Disclaimer: Stargate SG-1 and all characters therein are the property of Richard Dean Anderson, Michael Greenberg et al. No money is being made from this story and no infringement of copyright is intended. All original characters are the property of C.D. Stewart.
Summary: This (shortish) story is set time-wise roughly about 150 years after what in real-life would be the end of both real-action series, Stargate: SG-1 and Stargate: Atlantis. I am assuming that Stargate SG-1 will end after ten seasons (2008) and Atlantis also after ten seasons (2015). Rating: T/PG.
QUIETLY INTO THE NIGHT
Chapter 4
Those early years had been fractious and tumultuous. Everyone wanted a slice of the pie and a piece of the heroes, and SG-1's reputation along with that of the wider SGC had only increased exponentially as they moved fully into battle against the Ori. Again, Georgiana was aware that few amongst the masses realised how close that victory had been.
The revelation that the Alterrans, the Ancients, had not been exploring but fleeing the evil ones of their Ascended kind had put a whole new light on the situation for the SGC when it was understood that the Ancients' resolute policy of non-interference with the affairs of 'lower' races did not stem from egomaniacal indifference such as Anubis displayed. Things had been very close to the edge for a long time, helped only by the fact that 'new' Ancients such as Sha'ri and Daniel's Ascended son, Shifu, plus Kasuf, Skaara and the Ascended Abydonians had been a lot more proactive when it came to rendering aid to their 'lower' life form friends the Tau'ri. The Asgard and even the Nox and even the Reetu also had to resist the attacks of the Ori.
Yet again though, the SGC got lucky. Millennia of mindless devotion had caused the Ori to forget the wise caution of General Landry and Colonel Mitchell's grandmothers – always remember there could be someone higher up the food chain than you. The Ori's megalomania made them believe they were the creators, not a creation.
The benevolent entity who had developed so much of the universe with sentient life was not best pleased with the actions of its eldest children, and had finally used SG-1 in the form of Mitchell, Carter, Jackson and Teal'c as a 'conduit' to administer some much needed discipline and chastisement. The Ori had wilfully forgotten that benevolent did not mean impotent, that tolerance was not the same as inability, that mercy could give way to righteous anger and that patience inevitably did run out.
Again though it had been a close-run thing because the entity would not interfere directly, a stance that had astonishingly been backed by General Jack O'Neill, previously a vociferous opponent of that 'not my problem' attitude. Georgiana, like a great many, would have given much to know what had happened on that occasion when several SGC personnel encountered the entity. She would never know – nobody involved, from General Hammond down through General O'Neill through SG-1 and even Lt Colonel Paul Davis or Chief Walter Harriman – would ever speak about the matter for either public or private record.
Daniel Jackson's brief summation of the 'visitation' had revealed that the 'Being' refused to interfere directly in the matter on the valid grounds that to do so would invalidate everything that was quintessential to the idea of 'free will'. The second reason, as the entity had declared with what Daniel swore was clear exasperation, was that the entity would then be constantly hounded and harried by those wanting it to 'fix everything' on the grounds of 'you did it for them' rather than be willing to face and overcome challenges on their own.
Georgiana really looked at how tired and sad Daniel's usually bright eyes were and conceded to herself that while SG-1 and their SGC comrades had been giving their all in the fight against the Ori - with eventual joyous success – behind the scenes things were unravelling as fast as they worked to patch them up, most noticeably and painfully in the SGC personnel's private lives.
For instance, Mark Carter had been stupefied to see what his sister and father had actually been doing for over five years, his fond illusion of his father as a frail old warhorse in remission from his cancer, warming a desk at the Pentagon en route to retirement, utterly shattered in the time between one heartbeat and the next. As Mark had wryly enquired of one particularly obtuse tabloid reporter, how exactly was he supposed to 'process' the revelation that in truth his father had died a galactic hero on a planet the other side of the galaxy saving pretty much everybody from the über-evil?
From being young, Mark Carter had always nurtured the opinion that he had 'lost' first his father and then his sister to the military; the already present gap between Samantha and Mark became an unbridgeable chasm. He was unable to really adjust to the fact that his father and sister had been hosts, or the bond of shared experience that generated between them, despite the fact that two of his children eventually joined the SGC and one of his daughters became a Tok'Ra and married her fellow Tok'Ra Dalomar/Shevan, nephew of Jolinar's mate Martouf.
Daniel, not being a vengeful or egotistical person by nature, found himself embarrassed rather than gloating over the fawning apologies of the archaeological world and their obsequious recanting. The widely realised discovery courtesy of the SGC and Dr Rodney McKay in the Pegasus Galaxy that 'Ascension' could indeed be managed by science rather than mysticism (by virtue of the example of Anubis, ironically) enabled him to re-Ascend but retake human form at will.
He had done so for some considerable months after the threat of the Ori was finally vanquished, ostensibly grieving for his dead grandfather Nicholas Ballard and 'connecting' with his Ascended son Shifu more intimately. Georgiana was one of a select few who had learned that in reality Daniel had found it increasingly difficult to cope with the fawning plaudits and OTT adulation from patently insincere types all wanting to jump on the bandwagon. Certainly a handsome man, he had also been greatly mortified at 'romantic' pursuit by a variety of women who wouldn't know what a 'meaningful' relationship was if it hit them in the face.
General Jack O'Neill's ex-wife Sarah, perpetually grieving for her lost and only child, had likewise been unable to come to terms with the realities of his clone 'son' J.J. O'Neill, eventual adopted son Loren, or the fact of his daughters. In some ways that he had an illegitimate alien child, his Edorran daughter, Jara, was easier for her to cope with than his technically legitimate daughter Kyja, since Kynthia's giving O'Neill the marriage cake on Pelops was a legally-binding marriage ceremony on that world. Adding even more pressure was the fact that the Asgard publicly credited SG-1 and primarily O'Neill with the saving of their race due to a combination of factors.
Of the four, perhaps Teal'c had fared best. He was greatly revered amongst the Free Jaffa and also accepted when he began to live in the local community around Cheyenne Mountain. He continued to receive only acceptance and courtesy from his grateful neighbours. Jaffa children were used to having a much more distant relationship with their fathers than was normal in many cultures and Ry'ac had been classed as an adult warrior in his own right years before the war with the Ori.
The emotional fallout that many of the SGC experienced was thus not felt by Teal'c; his only real 'loss' was the final death of the great warrior Bra'tac, which devastated him. Others were not so fortunate, such as Colonel Paul Davis, who was divorced by his wife less than two years' after the public exposure of the Stargate programme because she felt unable to 'live up' to the popular image of what she called the 'superhero's love interest'. It was a sad consequence played out several times in the ensuing decades between spouses and also parents and children, one party too intimidated by the fear of having to live up to an 'impossible' legacy.
As if that were not enough, there had been the politics and money-men, jockeying for position and power, plus all the self-appointed 'watchdog' groups: some of whom deplored the militarization of the Stargate programme; others who objected/supported the Touchstone programme on environmental grounds; others who protested about the archaeologists chosen to work on the artefacts retrieved and so on and so on. The injuries sustained by the aged British Queen Elizabeth II in Chemosh's attack left her with permanent nerve damage requiring constant use of a walking cane, and cemented the monarchy's position as if it were granite. So when she requested that Earth's prototype Touchstone be sited, symbolically, at Greenwich, the SGC had complied causing a monumental fit of pique to erupt.
One such self-appointed moral watchdog group had instigated an investigation into General Jack O'Neill with the express intention of charging him with war crimes and genocide under the Geneva Convention, even talking in interviews about trial at The Hague. One of the group had 'jumped' Daniel Jackson live on CNN coming out of Cheyenne Mountain, demanding to know how someone of his 'loudly trumpeted ethical views on the military' could work so closely and have such ties of friendship to a mass-murderer. For ten minutes the world was audience to a 'fire-and-brimstone' oratory that set the importune man quaking in his shoes, wherein Dr Jackson neither paused to take a breath nor uttered a single swear word. Speechwriters called it a masterpiece on a par with the Gettysburg Address, and Harvard made it a standard text in their Rhetoric module of the Politics & Government course.
But all the other stuff of day-to-day life and non-media-worthy existence was going off at the same time too. Though named for her illustrious great-grandfather, Georgiana's only real recollections of General George Hammond were of a short, rotund, bald man with kind blue eyes, a gentle voice and a fund of what she now knew were extensively Bowdlerised stories about the Stargate explorations. She did remember that when anyone got him to talk in detail about those frantic years, he invariably quoted (with various degrees of exasperation) Charles Dickens' famed opening line of A Tale of Two Cities: "'It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.'"
With his beloved wife long dead, his children grown and independent, there had been nothing stopping George Hammond devoting all his time and attention to being Chief of Homeworld Security and senior commander of the Prometheus, and if he had felt the pressure of trying to do a hundred-and-one things simultaneously, what must it have been like for everyone else involved trying to find time for families and some kind of life?
It was a considerable amount of time after the Stargate became public before those on the First Atlantis Expedition managed to make any headway in attempting a viable solution to the danger posed by the Wraith. Having to fight a two-fronted war against the Ori and the Wraith should Colonel Caldwell's Daedelus and the Atlantis base under Colonel John Sheppard fail to contain them in the Pegasus Galaxy had been yet another nightmare that kept many SGC personnel from the brass to the janitors awake and sweating in the dark most nights.
It wasn't until even later that Daniel Jackson developed a solid theory that the Wraith were 'probably' the historical reality behind Earth's vampire mythology. The physical appearance of the Wraith and the characteristics of the undead in Earth legend matched in too many ways to be coincidence – it appeared that at least one Wraith had managed to return to Earth with the Ancients from Atlantis. While many of the anti-vampire standards – mirrors, crucifixes, holy water, et cetera - proved useless, what did not, amazingly, was garlic and sunlight.
Experimentation with what few biological samples the Atlantis Expedition had been able to send back proved that garlic bulbs contained an enzyme inimical to Wraith physiology in much the same way that an inability to produce insulin led to diabetes in humans. By testing the samples with UV spectrum light, it was shown that the emissions of a yellow sun were also eventually as lethal to the Wraith as sunlight was to the Earth vampire – the Wraith's homeworld sun was red. The Wraith had developed their culling beam for use even from small 'dart' ships to minimise their exposure to the yellow-sun worlds their victims lived on, and though they could tolerate direct exposure for short periods, eventually a yellow sun burned and would kill them.
Unfortunately more valuable time would pass before Drs Rodney McKay and Carson Beckett finally managed to actually manufacture ZPMs using the Pegasus Galaxy's equivalent of Naqahdah and thus ensure that Atlantis could be inhabited permanently, also of course enabling them to open up the Stargate all the time to Earth and defend Atlantis from Wraith incursion.
In the meantime, anyone with any political or diplomatic ability on Earth was being run ragged. The Goa'uld had inadvertently continued the colonisation of space by humanity that the Ancients had begun, and the top-level System Lords such as Yu, Apophis, Baal and Anubis had ruled entire galaxies, some containing dozens of worlds populated by billions of humans, all of whom were rediscovering their legendary ancestral home, the world of the Tau'ri. Within eighteen months, genealogical and archaeological 'tourism' had become Earth's largest economy, with countries like the USA, which had little pre-industrialised history, suffering in comparison to the UK, Europe, Japan, China and Asia, which had millennia of recorded history and monuments to show off – and eagerly did.
The effort and manpower involved in the urgent threefold task of a) nurturing the fledgling but exponentially expanding Tau'ri Alliance, b) trying to prevent the Ori replacing the false Goa'uld gods with their own equally evil selves and c) helping the Tok'ra ensure the power of the few remaining Goa'uld System Lords remained destroyed was indescribably intense. It became more so when the breakthrough decision was made to dispose of the by-then infamous 'sarcophagus' technology.
Asgard scientists proved unable to isolate and correct the design flaws that created addiction, but did manage to identify the vital healing components and verified that humans who were not Goa'uld hosts could use a sarcophagus sparingly over time. These components were placed in Earth hospitals under the most stringent of operating conditions, especially since (as Daniel had testified to Congress) if an already healthy person used a sarcophagus or it was used too frequently in a short time span, it rapidly became addictive to a degree greater than that of crack cocaine.
Cannabilism and the genetic degradation to the genome inflicted upon Goa'uld queens by the sarcophagus meant their population had actually dropped below sustainable levels long before the sarcophagi were removed from the Goa'uld's reach. Many System Lords had died rapidly from withdrawal, though there had been the odd exception like Baal, who was suspected to have accessed Ancient healing devices to overcome his addiction before he settled on Earth as a legitimate businessman; something he had claimed was a lot more fun than being a System Lord – apparently Wall Street was much more of a challenge than most of his 'limited' fellow Goa'uld.
With the ancient Goa'uld dying off and the Tretonin that meant Jaffa no longer depended on larval Goa'uld for an immune system, the Goa'uld population had gone into freefall, exacerbated by the rise of the Unas on their home world. Tremendously long-lived anyway, Chaka's friendship with Daniel Jackson made him in many ways the 'caveman who understood television', and his ability to apply brain over brawn eventually made him the undisputed Aka'chak or 'Chief of all Tribes' of the Unas.
Obtaining the last batch of the Tok'Ra's poison and reassured by Daniel it affected only Goa'uld, Chaka had baffled everyone by having it dumped in a remote inland sea where all the Goa'uld promptly died. However, Chaka knew that every hot summer the sea was reduced to barely a large pond. When the annual drought occurred the poisoned water was evaporated into the atmosphere and literally rained down on every watercourse on the planet. The Tok'Ra had designed the poison to be lethal to symbiotes even after great dilution, and the planet's fish and fowl population exploded when faced with the bounty of billions of dead Goa'uld in every stream and river, pond and lake, sea and ocean. While the odd Goa'uld might have survived in an isolated underground stream or acquifier, for all practical purposes, the Goa'uld were extinct.
In the meantime there emerged a minor Goa'uld queen who had largely avoided sarcophagus use, Zenobia. Her choosing to become a Tok'Ra, albeit probably out of pragmatism rather than conviction, had increased the latter's benevolent population and ability to take over abandoned Goa'uld technology as the Tok'Ra displaced the Goa'uld as the representative population of their species. For the first time ever, the sight of a Mothership in orbit around a planet was not immediate cause for alarm or panic.
Continued in Chapter 5…
© 2005, C. D. Stewart