"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."