Vala laid crumpled up in a ball in the corner of a cell when she finally awoke. Her groggy eyes struggled to focus in the dim light, but the Human style prison bars were clearly visible in front of her. She shook her head clear and glanced around…she was alone in the cell.
"Wonderful," she muttered to herself as she got to her feet, though a bit wobbly.
"Now…what do we have to work with," she said, inspecting the bars. The hinges were well oiled, the latch solid, and the locking mechanism on the outside of the cell. Her fingers reached around and felt for the keyhole.
"Damn," she whispered, feeling a card swipe slot. Vala turned around and looked at the rest of the cell…four bare walls, a floor, and a ceiling.
"Well…this is going to be a challenge," she declared. "Guard!"
"Guard?" she asked in a more subdued voice when no one responded. She pushed her face up against the bars and tried to look down the hallway. "Anybody?"
Vala pulled back and sighed. "Well it doesn't seem like I'm going to be using my wits to get out of this…or my charm…guess that leaves waiting to be rescued," she said experimentally.
"Right," she whispered. "What other options do I have?"
Vala looked around at the empty cell. She didn't have anything other than the clothes on her back.
She rubbed the loose collar of her uniform shirt and raised an eyebrow. "Hmmn."
Half an hour later Vala heard someone approaching and smiled to herself, but held perfectly still. When the guards came into view of her cell she heard one of them gasp.
Lying with her face towards the wall opposite the bars, but with the rest of her body face up on the very cold floor, the completely nude Vala had quite an effect on the two male guards that had come for her…but she dare not move. Not yet.
A sick, creepy feeling manifested in her gut but she pushed it aside…she needed to appear as serene and helpless as possible so the guards would come in close where she could kick them in the head and take whatever weapons they might be carrying.
"Well, this is an unexpected treat," a third individual said, whose footfalls sounded a couple of heartbeats later.
Vala didn't recognize the voice, but it had a distinctive accent. She assumed it was Chinese, but to be honest she hadn't studied that boring branch of Earth's culture in much detail. She'd dealt with Honor-centric societies before and found they gave her a headache.
That creepy feeling wouldn't abate, and even as Vala heard the door to her cell open and the moment of opportunity presented itself she couldn't shake the sense that something was terribly wrong.
The guards had come to remove her to another chamber and, in lieu of her actually walking, they were more than pleased to manhandle her naked body and moved in to pick her up.
The was a brief dispute as to who got which end, but one groped her chest as he got a grip on her torso and began to lift her up. Before the other could grab her feet she pulled her left knee up and, flexing backwards, gave her joints enough range to smash her kneecap into the man's forehead.
He staggered backwards in shock, but Vala didn't hesitate. She quickly kicked the other guard in the groin and got to her feet in a fighting stance, looking for weapons…but there were none. She noted the presence of a man in the hallway but he was out of reach so she hit the first man in the throat with stiffened knuckles and dropped him to the ground. She turned around and punched the other man, still struggling with her hit to his groin, in the face one, two, three times.
She finished him off with a heel kick to the face then ran to the open door to attack the remaining guard with a double-legged jump kick to his midsection.
The third man saw it coming and easily knocked her legs aside. Vala fell hard to the floor but tried to leg sweep the man despite knocking her head pretty good. She managed to knock one leg out from under him, but the other held firm and he caught his balance.
With a super-humanly strong grip the man reached down and picked Vala up off the floor by the throat and brought her face up near his. "Nice try," he said amicably.
The creepy feeling inside Vala finally clicked in place and her eyes widened with recognition. The man noticed her reaction and frowned…then his eyes widened with realization. He glanced back in the cell, confirming that both guards were unconscious on the floor, then shook his head at Vala.
"Now what am I going to do with you, Human," he said in an altered voice, finishing the last word off with a very familiar eye flash.
"General O'Neill," Walter called out excitedly as Jack neared the gateroom. "Your list, sir," he said after he caught up with him and handed him a thick stapled set of papers.
"Thank you, Chief," O'Neill said, pulling his equipment pack off his shoulders and stuffing the papers inside.
"Sir…," Walter continued, "it's been an honor," he finished with a salute.
O'Neill lazily returned it. "Thank you," he said, pulling his overstuffed pack back on.
"The others are waiting for you in the gateroom," Walter added.
O'Neill clapped the technician on the shoulder and moved on.
"Sir?" Walter asked quickly.
"Ya?" Jack said, hesitating.
"Where do you want to go?"
O'Neill walked on then shouted back over his shoulder, "Somewhere with trees."
"With trees?" Walter whispered to himself, trying to process the General's meaning. After a moment he walked back up into the gateroom and starting to sift through all the addresses in the database and pick out a safe one that 'had trees.'
"Attention!" Landry barked when the doors to the gateroom opened.
All the SG teams on base stood in a tightly packed formation in respect for O'Neill with only a thin path to the gate remaining between the green uniformed mass.
Jack nodded to them as he walked through their ranks to the foot of the ramp heading up to the stargate as the inner track spun as Walter dialed an address.
"I guess this is goodbye," Landry said.
"All good things…" Jack noted.
"Unfortunately," Landry echoed, catching his reference.
Jack turned to address all others present. Even those in the control room were standing at attention, visible through the safety glass.
"I'm sorry things had to go down this way. I hope the powers that be don't take it out on you guys, and I've written a letter to the suits taking full responsibility for this botched operation. From here on out I honestly don't know what's going to happen…for me or for you, but I want you to know that I don't regret my actions, or my decision to oppose the President. It was the right thing to do, and like the cliché clearly states, now comes the punishment."
"I've never been prouder of any group of men under my command. The work you've done in the SGC over the years makes you all true heroes…and your recent behavior has once again confirmed that fact. It's been an honor serving with you all…good luck."
The stargate activated with a kawoosh over the ramp then settled down into the typical event horizon.
"Hank, I'd like to ask you a favor."
"Anything," Landry said.
"Tell Hammond this was the only way it could have gone down. I couldn't have sat on my hands and done nothing."
"Sure thing, Jack."
O'Neill stepped up onto the ramp and took a few steps. He unclipped the P-90 from his vest and held it ready in both hands across his chest. He felt like he should say more, but couldn't find the words. He turned his head back and nodded to everyone once more beneath his green cap then walked the last few steps up the ramp and into the event horizon.
Landry watched him disappear into the blue glow then checked his watch. It'd been ten minutes since they'd dispatched the prisoner with the letter up through the emergency hatch. It should have reached the commander on the surface by now.
"Walter," Landry yelled back up to the control room. "End the lockdown."
As soon as the lockdown ended and the beaming jammers retracted to only cover the stargate, a small team beamed down into the SGC in the equipment rooms where the beaming jammers were kept. With the guards now gone, the three man team quickly accessed the equipment and bypassed the control room link. They completely deactivated the jamming devices then activated their transport coins, returning back to orbit before anyone was the wiser.
"Yes, sir," the technician's voice came back over the intercom, acknowledging the order as he activated the controls and ended the lockdown.
"Alright everyone," Landry said to the SG teams still standing at attention. "Return to your quarters and stay there until called for. There are probably some angry people up top…let's not give them an opportunity for a confrontation. Once I receive orders I'll…"
Suddenly the stargate disappeared from behind Landry, whisked away, no doubt, via one of the orbiting 304s.
"Son of a bitch," Landry grumbled. "We've still got teams offworld."
"Sir?" Reynolds asked, ready to do something.
"Fall out," Landry said with a sigh and a shake of his head.
"Yes, sir," Reynolds said dejectedly. "You heard the General. Back to your bunks."
The gateroom slowly emptied, with Landry the last person out. He looked back at where the stargate had been and shook his head. "Dear God, what have we come to?"
Three days later Landry sat in Hammond's backyard with a beer and a hotdog in his hands as the former Generals sat and looked at the campfire before them and the stars overhead. Landry and the others had been spared official reprimand, but the President had shut down the SGC and permanently closed Cheyenne Mountain. Landry had opted for retirement rather than reassignment…not that he'd been offered one. Most of the SGC personnel hadn't been pegged for reassignment to the new I.O.A. SGC in Egypt either, and Landry felt it best not to try and ride a dead horse.
"I wonder where he is now," Hank said, leaning back in his lawn chair.
"I don't know," Hammond said, the only other person seated around the campfire. "I don't think he'd ask the Tok'ra for help."
"No, I don't think he would either," Landry echoed. "Maybe he went to Dakara."
"What's on Dakara?" Hammond asked.
Landry glanced over at his fellow retired General. "That's right, you don't know. Bra'tac's new Jaffa Empire is based on Dakara."
"Bra'tac's always been a close ally," Hammond said evenly. "But I have a feeling Jack's not going to be in the mood for company right now."
"I wouldn't blame him," Landry agreed. "He got the rug pulled out from under him pretty hard."
"That he did," Hammond said, raising his beer bottle up towards the stars. Landry mirrored the informal salute.
Hammond picked a star and looked up in its direction. "God speed, Jack."
Atlantis emerged from hyperspace with a flash and immediately throttled up its realspace engines to counter the drift speed between the Dune system and the water-world beneath them. It amounted to only a few thousand miles per hour and a few long seconds of thrust, but it brought them down towards the planet's atmosphere quicker than usual.
"We're here," John noted to himself from the control chair. He'd slid back into the seat only moments ago and found himself experiencing a sense of déjà vu, realizing this must have been the same approach the Alterrans had originally made when they brought Atlantis to the Pegasus galaxy.
The atmosphere began licking at the city's shields as Sheppard searched for the previous landing coordinates not far off the mainland that was just now coming across the horizon. The city's computer highlighted a specific patch of ocean and John set course to put them down in the same spot where they'd first found the city.
The descent was easy enough. John didn't rush it and lazily brought Atlantis down over the ocean, hovering in place over the surface before gently letting it sink into the waves. The city's buoyancy brought it back up after a brief moment below the water line and Sheppard let it settle for a full minute before disengaging the shields and powering down the chair.
"Home sweet home," he said as he walked out of the chair room.
"We all set?" he asked when he got back to the control room.
"Yes," Elizabeth confirmed alongside Ryan, Kyle, and Matt Stevenson. "We were just waiting for you. Care to give the order?"
"Thank you, I think I will," John said, stepping up behind the control room technicians, most of whom were Asgard.
"Activate the beacon."
One of the Asgard meekly togged the glowing Ancient controls, seemingly unconcerned with what they were doing.
A small icon began to pulse on one of the consoles, indicating that Altantis's emergency beacon was active. The rest of Atlantis's allies had already been informed of the plan so they wouldn't respond to the beacon and rush to the city's aid. The only ones Atlantis wanted to come were the Wraith…and come they knew they would. En mass.
Sheppard glanced up at the ceiling and whispered. "Come and get it."