Sarah Mackenzie watched for a reaction on Harm's face. He looked stuffed, as though unsure how he should react to this story. She took another sip from her coffee cup and licked her lips before continuing. Harm seemed awfully subdued. He was normally a good deal more animated than he appeared to be today.
"What's the matter?" she asked him. "You would normally have a lot to say in any story I told by now."
"Still trying to work out what is going on here."
"Don't try too hard it gets worse."
"Oh I have no doubt that it does, none at all.
*
Sarah Mackenzie stood up from her position at the conference table, rubbed her eyes as though trying to wipe out the visual memory of what she had just witnessed. If seeing was believing, then perhaps not seeing was not believing. She found herself standing by the window and looking into the chamber where the huge stone ring stood. She reached out and touched the glass. On the other side of this thin glass wall, a small army of technicians calmly operated a device that could transport her across the galaxy. A couple of hours earlier she had not even been aware that such a thing was possible, let alone done here in the USA. She looked closely at the stargate and shook her head. If things went the way these people thought it would, that was exactly what was going to happen in a short time. She would be sent across space to another galaxy. To visit an alien world that the National Inquirer had been reporting as real for years, she wasn't dealing with this at all well. No she was going to take that back, she wasn't dealing with it at all. Not well, not at all.
Below her, she watched the four men who had come through a gate a few moments earlier. They were marshalled at the base of the ramp leading down from the gate and had begun speaking with the reception team. She watched while they gathered their gear together and marched straight beneath her feet.
She struggled to believe that any of this could be real. Only a few hours earlier she had been preparing to defend a corporal against a desertion charge because he had been silly enough to fall head over heels in lust with a girl during a shore leave. That was the way of the majority of the cases that came before her.
And then to be faced with this…
It boggled the mind. (And did horrible things to the intestines).
She wondered for a moment what Harmon would do if he were faced with this sort of choice. Knowing him he would leap at the chance and go Gung Ho into the breach. So that was definitely the wrong thing to do then. Was it possible to saunter forward slowly? She somehow doubted that it was possible.
Was that her role in all this? Was that what she was expected to do? It had a ring of half truth (or maybe three-quarter truth). But which bit was real and which bit was bulldust, and how can you tell?
And what about the political repercussions of this little affair?
That was an angle she hadn't considered until this moment. The level of security inherent in something of this magnitude must be enormous. For a moment she felt proud of the fact that she was selected for this mission.
And then it dawned on her.
The confidence being displayed in her by the line of command and the political power inherent in being part of the inner circle like this was a sword that had two edges. Newton's laws of motion applied to the momentum of human politics as well. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The opportunity that she had been given here had the same capacity to backfire as it had to provide momentum to her career. She was being handed enough rope to see if she hanged her self.
Seated at the table, the Stargate Command (boy didn't that bring with it some connotations now) awaited her decision.
She turned toward them, heaved one long sigh and then said; "OK," softly; and then added more loudly. "I'll do it."
*
Harmon Rebka regarded Sarah Mackenzie over the lip of his coffee cup. As hard as he tried he couldn't pick any sign that she was winding him up. It couldn't be real, he was sure of that but at this stage the punch line escaped him.
Well there was one way to short circuit that process. "You are kidding me," he chided. His smile turned secretive. "This is all a big wind up isn't it?"
She regarded him seriously, the small lines of a frown creasing her brow. "No it's all deadly serious. I'm not sure how much I can tell you. It's…"
"Bizarre?" he suggested. "The word you're looking for is bizarre."
"Yes. That is sort of what I wanted to say."
He wasn't going to bite again. Let her have her fun for a bit longer then. "Hmm," he prompted.
She waved an upturned hand at him, as though to say, well you know how it is. "You can see why I've been tramping around here all morning like my brain was replaced by a wad of cotton wool," she explained.
"I'm not entirely sure it hasn't. Perhaps those aliens…"
She smiled grimly. "That would sort of prove my point don't you think?"
He nodded. Her brain wasn't completely absent, just the bit that looked after delusion management. "Carry on." He waved an airy gesture with his half empty cup.
*
The four members of SG-1 led Sarah Mackenzie and the alien they called Odin down from the mezzanine floor and into the main cavern. Their boot steps echoed into the far corners of the cavern sinisterly. She found herself looking around at the infrastructure that supported the gate, at the marines that guarded the portal from the scum of the universe. How useful would an AK-47 be against an alien that could create the gate technology? She had no idea, but it obviously made them feel good to parade around in those camouflage uniforms, toting those guns. They might as well shout boo from behind the protection of a doorframe for all the difference it would make.
They led her up to the ramp, but not onto it. She wondered at the hesitation for a moment.
General Hammond's voice echoed through the cavern, amplified by the PA system so that it boomed ominously. He could host talk back radio she thought. 'Just dial 555-WINGE and we'll take called number eleven.' "Stand by," he called into the gate cavern.
The iris sealing the stargate portal, spiralled from it's engagement over the wormhole (doing the actual job of protecting us from the scum of the universe, those snakes in the nervous system, the Goa'uld) with a sound like knives being sharpened. Their outward passage revealed a gaping hole inside the rune decorated stone ring. Hardly the most inspiring of revelations, Mackenzie decided.
The ring rotated. Mackenzie heard an accompanying rumble, like the worlds densest grinding wheel rolling over a load of cornhusks. It came in to the audio processing centres of her brain through the big bones of her skeleton, rather than the little bones of her inner ear. The sound was now malignantly amplified by their proximity, no longer protected by the damping of distance and walls. It filled the otherwise expectantly silent cavity with a new and dangerous foreboding.
One of the chevrons around the periphery of the gate twitched. It locked into place.
"Chevron one engaged," commented an unfamiliar voice from the PA.
The wheel accelerated again, rotated in the opposite direction.
"What is it doing?" Mackenzie turned and asked Carter.
"It's dialling the address of the stargate that we will be heading out to visit. The first three chevrons represent the address of this gate, distance from the centre of the galaxy and then vertical and horizontal angle. The second triplet cover the same data for the destination."
"So you don't have a speed dial system worked out yet?"
"We don't, but the Goa'uld and the ancients and the Asgards and the Tok'ra all have."
"Chevron two engaged," interrupted the voice from the PA.
"Isn't the place where we are going outside of this galaxy? That was what you said wasn't it?"
"Yes."
"Then there must be more to the dialling process than you've just described. It only referenced stars in this galaxy."
"Right again. Odin brought his own dialling control system with him. They won't let us use the same thing that they do. They only let us use the one that we developed ourselves."
The rotation continued remorselessly until a third 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.
A fourth chevron locked, and then a fifth. A sixth chevron dropped. All the while the process was commented on, uselessly, by the control room operator.
The key mechanism surrounding the giant circular stone locked with a robust click.
"Control software off line," announced the voice over the PA.
A palpable air of expectation was felt throughout the cavern. Sarah Mackenzie was uncomfortably aware of the power that was being subdued here. Subdued by what they all admitted was a jury-rigged chicken wire and sticky-tape solution cobbled together by a bunch of boffins and then drowned in jargon to top it off.
"Chevron seven engaged," announced the voice from the PA.
There came the pregnant pause that Mackenzie expected.
She restrained herself from leaping in surprise when the burst of cloud rocketed five metres into the room; covering almost the entire length of the approach ramp in a fraction of a second. Like before, it swirled malignantly for a second before it retreated equally quickly to become a shimmering interface suspended inside the stone ring. Even up this close it looked like the surface of a swimming pool, except it was vertical.
"OK," muttered Mackenzie. "That was suitably dramatic."
"Coming," suggested Jack O'Neill.
"Wouldn't miss it for the world," she lied. Her bladder remained un-voided by an effort of will that only she understood.