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Hammond and Siler were sitting together at a table in a nearby corner. Hammond was in only his short-sleeved dress blues shirt and pants and Siler in his jumper. With no wrench in sight... Briefly Jack wondered what had the man done with his beloved tool, whom had he entrusted it for these few hours? His hand was in bandages from yet another accident in which he had almost cut it off. But Jack had noticed that the rate of his accidents had dropped considerably since Janet's death and thus Jack suspected that the bespectacled man had nurtured feelings of decidedly unprofessional nature for the tiny woman with the big heart and even bigger... needles and will.

For such a tiny woman she was a force to be reckoned with, her will, determination and strength of personality having made her even larger than Teal'c. And more feared as well. While Teal'c could make a person freeze with his glare, Janet had been able to make a person's reproductive organs, no matter whether inner or outer, shrivel and fall off with just her glare.

As the Technical Sergeant and the Major General raised their glasses with somber, sad expressions Jack raised his beer bottle as well. He knew whom they were toasting to and the three men's eyes locked in a gaze of shared pain. They threw back their drinks in unison and Jack's eyes momentarily went to the floor to blink back a fresh onslaught of grief. The past months had been horrible, first Sam's moving on and then Janet's death, Jack didn't know how much he was still able to take before he'd break.

Where's the point of fighting if you just lose everything and everyone in the process? Why should he lose everyone that meant something to him, a past lover and his very own future with another woman, just so some nameless, faceless people could live in ignorance of what he'd gone through, what he'd sacrificed for them? Jack was seriously starting to believe that they didn't deserve such a sacrifice from him and was reconsidering his path in life, his choices and the reasons why he was still in the Air Force.

His sour musings took him over to the tables with off-duty nurses where an equally morbid and heavy atmosphere was weighing on the present medical staff. The reason for their sad disposition was clear, they were thinking of their fallen leader, and Jack moved on quickly before he could be swallowed by grief again.

The next table was the table of the Force Recon Marines of SG-3. 'Stupid Jarheads.' Jack thought fondly, watching the loudest crowd at the party have fun. They weren't particularly smart, being dust-biters and Marines on top of that, but they sure packed a hell of a punch and were always there when needed. There were only a few things Jack was more happy about than seeing these burly men come to the rescue guns blazing and testosterone flowing.

Sam's science staff was cloitered around another table in a corner of the large room, talking excitedly about who knows what. Actually, Jack really didn't want to know what new invention was being born in their sick minds.

Hell, even the former Soviet leader Nikita Hrushchev had said in an interview given to a japanese reporter that we must fear what's in the files of scientists. Apparently he'd seen with his own eyes an experiment being conducted just minutes before and it had shaken him up so terribly that he had practically collapsed into a chair before having given that statement to the reporter. USSR had immediately denied their leader having said anything like that and that had been the last time he'd been allowed to give interviews... Jack had enough experience and therefore healthy mistrust against the government (any government) that he had a pretty good idea as to why.

Finally Jack's eyes fell on his favorite kind of geeks.

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The Astronomers.

The SGC had a rather small Astronomy department, partly because they needed them and partly not to arouse suspicion as to why a programme about Deep Space Radar Telemetry didn't have Astronomers.

These were the kind of people he genuinely liked and he counted himself among them. Different people, different characters, but all bound together by their shared love for the stars. These were also the people he spent most of the time with on-duty when his duties as the leader of SG-1 and 2IC of the SGC left him with time on his hands.

Neither of his science twins knew that their old man wasn't the dumb soldier he liked to pretend to be, the two were just too arrogant and full of themselves as only scientists who know they are extremely smart can get, believing they are the top of the evolutionary scale and better and smarter than everyone, refusing to believe that other people are smart as well. Arrogancy is a trait common to many very intelligent people and because of that Jack didn't hold it against them.

Only a few people on the base knew his real credentials. Dumb, uneducated soldiers don't make Colonels, much less leaders of the world's premier off-world team and Seconds In Command of Earth's first line of defence. Hell, they don't even survive a year in Black Ops, much less 20 years as Jack had. Hammond knew about his education, because he knew Jack's record except for his Spec Ops and Black Ops service/missions and Janet because she'd realized early on after they'd gotten together that he was smart, and had questioned him once, using some very persuasive tactics. Cassie and Teal'c knew only that Jack was smarter than he let on, but not his credentials, because they were both very perceptive and observant people.

Jack had a doctorate in Astronomy, as well as a Master's in Particle Physics. He knew that Sam and Daniel thought that he had that state-of-the-art, extremely sophisticated and expensive telescope and observatory on his roof just to observe his younger female neighbors when they were naked in the shower, but they couldn't be more wrong. He'd graduated from the Academy with honors and had then continued what he'd started in the Academy by pursuing a further education in Astronomy. Then came his time with Special Operations and a few years later Black Operations. During his time in Black Ops he'd been selected because of his education in Astronomy to be further educated and assigned to the command's experimental NEST (Nuclear Emergency Search Team, later renamed into Nuclear Emergency Support Team) unit. For that he'd had to get the correct education and thus his Master's in Particle Physics. He was presently working on his doctorate, but because of his work it was a slow going. Still, he was determined to get there. Because of that he now occasionally taught a class at the Academy on the topic.

Jack was far from dumb, the act that he'd been successfully keeping up for years was aimed against and was fooling only the arrogant, the self-absorbed and the dumb and it was still working marvelously. It really give him an edge over his enemies.

Which all translates to is that he already knew most of what Sam had explained to him over the years. There was no need for her to explain things to him except for the fact that he loved listening to her and found her really damn hot when she was trying to simplify things for him. The passion in her voice when she was talking about Physics had always managed to turn him on.

And what could be better than having the undivided attention of the woman you love?

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