Chapter Text
-- DAY 1 --
P3X-442 was supposed to be a simple reconnaissance mission. A few ruins, some dust, and maybe an enigmatic inscription to keep Daniel busy for three hours. Which, in SG-1 terms, qualified as a quiet day.
Instead, they found themselves on a planet that made no effort to be welcoming—and seemed rather pleased about it.
O’Neill swept the horizon with a glance. The sky was white and opaque, a dome without ambition that promised neither sun nor rain, just that dull, uniform light that flattened the terrain and washed everything in the same shade of gray. The ground beneath his boots was compact, almost mineral. Vegetation grew in sparse, stunted clumps, as if it had tried to take root here long ago, realized its mistake, and given up halfway through. In the distance, half-buried structures showed angles too sharp, lines too straight to belong to nature.
Jack had seen hundreds of planets. Some had surprised him. A few had impressed him. This one was already boring him, and he’d only been here four minutes.
“I don’t like this planet.”
Carter didn’t look up from her scanner. “You say that every time, sir.”
He exhaled slowly. She wasn’t wrong. That didn’t make the planet any more likable.
To his left, Daniel had already pulled out his binoculars, that Pavlovian reflex kicking in the moment he spotted anything remotely resembling an ancient structure. He aimed them at the buildings, completely absorbed, forgetting everything else: the mission, the protocol, O’Neill standing two steps away waiting.
“The regularity of the angles is remarkable. This isn’t natural erosion. And the stone—there’s something unusual about it.”
Jack waited two seconds. “Unusual how?”
“I don’t know yet. We’d have to get closer.”
Jack glanced at the structures, then at the sky, as if one of them might give him a convincing reason to turn around. Neither bothered.
“Fine. Let’s go.”
They moved in single file, Jack in the lead, Teal’c covering the rear. The ground absorbed their footsteps without a sound, smooth in places, as if polished by something less natural than time. No rocks. No irregularities. Just that flat, compact surface, like the planet was holding its breath.
Then the vegetation disappeared.
Not gradually. Not with that transition zone you usually found at the edge of abandoned areas, those fringes where nature reclaimed ground inch by inch. Here, it was sharp. Surgical. On one side, the stunted clumps. On the other, bare ground. A line you could have drawn with a ruler.
Daniel stopped. “That’s interesting.”
Jack stopped as well, without fully turning. He had long since learned not to ask why it was interesting. Daniel would explain anyway, with or without prompting.
“The vegetation boundary stops exactly at the foundation level. No transition zone. It’s clean.”
“And that means what?”
“That the ground was modified to create that boundary. Like someone wanted to isolate this area from the rest.”
Carter hadn’t waited for him to finish. She was already crouched, scanner pressed to the ground with the care she reserved for equipment that cost more than her car. The device emitted a muted beep. She slid it a few centimeters. “Residual energy concentration is significantly higher here. The stone seems to be charged.”
“Charged how?”
She glanced up briefly. “I don’t know yet.”
Jack nodded. Two “I don’t know yet” in under thirty seconds. He exhaled and moved toward the largest structure, a massive rectangular block that seemed to sink into the ground as if the planet had been slowly digesting it over the centuries, never quite finishing the meal.
As they approached, the silence changed.
It wasn’t the peaceful silence of a forest, nor the empty silence of a desert. It was something more deliberate. As if the air itself had been filtered, stripped of anything that could make noise.
Daniel stopped in front of what looked like an opening. No door, no hinges—just a perfect rectangular cut in the wall. He ran his hand along the edge, his face lighting up with that childlike curiosity that defined him, and which, depending on the day, was either his greatest strength or Jack’s worst headache.
“Look at this. The precision is millimetric. No tool marks, no friction, nothing.”
O’Neill stepped forward, weapon ready. He was far less interested in masonry quality than in whatever might be lurking in the shadows beyond.
“Let’s take a look inside.”
The dull exterior light vanished the moment they crossed the threshold, replaced by a soft luminescence emanating directly from the walls. No visible source. No flicker. Every corner perfectly lit. No dust. No cobwebs. No debris. None of the traces time usually left behind.
Carter slowly turned, scanner held out. “Sir, the air is incredibly pure. No bacteria, no particulate matter. It’s like a sterile room.”
Jack tapped the wall. Warm under his fingers, evenly so, with nothing to do with sunlight. “Makes me want to leave.”
No one was listening.
Daniel had already moved toward a console rising from the floor in a smooth curve, intact—too intact for a place supposedly abandoned long ago. At the center of the room stood a complex machine, made of a metal whose reflections shifted depending on the angle. It made no sound, but the air around it vibrated just below the threshold of perception, something you felt in your chest before you heard it.
“Don’t touch anything.”
Jack’s order was perfectly clear—and perfectly ignored. Carter and Daniel’s hands paused for half a second, the minimum acceptable delay, then continued toward the console.
Daniel studied the inscriptions across the surface, brow furrowed. “Some symbols resemble pre-Ancient, but the syntax is different. I can’t grasp the overall structure.”
Jack scanned the room, weapon raised. Teal’c covered the opposite side. “So what does it say?”
“Jack, I just told you I don’t understand it.”
Daniel’s hand hovered a few centimeters from the surface. He read, fully absorbed. Then, without even looking down, his fingers brushed the console.
A sharp crack split the silence.
The machine flared to life. A pure white light, almost painful, then an invisible wave swept through the air in a fraction of a second. Jack and Teal’c raised their weapons instantly. The wave passed through them like a cold draft, and the machine fell inert again.
“What was that?” Jack barked, finger still on the trigger.
Daniel stepped back, hands raised. “I don’t know, I barely touched it.”
Sam was already kneeling near the base, scanning with methodical urgency. Her readings said everything was fine. Her instincts screamed otherwise. She trusted her instincts.
“Carter?”
“Nothing, sir.” She looked up, and there was something in her expression that looked less like relief than frustration. Her instruments showed a clean, empty silence where she was certain there should be something. “No signature variation, no particle emission. Nothing detectable.”
Jack glanced at Teal’c. The Jaffa gave a slight nod. He lowered his weapon. Something had happened in that room—he was certain of it. Something his eyes hadn’t seen, Carter’s instruments hadn’t recorded, and Teal’c hadn’t deemed necessary to comment on.
“That’s it. We’re heading back.”
Daniel straightened immediately, clutching his notebook as if Jack might confiscate it. “We can’t leave now.” He gestured broadly at the walls. “The inscriptions are partially erased. I need time to reconstruct them. We have to understand what this machine does before we leave.”
Jack turned to Carter. She avoided his gaze, eyes locked on her screen, fingers moving with a persistence that made her opinion perfectly clear.
“Major?”
“If the mechanism was activated—even briefly—residual data might appear.” Her voice was calm, professional, perfectly measured. “But we need time.”
Jack looked from one to the other. Daniel and his theories. Carter and her data. Teal’c at the entrance, silent in a way that felt suspiciously like agreement. Three against one. He’d lost that vote often enough to recognize an inevitable defeat.
He let out a long breath. “Fine. Twenty-four hours.” He pointed at Daniel. “And nobody touches anything.”
They immediately got back to work. Jack stepped outside and paused at the threshold, letting his eyes adjust to the pale exterior light. The sky hadn’t changed—still that white, milky dome. Indifferent.
He found a supply crate just beyond the entrance, sat down, weapon across his knees, eyes on the empty plain.
— ∞ —— ∞ —— ∞ —— ∞ —
Several hours had passed before Daniel and Carter finally agreed to stop, after Jack had delivered a sufficiently definitive “We’re stopping” to close down any attempt at negotiation.
The camp was set up with almost instinctive efficiency, the result of seven years of missions together. No one waited for instructions. Everyone knew what to do: the tents went up in a few sure movements, equipment was distributed without discussion, the perimeter secured with automatic rigor.
Jack observed the result from the center of the perimeter. Functional. Efficient. Nothing comfortable, nothing welcoming, just the essentials arranged in the most useful way possible on ground that deserved no better.
Carter had settled on a crate, laptop open on her knees, already absorbed in her data. Daniel, a few meters away, had gone back to studying the inscriptions, his notebook covered in notes he was rereading under his breath. Teal’c had positioned himself at the edge of the perimeter, back against a structure. Everyone in their place.
Jack made one last circuit of the camp, checking access points, blind spots, distances. Everything was in order. He came back to the center and looked up at the sky. The light had shifted almost imperceptibly in tone, as if the planet had begun something without bothering to make it visible.
He went to get his thermos. The coffee was lukewarm. He drank it anyway, standing, eyes on the flat gray horizon.
Night fell without warning.
No twilight, no transition, none of those orange minutes that gave the end of a day its shape. Just a brutal shift. The white gave way all at once to deep black, as if someone had turned off the light somewhere above their heads. A low moon appeared, casting a pale, cold glow that bathed the camp in a slightly unreal shine. Everything was sharp. Too sharp. Like everything else on this planet.
The meal unfolded in relative silence. They ate their rations with the quiet resignation of people who had long since stopped expecting anything from field food.
During the first few minutes, Daniel tried to share his progress: fragments of translation, hypotheses about the builders, perhaps a pre-Ancient civilization, an offshoot that had followed its own technological path without ever joining the main current. He spoke with that quiet conviction he had when a theory was beginning to take shape, and his voice rang in the silence with almost uncomfortable clarity.
Then he stopped.
Jack was looking beyond the perimeter, caught on something he couldn’t name. Carter had not looked away from her readings. Teal’c kept his gaze turned outward, as if the silence suited him perfectly well.
Daniel opened his notebook and resumed his notes alone. He had long since stopped expecting his audience to share his enthusiasm.
Jack had known silent worlds. Some were silent because there was no wildlife, no wind. But this one was different. Denser. More present. Not merely the absence of sound, but something occupying the space in its own right, to the point where every sound made by the team felt almost intrusive.
He finished his coffee.
Teal’c and Sam took the first watch. Jack glanced at his watch, then at Daniel, who was fighting a yawn, eyes fixed on his notes with the stubbornness of someone refusing to give in to exhaustion.
“Daniel. Go to bed.”
The archaeologist looked up, slightly dazed, as if pulled out of an internal conversation.
“Already?”
“We relieve Carter and Teal’c in four hours.”
The archaeologist didn’t argue. He had learned to recognize that tone, the one that allowed no reply and, in any case, was right. He gathered his things without enthusiasm, picked up his flashlight, and headed toward the tent on the left.
Jack turned toward the one on the right. The routine had been the same for years: the Jaffa and him on one side, the scientists on the other. Simple. Square. Efficient. An arrangement that had imposed itself without anyone ever needing to spell it out.
Jack entered the dim shelter without turning on a light. By feel, he removed his jacket, unlaced his boots with the automatic gestures of a ritual repeated a thousand times, then lay down on the sleeping bag. He closed his eyes, letting fatigue come. Four hours would be short, but enough.
It was in that silence, in that space between waking and sleep, that he detected an anomaly.
The smell was wrong.
It wasn’t the familiar, neutral scent of Teal’c’s pack, the one he associated without thinking with years of shared nights on missions. It was something else. A light floral scent, a softness that belonged to only one person.
Jack went still, eyes open in the dark. He would have recognized it anywhere: Sam’s perfume. The one she always wore, even on missions. After so many hours spent beside her, in the lab and in the field, he had come to know it by heart without ever admitting it to himself. That scent he particularly liked, and which, here, in the middle of nowhere, went through him like a jolt.
His heart gave an irregular beat he chose not to analyze.
He reached out slowly, carefully. His fingers met the canvas of the pack, then something hard fixed to it. A metal shape. He froze, fingertips sliding over its contours.
A pin.
Carter was the only one who wore one on her pack.
So these were not Teal’c’s things. They were Sam’s.
He sat up abruptly, looking for a logical explanation and finding none. Then he got dressed in record time, grabbed his boots, and stepped out of the shelter with the relative discretion of someone trying not to make noise and only half succeeding.
Outside, Sam and Teal’c turned their heads simultaneously from their watch positions. They watched him cross the space between the tents in his socks, boots in hand. Surprise outweighed curiosity by a wide margin.
He yanked open the zipper of the other tent.
“Daniel. Out.”
The archaeologist startled violently and shot upright. He fumbled frantically in the dark, nearly knocked over his bag, finally managed to grab his glasses and shoved them onto his nose with an awkward motion. He turned on the flashlight.
“Jack? What’s—”
“We took the wrong tents.”
Daniel blinked several times. “What? No, I followed—”
“Carter’s things are in the other one.”
Daniel remained still for a moment, mouth slightly open, the obvious slowly making its way through his foggy mind. He looked around, searching for a rational answer the tent did not provide. “But I was sure I followed Sam… I put my things down right after her… I must have veered off on the way.”
“Probably. Come on, move.”
Daniel extracted himself from his sleeping bag, picked up his boots and pack while avoiding Jack’s eyes, left the tent with the air of a schoolboy caught doing something wrong, and disappeared into the one on the right.
The colonel did not come back out.
The lamps in both tents went out one after the other, and the silence returned.
Outside, Sam stared at the left-hand tent for a long second, her breathing imperceptibly shorter than it should have been. “What are they doing?”
Teal’c kept his eyes on the perimeter. “It appears Daniel Jackson and O’Neill have carried out an exchange of sleeping arrangements, Major Carter.”
Sam didn’t answer. The colonel never changed his habits without a good reason, and even less so to end up in her tent. What that decision meant was a question she carefully chose not to answer. She tightened her fingers around the grip of her weapon, her heart beating a little too fast beneath her jacket.
The hours of watch passed in that silence that made every minute longer than the last. Sam made her rounds with mechanical regularity, sweeping the darkness without seeing anything but shadows too sharply drawn beneath the pale moon.
Little by little, fatigue got the better of her. Her eyelids grew heavy, her focus slipped, and the landscape eventually blurred into a uniform gray haze. She caught herself staring at a motionless shadow for long minutes without really seeing it.
A hand settled on her shoulder.
She startled. Teal’c, of course. No one else could have approached without her hearing, and no one else would have had that way of bringing her back to herself without a word, just a firm, perfectly measured contact.
“You are exhausted, Major Carter. The camp is quiet. Go and rest.”
She opened her mouth. Closed it. He was right, and protesting would have required energy she no longer had. She nodded and headed toward her tent with the feeling that she was walking toward something she dreaded as much as she hoped for, without knowing which of the two was winning.
She entered with infinite slowness, holding her breath so the zipper wouldn’t rasp.
Moonlight filtered through the canvas, just enough to outline the cramped space. Jack was there, turned on his side. His breathing was slow, regular, that of a man truly asleep.
Sam removed her boots with millimetric care and slipped into her sleeping bag, staying on the very edge of the mat as if that extra centimeter would change anything. Body rigid. She had never been so aware of the heat radiating from him.
Jack did not move.
She waited, suspended in her own breath, not entirely sure what she was waiting for. Nothing came. The tent was silent, and exhaustion eventually made the decision for her.
She fell asleep.
— ∞ —— ∞ —— ∞ —— ∞ —
Four hours later, a heavy, firm hand settled on Jack’s shoulder.
He didn’t need to open his eyes to identify Teal’c. No one else woke him that way, with a touch that was neither abrupt nor gentle, but authoritative enough for the body to understand that sleep was no longer an option.
“O’Neill. You are to take over.”
Jack surfaced slowly. The first thing he felt was not the cold, nor the stiffness in his muscles after a few hours on an unforgiving ground. It was a steady warmth pressed against his right side.
He looked down.
Sam was there. In their sleep, she had moved closer until her sleeping bag had molded itself against his, without leaving a millimeter of space between them. She slept facing him, knees slightly drawn up against his, her silhouette fitting perfectly along the line of his body. Her forehead was almost resting in the hollow of his shoulder. In the unconsciousness of sleep, she had slipped one hand out of her sleeping bag, fingers flat on the ground, a few millimeters from Jack’s arm.
He did not move, holding his breath, afraid the slightest twitch might break that balance and wake her.
Teal’c was kneeling, one eyebrow raised. He had registered the situation. He had no intention of doing more.
“Teal’c.” Jack’s voice came out more strangled than he would have liked. “What’s Carter doing here?”
“Major Carter was exhausted. I suggested she rest.”
“I mean... in my tent.”
“This is Major Carter’s tent, O’Neill.”
Jack froze halfway through the movement he had started to sit up. “No, it’s not.”
Teal’c inclined his head slightly. “You exchanged tents with Daniel Jackson.”
Jack rubbed a hand over his face. He saw himself walking out in his socks, entering Daniel’s tent, firmly sending him to the other shelter. He had been convinced he was correcting a mistake. But if Daniel had been in the right tent from the start, he had corrected nothing at all. He had created a problem out of thin air.
That kind of conclusion was particularly unpleasant upon waking.
He then began an extraction maneuver complex enough to make the engineers at Area 51 turn pale. Sit up without shifting Sam’s body. Avoid brushing the hand lying on the ground. He eased himself away centimeter by centimeter, every muscle screaming under the effort of slowness. Sam gave a small, sleepy murmur, instinctively seeking the warmth moving away, and curled in on herself. Jack froze, heart pounding against his ribs, until her breathing became slow and regular again.
Once on his feet, he gathered his things.
“I’m taking over.”
“Very well, O’Neill.”
He stepped out into the icy night air and settled on his supply crate, elbows on his knees, eyes on his boots. The camp was deserted and silent. P3X-442 did not bother to comment.
He did not understand what had happened a few hours earlier. Above all, he did not understand how, with all his experience, he could have gone into the wrong tent.
— ∞ —— ∞ —— ∞ —— ∞ —
Morning arrived with the same brutality as night. The black gave way to milky white in the snap of a finger, as if someone had simply flipped the switch.
Jack had not moved from his crate.
He had spent the hours of watch staring at the horizon, the empty thermos at his feet, trying to reconstruct the logic of the previous evening with the rigor of an officer writing a report and the growing conviction that said report would convince no one, starting with himself. The sequence was clear in his head. The scent. The pin. The return to the other tent. All of it had made perfect sense at the time.
Daniel was the first to get up, with that slightly indecent morning vigor he sometimes had after nights in the field, as if sleeping on the ground in a military sleeping bag suited him better than his own bed. He stretched at length and turned toward Jack with the enthusiasm of someone with good news to share.
“Jack. You’ll never guess. Not one bit of stiffness left in my neck.” He turned his head from left to right to demonstrate. “I feel completely relaxed. The air must have particular properties, or maybe the composition of the ground. There are studies on the influence of geomagnetic fields on sleep quality that could—”
“Wonderful, Daniel.”
Jack hadn’t even looked up to answer, still staring at that invisible point on the horizon. The word landed short and final, leaving no room for anything. Daniel looked at him for a second, seemed to weigh the possibility of a reply, then shrugged and went back to his tent to retrieve his things.
Sam came out a few minutes later. She stopped at the threshold, automatically adjusting the zipper of her jacket. She gave Jack a brief, professional look, the kind of look meant to say nothing and which Jack intercepted with a precision that did him no good whatsoever.
There was that particular atmosphere of mornings when everyone knows something has happened without knowing how to address it. They went back to work in silence, each on their own, with that slightly too-careful application of people who need to keep their minds occupied.
An hour later, Sam closed her laptop. “Final readings are complete, sir.” She wasn’t looking at him, her tone perfectly calibrated, too even to be entirely natural. “The energy signature is stable. Nothing new to report.”
Jack turned to the archaeologist. “And you?”
“All the inscriptions on the base have been photographed.” He tapped his notebook with satisfaction. “I can finish the translation at the SGC.”
Jack took one last look at the room, the inert machine at the center, the walls too clean, the light that came from nowhere.
“Fine. We break camp.”
Packing up took record time. Every strap cooperated, every buckle adjusted on the first try. In seven years of missions, Jack had developed a tense relationship with field equipment and accepted its whims. But here, everything yielded without friction, with a suspicious fluidity that looked less like luck than some form of cooperation from the planet itself.
The camp was erased from the surface of P3X-442 as if it had never existed.
They set out toward the Gate. The ground absorbed their steps with the same softness as before. Sam dialed the address. The vortex burst outward with its familiar roar, finally breaking the planet’s oppressive silence with a deeply reassuring violence of sound.
They passed through one after another. Jack brought up the rear. He stopped and turned back for one last look. The ruins too gray. The sky too white. That silence that had said nothing.
Then he stepped through.
The passage through the vortex was disturbingly smooth. Too gentle. Too fast. Usually there was always something, an imperceptible resistance, a fraction of a second of disorientation, that brief nowhere between two places.
This time, nothing.
They emerged on the ramp of the SGC with the usual thunder of the Gate shutting down. Jack stopped for two seconds at the bottom of the structure, searching his body for the slight post-vortex nausea that did not come. The concrete under his boots had that familiar, reassuring solidity, that honest resistance that said he was back somewhere real.
That detail, for reasons he couldn’t have explained, reassured him only moderately.
Hammond’s voice echoed from the control room. “SG-1, welcome back. Mission briefing in one hour.”
The infirmary smelled of antiseptic and reheated coffee, that characteristic blend of level twenty-one Jack associated with mandatory medical checks and bad news. Janet Fraiser came in, flipped through their files with that speed she had for scanning them without missing a single detail, and stopped in front of Teal’c.
“No side effects after the vibration?”
“I am well, Doctor Fraiser.” A pause. “The night was, however, marked by a certain logistical confusion within our camp.”
Jack, seated two beds away, suddenly discovered a particularly interesting spot on the opposite wall.
Janet raised an eyebrow. That specific eyebrow she reserved for situations that promised to be interesting. “A confusion?”
Teal’c opened his mouth. Jack was faster.
“A tent mix-up.” He cleared his throat. “Nothing important.”
The silence that followed had a particular quality. Sam was examining the face of her watch with a concentration that had nothing to do with the time. Janet looked from one to the other with the gaze of a doctor diagnosing something other than physical symptoms.
She nodded. “I see.”
Jack stood. “Can we go?”
Janet scribbled a note on her chart, wearing the discreet smile of someone who had drawn her own conclusions. “No significant physiological changes. You’re free to go, Colonel.”
He didn’t wait for her to finish the sentence. He was already in the corridor.
— ∞ —— ∞ —— ∞ —— ∞ —
In the briefing room, Hammond listened to Daniel’s report on the inscriptions, then Carter’s on the complete absence of measurable energy emissions after the initial vibration. Jack, for his part, kept his eyes fixed on the conference table. He had never noticed how perfectly polished the mahogany was. Not a scratch. Not a single ring left by a coffee cup.
“Very well.” Hammond closed his folder. “Given the unexplained incident with the pedestal, you’ll remain under observation on base for the next forty-eight hours.”
Jack nodded. “Yes, sir.”
The briefing was dismissed. Daniel and Sam left together for their labs, already discussing residual frequencies and linguistic roots with that shared enthusiasm they sometimes slipped into, politely excluding the rest of the universe. Teal’c headed for his quarters for meditation.
Jack remained alone in the briefing room for a fraction of a second longer. He looked at the table one last time. Then he stood.
The level nineteen corridor was deserted, bathed in fluorescent light that buzzed with that reassuring industrial hum, the one that meant things were functioning normally. Jack stopped in front of the vending machine and pulled out his change.
It was his ritual. Buying a Snickers from this stubborn machine meant the mission was over, the danger was behind him, the real world had taken him back. He liked the ritual precisely because the machine resisted, because it rejected his coins, jammed its mechanisms, forced him to negotiate, insist, deliver a well-placed shoulder strike against the glass. A small victory, ridiculous and completely useless, but real.
He inserted the first coin.
It slid in without a sound.
Jack frowned. He inserted the next ones, one by one, waiting each time for the usual rejection clatter. Nothing. The digital counter, which normally displayed half-faded numbers with the stubbornness of a device refusing to acknowledge its own obsolescence, showed the exact amount in a suspiciously clear ruby red.
He pressed C-4. The usual code for the Snickers, a choice he had always personally found appropriate for a machine he had threatened to blow up at least a hundred times since working at the SGC.
He set his stance. Prepared himself. Mentally readied for the regulation shoulder hit.
Click.
The mechanism turned with total fluidity, almost gracefully. The candy bar slid from its holder, dropped into the exact center of the tray, perfectly vertical, without grazing the sides, and landed in velvet silence.
Jack waited. A squeak, a spark, any form of mechanical protest.
Nothing.
The coin return dispensed three quarters, perfectly new, without a scratch. He retrieved his bar. The wrapper was immaculate. He tore it open. The perforation followed a perfectly straight line, without resistance, on the first try.
Jack bit into the chocolate. Chewed slowly. Stared at the vending machine.
That old pile of junk, famous throughout the base for its chronic bad will, had just displayed a level of efficiency that had no business being here. Not in this corridor. Not in this base. That total absence of friction left a strange taste in his mouth. A taste of perfection that did not belong at the SGC. He had the persistent and perfectly irrational feeling that he had been betrayed by a vending machine.
He heard footsteps in the corridor and looked up. Walter passed by, file tucked under his arm. He saw Jack, gave a brief nod. “Have a good evening, Colonel. You and Major Carter.”
He kept walking without stopping.
Jack turned so abruptly he nearly dropped his Snickers. “What?”
Walter had already rounded the corner without looking back.
Jack stayed motionless, eyes fixed on the empty corridor.
Walter was precise, meticulous, rigorous. In seven years, Jack had never heard him say anything unnecessary.
So why had he said that? As if spending the evening with Sam was a given?