Disclaimer: Not mine, yada yada yada
I'll be using, as the story moves forward, some elements of the backstory for the Goa'uld and various system lords, as well as details on some planets (including ones that never showed up on the show) from the old Stargate SG-1 rpg. Albeit I will not be adopting them wholesale, because there are some things from the RPG that don't work with later canon or that I don't think quite make sense in general.
You don't need to read those books (long out of print as they are, they're hard to get/find), as anything pertinent will be explained as appropriate in the story, but if you run into some detail you don't recognize from the show, it could very well be from the RPG.
A lot of exposition here - I tried a few ideas out on how they figured all these details out, ultimately this was the best way to get it done, for what I want to do with this story. I tried to make it as entertaining as I could despite that.
Wasteland Gate
By Kylia
Chapter 3: Stargate? Stargate.
Cheyenne Mountain Underlevel 27
D Plus 0, Project Blue Book Rediscovery
Victoria had found pre-war ruins that still had functioning lights, so she wasn't surprised when she found out that there were still lights on in the base when they stepped out of the elevator into a hallway. The hallway was marked by paint labeling it with a letter and number, but she had no idea what it meant.
She was surprised for a moment that the paint was still there, unfaded, but only for a moment.
With no exposure to the elements... even most of the paper records here could be intact and readable. Pre-war paper was surprisingly durable, but after centuries of exposure on the surface, lots of books and files and papers and magazines were still too damaged to be readable. Down here...
Maybe I should give the Followers a message when I'm done here. Assuming they found anything they'd be interested in.
"Damn, they really knew how to make power run before the war," Mitchell mused as they looked through the hall. With the lights still quite dim, he didn't turn off the light on his gun as he stood there.
"Fusion Generators were set to replace all other power demands in the entire U.S, before the bombs dropped," Veronica explained. "A lot of them are still running, even after this long."
"Still - I mean, if we hadn't supplemented out generators with other sources, we'd have run out of power a while ago," Mitchell pointed out. "And we keep power off in places nobody is. Who's been down here for the last 200 years?"
"Hopefully not an army of feral ghouls or security robots," Victoria grinned. Well, robots wouldn't be so bad, but if it turned out to be feral ghouls, she was going to be very unhappy with the universe.
How does something so fucking rotten run so goddamn fast?!
Rather than waiting for Arcade, Raul and the other two to get the elevator and come down to join them, Victoria headed down the hall, slowly and cautiously, one hand on her gun as she held her Pipboy out ahead of her, lighting the way.
The floor was also painted with various colored lines, leading to different locations. She looked over at Mitchell and Sheppard.
"Know what these mean?"
Mitchell shook his head, "Not a clue."
"Well... let's just pick a direction and start going," Victoria brought up her Pipboy map, though wouldn't just automatically generate one immediately. She'd have to wander around this place a while as it passively collected data and made the map. Or she could find a terminal with a map on it...
The hallway took a turn into a large, open room with a conference table and a number of chairs around it, and a projector pointed at one blank, unadorned wall painted white. There was a window, of all things, looking over onto a large open room...
Victoria squinted and looked out the window - at the far end of the open room below was a massive stone ring, easily big enough for a Deathclaw to walk through without crouching... a ramp led up to it, as if people were to walk up that ramp to the ring.
"Ten caps says that's whatever Project Blue Book was all about," Sheppard said, walking up beside her.
"Sucker's bet," Victoria said, without looking away from the ring. "What the hell is it?"
"Only way to find out is to find a computer and see what they have to say," Veronica pointed out. "Looks impressive, whatever it is."
Victoria turned around and approached a door on the opposite end of the briefing room to the window. It had a placard on it:
OFFICE OF GENERAL W. O. WEST, USAF
BASE COMMANDER, SGC
"Or maybe we can just open the General's office," Victoria grabbed onto the handle of the steel door, but it wouldn't budge. She felt around underneath the handle, and instead of a keyhold, found some sort of electronic card reader.
"Or not," Victoria said after another moment. "Maybe we can find a keycard - if nothing else, I'm sure we can Shiskabob the door open, doesn't look as solid as the blast door up top. But let's keep that as a fallback." She looked around and saw the staircase going down in the corner of the room.
Before she could walk over to it, she heard the ding of the Elevator and a minute later, Arcade, Raul and the other two CDV soldiers walked into the room. Arcade went over to the window, looking out over the ring.
"What on Earth?" Arcade finally asked after a long moment.
"Not a super weapon... unless somehow that ring fires nukes or FEV."
Arcade shook his head, "Given the pre-war government, I wouldn't put it past them, but..." he trailed off. "Probably not."
"Well, let's see if we can't get the computers here working," Victoria headed down the tightly spiraled staircase into another room, this one level with the big ring - it too had another window looking out onto it. It also was a room filled with computers of all sorts, all of them still active. Only one of them was unlocked, though, and it was displaying a whole host of numbers and symbols that Victoria couldn't make heads nor tails of.
"Arcade, Veronica," she called the two over, "Can you guys make any sense of this?" She stepped aside for the Brotherhood Scribe and Follower Doctor look at the information.
"Only a little..." Veronica said. "At least not without more context. Looks like power regulation information..." she turned away from the computer screen and looked back to the ring. "I think that... thing is consuming power or at least, has a lot of power running through it on standby..." she trailed off then looked back to the computer screen. "I've never seen math like this before."
"I have, once..." Arcade said, stepping back. "I don't really understand it any better than you Veronica, but it's... I read part of a paper that covered this." He paused, closing one hand into a fist and pressing it to his mouth for a long moment as he obviously tried to remember. "Dr. Carter, that's it." Victoria looked at him pointedly, and everyone else seemed to be following suit.
"Right," He said after another moment. "Sorry - Doctor Samantha Carter. She's part of OSI - she stopped by the Old Mormon Fort once, a few months after the NCR won at First Hoover Dam. Her job is working on power generation for the NCR - especially getting old nuclear reactors working efficiently, but her real passion is old Pre-War Astrophysics."
"Astro...physics?" Mitchell raised an eyebrow. "Physics is all... inertia and gravity and atoms and... the Bomb, right? I didn't really pay that much attention in that part of school. What's... Astrophysics?"
"The physics of well... up there," Arcade pointed upwards. "Space."
"Space?" Victoria stared at him. "Space physics?"
"Yeah," Arcade shrugged, "She finds the topic fascinating - said she just likes to study it for fun. I know a guy who loves to read books on cats, even though cats are completely extinct. It's not uncommon in the Followers - I read all those socioeconomic theory texts after all."
"Yeah, but that's actually... useful." Victoria pointed out.
"Well, I'd say Dr. Carter's hobby would be useful now. She stopped by the Fort to trade - copy anything we had on pre-war Astrophysics for copies of what she had. Julie agreed to the trade, so we did it. I tried reading one of the pre-war academic articles on the topic. I couldn't understand it, not really, but the math in it... it looked pretty much exactly like this math here."
"Huh. Well, she's not here now. Let's see if we can't get these computers open..." She walked over to another one, started fiddling with the keyboard, trying to get around the need for a password, but even after she hacked her way past the first layer, there was an almost unprecedented second, more complicated layer of security.
She could probably figure out her way around it, spoof the computer into thinking she was an authorized user...
Her eyes traveled back to her Pipboy. "It can't be that simple?" She cooked her Pipboy to the computer, and then brought up the command code again, entering it into the system through her wrist-mounted little computer.
Sure enough, it worked. There was a low humming sound, then a sudden jolt as all the lights in the room turned on, the unexpected glare forcing everyone to look down and shield their eyes, but then after a long moment, they adjusted and looked around. They had a much better view of the ring, and it seemed to be covered in... symbols? All around the outer edge of it. She turned her eyes away from it to look at the computers, which were starting to display a pixel-made logo of some sort, and then two words:
"Stargate Command?" Victoria looked at the computer. SGC?
Victoria sat down at one of the computers, being carefully as she lowered herself into the seat in case it suddenly collapsed on her, but whoever had made this chair had made it well enough to last 200 years in a sealed environment.
The computer files were not helpfully arranged and labeled - or at least, there was no file labeled 'What Our Secret Base Does', but after a moment, she pulled one up.
Then she read it.
Then she read it again.
Then she opened another data-file.
And another.
And another.
Her eyes darted to her pipboy and she realized everyone in the room reading had been doing so silently for over an hour.
She looked around, and saw Veronica, Arcade, Raul - and Mitchell and his men all doing the same, and at a guess, the looks of confusion - raised eyebrows, furrowed brows, wide eyes, sheer disbelief written across their faces - were probably akin to the one on her face.
"Am I... am I the only one seeing this?" Victoria asked slowly, looking back to her screen. "Or was whoever was at this workstation writing a really bad novel?"
"I..." Veronica said after a moment. "I mean... this..." she typed away at the computer for a long moment. "I mean, there's only one way to find out, right?"
"Are you-" Victoria started, and then the floor shook slightly - only for a second though - as the Ring in the other room started to spin.
"VERONICA!" Victoria jumped to her feet, "What the hell!?"
"There's only one way to know if this is all true, and that's by... dialing this stargate. And seeing if a wormhole forms and I can't even believe I'm using that word - it's like I'm living some Captain Cosmos comic..." Veronica sounded giddy.
"And if we have some bug-eyed alien coming through that... thing," Mitchell gestured to the ring vaguely, "because you opened it?"
"Well, then we kill it," Veronica said, putting her power fist back on, "but if I'm reading the files I found right, the wormholes are one way for people travelling through."
"You could have warned us before you went and decided to do this on your own, Veronica!" Victoria snapped. She loved Veronica's occasionally impulsive attitude some times.
This was not one of them.
"Well, it's a little late now," Arcade said as a fifth symbol got locked in. Just two more...
"So... we're gonna open a portal to an alien planet. Know anything about it?"
"Not a clue," Veronica admitted. "I just picked an address at random - I wasn't proposing we just walk through it right this second. This is just... proof of concept." The seventh symbol locked in and then, with a roaring 'whoosh' sound, a geyser of water seemed to erupt from the ring - the Stargate - and then the thing calmed down, seeming to be just a cool, horizontal expanse of water, trapped in the confines of the Stargate itself...
"Okay..."
"Power consumption is up, massively," Arcade reported, looking back to the originally unlocked terminal. "I think."
"So it's doing something... and it's not exploding... that's something," Sheppard observed.
"But it could just be a lujoso light show," Raul pointed out. "Something's got to go through..."
"They had to have something that could send through," Veronica sat back down quickly, and hurriedly typed away at the screen before finally finding something. "Looks like they used... Eyebots. We don't have ED-E anymore... but..." Veronica kept banging away. "There was a whole unit of Protectrons and Mr. Gutsy's stationed inside that room at one point. But not anymore - but there is a Protectron still in a charging dock... looks like it's weapons don't work anymore, but if I booted it up I could command it to go through the Stargate - it could communicate back to us... in theory. Or at least we'd know if it even does send things at all..."
She looked over at Victoria, "Should I?"
Victoria inhaled sharply. Reactivating old robots as always a risky bet, if you didn't go in and replace the command drives with ones you'd personally refitted and reformated, or so she gathered.
But if she could command it from here...
"Send it through, I guess..." Victoria said after a long moment, taking a deep breath. "Everyone, be ready in case that robot decides to shoot us... and if it still has working weapons somehow."
Veronica typed in a series of commands, then Victoria watched as a Protectron charging port opened up and the Protectron started talking, it's robotic, modulated voice coming through loud and clear.
"Powering up... Gateroom Defense Protectron On Duty... all hostile incoming forces will be eliminated..." Veronica pressed enter on her new string of commands. The Protectron stopped mid-step, then resumed moving, but this time started moving towards the ramp.
"New orders received: Proceeding through Stargate." The Protectron started to walk, slowly, slowly up the ramp, towards the Stargate, and then through it - one moment it was there, walking into water... the next moment nothing.
A few seconds later, Veronica spoke again "the computer is giving me a confirmation: 'Protectron through'. And I am getting a response sending a signal through to it. On the other side of that... that wormhole there is a Protectron, and it is sending a signal back. I couldn't tell you what things are like there... but it is there." She cut off the signal and a few moments later the wormhole vanished.
"So... wormholes. Space. Stargate. Is this freaking cool or what?" Veronica started giggling. "This is an even better gift than that dress. Are there aliens? Tell me there's aliens!"
Briefing Room, Cheyenne Mountain Underlevel 27
D Plus 3, Project Blue Book Rediscovery
"Okay... so let me see if I understand this," Councilor Hammond said, holding his hands up a bit as he looked at Victoria and Mitchell. "You've taken twenty-three people off their posts and patrols on the surface, and authorized funds to pay for the time of four of our best scientific minds over the last three days... all because that device," he pointed out the window into the Gate Room.
"Is called a Stargate and is capable of moving from one planet to another. Other planets."
"That would be about the shape of it, Sir," Mitchell nodded, sounding a little sheepish. "I know how it sounds but..."
"I should have asked for the long version," Hammond said, sounding like he was saying it to himself as much as anyone else. "Start from the beginning, don't spare any details."
Victoria nodded. "In 1928, Archeologists at Giza, in Egypt-"
"Egypt?"
"Ancient country, even older than the original Rome, in Northern Africa, apparently." NORAD had had plenty of maps of the world, so at least Victoria was pretty sure Hammond would know about Africa. Lots of people in the Wasteland maybe knew the name 'China', but not any context, or even that there were continents. Cheyenne was a reasonably well educated town, but still.
Geography was probably not that important.
Victoria continued: "They found this... Stargate buried beneath a coverstone that was at least 5,000 years old at the time, and it was made of something not of this Earth. Eventually the US military got their hands on it. They tried several times to figure out what it was on and off, but mostly it just gathered dust until the 2060s, when they realized it must be some sort of transportation device." She looked back to Arcade and Veronica.
"What did the scientists call it in the logs you guys found?"
"Ah - the substance the Stargate is made up, apparently called 'Naquadah'" Arcade stumbled over the unfamiliar word for a moment, then went on, "it apparently is capable of generating and storing vast amounts of energy. Wormholes have been theorized since the 1930s... I think - not an expert," he took a breath and went on: "the gate is capable of holding all that and using it to... punch a hole in space-time, creating an artificial, stable wormhole that connects to a Stargate on another planet."
"There are more of these?" Hammond turned to look at the two.
"Yes - many more. The SGC wasn't actually sure how many... but lots. All over the Galaxy. Planets tens of thousands of light years away," Veronica confirmed.
"Okay... and they could connect to us?"
"Absolutely - if they had the 'address' for our planet. Every planet has one - a string of six symbols plus a seventh one that serves as the 'point of origin'. Don't ask me why we need that, this really isn't my field... at all," Arcade went on. "But yes - anyone could dial this planet and come here."
"And it's right beneath the town..." Hammond said, with wonder. He turned back to Victoria: "Go on."
"In early 2077, with the help of a guy named Dr. Daniel Jackson, they figured it out, they cracked the code. They sent a mission through the gate, to the one address they had at the time - a planet called Abydos, as it turns out. The mission was to find out if there were threats to the United States but also to find a planet to move population to in the event of nuclear war."
"So... like the Vaults?"
"But not designed by psychos who wanted to know what happened when you poured oil on a fire," Mitchell drawled.
"Basically. On Abydos... they found... people."
"Intelligent alien life? How much more like an issue of Captain Cosmos can this sound?"
"Not exactly," Victoria hesitated. "We found some photos," she handed one to Hammond - smiling people, dressed in weird robes she'd never seen, in a desert enviroment, standing with two people in full army gear - fatigues, combat armor, helmets, the works. "They found people. Human people."
"On another planet... in 2077. I know humans went to the Moon, I read old magazines about it once, but... we never went to..." he snapped his fingers, "the red planet, has the same name as the Legion's god."
"Mars," Arcade supplied. Hammond let out a deep sigh and nodded.
"No, no we hadn't... apparently," Victoria had known about the Moon since she was a teenager, but she hadn't even known Mars was a planet until Arcade had mentioned it back when she'd been killing Legionaries all over the Mojave.
"Anyway," She shook her head a little and went back on topic. "Apparently - and this is what they learned over the course of that mission, with a lot of help from Dr. Jackson's translation of ancient writings, some alien came to Earth thousands of years ago and... using his technology he pretended to be a God. The Ancient Egyptian God 'Ra', apparently. He took slaves from Earth to countless other planets - he and the rest of his species. And then 5,000 years ago, or so, people on Earth rebelled, buried the Stargate and Ra just... never got around to flying back here in his spaceship."
"Humans on other worlds..." Hammond looked like he was working through the logical consequences of that.
Humans on lots of other worlds meant those worlds could have humans on them. Victoria had learned a lot more about space than she'd ever wanted to know before, but apparently, Humans needed certain specific things to survive on other planets without very specialized equipment.
If countless other worlds could support human life.
Then there's countless places people could go.
Unlike had been, she wasn't quite so sure that some sort of wholesale abandonment of Earth was desirable... the Wasteland was hell, but it was home, and... the notion of rebuilding the world, claiming it back from the tribes and raiders and monstrous wildlife and just the... devastation that had claimed it.
The NCR's efforts to do that, imperfect as they were, were inspiring. Cheyenne was doing the same, as was every other successful settled community in the Wasteland.
But still...
A place safe from deathclaws, and radscorpions and feral ghouls and and all the other monsters of the Wasteland. A place free of radiation - where food free of radiation could be grown and people could live lives free of it? Completely? Or at least more so
And Cheyenne, in essence, controlled the Stargate. And all the potential - they did have all those refugees coming in, after all, and sooner or later Fort Carson wouldn't be able to support more.
Plus...
The food grown could be... well...
Sold. And Cheyenne could get a piece of that trade. One didn't have to be some greedy bastard to see the value in that. Not to mention other things from other planets that might have value.
Back on track, girl.
"On Abydos... Ra showed up."
"The same Ra that... came to Earth thousands of years ago?"
"He claimed to be - his species could just be really long lived or even immortal, like Ghouls, or maybe he was lying. Regardless... he was not happy to learn that Earth had technology that could be dangerous to him, when he captured US soldiers on Abydos. He was getting ready to take his ship to Earth and... I guess, destroy us. Instead, the expedition team... blew up his ship. With a nuke. While it was in space, above the planet."
"Thus, the one and only time since 1945 that the use of a nuke was a good idea," Mitchell suggested. This was where he took over from Victoria: "Afterwards, the Air Force started setting up facilities on Abydos. A whole new base. And they started exploring other planets. They found a list of addresses on Abydos. Hundreds of them, apparently, but they had to... account for the fact that planets move... so they only had a few working addresses back then, before the bombs dropped. The program has been running ever since and apparently we have all of them, now."
"So... we could go through the Stargate," Mitchell finished.
"Without knowing what's on the other side?"
"No, we can know that, actually," Veronica stepped forward to answer Hammond's question, speaking quickly but with self-assurance. This was something she knew well. "Assuming we can salvage some Eyebots or something like that, anyway. They used Eyebots equipped with advanced sensors to... check the planets. Make sure there was nothing hostile around the Stargate on the other end, that we could breathe, the temperature - everything. With the right circuits and other salvaged parts... I could jury-rig something like that, based on the schematics in the base computers," she shrugged helplessly. "Assuming we could get an Eyebot. Either a working one or one that's been scrapped I could try to fix up and reactivate."
"You could do that?"
"If it involves pre-war Tech, I can fix almost anything," Veronica said, smiling a little at the prospect of all the pre-war tech here. What was left of it.
"There's one other thing to consider - on October 23, 2077, when the Bombs dropped, records show some 212 people were here, in the SGC. Support staff, soldiers, scientists... and yet there's not one body," Victoria cut in. "We've searched most of the base - there's no bodies."
"They went through the stargate, obviously," Hammond surmised.
"That's what the records say. They went through to Abydos, which already had personnel on site, and lots of material and tech. They took almost everything they could that wasn't nailed down, wiped all records of Abydos's address from the base computers." Hammond raised an eyebrow, and Victoria continued, "there's no record of why, I'm guessing they were worried someone might break in? Maybe they thought the Chinese would come after the bombs... or mutants or just... regular people they didn't want to come with them."
This is the pre-war government that made the Enclave, after all...
"But... who knows what happened with them, but they could be out there too. There was power armor stationed here. At least twenty suits of T-60, possibly more. Plasma weapons, laser rifles, a whole host of robots, including Sentry Bots... who knows it if all stayed on Abydos. But on top of that, there's aliens... alien technology. Worlds entirely free of radiation."
Victoria started to pace, gesticulating: "I became a courier because I wanted to explore, wander see what the world had become, see what was just over the horizon. And now we have this - this Stargate is the ultimate horizon. And the potential that what's out there could pay itself countless times over. This is every salvaging expedition into pre-war ruins times... a million! You guys own the Gate. I'm not going to suggest otherwise - your town, your half-ruined mountain, your Stargate. But... I want to go through it. I'm not asking for all the profit of it... just a salary or commission - or hell," she said, realizing she didn't even care about the money, "I'll just do it for free, if I can get at my caps in the NCR. I've got plenty. Just... that..." she gestured towards the gate somewhat helplessly.
"Just let me go through that - and come back, obvious... but - think about the possibilities out there. Sooner or later Fort Carson will run out of room for refugees - there's always people driven out of their homes, by raiders or monsters or just the environment. You can send your own people with me to make sure I don't try to hold anything back but you can't just ignore-" Victoria realized she probably sounded like a ranting madwoman as she started to really get into it, talking faster and faster but she couldn't stop herself or even calm down. She had to make sure they understood what could be at stake.
I need to go through that Stargate!
"Miss Fernandez, you don't need to keep convincing me," Hammond interrupted her, grinning. "I'm sold. And I'm fairly certain I can sell the rest of the Council. I know of a few traders who might be able to source us an Eyebot in some form. Pick a planet, prepare for the mission... and you have a go." He held out a hand and Victoria shook it.
Holy shit! She felt like letting out a giddy noise of glee like Veronica was sometimes prone to, but she managed to hold it in.
"Thank you Sir. I promise you won't regret this." One way or another, she'd make sure he didn't.
She was going to get to go to another planet.
In your face, every other courier in the Wasteland!