Chapter 4
Washington, D.C. – The Hub Data Room
"Endeavor, this is the Hub. What is your status?"
Pamela Landy the Executive Director of Homeworld Command's Counterintelligence department, hovered behind the two techs who manned the communications consoles while her 2IC, Tom Cronin, quarterbacked the operation they'd practically cooked up on the fly.
A thin smile crossed her lips when she noticed the serious look on Tom's face. Even though their operations were much more low-key than the rats' nest they'd endured during their time at the CIA, Tom's stone-cold façade almost never changed. During the two decades they'd worked together, she could only recall a single instance when he'd been flustered.
That had been when she'd confided in him that she'd provided the address for the Treadstone rogue operation to Jason Bourne.
Now, she coolly presided over their operation like a spider in the center of a web of wondrous communication, employing technology no one on Earth could possibly have ever dreamed of using until the fateful day that Jack O'Neill had given her career a new lease on life.
"Hub," the captain of the Endeavor said to Cronin, "we are on hot standby. We have inserted the subspace tracking device inside a working model of one of their running light housings that my chief engineer cooked up with our Asgard trans mat device. Please be advised Colonel Kane awaits Final Green."
Landy smirked. Leave it to David Webb to have suggested using a running light to plant a subspace tracking device that ran on a naquadah power-cell on the Colonial warship. However, it really shouldn't have surprised her. Considering the ruthless Darwinian culling of Treadstone that David had survived, his talent for thinking-outside-the-box was the primary reason he was still alive.
David, the man she'd first known as Jason Bourne, now called himself Paul Kane. Paul, at that very moment, was many light years distant from Earth, preparing to enter the cold depths of space at her command.
Considering what they'd gone through together seven years ago, Pam much preferred working with him than against him.
Now Cronin flashed her a look. She nodded and just as she was about to start the operation, a telephone ringer chirped, its sharp and brittle sound incongruous to the oppressive darkness that encompassed the operations room.
Kim answered the phone, listened carefully for a moment then turned to Landy. "It's General O'Neill."
Pam blinked twice and took the phone from the younger woman. "Jack?"
"I'm here at HQ. Sam's with me. She's a little worried that if we screw this thing up, it'll come back and bite us in the ass."
Pam narrowed her eyes in annoyance at Carter's handwringing. It figures, she mused inwardly. Leave it to Mary Poppins to get cold feet at a time like this.
Of course, Jack, given his black ops history, understood the necessity for the operation. After she'd briefed both Jack and Sam about what the Colonial commander had said about the Cylons and her fleet's battlestars, it should have been apparent to even the most naïve government operative that they needed substantive intelligence on these people yersterday.
"Sam," she now said, "we've been over this. Willet's people are certain the Colonials don't use subspace for anything."
"But…what if they find the tracking device somehow?"
"They won't. There won't be anything left behind to connect the operation to us. We're employing a failsafe. If a single bolt is loosened after we've installed the housing or if anyone exposes the damn thing to an x-ray machine, all of the beacon's discrete parts will fuse into an unrecognizable lump of metal."
"Sam," Jack said, "even if half of the things this Vergis woman has said is the truth, we need to locate their point of origin and send the Blackbird to gather intelligence about their military capabilities and their society. I mean, if they're all as eager as Vergis to come out of their crib with their big honkin' ships and put on their big boy pants, we need to know a whole hell of a lot more about them."
Eager to get the show on the road, Pam snapped, "Look, Willet is about to put Paul into play. Quite honestly, there's not much more to talk about."
She heard Jack sigh deeply over their connection. "All right, Pam…your game, your call."
She allowed herself a tiny smile of triumph then. It was a rare day that anyone could get Jack to see things differently than his wife. "Thank you, Jack. Goodbye."
After she'd switched off the phone, she whirled to face Tom. "Go," she said.
He nodded and triggered his microphone. "Endeavor, this is the Hub. Final Green, you are go. Repeat, you are go for Final Green."
"Final Green," Willet answered from light years away, "is acknowledged. We are go. Kane is in play."
While all eyes were on their monitors, Pamela Landy leaned over Kim's shoulder and stared into the younger woman's monitor. "Now…we wait," she muttered.
#
Galaran Space – Outside of Battlestar Valhalla
Paul Kane found himself lost in an insurmountable immensity.
Kane hovered close to the forward hull plate of the Colonial vessel's port side hangar bay after the Endeavor had beamed him out into space. Harsh light spilled over the top of the Valhalla. Galar's sun was visible through his reflective visor, brilliant against the backdrop of the dark gray battlestar.
When he'd found the running light housing that was his target, he aimed his stubby-line shooter at a spot on the hull nearby. A tether unreeled from the spool on the shooter, tipped by a powerful adhesive on a patch that was designed to work in a vacuum and adhere to anything it hit. The SG-1 leader yanked the rope hard to make certain the tether was firmly attached before he used the device to reel him toward the housing.
As soon as he was within ten meters of the hull, his space suit's active camo coating reflected the grays and blacks of his surroundings, practically rendering him invisible to any of the Colonial pilots who were flying the Combat Air Patrol near their ship.
In moments, the side of the ship was dead ahead, looming above him like a mountain suspended in the depths of outer space. Its gargantuan stature gave Kane a sense of scale to his surroundings, making him feel like an ant creeping toward a mammoth boulder.
Once he'd positioned himself beside the running light, he switched on his outer helmet lights so he could see what he needed to do to get the job done. With his right hand, he unhooked the D-ring that held his universal wrench. He turned on the tool's heating element before he placed the round head over the first bolt that attached the original housing to the hull. He then flicked the toggle that allowed the wrench to ratchet down where its teeth could hold the head of the bolt tight.
It took him only a minute or so to loosen the first bolt. Kane carefully placed the fastener inside his right hip pocket while making certain the Velcro flap was closed before he tackled the next one.
As he continued to work, he wondered how Daniel would react when he found out they had attached a tracking device to the Colonial ship. At first, their Chief Anthropologist would probably be a little upset about the idea of Earth using surveillance to get a handle on the Colonials. Kane, though, considering his intelligence background, had absolutely no problem with it. Besides, once General O'Neil and Teal'c discussed the matter with the man and Vala comforted and have her wicked way with him, Daniel would get over it. Although his teammate was an idealist, the Goa'uld and the Ori had made Daniel see that sometimes the ends justified the means.
Kane, Landy and O'Neill all agreed they had to find the Colonials' home system and dispatch a stealth surveillance ship there to ferret out as much as they could about their culture. Given their apparent lack of knowledge about the state of the galaxy, they needed intelligence to determine whether these people could potentially threaten the worlds that Stargate Command had sworn to protect on behalf of the Asgard. Failing to do so, to O'Neill, be seen as a betrayal of the trust Thor's people had placed in the Taur'i.
Once the last bolt was unfastened and carefully placed in his Velcro-lined pocket, Kane carefully lifted the housing from its place and peered into the Colonial light fixture. There were two wires, one each connected to tabs on opposing sides inside the housing. One wire was yellow; the other was purple.
He balanced the fixture against his left leg and drew his multimeter from a pouch on his right torso. He used the device to determine which wire was positive so the faux housing's light would work just like the original bulb. Once he determined the positive current flowed through the yellow wire, Kane put away the instrument then withdrew his wire cutter from another pocket.
He snipped both wires, placed the cutter back inside his pocket, and attached the Colonial housing to an empty D-ring on the work harness of his suit. Then he pulled out the wire cutter once more and used the tool to strip a piece of the plastic coating from each wire.
Now he disconnected the housing that the Endeavor's chief engineer had fabricated from one of his D-rings and attempted to connect the small portion of naked wire attached to the faux housing's positive terminal to the Colonial's positive wire. He could feel the clammy beads of sweat on his forehead in spite of the environmental systems of his suit while he struggled against the clumsiness of his gloves and gauntlets to wind the wires tight.
After Kane had made the connection, he tested it and found that it held firm. He released a heavy sigh then winced. "Oww!" he complained as he flexed his fingers to try and ease some of the cramping.
He rested a minute or so, waiting for a little relief from the pain. Then he repeated the process he'd used before to connect the negative wires together.
Once again, he tested the connection. Again, it held.
This time, Kane didn't stop to rest. He drew one of the bolts out of his Velcro pocket and began to fasten the housing that contained the subspace tracker that their resident mad scientists, Samantha Carter and Jennifer Hailey, had cooked up to the original housing's mounting plate. Kane grinned. Although most people found Jen a bit...abrasive, he admired her bluntness. With Jen, what you saw was what you got. She didn't have a diplomatic bone in her body but he always knew where he stood with her and she was always straight with him. Plus, she was intimidatingly smart and as General O'Neill had once confided to him when the elder man and he had shared a beer together a few months ago, "You know, Paul, smart chicks are hot. Hell, that's why I was so damn attracted to Sam the first time I laid eyes on her all those years ago!"
As was the case with O'Neill and Sam while they'd worked together on SG-1, he couldn't consider pursing Jen romantically. Even so, it couldn't hurt to dream about the possibility once in awhile, he mused.
Minutes later, he was installing the last bolt when he spied a spot of light on the hull twenty meters in front of him. Glancing off to the side, he saw the light originated from the front of one of the Colonial fighter craft.
Kane's eyes narrowed. What in the hell is that pilot searching for?
He pondered that question for a few moments. Perhaps she or he had spotted the flash from the Endeavor's transporter effect when it had beamed him into the space near the pilot's mothership, he speculated.
Reverting back to his Treadstone training, he pushed aside any fear or concerns about being discovered out of his mind and focused on completing the mission. He tightened the last bolt down then squeezed the wire cutter as hard as he could, hoping to sever the tether line just above its attachment to the adhesive patch.
While the light crept closer to his position, Kane fought both to break the line and against the immense pain in his tired hand. Even though, theoretically, his camo suit shouldn't be susceptible to discovery by the search light, Kane didn't want to chance having the whole operation blown by a nosey pilot.
Suddenly,the line snapped. Due to the force he applied to break the connection, Kane found himself floating away from the battlestar's hull. Fortunately, he'd managed to maintain his grip on the wire cutter, leaving only a small patch behind on the surface of the hull.
When he drifted past the cockpit of the Colonial fighter craft, he activated his own subspace beacon.
Moments later, he was surrounded by a shimmering light.
Then he was gone.
#
When Kane had materialized inside the Endeavor's transporter room, both Captain Willet and the chief engineer began to remove his helmet and gauntlets. While the two women labored to assist him, he noticed Pam Landy's face on the large monitor on the wall.
"How did it go, Paul?" the intelligence director asked.
"It's installed and ready to go."
Pam nodded. "Good. Any problems?"
He only paused for a moment before he answered her. "No."
Then over the intercom, a woman's voice announced, "Bridge to Captain Willet."
Willet punched a button on the transport device's console. "Willet here."
"Ma'am, the subspace tracker is up and running."
"Splendid, Bridge! Thank you for your report. Willet out."
Pam apparently had overheard the bridge officer's statement because he saw a thin smile cross her lips. "Good work, Paul."
In response, he simply nodded and said, "Thanks, Pam. Now that the op is over, I think you should go home and get some rest. You look tired."
When she had apparently recalled the advice he'd once given her seven years ago when she was hunting him, she smiled broadly, well… broadly for 'serious-as-a-heart-attack' Pamela Landy. "I think I'll take you up on your offer this time…Paul."
#