Disclaimer: Godzilla the Series belongs to Touhou Ltd and Sony-Tristar. Stargate SG-1 belongs to MGM Television and Double Secret Productions. "Lizards, Wizards, and Demons, Oh My!" belongs to me and my insanity, for what that's worth. This story is rated PG by the Motion Picture Association of America for language, references to violence, and references to mental modification.
After-Action Report
February, 1999
Hicks
"Major Hicks? We've just had radio contact with the approaching ship, sir, they should be here in half an hour."
I looked up from my paperwork– why is it always paperwork– and blinked a bit as I tried to remember the name of the corporal standing in my doorway. Bleakman, that's it. He'd been a supply clerk before the aliens had grabbed him, just because they'd needed another warm body. After the dust had settled, we'd been left to sort ourselves out without any more detailed orders than "don't let the monsters off the island," and he'd sort of fallen into the position of general assistant. He was damn good at it, too; I needed to see about getting him a position doing logistics when this was over, and quite possibly a promotion.
"Thanks, Corporal. Get a squad of guys down there to unload, we're supposed to be getting some supplies along with our visitors."
He snapped off a salute and headed out, as I pushed myself to my feet and stretched. For a second, I just revelled in the fact I could stretch, that I had control of my body and limbs. The aliens hadn't much cared if we were comfortable or not; we'd been robots, basically, give us a command and let us go. Whatever'd been driving our bodies had access to everything we knew, but whatever made me me had been wrapped in tape and shoved in a closet, having to watch everything going on through a peephole.
The primary thing I remember grabbing onto, in that endless green ocean, was that the aliens had made one probably fatal mistake– they'd grabbed one of HEAT. Oh sure, I'd heard them gloating through the party line how they'd made the group split up, how they'd no longer be a threat, yadda yadda. I also knew that nothing short of actually being dead was going to stop Nick Tatopoulos from coming after his people.
After that, I'd floated along, listening to that sea of communal thought surrounding me, as the aliens got progressively more and more irritated and confused at HEAT and their stubborn refusal to give up and/or die. By the time they broke Dr. Chapman out, the transmissions had devolved into something that sounded kind of like the Tasmanian Devil in the old Bugs Bunny cartoons. Finally, HEAT had managed to take down that damn satellite dish that was boosting the mind control signal, and we were free. At that point, I hadn't been sure if I wanted to hug Nick or throttle him. Honestly, it's been five days and I'm still not sure.
Shaking myself out of my thoughts, I grabbed my cover and headed down to the dock. I'd spent the last five days dividing my time between getting the basics of a base set up and explaining to an entire parade of guys with stars on their shoulders why my suggestion of penning up a bunch of giant mutant wrecking balls on an isolated South Pacific island wasn't idiocy along the lines of juggling jars of nitroglycerin.
Weirdly enough, they'd actually seemed to be listening. At least I guess they were, since the base we were setting up was looking more and more like it was going to be permanent. I just hoped I wasn't going to be permanently assigned to it– my career had survived the mess with the first Godzilla, but only barely. Being stuck out in the back of beyond playing zookeeper was not how I wanted it to end.
Regardless, I had more immediate problems right now. Orders had come down from Colonel Abernathy, the new CO at Sandy Point, that four "auditors" from some government program were coming to check the site out. Translation, some black project had gotten enough leverage to get some people on-site to check out just how badly we'd almost gotten screwed over, but not enough to take the whole thing under their umbrella. Apparently whoever I was reporting to now had some pull.
I headed down toward the beach, collecting salutes from the guys stationed here and there along the path. Down at the dock, I could see a group of about twenty guys gathered– Bleakman had come through with his usual efficiency.
"So this shit eats anything oil-based it can get to, right? Which includes, y'know, polyester, and nobody has a fucking clue what it's gonna do to a live person. Aside from, y'know, suffocate them, like it's tried to do to the lizard a couple times already. And he just calls the Major up and ask for a lift, like he's going to the fucking corner grocery. Meanwhile, the fire-breathing lizard and the oil-eating blob are throwing down in the fucking oil refinery. So the fucker has us strap him into a harness on the end of a goddamn winch cable–"
Heh. Okay, apparently somebody was briefing one of the newbies on Tatopoulos. I'd heard them doing that here and there over the last few days. Somebody in the cafeteria'd asked if the guy was real, or if this was a "Chuck Norris Facts" kind of thing, which hadn't gone over well with the poor bastards on the construction crews who'd gotten mugged for their coveralls.
They all snapped to attention as I approached, though– they were all good people. Not all of them had been my guys before, but they were my guys now, and I was gonna make sure, somehow, that none of this came back to bite them in the asses. Now, as to how I was going to pull that off? … Gonna have to get back to you on that.
"At ease, gentlemen. We've got a ship full of supplies coming in. I want you to report to the loadmaster, help them get this stuff unloaded and start getting it where it needs to go. I'm gonna be showing a group of auditors around the island."
A voice in the back piped up. "Be advised, sir, the cobra is accurate at five hundred yards and in a bad mood most of the time. The spit can't get through the forcefield, but it makes a damn impressive splat when it hits. If, you know, that was required."
I did not let myself smirk. "I am so advised, thank you." Not that I would probably need to impress on our visitors why this was a tasking better left in our hands, but… it was nice to have it in reserve.
The ship pulled in, the gangplank came down, and soon enough, four people disembarked that definitely weren't ship personnel. First was a tall, gray-haired guy, a full bird colonel in Air Force BDUs, who was scanning the horizon with the ease of a lifetime of field work. "Chair Force" jokes aside, this was obviously a guy who'd seen a lot of combat.
Right behind him, also in BDUs, was a woman. Blond hair, Captain's bars on hat and collar. Combat instincts weren't quite as ingrained as her superior's, but again, this woman had field experience, and lots of it.
The guy behind them might be wearing BDUs, but he was sure as hell not military. Which, the lack of rank anywhere on the clothes was one clue, but more than that was the fascinated way he was scanning every inch of the skyline. That said, he knew exactly where his feet were as he made his way down to the sand. At this point, I could spot an academic a mile away, especially the kind that would, regretfully, put a nine millimeter through your skull when the talking finally failed. … Okay, Tatopoulos would try for center of mass with a trank dart, but I suspected that'd only last so long if he was pushed. And I also suspected Chapman's fuse was a bit shorter than that.
Last was a tall Black guy, in BDU pants and a t-shirt, no rank symbols either, with a watch cap pulled over what looked like a shaved head. Kind of hot for that, in my opinion, but everybody's different. Something was weird about him, though, and after a second, I realized his movements were a bit too smooth, too balanced. Like Dupres, except not quite. I shoved the thought away for a while, but it was probably going to agitate at me until I solved it.
I saluted as they reached me. "Major Anthony Hicks, currently in charge of Monster Island, sir." Okay, so the name was only two-thirds official, but I certainly wasn't going to call it "Site Omega." We'd won it back from those alien bastards, they didn't even get to keep the name of it.
The front two returned the salute, and I got a couple nods from the two in back. "Nice to meet you. Name's Jack O'Neill, this is Captain Samantha Carter, Dr. Daniel Jackson, and… Murray."
Murray? You've got to be shitting me. One name, no title, and the uniform was decidedly non-regulation– well, they were a black project. Those things are always bringing up questions that it's healthier to try not to answer.
"Pleasure. What's your specialty, Dr. Jackson?"
Blue eyes blinked at me. "Ah, archeology and anthropology, but you'd be amazed how many general applications those have," he replied.
Oh, that was good. Definitely going to be keeping an eye on him– the aliens' collective knowledge had contained a very sharp memory of just how thoroughly Dr. Craven had screwed them over back on the Leviathan, in part by coming across as a harmless, easily cowed academic, enthralled by the lure of new knowledge. Which was fair, because I'm pretty sure that's exactly what the man had been, before HEAT. Or– at least, there'd never been a reason for him to find that steel spine before.
"I probably would, though I've been finding all new reasons to appreciate both hard and soft sciences recently," I replied. "Well, if you'd like to follow me? I'll give you the ten-cent tour."
First stop was the beach where things had finally ended. The escape pod was still half-buried in the sand, and only some of the gigantic footprints had been worn away by the action of the wind and surf. The corpse of the first Godzilla had been taken away and destroyed. I couldn't help but pity him, at the end. He had never been more than an animal, really, and in the end, had been completely outclassed in every way by his son. That battle had been painfully short, and at this point, I couldn't help but wish the creature a peaceful rest.
Behind me, I heard O'Neill let out a whistle. "Serious mess they left."
"Yes sir. They made the mistake of pulling both Godzillas back here when they started having trouble, and when the mind control broke, the younger one kind of… dealt with the original. Decisively." No harm in revealing any of that, there was a ton of footage of the Cyber-Godzilla stomping through Tokyo.
I may have been fudging the order of events a little with Godzilla Junior, but I didn't feel like explaining to a bunch of possible spooks that the younger lizard had crossed a third of the globe to come protect the only authority he respected. Or that said authority was a radiobiologist who was just about as much a loose cannon as his lizard. And I'm sure as hell not mentioning the fact that back at Sandy Point, I'm pretty sure I heard Nick talking about his connection with Godzilla in terms of a parent/child bond. Hell, I'm not sure I want to think about that at all.
"What's that?" Captain Carter asked, indicating the blue-and-black mottled escape pod.
Ah. Okay, time to split hairs. "The mind control wasn't perfect. Not everybody was vulnerable, and a few people managed to get some… breathing room. Stole a fighter, took out the dish that was holding the mental control on the rest of us. Except that the aliens sounded a general recall as soon as that happened, and the fighter went off with the rest. Luckily, they figured out where the ejection seats were, so to speak."
"Do you think I'd be able to look it over?" She was eyeing the pod like a kid who'd just gotten a brand new Erector Set on Christmas morning. O'Neill rolled his eyes, but it was the kind of expression I'd seen my mom make a hundred times, usually when Dad had found a new history book and wouldn't be coming up for air for an hour or so.
"Not my call, but I'll be happy to put in a request. Tech this weird, the brass would probably like every brain possible on it." We were going to be getting a lot of biologists out here, but the tech was going to be shipped back stateside, so it wasn't as if they'd have to ship her back here. And if this woman was part of a team this weird, she had to be one of the best in the world at her job.
After that, we headed up the path towards the main command center. I may or may not have intentionally taken us closer to the King Cobra's enclosure than was strictly necessary, but the snake was apparently taking a nap somewhere, as nobody hocked a wad of glue at us. I did notice Captain Carter giving the forcefield a very curious look, and Dr. Jackson looking thoughtfully at the various troops standing guard here and there. I had to wonder what exactly he was seeing, but I didn't think it was a good idea to ask.
On the way, we stopped in at the hospital complex. I deliberately bypassed the main recovery tent, heading to the isolation hut to check in on Sopler and Hoffman. I ignored the various noises from the guests as they caught sight of the poor bastards. O'Neill blanched, but somehow, I had the feeling he'd seen worse, or at least close to it. I also may have angled the conversation with the medics to underscore that this shit had happened due to alien tech basically planting sleeper agent consciousnesses in the scientist's brains, just to instill the proper caution when dealing with any of this crap in the future.
(As to the prognosis on our friends? Still fucked, as the head doctor told me bluntly. They had minimal brain activity– enough that he wasn't comfortable calling it a vegetative state, but they were a whopping three on the Glasgow coma scale, which meant that basically they lay there and breathed. And I sure as hell wouldn't want to come back to a body that had been forcibly transformed into one of the things that had taken me over in the first place.)
"You have other injured?" O'Neill asked casually, as we left.
"Mostly from people being tossed around by explosions when things started going to hell. A few blue-on-blue issues, since the aliens were using us as security just in case of the control breaking down." Specifically, two dislocated knees, a sprained shoulder, and three concussions thanks to Dupres.
Honestly, I was just glad the woman hadn't gone for anything permanent or lethal. I had a pretty good idea what her skillset was, and dialing it back in situations like that took some serious doing. The fact that she was willing to do it, even when it was risky, meant that either she gave a damn about whether my people lived or died, or more likely, she gave a damn about the fact that the rest of HEAT would care.
Which is why I was clamping down so hard on any information I didn't absolutely have to share right now. Sure, Dupres was French Intelligence, and these people were Americans. Technically, we were more likely to be on the same side. But I knew for a fact that whatever her assignment might be, Monique Dupres's second-highest priority was keeping HEAT and their heroic asses alive. (Her first was keeping the world from ending, which I couldn't fault her for– it was mine too. In the line of work we shared, we didn't get the luxury of putting the people we cared about over duty.)
The fact was, Nick Tatopoulos was a loner who had no money, no family, and no connections other than a couple of French secret agents who would, reluctantly, stop short of causing an international incident. His life since college had almost been designed to create somebody who could be quietly disappeared into a shadowy organization's pockets without more than a ripple. Aside from Godzilla, of course, but before the invasion, most governments would have been just as relieved if the lizard had been the victim of a quiet accident. Pretty sure that was changing now, but… maybe not fast enough.
I was going to keep watching these four, especially Jackson. He was absolutely proof that whatever organization they worked for knew the value of unconventional employees– the question was, as personnel or as resources? Because anybody who thought I was going to let some black budget program casually strong-arm the only reason me or my guys or the entire goddamn planet were alive today… well, that was a level of stupid that generally wasn't survivable.
One way or another.
Jack
It was going to be one of those missions, I just knew it. While we'd been away dealing with the planet of singing flowers, Earth had been experiencing an alien invasion, with no connection to the usual suspects, even. Apparently this other race, which Teal'c hadn't actually heard of, had crashed a scout ship on Earth back during the dinosaur era, and their collect call home had finally been picked up. Earth had been saved at the last minute thanks to… well, gee, the reports were all kind of foggy on that part. Something had messed up the aliens' mind control, releasing not only the various soldiers they'd grabbed, but the various giant mutant animals who'd also gotten caught in the brainwashing net. Said giants had promptly curb-stomped their former masters and kicked their tails right off the planet. Which was a story I'd heard somewhere before, oddly enough.
What that "something" had been, though, everybody'd been really cagy on. And by the time the SGC managed to get itself dealt into the game, almost everything about said invasion had been hauled under the umbrella of an organization that went by the initials RAH. No clue what the hell that meant. Whoever they were, they had enough rank and pull that we were getting a lot of nothing. Finally, Hammond had apparently pulled a few strings and got us a chance to at least look the place over and see what points of interest we could uncover.
Our tour guide was certainly interesting. I had read the briefing– don't tell Carter. Or Daniel, either. Major Anthony "Tony" Hicks was one of the Army's clean-up guys, bouncing from issue to issue, with a lot of black ink in his jacket. Actually, it probably looked a bit more like mine that I'd particularly like to admit.
One of his unclassified, and frankly better-known exploits, was the handling of the first giant mutant lizard to make landfall in NYC, a year and a half ago. (Because, y'know, there'd been two so far, and the second one had apparently moved in.) Hadn't exactly covered him in glory, but then nobody involved had come out looking particularly great. At which point, Hicks had been relegated to chasing giant monsters in between security breaches until he'd been assigned to Sandy Point in New Jersey… which was where the aliens had started their occupation.
Now he was in charge of this little slice of heaven, and absolutely stonewalling us on something. Specifically, he hasn't said a damn thing about who it was that was the hero of the hour here. Seriously, whoever it is should be up for a medal or at least a commendation, but Hicks hasn't said word one beyond the fact that "some people" managed to get loose, evade an island full of brainwashed soldiers plus giant mutants, steal an alien fighter and blast the aliens' mind control doohickeys. It definitely wasn't him– if he'd broken free of the control, he'd say so, if only to make sure there was a record of exactly how it was done. And he's definitely the type of CO to be amplifying his people's accomplishments over his own. So who the hell was it?
We followed him around on the rest of the tour and were appropriately wowed by the giant mutant bat wearing a necklace that apparently kept it from blasting everybody's eardrums out. The giant worm had looked up as we'd passed its enclosure, then gone back to munching on a tree or five. Apparently there was a giant cobra, too, but it apparently hadn't felt sociable today. I was somehow okay with that.
After the tour, Hicks dropped us off in the cafeteria to talk to some of the enlisted guys without him hanging around. Which wouldn't have seemed very good for keeping secrets, but all of them were stonewalling just as much. To a man, (or woman,) they got fuzzy when we started asking any questions about who or how, exactly, things had gone down during that final mess. One guy pled a concussion making everything blurry, with a deadpan that would have done Teal'c proud. Finally, we regrouped in a quiet corner of the room.
"Okay, is anyone else getting the feeling that we're getting the runaround here?" I asked, taking a drink of the surprisingly good coffee the place stocked.
Carter rolled her eyes. "Yes, sir," she agreed. "I talked to some of the technical experts. They're happy to talk about the tachyon communication beams, what they've deduced about the various bits of machinery– apparently this species is very big on organic tech. But when I start asking about how whoever it was that stole the fighter managed to fly the thing, I get some vague comments about how apparently the mind control gave access to a central knowledge well, but nothing concrete about how somebody managed to access it without letting the aliens into their head. I don't think they know, and they're okay with that."
Which, not exactly the behavior I was used to from academics confronted with a new and interesting problem.
"It is interesting that many of the soldiers stationed here are wearing the insignia of different units," Teal'c commented. "Yet their behavior is that of a single group, ranged against outsiders."
"Going through something like this has a tendency to bond people together," I pointed out. We'd seen it in the SGC enough times, God knows. But Daniel was looking thoughtful, which was always a good sign. Or a terrible one. Either or.
"Teal'c's right, they're behaving like a group defending members from possible outside threats," he said slowly. "But I'm pretty sure– Jack, if whoever was responsible for breaking all of these guys out was here, we'd know it, even if they didn't want us to know who they were. Because everyone would be ranged around them, we'd have been carefully steered away from even seeing them, and… that hasn't happened. Everybody's fuzzy on the details, sure, but there's been no real effort to direct our attention in any direction."
A nod from Teal'c. "It is something I have occasionally seen, when a population wishes to protect an… unusual person from the attention of the Goa'uld. Sometimes it is done more skillfully than others, but it is not being done here. They do not worry about us seeing this person, they worry about us finding them."
"Oookay, and why would they see us as a threat to someone who just saved the planet?" Except I already knew the answer to that as soon as it left my mouth. This person, or these people, had done something nobody else could, which meant they were different. And people like that usually got treated either as freaks… or as exploitable. Either way, as unknown quantities, they were not going to want us anywhere near those people. I rubbed my face and let out a word that was not suitable for prime time broadcasting.
Daniel nodded. "Something else, though. There's a noticeable pattern– the guys wearing the insignia of Hicks's unit, from Sandy Point? They're almost all of them the ones taking the lead in any of the conversations we've had with mixed units. And I've noticed a lot of them supporting or reassuring the guys from other units, even when rank and age suggests it should go the other way."
He nodded subtly in the direction of the main doors. I angled myself to look as unobtrusively as I could, and caught a glimpse of a private talking to a guy wearing sergeant's stripes. The private had his hands on the older man's shoulders and the body language of a veteran SGC soldier talking down a rookie airman after his first firefight against the Jaffa. A few other guys, all of them wearing the insignia of Hicks's unit, casually moved to block the pair from the view of the rest of the cafeteria. The whole thing was smooth enough to seem almost natural.
"So they shipped out the hero or heroes early?" Carter asked doubtfully. I got her objections, that would have drawn even more attention. Now, maybe these guys had more confidence in their immediate superiors than they did us, but… somehow I wasn't buying that.
"Or they can come and go without the Army's say so," Daniel threw in. "If I wanted to, I could walk out of the SGC anytime I wanted. I'd probably have to get a job as a greeter at Wal-Mart, but I could."
I made a face. "Civilians. Wonderful." Which explained a few things. Civilians involved in this mess would have had more freedoms than the military guys, but also fewer protections. It also explained how hard and fast the walls had gone up. It had taken Daniel a long time to get the respect of a lot of the SGC, but the parts that he had? The general attitude was "that is our anthropologist, and if you hurt him, they will never find your body."
Daniel took another sip of his coffee, and the slightly smug expression on his face tickled my brain. "Daniel? Care to share with the class?"
"Academics have legends too, you know, Jack, and people on the lunatic fringe talk to each other. I may have lost a lot of my old contacts, what with the ridicule and the temporarily being dead and all, but I made a few new ones in… unusual circles. And I've heard stories. About the second Godzilla."
I raised an eyebrow in my best imitation of Teal'c. "Oh yeah?"
"There's been a few papers published on him, written by one Dr. Niko Tatopoulos, and most have a co-writing credit from Dr. Elsie Chapman. Two of the members of HEAT. And guess where HEAT was reported the day before the invasion, according to some of the Fortean websites?"
Carter groaned. "Nigeria. Chasing a giant bat."
"Okay, so Hicks is protecting HEAT?" I had a feeling I was still missing something here.
"Jack." Daniel's eyes held mine. "Hicks is protecting Dr. Tatopoulos. Because if the stories I've heard, and the papers I've read between the lines of are right? Dr. Tatopoulos is basically the man holding the leash of what could be one of the most effective weapons in the world."
… Crap. For a moment, I wondered, as I've done more and more often the last few years, why I wasn't making tracks for a lake up in Minnesota. Then I looked up at two pairs of blue eyes and remembered why.
"Okay, then. Let's figure out how we're going to write the report for Hammond… and what parts of it we're gonna keep to the verbal briefing."
Owari
A/N– So this story was inspired by re-reading Vathara's story "Site Omega: Aftermath." Great story, and it got me thinking– since I'd already loosely referenced SG1 in "It's A Sibling Thing," why not write my own view of how this meeting would go? Of course, this is a very different universe than "Urban Legends," and I'm a different writer, so… more focus on Hicks, who is still traumatized from his experiences. Also, I will never pass up a chance to write first-person Jack O'Neill. It's too much fun.
