Sarah Mackenzie looked up from her distracted gaze at her clasped hands. She paused in mid story and drew breath, tilted her head from side to side for a moment as though easing a stiff neck. She had been talking for almost half an hour and her throat was starting to make vague protests to it's union about misuse.
"So what was it about?" Harmon Rebka asked her. He still nursed the empty coffee cup, she noticed. He had obviously been on his way to the kitchen and she had distracted him from that important task.
"Were you going to fill that?" she asked, pointing at the cup he clasped in his hands.
He looked down at the cup as though seeing it for the first time. It was a dirty cup he noticed, still had a coffee bath ring from the last cup he had left half finished late the previous day. "I was," he said and tried to hide that fact that he was nursing a dirty cup. It wouldn't suit his image of immaculately presented perfection to be seen with a dirty cup. "I probably still will. Tell on though," he said waving the cup about. "I want to hear what this was all about."
"This is going to blow you away," Mac said. "You sure you don't want to go and get one before we go on?"
"Not now Mac. You've got me intrigued. I want to know how this turns out."
"It's a long story," she warned.
"It's still early. The day is young yet."
"You're sure."
"God, just get on with it."
*
Beneath the thumming of the rotors and the nasal whining noise of the turbine, Sarah Mackenzie leafed through the dossier. She was having trouble making sense of the first few entries.
The malignant presence of Jack O'Neill didn't help her concentration. He sat across from her, sharing in the limited confines of the chopper physically, but gave little else away. His face was turned away. His mind was a long way away. She wasn't sure she wanted to know what was going on under the baseball cap he had perched on his head. She kept staring at the SGC emblem. What did it stand for? South Guadalcanal? Secured Ground Control? Suck Grit and choke? See God's creations? Some Great Cockup? It might have been amusing, but it wasn't getting her anywhere.
She turned back to the file. Only one thing for it, she decided, start at the beginning and work your way through. The chronology seemed to be such that the oldest files were at the back. She hated that organisation method, even though she used it herself. You were always mindful of the staples. It was only way you could figure out where one document ended and another started.
The first report her eyes lit upon was a description of an archaeological dig in Egypt. OK. She frowned and read the abstract. It gave her no clues as to why it had been included, so she read on, ploughing her way through a laboriously concise account of the progress being made at the dig (today we shifted dirt with a shaving brush. We must have moved almost a cubic metre between the eleven of us) and described an artefact that they had uncovered. It only added to her confusion. OK, there were no answers in that one.
There were photographs; they depicted a stone ring. Oh, that was enlightening. She had no way of gauging scale. She looked at the for a moment, tried to work out which way was up, gave up and placed them back in the little envelopes they came from. For a moment she considered the possibility that her leg was being pulled, as Brumby would say.
The next report in the file was a long memorandum, demanding that the artefact be taken under the jurisdiction of a combined task force. There were a lot of references to previous memos on the subject. None of those were in the file, and the context of the memorandum was lost because of their lack. She flicked forward a few weeks in the file, but found no copies of those missing documents.
She decided to try for a more interactive approach to her information gathering. She pointed to insignia on O'Neill's epelette. "What does that stand for?" It had obviously gotten the better of her. She had run out of inspired acronyms.
He looked at her for a moment, almost as though he was considering whether to answer her question at all. "The SGC stands for Stargate Command," O'Neill explained.
Sarah Mackenzie blinked for a moment. If her leg was pulled much harder, it was going to tear off, she decided.
O'Neill looked away. A break in the clouds gradually appeared beneath them. Sarah Mackenzie followed O'Neill's eye line and saw the passing scenery. Beneath the chopper the snow-speckled houses had thinned out almost to the spacing of farming homesteads. They were travelling extremely quickly now. Their altitude was still increasing. The clouds seemed to be mostly below them now, like someone had blown up a cotton gin, and then left the wreckage out to cover the paddock.
" 'Star Gate' as in what?" Mac asked. For a moment she thought she had heard that wrong. The sound transmitted through the internal communications channel was poor, often coming through their headphones as a barely audible series of scratches. The microphones that they all wore were voice activated. As a consequence, the first syllable of any sentence was lost. It was always better to start a speech by uttering something articulate like "Umm" to get the microphone's attention.
"As in gate to the stars," answered the voice of Samantha Carter through the internal comm circuit.
Mac blinked again. They couldn't both be in on the joke, surely. "As in research project for space travel?" She asked. Her voice was still working while her brain tried to catch up, making sounds for the sake of reserving space in the conversation.
She did have a few coherent thoughts by the time her mouth had finished the place holding exercise. That would explain their listing their place of origin as Earth, she decided. It was a morale thing. Sort of a group-bonding piece of half-baked psychology. That sort of half-baked personnel management was typical of the Military, in her experience. It would be there on the off chance that they ever achieved anything. That being the case, it was a good idea to put the return to sender thing on the envelope, so the recipient could reject the thing when it turned up at the wrong address. Not a real likely venture, but hey what did the embroidery cost? A machine did it anyway.
"Something like that," agreed Carter to Mackenzie's question. Carter exchanged a look with O'Neill.
Mackenzie had to replay the conversation in the comfort of her own head so she could remember what she had suggested. Oh, yeah, that. Damn.
"They'll explain more when we get to our base," Carter said evasively.
"But…" she was only reserving space in the conversation again. Sarah Mackenzie had nothing coherent to say at that moment.
"Just read on Colonel," O'Neill said blandly. "It's all in there." He pointed to the dossier on her lap.
She picked the dossier up from her lap and flicked to the next document. It was a budget requisition form for…
How much money? She checked and she found that, yeah, all the zeros were in the right place, that was, in fact, Billions they were talking about.