McKay was used to not "getting the girl", at least not any girl he really wanted. In school, it was always the jocks who got the pretty girls. Jackson wasn't a jock, but he almost looked like one with that strong, muscular build of his. McKay had never thought that Sam would be shallow enough to be interested in a guy just because of his looks. He thought about it some more, though, and realized that she actually hadn't said one word about the archeologist's physical appearance as she was listing off his admirable qualities. So, what about the things she did say?
McKay started comparing himself to the qualities Sam said the archeologist possessed. Okay, so no one would call him a compassionate man, but he wasn't uncaring. As for courage, he might not be especially brave, but he wasn't a coward. He'd done some brave things . . . sort of. Nobody would call him beautiful, regardless of whether they were speaking of beauty on the inside or the outside, and he didn't think that anyone who knew him could say that he changed them for the better. He wasn't anyone's "rock".
But, when it came to brains, he had it all over the archeologist. The guy wouldn't stand a chance against him in a battle of intelligence. And that's what really mattered, wasn't it. Brains might not be everything, but it was the most important thing, and the more brains you had, the better you were. So, in that way, he was way better than Daniel Jackson. Too bad Sam didn't agree.
That day was a busy one for Daniel and his team. They made tremendous strides in finding out where Atlantis was, getting a lot closer than Daniel or any of the others had ever anticipated.
At noon, the team broke for lunch. Approaching the elevator that would take them to the surface, Sandra and Edward were deep in conversation, paying little attention to Rodney McKay, who was also getting on the elevator.
"I do not understand how he could have figured that out," Edward said as he pressed the button to take them up. "Even after he explained it to us, and we saw that he was right, I still do not know how he saw it."
Sandra nodded. "I know what you mean. He figured it out from, what, three words in a sentence? I read that sentence at least a dozen times during these past few weeks, and I didn't see what he saw in three seconds. It's totally amazing."
McKay's curiosity got the better of him. "What are you talking about?"
The two scientists turned to him. "Oh, hello, Doctor McKay," Sandra greeted. "We're talking about Doctor Jackson. We've been working on trying to find Atlantis, and the man is phenomenal! He's got to be, like, the smartest guy on the planet, or pretty close to it. He'd blow you away if you could see him at work."
The comment instantly soured McKay's mood, and he said nothing further to the two people. When they got to the surface, he changed his mind about getting lunch and went back down, feeling the need to make some brilliant discovery. He passed by the room that had been set up as a lab for Sam, but he did no more than glance inside.
Sam saw him pass by, but did not acknowledge is presence. She was afraid that, if she talked to him or even looked at him, he'd come in. Though outwardly appearing to have gotten over his attitude toward her relationship with Daniel, McKay was still a pain in the butt. His air of conceit in regards to his skills and intelligence was extremely irritating and the main reason why she could never really have found him attractive.
Back when she and McKay worked together to try to stop Anubis from destroying the Stargate, she had come to see a different side of him, one that actually made her like him a little bit. But she wasn't seeing that side now, and her dislike of him was back full force. Of course, it might also have to do with the fact that he'd insulted Daniel, which firmly put him on her bad side.
It was a couple of hours after lunch when, thanks to some clues Daniel had put together, he and his team found a gate address.
"Is that it?" asked Huge Thatcher, a plump, forty-year-old British man. "Is that the address for Atlantis?"
"I'm not sure, but, yes, I think it might be," Daniel replied.
"Then we did it," Sandra said excitedly. She looked at Daniel. "We could never have gotten this far without you."
"Oh, I think you could have," he responded. "You guys were heading in the right direction. You'd have found this without my help."
"Not as quickly," Edward said. "You probably took weeks off our search, maybe even months."
"Well, let's not get too excited. We don't know for sure if this is the right address."
"Could we ask Stargate Command to try it?" asked Carlotta Davis, a very tall, thin woman from Boston.
Daniel glanced at his watch. "It's nearly 10 p.m. over there. We can call them in the morning. In the meantime, we should keep at it. We might find something more."
The team decided to work through dinner. Huge and Carlotta went to the commissary and got food for everyone, which they all ate in Daniel's office as they continued pouring over the Ancient records.
It was well after eleven when they made another discovery. Everyone gazed at the symbol for Earth.
"Okay, that makes sense," Sandra said. "Earth is the point of origin. This would be the seventh symbol for the address to Atlantis."
"Yes, except that the translation of these words doesn't make sense in that context," Daniel pointed out. He shook his head. "We're missing something." He looked around at the tired faces. "We should all get some sleep. Our minds will be fresher in the morning."
Saying good night to his team, Daniel went looking for Sam, whom he knew was probably also still working. Finding her in her lab, he convinced her that she should call it a night, and the couple went up to the surface. As they passed the commissary, they saw Jack sitting at one of the tables and decided to say hi.
"I was beginning to think you two were going to put in an all-nighter," the colonel said.
"No, we both want to get an early start in the morning," Daniel told him. "So, what have you been up to today?"
Jack regaled them with tales from his job as "Ancient thingamajig power-upper". Despite his sarcasm, the two scientists could tell that the colonel thought it was kind of cool that he could do something the majority of the population couldn't. It turned out that Jack had a greater aptitude for making the Ancient technology operational than anyone else at the outpost, with the exception of Daniel. That fact briefly put a smile of pride on his face.
As they lay in each other's arms that night, Daniel told Sam about the progress he and his team were making.
"We found a gate address, Sam. We think it might be the one to Atlantis."
Sam rose up on her elbow and looked down at him. "Wow. That's fantastic, Daniel." Sam smiled at him. "I knew you could do it." A moment later, her smiled faded as she searched his eyes intently. "Daniel, if we were able to defeat the Goa'uld, if they were no longer a threat, would you want to go to Atlantis?"
"Yes, of course I would. Finding out all I can about the Ancients has been sort of like the Holy Grail for me. There's so much that I want to know about their culture, their beliefs, their way of life. The biggest question of all is how they discovered the secret of ascension." He looked up into her eyes. "But if I had to choose between going to Atlantis or being with you, I would choose you. I wouldn't be happy there if you couldn't be with me."
Sam brought her lips to his in a slow deep kiss. She then lay her head on his chest. "Maybe we can both go there someday."
