Chapter 3: Confusion
Isabel stepped out of the plane shaking, maybe from excitement or maybe with fear. She walked down the strange halls, looking at people in strange clothes and hearing voices with strange accents. She felt as if she stood out in her plain black blazer, knee length white lace dress and black high heels, everybody else was wearing bright colours and adventurous patterns. She continued to walk along the corridors and watched as people smiled and greeted her, she was amazed that everyone was so friendly. Spotting her suitcase, she grabbed the handle and allowed it to roll along behind her.
Three people, one woman and two men, wearing a familiar arrangement of dress blues approached her as confidently and calmly as possible. "Hi, I'm Colonel Samantha Carter, but you already know that. These are the two men you met last time, Major Davis and Lieutenant Grogan. We're here to escort you to our facility." The woman spoke. Isabel accompanied the Colonel to a black unmarked vehicle. She stopped abruptly; worried that she might have made a mistake. "Don't worry, it's just so no one can track our route. You'll be completely safe."
"Are you sure? It looks to me like you're here to abduct me!" Isabel was worried; she had no idea what to do.
"I promise that we're not here to abduct you, I've been there before and it's not fun. You'll be completely safe, I promise." The colonel looked directly at the teenager only to see her nod in reply and walk towards the vehicle. Sam followed her and closed the door. "We'll need you to sign this non-disclosure agreement just so we can be sure that what you're about to see and do remains a secret."
"Sure, of course. You do need to trust me after all." She signed the form and sat uneasily on her seat. She pulled a photo out of her blazer pocket. It was of her and a few other people, one blonde with braces and the other had an artificial looking shade of red hair. She looked at the picture and smiled. She missed her friends, they were too important to her to lose, but by not telling them she was leaving for Colorado, they might never trust her again. "How do you know I'm not a mass murderer? I mean I'm not, but how can you be sure?"
"We did a background check; you are person who cares about people and the importance of their lives too much to even think about killing people." Sam smiled at Isabel. "Who are they?" she asked, indicating the picture in Isabel's hands.
"They're my best friends, more like my family actually, Emily and Leila. You were right, I do care about people but you missed out the part that it kills me to lie to the people I care about. They have no idea where I am, I'm supposed to meet them at the beach in two days and when I don't show up, they're never going to trust me again." A tear rolled down her cheek, Isabel wiped it away as another tear fell.
Sam sat looking at the young woman. It struck her as frightening that someone so young could build a connection with someone so deep that they became just as important to you as breathing. Sam knew how it felt; the silver haired general sat behind a desk deep below Cheyenne Mountain had become central to her life. The only difference was that she couldn't have him, she was his second in command and he was her commanding officer, it was prohibited on so many levels. It scared Sam to think that someone else could trigger such a reaction in her emotions. She held back tears as she handed Isabel a tissue. "I know how you feel, well almost. My brother knows that I work in Cheyenne Mountain but he has no idea what I do and how important it is. Since you're going to be briefed on the situation I'd better tell you the basics. Do you like science fiction shows?" Sam asked the girl. What a good way to start, a trivial question.
"Well, yeah. I love them; they broaden my imagination and understanding of the universe. What does this have to do with getting me to fly over 5000 miles and nearly make me sick?" Isabel asked. Sam had finally been able to see how much the trip had taken its toll. The girl had a slight green tint to her pale skin and she had bags under her eyes.
"Because what I do sound a little bit like one. I travel across the galaxy by using an alien device called 'the stargate'. It allows near instantaneous travel to other planets by creating a stable wormhole through the fabric of the universe. By going through the stargate, the US Air Force has been able to advance technology far enough in order to do things like beam someone out of a room." Sam had a slight smile on her face. This young woman had only been able to come because of her knowledge of Asgard beaming technology. "We have also gained many enemies during the process of exploring the galaxy and because of that we think the earth is facing its greatest threat form the Goa'uld."
"What am I doing here then? I only wrote a paper on wormhole physics, not how to kick some random bad guy's ass! This is a bit much for me to take in all at once while figuring out why I'm here!" Isabel as looking around the vehicle rapidly with a look of pure shock on her face. "Who are the Goa'uld?"
"The Goa'uld are a parasitic race of symbiotes that take human hosts and supress their ability to control their own bodies. They then pose as gods and control as many human occupied planets as possible. Queens or Mothers can change human physiology in order to create jaffa, warriors who carry larval goa'uld in order to survive." Sam was starting to shiver at her own words, even after six years it still sounded horrible. "We're here; you'd better stay with me and do exactly what I tell you."
Isabel stepped out of the vehicle and stayed as close to the colonel as she could. She walked through a concrete tunnel, it was very dull in there and it almost seemed to her as if they were placing her in jail. An officer stood up and asked her to place her signature onto a chart. She looked to the colonel for guidance and received a swift nod and a small smile. She was then told to place her hand under a scanner; again she looked to the colonel for guidance and received the same reaction. After a few other procedures and receiving a strange card with a magnetic strip, she was led to an elevator. It counted down twenty-seven floors finally stopped. Waiting outside of the elevator was a man wearing a blue shirt, blue cargo pants and big chunky black boots. He smiled at the colonel and proceeded to talk.
"So, Carter, productive trip?" he sounded very off hand for someone who was obviously older than everybody she had seen. "And I see that our new recruit made it in one piece. Introductions?" he was definitely in charge as on command, the colonel turned and replied.
"General, this is Isabel Hastings, I've already told you about her. Isabel, this is General Jack O'Neill, he's in charge here and he will be present when he briefs you on the situation." Sam gave her a reassuring smile and turned back to the General. "Sir, if you don't mind, I'd like to change out of these before the briefing."
"Of course Colonel, it's in another hour anyway. I'll make sure that our visitor is OK." The General spoke to Sam, he was talking a little too softly with Sam for someone who is in charge. "If you'd follow me." He spoke to Isabel as the colonel walked away; he led her along a corridor until he stopped outside of a grey door just like all of the others. "You need to go through this one, I'll join you in there after I inform my superiors that you have arrived. Grogan, make sure she doesn't hurt herself." She wasn't a child, why was he treating her like one? And why did he suddenly sound all stern to the man named 'Grogan'. He was acting a little strangely. "Major, I'd like to speak with you in my office."
The four of them parted ways, Isabel and Grogan walked into the room to see that another man with strange glasses was already sat down and reading a blue file. "Doctor Jackson." The man Isabel had entered the room with spoke. The man with the strange glasses looked up from his paper and seemed a little distracted. "This is Isabel; I believe the General told you about her." Grogan motioned to Isabel that she should sit across from the man with the glasses.
"Hi," he said to her "I'm Daniel. Was your trip OK?" he asked, obviously he had given up reading and decided to be at least courteous to her.
"It was OK; I'm not too keen on planes. They make me feel sick." She shivered at her memory of the flight, or maybe it was just the temperature of the room. "I don't mean to be rude, but do you know when Sam will be back. She told me to do exactly what she said but now I'm a little confused." She looked around the room hoping to spot her somewhere.
"Sam should get here soon. I was wondering, how old are you?" Daniel was obviously not going to let her change the subject. Was he always like this? It was a little annoying.
"I'm fourteen." She informed him. He stared at her for what seemed like a few minutes. "So, what do you do here? Sam told me about the stargate but I still don't quite understand it."
"Well, we travel across the galaxy in order to meet new cultures and find technology that could help us in the fight against the Goa'uld. We use the stargate for that, we enter six symbols that are sort of like an address and then we use a seventh symbol that represents the point of origin, by doing that the stargate can then create the wormhole and allow us through." It sounded a lot simpler from him. Well at least it would if he hadn't spoken at a billion miles an hour.
Sam walked in and took the seat next to Isabel and smiled. "Hey Daniel, you're here early." She had changed into a long sleeved black shirt, green cargo pants like the General's and a similar pair of chunky black boots. "Are you OK Isabel?"
"Yeah I'm fine; Daniel was explaining to me how you get to other planets." She informed the woman while she took off her jacket and placed it across her legs. "You were right; it does sound like a science fiction show." She received a low laugh from the opposite end of the table. "What did I say?"
"Sam, you told her that it was like a science fiction show? I thought you hated them." Daniel said, still laughing slightly. The room slowly filled with people, the only topic of conversation that she had picked out of several conversations was her. Didn't they have anything better to do?
The General walked into the room and made his way to a seat at the end of the table nearest to the door he had entered through. All of the conversation had ended and all of the people in the room had stood up, Sam motioned to her to stand up. As she did so she took the opportunity to straighten out her dress. "Take your seats." He said simply and everyone took their seats, this time she knew that his orders were law. "Most of you know why we're here." He looked toward Isabel briefly and continued to speak. "Some of you don't so I'm going to have Carter explain it in detail." With that Sam stood up and nodded at the General. He spun his chair around to look at a slowly descending screen. As the lights went down an image of something that looked very much like a pyramid appeared on the screen.
"Now, Ba'al's new mother ship is on its way here and it will arrive cloaked so we have no idea where it will be and what course it will be taking. This is where our visitor comes in. A little while ago I visited her school in England as part of a research project to evaluate the young minds of the twenty first century. I put forward to some a tactical problem and others a more scientific problem. Our visitor answered the more scientific problem with a simple answer but a hard way to carry it out. She said that you could use UV and infra-red filters to detect the hear energy being emitted from the engines and the cloaking device. The reason she is here is because of what she had found out about one of the biggest secrets kept by the stargate programme. She found out about our beaming technology." After Sam had said that a few of the people looked toward Isabel. She gave them a nervous smile and returned her attention to the Colonel's presentation. The Colonel continued her presentation, losing the attention of many of the people in the room. When it was all over it seemed to Isabel that it was only her and Daniel who were still paying attention, well so was the big guy with the gold tattoo on his forehead.
"Thanks Colonel." The General exclaimed while Sam took her seat. The screen retracted and the lights were turned back on, much to Isabel's dismay, the sudden introduction of the 'harmless' radiation seared her eyes. "Now we have seventeen days to figure out how to track it and how to stop it. Colonel Carter and Isabel, our visitor, will be leading the operation; hopefully they will be able to fix this." With a movement of his hand, the General removed half of the room only leaving behind her, Sam and Daniel.
"Isabel, you'd better come with me." The General told her, she looked at Sam hesitantly to receive a reassuring smile. Taking that with her, Isabel followed the General into his office, gripping her blazer anxiously. "Could you close the door behind you." He said that more like an order than a question. That didn't reassure Isabel but she closed the door like she was asked and stood in front of the General's desk. "Take a seat." Obeying his orders Isabel took her seat and looked across to the General. "Now, I trust you. However my superiors don't. They believe that signing the non-disclosure agreement isn't enough. They want you to swear to us that you won't reveal the stargate programme, it's more of a 'the fate of the world hangs in the balance' situation not you'll get sent to the principal." He looked a little disgusted in the idea.
"Of course I won't tell anyone! It's not like anybody would believe me, this whole thing sounds like the plot to a science fiction movie." Isabel hastily spoke. She felt a little hurt that they didn't trust her but appreciated the fact that they needed to keep this a secret. "I don't mean to offend you but is that the only reason I'm here, because I found about the beaming technology?"
She sounded a little hurt but the General didn't want a lie to hurt her. "No, we brought you here to help track the ship and to help destroy it, so no. We didn't bring you here just so we could keep you quiet. You need to go with Colonel Carter now." He indicated the woman leaning against the large table in the adjoining room. "She will show you where the labs are after you have been checked out in the infirmary. Now, off you go. We kind of need you working on this as quickly as possible." He flashed her a grin that reassured her. Isabel grinned back at him and left the room, placing her jacket back on.
She was escorted to the infirmary to have a short haired doctor walk over to her and Sam. "Is this our visitor?" she said warmly. "Come and sit down over here." The doctor patted on the nearby bed and then waked over to a table to retrieve a chart of some kind. "Can you open wide so I can see you're the back of your throat?" the doctor was much nicer than the General. Isabel obediently opened her mouth and the doctor placed her hands on either side of her face just under her jaw bone. "You don't appear to be Tok'ra. Can you show me the back of your neck?" Obediently Isabel removed her hair from around her back and allowed the doctor to see the smooth skin on the back of her neck. "And not Goa'uld." That made Isabel shiver more than ever.
The doctor carried out a few more tests and took a sample of blood. Unfortunately, Isabel had passed out part way during the process and she lay stationary on the bed for the next hour. The doctor came back just as she regained consciousness. After being reassured that she was in perfect health, the doctor ordered her to stay lying down for a little while in order to fully regain consciousness. As she sat up, Isabel saw a needle sat on the table at her bedside and nearly passed out again. "You don't like needles do you?" Sam asked her, she looked sincerely sorry that she had to go through what the General used to back when he was leader of SG1.
"No, I don't, they make my skin crawl. Not because they're sharp but they remind me of blood, just the thought of it and I get queasy." Isabel shuddered at the revelation. She hoped that she wouldn't have to go through that again. The doctor walked back over to her and let her leave the infirmary. "Where are the labs? Are they on this level?"
"No, they're a little further away than that. We have to take the elevator." Sam smiled at her, for some reason it made Isabel feel a little better about the situation when people smiled.
"I think the General likes you." Isabel revealed when they entered the elevator. Luckily there was nobody else there to hear what she had to say. "He doesn't sound as harsh when he talks to you; he spoke to that soldier named Grogan really badly. He must like you." Isabel was very insistent about what she had seen. She wasn't going to mention the fact that she could have sworn the General said that he wished that the 'regs' would go kill themselves so he could tell the Colonel that he loved her.
"Unfortunately, he likes lots of people so you just need to get to know him better." Sam said as humorously as possible. 'If only!'
"What did you just say?" Isabel asked. Was she going crazy?
"I said that unfortunately, he…" Sam started when Isabel interrupted her.
"What did you say after that?" Isabel asked. She got a strange look from Sam, much to her dislike. "I thought you said 'if only'." Sam looked a little worried, Isabel couldn't hear her thoughts! Could she?
"No I didn't, you must have imagined it." Sam replaced the look of shock with a sympathising grin. "Don't worry, you're probably just feeling the effects of your little meeting with the needle, the General used to feel like that all of the time. That was before he took command." So the General hadn't always been the mean man behind the desk.
"Hang on, I felt like this before I went to the infirmary. I thought I had heard the General talking about something called 'regs' and how they should go kill themselves." she spoke as they made their way to the labs. "He said that he would then be able to tell you that…" she stopped talking when the halls filled with people. They walked through a door that said 'Colonel Carter' on it and she felt awed to see several laptops and various pieces of technology dotted around a work bench. "I was going to say, he said that he would then be able to tell you that he loved you." She said with a voice close to a whisper. "I was going to ask him about it but his mouth wasn't moving when I heard it. It was sort of like when you said if only." She looked at the blushing Colonel standing on the other side of the table.
"You should probably forget about that. It would be really bad if someone assumed something that wasn't real. So, how do you think we can find that mothership?"