Free STARGATE SG-1: Oceans of Dust by Peter J. Evans

began.
    “Daniel.”
    “Look, do you want to grab a coffee or something before we start on this?”
    “Nah, I’m good.”
    Level 20. Daniel tried another tack. “How are the hands?”
    Jack raised them, looked at them oddly. There were dressings on some of the deeper lacerations, and the smaller cuts still looked angry and painful.
    “They’re fine.”
    “Jack…”
    The older man’s eyes locked on his. “Don’t.”
    “It wasn’t —”
    “Yeah, it was.”
    The elevator doors hissed apart. Jack stepped inside. “Happy translating,” he said, his hand up in an ironic wave, and then the doors were together again and he was gone.
    “Damn,” breathed Daniel. And then became aware that Teal’c was watching him intently. “What?”
    “You were attempting to lighten his mood?”
    “No, not really… I just wanted to let him know he shouldn’t blame himself.”
    “The blame lies with Apophis.”
    “Yeah, I know that.”
    “As does Colonel O’Neill. But blame and responsibility are easily confused. It is the task of a leader to know the difference.”
    There was a soft chime as the second elevator reached their level. The doors slid apart. Daniel followed Teal’c inside, stood beside him as they closed again.
    “Should that make me feel better?” he asked.
    Teal’c said nothing while the elevator climbed. Only when it had reached its destination and opened again did he speak.
    “The blame does not lie with you either, Daniel Jackson.”
    Maybe
, thought Daniel, as the two men left the elevator.
But am I responsible?
     
    The notion would not leave him, no matter how hard he tried to concentrate on his work. The task of refining his translation of the message wasn’t quite difficult enough to drive it from his mind, especially with Teal’c there to fill in the gaps, and even re-writing it into Goa’uld hieroglyphs to send it worming back through the SGC databases couldn’t entirely distract him from it.
    At first, his feelings remained a mystery. Certainly, the deaths on Sar’tua had been tragic, but he had experienced worse. There had probably been occasions where he had been far more directly responsible for awful events — when he really looked back at those fateful hours on the plateau, the only thing that truly haunted him had been not speaking up about the locator beacon more quickly. But could anything have been done about it if he had? In all honesty, he doubted it. The device had been designed to attract help in all but the most dire circumstances. Sephotep wouldn’t have built the device to be easily disabled. It was only a complete and unexpected shutdown of the Tel’tak’s entire power system that had silenced it in the first place.
    In which case, Daniel reasoned, letting a mug of coffee steam his glasses while the database threw up an endless ribbon of negative results, why couldn’t he let this go?
    Part of the answer was, of course, if not staring him in the face, then at least torturing his eardrums. It was the effect of having Ra’s voice played back at him through that accursed, smoke-stinking tape deck.
    After all, his wife had only been dead a year, and her loss still impaled him.
    Ra had been the chief among the System Lords, in as much as that squabbling, fragmented, murderous clan of tyrants could ever have a leader. No human could have known it at the time, but Ra’s influence over the other Goa’uld was keeping them partly in check. Apophis, his despotic son, had only come to power once Ra had died.
    But whatever Ra’s last moments had entailed, it was arguable that his absence caused more woe and destruction than his existence. His demolition had almost certainly led directly to the abduction and appropriation of Sha’re. So if responsibility were the issue, or fault, or blame… Who but Daniel Jackson could truly bear it?
    How many people would still be alive if he hadn’t travelled to Abydos?
     
    He was tired, that was the problem. His mind had a tendency to