Chapter 3: Second Interview
Dawn drove her car along the road that led up Cheyenne Mountain. It was a beautiful September morning, and she had the top down in the blue convertible that she had managed to rent. The view was spectacular in places along the highway, and the wind was warm in her hair.
Signs warned her that she was approaching the security gate for NORAD's Cheyenne Mountain Complex, and she slowed her car. She came around a sharp bend, and she saw the gate. She joined the short line of cars waiting to be admitted. The guards on the gate were not rushing to let anyone in, but they were working quickly and efficiently. Everyone had to show their ID, and every car got inspected to make sure that there was no one hiding in the back seat, or in the trunk, or anything like that. A couple of soldiers, with dogs, were moving up and down the line. The dogs were giving each car a good sniff as well.
Dawn was ready when her turn came. "Good morning Ma'am," said the guard. "Please state your business, and may I see some identification please?"
"Good morning." Dawn handed over her passport. "Dr. Dawn Summers. I have an appointment to see Dr. Daniel Jackson."
The guard looked at her passport photo, and then back at her. He took another good look at the passport, and Dawn wished that she had some photo ID that had a more recent picture on it, at least one that had been taken after she'd had her hair cut.
After a couple more looks, the guard seemed to be satisfied that Dawn was the person in the photo in the passport. "Could you open your trunk please Ma'am?"
Dawn smiled at him. "It's open." She had gone looking for the trunk release as soon as she'd seen that the cars ahead of her were being searched.
A second guard was moving around behind her car, and he opened the trunk to look inside it. He closed it again, after a brief inspection, and reported that it was clear to the guard on the gate. He also closed the gas cap cover that Dawn had managed to open while looking for the trunk release.
The guard had found Dawn's name on his electronic clipboard. He handed it to her, along with a stylus, and indicated where she should sign. Dawn did so, and handed back the clipboard and stylus. He handed back her passport. "Thank you, Dr. Summers." He pointed as he gave her directions. "If you drive straight ahead, and then follow the signs to Visitor Parking, and Registration, on the left, someone will meet you there."
"Okay, thanks." Dawn slipped her passport back into her purse. The gate opened in front of her, and she drove slowly forward.
There were lots of signs to make sure she didn't get lost, and enough armed guards to make her think that she might get shot if she did wander into some place where she shouldn't be. More signs informed her that the guards were authorized to shoot. She found a parking space in the visitor section, and entered a building through a door with a sign that read "Visitor Registration" over it. Half an hour later she did have a picture ID that had a recent photo on it. She had also been fingerprinted, had her retinas scanned, her DNA sampled, and signed the documents that informed her that if she revealed any of what she was about to see or hear to anyone who was not authorized to know it, she could be charged with Treason.
Dawn handed the last of the documents she had signed over to the airman who had been guiding her through the process. "So, when do I actually get to see some of these things that I can't tell anyone about?"
"Soon Ma'am," said the airman. "They're sending someone to escort you down." He pointed her toward a row of seats. "If you'll have a seat, they'll be here soon."
Dawn was surprised to recognize her escort when she arrived. She heard her voice before she saw her. "Hello, Airman. I hear you've got a Dr. Summers waiting here to visit us." Dawn looked up from the pamphlet of security regulations that she'd been given to read, and saw the familiar form of Samantha Carter talking with the airman. She was wearing an Air Force uniform though, this time.
"Yes, Ma'am," he said. "She's right over there." The airman pointed Sam in Dawn's direction.
Sam smiled as she came over. "Dr. Summers. Good to see you again." She held out her hand toward her.
Dawn stood, and shook her hand. "You too, Major Carter."
Sam tapped a finger against her silver eagle rank insignia. "It's Colonel Carter now. If you're going to come to work for us, you're going to have to watch for insignia."
"Right," said Dawn. "So the guy with the stars is the boss?"
"He likes to think so," said Sam.
"Is it your habit to send colonels to escort in the new recruits?"
"No, I just happened to be on my way in myself, so I got diverted to escort you." Sam nodded toward a security checkpoint. "Come on, I'll show you the way."
Sam took Dawn through the security checkpoint to a bus that took them into the tunnel that led deep into Cheyenne Mountain. They weren't alone, so they passed the time by Sam telling her about the history, and construction of the Cheyenne Mountain Complex: created to be a stronghold against a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. Cheyenne Mountain's mission had evolved over the years. It still held one of NORAD's two command centres, monitoring the entire world for any sign of a ballistic missile launch. They also tracked everything larger than a BB in Earth orbit, and monitored the airspace in and around North America for any aircraft that might be flying without a properly filed flight plan.
After leaving the bus, they passed through the huge blast doors, and Sam took Dawn through more security checkpoints to elevators leading deeper into the mountain. Dawn was glad that she wasn't claustrophobic, but she still found the thought of all the rock over her head to be rather daunting. Sam took her through yet another security checkpoint, to an elevator that took them farther down.
They were finally alone in this one. The panel looked a little strange to Dawn, with the numbers going up as you went down it. Sam pushed a button near the bottom, for level 27. The elevator started down.
Sam looked at Dawn. "So, I've been meaning to ask you: were those demon spiders on that island?"
Dawn laughed. "I'm supposed to ask you if they were alien spiders."
They didn't have time to discuss it further. The elevator stopped, and someone else got on. He nodded a greeting to Sam, and pushed the button for level 28. Dawn and Sam remained silent for the rest of the elevator ride.
The elevator stopped on level 27 and the doors opened. Sam led Dawn out into a grey corridor. The air smelled a little stale: the odour of machinery mixed with that of people. They moved through corridors mostly filled by people in uniforms. Even the few non-uniformed people that Dawn saw had a military look to them. She was a little surprised that not all of the uniforms were American. She hadn't been surprised to see a few Canadian uniforms in the upper sections that contained NORAD, but down here there seemed to people from half a dozen different countries: some that would have given NORAD's founders heart attacks if they'd seen them inside one of their most secure facilities.
Sam opened a door. "In here." She waved Dawn through it.
Dawn went through the door into a conference room. At least this room wasn't grey: the walls were beige. There was a table that could easily seat a dozen people in the centre of it. There was a spiral staircase in one corner that led up, and another stairway leading down. One wall was covered by glass windows that had metal shutters closed over the outside of them. On another wall was a crest, with the letters 'SGC' emblazoned on it. She had seen a similar patch on the shoulders of many of the people in uniform, but so far no one had told her what the letters stood for.
There were two people seated at the table, and Dawn recognized the one who was rising to his feet. Daniel Jackson held out a hand toward her. "Dr. Summers. Good to see you again." He was looking a little older now, and was starting to get a few grey hairs, but she still thought that he looked pretty good.
Dawn shook his hand. "Nice to see you too, Dr. Jackson."
"Please, call me Daniel."
"And I'm Dawn."
Daniel let go of her hand. "Dawn Summers, I'd like you to meet Dr. Elliot Hayes." He held his hand out toward the other man in the room. "Dr. Hayes is the head of our linguistics department," said Daniel, "If you come to work for us, he will be your immediate supervisor."
Dr. Hayes rose, and shook her hand too. "A pleasure to meet you Dawn."
Dawn smiled. "You too…Elliot."
Daniel shot Sam a look. "Demons?" he mouthed to her. Sam just shrugged in response. Dawn could see that Dr. Hayes hadn't missed the by-play, but he seemed to be puzzled by it, which told her that he hadn't been told about the events that had brought her into contact with Sam and Daniel in the past.
Daniel smiled at Dawn, and gestured toward the table. "Why don't you have a seat, and we can begin."
Dawn picked a chair across the table from where Daniel and Elliot had been sitting, and sat down. "So…care to tell me what this is all about?"
Daniel sat back down in his seat. He slid a binder across to her. "It's about this." Dawn looked at it, and saw the title of her dissertation on the cover. "Even if you hadn't sent me a copy, and I hadn't met you already, this would have caught our attention," said Daniel.
Dawn looked at her paper: Tracing a Legend: A Philological Study of the Gould Legends Among the Egyptian, Sumerian, Babylonian, Indian, and Chinese Cultures. She had combined her minor in mythology with her major in linguistics when she wrote it. Tracing several legends, in various languages back to a common root. One 'legend' of demons known as the Gould. She looked up from the binder, and saw the expressions on the faces of the people in the room. A seriousness that didn't match the looks she got from other linguists, who appreciated her work as a clever bit of assembling the pieces of a puzzle. It was the look of people who knew that that solution to the puzzle could be of deadly importance. "You know about the Gould."
"Goa'uld actually," said Daniel. "They're an alien species, not demons, but other than that, the core legend that you reconstructed is one of the best descriptions of the Goa'uld occupation of the Earth that I have ever encountered."
"Aliens," said Dawn. "Um…you're saying that the Goulds were aliens?"
"Yes," said Daniel. "The Goa'uld are an alien species that first came to Earth thousands of years ago, and enslaved much of the human population, before they were driven off. They still exist, and much of the galaxy is still under their control."
Dawn listened as Daniel, Sam, and Elliot told her about the Goa'uld. She had thought that she was prepared for anything, but learning that there were real aliens out there among the stars who knew about the Earth, and wanted to conquer it, was a lot to take in. It was hard to wrap her mind around it. Now, the idea of demons wanting to conquer the Earth she was used to, but aliens? She wondered if any of the other demons she had read about, or encountered, were really aliens too. There had been that Quellor demon that had come to earth in a meteor when she was fourteen.
"So, if you people are Earth's first line of defence against the aliens, why are we buried half a mile under a mountain?" asked Dawn.
"It's just about time for you to see why, Dr. Summers."
Dawn turned toward the voice she had heard behind her. "Jack!" She saw Jack O'Neill coming across the room toward her. He was wearing an Air Force dress uniform, and her eyes went to his shoulders. She saw the two stars on each of his epaulets. "Uh…I guess I should call you General now."
Jack smiled at her. "We're pretty informal here. Anyone who's been through a fight with me, can call me 'Jack.'"
"I didn't really do much," said Dawn.
"There are half a dozen images that pop into my head, whenever I'm reminded about that damn island," said Jack. "One of them is you, holding a sword, with one of those damn bugs quivering on the end of it." Jack shook his head. "And for some reason, another is a herd of rabid ducks." He shook his head again, harder, as if trying to shake that image loose. "The important thing was that you kept your head, under circumstances that would make most people run screaming. You impressed me."
"It wasn't that big a deal," said Dawn.
"Yes it was," said Jack. "Nine out of ten people would have frozen, or run screaming. You didn't do either. And once the initial crisis was over, most of the last one in ten would have fallen apart, but you immediately set about helping tend to the wounded."
"You should have seen me after we got back home," said Dawn. "I still have nightmares about giant spiders."
"So do I," said Dr. Jackson.
"Me too," said Colonel Carter.
General O'Neill raised his hand. "It's unanimous. I see a spider these days, and I want to reach for my gun."
Dawn felt the hairs at the back of her neck start to stand up. A feeling that something was about to happen. A klaxon started to blare, and red lights started to flash. A voice announced "Off-world activation!" over a speaker.
"What's that?"
Jack glanced at his watch, and grinned. "Right on time. That, Dr. Summers, is the answer to your question about what we are doing buried under a mountain." He picked up a remote control off the table and pressed a button on it. The shutters covering the windows on the side of the conference room started to rise. Jack gestured toward them. "Take a look."
Dawn got up from her seat and moved to the windows. They looked down into a large room, the floor of which was about fifteen feet below her. The walls and floor of the room looked like they were concrete, and painted the same grey that most of the corridors were painted. The centrepiece of the room was a large ring, about twenty feet across. It was standing vertically, and made up of two segments. The outer ring was stationary, and there was another ring spinning inside of it. As Dawn watched, the inner ring stopped spinning, and a triangle on the outer ring lit up. The inner ring started to rotate again, until another triangle on the outer ring lit.
As each triangle lit up, the feeling that Dawn had inside her that something was happening grew. She knew in her core that she would be feeling this even without hearing the alarms, or seeing the spinning ring. She also felt like she had heard, or read, about something like this before. "The Chap-pie!" she whispered. "You have the Gould Chap-pie!"
"Uh…yeah," said Daniel. "But it's pronounced 'Chappa-ai.' We just call it the Stargate."
"It creates a stable wormhole between itself, and another Stargate, on another planet," said Sam, "allowing nearly instantaneous travel across the galaxy."
A platoon of soldiers took up positions in the room below her, all pointing their weapons at the ring. Dawn saw that most of them had some sort of gun, but others were armed with staffs like the one she had seen Teal'c carrying, while others had the smaller weapons that she still thought of as "bug zappers." More soldiers manned some larger weapons that were permanent fixtures in the room below.
The seventh triangle lit up. Dawn felt something like a mild electric shock pass through her body as she saw what looked like a horizontal splash of water surge out away from the ring. It fell back into a vertical pool that glowed with a blue light in the centre of the ring.
"IDC received!" said the voice from the speaker. "Incoming travellers are SG-8!"
Dawn saw people start to step out of the pool of light. The first few were soldiers, followed by a couple of men who were dressed more like civilians, and not carrying any weapons. Two more people stepped out of the pool, and Dawn recognized one of them: it was Teal'c. The man beside him was dressed in strange clothes, carrying a staff like Teal'c's, and had the same symbol on his forehead, but he looked older. He was wearing a skull cap, and had a beard shot with grey. The pool of light winked and vanished, and the centre of the ring was empty again.
General O'Neill spoke into a microphone. "Defence team, stand down! Welcome home SG-8, and welcome back to Earth, Master Bra'tac!"
The older man beside Teal'c looked up toward them, and nodded. "An honour to be here, as always, General O'Neill."
Dawn saw that Teal'c was looking up toward her, and he smiled. She smiled back, and gave him a little wave.
"SG-8, report to Medical!" ordered Jack. "Debrief at 0930!"
Dawn glanced at her watch: 0930 was half an hour away.
"Everyone returning from off-world has to go through Medical," explained Daniel, "to make sure that they haven't brought back anything unpleasant with them." He grinned at her. "They're lucky. It used to take longer."
"What about the guys with the guns?" asked Dawn.
"They're just in case any of the less than friendly aliens out there managed to compromise our team, and learn their IDC code," said Carter.
"But something like a Gould could still be hitch-hiking with them."
"That's one of the things that Medical is going to be looking for," said Jack. "They will be under guard until they've been cleared. Colonel Carter and I have some work to do, before SG-8's debrief, so we'll let Elliot and Daniel give you the tour."
Dawn found herself outside of Stargate Command's medical centre twenty-five minutes later. Now she knew what SGC stood for. She had been shown the control room, and the gate room. She had even walked up the ramp, and felt the Stargate itself with her hands. She hadn't mentioned it to the others, but she felt drawn to it. There was something about it that called to her. If any of them had noticed her reaction to it when it had activated, they weren't mentioning it to her, either.
The people Dawn had seen arrive through the Stargate were just leaving the medical centre. She smiled when when she saw Teal'c again. "Hi Murray!"
The older man with Teal'c raised his eyebrow, and looked at him. "Murray?"
Teal'c nodded to him. "It is a Tau'ri name that I sometimes use outside of the SGC. It was how I was first introduced to Dawn Summers." He turned back to Dawn. "Everyone here knows me by my true name: Teal'c." He nodded to the man beside him. "This is Master Bra'tac, leader of the Free Jaffa, and my teacher."
"Nice to meet you, Master Bra'tac." Dawn held out her hand to him.
"Dawn Summers is a scholar, and a promising young warrior," said Teal'c as Bra'tac shook her hand.
Dawn tried not to blush. "I'm not, really."
"Don't sell yourself short," said Daniel. "A Doctorate from Oxford at twenty-three is quite an accomplishment, and we've seen you in a fight."
"Indeed," said Teal'c.
"I have a high regard for the judgement of Daniel Jackson, and Teal'c," said Bra'tac. "You should listen to them."
"Yeah, but I'd look like I've got a swelled head if I agreed with them too quickly," said Dawn.
Bra'tac smiled at her. "Wisdom beyond your years, as well. Good day, Dawn Summers." He turned and accompanied Teal'c and the others away down the corridor.
Daniel waved his hand in the general direction of the departing people. "Um…I have to get to the debriefing too. I'm going to have to leave you with Elliot for the rest of the tour. I'll see you later."
"Okay, thanks for showing me as much as you have," said Dawn. "I know you must be busy."
Daniel left, and Dawn turned back to Elliot. "So, what's next?"
"I'm afraid that the next item on our agenda is to let the nice people in Medical have a look at you," said Elliot.
"Really? Why?"
"A couple of reasons," said Elliot. "First of all, we like to make sure that all our people are in top health, and second, we need to have a good baseline to compare against for when you come back from off-world." He showed Dawn through the door. "Dr. Fraiser, I have a new victim for you!"
A woman about Dawn's age, in a white lab coat, with a stethoscope around her neck approached them. Her light brown hair was drawn back into a pony-tail. "Hi, Elliot. So this our newest recruit?"
"Not 'recruit,' recruit," said Dawn. "I'm not joining the army, or anything like that."
Dr. Fraiser smiled at her. "Relax. I'm a civilian too."
"Dawn, this is Dr. Cassandra Fraiser," said Elliot. "Latest addition to our medical staff."
"I just started myself," said Dr. Fraiser. "Elliot, why don't you give us a little privacy?" She took Dawn over to one of the beds, and drew a curtain around them.
"You and Dr. Hayes seem pretty friendly, for someone who just started here," said Dawn.
"Oh, I've known Elliot for years," said Dr. Fraiser. "Now take your blouse off, please."
Dawn started to unbutton her blouse. "So, how did you meet?"
"My mom used to be the Chief Medical Officer here," said Dr. Fraiser. "The SGC is kinda the only family I have, now." Dawn could hear the sadness in her voice, and knew that there was something Dr. Fraiser wasn't saying about that. Fraiser put her stethoscope into her ears, and moved the other end toward Dawn's chest. "Now take a deep breath."
Dawn spent the next hour getting one of the most thorough medical examinations of her life. In addition to poking, prodding, thumping, listening, and taking blood samples, Dr. Fraiser gave her a full body MRI scan, and interviewed her about her medical history, childhood diseases, the status of her vaccinations, and whether there was any history of illness in her family.
The exchange of information wasn't just one way. Dawn found out that Dr. Fraiser had lost her mother too, just a few years ago. She didn't say exactly how it had happened, but Dawn knew that it had something to do with an SGC mission. It was at about that time that Dawn stopped calling her Dr. Fraiser, and started to call her Cassie. She also learned that Cassie had just graduated from medical school a few months earlier, and was doing her internship at the SGC.
Cassie also took note of Dawn's many scars. She looked carefully at the faint parallel lines that ran across Dawn's sides at waist level. "So, what happened here?"
"Uh…I had an interesting childhood," said Dawn. "It's classified. I'm not supposed to talk about it." She figured that that answer would do, for someone as junior as Cassie.
Dawn had just finished putting her clothes back on when Cassie opened the curtain again. "Okay, the low tech portion of your physical is over. Now comes the high tech part."
Dawn raised her eyebrows. "Low tech?" Most of the instruments that Cassie had used on her were pretty modern. The MRI scanner was something that she'd only seen on TV science shows about the latest new thing.
"Yeah, we've got some toys here that are out of this world…literally." Cassie took Dawn into another room that had a pair of raised circular platforms, each about three feet in diameter and six inches off the floor, in the centre of it. She pointed to the one on the right. "Step up there, and hold still." She moved over behind a control console.
Dawn stepped onto the platform. "So, what's this do?"
"Full body scan, right down to the molecular level." Cassie pushed a couple of buttons and Dawn saw a 3D image of herself appear over the second platform. Cassie twisted a knob and the image started to turn.
"Neat!" said Dawn, and she saw her image appear to speak along with her.
"It gets neater." Cassie twiddled with more controls and first Dawn's clothing, and then her skin vanished from the image. More layers were stripped away, until just her skeleton remained. It vanished too, and was replaced by the network of Dawn's circulatory system: her heart, arteries and veins. Cassie zoomed in on her heart, and Dawn could see it beating.
"Looks healthy," said Cassie.
"Hey, they keep telling me I got a lotta heart."
"You're the fourth person this week to use that one." Cassie adjusted the controls again, causing Dawn's other organs to be displayed.
"So, if you've got this fancy…whatever it is, why did you bother with all the other stuff?" asked Dawn. "This shows way more than any MRI could."
"This is new, alien tech, and we don't really understand how it works yet," said Cassie. "We like to be able to compare what it tells us with what our own instruments say. Plus, General Jack has a real distrust of nearly everything off-world, especially the stuff we don't understand. He's been bitten too many times."
"'General Jack'?" asked Dawn.
"Oh, I'm the only one here who calls him that. I've known him since I was a kid. Of course he was only 'Colonel Jack' back then. Anyway, we'll be comparing the data we got from this, with all the other data we collected the old fashioned way, to make sure that this thing isn't lying to us."
A light started to flash on Cassie's console. "Okay, we're done."
"So, what all did this thing do?"
"Lots of stuff. The main scan is just down to a cellular level, and it was finished almost instantly. That's what we've been looking at here. We have a full recording of everything every cell in your body was doing for a couple of minutes, to make sure everything is working right. Then the machine took a random sample from a few thousand different cells, and did a full DNA sequence on them, and recorded that too." Cassie pressed another button, and a green crystal popped out of the console. She picked it up. "It's all recorded in here. Enough data to actually make another you…your body anyway."
"You can do that?" asked Dawn. "Sounds creepy."
"We can't, but some of the aliens we've met could do it," said Cassie. "The General has managed to have himself copied a few times, which is one of the reasons why he made us make real sure that this thing couldn't copy memories."
"You're sure about that?" asked Dawn.
Cassie held up the crystal. "These we do understand—well, Sam and a few people like her understand them anyway. The new petabyte solid state computer memories are based on the same technology. Nearly every bit of storage capacity in this crystal is full of the data that we know about. There isn't room in them to load your memories too."
Cassie turned Dawn back over to Dr. Hayes. He took her on a tour of the rest of the facility. Dawn saw a confusing array of offices, gymnasiums, armouries, visitor accommodations, isolation labs, physics labs, and other things. It didn't help that all the corridors looked the same. Everything was painted the same shade of grey. The only way to tell them apart was by reading the letters and numbers painted on the walls. She was sure that she wouldn't be able to find most of the things she had been shown again, without help.
One room he showed her he called the 'Situation Room.' There was a board on one wall that showed the status of each of the SG teams. Dr. Hayes explained to Dawn how each team had an "SG" designation, and how different teams had different specialities: first contact teams, geology teams, archaeology teams, diplomatic teams, a couple of companies of Marines, and other things. Dawn saw that the board started with SG-2, and went all the way to SG-50, with various statuses displayed for them. Some were off-world, some were on stand-by, and some were on stand-down. The off-world teams had their departure, expected return, and next scheduled check-in times marked, as well as other bits of information. Each of the teams also had a national flag displayed beside it. Most of them were American, but she saw that there were Russian, Chinese, British, Canadian and French flags there as well.
"So, why is there no SG-1?" she asked.
"Aw, they're kind of a special case," said Elliot. "They were our first team, and the lead team for a long time, but they're no longer active, as a team, but we decided not to give their designation to anyone else."
"What happened to them?"
"Well, General O'Neill is in command of the base. Colonel Carter is in command of SG-2, which is now the lead first contact team, Teal'c commands SG-3, and Dr. Jackson is the head of the Cultural Sciences Division…which is comprised of linguistics, history, archaeology, and anthropology departments."
"So what was Teal'c doing with SG-8?"
"SG-8 is a diplomatic team, and they are engaged in talks with the Free Jaffa, so Teal'c, being a Jaffa himself, is also involved with them. You met Bra'tac. He's one of the leaders of the Jaffa, and he was Teal'c's mentor, for many years."
The last place Elliot showed Dawn was the commissary. It was nearly lunch time, and she was starting to get hungry. "So, how's the food?"
"Not bad," said Elliot, "but you won't find out for yourself today."
"I won't?" asked Dawn. She was feeling really hungry.
"You have been invited to dine with the General."