Stargate Command
Earth
Milky Way Galaxy

Dr Keller was making her way from her office in the Medical Bay of the Cheyenne Mountain complex to the main briefing room. It had been more than a year since she had moved back to Earth from Atlantis, but part of her still missed the Lost City, as she walked through the drab, grey concrete corridors of Stargate Command, it certainly wasn't like the gleaming surfaces and glittering towers that she had left behind. But even so, she didn't regret the move. Chief Medical Officer at Stargate Command was certainly a step up, even from being CMO at Atlantis, but mainly the thought of trying to have the longest long-distance relationship in history, with Rodney McKay no less, who had already been transferred to Earth, was not an appealing thought. This way they were only a teleport from each other, instead of three million light years.

Of course there were occasions were that distance wouldn't have been so bad.

Being at what felt like the figurative centre of a much larger galaxy meant working in the Mountain was more interesting, or certainly more challenging than things had been in Pegasus. Recently, things had certainly been challenging if nothing else.

It had been just under three weeks since the situation on the Protected Planets Treaty world, Ordigall, had been discovered. She did her best to remain detached, as all medical staff had to, for their own sanity, if nothing else, but this was a particularly horrible situation, and it was tough to do so. Treating one patient while a family worried over them could be stressful, treating entire families, hell, treating an entire village, at least the ones that weren't already dead, was a different level of stress. She hadn't been fighting just to save a son or a daughter, she'd been fighting to save a culture, a people.

After it had been determined that whatever illness was befalling the citizens of Ordigall was not contagious, it had been decided it was safe to bring the patients to Earth for treatment. It was unlike any sickness she'd ever encountered. Those in the later stages had to be left behind, after attempts at moving them had proven to essentially be a death sentence, only those who were outwardly still healthy, or only beginning to appear ill where brought through from the village. Depressingly that meant only 27 people had made it to Earth. Her early hope was that her and her team would be able to identify what had been making the Ordigallans ill, create a treatment and return to their world in time to cure as many of those left behind as possible.

That had been two weeks ago. Today, there wasn't a single Ordigallan left alive.

The initial symptoms had presented much like a flu, hence the fears that whatever it was would be contagious, from there it progressed into a haemorrhagic fever, before finally into a state of total system collapse; internal organs shutting down, failing, or, in the worst cases, appearing to essentially dissolve as the tissues broke down. Everything she tried failed to do more than slowdown the condition, in the end, the best they could do was heavily medicate the sufferers to spare them from feeling the pain of the end that awaited them.

She had two questions to answer along with the rest of the team; what was this, and how could it be stopped. Keller had barely left the Medical Bay since this had all began in her quest to do just that, as the bags under her eyes paid testament to. Her legs were still moving due to a mixture of willpower and adrenaline as she neared her destination, though by then it felt like she'd been walking for an hour.

The briefing room at Stargate Command had seen a lot over the years, General Carter's office at one end, windows that looked out onto the Stargate itself along one of the sides. At this point Keller hoped there wouldn't be any unscheduled offworld activations. The alarm jarred the senses at the best of times, she really wasn't in the mood for it today.

Keller quickly took a seat, hoping everyone else hadn't been waiting too long, General Carter was leading proceedings here, with General O'Neill and Richard Woolsey joining in via hologram. No pressure then.

Carter smiled and greeted the exhausted looking Doctor, and asked her to update them on the Ordigall situation. Keller cleared her throat, quickly summoned what willpower she had left after the walk here to stifle a yawn, then began.

"The infected present with symptoms not unlike a particularly virulent common cold or flu; aches, pains, coughing, that sort of thing. Depending on the age and health of the individual, stage two is reached within several days at minimum, to two weeks at the most, by which stage what appears to be a severe flu begins to change into symptoms not unlike the Ebola virus. Again, depending on pre-existing factors, within a few days to a few weeks, this leads into the total breakdown of, well, pretty much everything. Despite our best efforts, we have had little success in doing much more than prolonging this process. Sadly, the last living Ordigallan on the base passed away earlier this morning."

She glanced quickly at her watch, just to be sure it was actually the morning.

"You're certain there's no danger of infection?" Woolsey, the look of horror was plain on his face, even through a hologram.

"Yes, we're certain. Even though the early stages present like respiratory illness, it does not spread. We are certain that it is a virus, but it cannot spread beyond the host. Even extracting it for analysis has proven incredibly difficult, once outside the body, it generally dies."

"But you haven't managed to develop a treatment to destroy it within the body?"

"No, as fragile as it is once removed from a patient, conversely, it is nigh on indestructible in the body, all the stock anti-viral drugs we have failed, doses of radiation only slowed it down, we even tried tretonin to boost their immune systems, but with no success."

"Have you learned anything about where this came from?" General Carter this time.

Keller tapped on the screen on the table in front of her, bringing up a floating model of the virus for everyone to see, "The virus doesn't resemble any we've previously encountered, either on Earth, or elsewhere. It's base genetic structure doesn't match the native flora or fauna of Ordigall, at least as far as we've been able to ascertain, so what we can say with at least some certainty is that it likely did not originate there."

That was more than enough to bring a look of unease to the General's face, which then quickly spread to O'Neill, presumably out of a sense of trust for Carter's opinion. Woolsey seemed a little less certain of how to take it.

"So where does that leave us?"

"Well, if it didn't come from Ordigall, then either it came through the Stargate, or it reached the planet through some other means."

Carter's unease was by now a look of full blow concern, an expression that could be best summed up with the word 'damn.'

"General?" Keller couldn't help but want to know what was behind it.

"The Ordigallans told us nobody had been through their Stargate in at least three months."

Ah, that'll be why, reasoned the Doctor. She pondered on this new information briefly, "So either this thing has a surprisingly long incubation, via an as yet unknown infection method, or…"

"Or it got to their planet another way."