Complete
Action/Adventure, Vignette, Challenge
Set in Season 6
Disclaimers:
Stargate Sg-1 and its characters are the property of Stargate (II) Productions, Showtime/Viacom, MGM/UA, Double Secret Productions, and Gekko Productions. This story is written purely for my own entertainment, and that of anyone else who may happen to read it. No infringement of copyright is intended. It is not intended and should never be used for commercial purposes.
The original characters, situations and ideas contained within this work are the property of the author.
Author's Notes:
This fic is a response to the First Lines challenge, using the first line of The Eyre Affair: "My father had a face that could stop a clock." In retrospect, it might be cheating to take that line in its original meaning, but there it is. The title has as little to do with this fic as it would have done to the book that it wasn't used for.
Acknowledgements:
Many thanks to Shadow Maat for the challenge and Jasper Fforde for the first line and the title (an abandoned title for Something Rotten which seemed to fit the pseudo scientific tone). I was greatly tempted to go with the title suggested by MS FrontPage, but I think I'll save 'Complete Action' for another time.
As always, thanks to Sho for her beta work and Southern-Northern translation.
My father had a face that could stop a clock; not that he never knew it. My mother had a presence that could halt armies in their tracks; but it meant nothing to her. My great-uncle successfully slipped his skin a dozen times - to the best of my knowledge a record - and he would never shut up about it until the day he finally slipped too far and 'went up to London', as the saying goes. All of my ancestors were in some way extraordinary; in fact, their extraordinariness was so very commonplace that most of them never knew it. The people around them were utterly oblivious of course, but then humans so often are.
The fact that my great-uncle recognised his own ‘unusual’ resilience suggests that he was more of my kind. I was dimly conscious of my abilities from an early age – maybe as a result of growing up around physicists – although I only gained full awareness when that rat-swine Narim put me in his machine. Oh, it was a pretty speech he gave: No more disease, no more worm tablets, tripled life expectancy. He failed to mention the drawback, although admittedly that was because he didn't know about it. There are few things more cruel that one can do to a cat than to coalesce their perceptions and their instincts into true consciousness. It's bad enough being able to see distortions in the space-time continuum, without feeling the need to do something about it.
Keeping the Tollan from messing around with time was bad enough. For a supposedly advanced race they were remarkably slow on the uptake. They kept on asking how I got into the temporal research labs, but none of them ever seemed to wonder why. I could have told them of course, but even among the Tollan a talking cat wouldn't have had anything to look forward to but a short trip to the lab.
Since the destruction of Tollana, however, I had been looking back on those balmy salad days of broken circuits and extremely tricky sabotage - have you ever tried sabotaging a Tollan etheric circuit without the use of opposable thumbs? - with considerable fondness. Even aside from the relentless threat of the Apocalypse Child, the ability to perceive the world in four dimensions is a constant trial; the occasional attack by Tindlehounds is just the icing on the cake.
"I reckon the brute caught sight of you when you passed through the stasis threshold on Tollana," Buxton mused, idly cleaning a paw.
"I suppose," I agreed, as I stared tensely around me. A massive paw swept out at me from the transtemporal blur of the beast's body, the blow coming from above and to the right and about six seconds in the future. That's the problem with five dimensional assailants; they don't necessarily have to strike at where you are, they can go for where you were or where you will be. Fortunately, I inherited my father's face and so I nipped swiftly to my left while remaining motionless in time. "You couldn't give me a hand, could you?" I asked, with forced politeness.
"Love to, my dear chap," Buxton assured me, in the over-formal drawl of a mining baron. The door began to slide open and the big, blue tom jammed his paw down on the controls to block it. "As you see, however, I have to stay where I am. We wouldn't want poor Juna getting in that brute's way now, would we?"
"Quite," I agreed, tersely. "So why don't I take a turn on the door while you play with Fido?"
"I never caught the gaze of a Hound of Tindalos," Buxton reminded me. "He's here to kill you so you have to keep moving. Stands to reason."
As though summoned by its name, the Tindlehound came fully into my timeframe, the large, lean body resolving from the blur of motion. It looked like a greyhound, and an especially ugly one at that, with bluish pus covering its skin – if indeed that was not the skin itself. I hesitated to strike back at the beast for fear of getting that slime on my paws. It lunged at me with its long jaws, this time attacking from two directions and three time zones at once. I retreated from the obvious threat and almost stumbled straight into the hound as it made an objectively simultaneous manifestation behind me; its temporal movement was uncannily quiet and without the skirl of space-time distortion which usually accompanies fourth-dimensional movement so there was no warning of the sneak attack.
There was a blur of motion and then I was moving sideways. Buxton dragged me from between the Tindlehound's jaws and deposited me roughly on a clear patch of floor. I barely had time to register that he had moved before he was sitting nonchalantly back in place by the door. I struggled up and ducked another swipe.
"You could give me a hint, at least!" I accused. I lashed out as a paw came close; the slime was as horrid as I had suspected, but more than that, the mere touch of the creature's yielding flesh made my leg go numb.
"Don't touch it and don't let it touch you," Buxton suggested.
"Hah!" I snarled, angrily. "Fat lot of good you are, Mr Hoity-Toity Castellan."
"I've not spent all that time on your training so you can come running to me every time you're in trouble," Buxton replied, primly. "You want to look out for your own wellbeing, else how can you look after your precious Juna."
"Vida seems to trust me," I taunted. The Hound made a clever, paraspatial feint but I dodged it by standing perfectly still.
"The Princess Sangivida needs to learn a thing or two about trust." He sighed in despair as the Tindlehound almost clobbered me with a tricky retrotemporal manoeuvre. It was only instinct that saved me from that one, reflexes hardwired into my central nervous system twisting me out of the way of a blow I never saw coming until it had fallen.
I looked on in mounting terror as the Hound wound up for the attack which it had made moments before. Even to a cat it's pretty weird to be near-gutted by a set of claws moving backwards through time.
"Haven't you learned anything?" Buxton demanded, closing the door on our human friends once more. "Study your enemy; see how he moves."
"See how...! He barely moves in space at all; he just..."
"Hallelujah," Buxton whispered.
Understanding now, I did study the hound – not the way he travelled in space but how he moved through time. I had assumed his ability was similar to the one I used to slow or accelerate my own passage through time, just much more advanced. Now I came to look more closely, however, I saw that he was not moving in the long curves I used to distance myself from the zero line – the more-or-less fixed pace of historical progression. Instead, the Hound was darting here and there in straight lines, then angling back to the zero, which was impossible. If you left the line without a little bit of spin you would just drift off into space-time, or I would anyway; a human would probably just go insane and die of shock in less than a heartbeat, which could take anything from a fraction of a second to half-a-million years.
So, I reasoned, if he can move through angles in the that way I can't, perhaps he can't circle like I can. Good in theory, but it was going to be difficult to pull off anything that would be useful. Oh well, 'fortune favours the incredibly stupid' as my old keeper, Captain Carter, used to say.
I looked up at the Hound as it tensed to spring. I waited. He sprang. I stayed where I was.
A trace of uncertainty entered the Hound's muddy, witless eyes as it twitched itself sideways so as to land where I was rather than where it had thought I was going to be, a complex temporospatial operation. That was when I sprang, launching myself past it in an accelerated loop across its nose. Momentarily off balance - temporally speaking - the hound suddenly found itself dragged into my wake, but where my arc landed me smoothly on my feet, ten feet away and far less than a second after my starting point, the Hound was launched, uncontrolled, into the vortex, scrabbling madly at a curve which refused to give purchase to its angular, pandimensional presence.
"Not bad," Buxton allowed, letting the door slide open. "I'd have done it differently, but...awk!" He broke off in a squawk as Trini snatched him into her arms, a ridiculous sight as Buxton must have weighed almost as much as she did.
"Oh, Bucky!" the diminutive Tollan cried, rubbing Buxton's scalp between the ears. "We were so worried."
Buxton gave a plaintive mewl, caught as always between his hatred of being called 'Bucky' and his helplessness before Trini's exceptionally empathic head-scratching. I would have laughed, but I've let myself be called worse in exchange for less.
Juna came over and knelt in front of me. She might be younger than Trini, but she was wiser in the ways of cats. She reached out and stroked my head, fondly. "Are you alright, Schrödinger?" she asked.
"Absolutely," I replied, as a slender, smoke-grey queen pushed her way past the girl. "Highness," I greeted her with a bow.
"Schrödinger," Sangivida responded, with an adorable wrinkle of her nose. "You smell vile."
"Yes, Highness," I agreed. "I never thought I'd say it, but I think I need a bath."
Sangivida nodded once, then rounded on the struggling Buxton. "Castellan!" she snapped. "How dare you seal this space against us? We are your princess, are we not?"
Buxton managed to pull himself free of Trini's arms, but consented to allow her to kneel beside him and stroke his back. "I serve the Great Queen and your safety is my charge, Highness," he replied.
Sangivida bristled. "I can handle a Tindlehound," she insisted.
"I know," he assured her, evenly. "I needed to know if he could, if I am ever to leave you alone with him."
"That was a test?" I asked, incredulous.
"I didn't plan it, but it served." He paced to the door, deftly evading Trini on the way. "Let's get some dinner; fighting always makes me hungry."
"That cat's arrogance makes my whiskers twitch," Sangivida hissed.
I glowered after Buxton, but I suppose in the final analysis he did save my life. "Harrumph," I harrumphed. "Maybe he's right."
"I'll decide who I stay with," the princess assured me.
"I know," I agreed. "I meant he's right, we should get some dinner. Fighting makes me hungry too."