Mac paused and shook her head and then rubbed her eyes. Harmon waited for her to continue. She said nothing for a moment, just stared into space.
The delay got the better of him. "What did he show you?"
She shook her head. "I'm not sure I can describe it to you."
"Try," he suggested. "What was it that he showed you?"
"Well," she began, she frowned and then tried again. "There was a little snake thing living inside of him. It poked it's head out of a cross-shaped wound in his stomach." She illustrated with a couple of slashing motions of her finger beneath her ribs.
"You're joking?" Harm asked.
"No," she shook her head. "I wish I was."
*
Teal'c tucked his shirt back into his trousers. Mackenzie spent a few moments gathering her thoughts into some sort of coherent order. No that is the next step, first she had to have some thoughts to put into order, right at this moment she was having no thoughts at all.
"I know this is a lot to take in under such pressing circumstances," apologised General Hammond. "I just wish we had more time to let you absorb all of this."
Boy, that was an understatement.
Outside the conference room, in the operations room they had so recently stood, the counter above the operator's heads approached zero. An alarm sounded. It rung out in the conference room, interrupting their discussion.
Somehow lunch had disappeared. Mackenzie realised that she wasn't hungry any more and had cleared her plate. She stared at the empty plate for a moment and wondered how that might have happened while she wasn't watching. "How does the stargate …?" Sarah Mackenzie asked slightly distracted by the pace at which this whole exercise seemed to be occurring.
"Come along and watch it work," suggested Samantha Carter. Her enthusiasm for the oversize hula-hoop was like a schoolgirl with a new toy. Sarah Mackenzie followed along in her wake like a dazed puppy. They left the confines of the conference room and strode back into the operations centre once again. This time Mackenzie was ready to look at the place, actually try to understand what she was seeing.
There was a bunch of technicians seated in a loose semicircular arrangement working at computers. Each of them had a headset microphone attached to their ears and watched the display before them intently. A huge mimic panel displayed what Sarah Mackenzie took for a star map, displayed the path through which the stargate traveller must be moving.
The computer operator's demeanour conveyed an air of expectancy to Mackenzie's unfamiliar perceptions. In a few cases fingers danced on the keyboards.
"Incoming traveller," Intoned one of the technicians fatuously, I mean like there was anyone in that room who didn't already know that the gate was being used.
Mackenzie walked across to the window looking over the stargate installation and watched what was happening. For some reason there seemed to be steam issuing from something, like a leak. There seemed no reason for this to be happening, but no one seemed concerned.
"We have a valid GDO code received. I have confirmation that it is SG-6 sir."
"Open the iris," General Hammond ordered.
Mackenzie watched while the aperture that covered the hole in the centre of the stargate slid open with a sound like a dozen swords crossing.
The operations centre crowd became deathly silent, waiting. For one mad impulsive moment, Mackenzie wanted to shout out "Boo!!!" at the top of her voice, just to see what happened. She didn't do it of course. It was not good military behaviour and that sort of stuff had been knocked out of her during the last few years. Now back in her university days things might have been a bit different.
Below the mezzanine operations floor, the heavy stone ring rotated slowly within the confines of its stone shroud; finally drawing to a halt with a precision that was impressive in a machine of that size. Something went click with a solid sound that is characteristic of small stone hitting large stone.
At equal intervals around the circular stone structure, the builders had arranged stone chevrons that were able to move into and out of mesh with the ring. This motion was executed with a similar machine like precision to that exhibited by the rotation of the ring. One of those had just locked into place while Mackenzie watched.
"It looks like stone," Mackenzie said. "It isn't of course."
"You're right, it isn't," Samantha Carter explained. "If anyone measured the density of the material from which it had been fashioned," Samantha Carter continued, "they would have realised that it should have left a sizeable dent in space-time. A negative dent," she said and smiled as if that statement might have made sense. "Physicists call the phenomena a wormhole. It's one of the mathematical extrapolations we can make from quantum physical mathematics. It suggested that exotic matter, that is matter with a negative energy density, could be used to stabilise the boundaries of a wormhole in space-time. The thing you see on the floor out there is fashioned from that very type of substance."
"So we have the knowledge to be able to build something like that?" Mackenzie asked.
"Nooo," Carter said slowly. "We have just about enough knowledge to use the think like a chimpanzee using a typewriter. As for building it, we wouldn't know the first thing about how to fashion the material that the ring was made from."
"You're a physicist," Sarah Mackenzie guessed. It wasn't a hard puzzle, only a physicist could come out with that sort of rubbish with such conviction. I mean these are the people who think particles that might be a wave and might be a discrete particle (on it's own than confusion says it all) and when they needed to name the properties of the wave/particle they came up with names like charm and strangeness. And they want us to take them seriously and give them lots of money to play with those toys of theirs. When the Luddite men from Greenpeace make their mark in the world those sorts of gobbledegook physicists are going to be the first people consigned to the place with the rubberised walls.
Samantha Carter nodded. "Hence my involvement in this team. Her gesture encapsulated the four people who made up the SG-1 exploration team.
Beneath the control room, the ring rotated again, slowly, it spun in the opposite direction this time. A rumble like a grinding wheel lazily crushing cornhusks accompanied its majestic progress. It was a sound that filled the otherwise expectantly silent cavern with a new and dangerous foreboding.
Almost unnoticed in the cavern, a group of military liveried men and women - each adorned with protective clothing, and each armed with offensive weaponry - watched the progress of the ring expectantly.
The ponderous rotation and counter rotation continued remorselessly until a sixth hieroglyphic from among those engraved into the circumference of the giant stony toroid, dropped into place, forming a pattern that ancient Egyptians might have recognised. The key mechanism surrounding the giant circular stone locked with a final robust click.
There was a pregnant pause; it endured just long enough to lend an air of expectancy to proceedings. It was the sort of precisely fashioned pause that you would expect from any Creator who had a flair for the dramatic.
From within the ring, a burst of cloud rocketed a distance of almost five metres into the room. It swirled malignantly for a second before it retreated equally quickly and formed a shimmering interface that remained suspended inside the stone ring. It looked like the surface of a swimming pool, except it was vertical, and didn't slosh on the floor. The whole event looked like someone had set off a grenade in a jacuzzi, except it all happened sideways.
The silhouette of a man stepped through the interface and surveyed the scene that confronted him. He was followed seconds later by a second, a third and finally a fourth man. The event horizon closed with a similarly malignant gesture and the iris slid closed.
They lurched to a halt on the near side of the interface and then proceeded to march down the metallic ramp. Their footsteps echoed around the cavern with typical hollow reverberations that all these sorts of scene demand in any good narrative. It is a testimony to his self-esteem that the expectancy in the cavern's atmosphere did not cause them a flinch of concern. They didn't seemed to be in the least phased by the armed reception committee that Mackenzie had noticed for the first time. More than half a dozen AK-47s were aimed directly at the new arrivals.
"Colonel Makepeace?" questioned General Hammond.
"All present and clear sir," called the one who had led the men through the orifice.
"Permission to stand down from alert status?" asked the technicians who seemed to have all the talking to do.
"Stand down," ordered General Hammond. Probably just as well, Mackenzie thought, that they were so cautious. You never knew what might be out there.
O'Neill stood behind Mackenzie throughout the stargate demonstration. He had said barely a hand full of sentences to her in the five hours they had been together and each of them had involved some element of removing the carpet from beneath her feet. He did it again with his next sentence. "The Asgard/Goa'uld have been conducting experiments here on Earth," he said suddenly, filling the silence that had ambushed the gathering before it became oppressive. "Have been for about fifty years, perhaps since the second world war. We've only just found out about it. They have been working with human collaborators, some of them within the Department of Defence we think, among other things, key Foreign Service agencies throughout the world."
He shook his head and continued staring through the window at the stargate. The iris had slid shut again, closing the threatening absence of anything in the open gate maw.
"Strangely enough," O'Neill continued in a vaguely wistful tone, "the FBI have been keeping a file on unexplained phenomena. Apparently it was a sort of a hobby of J. Edgar Hoover's. That department looks after particularly peculiar deaths as well. Over the last few years, they came up with enough information on the conspirators to be able to find them, not enough to lay any criminal charges, of course, but enough to locate who they were. Their discovery must have caused an enormous ruckus in their ranks. From what we can make out, there were, apparently, many infiltrations within the FBI as well.
"This whole mess with the captured agent came about because he was captured by the Goa'uld. It's kind of ironic really, he could just as easily have waited and got a better result. The stupid part of this whole mess was what happened next. The Asgards were also on the case and just weeks later they acted as well. It might have saved everyone a lot of trouble if this guy had been just a little bit dumber. The Asgards would have come in and cleaned up their mess and gone about their business."
Sarah Mackenzie stared through the glass at the stargate. It was sitting resplendid in its cavern, looking remarkably impotent now. It might have been an ancient Egyptian carving in stone. A few stirrings behind her reminded her that she was not here as a spectator, she had an actual job to do. The conference group began making their way back into the conference room.
For some reason Odin had not come out with them to the operations room, Mackenzie noted. Probably the equivalent of going to watch a bunch of chimpanzees playing with a stick that they found on the ground. Our activities around the stargate was probably only of interest to an anthropologist studying primitive life-forms, Mackenzie thought bitterly. She might have been put out if she realised that the Asgards didn't have that high an opinion of humans. After all we were the ones who mistook an understaffed scientific outpost for Godhead. We would probably do it again tomorrow if were given the chance and sufficiently high technology. (Or perhaps not, remember the Cult following David Caresh, or the Jonestown massacre. You don't need hight tech, you just need a good line of chat and a few believers with big sticks, just in case.)
Odin rose from its position on one of the seats adorning the conference room and greeted their return with the same impassive gaze that Mackenzie had seen the last time they had met. Mackenzie wondered for a moment why the briefing was being conducted by the humans and not by the alien. It was the alien's story surely. Maybe it couldn't talk.
The smell of freshly brewed coffee filled the air. A percolator sat on the bench to one side of the conference room and O'Neill staged a mock race with Jackson to be the first to sample it. There followed the usual ritual around the coffee machine, while each of the participants holds their cup out to the leader of the ceremony who dispenses the elixir to all in measured doses. I'm sure you've all seen it done.
Odin watched on and marvelled at this latest manifestation of anthropological interest.
Sarah Mackenzie motioned for O'Neill to continue with the story as soon as she was supplied with her cup. He seemed intent on measuring the appropriate quantity of sugar and needed to concentrate intently on that important task.
"In the resulting dispute," supplied Daniel Jackson taking up the conversation as though nothing had changed, "between the official Asgard group and the renegade Goa'uld infested group, some of the renegade Asgards were subdued by the Asgard assault force. And after the situation was resolved, they liberated the FBI agent. Sort of."
"Sort of?" queried Mackenzie. She needed to sit down before she fell down she realised. She pulled a chair out and leant against the back of it heavily.
"Touch hard to explain," explained O'Neill. He took a long sip from his cup and released a heartfelt sigh. "We're getting there. Just hang in for a bit longer."
The members of SG-1 systematically pulled chairs from beneath the table and sank into the leather upholstery. It was a welcome break for Sarah Mackenzie, leaning against the chair was not doing it for her; she needed to sit down, desperately. She only realised at that moment just how much she had been forced to absorb. She followed suit with what she hoped was not undue haste.
"That's where you come in," Added Samantha Carter, she leant forward, leaning her elbows on the table and waving her right hand about for emphasis. She pointed vaguely in Odin's direction. "They want you to come back with them and act as his advocate. They don't know how badly knocked around he might be, the experience must have had some impact, and they need some one to help them find out just how much."
That sounded like a lawsuit pending to Mackenzie, or her life's work. She wasn't sure which.
"They don't want to judge him by their ethical standards," General Hammond added. "They're too alien. They want to judge him by our own ethical standards and that's why they need you. To assess his responses and to determine how they stand up in relation to acceptable human guidelines."
Sarah Mackenzie followed this tag team briefing with an air of growing dislocation, as though she felt the world receding from her at an alarming rate. "Oh, you have got to be kidding, right? They want me to tell them if he's OK. What did I do to deserve this?"
"Do you know what the reward is for a job well done Colonel?" asked General Hammond.
"Another harder job?" answered Mackenzie with another question of her own.
"Consider this your hardest, new job."
"Great. Do you have any doubts about my ability to do this?"
"No," answered General Hammond seriously. "Do you?"
"What happens if…" she began and then trailed off so she could think about this a bit.
"You would be amazed at what their technology can achieve."
Across the table from her Odin nodded his oversized head. Well that might have answered the question about their speaking.