Author's note: no, this story isn't abandoned! I hit the thick of the med school interview season shortly after posting the last chapter, with travel snafus making it a lot busier than it should have been, and then when I had time to write it took me a while to get all my plot lines straightened out. So here we go again!
Author's note #2: I've been toying with the idea of inserting a "character bios" chapter, perhaps as an appendix. Good idea? Bad idea? Let me know what you think.
THURSDAY, JUNE 29, 2006
0400 HOURS - EARLY AFTERNOON
Daniel Jackson wasn't the only surprise visitor. When the tel'tac touched down on the tarmac, Jackson was followed out of the spacecraft by Jacob Carter and Teal'c.
"Just like old times," O'Neill mused as the recent arrivals were ushered into the briefing room, where Carter and Davenport were waiting. They were no longer SG-1 - that honor now belonged to Ferretti's team - but they were all together for the first time in months. But it was not a happy meeting. The sudden and unexpected arrival of old friends, at this time, could only mean something was amiss. Everyone knew it, O'Neill thought. It was painfully evident from the worried expressions etched on the faces around the room. Even Carter, talking in the corner with her father, didn't look quite as overjoyed to see him as usual.
"So, Space Monkey," he finally started, feigning nonchalance. Very transparently, of course. Jackson would have to be blind, deaf, and dumb, and then some, not to see through that act. "What brings you to this neck of the galactic woods?"
"Jack... we've got a problem."
"I take it Houston couldn't help much?"
"Actually, I'd say Houston, or the Tok'ra equivalent of it, was the only chance we had."
"OK, bad joke."
"The Stargate on Earth is locked up. We can't use it."
The silence that followed was deafening.
Jackson continued. "Someone dialed us, and won't let go. Nothing's coming through the Gate, but every thirty-eight minutes, as soon as it shuts down, whoever it is just dials in again faster than we can dial out."
Jacob Carter lowered his head, and his eyes flashed. "We have reason to believe," Selmak added, "that a System Lord is temporarily sacrificing a Stargate in order to deny the Tau'ri access to the entire system."
"So that explains the whole mess with the tel'tac," Sam Carter said, "but why weren't you guys answering us?"
"We went for an emergency measure to get here as fast as we could," Jacob explained. "We just added a naquadria booster to the tel'tac, and we had to jettison it as soon as we got into this system, since it was about to explode. We managed to put a hundred and eighty kilometers between us and the booster, but the EMP pulse still knocked out all our comms arrays."
Meanwhile, O'Neill's face wore an incredulous expression. "Nothing at all coming through?" he asked Jackson, not quite believing his ears.
"That's the really funny thing," Jackson said. "When we left Earth about, uh," - he looked at his watch - "sixteen hours ago, they'd had the Gate running for more than nine hours straight, about fourteen redials... and nothing actually came through it. No attack, no demands, no threats, no attempt whatsoever at communication."
"Let's take this one step at a time," O'Neill said levelly. "Why would they do that? What do they stand to gain by cutting us off temporarily?"
"They prevent us from leaving Earth... and they also do not allow others to contact Earth," Teal'c suggested. "I believe you call it killing two birds with one stone."
"Trying to keep us from finishing Alpha Base?" Davenport inquired.
"I'd be surprised if they even knew about Alpha Base," Carter said.
"Our allies!" Jackson suddenly exclaimed.
"Indeed," said Teal'c. "But we need not even consider that much, DanielJackson. Our personnel who are off-world are now unable to return."
"So... were any teams due back in the last twenty-five hours?" O'Neill asked.
Jackson answered his question. "No, but we have six teams off-world right now, and three due within the next few hours."
"And if for some reason they need to get out of wherever they are," Davenport finished for him, "they can't go home, so they have to come here.
"I don't like this," O'Neill said. "We don't even have an iris. The machine shop's still waiting for some parts from Earth. As soon as we dial anywhere with Goa'uld forces in sight, they'll know exactly what address we're dialing from, and there goes our cover."
"Do you have another option, General O'Neill?" Teal'c asked pointedly, raising an eyebrow.
O'Neill looked at each person in the room in turn, and his eyes were met by stony faces.
Davenport was the only exception. "P3Y-495 would make a pretty good staging area," he mused aloud.
"Wait a minute, doesn't Kali still own that planet?" O'Neill couldn't believe it. He was expecting to hear something outrageous, but suicidal went a little beyond that category as far as he was concerned.
"As of SG-7's report last week, the base there is still crippled from the beating we handed out back in March," Davenport answered smugly. "And man, did we ever smash up the place."
"That's pretty accurate, I'd say," Jacob confirmed. "Kali's being pushed by both Nirrti and the Free Jaffa right now, and probably can't spare the resources to repair a minor outpost like that one for a while."
"We could kill two birds with one stone." Davenport pressed his advantage to the fullest. "Pick up all our off-world teams, and finish off that base while we're at it."
It was a tough call, O'Neill thought. There was a target of opportunity in front of them that seemed easy enough to take, but he had to weigh that against the possibility of opening his own base to retaliation before it had a workable means of defense.
Carter, meanwhile, came out adamantly against the plan. "I don't doubt we could take them," she explained, "but the chance of one of the enemy learning our location and reporting it is just too high. It just takes one."
"Got any others ideas, then?" Davenport challenged her.
"Sir, if I may," a voice piped up from near the door. Kat Fletcher stepped forward, a laptop computer under her arm, suddenly defusing what might have become a very heated argument. O'Neill wondered how she'd gotten into the room without him or anyone else noticing. Probably slipped by everyone in the heat of the discussion, he thought. Still, the lieutenant hadn't even been told that this meeting was even going on.
Fletcher slid the computer onto the table and popped it open. "We've had quite a bit of spare time in the last few weeks," she said, "so I started working on some stuff for what-if scenarios. I thought this one" - she pulled up some code in a text editor - "might apply here."
Carter stared intently at the code. "Origin-spoofing?" she asked cautiously. She wasn't sure. "Weird approach though, are you sure it works?"
Fletcher glanced around the room to see if anyone caught the exchange. "It's really blatantly kludged, so no, I'm not sure at all," she said, hardly raising anyone's level of comprehension or confidence. "I heard you know how to interface with the DHD?"
Carter nodded uncertainly. "I should be able to do it with this. Let me just get straight exactly what you're doing." She stared at the code, while people around her held their breaths. "You're bouncing everything through a third coordinate, which the computer should send to the DHD?"
Fletcher nodded.
"Okay, I'll give it a try." Carter's voice still sounded worried, but a bit more confident than before. "A couple hours, I think."
The general's indecision left him after hearing what was close enough to a vote of confidence from Carter. "Okay, first things first. Let's get as many teams in the cave as we have ready to go. We need people to contact any of our friends that don't have radio, evacuate anyone who needs to be evacuated. I'm also overriding SGC off-world orders effective immediately, and recalling all teams to Alpha Base if practical. Who's off-world right now?"
Jackson consulted his notes. "SG-1, 5, 11, 16, and 17 on standard recon missions, SG-8 on archaeological field assignment," he summarized. "Nothing out of the routine."
"In that case, I want all twelve of our teams ready to go the minute we've confirmed the spoofing program works."
THURSDAY, JUNE 29, 2006
1500 HOURS MSK
On Earth, news traveled fast. With the existence of the Stargate program now public knowledge, the closing of the Stargate was on television news within hours after Baal's first attempt to dial in. In the new Russia, where independent news outlets trying to scoop one another routinely speculated on events days in advance, conspiracy theories abounded. It was obvious, many pundits claimed. Russia had been excluded from the new Alpha Base, and now the Americans were keeping the Stargate at the SGC blocked, so that they again had a monopoly on the exploration of the galaxy.
By midafternoon on the 29th, Earth's Stargate having been unusable for more than twenty-four hours, even the major news outlets had picked up on the conspiracy theories. They couldn'tt possibly have known that, an hour earlier, all twelve Alpha teams had been called to emergency duty. Perhaps it didn't matter to some - even the modern-day incarnations of Pravda and Izvestia were often guilty of sensationalism in the name of the almighty dollar.
At this very moment, in fact, the wheels in Igor Arkadyavich Komarinsky's head were turning. On the desk in his Moscow office were a set of pictures taken by a photographer named Pimenov in the Khabarovsk airport. Pimenov had filed them away as unusable at the time after it became clear that no story was breaking. How wrong that prognosis was: months later, those same photographs were now of extreme interest to none other than the managing director of Izvestia.
On the screen of Komarinsky's laptop computer, meanwhile, was another set of photos: video captures from the CNN coverage of the first group departing for the Alpha Base. What made both sets of pictures interesting was the people in them. The same man who seemed to be in charge at the airport in Siberia had also led the first group through the Gate a month later. The rest of his four-person team appeared in both places as well. There was the thin man with the goatee, looking for all the world like a ridiculously stereotypical young American intellectual; the tiny, perpetually nervous-looking strawberry blonde; the broad-shouldered Asian. The leader of the next team, with his long nose and red hair, was likewise unmistakable, and so on.
Someone in Russia had been involved in establishing the Americans' new off-world facility, and now that the Americans' intentions were clear, there just might be a juicy exposé to write. In the old days this kind of journalism would not have been tolerated, but today the Soviet Union was long dead.
Heads would roll, Komarinsky thought as he picked up his telephone receiver and speed-dialed his news bureau in Washington. He intended to be the first to any story that might develop.
THURSDAY, JUNE 29, 2006
0730 HOURS - EARLY EVENING
"Whatever she's got up her sleeve, she's definitely taking her time with it."
"Always the pessimist, Martin. At this rate, you're gonna have a nervous breakdown before Fletcher does," Phil Davenport replied casually, leaning back and propping his feet up on the table. "Anyway, there isn't much we can do but wait."
They were in the smaller of the base's two briefing rooms, all the maps that Jackson and Gen. Carter had been able to dig up from the SGC archives now spread across the table in front of them, along with two half-eaten sandwiches on paper plates. An hour and a half earlier, an airman had tracked down each member of Alpha One, informing them that they would be the ones to take on any kind of rescue mission. Jackson had dug out a local map for every planet that a team was on, perhaps one of the most impressive excavations he had managed in his career.
Pasanen coughed impatiently. "Sure, she's a smart kid and all, but I still sometimes wonder why she has to have so many problems. She just always looks like a train wreck waiting to happen."
For a moment, all that could be heard was the sound of rain pounding on the roof. Autumn had descended quickly in the last two weeks, and the sudden rainstorm arrived just in time to accentuate the building tension in the air.
So many long stories start on dark and stormy nights, Davenport thought, wondering where this night would lead them.
"Of course it could always be worse," Pasanen added, as Davenport's silence began to grate at his nerves.
"Don't tell me," Davenport said unexpectedly. "Alpha Six. Not that I deal in rumors, but I'm sort of glad I'm not in John's shoes."
Six's linguist, 2nd Lt. Valerie Russell, was a character, to put it mildly. Something about her was off-putting. Like anyone else on the base, her competence was unquestionable; she'd received consistently strong performance reviews as an interpreter in Italy, and she was adapting well to documents and voice recordings in all kinds of alien languages. But she was vegan - sometimes seen in today's military, but only rarely - and the door to her quarters was completely covered with "LaRouche for President" flyers, openly flouting military regulations. No one was sure whether she was joking or serious.
"You do realize, don't you, that Six is the other team on alert for rescue missions?" Pasanen remarked.
"Eh. What are the chances, anyway?"
THURSDAY, JUNE 29, 2006
0800 HOURS - EVENING
"No worky." Fletcher sighed as the Stargate sputtered and died for what must have been about the thirtieth straight time. "Try ten-bit with redundancy?" She was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the cave, wires all around her, a laptop computer precariously balanced on her left knee and a mug of hot coffee dangerously close to her foot.
"That's really not the problem."
"Look, we're trying to talk to an alien device through a... a regular serial cable! Haven't we at least considered the possibility that we're doing something wrong there?"
"It's not the interface," Carter answered, exasperated, poking at the DHD's innards with a screwdriver. "We've been using the same protocol for ten years, it hasn't changed."
"Butbutbut... the, the DHD's internal timer thingie won't cooperate!"
"Wait a minute. You're telling me you were trying to time the pulse with the main control crystal? No wonder it's aborting the dial sequence. What's wrong with using the computer's clock, anyway?"
"Um... oops?" Fletcher's fingers flew across the keyboard for a few minutes before she looked up. "Thanks, I kinda forgot about the obvious. Try it now?"
For once, the dialing sequence didn't stop at the sixth chevron. The seventh chevron dialed and... nothing happened. A faint electrical hum could be heard coming from the Gate, but that was all. No wormhole, no event horizon... "Here we go again," Fletcher muttered, taking a big gulp of coffee and scrolling up and down through her code trying to find an error in it.
WHOOOSH!
The wormhole exploded into existence.
Fletcher looked up, and laughed.
"Did you just do that?" Carter asked, amazed.
"No, did you? Oh, it doesn't matter, we're in business!" Still laughing aloud, Fletcher packed up her computer. In moments, she was gone, spreading the news.
THURSDAY, JUNE 29, 2006
0930 HOURS - EVENING
The only MALP that had been delivered to Alpha Base so far was still in the shop waiting for new sensor arrays. It took some some prodding by Alpha One, but the crew chief was persuaded to hand over the rover with only the basic camera and microphone assembly attached to it.
That was enough to prove that the spoofing protocol worked, at least. By now, technicians had wired the DHD to the base computers, forming a more permanent and reliable control system than Fletcher's laptop. The MALP went through the wormhole, came out on the other side, and sent back pictures of the local DHD that showed a wormhole coming from the third location they had set. Fletcher had also found, after a few more tests, that there would always be a thirty-second delay between the seventh chevron and the establishment of a stable wormhole - apparently the formation of a stable double wormhole required a higher energy level. There were a few minor differences from ordinary dialing, and one major change: the double wormhole could only be maintained for just under four minutes, a tenth of what could be done under ordinary conditions.
With the proof of the concept visible to all, the next hour quickly became a blur of activity. With all twelve Alpha teams ready to go, O'Neill outlined his plan of action. First, they would make radio contact with the SG teams in the field, directing them to return to Alpha Base instead of Earth, and check on the status of any allies that had radio technology. The other allies would be contacted by sending teams through to check on them.
"Alpha 2, 8, and 11, get ready to move out to P3C-448," O'Neill ordered, directing two search & rescue teams and a Marine combat squad toward the cave. "We're using it as the third Gate, but if anyone has to come in hot, we're sending them your way. We can't afford to let the enemy see you dialing us. All other teams, stand by."
Most of the recalls went smoothly. The wormhole was opened, a radio message was sent through, and one by one the SG teams filed back. The precaution of using the third planet to cover emergencies turned out to be unnecessary. Kelowna, once contacted, had chipped in and augmented the Alpha teams at the emergency site with a rifle squad and a medical team, but for the first half-hour none of the SG teams were under fire, and none of the human communities that Earth counted among its friends needed to be evacuated. It almost seemed like a false alarm - except that Earth was still locked out.
O'Neill couldn't help but reflect on how long he'd been in the business as he saw the faces passing by him in both directions. Even if he knew they were in the Stargate program, he couldn't help his surprise at seeing people there who had been completely out of the loop just a few short years ago. Teal'c warmly greeted the Jaffa Rak'nor, now second-in-command of SG-16, when that team was the first to walk down the ramp from the Stargate. Robert Burke, the former CIA man who had been with him in the jungles of Honduras, unexpectedly came with SG-11. O'Neill fought the impulse to jump up from his seat and blurt out "What are you doing here?" Instead, he settled for a handshake and a pat on the shoulder. They could swap stories later. Alpha 9 departed for K'Tau with another face from the past among its number: 2nd Lt. Allison Fenwick, a tall, spirited young woman fresh out of the Air Force Academy, perhaps not all that different from the saucy thirteen-year-old who had stood up to Maybourne to protect Teal'c on the streets of Colorado Springs.
And then, going down the list of off-world teams, they reached SG-1.
"Daniel? Teal'c? Something isn't right here," Carter suddenly said.
"Uh-what?" Jackson asked, his head whipping around.
"Where did you say the blocking wormhole was coming from?"
Jackson scribbled some glyphs on a piece of paper and handed it over.
"No, this can't be right."
Everyone was looking at her now.
"The addresses are different, but the computer says they're the same place in space. I've never seen redundant coordinates like this before, not even with the two Gates on Earth. Normally only one set works."
"That's strange," Jackson agreed. "Try them both, to be sure?"
"Fire it up," O'Neill ordered.
On that cue, the technician at what was now the dialing terminal punched in the glyphs that had appeared on Earth's own Stargate when it had been blocked. The wormhole never formed.
"The other one now," Carter calmly instructed the technician. There was the now-familiar delay... and WHOOOOSH!
SG-1 was investigating a large base supposedly abandoned after the fall of Anubis, and left apparently untouched for the last two years. When they had first arrived on the planet, they had encountered no Goa'uld forces, and started to slowly explore and map the complex. O'Neill fully expected another routine withdrawal.
"SG-1, this is Alpha Base, do you read me?" he intoned into his microphone.
Static crackled on the radio set, breaking up Louis Ferretti's voice. "... Base, this is Ferretti, good to ... from ... over."
"SG-1, what's your status, over?"
More static.
"Louie, what's your status?" O'Neill repeated. "Can you reach the Gate?"
"Negative," Ferretti answered. "Baal's forces are ... got here two days ago. They've ... us, I repeat... they know we're here."
"Can you reach the Gate?" O'Neill asked again.
"Ne... safe for now but ... place is ... with Jaffa, we need backup!"
The signal faded and died.
O'Neill swiveled his chair around to face Phil Davenport and his team. "Congratulations, boys and girls," he announced. "You've just been given a hell of a first mission."