jeriendhal | "A Slight Detour", Part Nine

"Oww…" Daniel muttered. Not for the first time he wondered why zats couldn't act like a phaser on Star Trek, and let a person wake up without feeling like they'd been on a three-night bar hop. He blinked, and reached up carefully to reset his glasses on his face. Rufus was lying on a pallet on the opposite side of the cell, facing away from him. Further observations would have to wait until his brain stopped trying to escape from his skull.

"Oh, good. You're alive," Rufus said weakly, turning over to face Daniel, "I'm not." The fox alien was looking like something Daniel last saw lying flattened on the side of the road leading up to Cheyenne Mountain's parking lot.

"Dead, huh?"

"Very dead. Quite distinctly dead."

"No, I don't think so."

"Really?"

"Well yeah. I mean, I've been dead before, and believe me it hurts a lot worse than this."

"Have you now?"

Daniel nodded and immediately regretted it. "Oww, yeah. I mean, I did the whole dying of radiation poisoning thing. Skin falling off, lungs turning to jelly. It was gross."

"What happened afterward?"

"Oh, I became a disembodied being at one with the cosmos."

Rufus somehow found the strength to push himself up onto one elbow. "That must have been interesting."

"Not really. I mean, you float around lot, wishing you could help your friends more, put on a little appearance at a time of crisis, that sort of thing."

"Well that's something."

"Well, it's not like you're allowed to actually do much. Mostly it was frustrating."

"Ah." Rufus pushed himself up to a sitting position and took a look around the cell. "We appear to have been captured."

"Yeah." The last thing that Daniel could remember was following the broken trail to a small cluster of stone buildings, of Ancient construction, but with no particularly obvious purpose. He had been peering at some Ancient runes on one side of a building when Rufus had given a warning shout just before they had both been cut down by zat fire.

"Looks like pretty standard Gou'ald construction," Daniel commented, after sitting up carefully. "We're probably on a mothership. Which ought to be impossible, considering they're hard to miss in orbit, or on the ground if it's really in walking distance from the Stargate."

"Large?" Rufus inquired.

Daniel remembered not to nod just in time. "Grandiose." He managed to stand up without toppling over, and took a closer look around. "Looks like they finally managed to fix that problem with the cell ventilation system."

His companion looked up curiously. "Too small to crawl through now?"

"Exactly."

"What a pity." Marching feet clumped on the floor outside of their cell, and Rufus glanced over at the door. "Company has come."

The cell door slid back, revealing four Jaffa guards, staff weapons in hand. Their forehead tattoos indicated a mixture of origins, which Daniel decided was another bit of evidence to confirm that they were dealing with one of Anubis' plots.

"Lord Altjira will speak with you," the lead Jaffa informed them, "Come with us." Daniel and Rufus stepped out of their cell and fell in between the Jaffa, who marched two ahead and two behind them. Rufus spent much of the walk examining the extensive hieroglyphs on the walls, not to mention turning his head in wonderment at the burning wall sconces.

"You did say we're on a ship, didn't you?" he whispered.

Daniel nodded. "They're really big on tradition, trust me."

"Silence!" the Jaffa officer shouted.

They were led into a lift, and began to climb upward towards the apex of the pyramid-mothership, where the bridge and presumably Altjira would be waiting for them.

The lift doors opened, and they were escorted onto the bridge, the nerve center of every Gou'ald mothership, and literally the center of every System Lord's power base.

Altjira was seated on his throne, looking as if he had little time to deal with intruders in his domain. The first thing that Daniel noticed about him was that he was definitely not using a human host, nor even an Unas. Instead the host body was of a two-meter tall, green skinned humanoid, dressed in heavy robes, and looking vaguely devilish with twin horns emerging from his forehead, and white, pupiless eyes.

Beside him, Rufus froze in shock.

"You recognize his host race?" Daniel asked softly.

"Yes," Rufus said. For the first time since they had met that day, the fox alien actually looked frightened. "That's a Varn."

TBC