Cheyenne Mountain Complex- USSF facility
June 28th, 2020
“It’s a bit of a ways down sir” The poor Corporal immediately regretted it when he heard Statterfield’s laughter. “Hey Jack, did you know the Gate Room is a ways down”
“Kept asking them for elevator music” O’Neill replied with a neutral expression, it felt weird to be back in uniform, it felt weirder still to be back here and it felt even weirder to have his hair cut by Statterfield, that ended up bringing back awkward memories about a jungle raid in brazil, a would-be warlord. Some really bad mushrooms and a goat and one very confused Statterfield, that had been what? Two thousand? Oh one? A few weeks before the towers? He couldn’t remember, but he remembered her kicking the goat out, dragging him from the shack and submerging him in water. What happened with the goat again? Oh right, it ate some intel report and O’Neill had been too high courtesy of his captors to reason, so he just took the goat and blew the place.
Things were simpler then, he didn’t know about Ra and his possibly nonexistent, possibly existent empire. His daughters hadn’t gotten into a firefight with space men, and he didn’t know anything about project Giza or that nerd he left behind on space Egypt. “You got an office here?” Jack asked, noting how everyone seemed to recognize her when they came in together.
Or it could just be that they were ogling Statterfield, she was a looker even now and young adults no matter how much of sensitivity training nonsense you try and beat into their heads, were always going to be young adults. Man, woman, you stayed stupid, horny and arrogant until you turned thirty and realized life had kicked you in the nuts.
Statterfield shook her head “No, but I’m required to make quarterly visits to make sure everything is running smoothly. The facility sort of lost its prominence after you guys came back from Abydos.” “Didn’t realize we were that important” O’Neill remarked with a smug grin on his face that made the woman shake her head. “Sam, she tried hard to make it work, President Obama and the joint chiefs might have been, skeptical about your warnings, taking the interpretation that Ra was the last of his kind and whatever assets he had left would likely not know where we are”
“But Hammond and Ellis still believed, so while you were training the next generation of space marines. They had Sam try everything to “dial” into another world. Do some recon, maybe prove the threat to help us prepare”
With the NID and certain, reclusive magnates involved, he doubted it was just about proving threats. “We couldn’t even move the interior ring, your daughter helped Doctor Carter create an algorithm that almost got us to six chevrons but” she shrugged. “We tried, but the brass just wasn’t convinced, so they ordered priority be given into Project Constellation”.
They both went quiet there, no need to rehash the topic beyond that. Still, Jack was glad they had tried, even if it was in secret. “Fuck’n area fifty-one” Jack remarked “That psycho Carter and her mega dweebs get all the money and attention, but they haven’t produced anything and that whole damn facility hasn’t done anything since the B2’s”
“Being a little harsh aren’t ya Jack?” Statterfield asked, a mischievous grin flashing across her face. It was amusing working him up into one of his rants about how academics were the ultimate threat to the species, because the more they knew the more they wanted to go “stick their dicks in a hornet’s nest”. When the elevator doors opened Jack stopped before he could start, eyeballing the burn marks on the walls, the places where concrete had been blown off. The repair crews and, the dried blood. “They got this far?”
“Yes” Statterfield remarked.
Then it couldn’t be Ra, Jack reasoned, his fears that the powerful alien who seemed to border on the mystical had somehow survived a nuclear bomb going off in his face evaporated. The guys he fought were dangerous, four of them wiped out the bulk of his marines in under five minutes according to Ferretti. But once you got them out in the open, or in the right spot, they were too lightly armored to hold up to sustained fire for long, especially from some of the weapons he saw. Some of those next gen guns looked like toys to him, he figured they would have torn Ra’s half naked warriors apart. Jack didn’t like the implications there, but he refused to let himself go bonkers in speculation until he actually saw the man.
“How’s Hammond?” O’Neill asked as they rounded a corridor and he noticed one of the janitors was doing his best to mop with an eyepatch and what looked like cuts all over his arms. “Did someone loose a grenade in that room?!” O’Neill asked gawking where the smoking section had been when he’d shared command with Langford. “Yup” Statterfield remarked and he chuckled to himself shaking his head. “Christ what a mess”
“Hammond is fine, but he’s furious” she said but she wouldn’t elaborate on why which annoyed Jack, but he was used to it. Admiral Hammond in many ways reminded him of Ra, or at least what the mental intrusion implied Ra might have been once. A skilled administrator but also someone imperious, confident and relentless to the point that you wanted to do ten times what he himself did, not to outdo him but to thank him for the example he set and the loyalty he had for his superiors and more importantly those under his charge.
Yup, Admiral George Samuel Hammond must have been
pissed. You didn’t catch a man like that with his pants down and not suffer biblical consequences. And as they made their way towards Hammond’s rather spacious office, he noted both Kowalski and Lahm sitting outside of the doorway, looking like chastised children. Children who remained defiantly loyal to one friend, over someone they respected immensely. -I’ll make it up to them- Jack thought.
“Here is where we part” Statterfield remarked.
“Really?” O’Neill asked, somewhat annoyed the one thing that remained from when the universe made sense besides his kids was departing.
“Yeah, I need to brief the President and then I’ve got a parent teacher conference”
Her kids were still High School age, he forgot. “Have fun with that” Jack remarked, unsure which was the harder task. Briefing the President or playing the soccer mom when you just learned something world shattering and all you wanted to do was take your kids out for pizza.
He’d done both before and he concluded that the hardest task was walking into Admiral Hammond’s office and admit to him that you lied to his face for five years. He stopped to receive a hug from Lahm and a handshake from Kowalski who were both elated and scared to see him here but before he could ask why an irate Texan roared for him to get in there.
Entering, the first thing O’Neill noticed was that the Admirals Bowie knife, a family heirloom was embedded in his desk. The second, that there was a terrified member of the Joint chief’s on the other end of a monitor who was hastily thanking Hammond for his time and ending the call. O’Neill looked at the tall, bald mammoth of a man who could go from being the world’s most forgiving superior or grandfather to the living embodiment of divine wrath in the blink of an eye when needed and realized, from the lines on his face and the haggard look in his eyes that he must have been closer to seventy than sixty and he wondered why Hammond hadn’t been forcefully retired out. Beyond the fact that everyone was so terrified of him that they probably just kept cutting him checks and promoting him and would likely do so until he died.
Ellis was similar, only Abe retired and traded fatigues for a suit and still kept his power. Which made sense, both of these two men represented a world that existed now solely in the history books and the deeds done by both men, in the light and in the shadows were likely at least partially responsible for the why that world existed only in books. Ellis, a modern-day Nelson, or MacArthur, Hammond the navy’s very own Patton and some dumbass space Pharoah decided to fuck with their house. “
Damn fools” Hammond seethed shaking his head. “O’Neill!” he turned reaching out for Jack’s hand and of course giving the Marine a vice like grip he was only too happy to respond too. “Space Force Uniform this time?” he asked looking Jack up and down, seeing the green on red. Differentiating the marine part of the USSF, from Hammond’s navy blue and the grays of the “aerial and spatial combat division.”
“Yeah well, I’m back what can I say?”
“And I told you so might be appropriate”
Jack shook his head, not to Hammond. “You believed me sir” he wanted to flinch knowing what was coming.
“Lot of good it did” Hammond groused before gesturing for Jack to take a seat. “Tell me about Doctor Jackson”.
Oohh boy. “There wasn’t much to him, he was a nerd, he sneezed a lot. He did learn a language real quick and get us home though, that counts for something in my book”
“But you didn’t like him?”
“No, not at first Sir, he was an untested commodity” O’Neill began then adding “But he was right about a lot of things”
“But not this remnant of a dead civilization business” Hammond countered. O’Neill allowed himself to nod “Yeah, well he said he couldn’t be sure, in his defense”
“Not wanting to speak ill of the dead?” Hammond asked, a knowing look in his eyes.
Damn!
There was a moment, where Jack almost looked back at Kowalski and Lahm, but stopped himself before his body began to move, or so he thought. Except the old sea dog shook his head and chuckled “No son, they didn’t give you up, you did just now.”
Jack barely had time to register the Admiral was taking a swing, but he did register the fist nailing his cheek and his ass sprawling onto the linoleum.
“What was that for?!” Jack muttered, rubbing his cheek, trying to pick himself up gracefully. He’d just been knocked on his ass by a grandpa, the same grandpa who walked over, grabbed his shoulders and set him down in his chair like he was a kid who just took a belt to the rear. Outside, Lahm shot up, but Kowalski grabbed her wrist and shook his head. No, the Colonel had to fight this battle alone.
“Lying to me” Hammond remarked as he made his way to decanter full of what O’Neill suspected was a bourbon of some sort. Two glasses were poured, and Hammond handed him one before he made his way towards the rear of his office where he gazed at a map of the solar system done up to look like a map from the earliest years of the age of sail. Jack couldn’t help but notice the Dragons that marked the edges of the map.
Dragons, Snakes, alien beings that possessed cavemen, here there be monsters, but the cat was out of the bag now.
“Start again Colonel, from the top this time” And so help me, Hammond thought. If any information the Colonel omitted could have changed the minds of those idiots in DC, there was a good chance O’Neill wouldn’t leave this room alive.
And so Jack began the sordid tale, about their arrival on Abydos, the meeting of the people of Nagada and all the things that Hammond already knew, only the part about Ferretti and Jackson taking the bomb to Ra with it rigged to detonate the moment it was tampered with, heroically sacrificing themselves left out. Instead, O’Neill told him of how Jackson had indeed helped him destroy Ra, but that the nuclear weapon detonated in orbit over Abydos and how neither he nor Ferretti were dead, how instead they remained on Abydos, both to help the Nagadans rediscover the civilization denied to them and to prepare them for a defense should anything return.
The story infuriated him, but the old man kept his calm, sipping his bourbon and playing the odds in his head. Gross as this breach of protocol was, it served a purpose. O’Neill had reasoned that he allowed those two to remain (Ferretti because he wanted to protect Jackson and help their junior Marines and Jackson because he’d fallen in love with this Shau’re person and because he would be instrumental in helping them back on track). Because it served two purposes, the first being to defend Earth. O’Neill had argued that who ever was left of Ra’s people wouldn’t come to earth, but to Abydos and if they were truly a remnant civilization than the trouble would end at Abydos, defended by the army Ferretti was building and hopefully encountering a people who had regained some measure of their former selves. The other being that, if the same morons who had been so insistent on ignoring his warnings about Ra potentially being the leader of a truly vast empire would likely insist that they return to Abydos to begin mining the planet for Earth and that could potentially bring all manner of unwanted attention their way.
They were good enough reasons that Hammond wasn’t going to punish him, he would include in the report that the deception was squarely his and he knew Ellis would likely also step in and claim it and court martialing him and arresting Ellis would be too..risky. “These people, these bird men as you call them” Hammond began but stopped himself, instead he opened the door and gestured for O’Neill and the other two official survivors of the Abydonian mission to follow him. One they reached the medical facility O’Neill understood why the Admiral had held back his question. The room was filled with bodies, many of their own and more than a few who looked like they were very much not of earth. “These bird men, was there anything inhuman about them?” He asked.
“You mean like Ra?” Jack asked shaking his head. “No, except that they were strong as hell and their Captain seemed to be learning our language like he was fed it by Ra’s telepathy”. Hammond nodded “Strong but they didn’t have anything unusual about their physiology?”
O’Neill shrugged “Truth be told when we did drop ‘em they were often too mangled to make heads or tails of it”
Lahm who’d been looking over the bodies gasped when she pulled back the blanket over one of the serpent men and caught the slits on the body’s stomach. “Is that?” she blinked sliding on a pair of gloves. “Is that a pouch?”
“Yes, though Doctor Fraser believes both sexes have them” Hammond added before his left eye twitched lightly watching Lahm ease her fingers into the pouch. Colonel Janet Fraser was an airforce doctor who had been involved in the stopping of a few pandemics, in her late forties the woman had several medical degrees and like Ellis was somewhat of an autodidact. Her amateur work on theoretical xenobiology and speculative psychology were pretty well received in popular science type magazines. Unfortunately, like Ferretti she had a bit of an X-files side, being obsessed with cryptozoology.
Hammond, West and Ellis seemed to enjoy surrounding themselves with the freaks. Then again O’Neill realized he was watching a former colleague root around inside an alien bimbos pouch. “Bullet holes, you guys got lucky and shot through her pouch..hmm..there’s something else here” she flinched and yanked her hand away “Sucker has teeth!”
“There’s something alive in there?!” Hammond asked -Damnit Fraser- “No, not alive, its torn apart, my guess is by enemy” she quirked her head eying the mix of blood, mucus and…Blood? There was a blue substance that seemed to glow slightly on the tips of her index and middle fingers. “This didn’t show up on imaging?”
Hammond shook his head “No, Janet would have told me about it if it had. What the hell is it?”
“No idea, but it’s definitely not her offspring, I’m not even sure if this counts as blood or coolant” she murmured “But my guess, these soldiers carry these for a reason” she looked the woman over, she appeared to be roughly thirty or forty with pleasing if exotic features, high cheek bones and evidence of the same mixed human and other hominid ancestry the abydonians had but far more pronounced. “During the battle, I saw one of Ra’s killers up close. His armor was knocked loose and I saw something below, slits like this and what I thought were spasms of his abdominal muscles but now”
“Damnit Lahm why didn’t you say something?” O’Neill asked perturbed, if they could have presented a freaky detail like this maybe it would have turned enough heads.
She smiled “Because Sir, they were already looking at you like crazy when you described how the Star god possessed caveman pretty boy molested your brain with science fiction movies.”
“Fair enough” Jack muttered, catching an amused spark in Hammond’s eyes.
Kowalski who had been looking over the gear picked up the black spear like weapon. It was smaller than the one Ra’s bird dudes used, and Kowalski noted, lacked all the ornate trappings and was shorter by half a length. Though there was a beautiful depiction of a water garden on the staff it didn’t draw the eye and after a moment of searching for the trigger he laughed when a stock emerged. “Colonel, look at this” he tossed Jack the staff and O’Neill caught it nodding his head, the thing had to weight less than a pound and yet it felt like it was hard enough to cave someone’s head in. “Baton setting” he squeezed the grip slightly and the gem at the top glowed.
“Is that what was used against you on Abydos?”
O’Neill shook his head “The ones we dealt with on Abydos seemed to be for crowd control and might have been more ceremonial, this, this is like a military variant. Did they have those weird tase guns?”
Hammond nodded “We recovered a half dozen of them.” The Admiral’s eyes shifted to Lahm who was looking at the imaging results. “It’s weird, whatever is inside them doesn’t show up but man, their muscle and bone density is wild. It’s like a gorillas sir and I can’t even guess at what the thing in there is…Unless maybe it’s some kind of performance enhancer”
“A living steroid pack or something?” O’Neill asked, it would certainly explain dog breath, being impaled, stabbed and everything else and still coming.
“Maybe Jack” She turned to the Admiral “Sir on Abydos most of the civilians there were human but they were very clearly heavily mixed with what I think were other hominids. Like the Neanderthal, these guys here. “she gestured to the dead woman “Have features that are even more pronounced, but I can’t guess at what went into it. My guess? We’re looking at someone bred to be strong, healthy and athletic. This lady has a cardio-pulmonary system that would make most work horse breeds blush. Put her in the Olympics and she’d outrun, out swim, out toss, out wrestle and outfight our best all in the same day and maybe she’d need to take two minutes to catch her breath at the end. It’s consistent with what I saw on Abydos Admiral, whenever the Nagadans got anywhere near them without a lot of numbers they were just tossed around like ragdolls”
“Colonel O’Neill beat their leader” Kowalski said with a grin of pride “and you and me got a few didn’t we babe!”
Lahm rolled her eyes despite the warm smile. “Yeah, we did with back up” she continued to look through the medical file and her eyes narrowed in confusion on several of the blood readings. “Well, that’s weird. She’s in her late forties but there’s no damage to any of her organs that you’d expect from the kind of life soldiers have. I mean, they can resurrect the dead and reverse the aging process with that resurrection chamber thing Jackson talked about, but the impression he got was that it was something that only elites did. She’s not worn out” Lahm traced a hand over the dead woman’s hand trying to feel for any kind of callouses and the usual wear you saw on the joints in the digits and on the fingerprints of anyone who did physically intense work.
What disturbed her more was the imaging done on the body by Fraser suggested she’d given birth at least three times in her life but the signs of stress associated with that on her body was faded as if the last time she had a kid was five decades ago or more. Which made no sense, the woman couldn’t be over forty-six. “Sir, the people on Abydos were nothing like this, they had traits that suggested crossbreeding, but this is something else.”
“You say Ra took a human as a host, could that be what we’re looking at here?” Asked Hammond.
Jack had a hard time believing that old bastard was a snake living in a twink’s stomach and he shook his head. “His eyes glowed, he spoke with a weird voice that seemed to mess with your instincts”
“Put the fear of God in you?” Hammond asked, his voice far away.
O’Neill nodded “But only he did that, even the guy I fought wasn’t like that. No, Jackson was probably right about Ra being unique. He did things I didn’t think were possible and at one point I think he created an energy field around himself with his own mind and Jackson said there were times when he would appear or disappear, as if he screwed with your ability to focus or messed with your senses” He hadn’t seen that, but he saw the aftermath of what Ra did to Ferretti and felt the bastard in his own mind at least once.
“Well, you were right about there likely being more of them then because the golden bandido who abducted one of my marines tried that on me” Hammond was fuming despite how calm his voice was and by the cold look in his eyes O’Neill knew it didn’t take. But that didn’t surprise him, George Hammond was a quiet gentle old war dog, but he was still capable of being the biggest, meanest fucker in the yard and whoever did this was guaranteed the misfortune of learning that lesson the hard way.
God help the…God?
O’Neill smiled slightly at his terrible joke. And allowed himself a moment of vengeful satisfaction in the knowledge that Hammond hadn’t even stopped to consider it. He was willing to pick a fight with the Duke (Or Crown Prince?) and possibly an entire empire solely to get his marine back and to educate them on why no one fucked with the US military and George Hammond.
Hammond who’d been listening closed his eye for a moment, his hand resting on one of the tables. “Is there any way of ascertaining where they came from?” He asked, wanting to avoid having to send a team to Abydos, they had tried to send a probe some two weeks after SG-0’s return and it must have hit rocks because they lost contact pretty quickly. The beyond the risk, neither he nor the President were willing to endanger civilian lives on a world that might prove fruitless even if he had managed to send a team through successfully.
“Our best bet” O’Neill said after some consideration, his mind wandering to Shau’re and Daniel and Skara and Kasuf and his youngest who had stuck to Lahm as though she were an adopted older sister. “Is on Abydos”
“But the gate was buried correct?” Hammond asked.
Jack nodded slowly “Well that’s what Jackson said he would do, and he seemed to follow through. We might be able to get a radio signal out, some of that gear had solar batteries but” His eyes shifted towards the sink counter at the end of the exam room and his eyes flashed in amusement. “Nah, I’ve a better idea”
Kowalski grinned as he saw O’Neill grab a box of tissue, laughing “Don’t worry Sir, I think I know what he’s doing”