Ad Noctum: Chapter 12

“I am NOT,” Volker said, “a cosmic SQUIRE. I’m an astrophysicist. And a pretty fine one, at that.”

Chapter warnings: Stressors of all kinds. Violence. Injuries. Torture. Abduction. Anxiety. Panic. Purposefully insensitive discussion of mental health issues. Loss of agency. Thought control. Boundary problems. Manipulation. Gaslighting. References to suicide. Drug use. Death wishes. Indirect references to sexual assault. Blood. 

Text iteration: Early.

Additional notes: I admit, I did just want to roll around in the Rush&Vala of it all for a chapter.

Chapter 12

The analog fade of a fuel withdrawal extinguished Tiamat’s flaming sea. As the lights came up on the ultramarine stage and the attentive half of the raucous crowd applauded, Rush spoke into Vala’s ear. She rose from his lap and left the Goa’uld box seats. Instead of leading them back to their rooms, she paused midway down the grand staircase. A tapestry hung from the wall, a gold crook and flail on a field of faded blue. She pulled it aside.

A passage, dark and narrow, broke the continuity of the wall. Volker’s heart sped up. It looked tight, but he smelled the dry, cool air of a desert after dark, and that made it easier to follow Vala into the cleft. 

The stone beneath Volker’s feet turned to packed earth, then to the powder-fine sand of the dry seabed. After a short, straight stretch, the stone grazing his shoulders receded on both sides. The air was drier. Fresher. Soft echoes off near stone faded to the quiet of a larger space.

Navigating by feel, Vala threw a lever.

With the grinding of mechanical gears, a pair of doors retracted at the opposite end of the room. The widening slit of pale desert and night sky reminded Volker of retracting telescope shutters. As the doors opened, Volker made out dim shapes. They were in a hangar, crammed with car-sized craft.

“We’re going outside?” Volker felt a powerful desire to see an alien starscape, but, “Is that safe?” he asked.

“Safe enough.” The pearl of Vala’s gown glinted with scattered light. “And, I’ll be honest, little squire, I don’t trust this one to draw me a map I can read.” She planted an apologetic kiss on Rush’s cheek.

Vala approached the dark curve of a waiting vehicle, slipped off a shoe, swept sand off a sensor with the blade of her foot, then stepped down.

A band of blue-white light flared, illuminating a small Star-Wars-y speeder in a brief strobe.

Rush made an aggrieved sound.

“Sorry, sorry.” Vala reached inside the craft and toggled a switch. The seats and interior doors glowed with a soft, night-vision-friendly red. “Hop in, boys.” She hiked her skirt and stepped delicately into the driver’s seat.

“I should drive.” Despite his words, Rush climbed into the passenger seat. The interior lights turned the silver buckles of his Goa’uld evening-wear an otherworldly scarlet.

“Are you a skilled pilot, consort?”

“One way to find out,” Rush said.

Before climbing into the little speeder, Volker crouched to confirm that, in true Star Wars tradition, this thing was suspended in mid-air.

Heck yeah! 

The little craft hovered between Volker and the open hangar door, and a refraction gradient blurred the desert landscape visible beneath the craft. Volker passed an arm beneath the speeder’s keel, and it wobbled. Adjusting its field to account for the presence of his hand, maybe?

“Squire,” Vala said, “we will leave you.”

Volker scrambled into the back of the craft. “Yep,” he said. “Got it.”

Vala turned in her seat to eye him forbiddingly. The crimson light bathed her bare back in a warm glow. “Don’t stick your hand beneath drive elements?”

Volker gave her a two-fingered Luke-Skywalker-on-the-sail-barge salute.

Vala accelerated into the night.

They cleared the hangar doors, and Volker’s heart spasmed because the night sky on Rolan was a glory.

For handfuls of slow-scooped seconds he was lost in stellar density. Disoriented, he scanned for the bright spill of the Milky Way, but couldn’t find it. The stars were vast, alien, bright, innumerable. They were crowded. They pressed so close, burned so bright, variations in color were crisp—here a G-type main-sequence yellow, there a hot, young blue; there a wise red giant, brighter than Antares. Reflexively he scanned for constellations, lost perspective (was he outside the galaxy? In an orbiting globular cluster, within the Local Group, maybe?), regained it (no; if he were, he’d be able to orient himself relative to the galactic plane because the Milky Way as a whole would be visible). Then, the orientation clicked.

Rolan was nearer the galactic center than Earth.

As soon as he had the thought, he looked for rifts, for dark patterns in the brightest parts of the firmament carved by the dust that thickened near the galactic core—yes. The center of the Milky Way, thousands of light-years closer than he’d ever dreamed of seeing it.

“Oh,” Volker breathed. “Guess I can die now.”

Vala accelerated over the desiccated plate of a bone-dry sea.

With an ache in his heart, Volker thought of the Salar de Uyuni on his own planet. What an impossible task Tiamat had been set—to beg not just for her people, but for a whole world, for a sea that must have sparkled like diamond fire under a sky so near the galactic center. 

On the central console of the speeder’s dash, Rush pulled up a map of the terrain, displayed in topographies of red. “Shall we negotiate?”

“Name your terms, beloved.” Vala spoke with a glaze of restraint over raw ambition, and the wind of their passage blew her hair back.

It smelled of lilac.

“I’m offering the location of the Eye of Tiamat and an assessment of its defenses.” The red light glowed like a coal in the onyx at his throat. “I’ll do everything in my power to smooth your path to retrieving the weapon and facilitating your return to Stargate Command.”

“And in return?” Vala asked.

Rush shook his hair back in what had to be reflex, since it was braided out of his eyes. “I need a divine intervention.”

Volker leaned forward. “Yeah, or maybe she can just get a message to Stargate Command? Let them know we need to be rescued from the Lucian Alliance.”

“We don’t need to be rescued,” Rush said sharply.

“WHAT,” Volker began.

“Squire,” Vala said, short and sharp and plowing aside the dark with a glowing speeder, “these negotiations don’t involve you. Unless you’ve something more valuable to put on the table than the Eye of Tiamat?”

Volker balled his hands into fists and ground his knuckles into his thighs.

“Now. Consort.” Vala glanced at Rush, then back at the ivory sands. “You mentioned a divine intervention?”

“Yes well.” Rush sighed, a space-weary math professor in alien drag. “Can’t be helped. I’ve located my cosmically assigned lover.”

“No,” Vala breathed, the pearl of her gown turning a patina of retina-friendly light to red cream. “Tell me everything.”

Volker tried not to go fully insane in a sci-fi speeder under an unimaginably glorious sky.

“His name is Everett,” Rush said.

“Everett.” Even Vala’s hair ornaments seemed to sparkle with enthusiasm. “A noble name. Valiant, even. How did you meet?”

“Okay,” Volker muttered. “Maybe we shouldn’t encourage this?”

Rush settled back into his bucket seat and managed to cross an ankle over his knee. He wedged his shin against the dash in the cramped space. “He’s an SGC operative under cover with the Second House of the Lucian Alliance. I met him while setting a hangar full of half-built F-302s on fire.”

“Mmm,” Vala said, as if she’d just forked the tip off a piece of orgasmically delicious cake. “And did he worship you instantly, consort?”

“No,” Volker said.

The Mistress of the Unwearying Stars shot a glare over her shoulder before looking back at the pale plane of a dried-up sea.

“I admit,” Rush said, “things did begin with a grappling match.”

“Classic,” Vala said. “I met my own great love under such conditions. I was impersonating a Kull Warrior at the time.”

The scarlet speeder light burned softly in the buckles of Rush’s coat, the frames of his glasses. “Fitting.”

“And we’re certain it’s him?” Vala said. “Strong features? Tight curls? Broad shoulders? Built like a stack of bricks? Deep-set eyes? Handsome profile?”

Huh. That was a pretty good description of the Second House SGC operative. Meaning Rush had described him that way to the Goddess of Love before seeing him in that warehouse full of kassa dust. Meaning—

Shoot, what did that mean?

When paired with Rush’s other flavors of technomagery, “coincidence” seemed like a pretty thin explanation.

“I’m certain.” On the dry bed of a long-gone sea, Rush’s crimson-bathed poise hit as supernatural.

“Did he recognize you?” Vala asked.

“No.”

Volker leaned in. “So you’re telling everyone about this guy? Does Telford know about him?”

Rush regarded Volker with 50% math professor disdain, 40% disappointment, and 10% death god soul-hunger.

“A goddess of love is hardly ‘everyone,’ squire.” Vala tipped her chin up in prim offense. “I’m a special case.”

And, “Fuck off,” Rush suggested.

“Guys,” Volker drove his brain through insanity-inducing aggravation. “This is important. You knew what he looked like before you met him? Well enough you could describe him, correctly, to Vala before seeing him?”

“That’s how it works,” Rush drummed his fingers over his calf. 

Volker flashed back to the theories he’d been building about how Rush had come for him—sensing crystal, sensing human genetics, that was one thing, but an a priori physical description? Was the guy taking dictation from the cosmos? “How WHAT works?” Volker pressed. “You’re—what—homing in on him?”

“Like a pigeon,” Rush confirmed.

“Yeah, or a missile.”

“As you like,” Rush said.

“Is that what you did for me?” Volker demanded. “Did you ‘home in’ on me? Are there other people in the mix?”

“Unanswerable,” Rush said lightly, and summoned a crystal spar from a trick sleeve.

Vala pouted. “But where’s my cosmically assigned squire?”

“I am NOT,” Volker said, “a cosmic SQUIRE. I’m an astrophysicist. And a pretty fine one, at that.”

Rush flipped crystal over the back of his hand and vanished it. 

Vala’s hair whipped into Volker’s face as she banked toward the dark wall of the mountains. “I adore a fated match,” she said. “Whether it be love or work, friendship or service.”

A fated match? Volker couldn’t picture himself “fated” for anything.

“Does Telford know?” Volker asked. “About all this ‘cosmic’ stuff? Where does it come from? What does it mean?”

“Best to keep speculations about the cosmos confined to your own mind, I’ve found,” Rush said.

Ahead, the shadowy mountains loomed higher, cutting into more of the dewdrop and dust starfield.

“And how might a goddess intercede for you, consort?” Vala asked.

“In a week,” Rush said, “I’ll be performing a technical demonstration for Sixth House leadership that will involve the stargate on Lucia.”

“Lucia.” Speculation and warning warred in Vala’s tone. “It’s quite a public gate, you know.”

“I’m aware,” Rush replied. “I need the Second House to get word of this demonstration. And its significance.”

“Which is?”

“I’ll be effecting an ordinal unlocking of the first five chevrons in the nine-chevron address.”

Volker buried his face in his hands and moaned, “Nooooo,” into his open palms.

“That,” Vala said, a note of reserve in her voice, “is quite the favor. And it will be traced back to Q’tesh; our association is known.”

“Can’t be helped,” Rush said. “If you time it right, providing the SGC with the Eye of Tiamat will be enough t’get you back in their good graces and out of harm’s way.”

“And if I tip off the Second House, you think your lover will come?”

Rush looked at her in the blood-tinged light, exotic and familiar, absurd and grave. “Of course he’ll come.”

Vala braked where the seabed rose into foothills, where the dark shadow of the mountains had eaten a third of the sky.

Rush marked the spot on the red map of the console, said, “Wait here,” and slung a foot over the edge of the speeder.

“Is he serious?” Volker watched Rush stride into the desert.

“Maybe.” Vala thumbed a switch, and the craft’s interior lights faded to nothing. “Let’s follow, shall we?”

“We’ve got one zat, 80 knives, two people in formal-wear, no supplies, and—what? We’re going for the Eye of Tiamat?”

“What do they say on your planet?” The white shells in Vala’s hair stole and held more than their share of starlight. “YOLO, I believe it is?”

Volker snorted and clambered out of the speeder. Before he could catch Rush up, Vala took his elbow and dragged against his arm, slowing him down.

On an unremarkable, bare patch of ground, Rush stopped. He tipped his face to the sky, reflected light gleaming in strings of onyx and garnet in his braided hair. The galactic core shone in the lenses of his glasses. He angled his head as though listening. He reached into nothingness, fingers spread, as though testing the quality of the desert air or stroking the breeze like an invisible horse.

“What’s he doing?” Volker asked.

“The Eye of Tiamat has a heart of crystal.” The cream-colored streak in Vala’s hair matched the small flowers open at their feet. “All Eyes do. Before the System Lords repurposed them as weapons of war, they were something else.”

“Do you know what?” Volker asked.

“Maybe.” Vala smiled, mischievous and radiant.

“Tell me what you know.” Volker leaned into the intimacy of the moment. “I can’t help him if I don’t understand.”

Vala gazed up at him, still spinning so much charm from nothing that when she said, “I don’t know you, squire,” the sting was almost gone from the words.

Against the drama of stars and seabed, Rush took a lateral step, dragging the toe of his boot through fine sand.

Volker rallied. “You care about him, right?”

“Care?” Vala searched his face.

Volker couldn’t imagine what there was to see there. Just decades of TV marathons and being a Pretty Good Guy in a world built for people smarter and scrappier and crazier than he.

“What’s ‘care’ got to do with anything?” Vala asked. “Care, even when real, can be set aside.” She hooked a fingertip into the cuff of his sleeve and tugged. “I put in a few hours of work on a better jacket, and you’re ready to spill all your secrets?” She let his sleeve go. “And not just yours. His. Your planet’s.”

There was a barb in the words that took hold. Dug in.

“Weakness like yours,” Vala said, merciless in dry air, “might come from hiding who you are, so when someone sees something true in you, it opens the door that lets all your secrets out. Or it might come from a life with too little kindness, where small favors build outsize goodwill. Or it might come from a life with no betrayal in it. Or a thousand other places.”

“Trusting people isn’t weak.” Volker put more conviction into the words than he felt.

“I know someone who thinks like that,” Vala said, cold as the night desert. “I can’t tell you the number of times he’s died.”

Rush knelt, his palm pressed to fine white sand.

“If we had longer,” Vala continued, “I could toughen you up.” She smiled, small and conspiratorial.

Volker donned his Armor of Amiability. “No thanks.”

Approval glinted in her eyes. “Better.”

Volker swallowed the questions he wanted to pose, the assurances he wanted to ask for, the theories he wanted to float. All it would do was whittle away at what little respect she had for him. Instead, he looked up at the star-bright sky.

He could adapt, maybe, to life the way Telford lived it. Holding to routines, problem-solving in the direction of discrete goals. He could train and learn, slow and steady. He could make himself useful. More useful every day. Especially if he knew what he was aiming at.

But maybe, like Everett, he’d been chosen for something.

It was a novel idea.

He wasn’t anyone’s first choice for anything.

Except for the crazy math professor over there communing with buried crystal. Great.

“Here,” Rush said. “A kilometer down. And, alas, protected by a rather elaborate nest of Ancient defenses. The signal is strong enough at this precise spot that I suspect the SGC will be able to verify your claims remotely.” He looked up at Vala.

Vala stepped to his side, looking down at the sand. “Say a girl wanted to make the effort.”

“She might come back with a shovel, explosives, and a retrieval drone if she wanted to try her luck,” Rush said skeptically. “This is the crown of a domed chamber. But asking the Air Force to do the hard work might be in a girl’s best interest.”

“We’ll see,” Vala said, and began building a cairn of flat stones.

In the small hours of the morning, his head aching from too strong wine, Volker opened his eyes. The thin coverlet on Vala’s small bed held in heat surprisingly well. He felt warm and comfortable, still enjoying the last strains of a musical dream, rare and welcome.

He was sure it wouldn’t last, but a deeper, braver part of him felt something like contentment. In the span of hours he’d heard Tiamat’s lament, tasted alien fruit, seen the galactic core, found another shred of the palimpsest explanation of why he’d been stolen away from his nice and normal life.

Across the room, illuminated by candlelight, Vala and Rush sat at the table, still dressed in their sham finery.

“The Tau’ri have a test for it now.” The cascade of Vala’s dark hair ate the light. The champagne thread between her fingers flickered with the candle flame. “They take your blood.”

“Blood.” Rush leaned back in his chair, ankle to knee, and plucked a smoky yellow crystal from nothingness. Vanished it again. When he spoke again, his tone was speculative. “I’d think one would need to look at the brain itself.”

A test. Blood. The brain. With a little thrill of alertness, Volker realized they were probably talking about LA brainwashing. His own brain, maybe, had registered the importance of the conversational turn and woken him up.  

“Studying the brain isn’t so easy.” Vala bent over her work, throwing stitches tiny and quick. “But there’s something circulating in the blood they can detect.”

“Could blood be essential?” Rush hooked an arm over the back of his chair. “The drug can’t get to the brain if the blood won’t carry it?”

Volker flashed back to the textbook of medical physiology Rush had pulled from his bag the first day they met. He hadn’t seen it since.

Vala winced as she forced her needle through a tough patch. “Coercive persuasion isn’t native to the LA you know. The Goa’uld developed it first. LA psychotropic compounds are derived from symbiotes.”

Rush sat forward, leaned in, and plucked the smoky yellow crystal from behind Vala’s ear. “Tell me about radiation,” he said, almost shuttering the heat of his interest with a casual delivery. “Does it interfere with the control a symbiote might exert over a host?”

Volker’s heart sped up, remembering the abandoned refinement facility, its dank interior, how interested Rush had been in the fact that its personnel had been able to leave against the will of their superiors.

“Not like you’re thinking, gorgeous. Though you’ll find radiation will weaken most things, given enough time. Coercive persuasion included.”

Rush rolled his eyes. “Figured out that much on my own, thanks.”

Hey. Volker had definitely given him the radiation idea down in that nightmare naquadria mine. 

“Well done, gorgeous. Of course, radiation is hardly a viable defense against Kiva’s plans for you.”

Rush tried to flick his crystal up into an unfamiliar sleeve and dropped it instead. He bent to scoop it off the floor.

Vala glanced up from her stitches. “Sloppy.”

“Fuckin’ shoulder.” Rush flicked the crystal into nothingness and stared at a guttering candle.

Volker, his eyes at half-mast, felt an old idea tugging at him. Something from a graduate school elective in radiobiology. The thought slipped away as soon as he brushed up against it.

“The blood, then,” Rush continued. “Is there something there, y’think?”

“There could be,” Vala said. “The Faith and The Greeting require blood contact to work. They can’t be ingested. Can’t be inhaled. But—you’re imagining what? Draining your own blood so The Faith can’t take hold? It won’t work. You’ll die. A sarcophagus is hard to come by these days.”

Rush collapsed back in a boneless, defeated sprawl. He shut his eyes and brought his hands to his temples.

“Gorgeous, just don’t let it happen. Lead them on until you’re ready to bolt. Pick me up and we’ll stay half a step ahead of the world.” Vala grinned. With deft fingers she swapped from champagne to rose gold thread, threw a few stitches, then swapped back, blending the two colors. “We’ll collect all the Eyes, and hang them on our walls,” Vala said. “We’ll rescue every crystal in the galaxy and pile them high in a cave. It’s where we’ll go swimming on weekends. Backstroking our way through a cavern filled with thousands upon thousands of rescued crystals. Bring your squire. And your love. Nothing easier. Just cut out your transponder, steal that tel’tak from under Colonel Telford, and fly away. You could do it any time.”

Rush tipped his head back, eyes still shut, and shook his head.

Vala looked at him for a long moment, then bent back over the transition point between champagne and rose gold at the junction of upper sleeve and shoulder.

When she didn’t think anyone was watching her, she looked sad.

After that, there was no more talking, just the quiet, material sounds of stitching, pulled thread, the occasional snip of scissors as Volker faded back into sleep. 

True morning dawned, and Volker woke with the sun.

Rush, his hair unbraided, was asleep at the table, his head pillowed on his good arm, strands of onyx and garnet strewn around him. In the pale light that filtered through the grimy window, Vala’s repair of Rush’s hacked-up coat, dense with metallic thread, shone like a stylized bolt of lightning, running from champagne at the right cuff to rose gold over the shoulders then to copper at the left elbow, as though she’d run out of thread twice.

The door to the room opened, and Vala entered, dressed in her cream and pink Time Lord coat and pastel Drow vest. She carried a pitcher of water and a stack of glasses.

Volker sat, patted his wavy hair into presentability, and wished for Tylenol. “Don’t suppose there’s time for breakfast?”

“It’s in the hall,” Vala said, hushed and cheerful. “They leave it for me before court. Wouldn’t do for a supplicant to see a Goddess of Love wandering the halls like a commoner.” She motioned at Volker and he slid from under the covers, wearing briefs and his T-shirt with its new Lucian Alliance seams, and padded after Vala in bare feet.

Three trays sat beside the door in a polite line, loaded with alien oatmeal, breakfast meats, bread, cheese, and fruit. Volker crouched to retrieve the first tray, but Vala held up a hand, circled a finger, and pointed at his jacket and pants, sloppily folded on the floor beside the bed.

“There are more humiliating ways to blow a cover than being seen in American undergarments,” she said. “And yet, none come to mind?”

“Right.” Volker went back for his pants while she retrieved the first tray. 

“Next time you tangle with Kiva, you’d best go commando,” she advised.

Volker huffed a laugh as he fastened his newly tailored pants. “We’ll see. You’re good with idioms. How long did you spend on Earth, anyway?”

“Eighteen months.” Vala went for the second tray. “Watched seven seasons of The X-Files, did a stint in the service industry, bought a car, started a bit of war—you know how it goes.”

“Oh yeah.” Volker took the tray as she ducked into the hall again. “I start wars all the time.” He set the loaded platter on the table next to Rush’s head. The mathematician didn’t move. “Earth must be pretty okay if you’re trying to get back.” He swept his leather jacket off the floor.

Vala set the last tray on the table. “They’ve got supermarkets there.”

Volker plucked a grape and popped it in his mouth. “You ever been to a Costco? Best deals in the galaxy.”

“Love a good deal.” Vala smeared a flaky pastry with a creamy white spread and bit into it, then speared a berry with a petite fork and sucked the fruit off the tines. She used the utensil to prod Rush in his good shoulder. “Wake up, gorgeous,” she sing-songed.

Rush shifted, lifted his head, and straightened his glasses, which had spent a few hours digging into his face. He eyed Vala from beneath the fringe of his undone hair with an expression that would have been pure poison but for all the sulk in it.

Vala kissed his forehead. “Poor little Death God doesn’t want to lead his Squire into battle this morning?” she cooed.

“Give over,” Rush said. “Y’ve met Colonel Telford, no?”

“Perhaps you’ll kill him today,” Vala replied with satirical cheer.

Or, at least, Volker hoped the cheer was satirical. “I don’t think we should kill him today,” he said, just in case. “Or ever.”

Rush favored Volker with a sour side-eye and said, “No one wants to kill Telford,” as though announcing the results of a poll.

“Good,” Volker said at the same time Vala said, “Except you.”

Rush sighed. “Except me.”

Volker bit down through layers of pastry laced with spice and sugar and crumbled nuts. He chewed, swallowed, and did his best to memorize the taste and smell of alien baklava so that he could play it back in his cramped and lonely bunk, part of a bouquet of memories of brighter days and better times.

As breakfast wound down, Volker caught Vala’s eye. “Thank you,” he said. “For everything.”

Queenly, Vala inclined her head.

Rush caught up her hand and brushed a kiss to her knuckles. “Don’t die in a pit on Rolan.”

Vala smiled. “Don’t lose what’s left of your mind to a drug made of ground up parasites.”

Rush smirked. “Don’t sell so much as an ounce of the crystal I sewed into your coat.”

“A girl’s got to eat.”

“Vala,” Rush said. “I’ll. Know.”

She rolled her eyes. “Explosives better be enough to crack that vault.”

“Get Daniel Bloody Jackson and his band of merry idiots to retrieve it for you.”

“Hey,” Volker said. “Tapes Guy liberated the galaxy.”

Rush stilled, and a scorpion set came into his shoulders, compressed and full of poison. “This place strikes you as liberated, does it?”

The crazy thing was, despite the knife twirly pyromania, despite the Time Lord-y coat and the impulse control problems, Nick Rush was still and deeply A Very Particular Academic Jerk. Volker had met tamer versions of the man in conference halls, at poster sessions, on the opposite side of a lectern. Such academic tigers tended to go far in academia. Farther than Good Guys like Volker, who waltzed over buckled plates of his own affability, separated from any real emotion by vertical kilometers of laid-back crust.

“Yeah,” Volker said, not mounting a full-throated defense of Tapes Guy the way his heart wanted to, but instead clamping his metaphorical jaws on the metaphorical leg of the metaphorical tiger and barrel-rolling him into more reasonable waters. “Tapes Guy’s got a ways to go. But his job’s hard. He does his best.”

The dust-covered peasants who paid tribute to the Goddess of Love came into his mind. The Little God’s maitre’d with her too-revealing clothes of metal and rags. Vala and Rush themselves, host to a voracious parasite; it’d nearly happened to Volker, too—he’d nearly lost everything, nearly lost his body.

The fear was easy to access.

The anger was…more difficult.

“You boys have to understand: Daniel doesn’t live in the real world.” Vala came between them by straddling Rush’s thighs before he could spin up a cyclone of knives and disdain. She handed Rush her tiara.

Rush took the glittering ornament, and, like it was siphoning off current, the wattage of his buried rage dropped like a stone.

“No one’s ever turned him out on a street,” Vala continued, “or sent him away with nothing. He’s never had to sell himself to get by, to deceive uneducated kassa farmers and second-rate con artists into feeding him or clothing him. His life never depends on the fit of his coat or the direction of his gaze or the funds he has waiting in reserve. He’s the kind-hearted tip of an institutional spear.” She rested a fingertip over Rush’s heart. “He genuinely means well. He’s genuinely crushed and ended whole civilizations.”

Rush shot her a dark look and began fixing the arc of gems into her swept-up hair.

“But here’s the important bit,” Vala continued. “He does not know how to affix a tiara, he cannot pass as a god of death, he will not enjoy an opera without trying to liberate the planet it’s playing on, and he’s decidedly no fun,” she finished.

“The lady,” Rush said with the analog precision of a demonic slide-rule, “doth protest too much.”

Vala smiled, delighted and sad in equal parts. “You got me.”

“So, where are we landing on Tapes Guy?” Volker asked, sipping alien tea, already enjoying the strange hole in his heart Vala Mal Doran was actively digging and that no one else would be able to fill. “I’m for.”

“I’m against,” Rush said as he finished fixing the tiara.

Vala placed a pledge-of-allegiance hand over her heart. “I want to join his army.”

They took their leave.

Strange as it was, for the twenty-four hours Volker had spent with Rush and Vala he’d felt—safe. It had crept up on him so slowly he hadn’t noticed it, settling in during the opera, maybe, when he’d heard sung Goa’uld for the first time, or under a celestial canopy crowded with stars he’d been free to gape at. As they left Vala’s dingy room with its wardrobe stuffed with clothes and its round worktable where sartorial miracles had taken shape—that fleeting sense of security slipped away.

As they wove through the market on their way back toward the city walls, Volker gave serious consideration to the idea that maybe he had been chosen for something grand. The idea, on its surface, was ludicrous. He was a midcareer academic. No way, no how was his face gonna come up on any cosmic dice. There probably weren’t any dice in the first place; Einstein had been pretty clear on that one.

But there was potential energy inherent to position, wasn’t there? He’d fallen through a hole in the world and into a different landscape full of alien opera and hyperspace and quantum crystal, where societal parasites were literal and memory wars were literal, and truth was so hard to be certain of that he couldn’t trust the fidelity of his own mind.

Or Rush’s mind.

In the morning bustle of Jewel Box Market, Volker tried a new angle on the question he’d been asking for weeks now. “What do you need from me?”

Rush glanced at him, not hostile, not approving.

Too direct.

Rush’s head might hold a clash of narratives, of memories, even, if the story about being a host to a Death God were true. Kiva, maybe, had already given him the drug he and Vala had been talking about. More things and worse might have happened. 

But it wasn’t random. Rush’s eccentricities and excesses pointed along a vector, Volker was pretty sure. He’d said he didn’t want to be rescued. He’d encouraged Volker to develop his own goals. Rush was after something. Just because Volker didn’t know what it was, didn’t mean it wasn’t there.

Like a dark star, something guided their course.

“The naquadria planet, I do think we need.” Volker felt his slow way into conversational hypothesis-testing. “But I’m not sure we want it yet.”

“Almost,” Rush said.

“Getting warmer!” Volker said, encouraged, wishing for his Caltech office and his whiteboard. “Okay. So…we want the planet. We need the planet. But—we’ll take the planet any time maybe? The planet isn’t the rate-limiter.”

“That,” Rush said, with the likable smirk of a pleasantly surprised math professor, “is correct.”

Okay!

Whole arcologies of possibility rearranged themselves in Volker’s brain. Guessing. Wasn’t. Futile. Incredible news. A+ to Dale Volker. Useful and not-useful puzzle pieces began sorting themselves into piles. 

While he desperately wanted to grab the mathematician by his incredible Time Lord lapels and scream JUST TELL ME in his face, he tossed that impulse in the Not-Useful Pile.

Volker dug into his reservoir of Academic Affability and said, “And we don’t want to be rescued,” like a guy ignoring friction in a back-of-the-envelope calculation.

Rush arched a so-it’s-“we”-now-is-it eyebrow.

Volker replied with a what-the-heck shrug.

“Also correct,” Rush said, and there was a quieter note in his voice. As though he recognized his own softening, he shook his hair back, flipped a slim knife into his hand, twirled it once, and vanished it with a scowl.

“So,” Volker said, “given there’s an order of operations, what’s next?”

“The workaround for coercive persuasion,” Rush replied.

“Oh,” Volker said weakly. “Okay. No big deal. Just an alien biochemistry problem. For a math guy. And an astrophysicist. With no lab.”

“You asked,” Rush said with the ozone-stripping courtesy of a rogue gamma-ray burst.

“And it was answerable.” Volker waved a tiny flag. “Yay.”

“Find out what you can from Telford,” Rush said, “given you’re getting on so bloody well.”

Volker pursed his lips, swallowed most of his irritation, and said, “How am I gonna get anything you don’t already know.”

“Not sure if you’ve noticed,” Rush said, “but he doesn’t particularly care to upset me.”

“I don’t think anyone likes upsetting you,” Volker began.

“Fuck off,” Rush hissed.

“Again, I don’t ‘fuck off’, because you kidnapped me? So. I’m gonna assume I hurt your feelings? Sorry.”

“Speak to me like that again,” Rush said like supercooled liquid mercury, “and I’ll kill you.”

“Okay.” Volker tried not to roll his eyes. “I’m gonna talk to Telford about the blood thing. In exchange, I need you to come up with a cat food plan. Because I figure the supply we have will last about six more weeks. Mendelssohn will not be eating vy’ta. We don’t know what’s in that stuff; it might not be safe for cats.”

With an irritable there-and-gone knife flick, Rush said, “I’ll take care of it.”

“By getting cat food.” Volker lowered his voice as they passed beyond the gates of Tiamat’s long-gone palace. “Okay? Not by feeding him little pieces of Colonel Telford?”

The bleached seabed beyond the ruined walls stretched to the distant horizon. Halfway between the gates of the market and the ring platform stood a lone figure, dressed in dark leather. His arms were crossed, his head was bowed, and he looked like he’d condensed out of the shadow of the mountains.

Volker felt clashing waves of sympathy and anxiety roll through his nerves.

“No promises,” Rush said.