Stargate: Ragnarok
Baptism of Fire, Part 3
Chapter 1
Even before the urgent warbling of the base-wide alarm began sounding Taylor had shunted his chair back and begun sprinting through the darkness for the briefing room door. The explosion and the gunfire that immediately followed it had been audible even over the din of the bickering dignitaries, and the raised, borderline frantic voices in the corridor outside and sudden loss of lighting everywhere made it clear something was very wrong. As Taylor hit the briefing room door and yanked it open, he found that Webber wasn't far behind.
"What happened?" Taylor barked, reaching out and stopping a marine as he ran past, the emergency lighting beginning to come on in the few locations where it had been installed.
"Don't know, sir! We heard a loud bang and then all the lights went out. Thought it might be something up with the reactor, but then we heard screaming and shots and the backup generators didn't kick in. Pratley said it might have escaped, sir. The noise was coming from near Section J, and nobody in there's answering their radios!"
"Brigadier, what did that man mean 'it might have escaped'?"
"Get two armed guards outside this briefing room," Webber growled at the marine, pointedly ignoring Melford, "and seal this section off until further notice."
As the marine nodded and ran off, Taylor sprinted for the nearest intercom, yanking the telephone handset off the wall mounted receiver. "Control room, this is Major Taylor - we need full base lockdown right now. The prisoner may be loose."
There was no response.
"Sergeant Gibson, come in, this is Major—" He stopped. There was nothing. No sound, no crackle, no click, not even a light on the intercom unit to show it was open or active. He turned to Webber. "Intercom's down, sir."
"I thought internal communications were supposed to be a hardened, independent system," Webber said, his tone clipped.
"It is. Maybe something's taken out the base power plant," Taylor replied.
"Brigadier! I demand you tell me what the hell is going on!" Melford said loudly. Webber bristled, but continued to ignore him.
"You!" he said, pointing to a swiftly passing soldier. "Get to the control room quickly, get Sergeant Gibson to put the base in lockdown and full alert ASAP on my order. Do it manually, section by section, if you have to. Nobody goes anywhere alone or unarmed. We may have a very pissed off Fenrir roaming the base."
The soldier briefly went white as a sheet before he nodded, turned and sprinted for the nerve centre of the Garrison.
"Brigadier answer me!"
Webber snapped, spinning on his heel and striding swiftly and forcefully towards the figure of Melford, only barely visible in the current feeble lighting.
"I will answer you when I have finished dealing with the current situation and not before!" Webber barked angrily and loudly, his face mere inches from Melford's. "We have a crisis on base that needs my immediate and full attention, and it will get it."
"I demand—"
"You can demand until you pass out, for all I care. Good men may be in danger, if not already injured or killed, and there is the distinct possibility that something is prowling this facility with the intention of killing every living thing it can find. Sir Dennis, remarkable as it may seem, there are actually some things more important than answering to a civil bloody servant! And if you want my job for daring to put anybody and everybody ahead of your petty, self-interested needs, you can damn well have it – but not until I have made absolutely certain that the men and women under my command are out of harm's way and whatever threat is out there is contained! Have I made myself perfectly clear? Have I?"
Melford was glaring furiously at Webber, his face a mask of barely repressed rage. Without answering he spun and stalked angrily away.
"This is your mess, Major, you brought that damned thing here. What do you propose we do about it?" Webber said, fuming as he turned to Taylor.
"We need to restore power urgently, get the lights back on before anything else – as long as we're fumbling in the dark, we're in his element and he has one hell of an advantage. With your permission I want to check on Section J as soon as possible. If we're right about what's happened, we need armed guards stationed at critical areas, and then we need to organise search parties to track, neutralise and if necessary destroy the hostile."
"Fine. Go to it."
The trail was faint, masked by the pungent tapestry of the human base – there were paths hovering in the air, each distinct in its intensity, its dispersion and its origin. Here, the thick, cloying odour of sweat and there, the faint ammonia scent of urine. There were others too, all mingling with the delicious and all too faint metallic tang of the blood and the sweet aroma of the succulent flesh of dozens of unique apes. Disguising most of these was the bitter, chemical reek of the supposedly fragrant compounds these apes used to clean themselves and try to mask their natural odour, to little avail.
Mentally discarding these, he sniffed the air again, closer to the ceiling, focusing now on other smells such as the fading but still acrid odour of his explosive devices and the carbon emanating from the small fires they had started. The primarily nitrocellulose stench of the ape's crude chemically-propelled weapons drifting through the tunnels was hard to ignore, but through all of the trails crossing and filling every passage there was the one he had been searching for. There were other scents he didn't recognise enough to interpret, some pleasing, some alarming, others revolting, but the aroma of the goal was still strong enough to follow and trace to its source.
It didn't matter to Fido's eyes that there was very little light as he moved through the small, crude tunnels, occasionally hearing, smelling or on occasion even seeing an ape nearby, but always gliding stealthily past them in the darkness without them ever knowing he was there, let alone close enough to kill them. Individually they posed negligible threat, and he had a powerful, almost overwhelming desire to step right up to them and slit their throats with a single, effortless swipe of claws he had ritually honed only a day earlier, or perhaps feel their necks snap and their windpipes collapse and tear under the force of his jaws, but he knew that now was not the time.
The injuries he had sustained from the blast in the jail cell and the fall on the trinium-rich world weren't life threatening, but even though they were mostly superficial they were increasingly debilitating. The wounds, a few still bleeding, were numerous, extensive and painful enough to make ignoring them difficult even for an experienced Fenrir warrior, and as a result they were definitely affecting his speed, agility and focus. It wouldn't pay to engage any of the apes if it could be avoided. Not yet.
Fido knew these apes weren't stupid, and nothing like as helpless and weak as the ones in the cowering tribes of prey back home – on the rare occasions he encountered them, they always moved in pairs or groups, always armed and carrying small portable light sources that aggravated his eyes. Ascendancy taught that stealth was not cowardly, and that while there was more honour in open conflict, there was no honour in a senseless or wasted death, and as frail and easily hurt as these ape's bodies were, their minds and spirits were sharper, their weapons not weak enough to risk too many engagements. Fido decided he would not underestimate them again.
He stopped and sniffed the air again. The scent was getting stronger – it was no longer just an old trail, but a fresh, strong and distinctive new smell that was nearly impossible to miss. The goal was actively emitting the emergency locator scent in order to more quickly facilitate their reunion, and that meant it had detected his scent closing in. It was close, very close.
But not close enough. The only apparent route to the area where his goal was located seemed to necessitate passing through one of the few parts of the human base that was still lit – and moving under the emergency lights and next to a set of flimsy double doors was one of the apes. It wore the strangely ineffective and unchanging camouflage gear that bore no relation to the granite rock of their base nor the environment of the more primitive humans they had defended the previous day. On its head it wore the lopsided dark green headgear so many of them seemed to favour.
There was no way of approaching the ape without being seen or else alerting it to his presence. No matter. Fido quickly resolved to sprint towards it with one hand outstretched and rip the pathetic creature's throat wide open before it could even make a sound.
Fido backed up a little, then hunched down and launching forward, but he managed only a few strides before the severity of the injury in its leg caused the limb to temporarily go limp and make running next to impossible and it had to support itself on the rough stone wall – in full, illuminated view of the ape that was now staring at him, wide eyed. He had rushed, fully exposing himself to the prey like a weak, foolish, untrained cub, and had done so directly in front of the ape. To its credit, the human yelled but did not run, and swiftly withdrew the small, black one-handed weapons so many of them now carried, nevertheless clasping it two-handed to steady it.
The pistol immediately jerked and a small explosion of mercifully short lived agony erupted high in his chest, quickly prompting an enraged snarl. With a clinking sound, the now flattened copper projectile bounced off his flesh and dropped to the stone floor at his feet.
Seeing the wolf's reaction to the first shot, the ape with the floppy green headgear quickly redoubled his efforts. Several more projectiles hit his chest, torso and limbs in a short space of time, all of them ending up on the floor, and every time the weapon fired, tremendous pain followed. With his right leg hurt badly enough to force a limp and his left arm so bruised and battered as to be next to useless, Fido roared in pain, anger and frustration at the ape.
The projectiles couldn't break skin or draw blood easily without many repeated hits to the same spot, but they still struck with considerable force and left livid bruises that made movement even more difficult as the remarkably painful impacts aggravated his existing injuries, breaking open recently congealed wounds, causing already bruised flesh to split and bleed.
Snarling with rage at his own unforgivable stupidity and the pain the ape's weapon caused, Fido surged forwards, his injured leg forgotten as he shielded his head from direct hits with his good arm. The ape barely backed away at all, only a few steps, still firing even as he loomed over the doomed prey, but despite its courage, its fear was so thick in the air it was almost tangible. It was a thrilling stench that drove him on even more, despite the agony of the weapon's projectiles.
The weapon clicked and emptied, and the ape was clearly torn between running, yelling and reloading. Taking advantage of the momentary indecision, Fido surged forward over the remaining short distance and lashed out with the arm shielding his head.
The backhand connected with more than enough speed and force to feel bones in the prey's chest snap under the impact and lift the ape off its feet. It was hurled through the double doors with enough power to tear them from their hinges and shatter the glass panes in their upper halves and still continue into the room, eventually crashing into a table and collapsing its legs. The ape lay sprawled amidst the wreckage, motionless and covered in its own bright red blood. For a moment Fido paused, savouring the coppery smell and considering whether to devour the fallen ape to regain some more strength and ensure it never woke, if indeed it wasn't already dead, but others would certainly have heard the shots.
Reaching down, he picked up the small black gun the ape had used, but after only a few seconds it became clear that his hands were too large and differently shaped to effectively wield it even if he tore the trigger guard away. There was no way he would be able to actually fire it properly, even if he could reload the empty weapon. With disgust, he dropped the useless device and headed as quickly as his pained leg would allow him to move, all the while heading towards his goal, grateful to be back under cover of darkness.
In the space of only a day, Lhoaka was showing distinct signs of recovering from the Fenrir assault. Already she could see shops and stalls trading and people beginning to go about their day to day business once again, even as work gangs continued to clear rubble and move dead bodies. A black cloak of grief and loss still sat heavily on the city, but the Lhoakans weren't letting it take over or destroy their way of life. If anything, they seemed to be trying to restore the status quo and move on from the Fenrir attack with so much effort they almost came across as caricatures of themselves. She found herself admiring them for their dogged refusal to let themselves be beaten or unduly changed by their harrowing experience.
For the first time since she had arrived, Halverson just wandered through the city, taking in the sights, sounds and smells. She paused every so often to take a photograph of something that caught her eye, and occasionally found a seat or an out of way spot where she spent a few minutes admiring the architecture or simply watching Lhoakan citizens pass. She idly investigated a couple of shops and their wares, watched as a unit of guards marched through the street in formation and just drank in the atmosphere and the culture, hoping that she would see something that would give her brain a jolt and make her realise what part of the puzzle she was missing. She felt like a picture was beginning to emerge, but that the centre was somehow a black void while the edges were fully fleshed out, and cursed her poor recall again.
"There you are. I know you said you were going to take a walk but it took me ages to find you," Llewellyn said happily as he walked up to the stone bench and sat next to Halverson.
"Radio direction finding?" she asked idly.
"Nope, I just asked Waldroch. See, I'm getting better!" Llewellyn said, earning a brief but genuine smile from Halverson.
"So, what have you been doing all this time?" she asked, more out of politeness than genuine curiosity.
"Oh, you know. Waldroch showed me some of the city's armourers, engineers, fabricators and their places of work so I can begin to gauge how easy it will be for us to advance their tech," Llewellyn said, gazing at nothing in particular.
"He's becoming quite the tour guide, isn't he? I could have sworn he used to be a military officer."
Llewellyn nodded, smiling. "That's the perils of promotion for you – more responsibility, less sight of the job you originally signed up for. I think it's partly because of us," he began. "If you think about it, he's spent more time with us than any other Lhoakan, so he's kind of being made the liaison officer. It's actually a good fit, I think, 'cos he—"
"Don't take away their measurement system," Halverson said abruptly, staring at the ground.
"Sorry, what?"
"Back in the library, you asked me to think about how to mitigate the effects of the bootstrapping on their culture, and I just thought, 'standardisation'. That was going to be your first suggestion, wasn't it? Getting all the engineers and armourers using a precisely standardised system of weights and measures as the first step in bootstrapping their technology to a higher level, just like in the industrial revolution back home?
"Don't make them convert to metric or imperial, or whatever. Let them work with their own measurements: maybe help them to decide on a strict and precise definition of each, but let them keep their equivalents or versions of inches or metres or kilos or whatever. I think it will go a long way towards preserving some aspect of their culture and tradition, plus it might help them to see the change as progressive, beneficial and organic, and not as something being imposed on them by an outside force."
"Okay, great. That's good. I'll recommend that in my report to Webber," Llewellyn said quietly. "Thank you, Elise."
They sat in silence and deep thought for a while as the world passed around them.
"Damn but I wish Kelly was still here. She'd have spotted something that was 'off' by now. No offence, Gareth," she said after a while, smiling a little.
"Don't worry, none taken. Got eyes like a bloody eagle, she has. Still can't work out what it is that's bugging you?" he grinned back.
Sitting upright again, Halverson shook her head and sighed, staring off into space as the crowd bustled past.
"Well… list what you do know. Out loud. I've seen my sister do it loads of times when she forgets what she was going to the shops for, and it helps her nine times out of ten," Llewellyn offered. Halverson looked at him doubtfully before deciding it couldn't hurt and shrugging.
"Okay… okay. So… Lhoaka is a city-state, a trading society at approximately fifteenth or sixteenth century Europe level of development. Their world is close to the Void Prison, but unlike other worlds in the same proximity, they don't have a particularly strong Fenrir myth, just a vague impression, a weak folk memory perhaps. Their history just stops if you go further than nine centuries back and… oh! Oh! Good God, why didn't I see it before?"
She stood up excitedly and quickly half-walked, half-jogged away, politely but impatiently moving through the crowd and against the flow. Bemused, Llewellyn stood and followed her as best he could, often losing sight of her in the crowds and having to scan the pedestrians for a petite woman wearing a DPM smock and with nearly black hair scraped into a ponytail. Eventually he caught sight of her again as she stopped at a picturesque vantage point a full terrace below where they had started. He could see why – it offered a fine view of many of the city's greatest buildings. Jogging, he caught up to her.
"You can really move when you want to, you know that?" he said.
"So Dave tells me. Okay Gareth, pay attention. What's that?" she said, leaning over the stone parapet and pointing. Llewellyn squinted, looking over her shoulder before realising she was pointing at something a lot closer and more obvious.
"That? That's the Shrine of Daphell," he said, slightly bemused, as if he expected the answer to have been wrong or at least far harder to determine.
"Which Waldroch told us is the oldest building in Lhoaka, and trust me when I say, it is waaay older than nine centuries. I'd say twice that at least, maybe even a couple of millennia even in this climate. Now look at it – the architecture doesn't fit with the rest of the city," Halverson said, her tone hovering between triumphant and cryptic.
"Okay, it's old; but architecture moves on, right?"
Halverson shook her head. "Not as dramatically as that, not here. Look around – every single building besides the Shrine and the Bastion is built to the exact same architectural style, even though most of them were constructed decades or even centuries apart.
"It's a common finding across the galaxy – the SGC always found that the most advanced worlds were those with multiple states or societies living on them precisely because that promotes competition and conflict, which drives both technological and cultural advancement. Think Langara with Kelowna, Andari and Tirania, or maybe Tegalus with the Caledonians and the Rand, or the very best example of all?" she said, looking at Llewellyn and prompting him to answer. He simply shook his head and shrugged in bemusement.
"Earth!" Halverson answered. "Two hundred or so independent states, ten thousand years of conflict in all walks of life and God only knows how many distinct cultures and civilisations it's played host to across the millennia. The result is that we were easily one of the most advanced human worlds in the Milky Way even before we opened the Stargate."
Halverson paused as Llewellyn thought it through, realising there was indeed a pattern.
"Most worlds out there only have a single society with a small population occupying an entire Earth-like planet thanks to Goa'uld transplantation," Halverson said. "Even when they weren't kept in check by a System Lord, they often had or have no real competition for territory or resources, so unless they have an adverse environment, find advanced technology or basically have a specific reason to need to advance, they tend to stay the same or at least develop at a very slow pace because there is no impetus, no need to change the status quo. Just think how many societies there are in the galaxy that were transplanted from ancient Earth but have barely changed at all."
"Okay, and I say this knowing history was never a strong subject of mine, but has there ever been a society quite like Lhoaka on Earth?" Llewellyn asked, now genuinely intrigued.
"That's the fun part. Best as I can tell, Lhoaka isn't derived from a transplanted culture on Earth – at least, none that I know of. Instead, I think it's derived from several. I think we're looking at overlapping cultures here – so many disparate elements that only make sense if you separate them into distinct cultural groups, and it's blindingly obvious when you know to look for it."
She turned abruptly, leaning on the wall and staring intently at the crowd as if trying to find something, then triumphantly pointed at seemingly random things that caught her eye – clothing, writing, architectural elements, stylised designs, even actions and behaviour.
"That's clearly of Norse origin. That's… Greco-Roman, I think. North African, Norse again, also Norse, that's… east Asian, apparently, Greco-Roman again…"
"So they've got a bit of cultural cross-pollination going on thanks to the Stargate?" Llewellyn said. "You said yourself that they're a trading society."
"Except it's more than that. I don't think the SGC ever encountered a culture quite like this."
"Okay, that's great, Doc, but what does that mean?"
Halverson folded her arms against her chest, shaking her head and chewing her lip in thought. "Honestly? I have no idea right now. But I do know it's significant, and I'll tell you something else that's important and interesting but for completely different reasons – every single one of the Norse elements I've spotted has something in common with all the others."
"What, like… they're all Norse?" Llewellyn said, feigning mock-astonishment and grinning.
"Since you're going to be facetious, I'm not going to tell you." She said coolly, stepping away from the wall. "At least, not until I've found some evidence to back the theory up – and I think I know what to look for now. Trust me, if I'm right you're going to love it."
The emergency lighting was adequate where it was installed, but the illumination in most of the Garrison was feeble at best – the state of the base's construction had left entire areas unlit except when they were being worked on.
Taylor fumbled in his pockets for his keys – he had a small white LED torch that was better than nothing, but even so, he couldn't shake the fear and sense of vulnerability that dominated his emotions, suspecting that not only was he was sharing the same space as an escaped and likely enraged Fenrir, the wolf had nearly all the advantages. His heart was beating faster, and he was controlling his breathing so he could hopefully hear the faint click of trinium-laced claws on concrete.
With the torch, there was no longer any need for him to feel his way along the walls and count doors though even in the dim illumination the tiny light afforded him the armoury was very distinctive. He slid his key card through the reader, praying that not all of the base's systems had been affected by the power outage. Nothing happened. He tried it again. There wasn't even a red LED or the angry tone to say his card had been rejected – there was simply no response.
"Come on, don't do this…" he muttered to himself as he tried typing his personal access code manually into the keypad. Again, nothing happened. He tried again and again, to no avail.
Frustrated, Taylor sorted through his key ring to find the base master key. Carefully, he felt for the lock, inserted the key, and cursed as the door swung open with no resistance before he'd even turned it. Playing the LED torch over the inside of the door frame, he saw only a hole where the locking mechanism should have been installed, leading to another hole on the inside wall that was perfectly sized for a card reader and keypad, but with only another bunch of unattached wires protruding, all of them bound with a cable tie and marked with a piece of tape with some handwriting on it.
This wasn't looking good. Cursing under his breath, he pushed the door as closed as it would go without so much as a catch to hold it in place and scanned the torch over the inside of the large, armoured room. He was greeted by masses of heavy duty metal racks built to accommodate hundreds of assault rifles, sniper rifles, pistols, submachine guns, shotguns, grenade launchers, anti-tank rocket launchers, and light and heavy machineguns, and every single one of them was empty, many of the racks still covered in transparent plastic sheeting.
Angrily, he drew in a breath.
"Oh fu—"
"—crying out loud, people, settle down! You make any more damn noise and Lassie's going to come home. And by 'Lassie', I of course mean… oh hell, you know." O'Neill shook his head and turned, teeth grinding. The news that not only was there a Fenrir on the base but that it had been present for over a day and was now running loose while the Garrison had no power had not been taken as well as he had hoped.
Webber sidled away from the throng of bureaucrats and senior military figures milling around the briefing room, most of them reacting the only way they knew how to heightened threat – bickering and hurling blame. He moved to the door, opening it slightly to check that the two guards he had ordered to stand outside the room had indeed taken up their posts. Against the faint, green tinged illumination of the nearest emergency light he made out the silhouette of a burly, beret-wearing man cradling an SA80. A quick check confirmed he had a colleague on the other side of the doorframe.
"Anything?" O'Neill asked, his diplomacy-induced headache clearly winning as he sauntered away from the still-bickering VIPs, his warning about their noise attracting the Fenrir apparently less important than pointing out who was to blame and who had been against the project from the start. For a moment, he briefly entertained the fantasy of the wolf breaking in, eating the bureaucrats and either sating its appetite on them and passing out before it got to him or else discovering that bureaucrats really did not agree with the Fenrir digestive system.
"We've got our guards, if nothing else. Now we're waiting on Taylor," Webber said.
"I'd help, but I'm not as fast as I used to be, especially with this knee. Besides, it's his… operation," O'Neill offered.
"You can say 'mess', General," Webber said.
"Actually, that wasn't the word or phrase I was planning on using."
Webber continued to stare at the door.
"You don't think he should have brought the wolf back, do you?" Webber said. It was more statement than question.
"Hey, it wouldn't be the Stargate program if somebody didn't do something monumentally stupid every so often. I let Carter deal with her Replicator duplicate because I thought the potential strategic advantage would outweigh the risk, and somehow managed to not only keep my job but not get demoted. What Taylor did is no different, and was probably a better bet to start with."
"Perhaps. But we're ill-equipped to deal with the consequences of that decision, and I had no say."
"If he'd put a bullet in the thing's head, this wouldn't have happened but you'd have learned nothing about the Fenrir," O'Neill said.
As Webber listened, something occurred to him.
"I'll be back in a minute," he said to O'Neill, leaving the briefing room and hurrying away urgently.
"Hey, I'm next. I think it was the lasagne."
Taylor could have kicked himself. Of course nobody was going to stock a permanently unlocked or unfinished armoury with weapons or ammunition, he realised, angry with himself for even hoping he could acquire a weapon this easily. He had entered in the vain hope that in the time since he left for the combat mission on Lhoaka the previous day, construction of this room would have been completed and the contents of the storeroom on the other side of the base would have been disseminated to the purpose-built armouries, as was supposed to have happened. Either the base was more short-handed than he'd previously realised or their internal communications were screwed long before the power failed. Taylor made a mental note to direct a very stern and decidedly impolite rant at the person responsible once the current crisis was over – assuming he survived it.
Parts of the Garrison's layout had been patterned after Stargate Command with numerous small secondary armouries – little more than locked and heavily reinforced cupboards stocked with weapons, ammunition and vital equipment such as radios and body armour – distributed throughout the facility alongside three large primary armouries such as the one he was currently in. Though unconventional, especially in terms of keeping weapons and ammunition in the same location, it was a system that had served a facility as sensitive and prone to foothold or other critical security situations as the SGC very well.
If the primary armouries weren't finished or stocked, the secondary ones were even less likely to be. That meant there was only one room on the base where weapons were stored, and it wasn't nearby. But just because none of the dedicated armouries were stocked with weapons and ammunition, it didn't mean there was nothing in this room of value.
Taylor made his way through the empty racks and tables to the rear of the heavily reinforced and partitioned room, into a smaller adjoining room lined with metal equipment lockers. After fumbling with his keys for a while, he managed to open several of the lockers.
"Oh, you'll do nicely," he murmured, smiling and gratified to see most of the lockers full to the brim.
He cracked and shook two glow sticks and dropped them on the floor to provide enough light to work by. Moving quickly, he unbuttoned and shrugged off his jacket before storing it carefully in one of the lockers, then loosened his tie and rolled up his sleeves. Satisfied, he donned a black tactical vest and security belt with thigh holster, both pulled from another locker. The third locker yielded dozens of working radios, one of which he inserted into his vest, and the fourth held torches and other portable battery powered lights of various designs. He put a right-angle torch into his vest and turned it on, scooping dozens of glow sticks, a few working radios and as many torches as he could carry into a sheet of plastic he had pulled from a weapon rack and bunched up to serve as a crude sack.
He left the weapon-free armoury hauling the plastic sack and cracking and dropping glow sticks every so often as he headed back to the briefing room.
Webber was waiting for him by the open briefing room door, flanked by two armed guards. The base was deathly quiet with no power and so few people moving through the corridors, and it was beginning to get disconcerting. The Brigadier ushered him inside the room.
"Couldn't find any weapons in the nearest armoury sir, it's still not finished or stocked. I'll have to try the storeroom across the base. On a positive note though, I did at least find lights and radios," Taylor said as he handed a large torch and a radio to the Brigadier and several glow sticks to the outstretched hand of General O'Neill, who swiftly began cracking and distributing them to the VIPs.
"It's something, at least. Did you find out what happened?"
"No sir, I thought it best to bring these back first before heading to Section J. All I found was that the power outage and communication blackout both seem to be base-wide."
"On your way to the provisional armoury for a weapon, check in on the control room and give them one of these radios. I want to know the status of the base lockdown. And Major," Webber said, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper as he turned his back on the rest of the room's occupants, "this may help. I made a quick side trip to my office. Since I found out what this job entails and having seen what other rules we've had to break, I decided to always keep one in my desk – regulations be damned."
Taylor looked down, quietly surprised but nevertheless surreptitiously taking the proffered object and curtly nodding grateful understanding.
"I'll be on Channel Three, sir," he said as he left the room and wandered back into the hallways. With the proper military-issue torch in his vest now offering useful illumination, it was an easy enough task to head to the control room.
Even though he remained alert and focused on both his objectives and the grave threat that was very likely wandering the halls of the Garrison unchallenged, a thought kept bothering him – in the short time he'd known him, Taylor had never once known the Brigadier break rules. If anything, his strict dedication to regulation was one of his defining characteristics, and Taylor knew that the necessarily more informal, more flexible and more adaptive nature of the SGC, the SWRS and the Garrison riled him. So the idea of the Brigadier keeping a loaded pistol in his desk drawer despite stringent weapon and ammunition handling regulations was, to say the least, surprising.
Once he was sure he was out of sight of the dignitaries and the guards, he checked over Webber's offering. The British Army called it an L9A1, but to him it was better known as the Browning Hi-Power. It was a pistol he was intimately familiar with but hadn't used in years and even if nine millimetre rounds wouldn't penetrate Fenrir hide, the comforting and familiar weapon would still hurt and distract it, and as such it represented a significant improvement of his odds.
Out of slightly paranoid habit, he ejected the magazine, confirming it held the full thirteen rounds, sliding it back in and chambering a round before placing the weapon in his empty thigh holster. Just having any sort of weapon on his person gave him an extra measure of confidence as he jogged through the darkened passages towards the control room, towards the provisional armoury and eventually towards the Fenrir.