So many things could have gone wrong with her mission, O'Neill felt sick the whole time she was gone. And that made him feel even worse. He was about to embark on a war. He couldn't afford to let personal feelings cloud his judgment or distract him from what had to be done. He'd been right. Loving her had made him vulnerable.

When she finally appeared, he sat and looked up at her just as he had that day she'd walked away from everything for him. Standers rushed around to hear her report, and he managed to nod at all the right places and maintain a façade of normalcy, but he was running scared inside. It wouldn't do, but he didn't know what to do about it.

Gradually, the others moved off, and she was left standing looking down at him with a slightly confused look on her face.

"Sir?" she asked quietly.

"Everyone fine back home?"

"Oh, yes," she said bursting out with sudden enthusiasm and filling him in on her visit. "Daniel wanted me to talk you into coming back," she said.

"Not going to happen," he said.

"I know. I told him that," she said and they fell silent.

"What is it, Sir?"

He stared at her intently. "Did you think of staying? Daniel'll do what needs done...the Aschen will be outta there and..."

"I...no. No, Sir! Is that what you wanted me to do?"

'Never,' he thought, but he didn't say it. "So they sent real coffee, huh?"

He had promised to talk to her about 'things', and she had never called him on it. Until now. "Sir."

"No, Carter. I didn't want you to stay...I've been sick the whole time you've been gone afraid something would go wrong and you wouldn't be coming back. Or you'd be glad to be home and-"

"I am home, Sir," she said with enough conviction in her voice his heart finally began to beat again.

He leaped up and pulled her to him. "This isn't good, Carter," he said. "I can't lead an army scared to death for you."

"What choice do we have? I'm not sitting home wringing my hands, Sir."

"You could bake cookies?" He joked, but she didn't laugh. "What?"

"I used to bake cookies."

Ouch. "Oh? For Jonas?" he guessed.

She shook her head. "For my dad."

"Oh...you'll see him again. It's not like the Tokra don't have the resources to find us if they wanted. He'll come," he said and then frowned down at her again. "Do I always do that?"

"Do what, Sir?"

"Make empty promises whenever you're upset?"

She shrugged against him, "I guess maybe so?"

"I'm sorry."

"It's ok. It isn't what you say that matters."

"Are you saying, Major, that you don't give proper attention to the words of a superior officer?"

"Oh, can it."

"OK," he agreed easily. The discussion had wandered far away from 'things' and that was fine by him. Talking about it wouldn't change anything. In a very short while, he would order her into battle. In a matter of days, he'd take her and his 'kids' into the line of fire, and some of them were bound to die under his command.

He'd trained the recruits on the planet Danara, a world untouched by the Aschen. A split-second's distance from both Earth and Eonal by StarGate, Danara was many light years away from the Aschen path. It was a planet with the resources and willingness to take up a battle not its own. Their equivalent of an SG team had heard one of the earliest recruitment speeches, taken the information and need home to their government, and returned to officially offer whatever support their people and world could give.

O'Neill had gratefully taken them up on it. He sent them home with the plans for building training grounds and facilities to house the recruits. It was on Danara he had turned farmers into soldiers while Carter devised and built the CAAD's and the defense grid itself largely with resources the Danarian's freely provided. It was on Danara they had hammered out their battle strategy, and it was through Danara's StarGate O'Neill had launched the Standers' Rebellion.

And when the time came, Danara had converted its training facilities into field hospitals and soup kitchens to receive the wounded and weary off the battlefields. It was those Danarian hospitals the Asgard had emptied before finishing the war at Eonal.

Backed by the Asgard, not one Stander died on Eonal's wastelands or in the space above them. If not for the Asgards' untimely, timely arrival, the desperate, but hopeless, attempt to finish that battle would surely have ended in tragedy. But with it, the Aschen fled the galaxy, jumping their ships beyond the rim.

The Asgard, who had taken up the fight so late in the game, followed them through. They were waging another war in their home galaxy where the Replicators threatened to finish what the Aschen had started when they had decimated their population and forced them to take up cloning to keep their race alive. They had already given O'Neill as much time as they dared spare from their own battle.

It was left to the Standers to finish what they had begun. And finish it they did. The defense web was activated twenty-eight hours after the war had begun. The Standers' Rebellion was over.

Burying the dead would take five times as long as fighting the war. Caring for those left wounded and maimed would drag on for months. Finding ways to return fertility to entire worlds would go on for years and be only partially successful. But the fighting was over.

It was a time for celebration, but the Standers' weren't celebrating. First they had to rescue the fallen on Torantay and bury Hakter's valiant dead. The first rescue teams should have reached Torantay the day the war ended. But, they didn't. Danara assumed the Asgard had done for the wounded on Torantay what they had for those on Danara and then taken them on to the fight at Eonal. The dead on Hakter had been lying for longer than those on Torantay. They were their first priority. Those on Eonal assumed Danara had cared for the wounded on Torantay and sent them to join the burying details on Hakter or recover in the hospitals on Danara. With Standers split between Danara, Eonal, and Hakter those who looked to see an individual on one planet could naturally assume they were on another. Even someone like Colonel O'Neill.

The mix-up was deadly. The Rescue of Torantay, when it finally came, was hours away from being no rescue at all. As it was, it came too late for 11,312 of Carter's 15,000.