Rev 10.01.04
CHAPTER TWO: LIEUTENANT ADAMS
Lieutenant Michael Adams, newly minted United State Air Force officer, glanced up from his console in North American Aerospace Command's (NORAD) Space Control Center, to see a gray-haired man in blue battle dress uniform brushing his identification card on the outer door pass reader.
He wondered idly who the man was. Presumably, he was one of the off-shift personnel he hadn't met yet, come to do a bit of overtime.
So far, Methos, in his newly adopted identity as Lieutenant Adams, had been surprised at the ease with which he had fit back into the military way of doing things. He hadn't had any problems adapting to NORAD's Space Control Center.
True, armies made good hiding places for people like himself. Recruits tended to come from wide geographic areas, and from all sorts of backgrounds. And most militaries had a deliberate policy of moving officers around frequently. So with everyone virtually a stranger, and a continuous influx of newcomers, it was far easier to fit into a military base than into an established, civilian community.
Still, Methos tended to avoid the military whenever possible. He preferred a less structured life - and he liked the freedom to choose to flee rather than fight, if circumstances permitted. Of course, he thought, there are times when self-interest has to overcome instinct. And this had seemed to be one of them, he thought, reflecting grimly once again on his assessment of the evidence.
Even so, NORAD was proving a gentle induction back into the military life. His Space Control Center posting offered Methos an appealing mixture of academic - albeit application-oriented research - combined with the easy-going camaraderie that went with any kind of watch duty that involved long periods of boredom coupled with moments of adrenaline-filled tension. All in all, Lieutenant Adams was enjoying his new life.
But you need to pay attention if you want to keep it and succeed in achieving your objectives, he reminded himself. It would be months before he could be sure that he had really established this identity successfully.
Careful not to seem to be paying too much attention, Methos looked casually around to see if he could get any clues to their approaching visitor from the other staff in the Space Control Center.
His eyes roamed around the cavernous, rather empty room.
Half the room, where Lieutenant Jones was still intent on setting up some equipment, looked like an oversized electronics laboratory, strewn about with a seemingly random collection of electronic parts, devices, and computers. The equipment he was adjusting gave off a discordant offbeat song of beeps, set against the steady hum of the air conditioning and other equipment in the bunker.
The rest of the room, where he was sitting, looked like a miniaturized film-set version of NASA's mission control, with consoles mostly dark and empty now, in the early hours of the morning part way through gamma shift. From his central vantage point at the command console, he could see that the technical sergeant, Ian Spicer, was still intent on his panel, and hadn't yet noticed the visitor approaching. In the far corner, though, the other officer on duty had looked up, a happy smile creasing his hitherto expressionless face.
"Morning ladies, how's the space junk business going?" the gray-haired man said, finally escaping the guard desk and entering the room.
Starting to get out of his chair in order to formally greet the visitor, Methos considered the man walking towards him, still holding his ID card ready for entry into his log. Presumably, either a very senior officer, or perhaps a civilian contractor, if he thought he could get away with that as an opening line, Methos concluded.
The man wasn't wearing any rank tabs, but certainly looked more like a battle scarred, front-line combat veteran than a scientist.
Appearances can be deceptive, he reminded himself.
After all, he himself had played mild-mannered linguist and timid mortal researcher/immortal watcher Adam Pierson for almost 10 years.
A far cry from the man he really had to be, to survive, head still attached to his neck and sane (well, as sane as can be expected, he corrected himself) for over 5,000 years.
Inevitably, as they always did when he thought of the past, the suppressed memories came, a surge of paralyzed horror muddled together with gloating exultation.
Yes, he thought, we must certainly hope that appearances can be deceptive.
He sure hoped that the eager young Lieutenant Adams, fresh out of grad school and officer training, though sharing the same face, bore no resemblance to the man who had once been one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, the rider on a pale horse known only as Death. A thing that men had had been forced to fall to their knees to, and, at his whim, either serve or die, for over a thousand years.
Methos shuddered mentally, quickly suppressing the memories that threatened to overwhelm him. He was safe here, he reminded himself. Death was dead, long dead. No longer part of him. It was only a memory, a remnant of something that no longer was.
And for more immediate threats, the mountain itself, the hollow hill, was holy ground, the land being consecrated as all military bases were. No duels could be fought here to sunder his head from his body, bringing on the final death and the loss of his ancient quickening energies to some victor in the endless Game played by immortals seeking to be the only One.
Pulling himself together quickly, Methos mentally reviewed his current persona - you are young, eager, naïve, he reminded himself - and leapt to attention, making his hands twitch, seemingly hard pressed to resist the temptation to salute.
"Welcome to Space Control, Sir," he said rather breathlessly. Best to assume he's a superior officer he figured. If he's a contractor, no harm done. "Lieutenant Michael Adams at your service, Sir," he went on eagerly, in a mid- Atlantic accent. "Captain Marleau is at a meeting over in the Ops Center; - can I help you, Sir?"
He ran to a stop abruptly, waiting, as if just taking in the visitor's casual stance and the quickly suppressed grimace at his puppy dog-like enthusiasm.
"I'm Colonel Jack O'Neill," the man replied. "Just here to give my friend in the corner an early mark."
Methos attempted to stiffen even further, and started pulling his hand up into a salute.
The Colonel waved his hand down. "Relax, Lieutenant," the Colonel said. "Didn't you read the sign as you came in the Mountain?" he continued, trying to suppress a grin. "You know, the one that said you were entering a 'no hat, no salute' zone?" the Colonel said, pointing as he went on to his own insignia-less BDUs.
Inwardly, Methos, cringed. This was the worst part of a new identity, he thought, having to play the naïve new boy. Here I am, a 5,000-year-old immortal, and I have to pretend to be a 21-year-old geek. Oh, the disadvantages of never ageing he muttered darkly to himself.
"Sorry Sir," he replied stiffly, "I've only been here a fortnight".
"I would never have guessed," the tall, gray haired Colonel replied dryly. "Straight out of the Academy?" he queried.
"No Sir. PhD from MIT and then Officer Training School."
Now that the Colonel was in the room, Methos could see that although his BDUs bore no rank or name tags, he was wearing the identification patch of the mysterious SGC.
Despite Methos' discrete attempts to draw people out, no one seemed to know even what the initials stood for. All he got was warnings to avoid the project's personnel at all costs. So far, this hadn't proved hard, since the SGC officer of the watch was never the same from shift to shift, and all had tended to confine themselves strictly to the formal questions and answers required of them. They tended to ignore the lighthearted banter that was the norm amongst the rest of the Center's staff.
The smile on the face of the current SGC watch officer - which he noted had suddenly disappeared - was the first break in the pattern since he had been here.
Officially, he'd been briefed, the SGC was a project tasked with developing improved deep space detection and tracking techniques. It sounded logical - he'd been told their second in command, a Colonel, had himself developed some of the telescope data integration techniques that were part of NORAD's standard armory of techniques to track objects deep into space.
Around 30 SGC staff were rotated through each of NORAD's five shifts from alpha to echo, taking charge of the deep space detection console in order to keep them current, and test out the ideas and equipment being developed by the project. Several of the senior officers on the project also did relief shifts as watch commander.
But unofficially, the anomalies that surrounded the SGC fairly leapt off the page. He had learned in his first day orientation session that the SGC had its own, completely separate command structure, complete with a two star General.
True, the Cheyenne Mountain Complex seemed to have a lot of odd commands based in its conveniently secure confines. It was easier to hide things from the public eye inside a cold-war bunker built inside a hollowed out mountain, and safer to house some things inside a facility designed to survive a direct hit from a nuclear bomb.
Still, if all the SGC did was deep space tracking research, a Major General to head the project was surely just a little top-heavy.
Then, on his second day in the mountain nearly two weeks ago, the Canadian lieutenant whom he was replacing had muttered darkly that most of the project's members, though competent enough, didn't really seem to be scientists.
Methos, ever paranoid, had watched the SGC rostered staff on his shifts carefully since then. They certainly seemed a truly bizarre mix. Some clearly were scientists. But most of them had the tough, muscled look of combat hardened frontline troops. None of them, save those serving as replacement watch commanders, ever wore rank insignia. Yet occasional comments had revealed that some of them were disconcertingly high ranking for such an essentially routine function. Like a Colonel offering to handle a console in a command normally headed by a Captain...
Over the past week or so, Methos had worked hard to get gamma watch to relax around him. As a result, he had, despite the injunctions to secrecy that they had all received, managed to get them to open up one by one, and disgorge their particular pet theories on what the SGC was really up to. A common theme was that they were really Special Forces troops. And, Methos reflected, they certainly looked like they were straight off the frontline - stressed, edgy and sporting odd injuries.
But why use SFs, Methos wondered, to monitor the output of the telescopes that formed NORAD's ground based electrico-optical deep space surveillance sites for bits of space junk that might run into the shuttle, or satellites in orbit? Even if the US Air Force was still waiting for little green men to attack Earth (a reasonably popular theory in NORAD), did they really think they needed to be ready to fight hand to hand behind the massive granite doors that blocked the entrance to Cheyenne Mountain?
Another variant on the little green men theory was that they had brought the Roswell (or some other) aliens here many years ago, and were guarding them still, with the SFs on watch in case their compatriots ever came back to claim them. Methos sincerely hoped that this wasn't the case.
Still, if there was one thing everyone agreed on, it was that the SGC's research went well beyond deep space tracking. His watch commander, Captain Marleau's, theory seemed to center on Weapons of Mass Destruction research. Twice in the last year, he claimed, the massive granite doors that locked the mountain down and made it nuclear bombproof, had been closed.
Not, according to Marleau to keep terrorists or bombs out, but to keep the project team in - along with anyone who had the misfortune to have come in contact with them. Marleau claimed that there was a complete biochemical research facility down in the hidden depths that housed the SGC, and he had heard rumors from his predecessors of electronics warfare labs conducting weird experiments.
It had to be said though, that on Methos' brief observation, Marleau was inclined to excessive enthusiasm. He treated his claims with a degree of skepticism.
Methos pulled his thoughts back to the Colonel standing in front of him. The Colonel's eyes had been wondering around the room, looking with apparent disdain at the mostly darkened consoles.
"Oh well, Lieutenant," he said, "Good luck in your posting. I'll just settle down in the corner there, and do a bit of work as I keep watch. You just let me know if there's anything you need me to do," he said, moving towards SGC console.
Turning around to watch, he saw that the other SGC officer now seemed to be completely frozen, staring at the screen as if it was a medusa, turning him into stone. Coming back to himself suddenly as the Colonel approached him, he quickly reached down to hit the keyboard, and looked up at the Colonel.
"You can take the rest of the day off, Lou," the Colonel said to the SGC officer sitting in the corner, wearing a Class B uniform bereft of rank or unit insignia. "I've got a little penance to do for the General," he said.
"Sure, Jack, it's all yours. What did you do this time? Glad to see the Doc finally let you out of the infirmary, anyway," Methos heard Ferretti say, as he quickly logged himself out, and made way for the Colonel.
"It was easy peasy," the Colonel replied, grinning. "Just worked on driving the nurses nuts," he continued, as he carefully lowered himself into the chair that Major Louis Ferretti had just vacated.
"When the infirmary staff threatened to go on strike, she asked the General to keep me occupied," he said.
"Never mind, Jack," Ferretti replied. "At least she let you out. Anyway, its all quiet here - no satellites in danger of being hit, no space missions underway or planned, no Go...um UFOs heading for us so far...so relax, enjoy! I certainly will enjoy not being here!" he continued, talking as he moved towards the exit, as if afraid his ticket to leave would suddenly disappear.
As the Colonel settled into the console, Methos watched him saw him strip down a layer to his black tee shirt, revealing a wounded arm as he moved.
Methos dropped abruptly back into his chair, sprawling almost bonelessly for an instant, before hastily straightening himself. Desperately, he called upon the ingrained lessons of millennia in order to maintain his current persona, his eager beaver façade.
Despite his best efforts, he felt the blood draining away from his face. Methos fought to resist the grip of the nightmare that threatened to submerge him, as old, bitter memories surged up.
Shit, shit, shit he thought. I must be too late. For what he could see etched into the Colonel's arm were Goa'uld slave symbols.