Chapter 7
When SG-1 didn't immediately comment on the tape, Captain Oliver Hudson cleared his throat and looked to his Commander, who stood there as quietly as the Colonel himself.
"I guess I'll start off by saying that the Lt. Col. did, in fact, make it back to the SGC relatively okay."
"Relatively?" Daniel was the first to ask.
"He was greatly injured and died shortly afterwards."
"Who is he?" Sam asked. She almost felt like she should have known the answer to that already.
At this, Captain Hudson shrugged. "As I've said before, I don't know much about the specifics of the SGC, but I was told when I was shown this footage some years ago that he was put onto SG-1 after the Colonel here departed for retirement following a short stint as Brigadier General of the SGC itself."
Jack's eyebrows raised. General? So that's why Captain Hudson deflected his "sirs".
He was currently undecided on how he felt about the whole thing.
"What happened?" Ford found himself asking out loud. "On the tape, sir?"
"We were attacked," Daniel said, answering the question himself. "Obviously."
"Indeed," Teal'c agreed. "But it is unclear as to who or what attacked us."
"Well if the Ancient writing is any sort of clue, maybe the Goa'uld followed us to a library of theirs, or something to that effect," Sam added.
Daniel shook his head. "I don't think it was a library. They said they were in a lab. And the San Graal sounds more like an object than a book." His mind was already trying to dissect the possibility of what it was.
While his team discussed the tape, Jack's eyes remained transfixed on the now blank screen as his mind replayed some of the images that were just shown there. More questions than answers started surfacing, the two most important ones being first: what happened to the rest of SG-1 after the tape was recorded; and second: how did footage like this make its way into a non-Air Force sub and into the hands of a Captain who either knew too much and wasn't saying anything, or didn't know as much as he thought he knew.
"It wasn't the Goa'uld, Doctor Jackson."
That seemed to silence the team, and Hudson was happy for it.
Unfortunately, it also snapped O'Neill out of his silent questioning for he asked, "Then who?"
"The Ori," Hudson answered. "Though more likely their foot soldiers, followers of Origin to be even more precise."
"Meaning?"
"Sir?" Ford questioned.
"Doctor Jackson, could you enlighten my crew on who the Ancients were—are?"
Caught off guard, the archaeologist stumbled to find a good way to put it. "They're, uh, ascended beings who created the stargate system and created life in this galaxy. But if you don't mind me asking, what does that have to do with these Ori? Even the Goa'uld are no match for the Ancients."
"If they ever did anything but sit on their asses all day, you mean," Jack quipped.
Daniel shot him a quick well yeah look.
"They are also ascended beings, originally from the same ancestry as the Ancients, apparently. But they broke off and started their own way of doing things, and Origin is the religion they use to gain followers and subsequently power as well."
"Ascended?" Piccolo asked from his station?
Carter turned to him and said, "The Ancients were able to evolve enough to turn their bodies into pure energy and live on another plane of existence."
A whispered, "Whoa," could be heard from were Ensign Lucas Wolenczak was sitting.
"They don't follow the non-interference laws that the Ancients do?" Daniel asked of the Captain.
"The what?"
"He probably doesn't know," Jack said.
"There is probably a lot he does not have knowledge of, Colonel O'Neill."
"I'm getting that picture, too," Sam agreed quietly. "It's like these guys got half the story, and none of the important parts."
"Quite like you lot," Hudson interrupted, though it was more like "challenged".
"Touché," Jack admitted.
"Now that we've got that understood, can we move on?"
Jack nodded.
Alaron watched from a vent above the Bridge as the Captain attempted to explain years worth of history in minutes. But what caught her attention the most was the infamous team dubbed SG-1 standing more or less in the middle of the room.
Colonel O'Neill, Major Carter, her mind ticked off the list of people that apparently made up this mix. Doctor Daniel Jackson and the Shol'va Teal'c.
A part of her wondered if his death alone would give her enough power to raise her own army once more. The Goa'uld, of course, were still around, though the System Lords were dead and long gone by now.
Similarly, Doctor Allen Carter watched the briefing from the computer in his quarters. Hacking into the security cameras nothing short of easy child's play—he'd done more for the NID even before landing a job with them.
But a Goa'uld on board surely added quiet the wrench into his plan. What if it got to them before he could? What if the Major and that kid got them home before he or the Goa'uld could strike?
The latter worried him more than anything else.
"So your SG-1 went missing during that mission, correct?" Daniel tried sorting through it all for a fourth time. "Just… disappeared?"
Hudson nodded. "It appears as much. Mitchell dropped quickly into a coma following his return to Earth, and died only days after that. The camera didn't get anything else that you didn't see and the only other survivor was a Marine who also up and disappeared after handing in his resignation shortly after the mission flopped."
"There was a Marine there, too?" Jack asked, picking up on the bit of information Hudson had been holding back up until that point.
"A team of them, yes. I'm not sure why, or what other team that was, though."
"I could probably find out," Lucas chimed in.
The Captain turned to him. "I'd be surprised if those reports were even still out there to begin with, Ensign."
"But if it's out there—anywhere—I'll find it."
Hudson definitely had no doubt about that. He was still trying to think of a way to break it to the Ensign—if he should even tell him in the first place—that his jaunt to a certain Node was the reason they all had to have this conversation in the first place.
But they weren't there yet, though they were rapidly approaching that point.
"I'm more interested in why it's such a huge deal in the first place," Carter said. "We went missing—so what?"
Jack and Daniel sent her a look at the same time while Teal'c raised his eyebrow.
"Okay, not like that, guys, but you get what I mean, right? We're a frontline, flagship team in the midst of inter-planetary war. It could happen to any SG team and has in the past. So aside from the fact we usually make it out alive by the skin of our teeth, what makes this mission so different?"
Nearing that point very, very quickly, Oliver mused to himself. "The Air Force has suspected foul play ever since.
"Why?" Teal'c was the first to ask, which surprised the rest of SG-1.
"You were in an Ancient lab," Hudson said simply.
"And?" Jack prompted.
"No mirrors, nothing that looked like a cloaking device…" Daniel answered for him. "Nothing to suggest any other kinds of beaming projects."
"We only saw a portion of the room from the tape, Daniel," Sam reminded him. "Anything could be in there."
"But we were in there looking for a weapon. And from the sound of it, we knew what we were looking for. Why would we touch anything else?"
"We would not," Teal'c admitted. "Perhaps the Air Force is correct in assuming there was foul play present at the time of this mission."
"Especially if that footage really was stolen from the SGC before being recovered later on," Hudson pointed out."
"The Marines?" Sam asked.
Hudson nodded. "They were one suspect among many, yes."
"The others being?" Daniel asked.
"Section Seven," the Captain stated plainly.
"What?" For asked. "Why would they—"
"Or the NID, rather," Hudson caught himself. "I forget they didn't always go by that name. They've evolved slightly since their Division days."
"NID?" Jackson asked, though it was more of a rhetorical question than anything else.
"Wonderful," Jack commented with a heavy sigh.
"But we don't believe it was solely their doing," Hudson said further. "In fact, we know it was a combined effort between a small number of parties. One of them including a person some on this sub know quite well."
"Sir?" Ford inquired, but it was to Lucas that Hudson directed his answer.
"I believe you, Ensign, know him as Mycroft."
The Ensign's jaw dropped at the name.
