Revised 10.10.04
CHAPTER FOUR: RECLAIMING THE NIGHT
Methos' gaze swept across the huge black granite blast doors that marked the exit from the inner world of Cheyenne Mountain with relief. At last, he had safely reached the outside world. Desperate to get out, he decided not to wait for the bus to the car park. He turned away from the artificial glare of the Mountain's lights, and hurried down the tunnel-road towards the early dawn light.
As he walked, the icy, pine-scented air whipped through the tunnel from outside and wrapped itself around him, an antidote to the sanitized, somatized air of the Mountain's air conditioning system. It braced Methos, allowing him to wrap up and cover his anxiety, and to firmly draw Lieutenant Michael Adams on in its place. He evidently succeeded, for as he reached the Mountain's outer perimeter, he was able to salute the entrance guard with equanimity.
As he finally entered the gloaming, half-light of the emerging morning though, he couldn't help casting a glance behind him.
Intellectually, he knew that he was pretty safe for some time yet - days or even weeks in all likelihood. All of his instincts, though, cried out to him to run.
He touched the metallic talisman in his pocket for reassurance.
Surely they were after him by now? It wouldn't be hard for them to come and get him from here, he thought. But no one rushed after him; no one that is, except the rest of gamma watch, streaming out of the Mountain now, all clearly anxious to get home as quickly as possible.
Despite this respite, the craggy features of the SGC Colonel rose up again to haunt him. Methos tried to order his thoughts, but they kept swirling round in front of him.
He had panicked, he realized, chagrinned.
Hardly an unwarranted reaction, of course. The Goa'uld glyphs branded into the Colonel's arm, were, after all, MEANT to be a warning. It was just that it wasn't supposed to be aimed at or understood by him - or anyone else in NORAD for that matter.
He tried once again to wrestle the facts into place. His eyes swept the surrounding vista of rocks, stubble and looming trees; but his mind saw only the barbed wire barrier that prevented his escape into the wilderness.
As he paced, waiting for the bus to take him back to Patterson Air Force Base and his quarters, Methos found the incident pushing its way forward to the surface of his mind, demanding to be replayed so that he might understand it, fit it into the jigsaw. The sound of the alarm whooping from his console kept running through his head.
After a moment's struggle, he gave up, and went with the flow of the memory.
As the alarm pounded out its alert, O'Neill snapped out, "Shut it off, can't you, its giving me a headache." His fingers, though flew quickly enough over his console, eager to establish what had set off the noise.
"Number 14781 in the catalogue," Methos announced from the command station, "Otherwise known as OSCAR 11, amateur radio satellite launched March 1, 1984, broadcast frequency 145.825 MegaHertz."
Except that after faithful service for almost twenty years, it was no longer sitting in its allocated place in the heavens. Instead, it seemed that it was about to burn up in the Earth's atmosphere.
"One piece of junk down, a million or so to go," the Colonel muttered, voicing the space junk trackers creed, apparently unsympathetic to the satellite's user's plight.
"Old amateur radio satellites like OSCAR 11 are bound to lose their hold on geosynchronous orbit sometime, after all," he said, in response to their looks. "It's just that we should have been able to see it coming, well in advance," he continued, his voice tinged with annoyance.
The discussion was cut off when Captain Marleau came dashing back into the Control Center, rushing past the guard in record time. His initial survey of the room came to a full stop when he saw Colonel O'Neill, still seated at the SGC console.
"Sorry, Sir," he said. "I hadn't realized you were here. Do you wish to take command?"
"No, you go right ahead, Captain. I'm on light duty status, so humor a wounded man and let me just watch quietly from the sidelines," the Colonel replied.
As he shifted back to his normal duty station, Methos watched the resources being poured into tracking the satellite's fall. He knew that once a satellite's orbital wanderings started, its rate of decay was normally reasonably predictable months in advance, and typically happened after years in orbit. Issuing orbital decay warnings was, after all, the very meat and drink of the Space Control Center. They hadn't predicted OSCAR 11 though.
Methos understood that the satellite's unscheduled demise was an affront to their professional pride. All the same, Methos had thought that events of this kind were no big deal. There had been a couple of hundred explosions between pieces of floating junk in space that he knew of.
Yet it was being handled as if it was a big deal.
Other backup staff quickly poured in to join the party, bringing the Space Control Center to full alert status. As the analysis flowed, Methos - now fully into his role as Lieutenant Adams - was designated to pull up the tracks of some of the other objects in the same low orbit that OSCAR was supposed to be in.
The most likely explanation, he knew, was that the satellite had collided with some other piece of space junk loose in the vicinity. There were plenty of older satellites, spaceship parts, and other objects - objects that were continuing hazards to those still operating - wandering about unable to be controlled, and ready to cause catastrophic damage to anything that got in their way. The problem, though, was that nothing obvious was showing up: the system continued to be unable to identify the culprit.
As he worked, his life was complicated by Colonel O'Neill, who, despite his comment about watching quietly, issued a dry, running commentary on the proceedings, complete with quizzes, aimed apparently at educating the two Lieutenants – and occasionally their captain. Methos could have done without the not-so-subtle testing.
Marleau, though, his round face beaming with puppy dog like enthusiasm, lapped it up. Stuck yet again, he turned to the Colonel for advice. "Any suggestions, Sir?" he asked.
"Well, Captain, what were you thinking of trying," O'Neill replied, apparently reluctant to give in to the appeal to authority.
"Well, retasking our own network of sensors and telescopes to focus more closely on the area OSCAR 11 has been in, I guess," Marleau replied.
"Good call," the Colonel replied, encouraging him to follow his own judgment.
The closer focus quickly yielded some results.
It was clear that it wasn't just OSCAR 11: a whole little cone of objects at different heights in orbit had been displaced. It was just that OSCAR was the most obvious, since it was relatively large, and had been knocked not just out of its little favorable orbital niche, but out of orbit altogether.
"Perhaps it's a cloaking device," O'Neill muttered.
"Then how do we steal it from the Romulans?" Lt Jones responded, emboldened.
O'Neill grinned.
"Actually, the Romulans have already given us the cloaking device to help fight the Dominion - haven't you been keeping up with your Deep Space 9, Lieutenant?" he replied.
As they continued to work, attempting to eliminate candidates from their catalog of 10,000 or so space objects in orbit, data from a fascinating variety of sources appeared - sources that seemed to be deep in the solar system as well as in orbit.
Methos almost forgot his real mission for a while, so lost was he in the dazzling sophistication of the detection array, something well beyond anything he had expected. Until he realized it was a degree of sophistication that could only be explained by the use of alien technology. Not that there were any overt signs of this - it was just that the things these sensors could do were decades ahead of anything he had been taught at school.
Yet despite all the activity - and the technology - an hour later, no one was much the wiser. The obvious possibilities had all been ruled out.
Captain Marleau finally capitulated. He issued an urgent alert, and put tracking OSCAR 11's rapidly degrading orbit into the priority-tasking list for the tracking systems.
"OK folks," he said. "You can stand down from alert status now. I hereby declare the excitement officially over."
The Colonel, though, was not ready to call it a day, and finally gave up his pretense of detachment.
"All right kiddies - what can we learn from all this. Apply Occam's razor - the satellite moved, we can't find what caused it to move, ergo the simplest explanation is?"
Keen to ingratiate himself, and restore the credibility of his Lieutenant Adams persona, Methos took up the challenge this time and said, "There really is a ship out there with a cloaking device?"
"Well perhaps not literally," the Colonel responded, looking a bit tense. "It could just be hiding from us behind some of the other junk."
"Still," he said, "no reason why we can't try out something new. I've developed a technique based on something I recently read about, and I think it might give us some new insights. Why don't we see what we can find? It's what I came up here to try out anyway," he confided, looking at Marleau for permission.
As soon as the Captain nodded his agreement, the Colonel turned back to his computer and started working, completely reconfiguring the sensor array.
As he watched the Colonel play with the computer, Methos became increasingly excited. He quickly recognized that it was his work the Colonel was drawing on, his thesis topic - his contribution to Earth's defense.
He was tempted to say something, claim credit - but it was obvious that the Colonel hadn't matched his name to the paper he had read, and so he decided to wait.
It soon became obvious that the Colonel was adding a few variants to his approach, and was developing it into a full-blown shield detection technique.
Methos was impressed – he hadn't thought there were enough clues in the article, or a sufficient understanding of the technologies involved among Earth's scientists - to allow someone else to get this far.
As the Colonel set up the computer to re-analyze the data, though, Methos suddenly realized what was happening. His work could be about to give the enemy an extra advantage. He stared at his screen, unable to look away.
The Colonel was close, so close.
But he hadn't quite got it yet.
Almost without thinking, Methos acted.
These might be the good guys - but at the moment, the evidence was at best ambiguous.
Until he was sure one-way or another, he couldn't just hand them the key to seeing more, not without good reason.
Hurriedly, he decided to risk a little sabotage. Surruptiously, Methos altered some of the data stream, splicing it with another source to skew the results.
Somewhat to his surprise, the misdirection actually worked. After playing around for an hour or so, the Colonel was forced to declare that he had found nothing. His crestfallen look as he admitted it garnered him some sympathy from Methos - but not enough to make him cave in and fix the data back up for him.
As his memory of the crisis ended, Methos became conscious once again of his surroundings in the open air above the base. He remembered the aftermath. He had sat through the rest of the shift in suspense, waiting for the Colonel to realize what he had done. Sooner or later, he was bound to be caught. But he could do his best to make it later.
He had, very tentatively, with seeming modesty, admitted his authorship of the original paper. He had admired the Colonel's elaborations, and asked if he could perhaps help by re-analyzing the data.
After all, he thought, the Colonel was bound to make the connection with his name sooner or later. The Colonel had quickly agreed, and had been about to say more, when he was called away to the phone. Fortunately, the Colonel had had to leave the Center shortly afterwards.
He looked around towards the base again, as he thought about the Colonel's good-natured banter and dry humored barbs.
They certainly didn't fit anything Methos knew about either the Goa'uld or those who served them.
All the same, the evidence in favor of alien infiltration of Earth's defences was stacking up.
Which brought him firmly back to the present.
He considered his options.
Should he run now, before his sabotage could be detected?
No, he resolved, as he climbed onto the bus and took a seat. Not yet. He needed to think through what he knew again, in the hope that he could make more sense of it.
When the bus's engine finally started up, and the vehicle started moving down the road, Methos sagged against his seat in relief.
It had only gone a few meters though, when it suddenly stopped.
A familiar looking man, followed by a blonde woman, both with SGC patches on their uniforms, boarded, and headed towards him.
He stiffened, drawing in a deep breath.
Perhaps he hadn't got away with it after all.