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 5
"You see." It was Daniel's turn to make the words a statement rather than a question.
She nodded reluctantly. SG-1 had of course been in the thick of things, seemingly everywhere, putting out this 'fire' here, resisting the Ori infection there, shoring up that alliance, coaxing this nervous/obstreperous/paranoid world into the Tau'ri Alliance everywhere. But nothing stayed the same. People moved away or passed away. Personnel got reassigned or resigned or retired.
Politely declining the Asgard's offer of cloning technology, General Hammond had nevertheless taken advantage of new medical techniques that rendered old age less painful than it had been. He had survived until the age of 153, when, after an arduous week of high level negotiations between the Tok'Ra, Jaffa and many others, he had been killed by an embolism that stopped his heart beating between one second and the next.
"It was when General Hammond – " Georgiana began, finishing her sentence a heartbeat later with " – died," – as she stared around her at the familiar bridge of an Asgard spaceship. Standing nearby was an Asgard, about six-feet in height. She inclined her head respectfully. "Thor."
By virtue of Heimdall's research, replicator technology and even some DNA donated by General Jack O'Neill after having the Ancients' repository downloaded into his brain twice, the Asgard had achieved a breakthrough in their work to end the damage caused centuries of cloning. They had been helped even more after Colonel Sam Carter (need it be said?) found a way to circumvent the Ancients' 'Place of Our Legacy' databases access protocols. In short, she figured out to extract specific data in sections without a succession of people being required to get their heads sucked and then Asgard-mind-wiped before the data overload killed them.
Most importantly, they were able to ensure they didn't end up in the same mess again another few thousand years hence, especially as, using all her tact and diplomacy, Sam had pointed out that all their people were all their people. Access to Asgard libraries had shown her that the Asgard birth rate went into freefall within decades of the cloning technology becoming universally available to their species. The eventual zero birth rate had led to a finite population centuries before Catherine Langford's father discovered the Stargate at Giza in 1928; the Asgard did not reproduce but the same number of individuals were being transferred to new bodies, which meant the death of a single Asgard was a global catastrophe.
Listening to what Sam Carter wasn't saying, Thor and Heimdall had constructed an artificial womb and used what was distantly similar to Earth gene-splicing and IVF treatment to merge their genetic material in a 'new' Asgard individual. Even as she bowed to Thor and drank in the never-boring sight of an Asgard spaceship, Georgiana had to hold in a smile. SG-1 had been requested by General O'Neill as his honour guard when he received an urgent summons to the new Asgard homeworld. He had even been persuaded to allow a 'live' news crew to accompany them.
Documentaries still broadcast images of the stunned but unalloyed delight on the General's face when with great ceremony he was 'introduced' to the first baby Asgard to be born in nearly 3,000 years. His valiant attempt at demure modesty had failed altogether when Thor declared to the galaxy that the baby Asgard was called Oneil. However, Sam Carter's real objective had been achieved. Used to knowing everyone who knew everything, the static and slowly stagnating Asgard culture had been reinvigorated by the need to use their brains to educate and train and care for an Asgard who had to learn everything from scratch. Thor and Heimdall had used the technique again, to produce Kahta, Jaksun, Tilk, Hahmnd and Freyasa.
Daniel shot a pointed look at the wall behind Georgiana, breaking in to her brief reverie, but with her new understanding she was not surprised when she turned and saw where his glance was directed - the discreet Asgard lettering on the inner bulkhead, which translated as: O'Neill-Mark-Three Class battleship, Flagship the Daniel Jackson Four.
The death of General George Hammond had been the catalyst for SG-1's decision, she now realised; her great-grandfather had been the first, longest-serving and most greatly admired Chief of Homeworld Security that Earth had had to date and his funeral had been solemn and on a scale not achieved by some Presidents and national sovereigns, though he would have been hugely embarrassed by it.
Again, the media nowadays constantly regurgitated the defining images: Daniel and Jack had been pall-bearers; all four had been seated with the immediate family; Teal'c and Bra'tac, himself very frail and near the end of his life at that point, had both attended in full armour to salute the fall of a fellow warrior, Honorary Jaffa 'Master' Hammond of Texas. Most of the Tok'Ra had been present, along with the Asgard and other allies both galactically and from Earth's fellow nations, such as British monarch William V, King-Emperor of the 2nd British Empire.
Of course today the media's favourite footage was of those minutes before the official start of the televised funeral. An enterprising Reuters cameraman, seeking different footage, realised that though Colonel Cameron Mitchell was with General Landry outside, the other three members of SG-1 had disappeared. A fairly bright guy, he had guessed they had gone inside and he managed to sneak in also and provide live film from the inside of the Cathedral He had beamed to a watching world – indeed, watching worlds – the enduring image of four grief-stricken figures hunched side by side in front of the bier in distraught silence. Some hours after the official ceremony, a daring reporter had asked Teal'c how the death of the General would affect SG-1's future missions. The stern-faced, grim-voiced reply of: "SG-1 shall no longer travel through the Stargate," had made intergalactic headlines for the next week.
Whether a spur of the moment choice or one made prior to the funeral, SG-1 had had the idea of what they were about to do because of her great-grandfather's death, Georgiana realised as two instantly familiar figures – a blond woman and a huge black man – walked onto the Daniel Jackson's bridge. General Hammond's death had made SG-1's three original members and General Jack O'Neill think long and hard about where they were and their status both on their homeworld and other planets.
They were, and rightly so, universally feted as champions and heroes, but they were also seeing the first signs of a tendency to treat them as venerable elder statesmen, the first step on the slippery slope to being just four old people reliving long-gone glories. Such heroes as the First Atlantis team also deserved their place in the sun, and had the advantages of better/'flashier' technology. They also had a photogenic, attractive personnel complement that was on average a full decade younger than Daniel Jackson, the youngest member of SG-1 by eight months even after their combined age 'lowered' when Jack was promoted after they defeated Anubis and the much younger Cam Mitchell became the second team leader.
By the time of General Hammond's death, had they been in their original bodies and not had their consciousnesses transferred to Asgard clones, Teal'c would have been nearing a 120 years of age. Though by then riding a desk at the Pentagon instead of diving through Stargates, Jack would have been at the absolute mandatory retirement age even after that age limit had been exponentially increased due to the longer life-spans provided by the various advanced medical devices discovered off world.
Nor was that the end of it; Sam Carter had had the most cloned bodies, after suffering terrible injuries on two occasions in the infamous Hebridan 'no-rules' annual space race. Eventually a personal plea from Cameron Mitchell, Jack O'Neill, Daniel Jackson and Teal'c had persuaded her to stop entering after they'd had the unpleasant experience of seeing her mangled physical body both times, but Daniel, Teal'c and Mitchell hadn't been far behind her in getting themselves too injured to remain in their bodies.
So when Colonel Mitchell was in turn promoted, the rest of SG-1 had given up the limelight and gradually eased themselves off the stage and back into the wings, slowly tailing off the interviews and 'public sightings'. If anything, their workload had tripled once they began to beaver quietly away behind the scenes, but their main aim had been achieved: as time went on, people began to forget not them, but that they were still around.
Kyja O'Neill had married Danel, the boy Daniel had delivered on Pelops, and the pair had become prominent leaders amongst their people. JJ O'Neill had married Janet Fraiser's adopted daughter Cassandra, and both had declined cloning technology to extend life-spans that by now were naturally back up to the mid 'hundreds' for humans anyway. As JJ had said, his kids had enough to deal with a dad who was already a clone and a mother who was an alien.
Rya'c had made the same decision, he and his wife having three sons, Bra'tac, Teal'c and Jhaak; Bra'tac had been chosen 'Tec'mahtay', master or king, of the Free Jaffa Worlds to Teal'c's immense pride, but he had understood the anxiety of having your living-legend grandpa watching over your shoulder all the while. All those who knew SG-1 personally had had their own lives to live and to die. As time went on, most historians simply included a vague assumption of SG-1's passing in their texts and later books simply followed suit, quoting a source that was quoting a source that was repeating an assumption.
As she greeted Teal'c and Major General Sam Carter, Georgiana appreciated how privileged she was. Whilst Sam had been a popular cause célèbre amongst her nephews and nieces, the shine had rapidly dulled when it came to their descendents. These had struggled with the dichotomy of their nonagenarian grandfather in photographs interred in a cemetery versus his perpetually thirty-something sister still loitering in the background. Nowadays the Carter family, unlike Georgiana, had no idea that their illustrious ancestress also still lived. Attuned to the increasing discomfort of her family, Sam had distanced herself like Teal'c.
Nicholas Ballard had finally died of immense old age on the planet of his beloved Mayan giant aliens many years ago and was Daniel's only close relative, at least in human form, since his son Shifu – his only child – was an Ascended Ancient. The children of JJ & Cassandra O'Neill and likewise Jack's daughters Kyja and Jara knew of the legendary General O'Neill only as a figure in history texts or on archive newsreels. Teal'c had absented himself from his son's daily life for many years before Rya'c died, and his children had no real sense of Teal'c as a person – to them, 'grandfather' meant a grey-haired, wise elder in his early 130s, not a silent, aloof giant who didn't look a day over forty.
That was what Daniel had meant when he silently indicated to Georgiana the Asgard ship's name. Sufficient time had passed for the Asgard – not sloppy builders by any standards – to have reached the fourth ship to be named Daniel Jackson, and Georgiana knew for a fact that the Asgard had reached the Samantha Carter Six. SG-1 had encouraged the world to think of them only as names in books. Only the direct descendents of George Hammond had been made privy to the fact that 'SG-1' still lived.
"Hellooo, kids." Hands in pockets, dressed in Air-Force-blue BDUs (long obsolete having been swapped for a tiger-pattern on a grey background in the early 21st Century), Jack O'Neill strolled into the room as if here to do nothing more than watch his favoured ice hockey, also not looking a day over than when he'd first been appointed Brigadier General of the SGC nearly two centuries earlier. "Georgie."
"Sir," Georgiana could no more call him 'Jack' than she could fly, but something still prompted her to say, "You're really going to do this."
Jack tilted his head on one side and gave her a long look, then smiled. "Yep, I guess we are, since I assume your litter test went to plan, Daniel?"
Georgiana blinked and behind Jack's back, Sam mouthed the words, 'litmus test'.
Daniel meanwhile was nodding, "Completely."
Not having reached the rank of Colonel by being slow on the uptake, Georgiana blurted, "Our lunch at Panache, that was your test. You were checking to see how many people…" she paused as it sank in, "…recognised you as who you really were."
"And the result was zero," Daniel told Jack. "Zip, zilch. I sat there with Georgiana for an hour-and-a-half and nobody looked once at me. Not even Dr Chloe Woodhouse, who was sitting at the next table and who worked with me for nine months back on the Touchstone Project in 2011 – and she even tried to ravish on one of the workbenches at the time!"
"Maybe she didn't see you; she is a 167 years old." Georgiana couldn't resist playing Devil's Advocate as she fought back the urge to ask Daniel if Chloe's amorous attack had succeeded.
Daniel snorted, "It doesn't matter – 167 or 1067, the woman's got eyes like a hawk. If she didn't recognise me, nobody else would."
"In that case, I'm making an executive decision," announced Jack. "It's time to boldly go, kiddies…"
"You will be greatly missed, O'Neill," Thor spoke for the first time, softly.
Jack O'Neill gave one of his trademark grins. "Come on, it's not like we'll be gone forever, or even alone. The Ancient Ancients are out there; Kasuf is out there, so is Skaara, and Daniel's son Shifu – Ascended one and all. We'll drop by from time to time, check in and keep you apprised. Unlike some Ancients I could name who didn't –"
Call or write the whole time he was ascended – rolling his eyes, Daniel silently mouthed the words as Jack said them out loud, clearly familiar with them. "You're never going to let that go, are you?" he groused.
"You were an Ascended Ancient with the power of supernovas at your finger- tentacle – tips," Jack sniped, "and you couldn't, y'know, send an email even? Leave the occasional note?"
Daniel snorted derisively. "Oh, and who was it who shot me?"
"You were shooting up the Gate Room – besides you weren't you, you were Anubis."
"You didn't know that when you shot me!"
Biting the inside of her cheek to stop from chuckling, Georgiana remained silent, as did Teal'c and Sam, with the ease of long familiarity. Jack O'Neill and Daniel Jackson had been exchanging pithy banter for nearly two centuries; when the race between energy and entropy ended and the favourite probably won with the universe collapsing in on itself, the last sounds to be heard in the vast unfathomable void would undoubtedly be, respectively:
"Daniel."
"Jack."
Sam cleared her throat. "I think it might be a good idea if you went first…"
Jack gave a sniff but didn't argue. Taking a deep breath he exhaled slowly, rolled his neck to loosen up, closed his eyes, took another deep breath, opened them, exhaled gustily…and changed.
Georgiana instinctively turned her head from the incandescent white glow, turning back to face the place where Jack O'Neill had been standing. Floating in mid-air was an Ascended Ancient – which suddenly dropped two feet like a stone before stopping with much agitated thrashing of tentacles. Daniel uttered a strangled sound that strongly resembled a choked off laugh. Biting her lip, Sam Carter closed her eyes and instantly the light emanated again to leave a glowing golden Ancient floating much more serenely next to the first, faintly blue coloured one. Inclining his head sombrely towards Georgiana, Teal'c became an Ancient with instant grace, his long periods of Kel Nor'eem because of 'Junior' helping him achieve the right frame of mind without conscious thought. His Ascended form was much larger than Carter or O'Neill, and the light emanating from it was pure white.
Gritting her teeth and blinking frantically, Georgiana watched as Daniel Jackson became a glowing incandescent creature. Despite the baseball sized lump in her throat, Georgiana struggled not to laugh as the first Ancient propelled itself towards the observation window like an octopus surging through water, only with a great deal more (and less elegant) tentacle activity. It shot through the barrier as if it were not there, out into the vacuum of space itself, where it hovered for a moment, then began to whirl and wheel and spin about in a way that made Georgiana think instantly of her pet Labrador puppy wanting to play. Daniel-Ancient was suddenly quite close to her and it pulsed slightly, rhythmically. Georgiana somehow knew that Daniel knew exactly what she was thinking, and was also laughing.
The Ancient shot back inside the ship at precipitous speed, waggling its tentacles towards the other three in an unmistakeably come on! gesture before shooting back out into space again as if the window weren't there. Moving more slowly but more gracefully, the three Ascended beings surged out to join the first one, and as Georgiana and Thor watched, they hovered for a moment and then surged away into the vastness of space, within minutes becoming an indistinguishable bright dot amongst the countless stars.
"I am sure they will be all right," Thor tried to reassure her.
She managed a watery smile, unsurprised that her cheeks were damp. "I know it, Thor. We haven't heard the last of SG-1, not where Jack O'Neill's concerned."
Concluded in Epilogue…
© 2005, C. D. Stewart