"—she'll be moving on a vessel out of Cordai approximately, what, nine days, eight, no, between eight and ten, AURORA-7 can you—"
Jacob was sitting opposite me at the small side-room table at 1108. Selmak was up to the surface, the half-degree posture, the slowed breathing. Jacob's hands were flat on the table. He was not writing.
[Memory Recall — 6 tokens]
The taste came up the back of my throat the second the burn started — metallic, faint, like a copper coin that had been in someone else's mouth. AURORA-7's voice in my skull moved at the half-octave-lower register she used when she was running heavy compute and trying not to wake any part of me that did not need to be awake.
Continue. I have the thread.
"—a Goa'uld female. Old. Not in the front-line catalog. She has been in stasis. She — there is a sarcophagus involved. She is going to be moved through a vessel that will pass close enough to one of the survey teams that — Selmak, this is a host-take attempt. Multiple. She targets human female hosts. She has a pheromone signature that makes men compliant."
My eyes were half closed. I had not noticed when they had started closing. The right side of my vision was dimmer than the left because the temple contraction was sitting on the right.
"Name." Selmak. Low.
"Hathor."
The name went down. Selmak did not move. Jacob's posture did not shift.
"Continue."
"She was — she will be — extracted from the sarcophagus at a vessel transit point. If she reaches the SGC— I can't see how she reaches it. The detail is going. I had it three weeks ago. I had it clear. It's— there's a younger sister. A younger sister of an officer. She uses—"
I stopped.
Drew.
"Yes."
The younger-sister element is a false positive. The pattern you are recalling does not contain a younger sister. The shape is incorrect.
I held still. The taste of copper sat on my tongue.
"Strike the younger sister," I said aloud. "It's an artifact. Selmak, ignore that line."
"Acknowledged."
I kept my eyes half closed because opening them required asking the right temple to coordinate with the left and the right temple was not coordinating with anything at the moment. I felt Selmak's gaze on me. Selmak's gaze. Not Jacob's. The two were different. Selmak watched in the still way she watched when she was deciding how much of what she was seeing to keep in her own memory and how much to leave in Jacob's.
She did not say anything.
She did not name the head tilt I knew I had just done.
She let me finish.
I gave her the rest in slower sentences. The vessel. The Cordai exit point. The pheromone defense. The probable hosts — none named, all positions. The sarcophagus malfunction window. The four-day operational interval. The Tok'ra interception vectors. AURORA-7's tokens drained from one hundred percent to ninety-four percent in the thirty seconds the recall took.
Selmak listened. She asked two questions. The first was a clarification on the vessel mark. The second was a clarification on the pheromone radius.
I answered both.
Selmak nodded once.
"We will take this."
"Off-page?"
"Off-page. You will not see the resolution. You will see the absence of consequence."
"Thank you."
"Director Ramsey."
"Yes."
"You spent something to give us this. I will not name what. I will note that we received it."
"Thank you."
Jacob came back up. His shoulders settled. He stood. He squeezed my shoulder once on the way past — not a hard squeeze, the gesture of an older man to a younger one whose eyes were half-closed at eleven in the morning — and he was gone.
Jacob came back at 0717 the next morning, found me in the SRD office's small kitchen alcove making coffee with the machine Siler had stolen from the decommissioned NORAD break room, and waited until I had poured before speaking.
"Neutralized at the technical layer," Jacob said. He counted on his fingers without lifting them off the counter. "Sarcophagus malfunction during transit. Primary host body destroyed. No casualties on our side. Secondary asset extracted. The vessel out of Cordai is currently being logged as a routine cargo loss by minor System Lord administrative bookkeeping. The Goa'uld in question is dead at the host layer and probably at the symbiote layer, but Selmak will not confirm the symbiote until thirty-day observation closes."
Five sentences. Jacob held up a single sheet of folded paper.
"Operational report. You can read it or not."
"Not."
I took the sheet. I put it in the drawer of the small kitchen alcove desk, the drawer with the broken handle that Siler kept saying he would fix.
"Good," Jacob said.
He took a coffee for himself and walked away.
I drank mine. The coffee tasted faintly metallic at the back. AURORA-7 came up at the cooler register.
Drew. The taste in your mouth is the recall-burn aftereffect. I have logged it. It will diminish over the next eighteen to twenty-four hours.
"Okay."
The younger-sister flicker yesterday.
"Yes."
I am cataloging the shape. It is not the first artifact. It will not be the last. The contraction will produce more.
"Okay."
Do you want me to log the shape with a name.
I held the cup. The metallic taste was going faintly sweet at the edges. I did not answer for a count of four.
"No."
Understood.
That night I sat at the apartment kitchen counter at 2117 with the small leather notebook open and the Raytheon pen uncapped beside a glass of water Janet had set in front of me half an hour ago. Janet was in the chair across the counter. She had a paperback open. She was not reading it. She was reading me.
"Are you writing," she said.
"Yes."
"Work?"
"Personal."
"Okay."
She turned a page of the paperback without looking at it.
I wrote the entry in the small careful printing I used when the temple was still pulling.
Day 75. Hathor preempted via Selmak, off-page. Cost — one foreknowledge asset (spent). Side cost — recall produced a younger-sister false-positive. The shape was Hana-shaped. The contraction is going to do this more. Track the shape. Do not let the shape land on a real person before I have a chance to name it.
I read the entry once. I read it twice. I did not write Hana's name in the notebook. I did not let the pen touch the page where her name might have been.
I capped the pen. I closed the notebook. I put both in the drawer under the counter where Janet did not look because we had agreed without discussing it that the drawer was mine.
Janet closed the paperback. She set it on the counter.
"Bed?" she said.
"In a minute."
"Drew."
"Yeah."
"Your eyes have been half-closed since lunch."
"I know."
"I'm going to bed. Come when you're ready."
She left the kitchen.
I sat at the counter. I drank the water. The metallic taste in the back of my throat had dropped one notch. AURORA-7 settled at the cooler register and stayed.
The phone on the counter buzzed once. A text from Walter.
Sir. The Tollan vote is in fourteen hours. Travell's faction has lost two members overnight. The math has tipped. I'll have the final count at oh-six-hundred your time.
I read the text twice. I did not reply.
I picked up the phone and walked to the bedroom door.
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