03 - The First Amendment (19 page)

Daniel reached down and picked a candy wrapper out of some bruised
vegetation, a look of disgust on his face. “This must be where Morley’s men
stopped,” he said. “Litterbugs.”

The team paused in the trees to survey the town.

Etaa was spread out along the base of the hills, a bubble of human habitation
bounded by a tall—a
very
tall—vine-woven fence. Some of the vines were in
flower, giving the city wall an incongruously festive appearance. Beyond the
fence they could see a few widely spaced roofs, shaped like onion domes but
fashioned of some kind of straw thatch bundles. The main gate in front of them,
a double door of wide wood planks nailed together by crosspieces, was flanked by
one and a half cylindrical stone towers. The intact one was about fifty feet
tall, providing a vantage point not only for the surrounding countryside but for
the interior of the town as well. The other tower looked as if something had hit
it with terrific force, knocking the top off at an angle and blasted to pieces.
The gate between them sagged, all of its supports on one side vanished. There were several windows in the
tower, higher than a Western Earth eye would look for them, and they made jagged
dark holes in the ruins.

“This is where they fired on the Jaffa,” O’Neill mused out loud. “They took
out that right-hand tower with a grenade launcher—lucky it didn’t burn the whole
place down. They reported the force field right in front of the main gate.”

“It’s still really quiet in there,” Carter said, and shifted her weapon
slightly. “There’s something wrong. Unless it really is deserted, but that
doesn’t feel right.”

“I agree.” O’Neill continued to study the brown towers. There weren’t any
bird critters nesting on top of the flat platform at the top of the intact
one—in fact, he couldn’t hear much of anything at all. The tall wooden gates
sagged open, the supports on the right side vanished along with most of the
tower they’d been connected to. There was no flow of merchants passing in or
out, no bargaining going on in the shade of a hide tent. Etaa was humbled, not a
proud city anymore but a little, primitive town that had fallen to a siege.

O’Neill looked at the trees around and behind them. There was no sign of
return fire from the Jaffa; the vegetation looked healthy and untouched.

“O’Neill, look here.” Teal’C had taken a flank position some hundred yards
north, scouting the smaller city gate on that side. O’Neill signaled Carter and
the albatross to stay in place, while he and Daniel faded back to cross over to
Teal’C’s position.

“Uh-oh,” Daniel said, in a masterpiece of understatement.

Approximately a third of the north boundary wall of Etaa was slumped, as if
subjected to months of heavy rain that had pounded its mud bricks back into
liquid, its woven vines and log supports into a tangled mass. It still retained some form, though, creating a Dali-esque
image of a wall. Half the gate had melted too, the wood planks flowing onto the
ground as if spilled. He could see bubbles, but they didn’t move; they were more
like shells, as if the damage had been done long enough ago for the liquid to
cool and solidify again. The remainder of the wall—and the gate—looked
perfectly, obscenely normal. Whatever the weapon was, it could be targeted very
precisely. Even if, in this case, it was the wrong target. He hoped it was.

“I think the attackers, whoever they may be, are gone,” Teal’C said
judiciously. “This does not appear to be the result of a direct assault on Etaa,
but more likely collateral damage related to the battleground we passed
earlier.”

“I am
so
glad you think so,” O’Neill remarked. Then, at Daniel’s sharp
look, he added defensively, “I am. Really!”

“Just checking,” Daniel murmured.

“Well, I guess we’ll have to do a little recce.” O’Neill stepped out of the
tree line long enough to circle his hand in the air and pump his fist twice,
then faded back into cover to wait for Carter and their journalist to form up on
his position. Frank Kinsey was certainly getting an eyeful on this trip, he
thought. Talk about an exclusive.

A few minutes later the missing members of their group reappeared, looked at
the ruined wall and winced. Even Kinsey, O’Neill noticed, seemed able to draw
the proper conclusions, even though he had never even seen the residents of the
town, much less sat down with the Etaa for a formal meal of blood and milk.
Collateral damage or not, based on this it was likely that Shostoka’an and most
of her people
were
dead.

“Teal’C, I want you and Daniel to stay here with Kinsey and keep an eye out.
I don’t want to get trapped the way Morley did. Carter, you come with me, and we’ll see if we can
find anybody alive in there.” Anybody, in this case, definitely included the
missing members of SG-4 and anyone Morley had left behind as well.

Surprisingly, Teal’C shook his head. “It would be a better use of our forces
to continue reconnaissance around the perimeter.”

O’Neill paused. Teal’C was right, but he wanted to keep Kinsey out of the
way.

On the other hand, he didn’t want Kinsey
in
the way, either, and
cutting his mobility in half was definitely in that category.

“All right. Circle around, and we’ll look for you here in two hours.” With
that, O’Neill and Carter took off for the melted wall, making use of every scrap
of available cover. The others watched until they disappeared, and then went on
their own assignment.

The buildings, streets, and open places of Etaa enclosed by its walls covered
almost a square mile. When O’Neill and Carter picked their way through the
solidified slush, they could see that whatever the weapon was that had destroyed
the wall hadn’t stopped there. Every formerly solid structure in line with the
wall for at least a quarter mile showed signs of slumping and damage.

“That’s some weapon,” Carter remarked uneasily, poking at a bubble on the
ground with the barrel of her rifle. The bubble cracked, releasing a weak puff
of gas, and she backed away rapidly, weapon ready, even though there was nothing
to fire at but rapidly dissipating pink gas. An insect flying by passed through
the mist and promptly fell down dead.

“Uh, don’t breathe that,” O’Neill suggested.

“Roger that, sir.” They stepped carefully around the bubbles and past the
melted wall, stopping first to scan the area on the other side and, when no sign
of life was detected, to examine the melted wall surface.

“What would do that, Major? High temps?”

Carter shook her head. “I’d expect ash and scorch marks,” she said. “This
looks like something chemical. I have no idea what, though.” Removing a glass
vial from her pack, she carefully chipped away a sample of the wall and tucked it away. “This stuff is really hard, too.
Harder than I’d expect from adobe.”

“Make sure you check that vial. Wouldn’t want it melting through the
container,” O’Neill instructed. He couldn’t control a frisson of nerves.

“Yes sir.” Carter could have objected—it was an obvious precaution, after
all—but she simply nodded and took the order as meant.

“Okay, let’s go.”

Their boots crunched on the melt surface, and by mutual consent they moved
away from the path of the damage and onto the softer, if considerably less
sterilized, dirt surface of Etaa’s streets. They kept close to the walls,
checking the open doorways before passing each one.

It began to rain, a soft drizzle. The ground beneath their feet turned into a
thin mud. Both glanced back to see what happened to the rain on the ruined
surface; it hissed and spat pink gas.

“Don’t get that stuff wet,” O’Neill advised.

“Right,” Carter said patiently.

The city was arranged on what Jackson told them was a “kraal” plan, with the
city wall defining the perimeter, two or three concentric circles of round
mud-thatch houses inside that, and a wide open area in the middle. Each house
had its own satellites, for grain storage, cooking, and extended family. The
middle, open area was the place that originally held the flocks of the
cattle-herding Masai; for the Etaa, it was a marketplace, an occasional corral
for the town’s more valuable jointly owned livestock, and a dance floor for the
frequent celebrations. There had been a jump dance to welcome SG-1 to this
world, and a big bonfire with lots of food and music.

Now the central clearing was completely empty, the surrounding houses with
their own individual compounds eerily silent.

“You’ve noticed what I’ve noticed, I hope?” Carter asked as they checked
around a corner.

“Yeah. Where are the bodies?”

“There aren’t even any bugs.”

There weren’t. The last insect they’d seen had dropped from the pink gas
outside the town wall.

There weren’t any bird-critters, either, or animals, or humans. The place was
completely deserted. No chickens or dogs, imported from Earth along with the
human population.

“I do not like this,” O’Neill asserted with great conviction.

“I do not like this, Sam I am,” Carter responded ritually. O’Neill sighed.
“Sorry, sir.”

“I’m supposed to have the patent on the wiseass remarks, Major,” O’Neill
snapped. The two of them hadn’t even looked at each other during this exchange.
“Okay, let’s head for the tower and see if there’s anything up there. That’s
where they were supposed to be holding the prisoners.”

The path to the tower, unlike the rest of the streets of Etaa, seemed to be
newly paved with a shiny asphalt surface. It didn’t hiss, not even when O’Neill
spat on it, and it failed to dissolve several of the test substances—dirt clod,
candy wrapper, MRE—they tossed at it. It had no particular smell. So they
proceeded very gingerly down the path, until they arrived at the northernmost of
the once-twin towers at the main gate of Etaa. The footing was powdery, slippery
underfoot, as if it would be greasy when wet.

The black surface seemed thicker just inside the main gate, and not as shiny;
it covered most of the floor and halfway up the walls, in an irregular pattern
as if someone had used a paint sprayer. It flaked away from the floor as they
walked across it, its consistency somewhere between powder and goo. O’Neill
risked touching one of the walls covered with the stuff, and it left a dark
smudge across his fingertips and nothing more. It had stopped abruptly just short of the gate itself,
and had been invisible from their vantage point outside the town.

“You’re
not
going to taste that, sir,” Carter informed him even as the
thought crossed his mind. She took another vial from her pack—the one containing
the melted mud was still intact—and scraped a little of the black stuff into it.
O’Neill shrugged and turned away, wiping his fingertips across his fatigue pants
and leaving a long black smear in the process.

They made their way up the circular stairs that curved around the inside of
the tower walls, stopping an listening at every step. As they proceeded, the
black stuff became more patchy. Some of the original stone of the tower—one of
the few buildings in the town actually constructed of something other than mud
brick, woven vines, and thatch—was still exposed, and the black stood out
sharply against the soft pale yellow.

The observation room of the tower, where Morley reported that the SG-4
prisoners had been held, was coated at one end with the black stuff. On the
other side of the room, near the window that overlooked the interior of Etaa,
the place looked as if a fight had taken place, with low stools overturned,
drapes ripped down, rushes on the floor scuffed to reveal bare floor. But there
was no sign of life.

O’Neill went to the inner-side window while Carter searched the room. His
vantage point overlooked the main street of the town, and he could see most of
the main square. There was nothing, not even on the farthest periphery from the
melted area. Nothing moved in Etaa. No impossibly tall humans, no animals, no
bird-critters. Nothing at all.

He shifted over to the exterior window, searching for and finding the other
members of the team moving down the line of the wall, just inside the shelter of
the trees. Satisfied that they were all right, he continued to scan the horizon, looking for signs of the tubenecks or their
opponents.

“Uh, sir?” Carter said. Her voice sounded odd. “There’s something here I
think you should look at.”

He glanced over to see her squatting beside a ripped length of curtain,
balancing against the butt end of her rifle. Taking one last look around, he
came over and went down on one knee beside her.

“What is it?”

Carter pointed to the curtain, following its folds until it intersected a
particularly thick layer of black stuff. The line where curtain met goo could
have been drawn with a straightedge.

O’Neill unlimbered a pocketknife and poked at the black stuff. It didn’t
cover the curtain—it
was
the curtain. Or it had been, at least.

“Yikes,” he muttered. “Where did all this come from?”

“Sir.” The blond captain’s voice was strangled. “Look.”

She was pointing with one unsteady hand at a bit of bright metal similarly
cut across by the goo. O’Neill worked his knife blade under the scrap and
tenderly worked it free from the fold of cloth that had snagged it. It was
machined metal, not something manufactured on Etaa, a smooth, slightly curved
plain rectangle about an inch long, with one flange sticking out, trimmed by the
goo.

“What—” he began.

“They’re captain’s bars, sir,” Carter said, her tone tight with unshed tears.
“Look.” She picked up the bit of metal and held it next to the gold leaves on
her own shoulder. “This belonged to—” she looked down at the goo—“this
was
Captain Dwyer of SG-4. And look there—”

His gaze followed her pointing finger to a place well above his eye level,
where the black stuff had disfigured the cool yellow wall. At the very top of the black mark, as if held in place by it, was a small tuft of white
feathers, as if from the very edge of an edge of an elaborate headdress. “All
this black stuff, sir—I’m betting it’s all carbon. Everything living here is
dead. They’ve all been—” She gestured helplessly at the black layer. “They must
have herded everyone onto that street we came down, where it was so thick, and—”