Part XII
Jack was in a foul mood the next morning. Even Teal'c was keeping his distance, after Jack had growled at him during breakfast.
It wasn't just because of the situation with Cassie. He had gotten even farther behind on his paper-work. He had received several polite, but increasingly firmly worded requests from Major Davis for him to submit his mission reports for his last three trips through the Stargate. Maybe he could get a copy of Carter's reports, and just put his name at the top. It wasn't like anything had happened. They seemed to be going through a bit of a lull. Anubis hadn't made any new moves against Earth since the destruction of Abydos. He seemed to be consolidating his strength among the System Lords, and the longer they kept fighting each other, the better Jack liked it. Up to a point anyway. The biggest weakness that the Goa'uld had was that they were always fighting each other. But once Anubis finished stamping out all opposition, he'd be more dangerous than ever.
There had been no sign of Daniel since then. No ascended guy popping in to chat—which Jack admitted was kind of a good thing. Daniel had only shown himself when the situation was very dire, but he hadn't even had a feeling that someone was watching. Nothing. Jack was worried. Daniel had been breaking a lot of the Ascended's rules there at the end, and they had shown that they could be ruthless with one of their own who did that.
He had just finished filing the serial numbers off Carter's reports: removing all the scientific gobbledygook, and adding some pithy comments about the number of trees he'd seen on the three worlds that they'd visited, when word came down from upstairs that there was a courier waiting, with a package that he had to deliver into O'Neill's hands personally.
When Jack got back to his office, fifteen minutes later, he had a package in his hands that looked to be about the right size for a report binder, about an inch thick. He removed the outer wrapping, and saw that he was right. The inner wrapping included a security seal, and the binder was covered with words like "Top Secret," "Eyes Only," and dire warnings about what would happen if it fell into unauthorized hands. There was a cover letter from Captain Finn that told him that only he, Major Fraiser and Major Carter were authorized to see what was in the binder. It was left to their discretion whether or not they showed any of the material to Cassandra. It was to be shown to no one else.
He broke the seal, and opened the binder to its title page: "Operation Initiative." He read over the brief mission statement. The Initiative was an operation whose goal was to capture "Hostile Sub-Terrestrials" for study of their strengths and weaknesses, with the aim to learn how to: A) Protect the public from HSTs, and B) Determine if any HSTs could be harnessed for use by the Armed Forces of the United States of America, to further its foreign and domestic policies.
Jack snorted. That second bit sounded like the same sort of NID bullshit that they had to put up with. No wonder this project had left a bad taste in Harris's mouth.
He flipped the page to the table of contents. Most of it seemed to be a listing of various HST species, in alphabetical order. Jack scanned the list, and wondered who named some of these things. Come on! Who would call something a "Glarghk Guhl Kashma'nik?" How the heck did you even pronounce it? The last HST species listed was "Vampire." He flipped ahead to the indicated page.
What he read didn't really surprise him (other than for the fact that he was reading it from a classified, top secret, government report.) It was a re-capitulation of everything Harris and Russell had told them about vampires last night. He noticed that there was a reference to a video file, and looked back at the inside cover of the binder. There was a DVD in a pocket there. He transferred it to the DVD reader in his computer. When it started to play he was presented with the same sort of warnings about what could happen if he showed the contents of this DVD to any unauthorized people, or made any copies of it. It wasn't really all that different from the threats in the FBI warning on the DVDs that he rented. The menu let him quickly skip to the the section on vampires.
At first he saw what looked like a teenage kid, one who was a little too into the punk scene. He was stripped to the waist, had dark, spiky hair, and pale skin. He was lying on a table, with heavy restraints holding him in place. Leather straps were around his arms, wrists, legs, ankles, waist, chest, and neck. They seemed to be overkill for a kid that size. They looked sturdy enough to hold Teal'c. He had leads from various pieces of equipment attached to his head and chest. The room was harshly lit, antiseptic white. White floor, white walls, white ceiling, making the kid on the table stand out in sharp contrast.
There were men in white lab coats, monitoring the equipment, some of which Jack was familiar with. He'd spent enough time hooked up to their cousins in Janet's infirmary. "Electro-cardiogram is showing a flat line," said one of the lab techs, "But the electro-encephalogram is showing lots of brain activity."
Another man looked like he was trying to take the kid's blood pressure. "This isn't working; I can't find any pulse." He stuck a device into the kid's ear for a second. "His temperature is 24.3 Celsius."
"The capture team reported that he was showing fangs, and a distorted forehead when the grabbed him," said the third man, "but changed to look like a normal human, after he was knocked out. Looks like we've got another example of the vampire HST. Anyone remember to bring a mirror?"
"Yes, Dr. Angleman," said the tech monitoring the electro-whatsit-grams. A small hand mirror was produced, and Dr. Angleman proceeded to look at the kid's reflection in it—or tried to anyway. "No reflection, we have a confirmed vampire. We'll give this one the designation Hostile-10." He angled the mirror so that the camera could pick up the kid's reflection in it…but it just showed an empty table.
"Okay, let's get on with the vampire test procedures, picking up from where we left off with Hostile-6," said Angleman, who Jack had decided was the chief lab-guy. "Let's get out the holy water."
The next twenty minutes of video sickened Jack to watch. The lab techs did things to that kid that he wouldn't do to a Goa'uld…not even to Ba'al if he ever got his hands on that snake. They dripped holy water onto his skin, and watched it burn him. They cut him with scalpels, and measured how long it took for him to heal. They shone various lamps on him—ultraviolet, infrared, white light, full spectrum sun lamps, and more—which did, well, nothing. The kid—who didn't really look like a kid anymore, his face had changed as soon as the first drops of holy water had touched his skin; he had a bumpy forehead, yellow eyes, and, yes, fangs—had reacted violently to having a substance, that the running commentary made by Dr. Angleman identified as garlic paste, rubbed under his nose. They tested to see if he healed faster, or slower, if he was cut with knives made of silver, and various other metals and alloys.
The end finally came when they decided to see what would happen if they actually injected the kid with holy water. A syringe full of it was injected into a vein on the inside of his elbow. The kid had died screaming, as if someone had injected him with acid, until his whole body had exploded into dust.
Dr. Angleman seemed quite satisfied with that result. "It appears that we can make an effective anti-vampire weapon using a standard tranquillizer dart, filled with holy water," he told his companions. "Vacuum up the dust, and send it to the lab for analysis. Let me know if it's any different from the last one's." He walked toward the camera, reached out his hand toward it, and the recording ended.
Jack took a quick sampling of other vids on the DVD, and found more of the same. Scientists performing experiments on all sorts of things, some of which looked more human than others, but the more he watched, the more certain he became that the most inhuman things in those vids were the scientists themselves. Harris had mentioned that 40 of the people involved in the Initiative project had been killed, and Jack found that he wasn't feeling the least bit sorry for any of them. The worst were Dr. Angleman, and a woman, who was even more cold-blooded about how she examined the creatures, named Dr. Walsh. Part of Jack really hoped that they were among the dead.
He considered for a moment that this was all some sort of put-up job. The videos could have been faked. Nothing in what he saw couldn't have been reproduced by a Hollywood special effects shop. He'd have to have Carter take a closer look, see if she could detect any signs of fakery, but mostly that decision was just him being cautious. There was too much consistency in what he saw, and if the government was going to fake something like that, why not put a spin on it that made the government look good?
He went back to the binder. After the section on HSTs, was a section on the Slayer. He started out by reading an introduction that was written by Dr. Walsh:
You cannot study HSTs for very long
without hearing stories
about "the
Slayer." Most of these stories are so improbable,
that
we had dismissed her as a myth, a sort of boogeyman's
boogeyman.
What could be more terrifying to a predatory
monster,
than a human who looks like the most helpless sort
of
prey, but is in reality a deadly predator of monsters?
Imagine my surprise when I learned that
not only is the
Slayer real, but that
she's been dating Agent Finn, and that
I
had given her a B- in the Freshman psychology course that
I
teach here at UCS, as part of my cover…
What followed was some biographic information on Buffy Summers—nothing that made her look like anything all that unusual, if you ignored the the times she'd been suspected of arson, and killing people. Some of the incidents were annotated by Summers' explanations for what had really happened: vampires attacking the prom started the fire at Hemery High. A man she'd been suspected of killing was really some sort of serial killer robot, the fire that had destroyed a Sunnydale High science lab was really caused by some boys who had been trying to create the Bride of Frankenstein. Dr. Walsh had added her own cryptic annotation to that incident: "Contact Epps. May have information useful to 314."
The report on Buffy Summers included a description of an exercise in which she had evaded a squad made up of half a dozen Army Rangers, and Recon Marines for 42 minutes in a wooded area only a quarter mile on a side. Then it seemed that she got bored with running them all around in circles, and she "neutralized" them in 28 seconds.
There was a video of the final minute of that exercise on the DVD too, and Jack watched it. He couldn't believe what he saw. Not only had Summers evaded these soldiers, supposedly the best that the U.S. military had to offer, she'd done it while wearing a white coat. If that was any sort of indication of the sort ability that Cassie had developed, maybe he'd have to go a bit easier on the team that had let her sneak out of, and back into, her house the other night.
The final entry on the Initiative was a terse report stating that Walsh and Angleman had been killed, and that Colonel R. McNamara had been assigned take control of the project, and investigate their deaths.
Jack leaned back in his chair to think. He'd known Bob McNamara (he never let anyone call him Robert.) The Special Forces community was pretty small. They'd crossed paths a few times—back before Jack had ever heard of the Stargate—when he'd been working anti-terrorism in Europe with NATO. McNamara was a good, solid, soldier. His problem was that he was too solid: too by the book; no imagination; unable to think outside the box. How he'd gotten into Special Ops was a mystery to Jack. SpecOps wasn't for people who couldn't fly by the seat of their pants.
He also remembered hearing that McNamara had been killed in a training accident, a few years back. He checked the date on the file. The "training accident" would have been a couple of months after he took command of the Initiative. Jack was all too familiar with "training accidents." Most of the SGC's casualties were reported to their friends and families that way. From what Harris had said about how the Initiative had ended it seemed that McNamara had managed to screw up by the numbers, leading to a major charley-foxtrot.
And now Cassie was being drawn into that world. Jack didn't like it. They'd rescued her after Nirrti destroyed her people. On the dark nights when Jack wondered if all the SGC's "training accidents" had been worth it, the thought of the new life that they had given to her was one of the things that made him answer "yes." And now it seemed that she was being pulled into a life that could be more dangerous than that asked of the soldiers who volunteered for duty with the SGC.
He didn't care what Harris said about it. Cassie hadn't volunteered for this, she'd been drafted. One way or another. If it wasn't WCI, it would be someone else telling her how she should use her new abilities. Well, not if he could help it.
For starters, he had to show the files from the Initiative to Janet and Carter. He was tempted to include General Hammond, Teal'c and Jonas, despite their lack of authorization, but he had learned long ago that the first rule of security was not to tell things to people who didn't need to know, and for now, none of them needed to know about this.
Janet and Carter reacted to the package on the Initiative in pretty much the same way he had. They both were appalled by the behaviour that they had seen in the videos, and that made them even more determined to keep the NID from learning anything about what had happened to Cassandra. They were not happy that at least one government agency already knew about her, but they didn't have any idea about what to do about it.
They were also both more open to the idea that the whole thing was some sort of fake. Their scientific training made them even less enamoured of the "it's magic" explanation for anything, than Jack. Much of what Janet saw in the experiments flew against all her years of biological and medical training. Organisms with the properties of the ones described and shown shouldn't have been possible. Carter couldn't believe the physics of it. How was it possible for something to be seen, but not cast a reflection in a mirror? What happened to the fifty or so kilo's of the vampire's mass, when it turned into a handful of dust?
Jack didn't think that they had enough information to be arguing about those things. "We've got to work with what we know, and for now, this is it. What about us giving Cassie the training that Harris seems to think she should have?"
"Whatever else, he does have a point about that. Cassie is a danger to herself, and others, if she doesn't learn to control this," said Carter. "Remember what you did to Siler when we were wearing Anise's armbands?"
Jack winced. "Oh yeah." Siler still had a tendency to flinch away from Jack if he passed him in a stairway.
"So we give her some training; teach her to control her new strength," said Carter.
"I don't like the idea of her learning how to fight," said Janet.
"None of us does," said Jack, "so we stick to non-fighting things, like T'ai Chi."
"She really seems to like the idea of having Teal'c teach her how to use a staff," said Janet. "I'm afraid that if we don't provide her with something more active than T'ai Chi to direct her energy into, she's liable to go looking for something on her own. Go back to sneaking out at night. If Teal'c can't wear her out, no one can."
"Do we tell Teal'c about this?" Carter waved her hand at the Initiative report binder.
"Not for now," said Jack. "I think we leave it up to Cassie whether she tells him about any of this 'Slayer' stuff. That's something else I agree with Harris about. She's the one that this has happened to. She's the one who gets to decide who knows about it."
