Author's note: all times are assumed to be Mountain Time (Colorado time) unless otherwise stated.
==============================================================================================
SATURDAY, APRIL 1, 2006
2100 HOURS PDT
Las Vegas, Martin Pasanen thought. Leave your inhibitions at the door, leave your money inside. He didn't know exactly how he'd ended up here, wearing a penguin suit and trying hard to look like a high roller, but he was fairly sure it had something to do with the man sitting at the bar next to him, tapping out the jazz band's beat with the poker chip in his hand.
Phil Davenport finished his drink. "OK, I'm ready," he declared. "Let's go."
"I still don't think this is a good idea, Phil," Pasanen said glumly. What a poseur, he thought to himself.
"What could possibly be wrong with it? It's brilliant!"
"And stupid, risky, and outrageous."
The duo sidled through the crowd toward the nearest roulette table. "That's why it's so brilliant! Besides, I thought you nominated me to collect the money," Davenport argued.
"I did, but... look, a lot of people are gonna be pissed if we lose. There's twenty bucks of my money in there."
"C'mon, O'Neill deserves a kick-ass party. We could double our funds right now! And if we lose, it's out of my pocket." With that, Davenport pulled it all out: $2,250 in chips, the total donated by SGC personnel for a party to celebrate O'Neill's promotion.
"Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets..."
With great ceremony, he put it all on black. This was it: everything gambled on a single spin of the wheel. Time seemed to stop as the ball rolled around and around...
Suddenly, Davenport's cell phone rang. He excused himself from the table and answered it. It was Hammond.
"General Hammond! Is there an emergency?" Davenport asked.
"Not in particular. I know you're on a 72-hour pass, just wanted to tell you that you've been promoted to Lieutenant Colonel, effective as soon as you get back."
Now this was totally unexpected. "Thank you, sir," Davenport responded, barely able to hide his surprise and elation. Did this mean he'd be taking command of his own team?
"I was just wondering," the general added, "where you are at this moment. Sounds like a whole lot of action over there."
"I'm, um, at the Nuggets game," the soon-to-be lieutenant colonel fibbed, moments after a loud cheer erupted from a nearby group of people.
"That's funny," Hammond said. "You'd think from the crowd noise that the Nuggets weren't losing by 27 right now... make that 29."
Davenport was speechless. He sidled over to look at a television screen showing ESPN. Among the NBA scores sliding across the screen in the bottom bar were the words: "SAN ANTONIO 96 DENVER 67 4TH QTR."
Hammond continued. "Just a couple more things. Tell Pasanen he's been promoted too. And good luck."
By the time Davenport got back to the roulette table, Pasanen was waiting for him - empty handed. "Twenty-three. Red," Pasanen said, matter-of-factly.
"Aww, man..."
TUESDAY, APRIL 4, 2006
2300 HOURS
"Sir, I think there's someone you'd be making a mistake not to include," Carter said.
"This'd better be good," O'Neill grumbled. Ten weeks after he'd started looking through the files, after, in his own words, "burning copious quantities of midnight oil" in the past few days, he was done. And there'd be hell to pay if he had to make changes without a really good reason.
"I just got a call from an old friend from the early days of the Stargate project. He's a professor at Caltech now."
"And?"
"He wanted to recommend one of his grad students. One Kathryn Fletcher." Carter tossed a file onto the desk.
"Grad student from Caltech. Another scientist, Carter?" O'Neill raised an eyebrow, and glanced at the photograph paper-clipped to the front of the folder. It was slightly blurry and pixelated, probably taken with a cheap digital camera, but he could still see a childlike face framed by shoulder-length blond hair. Behind her head was some kind of control panel, and something that might be an oscilloscope - the kind of stuff he'd expect to find in Carter's lab. "Looks a bit young too." That was the understatement of the year, he thought - his first guess was thirteen or fourteen years old.
"She's Army Reserve, sir. Corps of Engineers. I couldn't get an Army file on her on two hours' notice, but that's her academic record and whatever I could find of her service record on the Internet. The photo's a few years old, I think she was sixteen at the time."
"OK, but why exactly do you want me to pick a grad-student-slash-Army-Reserve-engineer over all the people we've already got?"
"Well, here's the situation. She wants out of academia, at least for now. Nick thinks it'd be a shame to see her brains go to waste."
"That's what they said about Jay Felger."
"Sir, I think we should give her a chance."
"Frankly, the only difference I see is she's a lot younger, and female. That 'girl power' idea's nice and all, but the SGC can't exactly do affirmative action here."
"Trust me, she's brilliant. Just open the file."
O'Neill flipped open the folder. The first page was a master's diploma from Caltech, dated 2003. The next was a Bronze Star citation for a combat action in Afghanistan. He gave a short whistle.
"Anything else you need to know?" Carter prodded him with the question.
O'Neill groaned. "Yeah, what is it about everyone remotely associated with you, and making me feel inadequate?" First it had been Carter herself. Then Jennifer Hailey, now already a captain only five years out of the Academy, and 2IC of SG-2. After her, Carter had recruited 1st Lt. Viet Nguyen of SG-19, the wiry, hard-as-nails former Force Recon squad leader who had to be the best demolition man he'd ever seen. And now, apparently, she'd discovered Fletcher.
"To tell you the truth, when I think about what I was doing at her age, she makes me feel a bit inadequate too," Carter admitted with a sheepish grin.
"Good, that makes two."
There was a knock, and the door to O'Neill's office swung open.
"So what's our timeline?" asked Hammond as he leaned his considerable bulk against the door frame.
"I'm thinking we get all our people here by the end of this month, and send the first nine teams over as soon as we're done building, the rest a couple weeks later. I'm hoping we can keep the SGC running smoothly while we're moving people in and out."
Hammond nodded. "Got a team-by-team list yet?"
"I'll come up with one by next week. Carter wanted to make some changes, so we're just talking about those right now."
"Sounds good," Hammond said. "Just give me some time to look it over before it goes to the Pentagon." He turned and left just as abruptly as he came.
TUESDAY, APRIL 18, 2006
0200 HOURS
It may have been late at night, but deep in the bowels of Cheyenne mountain, the SGC briefing room was brightly lit. Jack O'Neill glanced at his watch, just as the first two members of what would be his flagship team walked in and automatically took seats on O'Neill's right, facing the door. It was 2:00 in the morning. Right on time.
"Good morning, Jack," the man next to O'Neill said cheerfully.
"Top o' the morning to you," O'Neill answered, making a show of looking at his watch again. He knew the man well. Phil Davenport was a four-year veteran from SG-5, which had gone with SG-1 on several off-world missions in the past few years. More importantly, the two men played roller-hockey together whenever they had a chance. O'Neill had played center and Davenport had been the goalie for Cheyenne Mountain's entry into the Air Force tournament earlier this year.
"So what's up tonight?"
"Merry Christmas," O'Neill answered. "You're getting a command."
"Oh, really?"
"Usual gang of crazies and misfits, of course, except this time they're yours."
"That's reassuring."
"Good, I was hoping so."
A singularly intense officer in the field, regardless of his colorful off-duty life, Davenport was one of the fastest-rising officers at the SGC and O'Neill didn't even hesitate when choosing him to lead the new base's flagship team. The younger man was like him in quite a few ways. Like his immediate superior, he kept his doctorate (O'Neill's in astronomy, Davenport's in chemical engineering) a secret from most others on base; he had been quietly involved in covert ops all over the Middle East before coming to the SGC; and as 2IC of SG-5 he had built up a reputation for driving both his CO and General Hammond up the wall with unsolicited smart-aleck remarks. He was also able to read the Goa'uld language, having gone off-roading around the desert with an Egyptologist while stationed at the American embassy in Cairo.
On the same side of the table, Martin Pasanen just nodded, with a slight grin. Pasanen was a Special Forces sniper, the unique breed that was considered valuable enough to get away with openly flouting the regulations. It showed in his badly-trimmed goatee. If he hadn't been an officer, he'd have been the archetypal cynical Sergeant Major, O'Neill thought. But if his near-total lack of discipline was infuriating at times, his success rate was unquestionable. Before coming to the SGC, he'd won a Silver Star in the invasion of Afghanistan, singlehandedly capturing the entire crew of a "technical" by first shooting the machine gun off its swivel mount, then killing the driver and the vehicle commander with his next two bullets. On top of that, he'd picked up two Bronze Stars at the SGC. As the most decorated officer here, outside of SG-1 and SG-2, Pasanen had the Teal'c stamp of approval for 2IC.
"Hello, cutie," Davenport said as the next arrival entered, still in civilian clothes.
"Good Lord, she can't even be half your age," Pasanen hissed under his breath at his soon-to-be CO. O'Neill raised an eyebrow in his best impression of Teal'c.
"That would be Lieutenant Cutie to you," the petite blonde riposted in a lilting soprano. Davenport's face flushed. Seeing O'Neill, in the room, the young woman stood to something resembling attention, bouncing slightly on her feet, and saluted. "Second Lieutenant Kathryn Fletcher reporting, sir!"
O'Neill returned the salute. "At ease, Lieutenant. We're just having a friendly little chat tonight."
2nd Lt. Kathryn Fletcher, US Army Corps of Engineers, literally jumped into the nearest chair and pulled her feet up into it. Damn, she was tiny, O'Neill thought, his doubts about her resurfacing. This was the one Carter was so adamant about including? Her file said she was nineteen years old, but she appeared even younger, and her slender build and delicate round face made her look very fragile indeed. She'd probably had to cheat just to make the Army's minimum weight requirement. No one doubted that she was brilliant - she had already earned a master's degree from Caltech by age sixteen, before dropping out of graduate school earlier this year - but her service record, a year and a half in an Army National Guard engineer battalion, was hardly long enough to say anything. And she was fidgeting in her chair - not unlike himself when he started out, O'Neill had to remind himself. Nevertheless, the alert blue eyes that caught his suggested that there was more to her than what he saw.
"Sorry, sir," she said with a nervous smile. "It's the caffeine." She glanced at the faces around the table: Davenport slightly embarrassed, Pasanen more dubious than anything else, O'Neill trying hard to look nonchalant.
The last member of the new team, a short, stocky Asian-American, arrived just as the clock hit 0205, looking like he'd just been dragged out of the lab. He probably had been. He was even wearing the obligatory long white coat and latex gloves.
Dr. Kevin Hsu was not by any means new to the SGC, as anyone who passed through the infirmary could attest. Although no one could truly replace the late Janet Frasier, Hsu was one of several doctors who, put together, were possibly even more effective. A neurosurgeon by training, he had taken enough of an interest in linguistics to earn a master's degree in the field after becoming a doctor, which had repeatedly put him under consideration for a field team assignment. He looked a bit overweight, but his scores on the physical fitness tests actually came close to Special Forces requirements.
"Timely as ever, Doc," O'Neill observed.
"Is there an emergency, Colonel?" the doctor asked.
"Not really," O'Neill said. "Just having a little chat. Take a seat."
"If you don't mind... oh. It's about Alpha Base, isn't it? And why am I always the last one to hear about these things?" Hsu deposited himself in an empty chair as the presence of the other three people in the room finally registered his mind. Phil Davenport from SG-5, Martin Pasanen from SG-20... and some girl he'd never seen before, who seemed badly out of place. Did O'Neill have a daughter? If he did, then Hsu certainly didn't remember him ever mentioning it. Everyone knew about Charlie; he'd be twenty-four now if he were alive, which meant that this girl would be quite a bit younger...
His absent-minded reverie was broken by O'Neill's voice. "I guess you're all wondering what the hell you're doing here at two in the morning." The colonel paused and looked around the room at four blank faces. "Well... we're here at two in the morning because Lieutenant Fletcher got her commission about thirty-six hours ago..."
"Congratulations," Hsu said quietly.
"Thanks," Fletcher answered.
"...and the Army desk jockeys just couldn't seem to figure out how to transfer her from reserve enlisted in California to active-duty officer in Colorado without creating three nonexistent Kathryn Fletchers in the process."
"Not that I mind the time," Fletcher said quickly as the laughter subsided. "I was a grad student just a few days ago, so that would make it just about lunchtime for me."
"So how do we know you're not one of the nonexistent ones?" Pasanen couldn't resist asking. Fletcher said nothing, but a manic grin appeared on her face.
"Back to business," O'Neill interrupted. "Yes, it's about Alpha Base, and it's not a coincidence that the three of you who are military all just got promoted. You four are going to be Alpha One... unless any of you asks out, that is."
Phil Davenport couldn't believe it. Did Jack O'Neill trust him that much? Stargate teams were all elite units, but there was something about having the number one that scared him a little.
"Alpha One, sir?"
"Don't tell me you didn't see it coming. Can you think of a better man for the job who's not already leading an SG team?"
"After Vegas?" That stunt was common knowledge around the base by now. The SGC grapevine was notoriously fast-growing.
"I hope you learned something from it. Just promise me you won't put Alpha Base on the line on a poker game with Baal, OK?"
"Damn, I was just about to do that too."
O'Neill raised an eyebrow. "You do know he cheats at cards, I hope," he deadpanned.
"Two can play at that game," Davenport said, smoothly pulling an ace and a king out of his sleeve.
O'Neill grimaced, then turned his attention toward the other three. Pasanen was apparently finishing up Fletcher's Stargate 101 crash course - he'd just started explaining what Alpha Base was - while Hsu was interjecting a comment here and there as needed. The doctor swiveled his chair around to face O'Neill.
"General O'Neill," he said, a bit stiffly, "it's an honor to be picked for Alpha One. But I'd like to talk to Abby before I decide if I'm in or out."
"No need," O'Neill said. "I told her six hours ago, and she said yes. She's coming along too, as chief surgeon."
The doctor relaxed visibly. "I'm in then."
O'Neill then addressed the whole table. "It'll be about two months before the base is ready to start operating. That means you have a good bit of downtime before then. Davenport and Pasanen, your replacements at the SGC are joining their teams later this week, so we should be running pretty smoothly here. I suggest that you all take the next couple weeks off. You'll be training together for a while after that."
"Sounds good to me," Pasanen said. "When do you want us back?"
"Wednesday, May third. I'm having you guys train in Russia, actually," O'Neill said. "I see two of you haven't really been in cold weather much, and I'd like you all to be ready to handle any kind of weather conditions you run into on missions. Besides, the Russians are sending a couple teams over here soon, and they wanted to train with a few American teams beforehand. I'm sending you with four other Alpha teams, probably Two, Three, Six, and Seven."
"We're working with the Russkies?" Pasanen had to ask.
"They won't be at Alpha Base. They're sending two teams to operate out of the SGC. We'll have a Russian liaison around, but probably not more. Oh, that reminded me - try to keep the Russian press off our backs, they can get pretty vicious."
"By Washington standards?" Davenport asked.
"You'd be surprised," O'Neill replied without the slightest bit of humor in his voice. "Nye vot pravda v'izvestiye ni izvestia v'pravdye," he intoned cynically.
"Ish?" Fletcher rested her head against one shoulder and looked generally perplexed. Everyone looked at her, before realizing one by one that she was probably the only one in the room who spoke no Russian.
"There is no truth in the news, and no news in the truth," O'Neill finished.
==============================================================================================
SATURDAY, APRIL 1, 2006
2100 HOURS PDT
Las Vegas, Martin Pasanen thought. Leave your inhibitions at the door, leave your money inside. He didn't know exactly how he'd ended up here, wearing a penguin suit and trying hard to look like a high roller, but he was fairly sure it had something to do with the man sitting at the bar next to him, tapping out the jazz band's beat with the poker chip in his hand.
Phil Davenport finished his drink. "OK, I'm ready," he declared. "Let's go."
"I still don't think this is a good idea, Phil," Pasanen said glumly. What a poseur, he thought to himself.
"What could possibly be wrong with it? It's brilliant!"
"And stupid, risky, and outrageous."
The duo sidled through the crowd toward the nearest roulette table. "That's why it's so brilliant! Besides, I thought you nominated me to collect the money," Davenport argued.
"I did, but... look, a lot of people are gonna be pissed if we lose. There's twenty bucks of my money in there."
"C'mon, O'Neill deserves a kick-ass party. We could double our funds right now! And if we lose, it's out of my pocket." With that, Davenport pulled it all out: $2,250 in chips, the total donated by SGC personnel for a party to celebrate O'Neill's promotion.
"Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets..."
With great ceremony, he put it all on black. This was it: everything gambled on a single spin of the wheel. Time seemed to stop as the ball rolled around and around...
Suddenly, Davenport's cell phone rang. He excused himself from the table and answered it. It was Hammond.
"General Hammond! Is there an emergency?" Davenport asked.
"Not in particular. I know you're on a 72-hour pass, just wanted to tell you that you've been promoted to Lieutenant Colonel, effective as soon as you get back."
Now this was totally unexpected. "Thank you, sir," Davenport responded, barely able to hide his surprise and elation. Did this mean he'd be taking command of his own team?
"I was just wondering," the general added, "where you are at this moment. Sounds like a whole lot of action over there."
"I'm, um, at the Nuggets game," the soon-to-be lieutenant colonel fibbed, moments after a loud cheer erupted from a nearby group of people.
"That's funny," Hammond said. "You'd think from the crowd noise that the Nuggets weren't losing by 27 right now... make that 29."
Davenport was speechless. He sidled over to look at a television screen showing ESPN. Among the NBA scores sliding across the screen in the bottom bar were the words: "SAN ANTONIO 96 DENVER 67 4TH QTR."
Hammond continued. "Just a couple more things. Tell Pasanen he's been promoted too. And good luck."
By the time Davenport got back to the roulette table, Pasanen was waiting for him - empty handed. "Twenty-three. Red," Pasanen said, matter-of-factly.
"Aww, man..."
TUESDAY, APRIL 4, 2006
2300 HOURS
"Sir, I think there's someone you'd be making a mistake not to include," Carter said.
"This'd better be good," O'Neill grumbled. Ten weeks after he'd started looking through the files, after, in his own words, "burning copious quantities of midnight oil" in the past few days, he was done. And there'd be hell to pay if he had to make changes without a really good reason.
"I just got a call from an old friend from the early days of the Stargate project. He's a professor at Caltech now."
"And?"
"He wanted to recommend one of his grad students. One Kathryn Fletcher." Carter tossed a file onto the desk.
"Grad student from Caltech. Another scientist, Carter?" O'Neill raised an eyebrow, and glanced at the photograph paper-clipped to the front of the folder. It was slightly blurry and pixelated, probably taken with a cheap digital camera, but he could still see a childlike face framed by shoulder-length blond hair. Behind her head was some kind of control panel, and something that might be an oscilloscope - the kind of stuff he'd expect to find in Carter's lab. "Looks a bit young too." That was the understatement of the year, he thought - his first guess was thirteen or fourteen years old.
"She's Army Reserve, sir. Corps of Engineers. I couldn't get an Army file on her on two hours' notice, but that's her academic record and whatever I could find of her service record on the Internet. The photo's a few years old, I think she was sixteen at the time."
"OK, but why exactly do you want me to pick a grad-student-slash-Army-Reserve-engineer over all the people we've already got?"
"Well, here's the situation. She wants out of academia, at least for now. Nick thinks it'd be a shame to see her brains go to waste."
"That's what they said about Jay Felger."
"Sir, I think we should give her a chance."
"Frankly, the only difference I see is she's a lot younger, and female. That 'girl power' idea's nice and all, but the SGC can't exactly do affirmative action here."
"Trust me, she's brilliant. Just open the file."
O'Neill flipped open the folder. The first page was a master's diploma from Caltech, dated 2003. The next was a Bronze Star citation for a combat action in Afghanistan. He gave a short whistle.
"Anything else you need to know?" Carter prodded him with the question.
O'Neill groaned. "Yeah, what is it about everyone remotely associated with you, and making me feel inadequate?" First it had been Carter herself. Then Jennifer Hailey, now already a captain only five years out of the Academy, and 2IC of SG-2. After her, Carter had recruited 1st Lt. Viet Nguyen of SG-19, the wiry, hard-as-nails former Force Recon squad leader who had to be the best demolition man he'd ever seen. And now, apparently, she'd discovered Fletcher.
"To tell you the truth, when I think about what I was doing at her age, she makes me feel a bit inadequate too," Carter admitted with a sheepish grin.
"Good, that makes two."
There was a knock, and the door to O'Neill's office swung open.
"So what's our timeline?" asked Hammond as he leaned his considerable bulk against the door frame.
"I'm thinking we get all our people here by the end of this month, and send the first nine teams over as soon as we're done building, the rest a couple weeks later. I'm hoping we can keep the SGC running smoothly while we're moving people in and out."
Hammond nodded. "Got a team-by-team list yet?"
"I'll come up with one by next week. Carter wanted to make some changes, so we're just talking about those right now."
"Sounds good," Hammond said. "Just give me some time to look it over before it goes to the Pentagon." He turned and left just as abruptly as he came.
TUESDAY, APRIL 18, 2006
0200 HOURS
It may have been late at night, but deep in the bowels of Cheyenne mountain, the SGC briefing room was brightly lit. Jack O'Neill glanced at his watch, just as the first two members of what would be his flagship team walked in and automatically took seats on O'Neill's right, facing the door. It was 2:00 in the morning. Right on time.
"Good morning, Jack," the man next to O'Neill said cheerfully.
"Top o' the morning to you," O'Neill answered, making a show of looking at his watch again. He knew the man well. Phil Davenport was a four-year veteran from SG-5, which had gone with SG-1 on several off-world missions in the past few years. More importantly, the two men played roller-hockey together whenever they had a chance. O'Neill had played center and Davenport had been the goalie for Cheyenne Mountain's entry into the Air Force tournament earlier this year.
"So what's up tonight?"
"Merry Christmas," O'Neill answered. "You're getting a command."
"Oh, really?"
"Usual gang of crazies and misfits, of course, except this time they're yours."
"That's reassuring."
"Good, I was hoping so."
A singularly intense officer in the field, regardless of his colorful off-duty life, Davenport was one of the fastest-rising officers at the SGC and O'Neill didn't even hesitate when choosing him to lead the new base's flagship team. The younger man was like him in quite a few ways. Like his immediate superior, he kept his doctorate (O'Neill's in astronomy, Davenport's in chemical engineering) a secret from most others on base; he had been quietly involved in covert ops all over the Middle East before coming to the SGC; and as 2IC of SG-5 he had built up a reputation for driving both his CO and General Hammond up the wall with unsolicited smart-aleck remarks. He was also able to read the Goa'uld language, having gone off-roading around the desert with an Egyptologist while stationed at the American embassy in Cairo.
On the same side of the table, Martin Pasanen just nodded, with a slight grin. Pasanen was a Special Forces sniper, the unique breed that was considered valuable enough to get away with openly flouting the regulations. It showed in his badly-trimmed goatee. If he hadn't been an officer, he'd have been the archetypal cynical Sergeant Major, O'Neill thought. But if his near-total lack of discipline was infuriating at times, his success rate was unquestionable. Before coming to the SGC, he'd won a Silver Star in the invasion of Afghanistan, singlehandedly capturing the entire crew of a "technical" by first shooting the machine gun off its swivel mount, then killing the driver and the vehicle commander with his next two bullets. On top of that, he'd picked up two Bronze Stars at the SGC. As the most decorated officer here, outside of SG-1 and SG-2, Pasanen had the Teal'c stamp of approval for 2IC.
"Hello, cutie," Davenport said as the next arrival entered, still in civilian clothes.
"Good Lord, she can't even be half your age," Pasanen hissed under his breath at his soon-to-be CO. O'Neill raised an eyebrow in his best impression of Teal'c.
"That would be Lieutenant Cutie to you," the petite blonde riposted in a lilting soprano. Davenport's face flushed. Seeing O'Neill, in the room, the young woman stood to something resembling attention, bouncing slightly on her feet, and saluted. "Second Lieutenant Kathryn Fletcher reporting, sir!"
O'Neill returned the salute. "At ease, Lieutenant. We're just having a friendly little chat tonight."
2nd Lt. Kathryn Fletcher, US Army Corps of Engineers, literally jumped into the nearest chair and pulled her feet up into it. Damn, she was tiny, O'Neill thought, his doubts about her resurfacing. This was the one Carter was so adamant about including? Her file said she was nineteen years old, but she appeared even younger, and her slender build and delicate round face made her look very fragile indeed. She'd probably had to cheat just to make the Army's minimum weight requirement. No one doubted that she was brilliant - she had already earned a master's degree from Caltech by age sixteen, before dropping out of graduate school earlier this year - but her service record, a year and a half in an Army National Guard engineer battalion, was hardly long enough to say anything. And she was fidgeting in her chair - not unlike himself when he started out, O'Neill had to remind himself. Nevertheless, the alert blue eyes that caught his suggested that there was more to her than what he saw.
"Sorry, sir," she said with a nervous smile. "It's the caffeine." She glanced at the faces around the table: Davenport slightly embarrassed, Pasanen more dubious than anything else, O'Neill trying hard to look nonchalant.
The last member of the new team, a short, stocky Asian-American, arrived just as the clock hit 0205, looking like he'd just been dragged out of the lab. He probably had been. He was even wearing the obligatory long white coat and latex gloves.
Dr. Kevin Hsu was not by any means new to the SGC, as anyone who passed through the infirmary could attest. Although no one could truly replace the late Janet Frasier, Hsu was one of several doctors who, put together, were possibly even more effective. A neurosurgeon by training, he had taken enough of an interest in linguistics to earn a master's degree in the field after becoming a doctor, which had repeatedly put him under consideration for a field team assignment. He looked a bit overweight, but his scores on the physical fitness tests actually came close to Special Forces requirements.
"Timely as ever, Doc," O'Neill observed.
"Is there an emergency, Colonel?" the doctor asked.
"Not really," O'Neill said. "Just having a little chat. Take a seat."
"If you don't mind... oh. It's about Alpha Base, isn't it? And why am I always the last one to hear about these things?" Hsu deposited himself in an empty chair as the presence of the other three people in the room finally registered his mind. Phil Davenport from SG-5, Martin Pasanen from SG-20... and some girl he'd never seen before, who seemed badly out of place. Did O'Neill have a daughter? If he did, then Hsu certainly didn't remember him ever mentioning it. Everyone knew about Charlie; he'd be twenty-four now if he were alive, which meant that this girl would be quite a bit younger...
His absent-minded reverie was broken by O'Neill's voice. "I guess you're all wondering what the hell you're doing here at two in the morning." The colonel paused and looked around the room at four blank faces. "Well... we're here at two in the morning because Lieutenant Fletcher got her commission about thirty-six hours ago..."
"Congratulations," Hsu said quietly.
"Thanks," Fletcher answered.
"...and the Army desk jockeys just couldn't seem to figure out how to transfer her from reserve enlisted in California to active-duty officer in Colorado without creating three nonexistent Kathryn Fletchers in the process."
"Not that I mind the time," Fletcher said quickly as the laughter subsided. "I was a grad student just a few days ago, so that would make it just about lunchtime for me."
"So how do we know you're not one of the nonexistent ones?" Pasanen couldn't resist asking. Fletcher said nothing, but a manic grin appeared on her face.
"Back to business," O'Neill interrupted. "Yes, it's about Alpha Base, and it's not a coincidence that the three of you who are military all just got promoted. You four are going to be Alpha One... unless any of you asks out, that is."
Phil Davenport couldn't believe it. Did Jack O'Neill trust him that much? Stargate teams were all elite units, but there was something about having the number one that scared him a little.
"Alpha One, sir?"
"Don't tell me you didn't see it coming. Can you think of a better man for the job who's not already leading an SG team?"
"After Vegas?" That stunt was common knowledge around the base by now. The SGC grapevine was notoriously fast-growing.
"I hope you learned something from it. Just promise me you won't put Alpha Base on the line on a poker game with Baal, OK?"
"Damn, I was just about to do that too."
O'Neill raised an eyebrow. "You do know he cheats at cards, I hope," he deadpanned.
"Two can play at that game," Davenport said, smoothly pulling an ace and a king out of his sleeve.
O'Neill grimaced, then turned his attention toward the other three. Pasanen was apparently finishing up Fletcher's Stargate 101 crash course - he'd just started explaining what Alpha Base was - while Hsu was interjecting a comment here and there as needed. The doctor swiveled his chair around to face O'Neill.
"General O'Neill," he said, a bit stiffly, "it's an honor to be picked for Alpha One. But I'd like to talk to Abby before I decide if I'm in or out."
"No need," O'Neill said. "I told her six hours ago, and she said yes. She's coming along too, as chief surgeon."
The doctor relaxed visibly. "I'm in then."
O'Neill then addressed the whole table. "It'll be about two months before the base is ready to start operating. That means you have a good bit of downtime before then. Davenport and Pasanen, your replacements at the SGC are joining their teams later this week, so we should be running pretty smoothly here. I suggest that you all take the next couple weeks off. You'll be training together for a while after that."
"Sounds good to me," Pasanen said. "When do you want us back?"
"Wednesday, May third. I'm having you guys train in Russia, actually," O'Neill said. "I see two of you haven't really been in cold weather much, and I'd like you all to be ready to handle any kind of weather conditions you run into on missions. Besides, the Russians are sending a couple teams over here soon, and they wanted to train with a few American teams beforehand. I'm sending you with four other Alpha teams, probably Two, Three, Six, and Seven."
"We're working with the Russkies?" Pasanen had to ask.
"They won't be at Alpha Base. They're sending two teams to operate out of the SGC. We'll have a Russian liaison around, but probably not more. Oh, that reminded me - try to keep the Russian press off our backs, they can get pretty vicious."
"By Washington standards?" Davenport asked.
"You'd be surprised," O'Neill replied without the slightest bit of humor in his voice. "Nye vot pravda v'izvestiye ni izvestia v'pravdye," he intoned cynically.
"Ish?" Fletcher rested her head against one shoulder and looked generally perplexed. Everyone looked at her, before realizing one by one that she was probably the only one in the room who spoke no Russian.
"There is no truth in the news, and no news in the truth," O'Neill finished.