Sarah Mackenzie drawled to a halt, leaving her story interrupted. Commander Rebka waited patiently for her to finish the sentence.
"I…" she began and then stopped. She went to speak again and then stopped a second time. "I'm still having trouble with this," she said finally.
"Who was it? Some one we knew? Some one from an old case?"
"I…" she said again. "I'm going to have another cup of coffee. You?"
He looked momentarily puzzled. "Yeah," he agreed dubiously.
She climbed from behind her desk and stepped around it. He handed her the cup.
"So who was it?" he asked.
She stopped at the door and turned back to answer him. "That's the wrong question. You should be asking what was it?" She closed the door behind her to let him consider the answer to that question.
It was going to be a good day after all, she decided. She marched to the kitchen in a much-improved state of mind.
*
Despite all that she had read during the flight from Washington, and the secretive nature of O'Neill's behaviour throughout their time together, it was only at that moment that Sarah Mackenzie knew that this situation that she had found herself in was not only real, but also deadly serious. Oh, and slightly to the left of left field, in fact it might be standing in the car-park outside the ground it was so far to the left of the pitcher's mound.
It was time to stop laughing down her sleeve at their self-important posturing and time to accept that they might not be the crackpots that she believed they were. Laughing hysterically might not be out of place, she decided. In fact that had a wonderful attraction to it. She could burst into gales of hysterical laughter and maybe they would take her away, after dressing her in a jacket with long sleeves and buttons that fastened down the back. That was a nice idea, she could do with a long rest, somewhere peaceful, with tranquil views and padded walls.
In her mind there was a disorienting lurch, she finally let go of the notion that she was about to meet a Russian so that they could negotiate. No, that was not on the agenda at all. Not one little bit.
For a moment she thought she was having a stroke, but no such luck. It was simply her head draining of blood pressure. She didn't faint, but only through an exercise of will.
No it was not a Russian, or an Israeli or a Kuwaiti who was waiting for her in the conference room. She was going to meet someone else entirely.
Nothing would have proved that the stargate was not simply an interesting research program, using up vast amounts of Pentagon dispensed taxes, more thoroughly than the sight that General Hammond's team presented to her at that moment. The stargate was real. It was…It was… not just a way to put every expert in every field from Aardvark adenoids to Zebra testicles onto the payroll and make work for them so that they don't become Greenpeace activists or some of the kind of commie subversive. (I guess that must be a legacy of electing a Bush to the White-house again. The USA may well be the one place in the world where the majority of citizens in a genuine democracy (sort of) can claim; 'don't blame me I didn't vote for him', truthfully.) Democracy is an interesting concept, especially the way it is executed in the western World. Once every three, four or five years (depending on where this exercise is conducted) the people get to chose from a very select field just who will be their dictator for the next three, four or five years (strike out which ever is not applicable). Sort of like totalitarianism with the dictators taking turns. It is so much more dignified than the way it's conducted in places where the country name includes the words 'Democratic' or 'Republic.' Some times you get a place like the Democratic Republic of Congo, where they have both words in the country name, and you can guarantee that the election of a new government involves casting your vote with little streamlined lead pellets, and the swinging vote probably uses a machete.
We digress, back to the story. The stargate was the means by which the Delegate was able to come to meet with the representatives of the United States Military. His trip was somewhat too long to have been conducted using commercial jet travel. In fact if we start to add up his frequent flier entitlements we need the services of Cooper's and Lybrand before we get to far into the task.
Sarah Mackenzie thought she understood the term déjà vu. Now she fully understood the term for the first time in her life. The most disorienting aspect of the Delegate's appearance was the overwhelming familiarity of it. It was such a familiar sight that it could actually be termed a stereotype.
The Delegate was small and grey. It stood barely a metre and a half tall. It was naked, and obviously had no external gender specific identifications. Gender might not actually be relevant to the Delegate Mackenzie realised. The head that sat atop that frail body was oversized, with enormous almond shaped black eyes that stared unblinkingly out from an oversized skull. The face surrounding the eyes was too small; the nose was almost an afterthought. It amounted to, well it was little more than a couple of slots to allow the passage of air. The mouth was small prissy and virtually lipless.
"Colonel Sarah Mackenzie," General Hammond intoned. "Meet Odin."
Odin presented a hand with three very long thin fingers. It hovered in the air waiting for Mackenzie to shake it.
*
"You are kidding me," Harmon Rebka said to Sarah Mackenzie, over the lip of his coffee cup. If he wasn't careful he was in danger of pouring it down his chin. In his current state he might not notice the damage.
"I'm not joking, Harm," Sarah Mackenzie said. She wore her most earnest expression. The unfortunate part of wearing such a serious expression is that it looks comical by itself. "I am deadly serious."
Harm managed not to laugh by the expedient of biting the inside of his mouth. This is a sure fired way to avoid laughing. It actually hurts like hell. "An alien?" he managed to ask finally. "Not just any old alien, but a genuine bug-eyed grey abductee story type alien."
"The very one," she said and nodded. "Like straight out of the National Inquirer."
"Did you see Agent K or Agent J?" Harm asked. He managed to get the question out without smiling around the lip of his cup, and managed not to spill coffee on himself.
Mackenzie was elsewhere. "What?"
"You know the Men in Black," he said. The confusion on her face prompted him to say, "MIB, movie starring Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones… protecting humanity from the scum of the…Never mind."
"This is real Harm," she turned that look on him again. This time it wasn't funny.
He held up his hands in mock surrender. "Hey I'm listening."
"Hmm," She sipped once from her cup. The coffee was still warm. She had expected it to have cooled down to the point where it was disgusting given how much time she had spent talking so far.
"Carry on I'm all ears."
"That's what your girlfriends say I hear."
"Ha Ha, the story…"
*
The alien that General Hammond had introduced as Odin had done something so incongruously unexpected that Sarah Mackenzie forgot her manners for a second. She stared at the outstretched hand. Her mind was blank. Samantha Carter nudged her elbow and Mackenzie realised that she was supposed to shake the alien's hand. She took it and was surprised at how firm the grip was from such a frail looking creature. Its flesh was surprisingly cold.
Her mind was going around in little circles. The logo on their shirt was not for show. It really was a return to sender pieces of addressing. Funny how your mind tries to concentrate on the minute when the really big picture gets a bit overwhelming.
"Odin represents the Asgard on earth," General Hammond said.
Mackenzie sort of free associated her way from, Asgard references, to the name Odin and then finally to the way the Norse society of hundreds of years ago had…Oh my…
"The team who will go through with you is the SG-1 team," Mackenzie heard General Hammond say. She realised that she had missed quite a bit of the conversation while her mind had been elsewhere. She hoped none of it was important, somehow she knew that was a vain hope. Everything in this conversation was going to be important, she could tell that.
She shook her head and cleared her mind as best she could under the circumstances. "I'm still trying to catch up here," she apologised.
"Take your time Colonel," Hammond offered. "While we have lunch you can meet the rest of the team." He beckoned to a group of humans who stood unrecognised behind the slight figure of Odin. "This is Daniel Jackson." He indicted a man of slightly more than average height, even featured as though he was a television presenter rather than a member of the marines. He wore glasses that were formed from a fine wire frame and offset his features well. His dark sandy hair was cropped reasonably short. His eyes were alive with more than the normal level of Marine intelligence, there was none of the guarded looks that military personnel exhibited either. She found herself looking at his shoulders. With a start she realised that he had no rank insignia. Then she realised where she had heard the name before. It had been scattered throughout the file she had read earlier in the day.
"He is our civilian representative," continued General Hammond. "Daniel's work on the translation of the runes around the stargate led to the controlled use of the thing in the first place."
"Translation?" she asked. Then it dawned on her, she had read so much that she had not had the chance to digest it yet, the stargate was not a human creation; it was a human discovery. Of course! The world wobbled a bit more while she made another conceptual shift.
Let me try and summarise this for myself, Mackenzie decided. There were aliens out there in the wider universe who looked like the Asgards and who were always being accused of kidnapping people from those dinky little mid-western towns so the tabloid papers could make their awful headlines. Those rumours always seemed to abound in the…She put a halt to that line of reasoning. They were in Wyoming, she reminded herself, right in the heart of that part of the country where those rumours always seemed to originate. Oh dear… Then if they were true, then…
Daniel Jackson was holding out his hand as though expecting her to take it. She shook it absently and mouthed a few vague, and hopefully, appropriate pleasantries. She was still dealing with the idea that the National Inquirer was accurately reporting real events. That would suggest that the rest of the papers, those who ignored the alien abduction stories were probably being pressured into silence by the might of the military and the official secrets legislation. Mackenzie felt the approach of an on-rushing headache of biblical proportions.
"We expect you to have lots of questions," Carter said. "Things are reasonably urgent though. A lot of them can be answered as we go."
"As we go…Where?"
"With Odin."
I think I missed something important there, Mackenzie told herself. If I ask them to, I wonder if they wouldn't mind pausing so she could rewind this conversation and listen to it again. She was sure she had missed a great deal of it.
She thought she had a handle on what Carter meant this time. "You want me to go through that thing?" Mackenzie guessed. She thought there was an uncomfortably obvious note of anxiety in her words. It might not be all that obvious to the other's but in her experience, that jump of an octave and half in the last syllable was a dead give away. It had only dawned on her at that moment that she was expected to Go Through The Stargate To An Other Star. That was what these people expected of her. Her mouth was suddenly very dry. Now where was that long sleeved jacket when you needed it?
A good scream might not go astray at this moment.
"Yes, it's where our hostage-to-fate is at the moment," Hammond explained cryptically.
"Where? What? Hostage to fate? Oh the FBI agent who's…oh sh…"
"With the Asgards…"
"OK. I think I get this."
"Our FBI agent is with the Asgard, yes."
"As in Norse Gods?" She just had to clear that up. Maybe it was just the name they had applied out of a twisted sense of humour? She could imagine Jack O'Neill finding something like that to be funny. With a name like Odin what did she really expect?
"Yes," said Daniel Jackson. "It's not just a name we gave them in tribute to the Old Norse Gods, they actually were the source of their theology. The ancient Norse, actually interacted with the Asgard, Odin was the leader of the outpost that monitored Humanity at that time and…Are you alright?"
"No I think I'm suffering from a lack of blood sugar and a really big conceptual over load."
"We should start lunch," General Hammond suggested.
"And sit down," agreed Mackenzie fervently.
The delegation took seats amid the standard wheels on carpet rustling while their chairs were moved about. Mackenzie took a seat part way along one side of the table. She helped herself to a sandwich while she decided what to say. Everyone at the table noticed that she took a cheese and gherkin. She must have been seriously stressed because everyone knows that no one eats those things. They're always left on the plate at the end of the conference. You could put them in boxes and sent them to Rwanda and they would sit on the docks and go rotten before anyone could possibly get hungry enough to eat one. It went straight into her mouth, got bitten chewed and swallowed while the rest of the delegation watched on in stunned amazement.
"Oh…" She thought for a moment. What could she say to these people after that revelation about the Norse Gods? She decided to plough forward. Perhaps her mind could catch up at a later date. "Which star are we talking about?" she decided was the best question she could ask at this moment.
"We don't have a name for it," Samantha explained while she selected sandwiches of her own. She pushed the cheese and gherkin things away and looked once more at the half-eaten one on Mackenzie's plate. She shook her head. "It's not in our Galaxy," Carter said in such a deceptively matter of fact way. "It's in…Is there something wrong?"
"No, no. I. I…" Mackenzie shook her head. This was getting ridiculous. Not in our galaxy? Oh boy…
"The Asgards are all over the stargate network," Carter explained. "They're one of the few races with a real understanding of how the things work. Until recently they had an outpost not too far from here, for research mostly.
"The Goa'uld overran the outpost of theirs," O'Neill explained cryptically, "and the Asgard's research team was subdued, circumvented and 'blended'." He smiled cynically. "The Goa'uld installed their symbionts in the Asgard personnel. It's a new problem for them. Gave them quite a fright."
Sarah Mackenzie was suffering from a bad case of information overload. "The what?" she asked; she was already dreading the answer.
She took a sandwich and began eating. At least she would cure one reason for the sick feeling in her stomach. Her discomfort might have been caused by eating a cheese-and-gherkins sandwich, we don't know, and have no way to be sure because nobody has ever eaten one in the past so we have no way to judge their effect. It is unlikely, they were all fresh ingredients and there was no reason to suggest that she may have been suffering from salmonella poisoning or bilious problems. The nagging sick feeling in her stomach is probably related to the face that she hasn't eaten for a long time. Of course it might have something to do with the development of a totally new and unexpected ulcer. Curing that other one might take a little more effort and some assistance from a doctor.
"The Goa'uld?" Asked Jack O'Neill around a mouthful of bread laced with processed meat-like substances and processed cheese. He then proceeded to answer his own question. "They're a bad lot of alien parasites floating about this galaxy. They make a lot of trouble for the rest of us who are using the stargate network."
I wish I hadn't asked, Mackenzie thought to herself.
"They are semi-intelligent parasites that get by, by having a symbiotic relationship with slave hosts," Jackson explained. "Part of what they do is borrow the neural capacity of the host, making the symbiont a good deal brighter than the little reptilian thing is, to start with."
Seriously should never have asked, thought Mackenzie. You can stop now. Too much information.
"They were the aliens that Erik Von Danniken postulated in his Charriot's of the Gods thing about twenty years ago. The ones who were responsible for building the pyramids of Egypt, and that sort of stuff.
She couldn't help herself. Before she could get control of her mouth, the question was out before she could bite it's head off. "What're they like?" she asked.
"Show her Teal'c." O'Neill pointed to the dark hued man lurking at the end of the table. He pushed away from the table and climbed to his feet. He stepped forward and revealed a distinctive gold tattoo embossed into the skin of his forehead. His head was shaven. His face was regular apart from the most exaggerated lips she had seen on a human being. They looked like a plastic surgeon had been just a trifle too enthusiastic in their development. They made Mick Jagger look positively skeletal.
Of course they had one of those here as well, Mackenzie thought. How stupid of me not to realise that. D'oh.
The large Black man had sat quietly through the dissertation without saying a word. His only comments had been the occasional editorial comment conveyed by a single raised eyebrow that punctuated the revelations made by the SGC team.
O'Neill pushed away from the table so that the man he had called Teal'c stood revealed before her. He pulled the hem of his shirt from the waistband of his trousers and began lifting it to show his abdomen.