[Stargate SG-1 03] - The First Amendment

by Ashley McConnell - (ebook by Undead)

  O’Neill nodded. “You could say that.”

  The reporter took a deep breath. “But how do I know any of this is true? How do I know it isn’t just an elaborate cover for some new U.S. technology?”

  “There’s a switch. Usually the aliens get all the credit. I don’t suppose you’d be willing to take my word for it.”

  “Um, no.” With the air of a man mustering a last argument, he went on, “If Earth really does have a way to the stars, don’t its people have a right to know? And if there are casualties, and a threat to Earth, don’t its people have a right to know that, too?”

  O’Neill nodded. “And do they have a need to know? What would they do with the information if they had it? What about that crowded theater?”

  Kinsey shook his head in disgust. “Do they have a ‘need to know’ that they might die tomorrow? Come on! If the theater’s really on fire, they sure as hell need to know! How else can they defend themselves?”

  “That’s exactly what we’re trying to figure out. Until we do—given how the rest of the world will probably react—should they know? Would their knowing help or hinder? And would they actually even want to know?”

  “I would,” Kinsey said instantly. “God, aliens? Space travel? Hell, yes, I’d want to know!”

  If we don’t give him something he’s never going to leave us alone. I know the type…. Take him through, Jack.

  Oh, well. At least they were going to be able to figure out what Dave Morley wasn’t telling them.

  “Okay,” he said. “How’d you like to go for a little ride?”

  “A ride?” The reporter was momentarily confused.

  “But you can’t do that!” Bert Samuels squeaked.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Most of the people who worked at the Cheyenne Mountain Complex were support personnel. They had a regular schedule, eight to five, five days a week. The rest, of course, were on rotating shifts, keeping the radar sweeps manned twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, looking for Things falling from the sky.

  Still, there was a noticeable increase in traffic on NORAD Road heading toward the base and Colorado Springs every Friday just after five o’clock.

  George Hammond had made sure that Bert Samuels was right in the middle of that traffic, with orders to keep his mouth shut under pain of court-martial and remain at the base BOQ until further notice. He’d spent a good thirty minutes on the phone with Mike Wickersham at the Pentagon, commiserating with him about unruly subordinates who were rapidly accumulating black marks on their service records but still managed to have friends in high places. The military was supposed to be separate from politics. Fat chance.

  Hammond himself had stayed late on this particular Friday, doing paperwork, avoiding the traffic, and determinedly not second-guessing himself about this whole harebrained idea. He trusted his instincts about people, and his instincts told him that Frank Kinsey was a very different man than his father was. He would use reason. He would do the right thing.

  He’d better.

  The team would go back to Etaa as soon as it had the logistics set up, which meant as soon as Devorah Randolph finished the party for her kids and could come back to work on the weekend. The inconsequential delay added some assurance that whatever had gone wrong on that world would be long gone by the time they got there.

  Meanwhile, Frank Kinsey was sequestered in the cold depths of SGC, pestering everyone he could with questions about the Gate. Mostly this meant medical personnel, as he was taken there almost immediately and sequestered in an exam room, away from the casualty ward.

  He grilled Janet Frasier as she gave him a complete physical, making sure there were no preexisting conditions that a litigious journalist could blame on the military after going on a mission. Not knowing for sure what she could say and what she couldn’t, Frasier said nothing, but kept her probes safely stored in the refrigerator until called for.

  “How many people do you get coming through here in a month?” Kinsey asked, pulling a paper sheet up around his hips as he sat on the examining table.

  Frasier gave him a pleasant, meaningless professional smile and rapped perhaps a little harder than necessary at the tendon immediately below Kinsey’s right knee.

  “What kind of injuries to they have?”

  “We get a lot of really nasty paper cuts,” she murmured, cracking a good one at the left knee for good measure.

  “Those men I saw earlier didn’t have paper cuts,” Kinsey insisted, leaning forward as far as possible to try to peer out the door and into the ward across the hall. “Hey! What’s that needle for?”

  “Tetanus,” she said sweetly, and jabbed. “You know. For lockjaw.”

  Meanwhile, the SG-1 team was caucusing, trying to figure out how much to say and when. It was very odd to be trying to decide what to say, rather than what not to say.

  “He’ll need to know the historical background,” Daniel Jackson was saying. “That might actually work in our favor—he’ll think we’re all a bunch of von Danikens.”

  “We are a bunch of von Danikens,” O’Neill pointed out.

  Carter and Teal’C exchanged identical glances of bewilderment.

  “Before your time,” the colonel informed Carter. “Before yours, too, Daniel. How’d you know about him?”

  Daniel grinned. “I did an undergraduate paper on the utter implausibility of the idea that aliens had ever visited Earth and created the basis for Egyptian culture, built the pyramids, or gave the Pharaohs their religion.”

  The rest of them burst out laughing. Even Teal’C’s habitual frown lifted for an instant.

  “Hey, I got an A-plus on that paper,” Daniel said with mock indignation. “The professor said it was the best one he’d ever seen. Wanted me to publish it.”

  “Well, you can’t argue with science,” O’Neill said with mock gravity. “And you were almost right. They stole from us instead of vice versa.”

  “Anyway.” Carter got up and refilled her coffee cup, adding some powdered almond cream flavoring and ignoring the disgusted looks she got from the others as a result. If they really thought it was that terrible, she reasoned, why did the stuff appear next to O’Neill’s coffeepot mere days after he’d found out she liked it? “What about the physics involved? I mean, are we going to give him a complete briefing? That would take days.”

  “Months,” Jackson agreed, scooting his chair aside to let her get back to her own. “But I thought the whole idea was to convince him that he shouldn’t be writing about this stuff at all. So why tell him anything? Send him away with an axe hanging over his head.”

  O’Neill sighed. “First, because Daddy is a senator who already knows too much and doesn’t like us. Second, he’s got this fixation about the Constitution and the First Amendment, which normally I’d sympathize with but at the moment is really inconvenient, so we’re trading information for silence. And third, and most important, because Hammond told us to. I think he’s nuts, but he’s a general, so…” He sighed. “The question is not whether, but how much we tell him. I figure we might as well go for broke. He can’t write about anything at all, so we may as well answer all his questions.”

  “And this is somehow going to prevent him from plastering it over every front page in the world?” Jackson was still skeptical.

  “Hammond thinks so.” O’Neill shrugged. “Right now, I’m more interested in figuring out what went wrong on Etaa. I keep thinking there’s more that Morley didn’t tell us.”

  Dave Morley was currently under sedation and in restraints under Frasier’s direct supervision. He wasn’t telling anyone anything.

  Now it was Carter’s turn to shrug. “The Jaffa came, they saw, they conquered. They’ve done it before. Just because we didn’t have any prior indication they’d come, doesn’t make any difference—we learned that a long time ago. What else could it be?”

  “That’s the problem. We don’t know ‘what else’. And I keep having this creepy feeling that with all his talki
ng about force fields, he wasn’t thinking about Jaffa at all.”

  “The Goa’uld have long had personal fields, and larger fields they use for their ships,” Teal’C pointed out. “It is not unreasonable to suppose they have developed a large, portable field capable of trapping the enemy as in a net.”

  “That wouldn’t exactly be a force field, though,” Carter argued. “The technology to fend objects off isn’t necessarily related to the technology of trapping people so they can’t move.”

  “I did not say it was. But having developed the one indicates that they could be able to develop the other.”

  “Okay, okay.” O’Neill raised his hand. “Enough. I’m willing to stipulate that the field Dave described actually exists, which means we’d better be on the lookout for it just in case the place isn’t completely deserted. If we’re lucky, we’ll be able to locate some of Shostoka’an’s people and we can ask them what the hell happened. In fact, that’s probably our best bet.”

  “They’re not going to think much of us as allies if the Jaffa just got through cleaning them out,” Carter muttered. “There many not be anybody left. It wasn’t that large a population to begin with.”

  O’Neill closed his eyes. Carter always argued.

  But she also knew—usually—how to take a hint that her superior was getting exasperated, so she shut up without finishing her thought.

  “I don’t know about you,” O’Neill said, “but I’m going to go home, eat dinner, and go to bed. Tomorrow’s likely to be a really, really long day.”

  “Like today wasn’t?”

  O’Neill glared. But Carter had managed to field that grenade, so he left it at that.

  * * *

  Frank Kinsey was served dinner in his quarters that night, a decent—last?—repast of pork chops, spinach, applesauce, salad, coffee, and even ice cream for dessert. They left him with a briefing manual that he understood to be standard material for new personnel joining the Stargate team. Between that and the TV set tuned exclusively to CNN, he was expected to entertain himself for the evening. He didn’t have to hear the soft click to know that he was locked in.

  The TV made a comforting stream of background noise as he paged through the manual. Most of them, he noted without surprise, focused on tactics—what information would be available to a team and how they could use it. Apparently “probes” were sent through the Gate to gather data before actual living people went through—a precaution he approved of, but one which didn’t always work, judging from the shape those soldiers had been in coming back.

  The books also noted that “Before any teams are sent through the Gate, the existence of a DHD on the target site is always verified ahead of time. Return to base must be originated from destination. Teams cannot return through a passage originating on the base.” A DHD, he gathered, was the mechanism used to open the—passage?—between two predetermined points. The notation had an air of “learned that one the hard way.” He also noted with amusement the discreet reference about returning “to base” rather than “to Earth.”

  And apparently one passage couldn’t be opened on top of another, which explained Morley’s frustration when that other team came back, interrupting him before he could finish opening the Gate himself. Kinsey wondered where he would be right now if Morley had succeeded in putting in all the proper codes to open the Gate first. A new world? The book didn’t say.

  “Teams are cautioned to send the iris signal before entering the passage for return. If the signal is not sent, the iris on the base Gate will not be opened. Each member of the team will be equipped with a signaling device.”

  He wasn’t sure what that meant, so he filed it away in his ever-increasing store of Questions to Be Asked.

  As he read, he listened with half an ear to the steady stream of news. China was still upset over the bombing of its embassy and its loss to the Americans in women’s soccer, and still indignant that anyone could possibly believe they had needed to steal nuclear miniaturization technology from the United States. The Patchen Lama had measles. The Euro was down against the dollar and the Common Market was contemplating trade sanctions against the United States. Russia had publicly requested that Washington butt out of the latest India-Pakistan crisis. There were more rumors about AIDS being deliberately imported to black communities in California. Unemployment on the Lakota reservation officially hit 86 percent. Mir’s orbit continued to degrade. Islamic fundamentalists in Indiana were taking exception to efforts by Christian fundamentalists to convert them. A world’s record opal had been discovered by a three-year-old boy in Australia. A Nazi war criminal had just died in Argentina. Drug terrorists continued efforts to bring down the government of Colombia. Seventeen died in an airplane crash in Indonesia.

  O-bla-dee, o-bla-da. Don’t they have any idea what’s out there? Kinsey wondered, glancing over at the neatly folded fatigues set out on the desk, with boots lined up precisely under them and a cap resting on top. He was reasonably sure that this uniform, unlike the one he’d been issued long ago when he’d done his own military service, would actually fit. Why do they spend all their time squabbling with each other like a bunch of spoiled brats, when there’s a whole universe out there?

  Because they don’t know. And I’m going to be the one to tell them.

  A cold shiver of delight ran up his spine. Talk about the scoop of the century! And it was going to be his, all his. They’d know the name Kinsey forever. It would be in all the history books—the man who revealed the truth about the stars. Who unified Earth.

  Castro denounced the United States for further attempts to assassinate him.

  Survivalists in northern Nevada were in the fifteenth day of standing off local and federal law enforcement personnel, claiming that God had declared them a sovereign country.

  The FBI and the U.S. Navy apologized for their rush to judgement over the explosion aboard the Iowa, while refraining from naming anyone specifically responsible for the rush in the first place.

  Three Israelis were arrested in New York for spying on the Lebanese delegation to the UN.

  Life on Earth went on, blissfully self-absorbed.

  Frank Kinsey hugged himself and paged through briefing books on life in outer space.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Still, when Jack O’Neill led their little party up the ramp to the shimmering pool that was the Stargate, Kinsey abruptly couldn’t believe they were serious. If he hadn’t seen, less than twenty-four hours before, with his own eyes, real human beings stumble out of that circle, he wouldn’t have come anywhere near that maelstrom of blue energy. He was still jumpy from the very sound of it; as soon as the bodiless voice intoned, “Chevron seven encoded; Gate activated,” it had roared open. Or not exactly “open”—he couldn’t see through the Gate anymore. It didn’t look like something one could walk through. It was as if whatever lay beyond the Gate was pressing against it, as if the Gate were a dam holding it back, and when the iris opened and the portal was activated, it gushed through and then settled back into equilibrium.

  He had serious doubts about the sanity of the first person to actually walk through that thing.

  But they were looking at him with exaggerated patience, that look that said We know you’re scared but we’re too polite to say so, and so he gritted his teeth and marched after them.

  It wasn’t fair, really. The four of them were loaded for bear, with rifles and sidearms and all manner of wicked things, and all he had was a set of borrowed fatigues. No cameras, no tape recorders. Though he noticed enviously that both Carter and Jackson carried camcorders—so records did exist, and maybe under the Freedom of Information Act—

  O’Neill went first. As he touched the surface his body seemed to disappear, as if he were walking into a pool of mercury. He was followed immediately, without hesitation, by the blond Major Samantha Carter. As they disappeared, technicians at the foot of the ramp were doing hasty last-minute checks of the supplies on the transport that would be going with them
. It was a cute little mini-tank with treads almost as large as it was, an all-terrain vehicle built for worlds other than Terra. Someone had stenciled F.R.E.D.. on its side. It probably stood for something; yet another question to be asked. But not right now. Right now an opaque shimmering mirror awaited him.

  The others were waiting for him to go next—Jackson made a little bow and an After you, Alphonse gesture, while the tall black guy, Teal’C they called him, simply stood waiting, holding a long staff, a modern-day Roman centurion in battle fatigues. Teal’C always looked like he was frowning mightily, but that seemed to be nothing more than the way his features had settled on his face.

  He was going to tell the world about this. Humanity’s Gate to the stars stands in lonely grandeur at the top of a metal ramp that rings beneath the booted feet of—

  The future and fame awaited. So he took a deep breath and held it and followed where O’Neill and Carter had led, into the mystery.

  And found himself gasping, tumbling, falling, through a live, twisting, writing tunnel of blue light. It was cold, much colder even than the interior of the mountain. He had never felt such cold, sinking icy fangs deep into his bones and not letting go. He couldn’t see the others. He knew he had walked into something, but once in it he lost all sense of sight and touch. All he knew was that it was cold, bitter cold, and he was tumbling, falling endlessly. He was alone, he was dying, he was… Frank Kinsey screamed as he was pulled through the shimmering surface. He didn’t mean to. He couldn’t help it.

  Thinking back on it later, he decided that if he couldn’t hear himself scream, no one else could either.

  It sounded good, anyway.