Ax
Senator Kinsey glared at the human he called O'Neill. Even with my lack of experience judging human emotions and expressions, I suspected there was little goodwill between the two men.
"Mr. Starsky," Kinsey greeted the human. "Or were you Hutch? I never can remember."
This puzzled me. Had the senator not just called the man greeting him "O'Neill?" Perhaps O'Neill was a title? Before I could ask one of my friends about it, the human called either Starsky, Hutch, or O'Neill spoke.
"Geez, Kinsey," he said to the senator. "I barge into your house one time using that alias and you never let me forget it. Give it a rest, will ya?" That answered the question of what his actual name was.
"Don't forget you were with a convicted traitor," Kinsey replied.
"Yeah, yeah, whatever." O'Neill waved the comment aside. "Now what is this about? What brings you to our little slice of heaven here at the SGC?"
"Don't tell me you don't know, Colonel"
"All I know is that Hammond got a phone call from you that both puzzled him and pissed him off." O'Neill paused, looking around vaguely. "You seem to do that a lot."
"Call Hammond?"
"Piss him off."
Kinsey looked exasperated. "Can we just get to the SGC?"
"What's the rush? I kinda like catching up with you." O'Neill paused and pursed his lips. "Wait, you know what? On second thought, I don't. Get in," O'Neill said getting into the driver's side of the vehicle.
"What happened to catching up?" Kinsey asked, getting into the passenger's side.
"I remembered you're a son of a bitch."
I was taken aback. No Andalite military officer would dare speak to an elected official in such a way. He would be instantly stripped of his rank and quite possibly exiled.
As we followed the two men into the vehicle, Marco spoke. (Oh, yeah, these guys are pals. Nothing but love.)
I suspected his remark was sarcasm; I am getting quite adept at recognizing it.
(It is true that these men dislike each other,) I said. Then, so the senator could hear me, I continued. (But they are going to help us alert the military to the Yeerk invasion.)
Kinsey gave a barely perceptible nod.
Jake
As we drove to whatever the SGC was, we traveled through several security checkpoints; the senator and colonel dutifully showed their IDs at each one. After getting through one particularly fortified checkpoint, the road went straight into the mountainside, into the gaping mouth of a large tunnel.
Marco spoke up. (This must be Cheyenne Mountain. It's the home of NORAD.)
(You get that from the History Channel, too?) Rachel said, amused.
(What? Modern Marvels is a really cool show.)
(What can you tell us about the place?) I asked Marco.
(Um, other than housing NORAD, not much. Let's see-)
(I thought you watched the History Channel,) Rachel interrupted.
(I watched it. I never said I paid a great deal of attention. I may have dozed off once or twice.)
(Just tell us what you can,) Cassie said.
(Let's see, the whole place is deep underground. It has huge blast doors, shock absorbers, the works. Can pretty much handle all but a direct nuclear strike. NORAD handles the tracking of whatever might be in North American airspace, specifically missiles.)
(Any thing else down there?) Cassie asked. (From what we overheard from the senator I don't think he was talking about missile tracking.)
(Nothing I know of,) Marco replied. (Must be the SGC.)
(But what is the SGC?) Ax asked.
(Like I know. That's just where Kinsey said we were going, right? It must be in the mountain; there's only one road in and out.)
I thought about asking Kinsey about the SGC, but he wouldn't have been able to reply without appearing to talk to the windshield, which probably wasn't a good idea with the colonel right there. He probably wouldn't have told me even if he could, anyway.
We came to a stop in what seemed to be a small motor pool, but it was hard to tell anything with the low light and the fly's already screwy eyesight.
We stayed close to the colonel and Kinsey as they walked through an enormous blast door after showing their IDs to an airman. O'Neill swiped his ID card through a device on the wall and a moment later a door opened to an elevator.
Once inside, O'Neill pushed the button for level 11, the lowest level.
Kinsey and O'Neill spent the elevator ride in silence, with the senator glaring at O'Neill and the colonel nonchalantly gazing at the nondescript metal walls.
After unloading on level 11, we passed yet more security and got on yet another elevator, this one bound for level 28.
"So, are you going tell why you're here now?" O'Neill asked as the elevator descended past level 14.
"I'll think I'll save that for when I see Hammond," Kinsey replied. "Suffice it to say that I may finally be able to do something about the mismanagement here."
"Mismanagement? For God's sake, Kinsey, you've had Thor tell you to keep Hammond! If that's not a glowing endorsement, I don't know what is!"
"I know you have something of a friendship with Commander Thor-" Kinsey began.
O'Neill interrupted him. "That's Supreme Commander Thor to you," he said, raising a finger.
Kinsey glowered. "Despite your friendship with Supreme Commander Thor, I trust myself more than a little grey alien ten thousand light years away."
The others and I were discussing what we were going how we were going to communicate with powers that be in the base when Kinsey's statement caught our attention in a rather big way.
(Little grey aliens?)
(Ten thousand light years?)
Now, we deal with aliens all the time, and we had suspected that Kinsey and his contacts knew something about aliens, but for whatever reason, hearing a United States senator and a colonel in the United States Air Force calmly discuss aliens in an elevator in a secret underground base drove the strangeness of this situation home. More than that, it told us that Earth, or at least this snarky colonel, had alien friends who weren't Andalites.
As the elevator door opened on level 28, we had no idea what we were truly getting involved in.
And another chapter! I'm having fun writing this. I hope people are having fun reading it!
On another note, I did find the relationship between O'Neill and Kinsey a little hard to write and I'm still hammering out the kinks in it. I'm afraid that here it came off as being too similar to the love-hate relationship between O'Neill and Maybourne. Oh, well, something to work on.