"Unauthorized gate activation!"
Red lights flashed and a siren blared as General Hammond strode into the control room; the room was half-dark, thanks to heavy metal shields blocking the plate glass window that ordinarily provided a view of the Gate. A flurry of clicks and beeps buzzed in the room as personnel adjusted monitoring equipment and computers, barking out reports back and forth. Even the normally imperturable black berets stationed on either side of the door looked on edge.
"What's the situation, people?" Hammond demanded, with a nod to the windows. "Why are these closed?"
"We're not sure, sir," one of the men volunteered. "A wave of radiation was detected, so the blast shields closed automatically. The radiation doesn't seem to be immediately threatening, however—"
"Well, get them open! We need to see what we're dealing with here." He turned to the balding corporal manning the stargate controls. "Corporal, talk to me: Who's dialing?"
"Yessir! It's, uh…what the hell?"
It was a bad sign when the usually composed technician started swearing. "What the hell, what, corporal?" Hammond asked.
"There…is no gate address, sir. It just activated independently."
"That's not possible, corporal."
"I know, sir."
Just then the window's shield retracted. The gateroom was immediately bathed in a lurid green light; there was a startled exclamation from the back of the room. Hammond stared at the gate, which had exchanged its bright blue pool of light for a swirling mass of glowing greens. There were a few moments of stunned silence, and then Hammond turned to the corporal.
"What the hell, corporal, happened to my stargate?"
"We're not sure, sir…it seems to be some sort of energy mass, but the readings are completely different from anything we've ever seen. It…seems to still be functioning as a wormhole, as far as I can tell…" A new alarm began beeping insistently on the monitor in front of the corporal. "If these readings are still reliable, sir, we have an incoming traveler."
"We'll deal with the green issue later, people. Standard bogie protocol: Close the iris! Send a squad to the gateroom. Make sure they have some zat guns down there, I want them to be prepared for anything."
"Yes sir!"
Seconds ticked by, and nothing happened. A few wisps of strange green mist that had somehow escaped the iris swirled in a lazy spiral pattern in front of the gate. The siren and the flashing lights took on a monotonous aspect as they blared on and on...
Then the energy flared to an even brighter green behind the shield, forcing the men in the control room to shield their eyes. A small figure hurtled through the iris and into the gate room. It seemed to be falling, or perhaps flying at a high velocity, arms shielding its head. As its trajectory sped it through the gateroom, the squad opened fire, but the bullets did no damage. The thing's momentum shot it at an upward angle and straight toward the viewing window of the control room.
Though the glass was bulletproof and several inches thick, Hammond found himself moving out of the way—but instead of impact, the alien passed effortlessly through the glass as if it were water—it flew by inches from the general's face, and he felt a sudden chill. He got a vague impression of the alien—small male humanoid, white hair, wearing some form of black bodysuit, eyes shut. Hammond had the feeling that it didn't even realize it'd been shot at.
A blue flash lit the room brightly; the blue light hit the figure, and it convulsed in the air, still moving forward, then crashed with a sickening crack into the far wall of the control room. It slid to the floor with almost comic slowness, like a bug down a windshield, leaving a slightly luminous green stain.
Hammond looked at the man standing in the doorway, a box under one arm and a zat gun still ready in one hand. "Colonel?"
Colonel O'Niell cocked an eyebrow, raising the weapon a little higher. "Somebody call for a few of these?"
The colonel's words seemed to break the freeze the room had been in. The technicians went back to their stations, typing madly to silence the myriad alarms still going off. The black berets ran from their posts at the door to the alien. One of them took a zat from O'Niell and trained it on the humanoid while the other bent down and carefully rolled it over. As he did so, there was a flash of bright white light from the alien, drawing the attention of the already jittery crew.
Hammond turned, dreading the worst. What now? An alien device designed to blow up the base? A plague? A mystical prison? A mind-melt? A million different possibilities buzzed through his head—the less plausible, he'd found, was often the most likely—but nothing prepared him for the sudden change in their prisoner.
"God save us," someone said in a hushed voice. "It's a kid."
Everything strange and alien had vanished, leaving a skinny, black-haired kid in sneakers, dirty jeans, and a white t-shirt with the Cocoa-Cola logo on the front. His eyes were screwed tightly shut, and there was blood seeping from his hair. One of his arms lay at a strange angle, obviously broken. The black beret who was crouching next to him looked up, his dark-skinned face paled to a sickly putty color. "He's hurt bad, sir."
"It could be a trick, General," O'Niell said quietly. "It's happened before."
Hammond slowly shook his head. "I'm not going to make assumptions. He hasn't made any acts of overt aggression; he could be an innocent person, for all we know. Alert medical bay, send a team up here quickly. You," he gestured to one of the black berets. "Arm yourself appropriately and stay within sight of the intruder at all times. Until further notice, he is still a suspected hostile."
"Yessir."
As the gate shut down, a small cloud of the green substance broke off in the gateroom, hung in the air a moment, and dissipated into nothing. "Weird…" the corporal muttered, but he had more pressing things to worry about. Like figuring out yet another alien energy source before it destroyed the gate, the command center, and probably the entire planet. Joy.