When he regained consciousness he saw that the man was still lying face down right next to him. After checking that all the wounds had closed properly he threw the man onto his shoulder and walked over to a small stream the DHD had detected.
There he laid the man down and watched the blood wash out of the green uniform and the green and black stuff on his face cleared to reveal a man he had meet in a much better shape not long ago.
The face of General O'Neill was not what he had expected when the brown and green face mask washed of. The water seemed to have some effect on the General who begun to squirm in his arms.
"Easy General." He said when the former tried to escape and he had to hold him down. "You're kind of safe now."
"What do you mean by kind of safe? Either you're safe or you're not! And I've just been hunted down by a bloody death squad." At least there did not seem to be anything wrong with the man's lungs, if his loud tone was anything to go by.
"Well they should believe you are dead General, they did leave you in the bushes with some nasty wounds. I found some metal pieces which I think are the cause of the wounds." He said as he helped O'Neill up on his feet. "We should probably get moving in case they come back to collect your body."
"I doubt they will, I have too much power for them to show my dead, cold, body. They'll write me off as missing in action." O'Neill said as he walked towards his camp.
"We should still get moving, unless you're waiting for someone. Or is there something of value on this world that I am not aware of?" He said as they avoided a rather fancy fall trap.
"No, but I'd like to get the few things I managed to bring with me." O'Neill said as he begun to push things lying around into a bag. "I might have been ready to abandon it all, but now when I have to chance to take it with me I plan to do so. Unless you plan to put a bullet in me that is?"
"Firstly I don't know what a bullet is and secondly I can probably replace anything you've lost." He sat as O'Neill pushed a fluffy bag into his face.
"Those metal things you pulled out of me are the remains of a bullet, we load them in weapons and the weapon launch them at high speeds so we can kill each other. I had a pistol which I lost a few planets ago, if I'd still had it I'd show you how it works." O'Neill said as he threw the bag onto his shoulder and headed back towards the gate.
"So care to tell me what happened General? I watched through the DHD and even if the clothes and equipment were different from the ones used by you when we traded they used the same weapons as you. I thought you were an important Tau'ri?" He said as they walked through the forest.
"I'll tell you as soon as we're in a safe place, I take it you've got some sort of an Ancient base?"
"It's a lab, but yes I do use it as a base." He said as he touched the DHD and dialled Jobos. "It's probably the safest place for you at the moment, unless one of your friends give away the address and they come by ship."
"The only ship they'll have access to is the X-401 but it will be busy transporting materials to and from the new Icarus base. What you told us about Destiny only made our leaders want the ship more." O'Neill said as he stepped up to the gate which activated without the unstable vortex. "You've got to teach me how to do that with the gate."
"They can not stay on that ship General, I will find a way to destroy it" he said and ignored the request.
"Fine with me, as long as we get our people of the ship. But how do you do that with the gate?"
"I don't need to clear the other side if I know what's on the other side, so I tell the gate not to."
"That's what the kawoosh is for? I guess we've used it in the right way a few times then. But how can you do it then? I don't see you using any technology to do it." O'Neill said as he looked at the gate.
"I guess there's no use hiding anything from you General since I guess you are stuck with me now. I can look through the dialers, the DHDs as you call them, using the sensors installed in them. In other words I know what is on the other side of all the gates, unless someone moves the DHD away from the gate, therefore I don't need the blast unless something is in the way. On the other hand we have no way of knowing if you know what's on the other end, so both gates send out a blast just to be sure." He said as he walked over to the covered rings. "Up there is the lab I where I spend my nights."
"That's a long and dangerous walk, it would be easy to fortify. I like it. What was your name again?"
"My name is Mokar and we will not be walking there General." He said as he held out his hand vertical in front of him to show it was his doing when the rings rose out of the ground and surrounded them.
"This room is rather cramped isn't it? Is there another room I can take or do we have to share?" O'Neill asked as they stepped out of the rings.
"There is another, proper, lab down the hall. It's the right door, don't take the left one, there's some equipment behind the left door which is sending out quite a few sparks. You should probably stay away from it."
"I'll just take a quick look before I go to bed. My head feels like it's going to explode."
"Just be carefull General, I will have my uses for you soon and you will not be of any use to me dead."
"I'm not sure I'd like to help you Mokar. I just want to get my planet back from the Goa'uld."
"If you help me I am sure we can reclaim Terra from the Goa'uld. In time however you might find that when the number of Alterra grow we might want to reclaim Terra ourselves."
"You would drive the humans, your children, from their home world?"
"Never. We would rule the planet so that we all could exist side by side, so that we could be a guiding hand for you as you entered the galaxy, O'Neill, and space beyond."
"In case you haven't noticed Mokar, we're already out here, we have bases in another galaxy we call Pegasus and we've visited several others, not including the ones visited by our people on Destiny."
"That was not what I meant General, I have seen parts of your planet through the DHD and it would seem that you are still rather primitive, I happened to watch through your DHD as it traveled through a city and I didn't detect a single thing which points to you being as advanced as you claim."
"We're advanced, the gate has brought us forward several hundred years in time in the last fifteen years, technology wise. We just haven't had the time to give the public everything yet."
"And that is where I come in General. We wished to be here to guide you, we hoped that the repositories would spawn an Alterran much sooner to guide you and the galaxy when the plague was no more. When we claim Terra again we will show you the galaxy, the good things and the bad. Our technology, your numbers and our leadership."
"You think the people of Earth would just bow down when some alien comes barging in and claim they ruled millions of years ago?"
"Absolutely not General, but i surely think you already have power structures in place which we can use. If I introduce some technology to your planet I am sure I can gain power and grow it from there."
"You're an evil bastard you know, but you can't be worse than Kinsey. If you help me get rid of him you'll have my allegiance, that's a promise. For whatever it's worth."
"Who's this Kinsey?"
"He's a disgusting little man who's worked against me since we first used the gate. He's against all things alien. I'm sure he's the one who tried to have me killed."
"Please General, start from the beginning."
"My head's pounding too much Mokar. Tomorrow I'll tell you everything." O'Neill said as he took his stuff and headed down the corridor. When he reached the two doors he opened the left one and jumped backwards. "There's quite the firework in here."
"I'll try to get it sorted out some day." Mokar said dismissively as he slumped down against the wall. He was conscious, but he was still drained by the healing he'd done to O'Neill and it would most likely be a few days until he was back to full strength. Had he found O'Neill a few days earlier his attempt at healing him could have killed them both.
The morning after he awoke to heavy footsteps and automatically he drew the stunner to aim it in the direction of the sound. When his eyes woke up enough to sharpen his vision he saw O'Neill standing a few steps into the corridor with his hands in the air.
With one hand he motioned for the man to approach while he returned his stunner to its resting place. "I'm not used to having people around General."
"It's cool, at least you didn't shoot me."
"Are you hungry?" He said as he pulled up two rations from the bag he carried.
"Well I've never turned down food." O'Neill said as he snatched both packs and sat down on the other side of the room. "These aren't too different from what we eat out in the field back home."
"Then I hope you like it General, because that is the only kind of food I have access to."
"It'll do just fine Mokar and please call me O'Neill or Jack or anything but General please."
"Very well O'Neill." He said as he took up a pack for himself and they ate in silence. Only when O'Neill had followed Mokar's example of throwing the trash in the corner did they speak again. "I believe you had a story to tell O'Neill."
"I know. I just don't know where to start." The man said and leaned his back against the wall. "A little over ten years ago a man named Robert Kinsey was elected Vice President of the United States of America. Before being elected he'd tried to stop us from going through the gate many times, but each time he was stopped. After this he tried again but was stopped during an alien invasion. A year lat… You do know what a year is right?"
"Yes O'Neill I do know that. But there were many other words Daniel's mind did not tell me of."
"Like what?"
"It would be easier if you would allow me to link our minds and recover the knowledge from your mind."
"There's a lot of private things in my head Mokar."
"Then show that you trust me O'Neill and I will show you the same trust. I will only look at the knowledge of the words in your mind."
"What would you offer in return?"
"I will entrust you with the knowledge of the facilities I have under my command."
"Fine, but only the words, nothing else."
"That I promise O'Neill." He said as he moved over to O'Neill and placed his hands on the temples of the man for a minute. Then he removed them and returned to his wall. "Your language is rich in words, but I do think I understand it now."
"Good, I guess. Back to the story. About a year later he was taken as a host by the Goa'uld and never seen again. Everyone thought he was dead, at least until a week ago. I'm not really sure about how it works, but the current President died a while back, so the election was moved a year, to this year.
Anyway I was sitting in my couch watching the tv after a day in the SGC and there he was, being presented as the new President. He'd been on the SGC's wish list of bad guys so I made a call to the Commander of the SGC, a man called Henry Landry. He's a hard but fair man. Instead of him I heard a man with a chinese accent answer the phone and I knew something was wrong. The fact that my door was blown off its hinges half a second later sort of confirmed that. Luckily I always keep a few Zats hidden inside and outside my house just in case, there's been more than a few break ins.
So I dropped the two intruders and searched them for some sort of ID, the only thing I found were two NID badges. It's an organisation which have allied with Kinsey before, but we shut it down at the same time Kinsey disappeared, or at least we thought so. Either way I got into my car and drove towards the SGC while I tried to contact Carter, Daniel and pretty much everyone else in the base.
When I got to the SGC I stopped a few kilometers from the entrance and used an emergency hatch to get into the base. Inside the base I managed to sneak into the locker room and steal this uniform and a cap, which I lost two days ago.
Daniel's room was the closest one so I headed there first. Outside his door they'd stationed two guards, but I don't think they expected me to be inside the base, cause I could walk up to them and shoot them from point blank range. Daniel must have heard what was going on, cause when I entered the room he was standing behind the door ready to smack a chair into my head. Luckily he didn't when he saw me.
Then he told me how the base had been flooded with some kind of gas. We'd built the base to keep things coming through the gate away from the surface, not the other way around. When he'd woken up he'd been lying in his quarters, on his bed, and the guards outside had refused to reply to his questions. So we dragged the guards inside and searched them, of course they had nothing on them. The insignia on their uniforms wasn't something we recognised either, it was Earth as a background, then it had four red letters written over it, ATRF. It must have been new because neither of us had heard of any ATRF before.
The base was surprisingly empty, there wasn't even anyone in the control room when we entered. There's a storage room right next to the gate room which we raided for supplies and a couple of bags before we dialled the gate and hurried through. I'd planted some explosives to go of thirty seconds after we dialled so we hurried. I stepped through first and Daniel was right behind me.
I was the only one who came out on the other side and I've been on the run ever since. It did take me a few days to figure out that they used the subspace beacon in my arm to track me, so I dug it out and crushed it. That was three days ago, since then I've been holding up on the planet where you found me. I didn't think they'd find me again so I set up a more permanent camp."
"Yes, I saw at least two men falling victim to the traps you've placed and many more had been injured or killed when they returned through the gate."
"It's sad when you have to kill the men who serves the same country as your own."
"You need to let go of those thoughts O'Neill, you do not serve your country any more, you will be one of the cornerstones of the new Alterran empire, that is where your allegiance needs to lie."
"Only after we clean out Kinsey from the White House."
"Then we'll need a ship. But first I believe I promised to show you something." He said as he stood up and walked inside the rings. "It's not much, but it is what I and now we, have to work with."
"I always like sightseeing." O'Neill said as he joined him at the rings which activated.