History Deferred

Chapter Two – Inception

Of course I'd read the reports, seen the pictures and watched the footage during the prep for what was then just another assignment. Even then I had trouble believing that it wasn't some sort of joke. But the first time seeing the plasma leaping from that big metal ring… well it's not something I'll forget anytime soon.

- Colonel Myra Silva, 2044

Cheyenne Mountain Complex

Colorado Springs, Colorado, North American Union

September 6, 2042

Myra wasn't sure about this new posting, deep in the bowels of Cheyenne Mountain. Having cut her teeth during the Second Red Revolution and come into her own on the heat blasted plains of Africa and the frozen wastes of Siberia, the transfer to Colorado hadn't been well received. She'd been responsible for planning the raid into Mogadishu back in '39 that had whipped out the last of Al Qaeda's leadership. She'd taken out that old fossil al-Zawahiri with a round right between the eyes. But here she was playing nursemaid to a three story metal ring three hundred meters under a mountain.

Granted it wasn't all bad. Nearby Colorado Springs was a nice change of pace from what passed for civilization in the developing world and the beer was cheap for servicemen down at O'Malley's. Her new boss hadn't proven too full of herself either; a condition that tended to afflict flag officers in her experience. And she had to admit it was a bit cool exploring the old home of NORAD and seeing some of the leftovers from the Cold War upstairs.

Not that she was doing any exploring at the moment. She'd been summoned for an emergency briefing and was waiting for her new CO to get off the phone in her office. Idly she wondered why they hadn't installed a full teleconferencing suite yet. But given the state of the base there were probably better things to do. Cheyenne Mountain had all but been abandoned in 2022 after the opening of Liberty Station and it showed. Everything was vintage 20th century tech from the lighting to the computers.

Around her sat her team, each absorbed in their own minds. To her left Major Fareed Serrano was running a laser sharpener over his karambit, each pass honing its edge well beyond sharp and closer to mono-molecular. That knife had been with him for almost three years; she'd been with him when he'd picked it up just before an op in the Philippines. It wasn't just a souvenir either. Fareed had refined its use to a near art form and only he knew just how much blood its titanium blade had drank since.

Across from her was Captain Roger Simmons, their resident tech specialist. She'd yet to encounter a system he couldn't break through and while they all had some sort of technical training, he took it to another level. At the moment he was sitting with his eyes closed, seemingly asleep. Myra knew better. Behind his eyelids he was absorbed in the net; his cerebral mods allowing him access to the vast online world at the speed of thought.

And beside him was the last member of her team, Master Sergeant Adrienne Vega, the team's sniper. Despite almost a century of vids to the contrary, most snipers were rather well adjusted men and women, no less unstable than the average person walking down the street. Adrienne was the exception to that rule and were it not for her almost supernatural skill with a rifle she would've been thrown out years ago. She was anti-social bordering on introverted and usually maintained a mood that could charitably be described as dark. But Myra had also seen her drill a warlord right between the eyes at over two kilometers on a windy day in Chad using nothing but an old SVD Dragunov and without a spotter. Many considered her to be a modern day Lyudmila Pavlichenko, especially considering she already had almost two hundred fifty kills to her name.

"Thank you all for waiting," said General Hailey as she exited her office. "I'll get right to it. Approximately two hours ago the Stargate activated and we received a signal from someone purporting to be Doctor Jackson. While I'm not completely convinced it was the same man who went through in '95, he did provide enough details that I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt."

"And we're going to go through?" asked Silva off handedly.

"Yes colonel," replied Hailey simply. She'd spent enough time with Special Forces over the years not to be put off by their lack of formality. "Full combat load out in case this is a trap. I trust you've studied the AARs from Colonel O'Neill's mission?"

"Yes ma'am," replied the colonel with a shrug, "but they reported the local populous along with Jackson KIA'd."

"So we were led to believe. But it appears that he deliberately falsified his report after being convinced to do so by Jackson, apparently out of the somewhat understandable belief that the US military would exploit the local population. I gather that he wasn't exactly a fan of the government."

"Not all that unbelievable," added Simmons as he opened his eyes. Myra could still see the data flowing behind his eyes. It was a rare moment when he wasn't absorbed in the net to some degree or another. "I don't have to tell you all about some of the less savory things that took place in secret back then."

"True enough," agreed Hailey without preamble, having had a few hours to mull it over. "Regardless of the reason for Colonel O'Neill's omissions, we have an opportunity here that we have to exploit. Doctor Jackson claims to have uncovered a map of sorts that has addresses to hundreds if not thousands of Stargates across the galaxy. We need that information."

"And if he's lying?" asked Fareed. "What if he's grown tired of playing in the sand and wants to come home?"

"Then we need to know that too," replied the general.

"Understood," said Silva, speaking for her team and cutting off all remaining comments.

"Good. Get geared up and be ready in the embarkation room in one hour. Dismissed."


Standing at the base of the ramp an hour later, Silva couldn't help but feel the butterflies ripping at her insides. She was about to make history, something no self-respecting member of any Special Forces unit wished for. Around her she was sure her team felt the same way, even Adrienne, despite their outward stoicism.

Checking her weapon one last time, she waited as the inner ring ground its way through its dialing sequence, each chevron lighting up as it accepted the specified pictograph in turn. As it approached number six a faint vibration filled the room, quickly extinguished by the dampeners as they automatically adjusted and applied the correct counter resonance frequency. And finally the seventh chevron was accepted, the gate coming to life in a great outward explosion of plasma and exotic particles that science had yet to quantify or name. This wave collapsed under its own weight seconds later, slamming back into the newly established event horizon and generating ripples that radiated outwards and reflected off the edges.

"You have a go," announced Hailey from the control room as the team approached the shimmering pool.

"Anyone have anything inspiring to say?" asked Simmons, sarcasm and irony dripping from his words.

"Yeah," replied Adrienne, a rare smirk crossing her lips, "let's not fuck this up."

"Amen," added Silva as she stepped though into the ether of the universe. Time ceased to mean anything beyond in the non-Euclidian realm of subspace, the vague image of lights, motion and energy imprinting itself upon her consciousness as she was ripped apart, converted to energy and rebuilt on the other side like a piece of cheap furniture. It was over as soon as it began, a thin layer of condensation covering her as she exited, the remnants of the higher humidity from the mountain evaporating in the moisture starved desert air that filled the arrival chamber.

Her team stepped through a moment later, each examining the room that presented itself. Waiting for them was a group of humans led by an old man with primitive looking glasses perched upon his nose, dressed in a loose flowing robe of tans and beiges. Behind him was a rough looking group armed with swords, crossbows and several vintage M16s. The two groups stood examining each other as the stargate disengaged behind them.

Slowly Silva stepped forward, her rifle hanging from her chest. "Doctor Jackson I presume?"

"Yes that's me," replied the old man, holding out his hand in greeting.

Taking the offered hand and ignoring the curious look he presented she replied, "Colonel Myra Silva, North American Special Operations Command."

"I'm glad I was finally able to reach you. I've been trying for so long."

"You can thank those idiot bean counters in DC for that," replied the colonel with a grin.

"I'm sorry?" replied Daniel in confusion.

"Long story. This is the rest of my team, Fareed, Roger and Adrienne," she continued, nodding to each in turn. "So I take it you've got something to show us."

"Yeah. This way," replied the old archeologist as he turned and led them out of the chamber. "I found it about three months after Jack and the rest returned to Earth. Over the years I've excavated most of the pyramid and found many interesting things about Ra and his race."

"The reports state that Ra was the last of his kind," interjected Simmons as he ran a quick search to make sure he hadn't missed anything.

"That was what I thought at first," replied Daniel as they exited into the blazing sun. "But I was wrong. Ra was the leader of his race, the Goa'uld. His official title was 'Supreme System Lord' and apparently he held dominance over hundreds if not thousands of his kind. But as you can imagine my information is a bit out of date."

"Understandable," replied Fareed. "This place looks like it's been abandoned for centuries."

The group descended the thick packed sand slowly so as to allow Jackson the extra time he needed. He wasn't the young man he'd once been. "So what have I missed back on Earth?" he asked idly only to receive a few dark chuckles in reply.

"Forty-seven years doctor," replied Myra as she held up her right arm, making a show of examining it. She'd lost both her arms, her right leg and half of her left during the waning days of the Second Red Revolution in an ambush. A decade earlier she would've been discharged and sent home as a war casualty. But technology had advanced to the point where a missing limb wasn't the impediment it had once been. Over the years she'd replaced more and more of her body to the point where she was more machine than man. It had become somewhat of a tradition in the Special Forces, somewhat joking referred to the cyborg squad by the rest of the armed forces.

Daniel was surprised by her show. He'd assumed the colonel's arms were covered in some sort of advanced armor. That assumption was broken as he watched her fingers contort in ways no human hand could hope to do before folding in on themselves to be replaced by some sort of machine gun. Then the process reversed itself until she once again had a hand. Next she extended a wickedly sharp blade from the back of her forearm, retracting it a moment later. Her grin at his look of surprise told him he'd missed quite a bit indeed.

"A lot of things have changed over the years."

"I can see that," he replied lamely. "What… I mean why did you…"

"Have this done?" she finished. "Didn't have much of a choice doctor. Not after Yaroslavl."

"In Russia?" asked the archeologist.

"It was back in early '23 and the war had been raging for almost two years at that point. My fire team was caught in a commie ambush and I was the only survivor. The cocksuckers left me for dead, bleeding out in the snow. Next thing I know I was waking up in Walter Reed missing my arms and legs."

"The US went to war with Russia?"

"Not quite. It started as a civil war between the progressives and the ultranationalists and communists. But then Grozny got nuked and everyone jumped right on in. I was just a snot-nosed first lieutenant back then with way too much testosterone, despite all evidence to the contrary," she added with a smirk, her team chuckling behind her. "I ended that war missing half my body, a captain's insignia and an invite to join the rangers."

"How bad was it?" asked Jackson, a shiver going down his spine at the mention of nuclear weapons.

"Almost six million dead. Russia is now broken up into fifteen separate countries. The European ones aren't too bad and North America and Japan support a Far East protectorate. But Siberia is ruled by a bunch of rogue, nuclear armed successor states that go at each other like a bunch of feral alley cats. And they aren't too shy about throwing their weight around to get what they want in the world stage. Kind of like the old North Korea back a few decades ago times eleven. Plenty of business for us in SpecOps."

"I can't believe it," replied Daniel as he led them through the bowels of the pyramid. "What could push men to use nuclear arms? I thought they were a thing of the past after Reagan negotiated the START treaty."

"And then Obama negotiated a second one back in '09," Myra replied with a shrug. "But that fell apart in '14 when Putin pulled Russia out of it. And things kind of went to hell after that."

Daniel shook his head sadly as they entered the map chamber. "The more things change… anyway here we are. I've spent years trying to map these constellations in the Abydos sky but I couldn't get them to work on the gate. Maybe you'll have more luck."

"Simmons," ordered Myra simply as the tech specialist snapped out of his gawking.

"Damn, you could buy an island in the Caribbean with all this gold. Anyway let's do this. Could everyone move back to the entrance please," he said as he walked to each of the room's corners. At each he removed a small egg shaped device from his backpack and placed it on the ground using its integrated deployable tripod. A minute later he had finished and rejoined the group.

"What are those?" asked Jackson.

"Portable LIDAR imagers," replied Simmons as he tapped a few commands into a tactical slate attached to the inside of his right arm. "They'll create a virtual map of this room down to a resolution of one-tenth of a millimeter. Then we can take it back with us."

A final command activated the array. Operating in the infrared spectrum the lasers were invisible to the human eye. However the holographic readout projected from the slate showed the results as the room was surveyed over and over again, each pass increasing the detail until it was photo-realistic.

"Now let's get this indexed," said Simmons as the survey finished. A second set of commands ordered the onboard software to begin a translation of the hieroglyphs attached to each set of gate coordinates. With processing power of twenty petaflops, the small computer rapidly completed its task, reducing the data spread across the walls to a simple list of address, each with a small block of descriptive text accompanying it.

"Incredible," murmured Jackson as he watched the process in awe. "I've been working on translating this chamber for the last forty-seven years and you've just done it in seconds."

"I doubt it's perfect," replied Simmons with a shrug. "Ancient Egyptian isn't exactly a language that's in use at the moment so the translation matrix probably got some of its wrong. It isn't like translating English into German after all."

"I guess," replied the archeologist. He remembered computers as plastic boxes that sat on desks and blocky laptops that were too heavy to realistically rest comfortably on one's lap. He supposed he was feeling like what a scientist from the Second World War would've if he was thrown fifty years forward. "Anyway I've got more to show you guys if you're up for it."

"After you doctor," replied Myra with a grin. Maybe this new assignment was going to be worth it after all.


The White House

Washington DC, North American Union

September 8, 2042

When the North American Union had been formed in 2034, many had assumed that a new capitol would be built for a new nation. However the infrastructure that DC already possessed made retaining the seat of government in its current location more attractive to the new nation. A lot had change of course but it still remained the same city with the White House at its center.

Within was one of the most storied spaces in Washington. The Situation Room, that darkened cellar from which presidents had overseen countless national security threats was now playing host to yet another. Like most of the mansion the room itself had changed over the years, projection screens replaced with television monitors, then plasma displays and finally holographic projectors. With each successive iteration they covered more and more of the walls with information until there was none left.

The meeting participants, a somewhat modified National Security Council stood as President Rosalyn Caldwell entered the room, her tired visage unusually serious, even for her. Taking her seat at the head of the table she began without preamble.

"Thank you all for coming. We have a lot to get through so let get to it. General Hailey you have the floor," she said, gesturing to the holographic image that sat in one of the chairs.

Inwardly Hailey was glad that they'd gotten the teleconferencing suite set up in time for this meeting, sparing her the necessity of flying to Washington. "Thank you madam president. All of you have been briefed in on the Stargate. Approximately two days ago the gate was activated from off world and we received a radio signal that purported to originate from Doctor Daniel Jackson on the planet of Abydos. He claimed that he and the native population had indeed survived, in contrast to Colonel O'Neill's original report. He also claimed that he had uncovered a cartouche of Stargate addresses that served as Ra's map to gates across this sector of the galaxy."

"With the permission of the president I ordered a team through the gate to confirm this story. That was twenty-eight hours ago. Approximately two hours ago the gate activated again and we made contact with that team. They confirmed everything Doctor Jackson said and squirted us an indexed copy of the Cartouche through along with their initial reports on the situation. It appears that the people of Abydos have had somewhat of a renaissance over the last forty-seven years with Doctor Jackson serving as an advisor."

"Thank you general," said the president, reassuming control of the meeting. "So we now have a list of stargate addresses. First of all can we use them?"

"I don't see why not," replied Hailey. "We've already fed them into our computers here and should have an updated map within a week. We're having to correct for stellar drift but the calculations, while complex, are entirely within our capabilities. Assuming the gate network is intact and operational we can begin sending reconnaissance elements through within weeks."

"And that brings up an important point," said the Secretary of Defense, Douglas Demelo. "Should we? Don't get me wrong, I realize the Stargate represents a massive opportunity for advancement but it could also be a Pandora's Box that we may never be able to close."

"I agree," added the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Jerrome Cappello. "According you your team's report, Doctor Jackson claims that he was in error when he assumed that 'Ra' was the last of his race. If he's correct we could be facing an alien race with god only knows what kind of technological advantage over us."

"All good points," agreed the president, "and I agree that there are plenty of reason not to do this. But if 'because it could be dangerous' was a reason not to do anything, we'd still be living in caves. Besides, hiding our heads in the sand is never a good policy to adopt. General Hailey, what resources do you have available and what would you need to get a full exploration program operational?"

Those words caused the breath to hitch in the back of the Jennifer's throat. She'd spent the vast majority of her career working for this moment and now that it was here she was almost afraid it was a dream and she was about to wake up. Taking a deep breath she replied to what was perhaps the most important question she would ever be asked. "At the moment I have approximately six hundred personnel under my command; mostly technicians and the support staff needed to keep part of the mountain functioning. I also have a company of marines, mostly serving as security and a single four person team from SOCOM as my only recon element."

"Bottom line, I will need a significant increase in personnel and funding if I'm to get a sustained exploration mission underway. We'll need to retrofit the mountain with proper scientific facilities, completely overhaul the systems here and preferably get a fusion reactor setup so we're self-sufficient from and energy perspective. I'll need more reconnaissance teams, preferably SOCOM, and at least three more companies of marines for security purposes."

The president took all this in before nodding, "So ordered. Admiral I want you to give priority to General Hailey's requests. For the time being we'll fund it out of the black-ops budget so we can keep this under wraps."

"That brings up another point," commented the Secretary of State, Elizabeth Weir. Having long served her country as a respected diplomat and ambassador to several nations, she was winding down her career and looking forward to retirement. That's not to say she wasn't still a force to be reckoned with as everyone in the room knew. "Do we have the right to keep this a secret from the rest of the world?"

The president was quite for a moment while she considered that. "No we don't," she said with conviction. "We could never hope to keep something so important secret regardless of how hard we tried. Elizabeth I want you to come up with a plan to reveal the gate to the governments of Europe, South America, Southeast Asia, Oceania, Japan, Korea, Israel, South Africa, the Russian Republic, the Kingdom of Saint Petersburg, the Chechen Federation, Switzerland and Luxemburg. We have to let them know what we know."

"What about China?" asked Weir with a frown.

"Not with their internal problems," replied the president. "They still haven't recovered from the 2015 recession and they've been bordering on civil war for almost a decade now. Their government ministries are riddled with informants from all sides and some of them will see an advantage in letting this information leek. And then the whole world will know."

"Is that a bad thing?" persisted Weir. She was widely known as a proponent of government transparency.

"Elizabeth, have you ever heard of a man named Orson Welles?" asked Demelo offhandedly.

"Wasn't he a Hollywood actor back in the 20th?"

"Yeah but before that he was on the radio. This was back before the Second World War of course when television was still a novelty and most people got their entertainment from radio broadcasts. At the time Welles was a star of a show called The Mercury Theatre on the Air and in October of 1938 they decided to do an interpretation of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. They did it in the form of a series of fake news bulletins. Add to that the lack of commercial breaks and some people actually thought Mars was invading the Earth. People panicked across the Northeastern United States and Lower Canada and fled their homes. There were even reports of suicides."

"I'd like to think people are more intelligent and better informed today," countered Weir.

"It doesn't matter," replied the Secretary. "A single person, if you sit him or her down and explain something to them will listen, think and then adapt to a new situation. But people are dumb panicky animals; something that is proven every time a riot breaks out somewhere. Let's assume we do reveal the Stargate to the world. Then what happens if we have to tell them that we've run into a hostile group of these 'Goa'uld'? We'll have a repeat of the flying saucer panics of the 1950s, regardless of whether or not an alien fleet is on its way to Earth to blow us to kingdom come."

"And don't forget the apparent parasitical nature of the Goa'uld," added the Chairman. "If they can infiltrate and take over a person's body, we'll have people thinking their next door neighbor is an alien because he forgot to return a weed-whacker. The bottom line is that we cannot reveal the existence of the gate to the world until we have a realistic means of protecting Earth against an attack from space."

"I agree," said Caldwell, making it official. "I know you want to tell the world about this Elizabeth. I know that you're hoping that First Contact will make the world come together and look beyond our own petty affairs. And I hope you're right. But for the moment we cannot. Part of our duty as leaders is that we sometimes have to keep secrets for the good of our people, either to protect them from threats they cannot understand or to protect them from themselves."

"Understood," replied the diplomat. "I don't like it but I understand the reasons. That said I insist that this new Stargate Command have a detachment from the State Department to handle any diplomatic contacts with other worlds. We cannot have the military being the only face of our planet."

"Agreed," replied Caldwell, herself a well-known supporter of diplomacy. "But the facility will remain under the overall command of General Hailey. Let's get this done people. We have a galaxy to explore."


Codex: The Second Red Revolution

The conflict commonly referred to as the Second Red Revolution, a period of civil and general war stretching over a two and a half year span is seen to have had roots dating decades earlier to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Most historians generally agree however that this period of instability truly began on May 7, 2012 with the reelection of Vladimir Putin to the presidency of the Russian Federation. The following years saw increasing crackdowns and imprisonment of progressives, liberals, democrats, homosexuals and ideological and ethnic minorities opposed to Putin's administration. During the same period restrictions on communists, ultranationalists and the Mafiya were lessened, leading to drastic increases in their power and authority.

This all came to a head on February 6, 2021 with the official unification of the largest ultranationalist and communist parties into a single political entity. Having united in their goals and with the backing of the criminal underworld and the Kremlin, this new ruling party declared the rise of a Second Soviet Union and began a widespread purge of all opposition. Those opposing the new government formed a loose coalition for mutual protection and were commonly referred to as 'Guards' as an allusion to the White Guards that fought the Bolsheviks during the October Uprising of 1917. Fearing persecution under the new government, the Guards began fighting back with material and intelligence aid provided by both the United States and the European Union from without and the Chechens from within.

For the next eight months both sides fought a bloody conventional war that left almost a million civilian and military casualties and caused wide scale devastation to Russia's infrastructure. This changed on October 14, 2021 when ultranationalist forces launched a strategic nuclear strike on the Guard capitol of Grozny. An estimated four hundred thousand perished directly in the strike with another one hundred thousand dying of radiation related ailments in the following weeks.

The use of nuclear arms, long seen as a red line in the international community, was the final straw for the United States. Over the next month almost eighty thousand American soldiers were deployed to Russia, augmented by contingents from Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan and Canada. These forces provided the embattled Guards the necessary advantage to begin forcing the ultranationalists out of Western Russia and across the Urals.

The war is officially said to have ended on November 16, 2023 as the last of the ultranationalist forces retreated into Siberia.


Codex: The Aftermath of the Second Red Revolution

Although the war officially ended in November of 2023, the fallout continues until this day. Almost six million died during the two and a half year conflict and Russia was left in a state of devastation both economically and politically. While the revolution had failed to bring about a rise of a new Soviet state, it had succeeded in its goal of destroying the Russian Federation. Over the next four years fifteen new nations would rise from the ashes. These so-called 'successor states' ran the gambit from liberal democracies to autocratic dictatorships, ethnic enclaves and neo-communist unions, many of whom still control the remnants of the former Soviet nuclear arsenal.

Of the fifteen states, the most powerful is the Russian Republic centered on Moscow. While this region bore the brunt of the much of the war, its built up infrastructure and defenses left it more-or-less intact and spared most of its population. After the destruction of Grozny and the subsequent operations that drove the ultranationalists east, Moscow became the new capitol of the Guard. In the years following the war the region increasingly embraced progressive policies becoming a modern, high-tech economic destination and a close ally to the European Union.

Another notable successor state is the Kingdom of Saint Petersburg; a federal democracy under the titular control of a constitutional monarchy. The throne of Saint Petersburg however remains open in memory of the Romanov family with its parliament appointing a ceremonial chancellor to act in their name every ten years.

In the south the Chechen Federation is centered on the former Chechen Republic and stretches from its northern border fifty kilometers south of Volgograd all the way to the Georgian and Azerbaijani borders. While the region has historically had a cool relationship with Russia, the Chechen Federation enjoys relatively close diplomatic ties to both the Russian Republic and the Kingdom of Saint Petersburg as well as the European Union.

The remaining successor states further east are primarily ruled by either autocratic dictators or neo-communist parties with the notable exception of the former Far East Federal District which was reformed into the Eastern Russian Protectorate minus the Sakha Republic. This semi-autonomous nation was created with backing of the United States and Japan and serves as a buffer between their interests and the rogue successor states to the west. Its capitol is located in Vladivostok.