Chapter 11

Rachel sat silently gazing out the window of the SUV as Sam drove toward Prime. She had contacted the security supervisor at Prime and had ordered him to lock down the entire facility, including the home offices. Sam could only imagine that to lock down the Malt Shop had to be akin to a Wildfire in Cheyenne. She envisioned heavy doors closing, armed guards rising to the occasion, and the general sense of tension that was felt in any high security facility that feared being compromised.

She glanced over at Rachel, annoyed to some degree by her silence on the matter.

"You want to let me in on what you're thinking?" Sam asked.

"I'm thinking this is not looking good for any future contracts for the company. I'm thinking," she said, "that Ellen should have come to me with this sooner if she suspected infiltration."

"Any idea why she wouldn't?"

Rachel shrugged. "She's thorough. According to what we could see in her notes, she wasn't sure if there was a real need for lockdown."

"Someone beat the hell out of her tonight," Sam said simply. "I'd say that's pretty good supporting evidence."

Sam's cell phone rang. Its loud chirp startled both of them.

"Carter."

"You're having a busy night," O'Neill said casually.

"Yes, sir," she said. She noticed Rachel look over in curiosity.

"Give me the rundown, Major."

"I'm still piecing together the details, sir. Ellen Bainbridge, one of Prime's top researchers, was beaten up pretty severely at home tonight. Police don't have a suspect, but we found some things that may or may not be cause for alarm at this point."

She knew the impending reaction. Sam could just see the raised eyebrows, the sarcastic look on his face. There was a brief pause before O'Neill spoke again.

"Such as?"

"I'm on my way to check it out now. I'm going to have to get back to you on what I find, Colonel."

Now it was Rachel's turn to raise a brow. "O'Neill?" she silently mouthed.

"Carter," O'Neill said in his unique warning voice, "need I remind you there are a lot of eyes on Prime right now?"

"Understood, sir." Sam reached over and rolled down the window. She stuck the phone into the solid stream of air produced by traveling the freeway's speed limit. Then she snapped the phone closed.

Rachel's surprised was evident. "Did you just hang up on a full bird colonel?"

Carter was feeling impatient. Her foot pressed into the accelerator a little more. "Look, we need to get some answers before I get pressed by the SGC or the Pentagon. And you need to start being straight with me."

"Straight about what?"

Sam decided to tackle the issue head-on. "Did you pull my files?"

"Did I what?" Rachel responded, seemingly shocked.

"Someone pulled just about every file on me, including my sealed records from the SGC. I need to know if that was you."

Rachel gave a moment of consideration and relented. "I'll admit I did some inquiries with some people on the inside," she admitted, an ironic grin on her face, "but pull your files? Why the hell would I need to do that when I have direct lines of information?"

"The Pentagon has it that someone at Prime pulled my files. You're topping the list of suspects. Give me one good reason I should believe it wasn't you."

"Because we've known each other a long time, Sam," Rachel said defensively. "If I wanted to know that much about you, I'd just ask you directly. I don't need to go sneaking around yanking service records. When I want an answer, I get it - all by myself."

Rachel was right. The woman got what she wanted in life by getting it on her own. She relied on no one, which had made her a captain of industry. She had attained the position she had not by the fact that she was the daughter of a phenomenally successful military contractor but that she was well suited to handle its challenges. She was a pit bull when it came to her projects, and for good reason. She wanted to be successful, and she always had been as far as Sam knew.

Sam had no intention of backing down, though. "If not you, then who?" she pressed.

"How the hell should I know?" Rachel said in a raised voice.

"There are a finite number of people working for you. Who would benefit the most from it?"

"That's a little hard to say, since I don't know why someone would want to know every detail down to your bra size. I mean, you're only this huge repository of alien information. I can think of a whole hell of a lot of people, and not all of them on the inside of Prime, who would love to dissect you like a bug and see what you know."

"I've been that route," Carter said lightly. "You need to start giving me answers, Rachel. I'm getting backed against the wall, and I don't like it."

Rachel backed down at Sam's ire. "Tell me what you want, Carter, and I'll do whatever it takes to give it to you."

"The first thing we're going to do is find out who was making the inquiries. I need access to your corporate data."

Rachel held up an objecting finger. "Except that."

"Rachel," Carter warned.

"You're out of your mind if you think I'm going to let you waltz through the company's financial data. I have enough agency regulators breathing down my neck all day. I don't need you giving the Pentagon more ammunition."

Carter chuckled. "Trust me – they don't need much."

Aside from the fact that the Pentagon was a culmination of not just military but of other entities in the government, its pool of resources was almost endless. It had the authority to do whatever it deemed necessary to protect the security of the United States and its allies. In the case of Stargate Command, the mission changed to include the security of the entire planet.

"The MALP program is our bread and butter. I've busted my ass to keep that contract, and I don't intend to let it go any time soon," Rachel vowed.

"If it's so important, why wasn't Doctor Bainbridge working on it?" Carter asked, pressing the issue as much as she could.

"It isn't her kind of project. It was a moneymaker to her, which isn't why she's in the business. She's a hell of a researcher, Sam. The MALP is a tinker toy in her eyes. She doesn't get a thrill out of adding robots to a rolling box. She's always been on the cutting edge, and the MALP just isn't there for her."

Carter pursued the line of questioning. "If not for her, then who?"

Rachel shook her head. "A dozen people at any time. Depends on what we're adding or fixing. It's not like one person fixes the damned things when you send them back in pieces. There's a lot going on in them."

"We have to start looking at those twelve when we get to Prime."

"I'm not going to let you or anyone else rake them over the coals. They're loyal to the corporation and me. They work hours a hooker couldn't live on just to get the job done on time, and all to make sure the SGC teams don't step into a pile of crap on the other side of the gate."

Carter could not believe Rachel's defense of the situation. "Someone put Bainbridge in a coma tonight. I'd think you'd want to investigate everyone who might be involved."

"Sam, I'm all for the truth. I want to know who hurt her, yes. But I can't allow others who are innocent be subjected to a Pentagon investigation. They've earned that protection. I would have thought you'd understand that."

"You're not leaving me many choices," Sam said, frustrated.

"I'm going to meet you halfway on this," Rachel bargained. "I'll let you look at the data you want, but I'm not going to open the doors and let every halfwit CID guy come into the most secure commercial military production facility and poke around. It's just not going to happen."

Sam was silent, driving just a little faster in frustration. "What are you afraid of people seeing, Rachel?" she asked quietly.

Rachel slouched down in the seat a little, weariness overcoming her. "This is not a pretty industry, Sam," she said. "Playing strictly by the rules doesn't get you contracts, nor does it put you ahead of the other guy. We don't wave the flag and build weapons. We wave a piece of paper and ask the government to sign on the dotted line. Sometimes, that involves incentives that go outside the ethical curve you swear by in the SGC."

"Kickbacks?" Sam asked, already knowing the answer.

"In one form or another. If you don't think everyone does it, then you're naïve about the real world. Nobody gets multimillion dollar contracts without greasing the slide a little."

"Let me guess – the list of names is distinguished?"

"If they were revealed, I'd be taken off their Christmas card list, for sure."

The list of suspects opened up exponentially with Rachel's revelation. Sam's mind reeled with the possibilities. It was possible Bainbridge had threatened to expose one of the kickback recipients. Perhaps she was preparing to turn evidence over to the Pentagon or some investigative agency and discovered a mole inside Prime.

Sam's mind weighed the possibilities the rest of the ride to Prime while Rachel stared out the window, lost in thought. The streets became more and more deserted as they snaked through the lower income sections of town. Prime loomed like a hulking dead monster, illuminated by a minimum number of lights to give it the look of a place that had long since been abandoned. It made no difference. Sam suspected Prime's guards enjoyed full nightvision technology that allowed them to see as if it were day in order to protect company assets.

The parking lot had a few cars in it, not surprising since Rachel had ordered the lockdown when only a minimal number of employees would have been on staff in the facility. Sam's eyes scanned the lot, spotting three guards in the dim shadows of the building. She felt her training kick in to gear, looking at possible areas of ambush. The night temperature was dropping, and cold dew was forming on the cars in the lot, giving them a frosty winter look. The late hour cast an eerie feeling over the lonely parking lot, with its sparse sodium lights humming steadily for two in the morning. Her first instinct was to draw her weapon for defense until she realized she was not carrying one. Her departure from the SGC had vacated her right and even need for one in the real world. She no longer enjoyed some of the practices that were commonplace when working in the world's most secure facility.

Sam's eyes peered into the darkness again, looking for more targets. She assumed the shadows belonged to Prime's security team, but she also knew nothing was to be taken for granted. It would not have been the first time infiltration had taken place, putting one of the team in harm's way. She was out of the protection and auspices of the SGC. Being associated with Prime made her all the more a target for any agency that had been lying in wait for its moment to strike.

Sam noticed Rachel peering out into the darkness, too. Although she had been a scientist for the Air Force, she was an airman first, trained assume everything was a dangerous situation. Basic training taught its recruits to be aware of their surroundings. There was every reason to assume the current situation was dangerous.

"Yours?" Sam asked, pointing to one of the shadows in the corner.

Rachel zoned in on the area. "They're in standard deployment for the code."

"Set to stun or kill?"

"They're not going to mow us down when we get out of the car. Just don't deviate going to the entrance. We'll be met at the door."

"Then what – a full cavity search?" The words were out of Sam's mouth before her self-discipline could react.

Rachel glanced at Sam and shook her head in dismay. "You've definitely been hanging around Jack O'Neill too long."

Sam would have given anything at that moment to still be hanging out with him. She missed the SGC and her work there. She missed the camaraderie and the clear mission they shared, even though the lines between the participants sometimes became muddied. She had a new mission, though – one that was very important, even if she did not want to believe the implications.

She got out of the SUV, closing door with less force than she would normally have used in an effort to quell the sound. The walk to the security door seemed to take forever. Sam's eyes darted from one dark shadow to the next, sometimes losing her mark on them when she passed under a sodium light. When the doors to Prime were finally in reach, she grabbed the handle and yanked it open, glad to be inside the building.

Rachel followed close behind her. The sound of the heavy door sealing brought relief to both of them. Mitchell was waiting for them at the security desk. His face was hard with stress.

"Doctor Dekker," he greeted, though there was no cheer in his voice.

"Mitchell," Rachel said, "are all protocols active?"

"Yes, ma'am," he answered. "We secured the building at zero-one-fifty-six. No one's been in or out except the perimeter security team."

She approached the desk. "You have the roster of personnel?"

He handed her a sheet of paper on command. "Minimal compliment tonight. No one's here who shouldn't be."

She studied the paper. "When did Doctor Bainbridge leave tonight?"

He checked a log behind the desk. "I show her checked out at twenty-one-sixteen."

"She was alone?" Sam asked.

"Yes, ma'am," he confirmed solidly.

Rachel beat Sam to the next question.

"Mitchell, did she have her briefcase when she left?"

He nodded. "I pulled the security video. She definitely had it when she left, Doctor."

Sam saw Rachel tense at the information.

"We'll be in the lab area," Rachel told him. "The lockdown remains in effect until you hear from me. Understood?"

"Understood," Mitchell said. "I'll let the tenth know you're on your way."

"Good," Dekker said. "Major Carter and I are bypassing the checkpoints tonight on my authorization. Clear the major for all-access."

Rachel began to walk toward the elevator when she turned one last time to Mitchell. "Lock that door down. No one in or out until you hear otherwise. Anyone tries to come through it, take whatever measures you feel necessary."

"Affirmative," he answered.

Rachel and Sam entered the elevator. Archie complied with the command to descend to the tenth floor. Their descent was a silent one. When they exited, they encountered the second security checkpoint and walked by it with only a nod from its guard. Mitchell had apparently relayed the orders for the night to the guards on duty.

The lab area was quiet. Three cubicles had their lights on, giving a lonely glow to a usually bustling lab. The MALP terrain room was lit, the main source of illumination in the lab. Just over the sill of the windows looking into the room, Sam saw a blonde head hunkered down at the MALP control panel and recognized the person immediately as Holleran.

"Your brother is working late tonight," she commented to Rachel.

"Not unusual. The VR simulations he needs to run take up a lot of CPU. The other researchers get cranky if he runs his programs during peak hours," Rachel said, turning toward the MALP room. She stood at the panel of windows. "I need to tell him what happened."

"He doesn't know?"

Rachel shook her head. "Once the protocol is in place, all communications from lab areas are blocked. I don't want him hearing it from anyone else. He's very close to Ellen."

She opened the door to the terrain room. The smell of foliage wafted into the outer area. Holleran was in his VR gear, eyes covered by goggles and his hands by gloves. He stirred from his work when he heard the door opening. He looked up at them once he removed his goggles.

"How's it going, Holleran?" Rachel asked.

"Okay," he said, slowly and carefully. His wariness was acute. "Why are you here? It's l-late."

Rachel leaned up against the MALP. "Holleran, there's something I need to tell you."

He said nothing in reply. He waited patiently for her to continue. Sam could see from the look on his face that he knew something was terribly wrong.

"Doctor Bainbridge was hurt tonight," Rachel began.

He gave her a quizzical look.

"Someone broke into her house and assaulted her. She's not doing so good."

Holleran's face dropped in shock. He looked to Sam for confirmation.

"Holleran," Sam said, "do you know who would want to hurt her?"

"No!" he answered in a near shout. His chin quivered slightly with the news, though he controlled his emotions. "C-can I see her?"

Rachel hesitated, and Sam could sense her pain in the answer she had to give. "We're in a lockdown. Until we can get some answers about tonight, you can't leave. No one can."

Again, Holleran's chin quivered, and his eyes filled to the brim with tears. Sam truly felt for him. She had sensed the connection between Holleran and Bainbridge the first time she had witnessed their interaction. Rachel reached out to him, caressing his face.

"As soon as we can end the lockdown, you can go see her," Rachel promised.

As much as Sam hated to break the moment between a brother and a sister, she knew the investigation had to press forward while the event was new. She walked to the other side of the MALP and stared down at it, completely at a loss for where to begin looking for evidence. Rachel saw the move.

"Holleran, Doctor Bainbridge was worried about the MALP project," Rachel said. "Do you know why?"

"No," he answered. He looked bewildered at the idea.

"Nothing out of the ordinary?" Rachel continued.

"No," he said again. "MALP's okay."

It was not the answer Sam wanted to hear. Rachel was not pleased at the dead end, either.

"Look," Rachel said, "Sam's going to look at some things with the new model. I want you to help her in any way you can, okay? I know you've done a lot of work on it, and you're the best one to help her get some answers."

Holleran looked at Sam. He nodded at her, though there was no enthusiasm. It was with a thin underlying suspicion that Sam was sure Rachel could not see. The notion was gone as quickly as it had appeared.

"For now," Rachel continued, "Sam and I are going to check a few things in the lab and maybe catch some sleep. If you find anything, you wake me up. I don't care what time it is."

Holleran nodded his understanding. Rachel straightened from the MALP and ruffled Holleran's hair.

"Hang in there, kiddo," she said. "Say a prayer for her if you think about it, okay?"

Holleran looked down at the VR goggles in his hands, acknowledging her once more without a word.

Sam followed Rachel when she began walking toward the terrain room door. The lab was silent except for one cubicle where an old time radio show played quietly. She heard an advertisement for Blue Coal sound out in an otherwise quiet research area. She could not see the cube's occupant, and her sudden weariness outweighed her concern for who it was. She followed Rachel as she walked toward the back offices. The slight limp Sam had noticed initially with Rachel seemed more pronounced. Dekker appeared to work harder to get the leg to move forward to take the next step.

Rachel's office was pristine by any standard. Sam had expected something along the lines of stainless steel for décor, but she found it richly decorated in earthtone colors. Two leather couches took up most of the room. A large mahogany desk was clean and orderly. The subdued lighting gave the whole place a soothing atmosphere that was intoxicating the wake of bodily fatigue from the long day.

Without saying a word, Rachel went to the wet bar in the far corner of the room and opened a cabinet drawer. She pulled out a prescription bottle and shook out two pills, downing them with a glass of water from the tap.

Sam sat down on one of the couches. "You look sore," she commented.

Rachel put the glass in the sink and opened up the small refrigerator under the counter. She pulled out two bottles of beer. Her gait seemed even worse than it had been in the hallway.

She handed one bottle to Sam and sat down heavily on the other couch. "They rebuilt the leg but not all the nerves. They get torqued every now and again," she said, popping the cap on the bottle.

Sam did the same. "Pain meds?"

"Just enough to take the edge off. If I took what they wanted me to take, I couldn't function at the pace I do around here." Rachel rubbed at her tired eyes and laid her head on the back of the couch. Her eyes closed. "This is not what I had in mind when I decided to bring you on board."

Sam took a long sip of the beer. "I'd rather it be me than someone else."

Rachel straightened and looked at Sam. "You said the Pentagon had ammunition on me. Just how much are we talking? I mean, did I piss off some senator, or did I not kiss the right ass?"

"I don't have all of the information, but from what I know, they're paying attention to you. For that to happen to this degree, there has to be something significant."

"So, it's not just a matter of them thinking I peeked into your personnel file?"

"If I thought it was just that, I wouldn't have hung up on Colonel O'Neill."

Rachel was pensive. "You think he knows more than he's telling you?"

"No," Sam said confidently. "If he knew, he'd tell me."

"So, for all you know this is a fishing expedition, initiated by some DC watchdog into a powerful corporation?" Rachel snapped.

"Maybe," Sam conceded. "But you need to start trusting me. I have to look at the data if you want the answers."

"No offense," Rachel said with a laugh, "but there are some things I trust no one seeing, including you. Imagine if I told you I wanted to look through your technology reports. Wouldn't you be a little jaded at that?"

"That's a different situation."

"Is it? It's all classified – your stuff, my stuff. You take ownership of it, protecting it like a child. I did my time with the Air Force. I gave it everything I had in Washington. And in the middle of it all, I lost the only man I've ever loved. The only thing that's come close to replacing him is this place. I love what we do here. It's everything I've ever wanted to be in my life, and I'm going to do whatever I have to in order to protect it."

Sam took another swig of her beer, taking comfort in its taste. "Just don't lie to me. I can't help you if you do that."

"Does that door swing both ways?"

"You know I can't guarantee that. You're the one under investigation, not me."

Rachel smiled. "Always driving the hard bargain, Sam. No wonder you survived the perils of guy-oriented programs."

"I'm a team player, Rachel. I wasn't always that, either. I learned that I had to work with a team and trust my life to them."

"And now I'm supposed to do the same with the life of my company?"

"You can't do this on your own. You need to trust someone."

Rachel drank down a large swallow of beer. "Not in my usual repertoire, Sam, " she said with a casual laugh.

"I don't see you having many other choices."

Rachel stared down at her beer bottle, picking at the label. Then she opened the drawer to the end table and pulled out a pen and paper. She wrote down two lines of information and tossed the pad to Sam.

"Super user access to Archie," she said with lessening emotion. "From there, you can access any file in the company."

Sam looked down at the information. When she looked up again, Rachel had graduated to an even more dejected state.

"Thank you," Sam said.

"You can log in from your office or my desk or wherever. In about ten minutes, I'm going to be horizontal on this couch and have zero hospitality," Rachel warned. "The closet in your office has blankets and pillows," she continued in a disjointed train of thought.

Already Rachel's eyes were drooping with exhaustion and what Sam figured was the beginning effects of whatever medication had been mixed with the beer. Still, Rachel managed to down the last of the beer and put the bottle on the end table. It clanked on the glass-covered surface. Rachel's eyes closed again, and she put her head back against the couch. In less than a minute, Sam heard a gentle snore.

The closet in Rachel's office was indeed supplied with pillows and blankets. Sam quietly retrieved a set and went over to Rachel. She placed the pillow on the end of the couch. It was easy to coax the executive into a more horizontal position as the pain medication fully entrenched itself in Rachel's senses. Sam covered her with a blanket, looking down at her friend and feeling a confusion of compassion that mixed horribly with suspicion and maybe even resentment. They had been friends a long time. Each had spent time outdoing the other when they were assigned together, trying to up the ante for research goals and succeeding.

Sam wanted nothing more than to trust Rachel Dekker the way they had trusted one another in what seemed like an earlier lifetime. Rachel's work had been nothing but brilliant, and Sam strove to do the same. It had been a competition, one they enjoyed all the more once Ronin had become such an integral part of an untouchable woman's life. For all Rachel's prior indiscretions, no man had been able to break the emotional steel barrier that kept her from loving any one of them. Ronin's loss, Sam knew, had to have been devastating. It was no wonder Rachel was protective of Prime and its people. It was all she had left.

The office Prime had provided for Sam was more functional than elegant. It had one couch, which was fabric, not leather. The lighting was still subdued and comfortable. Sam looked at the high-backed office chair behind the desk and knew immediately she would not sit in it until the next morning. She was tired. Her eyes burned with irritation, and her skin had the slightest hint of tingling as she went straight for the closet to get her own blanket and pillow.

The fabric covered couch seemed more comfortable than the cold stiffness of the leather couches in Rachel's office. Sam gladly kicked off her shoes and curled into the cool cotton of the comforter, her head nestling down into the pillow. Her mind registered the steady sounds of the ventilation system. It was like a white noise that put her senses at ease. She reached into her jeans pocket and felt for the slip of paper that had Archie's access on it. It passed humorously through her mind that Rachel might request that the paper be eaten or destroyed in a ritual pyre to protect its contents.

Sam began drifting off into a deep sleep, letting go of the paper and turning until she was completely comfortable. Soon, the world turned to black as Prime Power disappeared from her consciousness.