Blood Ties

Chapter nineteen

John cinched up the chinstrap on his helmet before stepping out of the Humvee. The faint rays of sunlight on the horizon were no longer strong enough to punch through the haze that still hovered over the street. He inhaled slowly, recognizing the pervasive, acrid smell of cordite and dried blood. The Museum building itself hadn't been damaged in the ambush, but the front steps were a mess of crumbled concrete and shell casings.

It had taken a maddeningly long time to get here. The Army had had its hands full, trying to secure five different sites throughout Baghdad where explosions had occurred almost simultaneously. As critical as John and Rebecca's1 mission was, it didn't trump ongoing urban warfare. They'd been stuck on base at Balad, the outlook for Jackson getting bleaker by the minute, until word finally had come down that the Museum area was under control-at least for the moment.

Climbing down from the Humvee, Rebecca adjusted her Kevlar vest and studied the other vehicles on the street, many of them scarred, inoperable hunks of twisted metal. "Good God," she said quietly. "If Dr. Jackson was in one of those-"

"Let's not go off half-cocked on that just yet." John scanned the helmets of the assorted soldiers patrolling the block, checking their rank insignia. There was a lieutenant standing next to a damaged personnel carrier, supervising the repairs being attempted by two of his maintenance troops. Bingo.

"What do we know, Lieutenant?"

The young man straightened at John's approach. "Sir, this was a three-vehicle convoy. We believe it took the first hit of a coordinated citywide assault. Four of the ten soldiers in the convoy were killed by the blast, along with a local; med-evac took five more to Balad. The last one-"

— was a civilian and is missing. I know. He's the reason we're here." John glanced at the Museum steps again, averting his gaze when he noticed the dark, drying stains on the shattered stone. "Any leads on what might have happened to him?"

The lieutenant shook his head. "Everyone who survived was wounded badly enough to lose consciousness at one point or another. None of them even remembered Dr. Jackson's name, let alone where he'd been when all hell broke loose."

"But you didn't find a body." Rebecca joined the conversation. "No unidentified limbs, no uniform scraps."

"No, ma'am. We've gone door to door on the surrounding blocks. If the locals know anything, they sure aren't talking."

John had expected as much, but it still irritated him no end. He'd called back to Colorado Springs from one of Balad's secure phone lines, hoping that the SGC might be able to track Jackson's locator beacon even without the Daedalus or Odyssey around. Maybe they could use a satellite, or something-the workings of those beacons were pretty fuzzy to him. Just another example of how much he didn't know about homeworld defense.

In any case, he'd come up empty so far. At this point, the chances of finding Jackson before either his inevitable injuries or someone unfriendly caught up to him were remote at best. The security squad now cleaning up the site would most likely wrap up their efforts soon so they could leave the area before darkness settled in completely and masked any nearby threats.

All that advanced technology back on Atlantis, and John couldn't find one man on his own damned planet. He nodded to the lieutenant and walked a few paces away, trying to come up with some kind of plan and keep a lid on his frustration at the same time.

Rebecca matched him step for step. "Getting worked up won't help Dr. Jackson or anyone else," she said, keeping her voice low.

Apparently he hadn't done very well at that second task. "Easy for you to say. The stuff that guy's done over the past ten years… If he's really dead this time, I have to wonder if we have any shot at all of figuring-this-out."

It was a sign of her growing familiarity with their situation that the phrase `really dead this time' didn't seem to faze her. "Then we'd better find him alive." She bent to examine a series of scorch marks in the road. "Battlefields make for lousy crime scenes. It's next to impossible to weed out the relevant evidence from all the extraneous chaos. If I knew which vehicle he was in, that might be a start."

"Probably the middle one. That'd be procedure, since he didn't have an assigned role in protecting the convoy."

They walked over to the wrecked Humvee. As the profiler eyed one of its unhinged doors, a shriek of static issued from John's radio, followed by a startling voice. "This is Daniel Jackson calling any coalition forces who can hear me, particularly Colonel Sh-"

John yanked the radio off his belt. "Jackson, it's Sheppard. Switch to channel Delta."

"Copy." There was a pause as both made the change in order to free up the common frequency. "I'm with you on Delta. Glad to know today's frequency protocols haven't expired yet."

The sheer relief of hearing Jackson's voice just about knocked John over. "Are you okay? Where the hell are you?"

"Ramadi, and I'm okay. I had some, ah, help getting out of the combat zone."

Rebecca's grin morphed into a puzzled frown, and she mouthed Ramadi?

John shook his head, already feeling the beginnings of an adrenaline nosedive. "Don't take this wrong, because it's really great to know you're still in one piece, but is there some reason you couldn't have clued us in on that fact a couple of hours ago?"

"There is, actually." Jackson sounded pretty calm for someone who'd practically been blown sky high not too long ago. "My new acquaintances and I had some trust issues to work out. It took us a while to get this radio working as well. The important thing is that I know a lot more about what we came here to investigate. The people who rescued me are worshippers of Lilith-or, more accurately, Ninlil."

A sharp gasp from Rebecca was hurriedly suppressed.

"Say what?" Although John knew better than to press for details on an open frequency, that statement was more than a little worrying.

"I'll explain later. Right now I need a ride back to the base. Think you can come pick me up?"

"We'll make it work. Keep monitoring this channel. Sheppard out." John tried to dredge up a mental map of the country and failed. He went back to the lieutenant, whose group had gotten the personnel carrier's engine running and was preparing to head out. "Lieutenant, what's the best option for getting to Ramadi?"

"Best option is to stay home, sir," the soldier told him without a trace of humor. "Going through Fallujah's a crapshoot even in daylight, and it doesn't get much better from there. If you really have to make the trip, see if you can take a chopper. Might have to wait a while for an aircrew to become available, though. They're stretched pretty thin these days."

If that was the biggest obstacle of the moment, things were looking up. John decided he didn't want to know how Jackson's helpers had sneaked him through the gauntlet by ground. "Assuming there's a Hawk free, finding a pilot won't be a problem."

John hadn't come to Iraq with any intention of returning to old habits, but the well-practiced rhythms of powering up an HH-60 Pave Hawk were distinct and comfortable in his memory. He glanced behind him at Rebecca, securing her seat restraint. "All set?"

"Sure." She hadn't even blinked at the idea of flying through the helicopter equivalent of shark-infested waters. She'd just accepted the proffered helmet and climbed aboard. He had to give her credit for that. "I take it you kept your flight qualifications current while you were on special assignment?"

Under the guise of turning to face front, John checked his assigned copilot for a reaction to the `special assignment' remark. Captain Baker merely continued uploading their mission profile to the navigation computer, her downcast eyes obscured by the night-vision goggles perched on top of her helmet.

"Remember how I told you about that six-week vacation I had a few months ago?" John answered Rebecca. "I re-qualified during my downtime."

"That's encouraging." Over the helmet intercom, a hint of a smile was audible in her voice. He was glad to hear it, if a little wary. Although she hadn't lost her cool for long, her earlier shock upon hearing Jackson's explanation of his situation had been plain to see. John was getting an increasingly strong sense that Rebecca Larance wasn't being completely forthcoming, and he was starting to wonder just how she'd managed to pick up some of the information she had on the Lilith-Ninlil scriptures.

He closed his hands around the collective and throttle and eased the chopper into the air, recalling yet again how very different it was from his usual ride these days. The intuitive controls of a puddle jumper were indescribably cool, but the jumpers' power was understated, the accelerations muted. Here, he felt the helicopter's strength thrumming through every surface.

Although this hop would be relatively short, he couldn't afford to treat it like a stroll down memory lane-not at night over unfamiliar terrain that likely held a few would-be shooters. Once he'd left the floodlights of the Balad flight line behind, he pulled his goggles into place and scanned the barely visible horizon.

Rebecca's voice filtered through his headset again. "Is there an established coalition base in Ramadi?"

"The Army and the Marines have been trading shifts there," replied Baker. "They've got a decent landing zone, which is all I ever- Incoming!"

Even as she called out the warning, John saw the brilliant flash from the ground below, whiting out his goggles for an instant. He banked the chopper sharply to the left and climbed, hoping the projectile had been a mortar and not something that could track his engine's heat signature. "Hang on!"

An explosion rattled the craft, stealing its lift and forcing John to battle the cyclic for a moment. Thrown forward against his harness, he quickly reestablished control. "Damage?"

"Don't think so," Baker reported. "Looks like we were far enough above it when it blew, whatever it was."

"All aircraft, be advised," came a controller's voice over the radio. "Reports of ground fire in sector Kilo."

"You don't say," John muttered. More points of light flickered below-muzzle flashes. The bullets wouldn't reach them at this altitude, though that wouldn't stop the insurgents from trying, because sooner or later the helicopter had to land.

John checked his green-tinted view against the nav computer. Within the cluster of buildings at his ten-o'clock was the courtyard that would serve as his landing zone. "Find me a descent path that won't put us in the middle of that fireworks show," he told Baker.

"Can do. Turn right to zero-two-zero, hold course for ninety seconds, then back left to two-nine-zero."

She talked him down to an altitude of five hundred feet, and he pulled out the evasive-approach tricks he'd honed in Khabour. Only a few bullets sang past the windscreen as he swung down between two buildings, which then blocked the shooters' aim while the chopper descended through the remaining seventy feet to settle on the ground.

"Well, that could've been worse," Baker commented as the rotors slowed to a halt in the high-walled courtyard. "Nice job, Colonel."

"Team effort. Go report our arrival to the area commander, would you? I'll handle the post-flight." John tugged his goggles and helmet off while she left to obey. Without his headset he could hear the clash beyond the wall for the first time. By the time he finished his post-flight checklist, the gunfire had faded out. "Guess we provided the excitement for the evening," he said over his shoulder to Rebecca.

When she didn't reply, he turned around in his seat. "Hey, if that whole thing freaked you out, I'm sorry."

"It did, a bit." But she looked more interested than concerned as she moved forward to take the seat vacated by Baker. "Getting shot at didn't seem to bother either of you too much."

He shrugged and powered down the avionics. "It's a fairly standard occurrence in our line of work, on Earth or elsewhere."

Rebecca's scrutiny didn't let up. "Do you miss this?" she asked suddenly. "Not the part about taking fire. All this-it's the life you had up until I met you in that conference room back at Hurlburt Field."

In John's mind, nothing good ever came from dwelling on roads not taken, so he'd been avoiding thoughts of that nature for a while. When he met her gaze, however, there was genuine care behind it, not just professional curiosity. For that reason, he decided to give her a real answer. "When I was in high school, a guidance counselor told me I could be pretty much whatever I wanted if I'd just straighten the hell up. I did, and I chose this. Yeah, I miss it." He stowed the checklist and climbed out of the cockpit. "Doesn't mean I'd change where I ended up."

"I guess I'm relieved to hear that." Rebecca accepted the helping hand he offered as she jumped down to the concrete. "I cleared you for the Antarctica assignment, after all. Obviously I didn't know it would lead you to another galaxy. Still, I'd hate to think I was indirectly accountable for wrecking up your life."

"Gracious of you, but nobody dragged me through the Stargate. I'm okay with taking responsibility for my own choices."

"Except you're responsible for a lot more than that, aren't you?" She watched him with an expression he couldn't decipher. "You've been in command of a major forward-deployed unit for going on three years."

What was she getting at? Had someone told her about Sumner-or did she know more than she'd let on about his prospects for getting back to Atlantis? Or was she tossing chaff to deflect attention from some personal issues of her own? "It's a lot more paperwork than power trip," he said, a defensive edge creeping into his voice.

"Actually, I was going to say that it sounded kind of isolating. And not just geographically."

That threw John for a loop. "I don't really think about it that way. Like I said, it's the choice I made, and I haven't looked back."

"I can sympathize. I've got a botched marriage under my belt, too, courtesy of a focus on my work to the exclusion of everything else." She glanced at her bare ring finger. "It's kind of like a merit badge in the Bureau."

And there it was. Maybe it was a product of too much tension and not enough sleep, but he saw something familiar in the rueful smile she threw him-something that suggested she really might understand- and it made the whole situation marginally more tolerable. He wasn't the type to bare his soul; usually, when things were rough, all he needed to hear from a friend was `I get it,' and that would see him through. Receiving that from her was an unexpected gift.

Offering a quick smile of his own, he nodded toward the nearby building. "We'd better go find ourselves a vehicle and give Jackson a call."

As it turned out, getting directions to Jackson's location wasn't difficult. Getting the local militiamen to let more Americans into the bunker where he was holed up, on the other hand, was more of a challenge-as was convincing their Marine chauffeurs to stay outside with their vehicle.

Inside, dressed in robes and speaking in what sounded like an Arabic dialect, Jackson stood up from a wooden table lit by candles. The guards reluctantly stepped aside to clear the doorway.

The archeologist switched to English. "Good to see you guys." Surrounded by chipped clay tablets, with a number of scrolls strewn across the table, he looked none the worse for wear aside from a damp patch of blood on his arm-in approximately the place where the SGC usually implanted its locator beacons.

"Same here," John said warily, trying to put two and two together and coming up with thirteen. "Were you even in that ambush at the Museum? Everyone else in the convoy got the crap kicked out of them."

"No, I was there, and I probably got it as badly as the rest of them. That radio I used to call you was the only thing of mine that survived anywhere close to intact. Hence these clothes." Jackson awkwardly scrubbed a hand through his hair. "I'm told my heart stopped at one point."

There weren't too many possible ways to make such a rapid transition between half-dead and perfectly healthy. Since Ascension probably hadn't been involved for a change, John had a sneaking suspicion he was going to be disturbed by what was coming.

Rebecca pushed back the scarf of the chador she'd donned for the drive and took a step forward, looking like she didn't quite dare to believe what she saw. "So it's true," she said softly. "There are succubi that restore life instead of taking it."

Jackson nodded. "There are definitely two separate sects. As a group, they're considerably more widespread than we first thought, and it's divided for reasons that, believe it or not, are centered on which faction carries the `true' bloodline of Lilith-or more accurately, Ninlil's- creations. The woman we saw in the video of Woolsey's cousin was trying to help him; he has-or had-an associated genetic disorder that should have killed him in childhood. Anyway, he carried traces of what they believed to be the `correct' bloodline."

"What makes you so sure?" John asked.

"Because she's the same woman who healed me and saved my life. Her name is Hanan." The corner of Jackson's mouth quirked wryly. "It means `mercy' in Egyptian Arabic."

John figured he'd better get ready to accept a pretty bizarre tale. "She pulled you out of the convoy?"

"No, that was a cambion named Baqir. He left with Hanan a while ago." Jackson shook his head. "It took me a while to place his name-I'm blaming that lapse on a skull fracture from the attack-but eventually I remembered reading about Baqir Abdel-Harim in Catherine Langford's notes on the recovery of the Stargate. I assumed this Baqir to be his grandson until he told me that he had made certain that a pendant of Ra made its way into the hands of a young girl at the Giza excavation in 1928. He was pleased to learn that Catherine had continued to wear it all these years."

Jackson's wistful smile vanished as he continued. "We were wrong about their motivations. Neither group was ever interested in locating the gate; they know exactly where it is. This entire time they've only been concerned with either protecting or eliminating this bloodline. The Ninlil succubi and incubi make certain the carriers survive childhood illnesses and adult diseases, while their cambion take care of the details, like hiding them and running biomedical research facilities that fund their activities."

Suppressing the urge to repeat his Underworld allusion, John focused on the unfamiliar word. "Cambion?"

"The half-human offspring of demonic lilin," Rebecca replied absently. John got the impression that the prospect unnerved her as much as it did him, which was saying something.

"Made famous by Shakespeare as Caliban in The Tempest," added Jackson. "In this context, they're the halfhuman offspring of succubi or incubi, which can't produce viable children between them."

John looked around the room again and saw no one except the guards at the door. "Where did this Hanan and Baqir run off to?"

"Hanan…needed rest."

The hesitation in Jackson's response was a belated wakeup call. If he' d been critically injured, healing him had to have taken a lot out of the succubus. The odds were good that she'd have to replenish that life by getting it from someone else.

Some hint of John's revulsion must have been visible on his face, because Jackson was quick to explain. "She's the ideological equivalent of a Tok'ra. When necessary, she'll take a few years off the lives of her cambion and replace it whenever she can. Around here these days, though, she's able to get all the nourishment she needs from giving mercy to the mortally wounded. That's where she's gone now."

In the abstract, it sounded almost reasonable-but this was far from abstract. There was a woman out on the streets looking for a shooting or bomb victim to drain of life. How was John supposed to rationalize that?

"I can't say I'm wild about the idea, either," admitted Jackson. "Even if it's the reason I'm standing here. Having said that, I believed Hanan when she swore that she only takes the remaining life from people who are in great pain and have no hope of surviving. Aside from informing me of the existence of the two opposing groups, she wasn't too forthcoming with details. Baqir gave me access to this place and promised it would give me answers."

"And has it?" Rebecca asked.

"Oh, you could say that." Jackson returned to the table overflowing with artifacts. "From what I've gathered, the bloodlines are only the beginning. The two sects have very different agendas."

So Rebecca had been right on target with her profile. John glanced over at her and tilted his head in acknowledgement.

"For the sake of clarity, the easiest way to distinguish between the two is to call the predatory group Lilith, which keeps itself in business by running various shipping, airline and travel companies, and the one that wants to protect humans, Ninlil." Rifling through the array of scrolls and tablets, Jackson selected a surprisingly well-preserved parchment. "I haven't yet figured out how the rift occurred or where it fits in with these divergent bloodlines in the general human population, but we'll get to that later. I started out by rereading the intact tablets of Gilgamesh and found that much of the text, including the references to sky gods, had been copied from this earlier set of documents."

He opened the scroll casually, not bothering to handle it with the care often shown to such relics. Before John could question him, Jackson lifted the manuscript for inspection. "This isn't parchment or vellum. It's almost like plastic, except even more durable. And then there's what happens to be written on it."

While John was by no means a language expert, he recognized Ancient when he saw it. "Guess that confirms once and for all just who got this party started."

We need to read it in the context of what we know now." Jackson closed the scroll again. "When Merlin and his group of refugee Lanteans returned to Earth ten thousand years ago, they realized they hadn't come through the Antarctic gate like they'd expected. The continents had drifted, and Antarctica was under a massive layer of ice."

"You'd think they would have planned out where they'd end up before making the trip." John glanced at the building's entrance and wondered how much time they had before their security escort told them it was time to leave.

"Maybe" Jackson rolled up the scroll. "It's going to take me a long time to examine all the texts, but what I've read so far suggests that Atlantis may not have been the only Ancient city in Antarctica. We've wondered for a while why we found an older Stargate and a weapons chair there, since Atlantis has its own chair and gate, and Morgan Le Fay did tell us that some Lanteans made their way to the gate at the southern pole. What if there's a lot more than one outpost buried beneath all that ice?"

John wasn't sure what to make of that idea. "If so, shouldn't we have detected it by now?"

"We went years without detecting the chair," Jackson countered, packing the scrolls in an open crate as he spoke. "Antarctica is almost half again as big as the continental U.S., and the ice that covers it is several miles thick in some places. My point is that the Lanteans left the Pegasus Galaxy for Earth expecting to have access to the same level of facilities that they'd left behind, and instead they encountered a primitive world. They learned from the humans they met that a Goa'uld, Ra, was running the galaxy, and the last thing they wanted was another war with a malevolent alien species. The Lanteans agreed they had to leave the immediate region where the Stargate was located-Egypt-most of them with just one thing in mind."

"Ascension"

Jackson nodded. "They viewed themselves as literally the last of their kind and believed that their only options were Ascension or extinction. Some sought to Ascend through reclusive meditation, but Lilith and others strenuously opposed them, arguing that Ascension through nonscientific means had led to the existence of the On. Lilith further believed that leaving the humans of the galaxy behind was wrong, if for no other reason than they would serve to empower the On. She'd brought along the Wraith genetic material from the experiments on MIM-316 she'd been forced to abandon, which would allow her to reproduce laboratory clones."

"Whoa, hang on." Even though John often mocked Rodney for his paranoia, sometimes a reasonable amount of alarm was justified. "Are you saying she actually created Wraith on Earth?"

"Not Wraith per se." He paused and pursed his lips before glancing through the narrow doorway. "That's as far as I've managed to get. Trouble is, the people who guard these artifacts take their job very seriously. Removing the scrolls or tablets from the building is out of the question. All they'll let me take is this." He withdrew a small rectangular device from beneath a sheet and held it up. John tried to contain his surprise when he saw that it was an Ancient data recorder. "They found it in among some outdated computer parts left in storage since the Gulf War."

The sound of semi-automatic gunfire in the near distance immediately drew everyone's attention. Muffled shouts outside were swallowed up by the sound of a small explosion that John estimated to be just a few blocks away. Time to get the hell out of Dodge.

"We can come back later if we have to follow any leads further." Jackson strode toward the door, paying no mind to the growing commotion outside.

"Come back?" Rebecca gave a short, disbelieving laugh. "We'll just drop by Iraq sometime on the way home from the grocery store? We almost got shot up, and you almost got blown up-actually, there's no `almost' about that one. And apparently it's not over yet. You really want to repeat this grand adventure?"

John was all set to agree with her until Jackson paused, caught his eye, and surreptitiously rubbed the bloodied patch on his sleeve. Following his gaze, John identified the miss ing locator beacon, affixed to one of the crates containing the tablets. Smart move; if they needed this stuff later, they could beam it out as soon as the Odyssey or Daedalus was back in range. Besides, an Ancient recorder held a lot more information than crumbling blocks of clay.

A second explosion, nearer this time, shook the bunker and sent a puff of dust wafting through the entrance. Two Marines and one of the militiamen followed, shouting similar orders. They had to get out of here-now.

"It'll be all right," he told Rebecca simply.

She shot him a doubtful look but pulled her chador back into place. Then she ran ahead of him out onto a street lit by balls of flame and punctuated by streaks of tracer fire.