“The President wants you in Washington.”
“Ah.” Jack settled back in the chair, found himself a pen to fiddle with. “And if I refuse this offer I can’t refuse, they’ll slip a horse’s head into my bed one night?”
“In the immortal words of Dr. Jackson, don’t be an ass, Jack.”
“Sir… George… I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but…” He might not seem ungrateful, but he certainly seemed to be at a loss for words. For a motor mouth Jack sure wasn’t much of a talker, especially when it came to people or things he cared about. “Eight years ago you dragged me back here kicking and screaming. Turns out it was the right thing to do… I think. I belong here, which was why I agreed to run the show when Dr. Weir left. At least I know how you’d want this place to be run… I think.” The pen sailed through the air, turned a tidy little somersault. Jack caught it, tossed it again. “What I’m trying to say, General… what I’m trying to say is, I belong here.”
Those last three words were loaded. George Hammond sure as hell shared the sentiment. What was more, he understood it perfectly. When he’d first come here, it was a dead-end posting for surplus generals awaiting retirement. For a good long while he’d babysat a defunct piece of alien technology. Then that had changed in one big hurry, and before he rightly knew what hit him he’d had a war on his hands— and a couple hundred men and women who’d turned into a close-knit family. No wonder really, given that it was them against any number of worlds. Hammond knew what it meant to be part of that family. But still…
“Jack, the war is over. You won. Which is to say that promotion isn’t a bribe. Not entirely, anyway.” Hammond sighed. “You’ve become a member of a very select club. Your commander-in-chief has made this a request, not an order. That aside he’s been shrewd enough to realize that I’d be the messenger least likely to get shot. As for me, I might not have played along, except I happen to think he’s right. You’re wasted here.”
“As opposed to Washington? You know me, sir. It’s not as if ‘diplomacy’ is my middle name. I’d just lower the tone.”
Hammond snorted. “With all due respect, son, not even you could manage that.”
“Wanna bet?”
“At the risk of repeating myself, Jack, the war is over. Which means you’ve become a glorified bellhop shuttling luggage to and from Atlantis.”
“Tips are good.” The mulish look on Jack’s face brightened to something close to hopeful. “Besides, what if we’ve missed a couple dozen Ba’al clones?”
Oh yeah, definitely psychedelic. Hammond stifled another sigh. “The Pentagon doesn’t think so. Neither does the IOA. They’re married to the bellhop version. Meaning that the SGC will be looking at massive cuts in funding. And that’s not speculation, it’s a promise.”
“It’s idiotic, that’s what!”
“I couldn’t agree more.” Now that he’d finally grabbed Jack’s full and undivided attention— not to mention indignation— Hammond allowed himself a small bout of relief. Maybe, just maybe, he could stop twisting the man’s arm before he snapped a bone. “They’re not looking past the obvious. Which is a) the Goa’uld are no longer a threat, and b) every time you activate the gate their electricity bill goes up by a few hundred thousand bucks. Do the math, Jack.”
“What about exploration? Daniel’s rocks and scrolls and anthropologically significant tea cozies? Those alien technologies everybody used to salivate over?”
“They figure the Atlantis expedition can cover all of that. With the possible exception of the tea cozies, but I very much doubt Congress will make those a budget consideration. Anyway, general consensus— however misguided— is that Atlantis can do what we’re doing without damn near shorting out the North American power grid every time they’re at it.”
Jack’s mouth had become a thin, hard line of fury, as if he were struggling to keep in an encyclopedia’s worth of undoubtedly colorful invective. “And the off-world sites?” he snapped.
“Scrubbed. Ideally they want you to start pulling out personnel by the end of next month.”
“Great! Just great! And I suppose I’m to nail the gate shut personally the second the last man trots down the ramp?”
“That hypothetical task would fall to your successor. Unless you manage to prevent it, of course.”
“Do I look like the great and powerful Oz?”
The outburst was followed by a leaden pause Hammond knew better than to interrupt. Let the man take his time to think it through. Or let the silence get so uncomfortable that he couldn’t help but say something. Anything. Of course, experience showed that, in Jack’s case, anything was more likely than something, simply because he knew every trick in the book, including this one.
Not for the first time, Jack surprised him. “So how would I go about preventing it?” he said at last, sounding amazingly calm.
“You do what the President’s asking you to do, Jack. What they need to hear over there is the point of view of someone who’s been there and done that and knows which way the galactic cookie crumbles. Even better if that someone is a bona fide hero.” Hammond clocked the wince that word triggered and felt entirely unrepentant. It was true, and every now and again it needed to be said, even if the guy at the receiving end bristled at it. “In other words, you go to Washington and be undiplomatic. I think President Hayes is counting on you to make one hell of a nuisance of yourself.”
“I guess I could do that,” he offered cautiously. “Kinda comes natural. When would I leave?”
“Yesterday.” George Hammond got within a hair of letting out a good old yell. Of all the victories he’d won throughout a long and distinguished career this one ranked right up there among the ten most improbable.
“Not gonna happen, sir. I’d like a chance to pack my toothbrush if you and the commander-in-chief don’t mind. I’ll also have to talk to people… Daniel’s gonna be pissed, and that’s just for starters. Teal’c’s gonna sulk. Loudly. And Carter…” Jack dropped the pen and scrubbed his hands over his face. “You sure a nice, drawn-out root canal wouldn’t do as well, sir? I’d volunteer to forego the anesthetic.”
“Don’t think that’ll be an option, son. Sorry.” Okay, Hammond wasn’t sorry in the slightest. He felt relieved. And a little guilty. But only a little. At the end of the day it would be good for Jack. Not to mention the Stargate program. He rose. “You made the right choice, Jack. Even if it won’t strike you that way for a while yet.”
“You got that right,” Jack muttered and pushed himself to his feet. “End of next week good enough?”
“End of next week will be fine.” Hammond smiled and saluted briskly. “Congratulations, Major General O’Neill. Give ‘em hell!”
Chapter 2
Friday morning, ten past nine, and Dr. Daniel Jackson had already gotten fed up with a somewhat painful decision making process. Consequently he’d postponed the whole dilemma and headed out for a caffeine fix.
Who had come up with those ridiculous limits on what you could take to Atlantis anyway? After all, it wasn’t like USPS was charging freight rates on items transported through the Stargate— even when they were shipped to the Pegasus Galaxy. Going by that arm-long list of restrictions, he’d probably travel with one clean set of underwear (disposable) and a toothbrush (ditto), and that was it.
Okay, slight exaggeration, but he really didn’t see why he couldn’t take more than one personal item. How on Earth was he supposed to make up his mind between the chess set and his prized Haida war paddle? Not to mention the books. Some of the essential volumes he’d snuck in under the label Research Materials, though even he would be hard pushed to explain the archeological/mythological/other relevance to the Pegasus Galaxy of, say, The Lord Of The Rings. And that still left—
“What can I get you today?” The barista interrupted Daniel’s mental diatribe.
“Oh. Uh… medcapnonfatwet,” he rattled off and held his breath, waiting to see if the experiment would be successful.
; “Excuse me?”
Daniel repeated his order slowly, in English. “A medium cappuccino, please. Skimmed milk, and easy on the foam.”
“Medcapnonfatwet!” the barista shouted at a colleague manning the giant espresso machine.
Bingo.
It was a hugely fascinating phenomenon. The tribe of the baristas spoke its own dialect and resented alien usage thereof to an extent that rendered them hard of hearing whenever an outsider addressed them in their own idiom. At least that was Daniel’s working hypothesis.
“Will that be all for you, sir?”
He nodded, dropped the exact change on the counter. “Thanks.”
“Medcapnonfatwet!” the espresso machinist hollered over the hissing of steam and the crunchy roar of an industrial coffee grinder.
“That’ll be mine!” Daniel made his way over to the pickup counter, sprinkled a generous dose of cinnamon on top of the milk foam, and took his drink to a small corner table.
One of the previous customers had left the morning paper behind. Perfect. He sunk into a comfy armchair and settled in for a pleasant half-hour of caffeine and news.
Twenty minutes into it, he nearly choked on the last mouthful of cappuccino. The news item was tucked away on the penultimate page, between Britney Spears’s latest escapade and a report on a Maine dairy farmer who’d invented a contraption to collect the methane gas his cows gave off when farting.
He hadn’t thought of the old man in forever. The reputation of Dr. Stavros Dimitriades as an unrepentant crackpot had rivaled that of Dr. Jackson and, though Daniel was loath to engage in this kind of judgment, held considerably more justification. He knew for a fact that, contrary to Dimitriades’s stubborn claims and spurious evidence, neither Nazca, nor the source of the Nile, nor the Greek island of Santorini was the location of Atlantis. Many years ago, Dimitriades, sniffing a kindred spirit, had all but stalked Daniel in the hopes of persuading him to join a new dig on the Azores. Daniel had blown him off, probably more unkindly than he deserved.
Eventually the old man had abandoned the Azores for Santorini, and now he was dead.
According to the local authorities he’d run his car off a cliff.
He’d continued digging all those years, mostly by himself, without funding and with little material support. Daniel suspected that the only thing to keep him in excavation permits was the simple fact that the Greek government preferred Stavros Dimitriades picking holes into the volcanic rock of Santorini to Stavros Dimitriades making a fool of himself and, by extension, his country on the international academic stage. Lately though his luck seemed to have changed. He’d attracted the support of an unnamed sponsor who, together with some US-based foundation, funneled a considerable amount of money and resources into the project. Apparently the investment was warranted. Only two weeks back the old man had publicly hinted at sensational findings that would conclusively prove his theory. Which hadn’t so much as stirred a hiccup among the archeological community. They were used to this kind of announcement from old Stavros.
Then the accident had happened.
Except, and provided the paper had gotten its facts straight, it couldn’t have been an accident. For the simple, compelling reason that Stavros Dimitriades didn’t drive. The man had never even gotten his license. He suffered from a mild form of epilepsy and was prone to zoning out without warning. Not a good look for a motorist.
Daniel cast a furtive look around to see if anyone was watching him. When he noted nothing but polite indifference, he carefully tore out the article, folded it, and stuffed it into his pocket. Though, if truth be told, he had no idea why he was doing it. Shrugging at himself, he decided to go back to his apartment and continue to tear his hair out over the respective necessity of a chess set and a war paddle.
He was halfway out of the chair when his cell phone rang. Slumping back, he fished it out of his pocket, frowned at the caller’s number. Canadian area code.
“Huh,” he muttered, flipped open the phone. “Jackson,” he said.
What the caller had to tell him drove all thoughts of chess sets and war paddles from his mind.
Some sixteen hundred miles east, another phone rang in a Washington office.
“We’ve got a problem,” the male voice on the phone announced without preamble.
“This isn’t a good time.” The meeting would start in ten minutes. Tardiness wasn’t an option. “Make it brief.”
“The old fool emailed a copy of the fragment we found to Webber. With instructions to contact— wait for it!— Dr. Daniel Jackson re: translation.”
“Dammit!”
“My sentiments precisely. What do you want to do?”
She pondered it for a moment. Bottom line was that they should have neutralized the old man as soon as he’d outlived his usefulness; in other words, the moment he’d endorsed Webber’s check. So much for the benefit of hindsight. But despite the obvious risk, the situation held advantages. Such as the fact that Jackson could get the document translated faster than any of their own people. All it would take was a simple precaution.
“I think we should give Dr. Jackson a strong incentive to do exactly as he’s asked and otherwise keep his mouth shut,” she said at last. “Please, listen carefully.”
Chapter 3
Her flight had been delayed, some scrap of debris had got stuck in the rental’s heating system where it caused a constant demented rattle, and rush hour traffic resembled a particularly well-executed logjam. Choking on exhaust fumes from the truck in front, Colonel Samantha Carter tried to resign herself to the fact that she wouldn’t make it downtown and to the campus anytime soon, or even before she suffocated in diesel smog.
The resigning herself part wasn’t going terribly well. In fact, if both the pace and the rattle continued for much longer, she might just shoot somebody— preferably the idiot truck driver who seemed married to letting his engine idle instead of turning it off.
Which was a classic O’Neill knee-jerk reaction, and she really didn’t want to go down that route. Doing so would mean, in a roundabout way, investing thought in the man, and she was too angry to do that.
He could do the program more good by going to Washington than by staying at the SGC, he’d said. That was so much bull, it practically mooed!
It wasn’t as though Jack O’Neill was the world’s greatest diplomat. Or an ace at flying a desk, for that matter. The man had been bellyaching for weeks over accepting command of the SGC, but all of a sudden he was happy enough to go bend paperclips at the Pentagon. Never mind that his team— former team— was left to unravel like an old sweater, worn and washed one too many times. Daniel was preparing to transfer to the Pegasus Galaxy (after all, what’s a few thousand light years between friends, right), Teal’c had gone to Dakara to see that the newly elected Jaffa government didn’t screw up their shiny new democracy deal, and Stargate Command’s incoming CO had yet to be officially confirmed.
Traffic jerked ahead, and she stomped on the gas with enough abandon to all but rear-end the truck when the spastic bout of motion stopped after a car’s length or so. At this juncture an accident was all she needed to make her life complete.
Sam closed her eyes, blew out a lungful of air.
It was nobody’s fault. Least of all Jack O’Neill’s. If anyone deserved a platinum-plated career move like that it was he, and thank God he’d grabbed the opportunity. The problem was hers. She felt as if the rug had been pulled out from under her. She’d lost her family. Janet. Jacob. And now her team.
She should have known better. Under any normal circumstances, no team stayed together as long as SG-1 had. People got transferred— or they got dead. It came with the territory. So you lived with it. You dealt with it. You didn’t allow yourself to care about your team mates more than you should.
Besides, the real reason for her edginess lay somewhere else entirely. And she wasn’t really edgy. Or angry. She was scared. As a matter of fact, she’d met Goa’uld who’d terrified her less
than this. Admitting to edgy was easier, though.
She grimly nudged the car forward another eight feet or so and dialed Cassie’s cell phone again. The call went straight to voicemail.
Not that Sam had expected anything else. She didn’t bother to leave yet another message.
Cassie had been incommunicado for almost two weeks now, which apart from anything else was in breach of the agreement they’d wangled out of the NID.
“Damn!” Sam muttered softly. “Damn, damn, damn!”
At first, when she’d failed to hear from Cassie, Sam had put it down to a healthy dose of stubbornness and independence. Regular check-ins with parents or, in Cassie’s case, a guardian/friend weren’t exactly high on a freshman’s list of priorities. Not to mention the fact that generations of students had graduated successfully without constant supervision. Keeping that in mind, Sam had covered for Cassie.
Which might well turn out to have been a colossal mistake.
No phone calls were one thing.
Not turning up for the weekend Cassie had been supposed to spend with Sam was in a different league altogether.
Funny how, sometimes, you just knew. Your luggage wasn’t going to be on the belt. Your roommate had boil-washed your cashmere sweater. That kind of thing.
Sam had stood at the arrival gate, watching passengers trundle off the plane, and she’d just known. Even so she’d waited until the cleaning crew had come and gone. Then she’d flashed her service ID, darkly hinted at a ‘national security threat,’ and bullied ground staff into letting her see the passenger manifest. Fraiser, Cassandra, Ms., had been booked on the flight alright, but she’d failed to check in. The only positive thing about the whole experience was that Sam happened to be in just the right place. Ice-cold fear congealing in her stomach, she’d demanded a seat on the next flight to Reno. It had been fully booked, but by then the airline staff were hunting for WMDs under the check-in desks and obligingly booted an outraged business traveler off the plane.
STARGATE SG-1: Transitions Page 2
