03 - The First Amendment Read online

  There was a small silence at his choice of words.

  “I don’t know,” O’Neill said. “I don’t like the whole story. It just doesn’t sound right. There’s just something screwy about it, and I can’t put my finger on it.” The colonel was profoundly dissatisfied.

  “Etaa doesn’t deserve to be just abandoned,” Jackson said. “Those are still human beings there.”

  “If there are still human beings there,” Carter pointed out. “It sounds like they were pretty thoroughly cleaned out.”

  Uncomfortable, Jackson changed the subject. “What about our next mission?” It felt strange, not being able to find the right words to mourn dead comrades, focusing instead on their own upcoming assignment. The archaeologist wondered if O’Neill’s pragmatism was catching.

  O’Neill cheered up slightly at the prospect of a new world. “Rusalka says she’s got something, maybe, but no details yet. The one we thought we had turns out to be in the middle of a volcano or something.”

  “Nothing like a little pyroclastic flow to get your juices going.”

  O’Neill glared at him. “Daniel, you’re stealing my lines. I’ve told you about that before.”

  The archaeologist shrugged. “I told her we weren’t going to use that Gate as soon as I saw the probe data. I’m just surprised it hasn’t been buried under tons of molten mud by now.”

  Carter glanced at Teal’C, who was observing the byplay with his customary lack of expression. While O’Neill and Jackson might displace their grief, at least publicly, about the loss of colleagues with sharp-edged banter about volcanoes, Teal’C remained silent, as if the well-defined muscles of his face were set in stone. The only sign of emotional connection the Jaffa had made to the discussion of the dead was a momentary closing of his massive hand when he mentioned the development of the force field. That would have been a reference to the days when Teal’C was Jaffa First to Apophis, Lord of the Goa’uld and deadly enemy to all that was human.

  “So she’s still looking for a good set of coordinates?” Carter asked. It felt like an inane effort to keep the conversation going, to add to the discussion, but it served its purpose.

  “She said she thought she had something,” O’Neill admitted. “I suppose we’d better be ready to get together and look at the probe data.” He pushed himself away from the desk and circled behind it to sit in the swivel chair. “Look, I’ve got some paperwork to do, and I’m sure you all have full social calendars too. I’ll page you if something comes up.”

  “So they’re just going to forget Etaa? That’s not right. Those people might still be alive.” Jackson was surprised, sometimes, by how firmly he identified with the whole of Stargate Command.

  “No, Daniel, we’re not,” O’Neill said evenly. “But we’re not going to do anything about it right now. I don’t like it any better than anybody else, but that’s the decision.”

  The archaeologist sighed and followed the other two out of the office, leaving a discontented colonel behind, staring at the poster showing the field of stars.

  Austin Pace, CinC Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center, was a medium man: medium height, medium weight, medium gray hair. He’d been a pilot, served in Nam and the Gulf War, had a chestful of decorations that he usually didn’t bother with. He commanded both NORAD and USSPACECOM, the heart of U.S. and Canadian air and space defenses. His first appointment of the day, Brigadier Ed Cassidy, was his deputy commander in chief for NORAD and represented the interests of the Canadian government. Cassidy was always the first person he saw every day, and the last.

  “Understand we’re having some visitors today,” Cassidy said, pouring himself a cup of coffee.

  “We always have visitors on Friday.”

  Cassidy smiled, added milk to his coffee, and sat down. “The Visitors Center always has visitors on Friday, Austin.” He patted gently at the neat gray mustache that trimmed his upper lip. “But we hardly ever do. Wonderful coffee you get here.”

  “They’re from the Senate office, Ed. We’ll just shoo them in and out again.” Pace leaned back in his swivel chair. Unlike the offices in the lower sections of the complex, the commander’s office was paneled in softly burnished medium-light maple. An American flag, and a Canadian flag flanked the NORAD logo that graced the wall behind his impressively large desk, also in maple. The floor was carpeted in a businesslike blue that was vacuumed every night. A circular table, surrounded by comfortable chairs, served for conferences. At the moment it held a rather nice tea service, a coffeepot, and a covered plate of scones. Pace got up and removed the cloth, inspecting the offerings.

  “Oh, naturally. I’m not objecting, of course. You were quite decent about all the disruption last year with HRH’s visit. One does rather wonder, though, how our shaky friends downstairs will like the idea.” Cassidy carefully brushed a bit of pastry out of his mustache.

  “They won’t like it at all, but it isn’t their problem. The visitors will never get that far.”

  “No, of course not. But you’re going to tell them?”

  “Yes, of course. This morning.” Restless, Pace moved away from the table and stalked behind his desk, shoving a precisely aligned telephone out of the way to get to the keyboard of his computer terminal.

  “George isn’t going to be happy about it,” Cassidy observed. “Kinsey—he’s been here before, hasn’t he?”

  “No, that was his father.”

  “So not the senator himself.”

  “No, thank God.”

  Cassidy drained his coffee cup and set it down gently with every evidence of satisfaction. “Well, it’s your worry, Austin. I myself plan to be fully occupied with the upgrade of the Survivable Communications Integration System. I’ll let you worry about actually surviving your communications with your Blue Book fellow.”

  Pace snorted, bringing a document up on the screen. “Thank you for the fraternal cooperation of Her Majesty’s Commonwealth of Canada.”

  Cassidy chuckled. “Any time, old man. Come to think of it, perhaps I’ll stay and watch. You Americans always have such interesting fireworks displays.”

  “Hammond doesn’t have anything to worry about,” Pace repeated irritably. “I’m having my staff notify his. No surprises.”

  “No, of course not. Never any surprises around here.”

  Marie Rusalka shared an office with Devorah Randolph, O’Neill’s logistics officer. The two of them also shared recipes, child care tips, and the occasional wicked speculation about various members of Hammond’s command team. It was a convenient arrangement, because Rusalka’s analysis of probe data provided Randolph with a head start on assembling the most likely support that SG-1 would need on each new mission. Rusalka’s desk was covered with computer components; Randolph’s was covered with lists.

  The probe data came back in sound, pictures, and line after line of electronic code, providing reams of environmental data. Sometimes the data flow was abruptly terminated, leaving Rusalka with just enough information to determine that the hapless machine had toppled out of the destination Stargate and splashed directly into a pool of molten lava, or that it had been almost instantly destroyed by hostile activity. Those were, she admitted to herself, the ones she liked best, because puzzling out what had happened in the few seconds’ worth of transmission was a lot like solving a crossword puzzle: filling in bits and pieces here and there until suddenly what had been a large gap in their information became a solid, or mostly solid, conclusion.

  She was hunched over one of those gaps, her lips moving silently as she considered and rejected possible explanations, when Randolph came in and flung herself into her chair, spinning around to glare at the bulletin board fixed to the wall behind her desk.

  Attached to the board were various official pronouncements, Orders of the Day, schedules, and pictures of her six-year-old identical twin girls. “I am supposed to throw a birthday party,” she announced grimly. “At school. They want home-baked cookies for thirty. On a Saturday!”


  “Furr’s,” Rusalka said absently, naming a local grocery store.

  Randolph spun around and began digging through the papers that covered her desk like the aftermath of a pulp avalanche. “Well, of course Furr’s. C-4, environmental—no, wrong one, although come to think of it those environmental suits might come in handy—have you ever tried cleaning up after thirty six-year-olds? Napkins—oh, here it is—and party hats, and noise-makers—why on earth do they think six-year-olds need to make more noise?—and spoons—why couldn’t they have given me more lead time…”

  “You’ve got a whole day. Who’s doing the punch?” Rusalka still hadn’t looked up.

  “Not me. I draw the line at punch. I ought to make Jesse do all this stuff. He doesn’t have to stick to eight-till-whenever.”

  Jesse Randolph was a farrier. He was perfectly happy to follow his wife from duty assignment to duty assignment, able to find work anywhere there were horses to shoe. The only time they’d ever had problems with career conflicts was Devorah’s tour on Kwadjalein Island, and that had only lasted thirty months. It had also resulted in the birth of the twins. Randolph made sure there were horses at their next duty station. It was very important to keep her husband occupied. And tired.

  “So tell him to do it.” Rusalka was single. She kept goldfish, unsuccessfully.

  “No, I should do it. Be Mom for a change.” Randolph sighed, spun around again in a 360-degree circle to end up facing her colleague, and changed the subject to something she obviously considered much more pleasant. “Sometimes I lose track of who I am, you know? Mom at home, supersecret support here. I can’t decide which role deserves the superhero costume.” She brandished an imaginary cape. “So whaddaya have? Anything good?”

  “Just what I was wondering myself.” The two women looked up to see Jack O’Neill standing in the doorway. “I vote for SuperMom, by the way; you’ve already got a costume for this job.” He shifted his attention to Rusalka. “You mentioned some possibles in the briefing.”

  Reluctantly, Rusalka pulled her attention away from her beloved data and nodded to her superior officer. O’Neill entered the room, claimed the one visitor’s chair that was normally wedged between the two desks, and sat down, sprawling, his long legs effectively taking up the rest of the room between the desks. “Well?” he prompted. “You said you had three possibles.”

  “We’re still evaluating,” she said with an air of protest. “The air looks crappy, I said so in the briefing.”

  “Well, since Harriman thinks we’ve hit a snag on deciphering coordinates, and we’re running low on probes, we’d better get something out of it.” He raised his eyebrows expectantly.

  “You really like this job, don’t you?” Rusalka groused. “Okay, okay. One probe is just transmitting dark. Some of the research department think it’s in a cave or possibly underground. It’s still operating, but we’re just not getting anything. That’s one of the bad-air ones.”

  “Maybe somebody threw a rug over it.”

  Rusalka gave him a Look. He returned it blandly.

  “We have another probe that’s transmitting steadily, but it seems to be in the middle of—” She hesitated, as if reluctant to put the concept into words. “It looks like all hell broke out all around it. There seems to be a pitched battle going on.”

  “And nobody’s plastered it yet?”

  “I don’t think anybody’s even noticed the Gate activated,” she said, shaking her head, “much less one Earth probe. I keep expecting it to go splat. But so far it’s operating perfectly.”

  “Have you gotten a look at the combatants? Are they Goa’uld?”

  “We have no idea. All we see is dust and explosions. All we hear is noise—we had to turn down the volume on it, and the techs are trying to separate out the inputs but so far haven’t had any luck.”

  “Where is it? I want to take a look at it.” O’Neill pulled himself up, got up and turned the chair around, sitting in it backward. It made a little more room in the room, at least.

  Rusalka gave him an exasperated look. “It’s in the lab. We’re still working on it, trying to get better resolution, to see if we can actually see anything on it yet.”

  “Oh.” O’Neill was disappointed but not discouraged. “And the third probe?”

  “The third probe doesn’t show any sign of human life anywhere.” She bit her lip. “At least, no surviving human life. I don’t think people can survive there. The atmosphere seems to be mostly methane.”

  Stepping over to a projector, she touched a control. Lights automatically dimmed as an image was thrown against a white wall. It shuddered and jerked, presumably as the probe rolled out of the Gate and over a few rocks, and then was still.

  Nothing moved anywhere on the landscape that the probe surveyed. The ground was charred gray and black, as if it had once been a velvety landscape that was then hit by a solar flare. The horizon faded into a dull gray in the distance. Nowhere within the scope of the probe’s lens were any signs of trees, buildings, or even crumbled walls. Just rocks and uneven ground and ash.

  “Ick,” O’Neill remarked comprehensively. “That’s it?”

  “Pretty much,” Rusalka said. “We think the probe got stuck, because it hasn’t moved from that point. This world is very Earth-like as far as gravity goes, but the ground is rock and ash. We haven’t seen any sign of indigenous life—animals, birds, or even any insects.”

  “Radiation?”

  “No. We don’t know what caused this, or how far it extends. It could be Paradise just outside the range of the lens, but considering how still it is, I wouldn’t bet on it.”

  “Hmmm.” O’Neill was silent for a moment. Then: “Which one would you recommend we tackle. Major?”

  “Right now, none of them,” she responded promptly. “We plan to send a really big flashlight through to the first of the three worlds, see if we can light up the place a bit. The probe has just been rolling around randomly, bumping into things and changing directions. We have no idea at all what’s there.

  “The second location looks like just an all-round bad idea.

  “And I’d like to see if anything changes on the third one before anybody goes charging in there.”

  “Recommendations noted.” O’Neill got up and waved a casual salute. “Thanks. ’Ah’ll be bahck.”

  The two women rolled their eyes as he left.

  “How much you want to bet he goes for Door Number Two?” Randolph asked, reaching for a scrap of paper to start a new list.

  “Are you suggesting our beloved colonel likes to go out looking for fights?”

  “I’m suggesting our beloved colonel is bored out of his mind. He hasn’t been anywhere for at least a couple of weeks. He likes Adventures.”

  “Nasty things, make you late for dinner.”

  “I wish I could go,” Randolph said wistfully. “It must be so… awesome, going to new worlds and stuff.”

  “Yeah? You looked at the casualty lists lately?” Rusalka had very strong and very practical views on the whole starhopping issue. “What would you do with your girls? I’ll stay right where I am, thanks. And hope they don’t let anything follow them home. It might want to keep us.”

  The gray phone on Major Rusalka’s desk rang then, and both women jumped. With one eyebrow hiked high, Rusalka picked up the receiver. Randolph watched with growing curiosity as the major made noncommittal noises, scratched a neat reminder on a memo pad, and finally hung up the phone. Her face was several shades paler than when she’d begun the conversation. She stared at the instrument, her hand on the receiver, for so long that Randolph thought she was going to burst.

  “Well? What?”

  “Oooooh, shit.” Rusalka’s hand finally fell away from the receiver, but she continued staring at it for a moment longer, as if it had suddenly turned into something poisonous.

  “What is it?” Devorah had never heard her office mate use an expletive in the entire time they’d shared space. “What’s wrong?”
/>   “You know those visitors they’re, having today?” Rusalka said, pronouncing the words with difficulty. “Well, it turns out that one of them is a reporter.”

  “So?”

  “He’s Frank Kinsey. Senator Kinsey’s son. You remember Senator Kinsey?”

  “Oh.” Everyone at SGC remembered, with shudders, the last visit from Senator Lyle Kinsey, who had come within a hairsbreadth of shutting down the project completely. “The general is not gonna like this,” she predicted somberly.

  “Yeah, and guess who gets to tell him?” Rusalka muttered. She threw the other woman a salute with one hand as she picked up the receiver again with the other. “We who are about to die…”

  “You die. I’m going to pull up everything I can find on the guy,” Randolph muttered, spinning her chair once again to stop in front of her computer keyboard.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Hammond’s lips tightened, and his knuckles went white around the receiver. “Understood, Major.” He disconnected and scowled.

  Senator Kinsey had nearly pulled the rug out from under him once before. It couldn’t be a coincidence that his son was snooping around, no doubt looking for a story. The “public” face of the Complex did provide the occasional tour for the interested (and usually high-ranking) civilian, but it was always scheduled well in advance and Pace made sure that Hammond was fully informed. Hitting him out of the blue this way was a violation of their agreement: Pace provided cover and no nasty surprises, and Hammond provided… no nasty surprises. The difference was that Hammond pretty much knew exactly what kind of surprises Pace could come up with, while Pace had absolutely no idea what he was being sheltered from. It was another reason Pace didn’t like the arrangement.

  Barely hesitating, Hammond got up and left his office, heading toward the upper levels of the mountain.

  It wasn’t quite time yet for his official appointment, but that was just too bad. Hammond wanted to talk to the CinC now.